The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast: Recent Episodes
Am Writing Fantasy Productions
In today’s publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don’t even need a literary agent.
There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing.
Join the two bestselling fantasy authors, Autumn and Jesper, every Monday, as they explore the writing craft, provides tips on publishing, and insights on how to market your books.
A brand-new podcast from Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt, the creators and hosts of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast.
This limited series is eight episodes long, dedicated to make you a better writer and understand story structure better.
You get to listen in on Autumn and Jesper's conversations as they plot a short story from scratch.
It's a behind the scenes look at the process of creative writing.
Simply search for 'Write the Story' in your podcast app, or visit the website here: https://www.writethestory.show/, to get started right away.
Come for three days of writing workshops, writing time, one-on-one coaching, and group activities. Leave with a completed short story to be included in a published compilation, polished writing skills, and new author friends.
Sure, writers are often introverts, but aren’t you tired of everything happening online? We are! Plus, you can learn more and improve your writing skills faster with a select group of writers (no more than 40!) along with personalized coaching.
Be warned, this is not going to be one of those events where you simply show up, listen to a bunch of PowerPoint presentations, and then head back home by the end of the weekend.
No!
We want you to actually complete a work of fiction.
During this weekend, all attendees will jointly worldbuild a setting for a story together with five elements which everyone needs to incorporate into the story along with a character.
Each participant will then write a short story between 1,000 and 10,000 words. Along the way, we’ll cover writing aspects such as worldbuilding, character development, plotting, outlining chapters, and more… all of which you’ll get to use that weekend.
By Sunday afternoon, all stories will be handed over to us, Autumn and Jesper, and we’ll then get them all edited and have a cover made for inclusion in a compilation made free for readers! We’ll do all the final work—you just need to come, learn, have fun, and write the story.
YES! You’ll get a published piece of work and a bunch of new author friends to help you promote it. The benefits of this Getaway doesn’t end on Sunday—not by a long shot!
Check out the registration page and the full event schedule here: https://www.amwritingfantasy.com/getaway-2023/
And just in case you're interested, here's the link to our brand-new novel, Magic Unleashed: https://books2read.com/MagicUnleashed
As mentioned, we're also working on a new podcast for you. Find it here: https://www.writethestory.show/ Make sure to subscribe in your podcast app, so you don't miss any episodes once we start releasing them.
Stay safe and happy writing.
We've unfortunately come to the end of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast.
In this short brief, you'll learn why and where to go from here.
The New York Times bestselling author, Anthony Ryan, joins the Am Writing Fantasy podcast for a discussion with Jesper about fantasy writing, publishing, and marketing books in today's publishing landscape.
Find Ryan's books here: https://anthonyryan.net/
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
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Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
0 (2s): You're listening to The Am. Writing Fantasy Podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need an literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I'm Jesper. And this is episode 154 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. And Autumn is putting the finishing touches on editing our next novel today. So instead I'm joined by a New York times bestselling author, Anthony Ryan. And normally when I do these interviews, I have like a massive time difference, Anthony, but not today because I think you're in the UK or something. Is that right?
Anthony (58s): Yes. Almost instantaneous.
Jesper (1m 4s): Yeah. And it's, and there's even light outside my window today, which I'm not used to when I do podcast recordings, but you are you're from Scotland originally. Is that right
Anthony (1m 17s): Originally? Yes, I don't sound Scottish, but I was born then spent most of my childhood there.
Jesper (1m 24s): I would actually love to visit Scotland one day. I've been to the London and stuff like that multiple times, but I've never been to Scotland and it's just like the scenery there. It's, it's almost a bit fantasy inspiring sometimes. Isn't it?
Anthony (1m 39s): It is obviously if you, if you grow up there, you have a different view of things. You don't know you growing up in it, you know, I see landscape the, yeah. Obviously, you know, as a true Scott, I recommend everyone should go to Scotland at least one.
Jesper (2m 1s): Yeah. I would really love to go one day, but perhaps before we sort of get started for real here, maybe you could just share a few words about yourself, Anthony, and just talk a bit about what you're writing and maybe how you got into writing. And so on
Anthony (2m 17s): Anthony Ryan, the also the raping shadow trilogy, the cottage Memorial, Trelegy blatantly the covenant of steel, excuse my most recent work and I, which is what I'm currently working on. I got published. I self published back in 20 11, 20 12 and was persuaded to go the traditional route when my first novel blood song took off and been a full-time author since the end of 2012. So yeah, this is what I always wanted to do.
Anthony (2m 57s): And I consider myself really to be able to make a living doing what I love to do.
Jesper (3m 4s): Yeah, that'd be pretty cool. So you have, you have some stuff that you publish and some stuff that is traditional puppets. Is that still the case today?
Anthony (3m 14s): Yes. I don't do that much self publishing these days. It's usually one or two things a year, if that, and it's usually a short work, it's a novella or short story or something like that. Full length works with pretty much always traditionally published these days. And to be honest, given the time and I'm sure, you know, better than I do the time it takes to do self publishing. Well, it's a lot of time. It's a lot of efforts to do it properly. And frankly, that was the time to do all sort of being traditionally published for the most part.
Anthony (3m 55s): It suits me quite well.
Jesper (3m 59s): Right. And you're with penguin IO
Anthony (4m 2s): These days is mostly all wet, a little and brown, I believe, but I'm still, you know, technically published by a switch is part of a penguin. So, you know, it's a thing with traditional publishing. You can be a bit confusing with all the different contracts and everything, but I don't think meters care that much, you know, you publish your next book. So yeah. Yeah. Well, within the national publishers as well, got a lot of different contracts and things with various different publishers around the world can be a bit hard to keep track of them all.
Jesper (4m 45s): Yeah. But then coming from a situation where you have experience with both the traditional side of publishing, but as well as some self publishing, what would you, sorry? Well, you touched upon this slightly there, but what would you say is the pros and cons of each of those two approaches? If somebody is sort of listening to this and debating, should I do one or the other?
Anthony (5m 8s): Well, it's weird. I think the advantages of self publishing are the disadvantages of self publishing of the same things. The advantages are you have to do everything. You know, you do everything yourself. You have complete control over everything. The disadvantages are, you do everything yourself and you have complete control over everything. So, you know, it's, it's a lot of work basically to self publish. We're new at officially published. You will have an editor who works for a publisher. Who's a professional editor. You won't have to hire them yourself, which can be very, probably the most expensive part of the process for self publisher.
Anthony (5m 48s): Especially if you're starting out, you know, a professional editor doesn't come cheap. And if you're writing epic fantasy, I mean, and the charge by the word, I mean, typically in the 200,000 word range, paying somebody a word by word basis to edit one of my novels. That's a lot of money would be very expensive for me. So publish as well as very time consuming. But you do, I think with self publishing, you do get control over the control you get. I know we'd be telling you attractive for a lot of people. If you know, I'm a bit of a control freak, I'm not too bad, but I can't be obsessive about details.
Anthony (6m 33s): And if you're that kind of person, self publishing is probably going to see it quite well, especially when it comes to cameras and cover design and you know, book descriptions and all that kind of thing. So yes, the advantages are that say are the same as a disadvantage, it's all on you. Or you either do it all yourself or you pay people to do it when you're traditionally published. Some of the burden is taken off you because you're not paying for you are an editor, a cover designer and all of the,
Jesper (7m 6s): Yeah. And I'm also thinking maybe what about reread with gods to the editing itself? I mean, of course when you are self publishing, you, as you said, you hire the editor and basically you can just decide what to ignore, what to agree to, whatever, whenever the editor tells you something, but with the traditional publishing, is it more in your experience that you have to more accept what the editor is pushing on you? Or can you still, do you still have the freedom to say like, like, no, that's not going to, I'm not going to change this or that.
Anthony (7m 40s): Unfortunately, I've never got to the point where I vehemently disagreed with us in the editors have told me there is a back and forth and other things we don't, you know, sort of mindless things don't always agree with when it comes to word choice, you know, cutting smaller scenes or something like that. But there have been times when I've been asked to do more substantial rewrites and others, some books don't require a lot of work at the editing stage and others do I take the view that these are professional people who've been doing this for entire life and it would be foolish of me to ignore their advice.
Anthony (8m 22s): If I ever got to the point where it is vehemently disagreed with what they were asking me to do, I would say, so we did have a discussion, but you know, as of yet, it hasn't come up where it really just completely at loggerheads and can't reach an agreement. I don't know what would happen if we got to that point, you know, contractually, you know, they can reject the book and then they want to have advanced back. We haven't asked, but yeah, that's, that's always the nuclear option, but it it's extremely, rather than the publishing world, you know, for that to happen, you know, it can happen sometimes when you get controversial figures, who've been given large Southerns to write a memoir or something.
Anthony (9m 10s): And, you know, especially with the insist on not having a ghost writer. Oh yeah. I've heard stories of people submitting manuscripts that were just unreadable tripe, and then wondering why the, you want to do advance back can happen. But yeah, when it comes to professional writers, people who wrote fiction for a living, it's very, very rare. And as yet, luckily for me as it come on, hopefully no.
Jesper (9m 39s): Yeah, no, I agree. And of course it's also a matter of, I mean, of course some editors could be difficult to work with, but so could some authors, right? It could also sometimes be the author who just makes a big deal out of something where the editor might be actually quite fair in what they're asking
Anthony (9m 56s): And I'm never going to nitpick over commerce or, you know, stuff like the semi-colons in the wrong place of don't get excited about that. You know, when it comes to, you know, the overall arch arc of the plot and stuff like that, it's, you know, it's pretty rare for them to have a problem with it. In my book, there's been a few things about have, by my own admission, I've gone down the wrong route. I've gotten down a kind of blind alley when it comes to plus and tried to get over and being a bit too convoluted. A good editor will point that out.
Anthony (10m 37s): They don't. Yeah. They don't come back and say, oh my God, this is a pile of crap. Where was wrong with you? You get what's called the compliment sandwich. The first paragraph is, oh, this is really great and so on. But the second paragraph is now here's some things I think needs some work. And then the third paragraph is once again, and this is really great novel and I look forward to publishing it. So they always bracket where they actually want to tell you, it's some nice words, sweeten the bell. Yeah.
Jesper (11m 9s): But what does your actual writing process look like?
Anthony (11m 14s): What I'm writing on right. Every day I rarely have days off. And my thing has to do with when life just gets in the way. So I will, if I have a doctor's appointment or something, or have to do something with family, then, then I'll, you know, I will take time off. But when I'm actually working on book, most of the time I write every day, don't actually produce a huge amount of words on a daily basis. But because I write every day because I'm consistent, you know, it looks from the outside, like I'm quite prolific and I've have reached at least one book a year for the last 10 years, which is a bad, I'm not actually that fast.
Anthony (11m 58s): Right. But I haven't consistent. My average word count in these days is about 1200 words a day, but I'm doing the thing where, you know, I use Scribner as my main writing program. And it has, it tells you how many words a day you need to do to reach you or a word goal by a certain date. And these days they just tend to stick to that. And long as you're consistent, as long as you speak to it, it works. Yeah. I don't do a lot of, you know, actually sitting in front of the computer and actual time spent sitting in front of your computer.
Anthony (12m 40s): Writing is relatively minimal, but I do do a lot of pacing around my living room. And you know, I remember Stephen fried at the British, you know, comedian and author. He said that writing consists mostly of making coffee for me, even though I drink tea rather than coffee, there's a certain amount of truth in that. There's a lot of things.
Jesper (13m 7s): Yeah. I was, I was myself through a, maybe I could call it an experiment, but quite recently, over the last six months, I, because I I'm also at the place short of where you are. I, I, I tend to, I don't really count my word count, but I, I write half a chapter a day because I feel like that's what I can get done in maybe about two hours. And in two hours after that, I feel like my creativity really goes down. But then I heard a lot about many authors who like, are really prolific, you know, the people who write like 5,000 words a day and stuff like that. So I thought like, let me try that. And then I tried to look into all the stuff that they did to increase their word count.
Jesper (13m 50s): And I really, you know, pushed myself. And I just came to the realization after a while. I probably tried it for like two, three months. And then by the end of it, I was like, I don't enjoy this anymore. You know, I want to take my time with it. I want to sort of think about what I'm writing. I don't want to just plow ahead. I don't know, for me, it just, it, it moved, removed all the enjoyment of the writing process to try to do it faster. So yeah,
Anthony (14m 22s): And also just might be mundane, but I'm not getting any younger. My hands I've typed a lot of words in my life. And after a while it hurts and I don't get on well with dictation software or anything like that. I don't write long hand fast enough to write that. Well, you know, I can write 85 words a minute long hand write eight. So just say my hands are quite happy to not trying to do the 5,000 words a day saying if you can great, if you comfortable for you, good for you.
Anthony (15m 5s): You know, but I think probably done photos in words once in a day when I was running up against deadline and it wasn't fun. It definitely would.
Jesper (15m 18s): No, I mean, I think when speaking about writing processes, it is really about finding your own sort of what suits you. Of course. I mean, of course, if you have like physical things, like your hands are hurting, then you have to respect that. But, but more in general, I mean that some people enjoy writing fast, other peoples don't. And I think it's actually good in my view to try to experiment with different approaches when you're starting out to figure out what works for you, but then something will probably be something you prefer versus something else.
Anthony (15m 48s): Definitely. I think there's no one size fits all when it comes to writing, you have to find it. Yeah. You have to experiment, find what works for you. And I think a lot of people do read whatever their favorite writing book is. Stephen King's on writing or, you know, save the cat or wherever it is and the bank, well, Stephen King writes 2000 words a day. Therefore I must write 2000 words a day. If you've never done that, it's a big ask. You know, it's a big thing to do if you're just not used to it. So, you know, my advice for novice writers is to find your comfort zone and actually embrace the comfort zone.
Anthony (16m 32s): Don't try and push yourself too much because what you're doing is difficult. And a lot of the time, especially with people who have jobs, they have families, it's carving out the time. You need to write it, come easy. All you can manage your day is half an hour and you do 500 words by 500 words a day adds up to love words after a year. But yeah, find, find your own comfort zone. Embrace. Not all. We'll give you at least a benchmark to, you know, you know how to push it. You know, you know, if you need to do more, whoever reason then you'll know just how much more you need to do, but tends to be what I tell them.
Anthony (17m 15s): Younger writers anyway.
Jesper (17m 17s): Yeah, no, I think it's a good advice. And because of as well, the, you know, you've written for quite a while, and as you said, you've written a lot of words, but do you ever feel like when it comes to getting story ideas and so on, do you ever feel like you get stuck in the same loop with the same kind of ideas? Or how do you go about getting fresh ideas?
Anthony (17m 39s): You have absolutely no problem with new ideas. To be honest, if we could turn off the idea factory in my head, I would for a while, at least, cause it was a while ago I tweeted, I had 26 books. I could probably start writing tomorrow. If I wanted to. That's probably got up to about 35 now because it just never stops. I just never stopped getting ideas. Ideas are the easy bit for me. Anyway, I'm actually coming up with stories to match the ideas. That's the hard bit, the ideas. Yeah. It's really, I don't go looking for inspiration.
Anthony (18m 19s): It always finds me whether it's a television documentary or whether it's, you know, something I saw on the news or just, you know, something I'd read somewhere that I can't even remember where it all goes through my head and just comes together with ideas and they never stop. I'm probably going to shuffle off this mortal coil with a lot of books unwritten, which, and there's not a lot I can do about it. It's just the way it is.
Jesper (18m 49s): No, you know, it's funny that you say that because I think when people looking to get into writing or start to write, they worry about this idea thing. But, but because I have it exactly the same way as you do. Well, you know, I have a notebook where I write down when I get ideas and just so chock-full of ideas, it's just like, I don't know. That must be 20 novels in there as well. And I will probably never get to half of them. I don't know. But, but getting ideas is like one of the favorite things that people think about a worry about in the beginning, but, and maybe don't ask some people who are finding it difficult to get ideas. I'm not saying that that doesn't happen, but I have also through this podcast, talk to a lot of different authors by now.
Jesper (19m 35s): And I'm yet to hear an established author say that I don't know, I can't get ideas. You know, everybody seems to be flooded with them. Maybe that's part of what makes us writers. I don't know.
Anthony (19m 48s): I think it is a thing it's probably something innate to people who do this for a living or at least have the potential to do it for a living is, you know, never running out stories. So this thinking in those terms, I guess you could probably train yourself to do it if you tried hard enough, but it does seem to be something that's just innate with me. You know, even as a kid, I was remember telling the kids go stories at playtime school and Clustered around me and I just make them up on the spot, you know, quite easily. Cause ghost stories are easy, especially when you're telling kid there was a house, it had a ghost in it.
Anthony (20m 33s): But yeah, in terms of getting stuck in the same ideas occurring, I'm always keen not to repeat myself. I don't want to be writing the same book over and over again. You know, another summarize have a formula, a character and series of books and those books follow a formula. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. As long as you can keep it fresh, if you're just writing the same book over and over again and you know, rubbing the serial numbers off and making it a little bit different, you know, I think that's going to get very Dallas. It get very Del for me, nevermind the reader.
Anthony (21m 14s): And I think fortunately tend to have the imagination. It doesn't get stuck in a rut too much. So it does. I do tend to think outside my own as well as not every idea I get is not for a fantasy novel science fiction. It's hard crime as well. Kind of like to get around to all of those yamas at some point, if we're going to find enough time to write.
Jesper (21m 40s): Yeah. Why did you decide that it was fantasy that you wanted to write originally?
Anthony (21m 48s): It's just so general. It probably appeals to me more than all others and it might be my, I thought a lot about wine. I think it might be because it's essentially limitless. You can do anything with it, depending on how you construct the world making up a yeah. There's, there's nothing limiting you. You can, you're not constrained by history. You can bowl from history. And I do all the Diana I steal shamelessly from real world history because it's presenting it in the context of fantasy. It doesn't matter so much. There's no copyright on history. You can take all you want. And also you can take away all the inconvenient, messy bits, keep the good bits.
Anthony (22m 32s): You know, the realities of history. History is always messier than people think it is. And it never conforms to the myths that people can't do around it in the UK at the moment, there's a lot of people spinning the stallion myths about Britain's past and prior role. You know what we did in the second world war or as my that. And it's clearly being spun by people who don't have a real grasp of what history is or what that particular history was. It's mythmaking, it's not his, but I think from a novelist point of view, especially even if you're presenting it in a fantasy context, you have to engage with the realities of, who's not the mess.
Anthony (23m 20s): Otherwise it's not going to be convincing the messiness of history. I think I'd try and reflect even on quite, you know, ruthless and cutting away on the calf and just taking the exciting birds. Still have to go thinking, reflect the messiness on.
Jesper (23m 37s): Yeah. And I, I also think, I mean, of course I, you know, I, as part of fantasy, I, I do of course love all your wizards and the magic and, and all that good stuff. But the other part on a more practical level is also as a fantasy author. I feel like it's because I don't want to get bucked down into research about how does this gun work or, or, you know, all those kinds of, or this particular city that the characters now go to that I've never been to. I don't want to do all that research in fantasy. I can just make it up. And that's quite wonderful.
Anthony (24m 12s): Yeah. That being said, I do, I do research. I've done because my second series, a, the draconian memoria was set in that sort of industrialized world, even though it was a fantasy world, it was industrialized and they were fighting with guns rather than salts. So the defense of research on guns for that, and here's a tip for you. If you put guns or anything related to guns in YouTube, be prepared for them to bombard you with all sorts of extremist nonsense. We looked at one gun video and within a day, YouTube had decided I was a white supremacist who hated women judging both were recommending me.
Anthony (24m 52s): So it's kind of staggering out the algorithms work,
Jesper (25m 1s): But yeah, it's a bit scary.
Anthony (25m 3s): It is. Yeah. You can see a lesson in how people get rid of medicalized. So stop recommending this to me button quite a lot now.
Jesper (25m 15s): Yeah. I can see that. Yeah. It's been a few years though, but, but I, I read the waking fires some years back the waking fire and I very much enjoyed it and it has dragons in it. So that's always good. But what I, why I'm bringing that up is because we were talking a bit about Writing Fantasy and we were talking a bit about what kind of stories to write and so on. And because you have also written and published quite a lot of books, I'm wondering if you, if you see some common tropes within fantasy, that readers seems to like more than others.
Jesper (25m 55s): I mean, dragons could be an example, but how do you see the success of your different books? Like, is there like commonalities that the books that has dragons in them or something else are usually more liked by readers than others? Or do you have any views on that?
Anthony (26m 10s): I think some people definitely because it requires Memorial, it was guns rather than So that steam ships, you know, air ships and stuff, some people immediately assumed it was steampunk. And it kind of is. And I don't mind if people call it that, but there are people that just won't read anything. It's got steam punk attached to it and a fantasy readers. You only want the songs, even if it has dragons in it, they just want the swords, you know, the medieval setting rather than industrialized setting, which is fine each to their own, you know, but I try not to be constrained by as a writer, readers have their preferences and that's fine.
Anthony (26m 51s): But for me as a writer, I do, I do want to be able to write what I want to write, you know? Yeah. And the drugs from the lawyers didn't sell as well as my other series. So it's sold reasonably well for what it is there wasn't in his big numbers because it wasn't, I think fall into what an epic fantasy series was supposed to be. You know, you're supposed to have people riding around on horses, in air ships, you're supposed to, you know, armies fighting great battles with, you know, dragons might be part, but it also supposed to be hordes of saber wielding barbarians and all of this and kind of wasn't in there.
Anthony (27m 41s): But I don't think you can, or you should be constrained by redirect expectation. You should write what you want to write because you can never really anticipate what they want. You know? So it's like apple, you know, apple as a company famously doesn't do market research. It makes the things it wants to make itself. People don't know what they want and you can do it. And there's famous examples of then Coca Cola. When they came out with new Coke, they did immense amounts of research and focus groups and market research about, yes, there's definitely a market for new Coke and people want new Coke.
Anthony (28m 24s): We put out new Coke, people hated it. Nobody wanted it. It was one of the biggest flops in commercial history. You can't anticipate what they want and you can't try and give them what they want. And you can only write when you write, I think at the end of the day, if it hits it hits is not alive. So you do buy that. I don't think there's anything wrong with writing to market. If you can, don't expect everyone to be a winner just because you write to a certain market. Cause you think, you know, a few years ago it was about empires and umpire romance.
Anthony (29m 4s): But just because it's invoked, it doesn't mean it's going to hit for you. You can never really, there's no such thing as a shoe. If I hated in publishing or in anything else.
Jesper (29m 14s): No, I fully agree with you there. There's definitely no guarantees one way or the other. And I also agree that it is incredibly important to write something you are passionate about because yeah, like we talked about writing a novel, it takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of effort. So even a month later, you are sort of tired of the thing because it wasn't really your thing. Anyway, then you're never going to get to the end. But of course, if you can find some, some overlap between what the market or the readers want versus what you like, then that's probably a good place to focus. I would say, because at least if you look at like streaming services, Netflix and so on, they pump out the same stuff over and over and over again.
Jesper (29m 59s): Right. Because readers or viewers in this case, we want what we, what we know we like, we want the same thing just in a new package. A lot of the time. I mean, when you're trying to do something that is very different. Not always, but most of the time it flops also on Netflix.
Anthony (30m 19s): Yeah. I think as a creative though, you can, if you're proud of it, if you think it was good, you're, you know, you're happy with it. That's the most you can expect, you know, if it sells itself, it's great. It's really great for itself. But really from a creative point of view, you, you have to be happy with it. Otherwise what's the point for me anyway, you know, I couldn't there's certainly John was, I couldn't write in, cause I don't read them and I'm not excited about them. No. Yeah. No disrespect to romance authors, but I couldn't write a romance novel to save my life.
Anthony (31m 1s): I wouldn't know what the hell I was doing. Me attempting to write a romance novel would be an insult to the young, the, you know, perhaps desperate for money. And I tried it it'd be a disaster. Yeah. So I think you have to be a fan of where the genre you're writing it. And it helps if it's a commercial yarn, you know, if it's very niche, it's going to have a hard time making a living at it. That doesn't mean you shouldn't write in it, but you know, just be aware that it's, it doesn't mean that nobody owes you a living is another thing. Nobody gonna drive a dump truck up to you for DOR and give you a load of money for no apparent reason.
Jesper (31m 47s): Ah, that would be nice. But given your years in the writing business, less industry here, are there some changes that you've noticed over the years? Like is there stuff that is very different now compared to what it was when you got started?
Anthony (32m 9s): Yeah. The basic publishing process, the process you go through hasn't changed that much. And the contracts are, you know, they're still using pro forma contracts that say you have to provide a written typed manuscript on double spaced paper and all that it's in the contract, but nobody ever does that. You send them an email with an attachment like everybody else. But what I have noticed is, you know, an increasing embracing of digital formats by probably they seem to be taking what I would consider a more realistic approach to pricing of, of eBooks.
Anthony (32m 51s): And so obviously it's been a bit of an explosion in audio books, audio books are now much more important. And when I started, you could probably negotiate a different contract, separate contract for your audio book, as opposed to print. And e-book these days, no, none of the major publishers will allow you we'll give you a contract unless you're willing to sell them your, your audio rights. You can't take them away and sell them yourself and they won't do it. You get all the manual fallout so that they're not interested. And I think that's probably true of even the biggest names in the industry. That seems to be a bit of a hard line when the publishing industry, because they've realized that audio books are profitable.
Anthony (33m 34s): They're very profitable if they're done well, you know, as a digital item to sell audio books are kind of perfect. You have a reasonably high value and a cost comparison to a print book. Don't cost that much to produce. There's a cost baggage. You have to pay an actor to do them, but you know, it's not as cost-intensive I think, as a print book. So yeah, explosion of audio is probably the biggest thing that I've noticed, but also, you know, publishers using social media for marketing and, you know, various different ways of exploring marketing in a digital age.
Anthony (34m 18s): They weren't doing so much of that when I started, but they definitely aren't.
Jesper (34m 24s): Yeah. And I think as well there, the audio book explosion is also very much linked to nowadays. Many people are way too busy in their life. So audio book is then like, like podcasting, you know, it's something you can listen to while you're doing other things. And I think in part that's why it has taken off in the sense that it has or to the degree that it has, because it, it just goes better with a busy lifestyle than sitting down to read a book. Nobody has that much time anymore. Unfortunately.
Anthony (34m 56s): Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm a fan of audio books or certain authors or Stephen King these days. I only do Stephen King audio books. I don't read his books. I only listen to the audio books for him. There's a few others as well. So I find this my preferred format for memoirs, you know, comedic memoirs and that kind of thing, especially when it's written, but it's read by the author. A lot of comedians do audio books a few days, which quietly.
Jesper (35m 26s): Yeah, there was something else I wanted to mention here before we, before we wrap things up because I was on your website earlier today. And then I saw a menu item called map room. And that really triggered me because I absolutely love fantasy maps. And it was so wonderful to see an entire webpage on the, on the website dedicated to maps from your books. I really liked that.
Anthony (35m 53s): Yeah. I'm a big map fan as well. I draw my old, my own maps for the books and you know, so there's no copyright issues with me putting them on my website. And if you are a fantasy also with maps at the front of your book, I would recommend putting you on the website because they don't show up that well on eBooks kind of fiddly, keep referring back to them when you're reading an ebook, but put them on your webpage. People have a place to go to see them, you know? Yeah. It does seem to be a thing for fantasy funds. They like a good map.
Jesper (36m 28s): Yeah. I know. I know for me, myself, if I started reading a new fantasy map, even if it's on the Kindle and I do agree, it's it, the resolution of it is not the best air, but if I do open a new fantasy book and I don't find that map within the couple of first couple of pages, I'm already slightly disappointed.
Anthony (36m 48s): Yeah. This is, it's become this thing that we all expect. You know, maybe one day I'll publish a fantasy novel without a mark just to be daring, but probably, yeah,
Jesper (37m 1s): That's great.
Anthony (37m 3s): I heard about David Gammell, loser delight, great British fantasy also, who never, that only, I think only his historical fantasies have maps in them. They were real well-matched but it's actual secondary world fantasies never had maps. And the story I had once was the, the trying to get hired a guy to do a map for him. And he said, all these characters live on the north pole because they're was going east, west, south, and all that. But it makes no sense when you try and track their movements in impossible direction. So basically impossible his roadmap, David them world.
Jesper (37m 44s): Right? No, but it is a challenge because when there is a map, then of course it becomes possible to start tracking the distance and how far were, or, you know, because we have it as well in the, in our novel, when, when I need them to go to one place of the, of the world, to another place of the world, I will actually pull out the map and just sort of figure out, okay, if you were a medieval guy who needed to go this distance, how long would it actually take you? So in one, on one regard, that's good that you can make it more realistic in that sense, but another, but on another hand it also makes it difficult sometimes when you're having multiple points of view and then for one character a month passed. And for the other one, you need to take two days, that's a bit of a jealous,
Anthony (38m 27s): It was it's. One of the realities of the medieval world was it took ages to get anywhere. And the average person can walk maybe 10 miles a day. You know, you know, a soldier can do 20 miles a day. Cause that's what they're trained for your average person, you know, carrying goods on that bag. He's not going to manage all in 10 miles a day. So it was a hard reality. Then you try and get rounded, maybe Busey magic or something. But if you want your world at one end of the empire Monday, and then they've made it all the way to the other end by Tuesday, you know, it's just not realistic.
Jesper (39m 9s): No, no. That's where, well we love time. And also does some tricks with these. I can't remember what, what Michael or what Jordan called them, but it was this way gates or whatever it was. I can't remember the name for it anymore.
Anthony (39m 23s): Yeah. Similar in Robin hops, assassin series over these Stoughton portals, people can go to yeah. It's a useful plot device. If you can get it to a
Jesper (39m 36s): Yeah, definitely. All right. Well, I want to thank you, Anthony, as well for coming on the podcast and share from, from all your experience and your insights into writing and publishing.
Anthony (39m 48s): I'm sorry. No problem enjoyed it.
Jesper (39m 51s): And if people want to learn more about you and your writing, Anthony, where do you want them to go?
Anthony (39m 58s): My website has all the links to everything. It's a Anthony Ryan dot net. You'll find links to my social media is on there and details of all my books and learn by them and so forth.
Jesper (40m 10s): Excellent. I will put the link to a Anthony's website in the show notes as well. So your deal is now you can go and click directly from there. And once again, I want to thank you, Anthony, for coming on the podcast today and fill in for autumn. So I hope you've got a lot from it and enjoyed it.
Narrator (40m 28s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Today we delve into the Nebula Award Nominated and bestselling book Jade City by Fonda Lee. What can this highly acclaimed AND popular novel teach us about worldbuildling, plotting, and characters? Join us and we share what we love, what we didn't prefer, and our thoughts on this novel.
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (1s): You're listening to The Am. Writing Fantasy Podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (29s): Hello, I'm Jesper and
Autumn (31s): I'm Autumn.
Jesper (33s): This is episode 153 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. And it is time for our Critical Reading of Jade City by Fonda Lee. And we'll be sharing our thoughts and views with the aim to see what we write as can learn from
Autumn (51s): Yes, I'm looking forward to it because it was such an interesting story, but you know, listening right now, if you were planning on reading this book and you haven't yet spoilers, there will be spoilers. So keep that in mind. If you're listening, this is a critical review, not a blurb or a teaser. We're going to rip it apart and say what we love, what we wish had been different and see what else we can learn from this book.
Jesper (1m 15s): Yes. And we also got a few remarks from patron supporters. So we will also mention some of that
Autumn (1m 23s): As well. Yes. I'm looking forward to it. I happen to have read some of those comments and I'm kind of in agreement with them. So that'll be really fun.
Jesper (1m 32s): I am for the most part as well.
Autumn (1m 36s): All right. End of episode. No,
Jesper (1m 38s): That was it. Go on. Read, read, threatened. That's it
Autumn (1m 43s): Awesome. Well, how are things over at Denmark? It's been a little while since we talked, which was partially my fault. I will warn viewers now. I am still, I had a cold. It really knocked it. Wasn't COVID knock on wood, but it's definitely knocked me for a loop. So if my voice is a little hoarse or if I will, I swear I will cough. I'll either mute myself or he'll go away from the microphone. But yeah, there's, there's a chance I'm still coughing a little bit. So it's been awhile. This episode was supposed to be the previous one and we just couldn't get together because cold I've got to call.
Jesper (2m 18s): Yeah, this was supposed to be 100 and episode 1 55, 2, and then it now turned out to be 1, 5, 3, and, well, it was a bit of a mess because we had to rearrange stuff and redo stuff and rename podcast episodes and whatnot, but we succeeded and we're here now.
Autumn (2m 36s): That's what counts. So how are things been? It's been absolutely ages since we talked.
Jesper (2m 42s): Yeah. Well now I don't remember if it was last week or the week before, to be honest. But we were in here during winter time, as I've said on previous podcasts, I started doing sea kayaking. So here during winter time, well, you can go out, see kayaking, but you need a dry suit, which costs a lot of money. So, and we don't have that, but then what we can do is we can go to the swimming hole. So we take the kayaks into the swimming stadium and we train in the swimming pool to do like, you know, Eskimo rolls is what we call them. Dana's I don't know what the English word is, but you know, without getting out of the kayak, you basically you're upside down in the water and then you learn how to get back up out of the water without exiting the kayak at all.
Jesper (3m 31s): And I actually managed to do the first roll this last time when we went to practice for the first time I succeeded in rolling around. So that was pretty cool.
Autumn (3m 42s): That is really cool. I've never managed to do a full one note. I usually, I was a whitewater kayaking so much smaller, like half the size of a ocean kayak, a sea kayak. And I still never quite learned the hip snap part to get myself fully back on my own. So that's really cool that you could advantage one.
Jesper (4m 2s): Yeah, well, it was like a w the time before my wife succeeded doing it and she was just like, and she did it like 10, 15 times, like, like w what, what brown run around. And I was, and I was just so much struggling. It was like, fuck, I can't do it. And then, but then last time we were here in the swimming hole, we had a couple of instructors with us. So I think the instructor probably spent like an hour with me trying to explain how, you know, because it is really, I mean, when I succeeded, I was actually surprised to see how little muscle power you need to use it. It's actually, it's all about technique. You, you almost need to do nothing to flip around if you just use the right technique.
Jesper (4m 45s): So, and, and if you like, like angle your body just slightly wrong, or you, you use your arm slightly in the wrong way, you're not going to flip around. So it's really about techniques, but it it's, I succeeded, but now of course, I'm concerned the next time we're going to go train, then I can't do it again.
Autumn (5m 4s): Well, it's all muscle memory. So eventually you'll get it down with that as awesome. However, it's hilarious. Your wife was like, whoo, I'm just rolling. Like
Jesper (5m 12s): Rolling around like, well, it's quite easy. Yes. That's easy for you to say Yeah. At the other than that, then a well on, in terms of working wise, we've sent book one of our new series off to the editor. So we're waiting to get it back from the first edit, and then it'll go to the second editor and so on, but, but we're getting there now. So, so that's pretty cool. And otherwise we've started to look ahead for 2020 and kind of discuss some of our future plans and so on. But I quite like this time of year when we're sort of reviewing, what are we going to do next inside? That that's always fun to me.
Autumn (5m 54s): It is. I think it's it's so it's good to do that. You should do in your life. Should do it in your writing, your book, marketing, whatever you got going on. I think so many people don't take the opportunity to reflect and then reorganized and then hit the new year with maybe some new goals and some new operations and stuff. So I agree which again, you know, go figure we've we tend to agree on just about everything. So it's no surprise. We both enjoy looking over stuff. And I think it gets your passion going, if you feel like you're just doing the same old thing and you just need to keep plugging away at it, you'd lose the passion. And, and it's half the fun is getting that back and getting excited about things and what you're going to do for the next year.
Jesper (6m 35s): Yeah, indeed. So how about you? What have you been busy with the last couple of weeks
Autumn (6m 40s): Sick, but not much. I've well, I mean, I've managed to get the editing done and so that's been off and I'm going to be working, starting to delve into getting our website for dot com, going some minor, things like that. So I'm looking forward to really getting into that more, but I was surprised last time I was truly sick was actually right when I came back from London and in January, 2019, I got kind of the same thing, chills, really sick. And that really knocked me down for three days. But this one, it was funny. I started feeling better and then I'd be sick for two days and then I'd start feeling better.
Autumn (7m 20s): And, oh, it's been a nightmare. I really thought I was surprised when I got the COVID test results back as negative. I'm like, really? If this isn't COVID, oh, there's some other nasty bugs out there. No one should ever have to go through this, but I have never had chills, like shaking so hard while I had a fever in my entire life. Thank goodness. My husband has medical wilderness medical training. Cause he's like, I wasn't worried. We're fine. I know what to do. But I was like, he's saying, right, this is not right,
Jesper (7m 52s): But there is a buck like that going around because I mean, over the last two weeks, I was sick for a couple of days as well. And I wasn't, I didn't have the shakes like you're describing there, but I did have a fever. And I was absolutely absolutely sure that this is COVID because it felt like, you know, the, all the flu kind of symptoms, all the stuff that you hear about and, and your throat, you can feel it all the time. It was exactly like the symptoms described for, for COVID. But I also went and got a test and it was negative, but there is something going around like that at the moment.
Autumn (8m 23s): Yes. I mean, none of our listeners catch it. It's not contagious through podcasts. Thank goodness. I
Jesper (8m 28s): Don't think it's contagious through podcasting.
Autumn (8m 32s): I hope not. But yeah. I mean, as I've described it, I feel like I've actually been sleeping with a hot water bottle. I feel like my internal thermostat, we, we speak in car language all the time. I'm not sure, but my thermostat is busted. It is not working. So please, if you find yourself getting cold, stay warm, make sure you, I was sleeping with a hat on and a hot water bottle and a coat. And it's just ridiculous. But yeah. Keep yourself warm and healthy and have a good December. Cause you don't want to get sick at the beginning of winter. It's I'm going to have a horse, a sore throat all winter now
Narrator (9m 7s): A week on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast.
Jesper (9m 13s): So I found a very interesting article on the internet that I just thought I would share here. Excellent. Because it's probably over the past month or something like that, I've been posting sort of different topics to our patron supporters about different aspects of PIP, big publishers merging together and sort of the effect that it might or might not have on us authors that all these big publishers are merging, you know, like low advances, lower royalty payments and so on. I mean us indie publishers, it's not so concerning, but for everybody doing the traditional publishing, then I've been just making different patron posts about that.
Jesper (9m 55s): But then I found this article as well about a penguin random house and Simon and Schuster was, they are looking to merge in a $2.2 billion deal. Wow. But then the us justice department stepped in and blocked the merger. Did you see that?
Autumn (10m 11s): No, I did not. It's funny. I read the news a lot, but I did not see that one.
Jesper (10m 16s): No, no. So the U S justice department assessed that the merchant would create a two dominant market role and it would hurt authors and readers. What do you think about that?
Autumn (10m 27s): Well, it's funny. I I've, I agree. We need competition. And so there are things to keep the, you know, something from developing into something that's not gonna squash competition, but then I like a Facebook and Amazon and
Jesper (10m 43s): Facebook
Autumn (10m 45s): And they haven't considered that dominating things. I mean, especially with Amazon bought good reads and they own publishing and, and there's like the dominant market, but at least they're trying to protect the brick and mortar ones. You know, it's good that they're maintaining some competition out there.
Jesper (11m 3s): Yeah. I mean, from a publishing point of view, penguin is the largest publisher and they are launches rival is shaman, Simon and Schuster. So those two merging would generate like a massive dominance in democracy. And in my view it would be like unprecedented on re what are you saying, unprecedented? That was what I was trying to say, control of the publishing industry. Right? So I fully agree with the us justice department here. I think it's a good thing that they are blocking this, but of course the lawyer of penguin then claims that it would actually be good for the authors if the two giants merged and that the publishing imprints will continue to compete against each other is what he said.
Jesper (11m 46s): I don't buy that for a second.
Autumn (11m 48s): I don't buy that. I think it would give them a better edge to compete against Amazon, but Amazon is so far ahead and eBooks and they're just really, and they're pretty solid and paperbacks, but they're just delving into hard cover. So I think it would put them against each other pretty solidly that way, but I don't think it would help authors to have basically your choices, Amazon or whatever penguin and Shuster would be called. But I mean, to me, it's almost like Amazon decided to buy, oh gosh, I might just completely blanked, but where you buy your, where we're also have our paperbacks published Ingram, like Amazon bought Ingram, spark authors would be doomed, just doomed, but I don't think anyone wants to go under, but yeah, that is like the only other real competition for Amazon is Ingram spark.
Autumn (12m 38s): And a lot of people don't even realize it.
Jesper (12m 43s): Yeah. And Spotify just bought a find a way voices.
Autumn (12m 46s): Wow. There's some shakeup going on.
Jesper (12m 50s): Yeah, yeah, yeah. They want to be the dominant audio producer, just like YouTube being for video to Spotify, want to dominate the entire audio Margaret. Oh,
Autumn (12m 59s): That'll be interesting.
Jesper (13m 1s): But then you also saw, you know, of course that was like early in the year, but also Spotify buying Joe Rogan's podcast for a hundred million dollars and stuff like that. Right. So they're, they're really, you know, playing hot in, in trying to just dominate the audio market, which I probably think, I think, I think they're onto something, but of course from a content creator point of view, you can be nervous that it's going to be the same outcome as it was for musicians. I like getting paid pennies when it's paid on And when or music is played on Spotify and it could be concerned about the same thing here from, from a audio book kind of perspective. Now today bought find a way of voices that you also can end up in a situation where we authors are just going to get paid a few pennies per audio book play.
Jesper (13m 49s): So that is a bit concerning.
Autumn (13m 52s): I agree. It's yeah.
Jesper (13m 60s): All right. So Jade city is a world fantasy award winner. It is, or it was named as one of the times, top 100 fantasy books of all time. And it was a Nebula award nominee for best novel. So, and I actually went, and now it's a couple of days ago, but I did go and check the sales ranking on Amazon. And I think you will see if you do that, that it's selling quite well. So there is a reason why we picked this book in the first place. Yeah.
Autumn (14m 28s): And I have to say in some ways it really impressed me. I was so excited. I think by the time I hit chapter two or three, I mean, I was into it. There was no way I wasn't going to finish the book. So I can say that, but I don't know when we'll get there, but my impression at the end I'll let you know if I still felt that way. And I went on because it is a trilogy and there was a book two and a three. So I will say we'll get to maybe how I felt at the end of the little bit. But I will say when I first started reading it, it was unlike the last critical review we did, which was of the fifth season. That one, we were talking about tense changes. I mean, that was very much literary fantasy.
Autumn (15m 9s): This one was true fantasy. Not, it wasn't even high fantasy. The setting and the time is more like Japan just after world war one maybe, or just after the U S you know, came in and started taking over just after Japan. Now I can't even remember the date that is, but when Japan opens up to the rest of the world and goes from the Shogun period into a modern era. So it's right at that cusp, there's guns, there's different far-flung politics, but this central very strong government that is used to a very traditional way of doing things and the clans are there. And it's, if you like Kung Fu movies, it has so much of that.
Autumn (15m 50s): It was really exciting. I kind of, yeah, I've kind of, it's just like the Grisha of universe. I'm kind of really liking that these a lot of fantasy that is not just medieval, it's really pulling up to different time periods now. And it's kind of like, well, this is, this is different. This is exciting. I'm really enjoying it.
Jesper (16m 10s): Yeah. Okay. I think I will, I will not give my overall sort of a conclusion on it. I think we'll talk through it. And then if it's not clear by everything else I say, then I can give my, my final words on, on this book by the end. But I think just as Autumn said, in the beginning of the episode, we are heading into spoiler territory now. So a B one, if you haven't read this book and want to read it, you probably want to stop now and then come back once you read it, and then you can listen in and see if you agree with what we're saying here, but yeah, from now on, you'll have been warned.
Autumn (16m 46s): That is very, I think that's been clear to warnings, you know, what you're getting into if you continue on from here.
Jesper (16m 53s): Yeah. But so I've made some different notes that sort of some, let's say places where I feel like I can, I can sort of drop in and talk about something, but there was no specific order to this. It's just like different notes on different thoughts. And then also some comments from Stephen, both from good reads our Goodrich group, but also from, from patron. So I have some comments of his and I, I picked some of the comments where I also have a, have you on what he says. So it's sort of like, they are good talking points. But I think first of all, I could start by saying this book is really well written.
Jesper (17m 37s): I really feel like, you know, it, it evokes feelings and, you know, the way she described things though, the characters and they do make me as the reader. No, I'm able to picture the scene in my mind when things are happening. So, So that is really well done. So yeah, first, first let's say item on the list is just that it is really, well-written
Autumn (18m 3s): Definitely, I think it is worth reading. It is a fun book to read. It is engaging the, again, the world is a different little bit of different time period. If you do like Kung Fu movies, it has that the magic system. I'm sure we'll get into that as well with the Jade and the green bones, the only people that kept kidneys who are the ones who can actually use Jade, everyone else is if they touch it, they're either, unreactive, there's a few people who are in the world who are unreactive to Jade, but the rest of them can basically become addicted. It's like opium. Maybe it's a good substitute for that, but it also gives you really amazing powers. So it's, it's sort of the magic system. And it's really fun.
Autumn (18m 43s): I liked that it's tied to a traditional item, that it works in very set ways when she talks about like, you can do this with it, you can do that with it, but it's really hard to do both. Some people are more powerful. They can take, they can wear tons of J jewelry. And there's other people that, you know, you put on five and that's your Bakst out, that's it? I like that there's variation. And it depends on who you are and your heritage. And that there's only this one select group of people, the Keck honeys, who are truly there, the Jade warriors, the green bones who can wear this. And it's also knowing a little bit of Japanese history and Chinese history, how important Jade was, you know, they, they buried their emperor's wearing Jade uniforms.
Autumn (19m 25s): And so I'm like, oh, this is it's tying in history. And it's, it's, it's Jade. I love stones and I love green, so, oh, I just liked this matching system. It really resonated with me.
Jesper (19m 37s): Yeah. Okay, cool. Because at one of the points that I had written on my list here is really a question mark to my cell is that it's this magic system. Really? That unique question, mark. It was what I wrote on my, on my list because it's basically just superpowers. I mean, yeah, you're using the Jade to, to get your powers, but it's nothing more than that. I mean, the more I thought about it, the less unique I actually feel like the magic system is. I mean, it's fun and all that. It's not, not that, but if you're looking at it from a uniqueness point of view or trying to create something new, then I really don't feel it is that, I don't know if that's fair to say, but
Autumn (20m 14s): I think in some ways, I mean, it's based on a lot of traditional, you could substitute any stone instead of Jade on any universe. I mean, I know I've read other ones where it's just a, sort of like the L stones of Shannara. You have stones and you can do something with it. So I think it has a very strong heritage in the same aspect, but I liked that she tied it in to a culture and a history. But again, I also know, and we'll probably get into that or we can get into it now, but the Jade is tied to a history that, again, I keep saying Japan, this is not supposed to be Japan. It's supposed to be Keck, knees and kick on. And that is, I think to me was the biggest weakness is that it was so obvious what country it was and the time period and the era that I was just like, can we just call it Japan?
Autumn (21m 6s): It felt like it's an island. So I felt maybe this is supposed to be Okinawa. There's the one area we're against, which to me is the Korea, is which Japan has a huge history of fighting with the Korea. And then there's this sort of English slash for some reason I kept thinking of Spain, but it might be because it was started with like Espana, you know, it had that kind of name to me. So it was like an English slash European foreign power as well. It's just like, it was so obvious that I was like, make it either more different and truly unique, or just call it what it is, because it's not even a filmy gray layer. It's pretty apparent what you're trying to base this on.
Jesper (21m 49s): Yeah. I think, I think that's correct. Not necessarily that I think that's a problem as such. I mean, I know we've talked about many times doing our monthly Q and a session with, with our students and, and patron supporters. And so on that if it's a horse, call it a horse. Right. I mean, we set many times, but I, I'm not sure it's a problem as such a, that, that you are sort of mimicking, mimicking close off of some, some real life place, because on the other hand, if you call it Japan and then they were running around with Jade powers, that might, that might also feel wrong. But I, I don't know, but I don't necessarily think that's a problem. That's probably like a, you know, taste kind of thing or opinion thing.
Autumn (22m 34s): Some people, yeah, I think some people will not mind it as much, but I, and I was comparing it to like the Grish of books, the Grisha verse, which has also has some key aspects that are very much based on cultures of this planet, but she does a really good job of anchoring the history into her novel it's they develop out of the novel and they have completely unique aspects based on the world. I guess I was, I like my fantasy, just a little bit more fantasy. And this was so close to the real world with just a little van veil of difference that I was like, well, I wanted to see, I think, a little more different. I wanted a little more traditional, a little more history based on the world she was creating for the book rather than something that, oh, I could let me go check Wikipedia and make sure that that is what, how it happened.
Jesper (23m 27s): Yeah. Yeah. I, I think on that note, I could just sort of inject the comment we got from Stephen on Goodreads, because it sort of goes very much along with what you're talking about. I think because Steven said a quote here, we have a very Earth-like world where technology is straight out of the late seventies, early eighties. Yeah. So that's just me saying he he's in a different time zone or time period, and you are thinking about it, but okay. Then back to the quote, they have cars, they have guns, they have landline phones, they have vocabulary is completely from modern times. Lee basically took the idea of a Jade based magic system and shoved it into a culture of Oriental gangs from the seventies.
Jesper (24m 8s): And right. So, so he's thinking that this is like late seventies, early eighties, where you're talking about after world war one. So there's a bit of, let's say change there, but, but again, I'm not so sure that I fully agree with the fact that their vocabulary is completely from modern times. Like you said, well, maybe it is, but I don't necessarily think that's a problem. I mean, this for me, this is a fantasy setting, so who knows how they talk? I mean, but it goes very much along with what you were talking about. Like, it feels like depends or why not just say it's Japan and so on and so on. Whereas I just think, I just view it as it's a fantasy setting so she can do whatever she wants and maybe it is indeed heavily inspired by some real life cultures and real life locations.
Jesper (24m 52s): I don't disagree with that. I also think that it's it's, it is that just like Steven is saying, and like you were saying as well, but I guess I'm just not seeing it as a problem.
Autumn (25m 4s): I, and I think that just comes down to personal taste to me. I'd like to see it. I would like to, if I didn't understand a word, like how the people greet each other, there is language used and I'm pretty sure all the language use was Japanese. And I basically could have put it into Google translator and checked it. I think there's a part of me who said, I would rather have that as a fantasy language, make it up to fit your world and don't just make it so that I check it. I did not, but I, I had assumed that I probably could have with that a lot, except for the place names that some of the greetings, some of the words, some of the language, the traditions were very much based on real things that you could Google or check on Wikipedia and double-check.
Autumn (25m 52s): And I was just like that's Yeah, to me, I'm like, I would rather have that just shifted a little more into fantasy. Otherwise it w it felt a little not cheating. It just felt like a little bit more work could have been done to make it really have like, wow. That is fantastic. That is so cool. Instead of going like, yeah, I read that the other day in an article on Wikipedia. Cool.
Jesper (26m 19s): Yeah, no, fair enough. Fair enough. But I have another call comment as well from, from Steven, which this time I very much agree with him. So I, you ready for this one? Is it also about culture and stuff? So he says a quote. I think if a culture had such a magic system for many centuries, it would have drastically all areas of history and industry in such a way that the world would be a very different place. How would Jade have affected the countless wars over the centuries? How would it have affected the world governments? How would it have affected technology? She doesn't really answer those questions and quote, and here, I really agree with Steven, because if you just imagine, like you take these Jade warriors and you put them in some sort of special forces in the military, I mean, there's nothing they couldn't do, right?
Jesper (27m 16s): I mean, yeah, you have guns and stuff. You can shoot them. But, but I mean, if they are like, especially the forces and they sneak in behind enemy lines, I mean, just, they can wreck complete havoc and there's not much you can do to stop them. So, and I don't think that she really concerns herself with, with the fact that wooden governments also try to find ways to basically leverage these kinds of people and conquer other countries and stuff like that is it's never mentioned really from a building perspective. I just felt like that was stuff that could have been explored further here.
Autumn (27m 56s): Yeah. I, there, I completely agree. The one thing I did like is that she does have the kind of European foreign power is trying to develop a drug to allow them. Yeah. So yeah. To allow their military to also be able to use Jade and I mean, it has bad side effects. It basically makes you addicted. It can completely overreact. So there, I like that. That was a really cool aspect. But looking at the history, basically all the history you have of Kay Khan and the Keck Annies and the Jade warriors is that they were kind of guerrilla fighters. There was a foreign country that was controlling them and they came down the Hills, they fought for freedom and a revolution, and they want it very, very recently, but it's just like
Jesper (28m 39s): Taking over the
Autumn (28m 40s): World. I know it gives, like you were saying, I mean, you have these guys train, they can deflect bullets. They have the power to do that. There's like six major powers and one of them is deflection. So yeah, you have some ninja like trained warriors. You could go assassinate just about anyone.
Jesper (28m 58s): I have a super fast speed and they have super strong, you know, super strength as well. So I mean, there's almost nothing they can do.
Autumn (29m 7s): No. And it's neat because she does have setups where it's like, it's really hard to do two of those at once. It's almost like you can only do one at a time unless you're really, really good. And you have to be well trained. I mean, there's a school you go through. I don't know how many years of schooling, just to be able to learn, to harness this energy. I loved all of that. But again, once you became a full blooded Jade warrior, a green bone here, pretty much it all, it's like, it all was just clan in fighting to control this tiny nation where it's like, they, their history, these people should have rulers. They should have been gone. Like there's mentions of being descended from gods, but it's not developed the point to explain that why they were so insignificant in their own culture prior to this period.
Autumn (29m 55s): And I agree with Stephen wholeheartedly, it just felt like it was missing. And if this was a real, real, real fantasy culture, their history would have probably needed a lot more explanation of why they weren't ruling other countries and incredibly wealthy country and a huge superpower because they got skills.
Jesper (30m 16s): Yeah. Yeah, indeed. And then that's the part where I don't quite understand why they're just sticking to the small little island here. I mean, why? I mean, okay, fair enough. I mean, gang fighting and stuff like, you know, it is basically the gangs fighting each other and so on, but, but come on. I mean, the government would have stepped in and say, say, Hey guys, you know, you're going to be filthy risk rich, all of you, if you worked for us and, and we go out and we conquer some nation, other nations, I mean, they would have done that.
Autumn (30m 46s): I agree. And I
Jesper (30m 49s): Could have just now. Yeah, I was just about to finish my, my thought because they, she could just have mentioned it as a short paragraph somewhere, just saying for whatever reason they didn't want to, or, or just give some sort of explanation to why, and then that, that would have been closed. Right. But because it's never mentioned, then it just makes me wonder. Okay.
Autumn (31m 10s): Yeah. And I think, again, this is where she was relying way too heavily on the history of Japan because they did close their borders for two centuries, 200 years. They basically were not open up to the rest of the world until the U S came in with a steam ship and basically opened up a country to, from the Shogun era where they're using samurais to basically fast forward, within a matter of years to a full industrial nation. And if you know the history, you're kind of like, oh, she's just basically assuming this is what happened here. And just mentioning instead of the shoguns, as it's the warriors in the mountains and the revolutions and the gorillas and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Autumn (31m 50s): But that doesn't work that's, this is supposed to be a fan of it. Doesn't it's not explained with the magic system she has. And that's where, again, I have the problem that if you're going to develop this culture and this history, and it's a different world, don't just rely on what happened in this world, because it doesn't fit. It's going to leave you these disjointed things that I'm like, I don't understand why this would happen this way.
Jesper (32m 14s): No, I agree. I, and one of the things we talk a lot about in our world building causes, basically making sure that you analyze what are the wider consequences of the magic system and of the things that you develop in your world, because it will have impact on other things in society on other nations may be in this case and so on. So it's not that you have to play that all out, meaning that just not like the needs to then conquer the world or stuff, but, but at least you need to think about what does it mean? And then if we, I don't want as an author to have the conquered the world, then at least I should have an explanation for why they didn't do so.
Jesper (32m 54s): And, and in the same vein here, Steven also said, if Jade is such a powerful substance, has anyone tried to harness it as a power source, the lead through line in there somewhere about scientists studying Jay to find other users, but to no avail, because it only enhances people of bloodline. I would have been able to accept that, but then it would have brought me back to my initial question of why would those J powered S J powered supers have been content with just their tiny corner of the world? And then we're back where we started. Right? But again, I mean, this is again the wider, the wider consequences of having J powers.
Jesper (33m 37s): And if you can really get that many powers out of a Jade stone, then I understand what Steven means in terms of, it's not only about military strength here, right? I mean, you, you probably would wonder as a government as well. I wonder if we can use this as a power source for other things, right. And again, like Steven also says, it's not that the fund, the leader needs to make that into something she could, like Steven says she could just have made a small paragraph some way explaining why they tried and they failed and decided not to go any further or whatever, and then fine. Right. But I'm, I'm really missing from a worldbuildling perspective. I think it is a really cool setting.
Jesper (34m 17s): So don't get me wrong. I think it's, it's quite cool, but that what would have just made it even better would have been some, some consideration about this wider consequence of the Jade powers. And I really feel that it's completely missing.
Autumn (34m 36s): I then I completely agree with you and Steven, that is just, there's something missing. I mean, there could have been any explanation why Jade warriors were limited, why they, they were sick. There was a disease, something just, I wanted some explanation of why they seem so minimal. They were just figure, you know, they had Klan leadership, but it was just this little island. Why not more, but I also want to get into the character is because I think
Jesper (35m 4s): Just thinking about,
Autumn (35m 7s): You know, we haven't talked in like two weeks and it's, we're still in the same Playboy that's, that's good. But that was, I think my other love and hate of the story were when it came down to the characters, they were well-developed. They were interesting. They had very strong personalities and there were two I wanted to really bow. Well, I guess there was three I wanted to bond with the one was the clan leader who was land. I really, he was my favorite up until okay, very big spoiler alert. He dies. And up until that point, I was really excited. Like he did not want to be the leader of a clan during a war.
Autumn (35m 49s): And that's where this world was heading. There was going to be a clan war. And he was basically the only one trying to keep everything together. He didn't want, he wanted to be, he was an awesome, peaceful clan leader, but I'm like, I want to see how he changes, how he transforms and boom kills them off. So I was like, Ugh. And I also, there was Shay, which was his sister and I wanted to like her, she had gone out and explore the world and come back. And there was a few chapters in there where it was like, do I go back to my clan? Do I knock it back to me? And I got to the point, I'm like, just make a decision. I was getting a little sick of her indecision and I never bonded with her because she was just too wishy-washy. And the only other one I kind of liked was Emery Andin.
Autumn (36m 31s): Who was the one who was the young Jade bone who had quite the backstory. His mother was like too sensitive, went bad. His father's European. Well, okay. Quote, unquote, European. We're just going to call him that. And he, so he's highly sensitive to Jade. He can do amazing things with it, but he was also too emotional there's times. I wish he was a girl, but then I would have been really annoyed. He was so emotional. At least as a guy, he was like, oh, okay. A really emotional guy. That's kind of different, but I didn't bond with him either. And at the end of the book, that is actually what kept me from buying book two is like, this is interesting. I have some questions about the world and the Jade and the magic, but I really don't really care.
Autumn (37m 13s): They killed off land and I don't really care what happens to any of the characters enough to make me go buy book two right now, maybe if I have some spare time later and that's prized me, I was really all set to love this book, but I didn't find the character that really made me want to turn the next page.
Jesper (37m 33s): No. And funny enough as usual, we agree here. I mean the only one that slightly had my interest until he was killed, but because it's like, I feel like from the very first page, the worldbuildling really comes into its own. Right, right. Immediately you're sucked into this pretty cool setting. And I was very hooked in it. The first couple of chapters, like this is really great pot. Then the character building and making me as a Rita care for those characters never really happened. It's also, I feel also it's a bit difficult to care for characters who are part of a crime syndicate and they just heard each other people and stuff like that.
Jesper (38m 16s): And it's that alone that in his own, it's a bit difficult. It's like, it's like the, the short story we wrote as a prequel for our new series, basically the main coats are there is, is one of the villain in the, So that also they it's, it was a to make, make a character to read us would actually care about because he is actually not that good of a guy. And I feel like that that's the same problem here. Yeah. That it's just like, there is no real character development. I feel like there's real. No, no real care to ox. It's just like a straightforward standard gangster succession story.
Jesper (38m 59s): Really? That's it?
Autumn (39m 0s): Yeah. I think you really put your finger on it. What, there's no character arc. I was, I thought li like I said, the land had some potential and I was interested to see where he grew too. And he dies. And that was the only one who really, I saw a potential arc to even Emory. I thought at the end, he totally acts out at the perfectly perfect storm moment to not act out in a culture where you don't act out, insult his family, insult everyone, like a huge slap in the face to his family. And I was just like, I wanted some reservations. Like I understood as a writer, why you would do that because to me, you know, you're Writing Fantasy.
Autumn (39m 42s): It's always like oceans are supercharged. Things happen, you know, big drama, but I just wanted some restraint from his character to show some sign of growth of thinking beyond his own needs. And yeah, he was being used. But again, in the family setting, it was kind of, he needed to have been used at that point. And it was also an opportunity for him to grow and he just didn't. And I didn't really, I just was so disappointed in him at the end of specifically where I'm like, okay, maybe there's potential. And I was like, I really don't care what happens to him after this. And like I said, I had that one thought I'm like, gosh, it would have been interesting if he had been a strong woman, because there's only a couple of strong women's because it's a very patriarchal, very patriarchal society, even though it's written by a woman.
Autumn (40m 35s): And I thought, well, I, I didn't connect with anyone. And that's really a shame because it's a kind of, it's the story itself had so much potential.
Jesper (40m 46s): Yeah. I mean, of course this is a Critical Reading episode, so we are being very critical. I mean, I would say it, isn't an entertaining read. It's a good book. So, so, so, so it's just us being very critical here because it's a Critical Reading episode, but so I'll continue in the second way and being a bit critical because what I also felt like I would really have liked some sort of surprised or, or twist about something, just something, but everything was so straightforward that I really felt like, not that I could predict everything that would happen as such, but I, and I don't know if Lee, maybe Lance Beth, you could say was a bit of a surprise. I was, I actually, I was not expecting him to die.
Jesper (41m 29s): And so that was a bit of a surprise, but know, but I, I dunno, it just felt too straightforward if you know what I mean.
Autumn (41m 37s): Yeah, no, I do. I see, I was kind of, I knew land was either going to die or he's going to have an awesome character arc. And I was so hungry for that character arc and it didn't happen. And I was a little surprised at how they used Emery to defeat the other clan or, well, it wasn't really a defeat defeat, but how they used him and his power, but it completely made sense. And if you were paying maybe attention to embryo a little bit more, you would have totally seen where that was coming from. So everything very much built off of everything you expected to in the story. And there was no huge surprise twist. There was no women coming in to save the day, which, you know, I always hope for, but it didn't happen.
Autumn (42m 17s): I was true. Everything was just a little too stuck in its box and stayed there pretty tightly. And so there, I kind of agree. I, I wanted something a bit more exciting, something a bit more surprising and it never developed. I was actually really holding up when LAN the night he dies, he gets a letter from his ex-wife that he had let go. He was way too nice of a character in many ways for the world he was in. And I always wanted to know what was in that letter. It was like the hanging threat. I was expecting her to say, well, actually I left and I was pregnant with you. And I just he's, he's your son and or your daughter, which would have been really awesome.
Autumn (42m 58s): And I it's time she come back and begin her training with you. I would've been heart-stopping Lee so excited, but they never actually mentioned the letter. He puts it in a drawer and no one finds it. I'm like, is this in book two? I don't. And again, that's, that's about the only curiosity I have is what was in this really thick letter edits. At least I'm curious about it, but you know, if there had been some tea, some tea, but it would have been better to end book one with someone having found it and opening it going, oh my gosh. Then I would have been booked to right there then.
Autumn (43m 38s): Oh my gosh.
Jesper (43m 40s): Oh, lots heat from Rita's if you did that. Oh my God. They said,
Autumn (43m 44s): I know, but I would have bought it in this, in a heartbeat just to find out what was said. So I didn't have that draw. And again, I agree with you, this book it's worth reading. It's entertaining. It's beautiful. If you love kung-fu it is such a fun book to read. I think book two and three might be worth reading. I mean, the reviews are astounding. The book sales are astounding. It's probably worth reading. Yeah. But I wasn't drawn to it enough, but I think there is, there's something to learn there as a writer that there's something missing with a character or something. A lot of people, even Steven had mentioned, he didn't connect with the characters.
Jesper (44m 25s): Yeah. Yeah. And of course a Windell, everybody could then say, yeah, that's nice. You guys are saying that, but this is, is this a top 100 fans as you broke it of all time. And so neighborly award nominee for best novel and so on. Yeah. And fair enough. Yes. But we can only speak of our own opinions here. And, and if I'm very honest about it, the only thing in my opinion, I can say, I don't understand why it is that highly praised. It's a good book. Yes. It's a good story. Yes, it is very, well-written great. Worldbuildling maybe with some, some missing pieces, like we talked about here, but I don't feel it's that good that it should be that highly pre I don't know. I mean, maybe I'm just, I'm just weird and I'm not like everybody else.
Jesper (45m 9s): And fair enough if that's the case, but I dunno, I enjoyed it. Good read, good entertainment. But if I hadn't known that it was a award-winning novel like this, I would never have guessed it. Let me put it that way.
Autumn (45m 23s): Agreed. I think I I've read some indie fiction that I think topped it, rivals it and tops it. So it's interesting that it got picked for us is such an award-winning and so touted. I think there's a lot of great books out there. It's no better than a lot of them. I mean, well, okay. It's better than some of the really rough ones, but it's on par. It's a good book. It's entertaining. There's other ones that are probably more exceptional. But other than that, again, it is my opinion. It was worth reading, but wow. I can only complain to complain to have the problems she has with how well it's doing good luck best for her. I'm so excited.
Autumn (46m 4s): I wish every author who wrote that well or on par could do as well.
Jesper (46m 10s): Yeah, for sure. For sure. I think one last thing I had on my list to mention here, because this is really something I've learned, not from this novel alone, but sort of from all these kinds of bestseller novels that we read over the, I mean, we read, we went one before as well for the, for this podcast. But outside of the podcast here, we, we have also had like what, four or five, something like that, very best-selling books that we've read over the last month, but just because we were trying to see what are the common denominators in these books and what I have learned, and this book is exactly the same. And I've been surprised about this because it's not, I guess my standard preference, but I just have to admit as well that after reading all of these massively successful bestsellers, what they all have in common is that they are fairly slow paced all of them, this one as well.
Jesper (47m 8s): You know, it, it takes time before things get going. It's not that nothing is happening, but, but it's not a fast page. One way that you like flipping pages to see what happens next. It it's fairly slow paced. It takes a time with where you spent just spend time with the characters and all of these very, very successful novels. They all do this. So I know, I know some people sometimes say, will, it feels a bit boring because not enough is happening, but at the same time, I just have to, you know, concede and say, well, apparently that's what most people want. That's the only conclusion I can draw because I've seen it over and over and over again now.
Autumn (47m 48s): Yeah, no, I agree with something and it's definitely not to my taste. Like I said, there was probably two or three chapters. I'm like, you could have cut one of these out. Oh my gosh. It's so slow in the beginning. Especially without the character development more. I think, I think that could have been stronger, but yeah, a lot of these incredibly best-selling books are slow paced and there seems to be a lot of time just spent dilly-dallying and learning parts of the world. And oh, remember when I read, there's a lot of cooking and food descriptions and I'm a foodie and I was getting a little tired of the cooking and the food description. That's a lot of cooking and food descriptions. Yeah.
Jesper (48m 26s): No, I mean, don't get me wrong. The point, the point with slow paced is not to be boring. That's not what I'm saying. Right. I mean, if you just have chapters cooking and nothing is happening, that is boring. That's not what I'm trying to say. I'm more things are happening and things were also happening in JTD, but it just takes it time with it. It, nothing is rusted, you know? Yeah. It's just a slow paced.
Autumn (48m 50s): Yeah. Slower than you might think. If you're writing slow and you think it's slow, you might be okay. Read a couple of these books and see how you, you measure up. Yeah.
Jesper (49m 0s): Alright. Anything else on your list autumn? Or is that it?
Autumn (49m 4s): That's it? I think we covered all my big topics. So I will just say it is a good book. It's worth reading. There's also a lot of great authors out there, so yeah. Go check out a book. All right.
Jesper (49m 17s): That's good. So next Monday I have a great interview lined up for you and I hope very much. You're going to enjoy that one. So see you then,
Narrator (49m 30s): If you like, what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join autumn and Jasper on patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, going, stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Do you wonder if you've avoided stereotypes in your writing and been appropriately sensitive to people of different races, ethnicities, or neurodivergent?
There are aspects to look for as you write and edit to make certain you are aware of how what you've written will be perceived. Plus, there are sensitivity readers who can help you out!
With special guest and sensitivity reader Iona Wayland, Autumn covers some tips from tying mental health to character arcs to checking yourself for outdated language which will help your writing cast aside stereotypes.
Find Iona on her website at https://ionawayland.wixsite.com/author and on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/iona.wayland/
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am writing Fantasy Podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Autumn (31s): Hello, I'm Autumn. And this is episode 153 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. And this week we have, yes, we're on vacation and taking a bit of a break, you know, I guess he deserves, but so instead I have with me a different author and sensitivity reader and someone who writes fantasy and I'm so looking forward to talking to her, so welcome to the podcast. I own a Wayland.
Iona (59s): Hi there. Thank you for having me.
Autumn (1m 1s): Yeah, I'm so excited. I, you said you're a tea drinker. You're a pet mom. This is going to be so much fun. And I even like the sensitivity, I can't wait to talk about that because I know my first story, my first passions were like, well, you know, we have these giant epic fantasy quests and no one ever seems to come out the other side with like PTSD. So that was one of the first things that I thought of when I first started writing back in 2010. So I cannot wait to talk to you, but first go ahead and introduce yourself. I know you have your book, ashes and talk is tell us a little bit about that and tell us how you decided to become like a sensitivity reader.
Iona (1m 45s): Well, I, and my day job is a trauma therapist and by night, so to speak, I write and ashes is my debut. It's a dark fantasy novel. It has a Latin X main character named Angela. And she has to decide if she wants to journey and avenge her brother's death. And so it's those trials of figuring out herself in the midst of trying to save her brother. Oh,
Autumn (2m 16s): That is cool. So yeah. So he's dead. Is it saving his soul or saving him or is that giving away too much of the book?
Iona (2m 23s): It won't give away too much. He is, he is dead at the beginning of the book, but it explores what was behind his death and what is behind like what his soul needs to pass on.
Autumn (2m 36s): That is so cool. I love it. Well, that is because I looked at the cover. I'm also a graphic artist and I saw the cover. I'm like, cool. I like this. This is a very nice cover. So,
Iona (2m 47s): So glad you like the cover. I designed it. I'm not, I mean, I'm not talented, like what you're saying, but I did design. I was like, this is exactly what I want, please, if you're able to do that. And they were so
Autumn (2m 60s): Nice. Fantastic. Well, yeah, it came out really nice. I do like it. So, wow. You've been working with trauma. So that's already your interest in your background and a, did that bring you to writing or have you always been a fantasy reader? Always wanted to be a fantasy writer.
Iona (3m 15s): I've always been a reader and a writer to the point where before I even could write, like I knew the alphabet or anything, I would watch cats out of like alley cats out of my window as like a little kid and right. Loop de loops. And that was my version of writing stories about the cats that I saw. So ever since then, I've just always wanted to be an author. And I've definitely, definitely a reader. So fantasy is the main thing, but I really like all genres. There's not any that I dislike.
Autumn (3m 47s): I think that's one of the benefits of being like an indie author, that if you want to do a cozy mystery slash fitness slash something, we can mash those up and turn it into something really special.
Iona (4m 1s): Yes, it's true. It gets very niche. I love it.
Autumn (4m 4s): Yes, very much so. So before we get into some of the topics and I think it's interesting, so it sounds like your, your writing tends towards inspiration, which is a super cool and more like noble bright, but I have to ask what your favorite type of tea is because I never get another tea enthusiast on the podcast.
Iona (4m 22s): The hard, oh, that's so hard. Well, right now I'm drinking an English breakfast, but oh man, my favorite tea, I have to say chai tea, which isn't really specific. Cause chai just means tea, but I like the spice tea for sure is, is so delicious. And I I'm really into bubble tea right now. Yeah. I definitely have that as like my Wednesday treat to myself middle of the week, treat to myself, I'll get a bubble tea.
Autumn (4m 54s): Oh, I love that. I'm not anywhere close to any place that sells bubble tea. So I will live vicariously through you for that one. Yes.
Iona (5m 3s): I definitely got lucky. Yes.
Autumn (5m 5s): Oh yeah. Well, chai tea again is a perfect answer for this time of the season and the fall. We're recording this in October. So yeah, we're all in the pumpkin spice attitude right now.
Iona (5m 16s): Yes we are. All
Autumn (5m 18s): Right. So this is, Ashley's your first one. Are you working on something else right now? Or are you going to
Iona (5m 24s): Actually working on a sequel? But there was a bunch of very happy but intense life stuff popping up. That was really good and wonderful, but it also made writing go on the back burner for a little bit, but I am working on the sequel to that. And the goal is to make it a SQL within the same universe. And the main characters of the first book are mentioned, or maybe even run into, but it is like a different main character.
Autumn (5m 53s): Oh, I like the ones like that, especially where you can, you know, work in somebody from a previous book or a different book. And they just do like a cameo. That it's Very cool. So yeah, I was like reading about what you do and as, as sensitivity. So you have to tell us what a sensitivity reader is and how you came up with that idea. But I was going to say, looking at your own writing, you like, you like to look at grief and surviving trauma and finding purpose and strength. And when I read that, I'm like, oh, you probably liked the, as someone else put it what's considered traditional fantasy, but they decided to start calling it noble bright, which is, you know, it might go dark, but there's always that hope that's buried in there rather than everything being dark and dire.
Autumn (6m 37s): And you're wondering, I remember one of the first dark fantasies I read it was really closely and in a sister died, everyone, this person cared about a diet and he's trudging through a swamp and I can never remember what the purpose, you know, what the final target and goal was. And I'm just like, you know, if I was this character, I would just lay down in the swamp and I'm done. So that's the other side of dark fantasy, but it sounds like you try to pull out a little bit of that hope in the healing.
Iona (7m 5s): Yeah. I definitely am healing focus and it's not saying that it's necessarily a happy or what the character expected to have happen. And there's still trauma from those experiences. And at the same time, I feel like healing is such a beautiful, intense process that all humans are capable of making that. I just wanted to make sure I depicted the human experience in that way and my writing for sure.
Autumn (7m 34s): I love that. That is so, you know, it's touching and it's, I love not, I it's one of those things when you're writing, you know, some people like have a moral compass and they're, it's almost like the fable where they're like doing a morality play and they're pushing the novel that way. But I do love it when you have characters. And like you said, it's almost like a twist or it's not what they expect. It's not what they fear, but it's a different result. But I do love the power of that change. The character arc, you probably work on that specifically is to see a character go through this trauma of face it and come out the other side one way or the other or somewhere in between.
Iona (8m 14s): Yes, exactly. I love some good character arcs for sure.
Autumn (8m 18s): Oh, is there a special one that you like to see? Like, is there something you've recently read as a sensitivity reader or even when you're writing or just a book you picked up and you're like, gosh, that was a good healing. You know, what made you think this is not only realistic, but just a very solid character, a character arc and maybe a little bit of a surprise.
Iona (8m 40s): There was one. So this is actually from a TV show that I've been watching and it's an, it's an older TV show, but I, there is this character that was really annoying in the beginning and, and he was kind of insufferable at times and very emotionally immature. And as it's carried on, you could tell that his character arc was instead of being insecure and overcompensating by being kind of obnoxious, he was like, no, you know what? I can do this. And if you believe me, then, then great. But if you don't, I'm still going to do it anyway. And he got to be like one of my favorite characters by the end of it.
Iona (9m 23s): So I thought that was pretty cool too. I had that whole, like this guy's like really annoying. And I wonder if he's going to be written out. That's how annoying. And it was really cool to see him thrive. It was very neat. So that is something that recently popped up for me.
Autumn (9m 40s): That is fantastic. That's actually something I wish I had done in my debut novel. I've a character that he's, I would describe him more as overly sensitive, maybe sliding towards manic depressive with highs and lows and often making bad choices. And I I've actually had a few readers be like, oh my gosh, I can't stand him. I want to skip his chapters. And I don't think I really ever healed him if I ever go back to the story. I think, cause there's always is, I've done two trilogies. And I like even things like three sets of three, it's just, I'm half tempted to write another third set and I might have to finish up his character arc where yeah. Maybe people will not want to like drown him.
Iona (10m 24s): It can be done. That's what you decide. Yeah. So, but that is real. That would be a really cool character arc to see having someone have like peaks and lows like that, being able to find more of a stability in between. That's pretty cool.
Autumn (10m 38s): It was. But I have to say, especially having published that on in 2012, I've had definitely people not see why I did that. Like they want to have an easy character. They want a character that makes sense. And a character arc. And literally there's times he doesn't make sense because he just, he's got emotional highs and lows that don't always jive with. What's going on or a little extreme on either side. And I do see that as an issue, even though I try to bring out the nuances, like he's a little different in the society, he's a little unhinged, but to other people who are more stable, it's just the way he is. But I think people are getting a little bit more now.
Autumn (11m 19s): I mean, it's been almost 10 years since I wrote it
Iona (11m 25s): Here since then.
Autumn (11m 27s): And what's crazy is how much society has changed. I see a lot more nuances in characters where they are, maybe there's some mental health issues and other things. And that's brought up a little bit more even in fantasy where I think before it used to be more in nonfiction. So I think it's a little more understood, but I would say, I don't know if you would give us any hints or tips on that, but if you're writing a character that does have some stresses like post-traumatic or mental health issues, cluing the reader in that you're not just throwing a crazy character and making them erupt just to like make the plot tense, but that it's actually a character issue, an internal thing that's going on.
Iona (12m 9s): I really liked that. I love when people are able to not like to show the nuances like you're talking about and show that it's an inner character struggle and how it shows up for that character through symptoms is a very cool when people are pulling them off in the correct way. There's not that there's a one way that is what's hard. And there is not just one way, but that's where sensitivity readers come in. Where, so I, I read that's so sensitivity reading is where there's someone with expertise or the life experience or both. And they will read through a manuscript that has not been published yet.
Iona (12m 54s): And they will point out depictions that may be harmful or inaccurate. So they, they really edit for inaccuracies in that regard. And then also I do diversity reading too, cause I'm a mixed race woman of color. And I like being able to help in that regard as well.
Autumn (13m 14s): Oh, that's fantastic. Oh, and that's so important with so many people being more interested in writing different perspectives and viewpoints and races and cultures, even when you get into fantasy. I mean, even a dwarf is different from an elf versus a different color or other race. So that is cool that you can bring that out and see if the experience is, you know, like you said, authentic and valid and not just being cliched and stereotype.
Iona (13m 44s): And in writing, like I think most authors and writers would agree that writing is very powerful. It depicts what's going on in our world. It shows even if it's in a totally different realm, it shows what the author's points of views are and what those characters points of views are and what they see. And so it's, it's really important to make sure that the representation is accurate so that there's not a perpetuating cycle going on from generation to generation. Yeah,
Autumn (14m 17s): That's so true. I mean, I know I was paying attention when I was, I just wrote a fake contemporary Fe fantasy, urban fantasy, and part of it, I have, I'm a native American as a native American, more of a spiritual being and to not fall in that cliche of the native American, who is a Sage and knows all the answers or, you know, all these other, you know, to make him an authentic character who happens also to be a native American spirit who also has this history that he actually kind of doesn't quite understand, like so many teenagers are like, yeah, great. My grandfather's is great, dude. And he's like go out to the forest and go to class. And I'm like, so it is important though, because sometimes we don't even realize the stereotypes were contributing to.
Autumn (15m 7s): I mean, I was just at a fantasy con and I was on a panel for women and fantasy and we decided that it was women characters, not just women authors. And I pointed out that so many times in the U S as a student, all of our examples are here and it's always he and she, or something, you know, the is always first. And I'm like, you know what? Screw that. I started all my pronouns. All my example cases are now female. Or sometimes I'll do 50, 50, I'll switch back and forth. But I always start with the woman for us. I always put she first because why, why is the default he, and you know, it only took me like 40 years to figure that one out.
Iona (15m 47s): And there's so many different, like nuances to, to gender expression and experiences and stuff. Like why start with he? You know, I love that. I really love that.
Autumn (15m 59s): Yeah. And even like you were saying, I mean, I just finished the late bar to go the Grisha verse books and oh my gosh, kudos to her. She has non-binary transgender. I think she has it all. And it was so fantastic to read. I'm like, this is, I can imagine the fantasy I read. Cause I grew up in a very conservative, very Christian, very rural place. And I know the fantasy, I read changed my perspective of who I became and I'm thinking my goodness, if I could have read the Grisha verse when I was 13, 15, and they thought Dungeons and dragons was bad, the water,
Iona (16m 42s): I think that shows the power of writing and how, why it's so important to have accurate representation. It can really change people's lives. It's truly incredible.
Autumn (16m 51s): So, I mean, as a, so as a sensitivity reader, what are the steps that you do when you look to help an author and what you're reading, what are you looking for that says, this is an authentic experience versus a, this might be, you know, the wrong way to go.
Iona (17m 6s): Oh, that's a good question. Okay. So one of the things I see most often is when certain races or ethnicities or mental health experiences are experienced, like a monolith. So like, like there's, there's like three examples. So like, let's say let's use depression. That's something that a lot of people experience and struggled to overcome or do overcome. And that is something that I think what a lot of people think is depression means sad. And so if that's the only presentation of depression, there's nothing that shows what actually is making that depression for that character.
Iona (17m 48s): Like everyone sad, but depression is different. There's way more reactions and symptoms that someone can go through. It can be very different that could be having difficulty getting up in the morning that can be staring off into space in the middle of the Workday that can be forgetting to brush your teeth or take a shower for a while. And then being like, oh shoot, how long has it been or not having the energy to do that? Or some people even experience physical pain of that. So I look for if there's any like broad strokes over simplification of mental health or any other kinds of experiences in the author's work, I think that way I can be like, let's be a little more specific.
Iona (18m 32s): And how does it show up for your character specifically?
Autumn (18m 35s): Oh, I saw like that. It reminds me of like, you know, I often teach like writing with the five senses. We still rely on visual. And then we might have sound because dialogue is sound, but it's like touch, taste. All of these other things are a way of experiencing the world and doing your world-building. It helps bring the world to life if you can touch it. So you're saying the same thing, like with depression, you know, even to me, I'm a huge foodie. So it's like losing that drive for like good tastes being like, yeah, it's just whatever, you know, that's all a sign and it also gives more depth to your character and more depths to the experience. Oh, I liked that so much.
Iona (19m 11s): I'm clad. And I'm glad you talk about the different senses. I remember my world being like totally blown away when I learned that there was more than five senses. Like not, well, there's the five main ones, but like, there's like balance. Like if something feels off kilter, there's heat, hot and cold. There's Like, I there's like 20 more or something like that. But I remember like at the very least let's bring in the five senses, but there's also all these other things too, that we can add on there for the whole experience.
Autumn (19m 41s): Exactly. And I always looked at it even the sixth sense, the traditional sixth sense is mind or soul spirit. That's where the mental health comes in is it's not just intelligence, but it's how well you deal with things. And that is such an interesting, you know, we talk about personally Nally tests to develop your character, but looking at just how reactive, how adaptive are they mentally to big changes. Some people are going to break very quickly and some people are going to be surprising and they're going to be able to change and flow, but eventually something might trip them up. And it's, it's part of knowing your character, knowing how they're mentally and emotionally handling the things you're these hurdles that you're throwing at them or letting them fall in love and then yanking of that away, how are they going to be like, oh, wow, there's a deeper impact to those things.
Iona (20m 33s): Definitely a consequence. Yeah. Deeper impact for sure.
Autumn (20m 38s): Very cool. So what are some tips resize? You know, don't so we have don't, you know, don't just dwell on one aspect, like, you know, definitely do your homework. Are we going to have a character? Who's depressed, looked at some of the other symptoms that are there. Like if they're manic, depressive, understand what the highs and the lows are and find a way of, of explaining that. Like I said, I can see readers being still startled. If you have a character that is truly going through a mental health crisis or has some issues, and especially when you come into across it and fantasy, it's not still not traditional to have those things, but they're creeping in there, but it helps to clue in the reader somehow saying I'm not just being over-exaggerated of this one character.
Autumn (21m 22s): There's a real reason. I mean, is there some clues or some tips you can give us that are a way of letting people know that this is, you know, this, these are the things that are happening to this character or for a reason on purpose.
Iona (21m 35s): Yeah. I, I definitely tell people to develop the character first, develop the character first because having a mental injury or mental illness is not a character trait. If someone's like, oh my gosh, they're so anxious that doesn't really tell me anything about the character at all. That that is just conveying a diagnosis or, or someone questioning if maybe they might have this diagnosis, like I want you to know, are they extroverted, introverted? Ambiverted do they out loud process, internally process? Are they quick to anger?
Iona (22m 15s): Like, do they have a quick fuse or are they really patient? Like, how do they process the world? How do they react to other people? What is, what do they hold, dear? What do they push away? Those kinds of things. And then, then you can add the diagnosis because you already know your character as a person. Because I think that they'll sometimes there'll be writers who will have someone have their villain origin story is that they are bipolar. And it's like, well, that doesn't really tell me anything. There are lots of people who are bipolar. There's different kinds of bipolar.
Iona (22m 56s): Like tell me about your character first and then just show through show. Don't tell, really show me what their symptoms are. And I think that's important to remember also not to always villainize those with mental health either. Cause that's a big thing that I see very frequently. And it's kind of cliche now. I think.
Autumn (23m 17s): Yeah. I was just about when you said the villain being bipolar, like, oh, but isn't that a stereotype too? I mean, that's just like the joker or something in Batman it's should not always be the mentally ill who goes off the deep end. You can have a way. I think it's interesting. Cause I've even read fantasy recently where there was someone who was going through issues. And I think the elves came up with a drug for them. I'm like, oh my goodness, we're getting into pharmaceuticals. Now this is fantastic. You can be a healthy, productive member of society and how, and just be different. You know, my nephew actually has Asperger's and he and I, it kinda runs in my family.
Autumn (23m 57s): We're all very literal. Like if you see a sign on the road that says like road drops 500 feet, our immediate thought is the road is going to fall 500 feet. Once we have a very literal interpretation, but it's just a different way of seeing the world. It's just our lens of the world is slightly different from most other people. But again, what is most other people? What is normal? This is normal for me.
Iona (24m 23s): I don't think there is such thing. I think normal is made up as a therapist. Joke is it's a setting on your washer machine and
Autumn (24m 34s): That's true. It doesn't say average, like normal cycle. That's true. I like that. I'm going to use that from now on to defend myself.
Iona (24m 44s): And I do think that what you're saying is like, yeah, like you process the world or family members are on the spectrum are autistic and they process the world in a different way, but it's also not different. It's also just how you process it. So I would love to see an autistic character with those kinds of like the ability, the different abilities and disabilities portrayed there with that disorder. I don't even like calling it a disorder. It's it's someone not knowing and I'm, I am not neuro-typical so I'm neurodivergent myself. So I think that it's very cool to see all kinds of representation in writing.
Autumn (25m 28s): I think it's important too. And that's one of the things I do love that. I mean, I did grow up in the eighties and it seemed like all the, it was all the male characters, you know, He-Man or something and they're wearing swords and they're going off and saving the women. And I was, I was always at least neuro atypical enough to usually just be able to put myself in the place of the hero. It didn't matter. I was a tomboy. I think, goodness, I actually just realized this the other day that my brother never said I couldn't do something because I was a girl. We were like playing Cowboys and Indians together. He let me play with his matchboxes. I'm like, oh my goodness. How much of my weird view of life comes from my brother?
Autumn (26m 8s): Not treating me like a younger brother instead of a little girl, all the way down to trying to draw and quarter me once. But we won't go there.
Iona (26m 18s): My choice of sibling relationships,
Autumn (26m 22s): I love writing about them. They're so horribly wonderful, but it is true. It's it's those different viewpoints and the diversity of viewpoints that make even a quest group. You don't want every single person the same. And I know one of the advices I give is like, if you're having a problem telling your characters apart, which one, your readers will then have a problem, but give them like a totem. I'm like this, one's the Fox, this one's the out you to do something so that you understand their differences, some kind of way of seeing them differently. And I think that goes for even how they,
Iona (26m 57s): Especially like, if the person's like indigenous and they understand the backgrounds behind, like what totems mean, but if you aren't indigenous and you want to try something else, you can also do like, smells this one author. Now I forget who said it, but that doesn't help. But she was like, you, you can use smells like sense and like, imagine that their candle, what would it be? I know for me, sometimes I'll imagine characters wearing certain colors, just because color is so important to me and having those different, like connections with color and, and what they mean for me and how I can tell like my characters apart and what makes them different from each other.
Iona (27m 40s): Yeah.
Autumn (27m 41s): That's when I wrote my debut, that was how I managed to get into character's head. I actually wrote in a different color font for each of the characters
Iona (27m 49s): And that's so helpful. It
Autumn (27m 51s): Was so helpful. I could, I knew then to stay, if I was especially, I was trying to do all chapters in one point of view. So I knew to stay. If I'm in red, I was in tie and I had to stay in Thai and it really helped me learn a lot better. But I, I liked that smells. That also gives you a totally different perspective and reminds you to use your other senses.
Iona (28m 12s): It does. I really hadn't thought of it until this person said it. And now I wish I could remember this person's name.
Autumn (28m 18s): Okay. I am sure. Well, you know, Google, I would say we can Google them, but yeah, that sometimes doesn't work. There's just so much out there anymore. Well, that's really cool. So you, I love that you do this kind of reading and sensitivity reading for both mental health, as well as races and stereotypes. And when you do it like character arc wise, what are some tips you can say for like showing a character shifting from the one side of their art to the other, like, are there good turning point issues or what are ways of showing that the, you know, they're becoming they're healing and moving on?
Iona (28m 60s): Oh, that's a really great question. Something that I think is helpful to show with healing is that it's not linear. So I think a lot of people, even, even their expectation for therapy sometimes is like, okay, I'm going to have like six sessions. And then on the seventh one, there'll be a big epiphany and then I'll be fixed whatever that even means. And it's like, well, that's not quite how it works and that's not how it's going to work for characters either. So I think it'll be cool to show like, you know, they, they, their tolerance might get longer. Like when they usually are like really quick to anger, maybe show that their tolerance before they blow up is lasting a little bit longer and a little bit longer, or they're able to tolerate another character a little bit longer than usual.
Iona (29m 54s): Or if someone has a hard time accepting accolades or like compliments, then showing that change in their effect from being able to just brush off, be like, no, this is it's like, wow, you really saved me. Like you're a hero. And then being like, I'm not a hero. Like we see that so much in fantasy. Like I'm not a hero, I'm just doing my job. But getting to a point where they're empowered enough to accept that they did something very difficult and very brave and courageous is very, very beautiful. I also love because I love seeing this cause this is how it happens in real life is when people regress.
Iona (30m 34s): So there'll be these accomplishments, these accomplishments, these accomplishments, and then they might use, they might break a little and use an old maladaptive coping strategy that they don't, they haven't used for months or year or whatever. And then they go back to doing that. And then they're like, oh, was this all for nothing? And of course it's not all for nothing but showing that like, I've been different. I've been, I'm different now. Like, but why did I do this? And showing how they come back from that again and again. And I know someone told me once that healing is, is kind of almost like cyclical, where it'll go in a circle, you're going forward like a wheel.
Iona (31m 18s): But it, you have some patterns that you have to break out of that takes some time and you might repeat them.
Autumn (31m 25s): Oh, I love that. I reminds me of the anagram, which has like the nine stages for each of the key personality types. And so it's like, yeah, you can move up and down the scale. And it's not just villains moving down, but you know, you can have a character that starts really high and they can go down and they can go back up and they can go back down. I mean, I know, I remember again, one of my characters, one of my favorite characters and he starts off pretty high. He's pretty kick ass, but he, his, the second book, there's a huge event at the end of the second one, he loses his sister and he, he just kind of crumbles and he slides down and some people were really mad at me, but I'm like, this is legit.
Autumn (32m 11s): This is, you know, people go through things. I've actually, I've lost siblings. It's you changes you. And I'm surprised that some people didn't want to see a character go down, maybe have, who went from a positive arc to a negative arc in one book and then came back up to the third book. That's what the trilogy is for. Right.
Iona (32m 31s): Absolutely. And that's how it is. Like you're saying in real life, like grief, that's something that I heavily have heavily explore in ashes. Is it? I think they used to think that it was like the stages of grief. It's not stages, that's a swinging pendulum. I don't know what's going to happen. We don't know. And you can go move back and forth all throughout your life for the rest of your life. It's going to affect it. You're going to miss that person. And that's what I really wanted to show. And there are times when Angela, my main character, she will sometimes handle things really well and use her resilience and use her, like I'm going to do this for my family kind of attitude.
Iona (33m 16s): And then there are other times where she's like, wow, what am I doing here? Like even going to work. Yeah, it's true.
Autumn (33m 24s): And that's a stick. And I love that. And again, I mean, we just because it's fantasy and a fantasy setting or has magic doesn't mean that the emotions aren't real. I mean, that's how we can pretend to be a dragon or pretend to be an L for any other species that we come up with. Is those really the emotional connections. And that's also what draws us to characters. So that's why I think explaining it to that as someone who has an experienced grief or hasn't experienced someone in their family who is, has mental health issues might not quite, we'll actually get it a little bit. And I think that's really important is to not just make some people go, this doesn't make any sense, but try to draw out the realism and say, this is, this is how it is for some people.
Iona (34m 9s): And I think that's really important.
Autumn (34m 11s): Yeah. Well, is there any other tips you can think of that you think would really help writers, you know, talk about how to write, even we talked a lot about mental health, but even bringing out cultural differences, how not to fall into those stereotypical traps or how to even question, you know, when you're developing a character as, or a certain point where you're like, where do you stop and ask yourself, am I just being a stereotype with this person?
Iona (34m 38s): Well, it's hard to know what biases, because we all have biases that we don't know about, which is why it's a lovely to have critique partners. I, my advice is to include the community, if you can, like of whatever you're writing about. So like, if you're an autistic person and you're writing an autistic character, then you should have some autistic beta readers. If you're not able to do, I have obviously support someone doing sensitivity reading or having a sensitivity reader, I should say, but if the person doesn't want to do that, then having the community help them. And then being very open to feedback about that.
Iona (35m 20s): Because I think even though we can have biases, if we have certain disorders or if we have certain backgrounds like racial and ethnic backgrounds, I think there's more room for biased error when we don't share that. So that's why it's so important to include the community there and just making sure to unlearning certain things does not feel very good, but overall it will improve your writing.
Autumn (35m 51s): Oh, that's so very true. And I know as it's, I love question, I swear. I didn't question anything as a teenager. I've made up for it as I've gotten older, but
Iona (36m 3s): That's part of being a teenager,
Autumn (36m 9s): But it is very important. I think, I mean, when I sit down to create a character and I go with my first gut assumption is like a female or a male and I've always stopped. Why, what color? You know, why do I feel like it should be that way? I think that's so important is to question basically it's exhausting. But when it comes to your main characters or even your sub characters, I know I was reading something, helping a writing coach with something. And it seemed like every default character was a male. The doctor was a male, the nurses were female. I'm like, come on, wake up 20, 20, 20, 21. Even know your doctors are now female. Your nurses are nail male deal with it.
Autumn (36m 50s): And when it sneaks in there and sometimes I think you're right, I saw it because I wasn't on the author. And so I really noticed it. I mean, I think if I went back to something I had written ages ago and I looked at it with a clean slate, I would also go like, oh my gosh, why did I choose that?
Iona (37m 8s): I've definitely looked at my old writing and been like, well, I've certainly grown because I know these certain thought processes are not accurate anymore, but you never have really thought they were.
Autumn (37m 23s): I think, I think we all deserve to be able to grow. I always feel bad, even if it is for politicians, which it's hard to feel bad for politicians, but you know, once like 20, 30 years ago you voted on this, oh, for goodness sakes, let them change. People can change their mind. Over 30 years, your writing will change. Don't be afraid, I guess, to try writing a different culture, writing a different species. I know with my first books, I remember thinking I wanted a fantasy race. I didn't want ELLs. What color should they be? And I was thinking black. Yeah. I was trying to go through everything, but I want it to be fantasy that finally made them their skins, the color of bark.
Autumn (38m 4s): So, you know, go ahead. Be different, come up with something totally new. That's fine too. Don't be afraid of trying it, but yeah. Make sure you probably check in with someone else. Some beta readers, some sensitivity readers to make sure you're not off the wall and going to,
Iona (38m 21s): Yeah. The bark thing reminded me. This is not me saying your elves are bad. They're gone. It's not, I promise this is something totally different. It just reminded me of that's something that has, has changed a lot is the description of eye, color, hair, color, skin, color. It used to be that apparently, apparently everyone's default white for some reason. And then, and then anyone else would be compared to food. And so they would be like, so they would be like chocolate skin or like mocha caramel.
Iona (39m 3s): Yeah. And that wasn't really, I mean, I'm sure it was harmful because anytime you've described someone as food related, it's like, that's a bit othering. I would think. Especially if you don't do it for one race, like the white race, it's cool to see like how that's changed and how authors, like there are authors who didn't know that that was harmful. And they learned, and they were like, okay, that's an easy fix. And they just put that in there. And I love, that's what I love seeing like as a sensitivity reader is not the mistake. I don't care if someone makes a mistake because it just is something that they're going to grow from. I, I, I do care if they don't listen to, not that they have to, they don't have to rewrite their book or anything.
Iona (39m 50s): Usually sometimes that does have to have it, but it's just like, are they listening to the feedback of like, Hey, here's a bit of educational piece as to why this isn't working 10 years ago, 20 years ago, it may have worked, but we found that it's harmful. And so, and here's why, and here's a way to do it a different way. And when people are like, oh, that makes sense. We'll do, I'm like, see, that was not difficult.
Autumn (40m 21s): Yeah. And it's, it's so much better to get it on, you know, from a sensitivity reader versus seeing it as a review on Amazon or good reads and being blasted for either cultural appropriation or being harmful with stereotypes,
Iona (40m 39s): It hurts. It can hurt a lot of people. It can, it has the potential to, yeah.
Autumn (40m 45s): We're in a global community, in a global society. And so all of our stuff, as much as we wish it was simpler, you have to be culturally and mental health. You have to be aware that all of these things are out there and you should write the best you can. And I still say, there are times where you might choose to do something that's a little harsh, but always make it a choice, have an answer. If someone says, why did you do this? If you have an answer that's legit. That's
Iona (41m 13s): Fine. You were intentional with it.
Autumn (41m 15s): Yeah. Just being intentional. I like that.
Iona (41m 17s): Yes. The intentions. And I like what you were saying too. Always question your motivation. Why, why, why? And then be intentional when you write is, is so important. And I think that's very, very cool.
Autumn (41m 31s): Great. Well, thank you so much for joining us. And of course, I'm going to put links to your webpage, but pleased to go ahead and tell people how to find you. So if they're interested in learning more about sensitivity reading, that they know where to look you up.
Iona (41m 46s): Yes. Okay. So I am most active on Instagram and that's Iona dot Wayland and I'm sure you'll have that information too, but my book is available in ebook paperback, and it just released as audio book. I was very excited to work with Melissa Medina. They did a wonderful, wonderful voice of Angela and brought her story to life beautifully. And then on my website, if you have inquiries about sensitivity reading rates or questions or anything of that sort, you can send me an information. You can send me your question or your manuscript or whatever, have you through my, at the very bottom of my webpage.
Iona (42m 32s): And you can sign up for my monthly newsletter,
Autumn (42m 37s): The newsletter. I might go back and get that because I think that'd be, I want to stay in touch. That'd be fantastic.
Iona (42m 44s): Thank you.
Autumn (42m 46s): Great. Thanks again so much for joining us and next week. Yes. For we'll be back. Actually he'll be solo and he'll have another fantastic interview lined up for you.
Narrator (43m 1s): If you like, what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, going, stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
A Game of Thrones has inspired characters who contain such strong good qualities, like honor or justice, that it can lead to his or her death.
And writing classes teach developing characters with strengths and weaknesses to make them well rounded. A heroine can be a skilled warrior AND too self assured.
This makes a more complex character, one that is beyond two dimensions, but what about a good character that just loses it and takes the first punch?
In this episode of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, Autumn and Jesper discuss the Evil Within.
The episode is inspired by this blog post: https://www.amwritingfantasy.com/the-evil-within/
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am. Writing Fantasy Podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I'm Jesper
Autumn (32s): And I'm, Autumn.
Jesper (33s): This is episode 155 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. And when studying the craft of writing, we learn about creating characters who are well-rounded, who have weaknesses and strengths. But what happens when characters unleased the evil within?
Autumn (55s): I like this topic because, well, I do like gray and nuanced characters. I like fillings with good traits and I like heroes with not always the best of traits. I think it makes them more relatable. So this is going to be a fun podcast to explore the dark side of your heroes.
Jesper (1m 14s): Yeah. Yeah. Autumn wrote a blog post quite a while back for the AmWritingFantasy a block. So that's sort of the starting point for this conversation. I guess you could call it at least that's what inspired us to dive into the pool of evil to The
Autumn (1m 34s): It's good. It's the good evil pool, right? So it should be kind of, I don't know if it's shallow early, deep in a couple areas, but we'll figure it out.
Jesper (1m 42s): Yeah, yeah. That's yeah, that'll be interesting. We'll see where it takes us.
Autumn (1m 47s): So how are things over in Denmark?
Jesper (1m 51s): Well, not much as chains, to be honest since last week, you know, I'm still just preparing for the referee instructor class and practicing presentations. And I had a meeting the other day with, with my mentor. And so, yeah, I still have not gotten back to writing at all.
Autumn (2m 11s): Well, I think you have enough going on that. That seems fair. Plus, it's giving me time to read book two so that I'll be ready to help plot book three. So take your time. You're good. Fine.
Jesper (2m 25s): Good. Don't worry about it.
Autumn (2m 27s): You deserve the break?
Jesper (2m 30s): Yeah. Well, something funny. I wanted to mention, you know, how in the master mailing list, because that we have available for sale on I'm Am Writing Fantasy dot com total block there. If somebody wants to check that out, but, but you know, in that course, how we talk about how you can possibly segment your email list?
Autumn (2m 52s): Yes. I remember that. Yeah.
Jesper (2m 55s): Okay. Yeah. So our insurance company should really learn a bit about this segmentation of email lists. Yeah.
Autumn (3m 3s): Oh,
Jesper (3m 5s): The letter from the, or an email rather, from the insurance company yesterday, and then I logged in to read what this message was about? Because I was not expecting any message. So I was like, okay. And then I read that email from them and they just wanted to let me know that in some cases they have not treated cases concerning pregnant, pregnant women in the proper way. And they want to let me know that this would change going forward. Okay. That was exactly my thing of like, okay, I'm not a woman. I don't think I'm pregnant. At least I don't, I don't believe so.
Jesper (3m 48s): So I was just thinking maybe you should learn a bit about segmenting your email list, at least at least segment between men and women. I think that should not be too difficult.
Autumn (3m 59s): Well, maybe they thought, you know, in case you wanted to let your wife know that, you know, the car and send the message to her. I agree. They should have been able to figure that one out.
Jesper (4m 10s): Yeah. I mean, may, maybe there's something about it that they thought like they wanted to inform people, you know, in general, like a general information that we are sorry that we have. I mean, I fully understand the message, nothing wrong with the message there. Right. It's good that if they had discovered that they have been doing something wrong and they recognize it and they would want to correct it, I'm all for that very good, good information. Right. But couldn't you just like maybe put an announcement on your website or on your blog or something to say, like, I just, I don't know. Maybe it's just me, but I don't understand why they're sending out emails to males, letting them know about pregnant women and how they, how they handle cases for pregnant women.
Jesper (4m 50s): I don't quite understand.
Autumn (4m 52s): I didn't understand either. They took the least, they did the,
Jesper (4m 58s): Yeah, yeah. Maybe it was the intern who was at work that day. And it was like, who am I supposed to send it to? I don't know. Send it to everybody. Okay.
Autumn (5m 7s): I can do that. I don't know how to segment. Oh, there you go. Well, you know, I guess it's better to be over informative, less informative. Maybe they just never had thought about putting a gender question in their information.
Jesper (5m 25s): Well, they have like a, what is that called in English? I don't know. Dennis Deniz is like, you have a, it's not a social security number, but you have like a number, you know, what is it called, named you don't you have like in the U S like a number in the official systems for you yourself, you know,
Autumn (5m 49s): Their social security number.
Jesper (5m 51s): Is it that in your yeah, but, okay. But anyway, they do have that number, a numbers ending on equal numbers is women and unequal numbers are men. So it's not that difficult to work out.
Autumn (6m 6s): Yeah. And it's not like that over here. It's pretty random.
Jesper (6m 10s): I couldn't imagine. Yes. Why am I not surprised
Autumn (6m 14s): You threw something at the wall? It seems to be working at least it hasn't collapsed in weight yet, so we're good.
Jesper (6m 21s): Well, okay. I'm not going to comment on that.
Autumn (6m 25s): That's what I covered. Comment on the U S government. Please
Jesper (6m 29s): Know, that's what I was thinking.
Autumn (6m 31s): This is not a political podcast.
Jesper (6m 34s): No, just let it fly. Let it fly. Didn't hear anything. So, but how I think so on your end,
Autumn (6m 42s): Pretty good. Just a lots going on doing a little bit of actually be doing a little bit of a seasonal job and just rearranging life and we're going to be moving. And we have some extended family worries with mental health and old age. So that's, you know, weighing on us and, but the good news is at least I've had some gotten to create some really awesome book covers recently. And I'm on like the last chapter for magic unleash. So I'm just moving it up and got to check some of the weird character traits that we came up with, especially dialect. So once I finished that off to the editor, so I'm really excited and I can't wait to delve into the second book, which is being dark gods.
Autumn (7m 28s): And then we have to figure out the plotting for the final book and the name. We still only one, we have a name, so we
Jesper (7m 34s): Have no name for us.
Autumn (7m 36s): So we have to name it and we have to come up with the plot. So that's all going good. So, you know, there's, there's bright lights here and there and mid the murkiness life chaotic. Eventually I keep saying this, eventually my life will settle down, but yeah, we can hope I have hope.
Jesper (7m 55s): I hope it's a good note to end on
Narrator (8m 0s): A week on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast.
Jesper (8m 6s): So just a couple of thank yous to share here today. First of all, Pamela Payne joined us on Patrion. So thank you so much for your support, Pamela. Yes. And we also have moose beard. That's actually the name that it goes by on Patrion, but it must be at rejoined us as well. So thank you for that. We really appreciate it.
Autumn (8m 33s): Yes. I enjoyed the conversations with moose beard. I know I've talked to him a couple of times in the past, so I'm excited. He came back to us after a little hiatus and it's wonderful to meet you, Pamela. Thank you so much for your support on Patrion and we're well, glad to have you. And it's my responsibility to send you the book cover bookmark that comes with joining. Yeah. Book covers. Sorry. I've got book covers on the brain, but bookmark and it we'll do that tomorrow or Thursday. I promise. So if it's late, it's my fault. I'm sorry.
Jesper (9m 7s): Yeah, it happens. But if you haven't checked out patron yet and all the different rewards that we do offer to support us over there, please follow the links in the show notes. And Joel also just to reiterate a patron is the only source of funding we have for this podcast. And to be very honest, we are not Sealy seeing nearly as much support as we would like there. So please go and check it out.
Autumn (9m 32s): We appreciate it. If you do support us, thank you so much.
Narrator (9m 38s): And onto today's topic.
Jesper (9m 41s): I actually re-read the block post the evil within this morning, Autumn. And you started out by talking about using arsenic to poison loved ones and neighbors and stuff like that. So when I started reading, oh, you almost scared me from this, from this.
Autumn (9m 58s): Did I tell you I was into poisons that it was an article? I think an Atlas Obscura that got me thinking about this topic. And it started with talking about when arsenic was banned and how prevalent it had been used to kind of take care of some members of the family or neighbors or how many people actually poisoned people with arsenic. And I was thinking not all of these people were bad people. They were people who had LA you know, they might've had kids. They had people they loved in their lives. There was just for some reason, one person or hopefully one, we're not talking about serial killers, just someone they wanted to get rid of.
Autumn (10m 43s): And they would use this readily available poison. That was just, you could just buy it at the corner store. And there was very little repercussions from getting as much of it as you wanted. And the symptoms are pretty benign. You could mistake it for a lot of different illnesses. And so a lot of people seem to have been off over the centuries.
Jesper (11m 6s): It sounds so horrible. It's just like, I'm just imagining like everybody going to the corner stores and buying an awesome Nick for everybody. They don't like,
Autumn (11m 15s): Oh, it's like others that, oh, there's a play. What is it T in our snake or T old lace in our sticks, something like that to you, an old lace. I can't remember the actual title, but it was sort of the same thing as like someone invites you over to T bury the hatchet between you and yeah, they're going to bury something. Maybe not a hatchet. Be careful when you're invited for social calls in the 18th century, I guess in 17th century, not the best time. So I thought that was,
Jesper (11m 48s): It's easy to get your hands on. Did he say anything about that in that article
Autumn (11m 53s): Regulated? I mean, this was before regulations and things like that. You could, I mean, at the time you can get Bella, Donna, there was a whole bunch of stuff that pharmaceutical that were used as like an, a pocket pocket potluck carry. There we go. So you could just pick this up. It was used to poison rats in LA, you know, other critters vermin around the house, not necessarily your neighbor, but it was
Jesper (12m 16s): Readily from many different things, including, I mean, there was a time where it was on a wallpaper. It was used very well. The first wallpapers were almost coated in our Snick. So we just didn't understand. We kind of knew what was poisons, but when we realized how badly it was poisonous, except for the people who were using it to kill off people like guess, oh my God. Yeah. Just imagine that somebody worked it out then this like, Hey, got to tell you a secret. If you don't like that guy, take this bottle, put it in his tea. He just see how bad it is. And then, and then all of a sudden, everybody knows. And isn't like, where did this all start it. Every time you go to a cheap nowadays, you have to be scared.
Autumn (12m 59s): That's horrible. Yeah. But anyway, this is a podcast about arsenic and how to, how it was once historically prevalent way of getting rid of people you no longer wanted in your life. Oh, a numeric. But about those people who were probably, you know, good people, maybe they went to church, they were had led good lives, but something made them do something very evil. And it started making me think about even our characters, especially often fantasy, you know, people talk about superficial or cardboard characters. And I started thinking about, well, how often do we really explore the depths or the evil within our heroes?
Autumn (13m 43s): Instead of just having, you know, you, we do these lists of traits of, you know, they like blue. They hate their little sister because she wants, stole their favorite toy or something. We make up these stories that go with our characters. But often we don't include like a truly bad character flaw, or even when it comes to just doing a bad action, maybe they just lose their temper. And that was one of the places I really started is what happens if your character, this good person just fricking has a bad day. They've been hiking. They've been struggling, especially if they're not the hero.
Autumn (14m 24s): Maybe they're the side character or a sidekick. And they're just a point of view character. And they've gone through all of this quest for their bestie best friend. And they've stood by and they've been hurt wounded. They're sick, they're tired, they're muddy. What did they just snap and just yell or hit or punch, or just go down to the Tavern. And they don't mean to take it out on somebody else, but they're not going to go hit their best friend. And they end up in a brawl. I'm thinking, this is, this is a character trait. That's kind of interesting. Why aren't we exploring more of the evil within our good heroes,
Jesper (14m 60s): But it humanizes to protect the nest, right? I mean, having them sometimes make mistakes or just not being the perfect hero. It, it humanizes to me, I think it makes the character more believable and more likable. In fact, I mean, not, not likable because they do a bad thing, but more likable because you can relate to it. You know, you know that that from yourself, you, you can get, you sometimes get angry and you do or say things you regret because you were too, too angry. So having a protectiveness that sometimes end up in that situation as well, I think it's actually a good thing.
Jesper (15m 41s): Maybe sometimes as writers, we are too concerned about having the character, always being the likable person that does all the right things. And so on. Maybe, maybe we think too much about it and maybe we just need to dial it down a notch and make them more human. Yeah.
Autumn (15m 59s): I think that's such a good way of putting it. I mean, it's, we do relate as a, we've all had those moments where, you know, if we, if you, there were new repercussions, how many times would you just like to go ahead and hit your boss or just, just act out and actually say what is on your mind? But we hold ourselves back. But the fun thing about fantasy is, or any fiction is that we can actually explore what happens if you don't or what is that straw that will break you or break your character and make them act out. And would that be the interesting, usually we have the dark night of the soul and it's based on the character being stubborn and refusing to admit something.
Autumn (16m 41s): But what if it comes out that they just don't want to admit that they're wrong about something? What if they do something stupid or horrible or they act out and do something that's wrong and they have to come to a reckoning about their own actions. That's also a very powerful dark night of the soul. And we don't explore that that much and fantasy, it's usually a consequence that happens to them. But what if they're the cause of it?
Jesper (17m 6s): Yeah, that's a good point. And I think as well, it, it's not only about the relationship between us as writers towards the reader, but it's also between the characters themselves. You know, that, well, sometimes even having a character who is just like the completely unlike unlikeable or unrealistic love interest, our way, you know, like this is never going to happen. And then in some way, on one way or the other, it ends up happening anyway, between the two characters, like I saw, I saw on good, you know, they have this list, Topia stuff, different kind of things, and listed together.
Jesper (17m 54s): And there is a list called couches, hate each other, then fall in love. And there's 263 books in that list. So it's kind of a thing.
Autumn (18m 4s): It is kind of a thing, oh, they often I've seen it in real life too. That sometimes people who aren't getting along is because they are too similar and maybe their traits that they need to accept about themselves. And once they do, they can bond, but there's a lot of learning maybe self-learning before you become, can actually get along with this person, who's sort of like your psychological twin. So that is also a good way of, of looking at it is yeah. The characters who should get along, but end up not, but end up then falling in love. That's a fun twist.
Jesper (18m 44s): Yeah. It's a, co-talk basically you're talking about there, right? I mean, it's, the coats are realizing maybe something, I think it's more powerful when they realize something within themselves, you know, they realize their own floor and then they figure out how to conquer that floor. And because of that, then they get to fall in love or something like that. I mean, I think that works really well.
Autumn (19m 9s): Definitely. And the other thing that I thought about with this is, you know, what if your Good Characters are actually the ones who act first? Cause that's another thing we often see. It's the main heroes, the Good Characters are the ones who are reacting to the antagonist, to the villain. So they're always good ones. They're the ones trying to solve the problems. But you know, if you have a nuanced villain and he's, or she is trying to do stuff in the best of their interests, but it's just rubbing your heroes the wrong way. What happens if they actually are the ones who attack first? What are the ones who go in?
Autumn (19m 49s): Cause you know, they go attack the guards or they go attack a village. They do something that's more hostile, even though they're doing it out of the good, what they see their good interest. But that doesn't mean they're always necessarily going to act good. And that's, I mean, it's a theme I explored in my first trilogy, the one of the last scenes in the last book. Well, the beginning of the chaos of the last book comes because the heroes go to save someone who's been kidnapped, you know, but they're being held hostage kind of cruelly, but the person is still alive and they go to rescue them and they're just so angry.
Autumn (20m 29s): They act out violently, they destroy some beautiful temple, this wonderful thing that this has been sacred for centuries. They end up destroying it. And then the bad guys, well the quote unquote, bad guys really have a reason to go and attack the heroes because now they're pissed off too. So something that maybe could have been dialed back with some talking like, Hey, you stole, you know, you kidnapped our friend. We want him back.
Jesper (20m 57s): Can you please get him back? Oh, okay. My mistake, I'm sorry.
Autumn (21m 8s): Maybe they didn't have to go into a full world scale war, but it does because they act out really aggressively. They overreact to something that they shouldn't have. And because of that, they technically hit first. They are the ones who started the whole war. I mean, if you look back in the history books, they always say, the Victor is the one who writes them. But if you looked back, I think they would be like, well, we should probably shouldn't have gone and done that. But that's sort of the difference. I mean, that's a fun topic to explore. If you have a good character with bad traits, are they still good?
Autumn (21m 48s): And I've thought about that. And to me, my answer is a good character can do bad things. They just regret it later. They realize their actions were wrong. A villain will do good things and they'll do bad things, but they'll justify the bad. They will have a reason. They did it. And they're like, it's fine that I killed a hundred people because they were going to just get in the way. And they were stopping progress. Well, they're just testifying.
Jesper (22m 18s): I killed a hundred thousand to save 10 million or something like that. That will be their way of thinking.
Autumn (22m 23s): Exactly. And that's, to me, that's evil, they're justifying it, but a good character will be like, I hurt one person. You know, I acted out violently, you know, other people maybe died or I destroyed this thing and I shouldn't have done it and I am wrong. And again, that can lead into a very powerful dark night of the soul going, what is wrong with me? Why did I follow the same path as this other person? You know, why, why did I become slightly evil? I shouldn't have done that. How can I stop myself from doing that again? That's a huge turning point in a character art in the novel, in a story. So that's fine. Why we should see that more in fantasy in any literature.
Jesper (23m 6s): Yeah. Speaking about starting wars because of it. Not that long ago. No. Maybe I dunno. Maybe it's actually a couple of years ago. I'm not sure, but I watched the show. Troy. I think it was on Netflix. Have you watched Troy?
Autumn (23m 24s): Yeah. It's been a while ago. Is there so many different versions? There are a few toys, but I did not. I've watched two or three. I, I said I love history, so yeah. I've, I've done a lot on Troy.
Jesper (23m 36s): Yeah. I think this one was a TV series. It was not the one where Brad Pitt please. Achilles dad was one of my most, I just absolutely love that. He's so freaking cool in that. But, but I think this one was a different show, but the point I wanted to make was that the Trojan prince Paris is he Smith. And by the beautiful Helen who is married to manna, Laos and Paris is actually as a, as a character. He's a bit of a coward, you know, when he's loved to Helen then sparks the entire Trojan war and at least to the death of a lot of people.
Jesper (24m 18s): But Yeah, but, but in the context and the context of evil within, you know, Paris doesn't really care or perhaps he does care, I don't know, but he definitely does put his own wants and desires above everything else. So that the evil within basically, you know, it can take many forms in this case because he is a coward. He's not the one causing direct pain onto others, but he takes actions with them, which then has the consequences that causes the war and all the pain and all the people who are soldiers who die and so on and so on. Right. So it can take many forms. And I think, I think it's important to look at it in a bit of a broader perspective as well.
Autumn (25m 1s): Yes, I agree. That's it. It's true. Cause I mean, you can always take just something like selfishness or cowardliness and yeah, let it have, let it maybe be kind of bubbling underneath the surface, but then to manifest in a way that could be the inciting incident like Helen being kidnapped. I mean, it sets off the whole chain of events. They could have negotiated that out. I don't know what Helen's view of that was, it is a relatively silent in the history of the world where she played a part of this. And if you wanted to go even in the first place, but it's all, it is an interesting topic to say, you know, these, these character falls can be in the hero and they can be the ones that really start the chaos of the book.
Autumn (25m 49s): It doesn't have to just be because there's a villain who's causing horrible things. I mean, truly the Greeks are not villains in, you know, with, in the Trojan war, they're going to rescue Helen, but it becomes this whole greater, you know, you can get into the socioeconomic issues going on and who wants to rule over everything, but really they're just coming to rescue Helen because she's, there is, and it's a love story. It's a love story. And it, you know, again, we're we see it from the Greeks point of view, but we can also often watch it from the Trojan point of view in modern day shows. So really there's no horrible party in there except for maybe at the end when the Greeks are throwing babies off the walls of Troy and completely flattening the city, that's pretty rough.
Autumn (26m 36s): But I just recently read an article about things on those natures and I was just thinking, wow, I ha I'm. I had forgotten that in the Trojan
Jesper (26m 53s): War. That that was a scene in the, in the ed. Wow. Yeah. Hmm. I think I just mentally skipped that part. Yeah. But I do have a question here that I'm curious what you think about. Okay. Yeah, of course. Of course. Otherwise there's no fun in recording podcasts. If I can surprise you with something, Nobody, this is more like a reflection because speaking of the evil within, I'm just wondering, do you think that you can take this concept like too far, you know, can you end up actually disrupting your entire story and destroying everything because you're taking it too far?
Jesper (27m 37s): Or, or what do you think about that?
Autumn (27m 40s): I think so, but I think it depends on then what genre you're writing. So if you're gonna write Nobel bright, your evil within your Good Characters, should there should be something and it can be deep. It could be one, you know, something that is a true evil trait that causes maybe a whole war, but they're going to regret it and they're going to grow from it and they're going to heal and it's going to end up leading to maybe not the glowing future they wanted, but it would be a positive change. If you're writing dark fantasy, it could be what destroys the character or causes the chaos or moves it into like a dystopian dark fantasy. That's really kind of, it would definitely be very, more psychological as well as physical, which could be a very interesting and aspect, almost like a thriller.
Autumn (28m 27s): And then of course, if you want to transform either your hero or a sidekick or point of view, character to a villain, this is a great way. Let them, you know, it doesn't have to be either people use things like alcoholism or they want to they're power hungry or they're corrupted by a magic gem. But what if it's just a trait that gets out of control, maybe they're a little self-centered or they're cowardly and they're trying to cover it up. And so they end up making the wrong choices, which leads to more wrong choices, which leads to greater evil and people die. This one Netflix series, the hundred is a very interesting example because one of the, the hero and the hero in of all like the entire series Clark, I think was her name.
Autumn (29m 9s): Yeah. She was known as like this killed hundreds and thousands of people and her actions were enough to almost just keep all of humanity from progressing into the next, I don't know what you would call it. Realm or state of being because of her actions. And she is a basically left behind. It was like, you either go forward without her or you don't go forward at all. And you're lost as a whole society or culture race. So that was fast. You still like Clark, you still think she's a great character. She did these things because she was trying to save people that she loved and her friends.
Autumn (29m 51s): But I did think at some point there were times I didn't relate to her because I'm like she could have chosen a better way. She's especially towards the end where she's doing it all in the name of her daughter. And I'm just like, oh my, yeah,
Jesper (30m 3s): It gets a bit too much.
Autumn (30m 4s): Yeah. It's like stop the maternal thing. There's another side to her character. That was much better earlier on. So yeah, it could go too far, but again, it depends. You need to sit back and think about the genre you're writing for and the tone you want for your novel and that's gonna make it, you know, if you go too far, one way, you're writing a completely different genre.
Jesper (30m 28s): Yeah. I think there's a good point around what character we're dealing with here as well. Because if it is the protectionist, I do think you need to be a bit careful because if you go too far, all the likeability will go out the window where you just mentioned clock there in the end, in the latest seasons of that show, she started to really annoy me. I liked her in the beginning, but at some point it was just like, oh, it's too much now. But if you take well Paris, for instance, we just in Troy, you know, he's not a very likable character actually, but I don't think it's too bad there because there are different characters.
Jesper (31m 9s): That's, it's more like there isn't like a one protagonist in most of those shows. It's more like the, all the characters together that tells the story. So, so in that sense, I feel like it works. But if you take, for example, did you watch the walking dead?
Autumn (31m 27s): No, I did. And I don't do zombie movies or shows.
Jesper (31m 30s): Okay. No. Okay. But Andrea is a character in the walking dead, and I think she's a great example here because she is not the protagonist in that TV show, but in the comic books, she is a beloved character. I'm not read the comics myself, but as far as I understand, she became like a second mother for their main protectiveness son. And basic, she ends up marrying the protagonist later on in the comic books. As far as I understand I could be wrong, but that's how I understood it. But actually in the TV series, what they did here was that they had her as part of one of the earlier seasons.
Jesper (32m 13s): And then they ha they had her basically abandoned the rest of the group, abandoned the protagonist because she sort of got very, I don't know, fascinated or whatever you want to call it with the show's main villain called the governor. And so, so she just sort of went to him and stayed with him. And people just started hating this character, you know, when she sort of just the protectionist and just went for this and he's the governor, he's like a real, like, insane fuck. He's crazy. And she goes in and basically stays with him and is like, okay, then she's out the window.
Jesper (32m 55s): Right? Forget about her. Nobody likes her anymore. So this is an example of a character who in the comic books were quite liked. And then, because you made her do some things within the show. I don't think that those things happen in, in the comic books, but in the show they made her do some things that were just like, you couldn't forgive it or ticket it. Take Jamie Lannister in game of Thrones when he pushes the breath, out of the window, in the beginning of the show. Right. Even, and they do like 2 million things throughout the Cummings after following seasons, they're they, they do so many things to try to redeem him and make him a good character and show.
Jesper (33m 41s): But at least for me, the fact that he pushed a kid out a window that never left me no matter what he did after that, it was just like, yeah, but you, you push the kid out of the window. It's just not okay. No matter what else you do for the rest of your life, it's not okay. Right. So I do think there's something about, you need to be mindful of how far you take this evil within thing and how far you drive, because some things you cannot come back from.
Autumn (34m 9s): Yeah. That's so true. I agree that there's a difference between losing your temper or taking the first punch or even starting a conflict versus, you know, killing an innocent or wounding a child or these other things that are just, yeah, you do those. And it's going to hang over their heads the entire time. And there are some things that are completely unforgivable. I, like I said, I think even Clark, there's a few things in the hundred that I just, you know, they, they called her, there was a blood Raina, or that was the other character. But just like you do something that is so bad, that it is, it becomes your title, that you are a tainted by it and it will follow you everywhere and you might be good, but you're never going to be as good.
Autumn (34m 56s): You're never going to hit those high, high points. You're never going to be untarnished and that might work for your story. It might show a great character, but again, if you are writing noble bright, you've got to have people who want that pureness, or at least something a little bit higher where it's like, wow, your, your, your friend or your counselor really did some bad things, but you stayed clean. You stayed out of it, or you at least told them not to go do that. That's sort of who you want as your main character, but another once in dystopian or dark fantasy that might work great for your main character to have that kind of an arc where it's just like, they want to, you know, earn their place back. But they know they're never going to get quite as far or as high and accepting that, that they're going to have to live with this, with this taint in their soul for the rest of their life is, is also a very nuanced thing.
Autumn (35m 49s): And then probably a very powerful story to write, but you to make sure you're setting up your entire story for that kind of level of impact and not just, you know, write your way into a corner and then go, oh crap. That's not what I wanted to do with my character. That would be bad.
Jesper (36m 8s): Yeah. But also that the thing that happens or the consequence or the action that the character took was something that is, is forgivable. As long as the character is really, you know, regretting it and showing their regret and trying to make it better. But it has to be something that is forgivable because otherwise you cannot come back from it. And for some reason, hurting an animal is just like, nobody forgives it. You know, if the character in the first scene of the story kicks a dog or cat or something, that's it, nobody will forgive it. I mean, you can have stories where the main character kill somebody, and that is forgivable for whatever reason that, you know, if killing another person is, is apparently okay on the some circumstances.
Jesper (36m 54s): Of course, not every circumstance, but readers can forgive stories where they're protecting this, kill somebody. But if they protect the kicks, a dog or cat, no way, it will never be forgiven.
Autumn (37m 7s): You think game of Thrones? No, it'll never be forgiven. But do you think game of Thrones would have been different with Jamie if he had ever showed true guilt and apology to even brand, just to actually have felt hard out, sorry, because think he did, at least in the show, I didn't finish reading all the books, but in the show he never seemed to be apologetic. He again just said I did it because I wanted to save Searcy because I had to do it for my sister. He always justified it. He never said, I'm sorry. He never, you never felt he was sorry for it. And I think that is part of why we see that tarnishment to his character.
Jesper (37m 46s): Yeah. I think you're right there. I think if bran had died from the fall, then it wouldn't have mattered if he had regretted it or shown regret. And I don't think there would be any coming back from that, but because Fran did not die. And if you had shown Jamie Lannister really being saddened about it and it really it's weighing on him and he he's regretting it. And then maybe, maybe you could pull him back from that. And maybe people would w would sort of forgive him after a while. Yeah. But I think it's only because brands survive to fall. Otherwise it would have been, it doesn't matter how much it probably, most people would feel like almost readers.
Jesper (38m 28s): And on this case where we're talking about a TV show, so viewers in this case, but probably most people would just be like, yeah, it's good. That you're feeling that bad. You deserve it. You know? So it's not about forgiving any more. It's more like, yeah, you deserve that. So it becomes something else. All of a sudden.
Autumn (38m 47s): Yes. I agree. So, yeah. So I think that's a good conclusion that there are, there are some things that you can't pull a character fully back from, which could work for, depending on your genre. But if you're writing certain types of fantasy, if you want your character to emerge scape, you know, scratched, but pretty much, you know, okay, there's probably a few things you should avoid, but otherwise exploring those evil intentions that evil within is, is a really interesting way of progressing a story and showing a character arc and showing a character change that is much more dramatic than some of the minor like, oh, you're mildly irritating and you have a stutter that I can't stand.
Autumn (39m 27s): You know, that's, that's so minor compared to the, the, what we're talking about, these traits that we're talking about here.
Jesper (39m 35s): All right. That's very good. So we will be back next Monday and this time for a critical reading episode where we will be discussing Jade City by Fonda Lee, which is the one we've been reading over this past month. So see you then.
Narrator (39m 50s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Do you want to write a page turning novel that will keep readers up long past their bedtime? Well, one key to doing that is to write chapters that keep readers turning pages.
We go over some tips from opening lines to closing and everything in between to help you write chapters that will keep your readers hooked.
To check out the book Plot Development that we mention in the podcast, follow this link: https://books2read.com/Plot-Development
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (1s): You're listening to The Am writing Fantasy Podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (29s): I'm Jesper
Autumn (31s): And I'm Autumn.
Jesper (33s): This is episode 150 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. And we are taking a closer look at Chapters today. How to Create Chapters, That Hook you readers, and hopefully give you some good and strong tips in the process here.
Autumn (50s): Absolutely. I mean, these are sort of the building blocks of that. Pull the reader through the story. And I don't think there's a lot of people who realize maybe the importance of setting them up. I mean, we spend so much time talking about that Plot outline and what goes into the intro of your story, but we don't talk a lot about what actually is happening in each individual chapter. So I think this will be a good one we'll chapters or a book is made up by chapter. So I don't know why Chapters would be important at all at all. It's like building a wall without using any bricks. We're putting them on the walls. No, there's you go, but let's assume you want a wall and if you just put your bricks, like just dump them in a pile, you're not going to have a very good wall, so you should make sure you put it together constructively.
Autumn (1m 41s): Okay. Well, if I say showed and I guess we have to talk a bit about that today.
Jesper (1m 45s): Yeah. I guess we will. We'll talk about some construction equipment. No, thanks where you over there.
Autumn (1m 52s): It's quite good. There is a school break here this week. So actually I don't have to get up that early in the mornings. That's very, very nice. That is always a sweet thing considering, especially, yeah, since I'd be getting up at 5:00 AM with my husband to see him off to his current training, he's going through yeah. That's, I'm envious if I'm AM's a little early for me. Yeah. The only problem is that now when you don't have to get up that early, you stay up later. And especially because my wife and I started watching squid game on Netflix. I heard about that. Yes. I've actually, I started up watching episode one and honestly I didn't get into it and maybe I was tired.
Autumn (2m 35s): So I just kind of put it aside. How are you guys liking it?
Jesper (2m 39s): Oh, I love it. I think it's so good. I finally understand why this caught on so big that it had it's I think it's so good. I buy have to try it again eventually, but yeah, I'll have to keep that in mind. Maybe I was just off that night. I don't know. But I think one good thing that be Taken away from us, you know, for us as writers and authors, is that the writer who wrote squid game, he actually tried to sell the script for 10 years, 10 years. Think about how much success it has right now. And it took him 10 years to, to sell it.
Jesper (3m 19s): And finally Netflix said, okay, fine. We'll buy it. And then it's a massive success.
Autumn (3m 24s): That's crazy.
Jesper (3m 27s): Yeah. And I think that's a good thing too, to keep in mind for us as authors, as Willy, when we write our books. And so on that, sometimes it just takes a long, long time and then success comes so
Autumn (3m 38s): Assistance and belief in yourself and just keep trying until someone finally says yes,
Jesper (3m 46s): Exactly.
Autumn (3m 46s): Very nice. I like that. Oh, it's been good. I, I showed you pictures, but yes, my husband and I entered dog, went whitewater kayaking. It was so cute. Yeah. We've done some really crazy adventurous things with this music, current terrier. So he's, he's a little, he's supposed to be like Toto, but he's a little bit of a, he's a monster version of Toto. He's a little bit like five pounds bigger than Toto would be. But yeah, we went, we went kayaking as a family and it was just gorgeous fall weather. And that was right before it switched from being like 70 degree days to now. It's like in the fifties that I've got the wood stove going, but that's nice too. It feels like fall.
Autumn (4m 27s): I can't complain. It's bit of kind of dice. I've been burning the candle at both ends though, because I, I, this is like my, why we're meeting and doing our recording. This is my afternoon slump time. And I'm trying with caffeine to get through it, but I am horrible. I get up at five and I am dead until about six o'clock and then my mind turns on them and I'm fine. And I find, I go through the afternoon and there's this slump. And then right around dinner time, I'll wake up and I'll be good to like 10. And I just can't change that rhythm in my body. It's been that way since I was a kid. And so yeah, I try, I keep myself awake right now.
Jesper (5m 6s): Yeah. But, but I think actually, I don't know, but I have a theory that probably a lot of people have it like that because I know exactly what I mean. What do you mean? I can also be like in the morning, you know, getting up for something you like really tired and it's like, oh, it's early. And then you think, oh, then I'll, I'll be thinking to myself then, okay. Tonight, I'm going to go to bed early because I'm so tired and I need to catch up on sleep and so on. And I'll be tired throughout the day as well on those days. Not right today, but in general, I mean, if that happens right. But then once I get to dinner time and afterwards, then I start getting, I start waking up and it's just like, no, you don't want to go to bed. And then the next day, the whole cycle repeats itself. And it's just like, I don't know, but you're not the first one saying it.
Jesper (5m 50s): And I have it the same way. I don't know if it's like something, probably not all EVERY everybody, but I think a lot of people, I like that they, they wake, my wife has the same thing she wakes up in the evening. I dunno. It's weird. Isn't it?
Autumn (6m 6s): Maybe we are. But I'm also really good at, up until about one o'clock in the afternoon from like 6:00 AM to one o'clock. I am fine. I am full throttle, but it's like, I need an afternoon nap. I needed like at one 30 to two, I need like a little bit of a nap and I'd be fine. And maybe I should just put that in my schedule somewhere. And I would probably be so much better, but I'm usually pushing myself through it.
Jesper (6m 30s): So if it goes quiet on UN, then the listener will know it's because you take a nap and then we should just, we just sit around here and quiet on the podcast, waiting for you to wake up and then we can continue.
Autumn (6m 41s): I won't do that to you. I think we can make it through.
Jesper (6m 45s): Okay. Okay.
Narrator (6m 48s): A week on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast,
Jesper (6m 53s): I noticed this morning that we just about to reach 7,000 members in the Am, Writing fences, you Facebook group order.
Autumn (7m 1s): That is so I knew we were getting close. It actually, it seemed like we hit 6,000 wait went from 5,000 to 6,000 really, really quick. The 6,000 to seven has been a little slower, but oh my gosh, that is so many people and so awesome.
Jesper (7m 16s): Do you remember the early days Autumn?
Autumn (7m 19s): I Remember when it was me making the group and then inviting a couple of Fantasy authors. I knew it. I hadn't even met you yet. Or maybe if I had, I didn't know you on Facebook yet. I only knew you on Twitter and yeah, it was just me and a couple of people. So yeah, I remember very much so. And it was me and some crickets.
Jesper (7m 40s): Yeah. And it was called slate. The fences, the Facebook group.
Autumn (7m 45s): That's right. I saw the, I actually still have the original logo, like the artwork I did for it. Way back when tucked away and like terrified. You're right. You're right. That'd be great. I will have to go and do that too. Especially if I happen to catch it at 7,000, I'll do a little celebration and like, oh my God, this was, this was when it was just me and like three other people, which I think are still members too. So that'll be, I will do that.
Jesper (8m 13s): Yeah. That would be fun. I think for people to see what it used to look like. But the funny thing is also when you have this many members, because I had the, there was somebody posting a, and there's nothing wrong with this. I'm just mentioning it for the fun of it. So the people involved should not feel bad about it at all, but there was somebody posting whether or not it was allowed to ask for some better readers in the Am, Writing Fantasy, Facebook group. And then I posted a, or I replied to say that, yeah. As long as you don't ask people to sign up to an email list or you know that in, in, in other ways you are trying to, to get them on your list or earn money from it or anything like that, then it's fine.
Jesper (8m 59s): And then somebody else replied to say, are you a moderator? Or have you checked this with the moderators? Because I'm not sure, sure. That's allowed. And then I replied, I'm one of the co-owners of the group, but this is what happens when you have so many people. Some people don't even know who you are. Right. Let's say,
Autumn (9m 17s): But I think it says like when it says admin next to our name.
Jesper (9m 21s): Yeah, yeah. Maybe they just made me laugh. She was asking me if I had checked it with a moderator. I like that. I don't think I need to
Autumn (9m 32s): Our Authors. No, we run very tight ship, obviously tighter than we realize.
Jesper (9m 40s): Yeah. So if you haven't joined yet head on over to Facebook search for Am Writing Fantasy in the group section, and you will find us. But if you don't like Facebook or you don't use Facebook, I should also point out how you can go to Am Writing Fantasy dot com and sign up for our email list. Through there, you will get information and you will get tips on writing. We share some world-building advice and much, much more that we actually don't share anywhere else. And the best way is to just go to so to Am Writing Fantasy dot com and then on the homepage, when you arrive, there is actually the free self-publishing success course.
Jesper (10m 23s): So the easiest way to do it is just sign up for that. And then you're going to get a full cost for free. And once you have gone through all the course material, you will be automatically added to our email is so that's the best way to
Autumn (10m 35s): Do that. Yes. Come join us
Narrator (10m 38s): And on today's topic.
Jesper (10m 41s): All right. So chapters, Autumn, what do we say about challenges? They are quite important. I guess if you want to build a house, that's what I, that's what I learned so far.
Autumn (10m 53s): That's a very important if you're building a house, you can't build a book. Well, actually I'm sure there, I would say you can't build a book without Chapters, but I am one of those people that would, as soon as you tell me, you can't do something, I'm like, ah, I must try it. So I'm sure you can. I'm sure there is like stream of consciousness writing that James Joyce was probably like never used a chapter and it was just publishers that forced them on him. So you probably could write a book. It would just be really tough. It would be a
Jesper (11m 24s): Mess. Oh,
Autumn (11m 25s): It'd be such a mess. Don't do it. I think the best way to be organized. It was with Chapters and it gives you so many things you can do. I mean, you can change up your story. You can keep Readers interested, purposely hook them. So they stay up till 3:00 AM. Cause we're cruel to them. You can change point of view of your writing in third person, point of view. So Chapters are really important. There's a lot going on in them.
Jesper (11m 51s): Yeah, absolutely. And I think, well, it, it very easily starts sounding like science or something, this stuff, right? Like talking about how to do a chapter in the proper way. But, but I think honestly for start, we have to say like, this is our way of doing a chapter. It doesn't mean that it's the only way or the only right way at all. You might have other ways of doing it. Or maybe you hear some advice from somewhere else that you think makes more sense and then that's fine if it works for you, it works for you. Right. So we can only say that this is the way in all of you, that it should be done, but underlying all of you.
Jesper (12m 36s): Okay.
Autumn (12m 37s): Absolutely. And I guess to me, we have some social proof that we're not doing things badly. I mean, I have a ton of reviews of people saying I stayed up all night. I finished this book all the way through, or I didn't finish it all the way through, but that's only because it hit 4:00 AM and I'm supposed to go to work at six. So I had to wait until nine the next day when I finally called out a bed after calling in six and finished it at 10. So I don't think we're doing anything wrong because I've seen on both of our reviews that, you know, we have made Readers stay up to the wee hours of the morning to read our stories. And that's partially comes through by the chapters because if you mess up on a chapter and you have a hard end to one, if you don't pull the reader forward and they're like, eh, I don't care anymore.
Autumn (13m 24s): I'm going to sleep. That's, that's where they take a break. If they get confused, lost, or you just don't have something that makes them want to flip the page.
Jesper (13m 34s): Yeah. True. Absolutely. And when we are talking about Chapters, think of it as a mini story on his own. So by ministry, what I mean by that is that the character should be trying to achieve something just like the dog is trying to achieve something now. So that's in its own little mini story. There
Autumn (13m 60s): Was a chapter break
Jesper (14m 2s): That was a chapter break. That was a point of view chains. It was saying, Hey, it's my point of view. That's all right. Yeah. What I was trying to say is that this means that the character is trying to achieve something and you know, it shouldn't be so that the coach just sitting around in a coffee, shop, reading a newspaper or talking to some random other character. And honestly I have seen books where this sort of thing happens and you are wondering a bit like, why do I care about this? What's going on here? Right. A chapter should contain some sort of sense of conflict and also some sort of, well uncertainty to some degree, I guess you could say, it's something that makes you wonder what's going to happen next.
Jesper (14m 47s): Right? Those should be the recipe for a good
Autumn (14m 54s): Chapter. Exactly. It's to me, it's like, it's curiosity, your mystery. There's something going on where, whether it's the character who is curious, you know, is trying to solve something and trawls the reader along. Or if the reader is picking up clues and they want to see what's happening, or even just an action event, they either news that happens off screen or that's just received or, you know, it ends at a battle and someone might be wounded and you're like, I have to turn the page. You know, those are part of the chapters. And I think one of the things we're talking about Chapters as a building block of a novel, but there's building blocks in Chapters. You can have a chapter that it's an entire scene and you could have a chapter that's made up of lots of little scenes, maybe not too many.
Autumn (15m 38s): You don't want to put in maybe 10 scenes into a chapter that might be a little intense, but two or three, it can happen. You can have scene breaks within a single chapter. And so those are important parts to remember too, if you approach a chapter and you just don't know what to do, or you not sure what's in it. Think of it as a scene. Scenes are different from Chapters, but a lot of people get them confused.
Jesper (16m 1s): Yeah. So maybe put a few more words on that. Autumm okay.
Autumn (16m 4s): Sure. Well, so it scene is an event that's happening and usually, you know, it's think of a stage and you have a stage set and you characters walk on, something happens and they walk off sometimes with a scene, you change point of view, but you often change rooms. You change other things that are happening within, but the reason they're combined into one chapter is because the chapter has its own goal. And to me, that's the most important thing. And we talk about this, We, I know you're going to bring it up. Well, we have a Plot development book and we do talk about Chapters in there. So that's a very good way. But to me, the first step in deciding what is making your chapter versus your scenes are the scenes that make up a chapter is a chapter, has a specific goal.
Autumn (16m 52s): And I always look at it as like, I have a goal for the chapter as an author. There's a part of the plot. It is, it is unveiling. So it's part of the inciting incident. It is part of the reaction phase. So that's my goal as an author, but there's also the characters goal and that's the part that's moving the stories forward. And that's an important thing you want to make sure the character has a goal when that chapter begins. And you know, it's going to wrap up the end of that chapter is, and when that his goal is met or it's stopped.
Jesper (17m 22s): Yeah. Let me put it into context to you because you mentioned our whole flooding guide book here, because in there we actually have, because now you're talking about character gold and so on. So I think just putting a bit of framework around it, the way we describe it in our book is that a chapter has five areas or you, you, you used the worst word building block before. So if we go with that five building blocks in a great chapter, so there is coach goal, there is a hook, there is conflict and Alima there's reaction and decision and there is the disaster. Yes. So by that, the idea is that you have a character who knows when the chapter starts, what he or she wants to achieve.
Jesper (18m 10s): And this character then goes after that in one way on other that the reader will find fascinating or interesting. That's the hook pot. And then only it's not that easy to achieve what you want. And especially not. When you live life as a fiction character, you live in the worst nightmare sometimes. Yeah. So it's not that easy. And something is standing in the way and that's then causing the conflict, right? And once you have the conflict, then you have a reaction to what happened. And that will lead into a decision on how to proceed that the character makes. And in the end, we will then finish the chapter on a cliffhanger.
Jesper (18m 54s): So if you can construct your chapter around those five steps, it will already be very interesting because you are showing the reader that this character, this is what the character is trying to achieve. Meaning that then the reader understands, oh, okay, this is what's happening. This is I, now I know what's going on. It's like, it's like when you enter a meeting in your day job, and there was no agenda and you have no idea what you're going to talk about it very quickly. It becomes very frustrating because like, why are we here? What are we trying to do? So putting that in front of the reader so that they understand what the character is trying to achieve, that's a good starting point. And then when you, you are making life difficult for the character and introducing the conflict and giving them something to react to, then it also humanizes the character because then you feel like, oh, okay.
Jesper (19m 46s): I can relate to that. I see why they're reacting this way. Or are they getting frustrated or whatever it may be. It's not that a chapter, a good chapter has to have like dire consequences or something. It doesn't have to be like that. That's not what I'm trying to say, but more that there needs to be something at stake and something, as they could just mean that I don't want my brother to find this thing out, for example, or it doesn't have to be like fight scenes or anything like that at all. But when you have something at stake, you have a reaction to it. Then when you end the chapter on some sort of, some sort of cliffhanger, and again by cliff hanger can mean a lot of things. It doesn't necessarily have to mean that it's like a, in the middle of a fight or I think James W what is it called?
Jesper (20m 32s): James Brown, John Brown. What is he called? The James Brown bet. James Brown. I think he has one where he ends the chapter with the, with the character opening a door, then he stops and you don't get to see what's inside. It that's a bit, I would almost say a lame, but okay. But it's a cliffhanger, but it doesn't have to be like that. It could just be like a cliffhanger could just be like, the character is wondering about something and you don't have the answer for it. And then you want to read on to figure out what is the answer. It could be all kinds of things. So don't say cliff hanger as like, meaning that you have to put some dire consequences on the table, every, in every chapter.
Autumn (21m 12s): No, it's more like an, almost an unanswered question or an unfinished event. I think those are better way. And I do agree because we often call it, the chapter ends in a disaster, but it doesn't have to be a disaster. It is. Yeah. That's just maybe a typical way of doing it because often with hurdles, it is sort of a disaster someone's wounded, and you don't know what happens, but you could be in a lull or it could be a love scene or something. And someone walks into the ballroom or whatever, a vendor at the, the tourney or something, the next person walks in the love interest or something. And you just stopped there. And there was other people going, oh gosh, you know, there, he or she is.
Autumn (21m 53s): And that's a cliffhanger because you're like, well, what will they say? What will they do you want to turn the page? It always should end on not wanting to turn the page. And it could be as simple as just receiving news, receiving a reading, finally, a letter that they've been holding in their hand and waving the entire chapter. They finally look and see what it says. And they're like, oh, oh my gosh, this changes everything. And of course you want to turn the page to find out what's going to happen next that's, what's important.
Jesper (22m 24s): And what's so nice about that. Is that because of what you just explained there, you already have the hook for the next chapter and you also already know what the character wants in the next chapter. So it just adds another minister to the first story. Yes, it's so nice. Because then again, you can build the next chapter with a clear beginning, a clear middle, a clear, and it just makes sense, right?
Autumn (22m 48s): It does. They build off of each other, which is why it becomes a whole story. They flow into each other with set happenings and events to see what it's going to happen next. And I always say like, as a writer, I always want to write the ending to a chapter. So excited that I want to write the first line to the next chapter. And so if you're that excited, the reader will be that excited. And I think that's, what's important. It's just, it has a flow to it and going even back to scene. So if you think about it as if there are these five or four aspects into a chapter, well, if you have the hook and then the character is doing something and they're going through the conflict or dilemma things, aren't going well.
Autumn (23m 28s): And for some reason that just that character's point of view is done, and you do a scene break, the decision and action and disaster or cliffhanger could end up being in a different character's point of view. And that's sort of why you can have multiple scenes that fit into a chapter, but they still fit the chapter because you are still following that Hook, decision dilemma, the action emotion reaction, and then the cliff hanger disaster event that is unfinished, that you want to turn the page to see what happens to it.
Jesper (24m 1s): I think the challenge faced by many writers is actually how to make that conflict part varied, because I mean, you cannot have a 400 page book where every single chapter has a fight in it or nothing. I mean, it could be either a physical fight, but it could also just be people arguing. I, I know when I started out writing at first, I had a tendency to create a lot of arguments and a lot of the chapters because it added conflict. So my line of thinking was good. But the thing is that it, it gets a bit tiresome if, if the characters are always arguing with somebody.
Jesper (24m 43s): So I think personally, you know, your first spur of inspiration is in 99% of the cases going to be probably quite full of cliches, you know, and that, that's why we prefer at least to do a detailed chapter outline compared to a very loose one where, or even to compare to riding by the seat of your pants. Because I think that the problem is often that you, you keep beating the same old horse or on and on and on.
Autumn (25m 22s): Yes, I think that's very true. And I, I think it also comes down to knowing your character really well, because you, as an author have, like I mentioned, you have a goal for what's happening in the chapter. And if you're trying to force things on your character, it's going to come across as artificial. And it's not as interesting. The stakes don't feel real. Something just feels off to the reader. But if you have a character and you give the character a goal, like you say, okay, this is going to be a hurdle. And you know, you're going to throw something horrible at the character. And you're like, okay, character, you'd go again. This is you're going in there. This is your goal. And this is what's going to happen. And then let the character figure out, you know, what in their world are they going to do to solve this?
Autumn (26m 2s): Why do they want to solve it? Knowing your character really well, knowing how they'll react will help pull you through. And I'll also help the reader really resonate with the character. Cause there's a F you know, you want to feel that character trying to problem solve and get out of it on their own instead of being pushed forward, along by the author, because you need to go to the next scene. You can definitely tell when you're reading.
Jesper (26m 27s): Yeah. And the, and of course the character arc is incredibly important in this whole conversation too, to make sure that you build in at certain points throughout the novel, in some chapters where you gradually showing on, of course, on less on less characters on a steady arc where they don't change. But otherwise that you have some chapters throughout the novel where you're gradually showing that the characters beginning to change. And we go in through it in great detail in, in our guidebook on, on how to plot a novel, but high level. It's often a good thing to start showing them, showing the reader, how the character actually insists on doing the same thing as they've always done, because that's how we work as human beings.
Jesper (27m 16s): We only, we only start changing once we figure out that what I'm doing is apparently not working. And only once we realized that that's where we start changing, because otherwise we, we're not going to change. Human beings are lazy people. We don't want to change, but once we start, you know, we keep banging our heads against, into the wall because we keep doing the same thing and it doesn't work. Then at some point we will usually start questioning ourselves like, Hmm. I wonder if I could do something differently, then that's where you start seeing the change. So that's a good thing to keep in mind when you're writing as well with your chapters to have four, while the coach would keep doing the same thing and keep facing the same problem, like, you know, from a character arc perspective, like they keep failing basically.
Jesper (28m 1s): And, and then gradually over time, they'll start trying to try to do some other things and get a different result. And thereby you solidify the change in the character.
Autumn (28m 12s): Yes. That is very true in such an important aspect. And of course, when you say doing the same things as you don't mean like, you know, going and trying to attack the night that he's obviously not prepared to do, he's not going to do that three times in a row, but he are going to maybe have him pick three different fights or just always be in over his head, always react stubbornly or arrogantly and not us for help. And then finally, you know, there's going to be that moment where maybe it's usually called the dark night of the soul, that moment where, you know, something happens and someone's wounded or hurt or killed because of their stupid actions. And they finally go, next time, I'm going to ask for help because I don't want that to ever happen again.
Autumn (28m 53s): But again, that's more the entire plot, but it's so true. Each chapter is just pulling the novel forward. And I did, I want to get back to it. You mentioned also speaking of, you know, not repeating, you said about not repeating like the same disaster, the same conflicts. And I also think is a really important not to repeat the exact same Hook or the exact same chapter ending. And those can be as simple as like you dialogue is a fantastic, like if two people are in the middle of a conversation, that's a neat chapter opening. And sometimes it's a really neat chapter ending, but you don't want to have every chapter opening being dialogue or every chapter opening being a description or even action.
Autumn (29m 34s): All of those are things you should take notice of and kind of vary them throughout your novel. So that one maybe is a dialogue, but another was an action. Maybe one's a description, keep things varied and that'll help make your writing a little bit more interesting and will help remind you to keep things different with each one and, you know, challenge you, isn't Writing all about challenging yourself to become a better somebody.
Jesper (29m 57s): Yeah, I would say so. I don't know. Are we missing anything? I feel like, I feel like that's pretty encompassing for, for How to Create Chapters.
Autumn (30m 10s): I think so too. I be, and I can't think of anything else. The best thing to do is to check out, like I said, the plotting book we get into so much more detail on character arcs and plotting the whole novel as well as how to lay out your individual chapter. The difference between chapters and scenes and some good examples in there. So I think those are really, what's important to take a look at if you really want to go in depth, because there's a lot more to this and nailing your chapters and knowing how they build your story is going to one help you learn to write better. And you know, if you're doing well in your chapters, those are usually like when I was writing, I had writing goals. My goal was not a word count.
Autumn (30m 51s): So I got Scrivener and it, it makes you, it allows you to do a word count goal. But I used to always be like, I want to write this many chapters this week. It's a nice, solid building blocks that helps you break down your novel. And two bites that are really, the reader is bites. The reader is going to stop and start at Chapters. They don't usually stop or start right in the middle of a chapter who wants to do that? That's because someone came in and like you have book from your hand or your Kindle ran out of batteries. That's when you stop in the middle of a chapter or if you're really bad, if it's really, really bad, baby, I don't know.
Jesper (31m 27s): Yeah. I mean, the chapter's only pot, it's only one piece of the entire puzzle. So I'll book is called Plot Development and it is a very full step-by-step guy. You know, you you'll get everything in that book. You will learn about the character creation as well. You learn about the character arcs, how to build the entire novel, outline, how it affects the chapters and how to build those chapters and, and so on and so on and so on. So, so you're going to get everything you need in that one book. So we've added the link to that one in the show notes, if you are interested. So next Monday, we are talking about the evil within it's about your characters and how to explore them in greater depth.
Narrator (32m 15s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/ Am. Writing Fantasy for as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, going, stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Some plot twists can elevate a story into a masterpiece, whereas others utterly destroys everything that came before it.
In this humorous episode of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, Autumn and Jesper compete to come up with the WORST five plot twists ever created.
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (1s): You're listening to The Am writing Fantasy Podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello. I'm Jesper.
Autumn (31s): And I'm, Autumn.
Jesper (33s): This is episode 149 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. And this is the first episode of the month. And we all know what that means. Don't we Autumn?
Autumn (44s): This one's a challenge where we compete with each other to come up with the worst of something. So these are always kind of fun.
Jesper (54s): These are my favorite ones and today's top 10 list is the WORST Plot Twists EVER.
Autumn (1m 3s): Oh gosh. At least I'm not going to give you a plot twist and say what? That's not what I prepared for. So I'm ready. Like I just mentioned to you, I actually was, I thought we were recording this two days ago, so I've been ready for two days. So I've got a good list. I think it'll be fine. It was actually really fun. This one was feeling kind of, I don't know what to come up with. And so I did a little bit of reading and research and started thinking and I'm like, oh yeah, there's some fun ones in this slide. Yeah, I think so too. All mine movies, although I only have two movies, so ha I, I actually tried to stick with books as much as possible, but yeah, two movies snuck in there.
Autumn (1m 49s): Okay. I know I picked movies on purpose because then I could play some audio clips and I liked those. Lets you do one of these days. I want you to plan ahead and send you some movie, some clips and tell you not to listen to them until you play them. But that's going to be kind of hard cause you have to test them somehow. No, no, that'll be fine. That's fine. I can just click and listen half a second just to see if it plays and then stop it. Okay. One of these days, one of these days I'll really be prepared. It'll be a miracle, but everybody's mind just like my God. Yes, it will be and prepare us.
Autumn (2m 30s): That'd be fantastic. Just imagine. Anyway, how are things going for you?
Jesper (2m 37s): I'm pretty busy these days. I just finished up the first draft of book two in our new Sherry's over this last week. So that was good. That's exciting. Yeah, but I'm taking a short break from writing now because I have so much preparation to do for my attempt to become a referee instructor. So that's basically, Yeah, it's taking up so much time. So yeah, just taking a bit of a break between book two and book three in our series a so that will probably be okay. But
Autumn (3m 11s): I think that is fine since you were so much further ahead of me on the Writing department. I don't mind if you take a little writing break and let me catch up a bit.
Jesper (3m 22s): No, no, indeed. That's fair enough. And yeah. And, and, and speaking about referee, actually, sometimes it's nice to have a referee at hand because yesterday my youngest son, he was playing a match and then we arrived there and then the coach came over and he said like, well, the referee who was supposed to be here has not shown up. So can you just refereed this match for me? I was like, oh my God. I mean, I don't have any of the clothes on, I don't have whistle. I don't, I didn't have anything because I was not going, I was just going to be spectator.
Jesper (4m 2s): Right. But, but then of course, I mean, they, they don't have a referee and I was just standing there. So I said, okay, fine. But I don't have any of my things with me. So I'll have to shout instead of blowing the whistle and so on, because that's what you're going to get then. And, and we did then, but that why I'm mentioning it because I was really surprised because these are a 13 year old kits. Yeah. Right. And I'm a bit surprised about how their behavior, you know, that, that they can talk the way they do to adults.
Autumn (4m 40s): Really.
Jesper (4m 41s): Yeah. Because I don't get, I mean, they, the away team there, they were the players that their 13 year old kids. Right. But they were complaining a lot, like all the time, like, well they've, they felt like the free kick was the wrong way or to the wrong team, or it shouldn't have been a free kick and, or the throw in wasn't in the other direction, in their point of view. And it was just all kinds of things. They complained all the time. And then the one point, like during the second half, I, I started getting a bit annoyed by it. Right. So I, one of the guys, one of the kids then complained again. And I just said to him, like, be quiet and concentrate on playing soccer instead.
Jesper (5m 24s): And then another teammate of his who was also walking by, he then said, well, we can't concentrate with your round. It took me a bit back. What did these are 13 year old kids talking like that to adults. What's going on? That
Autumn (5m 39s): That's crazy. That's quite a backtalk man. Yeah.
Jesper (5m 43s): But I didn't do that when I was 13 years old, no, to an adult? I mean, what's going on?
Autumn (5m 50s): I don't know. I didn't raise kids so I can not even imagine.
Jesper (5m 56s): No. But do you remember when were 13 year old? You wouldn't speak like that to an adult, you didn't even know, would you?
Autumn (6m 1s): No, I usually didn't speak. I had my nose in a book and I was just like, I prefer a silence. I am mute. So no, I would never have spoken to a, an adult with a bit of a snap, not till I was at least 16 or 18 and being snarky.
Jesper (6m 19s): Yeah, indeed. Yeah. I don't know. I think there's something going, because, and we talked about with some of the parents as well, not, not specifically to refereeing as such, but just in general. How, how the younger generations nowadays, they, they are very like egocentric, you know, they just focus on themselves and their life and they are the ones who are important. And I don't know. It's it's, I I'm, I D I don't like that kind of attitude, I must say. No,
Autumn (6m 48s): No, I, I respect any parent trying to raise a kid these days. It's, it's, it's a challenge with internet and so many issues. And I just Instagram for kids that they won the launch. I mean, let's just see this hideous. Absolutely. He is.
Jesper (7m 6s): Yeah, indeed. So, yeah. But how about you? You've been busy as well. I know
Autumn (7m 14s): I've been working on a portfolio website and, but it was also my husband's birthday. So we went for a hike it's high it's like peak fall colors. The trees are like yellow, and they're just dropping these gentle golden leaves in the sunlight. If it's sunny, this is all for artificial lighting today. It's a kind of a gray day, but other days it's been sunny. It's just, just, you know, in the seventies. So maybe a flannel weather and just absolutely stunningly gorgeous. So I cannot complain. It's, it's always a shame to have to do to computer work on such lovely days, but at least I have a nice view of the forest.
Autumn (7m 56s): As someone pointed out, I've got a nice view behind me. So, you know, I'm not suffering too badly that way, but yeah, it definitely seems to be a very busy fall, but it was wonderful to take a day off, to go hiking. And we're actually hoping for a bit of a float trip cause he worked as a whitewater raft guide for the summer. So we're hoping to go back and do the same trip together without paying customers just to have fun. And that'll be really kind of nice to get out. So yeah, I think so.
Jesper (8m 28s): Very cool. And you're also busy editing. I know.
Autumn (8m 31s): Yes. Yeah. That's what I was going to say. Thank you for jogging my memory. I'm so close. I wanted October one. I wanted to be done, but between that fantasy colony, I went to and a birthday celebrations and fueled their little life hip cups. I'm so close. But then I also remember we are, one of our characters is a dwarf and we created this whole speech pattern for how they speak and was like, oh, bugger that I had tried to do it a little bit, but now I've got to go back and double check. So it's like, I have like two, three chapters from the end and also have to go back and do a quick sweep of everywhere the door speaks.
Autumn (9m 9s): And so it'll probably be at least another week. Yeah, probably another week, but I'm living with it because it's so nice to be like seeing Scribner and you like, you're this, this long we're hitting definitely over 40 chapters, by the way, to see this huge list of Barbados so close. So that does feel very, very good knowing this is the last one, but it's still like, I feel like this is the one that every time I think. All right. I'm oh shoot. I forgot about doing that. It is the never ending story. We're so close though.
Jesper (9m 45s): We'll get there
Narrator (9m 48s): A week on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast.
Jesper (9m 53s): So after launching our new critical reading initiative, two weeks back, you can go back and listen to episode 1 47 if you missed it. But we also had to pick the next book to read and their voting already took place on Patrion and also in the Am Writing Fantasy Facebook group. So if you want to join in, you know where to go, if you want to vote in the future. And we don't know if we're going to keep this upright, I mean, this is was a new initiative we are doing and we will see how much people enjoy it or how much they, they jump on board and participate. And of course, if they don't and we will probably stop it again, at least now we, yeah, at least now we are on the second month.
Jesper (10m 39s): So at least the second attempt, we'll, we'll just try a bit more. And the voting this time was between the sudden appearance of hope by Claire, north Jade, JTD by finale, or which marked by cl Polk. And we had a pretty clear winner.
Autumn (10m 56s): Yes we did. I, there was no getting rid of wiggle room in this winter. So we had to go with it. I have to say.
Jesper (11m 5s): Yeah. So it was a Jade City by Fonda Lee that we, we picked up this time around. So, and of course we already started, you know, the, it was the voting took place like a week ago or maybe over the last two weeks from the time that this episode airs. But of course we still would love you to read along. And this episode where we will analyze JTD will air on the 22nd of November. So by the time you listen to this, if you listen, when this podcast episode releases, you still have a bit of time if you haven't started reading yet. And if we need to give you a bit of incentive, we can say to Jade city is the winner of the world Fantasy award.
Jesper (11m 51s): It was shortlisted for a Nebula awards, the Lotus award, the Aurora awards, the sunburst awards, and became best book of the month on Amazon. So you might want to check it out.
Autumn (12m 2s): You might, and if you need more incentive, I've already started reading. I picked it up instead of reading the news, which is horrible. Anyway. So I've been reading a Jade city for my breakfast and lunch breaks and I already 30% in. And I think I only started a couple of days ago. I like it. I really kind of got sucked in. I see a few things. I'm like, well, I don't like how, you know, funded this few point of view things that I'm like, eh, but the story, I don't know, it's totally sucked me in all the characters have pulled me in. And so I'm like, okay, now I've gone from, oh, I've got to read a book.
Autumn (12m 45s): Where am I going to find the time to, okay, I need more time to read this book. I read this. I even put aside some of my design work last night, cause I needed a mental break from it. Anyway, when you fall asleep too many nights in a row, thinking about the next thing you need to work on, I was like, okay. I took a, an evening off. I read instead and I thoroughly enjoyed it. So I have a feeling I'm going to finish this one probably before the end of the weekend.
Jesper (13m 13s): Wow. Okay. Yeah. I, I, of course I do audio books because I don't have time to read and I read too slow to read an entire book unless I, well, I could read it in a month, but then I really have to dedicate time to it and I don't have that time. So I do the audio book. I also did that last month, but I, I started listening to it as well. I think I have listened to seven chapters by now. I think I quite like it to so far, I must say, compared to last month book as well, this one is much easier to follow. Yes. You know, there's like the storylines, it's pretty clear. I last the, the one we had last month, it was like listening to the audio books.
Jesper (13m 57s): Sometimes I had to like rewind or whatever you would call it on the, you know, go back 30 seconds here and there to just listen to it again, because it was, it was a bit complicated. It felt like that at least in the audio book. And sometimes if I wasn't concentrating, I would, I would sort of lose the plot a bit. But, but this one is much, much easier to follow along. I think this one has,
Autumn (14m 23s): Yeah, I really like it. I think it has a ton of characters at least named characters, but once you kind of absorb them and see which ones are the really important ones, you're like, okay, I'm good. The plots this plot straight forward, even though the point of view change. And yeah, it's just a really fun story. So I'm, I, I do like this one. I can not wait to see what other leaders like think of it as well.
Jesper (14m 46s): Yeah, exactly. And I'm looking forward to discuss sort of the, all the, all the stuff that was done really well and what we didn't like until I did notice though, in the first seven chapters that there are, she's doing the right thing in terms of sharing world building in the sense that it's characters talking about it. But when I was listening to one of the chapters today, it did sort of rub me the wrong way to like, you know, th th the kind of conversation they were having, it was like a conversation nobody would ever have. Right. They're basically telling each other things that they all, both of them already know, but it was clearly dialogue just to get the billing across to the reader.
Jesper (15m 27s): And that, that was not too elegant. That, that part. But otherwise, I would say so far, I really like it. Excellent.
Narrator (15m 34s): And on to today's topic.
Jesper (15m 37s): So here we go on another competitive list. Oh, no, I hit that one again. Yes, he did. I did that last week as well. You did.
Autumn (15m 46s): I'm not editing this one out.
Jesper (15m 48s): No. Now I have to live with it. There is this for listening to, is this like a loop thing you can accidentally hit when you do a sound clip? And last week I hit it and I made Autumn edit it out. But I guess this time I have to live with the fact that it played twice, But okay. Another competitive list where we will try to outdo each other with the best worst list, and you are still competitive in the body. And
Autumn (16m 18s): That's why this is your favorite. It's not that it's a fun thing to find the worst of something. It's just, you're super competitive. And so you're like, yeah, that's amazing. And I'm like, oh, geez.
Jesper (16m 30s): It's not that bad.
Autumn (16m 34s): I can pick. I do at least a little bit. I am not quite as competitive as you, but I enjoy coming up with the worst ones I can find. So this one was quite fun. And if I remember correctly, I think I went first, last time. So guess who started his,
Jesper (16m 53s): Ah, didn't you say that again? Last time as well?
Autumn (16m 57s): Oh, no, I I'm pretty sure. I wouldn't. First listeners will have to tell me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure I went first, unless you want to flip. I was fighting. Do you want me to go? I'm ready? My list is awesome. So if you want me to put the best foot forward, I can decimate you.
Jesper (17m 21s): I don't mind either way, but I, I will say though that it was actually quite interesting to build this list of plot twists, because I don't know. I really feel like these plot twists when, when I was sort of building the list and looking through this stuff, it's like, if you get the plus plot twist, right, you can really elevate the story into almost a masterpiece. I was about to say, but it can also like orderly destroy everything that came before it, if it's not handled well. And I think that was quite interesting.
Autumn (17m 54s): And I thought, I thought it was interesting. I don't know if we'll need to define it if we want to define it now, but I noticed how many bad plot twists involved the deuce ex Machina, which is the term for the God in the machine, or when something completely never before seen in the entire novel shows up to save the day. And instead of being the hero and it's like almost all the ones I was finding where that was, what was happening in the readers were like, or the Watchers viewers were like, no, you just ruined the character. Went through all of this effort, everything suffered, nearly died, lost their loved ones. And then something comes out of left field and saves the day And they hate it.
Autumn (18m 38s): So I think that's going to be my take home. Yeah. That we'll have to see if there's another take-home, but that was definitely the take home I got of this was like, do not do this in your applaud.
Jesper (18m 50s): Yeah. I think it Dave's ex McKenna, isn't it?
Autumn (18m 53s): Yeah. I did not take Latin. I took French, So I, that's not how it'd be pronounced in French.
Jesper (19m 2s): Okay. Fair enough. I didn't take friends, so, and I did not take Latin. So what do I know?
Autumn (19m 9s): You're just making it up very well. There you
Jesper (19m 10s): Go. Calm. I'm waking up as I go.
Autumn (19m 13s): All right. So who's starting, You decide. All right. Well then I'm going to go ahead and start fine. I'll just, I'm just going for it. We got to decide. So are you ready? My number five, which I, I, as you know, I ordered this right before we started recording. Cause I had not done that part. So this is the only one. It is a movie. It's not my only movie, but it's one of two, but it's the only one I have not read or watched. So this is out of the dark, out of the dark by David Weber. And I chose this one to include because I thought it just sounded so crazy. So this is a science fiction novel in which humans are fighting an alien invader on a human colony world that Vader's are too powerful and all seems lost when out of the blow, one of the humans turned out to be wait for it Dracula.
Autumn (20m 8s): And he single-handedly destroyed the alien invading force by using his vampire powers.
Jesper (20m 17s): Wait, wait a second. So, so Dracula was part of the story all along and nobody knows. And then all of a sudden he is there, or yes, he just came on on screen. All of a sudden when you needed him,
Autumn (20m 28s): It turns out he was a character all along. And a lot of people have pointed out that it was very obvious because his name was I'll loop cut because I can't pronounce it. It's Dracula's spell backward is, was his, his name. People are like, oh, it's so obvious. You know, there's these Roman S Scholtz Scholtz soldiers. And there's this, you know, guy who is Dracula spelled backward. Obviously he was there all along, but everyone else said there was absolutely no hint that the guy, this character was a vampire. And it was just so surprising that most readers absolutely found it crazy, just totally out of left field and never saw it coming.
Autumn (21m 14s): And it ruined the entire story up to that point. They just felt like an entirely different ending than the novel should have had it.
Jesper (21m 22s): Right. But, and the other thing I don't understand is that he would have known all the time that he has that he's powers and you can just defeat them if he wants to. So has he just been walking around letting them take over like, well, I don't care. I'll deal with it later.
Autumn (21m 38s): I don't either. I haven't read this one. So I, I can't speak to that, but I was sort of wondering the same thing saying, oh, he was there the whole time. Why was it ever a problem? It'd be like super bad. Like, oh, I can't use my powers. I can't use my, oh fuck.
Jesper (21m 54s): You can't be bothered humans. You can die. I don't, I can't be bothered today. I'm too tired.
Autumn (22m 1s): Okay. So I probably will not read this one to find out what really happened, but there you go. That was my number five that I, it just sounded so crazy. I S I always joke. It's one of the examples of like John Rose, smashing you can write anything you want as an Indian indie author. You could have vampires in space. Well, someone has vampires in space. I had to pick this one for the list.
Jesper (22m 28s): So that, that is so weird. I don't, I'm not familiar with that book, so I don't know, but it sounds really weird. And I'm just wondering how, how the entire characterization of Dracula throughout the book, how that even works, because unless he he's like a very minor character and you almost don't see him, and then all of a sudden he walks onto the scene when you need him in the end. I mean, that even that is annoying too, but if he's part of the story throughout, then it makes even less sense to me,
Autumn (22m 58s): Just from the little bit I read, I think he was one of the main characters. He was very important, so
Jesper (23m 3s): I don't get it,
Autumn (23m 6s): But there you go. Bad plot twists your turn.
Jesper (23m 9s): Yeah. That's a, that's a pretty bad, bad product choice for sure. Dracula. Okay. Well, my online five examples on my list are movies, as I said, and I have audio clips for all of them, of course, just because I think it's fun. Not because I think you can guess all of them, but I'm going to make you try anyway, just because of like, I like tormenting, you like that.
Autumn (23m 37s): You too. All right, let's go for it. Get the torture going.
Jesper (23m 42s): Okay. So my number five is an example of what I earlier about the ending, destroying everything that came before it. Yes, because I actually quite liked the premise of this movie. And I also remember watching it, that it had me hooked as well. Okay. That was until the end of course. And I have a short audio clip here. So it might reveal which movie it is. This was, this is one of the ones that you might be able to guess if you at least are familiar with the movie, otherwise you can probably not get it, but maybe the listeners can, but let me play the audio clip and then you can see if you can guess it.
Jesper (24m 27s): Okay. You ready? Yep. Let's go.
Autumn (24m 57s): I've never watched this movie. I'm guessing it was called 23, but I have no idea.
Jesper (25m 2s): Yeah. It's called the number 23. That's correct.
Autumn (25m 5s): At least I guessed right. So, what's this about?
Jesper (25m 10s): So this is a thriller with a Jim Carey where he's character gets a book called. The book is called the number 23. He gets it as a person from his wife. You could hear that in the audio clip, which she says that I'm going to get this for you. So that's a book she buys to him for him. And he starts completely obsessing about this number 23. Like he sees it everywhere and he can constantly see things that makes connections to becoming 23, adding things together becomes 23. It's just all the time, everything. And in this book that he, his wife bought him, the chapter 23 is missing as well.
Jesper (25m 53s): So everything sounds pretty interesting so far, right? There's something going on. That's kind of fun. All right. Yeah. And it also had me pretty entertained. I actually quite liked it, but then it turns out the plot twist comes onto the stage now. And the mission chapter 23 explains that a girl was murdered and Jim character character, the main character was actually the one who did the killing. And then you learn that he wrote the book himself, but he has no memory of it because he gave himself a head injury. So he would forget the murder.
Jesper (26m 41s): He had an injury. I mean, talk about a skilled head injury. I
Autumn (26m 44s): Want to forget this bang.
Jesper (26m 47s): Yeah. That, that in itself is pretty lame. But the fact is also that once that reveals come, once you get that reveal, the movie spends like half an hour trying to, you know, come up with the explanation for everything that you've seen and how it all fits together. It just keeps explaining all kinds of it's like, they're trying to justify how everything makes perfect sense. And it's just like the last half an hour. It's just a nightmare up until that point. It's actually pretty interesting. And then it gets destroyed completely.
Autumn (27m 22s): Yeah. It sounds that way. I mean, they could have make it significant, make it someone else who did, I don't know, make it a mystery, not explain it and then have to explain everything. And just as I say, beat a dead horse, I mean, it just sounds like, okay, moving on. I don't really need to know that
Jesper (27m 43s): It was, and it was a real shame because I, I liked the movie. And then when it gets destroyed in the end, it's a bit like, dammit,
Autumn (27m 53s): Why couldn't they actually plot? This sounds. Yeah, you're right. Because up until that point, it's like, everything's adding up. It's like, you know, the number 42 is the meaning of life. You know, there's something important going on here with 23 and yeah, it's actually, he's a homicidal maniac that gave himself a head injury.
Jesper (28m 16s): Yeah. And also why, I mean, I, yeah, it makes no sense.
Autumn (28m 20s): I, is that your way of feeling regret to like bash yourself in the head? Why, why would you have written a book and then you should have brought the book and then hit yourself in the head and then there'd be no evidence you would have forgotten.
Jesper (28m 34s): And why would you walk into a store and find your own book? And your wife accidentally buys it to you for you? It's like, okay. Yeah. That's a coincidence. Yeah. I
Autumn (28m 45s): And name. Yeah. There you go. Oh, well,
Jesper (28m 51s): Yeah. Okay. All right. But that's my number five. It was not Dracula, but I still feel like it was pretty shitty,
Autumn (28m 57s): So, so pretty bad. I will not strike that one from my watch list. All right. So my number four and I was, I think I mentioned said my number five out of the dark was a movie. I was wrong. Sorry. That one was actually a book, but my number four is a movie. I don't know if you've seen this one, but it's a superhero movie. So you'll probably have it. It's not superhero. Movies are not your favorite, but as Hancock. And that actually starts will Smith. Yeah. So, yeah. So if it's the one
Jesper (29m 29s): Where he, he can fly or something, right?
Autumn (29m 32s): Yes, yes. And it sort of starts out the same way he wakes up in the hospital. He has no memory of who he was, but he's has these amazing powers. So he becomes a superhero, but this woman that, you know, he's interested in, but it's like, whenever they're together, she's the villain. She is the arch villain in the story. But then, you know, it starts like, you know, it sounds like this beginning of a superhero story, like this is the B the Genesis of a superhero and there's this evil villain. It's perfect. But that's the twist. The twist is with like no setup, nothing. It's just suddenly revealed that they're both gods and the previous it's just there.
Autumn (30m 14s): And she's not really a villain. She's more like his kryptonite. And if they're at the same place at the same time, bad stuff happens. But truly they love each other. And there used to be two other gods and they basically annihilated each other because of the same thing. They loved each other, but they can't be together because if they're together, they destroy things, things just blow up around them. And as most people who watched the movie have said that, it just feels like you're watching a superhero movie. And then there's this switch. Like someone else wrote the completely different movie ending. And now they're instead of superheroes they're gods and he's got his memory back and they're basically trying to come up with some resolution where they both get halves of the planet. So they don't cross paths.
Autumn (30m 57s): I'm not explaining it as well as it's confusing as it is, but it goes from superhero movie to God movie, God, and God.
Jesper (31m 5s): Yeah. You lost me a bit there halfway. I think it was complicated enough that even the explanation confused me
Autumn (31m 12s): And that's just, it, it feels like it could have been you to stick to the superhero, just stick to superheroes. You wouldn't need to suddenly say that the superheroes are really gone well. Yeah. That's, that's fine. You know, whatever all the way through I have. And at the time I didn't really notice it. I'm like, okay, that's just a weird twist. And now it doesn't surprise me that, you know, will Smith tends to get movies where it's, it doesn't surprise me where the villain is actually not a villain. It's just a misunderstood character. That's very will Smith. So that doesn't surprise me so much, but it was kind of like will Smith on my list. Oh, that's too funny. I wonder if it's, there was a one I almost selected that I would call a rum runner up for this list.
Autumn (31m 53s): So I'll have to see if it's the one you chose be interesting. But yeah, I, it was one of those ones where it was a perfectly good superhero, fun movie. Why, why, what happened to him that he lost his memory? Who is this other character? Who's sort of not even a huge character for awhile, but as the villain ish one and what what's going on. And then to find out, you know, boom is just like drop reveal. Oh, you're both gods. Oh, this is what's really going on. Oh, here's your memory back? Oh, there's these friends that you've lost a long time ago and boom. It's just like, well, we're at a totally different movie now.
Autumn (32m 34s): Thank you.
Jesper (32m 34s): Right. Because it's the same, same thing with, with the number 23. Like it's pretty good. And then all of a sudden it a detour and it's just like what happened happened. Yeah. You're just, you feel like you got, they lost the essence of what they were, the whole plot was up until that point. And you're like, I don't, it wasn't a twist so much as a different story. Yeah. Okay. That's a, it's a completely different story than my number five, but I feel like the, the conclusion of it is exactly the same, you know, it's, it's, it's about a good story. That just goes bad. Yes. That's exactly what it is. Yeah. All right. So what's your number four. Okay. I have a number four now and I'm actually not so sure you can guess which movie this is from the audio clip the fans out there of this stuff.
Jesper (33m 23s): They will probably know instantly, but I think I would not be able to guess it. I think so. I'll help you at least by saying that it's a Christopher Nolan movie. Okay. Okay. Okay. So I already for the audio clip. Yeah. Let me go get my phone so I can Google it, then I'll go ahead. Okay. Here it comes.
Jesper (34m 12s): So don't worry about what they're saying, but the voices might give it away what it is, you know, the way that he speaks.
Autumn (34m 18s): I would say based on the way he speaks, Batman, but I also say that is almost the exact level of decibels that I am deaf in for my left my right ear. So I was like, I don't hear you, but I'm guessing that the deep gravelly voice that is spoken slowly.
Jesper (34m 35s): It is definitely Batman.
Autumn (34m 38s): Okay. Yes. That's pretty good. That's two out of two now.
Jesper (34m 40s): That's pretty good. You're on a roll now. I think, first of all, I have to say that in general, I really like Christopher Nolan's movies and it's not that this one is bad either, to be honest, this is the dark Knight rises. Okay. And it's, it's actually okay. And you know, I don't, I don't generally like super hero movies, like you said, but this one is not too bad, actually. Okay. But why I have it on my list anyway, is because of the actual scene where this audio clip is from. So in the dark, not the dark Knight rises. Jesus. That was difficult to say, Batman is fighting bane.
Jesper (35m 22s): You know, that's the guy with that mask on and it looks pretty cool. Yeah. And they are fighting each other for like two hours when we get to this scene. Wow. And yeah. And all the way through, up until this point, Bina, he's like a really formidable villain. No, he he's like really good at what he does of being a villain. And he really challenged us Batman. And then they put in this twist in this scene. So just by the end of the audio clip, you could hurt, you could hear a woman talking. Yeah. And that was a Miranda tape as she used to, like Batman's love interest. And then in this scene, it is revealed all of a sudden, you know, like Batman has final defeated pain.
Jesper (36m 8s): He has him like on the ground. I got you finally, like after two hours right off movie, you finally got the upper hand. And then behind him is this, he's a love interest, Miranda, Tate. And then she stops him with a knife. She stops Batman. And you're like, what? And then it turns out, well, she's actually the true villain. And she was the one all along who wanted to destroy Gotham city with a nuclear bomb. It was not Bain at all. And the Bain is basically sort of reduced to this like, well, simple puppy who was just like carrying out the orders of his master, because he's so much in love with her as well.
Jesper (36m 52s): I mean, it's, it's just, it's such a shame because I really feel like just the mask that Bain wears, right. That the way he speaks you, you, well, you couldn't hear it, but at least I could hear his voice, but he's really cool. Dean is really cool. And he's a really, really good villain. And then because of this scene, you reduce him to dislike petty criminal. Who's just following somebody else who, a mastermind who wants him to do this and that. And, and then this lady, she kills pain, like really, really easily in the scene. And then this just it, and then Bain is done. And it's like, why do I want two hours of Batman fighting this guy? Like the best villain that he's ever fought.
Jesper (37m 32s): And then he's just like this Hensman basically,
Autumn (37m 38s): It'd be one thing. If, I mean, at least he should have some charisma of his own, you know, be a good, he could still be an amazing, massive villain and she could be in on it, but she doesn't have to be the one pulling his strings that does seem to reduce who this character from. Totally awesome to. Well, that was,
Jesper (37m 59s): Yeah, it's doing such a disservice to the character and all the characterization you've been building so far, because I really think that Bain is very iconic. He's a really cool villain until this point, if this stuff had happened happened, he would have been amazing. It's just like, ah, it feels like just because we need a plot twist, we need something exciting. Okay. Let's make a, this woman that Batman thought he was a loving that she was a love interest of his let's. Let's let, let's make her the villain and Tara, all of a sudden there's a new will. And in the end of the movie, it's just like, oh my God, I know. I really hated.
Autumn (38m 37s): I don't, especially a two hour, it'd be one thing. If it was like, you know, 45 minutes, the end of a TV episode, you're like sucked. But two hours in a theater to get to like that kind of a twist, I would have been throwing popcorn at the screen and walking out thinking I just wasted two hours of my life. I could've been like kayaking or something. Exactly. Oh yeah. Okay. Well, I agree that once I I'm glad I never watched dark Knight rises. I never got around to it. I don't think I will anymore. No. Next time. Yeah. Next time I break my leg and I'm tied up in hospital for like months at an and or something.
Autumn (39m 20s): I'll consider it until then. Yeah. No, I'm good. No. All right. All right. Good. You're number three then number three. So this one is my last movie and it was one when I watched it, I was like, oh, this is just horrible. So the producer shouldn't surprise you because he has he, after his first couple of movies, he made some flops. So the director is M night Shyamalan. I have him on Melissa as well. Well, you have to see which one he's got a couple of bad ones. I selected signs. Is that the one you picked or do you got a different one?
Autumn (40m 1s): It might be. Yes. So this is the alien one where it was a good premise. You know, there's this, there was some good scenes, cornfields, everyone. I grew up in the countryside. My neighbors were Amish. I grew up in cornfields. So I do not find them frightening at all at dark. But for some reason, most of the human population thinks massive cornfields are terrifying at night. They think the woods are terrifying at night. I live in the woods too. So I'm just weird. But I, so there's these things happening. It's a, he's a widower. He's got his daughter and there's this threatening music and weird things happening. And you realize this is this alien invasion and it's sort of tense and terrifying.
Autumn (40m 45s): And you're wondering how it's going to go actually pretty good up until that point until you find out, until you find out what defeats the aliens is, water, what is what 90% of this planet is made out of. If you're an alien species that can design faster than light ships, which you attack an alien world, that 90% of it is toxic to you. And then don't even bother throwing in the premonition of the little girl, leaving water glasses all over the house because she just subconsciously knows that her dad will need them to fight the aliens. And then they tie in his wife's dying words that are somehow our premonitions also for what was going to happen.
Autumn (41m 32s): I'm just, I'm not, I just couldn't buy it. I mean, really, if you're an intelligent alien raised, you're not going to go. You would at least come in a stupid, a suit that could protect you from the thing that's going to kill you. You can design spaceships. Oh, it was just horrible. I just water. You're allergic to water. Yeah. Great.
Jesper (41m 54s): I fully agree. It was number two on my list because I just hated so much.
Autumn (41m 59s): So I took all your number two.
Jesper (42m 2s): You know what I mean? Exactly. Because of what you say, you know, if you, if you know the water is going to kill you and you're like an highly intelligent alien race, number one, either, like you say, you would wear some protection on number two. Why don't you just pick another planet? Some something that wouldn't kill you. There's kind of, I mean, it makes no sense
Autumn (42m 22s): Go to Mars.
Jesper (42m 23s): Why do you even want it? Why do you even want invade a planet that kills you? It makes no sense.
Autumn (42m 31s): I mean, yeah. I, I, we're only trying to go to Mars, which would kill us. I mean, we're not allergic to anything there, but it has no atmosphere, but we're trying to go there because it's like the only other place we have to go, we don't have spaceships. That'll take us across the, you know, solar system. But yeah, I'm pretty sure there's other places we'd go. It's like, we wouldn't choose, oh, look, there's this planet. 90% of it is composed compost of acidic acid. That's going to totally boil our skin. Let's go there. Yeah. That's a great vacation.
Jesper (43m 1s): Yeah. And then we will be like, oh look, there are some people living dead. Let's invade. Then we need to conquer this planet. That will kill us. That's an excellent idea. Oh my God. Yeah. I really hated. Yeah.
Autumn (43m 15s): Ah, wonderful. I think that was the first one I watched where I was like, I don't like a nighttime alone anymore. I like the village. I like sixth sense. There was the one with the, yeah. The one with the brittle bones disease that he ended up making into a trilogy. That one wasn't bad. Now I can't even think of the name of it, but
Jesper (43m 37s): Mr. Glass or something
Autumn (43m 38s): That would, I kind, that was not bad. But by the time I got to signs and like, oh, this is horrible.
Jesper (43m 47s): I actually had a, an audio clip for it. Do you want to hear, Okay, here you go.
Autumn (44m 11s): You did my homework.
Jesper (44m 12s): Yeah. So that was also on my list. I absolutely agree. I hate that Twists that they put in there. That's ridiculous. And also because they just very easily defeat stadiums, then Indiana not like, oh, okay. They can't take water then boom, boom, boom. Then they are defeated. It's like
Autumn (44m 30s): The irrigation system.
Jesper (44m 30s): Why do we spend all this time building up to it? Then if you can just kill them off that easily, it makes no sense. Right? Waste of time,
Autumn (44m 39s): The brain will kill them. As I think one of the commenters, it was one of the famous founders. Like, you know, this guy, the lead character is a former priests. There's all this kind of premonitions and godliness. Well, you know what? God could have just made it rain and no problem. So yeah, it was a bad Plot, such a bad flood. Okay. You're a number three.
Jesper (45m 5s): You can, you can, yeah, you can get my number three here. And I think you might be able to get, guess what this one is because the dialogue in this audio clip is sort of pretty iconic, but I can give you another hint that this is the one that I mentioned. I had one on my list with will Smith. And this is, this is the one you ready.
Jesper (45m 49s): You know what that is, right?
Autumn (45m 50s): Oh yeah, that is, I am legend. And that was my runner up for the list. So that is awesome.
Jesper (45m 57s): Cool. It's funny that we have the same thing that annoyed us. That's pretty cool.
Autumn (46m 1s): I guess I like this. I love this movie up until.
Jesper (46m 7s): Yeah. So in summary, I think most people probably know it, but just summary, 90% of the people's population is killed by a man-made virus designed to cure cancer and then it sort of mutates and then it starts killing everybody. And as a result, you get these, Somby kind of like creatures, which they are quite terrifying. And, and, and it's actually a pretty cool the first half of the movie that that's pretty cool, very dramatic and will Smith character. He is, he's like this brilliant scientist, who's working on finding a cure or vaccine or whatever you want to call it. And he's alone in New York city and is basically just sort of surviving and working. That's all he does.
Jesper (46m 47s): And up until this point of the movie, the movie is pretty cool. I really, really liked it. And then he comes across to humans who are actually immune to the virus. So, and this, of course for him as a scientist, this is good news because then maybe he found the holy grail and now he can cure the disease. And it just so happens that when he then brings these people back to his house, this also leads to those kinds of some, be creatures to find his house, which he has like worked for years and years and years to make sure that they would never find him. And now they do and how she's under attack and all that is also fine. But then the twist comes now.
Jesper (47m 29s): So because of these two people who are immune, he actually manages to find a cure, but then the houses overrun by these some B kind of creatures. And then he decides to help these two people escape down a cold shoot while he himself decides to stay behind and pull the pin of a grenade and blow himself up, taking all the Sunbury creatures with him. And then you might be wondering, well, why is that so bad? That's pretty heroic. Yeah. But not if I tell you that he could easily just jump down to shoot himself. There was absolutely no reason for him to blow himself up. And the other part is that
Autumn (48m 9s): Jumped down the coal chute. Yeah.
Jesper (48m 10s): He could. And the other thing is that if you just find a cure and he gives it to these two people who are like, they're not scientists, they have no idea. And then he just sends them off. Like, how does he even know if he wants to cure mankind? How does he even know that they know what to do with that cure? Or will they even be able to find people who know what to do with it? He doesn't know. So it's just like the whole thing. It's like what? So years and years and years to find the cue and then he just blows himself up because of two random people.
Autumn (48m 42s): But he wasn't, even though no, I remember saying that at the end, when they're approaching, like they find a as another little town, that's like got a wooden fence. And I'm like, yeah, that looks like it has a top secret, you know, lab Labrador, the moratory where they're going to know what to do to create, you know, spread this cure to other people. And so that's part of the reason it almost made into my list. But then what I didn't know is that the book, this is based on has a different ending it's and the movie completely changes the whole meaning of the book where the book, the, the vampire zombie, like creatures actually have found their own cure.
Autumn (49m 22s): And they're not evil. They're basically a better race that it's going to just like we transplanted the new young Neanderthals. They were going to take over the human and humans are a legend. We're becoming something archaic from the past. And we're just fighting for our own last survival. But really, we just need to give up the ghost because we've created something that's better and stronger and more intelligent. And I mean, they have a whole culture, but so that's, doesn't show up in the movie. And I was like, no, they took the book and they completely changed the Authors meeting. Wow. So, yeah, there's a fair.
Jesper (49m 58s): And what you just mentioned about the book, that's what makes it cool because then it's, there is an irony in the fact as well that he's been working years and years and years to find a cure for something that isn't about being cured. It's not about being cured, but he doesn't understand that. I know that that's what makes it pretty cool to me. I think the book ending that's cool. But yeah, I D I don't know what the heck they were doing when they made this movie. It's just like, it's so stupid to screw it up like that. Yeah.
Autumn (50m 29s): I, they completely changed the character of the will plays. They changed the meaning of the story. They obviously did not understand how difficult sciences, other than it took him years to come up with this cure. And then he doesn't even know if they're going to be able to hand it over to someone who's surviving, who knows how to replicate it.
Jesper (50m 49s): It's not like you just put it in like some chicken soup and you're good. Oh, that movie. Yeah. It that's why it was all I was trying to divide between Hancock and that one. And I'm just so glad you came up with iron legends. So I got to have both of them on the list. Oh, cool. Okay. Well, you already took my number too, so I guess you need to do two in a row. Now. I only have my one number one,
Autumn (51m 15s): Right? Well, maybe I can grab one of your other ones. So my number two were, well, all of the rest of mine are books. So I know they're not going to be the same as yours. So this is actually mocking Jay from the final book in the hunger games series. And that is because, so this is the end where, you know, the whole story, three books, three movies lead up to the moment where Katniss is sent to, you know, take out snow and everything that's going on. And what happens. She actually gets knocked out towards the end of the movie and wakes up to find out the war is over. So it basically invalidates the entire book where she is.
Autumn (51m 58s): She accomplishes nothing. And so she spends all of mocking Jay on her super secret mission to reach the Capitol and kill snow. And ultimately, and all these people die to help her get there. And ultimately she contributes nothing. The problem solved totally without her. And she made as well as stayed home. And what's pissed me off almost more than that, because I had already given up on her as a character. She never really resonated with me. She was too wishy washy, but her sister, a little sister prim, who just wanted to do something important. She trained as a nurse basically to go and help the soldiers who were fighting the battle. And she ends up getting killed.
Autumn (52m 39s): And what ends up being a faked attack by the Capitol? It was actually the other side making it look like it was the Capitol. She dies as basically friendly fire, sort of, they kill out a whole bunch of people. It was so unnecessary and pointless. I was just frothing at the mouth. I was so furious. So that's why I made it to number two. It was just her Katniss herself. I've always said she, she has a flat character arc the entire trilogy. She never changes. She never does anything. She never grows into her role or takes control of her own life all the way down to getting knocked unconscious and everything happening without her.
Autumn (53m 20s): And she's just the most pointless character. And you're really hope that, you know, book three, the third movie, that something exciting would have happened. And it doesn't, I still don't like her. I
Jesper (53m 35s): Didn't read those books.
Autumn (53m 36s): Yeah. It was just not worth it, not worth it. So I will stop beating it there. But yeah, it just was a pointless, it has such potential. It was so interesting. And I really was hoping that by the end of the book, she would be like, I'm, bad-ass, I'm going to go and stomp somebody. And it really just never resonated. It never grew into that. She never becomes really a hero in, she sort of stays as a propped up figure. And it's just whatever.
Jesper (54m 7s): Yeah, because in the movies, I don't, I don't think that that's the case. I mean, in the movie she takes initiatives and she drives the plot forward. And so on. I don't, at least I don't recall it being such an issue in the movies.
Autumn (54m 20s): I feel every once in a while she would pop up with something good, but she was always, it was never an upper word arc. She was always never fulfilling her true potential. She never reached it and it's just disappointing. It was very disappointing. All right. And so we're going to skip right ahead since we did your number two to my number one of WORST Plot Twists. And I think this one, it'll be interesting to see, cause this was a movie, but I always look at it from the book side, but it's actually Harry Potter and the chamber of secrets.
Jesper (54m 56s): I would have to say, now I have not read any Harry Potter books and I'm not what's any Harry Potter movies. So I don't really know.
Autumn (55m 3s): Okay, so this is not yours. So this is the one where Harry is at the end of book one. So he enters the legendary chamber of secrets and Harry finds them face to face with Tom riddle, the younger version of the evil wizard, Voldemort and Ray riddle sends in a ballot. Basilisk I can't pronounce that, which is an enormous Fang snake after him. And it's chasing after Harry and things seem, yeah, snake giant snake. This is not a snake. Well, that's what it is in the movie. We're not going to question what JK Rowling's uses for her creatures.
Jesper (55m 36s): So, okay. So let me, sorry.
Autumn (55m 40s): So things are looking really bad for Harry. He's very young. Yestermorrow this is the first year he's at Hogwarts and then suddenly a magical Phoenix flies into the chamber dropping the sorting hat in front of Harry, which happens to hold the sort of Griffin door. So he uses that to kill the basle Lisk. And the Fenix is tears even heal Harry's wounds. And professor Dumbledore later reveals that Harry's loyalty caused the Phoenix to fly to him. But really, I mean, up until this point, there's no mention of a Phoenix it's just and brings the sorting hat.
Autumn (56m 20s): It brings the sword that Harry couldn't rim thing to bring himself. It's just comes out of nowhere. If that hadn't happened, Harry would have died. Book one, there goes the rest of the series.
Jesper (56m 33s): There's Deus Ex Machina. Again,
Autumn (56m 34s): It's such to me, it's one of the worst examples. It's like the whole book wasn't plotted and JK Rowling's realized she wrote written herself into a really bad spot instead of fixing what came earlier. She just thrown a Phoenix with a who brought the sorting hat that was holding the sword. Why would the sorting happy holding the sword?
Jesper (56m 53s): Why is, I mean, considering how popular Harry Potter is, why is more people not complaining about this? Or maybe they are just noticed it
Autumn (57m 0s): Maybe. And I just, even the fact is Harry Potter know how to use a sword. He can see, you know, how to use one. I just it's so ridiculous that, you know, it would've been better with the Phoenix had caused the bass list to blow up in flames. At least I could have said, well, that made no sense, but at least a Phoenix knows how to you know, like night something. So,
Jesper (57m 22s): I mean, short fighting is not something you just do. Right? I mean, you have to train pretty well to do that, especially fighting a monster.
Autumn (57m 31s): Oh exactly. I'm fighting something that's already, you know, poisoned you in a cut you in you're already in bad shape, but just because you got a magic sword, you're good to go.
Jesper (57m 42s): Oh, okay. That's convenient. Isn't
Autumn (57m 46s): It just,
Jesper (57m 49s): Okay. Yeah. All right. Yeah. I feel like I can, because this one is not Dave's X McKenna. This is just like screwing with your audience completely OTs. And it's, it's really bad in my view, but I have to admit that I really struggled with finding number one, my one number one entry, because I had to find something that was worse than everything else. And I had to do sort of, I did a lot of research on the internet just to see if I could, if it would jog my memory on something. And then I did find, find something that I actually had completely forgotten about. Oh, but this show that I'm gonna talk about. It's not a movie, it's a TV show, but it is one of my all time childhood favorites.
Jesper (58m 39s): I absolutely loved this TV show and I'll play the theme song song in just a second. And I promise you, you will know exactly what it is. Oh, that'll be exciting. But the, the show took the world by storm and anyone growing up in the nineties, they will know what this is. Okay. So I ready for your son clip.
Jesper (59m 21s): Yes. Okay. Here you go.
Autumn (59m 23s): So the X-Files it's going to be the first Twilight zone. I'm like, no, no. That's a different theme song. So yes,
Jesper (59m 32s): I guess all of your clips. I think, I feel like I wait, that's a bit, that's a bit of cheating because you didn't even have some place that I could guess. So I just lose automatically because you guessed. Right. And I didn't even have a chance to compete. Well, there
Autumn (59m 50s): You go. Ah, I like this rule. I like this game. I
Jesper (59m 56s): Think that's a crappy rule.
Autumn (59m 58s): This is like playing dune. Every player has their own strategy to win. I know what my showed is. You have to figure out yours.
Jesper (1h 0m 6s): Oh my God. Okay. Well, first of all, I want to say again that I love the show, however, and this is why it made it to number one on my list, because do you know like that feeling of your favorite show? Just being ruined completely. Maybe not completely, but they, they throw in some, some span into the wheel that just like what the heck is going on here. And it felt like it was just because the show creators, they had to do something to try to, I guess, spice things up a bit or something. But I had forgotten about this. Probably suppressed it to be honest, but what I found in doing my internet research, it came back to me.
Jesper (1h 0m 50s): So let me just explain. So in season 11, in the very first episode, we learned that you remember the wrist is a mysterious secret smoking man, who is part of the series. He's really weird and you don't really know what he's, what's going on with him. But then in season 11, we all of a sudden learn. In the very first episode, we learned that he actually impregnated Scali using some sort of alien science with the aim to create like the first superhuman child. And we get a flashback to season seven where Scully accused the cigarette smoking man of dragging her.
Jesper (1h 1m 30s): And it then becomes apparent that Scalia's son is in fact not molded after all then. So, you know, doing something like this, like four seasons later, it is just such a betrayal to the audience. You know, you for four seasons, you have believed that these two characters has have, they have a son together. They finally got together after all that time, you know where, or there was all this tension between them like romantic tension and so on and so on, they get a child and then four season later you'd just drop a bomb to say, well, actually it's not his child. Anyway. I mean, I liked plot twists. Don't get me wrong. And I can probably even stomach more plot twists than most people, because it does take quite a lot bef before I, it stops annoying me, but this one, it was just like, I really felt like a completely destroyed everything.
Jesper (1h 2m 22s): I thought about these characters. And it came also completely out of the blue, like, like the created just that, what can we do to spice things up? Oh, let's throw this stuff in here just to create some drama for the sake of drama.
Autumn (1h 2m 35s): Yeah. It's I don't know if they changed writers or what was going on, but I agree. I mean, they betrayed everything that the core essence of what you thought was sort of between these two characters and then it was just like, Nope, Nope, Nope. They're not a happy family. Sorry. Yeah, he don't do that.
Jesper (1h 2m 55s): Not okay. It's it's such a betrayal
Autumn (1h 2m 58s): And it's funny. Cause you, you were mentioning that reminded me of probably one that would have made my list and it might've even been number one. And that is the ending, the Firefly, the movie that pissed me off so much because they, again, not, not a twist so much as what they did to the characters, they killed off the pilot. They make it through this amazing crash landing and this happens and that happens and he gets spirited like by a piece of debris or something, right at the laughter everything is safe. And I'm like, no, it was such, it was done just to yank at the viewer's heartstrings, especially cause he was married to the, yeah, it was just, ah, there was a lot about the movie.
Autumn (1h 3m 44s): I wish I had never watched the movie. Anyone who's a Firefly fan. If you have not watched the movie, don't watch the movie. It ruins everything. I wish it's an exist.
Jesper (1h 3m 55s): Yeah. I love the series though. The
Autumn (1h 3m 57s): Series is awesome. The movie sounds good. And I can't remember all the characters well to enunciate all the ways that it sucks, but it sucks in very, very, it's cruel to several of the characters in ways that it just didn't need to be the series. That was awesome.
Jesper (1h 4m 15s): Okay. Well you said before that the it's like playing risk and you have to make up your own rules for how to win. So I actually just brought another one here because that's my way of winning. So if I can't beat you with five bad things on the list, I'll put six on the list.
Autumn (1h 4m 31s): I guess we're both winners this week.
Jesper (1h 4m 36s): So just an honorable mention here because some people will have this movie on their list of the worst of the worst. And let me just play you the short audio clip and then I will explain.
Autumn (1h 5m 16s): Okay.
Jesper (1h 5m 16s): I actually, I only watched it like probably a month ago or something like that. But this movie is called mother and it is staring a starring Jennifer Lawrence. And I included this one as an honorable mention because I'm really, really conflicted about this movie. You know, when I first watched the movie, I was like, what's going on? You know, the, the Mo the longer you get into the movie, the more crazy everything just becomes. And it's like, everything goes into chaos and it's like, it doesn't make any sense. It's like, where's what I, I can't even explain it. It's like, you have no idea what's going on.
Jesper (1h 5m 57s): And it just makes no sense. There's all these kinds of people who does terrible things, all of a sudden in, in her house. And it's just like, what the heck is going on. And you're completely confused all the way through the first half of the movie is just like normal mystery kind of thing. Pretty, pretty good, actually. And then the second half is just complete chaos with nothing makes sense anymore. And I won't spoil it here and say two months, because, because people might not have watched it yet. And it was not that long ago since it came on Netflix. So I don't want to spoil it. Like some of the other movies that I've mentioned today, they were all very old movies. So I want, I want, don't want to spoil it, but I just have to say, because after I watched the movie, I was like, when it ended, I was like, I have no idea what went on here.
Jesper (1h 6m 42s): So I actually went on the internet and I then didn't start searching for some explanations about what is the meaning of this movie. And then I found the answers. And then when I read those, I must admit that then all of a sudden, I say, ah, okay, I see, you know, and maybe it's just me being thick and not seeing it, but I understood it when I read. And it was explained to me what the point was and everything that happens in that movie, even though it seems completely insane, it actually has a purpose and an explanation to it. Oh. And I'm still conflicted about it because on one end, it's, it's, it's crappy because you, you don't understand what's going on and it just feels like complete chaos. But on the other hand, once you actually read the explanation for it, then it's like, okay, I, at least I can re I can respect what they were trying to do at least.
Autumn (1h 7m 32s): So, yeah. I mean, it's good that it had a meeting, but it does sound like it was bad. Something filming, plotting something where they, you need to go and read it on YouTube. They're going to hand out a flyer on your way to the movie theater so that you can understand what you're about to watch.
Jesper (1h 7m 47s): Yeah. I don't know be because once you, once you read the explanations, you want to also understand why it has to be shown as very chaotic. It's completely on purpose, but yeah. People can watch the movie if you want. I just want you it's. It's crazy. And then, and then go read about what I would definitely say. Don't read about what the movie is about first, because then it'll spoil everything. What's the movie just what's it. And then read about it afterwards and then make up your own mind whether you think it's just either this, either this movie complete stroke of genius oil, it's complete madness. I don't know.
Jesper (1h 8m 30s): It's one of the two, that's a good note to end on. That sounds like a fun twist. Yes. I think our plot twists, we both declare ourselves winners, so, Hmm. I don't know if it was the counselors winners, but also because we actually had a few that we actually agreed on. So it's true. Yeah. That's pretty. Okay. We both win. We're good. I'll say I won and then we can close it with that. Yes. You won as well as I did. That's not what I said. That's what I understood.
Jesper (1h 9m 11s): That doesn't count. No. Alright. Well, next Monday, we have an episode with writing a vice for you. We'll discuss how to create chapters that will read us. So see you then.
Narrator (1h 9m 22s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Many authors have considered starting a YouTube channel. Autumn and Jesper tried for a couple of years - and failed.
It's much harder than it looks. The questions is... will YouTube videos, focused on writing, actually help with fiction sales?
The extremely successful YouTuber, Jenna Moreci, joins the Am Writing Fantasy podcast to offer advice and guidance. She knows everything there is to know about leveraging YouTube as a marketing tool for authors and writers.
Check out Jenna's books:
The Savior’s Champion: https://books2read.com/tsc/ The Savior’s Sister: https://books2read.com/tss/
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (1s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need an literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I'm Jesper. And this is episode 148 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, and Autumn is taking care of some editing today. And once you use a way I've secured an amazing guest speaker for you, because today I'm going to talk to the very talented Jenna Moreci so welcome to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. Jenna,
Jenna (51s): Thank you so much for having me. I'm super happy to be here.
Jesper (54s): Yeah, it's a pleasure talking to you. And I just want to say for those who might not know, Jenna is a number one best-selling author of dark fantasy, and she also runs a very successful YouTube channel. So I couldn't think of anyone better to bring onto the podcast today to talk about YouTube for Authors, Jenna. Okay.
Jenna (1m 13s): Well thank you. I'm super honored. Yeah. I kind of fell into YouTube sort of accidentally, or maybe not accidentally, but I didn't expect it to get to this level. So yeah, I'm, I'm super down to talk about it and everything that I've learned along the way.
Jesper (1m 31s): Yeah, because wait, well maybe for context, I could just start out by saying Autumn and NAI and even myself before I sort of teamed up with Adam, tried my luck. If you want to call it that and running a YouTube channel and my God is difficult. And then Autumn and I tried for a while as well, probably like two years. And then we transitioned into podcasting and this is going much better to this, but the YouTube stuff is difficult. So yeah, it's, it's tough getting traction unusual. So I'm very going to be very curious during this episode here to sort of get your thoughts on it and maybe some tips and tricks for people who might want to try on their own to see if they can get a YouTube channel going.
Jenna (2m 19s): Absolutely. I mean, I've been doing this for almost a decade now, so I've been, I've been around for awhile. I've made all the mistakes and you know, that's what you got to deal with in order to become successful. You got to mess up a few times. So I, I hope I can answer all of your questions.
Jesper (2m 37s): Yeah, probably, but I don't know. Maybe we could just start a bit more on the, you know, not low side. I don't, that's not what you call it, but slowly and maybe, maybe you can just, yeah, a bit more about yourself and maybe put a more, a few more words on, on what you just said about why you started the YouTube channel in the first place.
Jenna (2m 56s): So I have been wanting to be, you know, author since I was six years old, it's literally my lifelong dream. And around the time I heard what a lot of people, you know, are told when they're young, that's authors don't make any money. It's not, it's not a viable career. You should try something else. And so I started off in finance. I have a degree in business with a concentration in finance and I got a job in finance. I was a stockbroker and I hated it. It was driving me crazy. I, I just, there was a moment where I realized I CA like I can't do this every day of my life. I have to at least try to become an author. Even if it's just a side gig. I just need to know that I gave it a shot.
Jenna (3m 39s): So at that point I started writing my first book and I started trying to build a platform. I researched the industry and, and I'm really glad I got a degree in business because I learned all about the business side of things and being an entrepreneur and creating a platform. And I started like most authors do with blogging. And I had a blog for a few years. It, you know, I had about 200 followers and I hated it. I hated blogging. I mean, I liked to write, but I like to write fiction. I don't like to write about, you know, normal life stuff. So I was blogging for a while. I'm working on my book, try to figure out a way to expand my platform even more. And a lot of people had told me, you should do YouTube.
Jenna (4m 21s): You're funny. You're sarcastic. You give really good writing advice. I was also doing critiques at the time. So people were like, you should create a Writing YouTube channel. And like most introverted Authors. I was like, no, like there's no way I am. Yeah. The only way I'm sitting in front of a camera and putting myself on the internet like that, sorry, fast forward a couple years, my then boyfriend now fiance suffered a very terrible accident. He fell two stories and broke his spine. And I had to put, you know, I quit my job. I put everything on hold to be as caregiver. And when you go through something like that, it kind of changes your perspective on life. And you know how our time here, isn't guaranteed.
Jenna (5m 3s): And I had paused working on my book. I had paused the blog and I just thought, you know what, like as he started to get better and I started to build my platform again, I was like, you know what, I'm just going to try YouTube. Okay. Like what have I got to lose? If it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. But I, you know, my, my time here is it permanent. So I got make an account and I started the YouTube channel, made a couple of crappy videos and started to get the hang of it. Yeah. I mean, that's how it always works. It always starts off with the bad videos, but I started getting the hang of it and I started off trying to be very professional and like, you know, like, you know, oh, I'm a dignified writer and that's just not really my style.
Jenna (5m 46s): And no one was watching the channel. And so finally I said, you know what? No one's watching anyway. So I'm just going to be myself and I'm going to be goofy and I'm going to be custody. I'm just going to be my normal personality. And literally the very next video, my channel skyrocketed, I went from a hundred subscribers to nine to 9,000 subscribers in a week. And, and the rest is history. Now I'm at 260,000 subscribers. I really did not expect to be in this place. But yeah. And because of YouTube, I was able to make Writing and YouTube my full-time career. And I'm doing a whole lot better at this than I was as a stockbroker financially. I'm making triple what I made as a stockbroker.
Jenna (6m 27s): So it all worked out.
Jesper (6m 29s): All right. Yes. Do you think actually considering that it was quite some time ago since you started out, do you think there's a difference in starting, you know, running a YouTube channel today versus back when you did it, do you think, has that sort of, is it more saturated market had more difficult now? How do you see that?
Jenna (6m 51s): Absolutely. I really got in at the perfect time when I started my channel, I looked for other writers on YouTube and I could only find two and their channels were very small and they were really young. And I was inspired by that because at the time I was like 28 and they were teenagers. And I was like, you know, what, if these teens have the courage to do this, that I have no, excuse, I'm a, I'm a grown woman. I have no excuse. And now after my channel kind of blew up, now, there are tons of writing channels on YouTube. So it's, I'm not going to lie. It's definitely harder to get started. Now, the key is, is to find a way to stand out and authenticity.
Jenna (7m 34s): Like I said, I started off very professional, a very phony and I wasn't going anywhere. Right. And once I became my authentic self people, people really, you know, gravitate toward that. You know? So I think that if you want to stand out in this market, you really have to create quality content that is consistent and authentic because people want someone that they can relate to. And they feel like they actually know.
Jesper (7m 60s): Yeah. Because I think reflecting back on the time that we spent on attempting to run a YouTube channel, I think once I reflect back to it nowadays, look, you know, couple of years since we transitioned into podcasting instead, I think I was very much focused at the point in time around probably thinking too much about how do you make a YouTube video that is engaging. And also because, you know, usually when people watch YouTube videos, at least as far as I've sort of in investigated or researched my way into, it's also about, you know, keeping people's attention in a YouTube videos.
Jesper (8m 45s): It's very difficult. It's not like the same as a podcast here. We are talking to each other. People are probably doing the dishes while they're listening to this stuff. And you can sort of do other things, which is very nice. I podcasts a lot for this particular reason myself, but with YouTube, you're competing against them clicking onto Netflix instead of something, right.
Jenna (9m 4s): So you really need to grab their attention. And I found that I was probably thinking, overthinking it too much about how to do that best rather the being authentic, like you're saying, but at the same time, your authenticity has to be attention grabbing, you know, I kinda like it to being on a date in the sense that when you're on. And I mean, like, I hate that analogy because dating sucks. But when you're on a date, the idea is to be yourself, but be the best version of yourself. So I'm very, I'm very honest and authentic on my channel. I talk about the fact that, you know, my fiance is disabled and has a chronic pain condition.
Jenna (9m 49s): I talk about the fact that I have mental illness. You know, I'm not saying you should say all this stuff on a first date, but the point is real people know about my life. They know about who I am. I I'm giving them my honest, authentic personality, but you also don't want to be authentic to the point where it's like, okay, you know, this is, this is getting to be like a bummer or downer or overshare or something like that. You know, it's like being on a first date, you give them the best version of yourself. Again, I'm not saying that all the other authentic stuff I was talking about is the best version, but people appreciate the honesty, but at the same time, I'm not going to go create a video where I'm ranting because I'm having a bad day.
Jenna (10m 30s): And I'm just like, oh my gosh, I had the worst day, I got a bad review and I did this. And you know, like I show them the sides of myself that are fun and quirky and goofy and, and people like that because they can relate to it.
Jesper (10m 45s): Yeah. And I think for most part, people are watching YouTube because they want a bit of entertainment as well. I mean, they can certainly watch YouTube videos also to learn something, but unless it's a bit entertaining as well then. Yeah. Well, you're probably going to click on something else instead. Right.
Jenna (11m 1s): Exactly. And, and I think that's the key is to be entertaining in your authentic way. I've seen some people because I'm, I've just, since I was a teenager, I've been a potty mouth. Like, that's just how I am my family jokes about it. My, I don't know if anyone used to watch the show Dexter, but there's a character on the show named Deborah who cusses a lot. And my nickname when I was a stockbroker was Deborah because of that, I just do what I taught. And so when I'm on my channel, you know, I'm, Kasie because that's my authentic self. Sometimes I will see other people talk to me and they'll be like, well, I'm trying to be like you, Jenna, you know, like I'm cursing and I'm doing that and I'm not getting followers. And I'm like, well, that's because you're trying to be like me. Like, I am not doing that to get the followers.
Jenna (11m 43s): I'm doing that because that's how I talk. And in fact, they get people commenting. Like you're not being a proper lady, you know, like mad about that, but I'm just being me and people are, people can smell a phony a mile away. So it's not about emulating someone else's entertainment factor. It's about being your own kind of entertainment. There are channels that are really successful where the people are very prim and proper, but they have a cute kind of entertainment style or their sense of humor is deadpan. You know, you got to do it your way.
Jesper (12m 16s): So would you say that some people will just struggle a lot to ever get success? You know, because I'm also, it's like, some people might want to be an actor or something. Right. But not everybody can be an actor because it's not a, it takes some, you have to have this kind of thing to be successful at it. And do you think it's the same for YouTube that you have to have some sort of, I don't know what you want to call it, but YouTube factor or something, you know, something that makes you entertaining to what your videos or the way you speak about things or whatever. Do you think everybody can do it? Or do you think it sort of requires some unspoken skill or whatever you want to go?
Jenna (12m 58s): I think it's a little bit of both. I think you can absolutely learn to, you know, improve your craft. Its kind of like Writing. Like you can, you can learn the skill, you can improve your craft over time, but some people have a natural talent and that makes the improvement and skill like learning easier. It makes that aspect of it easier. And there are some people who really, really struggle with a certain thing. Like, like for example, I'm terrible at all things athletic. Like I have no coordination. I can't even, I can't even shoot the aliens on the buzz light year ride at Disneyland. Like I have no hand-eye coordination and I could practice as much as I want and I will probably still suck.
Jenna (13m 39s): And that's just kinda how it is in a lot of activities in life. So I definitely think you can learn the skill and get better. Some people are more naturally inclined for it. Some people it's just not for them. And I think the problem is is that people don't give themselves enough time to learn where they fall in that spectrum. A lot of people will quit if the channel isn't making it after a month, it took me six months to get from a hundred subscribers to 9,000 subscribers. It took me six months to, to experience that leap. And now I'm at 260,000 subscribers. So you got to give yourself the time, but you also need to know when it's like, okay, this just does it for me. You know, I know people who've had their channels for years almost as long as me and they have, you know, less than a thousand subscribers.
Jenna (14m 25s): It's like, okay, well maybe, maybe this isn't really, you know, your forte and there's nothing wrong with that. You, you know, we, failure is a part of success. You know, it's a part of learning what you're good at, where your strengths are, where your passion is. And quite often, if, if you're not good at something, a lot of times it comes to the passion element of it. Maybe your passion is, you know, better spent elsewhere. And so sometimes you just got to something a shot and realize if it's for you or not, but you got give yourself the time to figure it out.
Jesper (14m 57s): Yeah. But I, I think actually that is an excellent, good point because you know, looking at our, our, you know, myON Autumn's YouTube channel, it's probably been there for like five, six years. There's 2000 subscribers on it. Most videos don't get many views because well we moved into podcasting. So it was just a secondary sort of channel. It just sits there. We don't do much with it anymore other than just uploading these podcast episodes. Right. Whereas the podcasts are getting a much, much, much more and more downloads, but, and I think as well, that it's a good point because we gave it a good run probably longer than we should have to be honest, but we didn't give up right away. We, we kept at it. But at some point we also just had a Frank discussion between ourselves and sort of said, this is not going anywhere.
Jesper (15m 41s): Is it? And it's like, no, it's not okay. Let's do something else. We did our best. But I, I, I think as well that we are enjoying the podcast much more and that probably shines through,
Jenna (15m 54s): Well, it's like me with blogging versus YouTube. I hated blogging. And I plateaued at 200 followers. I, you know, it, it's kinda like with writing, you know, when you are passionate about the story you're telling it shines through, you can see it in the words, my blog kind of plateaued, whereas YouTube, I get to be silly. I get to be animated. You know, it, it's a more enjoyable experience for me. It's easier for me than blogging. And I think that's why I was better suited for you too. But I think that's why my channel is way more successful than my blog is because you can see that I'm enjoying it more, this feels more on brand.
Jenna (16m 35s): It feels more Jenna, you know?
Jesper (16m 38s): Yeah. Yeah. So if people are thinking, okay, I think I want to have a go with this stuff. I want to try to do a YouTube channel and I want to be authentic. And I I'm gonna see if I can get a bit of success with this. Just on practical terms. What would you recommend in terms of, you know, you know, they, they need a bit of a recording equipment. They need some microphone stuff, you know, all the equipment things. What would you suggest in terms of just getting started? Because you can buy yourself crazy equipment if you want it.
Jenna (17m 14s): Right. Well, when I first got started, I just used my face time camera, my laptop, microphone and natural lighting. It's a little bit of a different environment right now. So that might be a bit risky. But what I will say is that the quality of your content matters more than the quality of the video. So if you are going to start off with any equipment at all, I would recommend it being a microphone because if your voice is Peaky or annoying, that's, what's going to make someone turn off in terms of the quality of the video, it's going to be the audio that turns someone off people can tolerate, you know, video footage that is, you know, clear, unclear, or grainy.
Jenna (17m 58s): They can tolerate that. They can tolerate bad lighting. They can't tolerate bad audio. So if you can get yourself a decent microphone, that's the equipment I would start off with. I know people who have really large channels and they're still filming on their iPhone, the, the, the image itself. So you don't need the, the camera and the lighting yet. You can park yourself in front of a window and do natural lighting. I would recommend this for when you're just getting started when you're just figuring out if this is for you. I say this because I know people who spent thousands of dollars right off the gate only to find out that their channel is just, you know, no one likes it. They're not good at it. It's, it's not for them. So, you know, start off with a microphone and let everything else be, you know, the homemade at the beginning as you grow, that's when you want to invest in a camera and lighting and things like that, as you start to see, okay, this is a viable option for me.
Jenna (18m 55s): Outside of that, the editing of the video is very important. It's different than podcasts with podcasts. It's conversational, you know, all that good stuff on YouTube. Time is money. People have things to do, and you know, they could be watching Netflix or Hulu. They don't have to be watching you. So edit out the ums. If you need to script your content beforehand, I script all my videos because I am a rambler. So I script them all or else they'd be like, you know, an hour long of me just repeating myself, script your videos, edit out the ums and UHS, you know, make it, get to the point, make it, you know, concise, give them the quality information or, you know, content that you are here for.
Jenna (19m 41s): Get rid of all the long pauses. That's the most important thing to start off with and of course being authentic. So if, if you're just getting started, those are the key things that I would recommend because the, even if you're funny and you've got a great personality, if you've got all of the pauses and lagging and the stumbling over words in there, it'll totally destroy the funny it'll destroy the entertainment factor. So get yourself a good editing program. And it's great because a lot of them are free. You know, I movie comes with, you know, apple products. I, I use I movie for like 75% of my editing. And I, and I've been doing this for years. You know, you don't, you don't need to get the fancy stuff right out the gate.
Jesper (20m 22s): No, exactly. My, my oldest son just bought a, some editing software. I think he paid like 80 bucks for it or something. And it's, it's very good. I know. So it's not even that expensive, at least that pot, the cameras can be expensive, I imagine, but at least editing software, that's not that bad.
Jenna (20m 38s): Yeah. I, I ha I now use I movie alongside final cut pro final cut pro was pretty affordable. And I basically just use that for all the overlays and texts and little doodads that flow on the screen. But in terms of just trimming your video down and getting the sharp cuts and getting out all the crud that you don't need it and your content, something like I move, he works just fine. And I believe PC has something, another free program, but I'm not, I don't, I'm not familiar.
Jesper (21m 6s): Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But, but then there was also things like thumbnail images, titles of the videos, keywords and that sort of thing. So do you have any good tips when it comes to those things
Jenna (21m 20s): For thumbnails? I would recommend something eye catching, you know, funny faces always work. I usually am doing a goofy face in my thumbnails text that, you know, you know, it's gonna catch your attention. When I do my trope videos where I talk about the worst tropes. Oh, right. Something like your romance book sucks. You know, it's just like, it catches people's attention. I make a disgusted face, you know, bright colors, things like that. The title is something that a lot of people mess up and it really hurts their place in the algorithm. People are always trying to make their title stand out. You know, like the clickbait title that time has sort of passed.
Jenna (22m 4s): And by that, I mean, you can make your title stand out without it being click baity, without it being like I'm pregnant with an alien. You know what I mean? Like be specific about what your, your video is about, because the idea is you want to get in the algorithm. You want people who are typing in, for example, if I were giving tips for writing a first draft, you want people who are, people are not typing pregnant alien baby. They are typing Well, you never know, but you want to attract the people who are typing in first draft. So put that in the title. You know what I mean? Like if you're, if you're talking about romance novels, you want people who are typing in romance novels.
Jenna (22m 48s): So you say what your video's about. And a lot of people don't do that because they think it's not catchy enough, but it's like, it's, you know, go with the common sense title. And then as you work, you'll see that certain words perform better than others. For example, book performs better than novels. So in a lot of my titles, I will say like how to write a romance book, as opposed to how to write a romance novel. YouTube gives you all these analytics. So they make it really easy to figure out like what, you know, what you should be typing and what works. There's also free platforms that you can use that show you, you know, how keywords know perform a lot of my videos, if it has writing or writer in the title, it performs better than videos that don't have writing or writer.
Jenna (23m 32s): People like lists, you know, 10 best, 10 worst. And so a lot of my videos have that, you know, and of course, you know, best and worst. These are these, those are sort of the click baity words, best worst. You know, it kind of creates a hierarchy. People like the idea of, Ooh, this might be juicy. There might be drama here, you know, and that, and that's where that comes into play.
Jesper (23m 55s): Yeah. Do, do you do any research when it comes to sort of the topics of your videos? So what should you talk about next week and the week after and so on? Or, or do you just go with what you feel like talking about
Jenna (24m 7s): A little bit of both, but mostly the former, I'd say it's 75% research and 25% of what I feel like. And by that, I mean, you know, I will, I, about every six months I go through my videos and I see how they're performing. And I look for trends. I also have a wonderful assistant who helps me with that as well. I know not everyone is starting at a place where they can have an assistant, so, right. So I've been, I've been doing this for years. I did it on my own for years. Trust me, you can do it. YouTube makes it super easy, but I go through the videos and I see which ones performed the best, which ones performed the worst. I look for trends. And then I, I, you know, sort of plan my YouTube schedule around that.
Jenna (24m 48s): So for example, my best performing videos by far, or my trope videos, you know, the 10 worst romance tropes, the 10 best romance tropes, the 10 worst scifi tropes, et cetera, those performed the best. You don't want to make your entire channel, just that thing, because then it becomes, you know, a one trick pony. It's not, you need, you need variety. You know what I mean? So you want to offer variety. So I try to mix it up with that kind of content, along with the second and third best kind of content. And then w when I plan my videos, you know, I, I know what performs best. And then I just think, okay, of all this kind of content, what do I most feel like talking about right now? So I give, I give myself a pool of the best performers, and then it's like, what am I in the mood to discuss?
Jenna (25m 32s): And then I will pick and choose from there every once in a while, I will do a video that isn't as well performing, but I really enjoy it. Or the diehard fans enjoy it. A perfect example of this is my unboxing videos about once every other month, I unboxed presence and books and goodies that fans send me in the mail. They are by far my lowest performing videos, but they are the favorite videos of my diehard fans. The people are all about the brand, all about the platform who really love to support me. They are constantly like, when's the next unboxing video coming out. So for me, it's fine that they're not as high performing because it makes the people who've got my back no matter what it makes them happy.
Jenna (26m 16s): So I'm happy to deliver that content to them, but yeah,
Jesper (26m 20s): Once in a while,
Jenna (26m 22s): Right, exactly about once every other month. And it's fun for me. I mean, I get to basically have Christmas all the time. I enjoy it. So,
Jesper (26m 31s): Yeah, for sure. I understand that. But there was one thing I was wondering that I, that I definitely added to my list of things that I wanted to ask you because, and I don't know if this is true or not. So this could just be my, you know, me misunderstanding the situation or miss calculating or whatever you want to call it. But I have always been wondering, because when you have all kinds of different authors often have, you know, the ones who have YouTube channels, they will mostly like you do as well. They will talk about writing more as almost, it can be fun like you do it, but, but it'll be writing advice kind of information more, I would say, mostly targeting people who are interested in writing, meaning other authors and so on.
Jesper (27m 20s): And I've always been wondering when it comes to actually selling fiction books. If somebody wanted to start a YouTube channel and the stuff you have to talk about is writing, because that sort of makes sense. Does it actually help on selling fiction books or is it more like a different audience that you're building and therefore you're building like a business on YouTube Prada and then you have fiction sales over on the other end, or what's your experience there?
Jenna (27m 47s): It w it can help if you do it the right way. And by that, I mean, I write dark fantasy action, adventure and romance. I write adult fiction. My channel is geared towards writers and readers in that group. By that, I mean, you know, like I mentioned before, I have a bit of a potty mouth. My books feature cursing. If you do not like a potty mouse woman, you're not going to like my books. Also, sometimes people will be like, well, you know, if you, if you talked a little bit different and you made less raunchy jokes, younger people could watch your channel. And it's like, okay, well, that's not my target audience at all fiction.
Jenna (28m 27s): I don't write children's books. I've had people be like, can you make your videos better for second graders? And I'm like, well, seventh graders are not going to read my book about the fights or the death tournament. You know, so no I'm not doing that. You need to gear your channel toward that segment. And a bulk of my videos are about dark fantasy fantasy. They're about romance. They're about adventure fight scenes. I gear my content specifically toward what I enjoy, what I'm writing, what, and thus, obviously I'm going to attract a ton of writers, but typically if you're writing FANTASY, you like reading FANTASY. And I actually have a huge audience base of people who don't write at all.
Jenna (29m 8s): They just think I'm funny, which I really appreciate it. And they're like, I don't write. I just think you're funny. And I like your books, you know? So I've had acquaintances in the past where they, it didn't translate well, they had a YouTube channel. It didn't translate well to their book sales because their channels brand was completely off from what, from the book they were selling, you know, like the, the channel being very professional, being very all ages friendly. And in the book they re they released as like raunchy. And you know what I mean? Like you, right. And they've attracted the wrong audience. And people are like, whoa, this is, you know, this is, this is dirty and salacious. And it's like, well, you didn't attract the right audience.
Jenna (29m 50s): You know? So it, you have to be aware of who you want, reading your books. That's gotta be who you make your channel for. You know? So, you know, if me dropping an F bomb, bothers a person and prevents them from subscribing, that's great because they wouldn't like my books, you know, so I don't need them. I don't need them in the audience. So it's all about being very cognizant of your brand and the image that you are releasing.
Jesper (30m 16s): Okay. Very cool. Yeah. And I said to you, before we started recording that I actually asked in our Am Writing Fantasy Facebook group, what people wanted me to ask you, Jenna. So there was quite a number of questions, but I tried to pick the ones that I sort of thought was on topic of what we're talking about here, and also would be a more general interest to more people than maybe the person asking. So, so if you're ready, I would like to just go through some of these questions with you here. I have five for you.
Jenna (30m 50s): Okay. Go for it.
Jesper (30m 53s): Because Anita asks, if it's worth starting a YouTube channel, if you haven't published anything yet, or is it better to wait until you're ready to launch your novel? I thought that was a good question.
Jenna (31m 5s): Absolutely started before. If you're starting it after you're, it's like an uphill battle because the book is already out and, you know, unless you have a big platform already and you're, you're, you know, you've got good sales and things like that, but usually people are starting the YouTube channel in order to, you know, to, to get the sales in order to boost their presence. So if you've got a big platform, you can start gentle whenever you want. But if you're doing this for the sake of selling a book, definitely start the channel before one, because it takes years to build an audience. And you don't want your books sitting, collecting dust published for years.
Jenna (31m 45s): And then finally it starts to get sales. And to, if you start the channel after, and then you direct people to the published book and it has no reviews and it's not performing, people are going to be like, oh, well, what's wrong with this book that no one's buying it. You know what I mean? So it's better to start it before that said, I'm saying like a YouTube channel in general, sometimes people, you know, I give writing advice and I also make satirical con content about writing. I started my channel before I was published and I was qualified to give writing advice because I've been in studying storytelling. At that point, I'd been studying, writing and storytelling for about 20 years.
Jenna (32m 25s): And I had been doing giving critiques for other writers. They asked me to create the channel. I've had poetry published and things like that. You know, I, I had some, you know, you know, some, some content that made me like qualified to give the writing advice. Sometimes people hop on YouTube and give writing advice because they see that other writers are doing it. And they don't really feel like they're qualified, but they're doing it because it's, you know, what's going on. If you don't feel qualified to do something, don't do it. You can make a video about something else. You can just track your writing journey. You can talk about, you know, the, if you're going traditionally could talk about the Query process or something like that. You, you don't have to give writing advice. So if that's your concern about starting before you're published, then make your video about something else or make your channel about something else.
Jesper (33m 11s): Yeah. And I think what you're saying that tracks very much with what Autumn. And I usually say, because we not, we don't get the question specific to YouTube, of course, but we often get the question about mailing lists. Like, do you start the mailing list before you publish the books or after you publish the books? And we also always say started we'll we'll we'll before, because that's the only way you can get enough people on that list. So you can actually sell some books once you do publish it later on. So it's never too early to begin. It's usually our moderate rare.
Jenna (33m 41s): Yes. And people always think, well, I have nothing of value to say, and it's like, don't sell yourself. So short, of course he has something of value to say, you just have to have the confidence and you've got to figure out what your voice is and what it is that you want to say. If you have, if you have the ability to write a book, which is obviously what you're trying to do, then you have the ability to do a mailing list or a YouTube channel, you know, just got to figure out what your voice and messages.
Jesper (34m 8s): Yeah. Okay. So let me move on to Stephanie's question, because Stephanie wanted to know how much time you actually spent on marketing, your books, working on your YouTube channel and writing new books. Like, do you split your time, like 20% marketing and 20% writing on and so on?
Jenna (34m 24s): Oh, I've I couldn't tell you. I honestly don't know. I work about what I can say is I work about 10 to 12 hours a day. Usually it's gotten a little bit better now that I have an assistant, but it really varies. It's I wish that I could give a straight answer, but it's hard for me to track because I'm also a caregiver. My fiance suffers from a chronic pain condition, and he's in a lot of like recovery programs to try and build back a strength. So everyday for me is very flexible. Every week is completely different. So it's really hard for me to track how much time I spend doing each thing. What I can say is that I usually try to devote a week every month to YouTube.
Jenna (35m 6s): And by that, I mean, a cumulative amount of time of scripting content for a month filming content for a month. And my assistant does the editing and then I do the little doodads bells and whistles the effects and uploading it. So that is the one thing I can say with certainty about one week out of every month is devoted to my YouTube channel. And then the rest of it is a hodgepodge of writing and marketing.
Jesper (35m 33s): Fair enough. Fair enough. Okay. So an angel also asked a question that, but I am going to paraphrase it a bit here just to sort of boil it down and get to the point of what I think more or less she was asking, but she wanted to know how you basically built such a great following on YouTube. I think you've talked a lot about it already, and maybe there was also a part of you saying that you got in at the right time. So, but I don't know if you have anything more to add on, on, on that question.
Jenna (36m 6s): I really think it's because people appreciate, you know, someone being themselves and being authentic because a lot of the things that I get, you know, cause obviously I'm a woman on YouTube. I get trolls, I get hate comments. A lot of the things that I get hate comments for are the reasons that people, you know, subscribe, they, you know, appreciate that. I'm a straightforward woman on the internet. They appreciate that. I'm myself. Even if it's not always those flattering version of myself, they appreciate the fact that I'm willing to dress up like a pizza or a hot dog. And my channel is if it makes people laugh, like I, you know, being yourself really goes a long way. And also one thing I didn't touch on is, you know, learn and evolve. You know, if you look at my very first videos, they are not the same as they are now, you know, I've upgraded you, you constantly have to learn, okay, how can I make this better?
Jenna (36m 53s): How can I improve? You know, I now have professional lighting equipment. I now have, you know, professional camera and all that stuff. I I'm looking for ways to improve the effects to improve the editing, to, you know, looking for what my audience wants more of. Do they want more giveaways? Do you know, do they want more interviews? I'm I'm constantly asking my audience. Okay. What do you want me to talk about? You know, so I think that's really important too. Sometimes people get complacent and they get comfortable and then they never branch out and improve. And when you do that, you plateau.
Jesper (37m 28s): Yeah. That's a good point. Yeah. I, we still, I think we have like probably, I don't know, maybe 200 videos or something on our channel and I can promise you, I do not dare go back and watch the first one. It's horrible.
Jenna (37m 43s): My first one is long since been deleted. It's like, but I mean like at the time it worked, you know, at the time, but like, and that's another thing is like, give yourself time to suck. You know, everyone is they're so they're so embarrassed to post their first video. They're like, it's going to suck. It's like sorted mine and look where I'm at now I've got 260,000 subscribers. Like it's going to suck for a while. You're you're just shaking off the cobwebs. It's okay. Just get into the, like, get into the flow. You're just embrace the fact that you're going to suck at first and that's fine. It's all just, yeah.
Jesper (38m 13s): Yeah. It speaks to everything about our personal YouTube, a strategy that we didn't even, we even not even deleted those ones, the old ones they're still there. It's just there.
Jenna (38m 23s): Well, to be fair, it took me years to delete my,
Jesper (38m 30s): Yeah. So Rob also was asking a question because he was wondering if organic growth is a business model for YouTube, rather than paying for advertising.
Jenna (38m 41s): I've never paid for advertising for my channel. So I'm going to say organic growth, but I'm not speaking from a place of personal experience because I've never paid for advertising. I do know other YouTubers who pay for advertising. I even, I mean, we see it all the time. Some of them have really big channels and some of them, it doesn't really look like the advertising has done a whole lot for them. I think it, it really depends on, on the strategy behind it. You know, if your ad sucks and isn't interesting or engaging people probably aren't gonna be interested, but as someone whose entire growth happened organically, then you know, I'm all for that.
Jesper (39m 22s): Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. What you just said about placing ads and stuff, this complete detour here, but it just reminded me that it was, I think a couple of weeks ago, usually when I exercise in the morning, I listen to music on YouTube. And then of course, because I'm exercising, I can't click the skip button for when the abs pops up and then this ad popped up and this guy was talking and talking, it just went on and on and on. And I was wondering, when does this commercial stop? And then I looked at my phone and it was, it said there was 45 minutes left. And I was like, what? This is an ad what's going on? You can't have an ad for 45 minutes.
Jesper (40m 1s): Oh my God.
Jenna (40m 3s): Yeah. Yeah. I mean like, you know, the, a lot of people, they do not do the research and I understand that writers are a creative bunch, but it's a business. This YouTube is a business. You know, selling books as a business marketing is a part of business. Do do the research. That's why I, you know, even though I ended up veering off from finance, I'm really glad I went to business school because it prepared me for self publishing my novels and starting my YouTube channel. And so do the research before you spend money on ads, make sure you're, you know, spending it wisely.
Jesper (40m 35s): Yeah, for sure. I have one last question and this not, this one is not sort of directly related to being a YouTuber, but I thought I wanted to include it because the first part is just something that I always find interesting. But then the second part is just a bit, bit of a weird and funny questions. Yeah. I think she was just having a bit of fun, but Terry wanted to know first, how much plotting you actually do for your books and Autumn. And I have written a guide book on how to plot novels. So I'm always interesting hearing that, but, and then she added. And could you also ask Jenna if their cyborg queen would make an Alliance with a chaos potato?
Jesper (41m 15s): I have no idea what that means. Maybe you do.
Jenna (41m 19s): Okay. So I'll start with plotting. I do a ton applauding. Like I'm on my channel. I am like the outline queen. I'm just like everyone knows that I'm always going to give advice that upsets the pants there is. If you're a pantser, that's fine. I just, it's not for me, but I, I, I, my outlines are hefty. Like my outlines are 30 pages long. I plot everything out. I have a method with no cars and organizing for me, people say that plotting and outlining ruins the fun or excitement for me, it is the fun and excitement because it's like putting together a puzzle and it's like, how is it going to turn out? You know, like, I, I love it. I, for me, it's a very creative part of the process.
Jenna (41m 59s): And it's one of my favorite parts. So I'm very heavily into plotting apps for the cyber queen thing. So cyber queen is, is my nickname as a delegated by my audience. My nickname in college was cyborg. And I mentioned it in a video and it blew up. And now in the cyber queen, I would, I would be open to an Alliance with a chaos potato. If the, if the terms and conditions were equal and fair, we can get into it. We just, we need to make sure we're on the same side. Okay. We, we have the same beliefs in world domination.
Jesper (42m 37s): Yeah. And also the word chaos. There might be a bit concerning if you're looking at an Alliance, you know, with, with something chaotic. That's I don't know how trustful is that
Jenna (42m 49s): Exactly. That's why we need to have a meeting and discuss what, how chaotic is this potato? I need to know.
Jesper (42m 57s): Yeah. I don't even know what I was thinking. Ks potato is that maybe something Jenna said in a past video or something, because it felt so odd. Like kid, where did you get that from? I don't know.
Jenna (43m 9s): I just imagine a chaos. Potato is like a mashed potato. That's been like splattered across a room. That's a chaos potato. Or that just might be a dead potato.
Jesper (43m 17s): Well, maybe it's one of, maybe it's more like you open the door to the room and throw it inside and close the door. Maybe that's what you do.
Jenna (43m 26s): But then that grease was splattered. That's a violent potato man
Jesper (43m 33s): And people screaming and stuff like that. Well, okay. I asked him I'm at my end of my list of questions for you Janet today. And I w is there anything sort of, I should have asked you that I didn't some very good voice that we never got to?
Jenna (43m 53s): Where can everyone buy my books? How about that?
Jesper (43m 57s): Of course, of course.
Jenna (43m 60s): So right now I'm in the middle of the Savior series. The first two books, the saver's champion and the Savior sister are available wide all over the place at all, major retailers, they are number one bestsellers in dark fantasy romance. The Savior Sheffield was voted one of the best books of all time by book depository, which basically was the highlight of my life. I will never get over that. So yeah, pick them up. They're great. If you like your books filled with magic and steamy swooning, us and stabby stabby die die, then there are the books for you pick them up today. Hey,
Jesper (44m 36s): Excellent. Yeah. And if you, you, you can also send me a link to where people can pick up your books or where you want them to go to Jenna. Then I will definitely put it in the show notes so people can just click through from there. And it will also go into the description field on YouTube. If anybody's watching there and then they can go and check out your book. So feel free to send me that link. Jenna,
Jenna (44m 58s): Thank you so much.
Jesper (45m 0s): And thank you for coming and having a chat here and offer all your advice and expertise today. I appreciate that, Jenna.
Jenna (45m 8s): Thank you for having me. It was so much fun.
Jesper (45m 12s): All right. So next Monday, Autumn, we'll be back and we're going to do one of our popular and some people call them dreaded worst top 10 lists. See you then.
Narrator (45m 24s): If you like, what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patrion.com/ Am. Writing Fantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, going, stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
The best way to learn the craft of writing is to study the best of the best! Join us for our first critical reading episode where we take a look at the Hugo Award winning novel the Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin. We take a look at what this story does right... and what had us scratching our heads.
Warning: there are spoilers if you haven't read the book!
Do you agree on our assessment of the book's strength and weaknesses? Leave messages in the comments or join the discussion thread in the Am Writing Fantasy Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/AmWritingFantasy/!
And don't forget to signup for the Fantasy Map Masterclass to be held October 28. Register at https://ultimatefantasywritersguide.com/fantasy-map-masterclass/.
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (1s): You're listening to The Am writing Fantasy Podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need an literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello. I'm Jesper.
Autumn (31s): And I'm Autumn
Jesper (33s): This is episode 147 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. And we've finally arrived at our new initiative. So once a month, we are reading a high profile fantasy book, and then we record an podcast episode about it. So this is our Critical Reading of the Fifth Season by NK Jemisin. Yes, I am looking forward to getting into the nitty gritty because I admit some of the aspects of this one or what kind of gave me the idea for the Critical Reading group when we were first talking about it. I also don't know if our listeners will be surprised at our, I think we both have a very similar takeaway from this book, but the Le there's some aspects of this one that are like, oh, that is so different.
Jesper (1m 22s): It's amazing. I see why I want to Hugo for this is such a cool book and there's other aspects that well we'll get there all the way. Yes. You're already teasing it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we got make people want to listen to like the heart of this line, which they should be excited. Yeah, I think it's, I think it's going to be an interesting conversation. And of course the, the idea is also here to see if we can try to draw out some things to learn in terms of either D these are good ideas or this kind of stuff you should probably avoid, you know, that kind of thing is what we're trying to draw out of the Critical Reading.
Jesper (2m 3s): Exactly. And we'll, we'll get to it, but it's all matter of opinion, obviously. So yes, you can disagree with us. That's okay. It's just our opinions, but yeah, we'll, we'll get to, it sounds good. Well, if we're going to get to it, how are things going for you over in Denmark? Yeah. Well, I don't think I have wage that much to share this week. I'm just attempting to finish up the first draft of book two in our new series. So a couple of chapters to go and maybe I will be done by Friday. I hope don't tell me that. That that's my, well, you should be happy about that or very happy, but I was hoping to finish the edits on book one, which always seemed to be getting pushed back ever so slightly.
Jesper (2m 50s): I'm so close. Maybe, maybe the end of next week, but you're going to beat me on the book too. I will catch up eventually.
Autumn (3m 1s): Yeah. Yeah. So I, I don't think I have that much other to share this week. It's just been, you know, what do you call it? Like a head in the sand? No, not head in the sand. That's not good, but in the trailer, how do you say
Jesper (3m 15s): Clouds? How did the clouds?
Autumn (3m 19s): That was not what I was looking for, but nevertheless, I know, I know you were at some FANTASY con or something or
Jesper (3m 25s): Yes, I went to a Vermont fantasy and sci-fi con up in Burlington and that was a lot of fun. I was there, there, it was definitely, I think, more, more than 50% Saifai but at the same time, it was so much fun. You would have, I thought of you several times because they had a R2D2 that was like truly moving. You could have mistaken it for the from the movies and the guy who could control it was so good. Like he didn't have to look down at the remote and the remote was so small. You didn't even really notice who was responsible. And this little thing would come up to your booth would be talking to you. And you're like, this is awesome.
Jesper (4m 7s): And there was like Ghostbusters, there was a gorgeous Ghostbusters car and some plasma things. But one of the coolest things is definitely the star wars. And there was a lead the 501st Legion for the stormtroopers. So representatives there. And so there's these guys walking around and for full storm trooper armor. And the coolest thing is that they had to go upstairs to the conference room and I happened to be up there and I look out and I see one in the hallway and I'm pointing out to my husband. He ran out there and got a picture just as the elevator doors were closing. It looks so star wars. I'm like, that is the best picture ever.
Jesper (4m 47s): So that one framed, it's just always, we're going to take a picture of a storm trooper. It should be in an elevator. It's just so cool.
Autumn (4m 57s): I've always loved those uniforms. To be honest, I think I always also in the movies, you know, when it seems like they just look so cool. And, and sometimes I feel like it's a shame that they had just like Canon father in the movies, just don't troopers because they look so cool.
Jesper (5m 11s): They look so cool. It's a very cool armor. And I was actually, I mean, I've been part of the SCA, the society for creative anachronism. I used to do that back in my twenties. And so I really enjoy that, but I didn't know there was a 501st Legion of storm troopers. I'm like, dude, you can go and dress up and be a storm trooper. That is cool.
Autumn (5m 38s): Yeah. Well, I would rather be the Sith Lord, to be honest,
Jesper (5m 42s): Probably I would want to go in as a Jedi master, but I do come from a FANTASY background. I think any Fantasy author should automatically get to be a Jedi or Sith master just it's in our resume.
Autumn (5m 56s): See you, you pick the good guys and I automatically pick the bad guys. I don't know what the tails,
Jesper (6m 3s): Well, we have to bounce each other's out. It's the force there's balance.
Autumn (6m 8s): Oh, okay. Okay. Fair enough.
Narrator (6m 12s): A week on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast.
Autumn (6m 18s): One last reminder here on the 28th of October, we are having our very first ever virtual Masterclass.
Jesper (6m 28s): I can't wait. It's a Maps. I love fantasy maps.
Autumn (6m 33s): Fantasy Maps. Yes. And if you can't make it in person, there will be a recording made available for you as well. So I don't know, I'm looking so much forward to just geeking out for an hour about fantasy maps. This is going to be so awesome.
Jesper (6m 48s): It'll be almost better to on, so yeah, it'll be fantastic.
Autumn (6m 54s): Yeah. We'll have a lot of fun and I will share some thoughts on map-making that you might not have considered before. So whether you want to learn something or if you just want to, well, kick out with us, we hope that you will join the Masterclass. It is a very inexpensive and it is conducted online. So you don't need to leave your house or anything like that to attend.
Jesper (7m 18s): And the fact it's actually a really good deal. It's not only is it expensive, but it's a two for one, you get a second invitation to a second Masterclass as you have to be scheduled. So it's a two for one deal. It's a really good deal. Yeah.
Autumn (7m 34s): Yeah. So there's a link in the show notes and you can find the registration page from there and yeah, we really hope to see you otherwise it'll just be you and me Autumm and I think talking, we can talk to ourselves about map-making, but it might be slightly boring.
Jesper (7m 52s): Never boring.
Autumn (7m 54s): That's true. That's true.
Narrator (7m 59s): And onto today's topic.
Autumn (8m 3s): Okay. So while we're doing, while we're doing Critical Reading here today, we, I think we better start out by saying that the purpose here is to learn from the books that we read, not to bast them or claim that anything is wrong with these books. Well, with this book in this case, and we should also say that the fifth season is a very popular book. It was awarded by the Hugo award for best novel in 2016. And this means that there's a lot of people loving this novel. So everything we say is personal opinions, and we fully understand that some people will disagree with that.
Autumn (8m 42s): And that's okay.
Jesper (8m 44s): Yes, exactly. And actually, I didn't realize this, but it's also has won the Sputnik award. It was nominated for Nebula award and it's a world FANTASY award best novel. This, this is a highly acclaimed story. So I think it'll be really interesting to look at it, but it's definitely that's. We want to learn why this is so popular and it's okay to, you know, find things that you don't like about it, but that's why it's a learning experience to find maybe the core features that you love and then, you know, learn from those and maybe learn what you want to stay away from. If you, especially, if people are leaving reviews or comments that you agree with and you can say, well, then I, there are readers who don't want that as well.
Jesper (9m 29s): That's great.
Autumn (9m 30s): And we gave plenty of warning as well, leading up to this episode that we were going to do this Critical Reading. So we are not going to be careful about spoiling anything here. So if you haven't read the book and you want to, I suggested you turn off the podcast now and then come back to listen to the rest. Once you have done the reading part. So yeah, I might say, oh, I think I will definitely say some sports.
Jesper (9m 57s): Yes, I will. Definitely too. And I had written down the exact same thing on my notes for today that spoilers will fall low this. So if you are still reading and haven't finished or plan on reading it, we're going to ruin the book for you. So stop now and go read the, finish the book and then come back and listen and see if you agree.
Autumn (10m 17s): Yeah, I think that's a good idea. So I try to divide sort of my notes into some headlines. So I have a headline called plodding, one called magic and one cold world-building and then I have a bunch of stuff underneath each headed air. So I don't know if we just want to start out with a plotting on and then go from there or do you have a different preferences?
Jesper (10m 41s): That sounds fine though. I wanted to start with maybe a quick explanation of what the fifth season is. I don't want to do a whole blurb and Sabine Opsis, you know, we're hoping you read the book, so, you know, what's about, but just to set the stage, the fifth season is, you know, we have our summer spring, winter fall. Well, the fifth season kind of lends its name to a world ending event, like a cataclysm, a major earthquake, something that is going to destroy civilization. So it doesn't come every year, but when it comes, it's known as the fifth season. So it's actually a very ominous title once you realize that
Autumn (11m 15s): It is definitely so, yes. Okay. So we'll assume people have read it or otherwise go and check the book description on Amazon and UK. You can see what it's about. So should I just get started on the plotting stuff and then we can see where it takes us.
Jesper (11m 35s): Maybe we should start almost with the way we would write books and we should start with the world building.
Autumn (11m 41s): Okay, fair enough. We can do that. Okay. So I can start out with my first point here. It's, it's a bit of a long one, but let me try to get through it. So first of all, this is from a wealth building perspective. It's incredibly complex with all, like, there was all this seismic activity that is impacting on society and we have slaves, we have outcasts. And to some extent, this book is also about people dealing with being controlled and abused and having a total totalitarian regime.
Autumn (12m 21s): And while I, well, I do enjoy the exploration of these sort of horrible things that people are willing to do to each other, as soon as they don't see the other person as a human being anymore, but I'm still wanting it to be more personal. You know, I have to sort of mention, I don't know if it's directly world-building building, but it's in here in my notes. But in this context, I have to mention that the second person present tense that the NKG Emerson uses it's, it's probably the reason why the book won the Hugo war, to be honest, because it's different and it is very well done.
Autumn (13m 4s): I mean, don't get me wrong. She pulled it off very, very skillfully. However, none of that changes how it really puts me off. I just cannot get into the story and the characters. I don't know how you feel about that. Autumn.
Jesper (13m 20s): I agree. I had a very hard time relating to the characters, especially the main character, which we can get to later. But again, we're not giving anything away, but I wasn't sure if we were not supposed to realize that the older woman, the middle age, you know, the, the motherish woman and the child were the same person. But I mean, as soon as we switched between the two, I knew instantly that the little girl was the same as the older woman who had just lost her son who was the same as the mother. I don't know if it's because we write in a fantasy and it's like, well, duh, or, you know, the idea of the goddess, who's the, the may, the mother of the crone. I mean, it's, it was just so obvious.
Jesper (14m 1s): And so I knew the whole time that this is going to be the same person and I still never related to her. But to go on your comment of the second person, I agree. That's what makes this story literary Fantasy is that it switches between a third poison person, point of view, to a second person present tense. And it's amazing that it's done. And it, I didn't notice it as fast as some people who have left comments on what they thought of the story as they read along for today's podcast. So I, it literally, I think I was about a quarter of the way through the book. And I was like, oh, this is a total, this isn't, this is using you. And this is using present tense.
Jesper (14m 41s): And this is not what was in this previous chapter. But I will say as a literary story, I think it was done very purposefully because the chapters where the second person is used are the ones where the character has just lost her son. And she goes into shock and doesn't recover for days. And she doesn't really recover for the entire course of the novel because that point of view is always in second person. She is disassociated from herself and her emotions and it works so well. The use of you makes it feel like you're separate from this character, especially compared to the chapters where it's third person.
Jesper (15m 25s): And so I think in that way, it works great, but I never bonded with her because this is the adult version. This is the present version of who she is. And all the other ones are memories, which their past tense makes sense, brilliant Writing, but for character, you know, wanting to hear more about this character, I told you I can share it later, but I have a quote who basically her, I grabbed the review and her title to the review are my feelings for this book are complicated leading towards negative. And I'm like, oh, that's I could have written this one. And she too mentions that she couldn't bond with the main character.
Autumn (16m 8s): No. And I agree with what you said, because I, I also think that the chose to point of view on purpose to exactly do what you sat there like to, to give you the sense that the character is this issue, this issue associated, I can't even say that now on to tie it, but, but that's definitely the purpose of it. And it works for sure, but at the same time, you know, if you're looking at it from a emotion, emotion perspective, like you want to get in the body of the character, you want to see and feel with them as they go through the story and getting Merced inside the setting and in their lives and all that good stuff.
Autumn (16m 49s): Like that's what I enjoy when reading to just disappear into this sort of fantasy world and go with the characters. And that's what you get with the deep point of view. We talked about that in a previous episode as well, but that is what kept, keeps me fully engaged. And it just doesn't happen here because as a reader, I'm also distanced from it because of the second person. And I feel like that's a real shame. And I think Stephen from patron, he also said something that I really felt like was true because he said like, quote, the point of views were a stumbling block for me at first.
Autumn (17m 30s): But I read on thanks to you guys with a critical eye so that I could see what made this book tick. And then it hit me the pros, the writing style. It was so lyrical and almost poetic in places. And I think that that hits it home for me because I fully agree. That's also how I see it. It is not, it is more lyrical and poetic than it is storytelling in many places. And for those who love that, then that's great. But I, I, I just can't get into the character and the story you, I just feel almost like I don't care. Yeah.
Jesper (18m 6s): And that it is a shame. It is a shame for a book that is, I think, has such potential because the world is really interesting and it sort of relates to what you just said about the lyrical writing. To me, the, I saw it more like poetry, but minimalize, the world is a very harsh world. The book has some really harsh themes things that I don't usually like to think about when I'm reading Fantasy, it's, it's dark, dark Fantasy to me. And the magic is also hard. It's hard. It is basically earth magic. And so you have this hard world it's described very harshly. The language to me is very bare at times, fractured very punctuated.
Jesper (18m 49s): It reminds me very much of geology and earth and different types of rock and layers. So it's like this whole thing is designed to be this hard surface as Rocky surface that can, at times it pokes you in it's painful. And that is just as a writer, as someone studying Writing, I'm like, oh my gosh, I want to read this in, you know, a college class. And I would have to break it down and discuss it. But as a reader, I'm like, I didn't bond. I didn't feel it. I didn't buy book two because I didn't have that, you know, warm gooeyness of, oh my God, I love this book. It was more like, I can appreciate this on a literary sense in a scene.
Jesper (19m 30s): And I see, well, it was done kudos to you and yeah, good. Don't need to write like that. Thanks.
Autumn (19m 39s): No, I agree. And I think I read somewhere that NKG, Amazon didn't intend for the setting to represent our world. And it's like future destruction. I could be wrong about that, but I think I read that somewhere, but one of the characters do call it earth. So there is that, but I sort of quite like the reflections on real life here, you know, whatever, whether the author intended it to be so not, I don't know, but, but I think it is pretty cool to think about, you know, from a climate perspective in a real world and so on. And yeah, I mean, it, it gives sort of the real world angle on thing.
Autumn (20m 20s): And I guess that's the kind of thing that also gets awards, right? Because there's more to it than just a story.
Jesper (20m 26s): Yes. Especially the end. You know, the last thing that alabaster the one character mentioned is have you ever heard of a moon and this planet that they're on, it's a supercontinent now. So it's like Pangea, but it's called the stillness. And so it's this fast continent and it doesn't have a moon. And suddenly, you know, the last phrase like mentions a moon. So is this future earth that has been torn apart with earthquakes and all this fracturing going on. It's very interesting. And I, over on world building too, I do the previous cultures that are there. They call them the dead sieves. So you see all these ruins of previous cultures and some of them sounded so technologically advanced and there's parts of the book where there's a lot of description and then there's like a dead sieve in the distance.
Jesper (21m 15s): And I'm like, I want to know more about the ruined cities. I would have been like hard hat on. I am going to go check it out, but they're basically the culture is, oh, we don't go there. They failed. Screw them. Like, no, I love history. I want to know why they failed. Can't you learn from previous lessons and become something better and not just wipe the canvas clean and start over and fail again. So there was that element too, where maybe it is describing our current world where we're not learning from past mistakes and past things and we're repeating ourselves and this just kind of does it with civilizations.
Autumn (21m 53s): Yeah. That makes sense. To me, at least, I don't know if that is the intention, but, but it, it makes sense that it's a commentary on the real world. I feel like, but I don't know. It asks a bit more depth to it, which I actually quite like.
Jesper (22m 10s): Yes. And I was definitely teased by the floating obelisks pyramids. I forget how they're described. They have a couple of different ones, but these floating blocks of stone. And I couldn't believe that the, again, that there was very little curiosity about what they were, except for alabaster, trying to figure it out. And a young girl on the cell, in the girls viewpoint. And I get days, I can't remember her name, but her, when she's a child and she's at fulcrum learning to become, I can't even pronounce it. Origin, NIST origin is what they call their magic system.
Autumn (22m 50s): I shouldn't going to
Jesper (22m 50s): Try. And I had to look up how to say it because it is a world real world. And so I looked up and so there's this girl, and she's curious, but it's like two people in the entire book are curious about these giant floating things in the sky that are made out of stone. And again, I find it, I find the lack of curiosity, which is something that is true for the whole book and especially the main character. She's never curious. And that's sort of against who I am as a person. I thrive off of going to know what things, you know, why things are this way. And so I really think that did not help me relate to the book because there's not a single character who was like, well, why does this happen?
Jesper (23m 33s): What happened here? They don't care.
Autumn (23m 38s): Yeah. And, and the other aspect of what you're saying, I feel like is, is I don't feel like there's enough at stake for the protagonist. I mean, yes, she is searching for her daughter, but the rest of what happens, like you're talking about the obelisk and all this kind of thing, all of that is sort of dealt with because, well, it's my job. So I'm dealing with it, but it's not, I mean, I just can't help by questioning here. If we, if we're trying to learn from it, what would have happened if the author had found a way to link all of this stuff around the obelisk and all that other stuff closer to the life of the character so that it make a personal difference for the character, whether she dealt with it or not, instead of just I'm taking care of my job, I just feel like that would be a lot more interesting.
Autumn (24m 26s): Yeah.
Jesper (24m 26s): Yes. I feel like the entire plot, what you have, you said you have a whole section on the plot. I feel like the whole plot revolved around the search, the present search for her daughter, and then the, how she got to where she is now, which is the two past point of views where there was some really cool stuff. Like, you know, the one time, the first time she bonds with an obelisk and a volcano erupts. And I'm still not sure if that was her, the obelisk or alabaster somehow making this volcano up here. And I thought, oh, this is going to start connecting with her. And immediately the next part, she doesn't even really ever think about them again.
Jesper (25m 7s): And then when she moves on with the present tense where she has been a wife and a mother in this new new town, and it begins with her losing her son, she's never even wondered about, again, anything that obelisk the things that I thought like, oh, you've connected with an obelisk and it's an alien intelligence and it was talking to you. Okay. Not mentioned for the next 50 chapters. I was like, oh, I want to know more about that.
Autumn (25m 34s): Yeah. Yeah. I, I do have some issues then. And I thought as well, if I just say infidel student, know what I'm thinking about, autumn,
Jesper (25m 46s): I think they hit you worse, especially cause you're listening. And I think maybe I just kind of skimmed them and didn't realize it was skimming them. But you said that there were more and I realized,
Autumn (25m 59s): Well, at least it feels like that to me. I mean maybe, maybe it's just me, but I was listening to the audio book version Al and I, and can I just say, if you haven't, you know, listeners, if you want to check this book out, then Narrator for the audio book is freaking amazing. She does such a good job at narrating this book. So that's definitely worth it. I can highly recommend the, that this narrator she's so good at it, but, but that's, I digress what I want men was just that I noticed in several places, how well, maybe you don't notice it so much when reading and I'm speculating here, but, but because of the very lyrical language, she's so good at writing that maybe you don't really notice that much, but there are quite a lot of info dumps in my view where you just get like a whole section about something that happened like in the older days or blah, blah, blah, something it's like.
Autumn (26m 57s): Hmm. Yeah. Okay. But, but if, if it was, if I read it in a book and maybe if, if it was maybe well less written, I could put it like that, then I would just feel like, well, put all of this conversation between characters or something so that I can, I get the, as part of the action of what's happening or characters talking about it and shared that way, because it feels like sometimes there's just a whole sections about old history stuff. And it's like, okay, I guess I don't, I don't know. Yeah.
Jesper (27m 32s): One of the reviews mentioned that if they had to read another description of meeting someone on the road and what they were wearing and what their hair color was that she would go and how you knew which part of the continent they were from based on these things, that it just seemed too repetitive. And you know, I, again, I didn't really quite notice that, except I know sometimes I, I would, again, probably just skim ahead a little bit, be like, okay, that's nice. You know, I, I don't need to know all the details. So again, I don't mean to be pointing out the flaws, but I think we're just, we're pointing out the difference between what's literary Fantasy and what is normal, like dark fantasy, what we expect in the two genres. And this is literally sold as literary slash epic slash science fiction.
Jesper (28m 15s): So it's, it's a weird mishmash where I think it fits better actually with literary Fantasy than it does with dark fantasy.
Autumn (28m 26s): Yeah, I do too, because I mean, as I hinted at just a moment, a Gomez, the writing is exceptionally well done. I mean, she writes really, really beautiful. I have nothing to say against that. It's it's amazing.
Jesper (28m 39s): And the world is like you said, it's,
Autumn (28m 44s): But yeah, that's what I mean, if that's what you're there for, then it's great. Right. But if you're there for more, like what I guess I could call commercial fiction, you meaning you're there to enjoy a story and so on, then this is not it.
Jesper (29m 0s): And I think part of that part is also the not bonding and the plot feeling sort of flat that, you know, all these potential side plot plots could have happened, but they don't because one, the reader, the character is not curious, but it's also the character. What kind of character arc would you call this? I'm thinking it's either a fail or a flat arc. And because she never learned, she never grows. She's not curious at all. She doesn't change. Plot is kind of static.
Autumn (29m 34s): Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to come back to that a bit when I talk about the ending, but I'll save that for a moment, but I did have another comment from, from Steven on Patrion as a last comment, I have at least on my list when it comes to world building, because I think he might have a good point here, but I'm curious what you think Autumm. So he's asked quote, the one aspect of the world building that I didn't care for is that she made up many curse words like rust and rusting. And yet she still used several modern curse words. This is probably nitty nit-picky, but if you make up your own own course words, that fit the culture of your story.
Autumn (30m 16s): Why use modern carbon curse words too? So I think he has a point. Does New York, Adam,
Jesper (30m 22s): I think he does. I don't know if I would have no, I don't. Can't say I super noticed it. I, I noticed like when she was using rusting and stuff. Yeah. I really, I just, I liked the ones that she made up. Cause again, it fits the world. It fits the culture of, you know, very like metal is not considered safe because it, rusts rust is a bad thing. It's leads to dead sieves, but I don't think I noticed too many modern words and what they were. And so, yeah, I think as a, you know, I would think I would appreciate them more if she, if she had stuck left them in the world that she was, especially if this was not supposed to be a future earth where people are still saying F this.
Jesper (31m 4s): So
Autumn (31m 6s): Yeah, I get the point that Steven is making to be honest, but at the same time, I must admit sometimes you can just put in the effort. I mean, I know there is a lot of debates. I've seen it in many times being debated whether or not there should be an F-word in a fantasy novel personally, I don't have any problem with it, but yeah, I don't know. I still get the argument.
Jesper (31m 30s): I I've used it because it fit, it was actually set in modern day earth. But yeah, I've been, as long as it's not aimed targeted at kids, I don't have a problem with using some of our language because you they're already speaking English. So why wouldn't they have some of the same swear words? I mean, at that point, why are you not making up all the names? Why aren't you doing this? Why aren't you making a Calvary word? Just let's keep it simple.
Autumn (31m 58s): Yeah, yeah, indeed. Yeah. So that was sort of my notes on the world building parts. And if I just go into, let's say, well, we talked about a lot of the plotting stuff already, but what I did want to mention as well, something very positive because I really like how we are following three women. It's the same person, of course, but essentially there's three women here in different ages, but I really liked that because I just don't think that there is enough fiction out there with female protagonists, to be honest.
Autumn (32m 40s): And I really liked that. Yes,
Jesper (32m 42s): I actually, it would be, it was funny being female. I didn't even think about it, but you're right. It was nice to have that and have that point of view. And also she was a very capable and determined woman. In many ways she could take care of business. She knew what she was doing. She had when she was younger, she was pushed around a little bit. But she overcame that, I guess, about the only growing she does do.
Autumn (33m 6s): Yeah, I agree. The thing is though, as you said before, it's just too easy to guess that it's the same person. I, I also guessed it almost immediately. So, but, but at least, I mean, if we disregard the fact that maybe some people didn't get it, I don't know. But if we disregard that for a second, the fact that there is a plot twist or surprise in the story, which if you didn't guess it is, it is a surprise at the end. I think that is a very good idea to take away from that as a learning experience, you know, to try to have something that will surprise and excited readers once they get to that final pots of destroying, they're like, whoa, you know, that kind of thing is great.
Autumn (33m 50s): Yes.
Jesper (33m 51s): Agreed. I mean, I will be, I would be surprised if people didn't, I guess I, it's hard to know how you're reading it. If you truly, she does make the settings, she doesn't tie them together at all, really until that kind of twist at the end where you realize it's all the same character, but she also didn't really go out of her way to make it seem too different. Like why they might, you know, hints that it was the same time. So I think it was a pretty easy guessed that they're the same ones. So it wasn't a huge twist, but it could have been, it is always good to have a twist like that.
Autumn (34m 25s): But honestly, I think if you did not have the second person, if all of them have been third person limited, I don't think I would have guessed it. Oh, it's because the second person stands out so much that I knew that it has to be linked to the other people in there. And maybe it's something to do with we're different on different in different times or something. I don't know. It was just so different that I knew that it had to link together somehow. And then I could just add the two and two together and then I guessed it right away almost right. But if you had three third person limited point of view, then I might not have guessed it to be honest.
Jesper (35m 8s): That's interesting. I still, I think I, cause I had noticed a second person at least consciously at that point. I just, again, I think it's kind of Celtic kind of the made mother and crone, as soon as it switched to a little girl, I'm like, oh, this is her as a child. I just, because she was mad, you know, she had the same power. It just seemed right to me. There was enough of the character in there as a, even a little girl that I'm like, yeah, this is the same one. So, but I think everyone would pick it up in their own path. But because the book like you were saying is it makes you think you start trying to think and solve it pretty quickly.
Autumn (35m 44s): I have to ask, how could you not notice? I mean, did the second person is like, it jumps right at you. I mean, it's like, oh, what is going on here? I mean, instantly, I mean, how can you not notice that?
Jesper (35m 56s): I don't know. I don't, I was reading it at night and if I was just tired or it was a very good. And like I said, I first noticed that the magic being an earth magic, which I had to laugh because of how many times you've picked on me for my debut novels, elemental magic. I'm like, here's a Hugo award winner. It's only earth element of so, but the harshness of the word and the language and just how everything just felt like geology. And I am a huge geology. Gleek I mean, if you like earth and granted and schist and you know, these big geological terms, oh my gosh, read this book and geek out and no one will know you're totally geeking out over just the geology.
Jesper (36m 39s): So I think I was so caught up going, oh, this is so cool. Her language is harsh. The world is harsh. I love how it all ties together. I can't imagine the number of revisions to make it sound this way. And everything ties together that I just never even noticed that it was second person.
Autumn (36m 57s): Jesus Christ. You must have been tired. It's like, as soon as I got to, to that in the audio book, it was like, I had to pause it, like what, what is going on here? It was just so incredibly different than weird all of a sudden. And I, and that, that, and that from that point on, I just couldn't get into it. So it did. But I agree with, with regards to the magic system, just to match it, I, I, I would hate to do all that research. She must have been, she must have done in order to pull this off and all this seismic stuff and figuring out how it all moves and all my God. So it must have been a lot of research behind that magic system, but it is very well done and I have to applaud her for it.
Jesper (37m 43s): Absolutely. Unless she happened to be, or have the family of geologists. And so she was kind of eking out on it as well. So I could see that, but yeah, you would definitely have to have an interest in deep earth sciences to come up with this magic system and make it, so she talks about flop fault lines and you know, some things can only happen here and only happened there. And probably you're not into geology and not into really cool magic. There's probably going to be times you're like, oh my gosh, please stop describing rocks to me. But I loved it.
Autumn (38m 18s): No, I, I too. I did too. I think it, because also I feel like it's a different magic system to what I, at least maybe there's already some magic system based on seismic activity and so on, but I I've just not seen it before. Maybe it exists, but I'm not aware, but at least it was a different enough that I thought it was, it was very cool.
Jesper (38m 38s): Yeah, definitely very cool. And I would say, cause I do want to point out and it's, I think one of the things that though where I fell out of the book and what lost me is that is with the main character, the present tense, the second person a son is I think what lost me is again, her arc her arc. I assume it's a flat arc to slightly fail, but she never learns from her mistakes, which again, that would be a grow arc. But I just, there was one point what should have been the climax where I'm sure you remember it, she's on the pirate ship. Do you know, she's had this safe Haven, she's in a really good place, but she's bored.
Jesper (39m 22s): And so she goes on a pirate ship and she is literally the one she uses her magic and pokes the spear up to the boat. And she realizes when she does it, that I shouldn't have made it visible because now they know there's this robe earth magic orogeny. And so we're going to basically have to kill everyone. She's the one who realizes it. And literally the next chapter, she goes and stops an entire volcano. No, one's going to notice a volcano suddenly just going away. I wanted to bang my head. And then she goes to alabaster the, probably the most intelligent character in the whole book. The one who's really a forward-thinking he's curious.
Jesper (40m 2s): And he, she tells him, you know, he knows that she did this and he gets mildly like upset when she says, oh, I saw somewhere on the shore. And he's like, oh, we should, you know, we'll have to be careful. She quelled an entire volcano. He should have been jumping up and shaking her saying, you just gave away where we are. That was 20 miles from here. And so this leads to the death of her first son. The book starts with the death of her second son. I'm like that. That is when I think I decided I wasn't reading book two was when I read through that climax and I'm like, this is supposed to be the clincher for the book. And I don't care. I'm mad at the character.
Autumn (40m 46s): Yeah. I cannot disagree with that. I have some points about that ending as well, but I just want to finish off one thing that Stephen said about the magic as well. First. So Stephen from patron said, quote, the magic system was very unique. Erogeny definitely adheres to Sanderson's loss of magic, where in origin he has limits orogeny has a cost. And the reader is given a clear understanding of how Erogeny is in this world so that he or she has a willing suspension of disbelief. In other words, it's believable, magic fits well into the story and it isn't used always to solve the problem or conflict in the story.
Autumn (41m 32s): In fact, for all intents and magic is both the problem and the solution in the fifth season. I think that's sums it up very nicely.
Jesper (41m 41s): I think that does as well. And even to add to that, that the magic system has the, the 10 rings the tiers. So you even have, you know, what level people are at and what they can kind of do at those levels. It's well done. I liked that. Yeah. You started off as a novice and what you have to do to advanced and how your, your attachment to the magic grows.
Autumn (42m 4s): Yeah. Okay. So let me get to the ending here. You touched upon some of it already. So I want to say a few other things in, in addition to what you already mentioned, because I feel like the ending just leaves way too many things completely open-ended, you know, I don't necessarily have anything against cliffhangers. I know a lot of people do, but it doesn't bother me personally that much, but please, you know, when you write a story, at least give the reader a certain degree of closure, you know, just something to at least give a sense of what is going on here.
Autumn (42m 46s): If you can take the stone eaters as an example, you know, by the end of this book, I have no idea what the Stoney ETA's want or how it all sort of links together. I have no idea. We also don't know what happened to Eastern's husband and child. I understand that this is the first book in the series, but it just left me slightly frustrated. And if I'm honest, like, you know, very honest, I have to say that I, I did not read like this book at all.
Jesper (43m 23s): I agree with the ending, especially it felt, it felt more like the first third of a novel than the first book in a series. It didn't have that book ending. And I thought it was, we never, in the entire story, we hear that the son has a daughter. I don't even, I'm sure we hear her name, but we never see her now even in a memory. And so it's hard to feel that mother's like she gets distracted. She goes up all over the map. You're reading about two other points of view of her that I never felt a huge bond. She's kind of just like the walking dead and, and just, this is her mission. It's her last living child.
Jesper (44m 3s): She will find her daughter, but there's no bubbling passion with that at all. And so I just kinda thought it was really weird that we had this huge pivotal character. That is the reason the woman is, you know, walking forever and what happens to her. And we don't ever see her even in a memory. And that's just seems very strange to me.
Autumn (44m 29s): Yeah. So maybe it would be fair to say that on the plus side you have amazing world-building lyrical writing and you also have well sort of commentary maybe, or at least there is even if it wasn't intended by the author herself, but there is something you could use as least as commentary to our real world and the, you know, real situation with climate changes and so on. So, so that's sort of on the plus side and I guess those things and well, not on the plus side, but the second per the use of second person in order to emphasize how the couch of fields dos are sort of the things I, I think is what gives you the awards because it is different and it is commentary on more than just being a story.
Autumn (45m 27s): And so that's why you is, she has one do your watch. I feel like, yes, but on the negative side to me, you have a very, the plotting doesn't, it doesn't add up, you know, it doesn't connect. Well, there was several times, like you've mentioned things that happen where it's like, it doesn't really like make logical sense. Why the character doesn't question this or look into this. Or there are several places like that. I'm also very much missing the personal stakes that we talked about as well. And if you're reading it for a good immersive fantasy story, then yeah, that's goes on the minus side as well, because it does just does not succeed on this at all.
Autumn (46m 12s): Yes,
Jesper (46m 12s): I agree is the, the tropes, the things that we would expect from commercial fiction or that make it immersive and maybe build up the passions just aren't there, but for the literary aspects for how well it is put together and how well it all fits together in a literary sense, the writing the magic, the world-building, the use of second person versus third person it's amazingly well put together and it deserves the award. But if you're working on it from more of a commercial and epic or dark fantasy, it is just not as adhesive. It doesn't have what people are looking for, which is often characters. And your just characters are what make you turn the page.
Jesper (46m 55s): And that wasn't what drove this story. And so I think that's a really important takeaway is it's the character. I won't even say it's a building, but I did read some of the reviewers said that the characteristics were just shallow. They didn't have that depth. It always stayed kind of on the surface. And the few times you thought you saw more, sometimes it just the contradicted each other. It wasn't very solid. Yeah,
Autumn (47m 19s): Yeah, yeah, no, I, I can agree with those reviewers because that's exactly the, that's exactly the point here. Right? I think everything here depends on how look at it, right? Because I, as a reader, what I appreciate when reading is the good story, the good characters, that's the sort of stuff that I enjoy. But of course, I also have to respect that many other people, they enjoy the other aspects that I had on the plus side just a second ago, Ryan, I'm not going to mention them once again here, but, but those things that I mentioned before on the plus side, some other people, they love that stuff.
Autumn (47m 57s): So yeah, I think a lot of it, well, it is like that for any book ever written. Some people love it. Some people hate it. That's the way it is, but I can only speak for myself. And I just, this is not the type of book I enjoy reading at all. And I will definitely, it's a bit of a shame because honestly, when, once I started reading it, I had, because of all the awards, I actually had quite high expectations that this was going to be awesome. And then I felt pretty disappointed to be honest.
Jesper (48m 28s): Yeah. And I would also say that I was surprised that this one did not come with any trigger warnings in the blurb, maybe because it's an award winner. But I mean, I have, my books are so much more mild, but I mean, this is literally sexual molestation, Istation, exploitation, the death of children. There are some really horrible dark themes in this one that I was shocked as true. And there was no trigger warning. And I was like, wow, I am shocked. I have a slightly rough sex scene. And I had someone, a reader put a trigger warning on my book and I was like, don't touch this one. This one's going to really hurt.
Autumn (49m 7s): Right. Yeah. Okay. We'll I have some final remarks, but I don't do what do we have more now on your note list? Autumn?
Jesper (49m 16s): I think that covers pretty much everything. I think I said there was, if you go into there, there's a review by NBS Lee. It comes up as the, the highest ranked critical review. Cause 295 people have found it helpful. And I think it sums up really well. The, the aspects that are so interesting about this book, I mean, she gave it a, she or he gave it a two out of five stars. Just, it's such an interesting complex, highly written book, but it's also not what you expect if you're reading commercialized fantasy or science fiction.
Autumn (49m 53s): No, totally agree. Okay. So what I wanted to do to finish off here is I want to take the chance to thank Steven for his input on Patrion. It is just so much more fun when we have people reading along with us here. And of course, if you, dear listener also want to provide input for future Critical Reading episodes and us sort of taking your comments into the actual podcast episode like we did for Steven here, then just make sure to join on Patrion. And there is a link in the show notes for that next Monday. I will have an interview with the extremely popular and successful YouTuber, Jenna Morrissey.
Autumn (50m 35s): And we'll talk about using YouTube as an author.
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Masterminds and masterclasses has been around for quiet a while - and for good reason. The best thing you can do for your author career is to invest in yourself. To learn and grow.
In this episode of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, Autumn and Jesper share some of their personal experiences from being part of masterminds, as well as, thoughts on why they are so beneficial.
If you want to join the masterclass on fantasy map making, sign up here: https://ultimatefantasywritersguide.com/fantasy-map-masterclass/
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (1s): You're listening to the Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (29s): Hello, I'm Jesper.
Autumn (31s): And I'm, Autumm.
Jesper (33s): This is episode 146 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. And today's topic is Masterclasses and Masterminds for authors. And it's actually a topic that we've sort of been sitting on for quite a while. Isn't it? Autumm
Autumn (49s): It is. We've had this idea and another big idea that kind of goes hand in hand with it. Why, why are we like Masterclasses or Willy's what the benefit of them are, especially mastermind groups as well. So this will be a fun one to jump into and I'm looking forward to hearing a reader and listener. I should say reactions because I would love to know what their take is on Masterclasses and all of these things that are out there to learn.
Jesper (1m 16s): Yeah. Yeah. And of course we have a bit of a culture. W what is it called?
Autumn (1m 20s): Altera photos. Yes.
Jesper (1m 22s): That's what I was trying to say yes. With this one, but that will become clear Indian, but I think most people can probably guess it already now
Autumn (1m 31s): Probably, but we'll see if they're right. Let them consider that we could pull twist ending. You never know.
Jesper (1m 39s): Yeah, no, no, that's right. I've had a bit of a cipher weekend this last weekend. Yeah.
Autumn (1m 48s): Well, I know because he, over the weekend you had a lot of refereeing and things going on.
Jesper (1m 52s): I did, yes, I did do that. I refereed three matches in the weekend, but then Sunday evening, I, I went to watch the new Dune movie in the theater,
Autumn (2m 3s): Right?
Jesper (2m 4s): Yes. And then I also started watching a foundation on apple TV plus. Which is also sci-fi.
Autumn (2m 11s): Yeah. That is a huge sci-fi weekend. How are they, how is Dune?
Jesper (2m 18s): Actually, I think, I think for once they have actively succeeded in making a Dune movie, because I think it works. They they've sort of slowed down the pace. It even says in the, in the opening credits. So it's not a spoiler. I won't spoil anything here, but assessing the opening credits part one. So it's only going to be the part of the, part of the doom story that they're going to show in this movie. And it definitely ends as well. That it's very clear that there needs to become be more movies. I don't know how many, but, but this one actually works for once. I mean, they've tried to make doom before and failed, I think, but, but this one was good and the end, the cinematography is it's amazing.
Jesper (3m 2s): Oh, nice looking.
Autumn (3m 5s): Excellent. I'm going to have to put that one on my list of, you know, date nights with my husband. If I can find it playing anywhere near us, where we're still,
Jesper (3m 14s): You should go and what's it for sure. That'd be. And, and also if anybody of the listeners, I don't know, I don't think you have apple plus two TV Autumm, but if any of our listeners do then what's foundation, as well as it goes, it has a very strong dune vibe to it. And, you know, in terms of cinema photography, it looks amazing. And it's so fun. I only watched the first episode I should say, but I actually quite liked it. I was pretty good. So yeah, a lot of scifi this weekend for me,
Autumn (3m 49s): Just trying to get out of this world a little bit. Orange juice. Very cool. I will have to go look this up. I'm good. I actually started a Netflix series that kind of goes along with some of the murder mysteries. You and I have been reading, call it high sixties, so, and that's on Netflix. So if you happen to see it, it's actually, it's fun because it takes part. I think the ship is probably the 1920s era, the roaring twenties. And so it's got all that gorgeous styling and the art deco, which is one of my favorite design times. So just gorgeous little elements. And it's a feisty young heroine who, you know, they ship a ship's officer who definitely is kind of interested.
Autumn (4m 34s): And she was just kind of batting them off as they did in the roaring twenties. Just like get serious. There's a murder we're trying to solve. So it's really kind of cute and good acting. I think that's actually, it might be Spanish based, but it's, it's really fun. But besides that, life's been quiet literally in a way, because you know, you know that I'm partially deaf and I've picked up a hearing aid this summer, but I finally decided it's I love hearing, but it's incredibly uncomfortable. I like, while we're podcasting, I can't have anything over my ear, like while I have it on. So there's this surgery that I've been contemplating, but I do risky surgeries.
Autumn (5m 18s): I'd had PRK done on my eyes so that I could go from like seeing three inches to 2020, it was a miracle. I cannot believe that modern science can do such things. And there's something very similar for my ear. And I'm like all for it, except for one thing, there's the nerve that goes for your taste. Buds goes right over where they need to, you know, do their little finagling. And so then she adds, you know, me, I'm a foodie. So, you know, I'm a foodie. I love food. I was like one of my joys in life. If I can't drink tea, you know, I might as well not get up for the day. Well, just exposing this nerve to light can mess it up. And they're like, usually it's three days.
Autumn (5m 59s): Sometimes it's a week. Sometimes it's a couple of weeks in 5% of the cases, it is a term sauce possibly, you know, the rest of your life injury. I'm like 5%. So that's one out of 20 people. This is just the doctor. He's like I said, 5% of my patients have this long-term issue. So one out of 20 people walk out of that door and they're never going to taste quite right again, I'm like, that's like saying I don't like my front door and I could get it fixed and have it moved or changed my front door. But there's a 5% chance that you're going to destroy the entire house. I don't know if it's, so I've been sitting here like flipping coins going.
Autumn (6m 43s): I trying to think of an analogy going, you know, if I, if I had a scratch on my front door and it really drove me nuts and I hated seeing it every day, what I risked destroying the entire house, just to have it fixed should probably just suck up the hearing aid, but hurts. It really hurts,
Jesper (7m 2s): But it isn't a hearing aid, also something about getting used to it, that wearing it enough and getting used to it.
Autumn (7m 7s): I was hoping so, but it's actually the longer I wear it, the worst it's getting, I have, it turns out I have a tiny ear canal. Of course it's got all these problems, but so it actually wearing, it makes it feel like you have a major sinus infection. That's just like clogging your ear canal. So it was like when I pull it out, if I wanted to pay a lot of money. So maybe if I save up a couple 10, 15,000, it's really expensive. Very, very expensive. So yeah, I'm on the fence. If any listener out there or someone reading the transcripts, if you cannot listen, has any suggestions, please let me know, because I am on the fence with this one leading towards sucking it up and not getting it.
Autumn (7m 54s): But maybe if someone has had a state, but it's got a stupid doc to me, if anyone else has had that and they've had a success, you know, let me know. I need some advice.
Jesper (8m 6s): All right. Well, that's a call for the listeners. I don't think I can help months on that one.
Autumn (8m 10s): Okay. Fair enough. You don't have hearing problems.
Jesper (8m 15s): No, probably other things, but not hearing. Okay.
Autumn (8m 18s): Fair enough.
Narrator (8m 22s): A week on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast
Jesper (8m 27s): This week, I was thinking to keep this section sort of short and sweet by just mentioning that we had a soon call with Jason, our Facebook group moderator last week, and Luke was supposed to be there too. He's the other moderator of the group, but unfortunately he couldn't make it, but it was so great talking to Jason, But, but the reason I'm bringing it up is basically because the Am Writing fences, your Facebook group has really come a long way since we started.
Autumn (8m 55s): Oh my gosh. As I told Jason, I remember, I remember when it was me and I was inviting a couple of Fantasy authors. I knew to join it. So if he did tell me I should get a pin for
Jesper (9m 6s): Being an inaugural member, but yes, it's not two people anymore. It's almost 7,000. It's a crazy, yeah. We were sort of joking if we would make it to 10,000 before the end of this year, but let's see.
Autumn (9m 22s): Yeah. That'll be interesting. You never know. I think it's slowed down slightly this last month, but it could pick up again. You never know how these things go.
Jesper (9m 30s): No, for sure. Not. So, yeah. So if you, you, dear listener have not joined the best writing group on Facebook yet. Just search for Am Writing Fantasy and you will find us.
Autumn (9m 41s): It's not just us saying it's the best one. It's the members and the moderators who just absolutely adore it. So that's kind of special
Narrator (9m 52s): And onto today's topic.
Jesper (9m 54s): All right. That was a sort of Sweden to the point. So we'll just get right into this main topic of Masterclasses and Masterminds, but I actually did a bit of digging ahead of this excellent Episode. Autumm do you know when the first mastermind was established?
Autumn (10m 14s): I have no idea. I'm guessing it's probably, if you're not counting internet I would say it's probably pretty early, but I mean, if you're counting the internet age, I would say probably post 2005,
Jesper (10m 27s): Right? Yeah. I did some digging, as I said, I think actually there is something about Masterminds going on in ancient Greece, but, but if we just sort of look at it in a bore Middlemore modern context and I could of course be wrong about this. So this is just as far as I could figure out or find out by searching around. Right. So I could be wrong, but I think it was actually Henry Ford. Oh, really? Cause he met formally with like a group of men who did not work for Ford motor company and they met at least once a month and then they shared ideas and they solve problems and so on. So I think that was actually the first mastermind in, in modern times.
Autumn (11m 7s): It makes sense. And there have been, you know, you mentioned that there have been a few notorious as well, groups, I believe in like the New York scene, the art scene slash writers scene, there were some amazing authors and scientists and minds that would get together and just spill out ideas. I think it is an amazing way of cooking up some really innovative ideas and problem-solving
Jesper (11m 33s): Yeah, yeah. Indeed. And later on, Henry Ford was also asked about his secret to his success and he actually said that this group, his mastermind was the reason. So I found that pretty interesting.
Autumn (11m 46s): It was really interesting. I had not heard that about Henry Ford.
Jesper (11m 50s): Yeah. So I think it, it can definitely the needle. I have been part of a few, a mastermind, so myself as, as part of, you know, management groups and so on and I also find it incredibly helpful.
Autumn (12m 4s): Yeah. And I've when I was learning to build courses, I was part of a mastermind group there. And so I've been in a couple as well and they can be, and like you said, work with work. I had a leadership mastermind course. So that was really, they're really great. And they can be an amazing way of focused learning as well as coming up with some really great ideas.
Jesper (12m 27s): Yeah. And, and I think basically we're just going to have like a general discussion here about Masterclasses and Masterminds and then maybe, maybe a bit about some challenges with it as well. At least I have a few notes about that, but I believe what happens a lot to us authors, it's sort of like we have our head down in the daily grind of writing books and you know, we never sort of stop to consider the options that are available to us. You know, sometimes, sometimes we may not, might not even be aware of them, but this is where like, like Henry Ford that we can actually benefit from what others are bringing to the table because they, they will, other people will have a different take on a problem you have, or they will just bring some ideas to the table that you hadn't even thought about.
Jesper (13m 15s): And I think that is some of, one of the main benefits probably from the mastermind.
Autumn (13m 21s): Yes. I agree. Because like, like our take our Facebook group, The Am Writing Fantasy Facebook group there, it's really supportive people ask questions all the time, but the problem is it is nearly 7,000 members and that we need to have moderators because every once in awhile, you know, someone's a little snippy and in general, they're really nice and usually very encouraging. But there is also a huge chance because you don't know everyone you're talking to, to misinterpret, what's being asked or not to ask it in a way that everyone understands. And I think the mastermind group, because it is a smaller group, it's usually focused participants. I mean, some of the ones I've been in, you had to be vetted so that you kind of fit in with the other people who are there.
Autumn (14m 5s): I mean, obviously it helps when everyone's on Author. So therefore, you know, everyone, a fantasy author, especially you got the ground rules right there, but when you have something like Henry Ford had, that's a S it could be this whole intellectual intellectual thing where there's a whole bunch of different people from different backgrounds coming together, you know, and you're discussing maybe random things. You kind of want to be vetted, but you get to know people and you get to know their concerns and maybe what they're working on. So that when you ask a question, they're like, they're seeing, you know, your lens and your sphere and they're problem solving for you. Not just as like a general, Hey, have you tried writing faster? You know, it's much more like, Hey, I know you have two kids and this doesn't work, but have you tried doing this instead?
Autumn (14m 51s): So that may, you might be able to, you know, turn out more words. I just think they're so helpful because you, I know from my leadership course, I mean, we stayed, we're still friends. We stayed friends for years, decade because it really was a powerful impact to get to know someone that closely.
Jesper (15m 10s): Yeah. And you took the points, you touched upon something that I think is important here because when you were in Masterminds or even Masterclasses for that matter, we are sort of all like-minded people. And what I mean by that is not necessarily that like Henry Ford, for example, if we use that example again, it's not necessarily that you have to be in the same industry. You don't even have to be authors all of them, but in our case, it will be. But, but even if you're not, I mean, like-minded in the sense that we all are there because we want to achieve something. You know, we, we want to move our author business further along the road. You know, we want to maybe earn more money.
Jesper (15m 51s): Maybe we want to become better at writing, whatever it is, but we are there because we want to learn. And by helping each other, it basically becomes for the benefit of everyone. And of course, some people might think, well, I already know enough, but I think the truth of it is that no, you don't. We can all grow. We can all learn. And that will, that's a continuous thing that will go on for the rest of your life. So for me, joining masterminds, joining Masterclasses is there's always something you can take away from those sessions, even if you're already quite accomplished.
Autumn (16m 31s): See, I think to me, that's where the master comes in. That wording is when you're still learning and still starting out, like, you're still learning how to write the intro, or maybe you haven't even conquered your first book. You're still learning a lot of stuff, but it's, it's huge and new that might actually not be the best time for the masterclass because you're still absorbing so much stuff that you're kind of figuring it out, but there's comes a certain point where you're like, all right, I've written a series. I've written a few novels. I kind of have the marketing done. I've done this stuff, but I know I'm not where I want to be. I have this growth and there's this kind of gap of what you want to learn, because it's becoming more tailored to who you are and your book and your journey, and nothing else is going to do it.
Autumn (17m 18s): So short of paying for a coach, which is very expensive, you know, paying for like one-on-one or joining a mastermind group where you can have that focus and you're helping others. And usually by helping others, you end up helping yourself because, oh my goodness, like, you know, I've, I've learned to life coaching over the summer. So that really, when you start asking the right questions and you re reflect on them yourself, you start solving your own problems really fast. And it's kind of amazing that way. So it becomes this group energy where you're helping each other and you're all excited and you're all really going to push forward. And so, yeah, if you think you'd have nothing else to learn, you probably won't go to a mastermind group and have that energy because you won't be putting out the energy as well.
Autumn (18m 4s): And if you feel like everything is too overwhelming, you might not be in the right spot for it either yet. You might need to, you know, write a book, tackle some of those big questions that you can just read a blog post for, or take a intro course on writing for. And then maybe you want to level up to the next stage and try mastermind.
Jesper (18m 26s): Yeah. And I think, and maybe you can, you can see if I'm right here, but I think that one of the major challenges or major reasons as to why authors do not join Masterminds or not so much Masterclasses, maybe because they're not, they're not so time-consuming, but more Masterminds is the time commitment of it. I think, I think a lot of the time people are reluctant to join something like a mastermind because they are afraid that they won't have the time for it. And, and then they just decide not to. And as I've said in the beginning, right?
Jesper (19m 7s): I mean, I've been part of a few masterminds myself. And of course I can only speak for myself, but I always have found that it is well worth the time that I put into it, because you're going to get so much out of it. And yeah, maybe it doesn't mean that you are prioritizing some of your time or allocating some of your time to the mastermind instead of doing something else, but usually mastermind, they don't go on forever anyway. So it might be like, I don't know, four months, five months, six months, something like that. And you meet maybe once a week, twice a month, something like that. So yeah, you, you will invest some time in it, but I think when time commitment concerns are the main reason for not joining, I think that's actually a bit of a shame, to be honest.
Autumn (19m 55s): I agree. And I think it might be good to let's define masterclass versus mastermind. So a masterclass is usually a single course. I've seen them up to three, you know, three sessions, but it's usually like, it's just a very short, very focused course that, like I said, it levels up, it is advanced techniques. You're not coming in as a beginner. So there's going to be lingo and stuff that you're like, oh, you know, I, you should know this already. It might be explained, but if you've never written a book and you take a brighter as mastermind, you might, or masterclass, you might be a little behind and you might not be as you ain't need to watch it a few times. But yeah, Masterclasses usually a very short one to three sessions, you know, at the most, so an hour or maybe three hours is not a big time commitment, but a mastermind group, it tends to be more interactive.
Autumn (20m 46s): And like, you, you can meet sometimes twice a month. It doesn't go on forever. It shouldn't be go on forever. I was invited to one that had no end point and cost a God awful amount of money. And I kind of cocked my head and said, you're not trying to teach me anything. You're just trying to get me to pay you and walked away from that one. So do you should always take everything with a grain of salt, but yes, they should be it's to me, it's almost like the life coaching. They should have a definite end point a definite target, a goal that you're going in for that you want to see happen and eat might be twice a month. And maybe it is once a week. It depends on whichever one you end up being a part of.
Autumn (21m 29s): But as with all things, maybe you won't be writing as much, but when you get out of it, you're going to be writing so much better, faster, stronger. It's going to be worth giving up some time so that when you get to the other side of it, what you're doing, you're doing with so much more confidence, skill and knowledge. And with some friends that you're going to still have. I mean, like I've had a writers group and we stayed in touch again for ages afterwards, because we really cared for each other and you keep those friendships going even after the group is officially over.
Jesper (22m 1s): Yeah. And I want to touch upon that just in a moment, but I just to add one thing to what you were saying about the difference between the master class and Masterminds, the master class are almost always very sort of instructor heavy. It is an instructor led class. So meaning that you have a teacher who is just explaining things, whereas the master mind, it also has it, but it's not so much a teacher. It's more like a facilitator. There is a facilitator there that will facilitate the conversation within the group. And there will be, at least sometimes there will be a bit of cheating as well, but it's, it's only a smaller portion of the mastermind. Whereas in the master class, you, you, you basically, even if it's probably virtual in many cases, but you're in a class room kind of environment.
Jesper (22m 49s): If you see what I mean, somebody is teaching something, whereas that that's not so much the case in the mastermind, it's more about a group helping each other to become more successful, whatever success means to you as, as the member of that mastermind. Yeah. So, but I wanted to get back to what you were saying there, because one of the huge benefits I see is, and it ties in with what you were saying. It's the accountability part. You know, you were saying like, you, you get the friends and you, you, you, you stop meeting on a frequent basis, but you have accountability built in. And that makes a huge difference. You know? So you have a mastermind session, you agree some things that you are going to go and do for before the next meeting.
Jesper (23m 32s): And that forces you to actually go and start ticking off those, those things on the to-do list. So that you, next next time you show up, you actually did what you were supposed to do because otherwise you're going to get stuck right in the mastermind. And you're not going to get much help. Plus who wants to show off for the next class and say, I haven't done anything of what we agreed I should do. I mean, nobody wants to do that. So not to say it can never happen, but in most cases it really helps you to, it's a lot about motivation. I feel like it's a motivating experience to be part of a mastermind. And maybe that's actually one of the greatest benefits of it now that I think about it. Yeah,
Autumn (24m 9s): No, I would agree. It, it definitely, you, you ended up with accountability partners. Do you want to hold up your part of whatever you're working on or learning or doing. So, you know, you've put in the effort, you, you join a mastermind group when you, you know, you're going to be putting in effort, you shouldn't join it already feeling tired and overwhelmed and everything else, because it's, it's a bit of a commitment because you're really, you're trying to take some pretty good skills and move it to the master level. You know, you're, you're pretty solid intermediate. And you want to go to the next tier. You're going to have to put in a very focused time intensive, well, not time intensive, but energy intensive mind intensive. You're going to think about it. You're gonna work on it.
Autumn (24m 49s): You're gonna have to be accountable for it. So you don't do this when you're like, I want to go on vacation. It's not maybe the best time in your life to do a mastermind, but it does up your skills, I think a lot. And I agree you end up, you know, putting in your effort, putting in your part. And so I think when you get done with it, maybe you're not quite as high getting all that same amount of workout, but you're higher than you were when you went in and you're better at getting your work done.
Jesper (25m 18s): Yeah. And at the same time, I want to say, be careful that it doesn't become an excuse. I mean, I think you'll write into, in what you just mentioned on them, but at the same time, that can easily be turned round to becoming an excuse for not joining and a master. Right. Like, well, Autumm said that I feel like having a vacation. So now I shouldn't. Right. I mean, a mastermind is usually maybe as I said before four or five, six months duration, right. There will be some point during that period probably where you have less energy or maybe you have something going on or whatever. So I also feel like you might need to push yourself a bit to say, I'll give it a try. Right? Yeah. And, and jump into, of course not.
Jesper (25m 59s): If, if you truly have something in your life that, I mean, I'm not saying that you should push past any like boundaries that you shouldn't, but
Autumn (26m 8s): Keep your health family first.
Jesper (26m 11s): Yeah. Yeah. For sure. For sure. But, but, but at the same time, if you want to sort of get to the next level, at some point sooner or later, you have to start investing in yourself and your business or in your writing skills or whatever it is you want to improve, but it's just tuition not to that's the problem.
Autumn (26m 30s): Yeah. Well, I, I guess I'm always the one who's like, oh, learn something new and let's go do that. I don't care that I've got, you know, a mountain of things, but I do see what you're saying. And I agree I've I do think more of a self-evaluation maybe you don't think you have the energy, but if you feel static in your writing career, or, you know, if you're looking at Masterclasses anywhere, but if you're feeling stuck or static, or like you're not progressing, things are not going as quickly or they're just plateaued, even if you don't quite have the energy, but you think you have the time commitment, that might be a good indicator to do a mastermind. Because being with other people who are excited, you know, and an instructor, or at least a facilitator, I like how you use that word.
Autumn (27m 15s): Facilitator fits very well with a mastermind group. You know, being with other people will get you the energy to keep going. So as long as you have the time commitment, even if you're not feeling it really good, like you're so excited, like you're wanting to get up at 5:00 AM to go running for half an hour. You don't have to have that level of energy because if you do, I don't talk to me at 5:00 AM. I'm still asleep, but you just have to have that realization that things are not quite going the way you want them to go. You maybe you're not feeling the writing. Maybe you're like fluff about it. You're just like, maybe I'm done.
Autumn (27m 56s): I don't know. I'm stuck. That's probably a really good indicator that it's time to, you know, level up, get into a mastermind group, get the energy, find out where you're stuck, get unstuck and push through it and come out the other end feeling really awesome. Like you did get up at 5:00 AM and went for a run and it was great
Jesper (28m 16s): Afterwards. It's great. But I think of course the mastermind should in itself be, be a good experience as well. It's not like, it's not like you have to force yourself to it. Like you might have to force yourself for exercising. It is it isn't true. I've always enjoyed the mastermind sessions. They are quite fun. You learn a lot, you take a lot of you get inspired from it. So I think in general, it it's a very good like that. And then I was just thinking about something based on what you said, and now it's escaped my mind again, like a puff of smoke,
Autumn (28m 50s): So that doesn't usually happen on the pad podcast. So we'll, we'll forgive you this time, but yes, but no, I agree. It is not like exercise. It's it's more like getting to hang out with some of your favorite people talking about your favorite subject and getting geeking out about it. So if you like getting excited about something. Oh, excellent. See, I just need to talk more. Go ahead.
Jesper (29m 14s): You just needed to fill the gap then I, yeah, no, but it was because you were talking about getting excited about the writing and so on, but it could also be of course, that you feel like I've tried every book marketing trick that I have, you know, I I've been able to find on blog, post on podcasts, listenings or YouTube or whatever. I tried, like, I feel like I've tried everything and nothing works. No, maybe then this Whaley, it could also be about, I want, I just want to sell more books, you know, that could also be something you could bring into the mastermind and, and learn from there. So yeah, a lot of good things can come from it.
Autumn (29m 51s): Definitely. I think it is just, it's a little cooking pots, Bunsen burner, and a little crucible. It's a crucible. That's what the word I was trying to find of. Just, you know, getting things going and really leveling up your skill to a new level faster than you would be able to do it on your own. And I think that's, what's important. That's why you join a group is because it is sort of like the speed training to get somewhere new.
Jesper (30m 19s): Yeah, indeed. So I don't know if should we get to our ulterior motive now Autumm
Autumn (30m 26s): I guess we've held out long enough and covered the basis of why Masterminds and masterclasses are actually a really good tool.
Jesper (30m 36s): Yeah. Because, well, the ulterior motive is not that surprising, I guess, but that it's because we want to, we actually want to have our first masterclass and we actually made it available for sign up right now.
Autumn (30m 51s): I'm so excited. Not just because I built the website and the registration page, but I'm still excited that I got it done.
Jesper (31m 0s): Yeah. And so there is a link in the show notes and you will get right to the registration page from clicking death. And we have shared all the different info, not that much, to be honest, but there is the information you need on the registration page, but the master class is on Fantasy map-making
Autumn (31m 20s): And that's what I was going to say. If you weren't going to tell people I was going to jump in and be like, we have to tell them what this one is about. So this is, this one is fantastic because what one who doesn't love a Fantasy map and two, this is how we met. So I think it's our inaugural masterclass that we're going to be is going to also be like with the topic of how you and I actually started talking. So it's going to be so cool. We already geek out about Fantasy maps. So
Jesper (31m 53s): What was it? Was it last week or the week before last we had the top 10 about Maps. I can't remember. Was it? Yeah,
Autumn (32m 3s): I think so. Wow. I don't think that.
Jesper (32m 7s): Okay. Whatever, but yeah, we love fantasy maps and the good news of course, is as well that the master class is taking place online. It's a virtual masterclass, so it
Autumn (32m 18s): Doesn't matter what country you're in. So that's always better.
Jesper (32m 21s): No, no, of course there will be a bit about time zones here in the sense that we are running it on the 28th of October. If you are in Europe, it'll be evening time. If you are in the us, it'll be daytime. But the good news is that we are going to record it. So if you sign up and you can't make it in person, that's absolutely fine. We will make a recording available. So, and I think I can promise it's going to be a lot of fun. Don't you agree? Autumm
Autumn (32m 49s): I considering I know what the slides and I know the topic I know is going to be so much fun. We're going to have a blast. And even though being a masterclass, it is mostly instructor led. We have a ton of questions and some Q and a sessions and polls and surveys. So it's going to be so much fun and interactive. And I don't think people are going to be like, that was an hour. That was like 15 minutes. It wasn't an hour. It was going to be a blast. Yes.
Jesper (33m 15s): Yeah. And it, and we have purposely made a soda. There are some fun things coming in between the information. So it's going to be entertaining. And I think it was 38. Was it $38 or something like that? It wasn't, it Autumm yeah. $38. Yes. And it's not very expensive. And what you get as part of that package is as well that once you've signed up for this masterclass, you will actually get, get access to a second masterclass on a different topic that we're going to have on a later date. We haven't set that date yet, but you will get in as part of the package here to have that included in the price that you're paying. So it's essentially 38 bucks for two Masterclasses.
Jesper (33m 57s): Yes.
Autumn (33m 58s): That's actually really good deal. I've looked at Masterclasses there. Even if you go to, what is it? The masterclass Lear learn something from Neil Gaiman. Those are $99. So $38 for a Masterclasses is for two Masterclasses is incredibly genius though.
Jesper (34m 15s): Yeah. Well, the other thing is that, sorry, I was speaking over you there. That's all right.
Autumn (34m 21s): So maybe we're being a little too cheap thinking about, you know, the, you know, $99 learn from Neil Gaiman and we're only doing 38 for $2 for two classes, but I guess we'll go with it because we've already announced it
Jesper (34m 33s): We'll go with it. But the thing is as well that we do plan to, at some point in the future, we, we don't have any dates for anything of this yet, but we do plan some point in the future to actually run a mastermind. And the thing is that our planning, at least as far as it goes right now, is that we are only going to invite people who actually attended Masterclasses to the mastermind when the time comes. So that might be another reason why you want to sign up. So you can actually at least put your, you know, taking the, what, not a tick in the box, but you can put your like ticket in the hat or whatever, whatever you say, your name and the hat.
Jesper (35m 14s): Yeah. Well, when we get to the mastermind, because the mastermind for sure will only be a very limited audience. So w w not everybody will be able to get in. So, but we do tend, it tends to add people to a wait list and so on if you don't get in the first time around. But yeah, we'll see about that. The mastermind part is secondary right now. The, the main point is that if you want to entertaining fun, geeking out about FANTASY map class, then get signed up for it. And then you're going to get a second masterclass at a later date. And of course the second one will also be recorded and it will be made available as a recording if you can't join in person and all that.
Jesper (35m 54s): So yes, that's it to be a participant. I don't want to geek out about Fantasy maps, but I guess I have to help run the show. I would sign up for that. That's true. Darn it. I can watch the recording later though. That's okay. Yes. Okay. So next Monday, we have our very first critical reading episode. We'll share our thoughts on the fifth season by N.K. Jemison.
Narrator (36m 29s): If you like, what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Have you ever opened a fantasy book, looked at the map, and wondered what the author was thinking?
Jesper and Autumn pull out their favorite worst fantasy maps and a few map pet-peeves in this humorous episode of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. Oh, plus a ghost story and more!
Join our Fantasy Map Masterclass at https://ultimatefantasywritersguide.com/fantasy-map-masterclass/!
All maps mentioned were chosen in good humor and jest and reflect personal opinions that aren't meant to be mean!
Check out some of the maps we talk:
Jesper's maps—
Wheel of Time: https://casapittura.blogspot.com/2018/08/the-wheel-of-time-map.html
Warbreaker: https://www.brandonsanderson.com/annotation-warbreaker-map/
Warhammer: https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/comments/ft00oy/made_the_full_warhammer_map_including_the_east/
Eragon: https://www.etsy.com/dk-en/listing/485637759/map-of-alagaesia-eragon-mapchristopher
Kushiel-world map: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/118923246398203552/
Autumn's maps—
Game of Thrones: https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/File:WorldofIceandFire.png
Shannara: https://www.fantasybookreview.co.uk/blog/2012/05/29/new-shannara-map-of-the-four-lands/
Terry Goodkind: http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/sot/images/4/45/New_world_map.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20100308012633
Anne Bishop: https://www.annebishop.com/s.tir.alainn.map.html
______________
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am writing Fantasy Podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need an literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I'm Jesper.
Autumn (32s): And I'm, Autumn.
Jesper (34s): This is episode 145 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. And we are back with one of our top 10 episodes. And this time we'll each share five fantasy maps that are the worst, and we'll see who can well, basically create the best worst list again.
Autumn (53s): And this was an interesting challenge to be describing Maps well on a podcast. So the YouTube listener, I think everyone just go check the show notes. We're going to have a links to some of the Maps we're talking about, but it'll be, yeah, we'll do our best, but I think we can be descriptive enough of what drove us crazy about the map in question.
Jesper (1m 16s): Yeah. And we'll, we'll try, we'll try. At least we have 144 episodes behind us. So hopefully we should be able to think about this being an audio medium.
Autumn (1m 26s): I know. Compared to some podcasts we're like middle-aged or something we're getting into the here.
Jesper (1m 35s): Yeah. Yeah. That, that, when you said that, that reminded me of the, some of the comments on Facebook, around the episode we did about marketing to different generations. And Jason commented on one of the, on that post about listening to that episode, made him feel really old. And I just had to tell him like me too.
Autumn (1m 59s): Yeah. When you're aged generation is next to the top, you're like, Ooh, that happened.
Jesper (2m 5s): Yeah.
Autumn (2m 6s): That's never fun.
Jesper (2m 8s): No, no, it's not.
Autumn (2m 11s): So how are things over in Denmark though?
Jesper (2m 15s): Well, yeah, so this last week has been one of those where it actually started out quite well, but then it just went downhill from there. Yeah. I mean the good news was that I went to that interview to become a referee instructor that I mentioned a couple of episodes back. And then the national football association actually came back and confirmed that I was selected. That was a good start to the week. That is awesome. Of course, I, I still have an exam to pass and I have like tons of homework I do need to do in preparation as well, learning like the laws of the game by heart and interesting stuff like that.
Jesper (2m 58s): But it does look like this is going to happen. So I'm pretty excited about that. It's
Autumn (3m 2s): Very exciting.
Jesper (3m 5s): Yeah. But then it went downhill from day, as I said, you know, so first the party who was selling the house that we were negotiating for, they decided that they didn't want to sell anyway. Oh my God. So I just said that we're going to pull the house off the market. So it was just like a colossal waste of our time, but also money of course, because we actually paid a building inspector to go out and, and look at the house and go through it with us. Right. So totally waste of time and money. But I really think that this, these people selling the house, I think they were just in it for the money. You know, they tried to see if they could sell the house with a huge profit.
Jesper (3m 47s): And then when it turned out that they couldn't because when we placed our bit of wee bit far less than what they wanted, and then they decided, well, apparently we can't get this much money for the house. So then we're just not going to sell it. But I, I don't know. I just feel, of course it's, it's there. Right? They, they can do that as they please, but it's really annoying.
Autumn (4m 8s): Yeah. You know, that's not the way that, you know, test your house market by like, you know, taking unsuspecting people who are sincerely interested in buying a house and you're like toying with them, you know, it's that little rude.
Jesper (4m 23s): Yeah. I dunno. It, it also rubbed me the wrong way to that way of doing that, but, oh, well, what are you going to do? There's nothing we can do about it, but at least now we know it's not going to be that house. So we'll keep looking and searching and figuring out what to do. But what was worse than that was that our youngest son was also tested positive for Corona. Yeah. We talked a bit about it offline already. Autumm yeah. So, but yeah, he's been in self isolation since the beginning of the week with me sort of attending to him. I'm just a room service guy now.
Autumn (5m 4s): Yeah.
Jesper (5m 5s): Yeah. I think that pot actually, he quite like, so he's like, I would like something to eat and then it was just like me coming with a tray with something, food for him and stuff. So that part, I think he's, he likes, but he's doing all right after the circumstances and he's already starting to feel better and he's, what's like 200 million hours of TV, so we'll see how it goes. But at least I've not got any symptoms yet, even though I'm in close proximity with him, but I just fingers crossed that it'll stay like that. Of course.
Autumn (5m 39s): Yeah. So near fully vaccinated. So that's, if you get it, the reason you are vaccinated, that is that it should be, hopefully be mild. So knock on wood that you'll be, everyone will stay healthy and he'll get better. Very soon. I have to admit when I was a teenager, tens, a little young, but when I was a teenager, I think I would have adored being locked in my room with a whole bunch of books and some music kid comic books and been like, yes, just bring me food and T I'll be fine. Just leave me in here for a month. Yeah.
Jesper (6m 9s): I think like a 16, 17, 18 year old, you know, they would love that kind of thing I would to have at that age. But Tim, no.
Autumn (6m 19s): Yeah, yeah. I was always a drawl or so was all my Crans were with me and some markers. I probably might be fine in there for awhile.
Jesper (6m 27s): Yeah. Yeah. True. But yeah, I mean, due to all of these things, I haven't really written much this last week, so I'm not too happy about that, but what can you do that?
Autumn (6m 36s): Yeah. We'll get back on track. It's fine. Life happens.
Jesper (6m 41s): And how about you?
Autumn (6m 42s): Oh, I already hinted. I had a bit of a story. So this is one that there's a lot going on in my life right now. Like everything from a sick dog that has kept me up and I'm hoping I can stay coherent for the entire podcast because I'm unlike, it's like, you know, having a baby every hour and a half the dogs go out. So I'm so tired. This was day four in a row. Parents. I don't know how you do it. I really don't know how you're doing, but I can handle a dog for about a week. And then I'm like, oh, please just get better. But I had an interesting thing that I had to share with you in the listeners that happened as you know, it was just down at my parents' house and that was, oh, it was so much fun. It was great being a kid again and getting to be spoiled with my parents taking me out.
Autumn (7m 27s): But the day I went to leave was actually my brother's birthday. And as you know, my brother passed away in 2000. So 21 years ago, he actually would have been 51. And my parents and I were sitting around there's a little island in the kitchen and I'm like, yeah, you know, today was, would have been his birthday. Right. And they're like, yeah, yeah. And my mom said, well, you know, it's funny. It's, you know, it's like, he's there because I'm his youngest son and my one cousin or the spitting image of my brother and all the way down to his voice. And just as my mom was saying that, and my dad was agreeing the two drop-down lights above our head pop like really loud and blue, but they didn't just blow.
Autumn (8m 9s): They blew the entire circuit in the kitchen and this is a newish house, you know, it's less than a 10 years old. They've just built it. And so like, we're like, oh gosh, that was, that's quite the timing. When, after my brother passed away, they actually had a whole bunch of electronical issues that happened in our old, old house. So we're like, oh, that was really funny. Ha ha. It's your brother. And so my dad's like, okay, he went on, he went fix the circuit, not a big deal. As we're sitting back down, finishing up breakfast, I, you know, I've got an eight hour drive ahead of me. So I'm trying to get ready to go. Mom's like, oh, I thought it was that light, that blue. I was like, no, it's that light. So they turned back on the lights. They both worked. They didn't blow either light. They're both halogens.
Autumn (8m 49s): So when they blow, they're like this pan, the butter Che to change. But yeah, it was a, they turned back on lights and they were fine. We didn't blow either a light bulb. And so we all just, we just kind of sat there a few minutes. Like that's really weird. That's never happened before kind of, you know, acknowledged, Hey, you know, happy birthday bro. And had a few minutes of silence and then we're okay. We gotta get busy today. So I thought that was just so weird. Amazing,
Jesper (9m 22s): Which went all out and then you could just turn them on again, as if nothing happened or whatever
Autumn (9m 26s): We had to switch the circuit breaker. But for there's no reason. I mean, it's not just that the circuit blue, the lights pop, they won't even do it on the radio. It pops, the loud goes right over my head that I jumped off the stool. It was so amazingly loud, it blew the entire circuit in the kitchen, credible. And then when they turned back, the lights on everything worked fine, no smell of smoke, nothing. The house didn't burn down since then. It was just so strange.
Jesper (9m 53s): It was just a sound from beyond.
Autumn (9m 56s): Yes. And even my husband's not quite into souls and spiritual beliefs at the moment. And he was like, well, we are all, you know, every S every emotion in your body is done through electrical impulses from your brain. It's like, so yeah. Your brother would screw with the electronics early, like tricks. And yeah. So it was really, it really felt like he was there with us for a moment being his normal troublesome self.
Jesper (10m 27s): Ah, that's, that's, that's actually a good story. I like, I like stuff like that. I thought you were like, I really don't know what I think about, you know, the whole souls and spirits and so on, but I'm also not in the place where I could, you know, say that I don't believe in it. I can't say that either, but I'm also not sure if I do believe in it, you know, it's, it's, I think it's very difficult.
Autumn (10m 51s): I think it does take time, but there's enough NEF things that have happened in my life. I do believe that there is consciousness beyond our physical bodies. And that's how I put it. Whether you want to call it a soul or what, I don't like the religious context, you know, that, but I do think there's a consciousness that is greater than the sum of our parts and that exists beyond our physical bodies. So yeah, I would be surprised that my brother would hang around for 21 years to drop by on his birthday. But as you know, he had a tragic death, so anyone would have, you know, maybe he would, and it was really interesting though, is just when we mentioned how much my cousin and his youngest son are so much like him at least look like a magnitude totally different.
Jesper (11m 38s): And if you should drop by at any day that it would be that day. Right. So
Autumn (11m 43s): It would either be the day he died, which it wasn't, it was on his birthday, which yeah, that would be, especially him. And my mom were like, they're two peas in a pod. Their personalities were so similar. They'd each other like five, six times a day. So yeah. I could see him stopping by, on his birthday to say hi to my mom.
Jesper (12m 1s): Nice. I like that story. Good story. Thank you.
Narrator (12m 6s): A week on the Internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast.
Jesper (12m 12s): So we got our monthly critical reading started didn't we Autumm
Autumn (12m 16s): Yes, we did. It's very exciting to get, see people voting on the books and getting into the one we've chosen.
Jesper (12m 25s): Yeah, because in the next few weeks, we will do the episode where we will analyze last month book pick, which was the fifth season by NKG Emerson. However, it is now time to pick the book for October. That doesn't seem, Yeah, it's crazy, but that's the way it goes, you know, time flies when you're having fun, as they say, but as a reminder, the way this works is that we've created a poll in the Am, Writing Fantasy Facebook group. And here you can vote on which of three books you want us to read and analyze next month. Of course, we would love for you to read along.
Jesper (13m 8s): And if you're a patron supporter, you will even be able to provide us with your views on the book. And we might just share that on air as well. So do you want me to share the books that we have the warming up for Autumm
Autumn (13m 21s): Yes. Unless you want to pay some in a chat because I did not grab them before we started recording. Again, I here today, I'm not as busy as my dog, so I did not prepare for that. I prepared for the rest of the episode though. I did do that.
Jesper (13m 35s): Oh, well, that's already progressed, so, okay. I'll not hold it against you then. Okay. The books that we pick this month, they is the winner of the world Fantasy or what it is called, which mark by cl Polk or another winner of the world Fantasy award, which is the sudden appearance of hope by clear north, or finally a third winner of the world FANTASY award, yet this kind of, kind of a T theme going on here. But the final one that you can vote for is Jade city by fondly.
Jesper (14m 15s): So the voting has already started in the Am, Writing Facebook group. So either go there and place your vote, or if you want to become a more integral part of the process, you then go and join on Patrion. There's a link in the show notes for that as well.
Autumn (14m 34s): Sounds good. I think we should give the Patrion votes, like double points because you know, they're special, important. They're more important. And I think if you are, I vote, cause you know, I have a vote on this one that we should get like 10 points, but you know, that's my opinion.
Jesper (14m 49s): Well, we are not allowed to vote. This is the, the people voting. It's not us voting,
Autumn (14m 54s): But we're readers too.
Jesper (14m 56s): Yeah. But they, they force us to read Autumm and then we just read what the people want us to read. That's the way
Autumn (15m 2s): It works. Well, it could be a worst job,
Jesper (15m 7s): But the speaking of patron, by the way, we also want to give Nancy Hurst a huge shout out. Thank you so much for becoming a patron support, Nancy. It really makes a difference. And well, without people like you, we would probably not keep the podcast going for very long. So
Autumn (15m 24s): Very true. Thank you, Nancy. And welcome to Patreon. We appreciate your support.
Jesper (15m 34s): So before we get into this, we should probably say that where we share maps that were actually created for books or games or movies or something like that, the intention here today isn't to hate on those maps. So everything we say in this episode is meant as like humoristic views on Maps. So there are probably those of you out there listening who might like some of the maps that we are going to mention and you know what that is perfectly fine, nothing wrong with it. So basically just take everything we say from this point, onward as entertainment, rather than critical assessment of the Maps.
Jesper (16m 14s): Does that sound fair?
Autumn (16m 15s): That sounds very fair. You know, this is definitely, it was a pet peeve or something we point out it's a personal opinion. Other people may totally disagree and that's fine. We're just looking at it from our own perspectives and to have a little bit of fun and poke some fun at Maps because you know, if you want to pull up one of mine to poke fun, please have at it. I'm fine with that.
Jesper (16m 37s): Yeah. Yeah. For sure. I mean, as I said, this is just entertainment guy, so it's a, it's a, one of our worst, top 10 lists. So we wanted to talk about Maps. So yeah, essentially we have to find some maps that we don't quite like. So be it
Autumn (16m 51s): That'd be it. I think we manage. Yeah.
Jesper (16m 53s): Yeah. So we should alternate, like we normally do Autumm and,
Autumn (16m 59s): But I remember, yeah, I remember last time probably because I did the post-production recording and stuff that I went first, last time. So I think it's your turn to go first.
Jesper (17m 13s): Okay. Okay. Yeah. One day I'll make up my mind if I prefer to go first and last, but I still don't know. So maybe it's actually good thing just to get the decision made for me. There you go.
Autumn (17m 25s): Well, I was happy to do that because as we've said, this is a partnership, so it's good if we both make decisions occasionally.
Jesper (17m 33s): Yeah. I think this is the fourth time you pointed that out today. So I don't know what's going on. Something is going on.
Autumn (17m 42s): I'm picking idea today. It's fun.
Jesper (17m 45s): Yeah. Yeah. You think it's fun? I do. I like when I pick on you Autumm but the other way around, it's not so fun,
Autumn (17m 53s): But these lists are all about, you know, giving, giving back as good as you get. So here we go.
Jesper (18m 1s): Okay. We'll I can start with my number five, but I must also say that it felt a bit different making this top 10 list compared to some of the other ones that we've made in the past, because it's, it's a bit more like, for example, the last one we, we made with like the worst superpowers, you know, some of it was really wacky and stupid and fun. Yeah. Whereas this is a, this is slightly more serious in the way that it's, it's a bit like, that's true. A little opinion, like you said before, it's not like fun like that in that con in that sense that it's just silly and stupid. Right. So, yeah, but let, let me get going here.
Jesper (18m 40s): And number five is not the worst map that I've seen, which is also of course, why it's number five rather than number one. But I decided to include a map, which some people might disagree with me about, but that's okay. I can take it. Excellent. But it's the, it's the map for Wheel of Time. Okay.
Autumn (19m 9s): Well that's the famous one.
Jesper (19m 12s): It's very famous. Yes. But I've always found this map quite boring. No, it's just like, it's one huge large chunk of land. And then there was one of my pet peeves and as well, you have the 90 degree angled mountain range. Again, I freaking hate those. What I do. Why do they keep popping up on maps all over the place? I don't understand. Mountains will never, ever form like that. So when I see it, I instantly, I mean, seeing, like pulling my head hair out, like why do you do that? Please stop.
Autumn (19m 50s): Yeah. It's sort of magic. That would not, I can't imagine how that would happen in nature. So I do agree with you in fact that I might be mentioning something about Maps that do that later. Not quite on the
Jesper (20m 2s): Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah, because I mean, I could also have used the map for the Lord of the rings, but we have sort of pre-agreed ahead of time that we were not going to put that on the list because if we did, we would probably both have it on the list. Not because Lord of the rings is a Batman in general. I actually quite like it, but it's just the mountains around more, or that it's the same issue again here. And I don't like, I mean, Tolkien did have a reason for it. We won't get into all of that now. Why, why, what Tolkien had a reason for it and so on, but it's just like, come on. I mean, I don't know if it's because Tolkien did it and then everybody started copying or something. I don't know, but it's, it drives me insane.
Jesper (20m 44s): And then there was also one this, a Wheel of Time map, like in the bottom left corner of the map, there was some cold something called the wind bites, his finger. And it's sort of like, it almost looks like a small islands that forms a finger or something, but it just looks really weird. So we'll put a link to it in the show notes. So have a look yourself, but I don't know. I just don't, I don't like it. It's not my favorite map. It's not the worst I've ever seen, but it's certainly not my favorite.
Autumn (21m 16s): Yeah. I, And I, I picturing it. It's been a while since I've seen that one, but I do. I do know you mean it's never stood out to me as a great X for such, for a book that has become sort of like a hallmark of a fantasy series. It's kind of a map. I will agree with you. They really studied. I never read the, I haven't read the books. I will admit it. I've never read the Wheel of Time. It's too long for me to even contemplate until I like, until I'm locked into a room because I have COVID and someone's serving me to you and then, or I'm locked onto a desert island, then I'll read the wheel of time until then. I'm a little busy.
Autumn (21m 56s): There's a lot of books.
Jesper (21m 58s): Yeah. I, I got to, I got to book six. I think it was in the night gave up. Indeed. It's just, I mean, I understand the people who like it, but just for my taste, it is way too slow paced. It's just like, nothing happens. And Sunday on book, after book, after book where it's just like, yeah, I think I've mentioned it on the podcast before, but I specifically remember some, some places where you spend an entire chapter where nothing other happens that they need to exit attempt and it takes them all chapter to exit the tent and it's like, come on, move people. It drives me crazy.
Autumn (22m 34s): Okay. I'd have to be really, it'd be at the bottom of my book pile and I was desperate for me to get through all of them. Then that's really tough. Yeah.
Jesper (22m 43s): I gave up. But yeah, maybe a you're hinting at somebody who needs to serve your tea all the time. And I don't know what you were hinting at there, but maybe you read it one day when that happens.
Autumn (22m 55s): I will hope so. Considering my husband is still currently I'm away in may and I'm, he's not kidding this hint. So let's just be in the dog. Are you ready for my number five? Okay.
Jesper (23m 9s): Yeah, let's
Autumn (23m 10s): Go. This one, there is an example later in my list, so I'm not going to share it now, but this is more of a generic, one of my pet peeves. And it's pretty easy to explain, but names of places that are in a font that is nearly illegible, even when it's at full scale, you know, those big, fancy Fantasy fonts. And then you take that and you shrink it to fit it into like a Kindle. Why, why, why, why do you even bother naming places when you cannot read it? Unless it is full poster size and then you maybe have a magnifying glass. It's just, I don't know. That gets my, just gets me every time.
Autumn (23m 50s): I'm just like, why don't you do that? The terrain is already so difficult and you have trees and you have this, and then you have this loopy Fullan that you're like, I don't even know what that says. And it's an Elvish. Y
Jesper (24m 5s): Yeah. I know why I know what you mean. I, I like to enjoy Maps, you know, I, I, I'm such a FANTASY map and she asked that I love looking at the maps and I can actually spend quite a lot of time just sitting there looking at all the details. And then if there's something I can't read or I can't see what it is, it's quite annoying to be honest.
Autumn (24m 23s): Yeah. And especially, I think a lot of authors, you know, if they get a nice, sweet, done Fantasy map, or if they do it themselves and they use these fonts, they forget that when it's on your Kindle it's or even when a paperback book, I mean, we're talking about a very small image, three inches by four inches. Maybe it's tiny. It should be very clean. And yeah, I've seen some maps that you just kind of look at and you're like, wow, I don't even know what this is trying to tell me. Why did you put it in there? And I think that's just such a frustration and that's sort of why it's a pet peeve. It's just like this, isn't it. You don't want to open it up and be like, oh, I love maps. Maps are awesome. I cannot read this one.
Jesper (25m 5s): I did indeed. Exactly. I'm with you there.
Autumn (25m 10s): Okay. Well, oh, we're agreeing. So I'm winning. Awesome.
Jesper (25m 15s): Oh, well, I don't know. Well, you agreed to the Wheel of Time as well. So we even at least now
Autumn (25m 21s): Good memory. I was trying to trick you there.
Jesper (25m 27s): Okay. Well, my number four, I might even get even more people on my back for this one on one another.
Autumn (25m 33s): It was exciting. Everyone pick on Yesper with me. No.
Jesper (25m 36s): Yeah. I already mentioned Wheel of Time with some people probably love, so that's a problem, but now I'm going to go all in and get even more people upset with me because now I'm going to mention one of Brandon Sanderson's maps. Oh, you're
Autumn (25m 50s): Just asking to get yelled at.
Jesper (25m 54s): I'm asking for trouble.
Autumn (25m 57s): Oh geez. So what is wrong with one of Brandon Sanderson's Maps?
Jesper (26m 2s): Well, this is a, this is the one for war breaker and it's basically it's in the city. So it's a, it's a map of a city. And, And in my personal opinion, as I said before, I love looking at maps, so they should be visually appealing and they should look good in my view. And it should be something that readers want to spend time enjoying. And this one is not, I mean, it's black and white. There's not necessarily anything bad about black and white maps. That that might be okay. In my opinion, again, I do like colors because I think it adds a lot more to the map, windows colors on it, but it's just like the way that the city has been drawn.
Jesper (26m 44s): It is it's hand drawn, but it's extremely busy. It's just like houses all over the map, everywhere there's houses. And I get that this probably reassembling what a medieval city would look like, but it's just way too busy. And I mean, have a look at it. I'll, I'll play, there'll be a link to that one in the show notes as well. But I have a look because I just, yeah, I, I think, you know what I mean when you see it. Yeah.
Autumn (27m 17s): I have seen this one. I think it's, it's drawn 3d, but not from the top. More like, kind of a sign. And so you don't really see the streets. I mean, it doesn't make,
Jesper (27m 29s): I was just everywhere.
Autumn (27m 30s): It doesn't help you. It doesn't work well as a map, it works better as like I drew a picture of a city. It's not really a map.
Jesper (27m 40s): No, I know. Well, you're going to have a map of a city, but then at least try to reduce the amount of houses in there and make it a bit like something that is, you have some other things than houses to look at something that sort of makes you want to investigate all the parts of the map and look, oh, look over there. There's a small fountain. Or, you know, just make it a bit more appealing and interesting instead of just 200 million houses stacked on top of each other. Yeah. I don't, I don't like it now, but yeah. So now, now I both assaulted. We love time and wall breakers go from here.
Autumn (28m 18s): And you're only at number four. I can't imagine what we're going to go from here. You know, if you touch dragon lands, people are going to like Flay you and bonfire you or something today.
Jesper (28m 29s): I can promise I'm not going to go there. Okay,
Autumn (28m 31s): Good. I just want to keep him safe. Right? Well, my number four is sort of what you've already hinted at. You had mentioned perpendicular mountains, but for me, I put number four as impossible terrain, as in not magical, but terrain like floating islands, that's fine. It's magical. But I mean, illogical cannot happen like rivers flowing through or mountains, which I have seen or around legs, which would not happen mountains. Like you mentioned, that are perpendicular or just randomly place. Like someone dropped a bag of mountains right. Onto their map. And it's scattered all over our, this is a fun one, which I don't know how many people have noticed continents that are perpendicular to each other.
Autumn (29m 13s): And my example for this is game of Thrones. Have you ever noticed that was stereos? And now I can't even remember where the three McKee are. They're like completely right angles to each other.
Jesper (29m 24s): They are. Yeah. The other thing is with the game of Thrones Maps, the other thing is that it doesn't even look very good. It looked just looks weird. It does look weird.
Autumn (29m 33s): I
Jesper (29m 34s): Mean, if you cut out all the, basically, if you think about the game of Thrones intro thing, you know, when the camera goes around the map and all that. Yeah. That looks cool. That looks extremely cool. So as long as you're focusing on the upside down map of England, which is basically a game of Thrones, if you will, if you focus only on Westeros there, then that looks good. Actually in my mind, I think that looks perfectly fine. But then when you take all the, I also don't remember the name of it, but all the lands with the Dothraki and all that up there, when you put that onto the map as well, it just looks weird.
Autumn (30m 11s): It does. It does not. It's too. It's like someone put England made it the same size as all of Europe and just put it at the end outside of Portugal. And it's just like, that wouldn't happen. How would that happen? I don't get it. But, and even that, I actually have another example. So I didn't think about this cities. They don't bother me so much when they kind of seem to be somewhere where maybe a city wouldn't exist, because that gets to be curious. I always think, well, the author had a reason for putting a city there. So maybe, maybe not. I always give them the benefit of the doubt. So I think maybe there's a story I'm willing to at least hold my criticism of cities just appearing in the middle of nowhere.
Autumn (30m 55s): Maybe it's an ancient ruin. And I just don't know that by looking at the map, but have you ever seen Terry Brooks' Shannara map where there are rivers that literally go nowhere? I mean, they flow and you can see them come together, these tributaries and they flow off and they'd go into other tributaries. It's like an Esher sketch of a Map. IBD stylistically. It's like, it makes me want to, like, I want to make an extra sketch of a, a fantasy world. It makes no sense. So I will link to that one in the show notes, but I looked at that and I think this is my example, too, for like a font that you're like, why did you use that font? But then you start looking at the rivers and they're like, going up, mountains are going, they're just lakes.
Autumn (31m 40s): They flow into lakes and the number out of them, which can happen, but not like six times on the same map. It's just, just, it's one of those ones that is a hydrologist. You know, I studied environmental science and I'm looking at this going, no rivers don't go together and then flow apart and just branch off and disappear into the wild. It just doesn't make sense.
Jesper (32m 7s): No Am yeah. Well what you're saying, not with rivers, but this stuff that doesn't make sense us. So actually my number three pig as well.
Autumn (32m 17s): Oh, go figure we, again, we met, if, if the listeners do not know this, we kind of met because of Fantasy maps. So I would have kind of not be surprised that we have some of the same things on our list of pet peeves.
Jesper (32m 31s): Yeah. It's also a pet peeve, but I have a concrete one here though for my number three, but basically again with things that doesn't make any sense. Right. But here we're back to mountain ranges again. So my third pick and w I dunno, tell me why do we keep seeing this problem with mountain constantly? I don't get it, but this third one on my list is the world of Warhammer.
Autumn (32m 56s): I
Jesper (32m 56s): Don't think I've seen this. So this is a, like a miniature war gaming setting in the middle of the ocean. In this map, you have a very large circular island and yes, you guessed it. There's mountains formed in a freaking circle.
Autumn (33m 14s): Volcanic. It could be a massive caldera.
Jesper (33m 18s): Yeah. This is where the Elsa lives in the setting. And it's been a long, long while since I read the law for the setting. But if I remember there is a reason for it, but honestly, I can't quite remember. And also I don't really care because it really rubs me the wrong way to see mountain shaped in a circle. It's just like, what the heck is this?
Autumn (33m 41s): Yeah. Short, if I had massive caldera, like, you know, center Rini, volcanic kind of area. Yeah. Otherwise it doesn't make much sense. Ambassador asteroid impact that kind of thrust up the land on both sides, but in general, no mountains don't form right angles. And they don't form circles. You have a very weird planet if they do.
Jesper (34m 3s): Yeah. And what even makes this map even worse than whites. Number three, I suppose, to number five, it's also had weird mountains is that it's like, take a look at the Warhammer Map. We'll link to it and shown it as well, but take a look at it and then tell me that it doesn't look exactly like a copy of, you know, you have north and south America, there's Russian as Africa. You even have Asia and Australia. The difference is that in the middle of the ocean, there is this circular Elvin kingdom with circular mountains. But otherwise everything else is exactly like earth. I mean,
Autumn (34m 39s): Took the Atlanta. Smith's stuck it in the middle of the Atlantic called it where the Elvis came from and called it a new world.
Jesper (34m 47s): But he couldn't come up with something just a bit more original than that. I just have a look at it. It's insane how much it's just a copy of earth.
Autumn (34m 57s): That is funny. And that's actually a nice segue into my number three, which is different for this one. I know we
Jesper (35m 4s): Had coordinated this. Sometimes
Autumn (35m 6s): It all works out. No, it's always surprising when we're on the same stream of things, but yeah, it happens occasionally. So this one,
Jesper (35m 18s): Occasionally I like the passive aggressive, common. It happens. Okay. Finally,
Autumn (35m 27s): I'm being sarcastic. I think what happens every time we talk, we're like, oh yeah, I was already thinking of that easiest part. However, I will tell people that I let them think that we're constantly combating. Like we are on our top 10 lists. So my number three is, have you ever, it's a Terry Good kind Map and not to pick on him because it's a good, he's a good author. But this example is just a good, good example of one that I find so frustrating. And it's sort of what you just said. It's so generic that it can be anywhere or any continent, which makes me wonder, you know, how good is the story?
Autumn (36m 7s): How original is any of this? When you look at it and you go like, oh, that's earth or, oh, that's a continent with an ocean. And it's like the Westmoreland's the north valley. Oh my gosh. Please make it interesting. Make it original. Don't just make it. It looks like you took a piece of the Gulf of Mexico and a little bit of Texas and gave it a different name and put it on a river and called it somewhere. You Know, it's horrible.
Jesper (36m 40s): All right. I don't think I've seen that one too.
Autumn (36m 45s): It's just it's so it's not in color. It's just, I'm like a antique paper in black. So black and white basically. And it's just line drawings and it literally just looks like anywhere. I, this is one of those ones where I think you've seen the world, the map, they call it a cliche Ville or cliche land. That's actually one of my favorite Maps because it is so well done. And it is funny, hilarious. Yes. The dragon tail islands, you know, it's, again, the setting that every Fantasy map has these exact same settings. And it's hilarious to look at, well, this one is sort of the same way, but not done to the gorgeous color quality of that one. And it's just black and white and you look at it and you're like, it could be Mexico.
Autumn (37m 29s): It could be a bay in Alaska. You know, there's so many places that you're like, it's like, you know, James bay upside down it's yeah. It could be anywhere. And it doesn't inspire any excitement. And you look at it, you're like, I don't know where I am. Why did you make a map of like my backyard? I don't care.
Jesper (37m 50s): No one of course the major difference is also that the, whether it's supposed to be a serious map versus one like cliche, it's just the cliche map world. That's meant to be just fun and goofy. Right. And there's a big difference in that. It is.
Autumn (38m 6s): Yeah. And yeah, the cliche one is definitely it's done so well that I would actually buy it as a post or it is just, it is beautiful. And it is funny. It is so funny. So I should find that and I'll try to link to that in the show notes as well.
Jesper (38m 20s): Okay. Good. All right. Well, moving on to my number two, so it's starting to get more and more nasty now, but my, yeah, my number one is even worse, but this one is, it's not far off what you were just talking about in the sense that following the same, like, well, yeah, well this is like somebody sat down and then they sort of brainstormed like, oh no, I can't do what I normally find on a Fantasy map. And then they made a list, like a checklist of that. And then they started just checking them off one by one. I put this on the map, put that onto Map, everything that, you know, just one of each.
Jesper (39m 0s): So this is, this one is the fictional world of Aragon. And this is the map that they used for the inheritance cycle novels. And basically it's like, you find a volcano check, you find a grant lake check, then the awesome islands off the coast, check again, a single forest. Good. And then next to that, there was next to the forest is a single desert Check. So I might be, I don't know, it might be a bit harsher, but I really don't like the map. And also because they've placed the desert right. Smack in the middle of the entire map and it just looks really weird, but I don't know, sorry if somebody likes this map, but I'm just not a fan of, it just feels like a checklist map and then just smashed together.
Jesper (39m 51s): There you go. Here's a Fantasy map and yeah. I'm not a fan.
Autumn (39m 56s): No, no. That sounds like my impossible terrain. Why is there a desert next to a forest? I mean there's
Jesper (40m 3s): Yeah, those, this doesn't D this one is such, well, there's a huge forest and then a desert right next to it.
Autumn (40m 8s): That's just strange. I mean it, yeah. Where you would find that in nature without grasslands or a mountain, a rain shadow or a high plateau to cause lack of rain. I don't know. That would drive me crazy. I'd be looking at it, going through any classes. So I'd do all of the, I think it would drive me insane. Yeah. That doesn't sound good. One. I'll have to check that one out. I don't think I've actually seen the map. So that one will be interesting to take a peek at.
Jesper (40m 38s): Yeah, yeah. Have a look at the link in the show notes.
Autumn (40m 42s): Well, my number two is one that I, there are some examples out there, but I couldn't find a good one that I wanted to link to. So I'm just going to describe it. And that is Maps with place names that are named descriptively based on like, if you were holding the map and looking down at it and the people on the ground would never be able to see that pattern or the places where it is a fast continent with areas separated by large obstacles. You have the names all sound the same. So there's kind of two different maps there. So it's like, you know, this massive continent, the size of Asia and something at the far east and the far west sounds like they're from the exact same culture that always kind of like, you know, they should be different.
Autumn (41m 24s): I want to see, I want to see some representation of different cultures and different types of people in climate, on your map. Because that makes me curious to know what's where I love traveling. That's why I look at these maps. I want to know what's going on, but yeah. But then you have those other maps and one of the examples, and I couldn't find an actual link to, it was a map that, you know, kind of looked like a body. And so there was like, the Heartland was literally where the heart was and the Headlands on the
Jesper (41m 51s): Right. Yeah.
Autumn (41m 52s): No, no, I don't care if it looks like that, unless they have hot air balloons or were named by a God or goddess, they don't know. It looks like that. That's just silly. So it was sort of like your one, your number of five, you mentioned something about the finger islands or something. It's just, no. So sometimes if there's a mountain and you can stand there and look off and say, oh, they're like fingers and you name it that way fine. But in general you don't go, oh my goodness, this looks like a Lotus flower. I'm going to name this Lotus island. Well, you don't do that.
Jesper (42m 30s): No, no, it doesn't. It definitely requires that you get fire away from, from the, If I above the land and new, you can see it from distance. Otherwise you would never recognize patents like that. No,
Autumn (42m 42s): Just drives me when I look at it. And I'm like cute though. It's like the Nazca lines, you know, we're going to, we have been debating how the Nazca lines were made and who they were made for, for centuries now. And it's just like, you know, don't do that to your readers. We don't want to, you don't want them to be confused over the map and why you named it? The elbow when no one knows it looks like an elbow.
Jesper (43m 6s): Fair enough. Yeah. All right. Okay. Ready for the worst of my list here.
Autumn (43m 11s): Yeah. This is going to be exciting. I want to hear what is the worst map you have found out?
Jesper (43m 16s): Oh my God. So the number one on my list made it here because it's just too lazy for my taste and I'll start explaining why, and then it's going to sound pretty much like something I already said, but then there was a kicker at the end. Okay. So I mentioned before how Y hammer, the Warhammer map is just a copy of earth. Well, this one is basically the same, but it's just for Europe. So this is the, I think you pronounce it, crucial world map or something like that. We'll, we'll link to it in the show notes as well, but there are three trilogies written in this setting.
Jesper (43m 58s): And while I do understand that they are supposed to be a fictional version of medieval, medieval, Western Europe. So I do understand that, but honestly, it just doesn't cut it for me. When you practically just take a map of Europe, slap some new country names on it and call it a day. That's not a fictional Map. No, I mean it, and this is where, I mean, like, that sounds very much like what I just said about Warhammer, because it's basically the same thing. But if you are naming the country on your map, that everybody can see when you know Europe, you can see to this Denmark and I'm from Denmark.
Jesper (44m 41s): And instead of writing Denmark, you call it Joplin. And as a Dane, I can tell you that a part of our country, the part of our country that connects to Germany just south of us is called Joplin in real life. That's what it's called. So for a fictional setting, which I'm supposed to immerse, be me, it Mustin, don't freaking put names in there that is called in my national language. That's the name of the place that is already fucking sake. It's horrible.
Autumn (45m 12s): That's that is, that'd be like me. I just wrote the tainted face series and it takes place in this world in this time. But you know, a different version where there's Faye and magic. And if I had included a world pap and why bother, so, yeah, and then two per se, it's fantasy and use real place names. But
Jesper (45m 33s): I can imagine, I don't, honestly, I have to admit that I don't know what nationality, the author of the crucial series, what nationality it is, but I can imagine, and I might be a mistaking. And if I'm mistaking, then I'm apologizing in advance. But I have a feeling that it might be somebody who doesn't know the geography, maybe that well of Europe. And then they'd just think like, Jutland, that sounds like some FANTASY kind of a war. Well maybe, but it's, it's a real name of a real place. So at least do some Googling first and figure out if it's a real name before you put it on the map,
Autumn (46m 10s): Or at least if you're going to, you know, if you're going to call it Fantasy, don't stay away from real-world words. If you found it. And you're like, oh, no one uses that anymore. That was the historic name. Just, just stay away from it. It's not worth it. Yeah.
Jesper (46m 24s): And if you then telling me that the author actually didn't know that this is the real name and then put it on the map. Well, then I'm going to tell you, then it only makes it even worse because then, then you knew about it. And then what the heck are you then doing? Are you, it makes no sense to me.
Autumn (46m 41s): Yeah. That's again, to me almost like lazy world building. If you're going to create a new world and you're going to call it a new Fantasy setting, make a new map. And if you have a hard time coming up with Fantasy images or a Fantasy landscape, like you just want to write a story and you want someone to hand you a map. There are programs and people who can do that for you. That is not a problem. Okay. I just found out how to randomly make a FANTASY map in like 15 minutes, I was like, oh, this is too much fun. It has, it just creates random things. I mean, it's, it's 3d and it looks pretty and you can start creating a story based on just something, something on someone hands you it's better. The world-building and mapping being is not your forte.
Autumn (47m 21s): Get someone to do it for you and give you a hand. All right. Yes, please. You ready for my number one? This is a good, a good lead in to what my number one is because it kind of shows that I am a graphic designer. I have to admit. Okay. So my number one is Maps that looked like you sketched it while you were potentially drunk or you had a migraine and you just wanted to call it done. It's good enough. And just hate that. So there are software out there. There are cartography programs. There are graphic designers. There are people who can make you even a simple map that is quite lovely.
Autumn (48m 3s): It can be black and white. It can be color, but don't just do these like little lines sketches. And I actually have an example for you. Have you ever seen an Bishop? She writes dark Fantasy and she has some of the worst Maps I've ever seen. I mean,
Jesper (48m 22s): If there's any inhibition there that just got to come and murder, you
Autumn (48m 26s): Let me know. Or they might agree. I mean, they're just, they're line drawings. They're just black and white, but there's just, there's no passion to them. There's no interest to them. They're so simple. There's simplistic. There's so they're painful. They're really painful. It's just, you look at it. And you're like, what is the point? Yeah, I will, you will. I will link to it in the show notes, but you look at it and you're like, what was the point of including this? It's just, you know, some trees and land it's, it's so boring that I would look at it. And I would probably not even pick up the book. I'd open up to the map and go, if this is all the time and effort you put into making a map and it is literally, it looks like you sketched it.
Autumn (49m 6s): It was some thick lines over it and you call it good and published it. I just, if that's, what's your editing gonna look like, I just, I am making an immediate judgment call, which isn't probably right. But that is what we do. We judge books by their cover. We're going to judge it by their formatting. And we're definitely going to judge it by what that map looks like. And it's going to greet us pretty early in the novel before we even start reading. And if I see a horrible Map, I'll be like, oh, well, there's your book, what quality you're going to have in there. So, yeah. And Bishop one was just one that I was like, oh, this is so painful. I can't believe this. Isn't like a published novel.
Autumn (49m 48s): This is really bad.
Jesper (49m 51s): Oh my God. I'm, I'm curious to see how much hate we are going to get on the back of this episode, you know, because essentially it's going to be like, here are the world's worst Maps. And then in the show notes, there's just going to be a list of names of settings and all kinds of things that all the bots on the internet can pick up. And then, oh my God, I could just see how much hate we are going to get on the back of all this. But as I said in the beginning, it's Mendez entertainment. So take it for what it is.
Autumn (50m 15s): That's a personal opinion, but, and if you need a better map maker, come talk to me. Cause lady I, your books, people say you write gorgeous, wonderful books, but you're a Maps, blah. They're just horrible.
Jesper (50m 32s): So I don't really know how do we declare a winner of these two top five list here? Autumm because it's, I think it's a bit difficult.
Autumn (50m 43s): I think I'm short of you just admitting I won, which is fine. I think that we, I think we might have to leave this one to the listeners if they don't, you know, come at us with pitchforks and torches for having pointed out Maps that they absolutely adore. So we'll have to see how that goes.
Jesper (51m 6s): Well, at least as far as a controversy goes, and I guess we stepped off foot in the hornet's nest of whatever you say in English, but that's about right. But okay. Maybe we'll, we'll leave it for listeners to declare winner here because honestly I can't quite make up my mind because yeah. And not that I have seen all of the maps that you mentioned, but at least the point you made. Yeah. I agree with, and I also felt you agreed with the points that I was making. So I don't know.
Autumn (51m 31s): Yeah. I think we can say the winner is the readers who do not have to see these horrible Maps when they pick up a book. So,
Jesper (51m 42s): All right. Well, we talked a lot about Maps today and of course our lists here were intended as pure entertainment, as I said, but if you are interested in more like let's call it proper advice on Fantasy map-making and it's not just a lot of goofy, funny stuff that we are sitting here and blowing out then, or perhaps you just love fantasy match and you like to geek out about it then Autumm and I will actually be hosting an online virtual Masterclass about Fantasy mapmaking in a few weeks from now. So if you want interested in that and go check out the details, why the link in the show notes, that'll take you to the registration page.
Jesper (52m 22s): And I can tell you, we are looking so much forward to host this map-making Masterclass for the very first time. In fact, yes,
Autumn (52m 30s): It will be so exciting and we get to geek out about Maps, which again, it's what brought us together. So yay. It'll be awesome.
Jesper (52m 38s): So next Monday, we are going to discuss learning through all the master classes and masterminds. How can such forums be helpful for your author career?
Narrator (52m 50s): If you like, what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
You've researched how to ride a horse, maybe how to shoot a bow or what that fiddly bit on a sword hilt is really called, but have you considered how combatants actually FIGHT? Or how long it takes a bruise to heal... and what exactly is the impact of adrenaline post fight?
Join Autumn and special guest Carla Hoch from FightWrite as they tease apart what so many authors get wrong about fight scenes, how to write a great fight scene, what Wonder Woman got wrong, and why dragon smoke is actually white (not black!).
Visit FightWrite at www.fightwrite.net and follow Carla on Instagram at www.instagram.com/carla.c.hoch/.
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to the Am Writing Fantasy podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Autumm (30s): Hello, I'm Autumn. And this is episode 144 of the am writing fantasy podcast. And today Jesper is on break. And instead I have a very special guest with us. So Carla, who is the host of the FightWrite Podcast. Plus you have a website and classes and so much more. So I want you to introduce yourself,
Carla (55s): Okay. I am Carla Hoke and I am the purveyor, I guess that's the word for the fight? Yeah, the fight right brand. I have the website fight, right? If I G H T w R I T e.net, and it's kind of a one-stop shop for everything that has to do with fight, right? Which helps writers write fight scenes action, and violence. And I have a book with writer's digest and it is fight right. How to write believable fight scene. And I have class with a writer's digest university. That's always in their library and hopefully we'll have more in the fall. Oh, I guess it is fall. We'll have,
Autumm (1m 35s): That's fantastic. This year,
Carla (1m 36s): I'm telling you this year has been slow and fast at the same time. It's either in park or it's in full speed ahead, right? Exactly.
Autumm (1m 47s): Yeah. And in some ways, days can be, have elements of both. And so I'm not sure where we are.
Carla (1m 55s): Yeah. Well, you know, they say that the days are long, but the years are short. Oh,
Autumm (2m 1s): It's very, very true. Well, that is awesome. I remember, I think your website has actually won something for reader writer's digest too. Like best law
Carla (2m 12s): It has. So it has it's it's in there top 100 websites for writers and they have different categories. And I think mine was in the category of writers helps writers. So three years and I have won a brand award to twice with can Christian authors network.
Autumm (2m 35s): That's so brilliant installations. Yeah, that is fantastic. And so I do want to give a shout out because it was actually the secret of how we met is a joint listener. Stephen recommended that I see if you wanted to come on the am writing fantasy podcast because he thought we would just be cool. It's like dream diner duo. Oh yeah. Big shout out to Steven as a thank you for introducing us and making this podcast happen.
Carla (3m 6s): And what's his last name?
Autumm (3m 7s): Guglich.
Carla (3m 10s): Okay.
Autumm (3m 12s): All right. Well, I, you have quite the background in fighting yourself. So I Think that is really interesting. So this came about because you're also a writer end of fighter.
Carla (3m 27s): Yeah. It, well, it came about because I was a writer and this is a classic case of the days being long, but the years being short, because it seems like I just kind of started, but it's, it's been like 10 years, 10 years since I started martial arts. I can't believe that, but it all started because I was writing a work that had fight scenes in it and I didn't know how to fight. And so I, my kids, I had my kids in TaeKwonDo. I think they were in like first grade and yeah, kindergarten, first grade. And there was a self-defense class that was at the TaeKwonDo studio. And I went to a couple of classes. I thought, you know, how much really do I need to know one or two classes, surely I'll know everything I need to know to write fight scenes.
Carla (4m 12s): And I got in there and I kind of loved it. And it just, it just kinda snowballed from there. And the strange thing is I was asked in a podcast one time, and this was the hardest question I've ever been asked. He was like, what's the weirdest thing that's ever happened to you? And I'm like, where do, where do I even start with that? But one of the weird things, my life tends to backpedal. Like it's, you know, circular, like I taught at a high school that was the Raiders and then moved to a whole new city, whole, whole new state and the Raiders, you know? And it's like this person I knew. And then boom, this person I knew with the same name, coaches, exact same names.
Carla (4m 53s): And I'm like, I don't, I'm not planning this, but I went to a writer's conference and I had the work with me that I started taking self-defense for the whole reason. I started wanting to know how to learn fight scene was this particular work. And I went to a writer's conference and I presented it to a man named Steve lobby, who I did not know. I had no idea who he was. It turned out he was Steve lobby of the Steve blobby agency. He was the head of a, a writer's agency. And I presented it to him and he, he didn't really, he, he didn't like it, you know, which I'm okay with that. And he said, I don't like the work.
Carla (5m 33s): It's not right for me, but I do like you, so let's keep in touch. And so year after year after year, we would see each other. If you don't go to writers, conferences, writers, I highly suggest it because it's, it's the adult version of camp. You see the same people. It is, you see the same people year after year after year. And so I kept up with him and anytime we saw each other to writer's conference, we would make time to kind of sit and chat. Cause we get along really well. And when I wrote the book, I got in touch with him and I was like, you know, what would you like to read this book? He's I, of course I'd like to read it. So he read it. And he said, because he also has an imprint of small house publishing for craft books.
Carla (6m 14s): And he goes, I do love this book. He goes, I don't have it in my budget right now. And I'm like, well, you know what? I, I sent it to writer's digest and he goes, you did what? I said, I sent it to writer's digest. And he started laughing and he was like, okay girl. He said, you go for it. And he goes, what he said, you know, just be patient, it'll take about six weeks for them to get back to you. And if you haven't heard from him by then, then just, you know, reach out. And I said, I'll do that. And it was not six weeks. It was six days. Oh my gosh, I know miraculous. And so I sent him a message back and I said, would you be interested in representing a writer's digest author? And he said, may be. And so the first person, I really pitched this book to the whole reason I started writing fight scenes is now my editor.
Carla (7m 3s): I know my agent for a book about writing fight scenes. So circle
Autumm (7m 8s): Really good kismet there. That is really
Carla (7m 13s): Is, it really is writers don't give up writing honestly is just a war of attrition. It's about successful authors. Aren't necessarily the best writers. I mean, come on. We've we've all read some books. They were like, wow. I mean, I've read books. I'm like, how is this person got this book out? And I don't have this book out, but it really is. It's the difference in who, who gave up and who didn't. I was a high school teacher and a track coach for awhile. And there was a psycho psychological study done that when two runners are running side by side, after three strides, one of them will probably give up, oh. So I used to coach my runners and say three full strides and at time and time again, and I think that's how it is with writers.
Carla (7m 59s): Keep the strides. Somebody is going to give up and you're going to be the one left standing. So just, just don't give up, keep pushing.
Autumm (8m 7s): I love that. And I think that is so true because it's, I know I've read recently that it's 10 years and 1 million words before you can really start seeing your career take off.
Carla (8m 17s): And
Autumm (8m 19s): That's a long time I would lose a lot of authors, one or two books, and that's their feeling. They're feeling it. Then they want to see something then, but to really come into your own 10 years in your words,
Carla (8m 33s): Right. And, and the average book and its lifetime in its lifetime, a published book only sells 2000 copies in its lifetime. Wow. So if you look and you think, okay, I've self published this book, or I've traditionally published this book and you know, I've only sold a hundred books this first year. Well, yeah, that's right. I worked, you know, people who are rich from writing, first of all are probably lying or, or they have, you know, a ton of books or they are just kind of, you know, this kind of lightning in a bottle kind of situation, you know, the JK Rawlings, you know, that just hit it big.
Carla (9m 15s): So if, if you, you know, if you're struggling, if you're not selling as many as you think you should sell, if you're like, well, I still have my day job. Well that makes you a writer. Correct? All of those things.
Autumm (9m 28s): Yeah. You might get one series of cells and you might get, you know, three years later it might die off and it might be one, one, a new one that doesn't sell it. It's also, I love Joanna Penn for that. She's very practical saying it's not a linear curve. You don't hit it big and stay up there for, you gotta work for it every day
Carla (9m 45s): And write. And one of the reasons why I love what I do is because I do love fight training, and I do love writing and they, they have so much in common when you are a fighter martial arts of any kind, you're not going to walk onto the mat and immediately be a success. You have to, you have to take your lumps for a very long time. And, and it's, you feel very defeated a lot. I had a, a new white belt SAIS. I've been doing Brazilian jujitsu. I've done a wide swath of things, but the one that I just, I really am sticking with. Yeah. I have as Brazilian jujitsu, I've been doing it about seven years, including, you know, quarantine and time off it's surgery and stuff.
Carla (10m 27s): And, and the kids, this white belt said, well, I just feel lost all the time. And I was like, yeah, me too. And she was like, what do you mean? You feel lost all the time. I'm like, that's just how it is. And that's one of the things I love about this art. So you really just have to keep plugging along. You have to take your lumps and not, everybody's going to give you a good review and that's okay. I call those. And some people will give you a negative review simply because they're a negative person. Don't always assume it is about your book. Especially if it's ugly, you know what some, what someone says may be based on our actions, but the way they choose to say it is about them.
Carla (11m 11s): And so, yeah, you're going to have some people will give you a one-star review. You're going to have some people who are very snarky and they may be fellow writers that, you know, and that's okay. And I liken that to, you know, people who aren't your fans, you know, when I'm competing, not everybody's cheering for me. That's okay. They're not my fans. I don't expect them to cheer for me. So, you know, when you, when you do have people that are critical of you for, in an unproductive way, criticism is incredibly important. You don't get better without somebody showing you, you know, where you need to improve, but I'm productive criticism. That's not about you.
Carla (11m 51s): It's not about your work. Those are just not your, that's not your team. That's not your fans. So when you write, keep your team in mind, when I compete, I'm not competing for the people who hate me and what my opponent, it to win. I'm competing for my teammates and my coach. So you just kind of have to have that, that same attitude when you write just, yeah, don't give up, don't give up. Don't take the easy way out.
Autumm (12m 15s): Exactly. And it's so true. And I do know it is human nature that we for, what do they say? Like you can have 10 good reviews, but it's that one bad review out of the 10. That is the one that sticks out in your mind. It's just like, well, if you look at the numbers, you probably have more good reviews than bad. So focus on
Carla (12m 34s): Differences. Yeah. Right, right. And you know what? I actually learned a lot from a review. I got on good reads. One of the reviews. I forget how many stars it was. It, I mean, it wasn't five stars. I think it was like two or three. And the lady said that I just, she told me the subjects that she wished had been in my book. Oh, that's, that's helpful. One of the things she, yeah. One of the things she asked was, but how does a person fight when they don't know how to fight? And I'm like, oh my gosh, that's a brilliant question. And so I actually reached out to her and I thanked her for her review. And I said, you know, I had never even considered that. And so I wrote a whole blog post about it. So that's brilliant reviews are all negative reviews.
Carla (13m 17s): Not necessarily negative critical reviews are only bad if you don't learn something from them. But again, if they're ugly and mean-spirited, it's not about you.
Autumm (13m 25s): Yeah. It's not about you don't even let it bother you and move on.
Carla (13m 31s): Move on. Exactly.
Autumm (13m 33s): So my big question for you, and I want to get into like tips and other things, you see authors doing wrong, but why should an author care if they're writing a fight scene correctly?
Carla (13m 45s): That is a very good question. And I liken it to how a boxer reps, their hands before they fight. You know, you see boxers with these gloves on, but what people don't know is you take off those gloves and you have yards and yards of cloth. There are people who work for the fighters sometimes, personally, or they work for the event and their job is to wrap hands. It's that important. And what you do is you wrap a hand tightly and you pull all the bones together so that when contact is made, the force is distributed evenly over all the bones. If you compromise that and you break, you get what's called a boxer's break.
Carla (14m 26s): And it's a break in the pinky on this very, very edge. It'll take you out of the fight. It doesn't matter how many other amazing bones you have or how great you punch that one, tiny crack compromises the whole. And so that's kinda how I see, you know, with fight scenes. If you have done your work, if you have done your research and you are proud of this, why not give your fight scene as much importance as everything else because you have to serve your story. And I was asked recently what that means. And it was like, you only put things in the work that further the work, if your fight scene is in there, there's a purpose for it.
Carla (15m 6s): So, you know, make it believable, you know, don't make it absolutely corn ridiculous because when you do that or just don't do any research at all or anything like that, you're letting yourself sit open for a boxer's break. And though it's the tiniest bone and it may just be a tiny crack. It compromises the entire works ability to pack a punch pretty much.
Autumm (15m 32s): And I do agree. I mean, we sit there and Google, you know, that, that lovely meme that it's like, when did you become a neurosurgeon? Do you last night? You know, we research now and it's true, but a lot of people assume they know how to fight and they assume how fighting goes. And I mean, I see this a lot because I'm a big hiker and backpacker and I go into, especially fantasy of blast. Yeah. You go into a fantasy test and like, they're not carrying a backpack. They have no food with them, but they said, I'll do fine for two weeks. And I'm like,
Carla (16m 4s): Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. Fighting is just like that. You know, hiking is its own language, literally its own language. There's little symbols that, you know, there's things that can know to take. They're really hard. They're really are, you know, and my daughter and I went, we learned this the hard way. We went on a short little jaunt in Colorado and I am in Houston. We are below sea level here, you know? And you get to Colorado, Colorado is super stingy with this oxygen. I don't know what the deal is, you know, Colorado share your oxygen. It's okay. And we got maybe a quarter mile in and I have a picture of my daughter leaning over, supporting herself on her thighs, just breathing.
Carla (16m 46s): I was like, yeah, we probably should have gone into this whole thing differently. But it is fighting. Fighting is like a foreign language. And people like hiking people at well, I know how to walk, not a hike, you know, and people will, I've seen fighting on TV, you know, I know, I know how to throw a punch. So you know, it, it it's akin to, well, I speak English, so I guess I can teach it. No, it is. It is. It really is fighting like hiking is its own language. It really is. And so, you know, when you watch people on TV fight and it looks so easy, there's a reason for that.
Carla (17m 26s): They've been practicing
Autumm (17m 29s): Choreographed. I mean, there's a lot going into creating a fight scene that you're going to watch. It looks so effortless. Yeah.
Carla (17m 36s): Oh yeah. And I mean, even like in professional fights you watch a professional fight and you're like, well, that's not so hard. Oh my gosh, you have no idea the work that goes into it. And you really don't until you start. And you're like, oh, okay. Knowing how to punch is only this much. It's the timing and the movement and knowing how to defend and you know, setting up different things. So it's harder than it is harder than people think it is. And yeah, I do have a lot of people come to me with fight scenes and I'm just like, or here's another thing, you know, they have a person in their work. Well, this person does such and such fighting style. I'm like, oh cool.
Carla (18m 16s): How long have you done that? Oh, I've never done it. I'm like, oh, I mean, I respect the challenge, but it's like, why would you be willing to write an entire scene in Portuguese? If you didn't speak Portuguese? You know, I really don't think you would just trust Google translate. You just want somebody who actually spoke Portuguese. Yeah. Don't as a foreign language teacher, former full language, don't, don't always trust it. You know, you would want somebody who actually speaks that language to look at it and say, well, that's not really how this works. You know? So yeah. It's not, it's not as easy as it, as it looks. And if you read a fight scene, that's done very well. It didn't just flow out.
Carla (18m 58s): You know, Chuck, Palahniuk the writer of fight club. He's been writing a long time and he, to this day, to this day, if I'm not mistaken, he's still in writing groups. He still has people critique his work. He still has the beta reader, you know? So the learning never ends it doesn't and the easier somebody makes it look, the more work has gone into it. Guaranteed.
Autumm (19m 24s): Yeah, I can go. I can definitely go agree with that. And so what are, what do you think are some of the worst things you see or maybe the most 10 things authors tend to use that is just not true in a fight scene. So are some of the worst offenses you've seen
Carla (19m 41s): The worst offenders, the greatest offenders. I also write for writer's digest blog. I do a monthly fight scene kind of blog post for them. And the one that I recently did was about writing authentic, oh, fight scenes, everybody. One of the things I see is everybody wants it to be authentic. Oh, well, that's not true. Okay. No, you don't don't want it to be authentic if we wanted everything to be exactly as it is. When we walk outside our door, there would be no fantasy. There wouldn't be no scifi. Cause we don't see those things around them. And it was Ernest Hemingway said it is a writer's job to write the truth. And that is, that is true.
Carla (20m 24s): But I don't think he meant true as in factual. I think he meant true to the human condition because if you've read old man and the old man and the sea, clearly he didn't make life because you had this old man for whom the short stories name named Santiago, because fights a Marlin, a Marlin that is longer than his skiff by just holding the fishing line. Okay. Nevermind. All the things that come after that, the man is dragged for three days, he ends up fighting off sharks and I'm like, okay, that's not authentic. You know, authentic is the Marlin takes it and he grabs it and it pulls him overboard and snaps at the same time.
Carla (21m 6s): So right. It is. And the true thing you want is truth to the human experience, the human condition, you know? And so I think sometimes people get so bogged down with wanting their fights seem to be authentic, that they don't serve the story. It's like, they'll make it authentic to the point to where they'll sacrifice the scene if they have to. But here's the truth of actual fights. And I'll just use fights on the street. For example, most of them are over under 30 seconds and that's a generous estimate. Okay. There is next to no banter and talking well, that's no fun.
Carla (21m 47s): I know. And most of the people involved don't know how to fight violent offenders. The majority of the time they pick their target and under seven seconds. And it's not about their height, it's about the way they walk, you know? And so it's all these things that if you're going to make your fight scene completely authentic, it's may not work for the story. If Hemingway had made the old man in the sea completely authentic, Lily would have ended after the first 10 paragraphs or, you know, so what you want rather than striving for complete authenticity, just like the title of my book fight, right? How to write believable, fight scenes.
Carla (22m 29s): You want it to be believable. And I don't think that betrays the art because how many times have we watched movies? And we were like, oh man, that was so real. But we know it wasn't right. We know for a fact, what we saw was not real, but we believed it in that moment. And that's the writer's job, you know? So number one, don't aim for 100% authenticity aim for believability too. Don't ride so much, honestly, writers care more, more than what kind of fight it was. What kind of work went into the sword, plane, everything, what they care about most is the impact it has on the fighters, on the story as a whole.
Carla (23m 16s): That's truly what matters. And I don't edit fight scenes very often, but every now and then I do contract work for different people and, and publishers. And I worked with a lady who her fight scene. I forget one scene was I forget how many thousands of words w not thousands over a thousand. I do remember that. And I highlighted a few things and I said, you know, these are great. Everything else just kind of needs to go. And she was kind of surprised. And I said, it's not serving the story. It's really not. You have to think of it like a navigation app. You know, if you're driving and the navigation app says, here's a mailbox, here's a road.
Carla (23m 59s): There's a two story house. Now here's this road. If it tells you all those things, it's going to divert your attention to your destination. You know, you can't put too much into it. And so I tell people a good rule to kind of think of is only write what you would see illustrated in a comic book or graphic novel, because real estate in those is so prime. You know, every single page of a comic book and graphic novel is major money, every single page. And so they have to make the most of it. And so what they do is they highlight the major portions of the fight.
Carla (24m 40s): They leave the rest of it to the reader's imagination and our readers are smart. They can do that. And they also make it a very much sensory experience. And which leads me probably to another thing. I think people are focusing more on the actions than the impact of the actions. You really want to focus on the sensory details because that's what everybody can relate to. Not everybody can relate to being stabbed with a Katana. Thank heavens. Yes, but we can identify with searing pain. And by the way, in my book, I go over diff I've I mean, firsthand account from people who've experienced different wounds to tell you kind of the, yeah.
Carla (25m 29s): Kind of the entire spectrum of different things experienced, you know, people know the blood, they know what blood looks like. They know what a scream sounds like. They can understand looking down and seeing your own blood on your hands and it freaking you out. So you really want to hit your reader, make them feel it. It's not what you say. It's how, how you make them feel. You know, you can look back at books. My judo coaches is taking some type of class and every now and then he'll say, Hey, have you read this? Have you read this? And he said something about Anton checkoff. And I don't remember what by Anton check-off I read. But I remember thinking I liked that.
Carla (26m 10s): So I don't remember the words, but I remember the feeling connected to it. And Maya Angelou said people, and this is so important thing. Remember this, as you walk throughout the world, people, people will forget what you say, but they won't forget how you made them feel. And so in your fight scene, they will forget the grip. You had, you know, the caliber, caliber of bullet, what type of sword, the foot movement, but they're going to walk away and remember how they felt. And I use Chuck Palahniuk again, as another example, there's a young man at my gym who wants to write and he's really good.
Carla (26m 50s): Like he has a blog. And I, I mean, this kid is like 16 in our blog. And I'm like, I'm a terrible writer. This kid is so much better writer than I am. He asked me one time, well, what, you know, what are some writers you like? And I said, you know, for a sensory experience, Chuck pollen, it hits it pretty hard. And the kid read one of his short stories and I warned him. I said, now Chuck, Paula, Nick is gritty. He's not a nice and tidy writer. And he goes, okay. And he came back and he told me, you know, the short story he had read, I think it's called guts. And he goes, I'm still horrified by it. And I want to take lots of hours. And I was like, right.
Carla (27m 31s): Isn't that awesome. So even though he doesn't, you know, years from now, he may forget the words of that story, but he's going to remember that when he got done, he was like, oh my gosh. So, you know, that's what you want to read with. You know, lastly probably is less as more. It really is. You know, I think we've all seen somebody who had on too much makeup, you know, and you look at them and you just think, oh my gosh, with half that makeup, you would look amazing. You know, sometimes too much is not enough. It's like, and my coach asked me yesterday, Hey, do you want to spar? And I'm like, yeah, I want to spar.
Carla (28m 11s): That's like Starbucks asking me if I want whipped cream. Don't insult me. Yes. I want whipped cream. Yes, of course. I want whipped cream. The rule should be, if you don't want it, say it, there should never be a question about it. So, but when it comes to writing, especially in the time that we live in, if you read more classic works like, you know, Jane Austin, Bronte, DH Lawrence, oh, I love doing Florence. They tell you everything. They tell you about the pebbles on the walkway. They tell you everything about the daisies and the sun. Okay. But those were also people who didn't have TV. And so books where their TV, you really have to get into all the details.
Carla (28m 55s): And we're a different society now for good and bad. I think they said that humans officially have a shorter attention span than goldfish kidding. And which is one of the reasons. Well, I mean, it's true. I mean, w we're multitaskers, we jumped to so many things. And for that reason, they do suggest that we make our chapters shorter. You know, if you're a Y a author, they tell you, Hey, make short chapters. Because teenagers that read Y a which actually the audience for why a is like 18 to 35, they want to feel that feeling of progression. You know, oh, I got this chapter done. I got this chapter done. And so we live in a very short attention span society.
Carla (29m 40s): And so you have got to make the most of every single word Michelangelo. They asked him how he created David. And a lot of people have heard this. He said, I just took a rock, a piece of stone. And I took away everything that wasn't David, you know? And, and that's how, that's how it is. You have to edit, you have to edit, what is it? They say, edit with a knife or edit with a sword or something like that. But you know, you, you write, oh, well, Hemingway again, he said, write drunk, edit sober. Yeah. You have to be willing to really cut things down. Even if it's something you love, which reminds me of another thing about fight scenes.
Carla (30m 22s): I think some, and I'm guilty of it as well. I think sometimes we write to teach rather than reach and that's the wrong way to go about it. We want to show the reader, look how much research I've done. I'm not a surgeon, but I play one in this book. You know? And when, if you're teaching your, unless you're writing a craft book, the, okay, I'm talking about fiction and informational nonfiction, your goal is to reach your reader, not be teaching your reader. If you have to constantly be defining things in your work, you've made an error.
Carla (31m 3s): And you know that when you use technical lingo in your work, you risk losing your reader. You know, it can take, it can take, when you send in your work to an agent or an editor, they asked for the first 50 pages they used to, I don't know what they ask for any more, but usually it's first 50 pages. So in their reading, their, their idea is if you don't have me in that 50 pages, you don't have me. So it can take, you know, a ton of time to really get a reader in your work, but it can take a page to lose them, you know? And, and you don't want that. So don't isolate your readers, you know, and again, sometimes you have to use technical lingo.
Carla (31m 44s): And I think print the princess bride, the book is absolutely a perfect example of that. Just like the movie, which is one of those that the book and the movie really do each other justice. You know, it's not one that like, oh, this is so much better. You know, they're really both, very tongue in cheek and funny, but the fight between Wesley, as the dread pirate, Roberts and Inigo, they starts the very first one where they're spitting out all that technical lingo. Yes. It's the same thing in the book, same thing. But it talks about the foot movement and about, and not he steps, right. But dust coming off the ground, okay, that's a picture. You told me how fast they're moving.
Carla (32m 26s): And you realize that they're shooting out this technical lingo to outdo one another. So in that case, it matters. Technical lingo also matters. If you have someone who has an expertise or proficiency with a something, it makes sense that they're going to use some words, you know, a police officer wouldn't call the trigger, the pew pew thingy. You can do that. Somebody who works with knives, isn't going to call it the sticky part, you know, the stabby end. So yeah, you need to know the technical lingo there, but at the same time, you need to show the reader. What's that means you don't tell them.
Carla (33m 6s): You don't tell them that, but you show it. So don't worry, aim for believability rather than authenticity. Number two less is more three, right. To reach rather than teach. And I think I've missed one in there, but yeah, start there. And, and honestly, I give you permission to not write so much, that burden has been lifted off of you. You do not have to convince your reader that you are an expert in this. You only have to convince your reader that the character is an expert at this.
Carla (33m 46s): Okay. And Unless they aren't, which is statistically more likely, it is strange. How many people in books know how to fight when the average population does not. They absolutely. Don't when I'm at writing conferences, one of the things I do is I'll say, okay, make a fist and hold it up. And it's shocking. The majority of people don't know how to make a fist. And I'm like, that's why would you know how to make a fist? Nobody's taught you? So I give you permission to not know something it's absolutely. Okay. You know? And when it comes to fighting, there are some great resources out there. There are some great fighting resources.
Carla (34m 27s): Mine happens to be a fighting resource from the perspective of a her, which is, is very, very different. So I think I answered your question. If I don't answer the question, say Nope, circle back.
Autumm (34m 41s): Great. So yes, you listed definitely some things that authors are doing wrong. And I agree, because I think there's often a tendency to focus on the wrong aspects. I'll see descriptions of like the sword hilt coming towards you. And you're like, you wouldn't know the emblem as it's about to knock you in the forehead.
Carla (35m 0s): Oh, you would not. You would not. Absolutely not.
Autumm (35m 5s): You know, there a wound is mentioned, but not the pain that goes with it. And then it seems like a chapter later, the character is fine. And I'm like, well, if you'd focus on how it's going
Carla (35m 16s): To feel to
Autumm (35m 19s): Hold holds,
Carla (35m 20s): These people heal so fast. Yes. If you want to go into the tiny nuances. Yeah. Healing time is a thing, people. And if your character is on the battlefield a lot, just because you don't get knocked out, doesn't mean you don't have a concussion just because you're knocked out. Doesn't mean you do have a concussion. And when you do get knocked out from a punch, you're not out all day, it's sometimes 10 seconds, sometimes 30 seconds, you know? So you don't have time to have a whole scene. You know, now, I mean, of course, when it comes to the human body, there's going to be variables that, you know, it depends on the age, the person and all that on my Instagram, I'm on Instagram at Carla C a R L a dot C dot Hoke, H O C H.
Carla (36m 9s): Or you can just hashtag fight right. Once a week, I do like a little fight, right? Tip or I put a blog post that you might want to read. And one that I have coming up, I don't know when it's scheduled it. I think it's sometime this month, but it is the healing of bruise, bruise, healing time, and the different colors and the spectrum it goes through. And one of the things I say is, you know, this is dependent upon the age of the person, the health of the person. And don't think you're going to see all of those particular colors, but for reference, you know, this is what you have. So definitely I think it's important to focus on the pain of things.
Carla (36m 49s): There's no greater motivator of man than pain. Everybody can relate to pain. So really I'm laser focused in on the things every reader can relate to versus only the readers who have held a bastard sword, or who have swung a mace. You know, how many people really have done that. So focus on the human experience, essence of the scene, which is the pain and the sensory details of it. Oh, I think that's the emotional impact. Yes. I was going to mention the other thing. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Very seldom. Does somebody, it, it seems so easy to kill people and you would, you know, we look at crime statistics and we think it's no big deal.
Carla (37m 38s): You just, you know, shoot somebody, you go about your day. It has a lasting impact. It really does. And even if the person just kind of goes blank, that's an impact. That's not normal. It's not normal to feel absolutely nothing. And one of two things is, is going to take place either that person has some psychopathic or sociopathic issues with their brain, which is not normal, or they're going to put it in a little box in the side of their brain and not deal with it. In which case it's going to come up somewhere else in their life and just nightmare. And I cannot to, it is so common from what I've seen when people kill somebody else that they, they dream about that person again and again.
Carla (38m 19s): And I mean, these are even people in jail who have killed multiple people in world war two. They did a study. There's a book called on killing by SLA Marshall. There's a lot of it. There's a subtitle with it too, but the main is on killing and, and he did a study of the soldiers and the Pacific American theater and how many bullets per kill. And it was an obscene. I forget like 60 something bullets for every one kill. And there is one instance where they had an enemy combatant running over, running through an empty clearing. And you had all these American shoulders shooting at them.
Carla (39m 2s): And none of them hit them. It was very star wars, very, very norm trooper aiming. And they were all shooting over their head or they were shooting in front of him on the ground. And it's because inherently killing another person is not a normal place to exist. It's not our homeostasis. It should not be right. And so between world war two and the Vietnam war, that's the one that came next. Yet the Vietnam war, they started operant conditioning and it's the same thing they have to do with police officers. And it, they literally not only train soldiers to kill from a technical tactical standpoint, they train them from a psychological standpoint.
Carla (39m 43s): And so they went through operant conditioning and all these little, all these things, you know, when you hear policemen talk about criminals that may have been killed, they don't, they don't say the person may say the perp, they say the target and that is distancing themselves from the other. And it's the other. And it's not a matter of coldness it's to help their brain process everything they've been through. So, yeah, and, and my book focuses a lot on that. I think people expect my book to be all about punching and kicking. And I would say a good half of it more than half of it is not, and is divided into five rounds. And there's chapters within those rounds, the rounds are sections.
Carla (40m 25s): It's five rounds like a championship MMA. And the second round is all about the human experience. You know, it's, it's what happens to us psychologically when we kill another person, it's about what adrenaline does to you, what a surge does, what a dump does. It talks about mental manipulation and all that kind of stuff. So, you know, little things like that, that people don't realize. I'm also amazed how many characters though. They are soaked in adrenaline. Just think so clearly. So, and their hands are steady. And I'm like, I have had people ask me to sign things just after practice. And I can't, I mean, my hand is shaking.
Carla (41m 8s): It's the adrenaline it's, it's what it does to your body. So yeah, I think the opportunities that writers are missing are actually the opportunities that number one are the easiest opportunity to, to take. And they make the most lasting impression. So step away from the technical aspect of it. I'm not saying make it completely crazy. You know what I'm saying? Look, there's some things that just, ain't a thing, picking up somebody by their neck and talking to them in the real world and a thing not possible Even then, because I did. Yeah. Oh, I know because my husband works in oil and gas and he's had to go to companies that do, they rent large equipment everything.
Carla (41m 55s): And I asked him something about cranes and there is actually a formula. They go through to create a crane so that you know how much weight you can lift before that crane topples over. Right? And so then if I am strong enough to hold you up, your weight is going to topple me forward. And that was something in the wonder woman movie. I have so many issues with the one. I love gal Gadot as an actress. I think she does a beautiful job, but there's one scene in the most recent movie where she's holding a man over the balcony. I think she's holding him by his foot and she's leaning over and talking to him.
Carla (42m 37s): And I'm like, gal Gadot is what a buck 25 with weights on. And she's holding this 200 pound man. She may be strong enough to do it, but physics isn't going to let that happen. Physics is going to pull her over the edge. So it's true. Make it, make it easier. And just remember physics is a thing the majority of fighting is physics. So,
Autumm (42m 60s): Oh, I think that is actually a fantastic note to wrap up on because that is, that is something. So, you know, even though we're talking about fantasy, even though we can play with magic or maybe tweak the physics of our world a little bit, there's things that are real.
Carla (43m 15s): We still have gravity. Magic has rules. You have to establish the rules of your magic. You have to establish reality for your reader immediately. Okay? If everybody on the planet has superhuman strength, it's not superhuman anymore. It's the norm. So you better know the rules of your world and you better print them out and keep them on the wall so that you can just glance at them. So you don't have to open a file. Cause let me tell you, who will remember the rules of your world and that's your readers? Absolutely. So I like it. I always say don't cross the streams. Meaning from Ghostbusters at the original Ghostbusters, at the beginning, don't cross the streams.
Carla (43m 56s): Everything in the world will go into nothing. And then what do they do to get the stay? Puft marshmallow man. Yup. But we love the movie they had to, but they broke their own rules. So just, if you're going to put, if you have little rules to remember that you keep on your wall, behind your computer, put up, don't cross the streams, keep the rules handy. Do not defy the rules of your world. Do not defy the rules of your magic. And I'm sorry if we're going over time, do I just go for it? Okay. Okay. You have to have characters that can be beatable. They cannot be invincible.
Carla (44m 36s): That's very true. Oh my gosh. If they're invincible, then the story's over the first page. Even Thanatos can be beaten. Superman can be beaten. And a lot of times what your care, if you're having a hard time figuring out, well, how can you beat this person? Okay. Well, a lot of times their strength is, is linked to their weakness. They knows who's super, super, super huge. And so what defeated him? Tiny little nanobots. They were able to drive. I'm pretty sure that's what it was. Another one. Superman. Why is he so strong? Because his home planet, you know, they have the sun and they have different gravity.
Carla (45m 19s): Okay. Well what's his weakness. Something from his home planet kryptonite, you know? So look at, and while we're talking about fantasy, let me just, I'm going to digress super quick. Oh sure. Dragons, dragon dragons. I love dragons. I think we need to do them justice. You ain't going to stand on the back of a dragon while it's fine. You're not going to do that. It's like standing on an airplane. It's not going to happen when people think, oh, you've just got rains. And I'm like, okay, have you ever been on a horse? Do you know when you stand up on a, when you stand up on a horse, it's considered trick riding for a reason.
Carla (46m 4s): So if you are riding, I should have gotten into the fantasy stuff straight off the bat. I apologize for that. If you are riding on the back of the dragon and you're like, what weapons should my person have? If they're on the back of a dragon, you're on the back of a dragon advantage. You, you don't need a weapon. It's like being in it. You are on the weapon. It's like, well, my person is my soldiers in a tank. What weapon does he need? He's in a tank. You know the dragon. Absolutely. If you need your wag, you know your dragon to do something, have them drop something from their claws. Oh, brilliant. Or have them use their, use that tail for heaven sake.
Carla (46m 45s): Now they can't use it so well while they're flying because they need that tail while they're flying. Yes, it's a rudder. And you have to remember when the dragon takes off, it doesn't take off like a helicopter. You know, it's going to have to flap. And so the person on top is going to be, I'm not saying you can't ride a dragon. I'm just saying, I want to see that saddle. And I also don't think you're going to be able to keep your eyes open because of how fast they're moving. Oh my gosh, you're going to need goggles. Also. I don't think dragon smoke is black. I think it's white. And here is why. Whenever you see you have a fire and the dark smoke comes out of it, the dark smoke is what could not be burned off.
Carla (47m 32s): Okay. It is what could not be efficiently consumed by the fire, a dragon, whatever is the source of their flame. Pretty sure it's going to be efficient enough to not have anything leftover may seem steam. It, yeah, you may seem steam in the air because the heat, you know, the humidity in the air. But I don't think there's going to be elements of that flame that aren't going to burn. That just doesn't make sense to me. And I talk about dragons in the book and I, and I call it my, my dragon soap box. Oh, the dragon soapbox. I love dragons.
Carla (48m 14s): I, it's hard for me to imagine. And you know what, call me crazy. Don't care. Clearly I don't care. Every culture in the world has had a concept of a dragon. And so you're telling me nothing like that ever existed. How can the Vikings and you know, the Chinese who had never encountered each other, both have dragons, you know, you have CATSA. Quadel Exactly. So I, and you know, there, there are descriptions in the Bible that you're like, oh, okay.
Carla (48m 53s): Maybe there were such a thing. So also, yeah. Get your dragon, right. People get your dragon, right. If it is a water dragon, it's construction is going to be different than if it's an ice dragon. It's going to be different than, you know, and not all dragons may have wings. Some of them may not. So, but I'm sorry. I love fantasy. Love it. Love it. Love it. And so that's one of my hangups.
Autumm (49m 20s): Well, I'm not going to complain about that hangup. I think it's perfect. I already could talk to you for like, there's just so many nuances that I would love to get into and oh my God, this would be, this was so much fun. So yeah, I think we would carry on here for the next two hours.
Carla (49m 38s): Yeah. Don't get me started about armor. I can go off on armor. I can go off about the weaponry. Armor is determined by the weaponry. It's not the other way around the armor that existed at the time of crossbows is not going to be the same as the armor that existed before, you know, crossbows armor from Japan is going to be different than armor from Europe. And that has to do with the availability of natural resources. So again, I could go off on that, but I know you we're running out of time. I apologize.
Autumm (50m 7s): You know, we, we, like I said, I don't think that any listener is going to complain one bit. It's so true. I think, just to think about things like that, like you have different cultures, even if you're not using China, you're not using the earth. Think about the technology, the weapons and the different, depending on what's it, this is an aspect of you're right. Everyone's a winner.
Carla (50m 29s): Right. And I can, I can do a whole podcast on creating weaponry to they look the way they do because they serve a certain purpose, not just cause it's cool.
Autumm (50m 37s): So
Carla (50m 38s): If you have a podcast on creating weaponry and all that kind of stuff, girl, I will talk your ear off.
Autumm (50m 45s): Well, maybe we'll have to think about doing this a follow-up on something like that. Cause that would be,
Carla (50m 51s): That would be great.
Autumm (50m 52s): We could blast. Well, I, and I'm so excited to know, dragons are in your fight, right. Book, because you just hooked me. That's like, we could just, we could make your check-ins right. Oh
Carla (51m 4s): Right. I have a fighting robots, dragons, robots, aliens, and Beasties. When I got the contract with writer's digest, they said, can two things, can you add 25,000 words? And can you add a chapter on fighting aliens? And I'm like, can I write a chapter on fighting aliens? That can be my 25,000 words right there. So yes, if you are fighting mythical creatures, if you have special circumstances, even I talk about, you know, battling telekinesis and all that kind of stuff. So there's a lot. Yeah. There's a lot of really groovy stuff in there.
Autumm (51m 35s): Yeah. That sounds like, I think just about every listener's dream come true is being offered a book contract to say, can you write about fighting aliens or dragons?
Carla (51m 46s): And you let your nerd show, oh, I can. So let my nerd shows like, yeah, what star Trek pajamas do you want me to wear while I ride it? Cause I have,
Autumm (51m 55s): Yeah. Brilliant. Oh, thank you so much. And you know, we may have to, we'll have to give listeners, do you want to follow up, you know, let us know and we will maybe Carla back on that would be brilliant. So not everyone know. I will obviously have tons of things in the show notes, but let people know where to find you. Okay.
Carla (52m 17s): The quickest way to find me is FightWrite.net. F I G H T W R I T E.net, if you mistake and do F I G H T R I G H T, you're still going to get there. I own them. It will lead you to the blog and the index. Just go to the index and peruse it. I'm trying to make it very search engine optimized so that you can really find keywords quick. And you can also buy my book directly from there. FightWrite. If I G H W R it's right here. It's right there on the back fight. Right? If I G yeah. How to write believable fight scenes with writers digest. Look me up on the Instagram hashtag fightwrite?
Carla (52m 58s): Carla dot C dot hope because every now and then I'll put out a call on my story on, Hey, let me answer some questions for you. And I'll go, IGTV, I do have a YouTube channel that I have grossly abandoned, but I will get back to it. I just have too much going on. So that's the best way to find me. I have a contact form in the blog and, and on my website. And I, I literally answer questions, people. So send them my way. That's how I know what to write about on the blog. You know, I can write about what I think is interesting or I can yeah. Or I can write about what readers actually, or writers want me to know the answer for them. So feel free to reach out anytime.
Autumm (53m 33s): That was good. And if you go to your website, take a look at your about section, which is hilarious on your wife's. I'm just going to leave that hook there to make people go and read your about section. It's adorable.
Carla (53m 47s): You know, somebody called somebody called me and they said, I found your bio on a writer's blog. This is like six years ago. And I'm like, what are you talking about? And they were saying how to write a funny bio. And they had used my bio. I'm like, my bio is real. It's not funny. So get over yourselves, read the bio. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it also tells what all my fight experience is,
Autumm (54m 10s): Which is definitely you have a resume there alone of what you're finding experiences. It is brilliant. Oh my gosh. Next time I'm in Texas. I am definitely stopping by. It would be way too much fun.
Carla (54m 22s): Absolutely. Absolutely. For
Autumm (54m 24s): A road trip. Cool. So come back next week for Monday where it'll be another one of our famous top 10 worst lists with Yesper and I they're awesome. There's so much fun.
Narrator (54m 42s): You like what you just heard? There's a few things you can do to support the am writing fantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going, stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Sure, you can target ads by keywords, age, and gender... but have you ever thought about what all that means? Not every generation is the same or will respond to the same tactics!
In this week's episode, we take a look at the different trends of Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z. Where do they hang out online? What are their spending habits? What key phrases will get them to buy your book... or cause them to run away in disgust? You might be surprised at which generation is the most ready to buy your book, what it takes to actually hook Gen X... or why KU might be the best fit if you write YA!
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (1s): You're listening to the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need an literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I am Jesper
Autumn (32s): and I'm Autumn.
Jesper (35s): This is episode 143 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. And this is a bit of a different topic that I actually haven't seen covered anywhere else. And Autumn, you wrote this a really interesting block series for our patron supporters. So perhaps I can just hand it over to you to share what we're talking about here today.
Autumn (60s): So you want me to do all the work again? I see how it is. Well,
Jesper (1m 6s): I prefer it that way.
Autumn (1m 8s): Well, you've been busy, so that's fair enough. But yeah, I don't even, honestly, I don't even know where this idea came from, but there was at some point I was like, what would it be interesting to look at marketing book marketing by generation? Like, is it different to market, to boomers? Should you be marketing your books to boomers? Cause you know, when you do your Facebook ads, it almost, almost all the trainings, like say two 60 and under, well, why are boomers not buying books on Facebook? Are they not on Facebook? So I'm always curious. And you know, I like to question the status quo and see, well, why does it work this way? So I wrote a series of four Patreon posts looking at marketing to boomers, marketing to gen X, go gen X marketing to millennials and gen Z.
Autumn (1m 57s): So I was actually really interesting and it did influence all of my thoughts on marketing. So it'll be really fun to dig into that today,
Jesper (2m 6s): For sure. It should be a quite interesting and yeah, maybe we'll learn some stuff that we need to think about here.
Autumn (2m 16s): No, I, I, I have to admit that it made me even rethink some of the stuff I'm doing my entrepreneurial sphere in my own life. And I think there is one generation that is like the ideal of who you should be marketing to. And I'm like, oh, I want to try this. So we'll have to get there.
Jesper (2m 38s): Wow. Nice. Yes.
Autumn (2m 41s): So anyway, how are things for you over in Denmark?
Jesper (2m 47s): Well, as you said, pretty busy, I would say. And we also really still struggling with the potty who selling the house that we put in an offer for still
Autumn (2m 60s): No definite there.
Jesper (3m 4s): Well, we are pretty far from each other when it comes to the price at the moment, we probably have a gap like 45, 50,000 us dollars between us at the moment, which is quite a lot. And if I'm honest, I'm not really sure that we are going to be able to agree. Yeah, we did increase our offer with around 17,000 us dollars, but because the house needs a new roof, which will be very expensive to fix. Like I, like I mentioned in a podcast episode, a couple of weeks back, we have more or less offered now as much as we're willing to offer.
Jesper (3m 51s): And if we offer more, we basically risk losing too much money if we won one day, want to sell the house again. So I think with the increased offer, we made, honestly, we're probably, if we want to sell the house again, we're probably going to lose around 50,000 us dollars the day we sell the house. And I don't like that, of course, but it's sort of within F acceptable acceptable range. I mean, we can live with that, but it cannot be any more than that. Right. And, and still, if I didn't look at that, then the selling party still needed to drop their price around 45,000 us dollars to meet us, which I don't think that'll happen to be honest,
Autumn (4m 37s): Too bad. Cause I know you guys liked that one, so that's really unfortunate. Maybe they'll change their mind. You know, you're going, we're going into winter. And most people, most houses don't sell in winter. I know in the United States. So I can't imagine that they're selling like hotcakes in Denmark. So maybe they'll rethink that.
Jesper (4m 57s): Yeah, usually, usually there's no problem selling houses in the winter here in Denmark that does, it goes year round. But I did talk to the real estate agent today and you know that the selling parties real estate agent, because she called me to sort of ask how things were going and what we were thinking. And I was sort of explaining to her like, you know, you're asking way too much money. And the fact that you had to put in a new roof, you need to account for that in the price, which you're not doing. And then I also told her, you know, find if he doesn't want to drop the price, but at the end of the day, the next buying party, if it's not going to be us, but the next party will have the same problem as we have now.
Jesper (5m 40s): So you're not going to sell the house. If you keep insisting on chatting this much for it, because other people will also figure out that, okay, we need to put in a new roof, that's very expensive. We want a price reduction because of it. So you're going to end up in the same place next time. And he's been, they've had it for sale for about six months now. Right. So it's also about time that you start questioning. Maybe your price is too high after six months and you still haven't sold it. Yes.
Autumn (6m 8s): Especially in the current.
Jesper (6m 13s): Yeah. W w we'll see how it goes. But honestly, I, I don't know. Yeah. So we will, we've submitted the, a slight increase in our offer. And then also said in the email that this is our last offer. So we're not gonna increase the price any more than this. So either you take it off or that's
Autumn (6m 31s): It, well, I'll keep my fingers crossed. We'll see what they say.
Jesper (6m 35s): Yeah. I think it'll be a no, but, but maybe who knows, maybe they changed their mind in, in four or five months when they still haven't sold it. And maybe they'll come back and say, okay, are you still interested? Who knows? You know,
Autumn (6m 46s): Maybe you'll find the perfect house coming up. I know you guys are so busy, so it's hard to look for houses at the same time, but you never know. You might find something else you like even more.
Jesper (6m 58s): Yeah. Yeah. Who knows, but you're also trying to work out what to do and what not. So I know you are busy as well. Autumn.
Autumn (7m 4s): Yeah. Yeah. Just a, I think it's so funny because we were just joking. I mean, it looks like I'm in the middle. It's like midnight here that we're somehow on the same continent, but it's only three in the afternoon and it is just like gray and raining. We got the fall rains coming into Vermont. But yeah, our housing where we're kind of wanting to leave here around November, you know, my husband spent all summer working in Maine. He's got some good job offers up that way. So we're kind of up in the air trying to look around too. But the housing market, the rental apartment market and the U S is just insane. So we're like, well, you can want to change something, but sometimes it's not as easy as you expected. So I don't know why we're going to end up doing where we'll end up being.
Autumn (7m 47s): But I know the next, I know the upcoming podcast will be slightly out of order, but I am going to go see my parents and that'll be fun. So I know one of our episodes we'll be recording soon. I'll have a whole different backdrop and maybe some overhead lighting. I won't look like I'm coming from like,
Jesper (8m 6s): Just for a change
Autumn (8m 7s): For a change just to, you know, make things exciting and keep my life exciting. It'll be good.
Jesper (8m 13s): Oh yeah. Sounds like a good idea. Okay. Let's move on here
Narrator (8m 19s): A week on the internet with the Am Writing Fantasy podcast.
Jesper (8m 25s): So the most important thing first here, Autumn. Okay. Are you ready? Oh, I'm going to spring something on you.
Autumn (8m 34s): I'm taking a deep breath. Okay. I'm ready.
Jesper (8m 39s): So one of the YouTube comments on episode 141, that was the one where we went head to head trying to come up with the worst superpowers ever. But one of the comments was from Zayed and he actually declared a winner. Did you notice that?
Autumn (8m 54s): I think I did...
Jesper (8m 56s): See that one because it made me rather happy. You want to guess who he thought was the winner or him,
Autumn (9m 5s): If it's the same post well, no, that's right. I saw a Facebook comment, not a YouTube one. Shoot. So you better not tell me he thought you were the winner.
Jesper (9m 15s): Of course. Otherwise. Why would I bring it up? Otherwise I would just have ignored it
Autumn (9m 22s): Really? I swear on Facebook he said I won
Jesper (9m 27s): No, no, no. He actually said, he actually said, quote, I'm a practicing Christian. And I got to say, I'm confused about Bible Man. I think yes. But wins on that one alone.
Autumn (9m 41s): I don't think so. You had, it was a pretty pathetic list. I have to say that you had, I don't know if it's the worst though.
Jesper (9m 49s): Well, that was the point of it. It was supposed to be pathetic.
Autumn (9m 54s): It was pathetic, but I wouldn't say it was worse, but the dog had weld, whatever that one was, dog welder. I just put the heck arm fall off point. Just know, I can't believe someone even came up with those as like characters ever much less actually wrote a comic where they're included. I mean really, really stretching, cutting the risk guys. There were some really good writers out there. They'll help you a lot.
Jesper (10m 31s): Yeah. Yeah. So I thought that was an important YouTube comment into, and that's worth mentioning of course, here on the podcast as well, I
Autumn (10m 41s): Think was
Jesper (10m 42s): For, no, thank you. Say it for, for being so smart about your choices on who should win. I think that it was a good choice. I would just say that.
Autumn (10m 55s): I think you guys have a deal going. I don't believe that one.
Jesper (11m 1s): Okay. But something else I wanted to mention was a post I did for our Patrion supporters, because I actually wrote about whether or not Kindle unlimited is good for fantasy authors. So if people want to check out the details of that post, I can, of course join over on Patrion. There's a link in the show notes, but I thought it interesting how in the post that all the top 100 fantasy books in the top 100 chart in, on Amazon, all of them are available through Kindle unlimited. That
Autumn (11m 40s): Is pretty impressive.
Jesper (11m 43s): What do you think about that? Every single one on the top 100 chart is in Kindle unlimited
Autumn (11m 48s): Pretty impressive. I think that is a high stat showing whether or not it's for fantasy. I would have to admit.
Jesper (11m 57s): Yeah. Yeah. The post I wrote was based on an article written by a written word media and it's based on some research as well, which I always like when I, she stuff that is based on research rather than on opinions. So, so I think that was a very interesting, and in fact, we have recently enrolled some of our books in Kindle unlimited as well. And I have to say, I'm not very happy about the exclusivity demand for Kindle unlimited or from Amazon there, but we do want to see how it affects sales. So yeah.
Autumn (12m 34s): Yeah. I, you know, I'm always up for testing, but it is interesting that, you know, you brought up your path, Patreon posts on Kindle unlimited and then today's podcast is based off of four posts and Patreon. So in if I want to, yeah. If you want to hear more about read those posts, which are in depth and have a lot of market research and links to other sources. Yeah. That's on Patreon. If you want to join. And really, if you were inspired by this episode today, and once you check it out and really get into the links and the stats, that's waiting for you on there for just a dollar a month.
Jesper (13m 9s): Indeed. Yeah. And also of course, if, if the, if you, dear listeners should be interested in knowing sort of, if we got any results from placing our books in Kindle unlimited, then do let us know. And I dunno, maybe we can dedicate like a future podcast episode to that topic or something. But yeah, if that interests you, then let us know. Sounds good.
Narrator (13m 33s): And onto today's topic.
Jesper (13m 37s): So we have some different generations to cover here today. We have boomers, gen X, millennials, and gen C. So I don't know, do we just want to start with the boomers and then sort of work down the list of these generations? Or how do you want to do it on them?
Autumn (13m 55s): I, that makes sense. Or I guess maybe at times we can compare and contrast, but I think as boomers are a great place to start because they were, it was not the, what I expected was the result of what came up with boomers. It was kind of fun to get a different perspective on who the boomer generation is, especially with marketing and fantasy book marketing.
Jesper (14m 21s): Yeah. So boomers are born between 1946 and 1964. So those are the people we are talking about. So this also means that they are an older generation.
Autumn (14m 32s): They are they're my, my parents' generation though. Some people have, you know, there are still a few people alive who are known as the silent generation, which is older than boomers, but I left them off our little marketing analysis. We were letting them be, let them be, but they're still readers, but the boomers, they're the, I said, if you're going onto Facebook and you were choosing your targeting audience on your Shane saying 60 and under, you're totally leaving out the boomers. The boomers are the ones who are actually 60 and older. So they're an older generation and you might be surprised. Cause I think the perception is that they're not online. Maybe they do a lot of research, but there's some interesting stats about where they hang out, how often they buy and what it takes them to actually buy something, which I didn't expect.
Jesper (15m 24s): Yeah. And also worth pointing out. Like you said, in the article that the boomers hold almost 50% of the total wealth in the us. So yeah. They have money. These people,
Autumn (15m 38s): Yes. There's 72 million boomers still alive. This was a massive generation there and they're called boomers. It's from the baby boom that happened post world war II. So there was a huge amount of children born, still a large base of the population, 72 million. The only one that is larger than this as gen of millennials are also really large generation. So lots of people, they hold around 50% of the U S well, that's a lot of money. And I guess the question is, well, you know, do they read fantasy? Do they buy books online? Those are really the big questions of if they're worth marketing to.
Autumn (16m 20s): And what I started to think about it, I mean, this is the generation that the first, when their Lord of the rings was published, these were the kids reading them, this teenagers, they were reading token. I would love that. Can you imagine being alive and Tolkien was writing and producing his books. That would be so cool. But they were alive with Isaac Asimov, if you like. Saifai so a lot of the clot, what we consider now, classic, they were the original fans. They were my parents who, you know, took me to see star wars and were fine with it and thought it was so cool. So they saw the moon landing. They are not anti fantasy. So I I've definitely heard that of some people saying, well, they don't read fantasy kidding.
Autumn (17m 3s): They may talk in popular. They love fantasy. They just didn't like Dungeons and dragons. Well, that's another story.
Jesper (17m 12s): Yeah, that's true. But the one thing that I'm thinking about, at least I, well, I don't have like a statistical research of it, but at least if I compare to my own parents, for example, I'm reading on the Kindle, for example, that took some convincing. You know, I, I don't know. I mean, of course my parents might not be like the stereotypical, you know, version of, of the boom was meaning that, that this is how all the boomers are not, I'm not saying that at all, but I could speculate, at least that might prefer to have the book in their hands, like paperbacks or hot packs and stuff like that, that I could speculate that.
Autumn (17m 56s): I think it would be not disingenuous to say that, that if you want to market to boomers, it would probably be a good idea to make sure you have a paperback version, but they have taken, unlike the perception they have taken to computers and the internet age actually extremely well. A lot of them are like, oh, Facebook is the number one place. If you want to go market to boomers, just go to Facebook. That's where they are. But it was the stats on them. I mean, it was 70% of like boomers are online or on a computer. And of those 70%, like 90% of them are on Facebook. So they're online and what my favorite thing about them.
Autumn (18m 36s): So they have their huge population base. So if you want to say, even 10% of them like fantasy and you know, or maybe 10% of will read on a Kindle, that's still a huge number of people. They have a ton of wealth they're retired. So they, they might work part-time but they don't need to work because they already have money and they're in retirement. So they have time to read which show that's fantastic. And they are, tend to be impulsive buyers and they're very brand centric. So if you say something to them that they like, they will immediately go and buy because they've got the money. They're not worried. They just learn what they don't have is time. So they want to make sure, you know, they have, they enjoy their lives.
Autumn (19m 20s): They're not going to sit there and him and hall, if they think they're going to like a book, they'll go and buy the book. And then if they like you, they love brands. So they will stay with you and be a loyal follower. I mean, they sound like the perfect person to try to sell your book to, you might want to tailor your ads though, specifically to them, they're going to want different wording. And remember they were alive when token was writing. So you don't want to say, hi, as good as a token. Well, you know, you better, gosh, darn be as good as token. Cause they know who that is. And they were reading it before you were born. So make your ads honest, but make it something where they're like, oh my goodness, I want to go and try this out.
Autumn (20m 4s): And they click and they may very well just going by like that.
Jesper (20m 9s): Yeah. Yeah. I think you're right. It might be sometimes a bit harder to get them to read the books, but yeah, the various debt, but I was a bit surprised in your post-test worlds that your post pointed out that a lot of them is actually using YouTube as well. That w I mean, not, not creating videos, but watching YouTube. I mean, that actually surprised me a bit because that's not normally what I would think about this generation that they would be watching YouTube. Yeah.
Autumn (20m 38s): And we'll see that across all of them. That YouTube is a really big player often next to Facebook, or a little bit better than Facebook. So YouTube, if you can find a way that taps into that market that is engaging. And I think that's the tough thing with selling books is finding a way of selling your books on YouTube. I don't think anyone has hit the perfect formula for that yet, but at the very least you can, if you can try out some videos, you could try them on Facebook and YouTube and see if you can kind of get people hooked in, try your book trailers, just make sure they're really, really good and really engaging and not boring.
Jesper (21m 17s): Yeah. I would not spend time on that to be honest. But yeah. Well we had our little spell with YouTube already. Autumn. So yeah, we gave up on that quite a long time ago.
Autumn (21m 30s): I don't, as I said, I don't think anyone, there's some people who do very well on YouTube and it takes a ton of work, more work than I think most people appreciate. And I still don't think when it comes to selling actual books, like being there as an author, not trying to sell a service, I don't think anyone has cracked that nut. So Hey, you could be the first one. Good luck.
Jesper (21m 51s): Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, okay. Should we move on to gen X? Yeah. These people are born between 1965 and 1979. So this,
Autumn (22m 9s): Yes, this is us. This is ours. And it's even includes my husband. If you count as you, the years you gave also includes something called they call them Zen, not millennials zinnias, which is starts with an X because they are the, a group that's, they're not really millennials. They're not really gen X. They're kind of squished in between. They call them a micro-generation, but they tend to go both ways. It can be a little bit more millennial. They can be a little more or gen X. And that's my husband. He's a little younger than me. There are some differences, but not much. But what is neat about these two generations or this generation micro-generation is we are the first ones who have an analog childhood.
Autumn (22m 51s): We had a childhood of books and playing outside and hearing about computers in the basement of giant colleges, you know, but never seeing one until we hit our teenage years. So our adulthood has been taken over by the internet and the digital age, but our childhood, we remember playing war and kick the can and running through hayfields. At least I do. It was much more, much more a hands-on and physical. And as I say, analog, and we're the last generation who has that memory of the time before computers, which is kind of Sky Net App or something.
Jesper (23m 28s): Yeah. Nobody, it's actually quite funny because as well, sometimes I've been, I've been talking to my sons about, you know, when we got the very first computer at home, when I was a kid or like teenage young teenager, we've got the very first computer. And I was trying to explain to them how it actually felt, you know, to get the first compete because they don't understand because computers has always been part of their life and they don't get the fact that once you sit down and for the first time ever, you use this kind of machine that has never existed before. And then I was showing them on YouTube. I found some old clips of what the games looked like back then.
Jesper (24m 9s): And they were looking at me like, are you crazy? I was like, but you don't understand. That was amazing back then. Yeah. Just some pixels moving on a screen was amazing.
Autumn (24m 21s): If you've been that the first time I did a, a game, that was, it was mushing. So multi-user shared hallucination. I did the college. And the fact that, you know, you could be on at 1:00 AM and you're talking to someone in New Zealand and all you had literally was texts on a screen. We didn't even have pixels for the, some of the sites I was on. And I was just like, oh my gosh, you're in Australia, New Zealand, you're in Asia. This is amazing. I can't, I still have an email that I found recently from my dad, one of the first ones on my account that somehow got saved. And it was like, I can't believe it was when I was studying abroad in Manchester, UK. And I was like, I can't believe you, you know, you asked me for this and I just sent it to you and you have it instantly.
Autumn (25m 2s): I mean, mail was two weeks long and I could chat with my dad, like, and get information, something I needed from him like that. Well, as long as it took the attachment to upload and download, which is like still an eternity compared to today, but back then 10 minutes for an attachment, you're like, cut, thank you so much. You just saved my life. It was amazing. And I still have one of those original emails and it's just cool. It's cool to think back saying this was huge, huge, huge, huge.
Jesper (25m 31s): Yeah, it is. Yeah. And it's so difficult to explain to people who are not gen Xs, what that felt like, but, but it, I think it's
Autumn (25m 40s): Pretty cool. It is. I am sure there is.
Jesper (25m 42s): And you also pointed out in your post how sorry I interrupted you
Autumn (25m 48s): And I'm sure there's listeners who are like, yeah, this is so cool. This thing. No.
Jesper (25m 53s): Yeah, yeah. And also you pointed out in your post to how during the teenage years of G annexes, we were influenced by dragon lands and dragons RPG and stuff. And I instantly thought, yes, that's right.
Autumn (26m 10s): Yes. That is, that came out usually most of our formative years. So if we're a fantasy fan, it might've started before dragon lands. For me, it started before dragon lands with Anne McCaffrey. But when it came out, it became this huge phenomenon, especially getting to play the role-playing game. Of course, on the side of that, our parents, we were going through the satanic panic, which I mentioned later in some of the other generations. But yeah, it was such a big donor that we, you know, we often hid the fact that we're into Dungeons and dragons from our parents. Lest we be have our games taken away or not be allowed to see your friends anymore, but it was sort of one of the first, I mean, token was big, but I think dragon lands really defines a lot of our generation and our love of fantasy and the type of fantasy.
Autumn (26m 57s): Maybe we still enjoy because it's changed a lot, but there's still a core of those stories that have the ELs, the dwarves that are still so much a derivative of token very closely.
Jesper (27m 10s): Yeah. And, and the whole thing about a, you know, like an adventure group, like in, in dragon lands, like there, they are a group that goes out together and all that stuff. Right. That's very trophy nowadays as well. And I also liked, which I also felt like hit home in your article was that we like to do research before we buy. So we are checking on the internet for reviews and, and you know, other competitors, other products and stuff like that, which I definitely recognize because I do that myself, whenever I need to buy something, I'm going to check reviews. I'm going to do some, a bit of internet research to see, you know, is there some, a better alternatives or is this really the best product and stuff like that?
Jesper (27m 52s): So, so I definitely recognize myself in, in that as well.
Autumn (27m 57s): Yes. I think that is a very funny trait. We weren't born into the internet age, but we helped shape it. And we certainly helped shape it as a marketing platform. So a lot of us that are entrepreneurs, we know our way in and out of the marketplace and in and out of running businesses online and we do our research, we will check out comparisons. We will look at competitors, we will check the reviews, we'll read the reviews. So we're not a spontaneous buyer. We are the one that when they say it takes at least seven to 11 times of seeing an ad before someone will go and look at your book, that's us. Yeah. We will not go buy your book just because you sell it on. Instagram will be like, yeah, that's nice. You don't hook us on the first bite.
Autumn (28m 38s): Not even close, we're going to check you out. We'll think about it. And compared to boomers. So was it a lot of more research and we are a smaller generation. We're not 72 million. We're like 68, I think. So there's less of us. And I can't remember what percentage of the wealth we have, but obviously boomers have almost half. And we have about half of what's left somewhere around 25%. So we're doing pretty
Jesper (29m 1s): Good. We're doing pretty
Autumn (29m 2s): Good. We were getting into our, you know, forties now and we're, we're okay. We're doing well. You know, our most famous, I think gen X-er is Elon Musks. So we, you know, some of us have done really well. None of the rest of us are working on that. We're definitely a generation of doing our research. We have some money, but we're pretty much, we've worked really hard to earn our money at this point. And we don't let it go as quickly. So you can get us with a coupon. We will launch, we will jump into an email marketing to get a coupon. That's fine. We know how email marketing works because we probably set it up ourselves. That's just how we, we know how it all works.
Autumn (29m 44s): So we'll sign up for something. We'll get on a list. And I thought it was funny. One of the biggest things about our generation is we'll stick with you. We like brands. We like people until they say something we don't like. And then it was like, you're gone. You have one chance to lose us. And you say something we find offensive, or we don't agree with like, you're gone unsubscribe. So we're the, also the unsubscribed generation,
Jesper (30m 7s): Right? Yeah. So I think in overall from a book selling perspective, this is where you're, you know, building up your reviews are really important. That's at least that's going to help to convince a gen X person to actually buy your book.
Autumn (30m 22s): Yes.
Jesper (30m 24s): Move on to millennials.
Autumn (30m 25s): Okay. Well, I want to wrap up one quick thing. So gen X is, are on Facebook, so you can still market to them. We're also on Instagram. And I agree if you're going to try to hook a gen X-er, you're probably gonna have to spend a lot more money than you would with a boomer and reviews. Being able to say other people have liked this, be very open with your reviews. That's how you're going to get them more interested than saying we're great. I write just like token and they're not going to buy that
Jesper (30m 53s): Molina. Millennial. Stan is born from 1981 to 1996. So these are the people who actually grew up fully in the internet age. And probably most of them probably don't even know what life before computers.
Autumn (31m 11s): No, if they have any interesting to me. Yeah. I can't imagine. So they have any recollection of life before computers. They will have memories of life before smartphones. So they might remember flip phones and cell phones. So that's kind of, you know, I can at least relate to that a little bit, but they grew up knowing computers, building computers, and they they're pretty snazzy and know their way around the marketing. What's surprised me is I thought, for sure, all the millennials, they get such a bad rap as being like the more self-centered generation. But at the same time, the oldest ones are in their forties. You know, they're taking their kids to college, they've grown up, but they are really still really good online.
Autumn (31m 56s): And I thought they'd all be off of Facebook, but there's still a majority of them on Facebook. And after that Instagram, I mean, those are the two big ones of where you can find still millennials somehow. I don't know how Facebook keeps everyone, but they do.
Jesper (32m 12s): Yeah, they do. Yeah. But also things like Twitter and Twitter and tick-tock and that kind of place, they also hanging out.
Autumn (32m 19s): Yeah. They're sick talk is especially coming up, but there are, yeah, there are a little more broad spectrum. So it's harder to find out exactly like in what was interesting. It doesn't that study this statistic. I was quoting didn't show if they were on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter, which most likely they are, but there could be some orders. Like, are you here or here or here? I mean, this is one of the ones. If you're marketing to them, you're going to have to market to our broad base. Cause I'm not quite sure where they are and how often they're seeing you.
Jesper (32m 53s): Yeah. And again, the majority is watching YouTube here. Amazing. Again, I'm not so sure about this. I mean, it's interesting of course, to know that the majority is watching YouTube, but I don't think that they are watching YouTube from a book perspective. So they're just using it as it as entertainment. So there's also means that I I'm not, I don't think that you want you to conclude out of this, that you should try to sell books on YouTube to these people. That's not the point here. No.
Autumn (33m 21s): Oh, I think you'll good luck with that. If you can find a way, but yeah. I think they're pretty much on YouTube. Like you said, for entertainment, maybe tutorials. I mean, my that's my favorite use of YouTube. I must be so boring, but I'm on it to watch tutorials on how to, to stuff. Yeah. I wouldn't do it yourself or that's how it works.
Jesper (33m 41s): Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and also for the millennials, you know, they have a very, very large population-based there even lots of than the boomers, but as you pointed out in your article as well, they, on the other hand, they don't have that much cash compared to our gen Xs. We have like five, five times the wealth of the millennials and they are many more than we are. So I think money wise, they usually operate with a fairly limited budget. Yes.
Autumn (34m 16s): I agree. There tend to be educated. And I think gen Z are even going to be more educated than millennials, but millennials tend to be educated. Their careers really haven't taken off, even though, I mean, they can be as old as 40, but they're still struggling. We'll get to the statistic when we talk to gen Z, but gen Z and millennials combined, combined, which has a huge amount of population. That's 68 million plus like 72 million somewhere in there. They only have 6% of the U S wealth 6%. So if you're a marketing to anyone who is 40 and younger, we're talking about someone who has only 6% of the U S wealth. They're going to be inheriting quite a lot from baby boomer parents.
Autumn (34m 57s): I think it was like 68 trillion. But again, the wealthiest are going to inherit. The most, most people are going to just inherit, maybe a nice modest sum. And then you take out the inheritance tax, which is like 50%. They're not going to be made wealthy overnight. And that was 68 trillion by 2030. So they still have some ears and that's a good a statistic. So that's going to be up and down. It's going to be some sooner. Some later may remind me later. So they're not a very wealthy generation. If you're marketing to them, this is the one you want to be trying free giveaways. They will sign up for free giveaways and free coupons. And again, these are people who have grown up with the internet.
Autumn (35m 37s): They have probably started their own businesses in high school. They know how it works. They know what happens when they sign up. Most often they've done it probably a million times and they, but they will do it. They will sign up to check out something and to give a sample, they'll go for the free sample. It might be the best way to hook them. However, they might not be able to afford to go buy all your books right away. They might have the budget for them. They might be the ones on Kindle unlimited. That's going to be the best deal for them because they don't have a ton of money. You want to keep these aspects in mind that, you know, they're the ones who are looking for things. But the nice thing is, is since I grew up in the internet age and because they have a limited amount of money, they're also really good at research.
Autumn (36m 19s): They're really into reading reviews. And they're huge at social media, leaving reviews and telling people if they loved or hated you. So these are the influencer generation. They're the ones who, if they like you, they're going to show the unboxing. They're going to give you reviews. They're going to give you a huge shout out. However, they are definitely not brand second shirt. They are quality centric. So they might stick to you for a while. But if they find something better, they're going to move to something better. So you might not be able to hold on to these as tightly, as you might a boomer who was going to basically keep you in cherished for the last breath.
Jesper (37m 3s): Yeah. And of course the good news is that the eBooks, at least, I mean, these people are very used to the, you know, technology and so on. So eBooks is not a problem. And then the other part of it is of course as well that they might not have a lot of wealth, but eBooks are like a couple of bucks. So for most of them, they, I think they should be able to afford a couple of bucks for an ebook. Otherwise they have a lot of problems, but not to say that some don't of course, but, but I think there's quite a big, I mean, because they aren't, there are so many of these that a lot of them will have the money to buy a three, four, $5 ebook. So yeah, it's good to know of course, to be mindful that they are operating on a limited budget.
Jesper (37m 48s): And like you just said, autumn, this, just to me, that doesn't mean so much about them not being able to afford the books. I think it more speaks to the fact that you have to write really good books too, to keep these people reading. Otherwise they they'll just not buy any more from you. Then they'll go jump on onto another author or something instead, and try to read some other books. But because they might, you might be able to hook them to buy one book, but they're not going to continue reading the series unless they really find it really good. Yeah. So for me, I think that's the important part. Yeah.
Autumn (38m 21s): Yeah. I agree. And I'm though, I do, I have met a, quite a few that have mentioned that, you know, they have a book budget, you know, they can only, they, everything is budgeted in their life because they only have so much money and you know, the good ones don't go over, but that's why things like Kindle unlimited are such good deals and they're going for the deals. So if there's a way, if they love reading and they want to be able to read as many books as possible in a month, they're going to read Kindle unlimited. And that's why I think you see Kindle unlimited being such a huge, you know, inducement, why so many people are a part of it because it's a good deal. If you're a serial reader and you only have like 4% of the entire U S wealth. Yeah, I do it. Not a problem.
Jesper (38m 60s): Yeah. Okay. So Jen C born between 1997 and two, 2012. So that basically makes them between six years old and 24 at this point in time, they are so there's a lot of them, nearly 68 million people in the U S here.
Autumn (39m 21s): So this is another big generation, almost the same as a gen X. So this is like our, our shadow copy gen Z and admittedly they're young. So there's not a ton of market research on them yet, but it's up and coming. They're starting to make their waves known in the world. But again, combined gen Z combined with gen with millennials, only 6% of the U S well, so tiny amount. So they're even less. They have even less than millennials because they're just getting into the workforce. If they finish their education, they almost, all of them have at least one parent that graduated from college and a lot of them are going on to do master's program. They're going to be one of the highest educated generations.
Autumn (40m 2s): And so because of that, a lot of them are not in the workforce or working full time. So they have even less money going around. They have also never known a world without smartphones, and that's just terrible by amazing, amazing. They are, you know, they're going to, the next generation is going to come with USB plugs installed. I swear. They just know their way around. Exactly. So they're there. The biggest thing I think in the reason I included them, even though they're not much marketing research is that if you are targeting Y a young adult readers, you're targeting gen Z. So go and look and see what they're doing.
Autumn (40m 43s): Of course, I thought it was so funny when I looked at why stats 50% of why readers are adults they're older than 24. So that's, you know, gen X of even boomers, millennials, they're all reading. Why are they just doing a secretly? But technically gen Z is your target audience. If you're Yia. So you should know where they are, what they're doing, how they buy books. This is really important for you to take a look at it and see where they're hanging out, which again is pretty much all over from Tik TOK to F to Facebook, to YouTube, to Snapchat. Tick-tock rising pretty quickly.
Jesper (41m 26s): Yeah. I think for these people, you know, think of somebody who's grown up with computers, they grown up with smartphones, they grown up with apps. So it's really important if you want to engage with these people online, which is like the main place where you should be engaging with them, all the, like, you know, nice images, nice user interfaces, eh, corresponding with them through commons and in chats and you know, the whole community building thing. That's the key here. So yeah, to me, like for, for somebody, a, a gen X person, I already feel like, oh, this sounds stressful.
Jesper (42m 9s): All the, all the million interactions in commenting on all these different social media platforms. I don't know. It's not my thing to be honest. But I think for these people, for the GNCs, it's important for them, this, this is how they, to a last degree, that's how they view relationships. A lot of their relationships are online. So it's, it's yeah. For, for, for somebody from a gen X, this is just like a different planet kind of thing.
Autumn (42m 41s): I mean, they consider their life online almost equal to their physical life. It is about equally important, 50 50, which yeah. As a gen X or having remembered like life offline that I still prefer, you know, to be offline quite a lot. We're the, we're the generation that's like, I'm digging a social media break. I mean, I think gen Z is like, that's half of my life. I would never go offline, but they want the fine touch. They want the, they want community. If you want to get gen Z ears into loving your WIA books, you have to build community. You have to have interaction and beautiful photos and you have to have video. They like video. So they want to see all of these things and you've got to be chatting with them and you've got to be dynamic.
Autumn (43m 21s): And you've got to also be really aware. And this is what I've been reading some way books. And the change is so non they're, non token, not at all. If you want to go read like the shadow and bone, the Grisha series of Krisha verse, it's so different from what I was reading as a teenager, there's very few elves, very few dwarves, very few overs. It's almost all humans and different races and their interactions. And, you know, they'll have issues of transgender and homosexuality. It's all there and it's very open. And those are the concerns rather than, you know, a quest group it's totally different. And it's kind of, to me, it was really a refreshing to read.
Autumn (44m 3s): It was very exciting to read very different, but it is a completely different audience. And it's interesting. You got to go in and hang out with them and see what they're doing and be on Tik TOK and be very engaged and fun and have that community, and also have the coupons and the free books and Canon limited, because that is definitely how you're going to be able to hook them. At least have one series in Kindle unlimited. If you're doing WIA, because they're in school, they don't got much money. Don't make them pay for everything. They're probably getting it as a Christmas present from their parents.
Jesper (44m 38s): It sounds like way too much work on them. I'm already tired.
Autumn (44m 42s): And you have kids, your kids are technically gen Z or
Jesper (44m 48s): Yeah, but I, yeah, that part is fine. But I marketing to these people sounds like way too much.
Autumn (44m 55s): Yeah. I probably is. But just have your train, your kids to do it. You'll, there'll be naturals. That's why you have kids, maybe your marketing managers. True.
Jesper (45m 6s): Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I was talking to my oldest son because he's about to, he wants to start his own YouTube channel. He wants to do like a, well, like a true GNC, I guess. Right. So he wants to build a YouTube channel and he wants to, you know, do like those gaming videos and stuff like that. And then I was trying, I w I was trying to be like the good dad who has been, you know, I've been doing the YouTube thing for us as well and all that stuff. So I was, I started talking about something because we were talking about the intro and outro music thing that you put on videos and stuff like that. And I was sort of saying to him, well, just be mindful that you know, that some of that is copyrighted.
Jesper (45m 49s): You can't just take some music for wherever. And he was like, yeah, yeah. I know all of that as you do. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I also know where to find it. Okay. So he knows all of it. I bet you, like, in, in four months, you'll will know more about YouTube than I ever knew.
Autumn (46m 6s): We're going to be hiring him as our social media manager. Just watch the,
Jesper (46m 11s): Yes. They just, yeah. They notice stuff. They do know this stuff. Okay. But what can we sort of conclude out of all this order,
Autumn (46m 19s): That if you're a gen X-er and marketing to G and you're not doing Y a and marketing to gen Z and millennial sounds too much market to boomers, try it. I would S I would love to know if anyone is specifically choosing like a Facebook audience saying, you know, 50 and older, and, you know, just finding the right words, because again, they will actually spend money. They will go buy your books. Possibly. Like I said, you should have paper books available, but they will read online. As lot of them have adapted to like the Kindle paper, whites and stuff that feel more like a book that look more like a book. I want to know if anyone's doing that because after reading this, I'm like, they have money. They're impulsive, they're brand centric.
Autumn (46m 60s): They sound like they have, they're retired. They have time to read. They sound like the gift of book marketing right there. Go for boomers. I want to know if anyone else is because it's totally rethought. I'm like, I now see why, if you're marketing to gen X, you're going to be marketing forever to try to get them to get, you know, give you a try. They'll give you a try, but they're, you know, they're booked, they're tired. They've got kids, they do their research. They're going to be so hard sell to, and the rust, you know, they don't have much money. These are not a huge 6% of the wealth they're going to be. It's going to take some time to get gen Z and millennials to want to spend money on you, unless you've got a really good deal.
Autumn (47m 43s): But boomers, you know, 50% of the U S wealth, lots of free time, impulsive shoppers. Oh, I love you. I have to admit in some of my best emails, I put that in the post, some of the best emails I've ever gotten and the lengthiest emails, because boomers will correspond with you and they will stick with you. My biggest fans have all been boomers, but it took until I wrote that article to valet, oh, this is why they care. And they want to get to know you and they will stay with you and they will love you. And maybe they're not going to give you as big as a shout-out as a millennial or a gen Z, because they're going to spread you all over the internet.
Autumn (48m 23s): They're going to love you in a really compassionate way. So I want to know if anyone's marketing to boomers. Cause I think it's totally a way to go.
Jesper (48m 32s): Yeah. So let us know. And hopefully you got a bit of a inspiration for, you know, well, at least on the Facebook ads, you can target different age brackets. So at least now, you know, for your Facebook ads, at least some things to consider and think about on Amazon ads, obviously there's no way to select certain age groups and so on. So there you, yeah, it doesn't help much, but yeah, but at least with the Facebook ads, I think this is very useful.
Autumn (49m 5s): Yes. And in the posts on patron, I actually went into maybe some suggested images because each generation has different traits of the type of images that call to them. So again, come, go check out the post on Patriana. If you're a member or join for a dollar a month, then go check it out and see what the suggestions are.
Jesper (49m 24s): Okay, good. So next Monday, autumn has a very special interview lined up for you. It's about how to write fight scenes. And for us fantasy authors that is highly relevant.
Narrator (49m 36s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the and writing fantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy for as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
The Internet is filled with advice for how to become a better writer. Some are good, others not so much.
In this episode of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, Autumn and Jesper share the best of them and try their hardest to agree on one winning tip. It's not as easy as it might sound.
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (1s): You're listening to the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt, and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello. I'm Jesper.
Autumn (31s): And, I'm Autumn.
Jesper (34s): This is episode 142 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. And I've actually been looking forward to this conversation, Autumn.
Autumn (43s): Oh, really? This one kind of took me by surprise. I had to look at it this morning. I'm like, oh, I need to come up with some tips. So I did come up with a few and I'm now excited to, to talk about it. But at first I was like, geez, this is so broad. Where do we start?
Jesper (1m 3s): That was why I was looking forward to it because I was curious to see what you've come up with. And, and we're talking about the best thing to do every day to become a better writer. So this is going to be interesting.
Autumn (1m 16s): It will. I think I came up with some stuff that I'm like, yeah, that's a good tip. So I can't wait to find out what you came up with us. You always research, plan it a little bit more than I do.
Jesper (1m 31s): That doesn't necessarily make it better, but at least I try, I put in the effort at least.
Autumn (1m 36s): That's right. And it's not that I don't have the effort. I just, I, I intensify my effort into a shorter amount of time.
Jesper (1m 44s): Yeah. Like five minutes before we record.
Autumn (1m 47s): It wasn't that bad. It was just a few hours ago.
Jesper (1m 55s): Well, okay. So it's only a few hours ago that I did it, to be honest. Okay. Hey, this'll be interesting. Yeah. How are you going to have something planned? Yes, we can plan. Yeah. So we'll see how that goes. Well, I'm doing okay. I w I was out doing my kayaking course again earlier this week I had to strain the muscle. Oh no. Well is one on my left side of my torso based somewhere. I, I don't, I don't know quite where it is, but it's like, when it happened, you know, I felt it right away. Something like happened in the muscles.
Jesper (2m 38s): Like, but then it didn't hurt too much. Then it was more like, it was just a smaller inconvenience, like, oh, it's okay. But then, you know, one night, once I got back home afterwards and I had taken a shower and I guess my muscles weren't in use anymore, then it started to become really sore. And then a Wednesday morning here, it was just like, oh my God, I slept bad all night. Because every time I turned, I woke up and it was the same last night. So it's starting to feel a bit better. Now I can move my arms around, like without hurting now. So it's, but it's still, if I do the wrong, like move, then I can still feel it.
Jesper (3m 18s): But I don't know. These past two days, I've actually taken some naps just to keep up with the last hours of sleep at night.
Autumn (3m 26s): Geez. That is pretty bad for you. That's what you're doing like a roller or was it just paddling?
Jesper (3m 33s): No, I think it was when, well, because it's, it's the cost of we're checking now. So we also practicing, falling into the water and getting back up on the kayak on purpose and stuff like that. And I think it was one of the times when I was getting back up, I think when I jumped up onto the kayak or something, I think that was when something happened. But yeah, I don't know. It's just a, I mean, it's funny because my wife has been teasing me because she started the kayaking like six months before me. And when she come back, when she came back from kayaking, she was all this like, really like tired. And, you know, you could, you could just see the workout on her, how tired she was.
Jesper (4m 18s): And, and then, and I was always like, well, is it really that hard because you don't get your, you know, you don't get your pulse up. You're not out of breath or anything. Right. And, and now she's just laughing at me all the time, because when I get back, I'm just like, oh, my muscles are so, because you're using all kinds of muscles that you don't normally use. And so I'm just so sore when I go, go back and really, really tired from spending a couple of hours out on the sea. So she, she, she, for some reason she finds it incredibly amusing. Now it's like I told you,
Autumn (4m 50s): You know, it comes back around, but I will say, I, you know, my mom always told me that there's something about sea air. That just makes you tired as well. So
Jesper (4m 59s): It does indeed.
Autumn (4m 60s): I will. I, you know, you can always bring that up, say it makes you tired. Hello. Imagine the shock of the cold water would, you know, kind of take a lot out of you too.
Jesper (5m 15s): Well, well you have, well, I don't know what the English words, but you have the gear on, you know, so it's not really cool. I don't know what it's called though. The wetsuit, I guess it's called a wetsuit, isn't it?
Autumn (5m 25s): Yeah.
Jesper (5m 25s): That's one of the times you have a wetsuit on. Okay. So it's not that cold. Really? Yeah. That's okay. That's cool. But, but it's more the workout of it and all that using muscles that I don't normally use. I run a lot of course, because I'm a referee, as people have probably heard me talk about million times before on this podcast. So running I'm very used to, and I'm very using used to using my leg muscles, but here you really use your upper body all the time, which I'm not used to do. So I can feel that. I bet.
Autumn (5m 58s): Yeah. I know. Even
Jesper (5m 58s): With my little bit of exercise program I've been doing, I, one day is like abs and legs and the next day is upper body. And you can feel, it takes two days to, to work out. I mean, not nearly as bad as the first week I started the first day. It did take me two or three days. I really filled it. But now that I'm in, like my second, yeah. Second week, almost the end of my second week doing it. It's rare when I have a day where I'm like, oh, but I did do something with my upper back arms. Cause again, you're not used to using some of those muscles and doing some weird down plank move and I'm like, that's not even possible. And yeah, it tends to be a little twin to the next day.
Jesper (6m 39s): Go figure. Especially as writers who just sits in front of a computer all the time
Autumn (6m 45s): Writer, graphic designer. Yeah. Website builder. I, I need my exercise program, my spare time online.
Jesper (6m 56s): But otherwise things are going okay on UN you had a storm coming or something, didn't you?
Autumn (7m 0s): Yeah. Well, we just had the remnants of hurricane Ida go through and it wasn't actually that bad up here, but yeah, some people died in New York and my parents in Pennsylvania, they had three days of rain and their basement started flooding. So it was bad. But what further west? I think of them. It, the whole town was flooded through, so it was pretty intense. But yeah, we have like, we've went from the eighties and like super high humidity. It was like 89. And like, it felt like the rainforest again, which we've had almost all of August. And then overnight, it blew out after a whip tail end of Ida. And it I've been wearing flat all it's it feels like September it is cool and Chile and I'm thrilled, but I was like, okay, we've gone from high humidity and really steamy, warm to, Hey, it's new England and we're in the fall.
Autumn (7m 55s): Just not ready for that. It's good. At least I've had my excitement this week is I've been preparing for Vermont's fantasy con, which is coming up October 2nd and third there's any other new England authors, fantasy authors or readers, which most of us are readers come to Burlington, October 2nd and third, I'm going to be there. I'm going to be on panels and talking. I think we're doing a lot of podcasts. I somehow signed myself up for everything, including organizing a paperback, give away. I don't know. I just, it's my nature. I get excited, but I've done all new swag. I just ordered new bookmarks for my two series and some new banners and a new tabletop display ordered all my books.
Autumn (8m 37s): So I have all this author stuff coming and I'm going to, I'll have to do some like unpacking boxes and videos because I am so excited to get author swag. It'll be great.
Narrator (8m 49s): Oh, a week on the internet with the M writing fantasy podcast.
Jesper (8m 55s): And we have also, apart from all that other stuff, you have ongoing there, autumn. And we also started a brand new initiative here. We decided for, for the podcast. And I don't know, maybe you want to explain what that is all about. Autumn.
Autumn (9m 8s): Again, you're not preparing me. This was originally my idea. So I think I can wing this one, but you did,
Jesper (9m 14s): You can manage.
Autumn (9m 15s): Alright. So I know this idea. I was reading some really good books this summer. So I'm like award-winning novels that were just, I wanted to talk about them with other authors, just pull them apart because that is the best way to learn. It's like I maybe I'm missing like those college courses, the ones that never actually happened to were actually fun where you could really look at a novel and pull out it's world building C. Why, why is this novel selling so well, why do readers love it? So I wanted to start a CRA authors critical reading group because critical reading, like really don't just reading a book and say, oh, that was good. And tossing it aside and reading the next one, but really asking questions and pulling it apart and looking at the point of views and the trends, the tropes, everything that's going on in it that makes us novel tick.
Autumn (10m 1s): And why it's really is captivating as it is doing that with other authors is a fantastic way to learn. And it's gone through a few different iterations as we try to pull this together. And you came up with the idea of somehow pulling it into the podcast. And I'm so excited about this.
Jesper (10m 21s): Yeah, I think after almost 150 podcast episodes, it was a time to it's time to shake things up a little. So what we decided to do was basically that once a month, we will pick a book that we are going to read. I'm going to explain the books for October, just in a second. And then we will read one of these books that gets picked, which is going to be picked by you, the audience in the am, writing phase fantasy Facebook group, and also for the patron supporters, you'll be able to vote once a month on which book we should pick. And then obviously it would be awesome if you want to read along. So you can read the book while we also reading the book, and then we will dedicate one podcast episode a month to basically do a bit of critical discussion around that book that Western chosen.
Jesper (11m 13s): And if you're a patron supported and you will be able to actually submit your views as well before the episode recording happens. So we will basically take your inputs on board as well, probably read maybe not all of it, but probably some of it aloud on the podcast and discuss your points of view as well. So that's sort of the idea and to kick things off, we already, by the time this podcast episode airs, we already did the voting. So for this month, you're too late, but if you're in the am writing a Facebook group, you will have seen it. Or if you're a patron supporter, you will, you will have seen it. And if you're not in the group, then get in there. So the next month, at least you will see the voting when it comes up, but we will be reading one of the following three books.
Jesper (12m 0s): It's either going to be the lies of Locke Lamorah by Scott Lynch. And that this book has over 5,500 reviews on Amazon, us with five dot five star ratings. So that's pretty damn good book, apparently
Autumn (12m 15s): World building, oh my gosh, the world building in that one.
Jesper (12m 19s): Yeah. Or if we are going to read the fifth season by NK Jemisin, and this is not only a Hugo award-winning fantasy novel, each book in the series has also been aboard water separately. So it has over 7,000 reviews on Amazon and afforded a five star rating. And that's the second option. And the last option is shadow and bone by Lee Baidu go, I guess that's how you say it, something like that. Well, it's basically the books behind the Netflix series shadow and bone, and this book has over 9,000, 19,500 views.
Jesper (12m 59s): That's crazy popular. Yeah. So by the time this episode airs, the voting will have finished. But right now that while we are recording, it has not. So I can't say which one it's going to be picked, but just go into Dave M writing fantasy Facebook group. And if you're not a member already just get in there and you can find the post where we will have announced by the time that this episode goes out, we will announce in the Facebook group, which of the books is picked. And then you can, you can buy that book as well, and you can read along. And then in October we will then have a podcast episode where we basically discuss what we've, what we thought about the book.
Jesper (13m 39s): And there were some critical discussion around it.
Autumn (13m 42s): Yes. And I'm so looking forward to it and you want to join the Facebook group anyway, because the discussion after the podcast will carry on in the group. So that way we'll have an ongoing discussion with other authors about the tropes and the trends and the characters and all the things we learned by reading this book.
Jesper (13m 59s): Yeah. So does this a bit of an experiment trying to shake things up a bit in terms of a podcast episodes for you going forward here? So we're very curious of course, to see how this goes and if people enjoy it. And if people will actually start reading along and communicating in the Facebook group about they have use of the Brooklyn so on, and we, we hope that it's going to be a bit interactive in the sense that us listeners, I engaged with the stuff that we're doing here as well, because I think that would be quite entertaining and funny for everybody. And if you do, as I said, if you do want your comments and viewpoints of the book to be included in the discussion here between autumn and myself, you need to get on Patrion.
Jesper (14m 40s): It, it goes down to as little as a dollar a month. So it doesn't really cost much at all. But $1 a month on Patrion will allow you to submit your views of the books as well. And there is a link in show notes to Patrion. So go and check that one out. There's also all kinds of other things rewards that we're offering to support us there. So, and speaking of patron, we also want to offer a huge thank you to Steven for becoming a patron supporter.
Autumn (15m 12s): Welcome.
Jesper (15m 12s): Yeah. It's because of people like used, even that we keep this podcast going. So thank you so much for your support on Patrion.
Autumn (15m 20s): We appreciate having you there
Narrator (15m 27s): And onto today's topic.
Jesper (15m 28s): Ah, so like you also said at the top order, and there's so many ways you could approach this topic and there's probably loads of things. One could do to become a better writer. And I've definitely collected a few things here and I was sort of thinking we could just go over what we eat, have autumn. And then by the end, we can see if we can sort of agree on one of the things that is the best of them, all sort of.
Autumn (15m 57s): So you want to come off or try alternate. Yeah. Well, I have a feeling there's at least a couple top ones that will really help you become a better writer.
Jesper (16m 8s): Yeah. Maybe B B, honestly, I feel like at least the ones I tried to only pick like stuff that I've thought was fairly important, but I'm really struggling to figure out if one of them are better than the other, but let's see. Let's see how we, how we go.
Autumn (16m 24s): Okay. Okay. Sounds good. Do you want to alternate or just read off our lists or describe things, how you want to do it
Jesper (16m 31s): Now? Let's alternate a bit. That's fun.
Autumn (16m 34s): I all right. And do you want to start with the top top one or do you want to like do the more
Jesper (16m 40s): Oh, well, if you can, you can do that if, but I have not, at least I have not mine listed in order of importance is just random order mine. So, but if you can do that. Yeah.
Autumn (16m 50s): Yeah. I think I, like I said, I have one or two that I think are the definite things that really, these are the things you have to do to become a better writer. So I can start at the bottom of my list. Okay. All right. You ready? Yeah, I'm ready. All right. So I think one of the things that is in a general, something that is going to make you a better writer is to write something that you're actually interested in. And the reason is if you aren't enjoying it, you won't put in the effort that you might have otherwise. And you would just, you don't make as much time for it. You'll just kind of maybe just, oh great. I have to do five minutes. Great. And you'll just, you know, word vomit, some stuff out and be done with it. But if you write something you're actually passionate about, don't worry about the marketing yet.
Autumn (17m 33s): If you really want to learn to be a better writer, enjoy the craft, put in some love and time and write something. You love, write something you would love to read. And I think you will become a better writer because you'll put so much time and effort into it.
Jesper (17m 49s): Hmm. Yeah. Actually I can cross one of my off the list basically more or less with that. I worded it slightly different, but I think it's the same thing I was talking about trying to write something that sort of sits in the middle of that Venn diagram between what you love, but also what readers want to read. I mean, if you're just, I guess if you're just writing for yourself, then don't worry about what readers want to read. But if you want to earn a bit of money from it, I think understanding the market and what readers want, that will also make you a better writer. That's true. Cause you will be able to write books that people wants to read, which I think is quite important, but not everybody, some people don't write because they want to sell anything.
Jesper (18m 31s): So, so that's fair enough. I think it depends. I think I can cross that one off the list, right. Because it's very similar to what you just said.
Autumn (18m 37s): Yes, I think so. But you're right. It's it definitely depends on what your end goal as an author. What, what meaning a better writer, what that means to you and that might've been right. Where we started is like defining what is a better writer. Do you just pull words together? Do you tell more captivating stories? Are you selling more books? What is your definition? Start there. And then you'll at least have some goals to like, you'll know when you hit your targets.
Jesper (19m 5s): Yeah. True. Okay. So yeah, I think that that is a good one. Probably not the one that we're going to pick as the most important one, but it's good.
Autumn (19m 14s): The bottom of my list. So you want to, since we, since you had a similar one to me, do you want to pick a different one?
Jesper (19m 20s): Yeah. Yeah. So let me start with a piece of advice that you're probably seen very, very often also because a very, very famous author wrote it in a book about writing that he wrote and it is called write every day. And I was sort of wanting to discuss this one a bit because I mean, I understand the whole thinking behind this one. And of course I also fully agree and understand that to become a better writer. You have to write if you don't write you and I'm never going to get any, I mean, study, studying, writing, and listening to podcasts about writing, but not writing.
Jesper (20m 5s): It's not going to make you a better writer. It is like a muscle like, like me spraining muscles, because I don't train enough. Right. If, if I was trained enough, then it wouldn't happen. Right. So writing is the same thing. It's, it's a muscle that you need to train. So I'm fully on board with all of that. But the one thing that I'm not so sure about and which is probably also why this one shouldn't make the final selection, I guess, but it's the writing every day part because I'm less convinced about that. To be honest, if, if it works for you then great. But if it sort of stresses you out, I'm not sure it's helpful, is it?
Autumn (20m 44s): No, I agree. You shouldn't create stress. And I know I used say write every day, but recently some toss ups between exercising and then my husband getting a job, or sometimes he has to leave really early and I'm the cook. So I make him breakfast and it's like, I can't, I used to get up and I would write first thing in the morning. And if I didn't do it, then it would be all screwed up. And there's days that I'm like, okay, just deep breath, you know, do what you have to do, fit it in later. And if you don't fit it in, don't beat yourself up, you know, fit in what you can. Don't have this major goal that if you don't do it, you know, you're just going to break down and cry and come to me like I did today. So be forgiving of yourself and your writing partners, please, because life can get hectic.
Autumn (21m 28s): But I do think it helps to have a writing goal for maybe the week one that is manageable. Not like, yeah, you know, I think I used to have one. I think it was just three chapters or something. You feel accomplished to finish that many. If you go over it, you feel great. But having one that is doable, I think is more important, but maybe being creative every day. Cause I have to admit some weekends recently. I haven't been necessarily writing as much as I used to when maybe I'll find myself drawing or something a little bit more because it's the weekend and I'm going to spend time with my husband or something else. It's, it's good to be creative every day. But I agree. But also what you were saying about it being a muscle, this one is one I think I would, I would have put towards the end of my list and I do actually have right just right.
Autumn (22m 15s): Is one of the books, most important things you can do. I mean, you can be creative in a blog post an Instagram post, just be creative. But it's the, I had this conversation with some people, a lot of people like, oh, I want to wait until I'm inspired. And I understand that, but sort of what you're saying, writing is a muscle. And if you write often enough, you know, a certain goal every week when you are inspired, you can grab that and really turn out some amazing pros where if you're still a novice, because you haven't written since the last time you were inspired, which might've been a week ago, two weeks ago, whatever that was your muscles going to be kind of squishy and you're not going to do as much. It's not going to be as good.
Autumn (22m 58s): So right. Even when you're not inspired because you want to build up that muscle. So you can really pounce on those days where you have time and you're excited about it.
Jesper (23m 9s): Yeah. I agree. Fully agree.
Autumn (23m 11s): Well, go figure, we often agree on things, which is why we've had a business together for like four years.
Jesper (23m 19s): It's definitely helps. It does
Autumn (23m 20s): Help. We do not have a contentious relationship. We should just let people know that now. Yeah.
Jesper (23m 25s): We w when we are doing our top 10 worst lists and we argued about the best ones, that's a, that's like the exception that confirms the rule.
Autumn (23m 35s): Exactly. Well, we have to poke and prod each other. Do you even get a little grouchy? So it's good. Absolutely though. I still think my husband and you are going to, so team up on me when we finally get together, I'm going to, I'm going to have to be ready. I'm going to have to make friends with your wife a little bit better so that we have a strategy in place.
Jesper (23m 54s): I, I, unfortunately I don't think you will have any trouble teaming up with her. If he gets about teasing me, she will be on board right away. Awesome. I shouldn't have said that. That was a mistake. Forget about that.
Autumn (24m 7s): That's all right. I already know. I don't trust Adam. He likes undermining me. So I'm a nervous, we're not going to do the spousal podcast interview. That's just going to go back.
Jesper (24m 19s): Yeah, I know. Yeah. We don't want to go there.
Autumn (24m 22s): All right. Oh my God. Well, I could give him my next tip. And that is, if you are writing, let's say you are an inspired TA or you just actually have some real decent writing time, which doesn't happen that often. And maybe it's a Saturday and everyone's quiet in their way or whatever. If you have some good writing time and you're planning on writing for a good stint, I would say use the Pomodoro technique, which it's a technique you can Google it. There's also, somebody has renamed it tomato technique, but excuse me, it's much older. It's called the Pomodoro. And that's where you do sort of sprints where you write for a certain amount of time. And then you take like a five minute break. So maybe it's 15 5, 15 5. And then when you hit, the end of an hour is a longer break.
Autumn (25m 6s): And this really helps because you can work on something. And even when you're passionate about it, once you hit that, you know, sometimes it's different for everyone. Sometimes it's 45 minutes. Sometimes it's 90 minutes. It depends on you. Your brain is just going to be like the ideas aren't there. It's not jelling. It's starting to just be a little bit of out of reach. And so it really helps to have breaks to know that you're going to have a break. I think it's really important to keep your mind fresh. So I would really recommend that it's a good way to improving your writing overall is not to just push through for two hours, three hours, whatever you have, you need to get up stretch, move.
Autumn (25m 49s): It really helps you.
Jesper (25m 52s): Yeah, I think actually it probably dovetails very nicely with the next one I wanted to say, oh,
Autumn (25m 57s): Excellent. We might've planned that. No,
Jesper (26m 4s): Not at all. But this one is quite important to me. I think because this one was one that I've sort of learned recently because perhaps actually thinking about it, perhaps we should record a podcast episode about this in next month or something, but it's basically, I guess I could best sum it up as quality over quantity. And what I mean by that is that I've been trying over the last couple of months to try to write faster, to just see if I can get through the first draft quicker.
Jesper (26m 44s): And I think it would probably would be worth discussing it in a bit more in depth, maybe next month in a podcast episode about number one, how to write faster. But also if you are one of those people who want to write faster, what you should be mindful about, because what I learned was that the faster I wrote, the more enjoyment disappeared from my writing. And it started to feel like I was just cranking out words because I needed to crank out words rather than enjoying telling a story, which I thought was quite eye-opening for me, because I actually didn't expect that. So for me, I think if you focus more on quality than quantity, it will make you a better writer.
Jesper (27m 28s): And then that's not to say that there's anything wrong with writing faster. And some people enjoy that. That's absolutely fine. But I, I think that should probably come down the road somewhere once, you know, you know, you feel very comfortable with writing, which was the case for me, it CA I start, I want to start trying to write fast, like several years after I started writing in the first place. So probably yeah, actually five years ago, so five and a half, I think, but nevermind that. But I just think that it's, it's important to, to make sure you enjoying what you're doing. If you want to be a better writer, I guess that's how I could best word it.
Autumn (28m 12s): Yeah. I wish I could say I totally disagree, but no, I, I feel this one too. I think we both had that realization within the last year, because even when I was working on the tainted face series that I just published and I loved the books and I love the stories, but there was times I was working on it and pushing through stuff faster than I thought, you know, I knew I could even do better if I spent more time on it. If something about the whole production schedule of trying to write things so fast that you lose that enjoyment and then you start questioning, and then if the book doesn't do well, because you never know if a book is going to do well, if it does great, fantastic. But if you realize, well, I didn't enjoy it much. It's I love the story, but you know, it's not making me millions of dollars.
Autumn (28m 55s): I think I would've enjoyed writing it slower. I would have enjoyed just the process I miss, like when I was writing my debut novel. And I just wrote words for the sheer love of writing those words and describing that world. And I sometimes think even though it was my debut novel, and I think it's the worst thing I've ever written. I think there's a little bit of that soul in there and that sheer enjoyment and love of that world, that it cannot be replicated just because I want to write faster. And so I think, I agree. I think if you really want to be a good writer, no matter how fast you write it, if you're losing that soul and that wanting to be immersed in that world, you're losing something.
Autumn (29m 42s): Hmm.
Jesper (29m 43s): Okay.
Autumn (29m 43s): Well, good. Well, that kind of dovetails it. It's not the one I was going to use next, but it fits with that one. And I would say, if you want to be a better writer, you need to read which fittingly. We already mentioned the critical author reading group, hint, hint, but I hadn't, I had been not enjoying reading very much recently, but then I decided I'm reading the wrong things. And I started really upping my game and going for the Hugo award winning novels and literary fantasy, which once I hit some of those ones that were just outstanding and I fell in love with the world and the characters, and then one of the, you know, tear them apart in a good way to see why they were so good.
Autumn (30m 28s): It totally changed. Even what I was looking at in my book saying, oh gosh, you know, I used to enjoy this more. I used to do this more. I want to, especially literally the Hugo award-winning novel that we've mentioned the fifth season. It is a very high level. It is very, very close to literary fancy fantasy instead of just being epic fantasy it's, it's got some word choice and points of view that are really literary fantasy, but I loved it. Oh, my question made me think and wondering why it was working that way and just why the characters were certain ways. And I just thought this is fun. This is what I love about writing. And I think it's important, whatever it is, whatever it is about writing or reading, even that you like remember that when you're writing, because you want to pull that in.
Autumn (31m 14s): That's what you want to imbue your own writing with is those elements. And if that is intense, plotting or intense characterization, or just really beautiful words that everyone tells you kill your darlings, but you just love them. Go write your heart out. It'll make you a better writer. You might have to edit some of it out, but you know, Kevin, again, capturing that essence and often finding that inspiration of reminding you of why you were a reader, what it is about the genre that makes you love it will help you be a better writer in it.
Jesper (31m 47s): Right? Yeah. I also had study, I studied a writing of the best I also had on my list, but I was exactly what you just said. So, so that's good. But I also had, I also had reading every day as a separate line, other than study the writing of the best, because of course studying the writing of the best. Like you said, it's, it's about understanding the story structure, the tropes. And of course you will, it will increase your vocabulary as well. But there are also days where I don't get to read just like with the writing. It's not necessarily everyday I do it, but I try to read most days of the week as much as I can.
Jesper (32m 29s): I, I do try to do it. But one of the things that I often see debated, and I'm not sure I have the answer for it, to be honest, but it is whether you should stick to reading in your Shanghai or you, it's better to read very widely so that you get all kinds of other impressions about writing and so on. And I think for one, if you haven't read enough in the younger you are writing, then you need to read those because you need to understand those tropes. But if we are assuming you already understand this young rhe, then I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing to try to read a bit wider as well.
Jesper (33m 9s): We have been looking at writing some murder mystery stuff, and I've actually picked up a couple of books that has nothing to do with fantasy, but they are murder mysteries. But just because I wanted to see how let's say outside the fantasy younger people who are very, very popular and good at writing murder mysteries, how did they do it when it just from a plodding perspective that I thought that was interesting.
Autumn (33m 34s): No, I agree. And I, I agree if you're going to write in like, especially a new genre or sub-genre that you're not that familiar with, make sure you're reading a few books in it. I've coached a few authors who are like, oh, I've written this, you know, I've written 60,000 words of this novel, but I've never read a thriller before and they're writing a thriller and I'm like, oh, you know, you're and they fight me with all my advice. And I'm thinking, just, please go read one, one of them before you turn away all my advice. But
Jesper (34m 5s): Yeah, if you haven't, if you haven't read it before, then don't try to write it. That's for sure.
Autumn (34m 11s): You will. You will. If your book takes off and you have never read a single series or novel in what you're writing, it's going to be a miracle because mostly readers, they have things they expect. And if you are not familiar with those aspects, I think that might even be first person versus third person. Point of view. When I wrote my first dystopian story, almost every dystopian story is in first person. And I don't really like it. And if it entered my head that, you know, this is what the genre expects. I probably never would have even tried it, but you can always learn from those genres and you can pool, like you're saying, murder mystery is you can do a murder mystery fantasy. You can criminal thriller fantasy, you know, Charlotte Holmes meets fantasy.
Autumn (34m 52s): These are becoming sort of a mishmash that people like it's okay to mix up tropes and mix up some of your storytelling as long as you're doing it well. And also realizing that, you know, maybe some mashups might not work well, a cozy mystery with like dark gallows murderer, you know, like, no, you know, there's a few things that maybe the readers of each John rhe are not going to like each other. So there are those elements, but otherwise, yeah, you can learn and get really exciting tidbits. I mean, you want to learn to do some foreshadowing, read some murder mysteries. They're fantastic. They do such a good job to make you sit there and try to figure it out.
Jesper (35m 36s): Absolutely. Okay. Do you have any more on your list? Oh, you actually
Autumn (35m 39s): Have a few. It was
Jesper (35m 43s): Still
Autumn (35m 44s): Good. All right. Yeah. So my next one to be a better writer. This is a very simple one, but I think it's very important. Turn off your wifi. Or if you really think you're going to have to Google something, make sure you turn off all your social media apps, hide your phone, give it to your, your five-year-old and make sure he can't buy anything from Amazon while you're, while mother holding it. But even if you have to use those apps that keep you locked out of your social media accounts for like half an hour, do that because you need to focus on writing when you're actually writing you, can't get that little wall and moment of distraction and just go and automatically jump to Instagram. It's not going to help you.
Jesper (36m 24s): Actually, I will say that I don't have that problem. You know, when I, when I write, I don't end up spending all the time on Facebook or something instead. So, but I do do understand, I know a lot of people do have that problem. So, so in that sense, for sure, but it's called it, of course also depends on the individual person, whether or not that's a problem or not. But I think what I also had on my list, which is basically, I think it's the same root explanation or root cause for becoming a better writer as you were, you were just saying, and it is basically about respecting your writing time, right?
Jesper (37m 4s): So if you, you mentioned early on, maybe set some weekly writing goals or something that, you know, keep the promises that you make with yourself and follow through on those and respect your writing time. So did you actually get that done instead of spending all your time on Instagram or YouTube or something? So I think that's the core
Autumn (37m 23s): Of it. Yeah, I agree.
Jesper (37m 28s): Okay, good. Well, that actually crossed one more of my list because that was the same thing I was going to say. But then I want to say something else because well, we, we trade in this stuff ourselves, but, and that's not why I'm saying it. I'm saying it because I think it's important, but educate yourself is on my list because you have to do the writing at the same time. Of course, like we said before, listening to podcasts or taking writing courses will not teach you how to write unless you're writing. But I do think it is very, very well spent money. If you try to, while you are writing also educating yourself, you know, take some online courses. So we have several of them.
Jesper (38m 9s): If you want to take some online courses and try to learn, because it will improve your writing a lot.
Autumn (38m 17s): Yes. And I, of course, that's it. Yes. Between the books we have and the education you could tell. I mean, part of the reason the first writing course we developed came from the fact that I took two adult ed writing courses at my local place in Maine. And they were just so, and they were not devoted to fantasy. They were devoted more to memoirs and there was times they were ripping apart the fantasy writers in the group for doing stuff. And I just wanted to know why, you know, how am I supposed to write this? Then if obviously these people are not teaching me and that pain, it led to a course for fantasy writers because you know, someone needs to teach this.
Autumn (38m 59s): It's, there's so much to learn in so many tips and so many ways of doing things and developing characters. And it's good to be curious, pick up a book, could pick up a chorus, you know, spend some time reading blog posts. We have a ton of blog. We have like 200 blog posts on the I'm writing phases of website. It's insane. Let's be Like, no, we got some stuff for you. The free, just go listen. And it'll make you curious. It'll make things spark. Just sort of like reading books in your mind. So I agree this one was on my list. So this time I get to cross it off, but yes, educate yourself. Be curious about the craft and learn to do it better as a very important thing. I think to add to that.
Autumn (39m 39s): And it sort of went well with what I was, we were both been saying about goals and stuff is to develop a routine and honor it. Like you said, if you can say, this is my writing time, just like how I said, normally I have to go, I'm going through a change that hasn't clicked fully into place. But my writing time used to be first thing in the morning, get my tea, go and write for an hour or so. And now that's, I've gotten old jumbled and I have yet to figure it out. That's stressing me out a little bit, but that's okay because it's a change. I had a writing time that I honored and that worked for me. And before that, when I had my full-time job, I would get home, give my husband and kids, get my tea and I'd write for 45 minutes. And that's how I did like 12 books, 45 minutes a night after I got home, I was like, hi, hi, nice to see you.
Autumn (40m 21s): Bye-bye I'm going to go right now. It's just that you have to get your family to understand, or at least to leave you alone and turn off your wifi, or at least your social media apps. If you have a tendency to try to distract yourself with them, but I were teens, whatever it is, sometimes you need that too, to like sink into, okay, it's my writing time for me, it was getting a cup of tea, but maybe you need to listen to music. I used to have a PA page of George R. Martin that I just thought was like the most beautiful imagery in the world. And I'd read that. And then I'd be like, yes, I am ready to write, to find those cues that tell your brain. Now it is time to turn on the writing and settle into that and have it and get your mind used to it.
Autumn (41m 1s): So that way, if you don't have it sort of like I recently have had my little hiccup, you miss it, you really crave it. And that's, that's a good thing.
Jesper (41m 13s): Okay. Yeah. And also along the lines of educating yourself, then I would say, learn how to make sure that every single chapter
Autumn (41m 26s): That's a good one. I agree, actually, that kind of goes with the wires.
Jesper (41m 31s): Yeah. Yeah. It's very aligned with what we've already said, but then still it's just slightly different, but if you can grab the reader in every chapter, we will definitely be a better writer for sure.
Autumn (41m 42s): Because it's sort of going along with that, I actually have learned to plot because I do think Panthers can write well, but I think understanding plot and plot structure is something that will make you a better writer. And whether that once the fall under education or, you know, learning to make chapters that are really gripping, those are like some of the techniques that I think you need to educate and read how other authors do it, figure it out. And by unpacking those specific techniques of writing really gripping chapters or learning to write a really engaging plot, that's character driven. When you understand those really core techniques, you will be a better writer as well. And I think it does take a couple of books and some education and some thinking to realize how that brainstorm moment of, oh, this is how it all comes together.
Autumn (42m 30s): And when that happens, you're will be a bunch stronger writer.
Jesper (42m 36s): Yeah, absolutely. I only have one more on my list or
Autumn (42m 39s): One more on my list. That's a really funny,
Jesper (42m 42s): Ah, there
Autumn (42m 42s): You go. All right. So let's see. All right.
Jesper (42m 47s): Minus something that I've actually talked about several times on the podcast before, but it is about getting feedback, but it comes with a caveat. And this is the part that I've said on previous episodes, because be very, very careful not to ask for feedback from a lot of different people, because especially when you're starting out, you don't know what is good feedback and what is bad feedback. And also if you're getting feedback from a lot of people, you'll get a lot of conflicting feedback, which is not very helpful either because you don't know which ones is correct, and which ones are wrong because you don't have the experience. So I would say, preferably, if, of course this is going to cost them money.
Jesper (43m 29s): But if you can, it's best to work with a developmental editor who can, who knows what they're talking about and they can help you. That would be the, by far the best thing. But if you can't afford that, then pick maximum one or two writers who you trust and who, you know, have a proven track record, meaning that they know what they're doing. And then listen to what those one or two people are saying and nothing else, but to get some feedback, because if you're writing in isolation, it's very difficult to understand, you know, you might, well, you might be the blind leading the blind kind of situation.
Jesper (44m 13s): I mean, you're just stumbling a heaven. You don't quite know. And that's not to say that it can't work. It can, but you might end up writing five bad books that nobody likes. And then you'll sort of figure it out, but getting some feedback from somebody who knows what they're doing. And couple that with educating yourself, then I think you will get to a better place much, much faster than if you don't do these things.
Autumn (44m 40s): Oh yeah. I agree. I can't believe I didn't include feedback in my list, but that is really true. And what you said is very true. I mean, you want to choose who you get feedback from. It should be like an author. You respect, if you can't afford it, a writing coach or a developmental editor will be worth their weight, especially for your first, maybe not your first book, maybe. I mean, that'd be fantastic, but even your second or third, whenever you can afford it, it's worth it because otherwise you can't see, you know that about your life. You can't see your own blind spots because they're blind spots where someone else will read it and be like, oh, this is where you're doing it wrong. But if you don't get someone That's a good day, came up with that.
Autumn (45m 23s): One knew what they were talking about. But yeah, it's, if you get too many other people or maybe beta readers or people who just like, oh, I don't like it. And they don't give you very specific feedback because they don't really understand plotting and structure and character development. That's not going to help you learn. It might just make you really frustrated or even steer you in the wrong direction. Just trying to write something that, you know, someone who absolutely adored Twilight loved. And you're suddenly trying to write Twilight when you were more going towards, you know, token, it's not gonna really help you improve. It's just changing your direction. All right. So my last one, which is kind of a strange one, maybe, but it's okay to do something inspiring, just, you know, exercise, take a walk and movement really loosens up your ideas as well as your body.
Autumn (46m 16s): So my last one is actually do something that'll inspire you and keep your creativity growing. And along with that, kind of like tailor to it, keep a notebook with you. If at all possible you want to be able to capture ideas and remember to look at them and maybe organize them, put them in a Scrivener file or something. You don't want a couple of ideas and never look at them again. That's not the point, but if you can get out and do something different and creative fun with your family, make up stories, whatever it is, that'll let you know, that'll loosen up your ideas in everything. And you will be surprised at what comes, but if you don't remember to write them down, you will lose them and that's not going to help you either. So make sure you have some way of taking notes and go do something fun.
Jesper (47m 1s): I don't know if we can do this autumn, but does any of all of these advices sort of stick out to you as the most important one?
Autumn (47m 11s): I don't know. It's like part of me wants to say educate yourself. I think being curious about how to be a better writer is going to make you a better writer very quickly, because you're curious about it. So you're learning. But I also think having goals like weekly goals that really helped me, I guess that helped me write more, which helped me eventually a better writer. But I think curiosity, be curious how to be a better writer, whether that's through education, reading, whatever that takes, that's going to get you going and at least make you unpack things. Every everything you touch, you'll be pulling it apart by whether it's marketing, copyright, which is always good to know as a writer or someone else's book.
Jesper (47m 55s): Okay. So I think, yeah, being curious probably encompasses a lot of the things we've talked about here. So, but otherwise I think the listeners can pick the ones that you feel talk the most to you. But yeah, I do definitely think, making sure that you educate yourself is incredibly important. And, and also I would say, unfortunately I think too many people skip that part. So yeah, there is dead. Okay. So next Monday we are going to have a discussion about marketing to different generations of readers. Are they all different or are they the same?
Narrator (48m 38s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/amwritingfantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
It's time for another of our humorously competitive top ten lists! This time Jesper and Autumn go head to head to see who can come up with the worst power to have—you know, the one that makes you think maybe NOT having any magic might not be such a bad thing. 🤣
Join us for some laughs and then comment to let us know who you think won the battle!
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn, Birt, and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I'm Jesper
Autumn (31s): And I'm Autumn.
Jesper (33s): This episode 141 of the am writing fantasy podcast. And are you ready for another top 10 episode today on him?
Autumn (43s): Well, Actually it's been a little hot and sweltering and humid. I mean, it feels like I just got dumped into Costa Rica without the beach. So I don't have a highly competitive edge, unless maybe it's a lay on the beach and drink a beer contests. So I'll do what I passed. I did not bring my game face to this one. I'm sure you did because you thrive off of competition, I think.
Jesper (1m 12s): Well, at least we are going to try to have a bit of fun today here and share our list of the five worst powers a character could have. And then as usual, we'll need to see if we can agree on who had the best worst list, Indiana and agreeing on who won is usually the hardest part of these episodes.
Autumn (1m 31s): Well know you always think you won, but I always know I did.
Jesper (1m 34s): See that's what I mean; we can't agree.
Autumn (1m 39s): We agree. We both feel that we can agree that each of us one.
Jesper (1m 43s): Yes, but, and then sometimes somebody on Patreon are the ones who do the tie-breaking.
Autumn (1m 49s): Yeah, that's exactly it. Sometimes they put on YouTube videos. So we, we do take votes. I don't think it's ever changed how we felt we did, but we try.
Jesper (2m 1s): Well, usually if they do conclude that they think I won, then I definitely agree with them. And then I think very wise people voting in that, those cases.
Autumn (2m 11s): Yeah. I would say, I think I've had more votes than you. So I think they are very wise.
Jesper (2m 17s): No, I don't think so. Is he already with disagreeing?
Autumn (2m 21s): I have more competition in me than I thought so we'll be good.
Jesper (2m 27s): Yeah. Apparently, so.
Autumn (2m 31s): So how are things over on your side of the planet?
Jesper (2m 35s): No, it's, it's it's good. We actually started, well, we talked about this a bit offline, but we did stop looking at a house because there's just not enough space in this apartment. I mean the location of this apartment, it's, it's like 200 meters from the beach wonderful location, but it's just, it's too small for the four of us. So we, yeah, we started looking at some new houses and we found one that is newly renovated. It was a completely overhauled about a year ago. So it, it looks really nice and we are looking at it last week and we felt like, ah, this is quite good.
Jesper (3m 22s): The price on the house is quite high. So we want that of course reduced. But just to be on the safe side, we, we hired a building inspector and we went out with him the other day to just go through the house and just check if there's nothing wrong with it. Some hidden stuff that you don't know about. Those kinds of interesting.
Autumn (3m 43s): Yeah. Some of my favorite parts of looking at houses.
Jesper (3m 47s): Yeah. But he found mold in the attic. Oh no. And he found the fact that the, I don't know what the correcting this term is, but basically not the roof, but like the inner inner structure of the roof.
Autumn (4m 7s): Like the trusses or just the plywood?
Jesper (4m 13s): The, the supporting structure. It's, it's a there's mold in it. And he even found water on some of the supporting beans. So it's, it's a matter of time before you have water pouring in from the roof. He said, I mean, the only thing that keeps out the water right now is the, the tiles on the roof. So, but if they start leaking or something, then it's going to go straight into the house. So that's of course a huge issue, but it's, it's fixable, but it's expensive. The building inspector said that he estimated it to cost about $60,000 to fix.
Jesper (4m 53s): So it's not a small expense, but we are actually thinking to put in an offer, but of course we need to have a significant price reduction to counter for this, but we haven't put in the offer yet. So, and I don't know how the selling party will react to, we're going to ask for a huge price reduction. Right. So I don't know how they'll react to that. And maybe, I don't know, we'll see what happens next. So that's where we at. And that's way more exciting on the house front than I expected.
Autumn (5m 27s): That's really crazy having built and restored houses. Yeah. The roof and the foundation are like two of the places you don't want problems. So, Ooh, no, indeed. But then, I mean, the building inspector said, he says that like, this is what he sees all the time because people are so fixated on isolating houses.
Jesper (5m 49s): So they just keep isolating more and more and more most offer to make it so tight and tight and tight box as they can. But nobody ever thinks about them. You still need to ensure that there's ventilation, but they never do that. And he says, she said he sees it so many places. And then, you know, a year or two later, then the structure up there, it's wet. It's moldy because of all the condensed that is created as well. And then it's just, yeah, that's very true. So I don't know, but apparently like ventilation, it's not something people think about for some reason, which is a shame because it's, like I said, it's completely renovated like a year ago. So it's really a shame.
Autumn (6m 29s): Yeah. That is really a shame. But yeah. I mean, it's funny the green houses and stuff, I mean, you want a good insulated core because it's easier to heat or keep cool. But yeah. I mean some of the best houses I knew one of them had a whole house turnover where they had a fan in the attic that could actually exchange all the air with outside air. Like open up all the bottom windows. Yeah. It was like five minutes. I was like, okay, that's a little intense, a half an hour would have probably done fine. But he was like, okay, hot air's out. I was just like, wow. You're you're into ventilation to more than I that's a little extreme.
Jesper (7m 9s): Yeah. Anything exciting going on on your end?
Autumn (7m 13s): Oh, well, one thing I'm going to share with you in, in when we talk about internet, which I actually meant to share last time, but I'm kind of glad I waited. I have a, I have, I have a show and tell, but well, yeah, so right now I can see two big things have happened. So one is, my husband is up in Maine and I wanted to give a shout out to him because he passed his main guide, which is a registered Maine guide. It's actually the oldest guide license in the United States and one of the hardest to get, and he just passed a sea kayaking test. So he is now a registered Maine guide for a C I kayaking recreation. Oh, whitewater. I just, he's got a ton of them now. So really kind of tickled that he's doing so well up there.
Autumn (7m 55s): So shout out to him for being awesome. And then the other thing is, I'm so excited for him. He's up there obviously guiding right now and in high demand. So I'm quite happy for him. He's actually, as we speak, he is leading a moose tour, hopefully on a canoe off looking for moose in the wilds of Maine. I think that's not a bad job description. Yeah. I, I need to maybe rethink doing that a little bit every once in a while to get my license to oh, and then the other thing, well in your world.
Jesper (8m 31s): Yeah. Well, dragon success,
Autumn (8m 34s): That's better than mooses true. We'd go looking for dragons as well as moose. Maybe it could be fun, but then I wanted to let people know if I actually started a new exercise program, which shouldn't be as exciting as it is, but I there's gotta be other people in the world who one just feel they're busy all the time. And for me to go to a gym is like a half an hour drive. Not even counting like the time to exercise and then come back. So I don't have two hours a day to do this. So it's been such a struggle. And I actually just found a new online program that's from home and it's called high intensity interval training.
Autumn (9m 18s): So hit HIIT and I had never heard of it before it. Oh my God. It's awesome. Because I also get bored really easy if no one has realized that here yet. I don't know. I'm good at writing books, but you know, put me on a treadmill for 20 minutes and I would rather jump off a cliff. I'd actually, I'd love to jump off a cliff, give me a squirrel suit. And I would still jump off a cliff. Not a problem, but exercise. No, but this is great because it's like literally 20 seconds. Some of them do it for one minute on one minute off, but I'm on one where it's 20 seconds for three different exercises in a row. So it's 20, 20, 20 and a 1 minute break.
Autumn (10m 0s): I didn't know. You could get so tired in 18 minutes, but it's fantastic. So if anyone else is out there and they don't have time to do that and they want to exercise, look up, hit training or send me a message. I'll tell you which program I joined. It was like 50 bucks. It's a diet plan as well as an exercise plan. And I feel fantastic and it's been seven days and you can combine it with the habit RPG app that I mentioned last week. Oh, that's you're really flying. That would be kind of cool.
Jesper (10m 35s): Yeah. Yeah.
Narrator (10m 39s): Oh, we go on the internet with the yam writing fantasy podcast.
Jesper (10m 44s): So you have something to share first before I just do a little speechy afterwards.
Autumn (10m 50s): Yes. I meant this is not, well, it has something to do with fantasy, but not with writing this time, unless you're talking about book covers, but I'm actually teaching a class on photo compositing, which is how I make all my covers. If anyone's a fan of my work. And as I just put on Instagram, there's nothing more fun than show and tell. So I actually did my book covers in posters for, for the course. So if anyone is watching on YouTube, you get to see the pictures, but I just, they just came today. This is the secret one. I don't think I've even shown you this one. This is another. I just was started working with about a month ago.
Autumn (11m 30s): The camera a bit longer. Well, especially cause I have a light glaring on it, but it's called the silver web. That was a fantastic one. But yeah, so I just did four cover for pictures. So I'm so excited. They're going to be shown in a gallery and then I'll be teaching a photo compositing course in October. So if anyone else is in New England and the Brattleboro, Vermont area, and they want to know how to, to make covers through photo compositing or just fun crap and photo compositing, the Vermont center for photography, and you can see the course I'm teaching and I cannot wait.
Autumn (12m 10s): It'll be so much fun.
Jesper (12m 12s): Oh, nice. Cool. I just wanted to mention that the, I checked earlier this morning and it's been quite a while since we had anyone leaving a review of the podcast. So I just wanted to mention that we would love to have more people find us. And one of the best ways is if this podcast gets some reviews that will trigger the algorithms that suggest our podcast to new listeners and it'll basically become easier to find us. So just a small request to our dear listeners here. If you can please go into your podcast app and leave a rating of the podcast or even better write just a short review, you could just say something about why you listen and what you get from this podcast.
Jesper (12m 56s): And that would be tremendously helpful for us. So it will only take you probably 30 seconds. So if you can please help us with that one, we would be so happy.
Autumn (13m 7s): We would definitely appreciate it.
Narrator (13m 9s): And on to today's topic.
Jesper (13m 13s): Right? So I think once in a while can dream about having like super powers. But the thing is, what if you got the lamest and most ridiculous powers of them all.
Autumn (13m 28s): This was a fun one to think about. And research. I did do a little bit of research, but I also tried to come up with some sort of original ones. But yeah, I, I went to, at the end, I found a list. And while to see if you found this same list, but it, it was huge. It was probably over 50 or 60 ones. And there were whole layers of those as well. Yeah. Yeah. They were just, I, it was... yeah. They were just fun to take a break and read through them. So this was kind of fun. One to do. It'll be interesting to see which ones you came up with and I take it. We're going to go from least worst to worst Worst?
Jesper (14m 7s): Yeah, indeed. Yes, let's do that. And that's usually when we do these top 10 lists, let's alternate. Okay. Sharing one of the worst powers each and then we'll empty out our lists and then we'll need to see who actually won here. So, I mean, I did some internet research like you and all of my ones here are not, let's say something I just made up. It's actually something that exists because I thought that was quite funny to have some, some, some stuff that exists out there, but it's just completely ridiculous.
Autumn (14m 40s): Oh, this will be interesting. Some of mine were based on it, but actually most of mine were just ones. I thought kind of my opinion that I thought this one would really sucks. You just dig to see what we have and we have any overlap and that'll be, that'd be telling.
Jesper (14m 60s): Yeah, absolutely.
Autumn (15m 1s): And it's been too. Right. So we did this. I don't remember who went first. The last time we should have brought a coin say as well.
Jesper (15m 10s): I don't remember. Hmm. So yeah. I don't know. Well, I think I said that last time as well. I don't know if it's best to go first or last. It depends on how much confidence once has in, in, in my own list here.
Autumn (15m 27s): Oh, well, if you're not ready, you know, I'm never afraid to jump in so I can go.
Jesper (15m 34s): Okay, cool.
Autumn (15m 36s): All right. So what would be number five, my least worst power that I thought would really suck to have is the power of nullifying. So this would be that you don't really have any other spells that you can cast no magic. You can throw, but you can break anyone. Else's I just think that would really suck. You'd see these people doing these marvelous, amazing spells, and you basically this like seething, angry person going break, break.
Jesper (16m 4s): You had a downer
Autumn (16m 5s): The downer in the room. I just thought that would really just not feel fulfilling at all for a magic power.
Jesper (16m 16s): No, that's true. But of course, if you are fighting like Sauron
Autumn (16m 20s): on or something, then that would be quite nice to nullify his powers. That would be, I have to admit, I didn't think about in terms of fighting. I just thought it was terms of every day. So it was my least worst, but yeah, I, it would be very, it would be like the person you want by your side, during a fight, for sure. Be my shield maiden at any day.
Jesper (16m 41s): The, the warrior of the potty. Definitely wouldn't want this guy, a woman next to him.
Autumn (16m 46s): For sure. Friends—besties.
Jesper (16m 51s): You just stand there, say anything, just stand there and just nullify do your thing.
Autumn (16m 57s): I'll give you a shout out at the end, you know?
Jesper (16m 59s): Yeah. Great. Yeah. You'll, you'll get a grapefruit for the work. Here you go.
Autumn (17m 9s): That would be sucky. You made it worse. Amazing.
Jesper (17m 18s): Okay. So you want my number five?
Autumn (17m 20s): Yeah. I want your number five.
Jesper (17m 23s): Okay. My first entry actually comes from the DC comic books. Okay. And this superhero is all the way he's willing to lend a hand to anyone in need.
Autumn (17m 38s): Okay. Doesn't sound so bad.
Jesper (17m 41s): That sounds good, right? Yeah. Well not when you learn that this is the arm fall off boy.
Autumn (17m 51s): Seriously?
Jesper (17m 52s): This is, this has to be one of the worst superpowers ever because this superhero, he can detach his arm.
Autumn (18m 1s): Why?
Jesper (18m 4s): That's exactly my thinking. Why I came up with that. Were they wrong? I mean, why would that ever be?
Autumn (18m 16s): Can you do something with this beat a villain over the head?
Jesper (18m 19s): Yeah. I guess you can use it as a clop on something and just a beat the SU super villain in his head with on Amazon. But you can do that anyway. You don't need to detach you opt to do that. It's called a fist. That's just stupid. I told him yes.
Autumn (18m 39s): Even as a writing standpoint, I just, why?
Jesper (18m 44s): The arm fall off boy. That's what he's called.
Autumn (18m 49s): I can see why I gave up on comic books when I did. It's really horrible. Is that modern? Or is this like something from like the forties or so?
Jesper (18m 59s): I don't know how old he is, but I guess people can Google that. But, but that, that was only my number five. So you can see what this is going.
Autumn (19m 7s): Yeah. I see you. You, you found inspiration pretty heavily. I should get points for at least coming up with my own, not—
Jesper (19m 14s): True.
Autumn (19m 14s): You know, pulling off of a comic somewhere, but that one is, I don't even know how that, I mean, I can see someone spitting that out as a writer saying, Hey, we need a blah, but it should have been cut before it ever made it into a plot.
Jesper (19m 29s): Absolutely. Absolutely. It makes zero sense.
Autumn (19m 34s): I, this is why if you're a writer and you're really stumbling for ideas, stop and think before you create something this bad. Okay. Please get a beta reader. Just trust me. All right.
Jesper (19m 49s): And come up wwith a better name that fall off boy.
Autumn (19m 53s): Yeah. Can we go for literal naming here? Seriously. Jonathan would be better. Just kill
Jesper (19m 60s): off. All right, Adam, the arm.
Autumn (20m 6s): That's too close to it. Isn't there Adam, the aunt. I know too close.
Jesper (20m 13s): Okay. Number four.
Autumn (20m 15s): Number four. This is what I actually, I think I vaguely remember from a Star Trek episode, but it's, it was sort of a power that came around in the eighties. I heard a couple of places, but it's empathetic healing. So you can, the wielder can heal anyone, but only by taking the injury into themselves. So, you know, if it's a cut, they get the cut. If we know they were stabbed in the kidney, they're now stabbed in the kidney. If the other person's dying of cancer. Well, now you're dying of cancer. It's really, I mean, it's a, self-sacrificing sort of ability and I just thought, you know, that's great. You can save your teammate from dying.
Autumn (20m 56s): If you die, I'm not into self-sacrificing.
Jesper (20m 60s): You can only do it once you don't want.
Autumn (21m 2s): I mean, it's fine if you're like just cutting scrapes, but then you're got to cut that you've got to heal and maybe get infected. I think that's just, no, I don't want that power if that's my only magic, I think I'd rather not have magic. The chance of doing stuff, not knowing someone was sick with something horrible and healing them and then being sick with something horrible. I mean.
Jesper (21m 25s): OH my God, that would be bad. Yeah. No. All right. That, yeah, that would be bad.
Autumn (21m 30s): Yeah. I think the consequences it's I can see that. Oh, well, thank you. I'm glad you agree. That one kind of sucks.
Jesper (21m 37s): No, yeah. That's right.
Autumn (21m 43s): OK, it was your number four.
Jesper (21m 47s): Okay. Number four. Yes. Admit that there could be certain and probably like very specific situations where this superpower could be somewhat useful. But once you hear what it is, I think you would prefer to, like you said before, almost have no superpower instead. Geez. Okay. So are you familiar with Marvel star Fox?
Autumn (22m 18s): Vaguely. I can't remember the details, but I know I've heard the name.
Jesper (22m 26s): So stock has, he has the power to excite pleasure in which basically means that he can make people fall madly in love with him. I mean, for us, regular people, you might, you might be able to think of some sort of situation where you think that could be useful for you benefit in one way or another. It's still quite nefarious, I guess. But, but as a superhero, I mean, are you going to go out fighting crime by having all the bad guys fall in love with you? I just don't understand. How is that helpful?
Autumn (23m 5s): It's very efficient. Just like everyone though. I mean, I agree as a villain. I mean, you can go get the people who have tons of money and power and just have them want to give everything to you. It's fantastic. Easy. But as a hero, I mean, by definition, you shouldn't be using and manipulating people. So yeah, unless you're going to go make all the villains fall in love with you. And Dr. Doom is not going to annihilate everyone on the planet because then he might kill you.
Jesper (23m 37s): Then you have all the bad guys in the world running around in your heels, like after you, because they all want to be with you. It's just like, oh my God. I told him very helpful.
Autumn (23m 48s): You can play them off of each other. So you just get, oh, you know, he likes me better than you, or you.
Jesper (23m 56s): That's just mean.
Autumn (23m 58s): That's my secret. I'm actually a cruel person underneath it all. Or at least I'm cool. I have no problem being mean to characters.
Jesper (24m 10s): That's that's true. I know.
Autumn (24m 13s): Yeah. I think I would have to go with becoming a super villain if that was my power. I mean, maybe I try to find some good to do with it. Get lots of philanthropy going, I guess, grasping at straws. I'm thinking, okay. If you could make Bezos fall in love with you and donate his millions, like his ex-wife, the world would be a better place.
Jesper (24m 42s): All right. Fair enough.
Autumn (24m 45s): All right. Do you want my number three then?
Jesper (24m 50s): Yeah. Alright.
Autumn (24m 51s): I don't have a good lead up to this one. This one was kind of an idea that came to me and I thought of the, what are the consequences of this when it's sort of the opposite of my number five? So this one is the power of permanence. So any spell you cast can't be undone and will last forever. So if you change a bird that just fell off a cliff or change your friend who just fall off a cliff into a bird, they will always be a bird. You cannot change them back. So if people are starving, so you can make plants grow, they're just going to keep growing and producing fruit and like 200 centuries from now, you know, there'll be a whole city built up around your magic tree that never stops producing fruit.
Autumn (25m 38s): If you make it rain, it's going to be raining in that spot forever. And just be flooding forever. You can't undo the spell.
Jesper (25m 50s): So, yeah. Okay. Well, actually this is going to need some to some interesting scenarios. So if you made it rain and then if you know, it's gonna rain forever, so you start building light, then you make a, I don't know, like a lava pool or something. I don't know. Oh, shit. No, that's not going to work. So you build something, you just keep adding new magical effects, try to nullify the other one. It's just going to be worse and worse and worse.
Autumn (26m 15s): It is the consequences of this one would just be a nightmare. I mean, it could be quite fun to write maybe a really short story on like how sucky this would be. You're going to eventually just trap yourself almost with everything you're gonna have to be to...
Jesper (26m 31s): Actually, that's not a bad idea.
Autumn (26m 34s): I'm glad you like it.
Jesper (26m 36s): That's actually a good, short story idea. I think its quite cool.
Autumn (26m 41s): There you go. If you want to write a short little Vela story for you there you have. But yeah, I think I eventually you'd be like, you're gonna be afraid to do anything. You'd be like, thinking through all the potential. If I actually do this, what's going to happen? And then you have those gut instinct ones where it's like, oh, I see my friend now, my friend is a seagull. Shit.
Jesper (27m 4s): And like, and then you feel bad about him being a seagull. So how can I make it ha well, I should probably just make sure there's lots of fish for him. And then, and then there's fish everywhere. Doesn't know, this is not good.
Autumn (27m 16s): Too many cats will come for the fish.
Jesper (27m 19s): Yeah, you should put that on one of your sticky notes for a Vella story, because that's actually a good idea. It wouldn't be fun.
Autumn (27m 27s): All right. Well, I already have it on a sticky note. I'll move it to the Vella. I story ideas. Sticky note. How's that?
Jesper (27m 33s): Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a good idea.
Autumn (27m 36s): I'm glad you liked that one.
Jesper (27m 39s): Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, well, my number three is not going to make it into a short story for sure.
Autumn (27m 46s): Probably should not have made it into a comic. I'm guessing.
Jesper (27m 50s): Yeah. Well, I just had to include this one on my list. To be honest, he, this character comes from hip, the Hitman series. Okay. And he's a member of something called section eight, which is like a group of superheroes.
Autumn (28m 4s): Okay.
Jesper (28m 5s): That part doesn't really matter, but I'll give you his name.
Autumn (28m 9s): Okay.
Jesper (28m 10s): And then see if you can guess what his superpower is.
Autumn (28m 13s): Okay. I ready.
Jesper (28m 17s): He's called dog welder.
Autumn (28m 21s): Hm. Please tell me he does not weld dogs together?
Jesper (28m 29s): Not quite, but he's ability is that he can weld the heads of dogs on the faces of evildoers.
Autumn (28m 43s): Were the dogs, real dogs, and were living and are now dead?
Jesper (28m 47s): Yeah, I think so. But no. How is that going to achieve anything to just weld a dog's head onto somebody? I don't understand how that's going to help anybody.
Autumn (28m 58s): Well, if it changes the villain's personality in there now got a dog brain. Maybe they'll stop doing what they were doing, but I just see lots of innocent animals being killed here. I don't like this one.
Jesper (29m 17s): How is that a superhero power?
Autumn (29m 20s): It sounds it's sounds horrible. I hope I'm glad my dog is asleep. I think you'd give him nightmares. I don't like this one, it's horrible. It's really stupid. But it's just mean, I don't believe in cruelty to animals and you're the vegetarian.
Jesper (29m 41s): Yeah. I'm vegan even.
Autumn (29m 44s): Oh, I don't like that one. No, I agree. I don't see how that's. I would have to read the comic book episode, but why turning someone into someone's head into it?
Jesper (29m 56s): Yeah. I wouldn't even want to read that.
Autumn (30m 4s): You know, you know, if you meet him a fish head, at least they would have to like jump into the water so they can breathe. I mean, this is... Why? Again another one that should not have made it off the table. Just the brainstorming session that day was really bad. Really, really bad.
Jesper (30m 26s): Yeah. There must have been drunk or so may, maybe all of these came out of the same writing room. Like they were at a Christmas party and everybody was drunk on eggnog or something.
Autumn (30m 36s): Yeah. I'm thinking they might've been doing LCD—sorry, LSD for this one. I somewhat had a little bit too much of something and had a bad vision. And they thought it sounded really cool, but you did not translate well.
Jesper (30m 56s): No, I agree. It's just too weird that it's just really horrible. We're getting to the top of the list, now.
Autumn (31m 2s): We are. Are you ready for my number two? Say you're ready.
Jesper (31m 9s): All right.
Autumn (31m 9s): So this one is the power, which I actually did get inspired by, by one of those posts. But this one is the power of imperceptibility. So in other words, you are immediately forgotten as soon as you leave, like the person's vision. So it doesn't matter how cool or anything you do. You just, you're never remembered. You know, heroes want to be remembered. I mean, that's half the, you know, the superhero, the whole nine yards, the suit you want to be remembered, you're this brand. But instead, no matter what you do, as soon as you leave the room, everyone forgets that you are the one who did it.
Autumn (31m 51s): So like your friends, the other people on the team, they're all going to get the accolades. And everyone's going to forget you even exist. Not to mention just like the problems. Like, can you even have a long-term relationship or do you even have friends because no one remembers your real. I just, I can't imagine the loneliness of this kind of a power that you could be the most marvelous. You could have God-like abilities, but everyone was thinking it was God. They wouldn't think it was you.
Jesper (32m 26s): Yeah. I think if you, if you a villain, I mean, at least if you could just have the powerful one week, that might be nice. You know, you could go and steal a lot of money and everything, and nobody will know that it was you anyway. They all forgotten you. But to have that, even as a villain for life, your entire life, it's going to be very lonely,
Autumn (32m 48s): Very lonely and very—
Jesper (32m 50s): Just, it's actually a bit sad.
Autumn (32m 52s): It is. It's a very sad one. I mean, it hurts as an individual. It hurt your ego. You'd be lonely, no connections. I mean, if you love someone and fell in love, you would have to make sure they stayed, you know, you stayed in their line of sight forever. And let's just assume that blinking doesn't count. Let's just presence or maybe 20 foot vicinity or something. I mean, the stress of that. Little talk about writing for tension, though.
Jesper (33m 23s): Yeah. But also think about how annoying it would be for the other person. You always there, like, look at me, look at me. No, no, don't look away. Look at me all the time. It would be like.
Autumn (33m 33s): Yeah, I just want to go, you know, shower by myself or go out with the girls. He's got to go. And would you believe it, though? I mean, that's just, it, you have no proof other than, you know, watching with friends or something, I guess you could, you could prove it that way by having a friend come in and have, you know, that person walk out of the room and come back in like, oh, who are you? Why are you here with my best friend? Yeah, I know. Oh, it just be when
Jesper (33m 59s): You don't have a friend, well, I don't have a friend.
Autumn (34m 2s): So no significant other like, so you did find that one who didn't want to leave your site and just the test you could do, like you could have another, a third person walk in the room and just be like, oh, I didn't even know you were there just to prove that it really is truly, will happen that way. I don't know. I mean, you're, they're going to be considered insane or you're not going to consider you at all.
Jesper (34m 24s): Yeah. Okay. That that's, that's sad. Okay.
Autumn (34m 29s): You think that once I wait till my number one...
Jesper (34m 34s): Okay. Let's do number two. Yeah. My number two is not sad. It actually made me laugh instead of okay. Okay. So this character who is a member of the Great Lakes Avengers. Okay. That's sounds pretty cool.
Autumn (34m 51s): Maybe, actually I'm not so sure of the great lake. I don't know to like, are they just located in the U S with the great lakes and they don't go any further or it's a small team and they don't know global, global reach yet.
Jesper (35m 8s): No, indeed. But this superhero, he can transform himself into a door and then you can let other characters walk through him into an adjoining room. Hmm. What do you think about that?
Autumn (35m 27s): Can't you just use it the door, unless maybe the door is locked and this way you don't have to worry about unlocking it? Like, if you forgot your key, it'd be so useful.
Jesper (35m 38s): Yeah. I mean, if it was like, you could walk through and then you could like teleport somewhere. Pretty damn cool.
Autumn (35m 48s): Yeah.
Jesper (35m 49s): But the thing is that you can only go into an adjoining room and that's pretty lame.
Autumn (35m 56s): Yeah.
Jesper (35m 57s): Also he's called doorman.
Autumn (36m 3s): They really need to work on some of these. Yeah. You know, a chainsaw works pretty well too. If you don't already have a door. A door actually works... A window? They could have called them window, man.
Jesper (36m 23s): Yeah. Yeah.
Autumn (36m 26s): Short of wanting to be again, a villain. That way you could just lean against the bank vault and just like, do you know, in and out,
Jesper (36m 34s): But you have to, you have to get to the wall that is around the bank vault. Otherwise it doesn't help anything.
Autumn (36m 40s): And he can't go through his own doorway. I take it. That would be too easy.
Jesper (36m 46s): Yeah. Yeah. I think so. I think he, people can go through him, but yeah,
Autumn (36m 54s): What's the point. I mean, it's not even like a novelty trick. I can see the kids going, you know, he's like showing off saying, "Hey, look, you can go through me through as a door!" And you know, just some bully going, I can use the door and I don't need you. I, yeah. Short of locking my keys out of the house or does it work for cars? You know, that would be useful.
Jesper (37m 19s): Otherwise probably he could, he could have a job as a locksmith.
Autumn (37m 25s): I was just going to say he would have a great job as like, for people who have lost their keys and need to get into some place. Yeah.
Jesper (37m 32s): But otherwise, yeah, not to excuse really? No. Otherwise he's just going to be that really annoying guy at the party. He was like, are you going to the bathroom? Hey, wait, wait, wait, let me, let me, you can walk through me. It's like, no, thank you. Yeah, please do. Please walk through me.
Autumn (37m 53s): I just be like, ill. I see why he didn't make it to like one of the big leagues of superheroes, because really
Jesper (38m 2s): Well, you no, with all the, those modeling, you know, my opinion about Marvel and DC. So I would not be surprised if you find him in a superhero movie theater near you sometime in the near future. Sure.
Autumn (38m 15s): I do not miss going to the movies anymore. Thank you. I'll just go read a book or write a book that doesn't have really lame superheroes.
Jesper (38m 25s): Yeah.
Autumn (38m 26s): All right. Are you ready for my worst power? My number one, the tragic and this one I just wrote, oh, it's four, four words long. Anything you touched dies. Okay. It's a power. I would assume that it is, it didn't happen at obviously until after birth let's hope, because that would really, that wouldn't have worked very well.
Jesper (39m 0s): Yeah. But do you have to touch it with your skin or can you put on gloves then?
Autumn (39m 6s): I would assume skin. I think we'll go with that. So yeah, it would be, you would have to be always covered in gloves or latex or something so that you're not physically touching anyone, but again, the stress of this one, my goodness, if you get a hole in your glove and then you grab your best friend's hand or yeah. You know, it's just another isolating one where this one's not quite as isolating as the other one, but the results, instead of just being forgotten, you actually could kill people you really care about. And I think I would rather have power.
Jesper (39m 44s): Even when, well, what if you accidentally touched yourself?
Autumn (39m 50s): I would assume... I think I will have to grant immunity. I did some of the lists I read were, I remember one of them was, you know, you weren't, a lot of them were like, you were not immune to the dire things that you could do. Like if you sweat acid, but you're not immune to it. That would really suck as a power. I don't know what the point would be because you'd slowly, you dissolve yourself as suffers. The second you worked out or something, he would slowly melt. That would be horrible. But I thought this one just, yeah, you're immune to it. You can't kill yourself, but you know, anything else you accidentally, you can't touch a dog. You can't touch a butterfly. You can't touch a plant.
Autumn (40m 29s): Nothing. You only can eat, touch, anything you touch has to be already be dead or you will kill it, which at least, you know, great for sanitation. If you needed to like clean a whole bunch of water, just touch it. It'll always be dropped them as a major filter.
Jesper (40m 48s): Sort of like it's the Aquaman basically.
Autumn (40m 54s): And a whole new level of Aquaman Britta. And he was just a filter. Let him otherwise just leave him alone. Don't let them touch anything. Or anyone just be horrible. If he fell in the ocean, I wonder how big of an impact it would have to things around him.
Jesper (41m 9s): It's just true. Just yeah, no, that, that would be pretty bad. I mean, at least, but at least you can, you know, wear gloves and try to prevent it. But of course, the problem is if you go, let's say you go, you go to the airport and airport security says, remove your gloves. No, I'm not going to remove your gloves or I'll do it for you.
Autumn (41m 32s): No, no, please. Don't, I will remove them. Just I don't touch me. I just, the stress of it. I talk about, it'd be like anxiety, man, if you had a name, but it just wouldn't be bad. It's so bad.
Jesper (41m 46s): Yeah. Yeah. That would be bad. Yeah. I'll give you that. That's not, that's not a good situation to be in.
Autumn (41m 52s): I thought that would really be a sucky power
Jesper (41m 54s): But I mean, I'm sensing a bit of a theme here, Autumn, because you keep coming up with something where people would be very lonely and isolated and I don't know what's going on.
Autumn (42m 5s): Well, those are obviously is this, this is a list of the worst things I can imagine. Obviously, being alone and isolated are on the top of my list of not a great way to be. How's that?
Jesper (42m 17s): Okay. Okay. Fair enough. Yeah. I just keep coming up with all the useless stuff instead. And this one is 100% completely orderly, useless.
Autumn (42m 30s): Oh, so, all right. I tried to imagine what this one is.
Jesper (42m 36s): You will never guess it.
Autumn (42m 37s): Probably not. I'm thinking like you can magically mix cocktails, but that could actually be fun.
Jesper (42m 45s): No, that could be useful.
Autumn (42m 47s): Good for parties.
Jesper (42m 49s): The number one on my list is one where, and keep in mind that we are talking in the context of a superhero here.
Autumn (42m 58s): Okay.
Jesper (43m 0s): So that's why so useless, right? I mean, if you were a priest or a preacher or something, then maybe you could use it.
Autumn (43m 9s): Alright.
Jesper (43m 9s): This is an interesting character is called Bible man too. And he actually even got his own video game.
Autumn (43m 20s): What? all right.
Jesper (43m 23s): And his super power is to know the Bible by heart. Woo hoo.
Autumn (43m 33s): I'm speechless. Really a good at memorization. And which edition of the Bible? I mean, like the original that could at least be kind of interesting or are you talking about like the king James?
Jesper (43m 50s): Well, I don't, I don't know, but he just knows the Bible by heart and he knows every phrase and every line by heart and he can recite the whole thing. So I guess if you preach it, I would be nice as a superhero. I have no idea how that will be.
Autumn (44m 5s): Unless you're fighting demons. I can't imagine, or trying to make the angels like really like, oh wow. You're, you're good.
Jesper (44m 14s): He's impressive.
Autumn (44m 17s): Angel brownie points! Why? You're really going to annoy people and you get into the wrong country where they're not Christian. You're, you're going be... I hope you can run fast and you're going to really be in trouble.
Jesper (44m 39s): No, I really don't understand why that will be helpful at all.
Autumn (44m 44s): I'm guessing a Christian White man came up with that one. I don't know why, but in maybe in like the fifties.
Jesper (44m 52s): I don't know. It does not sound like yeah.
Autumn (44m 57s): He's in there. Same writing room as the other ones. No, this is not something I think that the world needs in 2021, you have a less than coronavirus.
Jesper (45m 8s): Maybe I actually have a, I have an honorable mention as well.
Autumn (45m 16s): Oh, I can't wait to didn't make the top five.
Jesper (45m 22s): No, but it was more like, because this is technically, I guess not sort of a superpower in that sense because the, the character can actually, well, he can't use it on purpose. So in that sense, it doesn't feel like a superpower, but I just thought it was so incredibly stupid. I wanted to mention it anyway.
Autumn (45m 47s): Okay.
Jesper (45m 48s): Yeah. So this is a character called Sabu. And Sabu. He is part of an Indian comic book and he is a giant from the planet Jupiter.
Autumn (45m 60s): Okay.
Jesper (46m 0s): And he's power is that whenever he gets angry, a volcano on Jupiter erupts. So eruptions might be pretty cool, I guess, but not when it's on another planet, just get you home to whatever you're doing. Sabu. He is on earth.
Jesper (46m 42s): And then when he gets angry, I will kind of on Jupiter. But I mean, what is the point? Who cares? That'd be another one.
Autumn (46m 50s): I'm like, Hey, look, put this telescope or this satellite this way, watch this. Just why?
Jesper (46m 59s): Look what I can do. Okay. Yeah.
Autumn (47m 7s): I, I just, that one is probably one of the most pointless powers I can imagine. That's like saying, "Hey, I've got the power of gravity!" And you're like, "I don't care unless I'm in space."
Jesper (47m 27s): Okay. So let's just summarize before we conclude who had the worst list here. So on my list, I have the on arm fall off boy, I have the star Fox who can excite pleasure in others and I have the dog welder and then I have the doorman and then I have the Bible, man. That's pretty bad.
Autumn (47m 59s): All right. Mine were nullifying, empathetic healing, the power of permanence, imperceptive—insperceptibility. And then anything you touched dies. tou would win the most useless powerless. But I think for like truly worst consequences, I think I'm the winner there. Sorry.
Jesper (48m 26s): Yeah, no, I actually agree with that. I was thinking of saying the same, I mean the most ridiculous, stupid powers. I think my list is more stupid than yours, but if you want to have really, really dire consequences and live the rest of your life alone or in isolation and your list is definitely worse.
Autumn (48m 47s): I like torturing characters. I'm sorry.
Jesper (48m 51s): Yeah. Well, I guess it all comes down to what the scope of this list actually was. I guess we don't even know ourselves.
Autumn (48m 58s): I guess not. We wrote two different lists, but it was fun to go through.
Jesper (49m 4s): Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So next Monday, we are going to share this best things you can do every day to become a better writer. So we'll see you then,
Narrator (49m 19s): If you like, what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy for as little as a dollar a month. you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
What kind of stories are agents interested in? How do you find an agent and how do you know if the person is any good? And what about your publishing contract? What should you be mindful about there?
All these questions, and many more, are answered in this episode of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast by Jane Friedman.
Links to what was mentioned in the episode:
QueryTracker: http://querytracker.net Duotrope: http://duotrope.com Publishers Marketplace: http://publishersmarketplace.com
Not discussed during the interview, but this one is interesting as well: http://mswishlist.com
You can find Jane at: http://janefriedman.com
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need in literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than in 20 books between them. Now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I'm Jesper. And this is episode 140 of the Am Writing fantasy podcast. Autumn is busy launching her brand new novel today, so I've instead brought someone else on, so I won't be all alone because that will be pretty boring on a podcast.
Narrator (48s): But joking aside, I have to say that I really looked forward to this conversation, our little piece of intro music there to the podcast says that you don't really need a literary agent, or worry about gatekeepers and all that stuff, but that is all true if we are talking about self publishing, but not so much, if you want to get a traditional publishing contract and Autumn and I have actually started talking a bit about maybe trying to become hybrid authors, meaning that we will have both self published books and traditionally published titles. And so I guess in some ways you could say that it's a bit of, for selfish reasons as well, that I'm are joined by the very knowledgeable Jane Friedman today.
Narrator (1m 31s): Welcome to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, Jane, and I hope you won't mind me picking your brain today.
Jane (1m 38s): Not at all. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you.
Jesper (1m 41s): Yeah. I have a sneaky suspicion that the quite a few of our listeners will already know who you are, Jane, but the, let me just, I'll try to give a short introduction, Jane, and then you can see if I miss out something important here. So Jane has more than 20 years of experience in the publishing industry. And in 2019, she was awarded what the publishing commentator of the year by digital digital book world. And Jane also has an incredibly popular, I guess I could say newsletter for authors with in 2020, it was awarded media outlet of the year.
Jesper (2m 23s): And she also runs the award winning block for writers over@janefriedman.com and has been featured by New York times, Washington post publishers weekly. And the list just goes on and on. And that I miss anything that those are the important ones. Yeah. Yeah. And I think with those credentials, it's quite obvious why I want it to have a chat with you about traditional publishing, but maybe, maybe before we get into all of that, maybe you could just sort of share a bit about yourself that maybe has less to do with the business side, but more like who you are. So
Jane (2m 58s): Yeah, I started in the business in the late 1990s, right out of college. So in some ways my, my life has been spent on nothing but publishing in one form or another. I did go full-time freelance in 2014. So I was traditionally employed out a book publishing company and a media company in the literary journal at a university. And then finally after, I guess it was 15 years, 15 years of, of working for other people. I decided to just embark on my own. So I've been very happy working independently.
Jane (3m 40s): It's, it's a combination of doing the newsletter that you mentioned, which is for authors online teaching. And then I also do some consulting. So aside from that, you know, I do a lot, I do a lot of travel, but a lot of its because I go to the writing conferences. Mmm. So during the pandemic that certainly slowed down dramatically and I've spent a lot of time that my home office in the past year, but it's been good. I've been able to focus on things that I didn't have time for when I was traveling so much.
Jesper (4m 11s): Yeah. W what, what drew you to publishing and writing original that, do you, do you do you know, it was more like some people stumbled out to collage and by coincidence they end up in some sort of industry, but I was there something in particular that drew in there.
Jane (4m 26s): So it's, it's hard for me to say that I was drawn as much as it was the, maybe the process of elimination when I was growing up, I, I come from a very rural part of the United States. There wasn't a whole lot to do other than go to school and go to the library. My mother was a very bookish person. She was a librarian, in fact. So I spend a lot of hours in the library and I was just good at school. And I liked reading. And I dunno that I think this happens to many people who ultimately become English majors or they studied creative writing and they think, well, I I'd like books, I'll study literature. And so it just, I, but I think I'm fortunate in that I was able to turn that into something that actually pays the bills.
Jane (5m 10s): Not everyone does that.
Jesper (5m 12s): Oh, I know that. That's true. Yeah. I still have very fond memories myself of the library when I was a kid. I just, I don't know. I just love I could spend hours and hours in their well, but back then, it was the most comic books I was looking at. Of course. But yeah, you could just go out and take a new one and another one in another one in, and sit there for hours. Just go through all those pages. I don't know. There's something about it. Isn't that? I don't know what it is.
Jane (5m 36s): Yeah. I I've always been drawn to bookstores and libraries from a young age, although I will admit now in the digital landscape it's I do a lot less of that. And I do have as much of a fascination with computers and with figuring things out from a digital media perspective. So I like bringing those two areas together.
Jesper (5m 58s): Right, right. Yeah. OK. Well, in terms of, of talking about traditionally publishing contracts and how to get one, which is actually something that I'm, we are asked, but not all the time, but on a similar, a regular basis on them. And I, my cohost asked about how to, how to do that, how to get those kinds of contracts. And honestly, we're not the best one to advise on this because while autumn, they did have a contract like 10, 15 years ago, but I don't, we are not like the expert on this topic. And also, as I said, a bit earlier, 'cause we actually considering trying maybe to see if we can find an agent for ourself maybe in the years time or something, once we have a novel written for that particular purpose, I was thinking that maybe we could just try to structure our conversation in, in the same fashion light, sort of a bit of step-by-step where, where did we start and, and with what happens next to the next time.
Jesper (6m 56s): So on, in the process, because then it might make a bit more sense for the listener. And obviously where we start is with the story of self, you know, and do you, do we need to sort of think about what kind of story or what kind of novel we are we right. If we want to get it traditionally published?
Jane (7m 18s): Oh, a little bit, but not too much. So in other words, I think first and foremost, you need to write the story you feel called to riot, or that your interested in writing or, or that you are passionate about. And that's sort of cliched advice. You hear a lot, but its true that it takes far too much work, especially in my mind to go through the traditional publishing process, to try and write something that you think is going to just fit the market. To me, that's actually what self publishers do. There are always studying what's happening in the market and trying to jump on where the readers are going that happens in traditional publishing to, but I think there's also a concern for what's this writer doing that only they can do on, usually it comes out of your own obsessions or interest areas.
Jane (8m 12s): So, but on the, on the other hand, you know, you do have to be aware of kind of the model that traditional publishing works under, which is the way, if you're a first time author for them, they want the book to be a certain length. You know, they're going to get dissuaded. If your book is say more than 150,000 words are more than 120,000 words, it's usually the, where things start to get rejected more often because it's just too long when they don't know you yet as an author, they haven't established an audience for you yet just costs more in terms of time and editing to do a longer book. And if you're writing something that is a real mashup or hybrid of lots of different things, if it's really too far out there that might also dissuade them.
Jane (9m 3s): So they like things that are both familiar and fresh, which are, this is very frustrating to writers because what defines that? No one knows, you know that when you see it.
Jesper (9m 15s): Yeah. Because, and I don't know if this is right or wrong, but I have this impression as well that traditional publishers and I guess therefore also agency, they don't like to, I mean maybe some agents do, but, but if we sort of just take it in the broader sense here, I have a feeling that they don't like to take meant to many chances, meaning that they probably prefer to have something that is at least fairly similar to what is generally on the market today. Do you think that's a correct assumption or am I just reading into things that I shouldn't no.
Jane (9m 53s): And I think its true that they want something that fits the genre or sub genre. They like, they don't like things that are hard to categorize or that don't have good comparable titles or authors. So you should be able to usually imagine your book or yourself sitting alongside other books and authors, you know, you can say a free to use like ex they will like why if, if, if a publisher can't do that because your work is too odd or it's just, you know, it doesn't fit the model and yes, it's going to look risky. Oh
Jesper (10m 27s): Yeah. So, so, so that also basically means I fully agree. What you said before about in the others are probably doing far more market research, then the traditional publishers as are bad. But if it doesn't mean though that you should be doing at least enough market research, then to be able to understand what are the true those tropes and what to do, what do I need to deliver upon? Because if you are getting too creative and maybe thinking that, let me write something they've never seen before, because then I'm going to blow their mind. They will probably think, well, I can't sell this stuff. Yeah,
Jane (11m 4s): Exactly.
Jesper (11m 7s): But what about stand alone versus series? And if you are trying to get an agent, would it be best to just write a complete standalone thing? Or do you give them like, here's this book one of the series and leave it open-ended or doesn't matter maybe. Oh yeah.
Jane (11m 26s): Well there is of course a really strong tradition of series in science fiction and fantasy as well as some other genres like mystery or romance. So, but if it's safe or safer to propose a book that is the first and a potential series, so it can stand alone. But if it does really well, you're ready and it would make sense to continue it. Mmm. So I know that it's like a little dance that everyone is doing and, and the reason for this, his publishers or, you know, they like to see how things perform before they fully commit.
Jane (12m 7s): So it's not that they're going to abandon you after the first book, but if, if, if the sales just don't go in the right direction, especially like after book to are booked, three of the sales get softer and softer instead of stronger, and you may find yourself getting dropped by the publisher. So in other words, what that would mean on a practical level as that you would never want to query a series saying this is a five books series and you have to take all five
Jesper (12m 33s): It's something that
Jane (12m 35s): Basically works to both, both of you and the publisher and to a corner.
Jesper (12m 40s): Yeah. But I'm also thinking, and I don't know how often that happens, but I'm just, I'm, I'm, I'm just speculating a lot here. So do you have to correct me every time and say something incorrectly, but I'm assuming a lot of things I guess, but I would think that spending the time to right, like say the book 1, 2, 2, and three, and then give them big one and say, okay, here it is. I have two more books. If you are interested is probably not the best use of your time. I, I, I'm thinking it's probably a better to just write the first book, leave it in at least enough open-ended that you can continue and then just see if they want it before, because you couldn't, you just as risk spending a lot of time writing three books and they don't even want it.
Jesper (13m 22s): Or even if they're want book one and then they will never buy books two and three.
Jane (13m 25s): Yeah. Yeah. I, yeah, I would not, I would not write all 3, 4, 5, however many books there. I would not write the whole series and then start querying. I would write the first book and then have a really nice outline of how the series might unfold. And that doesn't take much, like it takes maybe a paragraph per book to show what direction you're going to take it in.
Jesper (13m 49s): Yeah. Okay. So basically like a bit of a plot overview or something, so to do the age and can see what are your thoughts are.
Jane (13m 56s): Right. And you wouldn't even submit that first. You, you have to sell the first book before you could have that conversation or at least interest them in the first book.
Jesper (14m 4s): Yeah. Oh, okay. Well let's assume that we have a story written out there and at least we think that it is abiding to tropes and we believe that we have at least written something that is fairly common in of course it has a good cover and it has a good showing are trophy title and all that stuff. And we don't need to find an agent. And I think, I think the general advice is that you should not try to approach any of the big publishing houses without an agent. Is that right?
Jane (14m 34s): That's correct. There are closed to authors'. So you're only weigh through the door is through an agent unless you happen to know someone on the inside or do you have a really good famous bestselling author friend who is going to make an introduction for you, even if that were the case though, you'd probably an agent to help you negotiate the contract, which I know we'll talk about. So yeah, I'd, I'd say when you're starting to query agents are step one and if the agent search doesn't go as intended, you can then start looking at publishers that are smaller, independent, that don't require you to have an agent they'll take your submission directly.
Jane (15m 14s): Yeah.
Jesper (15m 15s): Yeah. And I want to come back to that one about the smaller publishers, but I guess first, I mean, how do you find an agent? That's like the million dollar question that everybody asks? Probably yes.
Jane (15m 28s): So it's actually not, it's not rocket science. There are a few recognized up to date databases that you can use. And you just filter down to the agents who would be interested in your work. You can do this at sites like QueryTracker dot nets, do a trope.com. There's also publishers marketplace, where you can look up deals that agents have maid and you can filter the deals by genre. You can also do keyword searches and those deals. So if you are, if you have some sort of EY space opera, let's say that you could actually search the deals for space opera and look for agents who seem to like those sorts of books.
Jane (16m 11s): So if you use any, one of those are the best. If you use a combination that helps to consult different sources, you can then once you've got a working list and it might be, you know, for genre fiction, generally you can almost find a hundred agents just write off the bat without even working that hard. So then once you've got your list of a hundred or however many, you would want to go to that agency website, make sure that there are still open for submissions. Sometimes they'll close, you know, check out there guidelines, make sure its a good fit, look at their client lettuce. Do you think that this person is going to actually like what you send them and then you send off your query.
Jesper (16m 54s): And can you sort of just assume that the people are the agents that are on the list like that are good agents or, or do you need to like vet the list yourself as well to Czech? Like do they actually know what they're doing? So yes. Yes.
Jane (17m 10s): So the, the three sites that I mentioned are I think, quite reliable, it would be hard to find and unreputable agent threw one of those three sources. I'm not saying it can't happen, but the likelihood is greatly diminished. I think where you get into real trouble with bad agents, if you start Googling around very broadly, like if you go to Google and just type in and literary agent that has a terrible, terrible idea, you will get all sorts of scammers and people who have a financial interest in luring you in and charging you money. And who knows what? Now there are definitely good agents better agent's there are some who are more well-known and less well-known.
Jane (17m 54s): Those are who, those who are still establishing their career and those who have been around for decades. And that's where you get into really subjective concerns. Like some people they want to get the biggest possible agent or they want an attack dog agent or they're like, actually I would like an agent. Who's still building their list and maybe they'll, they'll pay more attention to me if I'm one of their early clients and these are all legitimate reasons to choose one agent over another in the United States, there's the organization called the AA L a, which if you're a member of, of you have to abide by a certain code of ethics and it's also a place to go with complaints.
Jane (18m 36s): So if you do have a bad experience, you can go to the AAL eye and say, you know, one of your members has treated me poorly or you, you tell them what happened and that they can help address it. Not all agents are going to belong to that, but a good number of them do. And there's a similar organization in the UK. And I have to imagine probably in Europe to
Jesper (18m 59s): Yeah, because it it's, it's difficult. Right? And, and sometimes you see you on the internet, these really bad examples where you yeah. Almost like bordering on fraud almost right. Like from, from because the, the terrible thing is that the authors in this case are there sort of chasing a dream. And if somebody then says, okay, I'll take you on board. I guess a lot of people won't have there critical census M on God there. And, and then they jump in and say, well, regretted later. So the, oh
Jane (19m 35s): Yes, you're absolutely right. A lot of people are preying on people's dreams, hopes and aspirations. You know, one of the first signs you may be dealing with a bad actor is that they praise you to this guy's and then ask for your money. So that's the sequence of events that should raise a red flag for you. People writers, especially to just get really taken in when someone says, oh, you're, you know, you're brilliant. You're a genius. And you know, it's what you've been hoping for all this time, for someone to select you and validate the hard work. But you know, the truth is that agents and publishers both tend to leave you feeling a little cold.
Jane (20m 16s): There are not the most complementary people in the world. We tend to be very pragmatic, critical, well, you need to change this and this. And then, you know, maybe it will sell it. They just don't think they don't want to build up your hopes. In fact, there'll be very realistic.
Jesper (20m 36s): Yeah. And I guess it's well, well, if, if, if they ask you for money that you should just run for the Hills, right? I mean, why would you, you, you shouldn't pay them anything unless they make a deal
Jane (20m 48s): That's right. They only earn money when they sell your books. So they are in the U S agents get 15% of everything that the authors make. That's 15% of the advance, 15% of the royalties, 15% of, you know, an option sale. Or it can go as high as 20%. If there's a co-agent that gets into more complicated territory. But in other words, you're not paying them out of your pocket. There are like some rare cases where maybe the agent will say, look, you know, I really like what you've got, but there are these issues that need to be resolved. I can't resolve them for you, but maybe you should go hire this editor.
Jane (21m 31s): And there are going to help you, you know, maybe, maybe in you, you would invest at that point, but just be super cautious because, you know, until you have an actual manuscript that the agent wants to represent, you could just be spending a lot of money for, for nothing. You'd have to agree with what they're saying, I guess is what the point I'd like to make. You have to see that there. Right?
Jesper (21m 55s): Yeah. Quite recently here, I heard another example of M and agent, which again, of course it was fraught, but the agent was like saying, well, this, this is really good manuscript, but there is a lot of issues in it. And then lo and behold, I can fix them for you. You just need to pay me X amount of that. I can't remember how much it was, but something, and then I'll get my editor, which I have in house and they we'll fix it for you as well. That sounds nice. But again, don't pay them money.
Jane (22m 24s): Oh yeah. I don't, I don't think it's a good idea too. If, if an agent does think, I mean, it's, it's true. There are many projects that need editorial work, but you have to be careful when the agent ha has a possible financial interest in you having that work done. That's not good.
Jesper (22m 45s): But if you are then going off of these lists as human, and, but maybe by the way, maybe you can, you, maybe you can email me those lists that you mentioned earlier, then I can put them on the show notes for people. But if we're going off the list and let's say with, and sending out Query letters, which I'll come back to in a moment, because I want to ask about that as well. But let's say we are sending out hundreds of Query letters maybe. And then let's say some of them are a bit positive and they come back and say like, okay, this looks interested. But then I have heard examples of agents and saying like, they want to change something or this character doesn't work or this part of the plot doesn't work or whatever, but wouldn't, you sort of be chasing your own tail.
Jesper (23m 29s): If you keep correcting things to every time one of those agents comes back and say something
Jane (23m 34s): It's possible. So what you've described is called a revise and resubmit request. So this is where an agent has a phone call or sent an editorial letter saying, look, I'd like to represent this, but you need to change these things. And they'll go into sufficient detail that you, you get it, you know what their trying to get you to do. And then you go off and do it. But you have kind of going back to my earlier point, you have to agree with the work. Like you ha it should excite you like it. You should feel like, wow, yeah, this is going to make such a better book or yeah. I can see why they're making those suggestions and I can do it.
Jane (24m 14s): Like I'm willing to compromise in that way. Usually what I tell people as if, I mean, it's like a revise and resubmit request's is great. Just neutral speaking. It means that they are really C something in the project or a new, and they, they would like to see it come to fruition. They don't issue those to just anyone. And there are probably testing to see if you have the ability to edit yourself, because that's really required when you begin working with the publisher, you know, the, the editor you work with is going to expect you to take revision suggestions. So this is like the first, you know, the first hurdle that you have to get over.
Jane (24m 58s): But in any event, if you query several dozen agents and then, and you see a pattern in there, response, like there are all wanting you to do X, then, you know, okay, I'm getting a really strong message here. That X is a issue that has to be resolved. But if you get a bunch of feedback and it's all over the map, some people are like, we need to change the character. And others are all, you have to change the plot or no, you can't, you can't have this setting or your dialog sex. Like if there is no pattern, that's when I would really be reluctant to make changes.
Jesper (25m 35s): Yeah. No, that makes sense. But what about those famous Query letters then? What, what do you, what, what you do you focus on there?
Jane (25m 47s): It's almost all about this story promise. So the query is, were talking about as short, very short pitch are usually not more than 300 words, maybe 400 for some types of fantasy, where it might, you might have to do some set up are world-building to make sure that the whole thing makes sense, but very short. And we're talking about character problem setting. Those are the key elements. The rest of the query outside of that is really just housekeeping. So by housekeeping, I mean, there's, you know, maybe a hundred words of a bio.
Jane (26m 27s): There might be an element of personalization there where you talk about I'm approaching you because I see you represent blah, blah, blah, which is similar to my book. And you'll of course I have the title and the word count. And you'll comment on the, the comparable titles, what you think is going to be similar. But the, like I said, the book of the query, though, that decision is made on this story, does the agent or editor think that this story has legs in the market, as it intrigue them, does it make them excited? And does it make them want to read or request the manuscript? Now there's a difference between sending a query by itself and sending a query with sample chapters.
Jane (27m 8s): So if an agent or a publisher for that matter is asking for a query, plus the manuscript, they probably know from experience that a lot of writers are crap
Jesper (27m 17s): Are writing their queries. So,
Jane (27m 20s): You know, if they see the query in there, like, oh, this is a mess, they'll just flip to your first pages and see if there's something there. Yeah. So in those cases, I think the query holds less weight. And the agent's probably more interested in just reading the opening and seeing if you can write. So there is some reassurance there, but I hope, and that you're gonna be judged on the right thing rather than you're ability to pitch. But for those people that you're just sending the query, there are, those might be agents who are more concerned with things like, do you have a high concept? Can you write just to really snappy pitch, were the character are the voice really comes through? Does the book kind of sell itself when, you know, the general outline of the story?
Jane (28m 4s): So it does put a lot of it puts more pressure on the writer to have something that just feels exciting, whether that's the character or that premise, or, you know, something about it, you know, that jumps out.
Jesper (28m 16s): Yeah. And it's, it's just so much easier said than done to, to right. In, in an interesting M summary, I guess, of this story 'cause as well when you are, well, not even if it's not even in a blurb level. Right. But it's more like just the summary of what's happening. It's it's, it can be very difficult to actually make that sound interesting other than its just like, oh, well then there is this story about this guy who this guy does, blah, blah, blah. I mean, it's, it, it very easily becomes this sort of boring bland synopsis,
Jane (28m 55s): Right? So that's precisely what you want to avoid in something that's really light kind of plot oriented and mechanical because that will be a turnoff. Even if the book is very plot driven, I think it's necessary in the query to be able to marry together that character and the plot M and in the case of fantasy, you need to probably have a couple sentences upfront that kind of establish the parameters, like our way on a ho in a whole other like a world or planets. What's the what's defining life in this world that you've created. You shouldn't assume too much about what the age and are editor may understand about the world that you've created.
Jane (29m 39s): You have to be pretty direct. And you know, I think the thing that often gets left out of the queries icy is the relationship of tension. So most times we're really intrigued by stories where we see people in opposition or people are trying to preserve her relationship that matters to them, but there are forces getting in the way, are there personal motivations or what they need to achieve is in conflict with someone else in the story obviously, and you might have a village and it's really clearly in protagonist antagonist situation I'm. So I think, think about the relationship dynamics and what, what striving the story forward from that perspective, in addition to whatever interesting elements your fantasy world has in it, that's going to be, but hopefully these are whatever's magical or fantastical about your story is also built into what the characters want.
Jane (30m 36s): What's giving them trouble rather than just, you know, window dressing.
Jesper (30m 40s): Yeah. So in a, rather than just riding about the one on one ring, having to be carried to Mount doom, you also write about the relationship between Sam and Frodo and how the struggle and so on.
Jane (30m 53s): It's like excellent example.
Jesper (30m 55s): Yeah. Yeah. And why, while you were saying that, I just got to thinking, because you were talking about those sort of websites with lists of agents and so on. I, I just started wondering all of a sudden, if there wasn't like a repository of like, here are the examples of really good query letters or something that some people could look at it as examples, do you know if something like that exists?
Jane (31m 19s): In fact, the query tracker site that I mentioned has a really robust set of resources and message boards and posts where they feature query is that actually worked in the, you know, there is even the potential for you to post your query in the message boards and get feedback from other people. Although you have to be careful or you can get a lot of different opinions. Yeah. You're left feeling more confused, but I think one of the best ways to write a better Query, I think to the point you're making is to actually see a lot of them. And you, you start to see what works.
Jesper (31m 56s): Yeah. Yeah. Because it's often rather than trying to invent the wheel again, you know, it often works a lot better if you can. Just, the same thing goes for when we're writing blurbs, for example, the autumn. And I often do check out like, what are the, when this shop Shaundra, what our, like the bestselling books in the shop show on her. And it's, there are like some common elements that they use across those slopes. Because again, you will start seeing commonalities and you can start see, oh, oh, okay. I see. They always focus on something to do with this part or whatever. And then you can make your own version of that obviously, but then you are already like 10 steps ahead.
Jane (32m 32s): Yes, yes.
Jesper (32m 34s): Yeah. Okay. So let's, well now we have a book. We have found some Asians to send Query letters to, and we have written an awesome Query letters. Well, hopefully, so let's say that one of these agents then comes back to us and say, okay, this, this is great. I would like to represent you. What, what happens now?
Jane (33m 1s): So they'll have a conversation with you where they talk about that, their strategy for submitting it, there is no right or wrong strategy here, but they, you know, they're going to hopefully be very open and transparent about what they want to see happen. And the approach they'll take. For instance, some agents will put things up for auction and they'll make editors bid against one another, but you have to feel like you have a pretty hot property because if no one that shows up to your auction, it's a little embarrassing. The more common approach that covers most projects is the agent will send it out to a select number of editor's that she thinks are going to be most likely to want the book.
Jane (33m 45s): And then there will be some waiting and let's hope it's not that long. You know, maybe a month, maybe two months, you know, some of this depends on time of year. Like right now, it's a slower time because it's summer people in there away. And you can tell the agent, you know, I want to hear, I want to hear from you every time you get something from an editor, whether it's a rejection or whatever, or you can tell the agent, look, that would, it would be really hard on me to hear about every rejection that comes through. Can we, can we touch base on this state?
Jane (34m 27s): And we'll talk about what's happened so far. Of course, if there's good news, the agent is going to call you right away. So if there is good news, the agent will bring you the offer and the offer starts off as it's not a contract, its usually a, they say, OK, this is the advance we're offering. These are the most important deal points. Like is it world rights or not? What's the royalty rate look like? And there'll be some other little details. Like, is it a one book deal, a two book deal? And then if you just have one offer, its kind of this very straightforward, do you take it or not? And it's not the agent's job, you know, to push you in one direction or the other.
Jane (35m 7s): But to explain to you the merits of the deal, you know, the pros and cons and help you make a choice, that's right for you. If you have a competing interest, that's wonderful. And now you can decide where do you think is the best home for the book who is going to do the best job of bringing the book to market?
Jesper (35m 26s): Yeah. And I'm also thinking that, I mean, just from a business perspective, I mean, if, if 'cause at this stage, you shouldn't be too much of the author wanting to get anymore, but you should more put your business hat on and say, okay, what makes sense here? And I'm almost because I, I'm not an expert on this, but I've heard like the advantage. They usually are pretty low when you are first starting out. And what I don't quite like about that to be honest is the fact that the publisher has absolutely zero skin in the game and it's so if they give you a very, very low, a advanced than well, they'll probably just leave it for you to figure out how to market and they're not going to throw as much money behind it.
Jesper (36m 15s): So, and, but I guess that's more like common nowadays as well. 'cause the publishing houses probably also struggling a bit with finances and so on. So they put all the money on the big name authors and then everybody else gets us very small piece of the pie. But it is that right to you think. Yeah.
3 (36m 33s): I mean
Jane (36m 35s): With the book publishing and sometimes it's hard to talk about it. Generally 'cause each publisher can operate so differently from another one in the us, for example, there's tour, which is really well known in the science fiction and fantasy space. And you know, if you had an offer from them, even if it were a low advance, it could be really helpful to be published by them just because of the really significant direct to consumer community that they have access to that you wouldn't. So there's a lot of this decision variables here. W I think its true that a low advance means the publisher isn't going to be as focused on getting a return on their investment.
Jane (37m 21s): But I think people aren't as M there not as gracious with publishers as they might be of other businesses, like let's say Silicon valley startups have a 90% failure rate, but we don't go around criticizing them. Well maybe in recent years we do. But once upon a time we do, they go around criticizing them so much. We called them innovative and disruptive, even though the failure rate was high book publishing has always had a pretty high failure rate. I think the penguin random house CEO, Marcus Stoli recently said, it's a 50% failure rate. And by failure, meaning this book did not earn back the money that was invested into it, not just the advanced, but the time spent by the staff and the printing costs.
Jane (38m 6s): But he doesn't see that as a failure of publishing. You just use it as, this is a very risky business that we engage in every book as a startup in his mind. And I think it's true. And it's like creating a new marketing plan from scratch every single time. Unless, you know, you have imprints that are devoted to a single genre, which is why I mentioned tour because I think those sorts of publishers, do you have an advantage in that they're going after a similar group of readers with a lot of the things that their publishing when you get so big five publishing where it's really random, like it's all sorts of books that are coming out. I think that's when it gets very, very, very difficult.
Jesper (38m 50s): Yeah. And I want to return to something you said earlier about the publishing houses there, because if, if we're looking at the big five, w we have a chef HarperCollins, Macmillan, penguin, random house and Simon and Schuster, oh, that's probably the five very big one. But so if we haven't agent and where they probably gone on to these big five and nothing happens early on, you mentioned about maybe looking at the sort of next tier down kind of publishing houses. So in what is like the general view on doing something like that and having your agent ghost to go in to those, how do they age and just do that automatically, just you guys just go to everybody automatically or how, how do you approach that
Jane (39m 43s): It's going to vary by agent, but most agents are gonna go to mid size houses and there really let's say prestigious or established smaller processes. So for example, in the U S there's a grey Wolf and Grove Atlantic, which were both independent publisher's on the literary ends of things. There are considered small by big five standards, but they punch way above their weight. You know, the, when the book of prizes and get on the bestseller lists and they tend to invest in there authors over many, many, many years. So even if your first book doesn't do well, even if your first five books don't do well, they're probably going to stand by you because they believe in what you're doing as, as an artist, because they believe in literature with a capital L.
Jane (40m 31s): So I think that's the advantage you get. When you start working outside of the big five model, you get people who are in it for lots of different reasons, some are in it just for the commercial money, bit of it. And there has to be some focus on that or else the publisher won't stay in business, but many publishers, the smaller they get, the more mission-oriented they are, are they're in the business to bring attention and Lite to certain types of literature or stories. So it can be very satisfying. You could have a closer relationship with your editor and if they can be more agile, more experimental, more open to collaboration, easier to reach in communicate with than your big five publisher.
Jesper (41m 10s): And you also need to have to trust the agent that he doesn't go out and query some sort of a very small press somewhere that actually has no, no mussels to, to, to use or whatever. And the market, right. I mean, I guess the agent needs to, he, he should know that, that kind of thing, right.
Jane (41m 29s): They ought to, yes. I have seen some shocking sails from agents to really small presses or what I would even consider hybrid publishers where there might be no advanced or even the author is asked to pay some money. And I think of how you did not need an agent for that deal. And that, that was a total waste of everyone's time. So if you have a docent agent, at some point, there are going to say, look, I I've gone to everyone that I think you should publish with. There might be some other publishers out there that could be smaller, or maybe, you know, the places that offer very small advances. It's not worth my time to go to these places, but if you want to be my guest, so you might reach that point.
Jane (42m 13s): Yeah.
Jesper (42m 14s): Yeah. And at that point, I guess the new self-published that novel and you ride a new one on, and then you gave that one to B and say, okay, try this one instead of, I guess,
Jane (42m 22s): Oh yes. Age agents, a good one should have a conversation with you about, okay. Let's what's next? What are you doing? What's your next book? Do you have anything else in the drawer? Like what do we think the next move is?
Jesper (42m 33s): Oh yeah. Yeah, indeed. Okay. So, but let's assume that everything goes well, of course, because we want the success stories here and you then get that offer. And you mentioned it a bit earlier on as well, Jayne about the, the contract itself. And obviously the agent should be able to, to some extent advice you on, on the contract. But I, at the same time, I've heard some really like awful examples of what might be in those contracts. So what I mean, well, I guess what I'm getting at is I'm not a hundred percent convinced that you can just trust that the agent will understand everything and tell you everything you probably need to will read everything also to small letters yourselves.
Jesper (43m 16s): And if you don't understand them, maybe even get a lawyer to look at it as something. But what, what, what's your view on that? I mean, usually
Jane (43m 23s): You can trust the agent to take care of the contract in its entirety and explain to you what every claws means and what you are getting into. And where are you might be making compromises or thinks that where you're agreeing to something that's less than ideal. Usually some of the most important parts of the contract to negotiate are what would S what would be, what would be an unacceptable manuscripts scenario. So like where there is a difference of opinion between you and the publisher about what, what changes to make what's acceptable, what happens in those instances? So that should be carefully negotiated. As you know, most agents are going to try to ensure that you don't have to give back the advance.
Jane (44m 6s): If there's some disagreement that would lead to no publication of the book, you don't want to be in that vulnerable position of having to give back money you've already spent. And there is, there are lots of ramifications of negotiating that well, and most agents are very focused on getting that part, right? The other big issue has to do with reversion of rights. So, and again, often, if things haven't gone well, but the publisher, you want to be able to sever that as cleanly in as quickly as possible. So the reversion of rights clause governs how that happens when it can happen, how long it takes, etcetera. You know, those are the areas that every agent knows about. You wouldn't have to have, I think, be concerned about what their doing on that front I'm.
Jane (44m 52s): But of course there are lots of things like, oh, you know, what are the royalty escalators? Like? How does your royalty increase the sales increase? What are the different percentages for all sorts of sales, which are there, what are the rights sub rights situation's there is your agent going to be handling any of those sales and you could hire a lawyer to help, but they would have to know that publishing standards are, umm,
3 (45m 15s): Or you could also
Jane (45m 17s): In the U S if you're a member of the authors Guild, they have a contract service where they'll review any contract at no charge. There might be something similar in other countries where if you go to your author society, they have something comparable. Right. So it doesn't, it doesn't hurt to get another set of eyes, but your age, I mean, that's your agent's job, but that's job number of one is
Jesper (45m 38s): To go out. Oh, I understand. Yeah. Yeah. And maybe on just to skeptical, but because I'm, I'm also just thinking that the agent has he sort of playing he or she is sort of playing on to horses at the same time here. I know on one hand they, of course the one to have a good relationship with the author. 'cause the author is the client, but at the same time, they also want to close that deal with the publishing house, because that's the only way they're going to and earn some money on all the on hours they spend already. So I'm just a bit skeptical that you can a hundred percent just trust their word all the time. And maybe they sort of smooth out small things. He in there. Yeah. It's not a big deal that you can, you can access this. And because then we can close to deal kind of, I don't know, maybe I'm too skeptical.
Jane (46m 23s): I think where those sorts of issues come more into play is when the books are already under contract. And, you know, there were differences of opinion or there is some tension between you and the publisher. I think there are the agent is I find them, there are going to try and smooth it over to as best they can because they don't want to lose the relationship with the editor or with the publisher because they have more books to sell presumably to those people. And they don't want to burn a bridge. So I think agents still do work. I don't use the word attack dog slightly, but you know, some of them are very aggressive on behalf of their clients and they have too much power to be pushed around by a publisher and they can, they could say, look, I'm not going to bring you my next book by whatever new, huge talent there is.
Jane (47m 12s): So they have a lot of it depends on the agent, how much leverage they have in that regard, but they can, you know, give editors' the cold shoulder, uhm, with the contract or something that might offer a reassurance is that you usually agents deal with publishers multiple times over the years. And they end up having an negotiated boiler plate for their agency. So you're not starting from scratch each time you get the benefit of every other contract that agent has negotiated with that publisher. Right. And, and then they'd make some changes that are unique for you in your project.
Jane (47m 51s): So anything that, you know, that would be of concern to the opp, to you, it's going to be of concern to the other clients. So that's why I'm less worried about the issue.
Jesper (48m 4s): No. Okay. No, that's good to you clarify that because if it's probably in just me being to skeptical, but I'm also not in use to that kind of, that part of the publishing world a as you are. So it, so that was good too. You could clarify that, but, but Looker Jane we've already sort have been from the beginning to the end of the process and we could probably keep on from on our wire if we needed to hear, but you shared so much, very good and insightful information. So I was just wondering if, if people want to learn more about you and your advice and , do you want them to go?
Jane (48m 45s): My website is the best place. That's Jane friedman.com. You can find out all the of courses I offer the book's, the newsletters it's all mentioned. They're
Jesper (48m 55s): Excellent. And the thank you so much for your time, Jane. It was a pleasure talking to you today.
Jane (48m 60s): Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it.
Jesper (49m 3s): Alright. So next Monday, Autumn will be back in and we haven't quite decided what are we going to talk about yet? But I think it's going to be one out of funny top 10 lists.
Narrator (49m 15s): If you like, what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy for as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Dominic asked a question in our Patreon group and we answered with this episode! Does race and gender really matter in fantasy?
We take a look at the history of fantasy up through modern trends, looking at how fantasy has changed and is still changing. This simple question leads to an outcome that surprises Jesper... how important do you think race, gender, and sexuality are in fiction?
And a big thank you to Dominic for the question! We really appreciate having you with us on Patreon. ❤️
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need in literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than in 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I'm Jesper.
Autumn (32s): And I'm Autumn
Jesper (35s): This is episode 139 of the am writing fantasy podcast and a while back at, well, to be honest, this is, yeah, Quite some time ago, we received the question from one of the patrons supporters. Dominic asked if race sex like male and female and sexuality matters and is relevant to think about when writing fantasy fiction. And that is what we aim to answer today. Or at least you have some thoughts on that because we noticed how the same topic actually came up a few times in The Am Writing Fantasy Facebook group. So it's apparently something and above author's are wondering about,
Autumn (1m 16s): Oh, I'm looking forward to this one. And actually in a couple of books I've read recently, you kind of prepared me for this one. So I think will have some stuff to discuss, but first, so how were things going in Denmark? Good.
Jesper (1m 34s): Well, it's going fine. I actually started a kayaking course. So the other day. Yeah. Well, I, I S I think I emailed you a bit about it, but we never got to talk about how we went
Autumn (1m 51s): In curious. So yeah, you're out in the ocean and Denmark. This it is August, so that's okay.
Jesper (2m 1s): Yeah. It's okay. I mean, of course you, you have all the gear on and so on. And so it was that because it's called, but there was, and we went out on Tuesday. So a couple of days ago at the point of recording this and that there was a lot of waves and a lot of wind. So it was, and so they do like a five to six weeks course where you sort of learned all the techniques in how to save yourself if you fall into the water and all that kind. So you, you, you do a lot of practicing over like five or six weeks, and then once you're done, you are sort of released, not that you can't just go out as you please, even, I think even after that, but you, you can go out with some other people in and, and so on, but at, on Tuesday than I was out for the first time, and we were to post to sort of first just sale a bit, but there was way too many waves.
Jesper (2m 57s): So it's like the instructor said, no, lets just go back closer to the, to the shore because this is way too much waive here. Ah, so we, we did that and the, all my way back I fell in for the first time, which was not on purpose. Oh
Autumn (3m 14s): No, it's a good practice though.
Jesper (3m 16s): Oh. And then we got back and then yeah. And at that point we haven't even practiced how to save ourselves. So anything so, but it was very shallow water 'cause we were trying to keep close to the beach, but because of all the wave's, so if I could just, you know, stand on there on the bottom of Maya. So we, it was not so bad. And then when you were supposed to Trane saving ourselves, so he set, like we needed to tip over on purpose M two times each. Oh. And then, you know, gate get out of the kayak while you were basically upside down. So underneath water, get out of the kayak and get up and turn it around.
Jesper (3m 57s): And then he showed some techniques on how to climb on, on board again, which is pretty difficult. I have to say, because you were out in the water, in the kayak, his shaking and not very sturdy either. And you had to climb on border with that if that's not easy, but M but he showed some techniques to do that. A and so I think the first time I try it, I actually got up on the kayak and the knot plumped into the water on the other side of, if I was just back in the water.
Autumn (4m 28s): Oh, that's great. I wish I had a recording of that. Oh, well you make me miss my to practice things. Yeah, yeah.
Jesper (4m 41s): Yes. And then I did my two practice, a, you know, tipping over on purpose. And then he said like the Indian, he said, okay, I think that's it w we will stop for today. Let's say go back. And then we, we were sailing back and then I, I accidentally tipped over again. So I ended up in the water for the fifth time then. Well,
Autumn (4m 60s): You got you're dunking in that. That's great. Oh, oh, you definitely making me. When I, before I met my husband, like I had done whitewater kayaking and there was never a particularly good at the roles, but, you know, I was used to going down rapids. I was doing all that kind of stuff. And we got to me, it was in, it was a lot of lakes. What we both got CK at kayaks and they had a 17 foot sea kayak, but it had a rudder on the back. So yeah. Some of those techniques on how to get into it and I'm like, oh, you don't want to watch out for the rudder. But yeah, I would, we left, I sold mine. He still has his cause it's a fiberglass one in, and it's gorgeous.
Autumn (5m 40s): It's so much later than mine, but I miss the times we've had on the water, you know, me, I've had sailboats like KX, we'd still have canoes. So I like the water. That sounds like a lot of that. Oh
Jesper (5m 54s): No, I like it at two one. And, and you, you can, you can sell some really, you know, some of you are very nice trips, right? You that you can do on the sale down on some very nice like streams where you can go and watch some nature in while we were sailing as if it's very nice. I think that like it, but I have to say Tuesday evening when I came back and I had taking my shower and I was back in the couch, I had a bit of soul muscles study. But if it's a good way to get some exercise in as well,
Autumn (6m 25s): There it is. You making me miss it. And you will do this. One of these times, there is actually a trail call the Maine coastal kayak trail in main. And I forget, I guess too, like 200 different Highlands. You go to an island every night and you camp and you just keep going down the trail. So you and your wife and your kids, you're going to have to come over and we're going to have to do it because its been my goal to do that. Ever since I moved to Maine was deleted part of the Maine kayak trial. So I think that this might work out a lot of these days it could be really fun. So that would be cool. Okay. Well we get to the gut plans,
Jesper (7m 0s): But I'm like,
Autumn (7m 2s): Oh well I'm, I'm solitary again. As my husband's off, back up in Maine guiding people on moose, watching tours, canoe watching canoe in whitewater rafting. So if I'm getting all these gorgeous pictures of Lake's in the sunsets and moose and I'm sitting in our little cabin and very dry Vermont working on in graphic design thinking to get myself back up to me and as soon as I can, so we're starting to figure that out so that maybe he'll have less of a commute when he goes to work. Instead of being seven hours away, we, we could maybe be a couple of hours away from home. That'd be nice, but otherwise good doing some fun designs.
Autumn (7m 43s): And we're actually in the middle. I dunno if you can hear the rain, but if anyone hears in the thunder, interesting sounds we're in the middle of the end of a tropical system. So we've had this height. It's like not hot the humidity, but its high humidity in damp and its just been raining like the rainforest all day. It's its very nice, but its also very stinky. So I'm, I'm expecting you to the tree to fall over or some thing again. Oh I know. And a bear coming to the cabinet or something. Hopefully not because I don't really want the dog and the bear to say too much.
Autumn (8m 24s): Usually every time we dealt with bears, I almost always had the dog like some of our high. So I was never that worried except for one time, literally in this property we were walking to the main house and I saw this creature moving through the field next door in, running into the woods, like running towards us. It was going across our path and I've just looked at me. I'm like, damn, what is there a Shetland pony rules? And then I realized it wasn't a Shetland pony. It was one of the biggest black bears I have seen outside of a Labrador in, I mean I've seen some there seeing a huge, even in a grizzly while we are in dead horse, Alaska, what? This was like at least 300 pounds, he was massive.
Autumn (9m 4s): And we had the dog with us and he was ahead of us. And he was well-trained if you dropped out and you kind of throw your arms open and you call for him and he's like, oh, so he turns around and comes running for me. And I'm just focusing in on our dog while there is massive black bear runs right behind them. I'm just like, holy, oh, like I said, I had a little fizzy gig. This was a man. He wasn't even on the size of this thing, but it was really cool to get the sealer bear. What I saw that I mostly saw it blurry behind the dogs come back to the, for a cookie.
Jesper (9m 46s): Well, at, at at least that dog is very quick. I mean, I mean even if the, even if the bear wanted to attack it, I guess that the doc had run away. I mean, I think unless it's the stupid enough to fight back,
Autumn (9m 58s): Oh, he's a terrier. So we might get an in his head that I can take it out. But
Jesper (10m 5s): Tell him, I said that you want to fight me.
Autumn (10m 8s): Oh, do you have food as there at the end of this? Because there's are no food. It's not worth it
Narrator (10m 22s): Writing Fantasy Podcast.
Jesper (10m 26s): So Autumn, I thought I would bring something slightly different for this section. Oh,
Autumn (10m 31s): Okay. I liked do you know? I like changes what's up.
Jesper (10m 36s): Yeah. I actually found an app that helps to improve your habits and getting rid of bad habits. It's basically like gave me five habits.
Autumn (10m 50s): That sounds kind of cool. This, this thing.
Jesper (10m 56s): So yeah, it was because doing the you and your summer holidays, as I was sort of thinking, you know, I do a lot of what is cardio exercising, you know, running and stuff like that, but I don't do very much. So in terms of, of, I don't even know what it is called, like, but do you know like bodies, strength, exercise, and kind of, you know, like core so strange. I don't know how much of that. I, I just mostly do. Oh yeah. I mostly just do running and I thought I should be doing more of a muscle strength than, and body strength and stuff like that, but I've always found that kind of exercise and quite boring.
Jesper (11m 37s): So I never get around to do it because it's like, ah, nah, I don't want to. So during the summer holidays I started, I, I must find a way where I can sort of motivate myself to do this stuff that I don't want to do. And then I found this app or this app you afford. So especially in, just for the phone that you just downloaded from the app store, but in his called habit RPG. So already from the name, you can hear that it's, it's a game basically.
Autumn (12m 5s): But if it's
Jesper (12m 6s): It's pretty cool. Oh yeah, because it's pretty cool because you basically create a character like it's a role-playing game, but so you create a character and you as sort of M you leveling up your characters, so you put it in your own habits. Ah, you can either put it in habits that you want to do. Or you can put that in habits that you wanted to not do right in. I don't want you, if you decide you put it in yourself and then you set your own schedule for like, it could be that I want to do on, I want to not do this thing every day for whatever it may be all. And you can put it in several as well. And you define if it's difficult or easy and so on. And then the more difficult it is, the most experienced point that your character will get from completing it.
Jesper (12m 51s): And so basically every time that you've done to have that you wanted to do you do you click in the app and you say, okay done. And then your character gets experienced points and he levels up and you can buy equipment for him and all of weapons. And you can go on question and fight boss's in all kinds of stuff. So there's fighting. Like you don't need to sit down and press anything. You just, you just say, I want to fight this boss. And then if you complete enough of your habits, then you'll the feet, the bar. So it's oh, that's awesome. It's pretty in, in a sense it's pretty primitive, right? It is a way to just game-ify your getting good habits. So I showed it to my sons and they've downloaded this as well.
Jesper (13m 33s): And they, they, they put it in all kinds of habits that they want, they needed to do like a, we need to read more. So they put it in like, and I have to read 10 pages every day and stuff like that. So they put that stuff in, into their habit RPG. And so it's, I think it's pretty cool. So I, I thought I would share that 'cause some people might find something like we got useful.
Autumn (13m 53s): Oh, I think that sounds really useful. I'm always trying to get myself off of it, the computer in, out the door Morris. So that could be a good one. Usually, you know, the dog encourages me, but he's not exactly high M running or anything. Exercise. He can only go so far being so small. So that would be kind of, I might have to look into it too.
Jesper (14m 15s): Yeah. It's, it's actually quite cool. Especially for those people who, who like role-playing games and stuff like that, you know, it, this, this will be write down there early and the once you get to the level 10, you can choose. If you want to be a major or a warrior or a range, you're all kinds of this guy. It's
Autumn (14m 32s): Pretty cool. It is. I could see this totally transforming someone's writing. You can, you know, you're leveling up your role playing game while getting your writing done. So yeah. You can
Jesper (14m 42s): Put it in. Yeah. Oh yeah. You could put it in your writing sprints, if you want to, like, I want to write 500 words per day. You could put that in to you and say, OK. And then I put that in and every time you do what you press that you've done it. I like it.
Autumn (14m 60s): Anything else? Oh, oh, I don't think I have anything exciting to announce. I should probably check out stuff, but like, it's been a little hectic. I will have to put that into my role playing habit game.
Jesper (15m 15s): Oh, wow. Yeah. Okay. So it'd be at, let's move on
Narrator (15m 20s): And on to today's topic. So,
Jesper (15m 24s): So race, sex, and sexuality in fantasy. And well, to be honest, Autumn, I'm not sure that in terms of its relevance, that it's any more or less relevant than in fantasy than it is in any other or do you think
Autumn (15m 43s): I would say it's probably, I agree. It's probably just as important in every genre, but maybe fantasy because of its own history in where it stems from has its own hiccups and problems to overcome might be a way of putting it in what way? That, like, if we say that fantasy started with token, which I agree with, most of the fantasy is a genre did start with him. But fantasy, as a type of storytelling has been going on since, you know, go back to ancient Greece, even prior to that, story's a fantastical nature in a magical beast.
Autumn (16m 25s): And the incredible powers have been along for around for a long, long time. But if you start with Tolkin and you do read the actual, oh, Lord of the rings, there's very few female characters or absolutely no sex. And there is a lot of instances that if you say this is what our traditions, what were based on, and you looked at what modern readers, like there is a lot to overcome.
Jesper (16m 58s): Yeah. Especially in now that would just have some the holidays. You know, I have been reading a lot of work over the summer holidays and at least if we were talking about like the sex scenes and stuff like that, not that this erotic erotica bud, but in fences, you novels, like just the fact that you spent almost any time at all talking about what the characters are doing, you know, in a bedroom kind of things there it's, it is very, very limited what there is in it's actually quite rare. I would almost say that in a fantasy book that there
Autumn (17m 33s): Is anything I like that. Yeah. I would say unless you're getting into fantasy romance, there's some babies in some dark fantasy. And I think that there might be a little bit more, but yeah, you're getting into specific sub genres, but if you're in sort of the and epic or high, I think there's a lot less though. Again, it depends on if it's leaning towards Y a or if it's leaning towards adults.
Jesper (18m 2s): Yeah. But even the stuff that is written for adults, like epic fantasy novels for adults it's there was almost none of it in, in, in those books. And, and I also think that most readers would expect there not to be stuff like that. So to some extent that I think it is important to consider what reader expectations are and, and think about that. But at the same time, I don't see why this, why you couldn't do it like a bit more of this sexy stuff in the book, if you wanted it to.
Autumn (18m 38s): I agree. I think there's a definitely room for there's some room for so much. I mean, up until a two books I read recently, I would have said that gender has become almost normalized. There was a time like in the eighties, it was always like the token female you had. I'm all the guys in the question and one token, female, and that's all, there was an almost, I would say almost every book I've picked, picked up since, you know, the digital age of eBooks and E reading, that there was always been a nice cadre of women that were well-developed. But then I read two books in the summer and they are horrible for the portrayals of women.
Autumn (19m 20s): They were noticeable that all the characters were men or that there's a only bit part's for the women are, they were never point of view characters from the women. And I, in one case, the woman in the story, we were one of the two types. They were either mousy in, quiet, in a little insane, or hard-ass brittle cold and possibly an assassin. And that's it. Those were the only type of woman. And I was like, wow, how did we backslide here? I've heard other authors at her, got male authors say, I don't know how to write women. I've been like, there are people, right? People M you know, everyone's a different, it's not that hard, but then I read these two books.
Autumn (19m 60s): So I'm like, wow. Some people really don't know how to write the opposite gender. And then I have to admit, I read a different one. What, actually, one of those, the mail point of view character was so strongly was being in the guy's head in a way that most fantasy books I had never been into the house. If I ever needed the description of what it was like to get kicked in the groin for a guy, oh, this book has several really good passages. So I was like, oh, I have never considered that. And so think about it. I've never read that in a fantasy story before either. That's fascinating. Why don't we hear more about this effect and say, oh, I've been in a male's head, you know, the male night for, in male majors for ages.
Autumn (20m 43s): They've never gotten kicked in the groin. Huh?
Jesper (20m 49s): Well, yeah, to be fair. I think that's the part that would be difficult to write about the other JIEDDO or if, I mean, that, that, that's going to be difficult to imagine what that feels like. Yes.
Autumn (21m 1s): I don't expect a guy to under S to write about what it's like the nurse, a child, but they could probably try to make up something. And, you know, at this point I could always refer back to this book if I ever need to write about a guy getting kicked in the groin because very good descriptions, but those are some of the new, so, yeah.
Jesper (21m 22s): Yeah. But I think apart from like the sexuality stuff that if we also touching or talking about racist, because I think the nice thing about fantasy is that it sort of offers us this freedom as author's too, where we imagine new resources, we create new cultures, but we can use those things as tools too, like examine maybe the sexual biases or gender biases or stuff like that. And Macy may use it as a vehicle to, to make the reader well, could we say like reconsider his or her on her own cultural assumptions to some degree.
Jesper (22m 4s): So I think that that's what fences, you probably does better than most other genres or Spotify as well. Of course, if you could put that in the same category here, but anything that has to do with like our, the kinds of raises in humans and other kinds of people in cultures where you can start playing with these things and maybe show a different perspective as something that makes the Rita thing a bit of like, huh, oh, I guess, I guess you could look at it like that. You know, because it becomes less dangerous is the wrong word, but it becomes less like confrontational when it's an elf and a dwarf rather than, you know, two humans of, of different skin color or whatever.
Autumn (22m 49s): I was going to say the same thing that you are differences in skin color become so much less when you're talking about ELs vs door's versus giants versus cognisent dragons are set in and dragons. So sitting at the trees we have, as you know, so there are, I think I agree fantasy, and sci-fi, you have managed to broaden the differentiation of the different races, but also, you know, there's still a lot of subjectivism that there's still a lot of us versus them, you know, human versus, or especially elves, elves are always Hottie. You know, they don't like the other races or dwarves or always in other ways.
Autumn (23m 33s): So there's always those portrayals. And I think it's exciting when we get into something that has different, that kind of, you even breaks those moles and starts making me question why certain species are like this. It's why I do like fantasy that comes up with new, new creatures and characters and races, because it's fun to see something different. And it was a, and it's also, sometimes I know some of the newer fantasy is much more nuanced. I just finished a book, which I didn't even tell you. I finished my first one that we were currently reading. And it was interesting because it actually kind of talked about religion and some of like, it kind of tied up some Judaism, Muslims sort of like this that they had.
Autumn (24m 20s): This is one God that has the skin, especially woman's flesh, its just like, oh my goodness. So my you don't cover them head to toe. Don't even talk about like they say the problem of writing along in sex, when you came, you used the word sex is, but it was interesting to look at, it had to have that pulled apart and it was literally, it wasn't even a different race. So they just stuck with humans for the whole book. And I'm like, this is really interesting. I think I have a much better understanding of this mindset and when it's being forced on other people in why other people are trying to force it on other people, I really thought the book was well written in that way. And if it was nice because it was a fantasy world somewhere totally different, it didn't use, you use the totally different God just to kind of pull that out elements at if you were paying attention and you're like, oh, oh this is the sort of probably what inspired them.
Autumn (25m 14s): And that is so interesting to read.
Jesper (25m 22s): Yeah. I think that either, if it's like very deep, world-building where it really has nothing to do with like cultures or races or whatever you want to call it here on earth, but it's just so well developed that you can actually understand Y you know, a certain made of raises behaving the way that they do and how they act toward the other genders or if it's really, really deeply built. I really enjoyed at all. I also enjoy. Or if it's, if it's actually to show that you can almost, you, you can sort of recognize that this is probably built on, on, on this, this kind of this culture or this religion or something from, from real life.
Jesper (26m 12s): But then it just starts to sort of explore the, some different viewpoints on it. Or maybe it makes you sort of understand maybe where these people are coming from me. Not necessarily that, that do you agree from it, from reading it, but at least you can sort of, you start seeing their perspective and you can translate that perspective into real life in some ways, I guess, okay. I, I can sign, they kind of see ware in their culture of this makes sense of something. But I kind of like that if, if it's either, oh, I think the stuff just sort of told a plumber's in the middle where it's just this machine thing and it may be based off some reality, but it doesn't quite either as it's, it's almost not well-built enough either that you can sort of map any of the two sides together.
Jesper (26m 60s): So I think those are the things that I like the, the least, but it's of course on all of the matter of taste, bud, but I just like, if there is a bit of intention behind it,
Autumn (27m 12s): Yes. I think the intention is always the importance and it is interesting to watch an author grow because I always, that was told you, I just let red many of lay BARDA goes M novel's. So the growth of stories, and I thought her world building was not top of the notch. You know, if you could obviously tell which parts were from where, what of this world that she was drawing from, you know, Russia Nazis, there was some neat ones. It was sort of like Africa wild west. I'm like, oh, that was kind of a cool thing to lump together, but it was not really original, but it, as a story grow, we grew and the world's grew more in depth than she explored. The more I became more authentic too, where she was when you stopped seeing what it was based on.
Autumn (27m 58s): And I thought that was good, but it definitely, it took the first trilogy to get there. But what she was incredible, one of the best authors I've read about was her characters in her dynamics and actually in another aspect, she was so good when I mentioned she's really good at plot twists, but she's good at character twist, like looking at race's. So she talked, she had transgender or transsexual homosexual, every bisexual EV I think there was one that might've been more asexual. And so almost every diversity that his modern and his really out there with specially with the younger readers, this as a white book, and yet she covers all of these gender and stereotypic topics so well, and every character is, is unique.
Autumn (28m 43s): And it's not even that, it's not like when I was reading books as a kid that might deal with homosexuals or asexuals or something, it was always kinda like, you know, if that was so controversial in her world, no, it just is. It's just, just the way it is an accepted. I'm like, this is nice. It's nice to get into that mindset where this is not something you need to bring up and tear her apart and explain it as just like, oh no, that's fine. That's fine till you're a woman, but you would rather be a man. Okay. We're good. Just like this, this wonderful. This is perfect. So that was one thing that you said in her character, his and how they relate it to the world in related to each other.
Autumn (29m 26s): I see why she's doing as well as she is, because she's very brilliant in now that her world is getting deeper. Its really good. But yeah, if when you get a chance to read her, as you're going to have to take a little breath every once in a while, because there's definitely parts of the world, you'd be like, oh good, have done more to it. But I think she's a great example of looking at genders and the stereotypes and characters and you know, again, she doesn't have different races. She doesn't have elves and dwarves in all of those things that keeps with humans. And I think that's becoming a lot more of a trend. I'm seeing, you know, some of the high fantasy books going that way, but there's a lot of books that are coming out there.
Autumn (30m 8s): It's just people just humans' and just exploring the topic and be in religion or gender, why they were mean to each other, what are the cultural differences? Why are we fighting? And those are all of a hidden Subutex. And it's like, wow, this is, this is different. And I kind of think that's so special in its own way,
Jesper (30m 31s): But that was also a bit of what I meant when I said that I'm in my fantasy in this regard and makes you reflect a bit about that, your own opinions to people who are of a different sexual orientation than yourself. If you know, reading a hundred thousand words about these people or however long the book is, but, but you are spending a considerable amount of time in the head of these characters and you start to understand or at least see how they live their life and, and what it means to them. And, and that's where I think it really matters a lot of these kinds of things because it helps us become better people basically.
Jesper (31m 15s): 'cause we start to understand that. I mean that this is what reading dusty people in my view, like we, we become better. People, stories heal people because you, you, you, you become more in empathic towards others because you start understanding how they feel and so on. And so I think that that is all very good. But at the end of the day, I'm also thinking now that we're talking about it, that if we are talking about a topic like sex or race or sexuality and stuff like that in, in books, what it really comes down to at the end of the day is just a conversation about characters actually. You know, because with you, it is just the matter of these characters.
Jesper (32m 0s): They are who they are and their experiences through the life that they live influence who they are. So the person and they influence their surroundings, but they aren't just people.
Autumn (32m 14s): No, that's so true. And it is also, you have characters who, you know, they overcome, they get to be friends with people they might not have thought of before. And so maybe you start seeing that other side, it's really, it's up to authors. And again, you could be maybe a very narrow mindset author where something is right, and something is wrong. And that's what you want to put in your story. But to be authentic to that, you should understand the other side as well. But I would say a lot of fantasy authors have at least the ones that I read are a very liberal and they were trying to make you see, people are people and life is living. You know, whether it's a sentiment tree or a dragon or your next door neighbor who you really just can't stand, but there are a person than they have feelings.
Autumn (33m 1s): And so if that comes out in fantasy, that we do our best to understand it. And in your right, the science, there is a bit of actually quite a few studies about readers and reading. And it shows that people who read a lot of books actually have more empathy and they understand we live a hundred, you know, a thousand different lives, but through the stories. So we understand people in can transport ourselves into someone else's head so much easier as a reader. I haven't seen the studies as authors, but I would assume it probably carries over 'cause we really, as an author, you really spend time in heads. I've whether it's a villain or like you always bring up that politician that I just could not get into his head.
Autumn (33m 45s): I am not meant for politics. Did you learn something about the strengths and weaknesses of other people by putting yourself in their heads and writing a hundred thousand words in there? Point of view. And I've always said my FA my favorite character is the one who's point of view I'm writing in it at this moment. I don't care if they were the worst character in the room were the best character in the room. But they're my favorite one, because I am going to tell the story to the best of my ability to tell their story the best way I can. And so when you do that, you do transform yourself and you open yourself up to other possibilities. And that is the power of story is to be able to maybe bring some understanding the world in I've said before, it's changed fantasy change.
Autumn (34m 34s): The reading I did as a teenager changed who I became because I grew up in a very conservative, very small minded community and I was reading it. It wasn't even dragon Lance Mercedes Lackey. I was totally the one in who I read some things about, you know, a woman. I still remember the scene, a woman who was selling a was a prostitute and they were writing buy in the one person it's like, oh, well that is so low of her. And I was like, she has nothing else to sell, but herself, she isn't that bad of shape in that out of poverty. And it kinda like, this is a slap in the face. I'm like, so yeah, this isn't like, it's a moral choice. She has no other choice. And it made me start questioning things from a very young age and wondering about the stuff I was being taught and whether it was right and how I wanted to view the world.
Jesper (35m 27s): Yeah. I think that's, you, you, you were saying a lot of true things too, because essentially, and like you say, if the character, they didn't have any choice, if you, that the fact that the customer didn't have any choice, then that gives you a new perspective. But on the flip side, have that, for example, we've, we've been doing a lot of, or still are doing a lot of research about pirate history and stuff like that, because we want to write a, some stories about pirates in the future. And with regard to all that research as well, we both watch the Netflix show is the pirate kingdom. Oh yeah. I'm and there are, for example, it really rocked me the wrong way.
Jesper (36m 12s): That's how they protect, portray and Bonny in that series. There 'cause, if you have like, like you were ex just explaining that from that book, if you understand why to coat it is in that situation. And they act that way because maybe they don't have any choice or maybe they have chosen this because it made sense or it aligns with their motivations or whatever, then it is fine. But in the Netflix show, for example, I really, I must say I really enjoyed the show, so I, I'm not putting the showdown because it is, I think it's really informative and a very good show. If you like pirates, then go and watch it. But the one thing that I did not like what was the on Bonnie pot, because they basically portray her.
Jesper (36m 55s): Like, she's just as a kind of prostitute that just runs around and does the, you know, prostitute thing in quotation marks here. Yeah. But, but if they don't give her any sort of motivation or explain anything, so afterwards during the summer holidays hear I got a bit of annoyed with it. So I actually went and I found a nonfiction book about Anne Bonny and her life. And then I bought that and read it. And my God, she
Autumn (37m 21s): Is so fascinating. It's so fascinating,
Jesper (37m 25s): But they just did not get that across at all. And that a Netflix show, which was the shame, but the, the whole point that I was just trying to make here is that it doesn't really matter if a character is of a certain sexuality, or if there are in a certain situation whereby they are doing things that normally would be frowned upon. But if you can make sure that it is clear why day in the situation and why, what they're doing is aligned with maybe their motivation is just to me, I need to do this to get out of this situation. Or, you know, long-term, I, I, if I can just earn enough money, I can buy my ticket out of here or whatever it may be. But as long as it's clear, why are they doing what they're doing?
Jesper (38m 9s): You can easily have characters who are doing things or are acting certain ways, or maybe that's just the way that AI on the personality. But if, if the Rita at least understand, don't, don't necessarily agree with it. But if they at least understand why, then you can get away with all of these things. And then at the same time, you will make the reader start, think a bit about, well, maybe these kinds of people who does this thing that I don't like, whatever that may be, that maybe they're not too bad, all of them. Right. And, and thus, you, you will start healing the world that bit.
Autumn (38m 45s): So just a bit, I hope. And I do you think to play on me to add to that is that I think a lot of traditional fantasy up until possibly recently, the people who are different we're changing or leaving there society because they we're like the cultural as normal. And so they were going to find a group where they're accepted. I think that's something a lot of us feel, but I have noticed a shift where there's a lot more stories where no, they want to speak up for the other people in their society who feel the same way, who are also put it down. They don't want to just, if it's not the classic tropes is like, like I said, this, the token female, she's the only one who wants to be your hero.
Autumn (39m 29s): And she is the only one who wants to go carry a sword. Well, no, now she's speaking up for her best friend and the sisters that are out there who are, they should be given the choice. And I've noticed that a lot on several, the books that I've read recently. And so I see that as a cultural shift where it's like, people don't want to be the only one. They know that there's enough other people in the planet, even if its a fantasy world there or not, the only one and they want to help everyone. And I think that's also exciting. And again, I think it's interesting. Like if I was studying this in school, you could actually track the difference, the society and the different generations and how we're trying to make things better and save for a lot of different people.
Autumn (40m 12s): And it shows and our fiction. And if that is the importance of why it is in there, that's why when society goes crazy, they start outlawing and then burning books. That's why I wasn't Plato who said, you know, basically books are one of the things. If you wanna have a controlled society, you don't let people read because as soon as they start reading, they start understanding each other's so much better. So yeah, they might be fantasy, but it's incredibly powerful literature and it'll change people's minds.
Jesper (40m 46s): Yeah. Oh, well it still happens today in some parts of the world where you're not allowed to read whatever you want. Exactly. And yeah, it's not even that foreign. Yeah.
Autumn (40m 54s): It's not, unfortunately, I mean there is, we were just talking about other current cultural things going on in, you know, there is a lot of societies where women are not allowed to read or the different people are not taught to read and it's to control them. Once you give people the ability to read, they start questioning and they start learning and they might learn something that you can't control. And I think that's, that's why reading and literacy is so important. And that's why as authors, it's also important that the things we put into our stories, it's one thing to tell the tale, I'm all for a really good story. But I, even if it's not an overt a thing I put into the plot, I think my world view of who is of, of accepting people in protecting life, in caring for people just comes through because those tend to me, the characters I create, or I tend to push all the characters that way eventually.
Autumn (41m 51s): And the other ones just get tossed off
Jesper (41m 58s): This entire conversation. Just got a lot deeper than I thought,
Autumn (42m 4s): Oh, well I think that we can blame Dominic. It is all your fault. Thank you for asking this question. But yeah. So I guess it was an easy question to answer. Does it make a difference? What gender sex, race, ethnicity, or whatever you want to call you or your characters? Is it a big deal to have those in your fantasy? It's possibly the biggest deal if you want to change the world.
Jesper (42m 31s): Yeah. Well, yeah. And it's about creating characters and what race and sex and sexuality they are, that that's part of my being. And so it is very important. And to me, it's, it's not something you just pick at random, you know, trying to think a bit about it when you create your characters and see if you can incorporate something that, and now that you need to force any of it into the, in the story, if it doesn't belong there, but if it would make sense or if it would give a different perspective to some of the storytelling and basically enhance the story, then why not use it. And also during your world building, I think it would be good to think about some things and think about how would it influence society.
Jesper (43m 12s): How would it influence other characters? If this couch is very different from everybody else, how, how would that influence relationship's and so on? And how do you society view of this group of people or this particular race or whatever it may be. You know, all those sorts of things are very important to think about. So does it matter? Yes. I think it matters a lot. I agree.
Autumn (43m 35s): I think we can wrap it up there that this is, this is important and I agree, especially world-building in should come from there. You should not just pick because diversity is a good buzz word. And because you want to be popular around among the Gentiles, you're going to have someone who's transgender, don't do it to be popular or to get the sales, do it because you are care about the topic you've researched it, you understand it, it fits the character and it's the world you want to create. Don't just do it to try to, you know, fit in for the other readers. Do your homework readers will know. They'll know what the difference.
Jesper (44m 12s): Yeah. The story is king. As we like to say some times
Autumn (44m 17s): Or queen.
Jesper (44m 18s): Well next Monday I have an excellent interview lined up for you. I'm talking to Jane Friedman about traditional publishing contracts.
Narrator (44m 25s): How did you get an agent and many other things? If you like, what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, going, stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
What is the difference between preselling your book and making it available as a preorder on sites like Amazon? Is one better than the other?
Tune in to the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, episode 138, where Autumn and Jesper share the result of a recent experiment, using the pre sales function as mentioned by Mark Coker, the CEO and founder of Smashwords, in episode 118.
If you're interested in the $150 discount voucher, to be used for any of the Am Writing Fantasy premium courses, sign up via this link: https://www.subscribepage.com/awfnewsletter
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need an literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (29s): Hello, I'm Jesper.
Autumn (31s): And I'm Autumn.
Jesper (33s): This is episode 138 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. Back in the eighth episode, 118, Autumn talked to special guests, Mark Coker, the CEO and founder of Smashwords. And during that conversation, some new tools where shared, which was around how to resell your books as opposed to set up pre-orders or pre-sale as you write and say, presale you books, as opposed to setup, pre-orders like to do on to Amazon. And you have been testing that out, Autumn.
Autumn (1m 8s): As always, I'm the perfect Guinea pig for all our experiments. So I tried out for free sales and I have tried out preorders, both on Smashwords in other places. So we have some results to share on some thoughts and tips. If anyone wants to check out this feature and I can't wait to share it, but really today we're both kind of getting back into the driver's seat because you just back from vacation.
Jesper (1m 38s): Yeah, yeah, indeed. I mean, we recorded the bunch of episodes before the holidays to carry us through. So in reality, well, for the listener, that sounds like it's only been a week, but for us it's been a month since we last recorded anything.
Autumn (1m 51s): Oh, I know you have to record it even late. Cause we had so much stuff to talk about forehand. So yeah, we have a lot
Jesper (1m 60s): Of future pants to the future plans to have to talk about
Autumn (2m 5s): Definitley, but you have a good vacation. It's been good. Yeah.
Jesper (2m 8s): Good vacation. A lot of relaxation and the doing as little as possible apart from reading a ton of books, I think I managed to read five books, which has never happened before or some of them where a fairly short, but there was also a one very long won in between. And so, yeah, and that was good. And the way it's been busy, so busy coming back, I must say a and the, the, the, the thing is that time off work always makes me think about a million new things. So apart from writing stuff, in what we should write about how we should tackle our next series, which we just talked about offline here, I've also filled up my pocket of marketing ideas, primarily like Facebook ads, strategies.
Jesper (2m 54s): I think you noticed all in once I started emailing about, can you make new ad images for this and that?
Autumn (3m 1s): I know you're on vacation. I started getting some new tasks. So I was like, wait, what? So I'm not on vacation. Doesn't mean you could assign me things. Yeah. It, you know, so it was fun. Oh yeah.
Jesper (3m 14s): Yeah. That, that happens. So, you know, I, I stopped thinking once, once I get down, then my brain start thinking about new things. So I think that's good. It's good to take some time off sometimes.
Autumn (3m 25s): Yes. I think it is very good. And I have to admit, even though I S I had a total task list that I, I didn't actually get the bottom, have there still few things on my list of things I've meant to do while you're on vacation when we didn't have our normal sessions when we record. So they're still have stuff to do, but I have to be in, I snuck in some extra books and some extra reading as well. So it was nice to meet me. You slow down a little bit and get some reading in it. It was kind of,
Jesper (3m 56s): Yeah. And the, the other thing that actually happened while I was on vacation was that like, I got an email from the national soccer association. Oh yeah. And they, yeah. They asked me or they sort of, well, how do you say that? But they suggested in a nice way, because they have a position coming up a as to become a referee Instructure oh, instructor, referee Instructure. So they send me the email and says that we would like you to apply for this position, if you would please consider it really. So, yeah. That's pretty cool.
Jesper (4m 36s): So, and of course there is no guarantees that I will get it. I was not the only one, but I think they have, like, that was five people as something on, on that email that they have picked out and say would like you guys to apply for this. But if I understand correctly, I think there are going to hire a couple. So it's not only one person. I think there are going to be a couple of, but yeah. So as we know from the recording, this podcast, all the courses we do with writing and I love teaching. So I think this is excellent. So I would like to become an instruction. And if I'm honest, one day, at some point in the future, I will not be able to run as well anymore. And she catches up with me.
Jesper (5m 16s): So maybe teaching would be good to get into.
Autumn (5m 19s): Yeah. Oh, I can see that. Let's not talk about age because I'm even older than you. So lets just not, that might be that, you know, it's so flattering to even get an email asking you to apply, but good luck. That would be really kinda cool. We just spend like two hours talking to you. You didn't oh, you're just telling me this now. And I always do this on purpose and I think he like holding out on me.
Jesper (5m 46s): Yeah. I could, I could just say it to the listener that a, we just had a two hour like business and writing meeting. And I think I started up by saying, I want to ask Autumn a question and then I did not ask the question until two hours later and I gave her like three teases throughout the two hours that I'm going to come back to the question
Autumn (6m 7s): That you didn't know where it was. We go to each other, having to use, I was like, okay, what is this question? And then you have to keep hitting sing about, but if we got through it with the question, we can do it. Yeah. Excellent.
Narrator (6m 24s): A week on the Internet with the Writing Fantasy Podcast.
Jesper (6m 27s): So Autumn, another thing I want a spring on you here.
Autumn (6m 30s): Already?
Jesper (6m 32s): Already? We are recording, but the first time in the months, so I'm kind of like coming to the, the gates running now
Autumn (6m 40s): That you saved all of these things up on you have in place. This is why you been thinking about while you're on vacation are the things that you can the spring on me. No, I know.
Jesper (6m 49s): No, but this is now on probably a month ago because that's how long it's been since we recorded. What did you notice? How Dominick wave in on Patrion on which one of us? One episode 123 where we did the top 10 lists of the worst characters, all the worst people that we could think about teaching magic. Did you see to the, he actually I have sometimes to say about who
Autumn (7m 15s): You bring this up 'cause he said you won that's my reading this out. Otherwise you would probably have forgotten about this topic of conversation,
Jesper (7m 30s): But he did say something else as well. Yeah. He did say something else as well. And that's where I first my memory, he was saying that the way I was trying to move the goalpost and change the rules of our top, Tim you where I have no idea what he means. That's you, that's not as important either. That was the important thing was that you said you wanted, he said that I was the wind up that episode
Autumn (7m 58s): And he apologize to me, but I don't know that it was just one opinion. I'm still holding out for other's
Jesper (8m 8s): I'll really oh, patron supporters. Very important. So
Autumn (8m 15s): Maybe we can double Waite him. At least
Jesper (8m 16s): They have to say, I want to him, that's it.
Autumn (8m 18s): Yeah. That's all you need. So know I see how this goes. Oh yeah.
Jesper (8m 24s): Oh yeah. A quick reminder here. A as I mentioned in the past few weeks, on the past few weeks of episodes and we might just mention it next week as well, but after that it'll be too late. So this is one of those last kind of reminders now. But we have decided to offer everyone on our email list, a massive discount for either one of our flagship courses. So I want to mention that in the autumn,
Autumn (8m 53s): You said either one, you have forgotten your month off, we decided it was going to be for three, either have the three courses
Jesper (9m 1s): Three. Yeah. That was you explain what those costs as well.
Autumn (9m 5s): Obviously I've kept my mind going in. Was it on vacation? But yeah, so we're going to offer coupon for either the ultimate fantasy writer's guide, which is our premium premier writing Corus, the one-stop shop for everything, from how to write, develop ideas, to marketing and building your author brand and platform to crafting incredible fantasy world, which is our world-building mega chorus, which is so freaking awesome. But it'll take you to sort of along the, you will develop a world, not just for a world, but you're going to actually develop it in conjunction with really feeding into your story and creating a world in a story that are combined and just intricate.
Autumn (9m 48s): Or we decided that you remember it's like, that was like the beginning of the previous episode. We decided we would throw in our master mailing list of course as well. So if you have questions on how to, to email marketing and talk to the readers and turn your readers in the super fans, that of course we'll be having a coupon to only if you sign up for it though.
Jesper (10m 15s): Yes. So we will be emailing out this voucher. It's going to be $150 off, but if you want to get your hands on it, you'll have to get on the email list fast now because it's going to be super. So you're going to, you are going to be too late. If you don't get on the list quite soon, we have placed in the link in the show notes from where you can do just that. Yeah, but don't linger.
Autumn (10m 38s): You don't linger where you are going to be signing up for the next time. Maybe we'll know if we, when we decide to do this again today.
Jesper (10m 52s): So we are going to talk about preorder versus presale as we said up at the top. But I think we need to explain what is the difference here? Yeah.
Autumn (11m 1s): Think so as to what you, okay. You want me to explain this, right?
Jesper (11m 6s): Oh no, no. Well you hear me. Oh, okay.
Autumn (11m 9s): All right. You can see if I get it right. So a pre-order I hopefully a lot of authors are familiar with this though. It was interesting when I was talking to mark Coker that he said that a lot of authors still don't use pre-orders and that typically the authors who do use pre-orders tend to be the higher earning one. So I thought that was the kind of an interesting to statistic, but a pre-order his, when you put up your book and you say it's, it shows up on Amazon, it shows up on Smashwords actually Barnes and noble cobalt. All of those platforms do have pre-orders. And so you'll see it often there is the book cover and it'll say a release date and you can go ahead and click the button so that you were buying technically before it is released, you don't get an actual copy of the book.
Autumn (11m 58s): You just gets M you get to put on your order or early it's like you don't, you, once it's released, you will be there in the first ones to get it. And most authors, when they do pre-orders often offer a discount. So you're usually buying in. So if you're book is normally four to 99, maybe you're gonna be able to get in 99 cents are 2 99. Then you get a little bit of a discount by ordering it early. And for authors, it's nice because you usually depends on the platform, but often all those sales dumped in on one day was a pre-order often, those first few days after release are the biggest selling days for your book. And that part of that is because you have maybe a month, two month, six months, or even as possible of pre-order where your book shows up as being live.
Autumn (12m 43s): Some authors, they make it fun and they use M a fake cover. They will just say like cover coming soon. And they'll do a cover reveal and you can do all this stuff. It's kinda if there's a lot of stuff that goes on with pre-orders, but that's it. You put up the book for pre-order and you don't see any money from it until it is finally released. The day that is released, whatever day you decide to have as a really estate now pre-sale is different and is something that smashed where it's has come up with. Those are the only platform I'm doing it. And actually my coworker has put it in four, a patent. He just wants to own this one, which I don't blame him. Cause I have seen Amazon pickup. Some of the things Smashwords does first.
Autumn (13m 26s): So leave him for, to sign, to kind of copy, write this one himself. But the pre-sale is that in between steppe, you can put your books book up for pre-order and you don't see any money from it until you release it. Presale is that space in between where you put up the book for pre-order you do have to have it up for pre-order and then for certain people, or you could do it for the public at large, it's kind of cool. You can get it into the nitty gritty. You can actually sell the book before its available in stores like Amazon. And what's kind of cool is that means if your book is going to be in the Kindle unlimited, but it isn't released yet. So it's not in Kindle unlimited.
Autumn (14m 8s): You can actually run a presale and not run a foul of Amazon's terms of service. So that's kind of a cool tidbit if you are a Kindle unlimited customer, but yeah, this gives you a chance. You, you sell it like as a regular book, except for there's some really kind of cool twists and why it works out as a presale. It's very exclusive. And you know how to readers love exclusive deals. This gives you some income between the pre-order and actual launch.
Jesper (14m 39s): Yeah. Now I haven't tried this pre-sale stuff, but since you had the Guinea pig here, Autumn, but it sounds to me very similar on you. You, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds very similar to what we normally like to do in the, in the sense of, if, for example, we want to release a book in Kindle unlimited. We noticed some readers like to read on Kobo or something. So what is a pretty good strategy is to, for example, if you have something on Patrion, you could go to your readers and say, okay, for during this two week window, you can buy the book via Patrion here.
Jesper (15m 24s): If you, if you don't wanna buy from Amazon, here's the two week window where you can buy it and you can avoid buying it from Amazon, if you prefer, and then, you know, you can then use book funnel and just post the book from the link inside patrons. So when you buy it from here, but using Patrion that it makes it easier in the sense that they're already paying money in so on so they can download it from there. Or you could, you could do it yourself if you want it to using the sales link directly from BookFunnel. But I guess this the same thing, isn't it?
Autumn (15m 53s): It is the difference to me. I think the difference. Well, the, but I was talking to mark. I said, oh, well, you know, I already sell my books on my website and I often have done that, releasing it early. And we've done this for our own books if we re released them early from our website. So if you buy directly from us, you know, it's often available a week or two weeks before the preorder date comes up so that we do that. 'cause we get a higher royalty rate, which is fantastic. You could get people to trust us in, come and buy from us directly. Presales are kind of filling that niche. If you do not know how to do that, set up the actual ebook sales directly from your website.
Autumn (16m 34s): So it works and it, you do get a higher percentage Smashwords set. So does a 80% royalty rate. So that is, you know, better than you're going to get off of Amazon, which was kinda cool. And it sort of that idea, there is a few differences where if there is an anti piracy pledge that people are signing. So that works out really well, that if you're selling the book like literally two months before you would ever released it on the pre-order, you, you, you know, you know, they're not going to be sharing it around other people because that's, oh, you, that would be something that would be concerned about it. If I was doing a pre-sale, that was way out front of my pre-order date. And the other difference is you can actually through M through Smashwords they have, they done it so that they can get a second discount that if they sign up using, in giving you your, their e-mail address and so subscribing to your e-mail rate, they can make me get another small discount or a big discount.
Autumn (17m 34s): So you could say, pre-sale, it is 4 99. But if you agree to my email list is going to be 2 99. So suddenly this is a way of generating people to get on to your email list. And that's kind of the thing about the pre-sale 'cause if you do that, you would obviously there's two ways of doing the settings and we can talk about the setting's, but you could make it a public one. And so, you know, people who just go to Smashwords where you can just spread the link everywhere, and the people who can go and find it like a regular book, and then they can get a discount. If they sign up to your email list, I was like, oh, that is, you are getting a sale. Is that you're getting money.
Autumn (18m 14s): And you're getting someone on your email list. That's pretty cool. Or you can do a private link. And so in that case, you're probably just sharing the private linked, like you sent to your Patriot supporters or the people that are already on your email list. Well, in that case, they're probably not going to care too much about signing up for your e-mail list. Cause they were already on your email list. They probably can still sign up and get the discount. But yeah, in that case, when you have a private link, if you know that little extra coupon deal, isn't that exciting though. Speaking of coupons Smashwords is one of those places that does offer coupons that you can use and generate, and you can use those coupon codes with the presale.
Autumn (18m 56s): So if you want to do still do something exclusive too, the readers who are specifically on your email list, you can give them, Hey, go and get this book on presale before it's out in stores. And if you use this code, you can get 10, 25% as well. So if you could make people get so excited, you could, you make the coupon good only for one or two people and use it as a give-away there's a lot of fun things you can do with the presale length and how they have it set up.
Jesper (19m 27s): Yeah. Yeah. I can see that, that, that is different than the, for sure. The, the, the part about getting people to sign up. That's not something that you can do anywhere else. So that is quite unique. It was.
Autumn (19m 37s): So that's why he kinda convinced me to like, oh, I know you're selling books on your own website, but you should give this a try because you can generate people signing up to your email list. And I'm like, okay. That is, that is pretty gosh. Darn cool.
Jesper (19m 50s): Yeah. And the other thing about is that if all of the setting up have the payment modules on your website or setting up the payment collection, some of our books on which you can do now-a-days, but if all of that feels too daunting and to technical than at least this, I mean, it's probably like ticking a box when you have uploaded Smashwords anyway, isn't it?
Autumn (20m 11s): Oh, it was two pages, but mostly just radio button check boxes. So yeah, you have to start by uploading you're pre-order and the caveat you have to have your completed final manuscript. So, you know, often with pre-orders people set it up and they're like, okay, you know, S Amazons like gives you five days'. You have to have it before release that you need to have the final version of uploaded on this case. You need to have your final version. So you have to plan ahead and you have to have the final book. And that's I think really the key here. So you're purposefully pushing off your pre-order, even though you have the final book, instead of releasing it, just to use the pre-sale.
Autumn (20m 52s): But yeah, once you have that uploaded, there's literally a button in your Smashwords dashboard that says, Hey, you know, sign up for pre-sale and you go through a few questions, like, do you want to public? Or do you want the private, do you want to offer a discount through email? Do you want people to have to sign up the, the antipiracy pledge? And you answered this really quick questions. There are mostly radio buttons, just like thinking about it and have done. And off it goes it's up there. And whether it's public or giving you a private link, there you go. It's it's really pretty painless. I will say.
Jesper (21m 28s): Yeah, the, that is pretty cool. And of course the nice thing being as well, that with the presale here, you're, you're collecting the money right away. I, I guess, I mean, some people might not know, but for example, if you are doing pre-orders on Amazon a if the reader then seize you, pre-order on Amazon and they buy via the pre-order, like you said before, it's not going to be delivered also not charged until the date that pre-order goes like, but what some people might not know is that Amazon actually does not count pre-orders against your bestseller rank or the book rank on the release date now.
Jesper (22m 11s): So basically
Autumn (22m 12s): The time to go, but not in here.
Jesper (22m 15s): No. So basically the stuff that you sell during your preorder is not going to help on your ranking at all. So of course, if you're white, other retailers do not punish you like this. And honestly, I feel like it is Amazon punishing you for doing pre pre-orders, which I don't understand why. No, but they do. There's probably some reason for it, for somebody in the past who was gamed the system, and then they have done something like this. I couldn't imagine, but I don't know. But on the contrary, the other retailers, they will actually give you a bonus on release day. So the pre-order will increase your visibility in their store, but your ranking will also increase from the cumulative buys when the book goes live.
Jesper (22m 55s): So you actually getting a booster twice, if you are using pre-orders on the other retailers, which is quite cool that, but of course we know 90% of all the book sales for most authors comes from Amazon. So that means that Amazon in general are the only one we are majorly concerned and focused on, unfortunately, but that's how life is we. This also means that the pre-orders in Amazon, I guess that the reason we usually use pre-orders of them. Yes. But the reason we do it is not because it's going to help on the ranking or, and also not because it's going to help on the more sales and so on.
Jesper (23m 37s): But actually the reason is just because it can be very stressful when you have a deadline and when you have a pre all the way that we do it, because Amazon is not very flexible in moving the dates at all now. But I think if they allow for you to do it once that one today, what are
Autumn (23m 57s): The days? And that is yeah,
Jesper (24m 0s): But what we normally do is that we make sure that we have the entire book ready and done and final. So we actually will, we could of done is we could just release it and make it public. But we already said it. We always set it up as a pre-order for one, because there was no stress. Then we don't have a deadline by which we need to upload the final files because we already did. But the other thing is that then that allows us to run some of these other things, doing the pre-order a meaning, for example, then we can tell people, Hey, if you want it earlier, you can buy it directly from us. Of course, we do have all these websites, shenanigans that we need to take care, have a lot of them gets to do, but the, but then we have that possibility too, to sell the book directly.
Jesper (24m 46s): And 'cause, we can offer that earlier than other people getting it from buying on Amazon, there was an incentive, they have to buy it directly from us. And of course we want people to buy directly because then we were getting the full royalty ourselves. We don't have to pay 30% to Amazon for instance. And the other thing is that we need, we don't do this always on in, but sometimes we do, we like to run some sort of giveaways or something related to the, to the action release of this new book, just to get the word of mouth going as well and, and people sharing online and so on and so on. So you can do some, have all of these other things when it's on pre-order technically you could also do it if you just pop into the book.
Jesper (25m 31s): But the problem is that when there is no time limit limit on things, you could come up with some arbitrary, the time name on and say, you have to do this within one week to get this price. You could do that as well, if you want it to. But yeah, but when you do and the, yeah,
Autumn (25m 48s): Yeah. If you do the pre-order though, you can, Elise, you can get people excited about the giveaway. You know, you have you, maybe you have a month or two months to tell people when this releases there's going to be one week where if you get back to me with the first word in chapter 28, then you will be in for a drawling. You know, you get the two month window to let people know about that. Where if you just released the book and you say, OK, you have one a week to do that. If it's you just have those that one week to tell people, Hey, do this and you can get into it. So the time limit is totally different. And I'm surprised you didn't mentioned this, but with you, you have a pre-order you have the website where the book is going to be live. So if you want to set up any advertising, you have the link to the website where, or the book's going to be live.
Autumn (26m 32s): You can actually get all your ducks in a row and have your advertising ready for launch week. And that's that's to me, I think Y the authors who do do pre-orders, they have all their ducks in a row. They have the advertising, they have the giveaway are the scavenger hunt after release. They have all of this excitement going on and they use that pre-order period to generate that excitement and to get people ready. And really, they know the rules, they, they know what's going to happen and they can celebrate what the author, where they author said, oh, by the way, really start yesterday that I'll tell you, you're like, Ugh, okay, what you said, you don't feel quite catching and you have to catch up. So I think pre-orders, Mmm.
Autumn (27m 13s): Yeah, you have to have all your stuff together in the beginning, but it gives you a chance to have a lot more fun. And I think to celebrate, because you're not freaking out that you need to get the final format done and getting up there and all of those other things it's already to go, and you can kinda kick back in and just do some Instagram posts on it.
Jesper (27m 33s): Oh yeah. I, at least I feel like the entire release process of a new book is it's less stressful. Once everything is just on pre-order and you have your time to get all those ducks in a row and so on and so on, and this is how I feel, but I do also know, and I have a full disclosure here. I do know that there are some disadvantages they have, and I mentioned before, right? Ah, how its in a sales on not counting against your sales rank and so on. So there are definitely this advantages to doing pre-orders but yeah, to me taking the stress out of the picture. Oh yeah, yeah. That is worth some money to
Autumn (28m 8s): Me. Yeah, I agree. And it is interesting. So I did try to with a presale, I ran it on the last book in my tainted face series instead of putting it up for sale early on my website. And actually I've always been, I'm not a good procrastinator. I always do stuff as soon as I'm supposed to. Or like that's why assigned times and deadlines for it because if I don't do it when I meant to, and then forgot to do it. So I still have to put up the final books for sale on my website, which I do have some odd, some readers who always wait for me to do that. And I'm just realized that and I now feel really guilty and I've got to go on my website and get it all set up. But if you, I did try it out.
Autumn (28m 48s): So instead of selling it directly on my website, I decided to do it and Smashwords pre-sale and I think it had mixed results. You know, it was hard because I only tried it once and I literally only did it as a two week window 'cause as you and I both know, I was very behind getting this last book out the door. It was very long, 150,000 words. So I it's not horribly long, but it was so long and I have other projects and other things going on. So it kinda got backburnered when it should of been front in Bernard. And I only had a two week pre-sale trial, but I did it public. And I also did it, did send the link to the mailing list and I did have a lot of people go and check it out, but I will have it.
Autumn (29m 31s): The final result is I did not have a ton of sales. I think just like pre-orders just with everything is you have to have your ducks in a row and you have to let people know you have be either advertising it or on social media and posting about it in telling your newsletter quite a few times. And I think there's one, maybe two other things that might cause people to hesitate before they go and buy your presale book office Smashwords and I dunno if you can guess what those are you. Mm, Nope. I've got to put you on this, but
Jesper (30m 8s): It's very late from you. My brain is not working. Oh, you know it is, we are recording now. My brain is not working anymore. You
Autumn (30m 14s): Just going to make me to take pity on you. Cause you know, I always do. But the first one is not many leaders to know what Smashwords is. So they it's not Amazon. It's not Kobo. It's not Barnes and noble. And goodness know Smashwords has been around almost as long as Amazon has been selling eBooks, but still it's never made it in to that big name categories. So they see Smashwords and they're like, oh K and new profile and knew place to have library of books. And I do you think it's unfortunate. It's out of the problem. It's always as problem, but of all the seller's that are out there and Smashwords M really does it's best authors are from indie authors are from a third near and dear to mark Coker his heart.
Autumn (30m 58s): He is an indie author. That's why he created this platform. So I, I respect so much that he does for indie authors. And that's what I try to tell people about smash where it's, because I don't want to see this one go away. I had like the pronoun when the pronoun was out there for authors. Oh, it was just a fantastic thing. And when they collapsed and closed up shop, I was very sad, but Smashwords, I don't want to see that happen because they have been leading a forefront of stuff and tools that are available to authors, indie authors, that the other platforms are slowly putting into place as well. So there are kind of like, you know, there, there scavenging off of smash words like coupons Smashwords you used to be the only place where you could create your own coupons.
Autumn (31m 43s): And I just saw, I don't know if it was Kobo. I forget which other platform now allows you to do that as well. I was like, oh, I know where they got that from. They did not come up with that on their own and they're not doing it just to me that they're not doing adjust to compete with Amazon. They're doing it to compete with Smashwords actually. So that's one thing to keep in mind. So yes you, are you going to have some readers who maybe they'll follow the link and they'll see Smashwords I don't know. I don't know if I want to start a whole new profile. So I think you have that going against you. And then the other one in, I almost feel guilty saying this one. So I'm surprised you didn't guess, but have you been on the smash where its website and looked at it recently that you can think of it, but it was developed in, in 2010 ish I'm and it looks like it was developed in 2010 ish.
Autumn (32m 34s): And to me that as it's so superficial to say is that, but it's a problem if you've never seen Smashwords not following it, you don't think it's superficial.
Jesper (32m 46s): No, I don't think the superficial, because I mean, if you, if you come to a website or you, I mean, it's similar to that. So imagine somebody who wants to let's say buy one of our courses, for example. Yes. And then they go on to Am Writing fences, you have.com and this is something that could of been developed like 15 years ago. Would you, by the cost of, I wouldn't, I would think like, well, okay, if this is the quality than I don't wanna do that. So I understand that part, but I think even more, your first point is probably even more important in the sense that if you think about like the average reader, if you are, let's say you used to buying books on Kindle or even on Kobo, it doesn't matter.
Jesper (33m 26s): But you, you used to buying eBooks from one of the major retailers like Kobo or Amazon. So you go on to Amazon, you find the book you wanna buy, you put a, you press, the one-click buy. And the, you say delivered too. My Kindle and whipped. You have to you the books on your Kindle, right? And as soon as you take the reader out of that environment, the first thing they will be asking themselves is how do I get this file on to my Kindle now? Because I can't click that button where it says delivered to my Kindle. And it might be that, you know, that it, at the end of the day, it's quite easy with Smashwords and so on it's because we sometimes have to same problem with BookFunnel yeah.
Jesper (34m 6s): Where some readers comes to it and they didn't like, they don't understand how they can download the book and get on the kennel from BookFunnel. Even though like, there, there, there is like a button like click here and then on does a good job in explaining how to do it. And it's very, very easy, but I can easily say that because I've done it so many times. But for the, for the like 65 year old lady who likes to read fantasy books and just goes and click one button on Amazon and the need, the P S Kindle for her to go to BookFunnel or to go to the Smashwords so someplace where she's not used to be and freak out how to, which buttons to click to get. And it might be easy for us because we're used to this and we work in this environment everyday, but I think we have to keep in mind that most Redis they don't right.
Jesper (34m 53s): That they are not familiar with all these different sites and services and whatnot. So for them it's massively confusing. Yeah,
Autumn (35m 1s): I think, yeah. And in that case, you know, you're, you, maybe you get so send people there because they were really excited. Cause I had a ton of people who have followed the link to go and see like, oh my gosh, the books available in the last book in the series is available early. They were excited. But when you have never been to Smashwords before, if you don't know this story, because you know, what are the readers care that they support in the authors? And they're really fantastic. And all that, they land on a website that was built in 2010 and looked like it was build in 2010 and then they might not feel that comfortable saying, yeah, I can totally use and go with it. And I feel comfortable. I know they're going to support me if it's, it doesn't have that feeling that, that kind of sleek look, modern look.
Autumn (35m 47s): And I'm like I said, it as part of me feels bad saying that because I know, I know how many people I've uploaded a book there and they're like your 28 in line to have him, you know, converted in, turned on to a computer, into a book because there's 28 people ahead of me uploading books at the exact same time. This website is active. All the time books are being published at all in on all the time. And I redesigned our course website while it was live. And even though I knew what I was doing to then take it from the staging site too, the actual website while it was live. And we have students who are like taking the class, even though, you know, you, you tell them I'm gonna to take you down for like two, three hours.
Autumn (36m 30s): Hopefully everything will be fine. It's wracking it. It's a lot of work. And I can't imagine doing that on a website, the size of Smashwords actually that's oh yeah, for sure. I, there is a really funny story in, I cannot remember which book store it is, but they went and did an update recently and they accidentally turned everyone's book into the exact same one, like this dragon book, which it looks so as the dragon book and they apologized profusely. But I couldn't imagine being on the other side, having pushed the staging site to live and then going wholly, oh my God.
Autumn (37m 11s): Yeah. We just screwed up the entire website. I would not, you could not pay well, you, you would have to pay me. Gosh, awful. A lot of money to put up with that level of paranoid craps so I can understand why the website, it hasn't been updated yet, but it shows, and I think it does hurt Smashwords itself. And also you, if you're using it in your sending readers who don't understand what Smashwords is, and they looked at the website and going, and it looks like, you know, 2010 Yahoo Yahoo or something, it does not look sleek and pretty. And so those are the right to especially also let me see.
Jesper (37m 51s): Yeah, we actually also 'cause we were talking about putting in your credit card somewhere. Right. And, and that's where there that's really where the big barrier is because even getting people to, I mean, we've been talking at some point in the past, we talked about maybe if we, because there is quite a lot of people who don't like Facebook and probably like a year or maybe two years, I can't remember what quite a long, a while ago, before the Am Writing Fantasy Facebook group became what it is today. There was a point in time when we were sort of debating, should we stay on Facebook? Or should we move somewhere else to mighty networks? We talked about at some point. Absolutely. But also then that doesn't even cost money for people.
Jesper (38m 32s): But just the fact that you have to create a new user profile somewhere on the mighty networks app that you don't know, you're not familiar with it, that Facebook has on your phone. Everybody knows it. Everybody uses it. So already there is a barrier, but that if you then add on top that you need to put on your credit card and you don't know the brand, you don't notice. And maybe if it looks a bit dated as well, you could be worried about safety, ah, of putting on your credit card information as well. I mean, there's just so many barriers that you need to get across there and it's really not easy.
Autumn (39m 4s): It is not. And I saw that with my results. Like I said, I did not advertise it heavy. I was just kind of, you, you know, that it was just, I was happy that we get the book out. Oh, that's that was done. I was happy with that. I was, I should have marketed it a hell of a lot more, but even so I did not see many for the number of people who did follow the list. Cause we have quite a big e-mail of reader list and to see the number of people who did follow it versus the number of people who, because you can see the status, I will say that in Smashwords that gives you a great stat. So you can see how many people looked at it. How many people download it to the sample, how many people bought it, those are all clearly laid out for you in your dashboard.
Autumn (39m 44s): And to see those, the number of people who went and looked at the book versus the number of that. So that I actually went and bought that. You're like, yeah, that's something, these are readers who desperately want the last book in the series. And I did not have a ton of people biting it. I get more people who would buy it from me directly from my website. So this shows that there was something about the presale, something about that. That was just like people where like it's something stopped them from actually buying the book early. And as a reader who just, while you're on vacation, I red seven books, I've read the whole everything in lay BARR to NGOs M Grisha vers. So I ran all of her books. And as if I do, I can get one of the, the next one that she hints at early, I wouldn't be buying.
Autumn (40m 32s): So knowing that if you're hopefully developing fans, who are that excited for the last book in the series, and they're not willing to pull out their credit card, something was stopping them. And my guess is not that they didn't want my book. It's something on the website.
Jesper (40m 48s): Hm. But of course all have that doesn't change that a, the pre-sales function that my Coca and, and Smashwords developed in. It's very, very cool. So I would still say if, if the listener here missed out on the details, then go back and listen, listen to episode 118. When autumn talked to my coach and you can hear a lot more details about all the things this map, which can do if it was a very good interview. So
Autumn (41m 16s): Yeah. Oh, in there just so people can know. I mean, there they work as a distributor or that you can send out your pre-orders to Cabo all those other platforms. I still like it. And they have an amazing customer service. So, you know, feel free to join, create an account. I think they're better than digital in many ways. And then send them a message saying, Hey, where are you gonna update your website, helped me out.
Jesper (41m 43s): And don't see that autumn asked you to say,
Autumn (41m 46s): Please don't get that mad at me. We've had a great conversation.
Jesper (41m 53s): Oh right. So next Monday we are looking into a topic which has actually been brought up several times by different people. And that is how relevant race and gender is in fantasy.
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No matter how fast you type, you can't write an entire novel in one day. So how do you keep your story's flow going?
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Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am writing Fantasy Podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need an literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I am Jesper.
Autumn (32s): And I'm Autumn.
Jesper (34s): This is episode 137 of the am writing fantasy podcast. And we have a writing related episode today as well. Well, We were going to discuss how to maintain your story flow in this one was one of your ideas.
Autumn (48s): All of them, there was, well, actually it came off the blog. It was a very popular post there. So I thought we should do an updated content slash podcast on maintaining your story flow, which is convenient because I have, like I shared with you before we started, I've finishing up the final book of the tainted phase. So I wrote this, so I stopped at the end of January. So, you know, almost six months ago now, and I've realized I was missing a chapter. So too, we use all one more. If I always, oh, that's my history. I will write a short book. And when I get to the climax, I'm always adding at least two or three chapters. So what's the right, that, that next chapter that would flow and fit into the whole story after six months it's oh, it's a little more challenging.
Autumn (1m 34s): I think that in a lot of people realized to make sure that that kind of meshes Inn and sounds right, and they still have the character in my head. So those are the kinds of tips we are going to look at. Cause it could be six months like I did, it could be a year. It could be just, I don't know, between one day and the next and you just kinda lose that, that drive that makes this story sound like one cohesive whole. And we wanted that. You don't wanna do that. You want to read or not to go, well, what happened with their reading? It did they all, they have a bad date. That's why they character died. Right. But you already had like 150,000 words and then you add up, you decided to have another chapter.
Autumn (2m 16s): So that was I, that was counting that chapter. I knew how long it was going to be. So that's 150,000 and yeah, I was aiming for 90,000, but there's just so much going on in so many important storylines when you write the final book of a series and you're pooling all of those together and she let my readers know theirs kind of have a few ending things that could continue on to another book because that's like I said, I swear my tombstone is going to be, I'm going to have it like a design as a book. And on one side, it's going to have all my, all my information of who I was. And the other side is going to say to be continued because I will never, ever wrap up a story completely.
Jesper (2m 56s): I don't think so. Yeah.
Autumn (2m 58s): Even this one even was the final book. It's not possibly the final, final book ever, but yeah, yeah, that was a lot going on. So yeah, it went from 90,250. That was just the way it goes sometimes. But that's also a good thing, you know, 'cause, if you are well in general, you know, if sales justify it, then it's always nice to have a few open-ended so that you can continue on. Oh, absolutely. Or if you know the character's wake you up three M a little to often, maybe we will continue with anyway. So just for yourself, it is, you have the characters, are you regretted? You didn't kill that character.
Autumn (3m 40s): And I don't know how that could be worse and you'll have undead.
Jesper (3m 43s): All right. It's all right. You got to watch out which ones you kill off.
Autumn (3m 50s): Like they can come back too. And that's true. So otherwise we have just been a writing in going about all that editing stuff. Yeah. So that's pretty, and some book covers. I've got to, I'm trying to finish up this Tainted Fae in staying out of the heat. We're recording early again because we have vacation time coming up. So where we're at now in the world, it is incredibly sweltering in record, breaking temperatures and highs for all. I know that's going to be the next month as well. So I have been hiding from the heat and getting up extremely early so that if I want to exercise or do anything outside, it has done before 7:00 AM.
Autumn (4m 31s): 'cause you don't want to go outside after 7:00 AM. Not if you're, we've already discussed that. I have that pro, so that fly protein that, that your brain unwinds at above 80 degrees. And that's it for me. So I'm going to stay inside and do very small, quiet things.
Jesper (4m 48s): All right. Well, writing time is not too bad anyway. So of course, if it gets too warm that you can't write it, and that is a bit of annoying thing to do.
Autumn (4m 58s): So. Yeah. Yeah. Well that, that's my excuse for the AC is my dog. So as we've talked about, and this is a fizzy gig, he looks like a fizzy gig. He is as free as a fizzy gig and he gets hot. So we have to have an AC on. And then from my poor computer's sake, I have to actually run an AC because that gets too hot and humid. And I can't run all my, I can't write where I can't draw all that's the end of the world for me, so that I have been working on some fun fantasy maps for other authors and some really cool book covers. And I don't want my computer to die on me, which means they probably shouldn't touch it.
Jesper (5m 33s): So that famous question of what would you bring to a desert island? It's just like my computer so I can make the very least pen and paper, this giant sketchbook, because you can use that for writing or drawing.
Autumn (5m 45s): Oh yeah. That's true. So how have things been for you?
Jesper (5m 52s): Good. Yes. I got my first vaccine shot last Friday and I was sort of really crossing my fingers that I wouldn't get sick from it. Like some people have been, but I was actually okay. You know, Friday, Saturday, and I was fine when my arm was sore. Like it is for a lot of people, so that was fine. But then Sunday, Monday, and also part of today, I've just been so drained of energy and extremely tired. I have so much, it's been a, it's been a struggle for me as well. And so I haven't gotten any writing done yesterday, none done today either.
Jesper (6m 37s): I just haven't had the energy. So I'm sort of fingers crossed that maybe I'll get some writing done tomorrow, but honestly, I feel like right now it's, it's sort of up in the air whether or not, I don't know. We, I think it depends on how I feel tomorrow.
Autumn (6m 52s): I can understand you said that I went through the same thing. So it's something that goes quiet on the podcast and you only hear me talking, you've gone to sleep.
Jesper (7m 0s): And so yeah, you can sort of that clap your hands on the podcast and then they might wake me up.
Autumn (7m 7s): Oh, all right. Well, we'll have to keep that in mind. If I see the screen go dark and you're kind of off to the side,
Jesper (7m 16s): or if you hear a bump in to the microphone, that was just my forehead.
Autumn (7m 20s): So that we go, all right, that's fair enough.
Jesper (7m 24s): Oh, but I did. I took me awhile to really put two and two together because we'd been traveling and a few other things, but I re I had that for like two weeks. So I hope it doesn't last that long for you, but I even started drinking iced coffees and stuff, and I'm not a coffee drinker. It's, I'm like T all the way, but I needed something because it felt like my whole life had gotten derailed. And I'm usually high energy. I mean, I'm actually low energy compared to my mom.
Autumn (7m 50s): And you should meet her. She's like a tornado. I just, I was fading, but right after lunch and, and, and you're right, if it's a tiredness where your brain is just like, you want me to put two words together, know, knock it up. And so I, and it's just that size. Yeah. Oh, wow. Oh, it's feeling slightly a better today compared to you yesterday evening, if even so I hope fingers crossed by tomorrow. That I'll be somewhat.
Jesper (8m 19s): Okay. Again, I I'm not feeling bad or anything. I'm just so, oh, so, oh, well that was the big question you get sick.
Autumn (8m 25s): That's good. That's good. But the big question is they are now saying mixing your vaccinations. Your types is a good thing. So are you going to get the same thing again? Are you going to go get something different for your second shot?
Jesper (8m 39s): It's the same one that I'm going to go for a second shot. And I, and the nurse did say when I got this first shot, she said that mostly people have more after effects of the second one than the first one. So I'm expecting they might be worse, but let's see.
Autumn (8m 58s): It only lasted. I didn't get, even, I felt a little run down from maybe 12 hours and then it was like, oh, I'm fine. I didn't have the same tiredness. So hopefully you will feel okay.
Jesper (9m 7s): All right. Yeah.
Narrator (9m 11s): Oh, a week on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, the
Jesper (9m 17s): Virtual reported on some interesting information that I thought it would be very good to share with people here on the podcast because it's highly relevant for us authors.
Autumn (9m 30s): Yes. So I'm, we talked a bit about this as well before the recording.
Jesper (9m 34s): So you're already in the loop here.
Autumn (9m 37s): We have just, we've already strategized and discussed it because it does change how you run one of the most important things that you will have as an author. If you're running a business,
Jesper (9m 49s): man, that was quite a and efficient Tuesday order. And once you think of it, that you had recorded over a hundred posts, podcast episodes by now,
Autumn (9m 59s): and most of them by the seat of my pants. Thank you.
Jesper (10m 3s): You don't say that. You just keep that to yourself.
Autumn (10m 5s): Oh, okay. Sorry. My mistake I'm always prepared.
Jesper (10m 9s): Yeah, exactly. I don't know if, if I said what you needed to lie, but you have just leave out information. That is not the same as lieing. And now you are an outright lying and such.
Autumn (10m 18s): I feel like I'm always prepared because I know it's so well, I don't need to do my own work.
Jesper (10m 23s): Yeah. Okay. Now we just paddling. Instead. I'm really glad that we get back to this anyway, where we wanted to talk about an article in the verge that they have. They reported from a one of apple, apple usually make announcements on its worldwide developer conference. And a, one of the announcement's that they made on the worldwide developer conference was concerning e-mail marketing. And obviously from us authors email lists and being in touch with readers through email and so on is really, really important. So that of course made me pay attention.
Jesper (11m 6s): It's one of the cornerstones for us authors. And it's not only of course some email, this is not only for building an audience, but also maintaining it. So what apple announced was that what they call major privacy protection. Mmm. And what this means is that it's basically a way in which apple will limit the amount of data that people who send you emails can collect about you. So all in all, I'm very supportive of that. I, I liked the privacy protections in general, and I don't like when all the M big corporations.
Jesper (11m 47s): And so what not collect information from what you're doing on the internet and so on, but that also to all of us author's of course, because when we are sending out emails, there is in the email and invisible pixel that basically tracks in the sense that if the pixel gets loaded, eh, which means that than the email was opened than the information is sent back to the email providers. So that, that could be whatever email provider you used like us, we use MailerLite, you could be a MailChimp ConvertKit whatever, when you use, right. But all of these vendors incorporate these invisible pixels to be able to tell you what your open rate is.
Jesper (12m 33s): So, but when the fall comes, apple will roll out the Iowa iOS update version 15. And within that iOS update, the mail app will basically stop a, that invisible picture from loading. Yes. And this also means that whenever you are sending emails to readers who are using apple, then the tracking of the open rates will start become inaccurate, or basically they, it won't trigger the registration within the email provider. So this also means that when you're looking at the metric called open rates, that's basically what is tracked via this pixel.
Jesper (13m 21s): Well, then you need to understand that a certain percentage of the reader's that actually opens the email's is telling you when you are looking at the open rates that they did not open it. So let me just do that again, in case that was a bit confusing. So when you send your emails, the open rates will get tracked, but 'cause this blocking is in place by apple is means to have some people will open the email, but you won't know that they open the emails. So maybe that was a better way of putting it all.
Autumn (13m 53s): That makes sense.
Jesper (13m 54s): So what that's, what this, all of this means to us, all authors, in my view, I think we need to, first of all, of course, don't be like overly concerned and worried. And now I think that the world is falling apart and now email marketing will be worth nothing and so on. And that is not the case, right? So lets first of all, take a deep breath. Don't worry too much. So it's not like nothing will work anymore. Email marketing is still the most important cornerstone of your author business in my view. But there is of course, a few things you need to be aware of. And one of the things that autumn and I discussed today prior to this recording was that a pretty common, best practice is too recent to on open.
Jesper (14m 40s): So again, within your email provider being MailChimp ConvertKit MailerLite blah, blah, blah, whatever it's called, they have always like an automated function where you can set up the system either automatically reset to open one's. If I remember correctly in ConvertKit you have to do it manually, but they will track it. And you can go in and say, I want a recent, this email to unopens M which is a smart thing to do. And it's, it's like a best practice. And we have been doing it for a long time already. But what I would say is that since the tracking pixel doesn't register, whether they opened it or not, this means that it will automatically be displayed as unopened. So if you don't start recently emails, all the people on apple devices, or at least all the people who haven't actively opt into wanting to be tracked, which I will assume will be a very, very small group of people who will actually opt into being tracked.
Jesper (15m 37s): So that means that let's just say all of it all like 99% of the people using apple devices, if you receive emails to unopens, you are going to send them the same email that maybe a lot of those people already read and then they're gonna get it again. What's this going to annoy them? Or a lot of it would annoy me.
Autumn (15m 56s): Yeah. So, and then you are unsubscribe rate is going to go up unsubscribed
Jesper (16m 1s): because why are these people always sending me the same email twice? That's really annoying. And I understand that. So the thing we discussed now was that come September, we will stop re sending to an open. And we'll just hope that people actually open the emails because we can't trust that metric anymore. Yeah. And that's that that's annoying of course, but so is life and life moves on?
Autumn (16m 26s): Oh gosh. Well adapt. It's fine. Yeah. It's definitely something to keep in mind. If you clean out your email list based on, you know, people who don't ever open your emails, you might want to, you know, send them an email beforehand with like a link to click or something that gets them to a survey. That's why we liked MailerLite there are so many like active things that people can do to answer questions and click on things and stuff like that. So you might want to make sure you do something before you delete someone because they might of be reading every single one, but that might be reading it on an apple come September. At that point, you're not going to know if they're reading it or not. So keep that in mind.
Jesper (17m 6s): Oh, that's a very right. That that's exactly the other part of it. And what of course, where we do is we try to run what we call re-engagement campaign. So that means that we are sending like three, four emails to see if we can get them to re-engage before we delete them. But even then you need to be careful because the way that we set up re-engagement campaigns normally is that if they didn't open the email or so of course, although if they click something inside the email, we will remove the tack against their name for them to be deleted.
Autumn (17m 38s): Right.
Jesper (17m 38s): But again, that won't work anymore. No. So you can't even trust that. So you have to be, I think very, very explicit in the emails that you send out, like telling that you cannot tell whether or not they're reading your emails and therefore you want to make sure. So if you are doing pruning of your lists, meaning deleting stuff, people that who are inactive, which I think is a good practice to do it. And I also know a lot of people also influencers in the author space who do not agree that it's a good idea to prove the list. So take that as you will. But if something you do, then don't base your decision on deleting people on the open rates know.
Jesper (18m 18s): So that's also a problem. Yes.
Autumn (18m 21s): Yeah. So we have changes, but will get well adapted. Its not that big of a deal. Well we'll survive unless you're really into metrics. If you're really in a metrics. I'm so sorry if it's going to be bad metrics.
Jesper (18m 32s): Yeah, indeed. So we will place a link to the article in the show notes. So if you want to check it out and if you want to read what was more set in in more details, then you can. But honestly I just told you everything. So sounds good.
Autumn (18m 47s): And I have one thing to share even though it's, it's not really to the author community, but I know they can celebrate with me.
Jesper (18m 53s): Okay. Yeah.
Autumn (18m 54s): I don't know if you notice, but over the weekend board of water hit its 400th review, so yay. Oh that's my debut novel. And so it is lovely to see it hit 400 when age.
Jesper (19m 6s): Oh wow. That's so good. Very good. Congratulations. You 400 reviews. That's that's not a small,
Autumn (19m 16s): oh that's a nice round number. It's a big one. I like it. Yeah. Yeah.
Jesper (19m 21s): Oh so a very quick reminder, before we move on to the topic of the day here as mentioned last week, we've decided to offer everyone on our email list and massive discount for either of our flagship courses. And we will be mailing out a voucher code of 150 bucks to be used on any of our courses.
Autumn (19m 44s): Oh I was gonna say, oh you said two flagships that we actually decided like what an hour ago, it's going to be for a choice of three courses.
Jesper (19m 52s): So yeah.
Autumn (19m 53s): Why not that big deal?
Jesper (19m 54s): Well, yeah that's that's quite a discount. Yeah. So we have the ultimate fantasy, all writers guide course, which is the writing guide or the writing course. We have the well building course, which yeah, I guess you, maybe you can guess what that's about.
Autumn (20m 11s): Yeah. Well it's officially called crafting incredible fantasy world. So we do you call it world-building that would of been too easy.
Jesper (20m 19s): We also have, then that's the third one that we added into the pot, the email marketing course, which is very much on point of what we just talked about. Oh yeah. So you can get $150 off of any of these courses, any one of them of your choice.
Autumn (20m 37s): Yup.
Jesper (20m 38s): And we placed a link in the show notes from where you can get onto our email is so that you will also get this emailed once we send out the vouchers. But yeah, if that's something that you interest you, I will alert you to get on the email list right now as you're listening to this, because I'm not gonna say for sure when we're going to send out the voucher, but it's going to come in the next probably maybe three weeks or something like that. So if you forget about it and don't get signed up, then you're going to miss it. So yeah. You better get going. Sounds good.
Narrator (21m 13s): And on to today's topic.
Jesper (21m 17s): Perhaps I'll just give you the range here, autumn, and that we can explain what we were talking about.
Autumn (21m 21s): You just doing that because I said I never did my homework and I do this by this either of my pants. And you're like, okay, go, go for how long
Jesper (21m 27s): I'm going to test it.
Autumn (21m 30s): So yeah. Well I've already hinted about this at the beginning. So this topic is maintaining your story flow into me. This means sort of what I said before that it makes this story. It's two parts won that when you have a reader reading it, it sounds like one cohesive story. It doesn't matter if it took you five years to write it a decade or if your one of those insane fast writers, it took you a week. It all should still sound like it was one author written in one setting in story. It doesn't sound like it's all over the place where all these big life events happened in between. And the other thing is, as a writer sitting down to write, it lets the reader's response. But as a writer, you know, you have life jobs, personal things, COVID, you know, all of these things that have been every single day, hopefully not that often, but things that interrupt her writing in, how do you maintain that story?
Autumn (22m 25s): Almost enthusiasms. How do you keep that voice? That author's voice, the characters have voice going so that you don't feel like you're coming back and going, oh, I have no idea what I was writing and it doesn't make any sense. And where was I going with that? So its kind of have those two principles. I think we're really covering today. If you agree with that.
Jesper (22m 45s): Oh yeah. I like the idea for this podcast episode, all that, but it's also a very broad one. We, we can sort of go anywhere where you almost absolutely. Oh yeah. I think that was kind of like the idea is to just help you keep that story vibe going, but, and there are so many different ways of doing that and was one thing that was going to work for somebody might not work for you. So, oh, we're going to cover a couple of different things I think. Alright. So where did we start?
Autumn (23m 11s): Oh well to me and I think you'll agree with this is the best way to keep your story on track and flowing. And so that you don't feel like if like last is to have some sort of outline, doesn't have to be a whole plot, but outline, I thought you'd liked that one. I mean we have those old YouTube videos. Maybe we can find the link to them and like how to make a half an hour story outline. It doesn't have to be something you spend days or weeks plotting, but to have a roadmap so that you know where you're at and where you're going. And that way if you happen to be halfway or a quarter or three-quarters you can pick it up and go, oh yes, this is where I am.
Autumn (23m 52s): And you can go back on your route again and not get lost. Yeah. I would say even better either go to a Am Writing Fantasy dot com or go to Amazon or wherever you buy books and then just search for my own name. And then you will find the book called plot development and their is a full step-by-step guide, their, that we actually wrote on how to do the outline and it will help you a lot. It will
Jesper (24m 19s): And even if your pants or even if you don't blink outlining you just try it on once and then I will fully respect if you afterwards say, yeah, it's not from me. Fine. But I think it's important not to have an idea in your head, that loud lining is not for you, if you haven't tried it. And there's a lot of those people out there, I'm sorry. But there is, there's a lot of people that have prejudiced that outlining is not from me. It doesn't work. That's not how I right. But they've never actually tried it. So I'd say just try it before you judge. That's all I would say.
Autumn (24m 51s): I agree. And it'd be having started as a pantser and we all know that I'm the Guinea pig of this spontaneous and hey. You go do this and I go in and do it without him thinking often, I don't know. I've got to work on that. You can't believe I've made it this long in my life. But I, I went from pantsing to at least mildly plotting. I mean, that's why I developed first that half an hour outline. And now when we're writing together, we plot and we plot pretty heavy. And the more I get into writing in the types of writing, I like, I like literary fantasy and I like very involved subplots and plot. So have you only get that if you are plotting because it's too hard and tangled to do as a solid pantser, if anyone could keep that going hats off to you, but I don't know how you can do that intense of a storyline without doing some plotting.
Autumn (25m 41s): So give it a try. It's amazing what comes out the other end. And as I said, I tend to be very much so I live my life as a pantser and I'm a plotter when it comes to writing.
Jesper (25m 51s): Yeah. And I would also go out on a limb and say that the people who say that they can do that, that's not, that's not right. I I'm sure that the pantsers can make a very, very elaborate plots and subplots and so on. But the thing is that the re the way that they do that is they, they, they have to go over it many, many, many times and see that in and edit it and edit more and more to see that in new things in and make things connected and so on. So that's of course also the way to do it. A but if we were talking about maintaining a flow, then it is easier when you have an outline and you notice that everything is already connecting, you know, all the foreshadowing it's there, you set it up.
Jesper (26m 32s): So, you know, exactly what's beats to hit in which chapters and so on. And it just makes it easier.
Autumn (26m 39s): It does that even with, even the outlining, and we look beyond the plotting, having a chapter outline and having a chapter flow, where you go, you have a hook at the intro and you have a developing problem and a climate, you know, a resolution. And that's usually tangles into the next chapter. If you're skipping point of view, you know, having those things figured out, what's the next point of view? What is the next thing? What is the next hook? What's the, how has this, chapter's going to end those that are having those aspects figured it out really helped you maintain this, just focusing on this story of focusing on the emotional plot or the character arc that helps you maintain your flow. I mean, I always liked the idea that Einstein had five different suits.
Autumn (27m 20s): They were all exactly the same because it wasn't, you didn't want to have to stress his mind about what am I wearing. He had bigger things to think of. And when it comes to your story, it's the same thing. You have bigger things to think of than, oh, you know, how has this next chapter going to start off, get all that figured out so that you can just enjoy writing and the process of writing. And you don't have to spend half of you're writing time. And especially, I mean, like you said, when I have my full-time job, they would have time. You have 45 minutes, a night to write or an hour and a half. And I still finished four books in a year because I had it all figured out. I knew when I came home, I could open it up and see where I was read the last sentence and go, oh, this is where I've had.
Autumn (28m 0s): And I could just get to writing. I didn't have to worry about all this other stuff. Cause it was set up ahead of time.
Jesper (28m 7s): Mm. Yeah, indeed. And if, if, if, if you don't like outlining and that sort of thing works for the pantser, right. I mean, if, you know, if you think about the day before, where am I going to start the next chapter tomorrow, then that will help keeping the flow going. Even if you don't have an outline.
Autumn (28m 25s): Absolutely. That was, that was so of my favorite tricks for myself as when I realized like your down until your last five minutes of writing time, you know, the family there in the background and food, food, food dinner, who are you ever coming out of there and get off the computer and you know, that that's coming and you're like, okay. Instead of writing and trying to finish up the scene, I would actually take a break and start making notes for myself. I would get hit space a couple of times, put it in bold or italics so that I knew this was, this is just notes for myself. And that say, this is where I'm going. This is where this scene is going. This is where the next chapter is. Just brain dump everything that's in your head because you know, you're almost out of writing time and the most efficient use for it.
Autumn (29m 7s): So that you'll be able to pick it up again faster. Next time is to leave yourself some breadcrumbs, make sure you do that as a fantastic way of wrapping up you're writing. And then to tell them, look, I only need five more minutes, please just give me this.
Jesper (29m 25s): No that that's true. And I was also thinking that M one of the things that I'm very much an advocate for in terms of keeping the flow in the writing going is to get the writing done before anything else, if it's first thing that you do when ever you have to time, whether it's in the mornings or the evenings. So that doesn't matter. But, but if you do the writing before you do any of the other stuff, like maybe managing some ads or replying to emails or whatever, it may be sort of admin stuff that you have. If you do the writing first, then you are taking care of the most important thing first.
Jesper (30m 5s): And that, that helps a lot in terms of keeping the flow going and you don't get sucked into, oh my God, it's now a week since I wrote last time, because I've been doing all these other things and maybe you got a lot of fun, but it hurts you're writing. So I'm prioritizing of that sentence is important.
Autumn (30m 24s): Yeah, I agree. I mean, it helps before when I had the full-time job, I would often write when I got home, which was at my most creative time. It helps to know when you're most creative time it is. And for most people it tends to be morning. Some people it's after 11, 11:00 PM. And I know they're, they're vampires I have no idea how that is your creative time, but that they do exist. I've been told I've never met one because I'm asleep. I had 11:00 PM at that time, rarely, very rarely occasionally, but you know what I'm doing overnight drop drives to go see my parents. So that's about the only time you have killed me over night up at 1:00 AM.
Autumn (31m 6s): All my goodness. But yeah, it's knowing when you are creative time, it is. And trying to set that as your writing time. But if you have nothing else that, you know, having either a set time, this is my writing time and making your family like understand that and not bother you. This is not when you're going to go Facebook and chat, you have to be good to turn off your wifi. So if you have to, I mean, I know we often use it to go do quick research, but you know, leave yourself a blank, you know, come back and do the research later. If you have to do it when you're editing, try to stay offline, truly focus on writing. But I agree now that I I'd rather get up earlier again, I'm in bed early.
Autumn (31m 46s): So 5:00 AM to me is, is not that bad of a thing. And if I can get an hour of writing in my whole day is just like glowing and set. I just love that. And it's sort of like the idea of, I'm not a huge exercise fan, but if I can get a little bit of exercise in and then get to writing, oh my gosh. So that day is like a, so I already feel like I've won the championship and it's not even 7:00 AM yet.
Jesper (32m 11s): Yeah. And I, I think as well, the, well, when you said you turn off the internet reminded me because that the fact that they're on know disturbances around really helps a lot. So if you are currently in an environment or a place where you find yourself getting distracted all the time, then maybe you need to find a different place to do you're writing. Mmm. And some people like it when they have very many people around, like in a cafe or something, and there was no summer. Some people liked that noise level. Other people preferred extremely quiet and isolated with a locked door, almost a, but it's up.
Jesper (32m 53s): So it doesn't matter what it is. But I think it's important that you work out what works for you and try to make sure you create that sort of writing environment for yourself, because that will also again, keep the flow going.
Autumn (33m 6s): Oh, I agree. I mean, keeping, and that can be a little things. I mean, where are you write the time of day, all the clutter, if, whether or not, you know, you can have a clean writing space often really works better for people, especially if you're still putting all your stuff into sticky notes instead of Scrivener files.
Jesper (33m 23s): And you're doing that thing of that.
Autumn (33m 25s): My sticky notes of talking about actual sticky note. So the one of my desktop's, I love my sticky as they work very well. Oh, I think that we've been working together.
Jesper (33m 42s): So probably you only had to say one word, but where do you start laughing?
Autumn (33m 46s): Or you're like, oh, this sticky is that he's. But you keeping the clutter, you want to be able to find your notes from your writing file, but I have two, or even if I'm hitting up really bad writing package, and I just need that little to know what you need to push yourself over the edge to get your self and that mind space. Umm, I used to have told you that and I have told the audience, sometimes they would be keeping that page like Jara Martin. There was just like some of this writing, they just go in and speak of wow. That I want to go write because then I wanna right. Like that sometimes. And recently like that chapter or that I just tried to finish. I just, I had a whole bunch of notes and they weren't flowing together. I sometimes do that.
Autumn (34m 26s): I write backwards. I will just do like scenes and then I'll have little breaks in between them. And I'm like, okay, I've got to make this into a whole thing. And I finally just M sometimes it's putting on headphones. I just put on like a YouTube epic three hours, epic fantasy music. And it helps sometimes having that background and soaring music in battle scenes. And so it was just like, ow, my brain said, oh, okay. Yeah, yay. I know we're going to have right now. And so you need to figure out what your triggers are. You know, what kind of little routine, if you do sit down with a cup of tea and listened to that music or read a paragraph, what do you need to do to make your mind go? Yes, I am ready too. Right. And we're were gonna keep this going.
Jesper (35m 7s): And sometimes you're just stuck and you don't quite know what is supposed to happen next in this story. And I can't quite work out the character or whatever it may be. And I think here it's very, very good to go outside, go for a walk and put it aside for a bit and get, go out. And don't think about what should happen. Just let the inspiration come to you because it will, your, your mind will be working on solving the, without you even thinking about it. That some that's exactly why sometimes you will experience that when you are in the shower or you all doing grocery shopping, then all of a sudden it pops into your, oh, I know what it is now.
Jesper (35m 48s): And that's because your mind is working on it. So just sometimes accept the fact that your mind needs a bit of time to work on the problem and then go for the walk, go do something else, whatever it may be. I do feel like fresh air is very, very good thing. A but the main thing, whenever you do, don't stop jumping to the new shiny story idea that you got and leave this one behind because then the other one feels easier to go to because you're not stuck there yet. You have to finish the stuff you're working on. And I know, I know that some people like to have multiple projects that they juggle and fine if that's what you like then, but at least from my point of view, I will never give the advice that you should be jumping into a new projects all the time.
Jesper (36m 33s): Because the fact that you can prove to yourself that you can finish something is massively important. And even if that, that means that today you are going to go for a walk and you're not going to do anymore writing until tomorrow and wants you slept on it and allowed your mind to work on solving the problem at hand, then that's fine, but don't just put it aside and start writing something new because chances are, you will also hit a roadblock in the new project and then on what you are going to do, are you going to jump to the new one again? And you see all of a sudden, you'd have 10 of unfinished manuscripts on your computer and 'cause every time you get stocked, you jumped you something new and set. You have to teach yourself how to overcome those obstacles and actually finish the work.
Autumn (37m 16s): I agree. And I would say usually the best ideas come to me, not in the shower, but usually when I have like three things on the stove. And that's always, when you get a good idea and you're like, darn it. That's why I always keep note paper like stickies around so I can keep it quick and, and not forget because writing down those ideas will also help you keep going so you can add them. Like, that's why I do love Scrivener. I can just say, oh, I've got this idea for a seen, and I stick it, you know, in the chapter where I know that needs to be, I love being able to do that. So when I get to that chapter, it's already sitting there waiting for me, but I do.
Jesper (37m 54s): Yeah. Or, and the court board and script. And that has what looks like sticky note. So that probably nicer as well.
Autumn (37m 58s): You were thinking of me. But I also, I read, I definitely agree. I always had this rule that if I had only been sitting down for 15 minutes and I was stuck, I couldn't leave. I couldn't leave until I hit that 15 minute or 20 minute mark. I had to at least try to write and work on my story for those 15 to 20 minutes. Cause it is your brain is like, I don't want to do this. I don't want to go to Facebook. I don't want to do this. I wanted to go do something else. But if you can get into it, you'll usually push past that and keep writing. And sometimes I would need to not be, we work with exactly what I thought I was going to write on the story, but I'd have to sink into the character
Jesper (38m 37s): head saying, okay, what does the character seeing right now?
Autumn (38m 39s): Was it raining? Is that what, you know, just kinda pull myself up into the story and it may end up cutting out of that stuff. Maybe they're all be bits. I keep because it's a really good description and really places, you know, the reader into the character's head. But I have to admit if I have been there for 15, 20 minutes and I have put in an honest effort and I haven't been jumping off to Facebook or something, I agree sometimes just saying, what else can I do? I'm going to go for a walk. I'm going to let this sit because sometimes that's all you can do. However, I will admit there was a time I was working on two projects in tandem and I thought it was fantastic because I would write like, I'd have a goal of four chapters in one and just half a chapter and the other one.
Autumn (39m 20s): And if I hit those glitches where it's like, oh my gosh, I can not think what happens next. This character is not flowing. Especially that story. You had a politician and I've talked about that before. I don't do politician. Well, it was so hard to write in his voice, but then I could, so I could switch to the other one saying, okay, I'm gonna do that half chapters and jumping between them. I worked very well, but I have written over a trilogy at this point. And it was not a fresh out of, you know, gay. I have earned my little Stripe's and I knew that I could do it. And I only stuck to both of those and I managed to continue and get it done.
Autumn (40m 0s): So it works. So if you have a blog maybe or short stories or Vela is a good thing. And as long as they were in the same vain and you don't switch two new ideas where you actually can have two side-by-side like parallel projects and one's your main project, but maybe you're going to write a quick Vella story. You to go with it, to get some new reader interests that can work. Sometimes. I don't know. Maybe if you're brain is like mind on a squirrel in cocaine, that we will work really, really well for you.
Jesper (40m 30s): You, if you work, so you speeding up and down to three trees of carrying sticky notes and putting sticky notes on today, my name and sign this tree it's all right.
Autumn (40m 42s): Now, you know what my brain looks like.
Jesper (40m 46s): And also you hit did too. What we were just talking about. I think pro athletes, for example, they, they often visualize the outcome that they want so that they visuali visualizing their case. For example, what does it feel like to cross the finish line as number one or whatever, if it's a running or if it's a soccer game, which I like a lot than visualizing, how does it feel? Or how does the whole curve in the air when I score the goal and stuff like that. Right? But if you are, if you haven't proved to yourself that you can finish work yet, and you were in that rod of things where you have a bit stuck and you can't quite figure out how to move ahead and you really wanted to jump to that new project, because it sounds so much exciting right now than this I'm grateful, middle of the novel you are stuck in, then that I think, try to copy a bit what this pro athletes do, try to visualize in your mind, what will it feel like once I have the novel done, how will I feel about it?
Jesper (41m 55s): And then hang on to that feeling. All right. And try to channel that feeling into forcing yourself to actually write it, because you know that by the end of it, I'm going to get to this place where I know how good it feels. And that's another way that you can try to trick your mind to battle that challenge that you have facing. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think sometimes just give you the energy to push through some of those really tough chapters to say,
Autumn (42m 22s): okay, you know, especially with like the seven steps of story structure, all can stuck in the reaction phase, but how cool is it going to be when I get to write that, that horrible scene of, of, you know, that dark moment that happens with flips the whole SI you know, a whole book and, you know, you, when you start thinking, okay, what's it gonna feel like we finally get to write the climax in this big, wonderful thing that happens then that can keep you going as well, especially when you realize what it's going to feel like they finish it in the, and when you speak a visualization, I made me think sometimes having a writing session, sometimes you get so stuck and bogged down in the intricacies of each chapter, that beginning and ending a writing session session with an eye, you know, a quick look over your synopsis or blurb, or your two sentences that kind of where your theme for the novel step back and make sure you're still on track and remember, oh, well, this is what this story is about and get yourself excited about the whole arc of it.
Autumn (43m 16s): Again, sometimes that could help get you going as well.
Jesper (43m 21s): Very true. And I have another one and it might sound a bit weird at first, but there is a logic to the madness here. The thing is that, that you might actually want, if you feel like keeping the flow is a challenge for you, you might want to try out dictation. Oh, and I know the default reaction have many people is like, know, thank you. I don't want to dictate anything. That's crazy and fine. Yes. You might say that. We act, we did actually, by the way, have a podcast episode in the past about dictation.
Jesper (44m 3s): So you can go and search that one out. If, if, if you want to hear more about how to go about the dictation, but my point about it this morning, that dictating your story will increase. You're writing speed significantly. And sometimes when you have things to keep, you know, pulling you off, ah, and distracting you or interrupting your flow, if you can just churn out of the chapters quicker, you will also just get the riding out of their way. In the sense of that, then you are going to prevent those things from interrupting you because you already got the writing done 'cause you can dictate a ton more faster than you can ever write.
Jesper (44m 44s): So that something you might wanna try out just to see if it worked for you, go I'll, I'll go back and listened to that. The passed episode that we have on dictation and get some good tips and guidelines from, from that episode and then go and test it out and see if that works for you. Yes. I know. Just like before we talked about all outlining, don't say no to something you haven't tried. I agree. It's like talking to kids, isn't it . And until you did that, you tasted it.
Autumn (45m 12s): All right. I know. Fake spitting it out. It just because you have to think you're right. I know. I think you have to have a little bit of a logical brain for dictation, but again, I think anyone can learn to do it, and it really does help get ideas down very quickly. And so they have a spot. I think it's very useful. And I think just to wrap up, because I mentioned that story flow is also the reader's experience. So how to make a book that maybe took you a year, year and a half, even longer to write sound like a cohesive whole. I hate to say that the big tip is editing. Make sure you self edit. I would say, do I like content editing before you proofread, read the whole thing, get maybe an alpha reader to read the whole thing and point out of the places where things are out of line and out of junk, especially if you don't know how to do it, if you know, that's your first book and you've really, you can't see the forest for the trees, get an alpha, we have to get a mentor, find that content editor.
Autumn (46m 9s): I have them look at it over and they will point out to places where things aren't kind of kicked off a little bit. That way the reader doesn't go. Okay, did we start a different story? You halfway through this, a different author picked up. Occasionally I do find books like that, but it's usually not as bad as the author things, but it definitely only comes about by editing because only if you were like one of those really crazy productive authors who can sit down and write 50,000 to 80,000 words in a single week. None of that, I mean, we were both professionals and the I've never had that kind of level of, they don't know if I know, I don't know if I didn't enjoy it. I think that's beyond my enjoyment of writing.
Autumn (46m 49s): And I still wanna kind of have fun playing with words. So I'm never gonna write quite that fast 'cause I don't want too. So that's why you edit.
Jesper (46m 59s): That's why.
Autumn (46m 60s): Well, I love writing. I just don't want to write a hundred thousand words in a week. That's just know fun. You, you get to spend time with your characters that way two months that'd be good, but that's fine. Yeah.
Jesper (47m 10s): Well, if I could, I probably would.
Autumn (47m 16s): That's crazy.
Jesper (47m 17s): But I think based on this conversation, at least what we can conclude is that there isn't one magic bullet to resolve this situation and be looking for a magic bullet that feels like something said before about being that there isn't one,
Autumn (47m 34s): there doesn't know magic beans, but were still looking, but definitely know magic bullets know.
Jesper (47m 40s): And I think we can also conclude is that we are all different and that's okay. And I think based on the things that we covered here, the main takeaway is probably that maybe we set something that inspired you, that you want to go and try it. If you feel like maintaining that story flow is a difficult thing than maybe try one of the things we said, and maybe something sort of clicked with you. And then there's some of the other one's we mentioned might not, and that's fine, then you leave those alone. But I, I think we all have different, so yeah, you would have to find your own way.
Autumn (48m 21s): Exactly.
Jesper (48m 21s): All right. So next Monday we'll be looking at pre-sales versus pre orders. What's the difference And is one better than the other.
Narrator (48m 32s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/AmWriting Fantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, going, stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
It's time for one of Autumn and Jesper's very entertaining episodes.
This time they have prepared competing lists of the WORST characters they've ever encountered in either works of fiction or movies and TV series.
Tune in to episode 136 of the Am Writing Fantasy and judge who you think have the best of the worst listed.
As mentioned during the episode a massive discount for the premium writing course and worldbuilding course will be offered to those on the email list. If you want to get your hands on the discount voucher, make sure to sign up right away. Here's the direct link: https://www.subscribepage.com/awfnewsletter
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy.
For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (1s): You're listening to The Am writing Fantasy Podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need an literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than in 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (29s): Hello, I am Jesper
Autumn (32s): And I'm Autumn.
Jesper (34s): This episode 136 of the am writing fantasy podcast. And you know, I always love these top 10 episodes.
Autumn (45s): Oh, they are definitely some of the most fun ones that we recorded. I have to admit that I'm rather enjoyed them as well. And today we've created two competing lists, five entries, each of the Worst Characters EVER. And I just confessed to you before we started recording that if it wasn't for a sheer chance of luck, I mean, I meant to go into where we keep our podcast list and check it sooner, but kind of checked out this morning because we have another reason. And I made me realize that like, oh, I have to come up with five characters. So I kind of queried my parents.
Autumn (1m 26s): So, oh my God, I cheated. None of them are actually helpful, but they helped get my mind going as well as the last minute panic, that always helps us procrastinators. So, so you don't probably relate to that, but yeah, I feel my list is pretty solid. I even put it in order, so I'm ready. I'm ready.
Jesper (1m 54s): Okay. Okay. Well, I com very, very prepared. So I have some really annoyed characters that I can't wait to do.
Autumn (2m 3s): I'm guessing here them, you knowing what you've come prepared with.
Jesper (2m 7s): Yeah. So of course I had some sound clips because it makes it a little funnier to listen to all the podcasts listeners as well.
Autumn (2m 14s): So one day I swear, I will come prepared enough to have emailed you some sound clips to play for me. What I ask you, that will be pretty cool, but that would be M I deserve a cooky if I do know, but I already feel bad about it because the last time we had the top 10 last month, yeah.
Jesper (2m 33s): You came really prepared and you, and of course, I do like to know when the S lists and the last month you came so prepared that I was a bit nervous already from the start of that. I have a better list of you, but now that you are saying, you, you only realize that this morning, I feel much better already.
Autumn (2m 52s): Hey, yeah. We'll have the sea I'm so curious have,
Jesper (2m 55s): well, I actually, I have one on my list that I think he'll have as well, and he has a mention for me.
Autumn (3m 3s): Okay. I'm curious to see if we end up with the same and I try to keep everything actually related to fantasy slash superhero. I tried to actually keep it all in general. So all that. So I didn't do that. I just thought of the most annoying characters I could think of. So I know almost dude, but I decide to go for the extra challenge of in John.
Jesper (3m 24s): Okay. Okay. Well that is pretty cool. I will admit that, but it also means that all this stuff probably not overlap well, that's good, but ah, thank you for admitting.
Autumn (3m 33s): I did extra late minute, last minute homework.
Jesper (3m 36s): So, oh yeah. That, that, that's pretty cool. You are in a few points for that, but yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well that that's all right. So I already start the head. That's all that matters. So things over their, for you. Well, good. We have 30 degrees this weekend. We know that Celsius in 86, 90 Fahrenheit, something like that. Yeah. So we spent the entire Saturday at the beach and that was pretty varied because we do with the new apartment, we lived like a hundred meters from the beach. So it was that that's pretty lovely. But I also have to admit that we actually are starting to wish to move back into a house.
Autumn (4m 19s): Well, I bet I've surely a small part, but as much as it's nice to have that closer to the ocean, there's nothing living in a small cabin as I do. I would give anything for like my own office space and to be able to close a door and stuff like that.
Jesper (4m 34s): So yeah, I know. I'm sure you're feeling the pinch right now. I am the, that, there's just a, I mean the, the, the neighbor or the area here is really nice, but it's, there's just not enough space in here in this apartment. So, but, but we had a building plot in, in mind this well where we all want to build new housing, but actually some new challenges of surfaced because the city council start to make plans about putting a road right next to the place where we, we want to build a house. So that's not good. Know there is a town hall meeting this Thursday. So I'll attempt that and try to learn a bit more.
Jesper (5m 15s): But if they do end up building the road where they talking about billing road at the end, that there's no decision made yet, but that's what they're talking about. But if they do do that, then, well, we need to find the alternatives. And honestly, I don't know where that should be. So that at the end of the day, the challenge here is that we want to build a house close enough for the kids to be able to go to school, you know, by themselves, are you using the bicycle or something like that? And if you get too far away, that's not no longer possible. Right? So that limits sort of our options, but it's just, it's just politicians being weird. 'cause this particular route where they apply that they're talking about building the road, what's actually looked at like three years back and it was discarded as a possible route road back then, because it goes straight through a forest where there's also an endangered species of bats living.
Jesper (6m 13s): So write. And then all of the sudden the politician sorta put it back under the table and say, well, let's build a road there. And then of course, a lot of people started complaining because there's also people living in that area already on one thing is of course the endangered species. But the other thing is that it goes straight past the neighborhood where people live, right? So people started complaining and then the M the mayor of this town, she was like, wondering why, why is people complaining about this road? And the, I mean, nobody has ever, ever said that it was a problem before and so on and so on. And it's like, well, maybe that nobody's complaining 'cause this was this God of three years ago. So nobody thought it would ever happen, but I don't know.
Jesper (6m 55s): This has just politicians being politicians. All right. Well, you make no sense or they're an alien species. That's why we never talked politics. That's true. We don't want to go there. I know. Right. How about you? How are things going on your side of the Atlantic?
Autumn (7m 16s): Oh, it's been good. It was fun. My husband came home for like a week and a couple of days, and he's back off to a rafting guiding. And actually he even ref guided when he was here at a place, it was only 45 minutes south. So I got to see him before he ran off again, all of a sudden, but we've had some beautiful weather. It was like a perfect week where it was just in the seventies. Cool enough Knights that you actually need a blanket. And it was lovely. And then, you know, as soon as you left it, like hit the high eighties with super huge high humidity. It felt like, it felt like when I was in Mexico in the times, I've traveled to like Mexico in Acapulco, in Costa Rica where you wake up in the morning and the CSR has still.
Autumn (7m 59s): And so that humidity off the ocean is just sitting on top of you. And you're like, oh my gosh, I can't imagine what it's going to be like at three in the afternoon. But by then the sea breeze kicks up and it's so much better. But those mornings where everything is still and damp, when you hold up a piece of paper and it kind of goes, whew, it's fin it's, it's just damp. I've always wanted to live on a sailboat. And I said, I won't ever get another sailboat. Cause I've had too in my life. And I went once a third, but I said, I wouldn't get one until I can live on it and travel on it. And so as much as I want to there's days make up that humid.
Jesper (8m 38s): And you're like, oh, I don't know if I could do this 24 7.
Autumn (8m 44s): No, we actually, we got that problem solved. After traveling for four years across the country, we have repeaters and cell phone towers. If you are sailing in the middle of the ocean, well, that's in the middle of the ocean. Most of the time you are around land though. That's only like a one to two week window. So that I'm not that worried about those times. You do too many crossings.
Jesper (9m 4s): Oh my God. I would never want to live on a boat. I'm where two luxury minded to do this. One of my couch, all of those things.
Autumn (9m 12s): And shower's, and you could have, you just have the download the Netflix before you go, and then he can just binge watch. So that as well, the other person's at the tiller. Yeah, but still there's no showers and this again, so it has a good, but how shower?
Jesper (9m 29s): Yeah. If you have a luxury boats, maybe that most of the sail boats I have been on, I wouldn't go for it or anything that can cross the Atlantic has got to have a shower, even if your, on the back. So that's what it is that you want to have ahead and a bathroom.
Autumn (9m 45s): So I, I think my adventure itch honestly, is acting up a little bit. I've been good ever since my husband got back from whitewater rafting and lost like 20 pounds, we've been getting up even earlier. I mean, he's getting up at like four 30 and I'm getting up about 5, 5, 15 in the morning. And every other day I get to go for a run. And the next day I usually do some yoga in some stretch exercises. And I am feeling so much better. Suddenly I'm feeling much better. And all my gosh, I just want to go hiking again. I want to a, I want to get all my motorcycle, which we don't have here. Cause we don't have enough room for it and I wanted to sell those.
Jesper (10m 22s): So I think that if you have Kevin fever, all the, all the editing and you're just sitting around and, and Kevin editing books all the time, you are drawing.
Autumn (10m 31s): I mean, I have gotten some wonderful and working on some wonderful M book covers and fantasy map. So that's lovely. But at, I love every day I wake up and think, oh, I'm so lucky I get to do this, but I have to admit, you know, they just opened up the Inca trail and as a new trail down in Peru, I want to do so. I don't like, we need to get those out of my system sometime soon. Or I'm going to just send you a note saying, run off to and talk me through and I'll see if they have a VPN down there, but the otherwise see you, you sounds good.
Narrator (11m 8s): Oh, we go all the internet with the yam Writing Fantasy Podcast,
Jesper (11m 13s): We have something quite exciting to mention. Mmm. And I don't know, perhaps it's the summer heat getting to us all the cabin fever or something like that, who knows, but at something, something is getting too. And if you work out what it is, let us know because we don't know how the sales, but you send me more. Yeah. What we decided to offer everyone on our email list, a massive discount to be used on either of our two flagship courses. Yeah. So within the next three to four weeks or thereabouts, we are going to email out a voucher code giving probably I think it's going to be 150 off the, off our two courses.
Jesper (11m 59s): Yeah. Maybe you could just explain a bit about what are these two courses that you just don't know that I always like to drive, stuff like that all on you. And you're like how you build a website. So you talk about it.
Narrator (12m 10s): These are our two premium courses. So we have the ultimate fantasy writer's guide, which is our first one. We put, well, actually M what's in the name of our first one we put out, but this is our first premium one we put out. And it is a 12 module, complete course of knowledge of how to develop an idea and right. Well, but then how to edit market, build a platform, how to format, how to upload to Amazon because, oh my gosh, have you have not done that yet?
Autumn (12m 38s): There's times where it's not that hard, but the first time it's like, well, there was a lot of what, what is this? I got to Google what they're talking about. So it covers all of that and then how to keep growing your author platform. So that's a one-stop shop, everything that you need to know about developing an author business and becoming a writer, which I think that's a pretty good start for courses. But then we decided we wanted to do a world-building course. And this is a, this is the one that you've been following along. And the podcast that took us oh, two and a half years. Yeah. It was massive. Massive, which I don't want to say that because I don't want people to be like afraid of taking the course, of course, oh my God, this massive, it's massive.
Autumn (13m 21s): It's actually wonderful. And incredibly well organized. And you don't have to do every video. There's like these optional places and extra information. And it's just wonderful. I mean, it takes you from again, the Colonel of you, how to start with the current, all of the story, you can develop one as you do it, but it helps you develop a world. Worldbuilding a story along with the world that the two are intertwined and inseparable and unique and just wonderful. And that it teaches you, you know, all the components you need to build that world to fit the story so that you don't get lost with worlds builders, disease, or just lost in your own world for six years, we, we try to not have to be too bad, actually.
Autumn (14m 3s): That's well, I guess if it's a portal there and it's a world where you can at least be an avatar that could kick, but that would be a good option. Pretty good at that would to cure my itchy feet. And actually, so if anyone that has a little bit of sitting around letting me know, but otherwise you can take the course and learn to build a world and develop your story and all the components so that when you're done, you know, we have an amazing world. You have a story that you are ready to write, to go with it. And then the final modules actually go into how to weave the two together without info dumping, how to bring the story to life in different ways so that you can really engage the reader.
Autumn (14m 47s): And I think that if you're a writer and you are worldbuilding and you just really want to bring out something amazing, I think it's a fantastic course. We have used it and test, we ran it ourself for our world have Alyssa, so we know how it works and it's pretty darn good. So those are two primary courses and it'll teach you everything like creating cultures, creating history, creating groups in Coles and gills and the magic systems and maps. Everything is so we did.
Jesper (15m 17s): So. Yeah. So if any of that interests you and you would like a massive discount, then we will include a link in the show notes that from where you can just add in your email address, because then you're going to get on our email list.
Autumn (15m 33s): And then you're also going to get that email. When we send out the voucher code, you can simply use that one and get the course at a very low price.
Jesper (15m 43s): That's pretty cool.
Autumn (15m 45s): I think that's fantastically cool. Yeah. We must be a little crazy this summer.
Jesper (15m 50s): Yeah. Yeah. I don't know what happened, but the thing is that these courses are self-paced as well. So you can dip in and out as you please, and you can of course do it from the safety of your own home
Narrator (16m 4s): Now onto today's topic.
Jesper (16m 8s): So we agreed that this top 10 list of the worst case, the characters ever B from the books that we read, or it could also be from movies we've seen.
Autumn (16m 23s): And that probably also means that since we're not going with some of the past top 10 list, we made, we create something completely made up. In this case, we are actually using characters that exist either in written works or in movie. So that means that may be some listeners. Will it disagree with us here? All them?
Jesper (16m 40s): I think that they might.
Autumn (16m 42s): I, yeah, I know it was funny cause I did Google some other list and there was a few characters. I was like, you know that character, I hate that. So I expect some disagreement. I expect someone to say, no, no, no, there are Worst Characters, but these are the ones that are near or not. So near and dear to my heart, I suppose I, I chose ones that were worse for a variety of reasons, maybe a little illustrative of some points. And so I went kind of along those lines. So their worst for not just their actions or just poor acting, I avoided poor acting just to give people a break.
Autumn (17m 22s): And I have to admit, I didn't choose any book ones just because of the character. Was that bad. I most likely didn't finish the book unless they were just like a tertiary character in the background. And I promptly just erase them from my mind.
Jesper (17m 36s): And that's when normally deal with these top 10 list. We are trying to come up with the best worst list. But in the end we also have to work out who actually won all them.
Autumn (17m 48s): All right. Well have to see which one we came up with that I remember I got some bonus points for sticking to genre. So I'm already ahead.
Jesper (17m 55s): As we get off the started off the gate, you said a small bonus point, but I can hear you all the way to make it like into boneless points.
Autumn (18m 6s): I did. So we can hear that. So this is what happens in you gave Kyla Fe anything.
Jesper (18m 13s): Yeah, that, that is true. But we also, I think you, even though I try to prepare, well for this episode, M I also have to say that that was actually quite hard because I wanted to try to find characters that were so bad that they basically made me want to stop watching the movie or the series.
Autumn (18m 36s): So when it's that bad, you know, that you've got the worst of the worst, but on the other hand, it was also pretty difficult to find the ones that are truly that bad.
Jesper (18m 47s): Yes. I agree. I've watched some really bad movies, as we've mentioned in previous podcasts on worst list where I, I binge watched all over the streets, signs theater 2000. You're like, why did you brought your brain with those? But they were fantastically horrible, but yeah, defying characters. And especially to you then to try to remember these characters that I absolutely let you know, spark some kind of level of hate where I didn't just forget them.
Autumn (19m 17s): It actually wasn't that easy. But I think that there's a few worst characters I could have probably chosen if I thought longer, had more time, but I feel very satisfied with my list. It is the good illustrative example list.
Jesper (19m 36s): OK. Well, I still feel like that because you weren't, that you have not as prepared as me. I, I have to say I have to win this one. Otherwise I'll feel disappointed, but we'll see how it goes. So, so who's starting out here with number five.
Autumn (19m 50s): I think I started, or you started last time to be honest, which is unusual for , but I'm trying to be nice to you. So I guess that was my turn to go first, if you would like okay. T
Jesper (20m 3s): han, than come with your number five.
Autumn (20m 5s): All right. I'll have at it. So my least of the worst is actually Sabrina Spellman from the chilling adventures of Sabrina, which is a Netflix remake from the books of Sabrina, the teenage witch.
Jesper (20m 22s): Ah, and I said, it's that new one? Is it is the new, I heard some very bad things about this series. Yeah, cool.
Autumn (20m 31s): I chose her, but honestly the entire cast, again, not for the acting, but for the roles and the plot and just all there were just so pathetic except for two characters that were two, I actually liked, which was in bros and prudence. And there's a part in the second series, which I began watching and that it was just so bad. I turned it off saying, I never want to see this again. But there was a point where they were tagged teeing off to go and hunt down the former head teacher eval dude. And I'm like, Darren, that I could watch a spin off of the two of them as hunters.
Autumn (21m 12s): You know, they were fantastic. But the rest of that, I was just rooting for more deaths. I think more of them needed to talk to me so badly. I can't even get into what was horrible. It's just, it was so, so tropish, they're just teenagers make me, I don't know, but I really afford them. So it was just like annoying in the way that you couldn't put your finger on. Yeah. Just bad. The characters themselves we're in very deep, the smells were pathetic. Ah, the Forsythe was horrible. They make stupid mistakes just to keep the plot running.
Autumn (21m 52s): Things were inconsistent about them from one episode to the next. And it was just so again, a lot of it was bad writing, but just there was no substance and there was nothing in the character I really wanted to root for. I didn't care if devil sucked her down to how it would have been fine. It would have been more interested. Maybe she would know, learn the lesson. I was so pathetic. There was a boyfriend that bounced back and forth in a really stupid love triangle that I just wanted to lb my head against the wall. She cured her best. Friend's Brian blindness. After not being able to cure it after curing it, not carrying it. I was just know, I couldn't guess it was a mess.
Jesper (22m 34s): It wasn't that, that sounds a bit like, it, it almost sounds like a bit of like, it's the series that is bad.
Autumn (22m 40s): And I mean the characters as well, but it sounds like the series as a whole, this just as bad as the character. Let's just say when the wrote, the second part of the series starts out that they're trying to go to hell to rescue Sabrina's boyfriend. And not only is it super easy to get into hell after a whole first season where they could never find the way there and demons were trying to rise up to earth and ends up like a doorway, they can go, but it ended up mimicking the wizard of Oz and all the way down to the tin man and the Lyon. And that's where I have said, no, just done done. If you lack of imagination, just know. And if anyone out there that likes it, just tell me why, because I don't care how bad it was.
Autumn (23m 25s): Horrible, horrible writing, but you know, the characters too, the characters were just, they lacked any depth and I just couldn't do it.
Jesper (23m 37s): Okay. Well, I have not watched that series, but now I know what, I'm not gonna watch that either double dog area. No, thank you.
Autumn (23m 47s): Good answer. I did that to my husband once and he still blames me for getting sick off of a piece of chocolate. I told him he doesn't have to take the double dog, the air cheese.
Jesper (24m 0s): Okay. So I haven't learned to find that as well. Yeah. You hear it. I'm going to stop out strong here. This character is the most irritating and up noxious character that I've ever come across. Well, this is gonna be good. Bad, good. That she was actually the first one I thought of for my list here today. She truly made me want to stop watching. Wow. And you've probably watched friends all from have a you, I have, it's been years. I am not a friend's worshiper.
Jesper (24m 43s): Unfortunately. Fortunately, if you, if you can remember, what is the worst character in the cast of friends that you can think of?
Autumn (24m 52s): Maybe Phoebe, I know it's been so long. You listened to this sound clip. And then just telling me that this was not annoying. All right.
Character 1 (25m 2s): The me Chandler bang. Oh no, I don't seek me out something deep in your so called out to me. Like, you want me, you hate me. You can't live without me. And you know, it, you just don't no, you know it so
Jesper (25m 34s): Well, that is Janice. Littmann from my friend and from friends and my, that character is just so incredibly annoying. It's that meeting.
Autumn (25m 43s): I can honestly say I do not remember watching an episode with her in it. So obviously I did not watch all the episodes, but that, that actually reminds me if I show that again, I'd probably could of used that character, but I can't remember the name of the show. It has been. So white-listed from my brain and despair, my S entity. Right?
Jesper (26m 6s): So at what else? She, well, she was just so incredibly annoying, but it's like both the way she speaks and she is so stupid as well. She has. And does you don't understand that the, the people don't know sort of like what she does and, and her laugh is so annoying that it's incredible and it's just made like that on purpose obviously, but it, it really works in the sense that I have to come up with list of characters that actually make me want to stop watching. That was her CHITAS she's annoying. So I think that is a pretty good stat for number five, but that is a pretty good start for now have five, like you said, it does it remind me now we have some show. I did watch, he had the character, had that exact same accent.
Jesper (26m 47s): And that was kind of like, I'm not watching this, I don't care. I'm not doing it, but yeah, I know. I can't remember what it was. Sorry.
Autumn (26m 55s): So I can't even bring up her name, but yeah, that's the, that's a pretty bad one.
Jesper (27m 1s): Yeah, pretty bad.
Autumn (27m 2s): Okay. So your number for my number four is actually syndrome from the Incredibles. I don't know if you watch that. So that's the animated cartoon. I love animation because I actually studied it when I lived in Manchester, UK. And So I just, that was the whole time stuff with paper and pencils and all my gosh, but they can do that with computers was amazing, but syndrome annoys me because I like powerful villains with cold hearts and decisive actions. And he's just nothing. He is still, and he's got a good backstory, but even up until the present day, when he was trying to kill off superheroes, he's doing it because he is the whiny little kid who wants to be a superhero in just isn't good enough.
Autumn (27m 46s): And he's still not good enough. And he dies stupidly and it's just blah, but it's just not so much. It's not what I want in the villain. And I think when you have a really bad villain that it ruins a lot of the story, a lot of that you could have a really fantastic character. And if they're up against a squishy Villa and you're like what, you're wasting them. So I just found syndrome just pathetic. Hmm. Okay. I don't know. Honestly, I don't know it, but, but it is important that we, we have talked about over and over again, the importance of having strong villains. So it definitely destroys the story of there's just this really both week.
Jesper (28m 30s): So annoying the villain. And I could say something about a villain in the last star wars movies, but I'm probably not going to go there because then somebody will jump on the and kill me. So we do not touch start wars secret.
Autumn (28m 45s): Okay. So let's go on to your number four of them.
Jesper (28m 49s): Okay. Now, before I have another clip repaired here.
Autumn (28m 52s): Oh, of course.
Jesper (28m 53s): Yes, of course. I have a clip from all five. Of course its going to bring home victory bonus points. Yeah. The way that sort of a, I actually canceled out of your bone is pointing. Gives that to me. I think,
Autumn (29m 9s): I don't think so. Lets hear.
Jesper (29m 11s): Okay. So in this scene, one of my favorite characters of this show has just been picked up by the character that I really don't like. So are you going to hear of a male voice and a woman in this clip and the it's the woman that I don't like.
Autumn (29m 30s): Okay.
Jesper (29m 30s): But I'll explain it afterwards. So you have just listened to it. I don't think you can guess who this is to be honest, but just to have a list and I'll explain
Character 2 (29m 42s): The walking for days, thank God you came alone, but are you going to America, New York? He's yours. This is the one of going family there. I know
Jesper (30m 1s): We need to find this man Dr. Sue rest, or you know what series that is from know I do not that doesn't ring a bell at all now it's from heroes and how has it? Yeah. And so I don't know if I have watched that now, but you say that well, that's actually a pretty good series'. So in this scene and the male voice is Skylar, who is like a really like bad-ass character. And I really like him and he's just been picked up by this woman called Maya and M Maya is just like the opposite of skylight.
Jesper (30m 45s): And that the problem I have with her is that she always comes across as so incredibly helpless and she's never able to sort of work out herself what's she supposed to do with it. So she always depends on the other characters to sort of take her hand and lead her down the path of wherever whatever's gonna happen. And of course at the same thing applies to in our writing a you don't want to see characters that doesn't know how to think for themselves because those characters just so annoying. And I really got quite worked up this my character and to be honest. And so you just ruined every single episode she was in than unfortunately, and the latest season she's in their quite a lot.
Autumn (31m 32s): And that's funny you say that. Cause a lot of that, the list that I saw, they listed a different character. Jenny Wisley was actually listed quite a lot for the exact same reasons. It's like she never does anything. Her like biggest fame is that she marries Harry Potter for whatever reason. And no one's like she cast spells in the entire show. She breaks into the chamber of secrets and they find her sleeping on the floor. I mean, she's just the static. And so that was a huge reader, no know to have the character that is just never manages to stand up on her or his own two feet that we indeed, and that it's so annoying to watch or read for that matter.
Jesper (32m 18s): It's just like that again. And I think Maya is that like this in my era character, who is the perfect example of what I don't want in characters. So let's say that the top hop number too. So that's pretty, or the number four I should say. All right. So I was only in number four. I still have the ones left. So the blowing you out all the water and only just started.
Autumn (32m 40s): Wow. So think, all right, you ready from my number three then?
Jesper (32m 44s): Yep.
Autumn (32m 44s): So this one, I didn't even have any problem thinking of it's a character. I really don't like, and that is Bella's Swan from the Twilight series.
Jesper (32m 57s): Oh my gosh.
Autumn (32m 58s): So you agree then?
Jesper (32m 60s): So I did not put her on my and this, but I could have yes,
Autumn (33m 4s): I despised her and I mean, not just the movies, I read the books and I read the books purposely because they were so popular and I wanted them to know why, you know, what in the writing was so right. And I read the books despite Bella Swan, because I absolutely hated her. She was just, I don't even know where to start, but she needed a big dose of like growing up really fast, being a lot less, less self absorbed stuff. Wishy washy over Edward versus, oh the nine. You can't remember the name of that, Jacob. Yeah. Yeah. I know it just and what was worst for the books in the movie?
Autumn (33m 46s): You could almost put up with it because the character's, you know, it's a movie you're watching things. That's a little less internal. The books is written in first-person and so you are literally in her head for three quarters of a novel and it's just the novels. I read the whole series. Oh, it's just, you feel icky. I'm sorry. I have felt icky after reading her chapters, I was just, you know, dunk me in an ocean so I can clean myself off. I did not like her at all. No one actually, you know, saying that it is slightly strange to think about 'cause we talk a lot about the importance of making good characters in, how, how do you make of characters and what makes them likable and how it's important and so on.
Autumn (34m 29s): And then when you think of something like bill, this one and how massive the success that Ceres has been, the main character that is not likable at all. And that, that is a bit counter intuitive. I don't understand that to me. Well, I know obviously there's a lot of people who either relate to her or a, like the ropes of this series despite her, but oh, I don't know her. So we're going to get a lot of listeners on our back here for just like that. That was used to use characters ever. But if you think she is Y tell me what about her resonates with you? Because admittedly, I was a tomboy. I have motorcycles. I played with matchboxes.
Autumn (35m 9s): I don't get the whole, I've never been romantic, like oohing over someone my entire life. That may be my husband, but I don't get it. I don't get her at all. She makes me want to smack her upside the head and tell her to grow up and you know, go and dig a ditch in Africa and we'll talk later.
Jesper (35m 29s): Well, that is a good number three. All of them. I can agree with that one.
Autumn (35m 34s): You put for me that that's the point.
Jesper (35m 36s): That's okay. That's a good one.
Autumn (35m 39s): Thank you.
Jesper (35m 39s): Okay. Number three, here is email more annoying than Jen is Littmann. Oh, so this is a bit of a blast from the past and you can probably recognize it because I think there's a good chance that you also like me watched the series growing up. Okay. Well, I tried to watch it because back then we didn't have any streaming services. So you watched whatever was on TV. And yet, even though this was the only thing that was on this character annoyed me so much that I would rather do nothing than watching more of this series. So I'm just going to play this little sound clip here.
Jesper (36m 21s): And I think you might be able to guess it is.
Character 3 (36m 31s): Would you look at this? You know, I think Ms. Ellie had this wallpaper in south fork.
Jesper (36m 38s): Okay, I'm going to stop it. There is, oh, I can't take how loud and annoying her voice is. I can you recognize that?
Autumn (36m 46s): I recognize it and I cannot think of the show, but I do recognize it.
Jesper (36m 53s): I have seen it in the cities as you tell me, like, oh yeah, it's the non-issue right. It's it's from,
Autumn (37m 1s): oh, that's right. Oh, she is so annoying,
Jesper (37m 4s): but it's not only her nasal voice that makes this character really annoying. It's also that constant relationship building between her character and Mr. Scheffel that just shot of it goes up and I know the down and blah, blah, blah. And the round and round, it's just getting on my nerves.
Autumn (37m 20s): It's like, when it's like plotted off of a soap opera where it's like today, you don't take Tuesday and it's all just please make up your mind. Either love each other. We hate each other. We don't do both. It's so annoying, but that is really, really fight that character. And I'm also starting to think that you don't like that New York, New Jersey accent, but maybe I'm wrong.
Jesper (37m 41s): Maybe. I don't know. I have never thought about that, but maybe, I don't know.
Autumn (37m 44s): I, at least I say that because I know my husband a, that is an accent. He's got a Boston Kennedy accent and he says, cause and stuff like that. So it's about the opposite of New York. They have a good rivalry with New York. Boston does. So he's pointed out at quite a lot of like that. So that she's definitely annoying. Why are you ready for that? I don't know if you watched this series yet, but Sheldon Samson, AKA utopia in Jupiter's legacy, which is a new Netflix one. So you don't watch a lot of superheros ones. So I didn't think you would watch this one, but if you don't like superhero movies in this has a very good back story and I actually really enjoy the in series, but he, the archetypical character of he's just a bit too, God-fearing a bit too pro USA.
Autumn (38m 48s): Democracy loves you, you know, just how he's too perfect. He's too rigid. He's just too, this is the way things have to be in. And this has democracy and we're going to protect it. And we're going to allow what people to make horrible choices and not take that away from them because they're allowed to make free choices. And it's just like gagged me so that I can not take, I would definitely, I've always joked. I would be a super villain, but I'd probably do something good. It ended up being one of the superheroes, but I just can't take that level of patriotic, red, white, and blue. And I'm American. I'm just know gray.
Autumn (39m 27s): There is so pure. And I have like characters with flaws. I'd like characters with doubts. I like characters that question. I love this clever, clever character. And when you're that Ridgid, you're not clever. Or you just see with blinders on. And I just don't like them. And there's a couple of characters that I could of used for this one. Jean grey in X-Men it's very similar. She's like the way to goody two-shoes captain America. Well, no, no, no, no, no, no. And it seems like it's a superhero trope where you have the perfect one. I mean his name utopia. It's just know, I, I just can't do that. I want flaws.
Autumn (40m 8s): I want weaknesses, not weaknesses that you're just so perfect. And you're upset. The rest of the world can not match your perfection.
Jesper (40m 17s): Yeah know, I agree. And it's, it's so tough because we were talking so much about the is a very important like characters or the, the importance of making a good characters in them. And then we come up with a ton of these are really annoying ones, but yes, there are out of the word though.
Autumn (40m 46s): Okay. Your number too.
Jesper (40m 50s): Yeah. So This is, well, this next one is one of those characters where I just couldn't wait for another character to kill him.
Autumn (41m 0s): It sounds like my number one. And I wonder if we we'll have a match. He's a real little Pete that is exceedingly statistic.
Jesper (41m 11s): Okay. This may be, imagine. So it sounds like my name is one of the worst and also most unlikeable characters that I can think of.
Autumn (41m 19s): Okay. I can't wait to hear this.
Jesper (41m 22s): And I also found on the internet that ranker, you know, that the internet service that sort of ranks different things, they actually did an online poll asking who the most hated character in T V history was at this character was by file on the top of that list. Oo. All right. So he is a spoiled Brett that makes my life miserable for everyone else. And why don't I just play the clip here? And then you can tell me who this is.
Autumn (41m 52s): All right.
character 4 (41m 53s): My mother wishes me. Join the Knights, watch stripped all the titles and polished. You would solve the room in Pomona in takes up on my lady, sons. I was begged mercy for her father, but that have a soft hots of woman. So long as I have your king tree's in shall never go on punished. So in and bring me in my head.
Jesper (42m 27s): That is right. Yes I can. 'cause this one is my number one. So it said free marathon.
Autumn (42m 35s): Yes. Oh yeah. That was when you said, you said oil brats make everyone's life. Hell yup. Rooting for him to di oh, we could not die painfully in fast enough.
Jesper (42m 48s): Yeah. But actually very honest. And I'm very being very honest here. All right. It is very, very rarely wear. I have watched a series where I actually like, not like, oh, it would be nice if this character disappeared or you sort of, but actually rooting for somebody to kill him.
Autumn (43m 7s): I can remember almost that ever happening until this character showed up and game of Thrones Christ he's in my husband said I almost the exact same thing. He's like, he loves game of Thrones, which is really cool because he doesn't watch a lot of fantasy with me. And except for that. So he's like, what's, that was over once Jeffrey was gone, he was good. And we almost started watching and again, and he's just like, as long as we skip those episodes with T take him knowing what was coming. And for me, I had to say that he's, he's definitely the worst, but this, this serious and Ramsay we're also too.
Autumn (43m 47s): And the show where I was like, duh, duh, duh, duh. You know, you have to be horrible ends as fast or as slow as possible. You know?
Jesper (43m 57s): I agree. But, but, but that was, I agree. Ramsey was also somebody you, you rooted for him to die, but yes, but Ramsey was not in annoying in the same way I used to me ruthless. Yeah. He was just ruthless and he was not a nice character at all. And you certainly did not root for him whatsoever, but still, he was just not annoying in that same way. Whereas this character of, so I still remember the episode when he finally died, he was just like, yes, yes, yes. It was like watching a football. And that says something like we do instead itself when you're rooting for him, I think it was the character. It wasn't a real person rooting for their death because I give George RR Martin credit for making it character that you are like, oh, so every one of the world can get behind wanting this character that I have amazingly powerful for a Villa, a young villain.
Autumn (44m 52s): You just fantastically horrible. You wanted him to die.
Jesper (44m 55s): Yeah. So it was in unlike some of the other examples. It's excellent writing. Cause you really hate him. It was my number one.
Autumn (45m 3s): Your number two. I can't imagine what your number one is.
Jesper (45m 7s): Well, my number one is so bad. Well, I'm going to let you, since I was my number one, we can skip to yours.
Autumn (45m 13s): And then if it isn't your number one, I have, like I said, a dishonorable mention.
Jesper (45m 20s): Okay. All right. So my number one, and honestly I knew right away when I made this list that this character have to be the number one and he is worth worst than any of the other ones that I've mentioned.
Autumn (45m 31s): Oh gosh. I can't imagine anything worse than Jeffrey.
Jesper (45m 35s): Oh, just wait here. And I have to say as well though, I love this universe. I love these movies as do millions and millions of other people. All right. However, I am the only one who find this character incredibly irritating. Oh, let's hear it. He was originally designed to give some funny laughs. But instead he is just so incredibly simple minded and stupid that he becomes intolerable. Let me play this a couple of four.
Autumn (46m 12s): You sounds good.
Jesper (46m 12s): I'll try again. Maybe it didn't say. Hmm. Okay. Interesting. Oh no. I don't know. Let me fix it. Yeah. I can tell you. So
Character 5 (46m 28s): I think that, can you tell your mommy, I love you. You almost got killed. We have brainless eyes. So the ability to speak does not make them intelligent that out of him know Mrs. Mrs. In our humble seven. Oh my God. I love you so much.
Jesper (46m 45s): I know. It's it just keeps playing how annoying it that you can't stop it and know.
Autumn (46m 54s): Oh, you're right. So yes. I saw the judge of things on so many lists as just hated, hated, hated him for everything from his character, his idiocy too, the cultural appropriation of what they based it on.
Jesper (47m 11s): And yeah, people hate our banks with that passion. I started checking in with a passion as well. I still think he is just so incredibly annoying that the all most destroys like, so I love this star wars movies, but at this character almost destroys those movies where he's in.
Autumn (47m 30s): Oh my God. Yeah. He's he's incredibly painful. I think one person had one redeeming quality sing. At least your kids can probably laugh at him where there is other characters like Geoffrey and others that are just like, no one laughs at that. They're just so bad or horrible that your, your not giggling at all.
Jesper (47m 49s): Oh yeah. But that is definitely up there.
Autumn (47m 51s): Like I said, I still think Jeffery's worst, but me. All right. So you wanna hear my dishonorable mention and I'm actually surprised she didn't mention this one because you stopped watching the series because you couldn't take this character. Oh, which one have, I know I've thought about the Lucifer from the T V series.
Jesper (48m 13s): Oh yeah. Yeah. That's true.
Autumn (48m 15s): Yes. And he was really annoying, but I know he didn't annoy me as much of these five that, but, but he is the norm. He is annoyed and I have, so I did watch it, the whole series and I just, just, they just released the funnel part of it. And it was worth to me it was worth watching, but even his character arc is amazing. He goes like for our and M anagrams, he has at the bottom, bottom bottom. And he goes all the way up to the top, over the course of the series, which is amazing to watch a little ups where, you know, you have backslides a little bit fantastic writing that way. And that's why I enjoyed the series in what he becomes is amazing. But there were times that I was just going, oh my God, I can not take just level of arrogance.
Autumn (49m 4s): Stupidity is in those first few episodes for painful, but once you've got more until the story, and once we got into the detective, Chloe and what is going on there, and then you and I will, I love the fact that Netflix did allow them to finish up the series and finish up the story arc because the writers did a fantastic job of doing that and tying up all these loose ends. So the series itself was definitely worth watching, but there were times that it was just like, holy rap. They had him start at such a low, low point that if I was writing a book, I don't know if I'd want to have you, you take a big risk to start with a main character that has that much of a oh yeah.
Autumn (49m 45s): But they do such a good job pulling him all the way up to the character arc where he's at the absolute upper end. And it's amazing.
Jesper (49m 55s): All right. Hmm. Okay. Yeah. Oh, I think this is a tough one to conclude on Oren because there's a lot of really bad characters on these two lists. You are. I think we have very good points on both sides. You have had some really annoying characters.
Autumn (50m 12s): And I think of my list with their very specifically purposely genre chosen niches are very, it was very well done. And I say so myself, yes, yes.
Jesper (50m 28s): Yeah. At least argued as well. Good for you a you aren't who'd well from your list as well. And you know, of course in some of them I have not watched, so I don't know. And the same for me, of course, some of my list do you have not watched? So you also don't know, but I might have to leave. And then we have a couple where we just agree.
Autumn (50m 45s): I think we can say Jeffrey is one of the worst characters out there forever, but yeah, he is. Yes. All right. Well maybe, I don't know. We have to have to have half that have the listeners way in which maybe we missed the one. Did we miss someone who's could be worse than these? I don't know. Right? Yeah.
Jesper (51m 6s): I'm even though I started out by saying that I should win this one because we both had, I have audio clips prepared, which I do think I should have some point. You have time for all audio clips, you got a 0.4 being stronger, specific to fantasies. So, and so that's pretty cool. Ah, and then we have a couple where we either, I didn't know that it wasn't, you didn't know mind. And then we have a couple of, we agreed upon. So maybe actually from the beginning, I would of been a sad. So as I said it in the beginning for not winning, because I actually came more prepared than you did. But on the other hand you pulled some pretty good stuff out of your sleeves there.
Jesper (51m 48s): So maybe, oh yeah, yeah.
Autumn (51m 50s): So maybe, maybe we can, maybe we can make it a DRO. I actually know if you too bad about it all. That's pretty good for a last-minute homework thing that, you know, I agree to withdraw because that was a pretty much a whipped up this morning list.
Jesper (52m 7s): Alright. But, but as you set, some of you listeners can think of some really annoying characters that we forgot about it. And please let us know. I would like to know what those are that we missed, or if you liked any of these characters, please tell us why please eat well. And we promise not to start arguing with you. So just say we accept your point of view and that's it.
Autumn (52m 27s): Yes, absolutely. I'm just curious, especially Bella, why it's especially Bella.
Narrator (52m 35s): All right. So next Monday we have back to the topic of writing craft. I always enjoy those too. And we're going to talk about how to maintain your story flowing despite all of lifestyle. So if you liked what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/Am Writing Fantasy For as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, going, stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Sure, you've heard about beta readers, but why do they help improve your writing so much? And what's the best way to utilize (and organize!) their help?
Join Autumn and two special guests, Pam Burleson and Paul Kilpatrick from Betabooks, as they talk about how beta readers can be such an asset, how best to use and find them, and how they created Betabooks to help authors learn to ease into the intimidating realm of asking people to read your book.
PLUS, grab the 25% off coupon on Betabooks! Use AWF when you enroll in a paid plan on Betabooks at https://betabooks.co/.
Check out the articles Paul mentioned on How to Run a Beta Read and How to Find Readers who will Love your Book. And don't forget to check out Pam's Beta Jam (PBJ) and submit your book if you'd like to have it considered!
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (3s): You're listening to The Am. Writing Fantasy Podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need an literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Autumn (31s): Hello, I'm Autumn. And this is episode 135 of the am writing fantasy podcast. And today Yesper is off on vacation in Denmark and having hopefully a lovely time. And instead I have with me two very special guests. We have Pam and Paul from beta books. Welcome to the podcast.
Pam (55s): Thank you. It was great to be here.
Autumn (58s): So I, I, I sent this in an email when I asked if you wanted to join me, that a, my niece actually is responsible for having found you and introduced me and I've set up an account and started playing around. But I have yet to understand the full breadth of beta books. So I'm looking forward to hopefully of crash course, but first, please, please introduce yourselves and a little bit about, you know, how you found or you writers. I didn't even find much information on beta books and your backgrounds other than a really cute blur up at the bottom of the website that made me want to desperately reach out to you.
Pam (1m 36s): Yeah. So my husband, Andrew is the third, have our little triumvirate here. He's a programmer and Paul and Andrew and I are all friends and Raleigh, Andrew wrote a book and had trouble getting anybody to read it. And then when people did read it to beta or whatever, he had trouble finding all the feedback. He was tired of that. So we decided to build it all so that he wouldn't read Andrews' book until Andrew build the thing. And so he did all right. I know, but at work, I'm not sure of Paul wanted it to work, but it did. Yeah. We've been going since then.
Pam (2m 17s): And the reason the books exist is to make it easy for writers to run their beta, to send their, their documents out securely, to, to readers because of the document doesn't even go out, its all on one side. So there's no PDFs or other documents floating around the feedback has all their in one place for it to be sorted and mark and yeah. So the idea of their just to make and easy way for, for all authors to do that. So I M right now I handle the customer support and we Paula and I have done or conferences together and not this last year, obviously, but no, we did.
Paul (2m 60s): We did it. We did at digital conference together. We did an online conference. That's pretty much it. I mean, technically speaking, a, one of the big headaches for Andrew was that when you did find a group of people, he just emailed them a word doc. And then he heard back from a number of people saying, oh, I can't open this. And so we sent it in a different format and then he started getting feedback via a series of emails, each person sending their own kind of email thread. And then he began making corrections and he sent out a new drafts to some people. And he ended up in this situation where he couldn't figure, he couldn't Colgate all this feedback from all of this emails, figure out who had, which draft and figure out what feedback he'd already used in making revisions in his draft.
Paul (3m 45s): And he said, well, this is a, this is a data flow issue. And that's kind of what software is ideally suited to solving. So I bet I could do this. And we were sitting around at dinner and he said, does that sound like a good idea of Paul? And I said, that sounds like a fantastic idea. In fact, I won't read your book until I can read it on the software. So I didn't just get asked to read a book and say, know, make me a better tool to do it.
Autumn (4m 10s): I absolutely adore that, that your husband is like, I had a problem and solve that because as it is definitely a problem that author's have of, especially as Yesper And I, as you heard it from the intro, you know, as we've come out with more books last summer, we released three NonFiction's and we were doing them all at the same time with different teams of beta readers, you know, 40 here, 30 here, 70 they're. And to get the feedback and to do the, all my life, I thought I was just going to go insane. Cause I'm the format or of the two of those. I'm the software person and our side of the business. So yeah, I was just, I think it must have ooze out to my family that my niece was like, Hey, have you seen this platform?
Autumn (4m 59s): And as soon as I saw that, yeah, it's like people come to you and you know where they are so that you don't do formats one day and then two days later, someone else, since you something else, and you've done so many edits, you can't leave. You're like, did I do this, this error they found? Or did I not? Oh my gosh.
Paul (5m 16s): So it is. And so you just described exactly, essentially the S the, the, the work flow issue that Andrew had in that we set out initially to solve. And then over time, we were in basically in a, sort of a semi open beta for over a year, just inviting authors and telling authors they can invite their friends. And that's when we began to get more and more feedback about, oh, I have this problem and all have this problem at some, like, the formatting issue was a very interesting one for us. I know we've talked to a bunch of people, but we wanted to make reading books easy on a phone and on the computer. And so we basically said, this is pre formatic. This is a prepress tool. So we do dynamic formatting on pretty much everything.
Paul (5m 58s): Cause we have so many people reading on phones. I think over it's over 90% of beta readers are doing at least some of their reading on phone. So that was really important for us.
Autumn (6m 9s): Wow. That always impresses me partially because I have bad eyesight. I've had M PRK, which is like LASIK done, but, and I starting to see it starting to phase out just a little bit, but it's been a decade. So I mean, I can, I used to only be able to see literally three inches and then the world was blurry. So I'm happy to have 25 20 is fantastic, but I cannot read on a phone to save my life. I get an important email and I'm like, where's the computer. I just need computers. But it is amazing that people, you know, they're they got younger eyes, I suppose. I know, but so good. No, go ahead. And do you think a lot of things, well, I think a lot of people that are also
Paul (6m 50s): Are busy, so their reading, while they're waiting to pick up their kids on there and you know, they're like, oh, we need something new and you finish the book you have in your car. You're like, oh, I'm a Bader waiting for so-and-so. I can just pick it up. I'm waiting in a waiting room somewhere. I'm in line at the grocery store. So we hear a lot of stories like that from people saying, oh, wait, this is so easy. I can read a little bit here. Like, like using any of your e-readers as well.
Autumn (7m 11s): Oh yeah. He just stuck at little league practice for the next hour and a half or something. So you're kind of whipped out the book. If we just know I'm taking fixers, honey really is what I'm doing. We were all good. Parent's at heart. Oh. And this sneaky one, but that is fantastic. So you've mentioned that it, you know, you are in beta testing and everything for a while. So when did you, when did this happen? Where did it? And Andrew have this book in this idea and he started developing it. Oh, wow. So, yeah, but not that, no, that's fantastic.
Paul (7m 45s): And when did you move? So we,
Pam (7m 49s): We left and 2017 left Raleigh in 2017.
Paul (7m 52s): So it was 2016 when we started.
Pam (7m 55s): Right. And I think we, we launched
Paul (7m 58s): Into like the public and then in 18.
Pam (8m 0s): Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow.
Autumn (8m 2s): I see. I love stories like that because I think being on the computer and I have, my dad was into computers. My nephew is a coder and I dabble enough to break things and fix them on my own. And so I think it's important for people just like with writing a book. So many people don't realize, you know, some authors. Yeah. They seem to be able to whip them out. And like five days, I know that's probably an insane, but you know, you know, it seems to be a month or two, they released 12 books a year. And for others it's over a year. I mean, I know I've had people ask my first series, which literally they all talk all day. Every single book took me or it took me a year of those a year of my life. And they asked for free and you are like, Hey, it was a year of my life.
Autumn (8m 45s): So I think that's fantastic to know, you know, how to code this website. And it looks, it is look very lovely on the surface, which is fantastic. That takes a lot of it's that takes design skill. It takes coding skill. You've got to be able to click a button and it actually does something without breaking. So a couple of years' seems so incredibly reasonable to me.
Paul (9m 8s): And how much, like a lot of authors, I mean, we were both working our regular jobs and this was something we did on the side and this is still a fairly small kind of operation. It's something we do because we're passionate about the community and the role that we think finding beta readers and connecting with readers plays and kind of an author's journey. Yeah.
Autumn (9m 28s): Do you want to get into the beta readers and you can finish what you're about to say, Pam, but I also want to talk about is so used to, or not authors. I have to know how you met. There is a story. They're how you got sucked into the reader universe, which is a wonderful place to be. Yes.
Pam (9m 44s): So goodness. So we, we met because we lived next door to each other. I mean, I have missed calls my mom from him. I met his mom, Melissa, and we became friends and then I was hanging out at her house and this is how I remember it. Well, and then I met you and then we were going to the same church. So Andrew met Paul and I was over at Melissa's house a lot with my kids and Paul, you, you have a history in the publishing business. So,
Paul (10m 18s): Okay. So I worked in publishing right into college and I did a co-write some stuff. And so I work in film production and then all sorts of theater a lot. So I've actually written plays and produced plays. So writing is been a big part of stuff that I've done. I'm not like a spot, an aspiring author. Let's just not really one of the things that is a passion of mine. I have I'm in the fourth book of a non fourth draft of a nonfiction book. And I mean, it's really more kind of, of venting exercise for me, I've realized over time and then probably ever gonna be for people. Pam is leaving out of that. I think eventually we found out that we both like similar books, then we started lending each of their books.
Paul (11m 0s): And then someone gave Andrew I think, risk legacy, which is one of these board games that you play for eight months. Yes. And, and then we all started playing that Andrew and I and a couple of other friends and, you know, as risk is, it was one of those rage inducing either you love each other or hate each other by the end of the things. And most of us love, hated each other. And then we ended up and then we started playing D D and we just kinda kept doing stuff. And I'm, and then I think maybe a couple of years later, Andrew did NaNoWriMo, which his, where he wrote the book that he ended up wanting to beta through beta books.
Paul (11m 43s): Well, that's fantastic. Him and Andrew are married. So that helps. So that's how they know each other.
Pam (11m 48s): Well, why not say that? Yes, yes. Yeah. And know I am a professional musician. So I come at the creative business from a slightly different angle, but I have learned is you can't make it unless you really put yourself out there and we just need to try it. And you're going to face rejection and you're going to face what feels like failure, but artists who want to make it camp. And it really just matters that you continue honing your craft in, reaching out to find your audience. And that's what I think beta reading really is at its heart. It's finding your audience, reaching out to readers, finding the readers who love your book and will tell other people about your book.
Pam (12m 32s): So we really see beta reading, not as a transaction, necessarily the way you would with an editor or other like professionals, because beta readers, aren't professionals. They are people who love books. And I think it's something really special to, for a reader to be part of an author's process. And we've found that those readers who are involved in the process become really attached to the writers and promote their work and just, it's a very special thing. And so we encourage authors not to just say thank you for the feedback, but so can you continue to develop relationships? And for those beta readers, you know, maybe offer a free copy of the book.
Pam (13m 13s): You mentioned the mat in your acknowledgements at the very least, but treat it like, like relationship with each leader. And you'll get their reputation as a writer who is really in it for the craft, but also for the people that you're writing for. And I think that's important. And we've seen that in beta books, at least authors and readers can interact in the books themselves. So a reader can leave a comment and a writer can respond directly to the comment in that book. And so there is some back and forth their, that can lead to have some really neat interactions. Oh,
Autumn (13m 46s): That must be really cool to see on the backend to be able to see like that relationship develop, which you can have over an email, but it's, you know, like you said, is all on one platform. It makes it kind of easy and you can literally just respond as their reading instead of, you know, oh, I've got an email and into my spam folder.
Paul (14m 4s): Right. Well, we don't watch, we don't watch too much of what happens. One of the things is, is it's big for us as it is kind of people having a private workspace. So most of the workspace is very private and we only really look at something if we're asked by an author for a technical reason. Yeah. So it would be awesome to like Snoop on people, but we don't do that. We generally hear about it when an author or a reader decides to tell us that.
Autumn (14m 29s): Yeah. Just, just
Pam (14m 34s): It's very behind the scenes is sneek reading anybody's books. So
Autumn (14m 37s): I know that's probably a very ethical choice. Have you as, as a very good, what are you, what you think? I mean, I love your description of the process, especially coming from a musician because I agree it's, it is hard work. You S I see so many authors who, I mean, they say, you know, so many people will start at writing a book and if they finish their first one, that's already a huge chunk of people who don't make it to the finish at the first one. And I do see a lot of first-time authors make the mistake of just launching without beta reading or getting feedback or a content editor, which is expensive. I mean, that's where be at a reader is make a good cheap version of a content editor, but it's something to get feedback and they just put it out there and then they get disappointed and they never keep working on something new.
Autumn (15m 23s): So that is definitely, I think, where I see beta reader coming in. But what do you think has been some of the strengths that, you know, you've then you're even your husband's books. There are things you've heard from authors that why beta readers can be so important, especially for new authors, trying to learn the craft and how to write something that readers will love.
Paul (15m 44s): So I'll tell you all started kind of with the technical side and Pam, we can try him and kind of with what we're all in thoughts, but kinda from a business perspective, you know, authors should know if they wanna sell books, you need to treat it like a business. And if we were talking about software or any other thing that we would all be talking about, finding your customers or, or product fit. And so one of the things that, especially in the process of finding beta readers, a lot of authors or forced to discover his, so who is my books for, and what is it about my book that certain readers we'll like? So we were talking about fantasy, you know, there's a, there's a wealth of sub-genres, right? And you're not just going to say, Hey, this is a fantasy book for fantasy readers.
Paul (16m 26s): You're going to say, well, this is his, this urban fantasy, or is this high fantasy? Has this grim dark light, and then narrowing it down and figuring out, oh, like, do I have a reader profile or do I have multiple reader profiles? Do I have a book description from myself kind of from marketing and for understanding who I'm writing to and why I'm writing to these people. And so that's one of the things that we see authors, we see them, we encourage authors to do. And the beta reading process forces, forces you to figure out who your readers are and then to go out and look for them and find out, oh, where, where do these people congregate? How can I find them? How can I reach them? And if you don't know that before you launch a book, you're not going to be effective at say, targeting ads, even writing, press copy or blurbs or back cover matter, because you're not thinking about who the person is, that's reading it and why they're going to resonate with it.
Pam (17m 24s): It's true. And I think artistically, it's important to get over the hurdle of sharing something that's so precious to you. You know, as you've mentioned, you might have spent 12 months reading this thing, and it's not a thing, right. It's, it's just the baby. Right. And you know, it's a scary thing to send your baby out into the world. And so you should be at your right. So it makes sense to look for those people that you think will be good for your book. And to really treat it as this is something precious that I love. And I think it can be a gift to the world and to a certain community of people.
Pam (18m 9s): And it's, if it's so hard, we need to make just a little bit of detachment from your work. And I think people are scared to, to share, to share their work because they're afraid of mean people. Yeah. I will say, I think, I think most people are not mean people, you know, you can say to someone, I wrote this thing, I love it. I'd love your feedback. Please be nice. And they will, you know, so I
Paul (18m 39s): Think that this, which is it's own feedback,
Pam (18m 44s): But then most people will not read it and say, this is terrible. What are you doing? And so you have, have faced in your own work and in the people that you are initially reaching out to. And when you're doing that first foray into finding readers, it's okay to use the people in your social circle. And I think Paul and I really love the same kinds of books. So if I were writing a fantasy novel, I would ask him to be one of my first readers, because he has so much familiarity with the genre. And I have other friends who we share the same interests. So just start with people who have, you know, but how do you also share that passion with us is a good place to start. And they might know other people that you don't know who would also be interested.
Pam (19m 27s): So I think to be, to be open-minded as you, as you send your book out into the world, but it's okay to start with those people that you already trust to be sure that when you talk to you, but also you don't want to just ask if the book is good and if they liked it, because if they love you, they'll say, yeah, it was good. I liked it.
Autumn (19m 55s): And you and your readers. Yeah. That is the problem. But having family Reed at your mom's always going to love it. It doesn't matter. Okay. So I do, I, do you remember seeing with beta Ray with the beta books, you know, you could set up actually questions as you are going through like, Hey, does this scene make sense? Is this character ring true? I like being able to ask those questions because you're right. I mean, a good beta reader who maybe has, does this for a couple of different authors because with indie publishing, oh my goodness. There are some very savvy beta readers who could basically do this as a profession. That's how they get maybe three books and they are so darn good. But otherwise you have to, you, right.
Autumn (20m 36s): You have to coax them kinda of like, did this character sound right? Did I screw them up somewhere? Cause you let me know. And then you start getting the full story.
Paul (20m 46s): Yeah. That was something that we were very mindful of when we were making the software is finding there's an, there's not, there's not an overwhelming amount of customization on beta books, but there is a fair amount specifically with asking questions as one of the things we were, we were very mindful of. So you can give full book guidance in your table of contents. You can give individual specific guidance at the beginning or the end of each chapter where you ask, you know, this is the climax of the romance. Can you tell me this, this and this. And then we also kind of offer guides about asking questions. We tend to encourage people not to ask yes or no questions, ask things that are more about opinion or have an open and open answer ability.
Paul (21m 30s): I personally say it's better to ask a question at the end of the chapter. So they're not thinking about it as their going through, but some people like to have their readers focusing on something per chapter. And then we also let authors insert kind of broader questionnaires kind of as a, like an act break or at a book break as they're going through, which some people like, because they're like, Hey, we've just finished the first act. Which of these characters, or do you like the most? Why you, why do you think they're the KIRO you no. And then sometimes you run into authors. We were like, oh no, they all thought so-and-so was the main character. And I'm about to kill them or something of that nature. It's not a problem with their grr Martin.
Autumn (22m 9s): So that's, that's just part of the plot, but Dick and put it in their readers and twist it a little bit. so that's fantastic. I'd like to that you, you know, you talked about, you know, coaxing and I think that was part of the platform. You, if I remember correctly, you could see where people were. So if you suddenly saw that like 15 of the 20 people, you asked, it only made it to chapter 10, you would know, even if they weren't giving you feedback, you're like, okay, everyone stopped at 10 once, you know, my passive feedback.
Autumn (22m 54s): And hopefully someone will have at least tell you what's wrong with chapter 10, but that is, yeah, you did something is wrong. There's a usefulness then that kind of, of statistics instead of sending out those emails, like you said, and never hearing back or just getting the, oh yeah, I read that month ago. It was great. We were kidding. Anything else? Go ahead. Oh, and one
Paul (23m 24s): Of the things we found is we've helped authors when a ton of betas is yeah. That, that very thing that you just said, oh, I read it a month ago. What we've discovered is if you treat it like an important part of your process, you actually get better response and a more engaged readership because they perceive that, oh, this beta is a part of this author's business and I have a responsibility to them. So it's saying, Hey, you know, can you read this book in the next two weeks? Or the deadline for being finished is this day. And then the book is closed, which is a future we have where essentially we just shut the book and you can work with your feedback. We found that that's actually very effective. It's also one of those things, but a lot of authors are really resistant to because they feel like they're placing some strange and position on people.
Paul (24m 5s): But it's one of those ironies where when you give people a higher expectation of their importance and their responsibility, they often respond positively because they are affirmed in how important they are and how valued they are by an author. Yeah.
Autumn (24m 21s): And that probably helped weed out some of the chafe, the chaff two, you know, the people who just want the free book versus the people who are, feel like part of the team and want to help. Yeah. Yeah.
Pam (24m 33s): And I think it's important to treat your beta. It's important not to treat it as if you're asking a favor from the readers. I mean, on one hand you are, but on the other hand, you really need their health, I think, and you should want to develop those relationships. So I'm just saying in a different way of what Paul said, that you don't need to be hesitant and, you know, and as people that try it, you know, you, you can approach with some confidence because this is something that you have worked on, you see value in it and you trust that other people will see value in it as well, and that they will drive value from it.
Pam (25m 12s): And now they may say see different things and your work than you see this, as we all have their relationship with the thing that we create and then we output. But that's one of the beautiful things about, especially casting your net wider with beta readers. It's great to have M 10 20, if you can find it. So you got a nice sample size and you might see, see trends that you weren't even aware of in your own work and the things that you can capitalize or lean into in the next books and the series. If your, if your writing series M which is good, my business, if that's where your, but yeah, I think there's, there's a lot of value to be shared.
Pam (25m 53s): And it's really good to approach it with, with the idea that you are bringing something valuable into their lives. Not only asking for their help, with their little project,
Autumn (26m 4s): I like that. I think we all do better when we realize that we are taking this seriously. I mean, we have it as a hobby and something we're passionate about, but giving it that dedication, that time on our own part and the people who love reading, giving their expertise as readers is very valuable because yeah, there's a lot of things that they can catch that a careful reader that knows that they're really doing it to help the author and not just their going to, you know, our creator as being an example. I mean, their getting an advanced reader copy just to leave a review. That's great. But their not often being very cautious readers, they might be looking, they might notice a typo, but their not going to sit there and go, why did you the character do that?
Autumn (26m 44s): I don't get it. It doesn't make any sense. And who's, or that's what the beta readers are for.
Pam (26m 50s): Yeah, exactly.
Autumn (26m 52s): And I do think it was so interesting threw me off at first, but you know, you, from when I saw you, you have to bring in your own manuscript. Like you have basically almost copy and paste might be the fastest way to get a book up there. But I do see the value. I mean, I still remember I read the Twilight series. It's definitely not one of my favorite, but the, what Stephanie went through when someone took the books that she finally is taken, what five, almost a decade for her to finally release Edward's point of view from the first book, because someone took her file and started sharing it. And I mean, not all of us are going to be Stephenie Meyer and be these famous authors, but that is the problem that is this fear that when you're sending this out to the world, whether you're sending an EPUB file or just like book, book, funnel has a place where you can send out reader copies to then PDFs, how someone can take that N share it.
Autumn (27m 46s): So where were you? Don't need it to be, so this one, you, you make, it all stays right there, which has kind of have I, do you see the point to that?
Paul (27m 55s): Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and that's, I mean, even I go back and forth on manuscript theft because when it happens, it's very publicized and people have a lot of fear about it. But generally when you're an aspiring author at the risk is very low, especially if you're trying to start a business because as you know, like writing a book and selling a book is, is not the, the goal it's, it's creating a platform and having books. You exactly know, but, but there's also, there's, there's increased vulnerability that an author is kind of sharing with the readers, especially depending on where they are in the process, because some authors will beta unedited chapters. If they have a group of people that are really hungry, like for instance, there's an author.
Paul (28m 38s): We use this site early on when we were in beta to would dictate a chapter and immediately share it to a small section, like the elite tier of his mailing list to get feedback before it even went through edits or, or copy of it because they were so hungry and such big fans, but also because they would give him good feedback. And that sounds terrible, like a terrifying thing for their ability to me. And that's one of the reasons we want to make sure that people feel that they have the control of our access.
Autumn (29m 7s): So that's really cool. So is it possible to do that, to set up different tiers like this, as I'm sharing this with just this subset group that our, my special fantastic fans, and when you're ready to get more beta, as you can have open it up to other people as well.
Pam (29m 22s): So yeah. So the way the process works as you upload you manuscript, and when you send out invitations to readers to their email addresses, and if you want them to run 20 rounds of betas with 20 different groups, readers', you could, and so you just, you invite the readers that you want and that first time, and then they're done, you can just remove them from the book and then do whatever you want. If you want to make any edits, you can, and then just invite another group and they can go through the book. And as the author, you can decide whether readers are seeing each other's feedback or not. So you can decide whether they're experiencing a clean read every time.
Pam (30m 7s): And I really think you ought to do that, but there are authors who like to build reader community by letting readers see each other's comments, sort of appreciate the books together in that sense. Well, almost like a
Paul (30m 20s): Bit is like a beta book club.
Autumn (30m 23s): Okay. Now I want to be an, a book club is going to really, and I did C so you can send out emails. I just like that. Cause, so if you already have, like, you've been doing this and you have, you know, 40 emails, you can send out an email list, but you, there are actually beta readers who are on the site. And you can like, as an author, I think for what is all you could basically go and like, look at their profile and say, Hey, would you like to try out this book? Is that right?
Pam (30m 53s): Yeah, that's right. I mean, all leaders joined at the invitation of an author at one point or another. So you don't just have people showing up. You have people invited who likely are trusted by another author. So we ask readers to fill out a reader profile if their interested, if they're looking to be contacted by new authors and we call that the reader directory and they involve, include as much information as they want their areas of expertise, genre, preferences, genre of this preferences, anything that they think uniquely identifies them as a reader home. And the database is searchable both by you.
Pam (31m 36s): You can just start at simply genres. Yeah. Anything you want. There is an advanced search you could search for roller skates and see if you come up with, as a reader and then it's searchable on our free trial. But querying readers is available only on our subscription because we wanna protect our leaders. We don't want them to get spammed. Oh, thanks. So yeah, you send out a query and the reader can decide whether or not to read. And it's just a real click, but quick button in their e-mail just accept or reject. It's also on the, on their dashboard, on the home screen. And we find that a number of our others have, I dunno at Paul, I think most authors find a few readers on the reader directory, but a lot of, a lot of people really do their own work to find their own.
Pam (32m 21s): Readers' we also have so many, sorry, go ahead, Paul.
Paul (32m 25s): Well, I mean, the director is a bit of a, kind of, it was a sneaky way that we thought that we could help authors get used to the idea of asking people to read their book. So I like that. So there's no expectation from us that you'll be able to find a group of beta readers through the directory. You might find one or two people. We encourage, we encourage the readers when they get queried. If they don't like the query to say, Hey, the reason I didn't like this query is because I list this in my preferences. And you said this, or, you know, I don't want to read my book, your book. It sounds amazing, but I'm busy, but it's really kind of a, a backdoor way to get authors used to the idea of maybe having a much softer approach where people they know we were already interested in.
Paul (33m 16s): So they can say, oh, here's my 160 word pitch to you. I know you liked this and this, let me practice how to approach someone. So that's kind of why it's there. Also a lot of people who came to this site for one author started emailing us and saying, Hey, I really enjoyed doing this. Can I feed them more bucks? And so that was when we created. And then we tried to find ways to make it a useful part of the author process. We so strongly encouraged people to go out and find their own group of readers out in the world, because that's going to be your business.
Autumn (33m 48s): Yeah. I mean, especially if you said you're sending out an email to invite them, so you have their emails. So you're creating you're newsletter list and there's a lot of people you're gonna like say, Hey, it's all out and stores. And I think that you are in it. And if we want to buy it, that'd be great. But you don't have to just tell your friends and family or anyone you think, yeah, that is how you want that author platform. Because without that, if Amazon decides that you aren't good enough and kicks you out, which is rare, but occasionally things do happen with people's authors profiles that get accused of something are break some rule and then toss out of Amazon. And that's a big deal. That's it? No matter how I'm of an wide author, I'm across everywhere, because I just think the world should have competition and should be available and open.
Autumn (34m 33s): But yeah, you know, Amazon's still is mostly the most of the eggs in the basket.
Paul (34m 40s): Well, I mean, I'm sure you've done 135 episodes. I'm sure the importance of mailing lists is something you have talked about extensively. And then that's, I mean, that's one of the reasons we tell people to find their readers, start, start building that list. Now start building that list. When you're halfway through your first draft, start thinking about who you're going to want to find. If you're going to start marketing an online community in your book, isn't Dunn, you should join the community and become a member so that when you are ready, people will know, oh, this isn't some stranger. And this is a Panda friend, 64 is asking me to read their new books. And now, you know, I've had 15 interactions with Panda friend, like let's read their book.
Autumn (35m 22s): That's true. That's where I was like pay into front. And you, you just came up with that one or is it secretly? You're all going somewhere.
Paul (35m 29s): I'm never gonna tell, Hey, everyone on a Panda buddies.com
Autumn (35m 37s): Sounds great. But then I did see how it is. It is true. So it's nice to know though, if you were an author and you are truly new, you, you, you should at least learn how to work on your marketing and like, say, how do you ask people to do this? But then you might actually get a couple of people. So if you're brand brand spanking new and you have no one to outreach for you, you might get one or two, you might get your first start. And that's always important. But I do. I love the fact that free trials, I've tried out a whole bunch of different editing software recently and stuff like that. And there was one or two that didn't have free trials. And I'm like, you've got to be kidding me even a 14 day, but you have a free level of free tier. And I'm like, there's like, you've got
Pam (36m 25s): My gosh. So it really is meant to give writers an idea of what it's like to use to use this software. And, you know, a lot of, a lot of writers are contentious. They have the one book and they have a few friends. They want to read it. But then if you do have more aspirations and a larger readership than you already know whether the software works for you. So that really was, was the goal there.
Autumn (36m 51s): We give it a whirl with book one and a couple of readers just to see how you like it. That's an example. And if you like it, you're going to come back for this, if you're really into writing.
Pam (37m 0s): Yeah. And we, we find that most, most writers will use the use data books for about a month to run their beta. And you can turn off your subscription after that. And all that means is that the readers no longer have access, but of course is retained access to your work indefinitely, whether your paid are not at that point. And yeah, I think a lot of people come to our site looking for readers and they see beta books and say, oh, these people will find me beta readers. And that is one of the reasons of among many that Paul's already mentioned that we instituted the reader directory, but we also have, I've got a book club called Pam S Beta Jam, and anybody can submit a novel of anyone who's looking to find readers can submit and I'll review.
Pam (37m 48s): And I choose pretty much any fiction genre. And I'm also looking for memoirs cause we got a lot of interest in that among our leadership. Oh, but it's, I make it available to our about, gosh, I think there are about a thousand readers that have come through PBJ at one time. And so most writers find they have two or three really dedicated readers who make it all the way through to really enjoy their books at the end of the process. So we try to make that available. That's available, whether you are on the free trial or subscribed or whatever. So that's, if you're looking for a way to find readers for free, that's a good way too.
Pam (38m 28s): So yeah. All it just requires that you upload your book and do a query at the group's homepage. And we're just getting started this summer after, after a hiatus, because a lot of people just were not, we're not writing, but I'd love to be able to send out a bunch. So anyone listening who is interested, it has a book that you need to get some eyes on it and don't know how to do it. So you submit
Autumn (38m 52s): I'm and check this out. That is an opportunity because I think that is definitely, it's not maybe the number one question I get asked by new writers, but it's probably in the top five. So that's yeah. So cool.
Paul (39m 4s): But the question being, how do we find readers or
Autumn (39m 8s): Just, you have the question being, what was, how do I find beta readers specifically? Like where do I go find them? It seems to stump a lot of people. I honestly think a lot of new authors especially get stumped by the difference between author groups, which authors are readers, but often we're so busy writing. We don't read as much as we want to. Or I know with me, I'm like currently on just like, if it hasn't won a Hugo or a Nebula award, I'm not reading it because I just want to, I want to see the top tier fiction. That just makes me go, holy crap. This is amazing. And that's just kind of like my goal for the year. So I know I've read a lot of other peoples books, so unless I'm doing edits and yeah. And then the authors to new authors, do you know?
Autumn (39m 50s): So their go to the, this author group, their asking them, Hey, you want to be a beta reader and their not going into like the reader groups and asking them if they want to be a Bader, you, it takes a little while to figure that out. I think.
Pam (40m 1s): Yeah. If, oh, sorry. Well, I'll just, if, if another writer is reading your book, but they're going to critique your craft and that's not what you need from a, a beta reader. That's very true.
Paul (40m 13s): The version of the book that they would.
Autumn (40m 16s): Yes. Oh yes. So my favorite reviews have been, well, that's not what I would have done it, so that's great. Then you write it. You are away.
Paul (40m 28s): Yeah. And one of the things that's, I mean, it's, it's frustrating for all authors, especially new authors. And it's also frustrating for us trying to help people. Is that a T two things I wrote into a lot of times is very naturally, you're used to asking authors for advice on how to be an author, because you've gotten great advice on how to write your book. But a lot of times what happens is they either instinctively their successful found readers kind of through luck or doing something that they were doing already kind of naturally, or they use a process maybe eight years ago. One thing I hear a lot of writers conferences is authors going, oh, well, you know, I started writing a blog and all you have to do is write everyday and then you'll get readers. And I'm like, well, I mean, when was the last time you actually read a blog?
Paul (41m 12s): I mean, it's not the same as it was and say, oh two, when people had a list of blogs, they would visit every day. Now you might be relying on your Instagram feed or a sub stack or Pinterest. So you have to find new things and, and it's always changing the best way to reach readers. And then the second thing is your early readers, that's almost like a fingerprint finding them and forming that relationship is, is going to be an incredibly unique to you, your book and who they are. And so I think you have to do some fairly systematic and deep thinking about who you are, who the book is and who you want to be reading it.
Autumn (41m 50s): Well, that's, that's a very good advice and so true. And I do think, I remember when you are right. I started on Twitter back before the second resurgence of Twitter being popular. And I loved it. And I remember someone saying is like, your first hundred followers are going to be the ones who remember and interact with the most. And I think that's true, even with beta readers, it's going to be those first ones that you, even, if they fade off, for some reason, they're going to be the ones you remember, and you are so appreciated. I have. So building that first a hundred list and just fantastic to do.
Paul (42m 24s): And you, you learn as they enjoy your book, you learn what you're doing because I mean, there's, there's so much focus on writing and craft, which I think is very important. And I feel like at, in some ways it's a dirty trick because write this book with a group of authors, you work really hard on a, you edit and then you decide, okay, I'm going to publish. And then it's a completely new skill set. It's a completely new set of expectations. And, and that's one of the reasons that we're like, okay, well you want to build a tool to make this less of a logistical headache. And that was something that as we were developing better books for their, we really found to be encouraging to all of us, which is, this is a hard process asking people to read your book.
Paul (43m 5s): When you don't have a name, you have never written a thing, involves a tremendous amount of rejection and it's awkward and uncomfortable, no matter how confident you are, no matter how strong your ego is. So just taking away the headache of you finally got someone to say yes, and then you send them a file and they say they can't open it. You feel embarrassed and you doubt yourself. And you're like, well, if I reform at this and send it, well, they even open it. Have I already blown that chance? And it going, going through that over and over just is demoralizing. So we really worked to make a tool that could remove as many opportunities for you to feel worse about yourself as we could.
Autumn (43m 47s): Well, it could almost be like your tagline, beta books will teach you marketing and this soft software. So that's so lovely. So we have to wrap up, I mean, is there any final advice or like your favorite thing or a favorite moment that has come out of working with authors? Because I know that my husband is a photographer and I was just shocked at how cruel other photographers could be on technique and composition. And, oh my goodness. So it's not like that with authors. I think there's some of the sweetest people on the planet. So any last notes that you would like to end on collecting my thoughts?
Autumn (44m 28s): That's fair enough. I'll
Paul (44m 30s): Go first. I mean, you're right. And the author community is amazingly open and they share and support each other. And an incredible way. I think one of the reasons is because it's so hard and because the information is out there and a lot of people just don't do it when they get to the hard parts and the hard part. And the hard part is first finishing your book. I mean, the stats, what's something like one in 10 people finished their book or a 10 out of 100 and something like that. But then the marketing part is, is just as challenging. People will keep writing books and won't put in the hard work of saying, okay, I'm gonna have to go out and find people that I think will like this book. And I'm gonna have to ask you a hundred to get 10, and I'm gonna have to do that over and over.
Paul (45m 11s): And authors will tell you that because it's not a secret and they're not worried about an author's just, aren't worried about people competing with them because they can't write books fast enough for all of the readers. And then, because it doesn't get talked about as much as an author. Well, I always encourage people to do something like go on YouTube and watch the Y Combinator startup school videos. You were talking about tech companies, but really the rules apply when you're talking about a customer fit. It's the same as a reader fit. And you are talking about finding your early customers is the same as finding you early readers. When you talk about honing your vision and your mission statement, like create a mission statement or a vision for your book and for your author career, and use that to guide how you look for readers.
Paul (45m 53s): The, the practice is very similar between say tech, startups and your creative startup. So if you're not finding things that are helping you in the author world, look for their field because there's a lot of entrepreneurs and that's what you are. If you're an author, and if you're serious, you're building a business as an entrepreneur. And you want to look for people. If someone so launched and a hundred million dollar tech company, maybe they have something to, we can help you find, find a hundred readers or a thousand readers.
Autumn (46m 23s): That's a good idea.
Pam (46m 25s): Yeah. And I think I would just circle back to the belief in your work as maybe not perfect yet, but there are so many readers outdoors and know reader goes, I like this other, and I don't have room for any other authors. None of us, we love reading are like that. We're all like I've finished all these books, but this one person who else can I read all of their books of. And so there are readers out there who will love your book. All you have to do is find them, all right, let's say are find-able. They are find-able and not everybody is your reader and that's normal and good and fine.
Pam (47m 5s): And when you find someone who's not your reader, that is one more step toward finding someone who is, because you've learned something maybe about your book, all about the people or person that you reached out to. So I would say just, just persist, just stay out there, keep going, because what you've done is significant, and we'll be really valuable, not only to you, but to other people who will enjoy and appreciate your work and enjoy getting to know you. And the process
Autumn (47m 39s): Is very cool. And Hey, you might get to join your book club and get to talk to you as well. And that's really
Pam (47m 46s): Trying to do it a little bit of a coaching also for people from whom is their first beta. We choose to book. So we've got resources on our website for how to find readers and sort of best practices for How to Run a Beta. And we really want to help writers be successful in this, this segment of talking about rejection a lot. Yeah. Well, you know, it's a part of growth you can't grow unless we put through uncomfortable situations. Yes.
Autumn (48m 15s): And you can't grow unless you actually start producing something in trying. So God is fantastic. I love the resources. And of course, we're going to link to beta books in the show notes. Otherwise it's pretty easy to find it's just beta books.com. So go and find it that way as well. So thank you so much, Pam and Paul for being here. Thank you so much for making beta books and actually having some resources on there that are free, which of their fantastic. And then you make it so good that you just have to buy in and join in as well.
Paul (48m 48s): Well, thank you for having us. This has been fun. This, this, this is our first one in a, in a year. I mean, I was like, oh no, I haven't. Podcasted in forever. Is this going to be okay? And it was okay. It was actually better than it was just fantastic.
Autumn (49m 3s): Good. Thank you for letting me a break you back into podcasting.
Pam (49m 8s): Yeah. So this has been really fun. I think we've got a coupon code Am Writing Fantasy. So H AWF, anyone who finds us through this podcast Use AWF for twenty-five percent off any subscription M four line.
Autumn (49m 26s): Oh, we go use that phrase of my accounts and has been fantastic. I will put that in the show notes as well. So thank you so much where you appreciate it. Have a fabulous day. And if there's anything that we can do to help you out again, let us know. It was fantastic having you here. Thanks so much. Okay. And so next week, so yes, we're at, I will be back and it will be one of our top 10 lists this time, the today 10 worst ever characters.
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So, in the spirit of sharing, we are answering listener questions about us and our writing! Because who doesn't want to squirm with the question, "Have you ever written a book/series that didn't sell well and what did you do?" Join us for some insight, fun, and maybe a few secrets...
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Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): I'm Jesper.
Autumn (31s): And I'm autumn.
Jesper (34s): This is episode 134 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. And by the time You will be listening to, this is going to be the middle of July, But we are actually prerecording to enable us to take a summer break. And yeah, this way you shoot, you were still get new podcast episode and in the spirit have some of the cases and we decided to do something different today because we've collected questions from your listeners. And in today's episode, we are planning to answer all of those and all the things that are you guys want to know. So I'm looking forward to this one, all of them.
Autumn (1m 13s): Yes. I love. And then listeners actually, where the ones that you pointed out that we've done now 134 podcasts, and we've hinted about our books and we've mentioned we have books in the theme, you know, they'll well, we come on in and says we've had more than 20 books, but we never actually talk much about our own writing in our own books.
Jesper (1m 35s): So thank you for pointing that out. Then we make up for it and this episode. So yeah, I mean, we are not going to talk about our books in the sense that they're trying to get you interested in reading them at all, but more like your, your, your reader listener questions in terms of what you wanted to know about our own writing journey and those sorts of things. So, absolutely. So that'll be fun.
Autumn (2m 3s): It should be very fun. Now I'm just dropping things here. Oops. I've already said I'm having a Monday. You can't have a Monday too, because that'll be a disaster and you already jinxed in fact that maybe, maybe it, the recording will screw it up and all of that kind of stuff.
Jesper (2m 20s): So, and, and usually when you, when you say something like that, all of them, you make me nervous because you have a very big influence on the electronics.
Autumn (2m 28s): I do. I've trying not to touch on my computer or my microphone or the light I've got going on as we're recording, because I've definitely had a total Monday worth. It's been exciting. I mean, I usually, you know, things in life I've mentioned, I felt like I was cursed. You know, I think January in February, but suddenly it's like something broke and I'm getting like five emails about this and six emails about that. And it's exciting, but there's a point where it was like, oh, this is fun. This is so I'd be like, oh my gosh, I'm a little nervous, but it's good.
Jesper (3m 3s): It's a good thing. That is a good thing, but I don't need to break anything. Yeah. I, well, I was joking with you last week. I can't remember if we were recording or if it was off air, but I was joking with you last week that while your husband was away too, how, where you were going to eat because the fridge was probably break once you touched it.
Autumn (3m 24s): So it hasn't yet, but I haven't been able to fix it's so broken slightly. So it has its moments and I knew it. I knew it. You just, you know, every, and plus I've got the weather going on today. We it's lovely. We were having a very wet spring and yesterday was gorgeous. We went for a hike up Mount, oh, I can never pronounce at one task to cook. Oh my task to quit. I should say, which is this lovely mountain. That's M overlooking the Connecticut river and this hotel. And we live in. And so we did a lovely hike and all of the mountain, Laurel and Blum, and it was sunny, you know, is warm. And today we woke up to thunderstorms and I know there's been pouring all day and you can see, I have this lovely, like white selfie light.
Autumn (4m 7s): That's just gorgeous. So I'm sitting in the dark waiting for more thunderstorms to roll through, but you know, so far so good that hopefully things are better for you. All right. It's pretty dark. He as well, you could see this is quite well.
Jesper (4m 25s): The people watching on YouTube at least can see it's quite dark. I mean, it's just getting late evening on my end or as well. So, well, I don't have that excuse.
Autumn (4m 34s): It's like, yeah, that's just bad with it then.
Jesper (4m 39s): But yeah, but you do. How did you have a good week? Yes. Otherwise good work has gotten busy.
Autumn (4m 46s): Drawing's getting busy. I'd love the Hike. My husband came back. So that was kinda nice at some time together. So that is all good. And I love the hike, feeling it a little bit in my legs. Should I? Yeah. But that's all right. So is he is so that's good. Yeah. And now the light went out.
Jesper (5m 1s): Yeah. You touched the light. I knew it.
Autumn (5m 2s): I did. I should never touch these things. So we'll see. All right. Well, my husband's looking for,
Jesper (5m 12s): and then podcast listeners can't see this, but her light keeps going out.
Autumn (5m 15s): Yeah, exactly. Like I predicted, I know it went out, but that's the worst thing that happens. We'll be fine. I'm getting technical assistance because you know, I needed to lets just talk about U for the moment. I always thinks of Denmark.
Jesper (5m 34s): I will. Yeah. It's it's not been good to be very honest. It was, it was a terrible weekend. But yeah. As I mentioned in last week, last week's episode and Denmark was going to play Findon for all our first match in the European soccer championship. And it was also for the first time ever that Denmark is one of the host nations. So it was like on our home field and, and I, you know, with COVID going on for so long and everything we've been waiting for like one and a half year for this match and everybody was looking so much forward to it. And I'm, and also because the tournament structures in such a way that know two matches are you ever played at at the same time?
Jesper (6m 21s): So basically everybody in the entire world who likes soccer was able to tune in and then something really terrible happened in that match. And to be honest at the effected me quite a lot over the weekend, and I'll try to do my best to talk a bit about what happened to you for also for those people who, who maybe don't watch soccer and Noah or, but of course by the time you listened to this, this, this slightly in the past. So it'll probably be a bit easier to listen to, but I'll try not to get emotional talking about this, but I have to admit that over the weekend I was quite emotional because I know it was really tough.
Jesper (7m 3s): So normally I try to keep upbeat and the nicer, you know, tone in these podcasts, but I'm not sure I can manage this second section here, but I'll try. Okay. So as I feel like it is important to sort of talk about stuff like this when it happens. So I'm about 40 minutes into this match. One of the dangers players called Christian and Ericsson, he suddenly just collapsed in on the field of play. And at first when I, so what I was sort of wondering what happened because there was no other players near him, you know, there was nobody tackling him or anything like that.
Jesper (7m 50s): So I was so sort of like that was, that looks a bit weird why he just fell to the ground. And then very soon when the, the cameras sort of found his face, if I can put it like that. So, you know, they filmed him his face and he at this very lifeless stair in his eyes and I, I just could install this. You, something is very, very wrong here. And M okay. So his teammates came running. Those nearest to him of course knew much more than we could from watching on TV, obviously.
Jesper (8m 36s): But he was in the beginning, he was just, you were just lying. Then he was shaking and then he just stopped shaking and didn't move. And then it become quite apparent that he had a cardiac arrest in the middle of the field. So the paramedics came onto the field and they spent like 20, 30 minutes giving him, you know, what is it called? An English heart-to-heart and then massage, what are you? I don't know.
Autumn (9m 5s): All right. I think I, because I did see, I read the BBC and I did see a little bit about this, but then they gave him a defibrillator and some CPR.
Jesper (9m 13s): Yeah. CPR. Yeah, exactly. And they probably spent like 20, 30 minutes doing that and all of the Danish players, his teammates that you sort of formed the circle around him. Yeah. And see this, this, this way. It gets a bit tough for me because it was so powerful images. You know, these people just try to shield him from the camera's all of the people watching M while he was just basically fighting for his life.
Autumn (9m 53s): Oh my gosh. It was, it was tough. I'm surprised. I didn't, I mean, I understand it is, I'm sure there's a live event, but I'm almost surprised that they didn't pan back or give a little more privacy to him at that point.
Jesper (10m 13s): Yeah. I mean the network I watched it on. They, they, as soon as they noticed what was really happening, they switched to a camera is from a helicopter outside. So just looking overlooking the city of Copenhagen, but there were other TV stations, who filmed the whole thing, which was not on the channel I watched, which I'm pretty preppy, pretty happy about that. I didn't know. I really feel that it's really terrible, but I know those images of his teammates has just made it around the world since, and on one hand it makes me really proud or the way that it is behaved.
Jesper (10m 58s): But then on the other hand, it was also really tough. And I think the worst part, when was that I need to breed a bit. So I'll take care of time. At some point they brought his wife onto the field.
Autumn (11m 18s): Oh, geez. Oh, that's hard. It was too much. Oh, she must of been broken down.
Jesper (11m 34s): Yeah. And then do you have the TV station up? They filmed this and we did. So I was really upset about learning afterwards that they filmed his wife standing there obviously completely devastated and thinking that he was dead because I thought he was that too. At that point then, and our team captain, an AR goalkeeper, we went to his wife and try to console her, which is also really tough. So yeah, this is not good podcast material and no, but I think is important.
Jesper (12m 17s): And I think it was like an hour later, it was then an announced that he was alive and he had been taken to the hospital too. So that was all good. Yeah. And so I think as well in that, in good sportsmanship, all of finished neighbors did a really wonderful job. So they were like chanting his name and the stadium as well.
Jesper (12m 57s): Oh, that is really good. And I know I had read that they had M halted play even after he'd gone off the field until they heard from the hospital that he was gonna be, he was at at least alive. So I thought that was really, I thought that was decent. Have, you know, all of the sides of the players were obviously, and I think I remember reading that some of the Denmark players were not able to continue to play. Some of them could, but that there is a player is just so effective that they're like, I can't do this today. So it was a huge, you know, and that's from anywhere. I want to maybe go a bit into what happened there, because that's not so emotional because I'm upset about that.
Jesper (13m 39s): Part of it was just an easier for me to talk about, because honestly, like I want to move a bit away from all of this because it's too emotional is still alive. I'm even struggling with T S right now is I speak because there's just too much. But let me move in to a bit of a ramp because I can barely handle that right now. Lets get that out. But you have, because we're face is the body of authority, bodies who sort of governance do you European soccer championship. And of course they stop the play as you sit. And when this happened and everybody just went to the dressing rooms after a while, they stood on the pitch for a long while, while the treatment was still going on.
Jesper (14m 24s): And then they, when he was taken to the hospital too, then they left the pitch and then it proved afterwards that, well, if I had given them a choice and we've had said, either you can play the rest of them match today. All you can meet again tomorrow at 12 o'clock noon and you can play them. Okay. And this has to me, it just so freaking unacceptable. Number one, you, you cannot ask people who've just stood around, watching their teammate almost die to make a decision about what do you want to play now? Or do you want to play tomorrow morning when you haven't slept all night? Probably because you're, you're so worried about at everything that's happened in you assault out of yourself and even asking the people to make a decision on what your preference is completely unacceptable.
Jesper (15m 15s): But then because they had no other choice did then is play players. Well, the finished players were very, again, they wonderful people, very sportsmanship. And so they said, well, they were, the day in is players. We will do, we will, we will do. They decide. That's a very nice, and then 'cause, today's play. We knew that if we go home and don't even sleep and have to get up tomorrow morning early, get back in here, chains again, warm up again where we have not going to be able to play. So they decided if that's our choice, then let's, let's play it, get it all over with. Right. So they came onto the pitch again and the plate, the sec, this is the last five minutes of the first half and then the second half.
Jesper (15m 56s): And of course, hats off to those guys for doing that. That's incredible. But it's also shitty because they were not in the game at all, not at all. And it doesn't matter right now at the sports part of it. And the results doesn't matter. We did lose one nil, but again, the, the, the header that was headed, it was like straight out our gold key and our goal keep is one of the best. And he fumbled it into the net, clearly not concentrating at all. And then a bit later on in an immense. So we got a penalty kick, which I Stryker also wasn't you could see it in his face, you know, just waiting to standing there, waiting for the referee to blew the whistle.
Jesper (16m 37s): So he could kick, he was standing there looking into the ground, like he's somebody who had lost everything almost like, and that's not how you stand. When you are about to take a pedal and you kick, you are your ready, you are ready to fight because you are going to score are now and you are or their right in. And he was not at all. And you made the weakest Kik ever, you know, like a 10 year old kind of kicked that all better. So I, and I'm, I'm just so upset about the fact that the way if I gave them such a shitty, first of all, the choices like between two bats, so it's not really a choice. And then secondly, sort of forcing them to play when they're not there at all. And the, and this is like the European championship, it's you, you have to be at your best. Yeah. And then we of course, to play and fuck, I don't know.
Jesper (17m 20s): It is. I'm just so upset about it. No, that is. I wonder if you say, well, rethink any of their rules after this, because I mean, I've been paying attention to the French open were, you know, a major player withdrew because she meant set in her mental health. They weren't supporting her. So I may be so maybe something different will come out of this as well, because you know, those are, I mean, they should been given like a week, which I understand their playoffs and things are happening and there's a timeline, but, but they need timelines can never be more important than human life. So I think the only decent thing you ever could have done would of been as an authority.
Jesper (18m 2s): They make a decision right down in this spot to say, everybody go home, don't worry about it. Just go home and then send everybody back home. And then the day after waiver could contact the team's and then say, okay, let's figure out when can we play a match in the coming days? That would of been the only humane thing way of doing that. It is not okay to ask people who are in a crisis and in shock to make a decision about two shitty options. I know somebody who was not men emotionally and mentally involved in that should have been the one to be the adult and say, Hey, this is what we're going to do to help people out.
Autumn (18m 38s): Yeah. Just say, go home, then go home. Right. We will talk about it tomorrow. Let's do this one, a real parent would of done. Would have you been in like, Hey, you know what, don't worry about the game. Everyone go home and take care of yourself and hugged your wife.
Jesper (18m 51s): Yeah. So, well, this was so much tougher to get through than I even thought. So. Sorry about that listeners. I don't know. I, I just failed. It was so important to talk about something when it really moves. You impacted me quite well over the last couple of days. So can you tell, maybe we should just move on to something else now. All right. If you're ready, if you only, if you're ready, we will continue on
Narrator (19m 17s): Oh, a week on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast.
Jesper (19m 23s): Okay. Let's get back to some businesses and I can start all of my astronomy, My crying. And so I'm just Writing a post for yeah. So I do, I was writing a post for our patron supporters about the issue of discoverability on online platforms like Amazon, because that is really our greatest challenge in today's publishing landscape.
Autumn (19m 46s): As I see it, I agree. And I wrote something very, very similar for us a day is a release, which of course today being a month ago, and this is released, but yes, I'm also in discoverability, but talking a little bit about Villa and some pros and cons to that as well. And maybe some tips on how to use it for discoverability. So that's definitely something we seem to be doing on Patreon recently.
Jesper (20m 12s): Yeah, absolutely. Then we also talk more about discoverability in our free self publishing success course. So if you want, you can go to www Am Writing Fantasy dot com and you can get the hands on the free course there. But I did learn a few things while writing this patron post in there. I thought maybe I could just share. That'd be fantastic. Yeah. Well technically, okay. This first one I was aware of already, but I still think it was quite important, at least as a reminder, maybe if other people that were aware as well, but at the price at which you sell your books actually plays a huge role in the book and in the, how the book will show up in searches on Amazon, for example.
Jesper (20m 53s): So for example, I was linking to some material in the post that shows sort of the behind the scenes of how I'm reaching this conclusion, but I'm not going to go there, but as the patron in supporters can read that stuff. But yeah, just ask the conclusion is that, for example, if you take a book selling 10 copies a day at 6 99 in a search that will rank significantly higher than the books selling 10 copies at 1 99. So the same amount of copies sold, but the one with the higher price will rank significantly higher.
Autumn (21m 29s): I didn't know that already, but I think it's a good reminder of that.
Jesper (21m 35s): It doesn't matter what you're selling the price at, what price, your setting. Okay. So it does. So I, for one that's, that's quite important that it is important that it is a good, yeah. And then the other part, which was also very interesting was that it showed that the percentage of people who buy the book after seeing it in a search for that keyword, the keyword is just so let's say this so much for epic fantasy and the books showed up, they clicked and then boarded. Okay. So the people who actually do that matters a lot more than you might think, because the more people that buy the book after finding it through a specific search will make Amazon positioned to book much, much higher in the search results, which is of course, then we will make your sale a lot more books.
Autumn (22m 26s): Yeah. That will really help selling books. So that's an interesting, so that means that there is no way of faking that one either. So it's not something you have to, but it helps to have good keywords then so that people will link and it fits your book until when they find it, they by it. And then we will elevate the book yet.
Jesper (22m 47s): But yeah, but we really find this one interesting is, is about shovel things. It's about the key words you say that, that the key words you use are related to what the book is about, but it's also about the book cover and the book description, because when they searched, let's say epic fantasy. You let's say you showed you, you, your books shows up in that because you have some good keywords and so on. But if you have book cover is not signaling signaling to the reader that is epic fantasy. And if the book description, don't clearly show that this epic fantasy, and this is what this book is about, the things that you normally associate with epic fantasy, then they won't buy it. And the more times people will ignore it, then the more Amazon will move it down the list.
Jesper (23m 29s): Right? Yeah. So I think it speaks a lot about a lot of the things we've talked about over and over again, but how all the different elements like covers book, title, keywords, book, description, it all links together and everything has to work towards the same. And if it does, then it will help you significantly in the ranking.
Autumn (23m 50s): And I think that's, that's, that's very good to always keep in mind. So that was very good. And it really is a combination of everything. So it's like, you really need to be strong, at least moderately strong in everything. They all have to tie together to a whole that we'll be stronger than all of the individual parts. And hopefully you'll rank better that way. Yeah. I mean that there are more details in that post for our patron supporters.
Jesper (24m 17s): But I think honestly the more time I spend looking into book marketing Anne and all of those topics, the more convinced I become that ranking is the single most important element when it comes to this success of a book, because you can put Facebook ads, Amazon ads, all of that behind it. But if you can make the ranking work for you it's hundred million times easier and trying to come up with new Facebook ads to push some sales.
Autumn (24m 46s): It's very sure. Remember you go, you know, tweak your AMS ads or find new targeting books and word's so yeah, that's a very good point and a good reminder to look over your blurbs, look over your book, cover and look over your keywords, get everything going together and move your book up a little bit organically.
Jesper (25m 6s): Yeah. In indeed. Yes, exactly. So at any rate, if you, dear listener also want access to these kinds of posts and much more than you could consider supporting The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, we try to give you a lot of things in return and you will, of course also help to keep the lights on here. So this, this podcast for example, is completely free. So it is entirely funded by our wonderful patron supporters'.
Autumn (25m 31s): So there's a link in the show notes, and I think that's not very fair that you mentioned keeping the lights on since mine went off like three times before I got my gurus technical assistance to fix it. So that's why we need some supporters because the light keeps going off.
Jesper (25m 54s): So yeah. So I have collected all the questions. So I was so glad you did because it's a Monday. I know I showed up and my life like know that that's actually a success in itself. So Monday as it is. And I think listeners will agree with me. There are some Monday's that's just showing up, she'd get you a reward for the day. Indeed. So maybe the simplest thing would be that I just sort of read them out. Ah, and then we answer them one by one. Maybe that's the easiest way to do this.
Autumn (26m 26s): I think that sounds well. Okay.
Jesper (26m 30s): And a, and there is no, you know, significant order on this. It's it's just questions and the question is, are the way we got them. So we just gonna answer whatever the listeners wanna know. That sounds good. It sounds lovely. So the first question is, have you tried other genres than fantasy? Oh, I don't. We just start with this one.
Autumn (26m 51s): Yeah, sure, sure. So yes, definitely. I have, I have written a post-apocalyptic I've written epic fantasy, urban fantasy, dark fantasy. And I know, but it's so different veins of it. So I kind of sometimes thinking about, well, not real mans, but maybe at cozy mystery or something, because I did grow up with Nancy drew and my best friend loved Nancy drew. So I've definitely had that kind of, I love that. Like you're Sherlock Holmes. I love that kind of slew thing and clues, especially the writing applause like that, I think would be a fun challenge, but I haven't written one yet. So mostly POS post-apocalyptic slash dystopian.
Autumn (27m 33s): And of course non-fiction with both you and with my husband. So those count too, in some real life travel writing sagas as well.
Jesper (27m 46s): Yeah. Well, for me if, I guess non-fiction is just younger, but that's, that's the only other thing I've written I've written. Yeah. So some with autumn, some of my own nonfiction, I did the fantasy mapmaking book. I did one on how to run right. Fans, as you booked descriptions I'm in the past, I did one on Twitter marketing as well. I synced unpublished that one because it's yeah, but we have a chance to of rules and the entire book sort of became obsolete. So thank you very much Twitter, or maybe stupid me for writing a book where the algorithms might change. So two months later, are you living in there?
Autumn (28m 27s): And he, I mean, I know you, and I know you had this huge file on world-building notes. I know you must have other notes, like just stacks of ideas of things. So if they were physical, they would be stacks, but yes. Ah, I bet you have some folders of other ideas you've got in there.
Jesper (28m 51s): Probably plans and write more non-fiction books at any foreseeable future, to be honest with you,
Autumn (28m 56s): But that's not true. We're actually slowly cause it's on my phone on me to do it. I've been trying to consolidate all of our blog posts and things. Then some Paul, you don't see, we were working on one to how we just,
Jesper (29m 10s): but, but yeah, that's true. But I guess I don't think about it as writing one because it's more consolidating stuff we already have and putting in one place, but yeah, technically all righty. Yeah. Okay. So next question is, have you both ever met in real life?
Autumn (29m 28s): No, not yet. That's what's so COVID, COVID that's all I'm saying is COVID and that timing on trips, I haven't made it to, since we've started working together, I've made it to London and we were so close, but I was with in-laws and it was calm. It was complicated. It was a very complicated to sneak away. So it didn't happen.
Jesper (29m 49s): That's a good ProMedica.
Autumn (29m 52s): Yeah, I know. I know my mother-in-law all doesn't listen to this, so I'm not too worried, but we will still be diplomatic. And then my parents were actually going to go and do a Norwegian cruise and I was like, Copenhagen, we're going to swing through and I'm going to stay or I'm going to come early and COVID so not yet so soon. Not yet soon yet.
Jesper (30m 12s): Well, we do have, When I, I can't remember now we talked about it last week on last week's episode on not, but we do have some plans on trying to, if COVID will allow, we have some plans and trying to put like an Am Writing Fantasy getaway together in 2022 S so the way of thing would be that that's probably going to first time we meet in person as well, I guess it could be.
Autumn (30m 36s): And unless something else happened, but at least we have actually zoom meats, the extended families so that we have done that. So that was really helpful. And I got to see your kids. It's so cute.
Jesper (30m 52s): Yeah. So yeah. So, but yeah, meaning in real life.
Autumn (30m 57s): Yeah. It's incredible to think about, because we've done so many podcasts episodes, we've done courses together. We've written nonfiction, book, fiction books, all of that. All of us several years. And we haven't even met in person is that it is, it is insane. And we've got to fix that hopefully soon. And you and my husband already pick on me, like, totally like you're on the same page, which is, I just can't wait for real life.
Jesper (31m 22s): Yeah. It's only going to get better off so I will touch on things and break them. And that's all that. So, you know, yeah. Yeah. I need to put a stove store things away before you come at you.
Autumn (31m 34s): Okay. Well, let me hold your phone.
Jesper (31m 38s): I know technical stuff goes in to the closet with a padlock on it.
Autumn (31m 41s): I have to see your terabyte computer. And I really know, I know.
Jesper (31m 48s): All right. Okay. Next question. Which comes first story idea or new world concepts.
Autumn (31m 57s): Oh, oh, I think for me story idea. But every once in a while you do two, but everyone's in a while you come up with a story or something, part of a world to me, and I'm like, I got to include that. I got to find a world for it. But I think to me, character is almost before story idea. Like I'll come up with a scene and I don't know much else, but I, or I feel this is a draw to a character. And then the story starts developing. So characters story world for me.
Jesper (32m 26s): Yeah. Same from me. A story idea is definitely before world, but I, I would have responded Xactly like you did all of them. So lets just move on to the next one. So this is probably where you were working together. So you figure, okay, next one. Have you read all of each others books?
Autumn (32m 45s): Oh that's a mean question for you.
Jesper (32m 51s): That's too many books know she writes too much.
Autumn (32m 56s): Oh no, we actually have, I have all your book's because I format all of your books and actually you have to put the cover's now, but I, I, and so I've read bits and pieces because I've been formatting them. But except for what we've written together, I haven't finished your Keystone bone trilogy, which I should. One of these days.
Jesper (33m 17s): I read Borb of Water.
Autumn (33m 19s): Yeah. Well just like my worst one.
Jesper (33m 23s): Yeah. Well, yeah that, but that's exactly how I feel about it that are as well. So if you don't have to read it, then yes. I just do stuff. All right. Well yeah, like we, we read this stuff we write when you write it together anyway. So I guess that counts, I think that counts. So answer is no we have not.
Autumn (33m 47s): No, because I write too much for you. Y
Jesper (33m 50s): eah, you do. I, I'm not going to read 20 books,
Autumn (33m 53s): so you're a slow reader or you have to admit, so if you read like a book a day, you'd probably be all set, but you could just say you take a little bit longer, so that's fair.
Jesper (34m 1s): Yeah. I'm very slow reader. Yeah. So, okay. What got your started with writing?
Autumn (34m 8s): Oh, well that's a good one. So yeah, I, you know this story obviously I guess, and we've mentioned at, on podcasts, but I always liked writing. I always was drawn to reading and I did actually win a contest in my high school and my senior year on writing, which I just kind of always forget about it, but I didn't take it seriously. I was big into art of studying studio art actually ending English and college, but it was outside of that when I was working on my master's that I started writing, I would get bored in class at its looked at the back of the notebook and I would start writing stories down instead of taking notes.
Autumn (34m 49s): And eventually my husband actually found one of those in, he read it and he's like, you've wrote this, this, this is good. You should keep writing. And so I kept writing and I did some adult ed classes thinking I would do the querier letters and a publisher. I did try all of that. But then my husband gave me an article on a government employee who is in a similar vein that I did and she did self-publishing and he's like, you should try this. And I think he gave that to me in early December in, in, in February of 2012, I published Born of Water.
Jesper (35m 26s): Yeah. And I don't want to cheat in answering this one, but so maybe I'll do the short version because actually if you go back to episode 128, when you list the number of we just did and on all of those interviews, we were asked this question. So I felt like we answered it, like at least five different places. Yeah. But maybe at the very short version was that I had an idea that maybe one time, one day when I would retire, then I would write something. I don't know why I had that idea, but that's sort of always all for very long time set with me that thought, but then doing some other occasions where you always go to Finland, we go to the dishonor and this just peace and quiet in this there and you know, stressful day to day activities or anything like that.
Jesper (36m 16s): So, and then I just started thinking, why, why is it that I have an idea in my head that I should sort of postpone things until I get retired and why, why couldn't I just start writing? Even if it's just a little everyday, just, you know, I could just start. And then I sorta thought, yeah, why not? So next day I started and I haven't stopped since it was some God awful, awful. What I wrote about the, and it got deleted and I don't even have it anymore, but, but I started all right.
Autumn (36m 45s): Cause I think I wrote a trilogy before I released my epic fantasy trilogy and my mom of course loves it, but is not published. So I think I broke every single writing roll. You should, the ones that you should follow him in the first like five pages is I've tried to edit it and I'm like, it's just, but I do think I still have the digital files somewhere, somewhere storytelling.
Jesper (37m 12s): Unless you, you have broken them all out with your fae influence how you know they're probably corrupted.
Autumn (37m 18s): Yeah. Corrupt. The file is what is going to say. I'll try to, okay.
Jesper (37m 23s): What made you decide to co-write a fictional book? Why did you decide to go?
Autumn (37m 31s): All right. I can answer it if you don't know how to say, well, we create a world together and we had to do something with it. I think.
Jesper (37m 40s): Yeah. Maybe it, maybe it was my fault actually, but I think it was mostly from a pure like business point of view, meaning that co-writing fictional books would of course allow us to write more books and faster. And I think it was purely from a financial and efficiency point of view that we decided, why don't we try to start doing this? Because at the point in time, when we decided to stop co-writing fictional books, we had already done so many other things together. So we knew that we were able to work together. And a, we knew that we could that all ways of thinking if you wanna call it that Align's.
Jesper (38m 25s): So it wasn't really that big of a leap at that point to say, well, why don't we just start writing some fiction stuff as well? We did test the waters a bit with, with a short story for us just to see like, well this work on it and in what fine. So we could just continue. Yeah. But I think that is basically what it is. Mostly like business decision or more than anything else.
Autumn (38m 47s): Yes. I know it helps that we are friends so that we would, if we haven't met this person. Yes. I think it's worked out very well though. I seem to, well, I'm finishing up my last independently written books. So once that's done and off my plate, then it will just be ours. And who knows? Maybe a little Vela story here or there, if I feel like I need to dabble, but yeah. It's is really exciting. I can not wait to at least this trilogy.
Jesper (39m 13s): No, indeed. Yeah. Okay. The next question is what tropes where you determined to avoid?
Autumn (39m 18s): Oh, I forgot. I know of you started this one. Let me think so.
Jesper (39m 23s): Okay. You can think while I can at least give you two tropes that we definitely wanted to avoid. One was having way too powerful of a character because that happens not all the time, but it happens fairly frequent in some epic fantasy stories. And when the character is just too powerful, their story also looses a lot of its attention. So we definitely wanted to not do that trope. And the other trope that we really wanted to avoid was also, we, we did want to include some of the more traditional fantasy races, like Ember dwarfs, but we wanted to avoid your typical version of those races.
Jesper (40m 7s): So we, we have elves and we have dwarves, but I was ah, should we just say significantly different? Yeah. So I think that's the way of putting it there.
Autumn (40m 20s): Yeah. I love our differences. They're incredibly interesting. So yeah, I definitely think those were the main tropes. I mean, we also knew we wanted to stay at all like fantasy romance. So I stopped really in support of a subplot then a trope.
Jesper (40m 35s): Yeah. I would say there's a bit of a romance in this story as well, because then I think that all these should be, but that's my personal point of view, but a lot of readers, like at least a subplot, but some wrote romance. So we do have that in our stores as well. But yeah, but I th can you think have something else that, should we move to the next question?
Autumn (40m 55s): Well, I'm trying to think there's so many, there's nothing because of the world is so big and we wanna write so many different stories, I would say, except for like not having this overwhelming power, but we might end up with some powerful characters, but then there's always good to points and tension. I think almost everything is on the table except for bad writing. So I think we're all. So have you work for the next series of, we want to work on we're exploring something that we're even having a hard time finding examples of of, so I think we're just going to do so tell people we're just going to be so cool, but yeah, so I would say there's not much that we could not find some way of going, oh, that's a horrible idea.
Autumn (41m 47s): But if we did this, we can turn it on it's head. So I think anything's going. Sure.
Jesper (41m 54s): Okay. Next question. How long did it take to, oh, sorry. How long did it take you to fully complete your first story?
Autumn (42m 2s): Oh, that's mean I just take it. They want the first one that we actually published is correct. Probably, probably. I like to say that born of water, I think took me three to five here. I do. I, well, I, I started at then I ended up writing handwriting, a story that became the whole series of Friends of my Enemy. And then I went back to Born of Water and worked on it again. I ended up rewriting it three times. Cause the first time was just typical fantasy tropes. It was boring and I knew it could be so much better. And then so I rewrote it and then the second time after that, so the final time I rewrote it, the third time was M I just thought of the characters were jiving in fitting.
Autumn (42m 51s): I had so much to learn even with an English degree and writing classes in creative writing classes, in adult ed classes, it just had so much learning to do. And I still look back at it and go, oh God is so much learning to do. But yeah, it took a long time. But then Rule of Fire was a year of Spiri of Life was like nine months. And when I did Friends and my Enemy, I did four and a half books in a year. So we got faster and better. Definitely better. Definitely very luckily enough, but how is how it goes very much so.
Jesper (43m 32s): Yeah, I think my, my first book was one and a half year, I think.
Autumn (43m 38s): Oh, that's not bad.
Jesper (43m 40s): No, but it's not quick. I mean, I know that, well, all of these is relative one person, so quick is another person's slow. So, but one and a half year, I think for the first book and then book number two took me maybe half a year, a bit more than half a year. Same for books three.
Autumn (44m 1s): So, and nowadays I think, well we were down to like four months, three, four, and then combine any when I each have my books in the tainted face areas, which is the last one I'm releasing on my own. I was writing a book and two and a half months. And those were 80 to 90,000 words a little bit. I think the last one is a little bit longer in that took, that took a little bit longer, but yeah. And then editing of course. So another, it usually takes me a month to edit so three and a half months for a complete book.
Jesper (44m 35s): I think I've gotten. Yeah. Okay. This one is interesting. What are your ambitions?
Autumn (44m 44s): Is that on writing or is it personal? It just says, what are you ambitions?
Jesper (44m 51s): Oh, I'm of course reading is as part of the, you know, the author career. That's at least how I read it.
Autumn (44m 56s): All right. I was gonna say, I know my ambition as a young young girl and still, I would love to be the first ecologist is on another planet. Cause that would be fricking cool. So barring that because I'd probably not gonna be the first button is on another planet unless like trip into a worm hole and end up there on my own writing wise. I definitely, I don't. And that's weird because I can actually say I, of course I wanna sell more books. So I want more readers. I would love to be as big as maybe, you know, commander George R. Martin, but I'm also, I do it because I love it as well.
Autumn (45m 39s): So I'm really happy. I've got over 20 books. I have to think about this one. What's your ambitions at this point, we besides maybe from selling more and writing more.
Jesper (45m 54s): Yeah. But that's why I think is a good question because of the more you think about it, the more layers there is to it definitely. I mean, I would like to, I would like to earn like a very healthy living from, from writing. That would be an awesome, I think, and I would really love to see our own fans as you will come to life on, on a TV series, like on Amazon or Netflix or something like that would just be awesome. I would just love that. So I guess that's an ambition. How does an ambition I have to say, I, I, I think it would be really cool to be well known enough that like the release of maybe the last book of a series was almost like an event.
Autumn (46m 41s): And if that was ever the case, I would love to have on like other indie authors, like have them do readings of their stories while we're waiting for my books is released because I would just be such a cool way to support the indie community to introduce them. Yeah. Introducing them to other new writers and even to have other writers I've in, we want other writers to hopefully Wright in our world. And I thought about the tainted phase kind of set up the same way where it could go into ways, places where I can't write it. So if someone else wanted to pick it up, that would be, we were really, really swell to half kind of a world where people like, I want to write with you. That would be fantastic.
Autumn (47m 22s): Yeah. That be cool.
Jesper (47m 23s): Yeah. Okay. What are your favorite authors fantasy or otherwise to particularly resonate with your style or have influenced you? You don't wanna start with this one. So that's a tough one. Tough one.
Autumn (47m 38s): Well, I can say obviously, you know, this, that Anne McCaffrey is the author. Who'd introduced me to fantasy writing. So I I've recently gone back and re-read the first full book of her is Dragon Flight. So that's the one that I read first and I look read it and it's not that the writing isn't good. The writing is good, but the theme's, you know, what's aloud the, one of the main hero, literally a the hero. And she is afraid of him at times he shakes her and it's supposed to be love. And I'm thinking, yeah, that's all I had the 13 year old. Yeah. So it's like if I had a 13 year-old girl, we would be sitting down in and talking about why this isn't appropriate, how it's changed.
Autumn (48m 18s): This has never, in a way you should be treated by someone who loves you. So I was really shocked, but I want to go back Mercedes Lackey. I know, changed my views on a lot of things. She's a very liberal writer. She is a very good writer. I wanna go back and reread it like her M Waldemar series of Harold majors and stuff in it. Whenever we were just a couple of those to see if there is good, as I remember as well. And of course, maker Margaret Rice and Tracy Hickman we're in there. And then a few in there. And my favorite book is actually called the wood wife by Terry Wendling, which is odd because it is more, is not even urban fantasy.
Autumn (48m 58s): It takes part in the desert. But the secret of this book is that it was inspired by my favorite artist who is Brian Froud. So if no one has watched, you know, like labyrinth and all of there, crystal, all of those things are puppets here in his wife created the frauds. He is absolutely. I got to see his work in person. When I was sent my year in England, I went to one of his viewings. Then I got to see Brian Froud original paintings. It was fantastic. And there was a series of four books written based on his paintings. And I have all four of them and yeah, T a the wood wife, which is the third one based on his paintings is one of my favorite ever.
Jesper (49m 44s): Oh, nice. That's a much better answer. And I can come up with that. But I, it was like, well, I'm with you on migrant rights. And Tracy Hickman, of course the dragon, all lands stories were the ones that introduced me to fenders you. When I was a kid,
Autumn (50m 1s): did you read Star of the Guardians? That was also by then, that's more of a space opera. I highly recommend that. Not to interrupt, but you should read it too.
Jesper (50m 12s): Okay, cool. Yeah. Well actually bought a, just like a month ago, I bought a whole, the dragon lands books, all survey on my Kindle and I will read them all again. That's awesome. So, yeah. Other than that, I would say probably Anne Rice. Oh yeah. And because I have tried to read some of, of, of an rise books that are not the vampire critical Chronicals, but those are not really not my favorite. Umm, some of them, it feels, I don't know if it's just coincidence, but then I think there's a lot of like religion stuff in all the books, not nothing against religion.
Jesper (50m 55s): People can do write and read what they want, but it's just not quite kind of my cup of tea. But the vampire story is like interview with the vampire in all those books, with all this stuff and all that stuff. It is just, I still have this vivid memory of reading through these books in and just the whole mythology she created about how the first vampires came to be and how we know everything involved and all, all of that origin story is, is just like, oh my God, I loved it. It was just like, it was so well done and it makes perfect sense as well. There was, there was logic to it, so oh my God. I just loved that.
Jesper (51m 36s): She was yeah, really good at foreshadowing in not having major plot holes and CAC characters that are just gripping and storylines that are gripping and not being afraid of killing things off. So it was, yeah, I do love her books as well. So yeah, that's probably what has had the most influence on me I think. And it plays into my love for world building. Of course that's very much to do with world-building. Yes. Okay. Next question. Have you ever started a book that just died in the draft? How did you know it was dead?
Autumn (52m 12s): I will actually, I can say yes because I started writing books to two black throne black blood, which is the first park is out as a novella. And so I started writing the second book, which is to be a titled Ebonrue and I was probably three or four chapters. And maybe even as far as five chapters, which I know we were talking about an novella, so that's, you know, it's, it's good chunk out of 14 chapters. And I just said, no, I was struggling with it. I was in hating the process and I absolutely love writing. And the funny thing is I was playing with two series at the same time and I kept thinking about the tainted Fae I'd released in first novella, both of them to see which one I wanted to right in.
Autumn (52m 54s): And I finally just said, you know what? I really want to write the tainted Faye. And I switched to it. And I think I like busted out the entire book one then, like I said, in like two and a half months. So it's not, I don't consider it fully abandoned because you and I are either talking about picking up that series or that theme or if we don't eventually I will finish it because I don't think I've ever, I even know that series is that my abandon trilogy that I'll never publish I finished at. So I always kind of finish what I start.
Jesper (53m 31s): Yeah. And again, the same for me when I start something, I will usually finish it. So, but technically, I mean, I have had the first book in my Keystone bone truly do you, for example, and what is Papa is, is not the same as the well I started, so I've definitely, definitely died in the draft and I actually deleted 50,000 words and started over and I'd heard a bid at that point in time, but I knew it was stepped because it was just organically evolving into a story that was not what I wanted to tell at all.
Jesper (54m 10s): And hence I sort of learned maybe it's all good, good idea to plot. That's very true. Yeah. Okay. Have you ever released a book that flopped and what did you learn?
Autumn (54m 26s): I would say Friends of my Enemy has all been, had a hard life the entire time. Those who have found it have loved it and like given it five stars and they adore it, but they're definitely lower and it is AMS ads. I, you cannot touch the word like this dystopian post-apocalyptic it costs more to get clicks on those words because of novels like the hunger games you just can't afford. It is more than the book it's worse, so I don't even market it. But when I read it is some of my favorite writing up to the Tainted Fae. I actually DOR the tainted face is more than friends of my enemy, but I think it's better writing and better characters in my epic fantasy series.
Autumn (55m 14s): So I feel bad for it that the people that it's like my unnoticed story that no one really knows about. And a lot of the fantasy readers are like, oh, I don't read post-apocalyptic because it's like, it's near future it's real world. But it taught me so much. I wouldn't have been able to write the Tainted Fae, which is also in urban fantasy it's real world it's now. So I wouldn't of been able to do and it was a great learning experience. I still absolutely adore it. If anything was ever turned into a movie, I think that one would fit very well because the characters are just rock solid. Awesome. And they still talk to me a lot. So I don't care. I feel I would love it to do better. The people who have read it, we love it to do better.
Autumn (55m 57s): The narrator would like it to do better, but I am, I am a hundred percent is still in love with it. I don't care.
Jesper (56m 9s): Yeah. And I would say the first book in my Keystone bone turn of the desolation as definitely not done very well. And I mean, it gets downloaded quite well, but that's because its Permafree so, so, but before then it was very hard to any, any copies of it. And I, and I think because the question also asks what I learned and I definitely learned three different things, but of course I can mention here so that the listeners can take that away in hopefully avoid the mistakes I've made. But number one is that the world building is actually very rich in this book and in the series and is very well developed.
Jesper (56m 50s): But then like, like you see often in new fantasy authors, I'm in debut novels and I was like everybody else. So then there's way too much in for dumping in this book in a way too much nun, engaging ways of telling sum, you know, a history of the world of why things all the way, day on, so on. And then that's not very good I'm so there is debt. Secondly, I used this book actually as an example in our self publishing success course to show people what not to do because the, the cover on this book is not signaling that this is fantasy and is not doing a very good job.
Jesper (57m 30s): And as I said, so, you know, of course I, you know, I used it as an example of show you is not what, not what not to do. And I, as I also said, and the costs, I should really change it, but I never get around to it because there's so many things I need to change this so many places. And 'cause this book is, has been out for so many years. It's not as simple as just updating the cover on Amazon. I need to, I probably have like 200 different tweets schedule that goes out and then I need to change the Amazon, all of those and on websites. And so on is, I don't know, it's just too much worse. And I, I really don't feel like in, and the other hand and allows me to is show in this so puppet, so cost, what you have to do. So, so it actually serves a purpose nowadays.
Jesper (58m 17s): And number three, last thing I would say as a top three things I learned was that you are a character and your main character really needs to have some sort of personality or something that stands out. Whereas the main character and this book, well, she definitely has hardship in her life because I'm always mean to characters or if there is that. So she does not have an easy time at all, but she's not distinct enough that there is there's something missing in terms of making her more special. So that's also something I learned. I learned a lot more about character development since I wrote that first book, but that's how it goes, like all of them, so that before the more we ride the mobile and we all have to start somewhere.
Jesper (58m 59s): And so usually when we look back at, at, at our own first books, years later, we always crunch all of them. Doesn't like her first book. I don't like my first book. And I think most authors feel the same. Yes. But there are, it doesn't mean that it is a bad story at all. It's a good story, but it's, it's just, I could have written it a lot better nowadays if, if I did it now, but so is life that's very, yeah.
Autumn (59m 23s): Born of water would be so different. So I wrote it now, but I'm not going to go back and rewrite it because that's like 20 some books ago.
Jesper (59m 31s): So yeah. So we have two questions left, Autumn, and we're coming up on an hour. So let's do it in last two. And then I think that's enough.
Autumn (59m 40s): Okay. All right. That sounds good.
Jesper (59m 42s): So this one goes in style story description, et cetera. What a piece of work chains, if you switched roles in your co-writing. Oh yes. Oh yes. But I'm not sure I could pinpoint how, but definitely. Well, you have, I mean, I'm a more of, I, you do the first draft and I do sort of like my overlayer and then I do the editing and we're still kind of working out the process. I still haven't there's some days I got it all was perfect. And then there's some days I fumble with in a bit, so I am still working in and out, but I think it's, it would be so different if we did it in reverse.
Jesper (1h 0m 23s): I don't think it would work quite the same way.
Autumn (1h 0m 28s): No, me neither. I would definitely be different for sure.
Jesper (1h 0m 33s): I think the other thing is that keep in mind that Autumn is a native English speaker. I'm not right. So switching, it just makes no sense because having, having all of them doing the, the last touches on it is just much smarter rather than somebody who is not a native English speaker, trying to edit something, an English speaker has written in it it's sort of does not make much sense to me.
Autumn (1h 0m 58s): Yeah. I think it would be pretty inefficient. Yeah. I, I don't think we could do anything other than maybe me making a more in depth plot and you writing it and then me doing what I'm still doing. And that's just seems silly because we already, we beat and we talk about the plot and we come up with together. So why would they do it first?
Jesper (1h 1m 16s): All my, yeah, I think of it. Yeah. And then the other part is, and the other part is that you quite like editing and I hate everything. So there's that as well.
Autumn (1h 1m 26s): Yeah, that's true. So if we ever want to torture, you all know, please don't make me edit anything.
Jesper (1h 1m 36s): Well, so, okay. Last question. How do you know when to finish editing and put the book out?
Autumn (1h 1m 42s): So this is when you give it to me, right?
Jesper (1h 1m 46s): Well, yes, you send it to all of them and it's done.
Autumn (1h 1m 52s): So for me, the answer, this question, and I know it's done what, I always start with a content, but I do a read through as fast as I can as many chapters as I can end of day. And I have a spreadsheet, which is a very organized and just Jesper should be very proud of it because this is a gorgeous spreadsheet. And I usually avoid spreadsheet. If you have to say, well, I avoid them like the plague. So I have to have one good one and it's a very in depth. And once I have, I go back and I fix the chapters that I have highlighted as these are the ones that need the most work. And then I go back and fix all the other ones. And then I go back and I run it through like pro writing aid and do all those changes in.
Autumn (1h 2m 34s): Sometimes if I of chance, if I feel like there's still something missing, I'll do one more, you know, gentle, fluff through. But then we send it to the editor and then we send it to the other editor and then they send it back to me. And I do the corrections and changes from both editors. And if I have a time, I'll read through it one more time. I do a lots of, lots of lots of pieces. So basically I know is ready to be published when I'm dreaming it, eating and sleeping it, I can recite passages from it by heart and have a whole book of quotes to the side that I know that I've pulled out. I all, I have often left and readers. Like how can do you remember about a book you've written? And I'm like, do you know, I've probably read this story 50 times is probably not that bad, but I've read the book that we're publishing at least 20 times before it is actually published.
Autumn (1h 3m 23s): And that's what I know it's done as, and the biggest joke, this is a joke. I've read it in her scene. And other people's of mentioned that when you're editing and you change something and then the next editing passed, you change it back to how it was, you know, you're done.
Jesper (1h 3m 40s): Yeah. That was just from what I was about to say, because I fully agree that obviously you need to be thorough. And that's also why we use two different editors to edit every book. So then it goes through more people than, than just the single editor. Ah, and then we usually have some typos layers as well on the backend, maybe 20, 30, 50 people on the backend who also goes through. So it's been a through a lot of people before we publish it. But all of that said, I still wanna sort of post S S like warning out there that there is a time where you need to say, okay, this is as good as I can make it. And let's move on to the next book, because keep polishing and polishing to get it like zero dot 5% better.
Jesper (1h 4m 21s): That's just not worth your time. So all of this comes with a warning.
Autumn (1h 4m 26s): Yes. There's a point of diminishing returns, which I just was something I was trying to email you the other day. I actually finally remembered the word I was trying to say, but there's a point of diminishing returns on that little curve where, you know, it's taking more work than it's worth. And that's when you know, or the other way, you know, is when your writing partner says, here's the next book for you to work. And you're like, okay, so the next one is going off to the editor.
Jesper (1h 4m 56s): Good point. Yeah. So I think above all, thank you so much all through all of your listeners for sending you these questions.
Autumn (1h 5m 4s): I think actually, yes, very much. So we might have to do this once a year or something.
Jesper (1h 5m 10s): Yeah. Maybe, maybe. So, thank you so much for your questions. And next Monday, if everything goes well, all of them will have a great and interesting interview lined up for you.
Narrator (1h 5m 25s): Do you like what you just heard? There's a few things you can do to SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/ Am Writing Fantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, going, stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
The more you write, the better you’ll get at it. Some think that you’re naturally born as a good writer, but that’s not the case. Practice is the only thing that’ll make you better.
In this episode of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, Autumn and Jesper aim to make your journey a bit easier with some advice on fiction writing which you can go and implement right away.
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy.
For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am writing Fantasy Podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need an literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello. I'm Jesper.
Autumn (31s): And I'm on,
Jesper (33s): This is episode 133 of the am writing fantasy podcast. And then we are talking about how it well today, Right? And the, I suppose this could be both a very broad topic as well as very narrow one. All of them.
Autumn (49s): Yes. When I saw the topic for this one this morning, I was like, oh, this was the one we were like, oh, you know, we'll, we'll, we'll come up with some tips. It'll be fine. I'm thinking, I wish we had done some more specifics of it. I sat down and I wrote out some tips. I did my homework for this one. I Ramez.
Jesper (1m 7s): Wow. That's that's good. So you're probably gonna have some very, very good tips today.
Autumn (1m 12s): Yeah. You sure this is a couple of them. I think you probably already have on your list and I know you already have a list, so I'm not that worried.
Jesper (1m 19s): Yes, I do have the list yet.
Autumn (1m 20s): So I just knew that this sort of melting away or we're there in the U S at the moment. So yeah, I don't like warm weather. I always laugh when I was in a science class and found it out there. There's a fly that you think that it gets below 85 degrees Fahrenheit. There is some protein in it's brain that unwinds, it, it kind of like fall's over and ex dead and you cool it down and be like, oh yeah, there really is it all. I heard that I'm like, its true. I always send my brain kinda just like go and it gets too warm and I get too warm and I've just not myself. And I'm like, is this true? It's about 85 degree is definitely my, my threshold.
Autumn (2m 3s): And it's, it's not, it's probably, it's supposed to be cooler today as it goes to the upper eighties, it's been in the nineties, but it's high humidity.
Jesper (2m 11s): Like literally there's tender storms around. So we're at ed, the 90% humidity. You walk out, say side and it's like breathing water and it's just, oh I can't do that. Just know.
Autumn (2m 24s): So you're gonna fall over at any minute now. And the act it until somebody comes in, cools you down. Good.
Jesper (2m 30s): Yeah. So if you are suddenly left in charge of the podcast on your own, if people are listening and you're like, where's all that up. Well, that's how I passed out. It's fine please. Don't I got a cool drink and to turn off my AC for the recording. So, you know, listeners I'm care about you, but the sound quality I turned off my AC, which means we are going to wrap this one up quick. In about 10 minutes. We are going to be done on out of here. Oh, but that's okay.
Autumn (3m 2s): It'll be a, yeah. You don't know if you saw the Instagram picture, but I, I took my dog and Dalton very well. It took my dog to the vet and he did very well. And he was so excited to get out of the cabin because of the, you know, Adam has been away north. So it just makes me and him and it's been too warm to go for a walk. You, it looks like he looks like a fizzy gig with legs. Okay. If anyone needs to picture my dog and he's a Fizzigig with legs, small legs, you are a small X. And so I hadn't been walking him is way too hot for him. He's he was bred for the Northern Scotland. He does not like the heat either, but we knew he was so excited to go somewhere to the vet. He was like whining and the car. He never whined, but the whole time.
Autumn (3m 43s): So you would just chattering away. Then finally we got back from the, but we got out of the vet and I looked at him and he looked at me and like, you wanna go walk you so it, you know, and so even though it was so hot, I drove him to a nice, there's only so many places around here that there is forested and water for. It does not have a ton of water compared to me and where it used to live. And so we did the hike around this lake and I throw him in, had him go chiefs, frogs. He is a M predator dogs. So he loves choosing small creatures like frogs, the defenseless creatures. He likes feeling things. He is a home murderer. I sleep the next door every night.
Autumn (4m 23s): I mean the dragon he is. So that's where it he's been. He has been the inspiration for, to have of my small sidekick characters. And by the time we got to the top part of the hike, I just looked at him and then bring it swimsuit. But screw it. I jumped in with them and we had a little bit of a swim. It was good. So how are things on your side? Yeah, well, yeah, I think for the most part is just a lot of sports on TV these days to be all right. It's an exciting though. So we have sports again, right?
Jesper (5m 0s): Yeah. It's pretty cool. You know, and we, of course, so we're recording a bit ahead of time here. 'cause we are trying to bang some episodes to cover for some of the occasion we're of course we're still going to release episodes even though we're going to be on vacation. So we're trying to prerecord. So that's just to say that what I'm about to mention now already took place some time ago, by the time you listened to this. So that's why it might seem off a bit time wise. But anyway, we watched the world cup final in ice hockey this past weekend and it was between Canada and Finland. Oh, those are two good teams. So that's exciting. Yeah. Yeah. So it's a nerve wrecking experience.
Autumn (5m 41s): You know, as the listeners might
Jesper (5m 43s): Know my wife, his finished and my son's AR also finished citizens, ah, as well as Danish. So, you know, you, you can work out who we were rooting for it Canada. Not really, but honestly I feel so bad for my youngest son because during the, over it, it went to the overtime. And then I dunno if it was a couple of minutes of something into, I don't know, I don't remember it, but into the over-time one of the Finnish players makes like this slightest mistake. Oh, you know, and on this level and the world cup final, just the slightest mistake. It does not go on punished at the squat at the winning goal as sort of some of my youngest son, he was so sad that he started crying.
Jesper (6m 34s): He was so, so sad. And even in the next day he woke up a and I ask it, I always asks him in the morning, went when the boys we go have all their way is to ask them how the slept not really good was so, so sad. I'm so sorry for this little guy you just met so much to him. Two when that final and that's he is going to need therapy is gonna remember this 20 years from now. He'll remember it. I'm sure it was like, I I'm pretty sure he was in there. It was, it was good. But we had a new channel now though, because of the European championship in sucker kicking off this week.
Jesper (7m 16s): So nice. Actually on Saturday then Marc will play against Finland. Ow. Oh, that's cool. So who do you route for in the family? Just like, it's so much of a dilemma, but I actually, to be honest, I think its worst for my son. Then it is for me, 'cause, you know, I I'm born and raised and Denmark show. Yeah, of course I route for Denmark. Right. But that's, that's the tough one because they're both. So who do you roofer? I don't know. We can draw straws and the thing of switch halfway through this, just let the family too and to, and that's fair. No, that's just the way it is going to be.
Jesper (7m 58s): My, my son, my son is a soccer coach. I actually asked him. So how are you gonna handle the fact that the Finland plays against them mark? And he, he is, he was sort of, you know, looking at, into the sky for the moment thinking, and then he said, well, I think I'm going to sort of paint down the middle and then I'll have Finland and then Denmark one on each side,
Autumn (8m 22s): They're adorable.
Narrator (8m 26s): Oh, weak on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast.
Jesper (8m 30s): Okay. So I notice that the Am Writing Fantasy Facebook group has passed 5,000 members. Now I think we have 5,200 or something when I checked this morning and goodness knows. But at the time this has released, it's probably gonna be 6,000. Its crazy. There is so exciting. It's a lot of fantasy authors in one place really is. We are a very powerful and well I'd say the group, we're not even that quiet.
Autumn (8m 58s): We're quite feisty. Like it it's fun and chatty and supportive and talk fitness, the art and characters and life and promotions. It's it's there there's always something going on in there, right?
Jesper (9m 12s): Yeah, for sure. I, when I, I posted about the podcast episode where we talked about a worst things you can do to a character. And that was an episode 1 28 and I laughed so much. So Terri and the response, did you see that right?
Autumn (9m 27s): No, no. I have to go in and see it. I haven't been in there. I had a small computer swapping issue that we'll discuss later, but I was kind of absorbed into fixing a problem. So no, I didn't go see it, but no, with Terry an say she is pretty funny. Yeah. And remember, we're talking about bad things to do against characters here. So, so disrespected from Terry on is of course in that nature and therefore also pretty nasty.
Jesper (9m 54s): So can you just didn't wanna hear it?
Autumn (9m 56s): So yes is definitely.
Jesper (9m 58s): OK. So she said, quote, I have one that I didn't realize until after the fact that I killed every once you loves her parents, her had adoptive mother, one of her children. I'm pretty sure if she ever met me, she would slap me. And of course, oh yeah. I always, I could see that. I think in that episode I said, I always feel bad for my favorite characters because I'm so mean to them, but I know that it can take it out, but I'm so mean to them. And as you said, when I was going through my cursed phase this year and you're like, well, you're just the, you're the hero in some story. And the author thinks that you're going to, you need to be tortured a little bit for some character development.
Autumn (10m 39s): Yeah. That's great. I love it. Yeah. I imagine, imagine you could talk to them in real life. They're like, why are you doing all this to me? Well, on the other side you will come out a better person. Just trust me. It was just like, no, I didn't want to try it. Just stopped doing it. I want an easy day, Darren. It. So whenever your yelling into the universe and this is so unfair and unjust, think about your characters talking to you. That's how they feel. Yeah. Could I just fall ones have one single chapter where nothing bad happens, please. It's a long healing because your unconscious no, no.
Jesper (11m 20s): The, the group is definitely been so much fun recently. So I do love it over there. Yeah. So if you are a deal list, now haven't joined us yet. The just search for Am Writing Fantasy in the group section of Facebook and you will find us. Yes and no. Actually I noticed that Ernest Hemingway had the following tips when it comes to writing well, so I thought that was probably an interesting place to start. So he said sounds good, shoot.
Autumn (11m 54s): Yeah. You said you should stop all. You should use short sentences and also right. Short, first paragraphs.
Jesper (12m 2s): What do you think of those two tips to start off all of them?
Autumn (12m 6s): I would say you use varied sentences, but I definitely think a short lead in sentence, especially with like your first, not how people worked so hard with that first line of their novel, but I sometimes think just a short kind of punchy one that makes you go ha is a fantastic way of opening a story and keeping that first paragraph kind of short. But I would definitely say I noticed this and I've talked with other authors about this currently because of the size of reading screens, like Kindle screens are kind of small and people need on their phones, shorter paragraphs and shorter sentences are definitely becoming the norm because you don't want to read something that is literally a wall of text on your phone screen.
Autumn (12m 50s): So some paragraphs have gotten down to like two sentences, which sometimes I think that's crazy, but I also have to admit whenever I see something that's longer than like three sentences, I'm like, oh for goodness sakes. So in some way, or you could say it, Ernest Hemingway was way ahead of his time.
Jesper (13m 8s): He was thinking about the Kindle before it even existed.
Autumn (13m 10s): Exactly. And he just, he was a head of the curve.
Jesper (13m 14s): He nailed it.
Autumn (13m 15s): But I do you like some Hemingway quotes because he was the one who said write drunk, edit sober. I'm like, yeah, that is, that's the wonderful writing advice. So yeah. I'm not sure you're convinced About that one, but one at least, but then Right tipsy, then don't be drunk on writing. I did.
Jesper (13m 33s): Right.
Autumn (13m 33s): Actually just see that as a famous quote by somebody else to always be drunk on your writing because it'll keep you inspired. Okay. Yeah. That's one of those fancy quote things that sounds really good, but in reality it's right. You really like that, but probably not. But I mean, yeah. I don't know. I, I sort of have some things that sort of, it's both here and there and whatever. So I mean there was no particular order to do it.
Jesper (14m 5s): Right. Tough. To be honest. Yeah. I did the same thing. It just, yeah. It's just some thoughts about this and that. He and they're right. Well, how come we both shared you share thought and I'll share a thought and I'm sure we have some thoughts in common because I know one of mine is, is totally already on your list. I already know it. Okay. Yeah. We can do that. So do you want me to start?
Autumn (14m 25s): Sure. Since you've volunteered, go ahead of you or you can stop it. That's okay. If you want, you want to, if you feel like that's so important then right. If you're intimidated and want me to go first, I can do that just to make all of your mind, then you want to go, go, go, go. I'm going to melt here. Come on. Quick, quick, quick.
Jesper (14m 48s): Yeah. Well I think for stop, there is something to be said about using like simple and direct language. I think clarity brings a lot in order to improve one's writing. So, but I think as well, I want to say that there are no like real fixed rules that you need to follow. And there's nothing like once you've learned these rules, then your writing will be the best it can ever be that this doesn't exist. And so I feel like that's probably the, one of the best things to get out there before we even get any further into this topic.
Autumn (15m 25s): No, I totally agree. And actually that was one of the, it's not on my list, but it, it was one of my thoughts is there, there are a few rules for writing, but at the same time, there really aren't. Like I said, one of my favorite poems as the Jabber walkie, which is a hundred percent nonsensical words, but I love it cause its so much fun to say, so you don't have to even use real language. You can completely make it up and be famous for centuries. 'cause it is such a fun poem. So there really aren't any rules, but you need to take everything we say and everything that editors other authors, other readers say and figure out what fits your style and what you want to create with your writing.
Autumn (16m 8s): But you should also, you know, if you're just learning, following some of the top guidelines will help you maybe figure out where your going with your own author, voice and style.
Jesper (16m 24s): Yeah. I agree in that. I think as well that, I mean, of course we're going to, we're going to share some tips here and of course is not that wants you just ignore tips and I, it, it's a good take on board, the good advice and so on and, and, and figure out what works for you. But at the same time, I think the point is just don't follow it blindly, you know?
Autumn (16m 49s): Oh, he's be purposeful. Yes. But do you think that makes sense, but for your first one where you talked about brevity, I mean, I agree that's such a, I mean there's so many, there are so many quotes about you. No kill your darlings, cut out the flour and the language. You know, if it, the fewer words that you can use to say something really helps you don't need to be over prosaic. There are some genres, maybe the literary genres and stuff where you, where those flowery prosaic languages are fun and they're more accepted, but mostly, I mean, fantasy has some beautiful descriptions, but then it has a lot of, you know, action and things happening and punchy language.
Autumn (17m 30s): I especially love short, punchy sentences. It helps me to know some really long ones. Yeah. So figure out you'd do some varied, but I definitely, I recently had an editor say that they had never read a story. I think how did she say it that, you know, use their was so well-described and so vivid and real, but you such minimal amount of words. Very I'm very minimalistic, I guess in my word choice, I don't repeat myself, but I don't have tons of weird new words. I just, I want the story to shine. Not how I say the story, right? No. Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. Alright. So are you ready for my first tip?
Jesper (18m 12s): Yep. For sure.
Autumn (18m 13s): Some how this became a competition again.
Jesper (18m 14s): I think so. Well, yeah, that's it. I was just thinking about it before and then I thought, well, I'm not going to say anything because I don't want to draw attention because the point of this episode is really not to make one of our top 10 coroner, the source of competition listed at all. So I'm going to stay away from that. And I'm just going to listen to your advice now.
Autumn (18m 32s): All right. Well, mine is, is a typical one that you'll hear everywhere, but I have a specific purpose for it, but I would say if you want to learn to write, well, you do need to read and read in your genre. But I would say don't just read. My advice is actually to take your favorite book and rip it apart and find out why does your favorite book? What makes it tick? What is the plot? How are characters introduced? What are the sentence likes? What is your favorite scene? Don't just read it, but actually pull it apart and look under the hood and see what's there. It's like your own little study. You know, if you're in high school is your, your private study tasks or whatever when you're going to work on your own.
Autumn (19m 14s): So do that. It really helps. I think to look at something you absolutely adore and not just say I love it. That's my favorite book with is find out why one in it. Do you really love? And you will learn probably more from that than I think I did in my college classes on the writing. So go and go and tear it apart.
Jesper (19m 36s): Look it adverb reuse. That'll really tell you and your genre, how may or how often you should be using adverbs, how often you, you should be using SED versus growled or whispered, looked at your favorite story and don't mimic it, but pull it apart. C why you like it? I put it back together in your own style and see what you create. Yeah, I think I remember you said at some point as well, that when you need it to get your head into the right sort of writing mentality or writing space, then you read, or you read a bit of George RR Martin, I think you set at some point and then your right back into where you want to be.
Autumn (20m 10s): Yeah. He, there is something about his writing that is so fluid and concrete in this deep point of view that I can re I have a few favorite paragraphs and some pages that I can read one of his, and it's just, it instantly resets my mind at this is the level of writing I want to do and I can get back into my own voice, but it reminds me of the voice that I'm trying to find.
Jesper (20m 34s): Yeah. I'm still struggling with that. To be honest, I fully agree with, with your response or you advise in terms of reading aloud in this genre. And I do that as well. I, I always, I'm always reading a book, one book on the other, but I think, I don't know why, but I'm really struggling with finding something that I really like. Mmm. Most of it, I try to even pick up the stories that are hugely popular and stuff like that. And I just don't, I don't, I don't, they don't engage me very well. I don't know what's going on. Maybe I'm just weird. I don't know. I don't disagree. The last three or four books I've picked up.
Jesper (21m 16s): I've been frustrated and the little disappointed and yeah, its I'm in a definitely, I'm trying really hard to find something I'm enjoying. I'm actually thinking, I want to go read some open sticking to it like an epic fantasy and regular fantasy, you know, heroic fantasy.
Autumn (21m 34s): I actually think I want to go read some literary fantasy, which has a stronger emphasis on foreshadowing and really deep plots as well as really strong characters. So you sometimes don't do as well in the characters, but I think I just want to cut my teeth on something with some really strong plot lines. Cause if I read something else that is nonsensical, I'm going to bash my head against the wall or my kid at all or something.
Jesper (21m 58s): Yeah. I'm not going to mention the name of either of the book or the author here, but I am reading the one that is insanely popular right now at the moment. I, I, I'm only okay. To be honest, I'm an only like 15% into it. It it's a very, very long book, like fantasy books sometimes. Huh. But if it's just not engaging at all, I mean the writing is okay, but it it's in the past episode we talked about writing and the point of view and with just the way we ride and that is so much more engaging and this is not really. And the point of view is so it's a bit like, yeah, I dunno. It's a bit boring, but that's off topic now, but I just want to, yeah, it was just your tip there made me think about how even sometimes if you pick up some very, very popular books and you start reading them, they might not really do much for you.
Autumn (22m 49s): So yeah. But again, that only just support the fact that you should read a lot because your, you know, keep reading different books and so on. Yeah. And that's why I said, yeah, don't just read. Don't just pull apart any books or whatever it is. Your favorite book, you read that one, figure it out. Why it's your favorite? That's the worst.
Jesper (23m 9s): Yeah. That's a good advice. All right. Okay. Then the next one here is it might be the one that I feel is the most important one, to be honest, maybe because this is very simple, in some extent, in some sense, but also very complicated, but it is really figuring out what you want to say.
Autumn (23m 31s): Oh, I like that because anyone can string sentences together, but you need to have a story to tell. Yes. And outlining really helps here. To be honest, I was going to ask you you're into that. You should learn the plot and we'll all right.
Jesper (23m 48s): Yeah. We, of course, do we have a full step-by-step hook on how to plot a novel, but if you're interested, you, you can search for plot development on Amazon and you'll find it, but we should really not why it was mentioning it. The reason I'm mentioning it is that going through the motions of trying to understand your story before you just start writing, even if you, even if you're not applaud and you don't wanna do like a full of plot or whatever, but trying to get your mind around, what is this story really all about? And what is it that I really want to say that will help your writing tremendously and make this story so, so much better then when you just sort of doing a brain dump on the page.
Jesper (24m 29s): Right?
Autumn (24m 29s): I agree. Yeah. I mean, whether you outline or like I said, I, I, we have YouTube videos on just a 15 minute, half an hour outline, which can do so much for guiding you in a direction, even if you're a pantser. But yeah, I think knowing the purpose of the story and maybe the theme of the story, all of those things can really want, it will help you right. Faster. 'cause you'll know you're going and the right direction. Your not just wondering leaf through the maze lost, but it'll really help you make a better story. And you'll write better. Because I mean, the point is, is to write a story and to tell tales, there's times that I'm like, oh, this is so cool. I want to go into that, but I don't have to be a short story of somewhere else.
Autumn (25m 12s): It, it doesn't really involve what is important for the story. And this plot are the subplot. It, it doesn't really need to be in there. So that'll help you with your writing. And so that you're not having readers, I work coaching with other authors and you don't want your, we are going, why didn't you mention this name? Why did you bring this up? And then you never mentioned it again. Oh my gosh. I hate it. When I read that as a reader, that your, like, why didn't you tell me this? If you never do anything with it, and that's a good point about the YouTube videos. So then we have like, I dunno, I will guess like modern 150 video is probably on the Am Writing as a YouTube channel.
Jesper (25m 48s): So if you need to find some inspiration about how to do a plot four series or a shorter plot overview or what, probably whatever you can think of almost go to the Am, Writing Fantasy as a YouTube channel, because they're actually YouTube videos on their that is not on this podcast feed. Right. It's all right. That's the first one is before we switched to you.
Autumn (26m 10s): Yeah. Yeah. Before we switched to podcasting, we did YouTube videos. So there's probably like a hundred videos, I would guess that it's not on the podcast feet. So yeah. Go, go and explore a bit then if you, if you need some help, so you'll definitely find videos. That'll help you. You taught me what B rolls, where we had those or some really good videos.
Jesper (26m 29s): So I think we still get comments on them. So I know people are still watching though. So yeah. Only wanting is to some of those videos are very old. So the first video is on the channel. They with those, well, not professionally reduced in this political like that, the advice are good, but the production value is not right. I mean, we all improve in time.
Autumn (26m 50s): Right, right. Yeah. Yeah. Indeed. You ready for my second tip?
Jesper (26m 56s): Yup. Go ahead.
Autumn (26m 57s): All right. Mine is learn the craft, very vivid characters. And I was going to say realistic, but I don't actually mean realistic because I hate to say it real people, real people could be a little boring. It. So you want someone who is personality, who a friend once said, this, describe this other person to me that they were like a motorboat when everyone else was at the canoe. And like their weight just kinda topples you right over. That's kind of what you want your characters to be that whole idea of larger than life. But you also want them to feel like they really could exist. So there are three dimensional. They have likes and dislikes.
Autumn (27m 39s): Those are really important to you by creating a character that is just beautiful overpowers, maybe, and so many ways, but it also feels like someone, you really want them to be your friend or you desperately do not want them to be your enemy. Create those types of characters and people are gonna be like, whoa. Wow. That is amazing. Right?
Jesper (28m 1s): No agree. And characters with the characters. Those are why people come back to the stories. It, it is not the old wall plopped on the day. What really engaged as the reader is to character. So fully agreed at, at this insane, the important it, it might not be directly.
Autumn (28m 20s): Well. Yeah, just some, it depends on how we interpret improving the writing. It, it, it's not specific writing.
Jesper (28m 29s): So, but, but again, my, my, my point about figuring out what you want to say, it's not Pacific Pacific to the sentences either.
Autumn (28m 36s): Right. So, but it's yeah. It's about storytelling, I guess. Yes. How do we know how to tell your story better? How's that? Yeah. Yeah, indeed. So when you have two ones that I'm like short and quick, one of them we already touched upon too. I'll just get those out of the way. And then I'll move on to the T two to another one. Okay. So the first one you talked upon that don't use the complicated words. So I had that one as well. And then another variation of that is use different metaphors. That what you used, you used to see, you know, find new ways of saying something that, that will improve the writing quite a lot as well. And so that, that was to small, easy ones, but that's a good one.
Jesper (29m 17s): We get out the way. And then the next one I have here is any words that can be stripped out without losing the meaning. Cut it out every time as the more, once you remove the bed and the story we'll get.
Autumn (29m 34s): All right. I agree. I was just probably a point where you have removed too many, but occasionally losing meaning that's true. It without losing, meaning it, occasionally I do it because I'm, you know, the, the editor hat usually on, in the two of us and I'm often taking it out words, but then all of a sometimes stop and be like, I needed that, right. I'll be like this, I'm adding something massively something, or being a massively booming. You, you know, something I'm adding in there because those words are fun. It's good to remember to put in some of those fun adverbs, the occasionally, but it is. And there's times where I'm editing and I'm like, okay, there's four words that I can turn into one.
Autumn (30m 18s): And I will always switch to something that is, or miss Ernest Hemingway must be, you know, I'm channeling him at times. I just really likes, just shortened up the sentences to drop all of the does. They call it sticky sentences, which is what I learned through pro writing aid. I didn't know they had a term, but when you have something that has all those filler words, like in the, a, all of those little ones that we really don't have, meaning there, the, just the little bit's there, that kinda connect everything with two, the more of this stuff, you can remove the sh punchier in more concrete, your sentences, our, and the more you get out of them, you don't get lost. And all of those little words that your, like, why are we, are we going with the sentence?
Autumn (31m 1s): You don't want it to have those sticky ones. They make people just stop and go, wait, I have to start over again. I don't know what you were saying.
Jesper (31m 9s): No, I agree. Absolutely.
Autumn (31m 11s): All right. Yeah. So I actually went to the ones on my list was learned, apply it, but I think we kinda, we kinda covered that one is important, but I would say for fantasy again, this is not a sentence structure, one, which is funny. I'm employed, I'm the editor and I'm avoiding all the sentence structure ones, but I would say, learn to world, build something unique and then learn how to share it with readers without info dumping or confusing the crap out of them. What are the stories I just recently read, which is interesting, because I actually meant to mention this one with the characters as well. But again, I won't mention any names, but it was an impressive world and this was not Brandon Sanderson.
Autumn (31m 55s): I would say that it, it was someone else and very impressive world. And really in depth, all this history, I was so freaking confused, you know, horrible job explaining any of how it related to the world and how old, who these people and God's in all of these things. We're I literally had two, I finish the book and I kinda had an idea of it. And then I read through the glossary and then I'm like, oh, they'll still don't get it. It's sad. I had to literally just suspend my own questioning or I would never have gotten past probably the third chapter, because I'm like, this doesn't make sense where you please explain what the frig you were talking about.
Autumn (32m 40s): He just horrible. And he was the same way with some character. Is he literally didn't describe the character, a sidekick. It's all three quarters of the worst of the novel. Up until that point. I knew one thing about the sidekick. Okay. Well, how it looked at three quarters of the ways through the novel, I've finally got a description. It was like, thank you read. I've got an hour to revise everything, but I just thought of till now, but he also did the same thing with it. It was one of the first times I've read a book where I can, honestly, I see a lot of authors saying, you know, I don't know how to right. Men, if they're all women or a woman saying, I don't know how to write.
Autumn (33m 22s): So men take it. I don't know how to right women. So all of the few times I can say you have two types of women in your novel assassin coldhearted or mousy and an insane. And was it, so then I say it, right? Vivid characters, right? Vivid characters of every genre at color race, no one should be one of two characteristics because I finished it going. I don't care who is buying this book. They're not women. I read it. And I'm kind of like this almost insulting I'm either. So these are my two types of characters. So learn the moral build and learn how to describe things.
Autumn (34m 3s): It makes sure you described things appropriately, but tone info dump it. So that's, that's, that's circled back to what my point was is you should create something amazing in this world that I just read was really, truly unique and amazing. I think for what the hits I caught out of it. I, I assume it, it seemed it under the hood from what I was gathering. I just don't know how it works.
Jesper (34m 30s): It reminds me of the advice to give when you are to Reed, the Silmarillion, have you ever read that one?
Autumn (34m 37s): No, I haven't. I will. I swear.
Jesper (34m 40s): Yeah, I have it all my Kindle. And I'm going to read it for the second time, but it, it is, it's a very nerdy book to read, of course, because it's not really a story as such. It's more like a wool compendium, but their advice when reading the Silmarillion. So I can give this to you now. That is, since you haven't read it, but the device is just read it. You know, you're going to get like 250 names of this, on this father to that blah, and do not try to understand who is, who just read and ignore it because you're gonna get so lost and you have no idea, five pay it later. What the heck is actually who, here we go, it's impossible to follow full glossary's and all that, but I just forget it.
Jesper (35m 22s): I just read it for, you know, the history of the world and just ignore.
Autumn (35m 27s): All right. Okay. All right. It that's the only way to read the Silmarillion the, without going insane, right.
Jesper (35m 34s): That's right.
Autumn (35m 35s): I will keep that in mind this speaking of that, and don't know if you're, so I just saw and share it on Patriot and Patriot how to create your own magic book. I'm just going to stick with my own philosophy of how to do that. And I'll ignore the similarity. I can't even pronounce it today. And I told you what my brain is slowly, this proteins, all we need to speed it up. All right. But yeah, so I'm going to, I will save that for later in cooler weather.
Jesper (36m 5s): Okay. I found a piece of advice from George Orwell. Now this is not something new to most of us, I think, but at the same time, it's, it's a good reminder. That is not to use passive voice when you can use active voice.
Autumn (36m 26s): That's a good reminder.
Jesper (36m 28s): Yeah. So the example all with all wheel uses was the Mann was spitting by the dock that is very passive at this very passive and not very engaging. And it is better to say the DOK with the man is active and it's much more engaging. And again, we talked about the point of view we early on, and if you right, and the point of view, you usually do not have the passive voice problem as much at least.
Autumn (36m 52s): Yes. And I, I, it's funny. I have seen that with editing a lot of books. I do it too, that I often see something in passive voice that you don't need to have to switch to the now. And they have, like, she was sitting down. You can just change that to, as she sat down. Yeah. I've noticed that if you see a was, and then a verb adding an ending and an I a T G I can guarantee you that is the verb. That should be where the was was, or was it is most, what is it just became a talk to her Susan episode. And I I've just seen it so many times. I maybe, because I'm like editing like crazy since like may or April or something, but I just I've seen that so often.
Autumn (37m 38s): And so many different authors that I'm like, this is really, it could just be, I don't see any one else having this roll, but if you have a was, and some of the verb finding and ending an ING, it is just getting rid of the, was it turned the verb into the act of choice. That's all you need is perfect. It'll be like, you're writing that much stronger because you'll be an active voice and it will not be this kind of passive. Oh, is that she was sitting down? No, she sat, she just sat down. So it's fine. Yeah, no, and dude.
Jesper (38m 8s): Yeah. And it was funny. My next one was M to right. Informative and punchy dialogue. So I think we covered that. All right.
Autumn (38m 16s): Yeah, I did. Yeah. I like punchy dialogue. My editor sometimes does it like my punchy dialogue, but I like my punchy dial. OK. But so my, as one is actually my last one on my list is to add humor to your writing. So yeah, a lot of is a tough one for a of people. I mean, a lot of authors use romance or friendship as a good subplot as a way of binding characters is getting an emotional event investment from the reader. But there's that old saying that if you can laugh together, you can stay together. When they talk about marriages, it's also true with your characters and with your readers.
Autumn (38m 57s): If you can make them laugh out loud, they will kind of love your book just the little bit more of than even a romance scene. So keep that in mind. I liked snarkey characters and I loved sarcasm. So I, you know, you're gonna definitely find that on my books. But then at times it's, I've had a few Maverick meanie at kind of characters. And even in the book, I just read that I couldn't understand the world. And I didn't really like some of the female characters because there were like one of two types, except for the main, the hero's wife who ended up in prison for three quarters of the novel doing absolutely nothing. But anyway, there were parts the parts of the book.
Autumn (39m 38s): I absolutely adored because some of the banter between characters and this kind of devil may care, sarcastic attitude. I'm like, dude, I like you. So that overcomes quite a lot of sins.
Jesper (39m 53s): No, I agree. I agree. Fully a M adding human makes a huge difference, but I personally find it very, very difficult also to come up with something that feels like smart enough, if you know what I mean, my name of humor is it's difficult. I think so. And so I do think it's funny cause I know when the best scenes I come up with our, one of those, one's like, you know, your in the middle of the cooking dinner or something, you're like, oh, this was the perfect dialogue. And you have to basically burn everything is shut everything off and do you run it right? It down. There's something about humor where I think it just is something that comes, you can create it at another thing.
Autumn (40m 34s): It comes from inspiration. But when it comes, you're like, oh, this is the perfect. So I do think, but it, if you could develop that, learn it. I don't know. Do it learn the improv? That would be a good class to learn, to do some fun humor and you just come up with some stuff. Yeah. But I think it will really, it would add a lot to a lot of stories that I read and they seem good, but man, if you can make me laugh and especially if you start T my goal and every, every interaction with people is to make them snort the hot or very cold liquid. That is perfect. Oh yeah.
Jesper (41m 14s): That's good advice. I have two more and then I think that's it they're short. So the first one is just very simple, but make sure to hook the reader.
Autumn (41m 24s): Oh yes. That's simple, but very effective. It is. And I think M not to make you take longer, but we say hook and people understand concept, but I think sometimes they don't realize what that actually means and concrete advice. And its, it can be anything that you just want to make them read the next sentence, whether its curiosity, whether it's and emotional outcome, you just wanna make some, keep reading and all hooking. It is it's, there's a lot of different ways of doing it from emotions to curiosity to, I don't know.
Jesper (41m 58s): So shadowing excitement. Yeah. That's all you do. It's finding that reason that the, you hit the paragraph or the period and you go, no, I got to know what comes next. Yeah. I mean, especially with the first chapter,
Autumn (42m 11s): Of course that's important
Jesper (42m 15s): And the next one is also a very short, but I just sort of general good advice. Just not really about the writing itself, but it's more taking a break from it and you know, walk away from your writing, leave it alone for a bit and then come back and have a look at it with a fresh pair of eyes. That's usually going to help a lot to improve the text. I think so too, especially if you're editing or you're writing and you do hit that wall, especially to me editing, if you, if the words are starting to run together and you were just kind of fed up or you're, if you find yourself trying to finish on an artificial deadline, that you were completely a hundred percent in control of walk away from it don't force yourself.
Autumn (43m 0s): I admit, I just kind of took a weekend break. I meant to like edit a zillion chapters and instead I finished reading a book and then I did a really good drawing. Sorry, Jesper. I didn't get my editing done, but I've felt so much better when I opened it up on Monday, I was like, oh, you know, boom, boom, boom. Just got stuff done. It floats so nicely. So yeah. Everyone needs a break every once in a while, once and awhile for sure of it. Yeah. And I think sort of maybe to round things off, I think it's worth saying that the more you're right, the better you'll get at it and why I'm saying that it is because some, some people think that you were like natural born as a good writer, but that's not the case.
Jesper (43m 49s): You know, practice is the only thing that'll make you better. Yeah. And of course it is challenging, especially because writing is very objective. Then that only makes it even more challenging, but you get better as you go along and it also gets easier as you go along.
Autumn (44m 5s): So it looked at me. I sometimes we could do things in reverse, but in general it gets easier, but you have to. So I live in reverse sometimes too, but I agree. I mean, when I look back at my debut novel versus what I'm writing, now you get a better, you get better. Your next book. There's a certain point where you have done the best you can for your skill level right now. Just go to your next story. It's okay. And just keep writing.
Jesper (44m 40s): So amen. So next Monday we are doing something slightly different because we have collected a bunch of questions from our listeners and we are going to answer as many as we
Narrator (44m 54s): Can. If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patrion.com/AmwritingFantasy For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, going, stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Some people don't make great teachers... so imagine what would happen if they were teaching magic!
Join us as we try to out-do one another with the worst person we can imagine having as instructor for magic. Expect to laugh, and to be suddenly grateful that any bad classes didn't include having to learn hexes...
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (1s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast and today's publishing landscape. You can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (29s): Hello, I am Jesper
Autumn (32s): and I'm Autumn
Jesper (34s): This episode 132 of the am writing fantasy podcast. And I'm looking forward to this one because You going to do one of our competitive top 10 list today. And a perhaps you want to say what the topic of today's lists are and what we are trying to beat each other at all of them. Oh, so today is topic. I've noticed that I think you even came up with the idea of this competitive list. I think this was just, this might be unhealthy for you. You want to compete so much today's topic. So we are going to talk about the 10 worst people to teach magic.
Jesper (1m 14s): And this is definitely going to be fun. I was having giggle fits, trying to come up with M characters. I would never want teaching me magic.
Autumn (1m 24s): So this will be interesting. Just see who comes up with the worst. Like yeah. That's, that's it. We have to include body. And then she was like, well, it's more like the combined five worst ones. Right? So it's more like who made the best or the worst list, the best worst lists. That's a, not the best, worst at it. Yes. I'm not confusing it all.
Jesper (1m 52s): No, not at all.
Autumn (1m 53s): And that's a bit, I had tons of time to work on this because it rained all weekend here. So I had some good thinking time. How about you? We were probably on a refereeing again.
Jesper (2m 10s): Yeah. And indeed. Yeah. So I was just coming up with my list is wanting, so I have not thought about it as much as you have a apparently. Yeah. We'll see how it goes. I I'm confident in my list.
Autumn (2m 24s): Of course. Well, you usually AR, but we usually give you a reason for your money. You, so we'll see. How are you saying I'm too confident possibly. You need to be a little more humble and admit that I have some pretty good lists.
Jesper (2m 42s): Yeah, well, yeah. I do admit that. Do you have a top-notch like this, but mine are just like a, a bit above, so we will see, I don't think that all the listeners agree with you.
Autumn (2m 55s): Thank you, Dominic.
Jesper (2m 56s): Oh, no, we don't bring that up again.
Autumn (2m 60s): So how are things over in Denmark?
Jesper (3m 3s): A it's as good as good as a you and I, we actually interviewed on a field as a storyteller, a podcast yesterday a, which was quite fun by the way. I'm but I'm mentioning that because during that product cost, I set how I finished watching American gods on Amazon prime and a I've mentioned how much I love this show on a few of our past episodes here. So, and I also mentioned that I feared that this show was canceled by the end of season three soda, there was no satisfying ending. And that was exactly what I found out. It happened because I finished up watching the American gods over the last week.
Jesper (3m 44s): So that's really annoying a, I still think it's a great show and I still would recommend people watching it. But then yesterday, or because I was preparing for this podcast episode, I did actually did a bit of digging and a bit of research. And it seems like that American gods might get a proper ending made either as a minister series of perhaps a movie. So, oh, but I don't know if that's just rumors or true, but that's what I could sort of find, but I really hope that that'll happen because I don't know why do the network's do that? I mean, I hate when they create a series and then just suddenly decide just to stop it in the middle of things.
Jesper (4m 26s): I mean, couldn't, they at least let the writer's room note at, we are going to end up at the end of this season. So we come up with some sort of it. I don't, I don't get it. Why is that? They're so difficult. I agree. I think it would be nice to not have it open-ended contract and be like, this was going to be a four seasons. And you know, if you do well, we'll come up with like another one or two. But I mean, I've definitely heard Netflix prefers shows is that only like two season. So that's why I thought it made it a three is a pretty good, but I mean that it's like you to look at supernatural if it was 16, 17 season's I mean, I, and I watched them all at the mall, but then we see others that are a perfectly good shows on what you can at least let them, let the people wrap it up.
Autumn (5m 8s): And that happened with Lucifer, which I saw the final episodes of that just came out and I want to watch it, but Adam's is not back yet. And we've watched the whole thing together. So I'm waiting till he was returned so we can finish out the series, but that was nearly there nearly stopped it. And they did give the writer's a chance to write the one last series. Thank goodness, because I hate stories that are left hanging. Yeah, man, I just find it weird because I mean, surely I mean, no problem that a network decides to locate, we don't think that there is no enough views on the series and therefore we wanna end it. No problem. I fully get that.
Jesper (5m 48s): That's fine. But what, I don't understand this, that they would know that ahead of time is not something that they all of a sudden realize that there is no sails this stuff, right? They will. No. So why can't you just tell the writer's room? Okay. We're going to do six S episodes more and then you need to wrap it up by the end of that, because there's probably not going to be anything else. You don't know how, how can that B oh, you know, it planning is okay. So maybe then all the producers are a pants or is, and then just kinda like a wake up one morning and going, no we're done. And then just keep going. We cut the strings, right. They're yeah. But, but, but the thing is it still, it's still a product that they are selling to the a consumer's here, right?
Jesper (6m 32s): I mean, as a user of Netflix or Amazon prime or whatever, a, if I constantly get series on a streaming service that is ended abruptly with no prep, I mean, I'm probably start going to dislike. It's a streaming service. 'cause every time I watch this show on it, it doesn't end properly. Whereas if, if they plan for it and always close to a series, well a or as well as they can, at least then they should also be getting more happy customers and thereby more people watching a streaming service. So I, it feels like this shooting themselves in the foot. I don't quite understand why. Yeah. I agree. And then you have some of the writer's, you know, something is popular and enough fans asked for it, then other ate, you know, a star as someone else might pick it up.
Jesper (7m 20s): And I've seen that happen where like the first three series are in Netflix and the next six are in stars or HBO max. And it's just like, okay. It just, it just gets confusing. But I don't know. I guess the world makes even less sense. Then we realized, yeah. And you have a show like a, well, it's old now, but as you all like Firefly, which it's just like really, really liked that it was so good. And the was so much demand in the fan community that they wanted more of it, but nobody made it known. So they did come up with that movie. And honestly, I, I thought the movie, it was horrible and I did a huge disservice to the actual series.
Jesper (8m 4s): So that's the other problem. Yeah. So anyway, that was sort of my week.
Autumn (8m 11s): What about you all as well, as you know, I mean, I'm currently so alone as my husband's off a whitewater raft, guiding and learning to that kind of stuff. So I get to hear every night about his M events of falling into hydraulics and holes and having the raft go over is just absolutely it stuff I would of totally loved in my twenties, but I have to admit, there's a part of me looking at him now, going, you're giving up at like five year and a bus to go rafting, buy five 30, your off the bus. It at like five 30, you have less than an hour to eat something. Before you go back for some evening classes on a raft guiding, like can say you can't up with you.
Autumn (8m 57s): So usually he and I was like, we telegram each other and were telegram. You, you know, when he was away visiting us as parents or I'm away, we were like telling screaming at each other, like every hour and sending each other a stickers and things. And I hear from him for like about 15 minutes now, I was like, this was a really weird to not even hear from him more than that. So that's definitely been an adaption. And plus it rained, like I mentioned all weekend and I'm in a tiny cabin in the woods and its pouring down bucket's so I can't even go for a walk and I've all alone out here. And I'm like, OK, I'm a little bit of cabin fever. Like he do leave. So I do go there and walk at least yesterday, I'm thinking of some of the dog and they keep me entertained.
Autumn (9m 40s): But yet there's definitely a time. And you're like, I'm not used to being this alone. There was a time I used to be this alone, but this was a really a loan. Yeah. I can see it. And you want some locks on your doors is, well, the worst thing out here is the 300 pound black bear when he was a shy little thing. And then we have a raccoon that is figured out how to open a cooler outside of the little bugger, a eye. But besides that, the scariest thing in the woods or people, and no one else really knows where this cabin is. So I'm not that worried about people, but yeah, people are scary. I started watching a Netflix show on true horror stories. Don't do that.
Autumn (10m 25s): So people are mean to you just don't wanna do with ghosts. And so then they get a deal with other people. Yeah, that's a recommendation passed on then. Absolutely.
Narrator (10m 40s): Oh a week on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast.
Jesper (10m 46s): So I've started working on something new, what's a autumn and I will make available to all our listeners and the author community. It is still in the very early conceptual stage, but we are planning to put out a few master classes and I don't think it will be ready until the fall a but the idea of is that these will be some meetings so that everybody can join from the safety of their home and there will be a, a recording and all of that good stuff for those who can't join live. And then there should, that's gonna, it's gonna be so that it, by the end of it, we're going to hook up some sort of a mastermind, two, it, but a lot more on that later, once it becomes relevant, I am excited about it.
Autumn (11m 36s): It, yeah, yeah. Go ahead and say, oh, I just think it was going to be, it would just be such a great opportunity to reaching out with other authors. And I actually am, might've picked up a life coaching course. That'll kind of go hand in hand with helping learning some more new, fresh coaching techniques. So I think this will be really kind of fit well in it. It will definitely.
Jesper (11m 60s): Yeah. But we'll see you. But I would really also like to put together some sort of a, you know, the first ever Am Writing Fantasy in-person event in 2022, I don't know. Do you think that will be possible with COVID-19 and all of that? As long as what of these new new, new variants are going to rule the world?
Autumn (12m 19s): There has been a wonderful research coming out of Brazil. That seventy-five percent is the threshold. If you get a vaccinated above 75%, it is pretty much contained the virus. And if he hit 95%, its like, basically you're fine. The everything is fine. And there was like, no COVID death's so I'm really hopeful a 20, 22, because I would love, I love and person conferences and working with students and more than a zoo actually like spending time. So that would be fantastic. Yeah. I would really like to put some in-person event together for next year and I think that would be really nice. I did hear though it as well, that that was some people in, I think it was Norway that they were vaccinated and then they got COVID-19 anyway and they went to the hospital and they actually died.
Jesper (13m 15s): So I, yeah, the, so I'm not trying to be a downer, but I ju I'm just not so a, a a hundred percent convinced that those vaccines are actually the wonder sort of how it will fix everything in medicine that may be some people think it is.
Autumn (13m 31s): Yeah. There's always a chance of a mutation. That'll be different and go around that. So that's what makes me nervous. So we'll have to see. Yeah. And the vaccine is not a a a hundred percent either. It doesn't give a a hundred percent protections. So you, you cannot be sure, but ah, but lets say we'll keep on a, an eye on things. However it evolves and a, if it goes well and maybe next year will put some sort of all of these trials.
Jesper (13m 56s): So she, if there's enough interest four and an event for my next year in-person but let's see, we'll come back from that. Okay. Anything else to mentioned before we go into our lists? Autumn?
Autumn (14m 8s): Oh, you know what? I had something I thought of and it's a completely out of my head. I'm blaming the pollen. It's a, I think the locus tree is decided to bloom now the sun's out and yeah, my brain has a little, so we do it for next time. It, when I remember it. Okay.
Narrator (14m 28s): And onto today's topic. So
Jesper (14m 31s): Let's start out by reminding listeners of the ground rules here. Just in case we have some new listeners joining us today. I didn't know if there was this a rules that is good, but there is a, a, a reminder here. Oh, all right. What are the roles? The idea with the alternating lists is that we try to come up with the best suggestions and by the end we should conclude, ah, we have the best five suggestions. And so that was pretty simple. And straight-forward five, a C I thought that was always just like the best, worst one.
Autumn (15m 9s): I think you were changing the rules. I mean, I have to go back and watch one of the other lists.
Jesper (15m 14s): Yeah. You do do that. And then come back and tell me I'm right. Because it's about having the best list. So a of course, if you have the best entry on the list and there is a good chance to lift as a whole as also the best, but if you need to have the best list, right.
Autumn (15m 28s): I disagree is in my mind, is it always been like that? And it, then it, it is like that because that's how I remember it. I will find proof if I probably can find some time to go find some proof. I think you're and I think it was just like to do that.
Jesper (15m 45s): Yeah. Probably. It's probably a pretty good bat. Wow. So as you mentioned that at the top of the episode today is list will be to chop 10 WORST People to Ever Teach Magic. We decided that this can be completely made of people, although they don't have to be. So that's up to each of us, whatever you want to include on to this. So I think that's just set us off well enough or then I think so. I, I think I already know you have me wondering what's going on. You're changing the ground rules. I'm not sure I liked this and not at all at all. And just reminding you of what the rules were just, they've always been like that.
Jesper (16m 28s): You would just agree. Alright. So how are you flipping a coin to C who goes first? Or did you want me to ease us into this? I actually think that last time I got to decide who went first, if I remember correctly.
Autumn (16m 43s): So you should decide this time. All right. I'm going to have you go first then. Yeah. Last time I, I ask you to go from us as well though. It seems like there is a pattern here maybe as best not to go first, baby. I always like to go second and speeches like glasses. So that way you weren't the first one, you got an out of the way it really quickly. And then you could just get back and enjoy it. So I'll go number two.
Jesper (17m 10s): Okay. Okay. Okay. Well, so my number five, which is like the least of the bath, what do you do? Something like that. At least a worst of the bad ones. So it sounded very complicated. So a number five and this one I call misses, what did I tell you? A oh, and now this is not meant in a scolding kind of way, right? It is. In fact men meant in a, I don't remember what I just told you.
Jesper (17m 50s): Wait, so this is a teacher who has absolutely zero short-term memory. So imagine how terrible that would be. You know, like every single lesson you start over, we were like 25 times because she can't remember what you just told you, what was she taught you? And then yeah. Yeah. And then you might try to get clever. And then you think that you're going to invent some sort of system. So, you know, it will keep her on track, but the problem, as you can remember that a system either. So it, it doesn't matter what you're do. She's just laughing all the time, this chart. And like I was at the spells, we were working and they'll spend a half your time doing a whiteboard chart structure of this is where we are.
Jesper (18m 35s): And this is where we were going. This is what you said, do you, at least he has a good longterm memory. Is she still remembers her smells. But yeah, because we imagine you were going halfway through something and then she thinks she was actually doing a different spell and he'll turn it into like a mushroom Tony and that's that you put it on the board. And then all of a sudden she was stop and say, why is that a bot? They're like, what is this a,
Autumn (19m 1s): I think I'll be looking for it. Another teacher, she, you don't have to be the only person in the universe who could teach magic for me to put up with that. I'd be getting her lots of just like pretty annoying. But yeah, it's just, it helps memory and I'm sure there's got to be a spell it for that. So she could only remember is, well,
Jesper (19m 23s): yeah, but yeah, memory is spelled up. Might help. So she can find one a, hopefully she has some book's sitting around that. It might be a better, a better bet is to just go with whatever books she's gotten a house.
Autumn (19m 40s): Yeah. Okay. All right. So do you want to know my number five?
Jesper (19m 45s): Yes, please.
Autumn (19m 46s): All right. So this is my easing into your worst potential teachers is that you actually find a magical dragon who is willing to teach you. So you're going to have a dragon as you're instructor. However, the deal, I know it sounds perfect, right? Just the deal is if you get the spell wrong, he gets to eat you. Why did you take yeah. And considering, I mean, do you have to decide if you trust the dragon enough to like set you up, like a smell that is not going to work?
Jesper (20m 28s): I don't think that many students will survive that for very long.
Autumn (20m 32s): I don't know if the dragon care.
Jesper (20m 35s): No, probably not, but a, I don't think it will. It'll get too sort of a graduate very many people.
Autumn (20m 42s): Well, if you do, you're going to be an awesome wizard.
Jesper (20m 46s): Oh yeah, for sure. And you're going to a drag and as your friend afterwards.
Autumn (20m 51s): Yeah, exactly. So I thought it would be a good start, something massive and very powerful. That gets a little snacky. Occasionally. Yeah. Snuggie on students.
Jesper (21m 5s): Yeah. I don't know that this isn't your toes.
Autumn (21m 10s): Imagine not turning it in your homework assignment. Just go.
Jesper (21m 16s): I think at least what will happen is the students will try really hard not to make mistakes, but a vision you bunk to make a mistake. It you're learning. Right. So you are bound to make a mistake sooner or later. Yeah. That's a good nuts. So that is a pretty horrible teacher, for sure. Yes. Alright. Well at least you, you can appreciate that. Won a little bit. You get to see a dragon. So it's like, Hey, you are not that impressed. I can tell you all, we always love dragon. So you just put a dragon and then everybody will always like that. So I didn't think that I should have how I'm doing.
Jesper (21m 56s): Good for a number one. All right, lets go for four. Okay. So number for this teacher, a teacher, yeah. Is a heavy, heavy smoker. She's a gambler cheese and C and she probably has the worst quality and teacher can have a gun. You get to what that is. All of them was just like the worst quality of a teacher. Well being always right. I'm not sure. I'm not a, I'm not a, a, well, okay.
Autumn (22m 32s): I teach writing, but I don't know what trying to think of how all the teachers of my life, who of annoyed me and most of them are the ones that never listened to their students. Yeah. That's not bad is. Yeah. Basically its like she doesn't care one bit about teaching. So that's pretty on top of that. I would do it. OK. Yeah.
Jesper (22m 53s): She doesn't care it all about teaching it. In fact she disliked her students. I have actually prepared, but this teacher a bad, oh no. You of an audio clip. Oh fantastic. All right. Let's hear this worst teacher. So see if you can a hear who this is. OK. Here it goes.
Character Voice (23m 18s): So I don't want you to worry class. These tests will have no effect on your grades. They merely determine your future social status and financial success. If any, do you know who that is?
Autumn (23m 33s): I was at the tip of my tongue, but I cannot say I can't think of the name.
Character Voice (23m 39s): Do you want to hint that?
Autumn (23m 40s): I do remember it. Yeah. I want a hit.
Character Voice (23m 44s): It's a character from the Simpsons. It's a Simpsons.
Autumn (23m 49s): O is it the, yeah, she is a brunette. I can't even think of her name though. It really can't.
Character Voice (23m 56s): And I'll try and just see if I can pronounce it correctly. Misses crap up a crop, apple or something like that was a crab apple.
Autumn (24m 6s): Yeah. I'll yeah, something like that. I can't even pronounce it, but yes I do remember her.
Jesper (24m 16s): Oh, magic teacher. That would mean that was pretty me. I think it was. So she would be one of the worst teacher's you could have, especially around fireballs a, you know, I think that the school will be on fire rod. It quickly when she was taking like a break and smoking and she doesn't really care what the kids are doing with the spells.
Autumn (24m 35s): Yeah. That would be bad. So it would be bad. But I have to admit as a student and her class, you could probably get away with pretty close to murders so that it might actually probably it probably yes. See the, is the magic toads, a neutral running around the room and the Al coming and eating someone's frog and it was just chaos.
Jesper (25m 3s): One of my class I might actually do well. Okay. So you don't think she stepped out of a teacher then?
Autumn (25m 10s): There is. And I was just a horrible teacher, but I'm just thinking of a classroom chaos as a student would be a blast, but it wouldn't be like, you don't have a fear of getting Eaton.
Jesper (25m 19s): So it's kind of a nice yeah, but you would, unless you are like at the top of the pyramid, you, you would need to be worried about getting bullied because she don't give a crap care.
Autumn (25m 32s): You would have to be, you would have to either have you're a little posse that you are teamed up and no one's going to pick on you or B be her meiny and to be like this zap, zap, zap to be done with it is shoot.
Jesper (25m 46s): All right. But it wasn't bad. Okay. But it wasn't a dry and then okay. I can agree that dragon is a bit more terrifying. Yeah. Alright.
Autumn (25m 59s): So you're ready from my number four, then this one's pretty simple. A is just, you're going to have a teacher, your teacher today for magic one-to-one is a super intelligent AI that has absolutely no magic abilities, but understands the theory very well. Okay. Good luck.
Jesper (26m 22s): Is it able to explain how to actually do this building?
Autumn (26m 26s): Is it understands? The theory can tell you the ingredients, you know, wave your hands, the pronunciation. But if there's something, some other essence that you have to draw, especially like a emotions, are it doesn't understand emotions at all. So if there is some other layer like, like in our spells, like you have to be happy or you're pooling on something internal where you believe in yourself, it doesn't get that. Just try. Yeah. Here's a book. Good luck. And I'll see you.
Jesper (26m 58s): It would be difficult, but it might not be the worst teacher because I think it can teach people some, some of it, at least I think you, you might not be as you might not be the best spill cost off the word, but I think it can teach you some spills or at least probably you could get something out of it.
Autumn (27m 18s): And I think if you could figure out whatever that ingredient is that it probably doesn't know since it doesn't have magic, maybe you could actually do it very well. If you could kind of figure out what's missing, but until you hit that point, it would probably be the most frustrating experience of having no, you are trying it wrong. Please attempt to spell number three again, just so we found it in my head against a wall O actually that reminds me a, of what was called a, I think it was just, oh my God, I'm sorry. Now I forgot the name of it. But we watched a friends' a, I think it was a friend's movie.
Jesper (27m 59s): You, you have the week a where it is also a scifi movie. Its like somebody wakes up in a, like a cryo chamber and they can't get out and there is something wrong and a cryo chamber. So it, so it's running out of air and there is an AI managing it so she can talk to the AI and all that. And it's, it's actually done really well because Dai just follows commands. Right. So she has to think about how can I get out of this and find the right, because the AI knows it at all all the time, but it doesn't think about suggesting anything to her and that's not what he does. Is it just, if you ask it something, it will reply like, yes I can do this or no cannot be done a or something.
Jesper (28m 44s): So, and is quite interesting. And at the end as well, it doesn't mean I don't even know it kind of where the name of it. I can't go look it up. Yeah, no, but, but at, at any rate she comes up with a solution in Indiana that you could probably have done in within the last two first two seconds if she had just thought of it. And that, that was actually quite neat. That is quite kind of good.
Autumn (29m 5s): Oh, I like that. So it's a fair you again, you admit having an AI as a teacher could be a very interesting, horrible teacher. You just you'd have to be best for.
Jesper (29m 18s): Yeah. Well I did that. No, because I, I guess what I'm saying is that it's actually not that bad as if a teacher, so you just have to be able to out-think your teacher, which could be difficult.
Autumn (29m 34s): Yeah. That is difficult. Yes. All right. Well, we'll see. I'm glad you agreed with me. So we will go to your number three.
Jesper (29m 42s): You're putting worded in my mouth then. Okay. So I don't know if I took the easy way out here with my number three, but I really think this is going to be a very poor teacher. Well, I, you better come up with a very good poor teacher. You're gonna lose some points on and taking it easy way out. Oh shoot. Okay. So my name number three is the wizard who were once very competent, perhaps one of the most skilled wizards in the whelm. However he has since turned into a complete drunk. So I'm not, I'm just talking about someone who's like fond of a bit of alcohol and may be a glass of wine in the evening and stuff I'm talking about.
Jesper (30m 28s): Like somebody who's so drunk that he keeps falling on his ass all the time. You mean all the time?
Autumn (30m 37s): Oh no. So good luck learning any magic from that guy.
Jesper (30m 40s): Yeah. It would be like slurring his words. You said it. Yeah. You pronounce it. Like what do you correct? That would be, and what he's on about and know that I have to admit. That would be pretty. I just, yeah, I think I would be walking away going. You just know, give me, just give me your spell book and you don't deserve this. It would be horrible.
Autumn (31m 7s): Yeah. And I've got to, you know, kind of learn anything at all from that guy. No, that, that would be a pretty bad teacher. I could see like your T your parent's like, would they set you up with this? So I was like, is this an internship or something? So we got you to the best mentor and is the famous all day long. And you find out he was like this smelly drunk idiot. He's like, oh my God. And tell your parents no, just Dell. So that'd be kind of, it'd be an interesting story you to write it. But I think I'd get tired if you watch, you didn't watch any of the cursed, which I've talked about things I didn't like about it. But they do have, when the show starts, Merlin is completely drunk himself into having no magic.
Autumn (31m 50s): Basically actually sort of lost his magic. It's complicated, but he is, Merlin starts out is a completely drunk wizard. And I'm like, oh, that is different. Take it.
Jesper (32m 0s): Yeah. That is different for sure. Yeah.
Autumn (32m 3s): So very drunk wizard, but that's not what do you want to have a round? Not as a teacher, but not in general. And I get, especially if I think we talked about this before, like a, a, I think you had come up with a wizard who only can really perform magic. Like we loosened up and it was drunk. But so this is like the opposite. Can you imagine if you're at this teacher incredibly powerful magic, I'm probably drunk so much just hallucinating and still have a magical ability. So it just be just driving through a fireball. You are going to be in the middle, middle of the Tavern and he's gonna be like, oh, this was a dragon. Then shoot a fireball across the room. And there's nothing like a place.
Autumn (32m 47s): Okay. Yeah. That is nuts. But that would be fantastic. Ways of learning. Magik you learned a run and jump really? Well. It would be in shape.
Jesper (32m 57s): All right. Yeah. You'll you learn how to avoid magic? Not to use it very much, so.
Autumn (33m 2s): All right. You want to hear my number three?
Jesper (33m 7s): Okay. I'm ready. Alright.
Autumn (33m 8s): So I think a horrible magic teacher would be a Fae any Fae because they always require bribes. They always require some kind of payment. They speak in riddles. They, as we both know, they break electronics. If you just touch it. So don't ever handle it at your cell phone. So there's a temperamental. They're impatient. I mean, you just, they're a bit elitist. You just don't want to learn from a Fae because I mean, I could see it. You'd wake up in the morning and they have grown a hedge maze that you've got a travel through to learn something that they wanna teach you. And you bought a time, you arrive in to the middle, they've heard a groan bored and went to a party.
Autumn (33m 48s): So she, I just wouldn't want to learn from a face. And that's just a normal thing. I mean, if you think you could have a banshee as a teacher, and if they are a temperamental and angry and she's shrieks, and then you blow your air drums possibly dropped dead from a banshee and we will have those little brownie is like my Bramble. You, you know, we just covered in spine, but it really likes hugs. It's just, you just don't want to deal with Fae. You just don't go there.
Jesper (34m 19s): No. All right. I can see that a yeah.
Autumn (34m 27s): Hm. Oh, you're not depressed. You just don't realize, smell like loses interest.
Jesper (34m 36s): So yeah. Yeah. But do the Fe even know how to cast mat? Do they have magic?
Autumn (34m 40s): Yes. Most do. I think they do is sell it to fail. I know. Okay. It's more like math nature of man and nature. Magic. I am not as temperamental eye must only be partially Fey, I think. No. No. Okay. All right. So I'm gonna have a sit down and have some soul searching. Am I, what do you say?
Jesper (35m 7s): 20% off. 30% off.
Autumn (35m 10s): Let's move on. Then I'm feeling, I'm feeling self-conscious now. Okay. All right.
Jesper (35m 19s): So you want my number two, then you are number two.
Autumn (35m 21s): Let's move on. I changed my mind and I, my, my number three.
Jesper (35m 28s): Yes. Okay. My and number two is quite a character. Oh, all right. Now I have a sound clip of this guy in a second. A really, but a, let me first explain why he's such a terrible teacher. Okay. Okay. Well, first this M first traits I'm going to mention doesn't actually have anything to do with teaching a church, but it just shows why he is a really bad person. So number one, he is a horrible racist. Ooh. Number two, he is home. We phobic and three, he was extremely arrogant.
Jesper (36m 13s): So that was, or not the best at qualities. I think we can agree. Yeah. No, I don't think I want to hangout with this person. Nope. And what makes him at a very poor teacher though, is that he is rude and he was cruel is a vindictive O and he actually enjoys humiliating, humiliating his students O that does not sound okay. Like a very healthy teacher. No. And if that's not bad enough, this will give you a hint as to which character I'm talking about. So how are you ready for us? A short, some clip here, listening.
Jesper (36m 54s): Okay. At first he might be in St as well. So we might be insane as well, because he has an alter ego in the form of a hand puppet. So maybe now you can S sort of guess who that might be, but okay. I'm going to play the clip, but I do. So just a warning here. This guy is not appropriate for some listeners. Okay. So if you have sensitive as you want. Yeah. If you have sensitive ears and if you want too, then please just skip 30 seconds a head on your podcast app now, and then for the rest of us, a buckle in 'cause a, here we go.
Character Voice (37m 40s): All right, kids. It is now my job to teach you the theory of evolution. Now, I, for one thing, that evolution is a bunch of bull crap, but I've been told after, teach it anyway, was thought of a by Charles Darwin. It, it goes something like this. In the beginning, we were all fish, okay. Swimming around in the water. And then one day a couple of fish had a retard baby, and the retard baby was different. So we got to laugh. So retard, fish, it goes on to make more retard babies. And then one day a retard, baby fish crawled out of the ocean with its mutant fish hands. And it had, but sex with a squirrel or something and made this retard, frogs squirrel.
Character Voice (38m 24s): And then that has a retard baby, which was monkey fish frog. And then this monkey fish frog had, but sex with that and monkey, and that monkey add a mutant retard, baby. It screwed another. And that made you, so there you go. All right. A part of an offspring, a five monkeys having a butt sex with a fish squirrel, congratulate who does this
Autumn (38m 55s): Actually totally lost it at first. I thought I knew, but now I'm just completely confusing. It just too shocked, I think is just my brain would into a meltdown, a lockdown mode going just, no. So please, Melissa.
Character Voice (39m 12s): It's Mr. Garrison from south puck.
Autumn (39m 15s): Oh, geez. Okay. So that's going way back. I have not watched Southpark for a very long time, but now that you said that it's there on my memory is extremely shitty teaching. You really don't want this lunatic teaching any magic.
Jesper (39m 34s): No, I also would hate to imagine you would learn any thing other than just a sheer lawsuit, a bill.
Autumn (39m 47s): So yeah, no, he wouldn't last long at the magical academy. I would hope.
Jesper (39m 55s): Oh no. Can you imagine him? He has a teacher. If it were magic, that was to be a nightmare. So that's my number two. All right.
Autumn (40m 3s): Well that's that is legitimately have a pretty horrible teacher. All right. I will. Now my number too is slightly complicated. So you are going to have to stick with me on this one.
Jesper (40m 15s): Okay. Okay. Okay.
Autumn (40m 16s): So it's sort of a simple concept, but a, so you're a teacher is actually going to be a wizard that is traveling it through time, in the reverse direction you are to him, it's forward. But to also, it would be a backward. So the last time you meet him, which is the first time he'll meet you is you are gonna be at your most powerful. And he's going to be like, I'm doing what I have to teach you. What I tomorrow, you're going to know Les. So I have to teach you this spell you're doing now tomorrow. Right? So, but the first time you meet him, he's going to have been teaching you a for 20 or 30 years and being like, don't worry, you don't understand it. Now you'll get it. And like five days, it don't worry about it.
Autumn (40m 58s): So it's just going to be complicated. Or you can make it really complicated that you actually teach him magic until you switch. And then he is teaching you the magic. You taught him later. So it becomes this infinity loop. That's just going to blow your mind.
Jesper (41m 16s): My brain is on fire.
Autumn (41m 20s): Glad I could help you out.
Jesper (41m 21s): How is that? Even gonna work?
Autumn (41m 25s): Its magic. Why not?
Jesper (41m 28s): But the first time, the first time did you meet him? He will think that you already know everything. There is no reason to teach you. How so? How do you even get to the end where you actually learned anything? Because you will never teach it to you.
Autumn (41m 40s): Well, he will have it to you for 20 years. So he'll know to you. It will be the first day. It would be like, oh my God, I don't know who you are. What are you talking about? Magic. And he's going to be like, look, I'm going to be your teacher for the next 30 years. Just get ready. You're going to tell you, you got to figure this out. I'll be back tomorrow. So you're gonna be like twice as a annoyed because just like, oh, I don't understand this. So I think he's gotta be all sappy because it's gonna be the last day he's ever gonna see you. So in to you, it's just the first day. You're all going to see. And it's just going to be really crazy. It'll be fairly fine in the middle. Maybe we not.
Jesper (42m 19s): So he is, he is aware that he is traveling in the opposite direction in time.
Autumn (42m 24s): He knows that. Yes, he knows it. So it, you just got to him its forward. But tell us is backward is timeline just goes into reverse compared to the way we see time.
Jesper (42m 35s): So he's also getting younger.
Autumn (42m 37s): I don't know. I didn't figure that one out. I guess. No, he'd be aging because he, to him, it says forward time. So guess it's backwards at him. It's forward.
Jesper (42m 48s): Oh my God, my brain can't even comprehend. How does that work? Is this too complicated?
Autumn (42m 54s): All of them. I thought it wasn't. I had to days of 12 hours of nothing but rain.
Jesper (43m 3s): Okay. But you mentioned a cabin fever before a, now I start seeing the symptoms.
Autumn (43m 8s): Yes. Coming up with teachers who are traveling backwards in time. And especially when I thought of the loop where actually your teaching him magic. When you, when you, when he first meets U and then eventually you switched and he was actually teaching you the magic. You taught him. And it's just this lovely, infinite loop of who actually knew magic first because yeah, go figure that one out.
Jesper (43m 34s): No, I can't. I still can't figure out how are you going to learn anything, but okay. Well, it, exactly, this was supposed to be worst possible to a person to teach you a magic. Yeah, you, yeah, you mind. But it's like when I was the Terminator movies, that was the same thing all day.
Autumn (43m 57s): I can get into a rabbit hole of trying to figure out, but how is this even working? So if they destroyed a microchip in moving up a two, how did it move it? Number one ever happened so I could get completely sucked in to it. So you're overthinking it. That's all right. Let's just agree. It is a hole Teeter and we will move on it.
Jesper (44m 19s): It, it is a bad teacher for sure.
Autumn (44m 22s): Yes. Okay, great. Excellent. I can agree to that. All right.
Jesper (44m 27s): Okay, good. So you ready to go on to my top one? So our number one, so yes, I'm ready. And this one is sort of in the same vein as your dragon. It is not a dragon, but it, it, is it the same wane in this sense that this team is also incredibly cool and would probably honestly be a very awesome teacher in some regard, but also incredibly dangerous.
Autumn (45m 4s): Hmm. Okay. So like a dragon, but not a dragon. Okay. Not a dragon.
Jesper (45m 8s): No. And I have a recording of his voice here. All right. So I'm going to play in and then see if you can guess who this is. Okay. All right. So far I haven't gotten any of the gasses, so we have to say no. And that's why I like to keep putting a questions for you. You can't get it. So, I mean, okay, here we go.
Character Voice (45m 56s):
Jesper (45m 57s): That was not his voice. Then that is yours.
Autumn (46m 6s): It might have been a bit weird. There's this voice it at the dog. Is it like, what is it the, you said is the voice of it and set off my dog. We are going to go with that. He was like, what the heck? I must protect you from this thing and need indeed.
Jesper (46m 20s): Yeah. So it took a few hints. You feel lost?
Autumn (46m 23s): I had a few hints. Oh. It's like, I wouldn't normally have thought is a dragon. That was actually the immediately as a small gun like that. It's not a dragon or is it Soren? Is the, okay. So not as a dragon though. All right.
Jesper (46m 35s): Okay. A hint, number one, he's also known as the necromancer. Is that help? No. What I mean, is it narrows down the potential list?
Autumn (46m 48s): Okay. And this, but obviously I have a one more week. All right.
Jesper (46m 51s): Yes. Yes. It has been a movie. That's correct. All right. What's the next 10 is the next time. It is. What do you just heard was the blacks speech of model. So that is like sarin or S M if not, so you can't think as a whole,
Autumn (47m 9s): but yeah, I knew it was a Lord of the rings or at least.
Jesper (47m 13s): Okay. Okay. All right. You didn't get that. All right. So which, which one is it from Laura of the rings? How you gonna make me go back and watch the installer? Or is it,
Autumn (47m 20s): I said it was Saren you didn't say yes. A
Jesper (47m 27s): ll right. So we, yeah. OK. In a roundabout way, I guess, but a, I will replay the clip. I said what?
Autumn (47m 35s): I said, I thought it was small. And then I thought, okay, it's not a dragon. It's Saren so I will reply. I got it. And then just say it. Okay.
Jesper (47m 43s): So maybe I talked over you then. Okay, fine. Okay. Then you're guested, but this guy is definitely can teach you a lot. It will also end in your own doom. Yeah. He will suck out your soul. Yeah. Yeah. Toll can actually set that absolute evil couldn't exist, but he then stated that sovereign came S Neah to a wholly evil we'll ask what's possible.
Autumn (48m 11s): Wow. Talk and set that. So do you want that guy to teach you not without a lot of magical protection and even then it'd be pretty desperate that it would be a really, yeah. I like my soul too much to want to have Saraj. And it was my, my, my instructor, but talk about learning. Darke magical. Art's you would be like a rockstar this, but that's what I mean. Right. In terms of how he probably could teach you a lot.
Jesper (48m 38s): And that sense, he was probably an awesome teacher, but yeah. You're gonna get sucked into darkness. Buy doing it. Yeah, probably. Yeah, you do. If you wanted it to be eval, it, it would probably be a good fit. But since he's a mortal, you're never going to take his place and it's just not going to end well at all.
Autumn (49m 2s): No, not really.
Jesper (49m 2s): And in that sense, it's it's, I would say maybe it was, is, it is a bit worst than the dragon, because it's a dragon you just get killed. How do you have to shuffle for eternity the way through all of this stuff? Yeah. Yeah. That would be a pretty bad. So that is a very good number one. I will admit it's hard and soft and I was pretty much a Trump card for that was like saying Darth Vader was going to teach you the Force. So you're like, well, is there you go? Yeah. He tells you a kill all this pupils, but you, if you survive, you will be great.
Autumn (49m 36s): Yeah, exactly. Alright. Well, I don't know what is a pretty good it is. I still have the dragon though. So I think we're pretty even. So you wanna hear my number one?
Jesper (49m 45s): OK.
Autumn (49m 46s): All right. Here it, so this is a sort of actually along the lines of one of yours, but it's a sorceress that isn't good at explaining things, but is it a really good at demonstrating? She just loves to demonstrate. So you could imagine her coming in, in and going, okay. Class' today. We are going to learn to turn that attacker into a slime mold volunteers, and someone would always have to be the victim to get turned into whatever warts POCs, but you know, curses, exes that are being demonstrated that day. And I mean, if I was at a class, I would just live in fear of the day. You actually get to the ones that could possibly kill you.
Autumn (50m 27s): And her were like, I would like to volunteer for the death spell and the reincarnation when right after slate of next semester, we learned, we will keep you a card technically frozen until then would be like, oh, I know you could imagine when your parents permission slip for her.
Jesper (50m 57s): Oh yeah. And then if there is no volunteers, she will pick somebody at random.
Autumn (51m 1s): So that's what a good teacher always does. It just goes in the one who is sliding in the back. The closest thing. No, I don't look at me and Lisa, not me, not me, but again, so that it is my number one. I just think she would then be bad, a horrible teacher to learn from it. It would, I would the anxiety of going to a class with that kind of a teacher and with magic, we would just be a teacher. I think I'd crack. Definitely I'd run away.
Jesper (51m 39s): Yeah, pretty much. So I think just like a, it, it looks like both our lists, most of it will just get you killed basically.
Autumn (51m 47s): So you had soul sucking for your number one, but yeah, you have pretty much any of this as this either. You're not going to learn magic or you're going to die learning magic.
Jesper (51m 59s): Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah. I struggle to see which lists is the worse, to be honest.
Autumn (52m 5s): And I kind of agree. These are a pro thought is, is a pretty bad top 10 list. I have to do it. I would not want to learn from Sorin, but there is pretty much any of this. Like I said, like this a sorceress you likes to demonstrate. I mean, I could just imagine going to class everyday was a teacher you hated that would potentially turn you into something nasty and hopefully turn you back.
Jesper (52m 27s): I mean, can you imagine acting out in her class, what she would do to you? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Even a, a hundred, like Mr. Garrison, what did you, you, if you didn't listen to what he said.
Autumn (52m 45s): Yeah. And especially is lack of passion for teaching this subject. Well, would just kind of end in frustration. I think.
Jesper (52m 58s): Yeah. I don't believe in magic at all, but they tell me I have to teach it to you. Is that so I will so open your books. We're going to then, oh, shoot it. Just get rid of the books. I hit his books. You just keep going. Yeah. And then, oh, well, yeah. Oh my God. Yeah. So I don't know who won this one.
Autumn (53m 17s): No, this was actually a pretty good, I think again, we'll have to leave it up to the listeners and they will have to let us know who had the best list since you want it to be the whole list. I still think dragon, but then sarin, they're pretty evil in this time.
Jesper (53m 34s): A siren and beets a dragon. But then, but yes, he does. He, he can, he could kill a dragon by snapping is finger.
Autumn (53m 44s): Hmm. I don't know. Maybe.
Jesper (53m 47s): Yeah, for sure. But the, the V but the problem is the rest of the list there. I'm not quite sure which one is the best. So we just go by your rules. So that is only about the best in the list then I one, but you, you, you said that a, you trusted me in the fact that I was remembering correctly. That is about the entire list. That's what you said it, and therefore I'm not too sure who won, but do you want to contradict that you, that I was wrong and it was not about the entire list and it was only about the best one on it. A, I want to contradict that. I will say we agreed to the ground rules for this one was only about the whole list.
Autumn (54m 29s): I have to go back and check on the earlier a podcast on the worst list. But so this one, we set it up. That is the whole list. And I don't think we can change it at this point, unfortunately. So, and they're both pretty even lists. I'm not sure who's going to be the winter. We'll have to flip a coin and hope it's not a magic coin. That's been hexed so that the winner gets the worst. I'm not sure.
Jesper (54m 57s): No. Okay. So next Monday we are going back into writing and we'll, she has some great tips
Narrator (55m 2s): On how you all right. Well, simple as that. And then looking forward to it. If you like, what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patrion.com/and Writing fantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, going, stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Jeff Wheeler is a highly successful fantasy author.
His books have been on the Wall Street Journal Bestseller list 5 times and have sold more than 4 million copies. His novels have also been translated into many languages.
Jeff Wheeler joins the Am Writing Fantasy podcast to talk about his road to becoming a full time author, having Amazon as a publisher and his love for fantasy.
Jeff can be found here: https://jeff-wheeler.com/
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy.
For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am writing Fantasy Podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need in literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than in 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello I'm Jesper and this is episode 130 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, and Autumn is busy editing our novel today, so I brought on an awesome guest instead, and that is Jeff Wheeler. So welcome to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. Jeff,
Jeff (47s): Thank you so good to be here.
Jesper (50s): Yeah, I've prepared a, just a bit of information about your Jeff. So I can just go through that and then see if I'm missing something. And then, then you can add to it, but basically if anybody listening should not be aware who Jeff is already, then Jeff is a, an author of multiple fantasy series. He has sold over 4 million books and he has also been on the wall street journal bestseller list five times and a year. Novels have been translated into multiple languages as well. And I was on your website earlier today. Jeff and I counted 33 books. So you're quite prolific.
Jeff (1m 24s): Hmm. Thank you. So it's my, my dream job was to be writing book, so I love it. I do every day. So
Jesper (1m 33s): Yeah, that's, that's so wonderful. It, especially if you can, a once a week, once you can make a living from it, then that's, that's really nice. But a, but I think I also read on your website that you started out self publishing and then God, a traditional publishing contract a bit later on. So w is that right?
Jeff (1m 51s): Ah, it is the, of my publishers, not exactly traditional it's Amazon publishing. So after creating the platforms like KDP and things like that, they created their own publishing companies. And I was one of the first authors. They picked up for their fantasy, a line in 47 north.
Jesper (2m 9s): All right. All right. Cool. Why did you decide that you wanted it to self publishing in the first place, Jeff?
Jeff (2m 18s): For me, it, it, I'm sure my story's very similar to too many of your listeners and others that I tried, the traditional routes. I tried like getting an agent. I tried doing those things and I even created my own magazine to get a readership going through that, so that when I started a self publishing novels that they would take off and none of that worked. And, and so I kind of put it aside. And then I, I wrote as another series of novels, my mirror would novels and again, tried the route of getting an agent was turned down over 40 times. And I finally said, well, either I either going to try this by myself, because the other way isn't working.
Jeff (3m 1s): And so I decided to self publish all three of those books simultaneously. So that way readers wouldn't have to wait a everything in between. So I invested the money in there, put it out there, and it happened to come right around the time that Katie P was launching and things like that. So before, when you could only order a print book, a ha having a digital version made things a lot easier. And then suddenly fans started to come in and as my sales increased, that kind of put me on the radar for Amazon publishing. And they reached out to me and asked to acquire that series. So I didn't even, I didn't even get sent a query letter. They, they, they, they sent me a query letter.
Jesper (3m 41s): That's a position you want to be in, but that, I guess that's a couple of years down the road that it isn't it a, that Amazon reached out about that, or
Jeff (3m 51s): That's true. I had, I had been trying, it's a break into the market for over a decade. So I I'm an overnight success story that took over 20 years to happen. But again, that story is not unique to me. I know a lot of other authors that tried that route and many of them, ah, even who've self-published, you then got a, a contract with some of the big publishing company. So it's not a unique story, but I love working with Amazon because at their heart, there are a tech company in having grown up in Silicon valley, having worked for Intel, a myself, a I understand in their DNA, I understand how they work in their, their constant search for innovation and creating new ways of, of looking and breaking into markets.
Jeff (4m 34s): And I thought that they were absolutely my, the kind of model that I was looking for a publisher that was going to be innovative and try to reinvent how publishing works. And boy, have they done that?
Jesper (4m 47s): Oh yeah, you could definitely say so, but I guess some people might be curious about what, what is Amazon like as a publisher? How is it to work with them?
Jeff (4m 58s): For me, it's, it's been a delightful experience. And I, again, I know many other authors that have a publishing contracts with the major publishers. So there was a lot of core differences, but to me, those differences or advantages that Amazon has, like, for example, I have a dashboard, I can see my book sales every single day. And I know we get that through KTP as well, but I think we get it in and Amazon publishing as a, as a little bit more robust in terms of the market demographics and things that we have access to. I, I get my royalty statements every month, so I know what I'm going to be making in advance. I get to see those royalty statements. I get to see a brake, you know, broken down a, through all the different markets in the world that, that do that.
Jeff (5m 40s): A, I earn, you know, a competitive royalties that you would get it, any of the major publishers as well. So I get paid more frequently and, and just as much in the fact that I don't have an agent also helps cause I don't have to pay an agent fee as well. So that's, that's a bonus, a working with them also really nice because certain publishers have cadences. So you have to be like, I'm very prolific. And most publishers wouldn't be able to keep up with a indie schedule that I have, but Amazon can. So I published three to four books with them every year. And then I still publish indie titles occasionally as well. Cause I want to keep that side a open as well. So I'm kind of a hybrid author, but most of my work comes out through Amazon.
Jeff (6m 23s): And I can really understand that the decisions that they make are based on data, they're based on a lot of research, they test a lot of things. And so they're able to see what efforts yield to book sales. And so that is amazing. A lot of publishers don't have that visibility to see what they're, what, what effort and what strategy actually increases the number of sales. So all of those things said, I think it's really a wonderful publisher to have
Jesper (6m 52s): Do it. Do you also have like a dedicated team of, you know, and as a dedicated editor and dedicated, covered of signs or, or are they more like menacing their pool of authors with a pool of resources? If you know what I mean?
Jeff (7m 5s): They definitely use a pool of resources, independent contractors. So I have a editor, you know, assigned to me at Amazon, but then I have a team of, at a development editor for a copy editor for a proofreader that I work with the same people every time. And I do that by request because they know my body of work and they're able to help me see when I've made mistakes, which is frequently. Right. So that's helpful, but they also, you, you contact people to do cover design. So, I mean, I've worked with several different cover designers. I don't really have ultimate say in that, but I, you know, they often say, Hey, these are the three or two that we're looking at. Do you have a preference between them? So I do get to speak up at the beginning a, but we don't use the, this the same ones.
Jeff (7m 49s): They, these are a variety of them to work with all of the different authors that they publish.
Jesper (7m 55s): Right, right. You okay. And if a, some of our listeners, which I'm sure some will be interested in a way, how do people normally get picked up nowadays by Amazon publishing? Is it, it just based on when they see somebody has enough sales, they are reaching out or, or how, how does that work? Normally
Jeff (8m 15s): Today, the way I was picked up was more how it was done in the past. That was over 10 years ago, it's much more traditional now. So they mostly work through agents who then will submit at all, not only to the big five, but also to Amazon publishing as well. So to get in there really having an agent is almost the only way. I mean, I'm sure there's other ways too, that they reach out to other authors that are established and invite them to come in as well. But a there, there definitely, as they were growing a w they were, they were at the one searching for authors and now authors are coming to them through agents for the most part.
Jesper (8m 51s): Yeah. It's a wonderful, a first mover advantage. You can get some times
Jeff (8m 56s): So, absolutely. And I feel very lucky that I was, I happened to be catching the wave when it happened and have had works already in, and I was writing a whole new series. So when they purchased my mirror with a series, they said, well, what else are you writing? And I told him about my next one, my mirror wind series. And they, they grabbed those to, so I'd signed a six books deal just right off the bat, which is kind of unusual that doesn't happen to everybody.
Jesper (9m 20s): No, I can imagine. Yeah, that's a pretty good. So, but are you then also doing some of your own advertising or is Amazon taking care of all of the Amazon ads for you? And so on
Jeff (9m 31s): A Amazon covers the advertising and the marketing for sure. And so all the resources that people can pay for today through KDP and things like that, we've been using it within a pub for years, and they even have more things that they can do than our, what we're available. So they can send targeted emails and things to past readers to make them aware of my books coming out. That's not something that's available through KDP. So they definitely have all of their tools plus all the tools that they are now a allowing indie authors too use. And so it, it, it's just neat to see how they've invented this ecosystem to make it possible for writers all over from, from all over the world, a to be able to make careers out of this.
Jeff (10m 13s): And so it's just, it's, it's amazing. And I have a lot of friends in the, in the space as well and get it here, but what they're doing and what they're spending their money on in terms of marketing that I don't have to do, because Amazon's giving that to me is just part of being one of their authors. Right.
Jesper (10m 29s): Are you running any sort of advertising besides what Amazon does? So you, are you completely leaving it? Everything to them? I doing like I'm thinking like BookBub ads or Facebook ads. So anything like that, or do you do any of
Jeff (10m 40s): That? I, I don't, I've, I've tried different ones for my self published title's as well, but I found that just the machine than Amazon is that by the virtue of them selling my books, my indie titles get sucked into that machine. And so it, it makes it available for readers. Anyways, I've tried those different approaches. I know different people have. It's just not something I personally spend my own money on because I already have the benefits of being able to utilize it through Amazon.
Jesper (11m 13s): Yeah. And I think over the years, I've also come to the realization more and more that a, if you can find a way to, well, some people call it a tickle the algorithm in Amazon. But if you could, if you couldn't find a way to get Amazon to just push you a book that is a million times easier than anything, you can do yourself basically
Jeff (11m 34s): True. But I don't want to underestimate the importance of having a social media presence, having a newsletter list, being engaged with your fans, because that's something they appreciate. And a little bit of effort like creating a newsletter or responding to a message on Facebook or Twitter, or I'm on Instagram as well, and creates that relationship between the author and the reader much more so than when I was a kid growing up, or you'd have to write a letter and mail it to the publisher. And you would eventually maybe if you get to author who may eventually ride back or you'd might see them that a convention are, you might see in them in a book signing, the relationship is much more dynamic now. And I think that having a social media is, has a great enabler of that because it allows us as authors to be able to connect with those fans.
Jeff (12m 22s): And the more, a connected they are to you, the more they like you as a person, the more they're going to stay on top of your re re release schedule. And they're going to be wanting to pre-order in and by things coming off so that that's outside the algorithm's, you cannot overstate the importance of word of mouth and how your loyal fans are your most likely source of a future leaders more than an algorithm, I think.
Jesper (12m 47s): Oh yeah. Yeah. For sure. No doubt about that icon. I also saw that you are also running a, a, like a newsletter and you have a mini mail list and I sought out on your website as well. How, how, how effective do you find your email list in terms of, you know, generating sales and so on? I, are you using that whenever you have a new book, you're sending out an email and do you then see that convert to sales or, or do you have more Relias as you said before on Amazon pushing things?
Jeff (13m 12s): Well, I, I know Amazon con their email list is a lot bigger than mine, so I don't know how much, I don't know how much my newsletter does, but I know that I know, for example, when I send out a newsletter about a pre-order available for a new book that I do, I immediately see a pre preorders going in. So it, it absolutely helps, but I'm not going to a kid myself so that the 800 pound gorilla is not me. And, and in terms of, of, of, of moving the needle. But again, I know my fans like hearing from me, they, they respond back to those e-mails, we, we, I, I respond back to them. I try to be very open and available to my, to my readers and let them know that I'm not, I'm not afraid to talk to them, not afraid to interact with them.
Jesper (13m 57s): I think that's a good point. We had actually a podcast episode probably by the time this goes out, it's probably like a month, two months ago or something like that. But autumn and I was discussing the effectiveness of social media in today's landscape in that episode. And I, I do think it's a bit of a difficult one because I fully agree with what you're saying in a sense of interacting with readers and people and responding to them if they tweet at you and you're you send it back a, a, a reply on. So I think that is really important, like you were saying as well. A, but the thing that I am wondering about when, what we discussed quite lengthy in that episode was that it really worth one thing is like somebody tweets out at you all are sense of Facebook messages and you apply it to that sort of one thing.
Jesper (14m 43s): And another thing is being actively engaging and trying to build up some sort of a, let's say using as a marketing tool to try to get sales on so on. Whereas I'm not so sure that that part is very efficient anymore. I I'm really not. So convinced that because social media is also a time suck, right? You can spend so much time and generating new posts or a new content to post there and whatnot. And I'm not really sure that it helps so much when it comes to sale. I think you are you're time is probably better spent writing and releasing a new book, to be
Jeff (15m 16s): Honest. No, I, I would agree with you. And, and if you've been on social media at all, you've seen, especially brand new authors, you using that too, to market a book in, and people don't pay attention to that, what they pay attention to a friend who's recommending you're book. So yeah, I, I use social media and let my fans know when my books are on sale. That's another awesome thing Amazon does for me. They put my books on sale regularly, even after the initial launch, it could be years later, there's still a marketing. My releases, my fans would want to know that they're on sale for 99 cents or a, a, you know, a, a British pound, right. They want to know that. So I want to make sure that they're aware of it.
Jeff (15m 57s): And then I find my fans will often forward and boosts that signal to saying, oh, this is on sale. And they share that with their friend. So that's, that's effective much more effective than, than me doing it because I don't, I mean, I, I've never bought, brought in a book because of the author reached out to me. I've, I've, I've, I've, I've bought a book because my friends and my author friends are recommending books to read. So that's, that's the power of it. I think people can definitely try to beat that too much. And what's more important is just being genuine and real in your social media and not just posting about your books, but posting about other things. I, all my Instagram account, I do, I do photos. I D that's a different thing than what I do on my Twitter.
Jeff (16m 39s): And so it, I just try to use the different social media is depending on the purpose of it, but it's not just for promoting a, a new release.
Jesper (16m 51s): Hmm... No, I get you a and I was also thinking a, just shifting gears slightly here, because I noticed that as well on your website, that you have a book called your first million words, a where you are describing your journey to publication. And, and as far as I could tell, at least I think that's the only a non-fiction book. If you had, at least this was the only one I found on your website, but why did you decide to write that one? I was a bit curious about that.
Jeff (17m 14s): It's a, it's a great question. I get asked so often, you know, I get, I get email request from authors that are starting out students in college, high school students. I'm part of teen author bootcamp as a player, I get asked for advice a lot. And so over the years I had written articles T which I put it on my blog, but I kept getting asked, like in, in speaking appearances, tell us your author journey, tell us how you got where you are. And I, my story's kind of a different and unique and a lot of twists and turns. And it that I think, I thought it would be helpful to other who are beginning their own journey. And so, I mean like many I've read Stephen King's on writing.
Jeff (17m 56s): I've, I've read a lot of different things all on the craft, but over the years, like looking at Intel and then in doing this, you know, dealing with the discouragement of getting rejected so many times, there's a lot of aspects to it that I think weren't being covered. And so I just, I, you know, I've, after having shared in speeches and talks my story so many times, I said, you know what I mean, just going to start writing these things down in a book, it's probably only gonna be like 70 pages. And it ended up being almost, you know, a lot more than that. And I just, I wanted it. I wanted it to inspire. I wanted it to inspire future authors. I wanted them to see the good, the bad and the cringe-worthy right.
Jeff (18m 37s): There's things that, of the mistakes I've made along the, the, the, the, the road that it's like, look, you know, I didn't get this right on the first try. I, I mean, I, here's what I did. Here's how I plotted my own course when, when nobody was telling me yes, and everyone was telling me know, and I just want it to give it, give some of the hope that if they tried not necessarily what I did, but just see that they're going to have their own journey. And I just felt like sharing that experience. In fact, I got a text from a, a, a high school buddy of mine just last night who finished your first million words, and he's a high school teacher down in LA. And he was like, wow. It's like, I knew you were in high school. I had no idea of these things that you went through.
Jeff (19m 18s): Thank you for being candid with us on your failures, as well as your successes, because you learn so much that, those things. And that's, that's what I wanted it to do with that book.
Jesper (19m 31s): Yeah. And I also really appreciate it because you, you, you are very much giving back. And I really like that a lot. Also, when, when I reached out a, regarding this podcast episode, you replied quite quickly that you were very happy to come on for it and for a chat here. So, and so I think it's a wonderful once people get some, some success and they sell a lot of books that they don't sort of forget to give back to everybody else. Who's not at that level yet. So I do it really appreciate it. I think it's a very good thing.
Jeff (19m 58s): You know, what it feels like when I created, started creating my own magazine deep magic, I would reach out to authors that I admired and, and, and hearing back, just hearing back anything meant so much to me. So I still remember what that was like, and you were a very courteous, yes, we are with your request. So I do this, this, this kind of a thing frequently, so, and I'm happy to do it.
Jesper (20m 18s): No, that, that's, that's a wonderful, but we also need to talk a bit of a fantasy here. Of course, 'cause a, this is The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. And I saw that you initially inspiration as well was from this Shinara, a Chronicles by Terry Brooks'. So T tell me a bit about that.
Jeff (20m 38s): Absolutely. I was not an avid reader until probably high school, but for me it began that kind of a desire to become a writer began. I was in middle school and it started with Terry Brooks' book a from his Shannara a universe. And it w you know, for me, I would pick up a book and I would immediately start to try to predict the endings. And most of the time I was right. And so it, it was, it just, it, to me, it, it was hard to find a book that challenged my imagination. And, and again, I, I wasn't reading Tolkien back then. I was just trying a lot of different things. And it was that Terry books, books that really kind of kickstarted to me in, in me the desire to be able to do that.
Jeff (21m 20s): He happened to come to Silicon valley multiple times for a book signings at the local as some of the local bookstores. So I had the opportunity to meet him. And so he really played a role in, in, in, in, in terms of my creativity of, of having unpredictable plots, having strong characters, having a lot of action. That's a kind of thing that I like to write good versus evil. Those themes and stories have always appealed to me. And so he became somebody that I looked up to well, as an adult, I found that he was doing a writing seminar in north of San Francisco, and I had the opportunity to spend an entire day with him.
Jeff (21m 60s): And you can just imagine how that affected me the chance to, he's going to read my writing. I'm going to be able to learn from him for a whole day. That was really a turning point moment for me. So yes, it began when I was in middle school, but he's influenced me even until today. In fact, I was so happy when my publisher approached him to do a little blurb for my newest series, the first Sergeant times. And he agreed to read the first book and do a blurb for it. I mean, I was over the moon, as you can imagine that somebody that I looked up too, I'd studied under a, was, I was now supporting it. I've been to a comic con event with him and up onstage with them. So it's been a fantastic thing.
Jeff (22m 41s): The influence that he's been in my life from the earliest of times, sparking that creativity within me, and then being able to watch his career and see how he's handled it and, and, and to learn from him in person was just amazing.
Jesper (22m 55s): Yeah. How did it feel getting critique on your work far from him? How did that feel at that point in time?
Jeff (23m 1s): Well, it was terrible. All right, because we all had to submit a story to him in advance. And I wasn't the first one that he began the critique with. And, and he was very, very candid and very pointed with his critique. You, it, it wasn't like a, I'm just going to try and make you feel good. He was challenging what people were saying. He was showing gaps in logic. He was showing where things weren't working. And I was starting to just sweat, like, oh my goodness, this is going to be horrible. And when he got to mine, he asked some questions, he challenged me, but I was able to answer it. And he didn't rip my, my things apart at all. And I was like, well, that's interesting. And then when we, we had it a little lunch break, we're in this cafe, buy this book at this bookstore.
Jeff (23m 46s): And I was sitting there and I was watching him get his sandwich. And I was in my mind, I'm a come sit by me, come sit by me. And he did, he came and sat by me. So I was just the two of us. And he told me during that lunch, he was like, Jeff was like, you're the best writer in this class. He was like, I could really see that U you have, you can have a future with us and talk about validation. I, I was like, wow. It was like to hear that from you're, you're a superstar. It meant the world to me. And it, it, it, but it, what that did is that it actually motivated me to throw away all the fantasy books that I had written prior to that. And to say, you know what, I've learned a lot from him. I've learned a lot through my magazine. I'm going to start fresh with something brand new.
Jeff (24m 27s): And that was my mirror wood series. And that's the one coincidentally, after having written and thrown away a million words, that was the book that a launched my success.
Jesper (24m 40s): So, yeah, it must've been extremely transformative as far as I can also hear from what you're saying, having a chat with him there, and my God, how lucky that he just sat down at your table.
Jeff (24m 50s): I know, I know it just was one of those things. Like, it was just meant to be a again, if I had the pleasure of meeting him since then, and it's just been a wonderful thing to, to know him.
Jesper (25m 2s): So did you fall in love with a fantasy genre from reading those specific books? A, was that sort of the trigger?
Jeff (25m 10s): Well, the vet, we all did help, but to be honest, the first books that I wrote while I was in high school, we're more thrillers, a more, a political thrillers. And, but I, when I came to realize is how much research you had to do to make something accurate in today's world. It took a raw, less research to make a fantasy world, because you could create the, the landscape, the geography, you weren't constrained by historical things. And so for me, a lot of my inspirations for my fantasy novels have come from periods of history in our own planet. Sometimes medieval Europe, I've written a series on ancient China. I've done lots of different kinds of series that I can kind of dive into.
Jeff (25m 53s): It kind of take something that interested me from history, and then it kind of repackage it and make it my own. And that's what I really loved about fantasy as it's not that it, the lack of research it's just allowed me to combine different elements that I didn't have to worry about somebody coming back and saying, no, this isn't the way it really works. Like you can't say that to a fantasy author. Cause you know, in my world, apple trees produce in what's in what, twice a year. And no one can tell me I'm wrong because I invented apple trees that way. So
Jesper (26m 26s): Yeah, no, I fully agree. I sometimes a hear on other podcasts as well when some of those may be a thriller auteurs and authors and so on. Talk about how, you know, Rita's come back to them and say, well, this gun, actually, it doesn't work that way and so on. And I, every time I'm just like, I'm so happy. I don't have that problem. Exactly, exactly. Well, of course we, we do still need to think a bit about the weapon's we use and the Armas, we used a a, unless you sort of create something that nobody has ever heard about. We, we still need to think a bit about that and not make it a unrealistic in that sense, but, we do have an easier life.
Jeff (27m 2s): It's it's true. And, and to me there's a lot of fun in researching things. I saw some great, a German videos of medieval Knights for my first Argentine series. Like how sturdy the Armour wise, how would they get it? How would they stand up against arrows and swords and things and watching a film footage of Armour taking a beating, or weapons' taking a beating, see, and that to me, and it's not even research, that's just fun. And so I like doing that stuff to make my stories as realistic as possible, but then you got to create your magic system and that's, that's part of the fun too.
Jesper (27m 39s): That's the best part. Yeah. Yeah. I also was, I can't remember anymore because there's many, many years ago, so I cannot remember if it was on one of the network shows or if it was just YouTube videos of whatever I can't remember anymore, but I was one time where they were this discussing whether or not like medieval Knight, you could resist a shut from like a musket and, and the, the, almost that they created now, the musculature right through them. Ah, but then during this show, they talk to like a, a, a blacksmith who we specialized in creating medieval llamas. Like they were created back then, and then they got him in the show to Smith, such an AMA, and then they shot at it and the bullet did not go
Jeff (28m 27s): Through it. Yeah. So there's all sorts of things. That was pretty interesting. I found was one of the tickets and I actually used to it in my new series that they would have these trials between nights and they wouldn't, you know, they wouldn't even wear armor that just sword against the board. And, and so you imagine getting cut up by a sword? Well, they would use moldy bread to put on the wound and I'm like moldy bread. It's kind of like penicillin, you know, I, my, they figured that stuff out, they figured out that moldy bread helped keep preventive women from getting infected. I'm like, that's cool. I've got to use that if my series, which I did it.
Jesper (29m 1s): Yeah. It's so cool. Yeah. And, and I'm also, I love listening to, I don't know if you ever listen to Dan Carlin, so a hardcore history podcast, a but that is such, such a good podcast. And I remember some point when he was talking about medieval Knight's as well as, and he was saying something like, they were like tanks, you know, it, when you meet a, a medieval Knight on a battlefield, you just can't, you can't do anything. So you saw it, it will not penetrate. If you could just hit him and it hit him and hit him and it doesn't help
Jeff (29m 28s): You and hope he falls down because other than that you're toast. Yeah. Yeah.
Jesper (29m 35s): So that was pretty cool. Well-
Jeff (29m 37s): It, it was exactly what was that. It was that kind of a theme that kinda of medieval night that inspired by new series. Cause I really wanted to write a story about Knights, but from their point of view and the training they'd have to go through the armor, they'd have to wear how hard it was. And some of the books I read from, you know, accounts written from the, you know, 12 hundreds, 11 hundreds, and it just fascinating. You send me those little details that we as authors weave into our stories, that when it is often, when people read my books, they don't realize this is real. This is a scene that actually happened in history. I'm not just making it up.
Jesper (30m 12s): Do you always go with some, something from real history that inspires you or do you all, so something sometimes just make something completely random up.
Jeff (30m 21s): Most, most of the books that I've written have come from something that inspired me from history or from Dungeons and dragons, a, a big role playing a fanatic, especially when I was in high school and in college. And so those story elements are, those are my two biggest sources of inspiration. And mostly because history is so unpredictable and D and D is so unpredictable. Like when I would play with my friends, they would come up with things that I did not anticipate or expect, which is a great thing to learn is a writer because it's the unanticipated that really delight's a reader. It, if they've like, just like I had a problem with always predicting what was going to happen next, one of the great things as finding ways to be unpredictable and to make your plot twist such that people don't see it coming, then it just deletes a certain part of our brains when something like that happens.
Jeff (31m 14s): And that's one of our, and you go to our core competencies as a writer.
Jesper (31m 21s): Yeah. It it's, it's like a double-edged sword, that stuff. Because a, I also feel like after, after becoming an author and writing books and stories, you know, when I watch like a murder mystery show or whatever, I like it. Not every time of course, but a lot of the times I'm able to foresee who to murder is Willow ahead of time when I'm watching like a TV show on Netflix or something. And it's sort of, I wouldn't say it destroys those shows, but, but it's a different experience watching that kind of thing nowadays, when you a story-telling you yourself compared to when you worked, but I don't know if you have that experience.
Jeff (31m 56s): I can completely relate too. You Yesper because I I've had that too. Book reading for me has not been as enjoyable in recent years as it was in the past because my author brain can't help, but want to make it better, or I predict what's happening because I see the clues and I piece it together. And so I tend to read more biographies or other things that are outside of my genre, just because I need something to trick my brain, to stop me from trying to predict everything that's happening. And I just find, find more history or biographies gives me that then sitting down with a novel, when I can find an author that's new, like one of my new favorite as Anthony, Ryan in the UK, a when I do find some, somebody who's so good at his craft and can create a world and do things and I can't see what's coming, I can't see where he's doing it.
Jeff (32m 48s): I just get transported. It brings me back to those days with Terry books again. And unfortunately its more rare than come in now. And it's just part of the process of being an author of your, you, you, you just start figuring stuff out easier.
Jesper (33m 2s): It, it is. Yes, absolutely. And I also feel like a, one of the things Autumn and I are doing with our books that we really tried and purposely to craft it so that you won't see what is it coming at the end. So we try to with all the books. So we were trying to see if we can sort of make twists always in the end so that you didn't see it because I really feel like personally, at least that's the kind of fantasy books that I like. I like when something happens at the end that I, I couldn't work it out a but at the same time. And maybe that was what you were trying to say a bit there as well, is that if I look across like fantasy books in general, many of them feel to me, at least in not that I've read all of them, of course, but, but the ones I've read a lot of the time, they feel like very, very straight forward.
Jesper (33m 48s): Like it's just like you go on this quest thing and at the end you fight the dragon or whatever and then yay. You, you won. And then, I mean, not that its not, it can be a good story. Of course it could be incredibly well-written. But I just feel like if we can work in some stuff that may be normally belongs a bit more over in another like thrillers and we can, if we can work that a bit into the fantasy, I personally at least feel that it becomes more interesting.
Jeff (34m 17s): A and I agree and that's the kind of books that I like to ride, but even within fantasy you can have things that are more action, adventure, Ew, there's a romance fantasy. And those readers expect a certain kind of trope that, that goes with it. So you, you have to understand kind of what your, what your market is, but I'm always looking for that a different angle of how can I like in my book, the Queen's poisoner, I made my protagonist eight years old and that puts all a whole series of constraints. Right? Cause he's not going to pick up a sword in and defeat the bad guy. He's got a defeat him with his head, but an eight year old can't outsmart as an adult, unless there's another adult helping the eight-year-old.
Jeff (35m 1s): So I like putting together these ideas that kind of create a totally different kind of a story than what people are expecting again. But those with those twists and turns put in there that make you want to keep turning the pages and say, what, how was this kid going to get out of these Kings? This King's clutches, you know, but the cards or so stacked against them. So I like looking for those different angles and not just having the, the stamp using the standard tropes, but often flipping them. No, no, I agree.
Jesper (35m 30s): And is that a book then written for a mature audience? I mean for adults or is it more like a YA?
Jeff (35m 37s): It's kind of both by audience range and I, I know this from my, my Amazon re results. I have readers who are in eight years old and I of readers that are over 80 years old. So I I've got, that's a good way. That's a great problem to have. And so it, you can't really classify it as why, because there is a very adult characters and there as well, but I don't, I don't ride with a lot of adult themes. There's no sex or swearing in, in my books, but, but that's just the kind of things that I like to enjoy myself, but yeah, people of all ages can, can get sucked into it and including my own kids and including my own inlaws. So I've got a range on both sides. So my, my father-in-law's begging for my new book, which comes out next week. So like I can't wait till this book comes out.
Jeff (36m 17s): So it's good to see that, that enthusiasm.
Jesper (36m 21s): Yeah, absolutely. But do you find a, the more books that you write at it becomes more and more difficult to come up with new, let's say interesting takes on things or, or, or, or does just the fact that you go into a different historical, a like theme, does that automatically bring some new twists and turns so to speak into your books? Or how do you feel about that?
Jeff (36m 45s): So, well, I kinda of two different processes. So like when I'm writing a book, my focus is on that one. And, and if a new idea comes to me for another series, while I'm working on that book, I'll send myself an e-mail a kind of capture some of the idea and I'll just file it away and I'll just let it kind of incubate in the back of my head. But I don't spend a lot in my conscious time processing that new idea. I want to stay focused on the idea that I have. So that as I'm thinking about the next few chapters, I always kind of plot off a story arc of where is this series going, but I don't plot all the twists and turns in advance. So I spent my time thinking about is I'm maybe I might need a, a N in, in, or a CASEL or a certain place in as I go in.
Jeff (37m 30s): And as I research that, that would give me a new ideas that I can weave into that story, add some twists to it. But meanwhile, in the background, I've got these other ideas that are cooking and I worried that am I going to run out of ideas? And I can tell you after all these years, my, my, my idea folder and my inbox is getting longer, not shorter. And so a new ideas come to me all the time, often multiple ideas while I'm working on a series. So if I get three new ideas for every series exponentially, that's a problem. Like I'm gonna die before I'm gonna write all of the story ideas that I have. So then I have to really be thoughtful about what am I going to work on next?
Jeff (38m 12s): What's that next adventure going to be? What do I feel the most passionate about? Cause I've got all of these ideas to choose from what are the ones that are the most exciting to me.
Jesper (38m 21s): Yeah. And I think that's actually a good point. A it's one that I've also started thinking more and more about in terms of, because my idea for all of those also a very, very long, and it does not get shorter. Like you S but I, I think it's a, it's a good point. The fact that once you start working on a series, you, you will probably, well, some are some for some people take longer, obviously, but your probably locked in four a year, at least a day. Some people might working on it even longer than that. But I think there is a good point in this choice that you're making, which one do we actually want to ride? And what, and, and what do you then choose out of that list?
Jesper (39m 3s): Write a book. I think, I mean, it does not, I don't think it's easy.
Jeff (39m 7s): No, no, no. It's not a bit. It, for me, it is the key decision maker is, do I have a fire in the belly four? It am I excited? So, right. So I'm working on a series. That's going to be coming out next year. And before I started working on it, I shared three ideas with my wife. And I just talked to her about all three of them, just independently. Here's the three ideas for three different series that I can do. And she said judging by the, by the look on your face, you're the most excited about this one? And I'm like your right. Like, there is a very practical and pragmatic reasons why I could have worked on the other to, but she could tell the, and excitement enthusiasm was there.
Jeff (39m 51s): And that's gotta be a key ingredient. Cause I, I have readers that say, Hey, go back to your, you know, an early, early, early series you self-publish before a mirror would, I said, I have zero interest in going back to that series. I have no fire in the belly, four. It, it would be painful for me to try to go back and try to write more in that world because I had originally designed like maybe a 12 book series. And I have since come to learn that most publishers don't like 12 books series because your readership keeps getting smaller and smaller. The further out you go. And so it's not, they're, they're, they're, they're good for like Robert Jordan's and others, but, but most of us can't a command the attention in that long and they'd preferred trilogies, or maybe for maybe I've done five a month and her advice was spot on and that's the one I'm writing right now.
Jeff (40m 40s): And she was right. I am still excited and passionate about writing this book. And then I'll make the decision as I get near the end of the final book. What am I going to go back to either of those two other ideas or did something else come along that I'm now passionate and excited about it? That's it gotta be a key ingredient for it?
Jesper (40m 60s): Yeah, absolutely. And maybe a way of had to watch the end. Jeff, I'm thinking if I, if we could like invent a time machine here and a, you could go into a time machine and you can travel back to the earlier version of yourself when you were just starting out on your publishing journey. If you had to, you only have time in the, in the past year for, for saying like one advice to yourself, and then you're going to sit back right here and depressant. So what would be the one thing that you will tell you a past selves as a piece of advice?
Jeff (41m 34s): You know, I've, I've, I've wondered that at times, you know, it because, you know, if I look at my journey, what would I have wanted to know the most that would have kept me motivated? Because my skills of changed my interests have changed. I've grown as a writer since becoming a full-time author a lot has changed. And you can't really summarize that in a, in a sentence or two, but the advice, if I could like flip out of a, at a time machine in and talk to myself while I was it Intel, or if I was in high school, I would, I would, I would have just told myself it's gonna happen. Like you're gonna get there. You're gonna become a full-time author some day. But I wouldn't tell me how, because would be no way to summarize that the up and down experience and talk about in my memoir it to the point where that, that self could understand what I was talking about.
Jeff (42m 21s): But, but, but I think it would be motivating to me to know that, you know, that I made it, that I made that happen. And that's the, that's the advice I'd like to give writers today. It's like, like, if you could imagine that you would succeed in anything that you did, what would you dare to do? Like if you knew that there was no chance you could fail, that you would eventually succeed, what would you dare to do? And I, I just knowing that by daring to be an author that I would achieve it someday. And that, if that, if I, if I don't know, if I'd tell myself that I would be more popular than I could have even imagined back then, like I I've exceeded way more than I ever thought I would of never thought I would of deserved.
Jeff (43m 4s): But if I could just tell myself you're going to make it, that would have a, that would've been very inspiring to me. And I hope it's inspiring to your listeners to, to put in the time it takes to write those books in a lonely room without anybody else there, unless you've got a co-writer it's up to you by yourself to pull it off. Well, but to know that you're going to make it, you'd make it worth it.
Jesper (43m 28s): You just don't give up. I think that's a, that's a very good a point to the conversation on M, but Jeff also wanted to ask you if, if a, if people want to check out more about you, where, where do they go?
Jeff (43m 44s): My website is Jeff Wheeler dot com. I have all of my different worlds there. I have a different page from the different worlds that talks about the settings and the magic and the kind of thing. So that way, if people want to explore like, oh, I may be more interested in this one. This one's got a more, a medieval feeling. This ones got it. More of a steam punk feeling. This ones got you. You can kind of look at it that way. I always get asked, like, where do I start? You've got over 30 books. Where do I start? The page that gets viewed the most on my website is one call it the one called a reading order where I suggest if, if I had a pick, this is the order. I would read my books. And cause a lot of my stories are tied together.
Jeff (44m 24s): There's a little hints from one that leak into another. And so if you want to capture all those nuggets and little Easter eggs, you would, if you read it, it in the order, I suggest you, you probably maximize that the most, but that's, that's what I would suggest.
Jesper (44m 42s): That's so cool. And I did, I can confirm the, those well page's you have on your website. It's really cool. There's a nice images and everything as well. So it looks really good. And a, of course, a reading about some, a fantasy setting who doesn't want to do that. It's a, it's a wonderful, thank you. So thank you so much for coming on a Geoff. I really appreciate it.
Jeff (45m 8s): It's my pleasure to be here.
Jesper (45m 9s): Okay. And next week, Autumn will be back and I'm prerecording this, so I'm not quite sure what we're going to talk about, but the tune-in.
Narrator (45m 20s): If you like what are you just heard, there's a few things you can do to SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
There are a LOT of parts involved in writing a story. Even if you are a panster, you should be thinking about the story's plot, characters arcs, how the two inter-link, sub-plots and how they affect the main plot, and then there is the story's emotional plot.
Wait. Emotional plot?
The emotional plot of a story isn't something we talk about much. In fact, there isn't a ton of information out there on it, but it is an important part of plotting as well.
Tune into episode 130 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast as Autumn and Jesper (well, mostly Autumn) share insights on the emotional plot.
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy.
For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (1s): You're listening to the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, this is episode 130 of the am writing fantasy podcast. And in today's episode, we're going to talk about the emotional plot and how to use it. Or perhaps I should say that you Autumn will be talking about...
Autumn (49s): I guess that's fair. This is one of my ideas because when I, I guess I knew about the emotional plot, but when I started playing with it recently and did a recent post in our Patrion feed, I just got so excited. Like, yes, we need to talk about this. And I somehow strong arms you into it.
Jesper (1m 12s): No, no, that's, that's good. Then I can take a bit of a backseat and enjoy all the preparation work you of course have done for this episode, Autumn, like you do for every single episode.
Autumn (1m 24s): Usually. Occasionally.
Jesper (1m 26s): No, you don't.
Autumn (1m 28s): I'll be fine. I have every faith. We'll figure it out besides not doing my homework. How, how have you been?
Jesper (1m 42s): Well, good. I did start writing book two in our series and I really wanted to get a writing sprint done this morning as well, but I failed. I was, I was actually up at five 15 this morning, but yeah, I prioritized exercising thinking that I could get a writing sprint done afterward, but then other tasks sort of got in the way and I hate mornings that just spiral, it feels like it just spirals out of control that way. Yeah. And I always advocate that people should prioritize writing and do it as the first thing, because then you don't get sucked into other things and you see, it happens to me like fingers, but I don't know my excuses that the being a soccer referee as well, it's important that I have a good fitness level.
Jesper (2m 37s): So that's my shoes. But writing is important too. So it's one of those choices. We'll all have to make at some point, but yeah, I will. I'll I'll get some more chapters to be too hard on yourself because you have started writing it. You've done two chapters. We did all the plotting. You finished the previous book, which I'm still editing. So I think you're fine just because you're like a half a book of me, your foe. Yeah. Well, it's not necessarily that I want to be far ahead of you, but it's more like, I like to be productive and I love when I can see progress. So when nothing happens because I get sucked into a million other things, well, I do make progress on other things, but I want to see the book advancing all the time.
Jesper (3m 25s): So since that's a bit annoying, oh, and by the way, my apologize in advance, if somebody can hear shouting in the background while we are recording, because my wife is watching the world championship, ice hockey in the other room and she can get quite an Tuesday astic about that.
Autumn (3m 42s): So if somebody shout to me, that's exciting. That's pretty fun. Yeah. Yeah. How about you? Could we have like a number 10 day? I, since I should've played hooky because I, you know, had to do my homework anyway, but it was one of those days where it's started off cool in the morning and got warm in the afternoon and we just got clouds, but it was like brilliantly, sunny, but not too hot. And it was just if every day was like that, but since it's not, it was definitely one of those. I want to go sit in the hammock and have a cider and just kick up my feet for a little bit.
Autumn (4m 24s): But I was, I adulting and I came prepared as much as you say, I didn't for today's podcast, so I I'm ready, but it's been good. Hey, and I got my second vaccination over the weekend. I am now. Well, once it's all the humanities kick in, I am now vaccinated fully. So that's, that was exciting. It wasn't horrible. I totally prepared. I was planning. I was going to be horribly sick coming in. My husband was horribly sick with his and I thought, okay, I'm just going to, I'm going to sleep on my bean bag chair. And he came back early from his training and was with me for the weekends. I'm like, I am totally, totally fine. And really, I just, I felt a little slow on my head was just, I've had worse, cold.
Autumn (5m 7s): I mean, it really wasn't bad, but I wasn't quite myself. So we didn't, we binged on Netflix and took it pretty easy over the weekend. I didn't force myself strong on myself to do much work. That's always woke up Monday, felt like I had started a bunch of caffeine and ready to go. So that's pretty good. Oh, what do you watch? Everything a program called sexify actually. And it was the characterization and the story were fantastic. I think it's a Polish. And so it was, I do tend to like foreign series and it was just outstanding, the characterization and what they were going through.
Autumn (5m 54s): And there were basically three women, three young college students who decided to develop an app. And the one was, she was head programmer and she was going to do something on sleep. And it was basically told it wasn't sexy. So she came up with something else and we won't go into it on this podcast, but it was a, if it, the name sexify and the stigma around it, you know, here I am skipping the topic, this typic stigma around what they decided to do was so interesting to see all their different roles and how they dealt with parents and try to figure out themselves in the world. And I just, we ended up watching, I think it was seven or nine episodes. And in two days we watched them all admit, which is totally unusual, uses one episode a day for me.
Jesper (6m 38s): But yes, it was fine. Got some tea, got some chips, some veggie chips and just sat down and watched shows. Yeah, that's good. Yeah. And you still need to, if you love the foreign shows, you still need to watch those. I know you need to find them. Right. We have like the bridge, I guess it's the English translation. And then what is it called? What is it called? Killing, I guess it's called, but it's not good in the unit because the English wasn't when you're got a headache, the last thing you want to do is have to read subtitles, but I've looked for that.
Autumn (7m 22s): And I thought, for sure, we had a workaround because we use a VPN and I figured what I could just put the VPN in Denmark. And then I could go ahead and watch the shows that I can't get in the U S it doesn't work that way. Netflix won't let me log in unless I'm under the U S VPN. So I can't get to your shows. Maybe I come over there and watch with you. Yeah. Yeah. And you can learn it's cold foods. Okay. To work on this.
Autumn (8m 3s): That's a good try.
Narrator (8m 5s): A week on the internet with the am writing fantasy podcast.
Jesper (8m 9s): So I'd like to thank Jen for joining us on patron. So thank you so much. It was so great to see you join us there. And we can't wait to hear more about what you're writing. Absolutely. Your support is of course, what enables us to keep the lights on here at the app, riding fences, you podcast. So we really appreciate that. And Jen has also become eligible for our monthly live Q and a sessions, and they are so fun. I love getting the question. See, that's why I'm always fine for the podcast. We never know what the readers or listeners are going to ask when they join us, our students and our Patrion people, when they join us for the monthly Q and a, you got to just be ready to go with the flow.
Autumn (8m 55s): But there it to me, especially when people come back in and they give us the progress, updates are just so fantastic to hear how people are doing. So it's good to answer the questions and share and offer support, and then celebrate when things are going well. Absolutely. Yeah, it it's really, it's really nice. I love those sessions as well. So dear listener, if you feel like you're getting something from these podcast episodes, then why not check out the patron page associated to the am writing fantasy podcast, we offer a number of rewards to supporters. And of course there is a link in the show notes, if you want to, or if you're interested in checking that out.
Autumn (9m 37s): So I don't know, is that it autumn, or do we have anything else that you see that the M writing fantasy Facebook group is almost at 5,000 members? It like exploded last month. I think we jumped a thousand and just a couple of weeks. So that's been exciting, but I was going to tease you and say, well, even if maybe I'm teasing the listeners, but even if you don't enjoy the podcast, if you have questions on your writing, you can join one of the question and answer sessions, answer sessions for like $5 a month. That's a pretty good deal for customized help on your questions on your world, building in your marketing. And I don't know how we came up with that plan, but darn it, that's pretty cheap.
Jesper (10m 23s): That's the, like the cheapest consultancy support you'll ever get in your life. That's for sure. But yeah, that's true. But I guess the irony is if they don't enjoy listening to the podcast, they will never say that
Narrator (10m 48s): And on to today's topic.
Jesper (10m 50s): So we should perhaps mention that the idea for today's episode came from a patron post that you wrote in the . Exactly. We always, I always try to give my best posts away there, and eventually they might find their way onto the podcast then the, maybe even the blog down the road, but this was one that I really enjoyed discussing Patriot. Like I said, once I, once I stumbled on the topic and that the emotional plot is totally separate from character arts and it's totally separate from the actual story plot, the story structure I'm like, it was like, I was finding one of those words that you've always something to define something you did anyway.
Autumn (11m 33s): And you're like, oh, that's what it's called. I was so excited. So I'm like, yeah, we got, we've got to talk about this one because there is not much out there on the emotional plot, but I think it's, I think I stumbled on like one of the things I could finally say, this is one of my favorite parts of writing. So I'm excited. Yeah. It's cool. And I feel like the topic of the emotional plot, isn't that clear really? And as you say, there's probably not that much about it out there. So perhaps it would be a good place to start if you just sort of explain why no one ever understands what I'm talking about. And you want me to explain?
Autumn (12m 15s): No, that's fair enough. The emotional, explain your mind, my story organization. And I've terrified you, I think have scarred you forever, that I was trying to, to, to just make any sense and make sense out of it. It's just the goal with go with my mind map. It's chaos, you know, that little meme that's, you know, Hey, what's that thing coming out of your head. And then someone's like, is mine, it's the plot to my next novel? And it looks like this giant worm cloud. Yeah, that's me all for time. But emotional plot, like I said, for it is not your story plot.
Autumn (12m 57s): It's not the story structure and it's not character arcs, but it kind of overlaps like if those are two spheres, it kind of overlaps with them. It's so if you have a Venn diagram out, it's one of those, the third sphere of it, it is you could define it two ways. And the first way is that it is the character's emotional journey through the story. And that's a good place to start. If you never considered emotional plot before and applying it to the story, you're writing start there, that's one you can do easily. But to me, I think what I like is sort of like the pro level, and that is the readers emotional journey through the story. So it is literally plotting out what you hope.
Autumn (13m 40s): You know, you never a hundred percent, you can't target another person a hundred percent, but what you really kind of want the reader to be feeling when they reach certain parts of your story. And that's what I think is so much fun. And that's interesting because I feel like normally when we are talking about plot, you automatically thinks about actions and you know, what is happening and stuff like that. And this is sort of more the yeah. Right. But, but you also mentioned the, but you also mentioned the character emotional journey and also the reader emotional journey.
Autumn (14m 25s): But do, are they not linked like that? They're not two separate things there they be linked, but they can be the reader's emotional journey can be different from the characters, especially if you have several characters, but if you are, if you play with foreshadowing, if you have different characters, like you have the villain's perspective. And so the reader might have information that character doesn't have. So the character might be feeling dread and intention and a whole bunch of other emotions that the character doesn't feel because the character doesn't know. And that's the advanced level of emotional plot that I like when you, when you start layering in those bits of foreshadowing and those little elements, so that you're going to ratchet up the tension on the reader in a way that is actually not part of the story structure per se.
Jesper (15m 14s): I mean, you might have those elements there to make it all tie together. But what you're really doing is you're putting in those elements to up the emotional impact of the story. And that's, that's the emotional plot. So you mean like for example, that the reader knows what is coming around the corner, but the character doesn't. So is that sort of what you mean? So hence it's, it's stressful or well exciting depending on what word you want to use for the reader, but the character is just sort of trotting along because they don't know what they are going to walk into. In two seconds, the character could be racing to meet her lover or wondering where he is, why he's late in the reader might already know the answer he's been captured or is dead or whatever has happened.
Autumn (16m 5s): So the reader is going to have a much deeper, mixed feelings going on where the character is not quite there yet doesn't realize what happened. And so that's, like I said, that's more of the advanced level at the very surface. Especially if you write with mostly just one, one point of view character, then the emotional plot can be very similar to what the readers plot would be. And it's much more, much easier. You may have a little bit of foreshadowing that the reader might or might not pick up on and that's going to change the emotional plot. But of course, I think it could also be the other way around, you know, if you have an unreliable narrator, then it could be the other way around that the character actually knows what's going to happen, but the reader is not knowing.
Autumn (16m 58s): So the reader feels all the emotions when it happens, whereas the character maybe don't because they already knew what or something, I guess, I guess it could go both ways. I guess that's what I'm saying specifically, you know, choosing to have that unreliable narrator, you can do that as a plotting element to help, you know, increase tension, but you can also do it, you know, add that other layer of that emotional plot. You're doing it because you're basically manipulating the character or the reader's emotions and you're doing it purposefully. And I think by saying, Hey, this is a different plotting element. This is a whole different layer and mapping it and keeping an idea of like, what am I'm doing this plot action to do this, to make this happen in the plot.
Autumn (17m 39s): And I'm doing it also has this reaction emotionally, and that's going to be that and making sure it all lines up. So that way I know I just read a story recently where something big happened and blew up something that a character was waiting for and the character didn't react. And so basically the emotional plot element was completely missing. And by recognizing that there is an emotional plot element, you don't do that. You don't have a big event happen and then completely ignore the characters reaction when something totally changes.
Autumn (18m 20s): But I'm wondering as well.
Jesper (18m 22s): So of course, if you know how you want your reader to feel at a certain moment, you know, in the book, that's very powerful tool if you do it deliberately, but I'm also wondering is that like something you would go through as you edit the novel, so you feel like, okay here, probably they need to feel like this and that, and then always, or do you more see it, like something you do while you're plotting your actual chapters or scenes like you added in there? Or, or what if you're pantsing then do what, how do you think?
Autumn (19m 1s): I would say if you're always, I think we both, I don't think there's any wrong way to do it. If you're a pantser it probably is something that you're going to add in later, unless you're just, especially if you're adding in the reader's reactions, if you're talking about the characters, reactions, if you're a, pantser, who's very attuned with emotions and the emotions of your character, you're going to put that in almost naturally. And then when you edit, you'll just have to make sure it's, you know, it's all there. You're clear on it. If you're looking at how to manipulate the reader, I think it comes out much better if you're a plotter or at least if you're more of a hybrid and you just simply plot out your chapters and if you have all your chapter, like, you know, your hook and your disaster and everything that happens in your chapter, if you also make sure when you do those, you say these are the emotional reactions, or this is the emotional note that this chapter is going to end on.
Autumn (19m 53s): And it's almost, you know, you can have the emotional reaction as your hook to the next chapter. And the nice thing about the emotional reaction, you talk about hurdles and you talk about laws while the emotions are often, sometimes highest in the laws, because things are happening in the hurdles and you don't really have a chance to react. So those ones where those chapters, where the pace is slower are usually saturated with emotion. So therefore your emotional plot is actually almost counter your regular story plot. And so that makes it gripping. It keeps the pace gripping on some level, no matter what, and you can't ever drop that, you know, you always have them oscillating around each other, which is a really fun way of writing.
Jesper (20m 43s): Hmm. Yeah. And also I really, I've grown over the years to love the lulls more and more and more because those scenes where there's no fighting going on there, they're sitting around the campfire and they're enjoying their bread and smoking a pipe and, and talking to each other. Right. Yeah. I mean, I, I've really grown to love those scenes because it's, it's usually where you can have the characters reflect on what happened. I mean, of course they will react in the moment when the dragon attacks and whatnot, of course, they will react to that and they will have emotions related to that. But the deeper understanding about the character's personality and their desires and their view of the world and all that stuff really comes to the forefront in those levels.
Jesper (21m 27s): And, and I really, I have really grown to like those, I previously, I think years back, I always felt that they were, you know, we just need some action, but, but in reality, it's in the slow scenes that, that you can really also build that relationship between the reader and the character. Because once you start understanding what the character is about and how they view the world, how they think, what they decide and what they want, that's also where as the reader, you start building connections with that coach and you start understanding them, even if you don't, you don't have to agree with them and their desires and their wants. But, but if you understand where they're coming from, you will start building a connection to that character.
Autumn (22m 10s): And I really feel that that's something action scenes can totally agree. Those are, I've always think I've always liked the lulls. And I, like, I think that's where, you know, that's where the, like I said, the emotions happen. That's where a character is fall in love. That's where they might have an argument that they couldn't have when they're helping their best friend. It's like, you know, you're, they're going to be there for their best friend to fight the dragon. But if there's anything like you won't, why did you do that? Why did you bring us here? That's what happened? You know, your risk, my friend's life. Those are the things that come out on the laws. And I like that kind of emotional spewing, I think. And that's why I liked this idea of the emotional plot is that you make sure you include that because you know, thrillers and action, adventure books, the ones that are always like the Hollywood cinemas that are boom, boom, boom, boom, you don't have an emotional plot.
Autumn (23m 1s): And that's why they feel superficial. And also why some of the characters feel so thrown away, you don't make that connection. You never see the characters reaction. You know, they're always this stoic. I am doing this because I am saving and rescuing my daughter. And you're like, okay, do you ever show that you love her? Other than you save her life, that's going to help me Chris, back to you? No. Well, saving somebody's life is a problem. The coloration, I think I know what you mean because I know, I know what you mean.
Jesper (23m 43s): And also when, when, for example, when I wrote the first draft of our book one, I tried really to, because something you said just reminded me that oftentimes also in the past, my LOLs would often be discussions between characters. You know, they would be disagreeing about something, maybe even arguing, I don't know, but big, because that would keep the tension high. So I thought like, oh, well that keeps it interesting. Even the laws. And it does. So it there's nothing wrong with it. But in the book, one draft that I just wrote that the one you were editing at the moment, I really try to make sure that some of the laws are not just arguments, but also just have like more deep and thoughtful conversations between characters and how they're growing to like each other and stuff like that.
Autumn (24m 39s): And focus more on that as well. Other than it's just being somebody arguing all the time. So because otherwise you have like a full novel with either there's somebody fighting or somebody's arguing. And that gets tiring walls are where the humor comes in. And so it's, you know, like I said, you can find in book one and I'm bringing it out a little bit more, but those where you can tease each other where you show characters are, are truly friends or, you know, things like that. Or like I said, like if you had that romance supply, they fall in love during, you know, during those laws. And that's where, like I said, where's your plot action drops your emotions, emotional plot goes up.
Autumn (25m 23s): And so then they both head into the climax and it's that much more explosive because the reader is tied with a character, is bonded with a character over those emotions. And the character has that the stakes are that much higher, you know, that they're emotionally invested in the outcome and maybe they're afraid and they know how much they're risking, where if you're just running Pell, Mell straight into the climax from one hurdle to the next, to the next to the next it's exciting. But I mean, you can only do an adrenaline rush for so long before you just need to catch your breath. And maybe you really won't remember, you know, remember the characters, remember the story as much.
Autumn (26m 4s): You'll be like, oh yeah, that was a fun read, but it doesn't resonate with you for a very long time. I think it's really the emotional plot that makes the story resonate and brings the characters to life. And especially if you are a cruel, cruel author and you manipulate the rate reader with an emotional plot that is specifically designed to, to bring out certain emotions at certain points where, you know, you have two characters falling in love, but you know, maybe the reader knows that it's not possible or, you know, something else is going on that they know one of them is, is not going to be true. And that can really start twisting some gears that the reader knows things that the characters don't.
Jesper (26m 45s): And they're like, no, I want to tell you don't do it. Don't do it. And when you have a reader shaking the book, wanting to tell characters, don't do something. You got them in your story. You've got a locked. Good. Yeah. And there was, I can't remember if it was one of our Q and a sessions or when, but there was somebody asking me at some point why I hated, or maybe it was one of our interviews, which we mentioned in last week's episode that somebody asked me, why do I, why do you hate the superhero so much?
Jesper (27m 24s): I, and all the Marvel stuff. But I think listening to what you just said, that's exactly why I don't like those superheroes stuff, because they feel so superficial that they don't have, at least to me. I mean, I understand some people would disagree and that's okay. Don't, don't, you know, send me 500 emails telling me how, how wrong I am. This is just my opinion. But, but this is just my opinion, but I feel often like the older Marvel superheroes that they don't have that same depth to them.
Jesper (28m 7s): You don't get those well laws, I guess, you know, a lot, a lot of the time in those movies where you really get to understand their emotional journey, that they are very caught, bought kind of characters often. I feel, well, I say that. And then of course, when I don't know if I can make it, it's under, it's behind a pay wall. And I didn't feel like spending like 9 99 to watch one movie. I thought it was just like, no. Oh, okay. Okay. Because that's like the perfect example of what I'm not talking about here, because the joker is built on emotional plot.
Jesper (28m 52s): It is built on characterization. That is really what it's about. It's not so much about the joker or Superman Batman. I meant it's not so much about that as much more about the couch and what happens to him and his personality and stuff and the eighties.
Autumn (29m 10s): It's so good, but that, I guess that's, to some extent, proof of my point, right. That that's what I feel like that's when it gets good. Whereas the other opposite where Superman is just fighting bad guys, or Batman is fighting the Joe Crane, you know, the older movies and stuff like that. It's it's, I don't know to me, it's this way. I think I agree. So it was like Superman loves Lois lane because he does. And it's just, it's like having someone who's evil. Yeah. It's like having a character who's evil for the sake of being evil. It's just, you need to see why, I mean, what does that mean to love somebody? What will he do for her allied or about who he really is?
Autumn (29m 50s): Does he ever feel conflicted about that? I mean, those are the questions that I really love. I love stories with a little bit of PTSD. These heroes faced massive battles. They see friends die. I want to see the reaction to that, those emotional fallouts of maybe somebody, you know, getting angry over this or not wanting, not treating themselves well, because they're so upset. That's the reality. I, I see in the world around me and that's what I want to see in the stories. And you don't just do that by like writing and you just throw in a random emotion, you know, readers will call that out. You want to have that layered in lace through the whole story, which means stepping back and looking at your plot, looking at your characters and the character arcs and saying, what is the emotional reaction?
Autumn (30m 40s): How is this character progressing on this character arc? What does that look like emotionally at this point in this chapter and making sure that it really is added in there. It's another plot thread to make sure is clear. And I think one of the few posts I've that are out there on this had a good suggestion saying if you're writing a chapter and it feels flat, or you feel like you don't know where it's going step back and look at the emotional plot. Because if you're not, if you're not connecting with your character, it's probably because you don't know where their emotions are and their emotional plot is. And once you figure that out, you will actually get the writing that much faster. It will help you write to figure this out.
Jesper (31m 27s): No, that might be true. Yeah. If you want to see something where it is more or less only, yeah. I would say so or driven by the emotional plot or more or less only. Yeah. You can hear that this is English. That's how you say it. Don't, you know, you should go to your native speaker, even you should know that that's how you say it more or less only driven by the emotional flood. But if you ever watched the mythic quest show it's, it's on apple TV, plus I think it's called mythic quest, but that is really like, it is just characters and their emotions basically.
Jesper (32m 12s): I mean, of course there is some sort of applauded it's it's about like a gaming company who makes an online game. And then it's basically about the people who work in that company. And it is a, it's a comedy show and it is quite funny, but it's funny because of the characters and their emotions. It's funny. And it is, it is actually really well done. I was very hesitant to what did I, I saw the trailers in the beginning, like many, many, many months ago when I was like, yeah, don't want to, but this is typically me when I see someone that's like, no. And then later on, I give it a try and, well, this is really good. Did the same thing with American gods. I also watched the trailer for it.
Jesper (32m 53s): Hadn't felt no. And then I watched it and I loved it, or I, I say, I'm still watching it. I love it. But, so I think if you want to see like a show where it's done really well, and it's easy to consume, it's like 20 minutes episodes or something like that. Yeah. So it's something you can easily consume. It's just a human there's. No, you don't need to think watching it at all. That there's no plot to follow as such. But I would say try to watch that show because it, it really shows you couch your feelings and emotions and how it makes you connect to those characters. I've been watching the good place, which is also very similar where it's, you know, looking at the enterprise.
Autumn (33m 37s): It's funny, it's cute. But it's the characters you fall in love with the characters I need. Even with sexify these three young hero wins that you know, how they meet, you know, there's, there's not a ton of action there. There's, it's, she's a game and app developer. Who's just trying to get her degree, despite not knowing things about her life. I mean, yeah, it's a coming of age story, but you get so sucked in because the emotional plot is so well done. They relate these characters. And this is, again, I think it's important in this day and age because we like good characters that have flaws. And we like villains that have good qualities and all of those layers, you can try to force them into a character profile, but by showing them actually manifest through the sh the plot and through the emotional plot, seeing the characters act certain ways, not just be told that it's a good show.
Autumn (34m 31s): It's a, not a towel. You develop that that much more and the reader experiences it. And they're going to get that little bit of connection, have those feelings. You're gonna like them when they think, oh, you know, this is a good character, a good person, but they did something wrong and there's going to be fallout from it. No, my gosh, what's that going to be? Or the villain is not a hundred percent evil and there's this other side to him. And do you just wish you'd wake up and see the smell of coffee and see his be a good person and save the world. Because as he's already got the power or the position to do it, he just needs to stop being evil. So those are the stories you really can tell really well with an emotional plot, I'll call back, call back, call back.
Jesper (35m 17s): What did we talk about? Just a few episodes. A good look at that again. We've talked about so much. Can we just go one of the worst, top 10 lists? It's just because I want to put you on the spot. W w no, but what was the topic of the episode evil things to do? Your character is one that comes to mind, the worst things to do to characters. We talked about a point of view, and yes, this goes along. And I think there is a very, very strong correlation here, because if you're writing in deep point of view, you are going to get exactly. They go hand in hand, it's taking the deep point of view.
Autumn (35m 58s): And if you're struggling with it, this is maybe what you're struggling with is looking at the emotional plot, getting into that character's head, because the deep point of view is also word choice. Like, you know, a sailor using, you know, as Todd, as a rigging line, you know, things like that. They're going to always use words that fit their perspective. They're not going to talk about, you know, garden hose and things like that. If they're a sailor, they don't know anything about garden hose, but they also, this is taking just the emotional side of it. So not worrying so much about the word choice that you would in the deep point of view, but talking about, you know, how are they experiencing this moment? And like I said, and then if you really want to get too technical, figuring out what you want the reader to be thinking, feeling at that moment.
Autumn (36m 44s): And that way you can make sure that even though it's a law, you know, there's something in there, the reader is going to be gasping over or so excited. Their heart's going to be fluttering. You know, those are the kind of emotions knowing you want to do that to your reader. You can be a little bit more strategic in making sure the chapter and everything that comes before builds that kind of emotion in your reader. And I really feel like if you get used to writing and deep point of view, a lot of this will come out automatically the emotional plot and the emotional reactions and the local scenes where you get to know, I mean, a lot of that will just come out naturally as you write your first draft.
Jesper (37m 33s): And then I think it's to a last degree, I would almost say it's a lot about being very vigilant when you do your editing passes, to make sure that you are not only looking for, you know, of course, the good grammar and all those sorts of things. And then, but, and also finding the right words, but also bringing out those emotional elements and sort of keep asking yourself, am I, am I hitting the emotional, Akio the emotional plot? Am I showing what the character feels about? What happened here? Not, not like, I think I'm not saying overdo it like all the time, but, but at least making sure that maybe, you know, every other chapter so that there is some emotional stuff.
Autumn (38m 19s): Well, yeah, I mean, you can almost guarantee that if it's a very action packed chapter, you probably don't need to worry about the emotions. That, that is an action chapter. That's a horrible leave it. The inciting incident. You don't, you have the reaction phase after the inciting incident because you are basically dealing with emotions. But yeah, I think it's, it's something just like when you're looking, if you're doing, especially if you do edit like me and you have those layer edits and you know, you're looking for your senses, you're making sure that the opening and closing hooks are good, look at the emotions. And if it's a chapter that isn't very exciting with action, make sure that there's emotional residence and depth there and, you know, decide how you want your reader to go through the novel, how they want, how you want them to feel.
Autumn (39m 5s): And maybe there's a way you can tweak that. I think by taking control of it and looking at it, you will have a much smoother transition and flow through the novel, and you'll make sure that those emotions resonate and you won't forget about them. Like I said, I've reading, I've been reading a couple of working with a couple of really new first time novice authors the last month. And in both of the stories, I had to point out parts where it's like this big thing happened and it undermines everything they expected. And then they just keep going. What happens next? You look at that emotional arc and make sure the character at the very least reacts. And then, you know, once you get a series under your belt, make sure you're trying to figure out how you want the reader to react and see how that goes.
Jesper (39m 49s): See if you can work on that a little bit more, often impressed by the fact that you can, you can do several editing passes and you can be so structured and make notes and everything. When I've looked at your script, the file, it's just that it's like night and day. I don't understand how you that's. It that's all you have is a very, I have this idea. I did a medullary right in Nevada, and it really developed the series yet. You should see my tainted Fe it is much more organized and much more clear and clean and clear crisp so I can organize it.
Jesper (40m 31s): If you think I'm mad, you should see my husband seriously. He can't find a socks. Okay. Okay. But I think, unless we have more to say on this, I think I can, I can conclude by reading out aloud how you actually ended that excellent patron article, because I think it sums everything up. Nice. Lovely. So yes, let's do that. Yeah. So these are your words being quoted to you. Okay. Yeah, it is. If your story feels, something is missing and doesn't align, look at the emotional plot.
Jesper (41m 14s): What is the character feeling? Does it make sense? What emotion are you trying to create in the reader? Are you succeeding? Nope. Somebody has been a genius who wrote that? I don't know who that was, but the author of that article, wasn't you. Okay. So next Monday I have an interview with the extremely successful Jeff Wheeler lined up for you. So you don't want to miss that one.
Narrator (41m 54s): If you like what you just heard. There's a few things you can do to support the am writing fantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/amwritingfantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, yYou'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
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- Book Report: https://www.getbookreport.com/
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- KDP Reports Beta: https://kdpreports.amazon.com/
- BookTrakr: https://www.booktrakr.com/
- Bundlerabbit: https://bundlerabbit.com/home/worlds
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Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to the am. Writing fantasy podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need an literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt, and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I'm Jesper
Autumn (31s): And I'm Autumn
Jesper (33s): Is episode 129 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. And I think This should be an interesting episode because it's a topic which we haven't touched upon previously, as in ever,
Autumn (49s): that's pretty good at 120 some episodes, and we have a topic that we've never even touched on. And that's that's I can't complain about that. Yeah. That's pretty good to talk about book sales, trackers and why it is helpful to be organized.
Jesper (1m 8s): Autumn organized my own methodology with how you track your sales and also which tools are available to do so. So yes. Yeah. Maybe you will actually pick up some good points from this episode. Autumn.
Autumn (1m 23s): I have, I have I'll have, you know, I use three different sales tractor trackers, and because of the limitation, it was more the organization stuff.
Jesper (1m 34s): I just looked at your script file before this recording. So I know, I know what you mean. What do you mean when you say organized and what I mean when I say, well, you have a very high standard in the organization. I don't think I do too badly. I know where everything is in my household. I am the organized one. So let that terrify you. Oh my God. But how are things on your end? Oh, it's good. We finally are hitting look short sleeve. We're hitting warm weather. Wow. And we're going to be, it's actually dry. We need some rain. I already see like the stream is starting to dry up and that's so sad, but it is nice to have some like shorts, weather and t-shirt weather, no coats.
Autumn (2m 19s): So that is nice. But yeah, we need some rain and we were in a drought last year and I think this year we we're already in a drought again. It's just kind of sad to see everything drying up. Well, it's supposed to be green. Yeah.
Jesper (2m 34s): That's not good. That's not what you want.
Autumn (2m 36s): No, no, but yeah, it was cause I was good at some things like, we're not, I'm not going to computers, but I have not figured out how to call rain yet, but I'll work on that. But maybe that's sort of one of the advanced level, phase skills that you haven't acquired yet. I think I just need to concentrate on it more and put out some more honey dishes or something. I'll figure it out. I'll keep working on it. Okay. Other things for you and your side of the Atlantic?
Jesper (3m 7s): Well, this is one of those very, very busy weeks, but at least I did manage to finish up the plotting for book two in our new series. So that's pretty good. It's really exciting. Yes. I got to look over it and gave some feedback and we figured some most stuff out and yeah. Now you're ready to start writing. That is so exciting. Yeah. And you caught some good stuff in it as well. That needed to be beefed up and corrected a bit. So that was great. Yeah. That's why it's so awesome to work with someone else. You get to have someone looking over your shoulder going really, instead of hitting a plot hole, they pointed out before you yeah, right. Yeah. Indeed. Or just in some of the cases, it wasn't necessarily a pothole. Some of it was also just more just strengthening the logic behind things, you know, that it makes a bit more logical sense and so on.
Jesper (3m 55s): So at least I might not be organized, but I'm very logical. That is a plus that you are absolutely, you're very good at that kind of thing. But I was also out refereeing this past weekend. Why experience really? So you hear that even though, you know, COVID well, in some places it's easing up in some places it's getting worse, but I mean, people are actually getting together and they can play sports now in Denmark and happy there should be happy behave, right? Yes. Well actually sort of by the final whistle we had the two teams almost fighting each other, so yeah, I was not too good.
Jesper (4m 41s): So do you want a short story about what happened? Let's go since I don't see anything interesting going on in my life at the moment, that's your about yours? Well, because the weird thing is that I still don't quite understand it. Right. So yeah, so we were, we were three referees because this is, I can't translate it into an anti-American terms, but it's sort of like, it's not the pro levels, but it's sort of just below, slightly, not just below, but slightly below pro level. So they're, they're, they're not amateurs as such, but so they're pretty good, but they're not pros either. So it's somewhere in the middle. Right? So because of that level, then you are three referees.
Jesper (5m 22s): You don't have like the main head referee and then you have two running the line. And in this match, I was, I was on the line, which means that you will, well, in my case, I was next to the, one of the benches and one of the coaches and the other linesman was on the other side with the other bends and the other coach and substitutes. And then all of a sudden, like there was probably like 10 minutes left. And then all of a sudden the coach on my side, he starts yelling and screaming and like five or six players sort of go Spisak as well, jumps up and screams. And I'm still, I don't what happened. And, and he's, he's yelling at me because I'm on his side, right on his side of the pitch show.
Jesper (6m 5s): I'm, I'm sort of the one he, he needs to approach if he needs to say anything or if also just in general, w w if he wants to substitute, somebody has to get my permission to do it. And so on. So he, he, he addresses me and he starts shouting like, eh, we are not gonna, you know, accept this kind of behavior and screaming and shouting. And I, I still don't know what's happening. So I'm like, what? What's wrong? And he's scraped, well, the other bench over there, they, they calling, you know, calling racist names to our players and stuff like that. And that was like, really, what did he say? And I'm not going to say it here, but he's had some, he said that the other coach over there said some really nasty word that you just don't use.
Jesper (6m 51s): I'm not going to repeat it here, but you can imagine. So I, and there is a linesman over there, another referee, right. So, but he's sort of going berserk. So I shout to him that he needs to sit down right now and then I'll take care of it. So, so he's, he does, he sits down and then I flag the main head coach or the main referee over. And I asked him, so what is going on? Because if it's true, what he's saying, you need to stop just showing some yellow and red cards now, because this it's not acceptable. If it's correct what he's saying, but I haven't heard anything because I'm on the other side of the pitch. So I don't know what they freaking out about. So he goes over and talks to the other linesmen, and then he comes back and save.
Jesper (7m 34s): The other linesman, says that he's standing right next to the, to the coach over there. And he didn't say anything. And then I'm like, okay, then I don't understand. So why, why is six people freaking out at the same time? Nothing was said, I, I just can't make up the logic. And still, I can't make up the logic. So we never figured out what happened, but, but then 10 minutes later, we, the final whistle blows. And then they storm over to the other events and they almost have a fight over there. And, and, and so something must have happened. I mean, I, I just don't understand, but so why did the other linesmen not hear it? The other linesman was then he was a quite young guy. He was like 17 or something.
Jesper (8m 14s): It was probably his third match or something. So he was when they stormed over there, very courageous, I guess, from him, he was, he started to try to put himself in the middle and push them apart. And I just went over there and winged him a wasted, come over here, just leave them alone. And we take our notebook and we make notes of who does what? So we can report it to the union. If somebody hits somebody, we know who hit who, so just don't get involved. Don't stand in the middle of it. Let them fight if they want to fight, but we just take notes of who does what, nobody hit anybody. They were yelling and shouting and pushing each other. But it's just like, yeah, it's weird. Right? When you, you don't even know what happened. I still don't understand.
Jesper (8m 56s): Maybe people have been cooped up too long, but yeah, that just seems weird that something obviously sparked off some kind of anger and no one else heard it. Something came out of the void and only these six people, apparently there was a Fe coming or something. It wasn't me. I was, if I was in Denmark, I would have done something else that day, not riled up soccer players.
Narrator (9m 24s): Oh, a week on the internet with the yam writing fantasy podcast.
Jesper (9m 29s): I don't know if you noticed all of them, but the was a very, very funny post by Jason in the am, writing fantasy Facebook group that you notice that how she's had a few this last week. So no, which one was this one? He had, there was like an image. I I'm sure he got it from somewhere else. I at least I assume, but it was a comparison of Lord of the rings with the Teletubbies. So there was like, that was the images next to each other, like, like the Hobbit hole. And then the whole top piece with also has this grass await and then the characters, the hobbits, and then the four Teletubbies. And then there was the eye of Sauron and then the sun from Teletubbies where there's a face in the sun as well.
Jesper (10m 13s): Right. Oh, that's fantastic. No, I totally missed that line. That, that doesn't surprise me about the group or Jason, who is one of our moderators. And he's obviously a very fun sort of moderator. Oh, I'm going to go find that one. Now that'll give me something to do when I get off. Yeah. It's very good. It's very good. I, yeah, it's just a lot of fun stuff going on in the Facebook group. So if, if you deal, isn't not having joined yet then just so it's 4:00 AM writing fantasy in the group section of Facebook, and then you will find us, but something else I wanted to mention as well, autumn, because we've been asking, we've been asked, I should say Radha.
Jesper (10m 53s): We've been asked by some of our listeners to record an episode where we talk about our own group to publishing.
Autumn (10m 60s): Yes. For summary. A lot of our fans, I think it was actually, one of them was on Facebook and the other one was a request like the same week on Patreon and saying, Hey, you've interviewed all these other people. You talk about, you know, how to write and this and that. You never talk about your own writing and like what books you have out and all of those things. And we're like, oh really? We haven't mentioned that good point a hundred and something episodes in and yeah, 129, this one is okay.
Jesper (11m 35s): Yeah. Yeah, indeed. So I wanted to make a request to your listener because I don't really feel like making a podcast episode where I'm asking all them questions that I already know the answer to. And then I guess vice versa as well. I, it's probably not very exciting for autumn either. And I hope as you've probably pick up from these podcast episodes that we try to have fun with it. We enjoy doing it, but I don't want to record something about a topic that I don't enjoy. So what I want to do is that I want us to be answering your questions. Yes. So please, if there is anything you want us to, or you want to ask us about why we started writing, I don't know.
Jesper (12m 21s): Some of the obstacles we've come found along the way or our collaboration, whatever, you know, then please send us your question. We've placed a link to the contact form on am, writing fantasy.com in the show notes. So you can just click there and just use the contact form to post your question. And then we will add them all together. And if we get enough of them, then we will record a podcast episodes asking or answering questions.
Autumn (12m 52s): Sounds like, but we've done sort of something similar once, but we were, it was different questions. So this will be really fun. We already have a few coming in, so it'll be exciting to see what else we get.
Jesper (13m 3s): Someone really gets something juicy. I never would have thought of asking you. That'd be really fun. Yeah. Yeah. Well maybe funny if it goes to you, that kind of question. I feel like I can ask the question, but, huh. Okay. Well, I'll start here. We should probably point out that what we're going to share is not an exhaustive list. There are definitely more options available out there to us north compared to the ones that we're going to mention here today. So if you think we have missed some important ones, then just leave us a comment. So everyone else also becomes aware of your suggestion.
Autumn (13m 46s): Absolutely. And this is such a handy tool because if you are selling books on like Amazon and you go into just the regular dashboard where you're your KDP dashboard and you try to follow along with your books. I mean, I remember when you have one or two books, that's okay. But once you get a series, once you get a couple series, once I think I'm up to 20 something books, oh, freak. That it's just too hard. You need to use one of these ways of really tracking things and drilling down. Especially if you're going to run AMS ads, Facebook ads, you need to know how books are selling. You need to have a baseline. You need to know how things are going. You have to keep track.
Autumn (14m 26s): See, I do know what I'm doing with these reports. Yeah. And I think it's also worth mentioning upfront here that if you're just starting out, this is probably not worth your time and effort to worry about right now. But I do still think it's probably good to listen in because then you are, you are aware of what you need to think about down the line. And I think that'll be helpful as well, even, even if you're just starting out. Yes. And if you are just starting out, there is actually a new feature on Amazon for KDP sales that we can mention that I think works just perfectly specific spiffy. If you're just starting out and want to have something better than the KDP dashboard report, which that little bar chart that's just blocked.
Autumn (15m 13s): Just totally blessed. Yeah. I dunno. I don't have so much trouble with it, but I'll explain why once we get to the end of the episode, but I mean, why do we want to keep, or why do we want to track and keep some sort of organization around book sales will? Well, of course we all want to know how many books we're selling. That's sort of a no-brainer right. But I think what it also comes down to this stuff is really the time that it takes to collect the data, like you just touched upon and there are actually some services out there that will do this thing for you and then save you the time and effort, which you can then spend on writing and stuff.
Jesper (15m 55s): So that's, that's pretty nice, right? Yeah. Yes. And I think it's so important. I know, even when I first started doing ads and stuff, you really need to take a baseline. You need to see how your ads are being successful. You're going to spend money on marketing, even if you're going to do like whether it's Amazon or an AMS ad through Facebook, or even just do a newsletter swap or, or sales swap where you're pointing them to a newer release or even doing something like a one-shot deal, like a free Booksy or bargain books. So you something like that or how heck BookBub, if you get one of those, you need to be able to track what before and after to see how effective it was because you're spending money and he told these things get expensive and you don't want to just be throwing money and actually find out you would have been doing better.
Jesper (16m 40s): If you hadn't spent that money on ads, that would be really bad. Yeah. The other thing as well that you want, or the reason why you want to track it as well is so that you can start calculating read-through. Yes. We're not going to go into read through here and what it is and how to calculate it and all that. But if you're interested in that go all the way back to episode 53, I interviewed Adam Croft because he actually explained everything in episode 53 of the am writing fantasy podcast. So just go back there, listen to that one. If you want to know more about read-through but excellent keeping track of your sales will allow you to calculate your read-through, which is important. That's explained in episode 53.
Autumn (17m 23s): Gosh, I don't even remember that one. That's really sad. I might have to go back and listen to it myself. That's a long time back. Yeah, it is. I do know Rhea throw though.
Jesper (17m 33s): Yeah. Okay. So let's go through these and share our thoughts on them on, on what we have here. And we haven't necessarily used all of them ourselves. At least I haven't found the ones that I picked. All of them. We, well, I have better things to do than testing out tracking software, but I'm still gonna share some reflection on them though. So I don't know if I do want to start out daughter.
Autumn (17m 55s): Sure. Do you want me to start? I have two that I'm not sure if they're on your list that are the two. Well, actually, like I said, I have three that I use and one of them is kind of cheating, but if I do what I like to cheat, I have to, we haven't even started the list yet.
Jesper (18m 10s): And you already say you're cheating.
Autumn (18m 11s): I am. I think it's fair because some people don't realize the features that are already available. And I think one of them is the new, there's a KDP report. That's in beta testing. I'm not well, you and I have discussed it. And I'm not sure if it's outside of the U S or it's just inside the us. No, I don't think I see it on my end. I don't think I see it. No. If, if you have access to it, when you go to your KDP dashboard and you go to the reports section, right at the top, it'll say, Hey, try out the new KDP dashboard or the KTP reports beta, and you can click on that. And it takes you to a much swankier KTP site that has like a nice side call 'em and actually showed you book pictures of like those sales and for that day and all these stats.
Autumn (18m 57s): And yes. And so it's visually, it's so much better. It's much easier to see what's selling. It does when you go into your there's a royalty estimator there, which is fantastic. So you can really drill down and see how your books are selling by, you know, separating out your author names. If you have a pen name or other author names, uploaded the book, the format, a lot of the same stuff you see in a regular KDP dashboard. So that's fantastic. I think my only complaint and one of the big limitations I see with it is your choice for time periods to look at, or this month and last month, that's it? That might be just because it's in, it might be B beta.
Autumn (19m 38s): I think they like that.
Jesper (19m 40s): Yeah. I'm hoping it's just because it's in beta, but at the moment, it's like, no,
Autumn (19m 44s): it looks so cool. It has this great information, great much nicer charts and graphs charts, and a lot more information than your regular dashboard or at least the same information. But normally you have to do the drop down menus and it's so time consuming, this is all click and visual. It's very nice. But yeah, that's the worst thing I could say about it is that it's just like, I look at it. I'm like this month, last month, that's it. And today, and that is it. So you're supposed to live in the present. Isn't that what you said? Yes. So I have to get my Zen going. Yes.
Jesper (20m 19s): Don't worry about the past. Who cares?
Autumn (20m 22s): Right. So if you want me to keep going my favorite one and the one I do use a lot and have for years, at least 2018, I don't know, maybe 2017, I've been using a book report. And so that is a fantastic one. It pulls the information from your KDP. So you actually have to give it permission to go into your Amazon files. And that one literally goes back to the day, uploaded your first book. So you can get your royalty is from forever. Even if you like just got it today, it'll pull the history. So you can see what you sold last year. You can narrow it down by book. It has reviews. Some of the features are it admits it's not a hundred percent up to date, but hopefully they'll maybe sync it a little bit better and it'll pull in reviews and your current book, ratings and rankings, all of those things are accessible through one dashboard.
Autumn (21m 15s): The worst thing I can say is that it is only for Amazon books. And I think that's unfortunate. It is also kind of cool because it's alive click. So you see, so you see someone got a book and it says it was given away as a freebie because it lists freebies and sales and it gives you your royalty amount right there without you having to deduct or try to figure out what your royalties are. So you can click on that and it'll take you right to Amazon. So that's kind of cool. So you can go check on books really quickly. I sometimes forget that if you buy my paperback, you can get what my ebook for free. And I'm like, how'd they get that book for free? And you click on it. No, everything looks fine. Oh right. I have that set up. So you can get that for free. If you buy the paperback because seriously, I don't buy the paperback. You should get something besides obviously an awesome book that you can put on your shelf.
Autumn (22m 0s): So I do love that. And I think book report is just a simple Chrome plugin, right?
Jesper (22m 7s): It is, it is a Chrome plugin. I think there's an app for your phone as well. I can't remember now, but it is nice. And it's one of the cool things is it's a very informative, very, I think it tells you a lot, especially we're selling mostly on Amazon or you gotta run AMS ads.
Autumn (22m 22s): It has a ton of information. And if you are selling less than a thousand dollars a month, it's free. And I think if you're over a thousand dollars, it's only like $10. It's, it's not 19. I couldn't remember what it, if it had gone up, but it's just not, if you're selling more than a thousand dollars 19, it's not that it's not a lot. I just, it's still, I just appreciate so much that it is really a very informative plugin, even if it is only KTP. I mean, that is usually even if you're wide, that is normally where most of your sales are coming from. And if you're running AMS ads, you need those specifically. So that it's free for under a thousand.
Autumn (23m 1s): That's amazing.
Jesper (23m 4s): Yeah. No, I quite like it as well. I've not used it myself, but I've seen it in use many times. The only thing I think is the downside. If you can call it that, it's the fact, like you mentioned that you have to lock into your KDP account. Otherwise it cannot collect the data, which I think is it's a bit, it usually you usually have to do it only once I've had problems. I have my Amazon on second level of validation. Of course, it's my books. Of course I have that like locked down tighter than anything. But so every once in a while they get out of sync and you have to click a button and then refresh it and it takes all of five seconds. It really isn't too bad, but yeah, it is giving a secondary app up, you know, they can go and read the, so you have to make sure you've got to trust this feature.
Autumn (23m 48s): I agree with you there.
Jesper (23m 51s): Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I have a couple of will to go through. I wouldn't say that I'm cheating, but it goes into a bit of different territory as well, because I think there's more to this topic than, than just tracking sales. It is also about saving the time, which means that the, some other tools can actually do that for you as well. So I'm going to go through some of those as well. But the first one I wanted to mention is actually called book tracker, but it's T R a K book tracker. I'm like, yeah, that's a bit different way of spelling.
Jesper (24m 31s): So this one will actually log into all of your accounts every day. So it doesn't matter if you are publishing via Amazon, Google, Kobo, drafted, digital, whatever. But book tracker will log into all the accounts and check your sales numbers every day. And then it compiles all the data and presents it to you in some pretty looking charts. And it also sends you like a daily email summary. So that's quite nice. There is some things that I don't like though. Really? Yeah, because when you go to book trackers website, if you want to start using it, they don't show what the cost is anywhere.
Autumn (25m 13s): Oh. And that just feels wrong to me. I don't like it. You know what I mean? It's like, they're trying to hide something. Yeah. It's that, there's an old joke that says, well, if you have to ask what the price is, you can't afford it.
Jesper (25m 27s): So well. Yeah. So I searched around quite a bit and I was unable to locate the pricing information from the website. Maybe it's somewhere hidden, but I, at least I could not find it, but I got through some other sources that mentioned that book tracker costs $5 per month. If you want to receive the daily emails and then $10 a month, if you want to also use it to track new reviews and it track your rankings and so on. So if it's $5 a dose of that. Yeah. I mean, if those prices are correct, which I'm not a hundred percent sure about, but if they are then the pricing is not too bad, but it just rubs me the wrong way that they don't show it on the website.
Autumn (26m 7s): It should be clear. What, what does it cost? How could you have a 14 day free trial? Isn't that, that's sort of the thing, isn't it?
Jesper (26m 16s): Yeah. Yeah. Correct. And then the other thing is cost that I don't like about this is the fact that, of course, for it, to be able to log into all your accounts every day to collect the data, it has to know all your passwords, which also I don't like, so there is that. Yeah, that is always an easy and I would say, oh, that was, that actually reminds me.
Autumn (26m 37s): I did have a third one. So if you use a distributor, you're probably going to mention one, I use Smashwords and they have two different features in there. They have a daily sales that gives you your sales by all of the platforms they distribute, as well as books. You can also break that down really well. And they also have a, more of a historical, that's a much more cumbersome spreadsheet that you have to really like spreadsheets. And I don't like spreadsheets, that's your job. I don't go into that one much, but it actually tells you, you know, if you had sales, how much you had sales and if like Barnes and noble has gone ahead and paid Smashwords yet, or if they have not sent the money yet. So you can really get some nitty gritty, fine tune details with that.
Autumn (27m 19s): So I have obviously been in there and looked at it and said, oh my God, this is scary. I ran away. But the daily sales chart, which again, you can back that up. I think 60 90 you can put in a day amount. So you can back it up really far and see like your spikes, where you were, things were happening. So that was one of the advantages of using a distributor. Obviously that doesn't give me my Amazon stuff, but it gives me everything else. And I will say that it is a very good and very up-to-date and from what I've seen, very accurate way of seeing where all my other sales. So I literally, if I wanted to, I go to two places, I can go to book report slash Amazon KDP and Smashwords, and I see those two and I know what I'm selling.
Jesper (28m 3s): Right. Okay. So the next couple of ones that I have is a software that will get the job done, but it's not in its origin, really designed for book tracking in the sense that it's not as neat as book report, you know, book report is designed for that purpose alone. Whereas the stuff that I'm going to mention now will get the job done, but it's not what it was intended for in, in that sense. And the first one using software,
Autumn (28m 32s): how dare you?
Jesper (28m 34s): Yeah. I don't know.
Autumn (28m 35s): I'm a rebel at heart. I knew I would rub off on you.
Jesper (28m 43s): Yes. Well, at least I haven't started breaking things yet. So as long as I don't break software, then it's okay. We'll see. We'll talk about the first one I want to mention is BundleRabbit. And this is actually one of the tools that we were looking into as well considering using, but we steered away from it because to use Butler rabbit, you have to publish through Ponta rapid, and then it's basically sort of like draft to digital. So you, you use them as an aggregator and then they, they keep 10% of the royalties as part of the service fee for what they're doing.
Jesper (29m 23s): Of course you don't have the concern about sharing your passport passwords anymore because you only access panto rabbit. And then they distribute to everybody else, including Amazon. So that's good. And the good news is as well that if you sell new books, it doesn't cost you anything because they only take 10% off the royalties. Right? So if you don't get paid royalties, there's nothing to take anything off. So you can actually sign up for it and start using it. And it's not an, unless you earn money, they don't earn any money. So that's quite nice. And you can definitely use punter rabbit to track all of your sales in one dashboard across all the retailers.
Autumn (30m 2s): Wow. So that is a real advantage.
Jesper (30m 4s): And it's probably how you can also use it to split payments between several different authors. That's also a very nice feature. And that was actually originally why we looked at it because, well, we have royalties to split, so we were looking at it. But then when it became apparent that then we have to publish through butter rabbit, then that's where I saw it said, no, I don't want to do that. But it's possible if you want to, if you don't mind that, then you can do that. And you can get all the tracking in that one dashboard, which is very nice.
Autumn (30m 35s): That is, I'm curious though, since they distribute to Amazon, can you be choose KDP select and do like your, your free days? Or is it like just, just generic, Amazon KDP?
Jesper (30m 49s): You can, it's a good question. I would think not, but that's a good question, actually. I don't know. No, because I was thinking, that's why, that's why, like, it's very similar to Smashwords. I think Smashwords can sell, send to Amazon if you want it. I believe. Or at least they were working on that at one time, but I never used that because not that I'm doing KDP select, but you don't have that option if you go through a distributor.
Autumn (31m 17s): So no, you probably can't know because it is exclusive with Amazon and then you go through the KDP dashboard, at least that's my assumption, but maybe somebody will know and they can let us know in the comments, I guess, logically, if you're just doing KDP select, you don't need the rest of the link. So you would just go to KDP select.
Jesper (31m 37s): Yeah, correct. Correct. I think that one through, but the, the nice thing with BundleRabbit as well and where it is different from draft to digital with system X, one, I'm going to touch upon the difference here is that you can also tell Bundlerabbit that this author here I have co-written with, and this author needs to get 50% of royalties and I need to get 50% and then Butler rabbit will split that automatically. Cool. So, so, so you don't have to do anything yourself in terms of splitting royalties with somebody else. So that is very nice, but of course they are going to eat those 20 10% off the top every time. So that's the, that's the payment. You have to give them to afford the service.
Jesper (32m 19s): So, yeah, but then let's, let's move on to draft digital because this is basically exactly the same as bottler rabbit. I probably most listeners already know draft to digital and they also know that they also take 10% off the top as a part of the service draft to digital, as far as
Autumn (32m 37s): I know, I think they have quite come out with a royalty share option as well. Just like bam, Butler rabbit. I think that they can do this nowadays as well.
Jesper (32m 46s): I think they call it drafted digital worlds or something like that. Not a rip off of Kindle worlds at all. So I'm using Draft2Digital myself and not bundle rabbit. So yeah, I'll go out on a limb here and say they're probably extremely similar. Yeah. Those two services and drafted a digital, of course, if you don't, if you're not using it, they can get to Amazon as well. So again, you can get all your sales in one dashboard.
Autumn (33m 17s): That's pretty cool. So, yeah. So I guess those are sort of like the three big distributors that kind of do it. Smashwords drafted digital and bundle rabbit. Yeah. And then the next one here is quite different, but again, it'll get the job done.
Jesper (33m 36s): And this is one we actually used for a little while only. So this is Abacus and we only used it for a little while and I explain why in a moment, but it basically Abbott cost costs you 2, 2 99 a month per book with the first title is free forever. Okay. And what really drew us into using Abacus in the first place was because you, you're not only tracking your sales in that because, but also your costs. So for instance, let's say that you you're running BookBub ads or Facebook ads or something like that.
Jesper (34m 16s): And especially when you're collaborating with somebody else and you need to pay royalties and split the royalties. Abacus is basic. Let's say, for example, let's say that I have paid for a cover design, for example, or something. And then the, I would have to deduct that cost from Autumn's royalty share because she needs to pay part of it. But I was the one who shelled out the money in the first place. So in Abacus, I would just add in the cost for the cover design. And I will just mark that this one was paid by me and then Abacus will automatically take out Autumn's part of the cost and subtract that from her royalties and even it out so that everybody gets to share out the royalties, but also pay their part of the cost.
Jesper (35m 2s): So it is basically like more like an accountant system, to be honest than it is a pro book tracker service. But you can use it for book tracking because you have all your royalties for all of your books in there, and you have all your costs in one place as well. And it will tell you by the end, I would like it to be better in terms of actually generating a full like royalty report. I would like it to do that. It doesn't do that very well, but it will tell you, this author should get this amount of dollars and this author should get that amount of dollars. It will tell you that, but it's not a blank. It doesn't show you a pretty report about it though, which I think is a bit of a shame because thinking about the fact that you will probably most use Abacus, if you co author stuff, right.
Jesper (35m 46s): And hence you would normally also need to send some sort of summary or something to the other author to show them, this is the royalties. These are the cost and this is the distribution of it. Right. So I would think if advocacy could generate a report like that, that would be incredibly useful, but they don't.
Autumn (36m 5s): Yeah, I agree. That's sort of like the whole point is like you get all this data and you can sell someone like you only get this or you get this much royalties and they're like, I want to see the accounting. I mean, you kind of want to be able to show that to them indeed.
Jesper (36m 19s): So there's no real good way of doing that in Abacus. So, but let me just get, get back to the point from before. Why did we then use Abacus for a short while and then stopped using it? Because again, and basically it is very neat in the sense that you download your KDP royalty report and then you upload it to Abacus just as it is from the download from Amazon, you don't do anything with it. You just automatically upload it to Abacus and Abacus automatically extract the data and automatically identifies the books and put the royalties into the different buckets. Okay. You had this book had this many ebook sales, this book had this many paperback sales and so on. So all of that happens automatically, which is very, very nice.
Jesper (37m 2s): Yeah. But, and here's the big, but the huge spot independence, the downside is that all the non-Amazon platforms, let's say that you have a book where you show the copy on Kobo, for example, right. But you did not sale sale, a copy of the same book on Amazon in that particular month. I know in like Fata majority of the cases, that will never be the case because most of your sales will be on Amazon. But we have, we had an example where we did sell some books on Kobo that didn't sell in that month on Amazon. And the problem is that Abacus forces you to upload your KDP role, to report a step one in the process.
Jesper (37m 47s): And that means that it populates the books that sold on Amazon. And then you can go into those books and you can add, okay, then I also sold for $400 on Kobo, or I had $50 of cost on Amazon ads on that book. And you can go in and add all that in. And then everything works fine. But if the book wasn't indicated KDP royalty report, it does not get populated in Abacus for that month. And there's no way of manually adding a book in Abacus for that month. So you start trouble. Yeah. And that's really annoying. And that's why I, in the end, I sort of said to autumn, I'm done with this stuff because it's basically not working.
Jesper (38m 31s): Right. Because especially when you're co-authoring and you need to share royalty reports, you can't have, like, you told you sold for a hundred dollars on cobalt, but you have no where to show it. Right. That doesn't work. Right.
Autumn (38m 42s): And you're like you said, it's probably unusual, but it does happen. It's possible for things to happen like that. And the fact that you can't manually add it, or I know you'd have to trick the spreadsheet and like use some last months data and it just would be messy. And that's really frustrating. And the last thing you want to do to me, the spreadsheets are frustrating enough. I just want it to be simple and it gets to dose in a second. Excellent. And I would say at first the price of 2 99, a book I'm like, oh, wow. But I guess if you're selling enough books, if that has less than 10% of the royalties for that book, that could be a good price. It could be high. It could be a little for you, but that's something to keep in mind is like all the other ones seem to be 10% of your sales.
Autumn (39m 27s): So if you're selling more than what would be 2 99 a month, advocates might be cheaper or it might be three times as much.
Jesper (39m 39s): Oh yeah. Yeah. For me, I think the other solutions are better if you, unless you really need a detailed accounting system where you can put in cost as well. Then I would say draft two digital or bundle rabbit is probably better if you're trying to split royalties with somebody else. But if you need the accounting system, advocacy is definitely usable, but just be mindful that you have this problem about the fact that if the book didn't sell on KDP and you're stuck for that month, which is stupid to me, but that's the way it's designed. At least maybe they changed the someday. I don't know. But I made sure to let them know when I canceled our accounts, that this was the reason. So whether they do something about it, I don't know, maybe it'll benefit some of the listeners one day when, when they change it.
Jesper (40m 23s): I don't know. Okay. So two final other options. The first one very short here, you could, of course, if you can afford it to, I know this is probably for those who are quite further along, but if you can afford it, there's always the option of having a virtual assistant taking care of this stuff for you and just keeping track of the book sales and going into the dashboards, collect the data and summarize it for you. That's perfectly fine.
Autumn (40m 52s): And definitely something you can get somebody to do, but yeah, let's leave that alone for now. Collaborate with someone like Jesper, who does it for you and it's fantastic.
Jesper (41m 2s): Well, yeah, because that's the last, that's the last option? Well, that's called writing with me 200 people starting to wanting to call them. No, no, no. But what I wanted to say is the way that I do it now, which to me honestly, is the easiest and the best way of doing it. And I know miles will wear it here and not everybody will agree and that's okay. But just to share how I do it, because I've been through several of these different solutions, I've looked multiple different passports and try to figure out how to do it best because the thing is, I want to spend as little time as possible every month, collecting royalty reports and figuring out how much money I own to auto autumn and transfer the money to her.
Jesper (41m 51s): Right. I, I don't want to spend too much time on it because that's time away from writing. And at the same time, I also need to produce a royalty report to autumn so that she can actually see that I'm not cheating her or something like that, that she could follow. But it's only fair, right? I mean, when you have money between people, you should also account for w how does that money go in and out of the accounts? So I need to do all of that every month and I need to do it as easy as possible. So what I ended up doing was that I set aside two full working days because that's how long it took me. But to, to basically build an Excel template, which has automated formulas to handle everything like currency conversions, revenue, cost, and cost management.
Jesper (42m 42s): So basically it takes automatically. I just put in what the exchange rates are in the Excel sheet now. And it automatically starts calculating for each of the currency, how much that is in dollars. Nice, because I always paid autumn in dollars. So it automatically starts calculating that. And then what it does it then is as well that I plug in how much sales we have from each of the dashboards. So that's the, that's the, the time-consuming pot that I go into each of the online distributors, I download the roll to reports and I manually type it into the Excel sheet, like, okay, for this platform, we had this many sales and this amount of royalties, but then Excel automatically starts calculating converting it to dollars.
Jesper (43m 29s): And when I then type in the cost, I have automated formulas that takes all the royalties and subtract all the costs and do the 50% royalty split between myself and autumn. So at the bottom of the sell sheet, it just tells me this year, this is the amount I need to transfer to autumn. And that's it. So it's actually pretty easy. And of course, I've made a show that I can just copy out all those calculations and put them into a document and send it to autumn. So the Roger report is actually the easiest part nowadays that takes like five minutes. So I would say all in all to do this once a month, I probably spent like 90 minutes, I would say to do the whole thing once a month. And that's not too bad.
Jesper (44m 13s): It took some time in west investment upfront to spend two days playing around with, I mean, if you were like the world champion with Excel, you can probably do it much quicker, but I was playing around with it quite a lot to get the, all the formulas to work just like a one or two. So it took me two days, but that was a one time and time investment. Right. I don't have to do that again because now I have to template and I just plug into data every month and that's it. So to me, that is the best way of doing it. I don't have to spend, you know, some part of a revenue to some other tracking service, or I don't have to pay somebody some software somewhere transform nothing.
Jesper (44m 56s): Yeah. I just collect the data, put them into my Excel sheet and boom, I'm done. So, yeah, it's 90 minutes a month. But on the other hand, there are limitations on these other software that we have mentioned anyway. So they don't do the full job. Most of them, anyway, a book report for example is wonderful, but it's only Amazon. Some of the other ones will tell you the royalties, but then you have to give them your past codes and they will take, take a fee or 10% and so on. So on. So yeah, that's my thoughts on that. I think that sounds fair. And especially like, if you, even if you want to use like bundle rabbit or something, but then you want to have like maybe the first book in a different series in KDP select, you now got to account, and it's also confusing.
Autumn (45m 43s): And I definitely the, your self-made spreadsheet, which I noticed you haven't let me touch, which is probably not going to get anywhere near that accidentally erase. It always keep backups. That's the rule, but I think your spreadsheet works marvelously and it does what we need. And yeah, 90 minutes is a crunch, but at the same time, once a month for stuff, I mean, you run the AMS ads, you run a lot of the Facebook ads. So, you know, you're spending time doing that. It's part of the LA life of being an author is also the marketing part. So 90 months over an entire month, it's not so bad.
Jesper (46m 25s): No, I don't think so. And we've of cost made sure to add links to everything we talked about in the show notes so that you can easily check out any of those solutions that you might be interested in, but I think that's it. And next Monday
Autumn (46m 41s): We will be back to talk about actual writing. And this time we explore the emotional plus, what is it how to use
Narrator (46m 51s): If you like, what you just heard. There's a few things you can do to support the, an writing fantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreonn.com/amwriting fantasy for as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the M writing fantasy podcast going, stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
In this episode of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, Autumn and Jesper compete to come up with the best (or worst rather) list of things you could ever do to your characters.
Here's a list of the worldbuilding and RPG podcasts where Autumn and Jesper were interviewed recently.
Worldbuilders Weekly: https://youtu.be/I_yLroTjxVc
TableTopTotality: https://youtu.be/YbikMcycuig
Game Mastery: https://anchor.fm/game-mastery/episodes/Episode-23-World-Building-and-Storytelling---Interview-e1068tb
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SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
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Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need an literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I'm Jesper.
Autumn (32s): And I'm Autumn.
Jesper (34s): This is episode 128 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. And we are going to have some fun today, as we share the top 10 worst things you could ever do to a character. And as usual, we'll have to vote on one by creating the best or the worst list, so to speak. So I think it's the worst list we should call it. Isn't it?
Autumn (58s): I think it has become the worst list, like put on the worst thing that we can do to characters. That makes sense in a way.
Jesper (1m 7s): Yeah, I think this should be interesting.
Autumn (1m 11s): It should. And I have a total confession to make is that I I've had a very busy week and my husband had recently gotten a second vaccination and he had a bit of a reaction and was not doing so well. And it was this morning. I opened up, I think, goodness, I was doing my homework. I opened up a sauna or a little checklist to look, to see what the topic was. And I said, oh crap, I've got to come up with a list. So I feel like I did, like, I did my homework right before class, but that doesn't mean it is not awesome. I put in a lot of mind power to make this list very quickly.
Jesper (1m 48s): I'm pretty sure my list is better than you, Autumn.
Autumn (1m 51s): You always have that confidence. So we will see.
Jesper (1m 57s): It's like fake it till you make it, right?
Autumn (1m 60s): That's all right. But let's just do it. You can't rattle my cage. I am completely confident in what my abilities here. So I have done some horrible things to characters. I am calm. I'm good with this.
Jesper (2m 13s): Okay. Well, I might have a few surprises, but I am looking forward to see what you came up with on the fly, which of course cannot be as good as the, but on the other hand, yo, I have to say if what you came up with on the flies better than the stuff that I really thought about, then it's not good for me.
Autumn (2m 30s): It's true. I might have to give me this one. We'll have to see how it goes. I'm sure yours are very good.
Jesper (2m 37s): Of course, of course, of course.
Autumn (2m 40s): And so how have things been over in Denmark?
Jesper (2m 46s): Well, something crazy happened this last weekend.
Autumn (2m 50s): Really? Just over the weekend?
Jesper (2m 52s): Just over the weekend. We went to a restaurant really, who would know something as ordinary, as visiting a restaurant would suddenly feel you saw other people eating. Yeah. It wasn't incredible. Well, the service was not good, right. Or to have for a go to a restaurant. Yeah. It was like the, the waitress. She was really nice and smiling and helpful and all that. So nothing wrong with that. But I think it was in the kitchen, but every single order got messed up. So we had to keep sending stuff back.
Jesper (3m 32s): It was a sushi restaurant, so we have to keep, and they may get on order. So we kept sending stuff back and then we had to wait another 20 minutes until the meat, what they were supposed to make in the first place. So at the end we could have eaten a bit more, but we just got to like, ah, I'm fed up now. I don't want to wait another 20 minutes on another wrong. Right in the end we just left. But that's, it was still good. We still went to the restaurant. So that's pretty cool.
Autumn (3m 59s): And I'm jealous. I love sushi. I actually planning on my husband's going away soon for a training. It might be gone as much as three weeks. I'm going to miss him like crazy. But I'm thinking he's not as big of a sushi fan as I am. So I'm thinking of maybe learning to make some sushi while he's gone, because it's like in Vermont, for some reason, it's not a good sushi selection. It's like California roll in that sense. Okay. Okay. I absolutely love sushi. It's one of my favorites, to be honest, I come over where you're going to a sushi restaurant then, because I can't wait. That'd be so awesome.
Jesper (4m 36s): Yes. This a local restaurant here. It's all you can eat sushi. Oh, just keep watering. That is fantastic. Okay. I'm going to fly to Denmark to get sushi that can't be sure it's a funny world. Yeah. But I think other than that in writing news, I'm just putting the finishing touches on the outline for book two and our new series. So I'm hoping to send you that final final.
Autumn (5m 3s): I cannot wait to see that. That'd be fantastic. Yeah. Then we can get into that. But what about you? Oh, well I can at least say the leaves have finally popped here and it looks like spring, even though the weather's, you know, actually kind of like light jacket weather, but it's sunny and the Birch or the beach trees are pollinating and they have these little Tufts of, of just like poof that are part of their pollen. So it kind of looks like all these little floating feathers through the forest. It's very magical and beautiful. Nice. It sounds like a faith place. It's me. Of course it is a very paved place. I know they live all the Jack in the pulpits are up in the Trillium or blooming.
Autumn (5m 43s): So it's beautiful. Little ferns are popping though. I have to say my editing. I cause you know, I'm editing our first book one and I'm trying to edit the last book of my face series and there's a lot of editing and I have to do it. It's not going as spectacular. I'd like, I need more hours during the day, but I'm still pushing through. I might end up pushing back. This is, I guess my first official worry announcement that I might end up pushing back the publication of my final book. Cause it's just, I actually need another chapter and it's just not where I want it to be. So I have to do-
Jesper (6m 20s): That's understandable. You're editing two books at once, right? I mean, it's understandable. It's a bit much.
Autumn (6m 26s): Yeah. Some other jobs on the side and yeah. Other things going on and I get my second vaccination and couple of weeks in a week or two. So once that happens, I I'm totally, after watching Adam go through his I'm expecting to be down for a day and I, my backup person, I was here for him, but he's going to be away from me. So it's just going to be me and the dog taking care of me. Yeah. The doc can bring you some, some rodents that he killed outside or something. Yeah. He won't be making me tea and bring me a hot water bottle at 2:00 AM. Like I did for my husband's. So I'm expecting, I might be down for a day or two. That's kind of slow me down more.
Autumn (7m 6s): Darn it. And I've been going to, I remember I'm partially deaf. I've been getting that diagnosed a little bit more and dial it in to see if there's something that could be done. But the point mints take time too. So it's been a week of a month of lots of things going on. Yeah. Too busy, too busy.
Narrator (7m 26s): A week on the internet with the Am Writing Fantasy podcast.
Jesper (7m 31s): Speaking of being too busy over the past few weeks, we've also been on a number of podcasts talking about world-building haven't we, Autumn?
Autumn (7m 39s): We have. It's been so much fun. It's world building and we've mostly been talking to a role-player games and games. Oh. So it's brought back some memories. I have not thought of in probably two decades. It's been wonderful.
Jesper (7m 54s): Yeah. We've been on the world builders, weekly podcast, the tabletop totality and the game mastery podcast. So it's been really fun and I think also very different conversations compared to what we normally do on this podcast. So if you're interested, dear listener, we have added links to each of these interviews in the show notes. And well, then I would encourage you to go and check that out. If you interest us loads of world-building tips in those interviews.
Autumn (8m 25s): It was, yes. World-building tips and some character tips and some writing tips and just a shout out to all three of them because awesome podcasts, awesome hosts. And it was so much fun to be on there and getting to talk to them. It was, it was as close as we can get to socialization in the last year. That's true. Yes. And, and also, I mean, just the whole role-playing community there and, and, and how, and to see astic, they are about world building and it makes it so much fun. Oh, that, yeah, I totally will. It's like if it was not, if it was more than my husband and I there's gotta be like groups that do this via zoom, it was, it would just be so much fun to do it again.
Jesper (9m 5s): Yeah. Yeah, indeed. Okay. But before we close out this section here, I also wanted to use the opportunity to thank everyone who left a rating and review over the last month of the am, riding fences, you podcast, because we did have quite an uptake and that is highly, highly appreciated. Yes. Thank you so much. We, it helps the podcast helps people find us and it makes us feel loved. So we appreciate that. Absolutely. Yeah, because it's like helping other listeners. So when you leave a rating or a review, because then when people start typing in writing or something in their podcast app, then the podcast platform will actually show our show if it has some good ratings and enough reviews and so on.
Jesper (9m 52s): So yeah. In other words, you were helping fellow podcast listeners. So if you haven't done so already, please don't stop now, go on and the, to your podcast app and leave a rating on review. It, it only takes like a second, but it really helps a lot. So if you already did it, thank you so much. And if you didn't just post a podcast here for 10 seconds and then leave the rating and review and then press play again. Sounds good. Thank you. And onto today's topic, I must admit that at first this sounded really easy, but then when I got into it, I did start wondering what you would come up with and then I just kept looking for something better.
Jesper (10m 42s): But then when you then said in the beginning that you hadn't really prepared that much, then I feel a bit better.
Autumn (10m 48s): Oh, glad that helped you. I'm sorry that I was competing with me. It was intimidating to you apparently. So, you know, I, I wanted to make this one easy for you.
Jesper (10m 58s): Yeah bBecause people have been mean to me on YouTube comments and stuff like that, saying that the Autumn always wins and stuff. And so yeah, I have to, I guess up my game a bit, I see really trying to prepare and if I lose now, then I'm going to go and dig myself a hole outside or something.
Autumn (11m 18s): That'd be horrible. Well, hopefully you were prepared. I'm sure you're going to totally blow me out of the water and you have to think of it. I it's sad. I'm coming from the state. So whenever someone says, oh, you're going to win. I hope they're not saying that just because I'm the girl. So, you know, I want to win honestly. And I did not work for this one, but it's funny. I started out by looking at this when I saw the topic like, oh, I have no idea what to do. And I started coming up with some and I did a little bit of reading and thinking and thinking about it. And I'm like, oh, got this one down. So, oh no, that's what I want you to say.
Autumn (12m 3s): I felt intuitively this was my topic. Sorry.
Jesper (12m 7s): So this will be fun. Yeah. Now I'm already feeling like maybe my list is not strong enough. I don't like that. You, you make me doubt myself.
Autumn (12m 16s): I'm just helping you become a better, better at torturing your characters. I don't know. Is that though? Is that the outcome we're hoping for?
Jesper (12m 28s): Yeah. At least I have five prepared and I have ranked them as well. So number five is the least bad. And then number one is the winner. That's going to take the take all. All right. You may be well, we'll have to see, I have mine ranked and they're ready to go. So I, who do you want to go first?
Autumn (12m 44s): Do you want, do you want me to go first? Will that make you feel better? Do you want to go first and just totally amaze me? I think, I think I might.
Jesper (12m 57s): Hm. Well, the thing is that because it's, it's a hard question because with number five, it feels like it's probably good to go first with number five, because then you're putting a bit of pressure on the other one. But then at number one, I feel like it's better to be last because then you can sort of finish it off on a big bang right there. Like this one is the best and you've finished off with that. So I have to flip a coin. What did we do last time? I think you started last time you started last time. Yeah, damn. Then I have to go first.
Autumn (13m 32s): Okay. Your turn. Okay.
Jesper (13m 34s): All right. Number five. And of course, keep in mind that this is the least worst of the worst. So it's only going to get better. All right. So if you feel like this is not that bad, then it's going to get a little, okay. All right. That's the way it's supposed to be. Yeah. So number five, let's call this character, Mr. B. All right. And you'll understand why in a moment. So Mr. B, he is very, very chatty. He is very outgoing and in general people really like him.
Jesper (14m 18s): However, and here comes, he has like an involuntary habit. No, it's more than a habit. It's more like a compulsion that every time he greet somebody, he has to burp the person in the face. It's just me. Oh, I would. So back home. I wouldn't be friends with them. That's for sure. I can imagine. No, not every single, so he's very likable, but then he's, he stops off really bad every single time.
Autumn (14m 49s): Yes. I feel like that that would be pretty bad thing to do to a character that would be mean to do to a character I have to. And you had to be actually worried because I'm funny, true story is my husband likes to whistle and it was probably five years into our marriage. When I realized what he likes to whistle is who's afraid of the big, bad Wolf. I think I finally stopped. I'm like, I am putting that into a story someday, because that is like the perfect serial killer. You have this nice guy. He's a good guy about town, but he whistles. Who's afraid of the big, bad Wolf and somebody finally put together. So, you know, I was a little scared there that you secretly knew that I like that one.
Autumn (15m 31s): There was also, what was it? Was it in kill bill or which one was it? Where there was also somebody who walked around whistling all the time. He was actually pretty cool. He was like, I can't, I think, I think it might've been, but it's been awhile, but yeah, that is definitely a very annoying and trait. Yes. It's not like the worst of the worst, but it was also number five. So it's going to be a lot worse for the characters here, but, but it's sort of a, it's not throwing you a softball, but it's more like a curve ball. Right. So it's, it's a bit difficult, but not too hard. Yes. Let's see. I, and I think it's interesting because you did this by literally creating a character perspective.
Autumn (16m 14s): And I did it more top level of as a writer, the worst things you can do to your characters, because I just love doing things to my character as I've just, I mean, that way. So you want to hear my number five? Okay. All right. I am. And this is, again, it gets worse from here, but I'm starting off pretty heavy hitting. And I'm just going to say killing off friends and family, especially in the first chapter of a book like that, it's all his friends and all his family doesn't have to be all about. I, it could just be just the parents or just the siblings or just the friends, but just that trope. And I put that as my number five, because that does like every Disney story ever.
Autumn (16m 57s): And to me, it is so over done. And that's why I put it at the first spot, but it is also so hugely impactful to lose a family member or to lose a good friend. So that's why we put it there because it is just like gifting out your heart strings and you can relate to that. And it's horrible, but oh, we need to find something else to do that with. So that's my, that's my number five. Okay. Well it's, it's a good start. It's a good start. The, you have to remember, I just kind of spontaneously spontaneously made this list and like the process of an hour. Why cooking breakfast? Well, that, that can't be as an excuse either your list is good or it's bad and no excuses about that.
Jesper (17m 41s): I was cooking breakfast while I was thinking about this. And while I was scrambling eggs, I was kicking, killing a family members. What a horrible breakfast. All right. All right. All right, well, let's hear your number for them. Okay. So number four, I was actually thinking for a while, if I should put some sort of torture on this list, but while that is a pretty terrible thing to do to a character, if you imagined that you would like in a dungeon and you're being tortured, it's probably, I mean, of course, unless you die, but then it's not mean to you anymore because then you're not alive.
Jesper (18m 22s): So if you do live, then you are going to escape at some point, or maybe you're going to get the, let free at some point. And then the torture stops. So it's like, I started thinking, can I make something that is worth something you cannot escape? Okay. Something you cannot could you, can you guess what? That could be? Autumn? What can you never, ever escape death? Well, yeah, but if you die, if you're dead, then it's not mean to the character, but because then he's dead death. Other than death, can't escape, a physical harming someone physically like losing it all. Can you not escape that?
Jesper (19m 4s): What kind of life are you living? I cut on how bad? Sorry I hit you. I cannot help it. Jeez. Okay. So let's hear it. What is yours? Well, you cannot escape sleep. Oh, okay. So every single time this character goes to sleep, he or she will have nightmares about that. Darkest fears. Very nice. I think that's good. Nice, nice. In the, in the horrifying sense, I guess if that makes sense. I think that that's pretty damn mean.
Autumn (19m 43s): That is very mean it's actually kind of related to my number four. Imagine that us thinking along the same lines. Yeah. That never happened before. We've never come up with something similar. So you want to hear what my slightly related number four is. Okay. All right. So mine was instead of not just sleep, but being stalked by a monster or a curse or a raving hoard of insects or some such thing that hounds you. So you can't sleep for fear of it catching you can't sleep, you can't sleep. So cause if you sleep, it's going to catch you or that even when you're awake, maybe it's whispering dark visions or ideas to you. So you just, every time you want to sit down and relax or have a meal, it's just spurring you to always constantly feel like you have to run and be an emotion.
Autumn (20m 35s): And then not saying a nervous wreck. Totally. And I'm not saying that this might kind of have stemmed from maybe a trip. My husband and I took to Labrador where the black flies were just torturous that I was constantly wearing this netting veil. So that even when I was eating or cooking, I was like, literally eating underneath this veil. I walking and pacing and basically it nearly broke me. I'm pretty tolerable, but I was ready to get on a plane and go home. So insects are some of the worst torture you could ever do. And, but not letting someone sleep and having that constant, like the buzz, the buzz buzz, buzz, you know, they're there and they're trying to bite you.
Autumn (21m 16s): And it's just, you just don't even, you don't even need to have someone whispering to you. Just a hoard of massive insects is enough to kill, to drive your character insane. So yeah, that's my number. Yeah. Well, true story as well related to that, you know, with a bit already ordered, but the list of the stuff don't know it, but true story as well. We were in a, in a, is in, in Finland, in the middle of the forest and there was this pond that was supposed to fill with water, but this particular summer, it was so dry that it was just very, very shallow water in the pond.
Jesper (21m 54s): And it has been like sitting there for months, I guess, you know, just shallow water, no flow through. No, it was just like an isolated pond, right? So there was no current or anything changing the water. So we was like the best mosquito nest you can imagine in the world. And it was like at this particular summer as well, just to make it worse was like the warmest that has ever been. We had like in Celsius a, I don't know what this is in fair Fahrenheit, but we had more than 30 degrees Celsius. So, and you're in the middle of a forest. There's no wind because you in the forest. And then you're sitting inside this cabin and it's incredibly hot.
Jesper (22m 36s): And as soon as we step outside the door and I mean, as soon as within one second, you were completely covered in mosquitoes. They came from everywhere, like right at you. And it was, it was the worst, two weeks ever of a summer vacation. We sat inside this freaking cabin for two weeks and just, it was like sitting inside an oven. We were just sitting in there cooking and we couldn't go up because it was terrible. And then in the nighttime, when you could go out a bit, you were still going to get bitten like 20 times, but at least you could go out. So we did go out a bit when it was night, but this was also the year why I got so annoyed with mosquito repellent creams and stuff like that.
Jesper (23m 19s): I was like, how to freaking, how, how are they allowed to sell this stuff when it doesn't work? You know, I just covered myself in it and it does getting bitten. So what's the point. I don't understand. But anyway, that was a complete side note, but that's okay. It actually made me realize that, you know, you're admitting my number four was awesome. So thank you. I'm admitting you on number four is really annoying. I don't know if awesome. It's going too far. Tomato, tomato. I have my interpretation. So, all right. What's your number three.
Jesper (23m 60s): Okay. So this is also about fear. So we, before we talked about having nightmares about the darkest fears in number four. So now in number three, with fears, I was thinking what kind of fear would be really bad to suffer from? And there was of course, loads to choose from. And some of them would really make the character unable to function in society. But, but then it came to me. Oh, are you ready for this one? I guess, what is it? What if the character is afraid of himself? Oh, geez.
Jesper (24m 38s): That's horrible. What if you're afraid of yourself all the time?
Autumn (24m 43s): Like you're going to metastatic, are you afraid that you're like insane or a deranged killer? If you let yourself loose or a ticking time bomb. I mean, you just afraid what you're going to do next all the time. Oh, maybe you're going to kill somebody. Maybe you're going to hurt yourself. Maybe, maybe just going to sabotage yourself. You're just afraid all the time of yourself. That's just, you cannot escape yourself. That's really so horrible. Horrible torture for a character. How could you do that? Oh, that was easy. All right. Well that one is pretty. That would be it. I'm trying to think of how it would be to write the book, like what the character arc would be, but that's not go there.
Autumn (25m 27s): Actually. I don't know how to do that. To me, it would be a bit like schizophrenia thing to read, like all the time, every chapter, the characters, just running around circles around themselves, unless you find out like, you know, it was a fear and planted it and actually he was amazingly good or would do something wonderful. But yeah, we won't go there. So that would be a diff a dark, dark story to read. Yeah. I feel like it. Yes. Yes. All right. So my number three is to take away the talent that whatever the character is, that is really how they define themselves. So like a swordsman would lose their arm or a maid would lose her magic or using it would cause pain or like an Archer, or if his musician like with a harp would lose their fingers.
Autumn (26m 16s): And this would be, cause both psychological pain, which is good, but also physical pain. Because, you know, you would obviously I've gone through something traumatic to have this happen to you. And yeah, I will definitely say this one stemmed out of my own right link. Cause I definitely combined it with the character. I had that with memory loss because they were held captive by centuries. So I had a character that was caught, imprisoned, lost their memory because they were tortured, lost the ability to change their, use their magic. They were changed into a magical creature and every time magic happened around them, it caused them physical pain once they were free from their horrible monstrous form. So it's, it was a fun story to write for that.
Autumn (26m 60s): Me, the character hates me still, but you know, we also have another character in, in our joint book that has lost his memory. Yes. That's also quite fun. It is quite fun. But I mean, to me, almost losing your memory is, is almost a salvation because you don't remember the dark things, but to simply lose whatever it is. If you define yourself as this math major, you're going to be this wonderful magic user and you lost the ability to cast magic or worse. It causes you physical pain. When anyone else uses magic, you'd have to move on. That is definitely a character. Or you have to find something other way of defining yourself or you're just going to be a horrible character or become the villain.
Autumn (27m 44s): I don't know. Yeah. I don't know. What is west, is it west to lose your short-term memory or your long-term memory? I think long-term, to me, I would not want to. Cause you have, especially so many things you would define yourself. It depends on if you had a really bad experience that you want to forget, but I think I could handle a losing my short term over my longterm. So all the time when you're doing something, you're forgetting what you're doing. How many horrible? I don't want to lose my memory. be like the next one on your list. No, it's not.
Autumn (28m 24s): No, it's not, but I don't know if number two.
Jesper (28m 27s): Well, I'm gonna come back with a really annoying one in number one, because number two, it might not, it might be one of my weaker ones now. I think being afraid of yourself is worse than this one. Okay. So you should have switched them. All right. Okay. Should I switch them around? I won't judge. It's fine. I know you will. That's my role here. Yeah. Okay. But I think we need some sort of fantasy curse for this one to work. So imagine that we have liked the most handsome prince or the fairest princess the world has ever seen and then comes to wicked witch and Lisa curse. Well, that sounds very cliche already, but don't judge a book by its cover.
Jesper (29m 14s): Well, okay. But this course is different because, because of this characters, very, very appealing looks, people are naturally drawn to them, but every time this character speaks to someone, they always end up either being rude or blurting out the person's secrets to everybody else. Oh, that would be, I agree. That should have been your number three, but that would be number three, right? Yes. That would be, it would be really a fun book to write. That'd be a fun character to have I've I've had a few slightly insane characters that do similar sort of things.
Autumn (29m 57s): Cause they're a little, just touched a little off and I there's so much fun to write though, because they just do whatever the heck they want even. But I could see in this case, maybe they don't want to, and they're trying to control this. So this is like combining with a couple of years, you know, like trying to fearing, going to these like a ball where they're going to be the Belle of it. And they're so terrified at what they're going to do to make it all go wrong and they just can't stop themselves. So in that case, good. Number two, that would just be the anxiety of it would be oh horrible. It is horrible, but I'm not sure it's the worst thing you can do. I mean, well, okay. I imagine going through life that every time you talk to somebody, you are, you're either being rude or telling their secrets.
Jesper (30m 41s): It's pretty nasty. That doesn't really mean you will not have very many friends. No, no. It wouldn't matter how pretty you are. They would, they would not be there to be your friends. And then if you had manipulative friends, they would only tell you secrets about themselves. That would not be true. It would make you look like an idiot. So yeah, you could actually use it in like political games or whatnot. You could tell the person something and then they will go and tell it to somebody else. And if the other person doesn't know that this person is well, actually no, that would work because the other person will know that this person always splits out secrets. So they will think it's correct.
Jesper (31m 23s): Exactly.
Autumn (31m 23s): Oh, I can have fun with master plotting. I think I should win just for coming up with a good story. I deal with it. No, no. Does not have rules go. I can't change the rules in the middle of the game. Why not? Oh, I'm a referee. That's okay. Oh shoot. He would be the referee. All right. So you're ready for my number to change the rules. I disagree. That's also in the rules that I'm the one who can change the rules. That's what the rules say. I think I've got to have to renew my reevaluate, my contract here. All right. Okay. Let's have you. Number two. My number two is to imprison a character, which we did talk about, but to not tell them what happened to their friends and family or possibly worse telling them different things.
Autumn (32m 14s): So they don't actually know which is the truth and what has happened to their friends and family. So sort of like just coming in and be like, oh, well your wife is going to be executed tomorrow or your children or slaves in the ice minds. And so this place with the psychological, so they're in prison, they can't get out. And obviously they're in prison because they either lost a battle or they failed in some way. But so you have that psychological torture as well as being restrained. And to me, this to me is nothing worse than not knowing what has happened to someone you care about too, and have no way of knowing and not have someone toying with your mind about what might be happening to them. I just think that is literally, I think the worst thing I can imagine in this life is to care deeply about someone and not knowing where they are and what's happened to them.
Autumn (33m 2s): Just be horrifying. And just imagine if you're the God or whoever it is that is telling the soup, how mean do you have to be to be able to do that to somebody that's just making up excuses, making up these stories about, oh yes, no, but this is, oh, did I tell you that? I actually meant this and oh, just the gut wrenching. This of it. Eventually, no matter how heroic this character was, I think that would just wear, wear them down, wear down their hope bit by bit and losing that hope and just being devastated. I think that's about, and that's my number two, but that's about the worst thing I can imagine ever doing to a character. I have to say.
Jesper (33m 41s): Hmm. Okay. So you should have put it in. Number one. No, I have something else for number one. You just said it was the worst. I don't, but I have something else for number one. Oh my God. Well, okay. I have the absolutely best one for number one. All right, let's hear it. This one is going to bring me the victory and you'll have to admit it once you hear this one. Well, I will only admit it if it is true. And once I hear it, it is true. So let me start out by asking you this. Okay. What is like the worst song you can think of?
Jesper (34m 28s): Oh, it's a small world after all. Okay. Well, so keep that in mind. All right. And I'm not saying that this one is going to be the most annoying song ever, but it's probably a bit close to it, but okay. Let me just play you a very short song. Clip to get you in the right. Have a sound clip. Okay.
Audio clip (34m 51s): I've been married long time ago. Where did you come from? Where did you go? When did you come from? good
Autumn (35m 8s): Stuff. Okay. So imagine you have something like that playing in your head constantly like forever. You can never stop it. It just goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on forever. That would be, imagine that. Well, considering I have some bad tinnitus, ha I do. I have that all the time. It's horrible, but not cutting my jaw or something like a loop forever. I almost think cotton. I chose better than tonight. I remember it. There was, it was actually from a, a movie I'll assume it's based on a novel.
Autumn (35m 48s): Cause all good movies are based on novels, but it was about a Russian astronaut or it was there talking about it. And there was this moment where they're saying, you know, the astronaut gets up there and they're up there for like in the space capsule. Can't move around. It's one of the first space flights. And all as I hear, like every few seconds is a bang and you have that for weeks on end and it's starting to drive this guy crazy and he can't go anywhere and you can't escape it. And the only way he could preserve a sanity was to embrace it and be like, every time I hear it, it means I'm still alive. It means the mission is still going on.
Autumn (36m 28s): So I don't know. You would have to just like with my tonight, as you become, it becomes as mental thing where at times you can actually block it out because it is just going on and on. I think it's actually worst if it changes because whenever things change, then you notice it again. So if you have just like this weird random loop of sounds and gunfire, oh my God. I hate gunfire. So is all the other weird sounds that happen? I think that might even be worse than just the same song on repetition though. I have to admit it's a small world after all for 24 hours straight might be enough to make me go insane. That might do it. Yeah. That's pretty bad. It is pretty bad. I will say that.
Autumn (37m 9s): That would definitely be fingernails on a chalkboard, which would be one of the sounds you could use to drive someone and say just on a loop, just don't know. Oh, that's just so total loop. So is it like if you definitely make yourself go deaf, would you still hear it? Yeah. Yeah. It's in your head. You hear it all the time. Even when you sleep, it's going on when you're trying to sleep you're mean I don't like that one. Yeah. You want to hear my number one? Yeah, I know. It's the list of the worst things you could do it over character. Yeah. So you know, my number one that is even worse than being tortured and not knowing what has happened to your loved ones.
Autumn (37m 54s): Okay. What's that it is to not write the character story. I think that is the worst thing you can do to a character is to have this voice in your head that says, you know, right. We write the story, make me this fantastic character and you just don't do it. I just think that's horrible. Yeah. Okay. That's Metta. I feel like I like you're bending rules, but I understand what you're saying. The, I think I have just, I have elevated above the rules to a worst of more, a different plane of worseness.
Jesper (38m 38s): Okay. You are so much inventing your own rules as you go. You think I play by anyone else's rules other than the ones I make up spontaneously? No, no, I get it. But this is the same thing. I sometimes say to my colleagues that it w when, if we have like a work meeting or something, it would be so much easier. If I can bring my referee yellow and red cards into the session, and then you get a yellow card for that goodbye. It will be somewhat each year. Well, you do you really want to kick me off the podcast.
Autumn (39m 19s): Now think about that. The yellow card is just a sin bin, so it's just, you just get a timeout. I can do a timeout. You would have to use a lot of timeouts for me, for sure. I like my number one. I think it is the worst thing you could do is you have to tell your character story. If you have a character saying, write me, you need to do that. You need to go, right? Yeah. I still think mines is worse. The infinite loop of music. I still think it would be worse if it's changing. Sounds but sound torture is pretty.
Jesper (40m 1s): It's used. It's pretty horrifying. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. Do we need people to tell us who won here? I feel like our one for, for sure. This one you put on some really good ones I have to say, but I'm going to leave it up to the listeners so they should tell us what just won't concede will. No, I will not. And they should just refuse to concede. I do. They have to let me know if they think I broke the rules or if I just simply, you know, made a better set of rules. I'm just afraid that they're going to say yes. Oh, well, let's see. I think I have one, a lot of them. So maybe I will let you have this one because you did do the work while not making it just feels like a pity victory.
Jesper (40m 45s): That's I don't want a pity victory that you're going to have to let the listeners decide. That's the only thing to do. Hmm. Okay. Well, dear listeners let us know in the comments who won this stuff. And if you feel like writing the autumn one, then just let us know if we don't get any comments. It's because I won. And if we do get comments, then it's also because I won that's that's cheating. I think you're making up the, what do you mean? I'm I'm just, well, okay. It's not a rule. It's just a recommendation. I'm just recommending people not to type if you wrote, if they think you won, I see how it is.
Jesper (41m 30s): Well, I'm at least I'm, I'm at least an honest enough person not to create personas to go in and leave comments to say that I won. I'll be nice though. I do. I have a wrap-up for this wedding. Cause I was thinking, why in the world are we doing this for the podcast? But then I realized in general making characters suffer should do at least one of two. If not both of these, they should advance your plot or they should deepen or reveal something about your character. So this is in a way an inspiration list of if you're really easy on your characters or you feel like you're plotting or your character arcs, aren't going anywhere.
Autumn (42m 6s): Review this list of 10 traits and see what you can do to help your characters. Go suffer a little bit and grow the point is growing and overcoming these fears.
Jesper (42m 20s): Okay, indeed. So next Monday we are back to some more serious topics. When we discuss some tools for authors, namely book sales tracker.
Narrator (42m 31s): If you like, what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at aApple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/amwritingfantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
What are fantasy readers looking for? What attracts them to your book? What sort of reader magnet do they pick up the most? Heck, what sort of giveaway should you join?
Join Autumn and special guest fantasy author and creator of Bookfunnel, Damon Courtney. They hash out some tips to help you understand what readers love and some ways that Bookfunnel can help you reach readers. Oh, and the fun of introducing your kids to D&D! 😉
Check out Bookfunnel at https://bookfunnel.com/.
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (1s): You're listening to the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape. You can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt, and Jesper Schmidt.
Autumn (30s): Hello, I'm autumn. And this is episode 127 of the M writing fantasy podcast. And today Yesper is on break. And so today I have with the fantasy author and founder of book funnel, Damon Courtney. Hi, David. Welcome to the am. Writing fantasy podcast, take three. This is take number three. We're doing this yet, But at least the second one, wasn't a full one. We got the error message, you know, like five minutes in, but just thank you for sticking with me. Hey,
Damon (1m 5s): We all have to deal with the technical problems. Me more than most. So I'm the technical guy in the family. So anytime there's any problem, I get a text from my mother, my mother-in-law, my father-in-law anybody. Just, if there's a tech problem, I'm the one who gets the text. So it all, it happens to all of us, you know?
Autumn (1m 23s): Yeah. I don't think you're supposed to be helping I'm on a podcast recording for someone else's podcast. We figured it out. I hope this is going to be the one they say third time's the charm. Yes. The jokes that I'm Fe. So does my husband. So three is a very significant for the face. So this is the take. This is the one I'm. This
Damon (1m 45s): Is the one that's going to work. I feel confident in we're for everybody out there. We're going to try, it's going to sound like we're being really spontaneous, but we're faking all of it because we've already done this before,
Autumn (1m 55s): As I just learned, which I didn't know. The first two times I talked to you is that you've actually had acting classes. So yeah, you're not you're ready for this. Totally.
Damon (2m 5s): I have. So I spent a lot of, I grew up in, in doing a lot of theater and a lot of musical theater and things like that. So if you ever catch me at a conference, you'll, you'll sometimes catch me in the karaoke room and things like that. But so yeah, I, I grew up doing that and then I grew up playing Dungeons and dragons. That was really sort of where I got, I mean, I've read fantasy my whole life. It's it's 100% my Shondra, you know, a little dabbling here and there in science fiction, but I mean, it's always been fantasy for me. I loved, I grew up, you know, I didn't play like Cowboys and Indians, like other kids did. I didn't play army. So I played Knights and dragons. That's what I wanted to play from, from the time that I was a little kid.
Damon (2m 46s): And so, you know, growing up, I, I was the dungeon master who did a lot. I ran the group for a really long time. And in fact, my friends and I still play not as regular as we used to we're we're getting back to bit more regularity. We all had kids sort of went to play. Then we had kids and we didn't play at all. And now we're sort of coming up the other side of the mountain, where a lot of our kids are, are reaching that age where we can sort of get back to a more regular schedule.
Autumn (3m 12s): So you're saying you're not initiating the kids as new players. So
Damon (3m 15s): The key, so we are actually, so that's awesome. Yeah. Know mine. So my son is 14 and he expressed an interest a few years ago. And so the dads got together and all of us have kids that are about that age. And we started playing D and D with them. I started running them through a group. And then my daughter, who's 11, who is, she's my mini me. Right. So my son is very much like my wife and he's a little bit more introverted, but he really enjoyed playing D and D even my daughter, she was nine. When she started, she would listen in on, on my son, Julian and I playing. And she very quickly was like, yeah, I think I'd like to try to play Dungeons and dragons. And I said, well, our group is kind of full right now. I would love for you to play.
Damon (3m 55s): But you know, when you get a little bit older, so when she turned 11, she kept asking and I said, yeah, I would love for you to play. So now I actually play, we play Wednesday nights with my co-worker and his kids. He has three kids. And then my son, Julian, and my daughter, who's 11. And she is, she's such a ham. I mean, it's just me, right? She's absolutely 100% my kid, but it, it kills me. She's playing a rogue who it would be funny. And you would, if an adult were playing it and you'd think they were playing it as a part, she never seems to recall what her backstory is. And so in one module, she'll tell you that her parents died in the next module.
Damon (4m 37s): It was her dad who ran off when she was a kid and it was just her and her mom. And then the module after that, her mom died. But her dad raised him. Like she just doesn't remember. And what's funny is as a rogue, you would almost play that off. Like they're constantly lying about who they are, but no, she really just can't remember who she, and so she improv all of it. And the DM that we're playing with, he's been really, really good. He's also a theater actor. He's either actually a professional actor. So it's, it's really great. He does all the voices and stuff. And Laura, he, he gives her the opportunity to, to role play out her character. So in this module, I know we're getting a little off track, but in this last module that we played last week, she, he had her find her long-lost mother, which again, could have been dead, not dead, just depending on which version of, of her character you were asking, but had her find her long lost mother and, oh, the happiness, like she's 11, but she's usually sitting right here beside me.
Damon (5m 39s): I have her pull up her desk cause I help her with some of the technical parts and oh man, it was just, you know, she finds her long lost mother and it was just, it was just I'm over here just trying not to laugh because she's being dramatic and she's serious about it. It's been such a it's it's such a joy, watching your kids enjoy the things that you did, you know, growing up as a kid and especially something like Dungeons and dragons. And my son is a big, big fantasy reader. So we talk about the book series that I'm reading and the series that he's reading and we recommend stuff to each other. So yeah, love that.
Damon (6m 20s): And really that's been my whole life. All my friends are big fantasy geeks and that's what we do. You know, I don't want to hang out
Autumn (6m 26s): With you guys for a week. I would pay money for that just to get to play with you guys. That sounds amazing.
Damon (6m 35s): As we've gotten older, it's actually, it tends to be more fun cause we don't get to see each other nearly as much. And so when we get back together, it's, I don't know, everybody's the same, we're all the same kids. We're all just eat dads now, but we're all still the same kids. And so we played, you know, characters that are gonna mess up the module and, and you know, characters that are going to have fun at that someone else's expense. Anyway. So yeah, when I sat down to write books, when I sat down to self-publish, you know, I had, my wife had gotten me a Kindle for Christmas, even though against her better judgment. Cause she knew that I was just going to spend all our money buying eBooks. And I read through several books that were sort of had been on my to be read pile for awhile.
Damon (7m 17s): Once we, I usually I read at night, I don't sleep till late. And so I'll, I'll get into bed and that's what I'll read until I fall asleep. But once we had kids, there was almost none of that. I would fall in the bed and just, you know, when I was out. And so as my kids had gotten a little older, I, I really, I misreading right. I wanted to get back into it. So I convinced her to buy me a Kindle for Christmas, which she did. And I was, I read several books that were on my to be read pile. And then I was just kind of browsing around through the fantasy books. And I came across a book that had like crossed swords on the cover and it had a cool title and it was only three bucks. It was two 99. And I, I had not heard about the self publishing revolution at the point.
Damon (7m 57s): This was probably 2009. It was. And, and so, and, and what happens was I lucked out because back then a lot of people were putting out, not premium product. Let's just call it not AAA titles. Right. So it very well could have been that I had picked up a self published book and then been like, this is not pretty good as it happened. It was a really great book. And then I get to the end and the author's note in the back of the book was just sort of talking about how he'd always wanted to be a writer. And this book was sitting in his heart, in his head for a long time. And as I'm reading this, I realized like, wait a minute. He, he just like, put this out there all by himself. You could do that.
Damon (8m 38s): That's a thing. And so I went to bed that night thinking I could write a book. I mean, I've been making stories my whole life. I could write a book. And so I got up the next morning and started Googling and searching and found out there's this whole revolution of self publishing that was happening in the world. Right. And yeah, immediately writing my first book.
Autumn (8m 58s): That is fantastic. I mean, in all of them, I have, I have to admit your trilogy looks fantastic. It has dragons on the cover. I mean, it looks the true sword and sorcery dungeon, you know, straight out of being a dungeon master and stuff. They look fantastic. So I think that is fantastic. Then I think I, as I said, in one of the previous takes, I didn't know that I I've been a member of BookFunnel for years and I was Googling it and saw in the intro that it said you were a fantasy author and book funnel came out of the fact that you wanted to share a fantasy book. I think it was with your mother. And I'm like, I've got to talk to you. So this is fantastic.
Damon (9m 35s): Well, and it's cool. Cause I, I do a fair number of podcasts and I, you know, it's always about BookFunnel, which is great. That's, that's what I do. I mean, I sit in this chair, you know, I work in my home office. I sit in this chair and I programmed BookFunnel every single day, but I don't usually get to talk about the writing part. First of all, I'm not a publishing author at this point, I publish my trilogy and then now I write code all day, but I, I do read every single night and I still read fantasy every night. So I, I love to talk about the, the, I love to talk about my books and writing and I do love to talk about fantasy and that's not a part that I usually get talk about. So I was actually excited to come on because we get to do a little bit of both. Hopefully we'll talk a little bit about BookFunnel.
Damon (10m 17s): Yes. If I didn't at least mention
Autumn (10m 18s): It. Yeah. Okay. We got to talk at least a little bit, but definitely dragons too. So you ever see either sneak dragons into your code or do you, do you have another story idea in your head and you just you're letting it percolate? So they're gonna separate
Damon (10m 32s): No, I have a whole notebook that I keep where I still write down ideas. My feeling is, or my hope is that I do absolutely want to get back to writing one day. Cause I just it's you always, I mean, if you're a writer, you always sort of had ideas, right. And now the beauty of the self publishing world is that if you have an idea, it's, it's entirely up to you. Whether you choose to make that idea a reality, like there, there is no one that can tell you. No, you could just decide that I'm going to write this book. I'm going to write it the way that I want it. I'm going to put the cover. I want the title I want and I'm going to put it out there into the world and I'm going to let readers decide whether it's good enough. Right. And I, I truly don't think that if self publishing hadn't come along, that I would have ever written anything.
Damon (11m 14s): I'm not the kind of person who likes to go out and, and ask people's permission to do stuff. So I wouldn't have wanted it to go through the query and the editor and then have a bunch of people tell me that I suck. I know that I suck. I can be very self-deprecating I promise you. Right. Right. We're all really good at imagining how bad we suck. Right. And so I can't imagine anytime I'd ever thought about writing as a, as a, as a young man, I definitely would not have. I always thought, yeah, I don't want to go through all of that. And so I just never did it really wasn't until self publishing came along and I thought, wow, I, I want to try that.
Damon (11m 55s): I just want to see if I can do it. Right. And then when I actually sat down, what's funny is I, I, I can be a little flighty. Sometimes I have these brand ideas and then I don't execute it or I execute 20% and then I abandoned them. And so I, I actually started writing the first book. I bought a copy of Scrivener, which was like 45 bucks. And yeah, after doing all this, it's just crazy. Right. And so I started writing it and I didn't tell my wife, which is strange for me because we'll talk about everything. And it wasn't until I actually finished the book. Now it was the first draft and it wasn't anything, you know, I still had a lot of work left to do on it, but there was always this, this little fear in the back of my head that we're just going to start writing this book and you're never going to finish it.
Damon (12m 40s): It's not going to be a thing that you continue. So I, I started writing it late at night in my spare time. And then I was sitting at the dinner table one day and talking to my wife and I, you know, kind of took a bite. And I was like, I've been kind of thinking about maybe writing a book. He goes, oh, well, okay, Mike, what kind of book? You know, with fantasy? That just something like that. She says, I think that's a great idea. I think you'd be really good at that. And they took a few more bites. I already wrote a book. I didn't want to tell her until I finished it. And then, and then as I was, I continued on and I wrote the trilogy.
Damon (13m 20s): I actually had a similar thing where I had this idea for a book funnel and I thought, oh, this is a really cool idea. I see this problem. And that Indies have, I have the same problem. And I think I can solve that problem. But I knew that if I allowed myself, I still hadn't finished my trilogy, which I still absolutely love the sort of true, very traditional fantasy trilogy. I can totally get behind the authors who are writing like 18 books series. But like, I need an ending. I want something where I know that I'm going to get to the end of this storyline. And then you can write a new trilogy and you can give me another story, but I really need to wrap the sky. And so I hadn't finished the, the third book of my trilogy. And I knew that if I started, if I gave myself permission to move on and work on this new idea that I had, which was book funnel, that I would never finish the series.
Damon (14m 8s): And so I, I, I basically made that my, you know, you have to finish, you have to finish writing because you set out to do this. You started, you wanted to be a self published author. So go and do that. I finished the series and then you can go write that thing. And so that's what I did. I finished publishing my trilogy and then I started building will fall.
Autumn (14m 26s): That is amazing. And that's, that's definitely, I understand I'm a task oriented. I like having one big project at a time, so I could see how that totally derail you. But it's, it is funny. So if you hadn't been an author, we wouldn't have book funnel and book funnel is huge. I think you are definitely, if not the number one, I think you were one of the first to come out with how you deliver things. And I know, I think everyone I've listened to a couple of the podcasts been on an every single one. I think the interview was like, I totally underused book flood because you have put so much, there's like hidden gems in there that everyone saw. I'm like, oh, you do audio files now. Right. I have audio books. I need to look into that more.
Autumn (15m 8s): I'll make myself a note. I'm really good with sticky notes on my computer, on my screen. I absolutely love stickies. Thank you for Mac.
Damon (15m 17s): Yeah. It started as something really small, which was just, I had my first book and, and you know, the advice from all the breweries at the time was sort of that, you know, you should, Hey, you should get people to, you should be building a mailing list and you should get people on your mailing list and you should give them like a nice, which we now call a reader magnet. But basically it's just a free story. If you have a bigger series, maybe the first book of your series for free something, right. Just to say, Hey, thanks for joining my list. And so I actually, I said, oh, that's a great idea. So I went out and wrote a short story that actually turned into a 25,000 word novella. Cause it couldn't stop. I couldn't stop writing it. And then I had this thing in my hand and I was like, okay, cool.
Damon (15m 57s): I've got my reader magnet, which at the time was just a free thing and how do I deliver it? So I go and I click on all like all of the big authors at the time, which most of them are still huge today. They're like, okay, how are they delivering it? They attached like a PDF or an EPUB or a mobi to an email and said, here's your book. And I thought that can't be it. That can't be how you do this. Cause there's no way that a lot. Or I know a lot of people who would never figure this out. And so the first iteration of BookFunnel was really just trying to solve that problem. I need to make this really easy for a reader to get a book. And if you had found us five years ago, that was all we did.
Damon (16m 37s): Was we just, you created, we created a little landing page for you. It showed off your book cover. And it said, here, click here. And we'll help you get your book to your Kindle or your Kobo or your Mac or PC or whatever it is you want to read on. And then, you know, then started the, the feature requests. Every, if you put out any business in the world, you know, it's the beauty of being a writer is sometimes that you, you write a book and you actually get to be done with it. You can say, I'm done with that book. Now you may not be done with that world. You may decide I want to do another trilogy in that world. Or I want to take this character and I want to write a standalone that expands on their story and you'll get readers who are like, I want to hear more about such and such, or can you write some more books about such and such, but by and large, if you do your job right, and people love your characters and your love your world, they will accept that you're done with that story.
Damon (17m 27s): But it's off where you're never done. There is never a, Hey, we just added the final feature. Thank goodness we're done with that. I
Autumn (17m 35s): Mean, how many times as Stephen King retired? So
Damon (17m 38s): Yeah, exactly. And so we, you know, the minute we put book funnel out into the world, we started getting all these feature requests. And so the book funnel today that is five years on, has myriad features that, that you can do all kinds of things. And yes, we added audio, we added short audio delivery, we added full audio book delivery. You know, we still do the core of what we do, which is that ebook delivery. But now we have group promos where you can join other authors and find new readers in your genre. And you can work together with other authors to create landing pages and bundles that you can, that you can all promote together. And yes, you can do audio and you can send out your arts through a service.
Damon (18m 21s): We have called certified mail that, you know, that, that does all this really cool stuff and sends automated reminders and follow emails and all this kind of stuff. And it's hard because if you had started a few years ago coming into BookFunnel, it would have been really easy. We do this one thing. And as we have grown, there's so much more that you can do. So that, that thing that you said, that's a common refrain that we hear I'm under utilizing my profile. And that's just because we were always building new stuff. We're always coming up with new features and sometimes we tell you about it. And then we move on and we work on the next feature. I call them feature grenades. We just kind of throw them at people. And then we move on and start working on something else. And that's not, that's not great, but I'm an engineer.
Damon (19m 2s): That's what I do. When I finished one project, I go and I work on the next project.
Autumn (19m 5s): Yeah. And I hear that a lot with authors with even their own newsletters, they send out an email saying, Hey, this book's been released. And maybe they'll just mention something like six months later saying, oh yeah, I love the new reviews on this book. And they get a ton more sales because people forgot that the book, you know, they hadn't seen that the book was out. If it's just like, I can see that with BookFunnel you need like a step-by-step comparison chart. Like, oh, by the way, at this date, we relaunched this. Have you checked it out?
Damon (19m 33s): That's not a bad idea. Okay. Since the last time you were here, here's all the stuff.
Autumn (19m 37s): Exactly. I, you might need to think about that because I know for me, like one of the things I drug drew me in, because I have a little bit of techie, I've got a computer software engineer in my family and my dad was again to a computer. So out of my family, I'm kind of like, I'm a low tier tech person, but I know what I'm doing. And I was delivering my own eBooks and stuff like that. But it was the questions from the reader saying, Hey, I don't know how to put this on my blah, blah, blah, blah phone. And I'm like, look, I just got my first smartphone. I don't know how you put a file. And I think somewhere I saw, so it's like you don't book funnel. They have tech people that do that for him, like 20 bucks a year. I think that was the starting price. I'm so sold.
Autumn (20m 18s): Sold you answer all my questions like that. You saw you didn't you say like you have people, you can still do it to like really archaic devices that we consider.
Damon (20m 29s): Yeah. We still see blackberries. I still, we have people that are on windows XP. I think the Blackberry's probably the oldest one. That's still like really, really, you're still using that. We see some windows phones. I mean, it's, it's, it's pretty impressive. Sometimes it's happened a few times, you know, it's you think I were kidding you, but I'm not. When I tell you that there are people that we've probably had a half dozen requests in the last five years where somebody asked us for a PDF because they wanted to print the whole thing out so they could read it on paper. And I was just like, that's, that's, that's not how eBooks work, but you know, cause I mean, hopefully so you can offer a PDF if you want to.
Damon (21m 10s): We, you know, we, we give you the flexibility to offer whatever file formats that you want. And we take care of the delivery part, but yes, PDFs are always optional, but we do get, we have had some of those requests and I, I got that first request and I thought, surely they were messing with me. And then the more I emailed them back, I realized they're not messing with me. That's really what they wanted. Which just seems like I was very much in as soon as I could read digitally. I, my wife actually that, that same Christmas, that, that I got the Kindle. She bought a hardback of, of a series that I I'd read for many years. And it was the latest book in the series. And I cracked open the book and I started to read it. And I think I got three chapters there before I put it down and grabbed my Kindle and bought the same book in April and never looked back.
Damon (21m 53s): I read everything electronically. It was a, it was an easy switch for me, which is my wife is a, is a huge audio book listener. And she's had the same experience now that she's, she has become an audio first consumer. If they, if the book is out on audio book 100% and she's going to get the audio book first. And if it doesn't have an audio book, which sometimes happens just because of delays, then she'll still read the ebook part. But she absolutely prefers audio books over any other format.
Autumn (22m 21s): Yeah. That's my husband has never been a fantastic reader, but he discovered audio books and whole he's gotten through more books this year than I have. I'm like, how did this? I'm so impressed, but that's so you, first time you did S so you said you did a reader magnet that ended up being a novella and you get to see all these stats behind the scene. So what is the best reader magnet that you think works out? Is it giving away a whole book, novellas, short stories, people do excerpts. What do you think works out the best for readers getting readers to pick up a book?
Damon (22m 53s): So I'll tell you, it really goes pretty much the way you would expect it from a tear, right? So the best thing you can possibly do is a full novel. And I don't, if you're just starting out as an author, if you've only got one or two books, I don't recommend you do that because you don't have a lot to sell. Right. But if you're an author out there, I mean, we have authors that have deep back lists. They've got 20, 30, 40 books out. Okay. I'm happy to give you a, we have several authors that will even give you the first, they've got three or four series, and they'll give you a starter library, which is the first book of each of those series for free. And the beauty is, is like, I just, if I can get you to read book one and you like it and you convert, then you're going to go on and buy the whole series. Right?
Damon (23m 32s): So if I have a deep back list like that, then I'm happy to give away one, a full novel, maybe even two or three, if I've got a really a multiple series and a really big backlist, because that is the, the goal that, that reader, magnet, that lead magnet is always there to get people to read it, and then drive you into buying the rest of the series. If you don't have a full novel, or if you don't have a long back list on the Vela works great. Most readers feel like a novella is just a short novel, right? They don't, they don't have, I don't see anybody ever complained about undeveloped. And then there are several things that you can do there. That work really, really well if you're just starting out a series. So if you're a fantasy author and you're, you're just, you've got your first book published and you're like, okay, now I want to start building up that newsletter, writing a prequel novella, which is so easy for fantasy authors, because we've already done right.
Damon (24m 25s): Well, we've already, I mean, I guarantee you, there's not a fantasy on there, out there who hasn't written their first book and doesn't have like 3000 years of history they've already written in their head. And we're like, well, maybe that happened in the dragon wars a thousand years ago. And before that it was the war of magic and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so like you have all of this world to play with. All you have to do is either just decide that you're going to pick some piece of that world that you're going to pull out. Or if you have some characters, maybe not even your main protagonists, but some side characters that you're going to pull out of your book and say, I'm going to write a prequel novella, or you take your protagonist and say, okay, I'm going to show you what happened just when they were kids, how he discovered magic for the first time, right?
Damon (25m 6s): Something that you didn't like, you sort of alluded to in your book and the best reader magnet that you, that you can have for a series like that in fantasy is, is something that ties back into the series, because what you really want is they read that prequel novella and they get to the end and they want to immediately jump into the series. Because the point of this thing over here, the reader magnet is to get you to buy this thing over here, which is the actual books yourself. So that's, that works really, really, really well. And, and it also works as a secondary. If somebody organically buys your book one and gets to the end, and you say, Hey, thanks for reading. I hope you love my book. If you'd like to know where the heroes first met, I have this free will that you can get for free just for signing up for my newsletter.
Damon (25m 53s): Right? So it works both as a, just sort of a, you never heard of me before, give this a read. You might like my writing and oh, you have heard of me. You've read some of my books. This book will fill in some of the story. You remember where they talked about that first time they met here's that story. And you can read that. And so that works really, really well for that. You can do the same thing with a short story. And I will tell you that again, full novel readers love the most novella. They love second short story. They love third excerpts. They love last. If you're going to do an excerpt, it's entirely possible. We have a lot of authors that do it. You just want to be really, really clear that what they are getting is chapter one through four, or they're getting some eggs, or you want to make clear that they are not getting the full book, because you are there on BookFunnel with other authors who are giving away a full book who are giving away into Vela.
Damon (26m 45s): And so you want yours to be really clearly stated that this is not the full thing so that they don't feel like they got triggered. Yeah.
Autumn (26m 52s): The last thing you want to do is make a reader feel like they were tricked or gypped into doing something that would be right.
Damon (26m 59s): I mean, you know, it's, you gave up your email address, where do you have nobody and nobody, nobody paid money for the XR, but at the same time, you want people to walk away with a good feeling. It's one of the things that I tell people, I see these questions a lot when they talk about their reader, magnet, and the question that always comes up is it, unfortunately, what I see happen is it feels like authors are trying to do their best to do the least amount of work for this reader, magnet thing. Like, can I just write a 500 word, short story? Well, you can, but that's not going to impress anybody. And then it's like, well, can I just write in a Vela? Can I, can I do this? And then it becomes, do I have to buy a professional cover?
Damon (27m 39s): Can't I just write some scribbles, some words and paint and put that up there. And what I tell people is this might be this reader, magnet that you're putting out there into the world. This might be the first time a reader is ever introduced to you as an author, right? They've never, they haven't read your other books. They aren't already in love with you as an author. So this might be the first thing they ever see from you. You really want that to be the first product that they get to know you for. When the goal is you like this so much that you went on to buy these other things. And it's especially short-sighted. If you have a longer running series, if you've got six and eight books or multiple trilogies that run back to back, it's, it's really shortsighted not to spend a few bucks to buy a really good cover for that novella, knowing that if I get you to read this, you might go and buy the entire series for
Autumn (28m 31s): Me. Yes, I, I still, and I agree. I do so still see questions like, oh, you know, they just whip off the reader magnet. Sometimes it's don't, you need to do, you need to put as much care, almost more care. You need to give your best stuff away for free so that you can get the readers to love your series and be willing to stick with you. Let's let a concept of like a thousand true fans. You want them to be just, wow, this is fantastic. I've got to buy everything you've ever written. And I'm going to stick with you for the next decade. Like you have with your favorite authors. And that's huge. If you can get that kind of buy-in
Damon (29m 4s): And that's what you want. You, you get the, so if I give you a free book and, and you know, you've, you, somebody comes into book fall on either. You know, you hope that you can drive traffic organically. That's that's going to be the best route to think you could get somebody who gets to the end of your book. And it's like, wow, I really liked that book. And I definitely want to read that people, the beauty of that is so what funnel allows you to create multiple tracking links that you can send, you can do anywhere you want. So you can actually put a different link in the back of book one and the back of book two in the back of book three, you can offer the same reader magnet, but there are different tracking links that go into the back of each one. So this gives you the, to find out where people are coming from. And the nice thing about that is if you get to the end, if you have a reader who gets to the end of book one, and they hated your book, the likelihood that they're going to be like, you know what?
Damon (29m 54s): I want to go read the prequel of this terrible book and find out what happened is very low. So if they get to the end of book one, or even better to the end of book, two or three, and then they join your newsletter, you know, that that person, they really liked what they read, right? Because you, you, they came back for more. They actually came and they gave their email address and they downloaded that develop. And so that's the best traffic that you can get. But that doesn't mean that you can't get great traffic from other authors. If I write fantasy and you write fantasy and 18 other people that we all work together and send it to your newsletter. And I sent it to my newsletter, there are two really great things that happen. One, we all write fantasy. So my readers, yeah.
Damon (30m 36s): They're predisposed to like what you're writing and your readers are predisposed to like what I'm writing, especially if we're all just like, we're straight up epic fantasy sword and sorcery, like we're really in them. Right. The second thing is if I send it to my newsletter and they click on it and then click your book, then the reader who just clicked on that is the exact kind of reader who a reads emails. Yeah. And then clicks on links in those emails. So any reader that gets sent to your list is definitely the kind of reader that you want to, that you want to be giving your book to. And, but those people are their leads, right? People think that they, they, you got 300 new people to sign up, which is not uncommon.
Damon (31m 16s): You can join a group promo on both all and have hundreds of new people join your newsletter. And then what you really need to do is that's a lead. So they looked at your cover and they were like, wow, it's got dragons on it. And then they looked at the title and like, wow, the dragon sword. Oh, that looks cool. I definitely want that book. But now they're not a fan of yours yet. They're just a lead that liked your book. And that's great. So you got them, you hooked them, but now you need to set the hook and bring them in. So that's where you want to make sure that they read your book and then go on to become a super fan. It's like you were talking about the a thousand true fans, right. Because what you're trying to do is I need to get more traffic.
Damon (31m 57s): I need to get people to read the book. But my goal is ultimately, once you read this book, I want to turn you into a super fan who will buy everything that I write for the rest of time. And I know that you, I mean, we've talked about it, but like, as a kid, there were authors that I knew, I knew their name. And I went into the bookstore and anytime they had a new book out, I bought it instantly. And they, I have some of those authors that I read when I was 10 years old. I'm 45. Now 35 years later, I'm still buying the book, the instant, I see their name. Right. I have a lot, I have an author alarm set up. And as soon as they publish the book, bam.
Autumn (32m 33s): Yeah. And that's, yeah. That's what you want. Yeah. That's one thing I do love about Amazon. And even BookBub where you can follow authors and have those new release alerts, because it's like, you get so excited about a new book. So that is, I know last time, I always forget that you can do the, the new, the links I used to be so good at doing links. Like I would do a new link with every single giveaway. Cause I love the newsletter newsletter swaps and the giveaway group giveaway options that you can get your book funnel. There's days. It's like, I have an alert set up whenever the new one comes out and it's like 20 new giveaways. I'm like, oh my gosh, okay. I'm not going to join that many this month. I can only put so many in my newsletter. I've got to pick like the top four and that's all I get, but it it's nice that people can be very specific, but they can also join, you know, there's wide giveaways.
Autumn (33m 23s): And then there's the focused one like Tiana and sometimes sub John, or you can get fantasy or urban fantasy. What do you think works the best for authors? I mean, should they be going, why do you think they work really well? If you're a fantasy author and you're teaming up with romance writers or is it good to throw your hat in those occasionally? Or do you think it's good to stick with your genre?
Damon (33m 41s): So I would say that if you, so the best thing is always going to be to get as close to your genre as possible. If you write epic fantasy, which is what I, I love. So that's always the example that I use, but let's say romance, for example, you could join like a mega romance promo that has hundreds of other books in it. But the thing is that romance readers, oftentimes they, they might hop around between a few genres, but a lot of times, if I read contemporary romance, that's what I like. So your Amish romance is not going to appeal to me. And your Regency romance is not really going to appeal to me. And so there may be some crossover, I read contemporary romance, but small town romance is, is contemporary.
Damon (34m 22s): And I kinda liked some of that. So you might get so some really good readers from a larger promo like that, that just sort of broadly romance, but you're definitely going to do better if I write small town, clean romance, right? So no explicit scenes and things like that. Then if I can find other authors who are all in exactly that genre, small town, clean romance, then all of our readers are definitely going to like the thing that we're writing. That doesn't mean that if you have the, if there aren't a lot of those promos, right? If you're looking at small town, clean romance and you find one or two, but you're sending out your newsletter every week. And so every week you'd like to include just a little bit of just a little promo down at the bottom that says, Hey, I'm in this promo with some other great clean romance authors.
Damon (35m 7s): You might check it out. If you could only find two of them. And then you've got two more weeks in a month to fill, you might try one of those larger ones. Because the worst thing that happens is what so new people find your book. I mean, horrible, terrible, but you may actually end up getting a really solid reader from that group. They may be that they're a contemporary author, or even that they read Regency romance, but your cover, your cover looks funny to them and they decided to give it a try. And so they did, and now you've got a fan, right? You don't know where your super fans are gonna come from. We always think that we know we get to two into our heads. And we think that we know who our ideal reader is.
Damon (35m 48s): And you may be right. You may even be really, really close to what your ideal reader is, but that doesn't mean that you know who every reader is. So you, I always tell people, draw, if you can find them the niche genres that you can narrow down and get as close to your genre as possible, those readers are going to be a lot closer to your, your absolute target audience. But it's worthwhile. We have at least a couple of times a year, authors will put together a big scifi fantasy mega promo, right? With hundreds of fantasy books now, fantasy and science fiction, right? Which always, for some reason, they always get lumped together. We even lumped them together and look out. I feel terrible because the truth is I do read, I dabble a little bit in science fiction, but I am by and large a fantasy reader.
Damon (36m 34s): That's what 90% of what I read is going to be epic fantasy. That sort of, you know, and I'll, I'll shift around between medieval epic fantasy and oh, this one's based on addiction and this one's samurai mythos and things like that. That's really cool, but that's going to be what I read, but we always lump those together. That said a giant promo that has a hundred scifi fantasy authors in, it means that you are going to get exposed to a hundred people's audiences. And so, and again, what's the worst thing that happened. They saw your cover, it looked good. They downloaded it. They might read your book.
Autumn (37m 8s): Yeah, that'd be fantastic. I have to admit every once in a while, like when I start, when I do some really Janiero specific and I see like the same books I've seen for month after month, I'm like, eh, it looks like a good giveaway, but we're going to go try something else that has different books. Because then we, I want to start reaching, you know, different authors and reaching out to different readers. And if you're getting, if you're ending up in the same newsletter every single month, that's probably going to start tapering off eventually. Right. So I know I asked you this question the first time and it was funny cause you looked a little surprised by like, oh, this is a difficult one because I tried so hard to find a question that no one had asked you and I've already asked it before. What do you think is your, what is either your favorite or the most underutilized feature in book funnel?
Damon (37m 50s): Oh, what was my answer last time? I'm just kidding. I don't
Autumn (37m 55s): Remember because I was like, I agree. I love that one. So
Damon (37m 59s): What the most under utilized feature in both phones darn. Now I need a Crip sheet. Cause if you tell me the answer, that's what I would pick. But now I can't think of, of my favorite features is probably the themes. So we've, , I'm trying to think of, there are so many features and so many things you can do in BookFunnel, but I'll tell you like, as a developer, just like a writer, right? Nobody sits down to write a book that they don't want someone to read. Right. As authors, I know we all play coy. We're like, oh, I would just love. I'm just happy to have the book. I, I don't really care if anyone reads it.
Damon (38m 40s): Absolutely. We want somebody to read that book and you feel good when I got the first time I got it and review that wasn't one of my buddies. I was like, holy crap. Someone read my book and they like it. It did. And so that's a super, it's a wonderful feeling. It's no different being a software developer. You, you go and you sit down and you build this super cool new feature and you think, wow, everybody's going to love this. And then you put it out there and nobody uses it. And that's just, that's like having a book that no one reads. Right? And so one of the features, one of the things that we tried to do really early on when we gave people book funnel was give authors the power to, to express themselves on their pages.
Damon (39m 21s): And so when we made our landing pages, we made your book cover really huge. Because to me that is the number one thing that a reader is going to look at. Look, you go into a bookstore and there's a reason why the face out books sell way more than the spine out books. Right? And so my feeling was like, no, give them the book cover really large. And then the next thing was, give them a tagline, give them a hook, right? Don't just say, download your copy of book, title, give them something that hooks them in. And that authors don't think about that sometimes. But those are the things that, you know, when, when, when you land on a page, what readers are looking for is they look at your cover. First, your title, second, your blurb third. And then from those three, they're going to decide whether they actually want to click and then get that book.
Damon (40m 5s): And a misconception that I see with a lot, with a lot of authors is when they're setting up their reader, reader, magnet, their assumption is that because this is free, that everyone will just take it. And that's not how that works. Like a free thing. You still have to convince people that they want this thing. And so that cover that tagline, that blurb, all of those are working together to get people to go, oh, this sounds really good. And then the second piece of that is it's not just getting them to take a copy. I need you to then read it because if you get it and you put it on your Kindle, but you don't actually read it, it doesn't actually do me any good. So all of those pieces are working in concert. And from the very first days of BookFunnel, we tried to give authors the power to customize the text and customize the look of their landing page.
Damon (40m 52s): But it was never quite complete. I think we had 10 or 12 color options that you could choose from and we wanted to limit it so that it wasn't so that mostly so that authors couldn't shoot themselves in the foot and come up with like a lime Sherbert page. Oh know that blinds people, but ultimately, but ultimately we released just a few months ago, we released a feature called deans that really lets you alone the entire page. And the reason was that we saw more and more authors who really had leaned into creating their author brand. Right. And not, not just each individual book, but who are you as an author? What kind of books do you and why would I want to read your books over someone?
Damon (41m 37s): Else's if you're a grim dark fantasy author, then make it very clear that that your books are filled with antiheroes and it's all grim dark, because that's going to attract, it's going to do two things. It's going to attract the readers who love that stuff. And it's going to push away the readers who don't want to read that stuff, which is okay, it's okay to be opinionated in your writing and say, look, I write grim dark. So if you're not into that, you probably not going to like my books. Right. And, but more and more authors were starting to lean into that author branding. They had created their own, they'd had designers create logos and they had their own, like, this is my brand color, right? They're John Deere green.
Damon (42m 17s): Right? And so we said, we started seeing more of that and thought we can do that. Right. Cause one of the messages that we've always put out is that we're not in the business, the business of building our brand, we're in the business of building your brand. I actually don't care if anybody knows who book funnel is now readers love us because we've been getting them, helping them get books for five years. And so we have a lot of loyal readers who absolutely love book funnel, but I want them to get your book. I want them to drive towards your brand. So we released themes a few months ago that really lets you design the pages the way that you want them to set your colors, to set the, the way that the fonts are displayed. And then you can even replace our logo.
Damon (42m 57s): You can actually remove the book from a logo from your page entirely and put your own logo in its place. And I think that's, I think that's awesome. I want you to make your pages your own so that when somebody lands on it, they know that they're looking at an autumn Burke book. They're not looking at a book on a page. Right. They're looking at your stuff. So I'm glad I had the same answer. I had to think about it for a second. Okay
Autumn (43m 22s): Know, like I said, I was so excited because I am a graphic designer when you released it. I think it was the same day I got the email. I'm like, oh, I am setting up some. It was so cool to be able to put, because I do have my own local logo and to be able to put that up on the corner. And I mean, it looks like it's my page, it's my branding. And I was just like, yes, this is so awesome. So I have to admit, I love that one I'm waiting for right now. Just color choices. If you ever allow like a PDF background or like a JPEG background, be like, but just an idea. But then I do love being able to choose the colors and play around with it. So that was so exciting. And now they all look the same. So yeah. And you
Damon (43m 60s): Get, once you create a theme, you can set that as the default for pen. So on book funnel, you can have multiple pin names, which means that, you know, this pen name, my scifi pen name has this cool dark black Starfield sort of feeling. And then over here, my fantasy one is I write Nobel bright fantasy, which is the opposite of grim dark, which is actually just fantasy. And so you can write these, you know, over here, my pages are for my fantasy pen name or this. And so you can create multiple themes. So you can even create a series theme, right? If you have a set of colors or if you've created a logo that's specific to a series, you can actually create a series theme and then label all of the books in that series, using that theme. And every time somebody lands on a page for a reader, magnet, or the first book in series, or even just a page that drives them to Amazon, all of that is themed in exactly the same thing.
Damon (44m 47s): And so there's a, there's a continuity there and you can set a default and say, oh, this is my autumn Bert theme. I want it set on that author, that pen name. So that any page I create with that pen name is automatically going to be set to that theme so that you do start to get that cohesive information.
Autumn (45m 2s): Yeah. It's just, it's fantastic. It's almost, I mean, I can make a match to my website. It's, it's perfect because I do use books, book, funnel. I love your coding help by the way, because I went and used book funnel to hook up to my PayPal and I have it on a different on the I'm writing fantasy website through pay hip and to be able to sell direct sales to readers and one, you have coding that makes it like this step-by-step it's like, you could figure it out as long as you can read some instructions and follow them. And it is fantastic because you're right. You've been around long enough book. Funnel is like the number one way of delivering books. And so when you tell, when I have like, why buy for me on my website? And I mentioned, Hey, these are the same books delivered through book funnel that you would get if you were just downloading my first, you know, my free giveaway.
Autumn (45m 50s): And it has that. Buy-in like, okay, it's not a virus infected thing. That's going to look the fly, the innards of my computer. So that's, it is nice that you guys have been around and you do such a good job with the delivery that, you know, readers are not like, oh, okay. I used to be afraid of getting something directly from an author or afraid that someone would have inspected it somehow. And that's fine. And
Damon (46m 12s): We give, so readers actually have a library of all the books they've ever gotten from BookFunnel whether they got a free book or whether they bought a book from your website and we deliver that because we do direct sales delivery. We haven't talked about that, but that's you sell direct. And then we have with the delivery of part about that, the nice thing about that is because there are so many tens of thousands of readers that you authors that use book funnel. There are millions of readers that go through BookFunnel every month. And there are tens of thousands of authors that, that, that either deliver free books or they do sales, or they do both. And now we've got a lot of audio book authors that are using us. We launched audio books last November. And so we have lots of audio book authors that are starting to do direct sales of their audio books, too. What's great about that is we have millions of readers out there who already have a library with book funnels.
Damon (46m 56s): So if they buy a book from your website, it gets added to their library. But if they buy a book from my website, it goes to the same library. So even though they bought from two authors, completely different websites, they all funneled together. They all funnel together into the title. They all come together to be like one library. So we have readers that have thousands of books in their books, on a library, and they can read them in the book funnel app. They can read them in the cloud. We have a cloud reader where they can read all of their books right from their browser, or they can send it to their Kendall. And will they, I mean, like it's cool because we have so many readers that do recognize our brand and recognize the word book and go, oh, I know how to do that.
Damon (47m 39s): I know how to get a book from that. So we do tell people if you're going to sell direct from your site, we have a little delivered by BookFunnel logo that you can put there. That just says, if you know what this is, it does provide a certain level of confidence to readers like, oh, I know that I'm going to be able to get this book. I understand. I know what that means. I already have a book from a library. I mean, we have, I think I checked at the end of the day. We probably have 15,000 people a day that are reading directly in our app. So I'm not, you know, when we started what clinical was all about, we do our best to try to send the books to your Kindle app or to your Kobo app or your nook or whatever it is that you're reading in. But over time we have more and more it's in the authors.
Damon (48m 18s): We are steeped in this stuff, right? We live in this stuff every single day where we, we follow the Facebook groups, we follow keyboards. Like we read all of these posts. And so you start to get this idea in your head that, that the world works one way, because we're in this vacuum of, of some publishing information. I wouldn't say vacuum, but we're in this, this bubble where we're always being bombarded with information and you don't realize how many people out there have never read an ebook before, because I see them in my queue every single day, we answer four or 500 emails a day. And it was surprising to me how many people we would get, who would say, I don't know how to do this. I've never read anything, but paper books from the library, how do I do this?
Damon (49m 0s): And what we found was that the assumption for most authors is everybody's got a Kindle, everybody's got the Kindle app. And the truth is that that's not true. And so we both here we were and we would say, oh, well go download the Kindle app. And you can read in that or download the Kobo app. And you can read in that, but all of those apps required a lot more work than just here. You can just read an our app. And because we didn't have an app that you could read it. And we actually didn't launch that until last January. But when we, when we launched that and we launched our cloud-based reader immediately, we started seeing an uptake in readers who just I'll just read it here in the book funnel app. And so the great thing about that is that if you're selling your book and I'm selling my book in tens of thousands of other authors are selling their books, then if all of them are going through the same place, then those readers do gain a confidence that I know where my books are going.
Damon (49m 50s): And I know that I'll be able to get them later on another device. When I buy a new iPad, I can just get the book from the lap and boom, there's all my books.
Autumn (49m 57s): Yes. I think that is brilliant because I do remember hearing horror stories about like, if Barnes noble, if something, you know, went down one of the big ebook stores, all those eBooks, I mean, you're where do, what do you do with them? Especially if they're at least book, at least alone with them use the same technology. Like EPUB even Amazon's EPUB now. Thank you. But it's, you know, if it's still up in somebody else's cloud or it's only on your nook, I think what do you do if it's, you know, the store's gone? So I do kind of like the fact that it's like, you know, you have this, I think curiosity, is there a way of following an author on book? So if you say like, I love autumn, Bert. I want to know if she has any other books here that I can pick up.
Autumn (50m 38s): Is there a way of doing
Damon (50m 40s): Not right now, but we've, we've talked a lot. I'd say we, my wife, Julie and I run the company, we're still a really, really small company. It's, it's really just five of us that do everything. And it's the other, the other three are our support team, but it's pretty much just Julia and I, who I do all the programming and Julie runs the company. So we we're always talking about ideas. Cause that's the, that's the big thing, right? The, the one that, the question that we get from all the authors is how do I find new readers? And especially, I think it's great, what we've tried to do. And what I've tried to tell authors is as much as possible, you should be pushing readers to your newsletter, to your website so that they can get it.
Damon (51m 21s): So that we're so that nobody is in the middle, right, right. Facebook is, is great for reaching people. Twitter, you can get on Twitter, you can reach people with your Instagram. You like to post pictures. There are all these amazing social media tools that you can find people, but all of those tools act as middlemen between you and the reader. And what's really amazing is that we, before self publishing, you didn't really have that, that that's not a thing that really existed. Right? I mean, I remember as a kid growing up that, reading those books and, you know, you might find the occasional author who have like a fan club that you could join and you can write a letter to, or something like that. But you couldn't just jump on Twitter and say, Hey, such and such.
Damon (52m 2s): I loved your latest book and they reply, but I could go so glad you loved it. Right. That's, that's an amazing thing. And I think that's even more so with self-published authors, people don't feel like, I mean, there are authors that I've read for years. That to me would be unapproachable. If they were at a conference, I would be the one going, you know, like Kettering off to the side.
Autumn (52m 23s): If I ever see the old diamond, I'm going to have a heart attack. What
Damon (52m 27s): Did you just say? Oh no. Yeah. If you saw him, you would be like right there. I could just go over and say hi. So, but like for self published authors, I don't think there is as much of that. There is a sort of a feeling of these are just real people and they're publishing great books. And so I always tell authors that you should absolutely take that connection is as close as you can. Let that reader talk directly to you. You know, there's this term that we use in software development called Flint stoning. And if you can imagine like Fred Flinstone, like paddling his feet under the car, and what it really means is there's a phrase that we say that's cause as do the things that don't scale.
Damon (53m 8s): And that is like any time you have to personally answer an email, right? You autumn, Bert, you get an email from a reader and they say, Hey, I just finished this such and such series. And I absolutely loved it. You have to answer all those emails. And that's not something that scales cause there's one autumn Burke. And she can only answer so many emails in day with all the other things that you can do. But until you reach the level where hundreds or thousands of people are emailing you every day, answer those emails, answer every single one, because that one email that one reply. That could absolutely be the thing that turns that reader who really likes your book into a super fair, holy crap. The author actually emailed me back.
Damon (53m 48s): I sent her an email to tell her I love her books. And she replied and asked me what my favorite character was. Holy crap. Right? That stuff, something that as a kid, imagine if you'd gotten a real reply, not the form letter. That's like, thank you for reaching out to the RA Salvador fan pub. Here's a picture of Bob, you know, with his dog. That was really nice. It's actually got, if you got a real reply that he'd written out and said, Hey, I'm so glad you liked the book. Here's a picture of me on the wall. Oh my God, absolutely framed that letter. And you would, you, if you weren't already a super fan, you would absolutely become a super fan. And so for those new authors that are just starting to put their work out into the world, and you're just start building that newsletter early, because you want to build that direct connection.
Damon (54m 36s): If you create a Facebook fan page, that's great. You create a group on Facebook, but the problem is, if you get everybody to follow you over there, then Facebook is the one who owns the relationship between you and your reader. Every post that you make, you're basically asking Facebook permission, please show this to my fans so that they can see it. And that's not what you want. You want the ability for Indies to actually create real connections with readers is something that has never existed in the publishing world until now. And so as an Indi, you know, be Indy, be the kind who just like, you know what? I answer all my emails. If you email me, you're going to get a reply, put that in the author note in the back of your book, email me, here's my address.
Damon (55m 18s): Tell me how much you love my book. I love to hear so many times so often we don't actually, we put these things out into the world and then crickets, we don't hear anything. I know that people are buying, right? What are they liking them? Yeah.
Autumn (55m 30s): Some of those, a few reviews. Yeah. Those emails. I mean, they are just fantastic.
Damon (55m 35s): And what's funny is you, I actually got more emails than I got reviews. I didn't have a lot of people read my book. I don't want to give the impression that there's like, there's just gobs, like was the best seller or anything. But I got more emails from people than I ever got reviews. And I think part of that is there's a certain kind of person who is willing to go and publicly leave a review on something and put it out there to me. It's it's I mean, and those are valuable because those reviews are incredibly valuable. Social proof to other readers who are trying to decide whether or not this book is something that they would like. But to me, getting that email, getting that, that kid, that 15 year old kid who emails you and tells you how much they love your book. That is so worth. It what's really funny is my best friend.
Damon (56m 17s): He, he was one of the first ones to read my books and I never told anybody that I was writing a book until after I'd actually it, because I didn't want to embarrass myself at this. It's a, it's a common thing you hear among all right. That, especially with your first book, you know, you're going to like it. I've read it 28 times. But if I read it 29, I'm going to catch that typo that I missed. But when you finally put it out into the world, my best friend, he had read the books and he really liked him. He told me what he thought about them. His son is now 12 years old. And he sent me a picture of the other day of his son had picked up. Cause I'd sent him a copy of the trilogy and paperback, his son had picked up the book and started reading it, which he sent me the picture. And he's like smiling, reading the book, you know?
Damon (56m 58s): And it's just totally cute picture. And it was wonderful. Cause he sent me along. He says, he says, guess who's reading your book. And then he writes me a quote. He's like, dad, if you read this great book, could you ask for a better compliment? Right. And that's what I thought until he got to the end of the book. And then he gets me, he sends me a text. He goes, so that should finish your book and puts it down. And he goes, man, I thought Harry Potter was good. And I thought, oh, I mean, yeah, it's yeah. I think the kids wrong, but I will take it. I'm going to take it. You're right. But that's one of those things that I've heard of authors, who've been around for a long time that have been writing books for years and decades, even in traditional publishing, you never know who is going to be the one who finds me, picks up your book.
Damon (57m 49s): Even that book that you think is terrible. Right. That first book, that first road's not very good. Like you don't know how people are going to respond to that. And so put yourself out there, put your email in that, that field, put that newsletter sign up in there because you want to hear from those people when they find you and fall
Autumn (58m 6s): In love. Oh yeah. I mean it is, to me it is those emails that you never know when you email someone, I've always, especially with COVID and everything else. I've had some hard years and I thought, you know, I want to be the nice person. I write noble bright too. So I like to Spire inspire hope. And so I always try to pay it forward and yeah, you never know what kind of day the person on the other end is going to be having. And I always like to, yeah, it's the one I, there are so many emails. I remember that people have sent to me either because it was a bad day or because you get to how much the book touched them that then, you know, I felt when you were talking about the kid, you know, you get those tingles and you're like, yeah, this is I say, I write because I have these stories in my head and I love the characters.
Autumn (58m 47s): And I love the challenge of telling the story. But man, you know, it's those emails of those words of encouragement when someone else connects with you and could love something you've created, you're like, this is why I do it.
Damon (59m 1s): It is why we all do it. And there's, there are abilities now for you to, to forge those direct connections, like never before. And so that's, I try to get authors to do that because that's one of the most beautiful parts about being an indie is, is really being able to actually talk to those readers and find those people who do love
Autumn (59m 21s): Your absolutely. And there's so, okay. So we haven't even touched on print codes, which are something we have a conference coming up. I'm hoping to actually use print codes for the first time this fall,
Damon (59m 32s): My second, that would be my second feature that I love that, that not a lot of authors use the ones who use it, use the crap out of it because it is so for those who don't. So what Kritikos let you do is generate a unique code, a batch of unique codes that you can literally, you don't have to print them, but that's what we designed them for. So that you could print out, you know, 500 bookmarks or 500 postcards. And each of them has an individual unique code on the back that you can then give to a reader. So it's, it's being able to carry your eBooks in your pocket and take them with you and give somebody, oh, Hey, I think you would love my book. Here's a free copy. And they go to a website, they type in that little code. And then once they get their book, that code is dead and no one else can use it.
Damon (1h 0m 14s): Right? So it's a unique code. That's just for one person. And that actually came about because authors, we have so many authors that were emailing us and they were all going to a big conference and they couldn't, they couldn't actually take enough books on the airplane. Right. So they couldn't, they couldn't pack the books in because if you're taking paperbacks everywhere and then what they heard from, from years past, they'd actually heard from readers who had told them that as much as they love going to these conferences, by the end of the show, they had so many paperback books that they actually had to leave some behind in the hotel room cause they couldn't pack them all home. And so we were like, oh, Hey, wouldn't it be awesome. If you could give somebody an ebook right.
Damon (1h 0m 55s): That they can go and get it on their own time when they get on their smartphone on their way home or they can just pick it up when they get home. So that was where print codes came about. I tell people that that book funnels roadmap, our development roadmap is always set by our authors when they're emailing us and asking us for features, we collate all that stuff together and go, you know what? That's a really cool idea. How w how long would it take to build that? We can build that. And so then we built it and printed codes was one of those things. So you're going to a conference.
Autumn (1h 1m 23s): Yes. So, yeah, so I live in Vermont and they have a they've meant I've paid, I've paid since 20, 20, March, 2020 was supposed to be the conference. So now it's going to be October 20, 21. Yay. It's confirmed. And I am going to, I want to use them because the neat thing is, I mean, I've been to a, Comic-Con a little wine and use a QR code for what is a free e-book on BookFunnel, you know, you just scan it and take it. But this way, if I have a book that I'm selling, I can still give away a free copy as like a benefit for coming to this store, to the show. So I'm so excited. And since we talked last, I also created a bundle for my own series of eight book series.
Autumn (1h 2m 4s): So you go and we'll pick up book one now for free, but when you get to book one, you get to see all the other covers below it. And they go to all the sales pages. Like you told me, there are such good features. I feel like you could do mentoring. Like this is how you use book funnel, but you're probably already busy enough that you don't need to have like a mentoring aspect to your day of all right. Let me step you through all the features and book funnel. Okay, good. Next person. Well,
Damon (1h 2m 28s): If you can't, if you catch me at a conference, that's usually the kind of talk that I give is just talking through, not just the, it's not like a feature by feature list of book formula. It's really more of the, what we see authors using BookFunnel for that are like, wow, that's a really cool idea. That's not something that we had thought of. You know, one of the best things that you see as a developer is developing some product or some idea that you think is going to be used for X and then people grab it and they use it for X, Y, and Z. And you go, wow, that's a really cool idea. I hadn't even thought about that when I built it. And so it's neat to see what authors are doing. So if you catch me at a conference and that you come to see one of my talks, a lot of that is what I talk about is, is what those, what some of those authors that are, that are really using BookFunnel to its full effectiveness, the kinds of tricks and things that they're doing that are just really, really neat ideas that you probably haven't thought of
Autumn (1h 3m 21s): Before. Yes. Well, I, I will definitely, I want to, I'm going to look for my conference schedule and that'll be like, the world is slowly, maybe returning to normal will be. Yeah. Or if you want to come to Vermont and October, which is gorgeous fantasy, come on a fantasy book show and fair. It'll be really fun. So you want to do a road trip of, thank you. I could talk to you all day about fantasy writing and books and dragons and BookFunnel of course, but is there any other special tip you want to give anyone before we, before I let you go back to answering, being one of the five people in BookFunnel you answering questions and emails?
Damon (1h 3m 58s): No, I mean like just new features. We have audio books out there. So we haven't even really talked about audio books, but that has, has really gotten huge it's it's audio books are sort of now where eBooks were back in 2011 and they're just like, like a hockey stick. They're just shooting up like crazy. And so we build out audio books so that authors would have the same power with their eBooks, with their audio books that they, that book funnel has given authors with their eBooks. You can sell them direct from your website. You can give away free copies. You can do short, you can do short, like novella length audio. You can give those away. And all those things that we talked about, bundles and print codes and group promos and themes, all that stuff. Anything you can do with your ebook on book funnel, you can now do with audio books and short audio as well.
Damon (1h 4m 39s): So we've, that's really been our push since the beginning of the year, because that's a, it's a whole new thing for us. You know, we're still building out all the ebook features and we're always working on stuff. But now as we build new features going forward, they're basically going to entail eBooks and audio books and every everything in between.
Autumn (1h 4m 58s): Yeah. I, there I'm jealous. I signed up exclusive with ACX when they first started and have six books with them. And now, like, I see what you guys have doing. I'm like, darn it. How do I get over there instead of where I'm at? I don't know. We'll have to, I'll have to start
Damon (1h 5m 13s): Reading you can't erase. Yes. Yeah, no, no, no. Most ACX they changed it to 90 days now, but it used to be one year. So if you've been in there for longer than one year, you can actually request to be removed from the exclusivity
Autumn (1h 5m 26s): And just take my book with me and just take your book with you. Great queues full of tips. I'm going to go check into that. That's my next assignment. Now that I got a bundle page up for my one series. Thank you.
Damon (1h 5m 40s): What about bundles? The last time that we talked, but that, that one didn't get recorded. So you guys missed out on that one, but every time we, every time we chat, I'm going to give you a to do list. You can just walk away and, and, you know, go off with your time.
Autumn (1h 5m 52s): All right. I'm going to, yeah, that'll be funny. Yes. For all the laugh. When he hears that, because he hates my stickies. He, they make him run away screaming. I'm just going to start though up. I'm going to start like, just scheduling with you like every month, like, Hey, you got free time. Let's chat. Let's have a sticky chat chat. We can talk dragons. I swear. Oh, thank you so much. I love what funnel and all the features. And if, and if there is an author who has not heard of book funnel, there'll be a link in the show notes. Please go check it out. Because it is a fantastic way of delivering books and selling books and audio books now. And joining giveaways. I mean, then that's the only, just like scraping the surface of what you guys are offering.
Damon (1h 6m 32s): Yeah. You can find us at dot com. And if you have any questions, even if you're not a book following user, you can email helping bill funnel.com. Our people are really knowledgeable, knowledgeable on, of course everything book funnel, but also really just kind of everything. Self-publishing we get lots of questions that have absolutely nothing to do with BookFunnel whatsoever. We get, we get questions from authors. Should I be NKU should I be why we should get questions from readers about like, what, what, what iPad should I buy? Which one? Which he reader is the best. Like we get, we get the craziest question sometimes. And it's, and I always talk about, we tell our people like, answer them. If you have an answer, answer them, even if it's just your personal opinion. Oh, I liked the iPad. Cause you can read on all these different apps or whatever, but whatever it is, we help all kinds of people.
Damon (1h 7m 14s): So if you have any questions, send us an email. We're always there.
Autumn (1h 7m 17s): Aye. You guys are brilliant. Thank you so much, David. And I really appreciate it. And I know this is the recording. That's going to work.
Damon (1h 7m 26s): If not, I don't know what we're going to do on tape for, and we're just going to have like a karaoke sing off or something. Sounds
Autumn (1h 7m 31s): Good to me. I'll be back, have a great day and thank you. And once again, thank you for having me
Narrator (1h 7m 38s): Next. We're going to have, yes, we're going to do one of our famous top 10 worst. If you like, what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the am. Writing fantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join autumn and Jasper on patrion.com/and writing fantasy for as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the M writing fantasy podcast going, stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
How do you create a magic system for your novel that is both unique and interesting? How do you tackle magic systems when worldbuilding a fantasy setting?
Tune in to episode 126 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast where Autumn and Jesper share exactly how they create magic systems for their fantasy world.
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent, there is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them. Now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I'm Jesper.
Autumn (32s): And I am Autumn.
Jesper (34s): This is episode 126 of the Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. And I honestly don't know how we waited this long to discuss how to create a magic system, but never... what do you say? Never late than never or what do you say?
Autumn (51s): That definitely works for me. Magic is like foundational a way where we've been joking about-
Jesper (57s): Better late than never, that's what you're supposed to say. Not never late than never, that makes no sense.
Autumn (1m 4s): Well, you know, my English wasn't perfect sometimes either. Oh, and this is, should it be interesting? Definitely. It would've been joking about magic and destroying computers all day. So, Hey, well, I know to talk about how you would develop that, if that was your story.
Jesper (1m 23s): Yeah. Yeah. I'm really looking forward to it because Magic Systems, that is one of my favorite topics.
Autumn (1m 31s): This world needs a better Magic System. If I was writing Earth it would probably be bad for some people.
Jesper (1m 40s): No honestly, there's not enough magic in real life. Not we need more.
Autumn (1m 46s): Magic definitely, this was the story, a totally different anyway. So how are things over a year, a side of the planet?
Jesper (1m 56s): It's good, not too many exciting things going on here. To be honest, I'm working on the chapter by chapter plotting of the two and our new Sherry's and a, I should not be done by the end of this week. I hope so that yeah, so that, that's a pretty good, I'm just working on that. And a otherwise soccer is really picking back up here in Denmark last Saturday we had 500 matches to cover and the region that I belonged to, which was a, too much. So we actually have to tell some teams that a, they would not go there were not going to get a referee. Ow, because we didn't have it anymore.
Jesper (2m 36s): It was just too many matches on one day they're excited. The COVID spraying, you know, lets go for it. Everybody is just wanting to play matches with just of course it was cool, but it's everybody wants to play out at the same day becomes a problem. Yeah. So just this week alone, I have three matches to referee. So yeah, in that sense it's a bit busy that you could say.
Autumn (2m 59s): I was going to say on top of writing on top of, you know, everything else that you got going on plus work and yeah, that just keeps you on your toes is a little bit.
Jesper (3m 12s): Yeah, just a little, maybe I'm going to be a bit tired and once we reached the weekend, but I have to referee a medicine that weekend as well. So that's not, you know, let's do it. I'm going to get much arrest. So Sunday I'm just going to be on the couch. Like yeah, I think it will. It'll be a well deserved couch day. I hope it is quiet and rainy and you don't feel like going out and you can just be like surf the internet and watch Netflix. Yeah. I can watch more of American gods. Like we talked about it in a past episode and I started to finish the entire first session of a season of it now. It's good.
Autumn (3m 45s): All right. I've got to like a 14 day span coming up where I'm solo on. I might put that on the list.
Jesper (3m 52s): I like it is. It's a really good, cool. I haven't checked though to be honest because there was only three seasons and I have not checked if, because I'm always concerned about checking on online about because then I'm going to get spoilers or something, but I have not checked if it's like a proper ending seasonal or if it's just the one of those where they're just not funding it and it just stops in the middle of it. I have not checked that, but I just have fingers crossed right now that is going to be a proper ending. And they had planned to end by the end of the season three, if not, then I'm going to get a bit upset.
Autumn (4m 28s): But do I do remember reading that, that yeah, a Netflix likes to have a series that only go two or three. So hopefully people are writing, knowing that Netflix prefers is the only two or three seasons.
Jesper (4m 38s): Yeah, but this one is Amazon prime.
Autumn (4m 41s): Oh, that's right. Darn Ooh. I don't know. Good luck. Yeah. I don't know. Well, and I dare not look it up on the internet. So the, I don't mind, but how about you? What do you, what are you doing these days? At least a book. So I'm happy yesterday. Revolution came out. I mean, when we're recording this, it record it out. It came out just a few days ago. So by the time it's out in the world, the book will have been out for a little while. But yeah, so it's good to have only one more book to go and my teen to face here. So I can't weight and I'm working on the edits for that one at the same time, working on edits for our co-written book one. So I'm editing and editing and doing some graphic design just to keep my sanity I suppose, and what is going for some Wachs, but we're getting the spring rains, which we desperately need.
Autumn (5m 27s): So I can't complain, but that means more inside time than outside time. Oh, you must be going crazy by all that editing by now. Jesus, I'll be happy when I finished tainted Fe and that I'm just working on our books and it will be much smoother.
1 (5m 42s): My may is going to be a busy month for me as far as trying to juggle way too many things. But after this, hopefully it'll smooth out a little bit and I will and mention I'll be a little solo for almost two weeks. So that should just work myself to death, you know, forget, sleep, pretend like I'm not a vampire. And what is your plan? It particularly to have a college student, I could work all night. That's what I'm going to do, but it's a wonderful of working on is wonderful. I can't complain. I just need more hours than the day.
Narrator (6m 20s): A week on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast.
Jesper (6m 25s): A few things to cover in this section today, but the most important part first. So we want to give a shout out and thank you to Creative Gray and James Delton. I think that's how you say it for joining us on Patreon.
Autumn (6m 42s): Yes. Thank you for your always appreciate having your supporter.
Jesper (6m 46s): Yeah. And not only is that, Dominic also increased his pledge. So thank you for your support as well, Dominic. So it is because if you guys together, of course, with the existing patron supporters that we can keep this show going. So if you are listening out there and you haven't checked patron out yet, then ask yourself if you feel that this podcast is perhaps worth a dollar a month.
Autumn (7m 12s): Maybe I, we, we hope we think so. I would support us if I wasn't already supporting that. I give my title for Bella, give herself a dollar. Sounds good.
Jesper (7m 24s): Well, that is a link to the show notes from where you can check out Patrion and all their rewards that we offer all over there. If you're interested. And once again, thank you so much a to creative, great James store and Dominic for, for you or pledges a, we really appreciate it. Yes, definitely. Thank you. And the other thing I wanted to mention, speaking of Patrion, I think everybody probably heard about Kindle alibi now, but I actually wrote a detailed overview together with my personal recommendations on Kindle Vela for our patron supporters. So by joining on patron, you are also gonna get access to that and tons and tons of advice that a we don't share anywhere else.
Jesper (8m 10s): And a autumn, you have written quite a number of advice, articles and so on, on patron as well to join my writing tips and things their yes. Yeah. So a very good a we, we loved to see actually it is so that once we get to $100 a month on Patreon, which we are very, very close to, then we actually going to do a dedicated patron Q and a session on only for patron supporters. So, you know, if somebody wants to get in on that, you could jump in now and then just a play it's a bit there on patron.
Jesper (8m 51s): And it's probably is not going to take too much to put it over the top. So that's true. And then we good to go that, what do you find? Oh, I can't wait. I, because I do, we've actually gotten to talk to a couple of our Patreon supporters and they're all awesome. And that would be really cool to get the help of a zoom chat are something with them. Yeah. And we'd just a, before the recording, this podcast episode, we also just came off the monthly Q and a session we do with all the students and old patron supporters at, at $5 and up. Ah, and it's, it's just wonderful. I love the interaction with people and I love the, you know, being able to see people's faces even better when they joined life. But also some people that just email it in some questions with this wonderful.
Jesper (9m 34s): And I love being able to help directly like that. A it's it's fun to do the podcast, but that's more generic. Whereas the Q and a session is just responding directly to peoples' questions. So thats, I love that. Oh, you two, are you hoping? And you know, with COVID easing up, maybe there'll be more conferences and stuff again, because yeah. I love the in-person stuff. It's so much fun. Yeah. And we still have it on the idealist to see if we could do some sort of Am Writing Fantasy thing, maybe a live thing with P seeing people live and stuff like that to sounds dangerous, but maybe we should do that.
Autumn (10m 15s): One day was six foot distancing, but where did you see me? The Facebook group, his over almost a 4.5 are for 4,500 members. So you, you know, that it would be a quiet the party. Yeah. That was going to be quite a bit crazy. I think it would be, yeah.
Narrator (10m 40s): And on to today's topic.
Jesper (10m 40s): So yeah, as I said at the top Magic Systems are probably apart from map-making one of my favorite topics, because it's such an integral part of the fantasy genre. It is. I, it is funny though, because I think I still remember writing, reading fantasy as a, you know, a young kid and thinking, oh, this is so cool.
Autumn (11m 0s): And I just assumed all magic was Magic you know, is like the same as Tolkien to the, the theme is the first story you've read. All magic is going to be like that. And it was sort of the introduction that magic could be different in different stories and then there's limitations and how you overcome them that I'm like, oh, this is really cool. And then you start thinking, what kind of magic would I have? We just got asked that on the podcast, what kind of magic would you want? And it, it was just so fun to think about. And especially as a writer to structure magic and to do that, what are the weaknesses? What are the strengths? How can you overcome it? I, to me, those are the F the best parts of writing or figuring those things out and then putting two people together and having a battle and yeah.
Jesper (11m 43s): To be good. Yeah. And there, it is also a very nice with a, with a magic wand, if it's just part of the it's part of a shopping cart. I had to me that if you read a, a fantasy novel and the magic just doesn't it. Okay. I'm not saying every single fence as you, Brooke has to have to have a lot of magic in it, but if it, if it's not a, at least the way in one way or another, and it's, it's also maybe a bit cool, you know, that it is not just the same thing you've seen a million times before then it makes a difference. I agree. Definitely. It makes it, there's just something really cool.
Autumn (12m 24s): Well, this is what's part partially memorable, but yeah, I can't see either of us ever writing a low fantasy novel with very little magic, then I did right. A dystopian series where there is no magic, but lots of explosions. Sometimes it gets a prize yourself. You know, I have to admit those. That was, I was at the time I was writing my elemental magic fantasy series. And so that was that magic. And I just wanted something that was, couldn't be solved with magic. And it was a challenge to switch to something where things had to be done with just wit and intelligence and guns on them. It can be interesting, but yeah, I prefer a fantasy.
Autumn (13m 6s): I prefer a magic and I think it's really fun. We've come up with some really different systems and through our own books. And then the book were writing together that make the magic, even that much more fun and interesting to write about. Yeah. So as part of the world, a building cost that we're offering on Am Writing Fantasy dot com, we have an entire module on developing Magic Systems. And within that, we have created six rules of magic and the course will go into a lot more details about what about ease of the six rules and add them what a lot more content to them. A, but in this episode here on the podcast today, we were thinking to just go through, let's say a bit more quick and then yet not totally quick overview of all the sections.
Autumn (13m 59s): I think that sounds very good. And you recorded this module, so I will let you lead. I already missed you. You, you said you were Mo that this is your structure, so I will follow up. Yeah. So basically we'll just go through the six rules of magic here and yeah. And then we can talk a bit about it as we go as well. Yeah. And hopefully it'll help people to inspire you listeners for when you're doing your Magic Systems. So first rule of magic, it sounds like first rule of fight club, world. Was it like you liked these rules? All righty.
Jesper (14m 40s): The first of all of a magic. So in order to explain our first rule of magic, I think I need to set the scene a bit because you see Magic Systems can either be very specific, but they can also be vague and mysterious or somewhere in between. That makes sense. Yep. Exactly. So if you take an example here takes a lot of the ring's for example. So on one hand we find magic and the, a lot of the rings that is very specific. So like the one ring, it is very clear what the one, one ring does and how it works.
Jesper (15m 20s): It has rules, right? So that's a pretty obviously, conversely, we also find magic in middle earth that seems to have absolutely no rules and laws. Scandals is, yeah. He's the perfect example right there. And there are those, let's say that the magic of middle earth and it's especially with Gandel that is just too random. You know, one moment you will have Gandel running for his life, trying to escape orcs, and that the next one minute he pulls off some weird magic trick that you never heard about it before. And we didn't even know what it was possible in the setting. A, so there was a debate about that, and I'm not going to go into it.
Jesper (15m 60s): It's a big, big rabbit hole. And the way I've seen some of the crazy conversations going on about that. So we'll leave that to everybody else to debate. But what I want to say about it, it was more than that. If you are looking at candles magic, then it is less rules and much more mystique. So you don't quite know what he can do really. And on the other hand, the ring, you know, you know exactly what you can do that. So I think, yeah, those, those were, there was one thing that I wanted to point out with Gandel for here. And actually I put paired a shorter audio clip here.
Jesper (16m 41s): OK. And it is one of my favorite scenes in a lot of the rings and a, if you are ready for this and let me play it, and then I'll S I'll tell you afterwards why I included it. Is there better be irrelevance? You're not just geeking out on Lord of the rings. Yeah. I'm just going to play like 15 different sign clips from a lot of the rings. And there is no relevance whatsoever except for the Suffolk. Yeah, that sounds good. Okay. But maybe there was a relevance, but you could say if you could work out what it is that right.
Jesper (17m 57s): I still get the goosebumps from listening to that is such a good to see which we could show the whole, like the actual, it would be so dramatic that you remember what is right. I care. And to remember what he, his fighting off, but yes, he is a little standing there and I say, you know, you were a not going any further and he's fighting the bell rock. That's what I, it was, I was like, I know is not the dragon. What is that? What is it? What it is it all right. I know where to go watch these movies again. Yeah, yeah. But the reason why included this, because it, you can hear the Clippy proclaims to be that wheel the, of the flavor of Anna. And we have absolutely no idea what the secret file is all about. It, it has never been mentioned before and the entire book a and well, he is just a, a wheel, all of it, for some reason, it could be making point that's the whole point, right?
Jesper (18m 48s): It is intriguing. And it leaves us with like a sense of wonder on, we like a wonder what that is, is it sounds cool, but we don't really know what it is. So it put it into different words. Apart from the one ring Lord of the rings is what we can categorize as a soft magic system. So this is basically, if you ignore the one ring, this is where you have no rules. And the author doesn't really probably know himself or herself. What the extent of magic is what it can, it cannot do that. And it says what type of Magic Systems. And to me, I mean, as a writer, I used to think I would never like a soft magic system, but my favorite books, RSF to Magic Systems and in their own a way it's kind of fun.
Autumn (19m 30s): I usually like rules because of that. I know how to break them and how to build tension, but it's also kind of fun to be like, it's not a, you could do whatever you want to know how this small little browny being like, well, do you mean, you know, that you can do that with a magic it's magic. So there is something, but for that as well. Absolutely. I think the key with a soft magic system is to be careful with the Dale's X marketer. So if people don't know there was an ex mark, and that is translated into the Cod in the machine, which basically means that a well, something within the machine will all of a sudden make it work. And then everything is resolved. And that, that in other words, to the problem with a soft Magic Systems is that let's say you reached the climax of your novel and the character is in a pinch there.
Jesper (20m 18s): And it's a big, big problem at, and all of a sudden, it just pull some Rahm, spell out the nobody has heard about it before. And then he went to the, or defeats a dragon. And Winster everything that you want it to win or whatever that can feel a bit like, yeah, it it's a bit cheap is not a good resolution of an entire novel that you just pull out a random spell that fixes everything. So why don't you do it on metric system B careful with that stuff for the messaging systems. And I think that that's a way like some hard Magic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm on the opposite. At the end of the scale, we have the rule based Magic Systems. So this is referred to as hot magic, like you just said, and this example, it could be Patrick Ruthers or a Brandon Sanderson.
Jesper (21m 4s): There are often found in this category. So a rule-based magic system just means that the reader us know what magic can and cannot do. So all of a sudden, you don't even have to worry about Davis X Makena anymore because there are rules to be followed. And the character's just cannot do whatever they pleased because its not possible within the Magic system. So they have the characters have to use their resolve and intelligence to figure out how maybe to use magic. But when, how can we use the magic two that advantage then it's not just putting out a, a spell. You never heard about it before. So we have a pretty hot magic system in our setting a Autumn.
Autumn (21m 45s): Yes, definitely. Even to have a list of dispels that you could cast. Oh yeah. I think we have a very, I don't think I've had a heart of a magic system that is hard before. I mean, it's very, and it's very limited. It is like, you know what a nine things that you can do. So it is very, very limited and it's different. Cause it's, I think I'm somewhere usually in the middle where it's like, these are the certain rules, but if you could, of what you're doing, you can kind of like, you know, combine and overlap and discover new possibility is using the same rule system, which is always fun. But yeah, hard magic is neat though, because you do know the rules, you know what they are, what you can't do.
Autumn (22m 26s): And so, you know, sort of like where the limits are, you know, what can cause tension? Okay. It's almost like Superman and kryptonite, but its it's more interactive and the interplay and that lends in the stress, it's, it's a understandable output so that, you know, the character can fall and be defeated and you're like, oh gosh, no, because this is what gets me with a doctor who with a Sonic screwdriver that light can do anything is a Sonic screwdriver. It, it should not be able to save the world, but it can and some episodes and that just drives me absolutely crazy. So you have to be careful if you do create rules, you don't then throw them to the wind.
Jesper (23m 8s): No, I agree. But as you say, of course it can also be in-between somewhere, like just mentioned a, that it's a bit hard Magic Systems, but then not quite so J K Rowling. It's usually in here with her Harry Potter series that there is some rules within the Harry Potter, a universal magic sister, but then not quite any way, because then sometimes he pulls up some stuff that you never heard about it again. So there is also that possibility to, to, to, to settle your Magic Systems somewhere in between these two end points. And it is probably to the last a week, it's a sliding scale right there. You can play it with it as you want, but basically without realizing we actually covered the first rule of magic here, 'cause the first of all of our magic is to decide what kind of Magic Systems are you going to construct you?
Jesper (23m 55s): This is a subject to the rules or is it not? Is it somewhere in-between, that's the first of all of magic. That's the first thing that you decide that it's a pretty cool rule. So I'm going to go with hybrid because it's good to have some wiggle room. Well, yeah, I actually liked most of them to be honest. I, I think that that each of them have their own challenges and they also come with their own benefits. A I don't necessarily, I think have a preference. I think most of it is. Okay. So the only thing that I don't like is it is to the soft magic system where all of a sudden, you, you do like the Gandel stumps. I don't like that to be honest because it just feels too easy. It feels like the author didn't know what to do.
Jesper (24m 35s): So all of a sudden the magic used to just pull it up some stunts and then, oh, look at that. Everything was resolved. Yeah. I don't like that. But, but other than that than I think all of them are equally good. A AMPATH jail. There's a magic. We're good. Yeah. So second rule of magic. All right. This one asks, where does magic come from? That's interesting as well. So is it, it could be that you pull magic from nature, maybe from the spirits, maybe from another realm, maybe you pull energy off of things or you get from the gods or maybe from within yourself, there's a million options.
Jesper (25m 21s): Yes. Reading, spell books, you, but then you'll probably a pill pulling it either from within yourself or your poorly is it's more about the second role is more about it. It's not so much of that, how you create the spell, but is more about where do you get where the, to the energy for the magic com from basically. So you, are you getting granted magic skills by the gods because you pray to them, for example, do you pull it from demons or do you lay lines with like, yeah. Yeah. Like what, like, you know, a setting where they call it the magic users to pull them, put it from within themselves because a magic system is based on emotions.
Jesper (26m 2s): So you have to funnel your own emotions in order to, or channel you own own emotions in order to cast spells. So, but it could be a million things. But the answer to the question gives you a lot of interesting things to play on for the next coming rules here. Oh, okay. I like that one to, yeah. So should we move on to rule number three? Yeah. I don't think I have anything to add, but that makes sense. Cause yeah, it's not necessarily that like you have a type, a magic like elemental magic. It is. Is it the gods granting in the magic or is it your own innate solar ability or a power that it's like a, a another sense. So, okay. I got that one. You've got that.
Jesper (26m 43s): Okay. Third role of magic or how can create a broken magic system that is, that sounded all, isn't it? You know, I don't think that what would you want to create a broken metric system where the thing is leaving space for magic to fail on? Not to always go asked. It was intended. That creates another sense of wonder. And it also hints of some sort of hidden depth within the magic system that keeps it intriguing and interesting. When do you spell Casa as well? When they had to deal with, or maybe some setbacks are disasters to one is once and awhile from a spell that goes wrong or maybe just doesn't happen at all a or something, you know?
Jesper (27m 25s): But if you could create, create some sort, it should not happen very often obviously. But if you could create something that just once in awhile, the magic just doesn't work. Like you expected it to. Yeah, that, that is interesting. I think so. I that's why like this roll is definitely one of my favorites cause I, well, its not because I'm a really good at breaking things. I, but I have a really good at breaking them, but I do good with that. But I think is interesting if you know that if things go wrong, if things can go wonky and you know, you, it pushes your characters into the situations that are you even more, a tense that is better for the reader as better for your story.
Autumn (28m 6s): It's so exciting. It, this is why I can do the completely soft Magic system where it's like, well you could do this, but then tomorrow you can't. I like to have at least some kind of groundwork groundwork laid that. I know some things are some things hold true. It is like if a gravity started just tomorrow, decided to reverse for 15 minutes, then to save you from getting hit by a car, wouldn't it be fantastic. But yeah. So I think this is a good one that maybe a lot of people don't think about it until they are trying to fight. But if you want to start thinking of your climax and thinking of ways your hero can fail, you need to know where are the weaknesses or how, how things can go wrong.
Autumn (28m 47s): I still loved that about what it is the first time I have a dragon Lance and a red light. How you forget the smell after you, you cast it. So then you have a sit down, do you have to reread it again? I'm like, that's cool. That is really fun to have that weakness. You cast something and then you're like sugar. I need it again. And you to go and do this. Yeah, no, yes. It's true. That's the way it comes from D N D that that's the thing in draglines there. But, but that, that is a very cool, but I think as well of what you just said, it also made me think the back to the soft magic system, because for one, of course, if you have something like a broken magic system, then you need to foreshadow with before the ending that the brakes like.
Jesper (29m 28s): So something may be in a minor situation early on to not a novel, we'd get to see the brake in the Magic Systems, so to speak. And it doesn't only just happen at the end because while it does to attention, if it can also come across as if, oh, OK, the author needed a bit more attention. So all of a sudden that spell failed and then never, ever failed before. So that's not good either, but just tracing back to the soft Magic Systems. I use that as well because it maybe just think that it goes with that as well. That if you have a soft metrics system where spells can, well, you just make it up basically because they can do whatever you want to do. But the thing is once the character has cast a spell, you have to remember that they can do it again.
Jesper (30m 13s): Which means that if you cast a spell in book one and then in books for you that spell, it would actually have resolve the situation. Well, all of a sudden that character doesn't use that space for the reader will remember, and the reader will be like, Hey, Hey, to wait a minute, why didn't he just cast a spell? He used in book one, it would have fixed the whole thing. So be careful, it just, you need to keep track of this stuff. Then if you have like a, a, a soft magic system that what, what it spells have you actually used, and if they are applicable again, to resolve the latest situation that later book, lots of good only speaks to the fact that he, the characters should be using it again. It's a really good point. It is just because you have a loose are a soft magic system.
Autumn (30m 54s): That doesn't mean that you don't have to pay attention to how the magic works or how you end up using it. And you're writing indeed. But that was a side track letting me get back to the fourth rule of magic, number four already, and number for you moving quickly here, what are the limitations of magic? Ooh, excellent. And this fourth rule of magic is actually mostly intended for you as a writer because most readers will probably never notice that it's here, but that doesn't matter what the story will become better. And that is the part that readers will and should notice because when our fourth rule of magic reads limitations, I'm not really talking about the costs of using magic.
Jesper (31m 41s): Okay. You know, like you needing setting certain ingredients or something like that. So that that's not what I'm talking about. Limitations just means what magic cannot do. Okay. So that's a very important to know that it is a very important part. So that's like, if you're a water elemental, you can't use fire. That's just the way it is. That works. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just knowing that there is some stuff that the magic cannot do, or maybe it could also just be that a, nobody can ever, if you have, like, let's say you have the soft Magic Systems again, but maybe there was limitations in the sense that nobody can ever cast any sort of teleportation or time-travel spells or something like, you know, you could have certain types of spells or effects that they can not happen ever, no matter what, but those limitations are important.
Jesper (32m 30s): And as I said, the reader might not notice what they, we'll probably not know that you have decided to teleportation is impossible. Right. But the fact that this never happens, it it's something that you don't have to play with because when you're writing again, you can't use teleportation. That's a resolution for a, a problem because you'd decided that there was this limit. Yes. And of course, bonus points for every author who could then link their limitations too, some sort of logical sense or a logical reason within their worldbuilding. And so if you can create a link there, you're going to get bonus points. Alright. I like that. I do know they're keeping track of their points, but that is a good point to make it, you know, is inherent to the world to that.
Autumn (33m 16s): Yeah. It, so that the two are tied that you have this magic system that comes from the world and can not go beyond a certain reason because of something you've already created in the world. That is, that is cool. World-building that is definitely a masterful. Yeah, it is. Then it also shows the reader that you know, that there was a reason for this worldbuilding element actually had a consequence over here in the magic system. And so on. What's a, yes. It just apps and so much step to the world. Okay. Fifth role of magic almost a year. No. Yeah, we are.
Autumn (33m 56s): We're moving right along. Yeah.
Jesper (33m 59s): The fifth rule of magic is something we just touched upon actually. It's what the costs of magic. Oh cost. So this is like cost energy or is this, where are, you would say ingredients? It, you know, you are, I have to sacrifice something or a burns and herbal something or you just makes you tired. Is that, what do you mean by that? It could be, yeah. I mean, cost to import now on one hand, because avid readers of fantasy expect there to be a cost for the use of magic. So it's like a trope within this, your honor, and you need to abide to it. So let, let's give two examples here.
Jesper (34m 41s): When Frodo uses the one ring siren can sense his presence might and the additional cost it is that the ring also sort of takes control over you. So you, you, you lose yourself to it's way and is power, right? So there was a direct cost of use. There was benefit from using it, but there was a cost every time that you do it, if that makes sense. And the other, I mean, it just kind of mention another example that I'm going to get back to what you set as well. Okay. But in the will of time series, by a Robert Jordan, men go and seen from using too much metric. Oh, that's great. I remember reading. So, and again, there is a cost of using the magic, but as you said, it could also be something less or you could also be that whenever you use magic, you become really, really tired and you have to sleep for example, or you get drained or it could be all kinds of things.
Jesper (35m 33s): I think that there should be some sort of cost. Shouldn't be that you should not be allowed to run round, just casting 500 spells. And you know, with like, it doesn't matter. Hmm. But I have not read a few where they had very strong limitations, like the elemental magic and the cost was, you know, slower. Like they could cast quite a few spells, but yeah, if it just something big or if a cast too many of them, and you know, if your only a wider elemental and you are in the desert, there's all these over the smell's you, you can cast anyway. So I think sometimes having a strong limitation will allow you to have a looser cost, correct?
Jesper (36m 15s): Yes. Yeah. Because essentially as well, that to some degree what we did with our Magic Systems as well, the costs of a fairly limited, in a sense that, but the limitations are a huge meaning that M because it's based off of emotions, if you have to pull from your emotions, but if you accidentally start mixing to emotions, so basically its like you have to purify your mind. Like let's say M the dragons is attacking you. I use that on a different podcast where yeah. Do that. Someone's going to it. If they've listened to it, they know how this ends true. But if the dragon is attacking you and you are scared, then you can channel being scared and use dispels that are associated to that emotion.
Jesper (37m 4s): But if you then all of a sudden, let's say the, the dragon does a swipe with his tail. All of a sudden you didn't expect that. And then you get you a surprise and then you accidentally start challenging surprise as well as being scared at once. That's no good. The, and not in our world. I can engine some place you don't want to be. Well, it was some, you know, it just, all of a sudden you were going to get a random magic effects because the magic system can not handle that. You are mixing emotions. So you have to keep absolutely pure in your mind about what you're channeling and stick to that. And if you start feeling something else, which is pretty difficult not to do when a dragon is coming up to you, you need that the channel.
Autumn (37m 52s): Yeah. Yeah. Imagine you needed a happiness pill. That's a pretty damn it difficult. It is. But we do have a cost because we do have a backlash of whatever magic you're channeling then kind of washes over you as well. So there is a cost, but it's a smaller cost because the limitations are so like you really, if you break the limitations, you're gonna have a horrible, a horrible experience who knows what was going to happen. And you know, you could turn the dragon in the, to dragons and yay. Oh my God. She is just making it even worse. Oh yes. Yeah. Well, if you start fighting each other and yourself.
Autumn (38m 32s): Yeah.
Jesper (38m 33s): Okay. Well that leaves the six rule of magic. All right. Well we're on six already. Right? I want to hear this one. Yeah. Yeah. So the sixth, the role of magic is what are the ramifications of magic? So applying the sixth rule is basically that well when applying it, I think to be honest, you have to limit yourself a bit as well, because at times it could be tempting to like, well, build a different way of how magic impacts society and culture is for every single country and every single species and every single race. And there the entire world, a, you probably don't wanna do that.
Autumn (39m 15s): Okay. So ramifications are a sort of, how does that fit into the world that culturally like do people to people without magic tolerate magic users or they want to capture them and use them like lucky left for cons of what's going on with the whole world and those who do and do not have magic. Yeah, exactly. What, what, what impact does it have on society? The effect that magic exists I'm and I think this is, I mean, you can have a situation like, well, for example, lets just take Gandel for again, because it's so easy.
Jesper (39m 55s): A lot of the rings or not at all. Okay. Well now what was that? That the other podcasts we won as well, they said to drink every time we've talked about laundry now and the thing that happened five times and one hour, goodness, that was drinking tea. Yeah. But where it was I going with this? Yeah. So for example, Gandalf, he he's a very revered in the middle earth. 'cause he's a magic user. Right? So in that society, the major that I just respected people, right. You could leave it at some things as simple as that, it doesn't have to be more in terms of ramifications, but it could also be that maybe people don't like people using maths, you maybe there was like a magic police that arrest people who use this magic or something like that.
Jesper (40m 50s): Or maybe everybody can learn magic. So there is tons and tons of school's that you can, you, you can go back to when you are, you just start learning magic or there are so many ways you can make it a show in your culture and in your environment and in you're setting that magic his part of, of the setting, but just don't go overboard and cram into a million variations. But I think if you pick a few things and work with that, then that's going to get you a quite far. Yes. I think that makes sense. I mean, that's like my epic fantasy with elemental, a magic, anyone who has elemental magic was like for us to join an order, the church of for orders.
Autumn (41m 30s): So you could even make it a religious, a quasi religious, I mean the magic came from the goddess. So you know, it all kind of fit together. So those are really fun ways to worldbuilding and make the magic fit into the world a little bit better if the limitations are coming from the world, you know, the result of having magic should be part of the world as well. And I think considering all that we've discussed is also worth mentioning how there are some cliche Phil Magic Systems that we have seen way too often. No. So I'm going to mention a few here. All right. This will be fun. I like to, the cliche is I'm going to mention a few ever since we mentioned you will see it, that are right.
Autumn (42m 15s): I'm not sure where I will ever since we mentioned having a pen name in just writing a completely trope trash fix it, it to sell it so much. To me, it was like this other life now secretly wanted to do this. It, it would actually give you a bit fun, but I think it would be quite silly as well with people there's nothing really silly. So the time you are creating a Magic system for your setting, try to avoid the following for alright. Okay. Okay. Number one is healing based Magic. Not that healing spells there is that there are quite common. There is nothing wrong with that, but when magic becomes more or less like a standing for a hospital and you better stay clear that, and I've been in a bit guilty about that one myself.
Jesper (43m 6s): So to try to avoid that, if it's not a very funny, when all the time the magic used to just heal, whoever gets hurt and they just continue to not cool. I used to have to set up to the world because I've definitely done this to, but if you don't wanna kill off to many characters to make the costs really high, you can heal someone, but it's a high cost to do it. But yeah, it's, it is one way of avoiding, killing off everyone. If that's something you don't wanna do. Yeah. But then to find better ways of doing that. Yeah. It's good to have a high cost to the 10 and number two is throwing Fireball's and the guilty of that to, but fireballs no, no pleas.
Jesper (43m 53s): We've seen it a million, but then do something else with fire to you do to, to have them throw in something other than fireballs pleas just once in a while. No, no fireballs hold them. You know that you are prohibited from firewalls from now on a, it never gets breaking. I like breaking the rules. So be careful if that okay, well you're not allowed to do a lot of fireballs and only fireballs just, and I know that you're not gonna do that because you're not going to do the on the board. Okay. Yeah. And that this next one, this one is for you. All of them. So I've, I've been guilty after the first to myself.
Autumn (44m 34s): Okay. So this one's specifically mine. I've, I've created a specific one for you because I have to, now that I'm guilty off and then I'm feeling bad and then I have to have to have to drag you down with me. All right. If I to pull me down and what is this? A slide elemental magic. I love the elemental magic there. It is seeing so many times whenever you are magic. See, and every time I think he, I tried to do something different when I did mine. I tried to have the powers do of a plus there's five is not for, so I just have five elements. But then you do have to explain that even though that as a culture in this world has five elements.
Autumn (45m 15s): But yeah, I don't know. I still have no guilt. I adore him elemental magic and I tried to make it a scientific so that it was earth was minerals and you know, dead things and yeah, fire water could purify to, there was so much fun trickling out that precipitates, I don't know. And fire can do light to the, to cast illusions. I'd tried to make it a little fresh. Come on. I feel like you are not re very taking my cliche film. Magic Systems is a very seriously, just a basically saying that all of them is is, is good. It's magic. I have no regrets.
Autumn (45m 56s): I just put in a magic.
Jesper (45m 57s): Okay. What about it? My number for, and you probably don't like that one either then. Yeah. This is a guy with Harry Potter that we've just had too many witches and warlocks using once and spells ingredients. So let's take clear of that one. It can, can you just give me one, then I can get you that one actually. Aye. I've never written the story with spelling, ingredients and stuff. And I did love supernatural and the, the, you know, they'd be tracking down all this stuff that they needed for the spells, but I don't know, its, it would be hard to do it another original one. Is it sort of like a authoritarian legends at this point? I've read enough of those at the moment.
Autumn (46m 40s): That I'm good. Yeah. I don't feel that this was a very good ending because I thought I had such good Clichy for the magic systems. And then your not on board. All I can just feed you. I want to write the cliche pill, magic systems. I'm going to just, you know, I want to start, I want to start this episode. Just not going the way I wanted it. Oh, I'm gonna go read that your pantry on a post on a Kindle Villa and maybe use that to write a cliched Magic Systems and I'll just be having a blast this weekend. Oh we have to be better here. It is. It is not going well. So the next week a autumn should have a very good interview lined up for you if all goes well. So it make sure to tune in it for that.
Narrator (47m 23s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST. Please tell a fellow about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/AmWritin Fantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Do you want to make your characters and writing pop? There are some pro techniques to enhance a character and connect the reader with her/him. One of them is using Deep POV.
Join us for a discussion on Deep POV. What is it? How do you do it? And when are there times you can purposefully not use it? We've got you covered in this episode!
To check out the K-Lytics report we mentioned, head over to https://k-lytics.com/dap/a/?a=7419&p=k-lytics.com/epic-fantasy
And you can check out our book Plot Development here: https://books2read.com/Plot-Development
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Narrator (3s): You're listening to The Am. Writing Fantasy Podcast in today's Publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need. And literary agent, there is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (31s): Hello, I'm Jesper. This is episode 125 of The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. And it's now time to discuss Deep point Of view, how we can Help you Story. I think that should be an interesting conversation, Autumn.
Autumn (50s): I think so. I liked this one because you know what I like to put up the point of view, and this is like one of my favorite aspects of writing. And so we were just looking at what people liked as well on the, some of the pastor podcast episodes. And it seems like the ones that have to do with writing crafts are quite popular together with our very silly monthly ones where, where we just like go out on something as well. Those are my two favorite podcasts. So I'm with the listeners and I guess it means we have to do more of them. Right?
Jesper (1m 22s): Probably we shouldn't do it like two or three times a month with it just to at least a half. I, that might be a bit too much,
Autumn (1m 29s): but we can't have a whole, like there has to be a month dedicated to podcast in a room with nothing but a stupid tub, top 10 list.
Jesper (1m 42s): All right. Maybe not, but we'll be fine, but how are things going on you and all of them.
Autumn (1m 50s): I don't know if they are good as you know, but the listeners might not be as I just got back from a trip from seeing my parents, which I haven't been down to their house since like pre pandemic, of course, because we are a good little kids, but it was so nice and also so hard because they seem to have, like, it seems like everyone saying like the pandemic was like, what a century. They seem to age on way too much. On the last year, it was just terrifying. But you know, they take their naps and I got to spend some time with them and we went, we did go out, I got my first vaccinations, you know, 50%, 80% protected. I know it's a lot. So I have my next one scheduled.
Autumn (2m 30s): And so we, we did go to work to do breweries and we went out just a little bit and then it could be a huge tide dinner or, you know, I'm a foodie yellow food. So I was making potstickers and Tom got gum, like Nike pronounce it Now, but I made it a coconut based supe. And it was just, honestly, it would be nice to go and visit your parents again after such a long while. Oh, it was eight drank too much beer drank too much wine, ate too much sugar. It's all of a good thing. It was a lot to like, exactly. You got to hang out with my folks. And they were definitely, they are definitely my, some of my favorite people on the planet. So it was really excellent.
Autumn (3m 10s): And I got to see my nephew and he gave me, and I don't know if you saw the picture I shared on Instagram and Facebook, he gave me a 4k monitor, a 32 and just give it to monitor. So I, well, he wasn't using it and he does coding. He does, he was doing a little bit of a graphic design, but he's going more into coding. So it was like, I don't need for K to read code has got to monitor. I was like 24 inch side by side. He's good. But yeah, he didn't need this one anymore. And he knows I've been doing graphic design on my 13 inch Mac pro. And then it gives me this more as you put it, it was like, I could bring it to you, but it takes up my whole bag.
Autumn (3m 51s): Wow. So I'm so excited. It was like the best late birthday present ever. It is fast. Spectacular. I have it. Yeah. I have to find a place to put it in our cabin
Jesper (4m 4s): because it's too big for a table.
Autumn (4m 7s): Yeah, exactly. It is. It is too big for a table. And so yeah, we were in, and we don't have a ton of wall space cause this captain has a ton of window. So like you don't get there or there are, so I can't wait though. And I already, yeah, I already was playing with a cover on it and going, Oh, I need to fix that. I couldn't even see it before. So, and it was a wonderful trip,
Jesper (4m 30s): But we also have a trip that we went to visit my brother and his wife this past weekend, which is probably the first trip we've had in close to a year, I would say too to COVID-19 as well. And it was really nice. And the, the, the weather was good enough for us to sit outside a car, a couple of hours on the terrorist as well. So that was, that was good. Yeah. I like that. Yeah. But also over the past week, I've started watching a new show on Amazon prime. Have you watched the American gods?
Autumn (5m 5s): Oh, no, I haven't. Not at all. I have seen it a little bit too. It,
Jesper (5m 8s): I am only two episodes a season, but I would have to say, I mean, I avoided For, I don't know quite why, but for awhile I just felt like, know, it's not my thing. I don't want to watch it, but then I thought, yeah, okay, I'll give it a shot. And I started watching it. It's really good. I mean, after the first two episodes, so I'm like, Oh my God, I'm hooked. You know what? It's like, it delivers
Autumn (5m 34s): Its kind of the way
Jesper (5m 35s): That we liked to ride stores as well. Do you know? It it's very easy. You don't quite understand what's going on it. So it's kind of a bit of a mystery thing going on in there. Like, and, and the main character does not understand either. So he is trying to figure out what is going on here? Why are these people so weird? Did this? I think they are God, but they are behaving really weird and they can do all kinds of supernatural things, but it's not over done. Like is just small things. Like he flips a coin and every time it lands on heads, for example, just like every single time, just small stuff like that. And I still don't quite understand after two episodes of what they're trying to do and what does God actually wants the main character to do.
Jesper (6m 15s): I don't know. And, and so that's the main character doesn't know either, but I like it. It is very intriguing and I want to watch more.
Autumn (6m 28s): Oh cool. Well that's my husband has some trainings through may. Like he'll be gone half the month at two different times, so maybe I'll go check it out, but it sounds like it will keep me in touch with,
Narrator (6m 38s): We can go on to the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast.
Jesper (6m 43s): So back in episode 122, so that's not that long ago, but we had Alex Newton on from K Lytics and she had some great market research about the FANTASY Shamara and Alex were so incredibly kind afterwards that he should be at the latest detailed Fantasy market report with me. So I thought I would summarize the conclusions from that report here for everyone's benefit. Right.
Autumn (7m 13s): Nice. Yeah, that sounds great. I can't wait to look at it when you summarize it and I know
Jesper (7m 18s): You don't mind them. So I've picked out like what is like maybe eight, seven, eight different key points here that I thought I could just a waffle off here and hopefully be a bit helpful as well. Excellent. So first of all, after that, A romance in thrillers Fantasy remains the third highest selling Shamrock of The on the Amazon Kindle platforms. So, and during the first COVID-19 lockdown period, there was a very clear and very sharp drop in sales of APEC fantasy novels.
Jesper (7m 58s): But the good news is that here in 2021 sales have been trending upwards again. So I don't know why people don't want to read Fantasy when they're on lock down, but I will hold it against them. I'll I'll have a grudge about that.
Autumn (8m 14s): Yeah, I agree. I mean, seriously, you're stuck at home and maybe it's like too, like you can't go out and be in a fantasy world for a long time.
Jesper (8m 23s): I would go. So the Epic Fantasy market is quite large. K Lytics measured around 800,000 a month in royalties being paid for Epic Fantasy. So that's pretty good. Mmm, wow. But it also shows actually there is in the top of the Epic FANTASY Shaundra, the competition is quite hard up there. So it means that it, it, it is a pretty good to write it in because there was a lot of readers, but to be on the bestseller lists and the two earn like on the top of the top of the chart, you have to sell a lot of books.
Jesper (9m 12s): So it's not easy to get to the top of those lists, but, but at least there was a lot of readers. So I think that's good news.
Autumn (9m 22s): Yeah. Yeah. That is good news. I mean even a small piece of a very big pie. It was a piece. It still tastes good. Yeah.
Jesper (9m 30s): Maybe depending on what kind of pie it is. I guess I don't like Apple. Is that enough? It's true. I feel like most people like Apple. Yeah.
Autumn (9m 40s): Well, you know, its kind of bland. Yeah. Well it, over here that there was a few States where they built cheddar cheese on top the top of the pie and I ain't touching that. Can
Jesper (9m 50s): We do like a chocolate pie? Is that possible?
Autumn (9m 54s): We Can do chocolate. I prefer coconut, but we can do a chocolate coconut and that'd be good. Yeah.
Jesper (9m 59s): I don't think this is in Decatur or K Lytics report. So the next one and this one will interest you Autumn. So if one looks at the top 250 covers in the best seller list, then about half of them show symbols or scenery on the cover as opposed to any characters. Wow.
Autumn (10m 26s): That's so interesting. It was surprising for me because me as a reader, I look at it and I'm like, eh, you know, what does it tell me about the Story? It's a pretty Fantasy picture, kind of interesting, but every time I've used a symbol picture as well. So I find it as interesting as well,
Jesper (10m 43s): Because then it goes onto say that 23% of covers shows a male, usually like warrior type of character on the cover. Whereas 14% shows a female character. But the interesting part though, is that okay if you compare the sales rank between the books that has a female character on the cover, versus those that has a male character on the cover, the female covers actually tend to rank higher than the ones with a male Now. And I think that's a very interesting to know as, as well. 'cause if you look at the fact that there is 23% of the mails on the covers, you might go to the conclusion to say, Oh, well that means that it's better to have the males on the cover it, but actually it's the opposite.
Jesper (11m 32s): It's better to have females.
Autumn (11m 35s): Yeah. What do you need to have more, have more female cover? We have an Elvin female assessment. Yeah.
Jesper (11m 43s): Got it.
Autumn (11m 44s): Yeah. Well we can do, how can I put her into book one? Alright. We won't get in to cover a spectrum and other good
Jesper (11m 52s): News for those who write military, that's a category on Amazon and hear the sales rank versus competition ratio is quite in your favor. So in other words, it's a pretty good category to publish your books in. So I think that's a good information to have if you're right. That kind of book.
Autumn (12m 17s): Yeah. Yeah. Or if you're thinking of writing that down
Jesper (12m 20s): Pricing, so $3, $3 99 and $4 99 is the most frequent price point among FA Epic fantasy books on Amazon. But the highest yielding price point is nine 99 followed by seven 99, which I think is pretty good news for us because we are planning to sell around six 99, seven, nine to nine or something like that. So that's pretty good. That is the highest, highest kneeling price point.
Autumn (12m 52s): Yeah. That is really interesting. I'm surprised you think. Why do you think that counts box sites are those individually books?
Jesper (12m 59s): I think it is. I think in part it has to do with the traditionally published books where the chart's more and there are, that's probably a school's to data in a bit, I guess M but what it does prove though, is the people who are willing to pay the higher price point for books a day. So if you make sure that your covers are indistinguishable from the traditional publishing, meaning that they look just as a professional, then there is, there should be no reason why people wouldn't want to buy it. And at six 99, seven 99 or something like that, even nine 99. I know we talked with the actually twice, I think, but way back when this podcast was a YouTube channel, we talked to Joseph Malick twice and he sells his, all his books are at nine 99.
Jesper (13m 49s): So it's yeah, it's a possible, right. But anyway, three 99, four 99, that's the most frequent price points. So if you want to stay within the frame of what people are used to, then that's probably the price point to go for it, but we are going to sell out books a bit higher than that, but it's up to you. Of course.
Autumn (14m 7s): Sounds exciting. And also
Jesper (14m 10s): About two thirds of all the Epic fantasy books are outside Kindle unlimited.
Autumn (14m 20s): Hm. Yeah. Interesting. So there's only a third that are in Kindle unlimited. Oh it's so that is, it makes me wonder if the people, if that's a smaller pool so that they are actually doing well, there's less competition. Or if readers just prefer to be outside of it, you know, there are wide, these books are, or why it's not a hundred a month.
Jesper (14m 40s): I can only say got my gut feeling. Is that a, I think there is room to play in Kindle unlimited. If you put Epic FANTASY in there. I think, I think that you can get a new readers because there's not enough Epic fantasy books in Kindle unlimited. They want to read. So I think it's probably a pretty good place to place your books, but that is just my gut feeling. I don't have any data to back that up. So there is a ton more stuff in this report. So if you are curious, do you have listener? I should. Yes. Did you go and check out the full report is mighty helpful in order to understand what is working and what is trending in the Epic Fantasy market.
Jesper (15m 23s): And I only gave you the highlights here. So we'll add a link in the show notes so that you can check it out yourself. The full report will cost you $37, but it is well, well worth it and on to perhaps a good place to stop is with a definition.
Autumn (15m 47s): Why is it? Oh, that's all it's boring sometimes. You know, I think it was a very good way to start though. It's true. Well, it should be, it helps to clarify things, but yeah. So Deep point of view that has usually referring to a third person limited, which I think that sounds even more confusing point of view. So a third person is when you use, he, she, his, her, you know that tight, but rather than I, which is a first person and limited means not omniscience. You literally are like Writing along on the character. Scholder you can only see, hear, feel, touch what that character feels seasoned here is in touch.
Autumn (16m 27s): So if someone has a running up to the character from behind the character is not going to see it, they're going to see what's in front of them, like their best friend standing up in throwing an X and thinking, Oh my God, why is he is trying to get out of my best friend or trying to kill me? Well, really throwing an ax at the, you know, the ogre coming up from behind. So those are the types of stories we're talking about. So if you write it in first person and your property, you are already limited and you are already sort of in a Deep point of view, your really grounded anchored into that character. So what we're doing is we're looking at anchoring the reader into a character, but using third-person now, why is a third person useful for Fantasy Writing? I know, you know this one, right?
Jesper (17m 9s): Well actually, before getting that far, I was also thinking that, Oh, maybe I I've tried to prepare some examples just to a few prepare. I always plan things on them. Why do you keep pointing out things?
Autumn (17m 29s): Yeah, because I think I just looked at the title of the day and said, Oh yeah, I'm good to know
Jesper (17m 33s): This way. I plan things. It was just to try to give you a couple of examples of that. So maybe, maybe make it a bit more real, but basically you, so we are trying to, with the point of view, we are trying to sort of hit a style of writing where we immersed to read as much as possible into the point of view character. And I think it's basically like, if you imagine watching your favorite films or TV shows, you know, we are trying to mimic in the Writing that we only experience in CS and knows what the character knows a and thereby we are limiting the narrative, so to speak.
Jesper (18m 19s): So I tried to make one of each, so an example where we have like a third person limited, like that's what most of us Fantasy authors normally. Right. And then another example with a Deep point of view. And I don't know how well I'm going to succeed here. So you'll have your own, my edit there anyway, Autumn. So you will have to edit stuff. Okay. This is the regular third person limited. Okay, ready? I need to do my voice storytelling my voice. I probably can't keep that up without a laughing. Okay, fine. Are you hurt the King's voice? Booming in the great hall, calling him in the way he had come to know signifying the King's anger.
Jesper (19m 7s): What had he done wrong? Fi find out. I didn't know yet if a familiar unease ceased his stomach. Okay. So that was like third person limited, pretty standard regular. And now my attempt of a transforming the same scene into a Deep point of view. So, and now you are the editor here. Remember the penetrating force of the King's voice echo throughout the great hall. Find out, felt it in his bones. And as he had so many times before, what has he done wrong this time? Come here right now.
Jesper (19m 47s): Shout at the King as if he was nothing but a laptop find out it felt the knot twisting and tightening in her stomach with every step toward the red faced man.
Autumn (19m 60s): Yeah. That's perfect. Congratulations. I think that's fantastic. I think it's pretty obvious. Yeah.
Jesper (20m 5s): Obvious. Which one is the most engaging, right?
Autumn (20m 11s): Oh yeah. The second one that was just, I mean, you know, to me, it's so brilliant because you really, you feel it. It's not, you're not just being told what's is going on with the character or what he's thinking and feeling that you kind of, you feel it, you were like, Oh, the gut twisting, you know, the anxiety. It, it heightens to me like, if I'm thinking of it as an art terms, it's upping the contrast, your getting that really kind of gripping engagement, what you don't get with just regular sort of center or a third person limited. Yeah. You definitely don't get up.
Jesper (20m 42s): All righty. You, you feel the blood boiling and all of that stuff right in that that's the way anger or the sadness or whatever the character feels that we feel it that's at least that's how I feel like Deep point of view, just bring so much more to the story. I actually learned what act in preparing, because yes, I do prepare for these episodes, all of them. But in preparing for this episode, I a, I actually learned that a star, this a Deep point of view Writing is actually only became popular in WRITING like 20 to 30 to 40 years ago. I didn't know that before or researching this. So that's that I find that quite interesting.
Autumn (21m 26s): Yeah. I mean, before that, even if you look at Tolkin, it is technically omniscient, even though you're mostly staying with Frodo, but there are times token head hops because you know, no one else what other people are doing. They had more of a Narrator type of voice. Now we have more of a character. Yeah.
Jesper (21m 46s): You told her why is that in the beginning? It is. It's much more akin to what you normally see in movies. And so on. I mean, I know of course you don't get under the skin of the characters in the movies, But, but watching the character's in a movie, you sorta get the feeling about their feelings. Right. So it's different from being told that The, then he went there and then he did this and, and so on.
Autumn (22m 12s): Exactly. And it's, I mean, that's where you have those little tension. I think it really ups the tension to be in the point of view, even in movies, you had that moment where you might dwell on something like just the breathlessness or if a panting I have watched a movie recently were the whole seen was black. And you had just heard someone say breathing, that's a Deep point of view. So that is when you're just, everything is down to just that one little focus. And because it is so tension, field and emotion field, you really engage with the character. If the bad news is, if you hate the character, you really like, Oh, I don't think engage with this character. But if you like the character, if you were rooting for them, Oh, you are just like grip in the book or the Kindle.
Jesper (22m 52s): Now I talk to my son. Well, so far away from what you were saying early on that, I completely forgot now.
Autumn (23m 1s): Oh, well, why, why are there to see the author specifically writing in third person verses first person? Or what's the better angle that this is? What is the main mode? I do know there are some first-person stories out there, but majority of the authors are the right person.
Jesper (23m 17s): You think the last part of it is because we like to have multiple point of view characters. And so when we write the third person limited, it, it allows us, for example, between chapter's to switch to another character. And then we are getting inside the head of that character. But if you were writing in the first person, you can see call every character. I then it would be pretty confusing for the reader who is I now? And then this is all of a sudden another person. So yeah, as you said, a fantasy novels do exist with a first person, but they are, they are pretty limited a that there is not that many of them, I think in the grand scheme of things. Yeah,
Autumn (23m 55s): No, mostly urban fancy. Yeah. I think urban fantasy is mostly an AI-based Story, which surprises me. And even when I write from urban Fantasy and I always stick to a third person because I like characters that that's what Epic Fantasy I can think of Tolkien, how many doors and every one that was running her off onto this quest, all of the hobbits. I mean, there were so many characters. You could not write that in first person or he could do like, who are we here? What are we talking about? You know, I'm in small, I've got to just stick with a small, we're fine. Right?
Jesper (24m 27s): Yeah. But I think as well for us, for this whole thing to actually work, you have to know your point of care, point of view characters really, really well, because otherwise you, you simply won't be able to write their personal point of view about what's going to happen. So yeah, there's a step.
Autumn (24m 50s): Yeah. There is that you definitely its up and things, a notch because when you're in Deep point of view, everything comes as if it was from that character. So even your word choice, one of my examples is I had a character who hated her father. So every time I'm in her point of view, should, did she ever think of even her father, his father? No. She thought of him his first name as father. She would never say daddy or dad, because that is, you know, that's an emotional resonance. And so it is literally picking every choice your metaphors become from that character. So we should do that anyway, but you really have to do it with the point of view.
Autumn (25m 30s): So you have a character that is a sailor. Is there gonna be thinking someone has a S their tents like taught the rigging? There are not going to have some things, you know, Oh, their stress, like a farmer or under the hot son. That's not what they are familiar with. You, you have to be very specific with every word choice so that you're just kind of pulling the reader in to this very narrow window of what it is like to live in. Yeah.
Jesper (25m 51s): Not only that also in terms of the character's personal and motivations and the background of the character, or even, you know, like something happens and a character don't like it. Okay. So you need to know, well, the reason he doesn't like it, this because a so-and-so happened in the past and it brings back back bad memories and stuff like that sort of thing. You can not see it into the narrative unless you know it, so it puts more demand on you to have a new character creation process to really know them. Of course, a in the plotting guidebook, we wrote, we have a whole section that we'll talk you through this. We will put the link to that won in the show notes as well.
Jesper (26m 32s): So, so if your interest that you can check it out at any rate, or whether you follow a guidebook all, or you do it by yourself, I think the main point is just that you really need to understand all those details about the, or otherwise it's going to be very hot. You can ride the point of view, but it's going to be very hard to do it well, unless you know those things.
Autumn (26m 54s): Yes. And it does, it's going to take practice anyway. But yeah, and I think one of the other things is like you mentioned your, Your have this character reacts a certain way because of something that happened in the past, but not always jumping back into that flashback, or even explaining like acted, you know, aggressively or said, I don't want to hear about that being. And then he has, and then you'd do that character. He thinks about the time that blah, blah, blah, you don't do that. In the point of view, you don't go wander off into character thoughts either. You, you really it's picking and choosing what is going to be related to the reader slowly and over a time. And it should come out in the other dialogue or a, maybe you'll do a flashback later, or you'll have something else to explain why that reaction is.
Autumn (27m 38s): You can allow that the reader to be a little bit like, Oh, well, I don't know why they did that. Exactly. But it's an obvious trait. Something triggered this emotion. And that is definitely one of the writing techniques to is that you actually get rid of things. Like he thought he wondered hee all those little verbs. It says the character is thinking that no one of these just do it. You have that thought, Oh yeah, you do this action. You don't think about doing it, right.
Jesper (28m 4s): Yeah. At least some of what you said there. I think that that applies just as well to the third person limited you, you should try to not wander off into all these kinds of other explanations as well. And that's not specific to Deep point of view where so much I think it's yeah. It's, it's just good Writing. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
Autumn (28m 27s): Yeah. Geez. You both said it. Yeah. Too funny.
Jesper (28m 31s): But is there, I was just wondering, because you're being the editor here. So if, for example, let's say I'm being the listener here. Now I wrote, I wrote my first draft and now I'm sitting down and I want to edit it and I want to make sure it is Deep point of view. Well, enough if I can say it like that. So is there anything you would say, like, this is a sort of the check list or these other things that you should be top five things you should be looking for? Something like that. It is. Is there any, anything you do when you edit all of them too, to make sure that, that the product is well in or written well, and the point of view?
Autumn (29m 21s): Absolutely. And I mean, the first one I think is taking out those things, like he thinks like, when she feels like if you had to sentence, like he, you know, if he feels a sweat of sweat beat on his forehead, no, you just go straight to sweat. What does it feel when a sweat runs down out of that hit right on his skin. Yes, exactly, exactly what you try to really imagine what it would feel like to do that. And you cut out those words that he feels, and he thinks, because those are actually create a little barrier between the character and the reader. And the whole point of the point of view is to just remove that barrier. And another thing is you often see people say like, he thinks about this, or he thinks that she is an idiot.
Autumn (30m 8s): No, it would literally be like, she's an idiot. That would be the character thought you would start doing those little introductory phases because it is literally like journaling in third-person. You want it to seem like you were just totally seated in that. Yeah.
Jesper (30m 22s): Yeah. I think that is exactly the key. Right? If you imagine yourself, when you're riding, if you imagine how I am inside the character, I wouldn't say to myself, I'm thinking, I would just think it right.
Autumn (30m 35s): I know exactly. If you wouldn't write it in first person, you won't write it in a Deep point of view. And so, yeah, like I think about going to the grocery store now, don't you just go to the grocery store and that is how it works. And those are the important little clues. And even like I said, the Italian is a lot of ice. Sometimes get readers who will read back when I stuff it's like, well, this is a thought it should be an Italian as well. You don't have to do that at the point of view, it should come across very naturally. If you want to see some really good Deep point of view, go read some George RR Martin. He is an expert at really anchoring into a character's head and really feeling like that world comes alive through that character.
Autumn (31m 18s): And that is, you know, you really make sure you dwell on the other senses, seeing what else is going on so that you have the thinking, the feeling of the touching, the tasting, all of those things are very much alive and nuanced throughout every single chapter. Yeah.
Jesper (31m 34s): Yeah, absolutely. And I think actually, I don't know if, if, if, if you agree with me here, but I'm almost thinking like isn't a lot of this really a bit of just a mindset shift on your approach to Writing rather than it is like a new technique as such. That's, that's almost how I think about it.
Autumn (31m 59s): I think it is. It is just realizing that the reason for this person is so spectacular is that you are really just with one character and you feel so connected with that character. And that's what gets you turning pages is because you want to see what happens to that character. So this was being able to do that exact same thing and those exact same emotional pools, but with multiple characters. And again, though, this is where you need to be careful or is that you then don't want to have 10 character's in your story. You want to keep it as limited as possible. And when it really becomes hard is when you switch to a character you don't like, or like the villain, you want to do the best you can to be that character, his voice, and show the world through their perspective.
Autumn (32m 47s): And that's why it works so fantastic. When you have those gray characters that you have a good characters that have some bad falls and bad characters that had some really good ones that you can show that they are really doing all of the wrong things, but for the right reasons. And that's where it's so impactful. It, it makes the stories. I think the ones that are really linger with you after you closed the book are the ones that are written and Deep point of view because you just really can not get these characters out of your head. And when you're writing it, you really can't get these characters. Knowing that
Jesper (33m 19s): That's also a challenge in the sense that we recently completed our first a reader magnet on a short story where the character, he is one of the Ember dwarves and I was setting, which means that the end, but wolfs are not very nice, you know, setting a no. And then the third thing is that as people know, I can actually be quite a challenge to write a character like that because he can come across as not being very nice. He's not very likable necessarily because that's the way he is. That's a part of their culture.
Jesper (33m 59s): So it was a bit of a challenge to write it in a way whereby the Rita actually understands where the guy's coming from, you know, the, that they understand, like he's not doing these things or he doesn't view things this way because he wants to be evil or anything like that. It is just, that's the way he grew up. That's, that's part of his culture. And of course, Deep point of view is excellent at explaining those things. But at the same time, it's also a bit of a challenge to, to nuance it a bit so that it doesn't come across as well as to blatant, because it's quite easy to sort of say, like, you're saying, well, we use grocery shopping before.
Jesper (34m 42s): Right. But, but if it was, you know, if it was something set Fantasy related, like it all peoples all humans, I hate to humans or whatever. Right. And then it's very easily to just say that and move on. But then you're also leaving the reader with the feeling like this is a complete idiot, this person, right. I don't like that, that character. So I guess is what I'm trying to say and what I'm talking to, what else is probably as well that you need to be a bit mindful about how you do it as well, too. So you can just do not end up coming across as it will assholes. Basically. You don't want that either, right?
Autumn (35m 22s): No, no. I think that's a really important, I mean, if for some reason maybe this is, it speaks poorly of me, but I have often been able to get into my villains easier than a few other characters. I had one that was a politician and an extrovert, and he could just whip off these speeches and to get into his mind. Cool. I mean, it felt like it was a contortionist, but that's just what you're trying to put on this other person's skin and its even more. So you have to understand how they act, why they act, how they would see things and why do they care about the things they do, even if its completely different from you and you'd have to avoid explaining it from an outside perspective, like, Oh, humans are horrible and just go all out.
Autumn (36m 6s): But most humans, you know, and then going into a rant about what's going on with humans, no, you have to be like humans, there's stupid meat sacks. You know, you have to, they're always carrying about things that yeah. You know, like money and whatever, and that's not what the door is square or whatever it is. You have to stick really deeply into that mindset of that character in that race. And you really, like you said, you really have to have all of that, figure it out to start writing. And even when I used to have to get to the Deep point of view, if the character was an already alive in my head, I would have to do some journaling. I would have to do some day before story is, I'd call it like the day before they ended up in the novel and I would write those in first person and I'd be like, Oh, you know, that's why this character is acting this way.
Autumn (36m 49s): And that's why we are that way. When you start on page one, when they enter the story, you are like, you already have that figured out, you know, their mindset and you can kind of push yourself into it because you really do have to almost right a little bit before you start writing to really understand the character or go back and add it in when you edit, because that's the other thing to look for is going back and, you know, checking over all your work and seeing where that mindset could be better, where you can cut out words where you can really make sure it's coming from the character as a worldview and their lens of how the world works and what they're really aiming. You know?
Jesper (37m 26s): Yeah. The thing that I find quite difficult with the point of view is for example, in the novel's we are currently riding, we have a, a goddess and when you are dealing with basically a deity, you know, some, somebody who is, who is just not all of our world and probably have motivations and drives that we don't even understand. They are. I, I really feel with her when writing her and I feel is very, very difficult to, to do other than basically more standard third person limited around her because I don't know how she feels.
Autumn (38m 16s): No, but I think it in its own way, I think that's kind of exciting because with their person limited versus Deep point of view, so you have a character that's kind of unknowable and you just kind of change how they're being portrayed, especially because you know, if that character is maybe not a good point of view, but you hear it, see them more and dialogue, or even if you are in their mind, but its kind of less clear and less anchored that's you can do that purposefully to make this character seem more unknowable. And it's a very slight difference, but you can use these to your advantage. And I think that's sort of, what's cool about it is that you don't have to have every single character anchored in to your point of view.
Autumn (38m 60s): If you have one that is more lofty, you can keep them out of it. And one of the neat things is, is if you are a misleading character and they are firmly believed that EI is going to happen and that is what they're aiming towards and that as maybe the lie they have been told, but they believe at a a hundred percent. And so the reader will believe at a a hundred percent all the while, you know, see you is what's gonna happen and you have this huge shift, it can be so much more dramatic and maybe you shouldn't delay it in light to your reader is, but it's so much fun to lie to your readers and Deep point of view. And it's believable because there's not that omniscient pull back where you are kind of like hinting at it.
Autumn (39m 41s): The character is going full tilt towards believing. This is true. And they kind of get a carpet whipped out from under there. So yeah,
Jesper (39m 49s): You can have some of those a bit like what the character didn't know was blah, blah, blah, that you sometimes see that in some, I think you all can do this as well. Sometimes. Like what Frodo didn't know at this point in time was out at the door. That kind of thing is no go in and Deep point of view.
Autumn (40m 8s): No. And I think a lot of writer's think that, that his building the tension, But 2 million that is completely remove the emotion of right. It's maybe you would have, yeah. You have a little bit of curiosity, four. It, but it's so much more like get you a gasp when the character is just yanked a different direction that you didn't see coming. But when you hear like this lady's little clues, but what if he didn't know it was over on the Shire? Oh, you know that's, if you're just suddenly pulled out of the story, I don't know if that character's head and its just not as much fun. You can actually put the book down at that point and a lot going on. Yeah.
Jesper (40m 41s): Yeah. I would say that a guy in conclusion, I think I would pose a challenge to the listener. You know, if, if you're never written in Deep point of view before, try it out, it doesn't have to be perfect. That's fine. But just try it out. Try to imagine yourself in the skin of the character and Right. What you feel, what you hear, what you see, what you teach or taste, what you can touch and that's, that's what you are allowed to. Right? Nothing else. You are not allowed to say. He didn't know this, that he didn't know that. Or explain this in that like you would normally you have to go with what the character knows and feels and tried to write a chapter like that and compare it to your other chapters.
Jesper (41m 28s): And I almost want to say with certainty that you will find that it's,
Autumn (41m 37s): You'll find, you'll find that you resonate with the character more. You'll find those more action. There is a lot less. Tell me a lot more sho and it'll just be like, you'll be like, wow, this is, this is pretty good. And if you don't come back and let us know what I want to see the difference because I firmly believed the point of view. Those are the stories that I love to read. And they're the ones I loved to write. And I think you'll find other readers react differently. If you show me what you wrote to someone else. Well, no matter what you think, if you show it to someone or a reader, see what they say, which one? So I don't know. Is there any like, did we miss some important elements here when it comes to the point of view a Autumn?
Autumn (42m 20s): I don't think so. The line is going to readers. I had hopping. I was just like doing that. I would love misleading my readers. I have to admit it. And just that it's an important way of showing even your evil characters. It really is a useful technique. Or even if you then switch to a third person, limited for a, some characters that are much more unknowable, it can be really okay. So next Monday we actually are gonna talk about one of my favorite topics because we are going to talk about creating a magic system.
Narrator (42m 54s): And if you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Yesper on patrion.com/ Am. Writing Fantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, going to stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Perhaps you've asked yourself more than once whether or not social media actually sells any books? Is it worth the time and effort you put into to schedule and post new stuff on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc.?
In this episode of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, Autumn and Jesper share their personal experiences and provides an answer as to whether you're better off spending your time writing or if social media is actually a good thing.
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. In today's Publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I'm Jesper.
Autumn (31s): And I have Autumn.
Jesper (33s): This is episode 124 of The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. And in this episode, Autumn, and I will discuss if social media helps selling books on it. And I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this topic, Autumn.
Autumn (49s): Oh, it will be, it'll be fun. I don't think it will be anything surprising between you and I, but it'll be interesting to share this with the listeners and see what their takeaway is and what we get in comments. Oh, looking forward to it. Yeah, for sure. But you also had a, a good week. You've been traveling for once. I have to look at it since the, you can actually see my background. It's a little different this week. I took us a sudden, well, I'd been wanting to do this since, Oh, I made a promise to my parents. And I think November that I would come see them December and then coronavirus ramped up and it wasn't safe. And even in the house, I mean, we are talking about a third and fourth wave.
Autumn (1m 30s): He was going on across the world and new lockdowns, but we finally just said, well, we're going to, so we drove a few hundred miles South or down in Pennsylvania and I'm visiting my family and it's too much food, too much sugar, too much beer. And it's wonderful. I'm not getting quite as much work done. I am actually surprisingly doing some work and I swear and putting the way my laptop for the rest of it today, at least I'm going to crack open the wine with my dad and we'll sit in the back deck and, you know, absorbed some sun and watched that a little pull up with some fish and you know, it's so good to be down here. So I I'm thrilled.
Autumn (2m 11s): That's what we did a little crazy probably, you know, this year or this world. I don't know if there is a good time, but we hopefully will finally be getting that delayed vaccine shot this week. So fingers crossed. It's a nice, yeah. So it was not quite as silly as it seems. No, but that's a pretty good news. And a also getting to see the family after so long. It's a very nice that it is very, it's been really good. I'm having tons of fun. If you could say that we'll be visiting your parents to know how are the things for you?
Jesper (2m 49s): No. It's good. I went to the hairdresser for the first time today. So, well maybe my headset for those watching on YouTube, you can't really see it any way. But, it feels so much better. It's amazing. I didn't know how vital hairdressers were, but apparently they are.
Autumn (3m 6s): We'll help you tip. Well, if you don't know, what do you tip and Denmark. So, you know, well there, you know that you guys just have it, right?
Jesper (3m 17s): Nope. That's not something that we do. And we, and then the consequences, sometimes when we travel, we can't quite work out how. When am I supposed to tip? Do I do it now? How much should I tip? And we can figure that stuff out. It's not in our culture.
Autumn (3m 30s): Oh yeah. I was going to say, I live in a culture where you tip and I still don't know when you're supposed to tip or not tip. So yeah. And I told you on our drive down to Pennsylvania, we've been listening to that book a year of living Danish lately. I feel like I'm getting some insight to Danish culture. It's probably completely wrong, but it's been thrilling to listen to the differences going I'm in the wrong country. You, I just fled out of it that you haven't been a carrot countries. So there you go. Well,
Jesper (3m 56s): What was your key? Take-away from that lesson
Autumn (3m 58s): And I'm not quite done yet, but yeah, it's just a, you take care of each other and that that's really cool.
Jesper (4m 6s): Yeah. Okay. Yeah. But we'll at least, I mean, we do, when it comes to tipping, we, we don't have a anybody's salary depending on tips. You know, if people are paid enough that they, they can, they can make their living. So you don't have to worry about tipping anybody because they had research, you have enough, enough money to, to, to support yourself. So,
Autumn (4m 27s): And do you understand that in your life? You're cool with that, even if it requires to paying more, you know, it's a livelihood, it's just like, Oh, well, that's, that's why we need to hear you understand this, that everyone has a right to live. And yeah.
Jesper (4m 41s): Yeah. That was definitely that. I mean, here, I mean, everything is very expensive, you know, normally are in foreign, just foreign news comes to Denmark. They're like, wow, this is an expensive place. And, and yes it is actually. But on the other hand, you know, there's a lot of social security. There was a lot of things that you don't have to pay for it, as I said this and so on and so on. So in that area, but we also pay a lot of money in Texas. Yes.
Autumn (5m 8s): We did hear that. It was like a 50%.
Jesper (5m 11s): Yeah. Yeah. So it depends a bit on how much you earn of course, but a but somewhere in there between 45 and 65 is quite normal. So, but, but, and again, our salaries is also high, so you have to pay more in Texas. Yes. But you also earn more. So I think compared to the U S I think we are quite better off still as an individual citizens. I mean, yeah.
Autumn (5m 42s): I think as a, as a society, I think your gap, and I think you do have a lot of, one of the lowest gaps between rich and poor in a developed nation. So I think that's really says something, right?
Jesper (5m 55s): Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But speaking of visiting family, I'm actually also planning to go visit my brother and his wife and his wife is coming weekend, which is also something that hasn't happened for months. So that's also pretty good. And I also finished writing the first draft of album. Yeah.
Autumn (6m 17s): And it's been quite the a week. This was so exciting and I haven't finished reading it yet. Of course, obviously I haven't finished editing yet, but Oh my gosh. My first book is I, I have two books, we have the, the novella and now we have the book book, so, and so it was good. Yeah.
Jesper (6m 32s): Right. And do you have wills the first full novel, or at least the first draft that's done? So that's nice, but, but one thing I did figure out, and of course you and I have been talking about this a Autumn, but I thought maybe some of the audience would be interesting as well in this, because one thing I did start thinking about what's that I needed. I I'll try to see if I can improve my writing speed right now, because I just, I would really like to increase my word count per hour. So I've started a bit of an experiment. We'll see how it goes to once I get into writing a book too, but I'm thinking that if I get it to work and I increased my word count per hour, then we could probably make it into like a future podcast episode at some point in time.
Jesper (7m 20s): And she, you know, what I've done and, and how it's working in and, and, and whatnot, because I'm thinking a lot of our listeners would probably be interested in that as well.
Autumn (7m 29s): Oh, I think they'd be interested even while you're doing it. Even if it does it end up working, but you won't get there. Oh, I I'm sure you've already seen a small increase. So it'll be interesting to see how it goes. Yeah.
Narrator (7m 42s): A week on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast.
Jesper (7m 48s): So we have a world-building post starting two twin, quite significantly in the Am Writing Fantasy Facebook group. And the people were asking questions and getting feedback and wish you the details about a fantasy worlds. And so I just thought I would mention that because yeah, I love Well, but like,
Autumn (8m 7s): Yeah. So that's the one You ConEd in Dunn, but it looks like a lot of writers were really just felt like sharing the world's. We're asking all these posts or I liked it. It was kind of like, and if I haven't developed it yet, you all have to stimulate my, you know, creativity to come up with an answer. I'm like, Oh, well, that's, that's fun. So you get to come up with these questions on there. We don't know the answer. You are going to start developing your world even more from it. So it they've been good pose. They were so big that we actually had to create a master post. It just kinda of like not flat. Everything has to, one has an actual writing question that wasn't getting answered. So,
Jesper (8m 41s): Oh yeah. Thanks. Thanks to Lou for organizing that a bit. Yeah.
Autumn (8m 46s): Yes. He stayed on top of it. It was very good.
Jesper (8m 50s): Yeah. Yeah. But I love how a few people could help each other out. And as long as tomes keep civil and friendly than I think online communities like, like this is really good to have. Yeah. So if, of course, if you haven't checked it out already, you are free to join. You can just search for Am Writing Fantasy in the group section of Facebook and you will find us. But yeah, I think that was all I wanted to mention about what it was going on on the incident this week.
Autumn (9m 21s): Yeah. Well, I did notice that if we haven't passed it by the time this is Erin, it's definitely past it, but I think we hit 4,000 members of the Facebook group. So, well, you know, it's not too shabby is getting a little, its getting so popular. What are you are popular? Popular? Well, probably not the only ones who can speak know. So we only ran a podcast. This is nothing, but it is getting so popular. You and I we're like, you know, letting in 60, 70 people at a time, we were like, wow, this is, this is wonderful, but all the way it, so it's changed a little bit. Now people, hopefully it gets streamlined in a little bit better, but come to Georgia is good. It's been really fun.
Jesper (10m 3s): No, no, that's a good point. And that is probably just worth mentioning as well. Just so people are aware of, because you might notice that the, in the Facebook group that a, we always tried to put in like welcome. And then we mentioned every single member who came in to the Facebook group, my name and we really liked doing that. And that was sort of purposely thing. Then we decided to do it because we felt it was a very nice way to be inclusive and welcome people in personally. But yeah, as a lot of them just said passing 4,000 members now and we get a lot of people joining, its like some days there was like 40, 50 people a day and it's just like, it's too much.
Jesper (10m 46s): So we have, as it turned on automatically at Autumn auto approval, I guess it's what is called an Facebook language. So people will automatically get in. So you will actually stop seeing those are very nice, a personalized welcome messages because I'm sorry, but its just too much now and it's sucking up. It's in writing out all those. I mean it takes me like 15 or 20 minutes just to write out that one message. And then if I have to do that or Luke or Jason or Autumn has to do that, like everyday, almost it it's a bit too much. So hopefully you will understand why we stopped doing that now.
Autumn (11m 23s): Yes we are still welcome you and we're so happy you're there, but it does the personalized welcome messages. When you start hitting 62, 74 people at a shot and it's taking a half an hour to write out or you just you're welcome message. Just want to say hi and introduce yourself, let us know what you're there and do it. We'll be happy for that two days.
Jesper (11m 48s): So as we are getting into this one, I actually don't know if, if some of what I'm going to say will be unexpected to some, I don't know, but I think it's worth to talk about social media because if we are not very careful or perhaps even despite the fact that we are being careful, social media tends to take up quite a portion of your time and it can also influence your life for good or bad. But what do you say? That's true.
Autumn (12m 21s): Oh, I see. I definitely say that's true. I mean, I know my husband has actually completely gotten off of social media because he realized what a bad influence it had been in his life. And so that we have me on the other side as an author where I tell him I don't have a pro at a private profile really anymore in my profile, my, it is my public profile. And you know, as an author I was working with Am Writing Fantasy. So if I'm online, if you Google me, if you Google my husband, he doesn't exist. So if you Google me, you'd get like 10 pages. So it's a good, hard to have that under a very small roof. Yeah.
Jesper (12m 55s): That's so true. Yeah. And also I'm not going to, well, let me, pre-phase everything that I'm going to say from this point out a I'm not coming at this topic as if I have the right answers. So just know that going in here. I just think that it's an interesting conversation and of course I have some viewpoints, but I think our listeners should make up their own mind about social media and a, you know, with anything we say, hear, if you agree with it fine, if you don't, it's also okay. It, it is just some few points that we have. And I don't think that this episode is designed to come out with like a recommendation as such.
Jesper (13m 36s): It's just more of just our reflections and then you can do with it. What do you want? I guess that's the best way to say it. Yeah.
Autumn (13m 43s): I think I'll have my phone and call it a recommendation. They might not have my writer, coach hat on that says if this is what I would tell you as a friend, the author to another author of what are you, you should focus your time. But yeah, if you happen to love social media and you were a total extrovert and you are doing well, or if you are shy, I want to stay away. If you want to be like my husband and don't exist, you're a ghost on the internet. Its all good. It's fine. If you be who you are and what you feel comfortable with it, you shouldn't put yourself out there if you're uncomfortable and you should not put yourself out there unless you're not reading it at all. That's probably a problem. But if you just love being out there, then that's fine too.
Autumn (14m 24s): Make time for him to schedule it and make sure you also get your writing done too. If you wanted to be an author. Yeah.
Jesper (14m 30s): And I know you have been playing around a bit with the Instagram and Pinterest on something or something like that, but I want to circle back to that, but I was just thinking maybe a good place to start would be to mention it because we just talked about the Am, Writing Fantasy, your Facebook group, for example, and just unpacking like say the group thing in general. I think that might be a good place to start since we just touched upon it and we can of course use Am Writing Fantasy as an example here, but I'm more looking at it at S group's in general. And I think it's a great group. The thing is just that it's not helping selling anything, you know, of course In with Am Writing Fantasy.
Jesper (15m 15s): Well that, that is of course non-fiction so, but even though, I mean we have nonfiction books out guide books for us. We have that, but a group like this is not helping to sell anything. It, it doesn't bring any revenue or anything our way we are trying to build a good reader group for our readers at the moment. And maybe at some point that'll start paying off. I don't know. Yeah. But what, what's your thoughts about running groups on social media platforms?
Autumn (15m 45s): Well, I, my biggest one because there are some really interesting Facebook groups and it is as an author of the best it's we naturally want to hang out with other authors and network, which is awesome. That's why we have Am Writing Fantasy. We can go out and network with other authors, but really if we're trying to get the word out about our books, you want to be in reader groups. And there's a few really cool ones like Epic Fantasy fanatics is the one that if I go into I'm like sucked in because it will be laughing my head off hysterically. And then I have to show it to my husband because of course he's not on social media now, but it's fantastic to be able to go hang out with readers. But one of the biggest things you'll see on almost every single reader group is you can't spam.
Autumn (16m 26s): You're not supposed to be a lot of them have either no self promotion rules or only a single thread where you're allowed to mention you're an author. They do not want to see you posting about your book at every single breath. And I think that's really important to know that they are literally there to enjoy it. They expect authors to enjoy it as a reader, not to be enjoying it as a way of life sniping off reader is so that you can kinda bring them into your, your full do you desperate to be pissing them off in there. That's great. If you meet some people and you know, they asked for a recommendation and you give to them and they happen to pick up your book, that's enough, your primary purpose. Are you going to get kicked out in? Some of them were really kinda fun.
Autumn (17m 6s): You don't wanna get kicked out and miss all the members and things.
Jesper (17m 12s): That's true, but I'm also thinking in terms of running your own group. And I think the, and here of course I, again, I could be wrong and this is just my, my opinion here. But I think those who have got started really early and they have massive groups and it's working for them, but I think it's working because they got started really early. And that early mover advantage, there are just paste a lot of dividends. Yeah. And M and those people who were in that group as like thousands of people, and then I will use to Def it it's part of their habit. It's part of that group is part of what I do.
Jesper (17m 54s): That's part of what, the ones that I check. But if you come in now with nothing and you're starting to try to build it, I'm really not convinced that it's worth the time and effort. We, we did try a short for a short while too, have a REIT, a group on Facebook. We actually shot it down and moved them to good reach because at least they are readers are hanging out. But also that we are trying to build it in its not easy.
Autumn (18m 19s): It is not easy. So I don't know. Yeah. I mean, and I do know a few authors who have it, like you said, they were kind of active readers groups. Even if there are small, a few hundred people to do it, maybe a couple of thousand, I mean that's kind of exciting and they work really hard if you author's. I know there are posting, it's not even about their own books and that's usually the biggest thing. It's usually they're out there posting, like there are showing a Fantasy image and saying, Hey caption This, what do you think of this there saying good morning there saying good night. It was like, I don't know if you have to admit, so what I'm talking and I am definitely an introvert. And a lot of authors are introverts when it comes to social media. I've often said if I wasn't an author, I wouldn't have a social media profile.
Autumn (18m 60s): I'm more like my husband. And it's probably why we we've been together 20 years' go figure. We are very common, but it's, I'd like I do like, this is where I like talking. Especially during a pandemic, it was a wonderful having these networks with readers and people that it's just like, Oh, we were already online. We are already have these conversations. So it was fantastic. But to have that reader group is a lot of work. And the times that I really put into a focusing, I am going to get this going and going to market. I'm going to do this post, this post, this post. And it's a heck of a lot of time. And if you're a busy, if you have a full time job, if you have kids, it really eats into your writing time. And so the other problem I see when you're putting your group on another platform, just like we're doing with good reads.
Autumn (19m 48s): But if you're doing it on Facebook, Facebook has the problem were, you know, they might not see your post at all. If you're not paying to promote posts to the people who want to see your post, which is really silly for that is literally how Facebook works. People follow your page and then you pay to boost your post so that they actually see what you're sending out. They might not be seeing the stuff you are posting in your groups anymore. It's Facebook started with groups, they went to two pages and then the groups no longer saw what you posted on your page. And now they switched back to the groups. And so if you're posting on your page, most likely, most people are not seeing anything. You are posting groups who are active right now, but there's a lot of rumors that in 2021 group's are going to be marginalized again.
Autumn (20m 32s): And so you are going to lose connection with your readers. It's just frustrating. There are some places where if you really love social media, good reads. If they're following your groups, they will see and they're getting there. They didn't get daily or weekly announcements of a, a synopsis as I have everything that everyone's posted. So if there are really interested in, they can actually get access that they will get access to everything you've posted on. Good reads. Amazon hasn't changed that yet. Thank you, Amazon, please. Don't you have not yet. The mighty networks, there's a few places that have started groups on mighty networks. You and I have talked about switching to mighty networks there. If you post something, literally everyone sees it.
Autumn (21m 14s): Everyone gets an email or if they have the notifications turned on, it had like places where if you are going to put in the time and money and effort, you know, they're actually going to see it without you, then having to pay for them to have to go see it. And that is my biggest problem with social media, where at least the platform's where it's a time, its not a general timeline at a specific where you have post something and then the next post below it has something posted after it. When they start mixing it up on favorite post liked, Post's just, they start playing with those algorithms and people. Aren't seeing stuff. Why are you putting in all of this time? Cause you know, if we circle back to it and we talk about how much time I've tried to put into it makes it making some of this work and following all the best tops, topics and tips.
Autumn (22m 2s): Holy crap. You know, it's like the weak, you don't work it all. You get any writing done in it. Oh, when you're just doing the marketing, I either not very fast or I'm not good at it or it does just take a boatload of time, right?
Jesper (22m 16s): Yeah. That will show you on Instagram and Pinterest experiment and you ran a bit. They have to see if we could get more Gatesman in there. But again, if it's a time sink and I feel like the evolution of all of these platforms, so it doesn't matter if it is it's Facebook, it's Amazon. It is the same thing as the evolution seems to be that it is more or less, just everything is turning page a plea. So if you don't pay for it, I forget about it. I, I hope good reach is not going to go that way at some point as well, but who knows if it is owned by Amazon so we could easily do. And once they have X, M w you stop all the advertising spots that they can get on to the Amazon store pages, then where to go.
Jesper (23m 2s): And they will might turn to the eye on Goodreads and say, why don't we start putting some ads over there? I mean, there's readers over there. Why or why can't we just start advertising over there as well? And then you have, well, yeah, I can easily see that happen. But I think just building an audience on these different platforms, it might just be it's, it's probably not the best use of your time. And I would probably even say that it's, it's more important how much time it takes it away from your writing time because writing new words is always, always, always more important than it is to interact with your audience on social media.
Jesper (23m 43s): I don't know. Do you think that is controversial to
Autumn (23m 46s): Oh no. I don't think it is. I think it's important to interact with readers, but I think there's multiple ways of doing that from your own e-mails to good reads to a social media, to going out to a book fair. I mean, you should definitely be like, look at your month and find ways of interacting with readers, but you should be writing first. I would say if you had a choice of what to do first and a night, right first, and then have some wine downtime to talk to readers, they are, however, it is a social media, compose emails, do a newsletter or do something and do it in that order. Don't put talking to them first because then you're already online and its like, you just want to check out this one more thing.
Autumn (24m 31s): You can go down the rabbit hole, you end up talking to someone else in the next thing you know, you didn't read anything that night and that's not helping your journey as an author.
Jesper (24m 40s): No indeed. But I think that for me though, it was a clear distinction between social media and email. This email list for me is completely different because on the e-mail list, you own the data. You own that list of people. Nobody can change the rules on you. You can download them anytime you want. You can take them to some other supply. If your current suppliers I'm making a fool of themselves or whatever. So you have plenty of options to do something and you can control the message. And yes, of course is true that there will be some, for whatever reason, when you send out an email, some of the emails disappeared and cyberspace and they never arrived in some of the inboxes.
Jesper (25m 21s): That's the name of the game, but it's not like 1% of the people we'll see you a message unless you pay that. That's not how it worked. So email is different. So, but if I look at it from a social media perspective, but I also feel like maybe it was probably a different maybe five to 10 years ago, but I feel more and more like social media is just white noise. I know it's, there's just a lot of stuff there. It's a time sink. And is it, it is being constructed in a way whereby you are in endorphins are kicking, you know, you're getting rewarded for a posting, something about that, like the best side of yourself that you can think of.
Jesper (26m 6s): And then somebody will like, you have a wonderful picture of your cat or whatever and, and then you, you, you feel rewarded and then, Oh, that was nice. Great. And then you we'll do some more of that. And I mean, I get it if I understand it, but my point is just that I don't think it helps at all. If we are looking at it from building an author, a brand is so much, I really don't. Yes. Maybe a bit. But if you are putting in a, a a hundred hours, you know, you're not going to get that value out of it as you would have done putting in a a hundred hours writing instead. But it, I don't know, I'm struggling with it because I think like you, if I did not have an author, a business to run, I wouldn't be on Facebook either.
Jesper (26m 51s): I would not have a profile on Facebook. I actually don't like it in that sense. And I don't like the way Facebook handles privacy and stuff like that. I have a lot of concerns with Facebook in general, but the thing is too, the Facebook ads, they work incredibly well. So it's like, I know it's a completely double standards here, Right? Because on one hand I don't like it. But on the other hand I found it very useful. And so
Autumn (27m 17s): It is tough and that is, and those are the ethical questions, you know, that you, especially for you and I, and we wrestle with it, okay, this is this incredibly invasive a platform that is mining your information. Cause as they say, if you are not paying anything to be on the platform like Facebook, then you are the product. So they are using it for data. And I'm not being a conspiracy theory theory as a steer, you can go online and look at all the data they're collecting. I love, I have a picture of data, pixel D to a scraper that tells me how many pixels or on websites I visit. And it was like, Holy crap, they are following you everywhere. So thank goodness. So the new Apple, and there's a few places where you can block all that, but then we are paying them for it does that's the worst part.
Autumn (28m 1s): And then we go and we, we do use that to then try to sell a book or something, but it works so well because they've mined all of the data. It is.
Jesper (28m 11s): Yeah. And so it's like, it's, it's like giving money to the devil and then complained about it. The devil exists. I mean it, yes we do. You know, it is tough.
Autumn (28m 21s): It is tough. And I would also say that there is, I agree with you about newsletters versus normal social media that we thought of it. But there's this new hybrid Now like mighty networks or some of these faces that have gone. And if you become a very popular author where people are coming to you, you can put a Mach social media website or on your website, its like forums. But now they look, they can look exactly like Instagram or it looked exactly like face, but maybe not exactly because, but they're following that kind of platform. So you can create your own social media site. So if you want, if readers love coming and working and interacting with you, but you were sick of Facebook, moved them into your own website, but you'd have to be a big enough that they are coming to you.
Autumn (29m 4s): But yeah, that's what
Jesper (29m 5s): I meant. Oh, it's not going to work. Right. But
Autumn (29m 7s): This is not, unless you have to be the way, you know, way bigger already. But there are sites where you control mighty networks being one of them were you can control the access to list all of those things that currently Facebook does it allow you to do it.
Jesper (29m 23s): But the problem is again, I mean the tools, there's plenty of tools. There's plenty of ways and, and good ways to organize things, yourself, own the data, making sure that they can take your audience away from you. If you put it in at a time to build it in. And, and that's good. That is good. But the end, if there's just a big pot, because the thing is that you have to drive all that traffic and that is just a million times harder and this white noise world than then you might think getting people on. I mean, yeah. As you mentioned earlier, we have been talking about moving maybe something to mighty networks at some point, especially if, if Facebook goes through with what we've sort of heard on the grape wine that they might need some Facebook groups this year and make them well pretty pointless.
Jesper (30m 17s): I think if they go ahead with their plans for lets see how it ends up. But if they do, we have been talking about moving to mighty networks, but again, they are, my main concern is really that then we have to drive all the traffic. Whereas today that Facebook algorithm drive the traffic that it shows the FA Am Writing Fantasy Facebook group to Facebook users that it knows we'll be interested in it. And then they come on board and they enter a group and we can have conversations with those people are and so on and so on. And that's wonderful. But if I have to go out by myself and say, Hey, you know, if you are interested, if you are a Fantasy author and you are interested in knowing more about a It and interact with your fellow Fantasy authors, come on over to mighty networks. The only thing you need to do now is to download an app.
Jesper (30m 59s): You don't have already created an account you don't have already. And then, I mean, nobody wants to do that. So it's so hot,
Autumn (31m 8s): Especially to me, it's like in what you were saying earlier is so true. It's like those endorphins, most people who are on social media because it is feel good and they wanna do that post that goes viral. They wouldn't have that comment that people go in like, and it's nice to network and talk to other people. It's a wonderful, like in the Am Writing Fantasy Facebook group where, you know, authors are actually getting help in their field who are overcoming her reason. And that is fantastic. But I think that is the rarity. And so many people who come to our groups like nothing else is quite like this group. They're not finding that in many other places because we are so strict on self-promotion and because we just have an awesome group and an awesome group of writers at authors.
Autumn (31m 48s): But usually like I do love Instagram, but the interaction there I've seen that go downhill. Like I started on Twitter, I love Twitter. And it was a writer as our So Starkey and it was so much fun being on Twitter, but something There changed and I moved eventually I'd tried, Facebook did like it. I got on to Instagram and I really enjoy it because I'm a very, you know, I'm a graphic artist who I love the pictures and that was fantastic. But I've seen that even kind of going downhill where now that's not just the post order or that you're just getting shown things that they think you'll like and interact with. But it's like everyone is shouting and waving there. You know, the pretty pictures, but no ones, not many people are across talking unless you happen to know each other and we've known each other for years.
Autumn (32m 33s): Then we are still communicating, reaching the new people. It's mostly people following to get more followers liking to try to, hopefully you will come in like their stuff. It feels very one sided it. And it wasn't like that before. And I do think it's just feeding that, you know, everyone wants to be an Instagram influencer. They want to have that viral post and it becomes so impressive and huge. It's not about connecting with readers. And I, I do miss that warmth, that actual like, Hey, there's a few people I know on here that they are half the reason I go back because it's one way I get to talk to them.
Jesper (33m 10s): And especially with talking about Twitter, because that's also a one way or I have changed my way of operating with it quite a lot. I used to use Twitter very actively. I used to spend an hour, hour and a half every week scheduling the next week's manual tweets where I gave people like updates on what's happening in my life, how five I come with, my writing, all those different thing, anything that I just thought that people might be interested in. So, and I spent an hour and now, and a half every week scheduling the next week's posts and I have almost 50,000 followers on Twitter.
Jesper (33m 56s): And that, that might look nice and, and sound nice. But honestly it doesn't make that part's have a difference because also that has turned white nose and I would always respond. Or if somebody tweets directly at me, I always respond to them. So I still do that, but I have completely stopped doing anything manual. I don't share any, I mean, I load up for example, when we are now released this podcast episode 124, once that's done, I will upload it into my auto poster. So it will go into my like automated cycle of tweets that it will start sending it out once in awhile.
Jesper (34m 37s): So that's all I do. So everything that goes on out on my Twitter feed is either or to push from my cycle of content, which of course, I think people will find that interest in that there was a lot of content as a, this is a a hundred episode, 124. So we have done a lot of episodes in a, and we have two and a half years of a YouTube videos before that as well. So there is tons and tons and tons of content. And I I'm still of course hoping that if people come across my profile There, they will find some stuff and think, Oh, this is pretty cool. Or at least some of it that they will find some, something that interests him and they can go and check it out. Of course. And it doesn't cost anything to listen to a podcast episode or what's a YouTube video that is something they can easily do, but the whole manual engagement and a time investment, I put it in into it before I just stopped doing.
Jesper (35m 28s): And honestly, I've not seen any difference whatsoever when it comes to marketing or sales effectiveness at all or nothing. It changes absolutely zero,
Autumn (35m 39s): Which is so it is sad because I do remember Twitter before the bots. And that's when I, that's where I had gained over 20,000 followers. And I still actually have most of them if they've dropped off a little bit, but I mean, Hey, you rarely go in there. And that's the worst thing it's like, I should say, if I'm not actually going to go to respond to people, I should just shut down the account. But it's hard to say, Oh, it's one of 2000 people, but by don't want them. And that's how we met at you. And I started to talking Actually on Twitter. So, you know, but it is, it's changed so much. There was a lot of white noise. And now that there are bots, there's a lot of people who are just not physically present and Instagram is still interesting.
Autumn (36m 20s): They're just starting to do the sideloading where you're getting to be able to schedule posts and get them up because I mean, it is, Instagram is still very much. You have to be manually doing it, but there are a couple of platforms that are actually now allowing them to do Instagram post. As far as even today, I got an announcement that the social media schedule or use is not allowed to do the first post, a post and a comment. The first comment on Instagram, because the comment is usually where you put all your hashtags. So this is huge for if your marketing, you can go ahead and preload all this stuff, but that means you're not actually home Instagram talking to anyone else is just a whole bunch of robots on their talking to each other.
Autumn (37m 4s): That's so we all have like an AI lives that we never go on in and check out. This is not again, not selling any books at that was sort of the point of this conversation. It's just robots talking, you know?
Jesper (37m 16s): Yeah. It, it just puts Instagram in at the same bucket as everything else afterwards, right now, everything is just the same as just, it's just AI as a posting stuff on behalf of whatever you loaded into it. And then everybody does that. I mean, I not to say that no books are ever sold from, from tweets or posts on Instagram and so on. I'm I'm sure that there are books are sold from it once in awhile. But my point is more, if you like being on the platform, if you enjoy it already then fine, then, then you know, we use it and, and, and post manually due to the things you like to do.
Jesper (37m 57s): But I think we need to stop seeing social media as if it's some sort of obligation that if you want to build a proper platform, if you want to sell books, you have to be on social media. I don't think that's the case anymore. I really don't. And I would almost challenge people to say, if you don't already enjoy it, a try, just stop checking the platforms. Maybe you run an experiment for a week and do like this, right. Create two time slots a week and say, during these two times, half an hour, I'm allowed to go into this platform. And I'm just going to check the messages in reply things and what not. But the rest of the time throughout the next week, I'm not going to login.
Jesper (38m 40s): I'm not going to even look at it. I just completely ignored. And then tell me what the difference is because I bet you, there is nothing, absolutely zero difference. No, other than you have made more time for yourself and you have more time to write and you don't get sucked into these rabbit holes. Yeah. So try that or even better. That just occurred to me, try to delete the app from your phone and see what happens. Then it looks
Autumn (39m 5s): Instagram because that's the only way it exists. But yes, but you know, I, I agree with what we were saying even about endorphins. I mean, I think it really does get inside your head and you want to make that viral post. Do you want to start seeing the really serious marketers? And when you really get serious about marketing on it, you know, they're talking about your tracking, what posts you do that day? What types of posts, how many lights did it get it? I mean, you want an hour just tracking all your insight, you know, your Instagram posts for the month and seeing which ones or getting the most interactions. What days, what type of post or is it? It is insane. And that becomes its own obsession. And again, yeah, a Lake is not a reader.
Autumn (39m 46s): It, it might not mean anything and it might be just someone going down pretty picture, pretty picture. You paint a picture of a funny, funny, or that, you know, to come back like me, you know, trying to get a Lake for a Lake, it might not be that important. And if you take a social media break for a week or so, the first few days are always tough, but when you can clear your head and then you hear your story and your, hear your characters again, and you're like, this is what's important. Go see your family. Like we've done. It's what's important. But yeah, I mean, you mentioned that Instagram chorus, I try to enact a very serious Instagram course ahead of all of these tips. And it was so hard. It ate up so much time and I'd be a part of it is having like a theme and a brand, especially with the Instagram.
Autumn (40m 30s): So I had made my own personal filter cause you know, I'm a graphic artist. I do all these crazy things. It became no fun for me to be on Instagram because instead of taking a picture of a pretty picture with the sky or a lead or, you know, flowers, I live in insight. So I'm doing all of these really things instead of I had to go and take that picture and run it through this filter, then go back and repost it and then make sure I had the hashtags in a certain area and do this. I was all serious. It took all the fun out of it. And I actually lost followers. I dropped by like 20. And I was just like, what the heck? And so I found that just so you know, funny, I've put it in like five times as much effort and time and planning and it totally burned.
Autumn (41m 19s): And it was really funny. Cause all my, I do have a second Instagram profile cause so, you know, I like Instagram and I'm a graphic artist. So then the other profile I've got my graphic artist and there I have always been kind of a very personal, so purposeful. Like I share a very white quote and then I do it very graphic picture, color or heavy like cut, cut, book cover. I did. And then I do a, a white picture. So it shows up as This, you know, you look through it, it's got a pattern to it and that's just the way I do it. That one is totally different. You know, people love it because what I'm sharing is graphic Media. If I don't share on that one, I see the results in my website. So oddly enough for it as an artist and it works fantastic by doing these very serious posts that have always been very serious minded.
Autumn (42m 1s): The other one, it was other authors quotes by doing like quotes from Stephen King. Oh, those would be like viral. Everyone loved them, sharing them copied on bookmarked my own stuff as well. Oddly enough, with my graphic one and some of the quotes, I had asked questions like a, you know, as an author, how are you finding book marketing? And so many authors came back to me saying, yeah, every time I posted about my book, I lose readers. You know, people complained and they brought their stock following me. And he was like, I'm on here because I'm an author. And every time I post, I lose followers, no seriously. Why bother him as an author?
Jesper (42m 40s): So the point and but, but again, that's where, that's where the email list is good because there isn't an entrance criteria. And if somebody has to type in their e-mail address, they have to confirm the fact that yes, I want to receive email. So already there are those who don't want anything at all. They are not never going to go through. This is actually quite funny. Just a side note here, because I was preparing a Facebook app earlier today than it is going to go live tomorrow. Well, we are recording ahead of time. So by the time you hear it, this is already in the past, but never say that that was not the point. The point was more to say, I actually on purpose wrote into the add text itself is that yes, this will require you to leave an e-mail address.
Jesper (43m 26s): And if you don't like it, cool, no problem. They actually put it in on purpose because I have seen it 2 million times. Now that every time you see all of the complaints started in the comment section. So this is again, one, you have to put it in your e-mail, but if you wouldn't have to put it in your e-mail address, if you wouldn't come on to our email list, what would be the point of us even running the ad is completely pointless, right? Because a part of the process is also to solve people off right. Or sort them out. So basically the ones who doesn't want to do any, who doesn't want to engage at all with us, who doesn't want to hear from us again. Well, great that you didn't sign up because then we don't want you there.
Jesper (44m 7s): Okay. So it, it is. But
Autumn (44m 10s): I think, yeah,
Jesper (44m 13s): I've just gotten a bit fed up with social media by now. I must admit, I also don't like how it feels sometimes like posts are being made and written in controversial or provocative ways on purpose just to get engagement. Not necessarily even because the post of beliefs or things, what he, or she posted, but more just because they know that this is going to piss some people off, sorry for the language. And then I'll get a lot of comments and so on and so on. And I don't know. I, I, my, I just feel like my life is too valuable for stuff like that. And I don't wanna spend time on it.
Jesper (44m 53s): Don't get me wrong. I love personal interaction. Like you said earlier as well, Autumn, I like it. When you have like the one-to-one conversation with somebody who has something great to say, or it doesn't have to be about any thing that I wrote at it, but it just like this sort of personalized ping pong. I like that. Stuff like that. That is cool. But going on social media to try to find that situation or that ping pong, it's just there's to many other things that just drains my energy, to be honest. So I dunno, I'm no longer a fan of social media, I guess. That's my conclusion. Two, all of this conversation.
Autumn (45m 31s): I know you've heard, especially on Instagram, even on Twitter, on Twitter, I think it was, they sent the first a thousand people. You felt you met, it would be the ones that you would remember the most in. I think on Instagram is like the first hundred or 200 people that you interact with and meet in there. First followers. Those are the ones that you kind of like, I keep going back and connecting with. But after that it just becomes competition. That's true. Yeah. I think, you know, there's a couple people that I've met that way. You being one of them. And I don't think you were my first a thousand though. I had at least every once in a way that you do, we meet up with other people and it's a great way, but I definitely have to play devil's advocate, even though I know we're getting like towards the end. So if you have this freebie, we want to give a way so that people get on your newsletter litter list.
Autumn (46m 16s): Where do you share it other than social media? How did you get people to hear about the free book you are offering?
Jesper (46m 23s): No. No, but that's exactly the thing. I mean, we are in a pay to play market. Now, the only effect, if we are talking about freebies, like a PDF, a free book, of course You, if it's uploaded through Amazon, you can advertise it on Amazon using the Amazon app. So if you want, but let's assume it's not, let's just assume that something you are giving away because you want people on your email list and the only really effective way. And this is again, it's double standards. I know, but they only really affect the way it is. Facebook. ASCE is the only thing that really, really works well when you, you can post on social media and all of that, but you can't like you are going to get like less than half a percent of people actually taking any action or a signing up compared to how many impressions you've got.
Jesper (47m 11s): So it's a whole ton of effort, almost no gain. Where is the paid Facebook ads? So you can get them to perform quite well. It takes some know-how and it takes some testing and some money and so on, but you could get it to work quite well. And that's the name of the game? Unfortunately,
Autumn (47m 31s): If we were not using Facebook ads to, for example, for what Am Writing Fantasy and so on, then I have no idea where we would find anybody. It just wouldn't happen. No, we would just, it would be like we didn't exist. I mean, marketing is important. And unfortunately marketing right now is social media and it is a pay to play market. The freebie use, the author is helping authors to boost posts. That was, it was a part of what I used to love about social media. And its just, even when they are helping each other now it's, you're just not making as big of an impact. I swear the algorithm pushes you down if you're not paying. And I've mentioned my, my theory that way to you before that, I just think if they see that you don't pay anything, if you just have a little negative somewhere in your little algorithm, it just kinda keeps you under a certain cap.
Autumn (48m 19s): And until someone proves me wrong, which I don't think there's any way. Cause none of us know what these algorithms are doing. I just firmly believe that it is true. And so I don't know, I'm a stubborn, so now I refused to pay for anything. But you do all of the work and because I'd be like, no, they can't have that, but you have sort of a, you have sort of outsource it to me nowadays anyway, but, but still, I mean they're is a difference between talking about engaging on social media versus running paid ads on social media. And those two things are actually two different thing. I mean its the same platform, but it was two different activities. Yes. Running the paid ads. I don't like giving Facebook money, but I understand that it's the name of the game and it's something that we have to live with.
Autumn (49m 2s): So hence I do it, but meaning engaging on Facebook, like posting things on my author page every week and stuff, I don't do any of that. Nothing at all. So that's just way, I mean that there is a difference between the two ways of using the social media platform that create. And that is I think the difference do you can set up the ad and tweak it and get it running. And maybe you just need some monthly tweaking at that point. Even AMS ads, its sort of the same thing. Once you get them running, if they're working or you're usually doing okay, you are getting the word out of your marketing somehow butt going on to Instagram or good reads or Facebook or Twitter and spending 15 minutes or an hour or two hours.
Autumn (49m 45s): And just talking to people, that's not gonna sell you the books that are running an ad. Well actually do know. So I think that's, as far as we go today and next Monday we are going to discuss deep point of view. What is it? And how can deep point of view help you out?
Narrator (50m 9s): If you like, what you just heard. There was a few things you can do to support The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy for as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
An awesome fantasy world can make a story — just as a terrible or terrifying one can make you run for a different book. Join Autumn and Jesper as they go head to head to come up with the worst fantasy world... or figure out how to create a story out of some pretty horrifying recommendations.
If you want to check out the Story Idea book Autumn and Jesper mention in the podcast, head over to https://books2read.com/StoryIdeas (and check out the brand new audiobook that was just released!).
OR pick up the Plot Development book and get a free ebook copy of Story Ideas at https://books2read.com/Plot-Development.
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast in today's Publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need. And literary agent, there is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I'm Jesper.
Autumn (31s): And I am Autumn.
Jesper (33s): This is episode 123 of The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. And today we are going to run it one of our not so serious episodes. We are going to dive into our alternate alternating lists. That's what, what I'm trying to say at the WORST and or scary fantasy world that we can think of. So they should probably be able to be a good one.
Autumn (1m 2s): And it should be, I have some fun doing some research thinking or finding some books. I am not sure if I wanted to read, but just to get inspiration, but it was actually a really fun one to come up with the list. So will have to see if I do a stool. Appreciate. Dominic's a comment that I always win it. And so I just thought, well, that's, that's the stuff we don't talk to her.
Jesper (1m 25s): And I think actually I think we already know who's going to win this one. So apparently we don't need to talk to, well, no, he does know what he was talking about it.
Autumn (1m 35s): I figured out that comment would make you go and do like extra work on this one.
Jesper (1m 40s): So actually it wasn't the back of my mind when I make my list, I was like, I have to come up with something good today. So I figured, so it will have to see, I definitely have a surprise for you at number one where I pulled it from. So it will have to, Oh no, it's already such as like, Oh no. Oh no. It, it must be a bad thing. One. Yeah. I'm sure you don't worry. You don't want you to stress now. And we have to get that.
Autumn (2m 5s): It's like at the end, it's in 40 minutes. So don't worry about it. You don't want to stress to the next 40 minutes. I can probably count. Let it go. You do you have more of a calm? I thought I was a competitor until I met you and you have a much more of a competition edge.
Jesper (2m 22s): Okay. To say, I like to compete, to be honest with him and well, I can at least pretend to be a sore loser. Normally. I'm not that I like to. I like to play the game here. You have to be a good example, too. The kids who are the referee and the adults you referee, sometimes it sounds like the last weekend I handed out three yellow cards for people who were doing the scent, you know, complaining about things. So well, but that's a nice thing that, you know, there are, I don't have to be the sole lose. If they disagree with me, I can just give them the yellow car. End of story. That you know, you do not have that power over me. I'm sorry. No worries.
Jesper (3m 2s): Yeah. Yeah. I think I've said to my wife at some point that I would love it. If it was possible, you know, in business meetings to bring my yellow and red cards and you just like, yeah,
Autumn (3m 12s): Well you are out by, by that. Wouldn't be so much easier than it would be pretty good, like a mediator or something. That'd be fantastic. You know, here's your card and you got to do your out time out yet. Go sit up for five minutes. So that would change the dynamics of things so much. It would. But I think that a lot of people wouldn't like you either, but That's a different story. You probably have to work for an independent agency where they can't fire you.
Jesper (3m 39s): Yeah. Well, that's it, Is that the moral on again with all the cards in his pocket? Or what the hell are you Sure? It was like, Oh no, it's another meeting today. Yeah.
Autumn (3m 49s): Oh, well, but it is besides that, besides the refereeing, how are things over on your side as well as the Atlantic?
Jesper (3m 55s): Well, it's a pretty good. My son's were actually going to go to the hairdresser today for the first time in months down the road in the lockdown. Yeah. It was a sign that I was very jealous, but then it just got worse because then the head rest is a canceled. Oh no, it was so frustrating. My, my oldest son who was really annoyed by it at the, Yeah. I don't know, like everybody else, I guess a we, or like a hair monsters is walking around here the whole time
Autumn (4m 23s): Or like my long hair. I took a couple years to grow this. Backout different for, you know, and that's the same as well. Go for the Viking. Look, you know, in braids and some long it'll be fine. Yeah. And that's your heritage, it's your heritage. You, you need to go for it. Yeah.
Jesper (4m 43s): But that is true. But actually over the weekend as well, just to say, tell you that, that I watch one of the movies that you were recommending,
Autumn (4m 51s): Which one
Jesper (4m 52s): I've watched The yang yang master on the floor.
Autumn (4m 55s): Excellent. What did you think you didn't even say?
Jesper (4m 58s): No, I didn't know if that was on purpose Or holding out. I always want to hold Out and stuff up.
Autumn (5m 5s): Then we recorded a podcast or a I'm sensing a trend.
Jesper (5m 9s): Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh yeah. No, no. I think, I think it was good. I like the is not going to do in this partnership, but I liked, as you said as well that you don't quite see Don and coming. Oh, I like that.
Autumn (5m 24s): Yeah. I, I, the setup was like, Oh, there's no way out of the day. Oh really? That makes so much sense. It's perfect. So that one is much better than the, the other one that is also the ying-yang masters, having the one that one's not quite as good. And like I said, especially for the one you just watched ferret demons. Oh my God, what a fair or a demon. So I might technically have one if you've seen my dog, but yeah. They're so cute. And they were all, so yeah.
Jesper (5m 53s): So, so we have any listeners out there. If you want to a way that it is a FANTASY movie, it is, it is Chinese, but that doesn't mean I don't mind being a Chinese, but maybe some people do it, but it's called the young, young master. And it's a show on Netflix. So a, if you want to check that out and ah, yeah, I should have just have to do it. It's a bit different in many ways, you know, it's, it has almost like a human side to it as well. Like it's a, it's a bit, it's not silly at all, but, but it is a bit like some of the creatures is a bit, like, I almost feel like they put in down as a comical relief, you know,
Autumn (6m 33s): And the turtles,
Jesper (6m 36s): They are also pretty cool. I mean, it is very FANTASY heavy, at least. So yeah.
Autumn (6m 40s): FANTASY have a very good CGI, very good acting and a story that has a twist at the end that you don't see coming and you don't see how that's going to have to work out. I thought it was a fantastic FA fantastic storytelling and fun event. It would, if it was a book, I totally would have to read it. So it was excellent.
Jesper (6m 60s): Yeah. Yeah. And I think it was based on or off a book. No, no, no, no, no. I read actually the first movie, the one I just watched the yang master, that's actually based off a video game. And then the other one that you just mentioned, the turn it to yang yang master, they turn it to you or something. I think it was called that's based off the book. Okay. And that one is, I have not watched the second one, the eternity one yet. But as far as I read that one is a bit more dark. Whereas this one young master is a bit more lighthearted.
Autumn (7m 31s): That sounds very correct. Yeah.
Jesper (7m 35s): Okay. But how about you? You, you had a bit of a bumpy ride, this bus.
Autumn (7m 40s): Okay. That seems to be a, as long as it doesn't go back to whatever month I said that I felt like I was cursed. I know, I think that was February, but as long as it doesn't go that way, we should be all right. But its been, that's been a little bit of a hiccup. My vaccine was canceled at the last minute. So now I don't get vaccinated until may because they changed the Johns, the Johnson and Johnson has some side effects, which I have to admit. I would probably be right in the target of potentials for side effects. So Lina, maybe it was a good thing, but it has been one of those weeks where you feel like the rug has pulled out of you, I'm a Hunter you with every step. So at this point I'm just expecting someone to push me off a cliff and we stay away from cliffs or they're just send me a parachute and Well, or Mary Poppins or has an umbrella or something I need to, I need a safety net this week, but we will get through it.
Autumn (8m 36s): And I will not. Maybe it's because of what happens to be my birthday or a week. So maybe its just, you know, fate instead of rubbing in it, I will ignore that. I've been hoping for a good week. I'm planning for a good birthday. Oddly enough. It's been, the weather here has been gorgeous in the sixties. Sunny, just lovely. Except for oddly enough that day on my birthday, it was supposed to snow seven inches. Right. And so I was going to go out to a, a lovely restaurant were actually having a certificate.
Autumn (9m 16s): I think it was going to be perfect. And now I'm just thinking, well shoot, I'm just going to get cheesecake and cheesecake. Good. Maybe it was too much hot chocolate in Rome and cheese kick-ass or movie or something. I feel like this movie and just get it over with, but that's how my week moving on.
Jesper (9m 40s): Okay. So if you just want to move on,
Autumn (9m 44s): Let's go up
Narrator (9m 45s): A week on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast.
Jesper (9m 50s): I okay. It took out a long, long time for audible to accept the files. I am pleased to announce that the audio book version of our guide book on how to develop story ideas is now finally available for like four or five months old. So I think more than that, I think it's great. They have a year of six month.
Autumn (10m 14s): Oh that is insane. I am so excited though. You did it again. You didn't tell me this or no, I didn't come to you in education were running up this disk. They'll send you back for training. Yeah.
Jesper (10m 29s): Well I thought it's excellent communication. I'm telling you right now.
Autumn (10m 35s): Well, that is exciting. So what are we going to do to sell a bright, having our book finally approved as an audio book
Jesper (10m 44s): That I don't know that it's a celebration. That's the part, I don't know how to do. I need more training on how I'll just say like, but maybe because I have an audio sample prepared, but maybe you could just to remind people what this book is about. And then afterwards I can just play a short sample right here and now
Autumn (11m 4s): Six months in a week of heck it's a story ideas now. So I do remember that it is full of tips and ideas on developing your story ideas and how to generate different ways of coming up with ideas in getting the, that flowing, its almost like creating a muscle memory of how do you come up with ideas and develop that. And it's a whole different skillset. So it's all about that. And I think I did. Okay. And I'm going to stop speaking.
Jesper (11m 35s): How are you afraid you are going to jinx it?
Autumn (11m 39s): Yeah, definitely. Let me touch on the computer. It will go black.
Jesper (11m 43s): Okay. So I have a, a short sample lined up here just so that the For Lissa listeners. So you can see, you can hear what is, sounds like it's a bit more than a minute in length. So a lien back and just a listened to it here. And of course listener, if, if you're not too interested in this book, just, you know, we use your podcast app too, a skip ahead in a minute or something, but here we go.
Derek Botten (12m 10s): We don't need to understand how our brains produce Ideas. We need to acknowledge that they do. It's not magic generating story ideas. Isn't a single event, but a creative process that involves collecting input from our environment and experiences to transform those loose fragments into a coherent hole. Well, we said that most original ideas has already been conceived. We also mentioned how inspiration is at the heart of combining OLED elements into something new or the greatest novel it is yet to be written. And when that happens will still be able to say the greatest novel is you have to be written. Every idea in the world is waiting to be done again with a new spin or an unexpected reveal.
Derek Botten (12m 56s): All it takes is to understand how to open our minds and allow inspiration to hit home. The more we experience, the more material we have available to interrelate and create new combinations from the better. For instance, when J K Rowling came up with the idea for Harry Potter, she was stuck on a train from Manchester to London, King's cross. Or how about Suzanne Collins? She got the idea for the hunger games when channel surfing between reality TV and actual war coverage from Iraq. The point is that story ideas are all around us. We need to train our brains to look for them and then note them down. As soon as they come into existence, in a sense, it becomes a simple matter of collecting enough input from your environment and putting those ideas through the brainstorming process.
Derek Botten (13m 46s): This will lead you to the perfect premise for your story. So
Jesper (13m 51s): How do you like the Narrator here? Why don't you want him?
Autumn (13m 53s): And he's got a very soothing as a friendly voice. I can listen to that one all day. Yeah, I really liked.
Jesper (14m 2s): So we place the link in the show notes from a where you can find this audio book and if you prefer an ebook version or a paperback that's found via that same link as well. And a little secret for our listeners here is that the Epic ebook version of this book is actually available for free because if you buy the plotting guide and will also put a link to that one in the show notes as well. But if you, by the plotting guide insight, you will actually find a link which will give you this story idea book for free. Of course the ebook version of it, the audio book version you can get for free.
Autumn (14m 39s): You know, fortunately I was actually thinking as well, all of them that, and of course I'm communicating this to you now. Okay. That was great. A very Well known. Is it okay?
Jesper (14m 54s): Yeah. Cause I'm going to have communication skills here. What if we a set that I'm the first five people who leave a review of this podcast will get a free audio book.
Autumn (15m 10s): I think that's brilliant. I love giving rewards to listeners. So let's do it. It will have to, we'll have to be on the spot and checking times, but yeah, first five who leave a review.
Jesper (15m 24s): Yeah. So we will do it like this. If you like the podcast, leave a rating and review right now and we are going to go first, come first served. Meaning it is when we receive your information about the review left. So you will leave your ratings, leave your review, then go to Am Writing Fantasy dot com and use the contact form on their and send us a link or a screenshot of the review. If you just left. And the first five emails we get and that's the timestamp in our inbox, the first five we get, we will get back to those five people with a free download code for this audio book.
Jesper (16m 5s): So don't delay, if you wait too long, it will be too late. So yeah, go ahead and, and leave a review and a will give you a free audio book sound the same time.
Autumn (16m 16s): Yeah, I think that's a really cool and then that's a way of celebrating. We go into audio book. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jesper (16m 21s): That's true. Yeah. Inadvertently and this is celebrate is something I wouldn't even notice myself. That's my bad on who we are going to work on. That I have a feeling that we are accidentally going to expire some people today when we go through all of this Autumn. Yeah,
Autumn (16m 45s): Probably I would think so. I definitely chose M one or two worlds where I think I would probably not make it more of a pro. Definitely not to the teenage years, but if it was dropped in it as an adult, I would probably have a few hours still live. So yeah,
Jesper (16m 60s): It seems to be my way, maybe not to inspire people in the way that they are going to copy the actual things that we say, but maybe some of the stuff we say it may be. Some people feel like I can actually use a small part of that on an element of that and change it around to something else. And a, I think, you know, you know, if that happens too, some of the listeners please steal away, just take whatever we say and use it. I don't care. You can steal all you want from this podcast episode. And then of course at the end will have to conclude a winner. Even though we might actually do that in two seconds, that's probably a predetermined, but,
Autumn (17m 36s): And knowing how my week is going. Sure. I Have no doubt. I'm expecting the PODCAST, to die and in a second,
Jesper (17m 44s): No, no, please. Don't jinx it a, I know your blood will have, it has quite an effect on electronics, right? It does. It, it does. That's what it is. That one step back. Yeah. Don't touch the computer Please. Before we get started, I came across a very funny comment, a on the internet, but I just thought it would, she has to be okay. It doesn't really fit into the list of five, but it was just such a funny comment that the way I thought was good at it. So we were, there was the question on the inside and posted about, which was the Wii WORST Fantasy Worlds to live in four, a normal person.
Jesper (18m 26s): And so it doesn't quite fit with our lists. Yeah. But somebody to answer to this question was, well, I think it would be becoming a volunteer firefighter in King's landing.
Autumn (18m 41s): Well, that's, that has a pretty good comment, But pretty bad jobs to have it. It's a pretty bad job or that kind of hard for me. So I dunno, I think we'd be left. So if they want us to share it up, all right, well I'm sure you'll get a few chuckles or who are listening to it. So that, it's a very good one, but I have to admit, I said there is, I, we both made a point not to steal from work's because we don't want to say that we think this world is horrible and it's like your favorite story. So we tried to come up with our own and I think that's the way to do it, but getting some inspiration, like reading some comments and stuff online, and there were some really funny comments and there were some things at work.
Autumn (19m 23s): And I did, I really did find the one that was like WORST Worlds. And there was a whole setup about a cursor town that I like. This is really would be interesting story. And it's sounds creepy. And what do you need to start bookmarking some of these, but it was actually not bad at all. Yeah, no, it was more of like, it's the WORST world. Like you would not want to be out in the world actually. And it was like, Oh, that must have been a very riveting story. So, you know, WORST worlds can be very inspiring. That's true.
Jesper (19m 56s): Yeah. I don't think that's not quite the way I've gone with my list, to be honest, if either it's not like inspiring And at all,
Autumn (20m 4s): I think I went with the potential for death horrifying and yeah. That's about where I went.
Jesper (20m 13s): Yeah. I tried to put a slightly different angle on most of mine to be honest, but because I have to try too. Yeah. Well now that is to say that, you know, the problem is sometimes when you try to be too unique, then it falls apart. So I ah, no, I, I am losing confidence in my list. All of it.
Autumn (20m 35s): Excellent. No, that's not good. I am ready to begin. Now I on me, I need a, when this week come on, it's my birthday. And we see that this my pantry, cause this is like Jesper. I powers your using on me. Like I'm Fe it's not fair. It's just not fair. I can't deny my breath. Right.
Jesper (21m 0s): Okay. Okay. Well, I almost feel like I want you to stop because I want to hear if I'm, if you start out really strong than I am getting really nervous, but if we could settle my nervous a bit, If, if the first one you've come up with is like, yeah, no, it's okay. Then I would feel better already.
Autumn (21m 14s): Well, this is my first one. We'll make you feel better because it was kind of, I actually changed it from something incredibly boring because I went with stories that would create Worlds that we create a horrible story. I guess it was really the theme of a mine. Yes, yes. And so that's what I wanted. But the first one is kind of, I just had to put it in there and I have a reason. And I'll let you see if you can guess because its something that I think you would suspect knowing me and also knowing something that's true to your heart as well.
Jesper (21m 43s): So are you setting me up for failure? So if I can guess it, that it makes me look like for you, you should have known this.
Autumn (21m 49s): Oh, we'll see. We'll see what we've already even talked about it today. So you're ready from my number one. Well, my number five is not the worst world. We are going to build out a number five. Yes. My number five. So this is a world where the water has been turned to undrinkable muck full of chemicals that will slowly poison you. Any animals that live in it or are mutated in the inevitable that live in the water. The soil has been contaminated so much that you are lucky to grow crops. And even if you could, the SOF, your reign will most likely destroy them. If it rains at all, it might be a drought year or it might be the aesthetic hurricane full of tornadoes.
Autumn (22m 29s): It just comes in waves out. Everything. Most animals have been killed off due to the pollutants. The landscape has a wasteland have destroyed cities. Birt husks. The building's massive contamination from the number of dead bodies, trash and leaked chemicals where any humans are writing about like Savage cannibals in the cities. So your best bet to live at all is in the countryside. If you are lucky to find any areas with existing forest and have a decent soils and of course food is scarce as possibly contaminated. And but if you band together at all with other humans to check out An existence here, they may look at you as a potential food source.
Jesper (23m 11s): Hmm.
Autumn (23m 12s): So I do know there are a dystopian stories that kind of had this world, but can you guess why this to me is one of the worst scariest worlds I can possibly imagine even though it's number five on my list.
Jesper (23m 32s): Hmm.
Autumn (23m 32s): Before we start and before we started talking in a recording today, we were talking almost about this topic when you are walking on the coast.
Jesper (23m 45s): Yeah. The people are Polluting stuff and whatnot.
Autumn (23m 48s): And it's based on what my absolute terrifying vision of what can happen to this world in what we're doing to it. And it had to put this one in there, right? No, this is the conservation side of me going. Yeah,
Jesper (24m 3s): No, no. So yeah. This is like a fast-forwarding 500 years or something. And then see what you get up with you on that. /
Autumn (24m 10s): I was afraid of fast forwarding, like 38 years.
Jesper (24m 14s): Three years. Oh my God. I hope not.
Autumn (24m 16s): This is a 30, But yeah, there are days I am terrified to see what we are going to wake up to tomorrow. So
Jesper (24m 21s): No, no that's true. So it was just a, just yesterday it was a sunshine here find with her and then like 10 minutes later it got all cloudy and it started snowing and I was looking at it, Linda White. What happened here is just like the way the climate is so fucked up. This incredible is yeah, it is really bad.
Autumn (24m 42s): Alright. So hopefully that will be eased you into the competition.
Jesper (24m 47s): Yeah. Yeah. Maybe. I don't know if I feel better, but I don't feel worse either. So yeah, it was okay. That's a win. Yeah. So this year you were a number five. Okay. So my number five is I'm sort of in the same vein as You. I meaning that I was trying to think of something that would be the worst nightmare for, from a writer's perspective. Okay. So imagine that you have created this wonderful fantasy world and you have created your characters, you have written the first chapter and now at some point during your world building, you thought that readers wanted something different, you know, something that they have never seen before.
Jesper (25m 36s): So your decided that this world, it would rain once every day. Okay. So, so far so good. Yeah. That's fine. It doesn't sound too. Yeah.
Autumn (25m 46s): But I know. And it sounds like the Costa Rica actually, it was like everyday two o'clock so we can turn on a faucet and it rained. Right.
Jesper (25m 54s): That's why I got it from No, but the thing is that every time it rains, everyone changes personality. Oh. So every day, the past is your characters will now become somebody else. Oh. And they will want something else. They don't remember what they were doing or why they're just on a new mission with new ones and motivations all of a sudden. So imagine what a mess. This novel will be. Every single chapter, the character is somebody new and there is no coherent overlap it, everything that they're doing, no consistent. It's a story arc, just character arc.
Jesper (26m 35s): It's just a random chapters of a person's life that goes nowhere. And you can go four, 150,000 words like that.
Autumn (26m 45s): I don't know if I could read it 150,000 words you could imagine being in the editor. I'm just going. No, no, no, no.
Jesper (26m 53s): But it is unique. Well building, no, I promise you. Nobody has seen it before. I
Autumn (26m 57s): Agree with you. And there might be a reason for that.
Jesper (27m 1s): Or you think, you know, maybe the, everybody else is just not as much of a genius too. Right?
Autumn (27m 5s): This is true as a writer. That one is absolutely horrifying. I just how you are, right. It would be just a bunch of short stories that begin and end every 24 hours or so it was just me. Yes. You could say. I mean, OK. So you could come up with the characters that is doing it's so darn just like wondering if its maybe it was more aware and maybe is it because you get wet and trying to hide from the rain and, and maintain who they are or do you have past lives? Like memories of flickers of things that you might have been doing before? See, you could Plot this year.
Jesper (27m 40s): Yeah. I can do it now. You are destroying it. It was a bad idea. Now you're making are starting to make it better and making it work. And that's not the point. It's the bad list. This one is not the point. This is not to make it work.
Autumn (27m 51s): And not to say I could write a story in this world. All right. Fine. No, it's horrible. There you go.
Jesper (27m 58s): I am not convinced that I was very sincere. Okay. You ready for it? By number of For, okay.
Autumn (28m 4s): What do you want to move on? Alright, so this one, this one I actually named, I call it Thou shall not right.
Jesper (28m 10s): Okay. That sounds serious. Yes. That's a very serious.
Autumn (28m 12s): This is great. Yeah. Serious world. I would not last year. Ah, it's a world that is dominated by a very strict religion. Or if you're a futuristic tech, a very strict AI where the priest or AI can read thoughts. So if you are disobey or if you even think about disobeying, you just killed your immediately kill. They just give up and go boom. So devotion is absolute or compliance is absolute. And that's why I'm saying, if I were in this world, it would be like five. It says you're out of here. So I am just not good at obeying things. I swear. I, it was a nice teenager. It's just been since then.
Autumn (28m 54s): So yeah. That's, that's why I call it that I shall not because of this world.
Jesper (28m 59s): Yeah. I wouldn't last long and I can tell you, And if they can, if they can read your thoughts, then nobody can avoid thinking something against the rules. Once in a while it was just impossible. I mean, everybody would die in this world. You know, there would be nobody left just the AI or the priests is. Yeah,
Autumn (29m 19s): I agree. And that's what That I, so in the eye by making it so strict that even your thoughts, we can get, you killed that. It just writing a story. What are you going to do with all these robots? Like people just, you know, thinking happy thoughts or listening to like constant music to keep themselves like the site or, you know, you want to write about the rebel. You want to, if I right about the person, who's going to find a way out of this trick. But yeah.
Jesper (29m 43s): But, but then if you had a non I'm going to, I'm trying to destroy you as too. So if you have the character who was actually the only one who is mine, they can not read. And he is trying to battle the powers that be in trying to figure out how we can free the rest of the people from this sort of mind control. Yeah. I can write that story. Not a problem,
Autumn (30m 5s): A problem. As long as you can throw in the one person like you can't read, you'd be all set. But if it's a a hundred percent, they can read all your thoughts and your growth from the time you were a child, you were like, yeah.
Jesper (30m 15s): Do you know what if it this way? What if it's one of the AI's who is going to be in it? Oh, I like that one. There you go. Ding, ding. Ding.
Autumn (30m 25s): Yeah. Very nice. Yeah. Okay, good. So if you were making my bad ideas is a good ones. I am going to make you a bad ideas and the good ones as well. If that's the way you want it to be that way. Yeah. Okay. So my number for yes. And this one might be quite interesting for the writer. I think maybe the reader we'll actually hate you for '
Jesper (30m 53s): It. Excellent. So The foreword to some one star reviews coming your way,
Autumn (30m 58s): It would ever write a book just to get one star or you would like to start up the pen name. Like I want to write trash. Yeah.
Jesper (31m 3s): You're going to change the worst stuff I can think of that.
Autumn (31m 6s): But you might like, it would be the ones that take off anyway. Go ahead. Your number for her.
Jesper (31m 13s): Yeah. Yeah. So, so this is a setting where it's, let's say it's mostly like the, well, the detail, so that makes it better. But it's actually the fact that there is no details. Okay. So everything is just made up at random as you go. Oh, and so it's not, it's not so, so that you make it up as you go as in like discovery Writing and then you will make it fit into what you already got. This is more like you have to use a random generator on the internet and whatever it tells you, that's what you have to use as the settings setting the elements.
Autumn (31m 59s): So if it like spits out umbrella and Gumdrop rainstorm, that's great.
Jesper (32m 4s): And then this is what it is then that's what it is.
Autumn (32m 8s): This is going to be really fun as a writer, but you know, the readers or going to be like, Oh, this makes no sense at all.
Jesper (32m 14s): Okay. Why did he throw in an umbrella at the dragon there? That makes no sense. So yeah. Yeah. I think readers will be pretty damn frustrated with this kind of world. No, but I can imagine teaching yeah.
Autumn (32m 30s): Writer conference, I'm a writer course like an in-person one and it's like it's right. Or improv or it would be so much fun to teach, to be like, cause it is something like storytelling around a campfire. I have, you know, when you do some of those exercises where you have to continue on a story that you passed in the chain and it was going to be so much fun. So this is sort of like kind of along those lines. And you know, as a, as our teacher, I would like to, I want to go do this as a reader. I would hate your guts. Yes.
Jesper (32m 59s): It would be like, Oh, this is the worst crap I've ever.
Autumn (33m 4s): But it, yeah. For a tool I'm just like developing your author voice and coming up with Ideas. It would be a blast.
Jesper (33m 14s): Yeah. True. All right. Well lets see, I like that one. Okay. All right. Well I don't like it, but okay. That's good that you do.
Autumn (33m 22s): I, I see it a tool. It, it would be an interesting tool, but yeah. And I would never want to publish something that can get out of it unless you like developed it For
Jesper (33m 33s): Well the fast, imagine how fast you can write it. Just copy and pasting out of random generators like in here with that. And then he did and then the next random generating And copy that paste in, it will take you like half a day and then you have another. Yeah,
Autumn (33m 45s): Well it would be for the bizarre I'm sure some of it's going to go do this now and just see what comes up, dragon in whatever the search term comes up with it. Or you go out there. You are good. All right. So you are ready for my number three.
Jesper (34m 1s): Yes.
Autumn (34m 1s): All right. I named this one too. And it sort of reminds me of your number five. So I call this one now you're here now. You're not okay. And so this is a world where random wormholes appear without warning, you can be walking down a path and be transported to the top of the mountain or the middle of the ocean or in a erupting volcano. And so like Stories I life, it would be so chaotic and unpredictable that it would be impossible to actually write a comprehensive story because you would just be like walking and poof, you know, you wouldn't be able to be with any one. You love you wouldn't your life would be inconsistent. So where yours was your memories or a race, hear you are physically, you know who you are and you're physically transported.
Autumn (34m 46s): Do you know to a cliff?
Jesper (34m 51s): Yeah. Nice. But could you have like some sort of limited countermeasure or something?
Autumn (34m 57s): I'm not sure if something, if you run up a bit.
Jesper (34m 60s): Yeah. So, so if you have something like if you have this substance or whatever it is, and it's very limited in supply, but if you have it, you can basically just walk straight through the wormhole, roll out and taking you anywhere. You, you know, we just want to walk through it and keep going wherever you are, where we are going already. But if you don't have it, it sucks you up and drops you somewhere else.
Autumn (35m 21s): I could see that. Or I can imagine if, you know, if, if you manage to have kids and you know, there are people are evolving on this world, eventually evolutionarily, someone's going to be able to control where the worm hole goes or at least start being able to manipulate it slightly. Would that be fun? So Yes, I, I was again, yeah. You know, you can find your way around it, but at, at, at its purest form before the child has evolved enough to learn that if they are thinking about something, they can direct where the wormhole goes and completely change as a society, it would be just a mess to Right. I, the love interest, poof.
Jesper (35m 59s): Well, she is now in the middle of the ocean and proof. He is in the volcano.
Autumn (36m 4s): We have stories over and it was the choose your own adventure gone wrong.
Jesper (36m 9s): But it would actually also be pretty crazy from like, like say if, lets say you have the One like court made that knows how to control this and its like, poof, well the arm is, or is that your front gate now?
Autumn (36m 24s): But yeah, there you go. That's like pretty great.
Jesper (36m 28s): And yeah, and also,
Autumn (36m 29s): I mean, that's the other thing. So I mentioned that it was all happens when you're walking. So what if you don't walk, you know, that's what you use to send them the servant's or something. There's definitely ways of playing with this so that it would be much less, much more controlled. And that's what you need to be able to develop a story is having control of things. But the minute things go completely random. Yeah. Good luck for writing the book. That's just me is true. Yes. Okay.
Jesper (36m 56s): You are not my fault for my number three. I sort of decided that to make my list a winning list, I needed to also play on some scary ones are excellent. So number three and number two is scary ones rather than a terrible ones. Bad ones. Okay. And I felt like with two of those on my list is going to be really strong. Okay. And what better way to do that than picking some real world locations to serve as inspiration for Stories, settings. Okay. So when things are based off of reality, then it becomes a bit more scary and it's true.
Jesper (37m 41s): Let's go back here in the Nordics actually in Norway to be precise, you will find a place known as ECA is house fortress. That's already sounds terrifying. Yeah, it is. As it sounds, it's a medieval castle and is actually also used as the mysterious setting for the fiction novel, the snowman, which is written by Joe Nesper. If you know him, it's a pretty well known Norwegian author. But the thing is that many locals act to report that this place is haunted.
Jesper (38m 21s): Excellent. So the most famous residents today are the ghosts of a woman and the demon dog that wonder is the castle grounds. Oh demon dogs. Yeah. So imagine a story where you are trapped inside this castle. I think that could be pretty damn horrific
Autumn (38m 43s): Though, if a real story. Cause we both have watched those M the haunting of Hill house, the haunting of, or something blind manner. I can't remember the one that is correct. We have of both watched those and Yes, I, horror story is hunting Stories are definitely spine tingling, especially when it's based on real events. So this can be quite, let's see, it's not a terrifying one to write it. And I think that'd be a fun story to write. So Writing. Yeah. Yeah. But it's a terrifying setting. It is a terrifying and that I did, I just didn't notice. We were so many people would say yes, it sounds like a great story to write, but we're talking like worse for at least this is a real thing. That's, that's terrifying.
Autumn (39m 23s): You don't want to live and you don't want to live in, In even game of Thrones. I mean, it has to be people to live, to survive. If you are a good person, you are dead in like two days. So there's are no places if you want to really live. But yeah,
Jesper (39m 39s): Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, that was my
Autumn (39m 41s): Number three. How do I like that? That sounds like it's going to be on must visit to the list when I come over to see, you know. Yeah.
Jesper (39m 48s): Well it is in Norway and not in Denmark, but anyway, so yeah.
Autumn (39m 51s): Is it still closer to you than it is to me? So yeah,
Jesper (39m 54s): I guess it is. Yes. Technically you could say that. Yeah.
Autumn (39m 58s): Okay. So it's the end of the world. It's good or excellent. I like that. I love it. I used to read horror, haunted, Real hauntings stories when I was a teenager. So that's really cool. All right. So you ready for my number to,
Jesper (40m 14s): yes.
Autumn (40m 14s): All right. This one I named poison. So this is a world where the soil is formed from uranium. So it's not such a high level that you would die instantly if you found yourself there, but high enough that it quickly starts affecting your DNA. So lumps will form across your skin has massive cancers form under your lymph nodes.
Jesper (40m 38s): Your lungs will feel with cancer cells so that you have a hard time breathing. The marrow of your bones is altered, weakening the structure so that you can just break your leg or your toes as are walking. Your hair will start to fall out. Your skin turns to boils and kinda like just lost all of your body. Oh my God, you is excruciatingly painful until you finally die with relief. So this is poison. Have fun writing a story set there.
Autumn (41m 12s): Well, I get it. I, I can see that there is a common trend here. And every one you come up with, this will have something like that. Nobody will survive this. It's impossible to live in those settings.
Jesper (41m 25s): Do you know if your characters are dying because of the world? Its, you know, it's not going to be a really interesting story. Oh maybe when you made this list, you had a bad week and you poured it into the city.
Autumn (41m 37s): I do it. Write this yesterday. No I I right noble. Right. And the reason I can write Nobel prize as I make lists like this one, I have a bad week. Every one dies, but I won't make it into a story. So this is what don't worry.
Jesper (41m 54s): Got it. Okay. If you say So. Yeah.
Autumn (41m 57s): Oh that's great. You are on for too. So,
Jesper (42m 0s): But two is a yeah, I want again a scary one as I said. Okay. And I was thinking, what could make it more scary than number three is it sort of has to write. And I wanted to try to see if I could see all the way to read with this one. Oh,
Autumn (42m 18s): Okay. And your number two. So this is confidence because you still have one to go.
Jesper (42m 23s): Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I do buy number one is obvious. Who
Autumn (42m 26s): Was the witness over? The last is fine.
Jesper (42m 30s): Excellent. So the guy in the catacombs of Paris, those were used by actually one of my favorite vampire authors and rice. Yeah. And she used it for a coven of vampires in the novel, an interview with a vampire or interview with the vampire may be, or even vampire. I can't remember, but either or people know what I mean? Yes. And that is already pretty cool. But what if I told you that the catacombs beneath the city of Paris, there are actual skeletal remains of over 6 million people down there.
Autumn (43m 9s): Well, let's see. Yeah. I didn't know it was 6 million, but I knew I've seen the walls of the skulls and the bones and I, yeah, I do. Like, Momento more, I, I, so I love these little death images and skulls. I should've been a goth, but I never was a goth if you do need to goth. But yes, the momentum OR I in the bones down there are S Oh, fascinating. I wanted to see them and it was in Paris and it never did make it down to the category.
Jesper (43m 34s): Oh, nice. Yeah. You can actually see the, the part of the stacked on top of each other is down there in, in the, the catacombs there. But now I don't want to Fantasy setting where its just about skeletons everywhere to sort of a bit boring here. Well, I suppose it might be a bit scary for some, but I don't think it is scary enough. So what if the deceased walked a month among us, but you don't know who they are. So they act like us. They look like us, but they are not us.
Jesper (44m 15s): So the scary part is that you know that they exist only. You don't know who it is, so it could be one of your friends. It could be your spouse. You don't know that it would be so imagining going through like that.
Autumn (44m 34s): Not knowing if your, one of the other that would be good.
Jesper (44m 38s): What are they up to? No good right there. Their trying to get rid of mankind. And so what a bit and you know that they exist, but you don't know who it is.
Autumn (44m 45s): That would be very interesting. That'd be a fun tension filled novel too. Right? I have to admit, right.
Jesper (44m 50s): Oh for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But it would be scary like hell
Autumn (44m 54s): If it was real-world in like imagining that the Corona virus, the people who are infected were changed somehow. Yeah. If this was a real world and you just did it, it was the impact of getting sick with something was much more devastating and it wasn't just deaths, but change you into something like a zombie, you know, that's like not into zombie stories, but something like that. Yeah. Then what would be, if this was a real thing that would be terrifying. Yeah.
Jesper (45m 19s): Yeah. But even in the Samba Stories, it's usually it's the human. So who are the scary ones into zombies? Story is not the Somme B's because the humans, humans are so scary because they can come up with all this ingenious ways of trapping in killing people and what not. So the sound bites well that they can be scary if there's a lot of them and you do. And you're trapped of course, but humans are much more dangerous. And imagine that if these people were like, look like you and act like you, but they are not you. And they want actually to, to kill you. So just going to grocery shopping you, you always have to be concerned if somebody's calling you over, it's like, Oh, are they going to kill me or something?
Jesper (46m 0s): Or somebody at the side of it arose you, you come across a car has like, you know, the typical trope of a puncture tire. And they're like, can you help me? No. Hell no, I won't have to help you. Bye-bye
Autumn (46m 13s): So much for a lot of good Samaritans.
Jesper (46m 16s): They don't make system this setting. I think,
Autumn (46m 18s): Oh, I like that. That is, that would be a very, I wouldn't know what to live there. I like, I wouldn't be able to trust you. This would be horrible. No. Yeah. I can't do that. Alright, so you ready for my number one? This one is a bit of a surprise. Actually.
Jesper (46m 35s): I hope it's not too good, but yes, I'm ready.
Autumn (46m 39s): This one also has a name. So its called the black Marsh in the bowl of Ashe, which both exists on the coast have storms. And I know that you are so intimately because of this one. I know we said we wouldn't pull from anyone else's novel, but I did pull from my novel. So this is from my Epic fantasy series, a rise of the fifth order. And I think they go back to it in games of fire. But so this is mine. So the, you know, stealing this one, but if you want to come and visit, talk to me, well we'll work it out. So it's, it was, it's a difficult place I'd never, ever would've went to visit here. And it was actually difficult to write about because it's so hard not to have your characters die.
Autumn (47m 21s): So this is one character is mostly survive. So first this is the coast of storms, which is similar to the eternal storm. If you've heard of that in Venezuela, whereas the catacomb go river beats Lake Maracaibo. So there's an average of 260 storm, 260 storm days a year. So it's like a lightning there all the time. And that inspired the coast of storms in my novels. And it's always pitch black broken only by lightning and a lot of rain. So if your outside of the two main cities, you are in a landscape, you can barely see its most likely you are going to be soaking wet. You were walking through Mark and mud and to make it even more fun because you know what I like fun thinking as an ecologist, any plants or in this area, they can't photosynthesize.
Autumn (48m 7s): They will be dormant waiting for the one or, you know, two days of sunlight where they can suddenly reproduce and grow leaves and all that other stuff or are they are going to find energy and a food source. And other means so most of the plants are actually carnivores. So giant thing is that Venus fly traps. My cat's for a strangling vines with thorns have suck your blood. So you know, the plants are going to kill you so you can imagine what kind of insects and animals eat plants up to the plans can already eat you. So you probably don't want to run into any the creatures that live there. What makes it even more fun?
Autumn (48m 47s): Because you know, me and I love really fun. Fantasy settings is if you have magic, you can't use it in the black Marsh. And that is because most of the area is littered with bones of creatures that the bones themselves don't allow magic. So there are like nullifying bones, which it works out quite well. It's usually in the story, but the problem is why would that adoptation of animals having bones that repel magic happen? Well, if, because there is an apex predator that eats magic. So if you can actually save yourself using magic from these like kind of carnivorous plants, you're going to be attracting something that is going to come and eat you like giant or a pack of a lost or Raptor as a kind of reminds me of, they will just get you down and eat your way.
Autumn (49m 36s): So yeah, I have some of my, I say my favorite characters in their it's just me. So I mean, it was really hard to just shove them into this landscape and hope that they came out the other side 'cause it was very desperately needed that they'll go in there, but you know, so that's my black Marche. It's quite a place. So I like that one. Yeah. It's quite fun too. Try to get your character's out of a pickle 'cause if they can be used magic, they shouldn't be. And most likely they can and there are fighting things when they are used to being trained with magics, there is something we got to use sorts of knives. Good. Look to you.
Jesper (50m 15s): Yeah. But that's exactly why you want to have your character's in situations were in the beginning as an author, you don't even know how to get them out of it. And, and, but then if you worked hard at it to find a way for them to get out of it, it will come across very, you know, very, very strong reasoning and a, a, a, a very good logic. So, so yeah.
Autumn (50m 35s): Well, thank you. I'm glad that you liked my number one. I do,
Jesper (50m 39s): But I also feel is cheating because you took your own. So I think you were already disqualified now the Yes,
Autumn (50m 48s): I will trust the listener's to decide if it was just qualified.
Jesper (50m 51s): Okay. But I know, I don't want to say, I don't want to hear it from Dominick. I don't care what you said. I'm just kidding, Dominique. If you're listening, listening.
Autumn (50m 60s): Oh, all right. Well lets see if I got, Let, just toss down. What is your number one?
Jesper (51m 6s): Okay. So this one is really bad, like bad in an annoying way. So I guess if you, if you read it as a humorous book, then maybe it would be okay, but that's only until you realized that it was actually intended to be taking seriously and then it'll just be, So This is a world where we are bringing to life the most hated cliches that exists. So let me share some with you in this world. Like you have the fact that there is only one single way to defeat.
Jesper (51m 48s): The bad guy can not be done in every way on the other, any other way. Only one way. That's the only way to do it. Okay. You have everything in the world with every place. And every item is a very long and hard to pronounce Fantasy names And the heroes cannot, of course also easily defeat, highly trained Warrior's in combat, even though there are no other system that is something you just do.
Autumn (52m 17s): Excellent. And the majors are always wiggling their eyebrows.
Jesper (52m 22s): And I can add some more if you want like villains who are apparently just evil because they are evil. They were born that way. Or how about everything that happens, happens because a prophecy for Told it. Yeah. I think that would be pretty damn annoying fantasy world to read.
Autumn (52m 44s): And it would be a horrible one to read it. It would be, I think he was in the boring one, two right in. But yeah, that would be just, I couldn't imagine going through a whole book cover all of the tropes, every single cliche you could throw in there and just show up to go to town with it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Jesper (53m 5s): If, if, if you didn't take a serious and, and you just made it a bit like very humoristic that could work. But if you're trying to run it like an Epic FANTASY and you're stuffing all of this in there, it's going to be a nightmare. It's a reef.
Autumn (53m 16s): It's one of those ones where if it's a role-playing game, it might be a fun one to be in cars. You can just decimate your competition. You are the hero and therefore you will get to the end, you'll get a Brown. And you'll definitely get that. You know, it's like one of those ones when you're having a bad week, you just want to play that role playing game because you're going to smash to everyone. But to sit there and actually read it all like a 150,000 words with me, just wiggling their eyebrows and women and chain Malbec, Kini is all the women that have to have to do it yet.
Jesper (53m 44s): Yeah, yeah, of course. Yes. That is there a as well as an, every time a woman in the room that you will have like a full paragraph describing her upper body in detail. Like there's no reason for it. It's just like a long a description of that. It's just like, and then probably a very nasty old man made sitting in the corner of wiggling. His brows said something really nasty, like
Autumn (54m 9s): Yeah, yeah. Oh lets just go back to the 1980s. Oh my God. I go and read one of 'em. Oh, one of those Hemmons or something.
Jesper (54m 23s): Yeah, that's painful. That is a pretty painful one. I have to admit.
Autumn (54m 26s): I am actually impressed that besides slightly with the rain versus my wormholes, having a slight kind of tendency to each other, we were in a completely different and again for this list, that's pretty impressive for WORST Fantasy Worlds Actually almost no overlap in these ones at all.
Jesper (54m 46s): We did have some in the, in the us quite far back now, I guess in terms of Episode. But yeah, we did have at some point where our list has a lot of overlap, but not anymore.
Autumn (54m 57s): Where are we seem to have gone away from them? I also think our list for a longer than I think they might have been 10 and now were just, you know, now we just choose the cream of the crop, have five. Yeah. It's like the best of the best. And that's all right. Well I have to admit to some of your story's I think it would be absolutely fun, but your number one would be except for a role-playing game. I just could not read that OR right in that I would just be, it would be less, it was Shrek a fish spoof couldn't do it, but it would be a fun spoof. If it would be fun to write comedic Fantasy one day I could get into that, right?
Jesper (55m 33s): Yeah. Yeah. Maybe. Yeah. I like your AI thing to be honest.
Autumn (55m 38s): And so I want to thank you. That's excellent.
Jesper (55m 41s): I didn't say that. I just said I liked it because you know, you have to, again, communication skills here, Autumn, you know, before you deliver bad news, you get the good news. Right? So you just first say, I like your AI and then you said, but I'm sorry that you lost. Yeah.
Autumn (55m 57s): So I, I am leaving that up to the listener. I'm sorry. You, neither of us are good in this list or if we are, we're equally powerful.
Jesper (56m 8s): Really? I thought I was the one deciding who One. Oh, okay. Well I guess we will leave it for our listeners. So let us know who you think had the best list or that works best. And don't forget to go fill out a review and then go over to Am Writing Fantasy, to come and send us a screenshot or a link through the contact form. And if you're one of the first five, we will get you an audio book.
Narrator (56m 43s): Okay. So next Monday we are going to discuss If social media activities at, can you help us all to us to sell books if its actually just a waste of time? If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support The Am. Writing Fantasy Podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patrion.com/ Am. Writing Fantasy for as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, going to stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Do you want to sell more books, face less competition, and achieve a higher return on your publishing investments?
K-lytics has the answers and this episode of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, Jesper talk to the owner of K-lytics, Alex, to gain a better understanding of what K-lytics is and what the latest trends and niches are within the fantasy genre.
Learn more about K-lytics here: https://k-lytics.com/
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. In today's Publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in a way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them. Now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I'm Jesper. This is episode 122 of The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. Autumn is taking a break today and instead of have a great guest for you. So I'm gonna talk to Alex Newton from K lyrics today and welcome to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, Alex.
Alex (48s): Hello, and thanks a lot for having me.
Jesper (51s): Yeah, it's a pleasure. I think I've heard you talk on so many podcasts now that your voice is almost feels familiar to me.
Alex (59s): Oh, wow. I didn't, I didn't realize it would be that many, but you know yeah. The occasional conference or a webinar that has happened, it does happen.
Jesper (1m 8s): Yeah. And also the nice videos you send out with K-lytics, the summarization videos. I've listened to you there are many times as well. That's the funny part, right? It's like the listener's who listens to podcasts. They also use to my, and Autumn's voice.
Alex (1m 23s): Right. Yeah. I can imagine because as you say, what I do usually comes with video and voiceover to explain the things, because the numbers can be a very dry matter. So I I'll try it to make it palatable. And the best way I found was with the video and with a voice accompanying the, the graphs and the dry stuff. Yeah. Yeah.
Jesper (1m 47s): And that's works really well. And we'll get into k-lytics in is just in a minute, but maybe just before we get that far, maybe you could share a bit about yourself. I believe you are on my side of the Atlantic for change. I normally always record, but somebody in the US, but you are in Switzerland, is that right?
Alex (2m 5s): I am. I'm based in Switzerland Now. I I'm a native German. You know, I grew up in Germany. I had my professional life there as a management consultant. Although there, I basically worked all over the globe and, and some 10 years ago when my little daughter was born and, you know, I had the typical corporate executive type of life, 24 hours, seven days a week Comic-Con activity and living out of the suitcase, I thought, Hey, you know, something should change. And, and that was right in that. What was it called? Like the Kindle gold rush. You can almost say, so it was almost by coincidence. I got into, Hey, what's Amazon doing? And, and yeah, six years ago, I officially launched k-lytics, which by the way is simply Kindle and analytics, but I didn't want it to get into the trademark dispute on day one.
Alex (2m 56s): So I dropped the k-lytics from the Kindle and here we are with K Lytics. So right now I have a, we've moved to Switzerland system one and a half years back and never looked back. So right now I'm, I'm very much running K Lytics amongst a couple of other things and, and enjoy my time here in this very nice little country that stands as a stronghold in so many aspects hear right in the middle of Europe.
Jesper (3m 25s): Yeah. That's true. Yes. So you lived in Germany before then?
Alex (3m 28s): Yes. Yes. I, I grew up in the Southwest of Germany and lived in Munich for many years and then near the stood guard area. So in the Southern area of Germany, yeah.
Jesper (3m 39s): Oh, okay. Yeah. I like watching the Bayern Munich games on television
Alex (3m 43s): Except last night. All right. So congratulations to Paris.
Jesper (3m 50s): Yeah, I guess so. But yeah, you did touch a little bit on a slightly there, but maybe you can explain that, you know, a bit more to those who have, who have no idea what K Lytics is. Maybe you can put a bit more, let's say the baseline information into what is it.
Alex (4m 11s): And in very simple terms, we tried to provide market research information to authors and publishers publishers to help them make better Publishing decisions is now that sounds very abstract, but if you're in an author, if you are saying the Fantasy on a world, and you decide about your next book project, or you are Writing already a, you know, your rights in the middle of a book project. And, and if you feel a little bit, mm, there is a market out there, or perhaps, you know, readers and potential buyers. So if you are not just writing for therapeutic reasons, or you have nothing else to do, but because you also want to make a living with your writing, you we'll have to face up to the fact that you run a business, right.
Alex (4m 57s): In any business that gets into a new product or service. Usually we'll do some kind of market research on it. If it's only like talking to a couple of existing customers or in your case, existing readers, Hey, what are your, like, did this resonate with you and how we do this on the ground on a scale by basically looking at a hundreds of thousands of books, and there are sales ranks on Amazon. And by aggregating the data from those books over time, or by certain genres, or by certain categories, we can basically deduct what is trending, what is going on? What is going down, what is selling, what is selling, but what is already crowded, what is selling and perhaps not overly crowded.
Alex (5m 46s): So we very much come into the game when people make decisions about that Publishing project. And later on, as, you know, things become very tactical in what category is, can I apply to my, what should be the pricing? If I do Epic Fantasy, you know, what are all the other Epic fantasy books are being priced at? Am I too high? Am I too low? And it can get very nitty-gritty in tactical than on the other side. But in essence, it is looking at what's out there in terms of data, aggregating it in an intelligible way and then packaging it so that not every author is a mathematician, obviously, so that you can make a very simple inclusions with you with the writing direction you take.
Jesper (6m 32s): Yeah, no. I personally really like a K lyrics and, and the reports, but I am curious, you know, why, why did you start Kelly this in the first place? Because I, I, in the Kindle gold cross back then there was nothing like this. So was it just like you thought that, well, this is missing, so I'll try to do it, or, or what, what was the driver behind you creating Catalytics in the first place?
Alex (6m 57s): It was almost a like half an accident that I ended up in the publishing world. Now I did start in my career in publishing, like literally 30 years back into a London based publishing company. And so there was some affinity with the publishing world, but at the point 10 years ago, when I started the first experiments, as you said, was a Kindle gold rush. And it was at that time when I looked at something, Hey, I want to work from home. So right now I'm clicking on all of those PayPal by button's. Is there anyway that others could click on mine? That was the out the, the, the onset.
Alex (7m 37s): So I was looking into various markets, you know, fitness Market, online consulting, Market information products, you name it. And I almost, by coincidence, I can came across one of those famous, or I think by now more in famous, you know, get, are rich with Kindle types of courses for the $99, you know, or these types of things in. And at first it was, you know, I was more thinking about publishing rather than writing, but having been a corporate management consultant for twenty-five years and having been in boardrooms 25 years, you vary, you become a very conservative meaning.
Alex (8m 18s): You know, I don't believe that. So you, you, you really tried to look at the facts and based decisions. On fact. So I started looking at Amazon sales ranks. I started to talk to people, Hey, if this whatever poly or a recipe books that everybody says is the thing, you know, if that has, I would say is to rank off 50,000 on Amazon, does it actually selling anything? And I found, I know its not selling anything, although everybody's saying, you know, you can get rich by, by uploading your grand grandmother is not even, Palio a recipe book, Polly-O breakfast, a recipe book. And at that point in time, I actually coined term, which I call to the present day, the polio breakfast recipes syndrome, meaning, you know, people tried to convince you that you can make money with some obscure, a nonfiction book upload to Kindle, which obviously is a total lie, but to the present day, but people are being sold courses, you know, to, to get into self publishing and make a living by uploading your knitting patterns and that sort of thing, which is obviously a complete nonsense.
Alex (9m 23s): And so at that point in time, I started doing some, it's almost like data experiments with Amazon and I figured out, Hey, that works. And then I was in the one where on the Facebook group and start a chair. I remember my first K Lytics report was very plainly about the top 30 main Kindle category. So essentially it was looking at is romance selling more than sci-fi and fantasy and sci-fi and fantasy selling more than engineering and transportation Book. So, you know, it like super crude level and people tore it out of my hands and then ask, Hey, can you do this? Can you do this full sub categories? And then people start diving into sub sub categories and, and the rest is history.
Alex (10m 8s): I think ever since 2015, we've been tracking more than 7,000 kids and a generous month in month out looking at hundreds of thousands of books.
Jesper (10m 19s): Wow. Yeah, it's impressive. I mean, you must have quite some machine power to data scrape all that information. Right.
Alex (10m 26s): Well, you know, it's not like a super large scale operation because first of all, you know, you don't want to, I think there can things to be said about, you know, to what extent can, and should you do automated visits on other websites? I know, I mean, in many industries you have it, you know, take hotel, price engines and all that stuff, but you know, it's a very, very small scale. So Amazon wouldn't even notice that. So, and, and also coming more from a data science point of view, you, you know, there is no value in just collecting data. The value comes with intelligent analysis of, and also the intelligence sampling, right? We look at books like seven days a month, like not every hour because also, you know, that would take bandwidths that also Amazon wouldn't be happy with.
Alex (11m 10s): So we add more like a, you know, not like the occasional visitor, you know, but it's a, it's a, it's a very fine line between what is, what is ethical and what isn't right. And so we chose to do a very hands off type off the data operation that samples book's rather than as you term it scrape, you know, the, the, the Ammons on site every hour or, you know, which is not, not, not the type of business I want to get into.
Jesper (11m 41s): No, no, that's fair. That's fair enough. And its always good to be a bit ethical about what you do. Although I think with Amazon, they have a scale that they know everybody and a lot of people who are scraping that data and I don't really think that to be honest, but, but its always good to have some ethical considerations. Yeah,
Alex (11m 58s): Absolutely. And, and, and, and in the end of the day, you know, we were there with that humble data collection to basically help help their clients, you know, that, that feed their whole Publishing and engine. So a and a, and so far, you know, six years they've, they've never complained. I've never complained. And, and, and the people have people that have been happy. So I hope it stays that way.
Jesper (12m 22s): No, that's perfect. So when it comes to the fantasy genre and that's sort of what we are all about here is also in the name of the Podcast because it is quite obvious, but considering the fantasy genre, I was hoping maybe you could share a bit about, you know, Latest data and your latest trends or sort of what you see when it comes to the FANTASY showing or what is trending and so on. I mean, first of all,
Alex (12m 49s): Well, the good news is that, you know, out of those big JARAs on Kindle, I mean, you have romance has always number one full of by Mr. Thriller suspense, then you have a bit of non-fiction, but usually it's and Fantasy. And I apologize if I, if I some make a sum with science-fiction I know of many FANTASY all for the first time, how can, how can Amazon, how does Amazon dare put those in one bucket at the very top level already, which I know is not the case, but you know, a scifi and fantasy as, as one umbrella category is, is usually the third largest. And especially during the last 12 months have this crazy pandemic time, we've seen quite some changes and changes in read the behavior.
Alex (13m 35s): And the good news they are is that overall people who have been looking for more, w we see categories that have to do with humor have been trending up. And if we see a very dark reads, you know, post-apocalyptic stuff is going down, but the, but the good news is anything that provided, say a, a, a good escapism for readers during these dire times has in essence benefited. And therefore, for example, in Fantasy overall, we saw a bit of a dip obviously about a year ago during the first log down periods. Like, because there are people who have been buying non-fiction books about how to bake bread, and it took a market share from some fiction, but, you know, very, very briefly after a brief period, we saw the, the overall Book market, obviously benefiting greatly from these dire times with a print book sales in the us, having grown, showing the highest growth rates in a decade with 8% growth.
Alex (14m 37s): Amazon grew 25% in the Kindle select global fund. So the royalties paid two author. So I mean, 25%, that's huge. And one of the beneficiary JARAs was Fantasy. Overall, as one example, if you take Epic FANTASY as an example at which is probably like the general, epitomizing a bit of Fantasy as a, I wouldn't say cliche, but as an overarching theme, you know, why, what makes Fantasy the Epic side of the thing is obviously clearly position to provide an escapism. And that category on Amazon had been like, it, it sort of had a peak before, back in 2017 or 18 around that time and with all its fluctuations, you know, and it has then had a bit of a downward trend all the way into the start of 2020.
Alex (15m 33s): And then after that brief dip, during the first blog down in it, it really shot up back again. And you see that these types of Fantasy markets are clearly benefited and we can, we can go and in, in Canmore, if you want, but on a, on a high level, you see that Fantasy Epic FANTASY, a very big Market, but also very high ceiling. So there, you can say it's a, it's a very grown up, very established mainstream Market on in the Kindle world. And then obviously you have these hundreds of when not hundreds, but, you know, a 10, 20 like big sub genres, you know, from Seoul to source a reaction and adventure game adaptations.
Alex (16m 14s): And they tend to do pretty well on the Kindle platform. So especially over the last year, all the teen young adult driven type of Fantasy, we saw a lot of trends happening there. And if you want, we can, you know, I can take into the data here as we speak and, and looking into some of those.
Jesper (16m 36s): Yeah, for sure. I, I think that would be very interesting because a part of it is, and that's what I liked with the K leader reports is also to do, to try to see, because at least for myself and, and Autumn, the stuff that we write, we, we are sort of settled in, in the Epic fantasy world. So, eh, I think the competition is probably pretty fierce there to be honest, but maybe you can contradict me, but, But I, I'm more thinking for, especially if you're sort of starting out and, and, you know, let's say you had decided that I liked to right Fantasy, but I actually like very many different types of Fantasy, then it could definitely also make sense to look into the catalytic reports and, and try to see, okay, is there some of these SOPs showed us where there was just less competition and it makes it a bit easier to get more sales, write it that way.
Jesper (17m 29s): I think K-lytics, this is very useful apart from what you mentioned earlier as well, that even if you are established in something, you can use it to figure out what is the good price range for books, what is the average pricing and, and so on. So your position, your product's so to speak or your books correctly, but, ah, but yeah, please share more details, right. I mean,
Alex (17m 51s): As you mentioned, it, a Epic, Epic fantasy, I think is a good example of, as you say, that there are established mainstream markets and just entering in there, you know, as a new comer could be a bit of an uphill battle. I mean, if you, if you look at the Epic Fantasy data, we did a study start of this year. That is one of the examples of a well, in my corporate world, we would say a very concentrated market, right? Where a few to determine, determine the bulk of the sales, you know, with obviously at the very top of the, the Brandon Sanderson, you know, crushing it with, with all his, his books and obviously the classics, the talkings and the Robert Georgians, the obviously George R.
Alex (18m 39s): Martin and all the F the fan fiction, the, the, the spin offs, the jaw, the Abercrombie side of the world. And, and then already, even with some of the, you know, a big, big names or whatever, what was it like rubbing havin, you know, that there is a whole number of names were immediately, you see the books of their sales rank, you know? Yeah. You know, it, it's a tough market. Now, the good news for Epic Fenton, what good or bad news depends on the eye of the beholder is there while you have like Publishing companies that really dominate like Tor books, right. That, that sine on like everybody or a bid or the DAW, there, there is a couple of big outfits out there, but then you do have an increasing chair in the publishers, the, the typical, you know, author that wants to make use of the self publishing self publishing world and all the opportunities that come with it.
Alex (19m 39s): And there, we do see a bit of like a balance between a traditionally published or with the specialized Epic FANTASY publishing houses and a couple of, you know, really good self-publishers that found that out a way into the game Now. But if you don't want to get head on with the brand and send the suns and of the world around, you will pose exactly the question you will pose exactly the question you posed, you know, are there opportunities out there in the overall fantasy world where it's perhaps a bit less competitive, less crowded, less established also.
Alex (20m 21s): And, and I would clearly say yes, you know, I mean, especially if you, if you'd be able to also address some of the teen young adult readership, which is not necessarily teen young adult people, because obviously there's research that suggests that the bulk of the teen young adult fantasy books are actually not read necessarily by, by teens or young adults, but also adults. So they really have opportunities, you know, I mean, take the huge Market, take the huge Market of urban FANTASY is by now, it's also no longer a niche market, but that created a whole, a publishing self publishing sub empire, where it's really been about, well, what types of urban Fantasy do I do?
Alex (21m 9s): Is it, you know, the, the, the leather clad chick that's running around with swords slang vampires at night and working at Starbucks by day, or am I going more into the Jim butcher type of world? And there, the data can, can give you hints. So for example, we saw a, what was it like a, almost like a five-year decline after the big hunger games hype was over, right. And with a pandemic we saw with many of the teens being sitting there at home, and after the homeschooling having to do something, there is perhaps the only so much Netflix who can watch you are only so many mobile devices available that they had to read books again, I don't know, but we saw a huge increase again in, in 17 young out adult FANTASY.
Alex (21m 58s): Segment's for example, these I'm a bit dystopian type of a royalty novels. Kira cos I think it was primarily a driver, obviously there was also the hunger games sequel, but those were pride to a predominantly self-published authors who really took the whole segment segment up again. And if I just look at the, the, the data of, of over a year or, you know, paranormal Fantasy has, has, has found a bit of a, a return if you also off two years off having done well, but paranormal, for example, the hole paranormal romance, paranormal Fantasy, I, that has peaked, I would say 2013, 14 ever since then, these waves are by the way, very long-term.
Alex (22m 47s): When I talk about writing to market or looking at these, this data, there is not about a monthly fluctuations. That's about catching the wave that carries you. And your project is over obviously a period of years rather than, rather than months. So by and large, you know, a teen young adult, whether its Fantasy fairy tales, especially in the teen young adult world, if you are a bit flexible to also put a touch on romance, into It, selling extremely well, you know, failed romance, paranormal, Romans vampire romance. Now for many Fantasy rights, they will go like, Oh yeah, no, that's like, I have to like Roman.
Alex (23m 27s): So it was like, okay, okay. Yes, I read you You. But for that reader who is looking for an escape, those vampires and that stuff, you know, or the whole thing happening in a complete fantasy world. And there, there is a world building going into it, perhaps not elaborate with maps and stuff. As you have in a tall Keaton type of a trilogy seven, 150 pages, I will tell you, God knows what, but to those who are in those jars, they make a good living with it. Partly, And, and there they are not obsessed with academic definition of what constitutes Fantasy and what doesn't, but basically looking at what do readers want and then almost from a menu.
Alex (24m 13s): Okay. Best example I'd say currently is, I mean, we are about, I don't know what your age yeah. They asked by the way, we're sort of the same generation. So we know movies like the, the witches of Eastwick right. Which is a vast awake. Or then later in the, in the late nineties, there was that other one with, with, I think they call Kitman right? So you have, which is, you have Housewives who are in their spare time, which is now right now we have a book Market getting going where some authors who've been big name authors in general, such as women's fiction, paranormal romance, urban fantasy, all of these jars are getting very crowded and cozy mystery.
Alex (25m 0s): Now they came together, they bended together and created something which is called paranormal women's fiction. They even gave it its own hashtag PWF. And if you look at it, it is Fantasy, you know, is a about, which is about w you know, that shadow whirled it's, it's bringing a cozy mystery. And so, especially what has been doing well in cozy mystery was paranormal cozy mystery, which is where they bring women's fiction into it because they target very specific. The authors themselves are usually like 45 and older. So they credibly you are right about all of these mid life problems.
Alex (25m 40s): You know, kids go on to college or midlife depression, and, and why they have women cast that in a FANTASY, in an urban fantasy world. You no overcome their mid-life problems so that that's not a long monologue that I give here, but it it's just to put some flesh to the bone when it comes to reading the Market, looking at trends and Writing to Trends, but without bending yourself, that's the important thing, you know, with what are you good at? And you're Fantasy writing and how can you take it and twisted in a way that you can combine your love, passion and craft with some Market aspects of a trend, more than others.
Alex (26m 23s): There is no guarantee for a success obviously, but I think the whole publishing business has where people do it in a professional way. It's very much become around the credo, this mantra of, of how do we increase the odds of success at at least if you can not guarantee success.
Jesper (26m 43s): Yeah. And it's so true. If, one look at it, especially with Amazon, I mean, Amazon is probably, well, it's, it's a good and bad in the sense that for most authors is, at least at Amazon is like 90% of the income. And that is good in the sense that if you can make it work on Amazon, there was a good likelihood that you will also have some money from it, but on the, the bad side then yeah, you're completely reliant on, on Amazon, which is, that's a whole different conversation. And I don't like that too much, but let's leave that alone for now. But I think what this is really about to me is trying to find, not compromising with what you want to write.
Jesper (27m 26s): I mean, because I don't think it works. If you start looking at a K latex report and say, Oh, I can see that this a is working really well and is trending. So I'm gonna write some books, that's your option. Right. And, but I don't like those kind of books. I don't read those kinds of books. A and I didn't really care about it, but I'm just going to write it because apparently that's sort of readers want, I don't think that works 'cause it will also come across in the story that you don't really like it. And if you don't read it to yourself as well, you probably don't even understand the tropes of it. So, so leave that alone. But I think what, I'm trying more to say it, and that's why I find that K Lytics is very useful. For example, when Autumn I, and I write out the books, I know that what you also said, ah, as well, that, you know, some sort of romance in the books, usually it works well and probably half, or if not more than half, I think of the readers of Fantasy in general, a woman.
Jesper (28m 20s): So if you don't put any WOTSO, if everything is just a sword fighting and dragons and, and what not, well, that can still be a great story. But if you don't put any romance in there, which is the data in Caledon, it also tells you is something that people like to read. You are missing out some stuff that you were, you could gain, maybe a lot more readers because you have some hope. And so all of them, and I always put some romance sub-plots into our Epic Fantasy stories. There is always some romance going on in those stories. And its more like for me, it's one of those things where I'm okay with it. I, I, you know, I don't love the romance of plots as such.
Jesper (29m 2s): It's not my thing, so to speak, but I don't mind either. So, so the question is more like, why wouldn't we put it in? I mean our Autumn likes it. So she is naturally bent to what is that? And she does those things really well. And that's of course the benefit I can enjoy that, the fact that I write books together with her so she can put her touch on those things. So that's great for me. But my point is just to say that you can look at something like K lyrics reports and you can pick out some pieces where you feel like these are Okay for me. You know, I, I don't mind them. I understand them enough that I feel like I can write at least a subplot concerning it and then put that into the books. And hopefully you will see somewhat more success rather than going down your tunnel vision way of, I only write this because this is the only thing that I like and every party that doesn't like that well, bad luck for them and Okay, fair enough for it.
Jesper (29m 54s): That's what you want to do, but if you wanna get some money for it as well, maybe you need to think of a bit about what readers actually or looking for.
Alex (30m 3s): Right. And, and I think you couldn't have put it in into a better way. And you, you mentioned a couple of elements there that that may be worth reiterating on the one is the love and passion for what you do. Like you say, if you don't love it to yourself, if you don't love Amish romance and you know, could imagine writing it for the next five years, then don't no matter how high it's trending. Right. And the, the other elements that you mentioned would be for me also Kraft Skil, I think there are a certain genres, a, you know, to write good sex scenes that are a steamy, but not pornographic. That that is a craft skill, you know, not every writer is able to do so and to do so.
Alex (30m 47s): I wouldn't know where to begin. Well, you tell me, and, and then there is also the thing about knowledge, right? I mean, a even if you, you know, during the hype times off of a literature role-playing game, the lid RPG in game lit when a Spielberg took the whole thing into the mainstream movie theater, well, you had people, you know, quarrying quarrelling about Well is the, is, is in that lid, RPG novel is the scoring and the gaming element, like really genuine. And I'm, I mean, if, if you are not a gamer yourself, you know, the readership, the nerds, the geeks, you know, they, they can smell this from like 50 miles.
Alex (31m 32s): So don't, don't get into it. So there is this, I always say, there's this passion factor and the knowledge that the craft skill factor and the, the knowledge factor, but we are all of these things coming into play. So, I mean, even Mozart, although he, I think at the end of the career that he was not so shining anymore, but you know, even the great artists and composers, a lot of them, they, they worked for money and they composed what was the royalty. I wanted to hear it, not just what they had in, in their inspiration and their inspiration. So it, it was pop music and at, at the point in time, so if you're in, in, in Epic Fantasy and let's, I don't know whether it were, it exists, but if you're a hardcore Epic FANTASY writers and, you know, its source and darkness and shadows, Well, it, it will be good to know that themes, like if you have in your title end book description, something around darkness, around shadows, about war battles or something around age ages, centuries, power, and magic, you know, these five strong words, you know, constitute like whatever 60, 70% of the royalties and, and books contain them.
Alex (32m 43s): But if you say, no, I'm going to write about whatever the, the, the golden And dungeon and the stone, the chaos and cry. And, you know, these are all also, you think very strong, compelling words, but the royalties are a much lower. You get the idea so that there is certain things that at certain points in time seem to resonate with certain reader groups. And it's just by bringing the arts and sciences a bit together and say, Mmm, no problem. I, I have it a lot more amongst my romance writers because they can almost like on the fly as they write the story, they can say, well, my God, it, if everybody currently likes mountain man, you know, living in, in, in a cabin, in as opposed to the billionaire or a vice versa, they can very quickly change characters and, and move the book more into a direction that may not resonate well even too, or are they rewrite the whole book and the like, remarketed were you, you had whatever, five years of age, I always say, you know, when we were, we were young and watching black and white movies, you had, you had women wanting to be kissed by a millionaire's or, you know, in Marilyn Monroe and the time's today, they don't want to be kissed by millionaires.
Alex (34m 4s): They want to be whipped by a billionaire. So you had this whole 50 shades of gray, pretty, pretty extreme staff. And, and that was like a never-ending story, but the market, it was getting very crowded in all of a sudden you had on Amazon, especially with the advertising restrictions on Amazon, on a very steamy content. You had a big surge also with the age group, probably have the typical Kindle device oner in any case clean and wholesome Romans was doing extremely well and was still more of a niche type of market. And all of a sudden, you know, we, we reported on over five years of the trend of clean and wholesome romance.
Alex (34m 46s): And over time you found even some steamy authors rewrite there, a billionaire romance novels, there are 50 shades of gray it into more like, yeah, clean and wholesome, clean read Swede, Romans billionaire romance, 'cause it was simply less crowded and in high demand. And, and that is what I mean with like reading the market in a way where you don't bend yourself, but you just tried to increase the, as you put it also in the, the odds of success.
Jesper (35m 18s): Yeah, exactly. And, and I think, and that's, that's basically where you can see you can, because it's let me rephrase that because it's really, really difficult to do that on your own. I mean, she just tried to go to Amazon and look through the, the different categories and tried to look at the top seller list and the different categories, but it's really, really difficult for you to ma to spot trends on your own because it's, it is so much data and it is so complicated that that's where I really see that Kayla Alex can help. Just a, I mean, I am You mostly of you and Kayla, it is like, it's an input. And then you, you need to unpack it yourself and say, okay, what of this can I use?
Jesper (35m 59s): And is this something where I have some sort of Venn diagram overlap between what I like to write and what the market likes to read, and then I'll try to merge those two together and make it fit there. And then I think for me that that's the point of it. But before we get into the end of the conversation that I wanted to also give you a chance to explain a bit, what if one buys K Lytics or goes into clearly, what, what is it that you're getting in there? And what are the reports that you were sending out and so on? And, and maybe also a bit about what are the, I think you have some tears as well. If I remember correctly has been a while since I was in their, but maybe just a bit of the pricing tiers and so on, if you don't mind.
Alex (36m 39s): No, no, no. Of course not. I mean, for those who are interested, basically, you know, we, we serve authors from the fledgling interested authors to, to publishing houses. So we have to provide, you know, different entry points into, into the products. So you can, we provide memberships and we provide single reports. Now within the, within Bose, the, the baseline for everything is the data that we collect and that we publish every month and an updated database. And what you basically can have is, is there are basically two big pillow's to the product. The one is a ready-made PDF report. Say there, there is a 70 page Epic Fantasy reports, 17 pages that comes with a video that completely dissects the Amazon available data on Epic Fantasy.
Alex (37m 29s): So if you're only interested in like that one Jara, you can simply go to the KLA, the sharp at K high for analytics.com/shop purchase the Epic Fantasy report. And we'll keep you busy for a good week. I'd say, if you really want to absorb the data, look at the video and especially makes sense of it, of how does that fit with your writing. So that is one entry points. So you can choose what we call genre reports on the card. There's two types of them. Ones are like really going in depth on certain sub jars, such as Epic FANTASY. There are others. We have a more general scifi and fantasy report that are not as deep in the analysis, but they are much broader because they would comparatively look well, there is more than a, a a hundred PSI Phi and Fantasy categories, and they would do exactly like we discuss before, well, what his, what is trending hire?
Alex (38m 19s): Is it urban FANTASY or is it a paranormal row? You know, is it is. So it looks at the category of data in a competitive way. So these are the types of John reports and you can buy them out a card, or if you are interested in more than one Jara, then we, the memberships, because the memberships give you access to basically a multiple reports at a time. And these, our monthly memberships, they come into tiers. One is premium. One has elite that lead to us to the highest tiers. And the difference between the two tiers has also actually a very simple, the highest tier a Gibbs gives you unrestricted access to everything. And one thing is all the reports. The other thing is though that database now also premium gives you the database, but the depth of the data you see premium basically would give you the data every month for about 420 down two sub category level.
Alex (39m 13s): But if you want to get into also this really granular and detailed, you know, in which 10 categories shall I put my book's sort of thing, then the elite level comes handy because there are, we track 7,000 categories, you know, from the gardening and horticulture to the lowest level Fantasy category of that, that exists. So, so especially if you want to also look a bit what's happening across job has gotten because some authors are very open-minded, you know, they write, say a urban Fantasy, but they really, because they know the JARAs are more and more blended and they want to know what is going on in romance, what is going on in mystery so that they keep a bit of head off, you know, ah, you know, there is a certain thing emerging could that's come over into like the paranormal women's fiction example I gave earlier that is sort of the > of like four genre trends meeting in a certain suite spot and meaning at a certain target rate, a group.
Alex (40m 13s): And that has what we do. So there is entry points from ala carte to membership's obviously we promote the membership's also price-wise 'cause, that is what keeps us afloat. And it gives us the continuity to provide this research, which we've now been doing for six years and hope, hopefully not too many more years to come.
Jesper (40m 35s): Oh yeah, for sure. And I definitely like to support what you are doing because I, I do think it's a very, very helpful, and that is stuff that authors can not do on their own. Umm, and I definitely also SUPPORT the, the, the fact that membership levels who is wanting to keep the business going. So we know this ourselves with, with Patrion, for example, is also sort of a membership ship site for this podcast. So it's, it's the same thing, but at least I will say to the listeners here as well, that if, if you don't know, if, you know, with this data things sort of me, I would definitely recommend just start out, maybe buying one of the younger reports for, for Fantasy.
Jesper (41m 16s): I did that as well, several years ago now, but, but I did this as well and it's not expensive at all. I can't remember now, Alex, I, but I, I think it was like 25, maybe
Alex (41m 26s): It's $37 that are a report on them. And you get probably, you know, more than 70 pages of, of, of analysis all aggregated in a understandable way. So it it's, as you say it as a writer that you should, of course we know, especially as an indie writer, you have so many other business aspects to run as, you know, the marketing, the ad's, the newsletters, you know, there is already enough business stuff going on to then say on top of it, do you'd want to become a market research experts may not be your core competency. So we, we crunch the data on hundreds of thousands of books so that you don't have to, that is the very simple essence of it
Jesper (42m 8s): Indeed, yes. So I will put a link to K Lytics in the show notes so any of your listeners who are interested to check it out a bit more than a follow that link and on the k-lytics website does a lot more information as well. Hopefully we touch the ball upon most of it, but there is explanations about what it is and what your getting inside of the report and, and all that stuff. So I want you to, to at least go check that one out. Thank you. And thank you so much for coming Alex, and speak to us out here and share a bit about all of this data crunching stuff.
Alex (42m 44s): Was a pleasure and a, hey, also all the best with your, with your own podcast. You know, I think its great that we see also so many people in the, in the publishing world and in the self publishing world for that matter to collaborate, you know, and, and have these forums for our people can exchange. I thought, and it was the last, at least I'd say, you know, of course there is traditionally published WORST. There is a hybrid publishes, you know, who have in some areas they have their rights back. They want you to go go half and they are half traditional And they have the, you know, like hardcore self published is. And from what I've seen is, especially in that hyper, then self publishing part of the journey, I've seen people be so fast and picking up Trends in, in, in collaborating together that they are in some areas of the rebar pull parts of the market.
Alex (43m 39s): But before the traditional publishers even know it exists as a market. So Andy, I think it's also things to these podcasts and forums like yours, where these thoughts are exchanged and transported to the community that, that make that happen.
Jesper (43m 58s): Oh yeah. Yeah. I agree. But okay. Thank you so much for, for coming here, Alex. And next Monday I we'll have a Autumn back here and that we are going to do one of our monthly fun episodes where we are going to discuss the top 10 worst and scariest FANTASY world.
Narrator (44m 16s): If you like, what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patrieon.com/AmWritingFantasy for as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Over the past few months Autumn and Jesper have tested out different types of writing software. Against AutoCrit and Fictionary, your hosts decided that ProWritingAid is the best one of them all.
In this episode of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, Autumn and Jesper (well, mostly Autumn), explains why ProWritingAid is such a great support tool for authors.
Sprinkled in are tips and tricks, you can take away and apply in your own writing process.
ProWritingAid can be found here: https://prowritingaid.com/
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. In today's publishing landscape. You can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them. Now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I'm Jesper And I'm Autumn. This is episode 121 of The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. I, and the over the past few months, we have been testing out some different types of writing software. We tried Fictionary AutoCrit and pro WRITING eight, and I think we've arrived at a favorite that we can talk about today. Autumn.
Autumn (55s): Yes, I definitely have my favorite in there is actually I should mention that one or two features that I wish it had at one of the other ones sort of did. So, you know, maybe I'll do some, maybe I'll be able to convince the staff at the one of our top choice. They've had a few features. That's my wishlist.
Jesper (1m 15s): Yeah. So we are going to deep dive a bit on ProWritingAid today and share our thoughts about it. And why are we? Well, I, I think it's not a secret that we like it very much. So we are going to talk about that and hopefully that will help some people, if they are not familiar with ProWritingAid already, then maybe they we'll be inclined to check that out. Or if they are already using pro Writing eight, maybe we are going to mention a few things they were not aware of.
Autumn (1m 44s): Absolutely. Or at least may be some ways of using it that they hadn't considered. So I think it will be fun. I've definitely been using this tool heavily on some major novels. I feel like all I have been doing is editing I since January and that's okay. That means there was a lot of Writing in 2020, so that's all right, right. It's good to be pushing things out the door in Publishing. So that's exciting.
Jesper (2m 19s): Its been Easter holidays here in, in Denmark, which means that a, I actually got quite some writing done on a book One. Yes you have been doing really well. Yeah. I am only seven chapters so away from the ending now, so that's pretty cool.
Autumn (2m 34s): That is so cool. More editing.
Jesper (2m 38s): You're never going to be done. It's just forever and going.
Autumn (2m 42s): Oh this is my punishment. Like I think so, but yeah, yeah, yeah. You're just clocking right ahead. Well, I hope you had a good Easter as well as some time off or.
Jesper (2m 55s): Yeah. Yeah. Well I do to the usual Corona stuff to there wasn't much we could do, but I got some Ikea furniture put together and we got rid of the bit of the, I think we are down to like five or six moving boxes after we moved, but everything else has not been unpacked. Yeah. That's amazing.
Autumn (3m 16s): That's good. So that is really good. And that means that you can, hopefully now that it's turning towards spring ish, I would have hoped they're that you can actually go for walks on the beach are through town and not be worried about, you know, coming back to a new apartment full of boxes.
Jesper (3m 31s): Yeah, that's true. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Autumn (3m 33s): And, and we've also started to allow soccer game now. So I'd been out refereeing, a couple of matches, which was nice to get started on again. So things are lightening up. No, you can't say lighting up. That sounds like we were putting on fire, but it's not getting better. That's exciting. And that's always an improvement. How about you? Oh, Goodlife my husband I'm was on top of things and he made an appointment for me to actually both of us to go get our coronavirus vaccine. So I'm very excited. And at the end of the month I, I might get to go down and see my parents and that's exciting.
Autumn (4m 14s): So I'm looking forward to that. We have, we don't have kids, so we didn't have like an Easter where your high things, but we have our own traditions since we never did have children that we, I have a deal. I've got an in with the Easter bunny and he comes every year and gives me this nice little basket of all of my favorite things. I don't know how he knows, but then he hides Adams, everything. So everything is hidden. And I get to spend the morning sipping. My tea is sitting there like this watching for his Easter candy. And it's just one of my favorite holiday. He has a, he gets back though.
Autumn (4m 55s): My tea delivery is brought by Easter, Easter Bunny's cousin is Jack and Jack likes to hide my tea delivery. So, you know, we each have our own issues with rabbits. Yeah.
Jesper (5m 11s): All right. Okay.
Autumn (5m 12s): Rabbits on a naughty, I guess. So we had an actual, a visitor That this year it was possibly an Easter raccoon. We had a raccoon outside of the cabin on Saturday night and he was adorable and just the big guys, he was a very healthy, feisty invasive right now, but he hasn't come back since then.
Jesper (5m 36s): Oh wow. Yeah.
Autumn (5m 37s): Yeah. Well that animal life I noticed as well, somebody in the Facebook group a and apologies, I forgot who it was, but I just noticed that somebody was a posting some stuff about, I think it was a, she that she almost died because she was, she got bit by a snake. Yeah.
Jesper (5m 57s): And as she survived, she was Okay now, But it was just like sometimes when I hear stuff like that, it it's just so foreign for me here in Denmark. We, we don't have any thing, you know? Well, I think we have one snake that has some venom that can be, but there was only that one, a type here in this country and it it's not lethal. Oh, well, okay. If you are out in the middle of nowhere and you get bitten by it and you don't get to the hospital, I guess you could be lethal, but its not, it's not to bad. You have time to go to the hospital and everything as well. So it's not like instant re reacting, Venmo or anything like that. So I don't know that the whole thing about all those animals are not, well, it doesn't have to be posted it, but just because like you were mentioning like, Oh that that whole thing has just so foreign to me.
Autumn (6m 45s): I mean, I think they don't know if you remember, if I told you that last year when we were walking to the, the main house on the property, We, I saw something running through the field and coming up towards us and I'm like, why is there a Shetland pony loose? I mean, I'm in Vermont, of course people would have ponies and that I'd be like, that's not a pony. That's a bear. That way. It was literally the biggest black bear I've seen outside of the Labrador we traveled, I slept next to Grizzly's have visited our camp site, but to be walking and Vermont, you know, I'm on my way to take a shower. My dog has like 50 feet ahead of me. And I'm like, yeah, it was cute. And I just happy.
Autumn (7m 25s): My dog is very well behaved. And if you open, you do a hug thing and you call him, he comes running with ears back. It was a little tail wagging. So I was doing that. Well, I watching this bear run about 10 feet behind him and I'm like, okay. So yeah, there is. And then a few other ones a month later and we saw the female mother with two of her Cubs walked right by the front of the cabin. And so what, that was just amazing and I'm glad that it was inside of the camp because she would have had the third Cub going on with her.
Jesper (7m 56s): Yeah,
Autumn (7m 56s): Yeah. If I could sit inside and watch it and I know that I am safe, then I think that would be pretty cool. But honestly walking around like in the forest and knowing that that bear could suddenly pop up, like I know why as a dangerous person, I'm just not used to that kind of thing. And it's only one thing that frightens me and the forest and that's actually other humans, most animals is there. Fine. People are scary.
Jesper (8m 21s): That Is true. Yeah. And, but that's also where we normally see and all the, some of the TV series, right. Is actually the humans that are the most scary ones to come across and not to some of these.
Autumn (8m 34s): No, no, that's true.
Narrator (8m 39s): A week on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast.,
Autumn (8m 44s): So I was wondering that you noticed that the Facebook has announced that they're gonna, they're going to create a new Publishing platform. I haven't seen something and I noticed that the article, but I didn't go read the full thing. So no, you can feel the listener in as well as me. Yeah,
Jesper (9m 2s): Well, yeah, kind of. I just thought that it was quite a significant news, so I just want it to share it. But I did actually write up a post for our patron supporters with my thoughts on this topic. So if people want to go into the details, then should I should just to go on to patron it and check out what I, she had there, but I just found it pretty interesting. And that's why I wanted to share it. And of course you can also do a search on the internet if you want to check it out yourself. But I think it's something to keep an eye on, but I'm not so convinced as of yet, which is what I explained on Patrion, but let's see where it goes.
Jesper (9m 45s): At least I just want it to mention it so people can keep an eye on it.
Autumn (9m 48s): Yeah. Well, you know how I feel about Facebook that yeah. Yeah. And I actually, I like Instagram, so that's kind of sad. I think I liked it better before Facebook bought it, but yeah, that's pretty much my, a theory on most things of Facebook is okay. That's a nice little moving on.
Jesper (10m 9s): Yeah. Moving on. Okay. Well let's speaking of patron as well. We want to give a huge shout out to Brian men. Dunka I hope that's how you pronounce the names, but yeah. Bryan is our new newest patient and support us. So thank you so much, Brian. And then we could not keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast going if it wasn't for people like you. So thank you for that.
Autumn (10m 36s): Yeah, definitely. Well, we love having you join us there and I mean, it's been good. It's been busy, even Dominic. I want to give a shout out to him who posted a link to us, unspecified spontaneously. And it's saying how much he was enjoying what he was learning on Patrion. So that's just, that's wonderful to know that you're really helping other authors and that's what we do over on Patriot and even more than we do in the Am Writing Fantasy Facebook group. So I would love to see other people. Do you have to sit there? Yeah,
Jesper (11m 9s): Absolutely. Yeah. So those are the link in the show notes, if you are interested and there's all kinds of rewards that we offer over there as well. So, so, so I'll go and check that one out. But one more thing on M O O D is, and I almost felt like not sharing this one with a new term.
Autumn (11m 30s): You really do have something else. Now what's up Please. I, how are you saying that? These for me?
Jesper (11m 39s): Yeah, I did actually say yes and I loved to spring things on you in the middle of a podcast episode, but this one is actually gonna play in your favor. And that's why I want really to be shared with you because I feel like I'm playing cards into your hands that you can use laid on Against me.
Autumn (11m 55s): And I don't like that. I love that. Please share it. It's my birthday this month. Come on. This is my present Please. Okay. So, okay. So let us stay present. And did you notice that the YouTube comments on Episode 119, where was she at the 10 WORST stories ever told, Oh, well let me guess I'm winning and by winning, please tell me I'm winning. So when we, just for the listener, when we are doing these alternating lists episodes where we sort of go a bit crazy and have a bit of fun with some random topic like we did in episode one 19, when we, she had those a 10 worst stories ever Told, we always a have a bit of a competition going on as well, where we try to best each other and see, you can build the best list, basically.
Autumn (12m 45s): What are the best, worst lists? You know, the best worst lists. Yeah. Usually, And on that note, Dominick said, and this paints me so much to read out loud. So you are killing me, Dominick. They just don't post like this in these kinds of comments. You Dominic. So Dominic wrote quote, Oh, Oh my God. I'd have to psych myself up for this evening. She'll just send it to me. All of them tends to win. Yes. Pro on quote is what it says. Autumn temps to when, what is that? It wasn't even just that episode.
Autumn (13m 24s): It was in general. What, Davidic your, thank you. You made my day. I owe you like a page or a review or something. Thank you.
Jesper (13m 39s): Yeah. Well, no, I strongly strongly disagree with those YouTube comments like that. And I, I don't actually appreciate getting that kind of comments. Oh, I love it. That's just fantastic. I have a winning, I hate it. That I have a feel for this one is going to come back and bite me later. I don't like it now and now it's hanging There. It's the precedent. Has it been, can we move on? I don't feel like talking about this anymore. All right, lets get into editing
Narrator (14m 9s): And on to today's topic.
Jesper (14m 13s): Okay. So when we write together, I'm usually doing the first draft while you and shots of the editing Autumn. So pro Writing ADE is sort of your domain. Yeah. You did give me a virtual to have a providing aid before we invested in it. But the fact that I'm not doing the editing also means that I have a, not too much knowledge, is that what you are actually doing inside the stool? Well then I guess you're a role in today's podcast is letting me know if what I'm saying is clear and understandable and not gobbling, but yeah, it was right to ask the stupid questions today.
Autumn (14m 57s): And It is, I, I, we started in January. So again, I had, we were planning on writing together. You were working, we were working on the novella And I was also finishing up my tainted face series and I wanted something to really enhance my editing. I mean, I think I do a pretty good job. I do several passes. We've talked about how we edit it before is that I do like a content edit and then I do like a word choice that I am doing really the fine tuning, you know, making sure everything looks good. And then I send it to the editor and I just wanted something a little bit more on that fine tuning. And so this was after the content edit were, I know all the subplots are good in general, everything. I think everything, I think it should be, there is there, but something before I said that to the editor and because of that, we looked at Fictionary we looked at AutoCrit and when I was looking at Fictionary, I think I suddenly thought I should check out for a Writing aid because I was a user with that when they were just mostly either or the like a little BB company.
Autumn (15m 60s): Umm. And it was on my Google drive when they still had my full time job. And I was doing some editing like in Google drive all at work and in my lunch break and stuff like that. So I had a premium subscription at one time to ProWritingAid long time ago when I thought it was pretty impressive that what they do now, there are pretty awesome. So that's, that's sort of the background of what happened. Yeah,
Jesper (16m 32s): Yeah, yeah indeed. And I just want it to inject as well that, because the other part of why we we're looking at these different software was also that we have been thinking that at some point in the future, we don't know when, but, and it could be years out. I don't know. But we have been thinking that at some point because the, the world, the fictional world, a, a, a fantasy world that we call it Elysium, the one that we created is so big and we created it so big on purpose because we were thinking that maybe at some point we would like to publish other authors who write in this setting as well.
Jesper (17m 13s): So one of the initial drivers behind looking into all of this was actually that we were trying to see if we could find some sort of software that could help analyzing work. Meaning for example, let's say that we wanted to take on board a two or three authors or something like that. And we said, okay, we are, if anybody is interesting in us Publishing your work, which would also mean that we are advertising it and all of that stuff on your behalf, then M you know, send some, some of your work to us so we can see your writing. But the problem with that of course, would be that it means that we would have to sit there and REIT nine novels.
Jesper (17m 57s): For example, we are at my reading speed, how will it take three years? So that's, that was not very good. So if we were trying to see that the Fictionary AutoCrit is that those were the two weeks we started with before Autumn thought of ProWritingAid. But when we were trying to see, can we use any of those tools to sort of like load in a manuscript and then get some sort of report from the software saying, what is the WRITING like, so that we want to, we, of course, do you want to read some of it, but we don't want to be forced to read entire novels. You know, it would be like in initial screening thing. So we, if it said already, or if the software were to assess, this is not a very good, and then why spend all the time reading It?
Jesper (18m 43s): Whereas if the software says, this is really good, Oh, there's no problems with it. Then we could go in and read it. Right. So we were, we were looking for some sort of screening process. So, so it was just to put the whole thing in context, because I may be, some people will think that pro writing aid is not quite the same as AutoCrit and Fictionary, there is some overlap, but its not quite the same. So it was just to explain where we were coming from as well. They're right. How about it?
Autumn (19m 8s): Yeah, I don't think so. There are all, I would say it's definitely worth checking out AutoCrit and Fictionary and they all have different things that they do. AutoCrit steam to be more towards editing. They had a lot of reports that were similar to ProWritingAid, but not quite as beefy. And then Fictionary had some really good tips on how to write better and develop your novel better. But actually it didn't get into a lot of the editing I aspects where pro writing aid has a really in depth editor. But besides that they have this wonderful overview that tells you, Hey, these are the areas, your strong in which I love that they started out with, these are the ones that you did well in.
Autumn (19m 53s): And then they have ones where they kindly say, these are our areas you might want to look working on. And then you can go into each of those individual areas that they say you need to work on. And there is a sub report where you can just look it just that one and work on it and fix it. And I've developed 'cause I've done like what three or four devils already. And it's what March is pro writing aid and going through all of these Stories, I, I feel like I'm like totally an expert on which of these reports that I go through and I have my own little standard of running through them to see how things develop and what I liked to develop. And I have noticed actually some really cool corks, but depending on my characters that a few reports will actually show up different ways.
Autumn (20m 40s): And so you can almost see the character's voice showing up in the report. So it's kind of, that's really fine tuned in a nuanced. When you notice, when you're noticing a software in AI going through something and saying this report, this metric has always reading this one, it's this character or you're like the herd. That's really funny, but the nice things that are really cool, it is really cool. And I could tell you what to report that is, but which ones I noticed, but there are definitely some reports there that I don't go into quite as much. And that's okay. I mean, everyone is going to look at things differently. Some of them, I just don't take the time and maybe they should spend more time on them, but I feel like I've already covered them later, but some of them we can get into some of the best reports.
Autumn (21m 25s): And I know my favorite is I call it echoes and this is a phenomenon. I'm sure you've noticed this, that once you think of a word, you tend to use it two or three times really close. Like after you write it the first time, like you'll think of something really such a strange word. I don't want to pick out something, but you know, we would not pencil, but it would be like maybe a description and action and you'll end up using like thrust or pooled or glanced. Look, those words like that. And you'll look it, you know, reuse it like two sentences later and then you'll reuse it like six sentences later and that just gets boring for the reader. That's why we have a thesaurus.
Autumn (22m 8s): And it's hard though, when you're editing and especially in editing, editing your own work, it is so hard to find those words are used to read backwards. My entire manuscript backwards, just trying to find them other people would read it allowed because you hear it. It often can you catch up so much easier that way. So you have to do something to really see what's in front of you or are, you can run it through a ProWritingAid and look through the echoes. They have two different versions that it took me a second to do this, but they have word repeat, which looks at every single time you've used that word in the entire chapter. I, the beautiful thing about ProWritingAid is if you write in Scrivener, like we do it actually can open a and file and edit chapter by chapter in Scrivener.
Autumn (22m 50s): So you don't need to have to like move your file into a different format or spit it out into word. Its just, I love having everything in one place. So it's so nice that it does that. And so I'm opening up my Scribner file and letting it run something you don't want to do the whole repeats, but echos just does when you use that word again within the next, so many words, like you can set it to whatever you want. 300, 500, a thousand of that's a little high, but depends on what you're writing. If you are doing a site to a scientific journal, you might want it really high. You might run at a really low. And that is definitely to me. The place to start is to see how many times we have reuse the same word.
Autumn (23m 30s): And it's just like, even when I thought I was good and I was being paying so much attention too, you know, not reusing the word too many times. Oh no. When you run it through this echos check, you're just like, Oh my goodness. I am in love with this word. Look as fallback. WORST. I, I double check that one all the time because it seems like I always reuse that one way to many times. So I'm often running through and doing stuff There.
Jesper (24m 5s): Yeah. Yeah. I can't say on top of my mind, which ones I, but I definitely noticed as well that even when I write the first draft, sometimes I, I noticed myself repeating the same word. So I do, I do as will pick up that you saw us and tries to try to even the first draft to try to use some different words just to not make it too painful for you.
Autumn (24m 30s): I do have a painful on myself. It's just our tendency to do that as a writer is it's like we get these things stuck in our head and we just keep using the same word. And it's just so nice. Like I said, it's so hard to find it on your own and that it has this echo cheque is just so fantastic. It was one of my favorite once you run is where I usually start. And it is impressive how much that cleans up your Writing right off the get go. You're really forest it's nice. Cause highlights, not only where are you used it at? Like how many spaces do you use it? But then it comes up. If you'd click on it, you could come up with a thesaurus and you can see, you know, other options you can think about it.
Autumn (25m 13s): And that's really, that's my most time consuming. Umm, so the terracing to it, that that is my most time-consuming edit in pro Writing rate ADE is running the Echo's cheque that can easily take a half an hour or more. Cause I'm really reading through it and pulling things out and trying to change, not just using the Taurus. Yeah. First chapter and that just using us the stories. But I tend to sometimes rearrange sentences and really try to really, really develop things a little bit better with this check.
Jesper (25m 46s): And when you do that, so when you make changes, it changes inside the Scrivener file itself, correct?
Autumn (25m 52s): Yes. Correct. And that is one of the nice thing. So when I then go back and open up, Scrivner all my changes, our there, as long as we hit save it and it does more new, if you didn't save it, it says, Hey, you didn't say this, but you do have to hit save. Its not like I'm I worked on a Mac. So when I get so used to like what I changed something, obviously I wanted to change it. If I changed it, I wouldn't have changed at all if I didn't need to change that. So max always save everything if you change it, but me and upper Writing it, you have to actually hit the safe. Right. And so
Jesper (26m 23s): What are some of the other reports and in the software
Autumn (26m 26s): From their I, the one I have noticed that actually have some nuances based on character's as well as my own author of voice is called stickie, which I think that it's just sound like a fun, have fun reports to run, But sticky sentences, our ones that you use a lot of filler words instead of the nouns and adjectives and verbs, the filler ones like the is, Oh, well actually yours is a verb, but you know, not even strong verbs. So when you have the sentence with a lot of those, its harder to comprehend for a reader. They are going to call us and they can be really short sentences, but usually they tend to be your longer sentences. And that's the one I've noticed that I have a few characters that do speak in a kind of wordy styles and those sticky, those were my sticky rating.
Autumn (27m 13s): We'll be like 46%. And it does give you ranges of what is normal in writing. So I think Forti is usually the upper level. I tend to, if I hit 40, I'm really proud of myself, usually 42% like you, my low end, I tend to write short sentences, which is funny. And it gives you a sentence variation that it says like average sentence length. I think it was between 11 and 18 based on the genre I've chosen. And I tend to write like 10.2 sentence length, 10.2 words per sentence, as my seems to be my average or a 10.8, 11.2. But my sticky index has a really high. So every once in a while I have a sentence it's like 32 words, you know?
Autumn (27m 55s): So, and it is, it is at least something that does give you, there is a whole report on length where it'll tell you your sentence length and it'll show you almost like an audit auditable, Audio graph, you know, the ups and downs. It will show you so you can see that you are really varying your sentences. These are important tools that it's happy. It's when I do, you know, read ProWritingAid eye, look at it and I'm like, Oh yeah, I've already got that good. So I tend to skip the length report unless I just feel like, you know, looking at fun squiggly graphs, but the sticky sentence, one is one where you get to sit down and you see the sentences. And then it's in this computer is saying, this might be confusing. This is going to make readers stall and you can go through and try to reduce those sentences and clean them up and move out some of the stuff.
Autumn (28m 41s): Do you really need to have this description, the description and, and, and an, or, and can you break this into several sentences and clean it up? And that really does help. That will help your reader so much to no, Hey, this is really long sentence or this was a really, even a short sense that just is not clear. Or can you put it in a better noun? Can't you put it in a better verb, make this a little bit more concrete, less sticky sentence. And so that was a fantastic one. And from there I think,
Jesper (29m 16s): Yeah, yeah, yeah. And quite a lot of these basically things that helps with the line by line editing. But I believe that, yeah. I mean, I don't think unless I'm wrong, but I don't think you are using it so much. But I do believe that ProWritingAid has some stuff that helps with short of character arcs on all the plotting elements and stuff like that.
Autumn (29m 39s): Yeah. But it has a little bit, it has some later ones, it has reports on pacing. So you can see how many sentences, how many paragraphs you have that are slow. One thing I wish it did is it will tell you how many paragraphs you have that are slow, but it won't tell you out of how many paragraphs and the chapter I have a knot, it'll tell you sentences. Or like how many sentences you have, but not how many paragraphs. And I think it would be so cool. If it would tell you, you have like nine paragraphs out of 28 that are slow because then if you wanted to, you could make your own chart to see how that is graphing. But it does help to see like, is this a lull you can, you should know for yourself, like, Hey, I meant to write this chapter as a law or this one is a hurdle.
Autumn (30m 26s): So it should be a lot more exciting. And you look at it and you're like, Oh, I only have four slowed paragraphs. Perfect. This is a hurdle. Or you lug it out and you open it up. And its like its 10 slow paragraphs that are full of like description and emotion. And its just really slow and you're like, Oh well that's okay. This is a lull. Or should it be, should I be reworking lists to make sure it's better? So that is one. And that it has one report. This is the only platform out of everything that we looked at that had to report that was on the census, that it actually looked through your text and pulled out how many times, how many words you use at fit each of the five senses. And that was fantastic. And that's where it Fictionary I thought was pretty cool.
Autumn (31m 7s): It gave you some advice to always use all the senses, but you were supposed to fill in which words you were using, ProWritingAid says, Hey, you use 2%. So four words that were in a smell. And I think that is really cool. So with just one quick check, you can say like I hit all of the senses or it says you're missing one. You can be like, Oh gosh, I'd have to go back in and add in this one. So I think that's a fantastic report. It really gives you an idea of how you're doing on all using all the senses. You know, do you see only 50% is site and you didn't use any touch. This would be horrible. You need to go fix that.
Jesper (31m 51s): Yeah. So in some degree or some sense, I guess you could say that if you are looking for some sort of software tool, when you are, let's say first starting out and you basically want to work more around story structure, character arcs, then Fictionary might be the better choice. But if you're looking for some software that can really help elevating you're writing and, and looking sense Instructure's structures, word choices, using a census and all of that stuff, then pro writing aid. Well, it, it, it is more powerful than Fictionary and, And I, I, I, and I also think the Fictionary is better than an AutoCrit.
Jesper (32m 38s): So, so I think that's the thing is it's almost like AutoCrit then Fictionary and then ProWritingAid I, but, but that's of course looking at our own needs, but if you are like a completely new author, you want some help, some software help in terms of just structuring the story, then Fictionary might actually be better than ProWritingAid for your needs.
Autumn (32m 58s): I agree. Yeah. The one thing I really enjoyed with Fictionary for the cause there was a free trial and I mean, if you want to go check it out, that's what I think it's really cool. It's got a 14 day free trial, the Fictionary and there's a 14 day free trial with ProWritingAid I, so you can't lose the fact. You can do both the same time and you use ProWritingAid I in Fictionary and then you are really doing some powerful writing at the same time. He probably could just focus on one or the other first though, but there are some really cool note features and Fictionary where it goes. And you want to know that, like it tells you to use a sentences and you can go click on the little question, Mark and explains why and what you're supposed to be doing. And I kind of like those notes at the time.
Autumn (33m 39s): I was like, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But now when I'm in ProWritingAid of the one thing that I think it really isn't the gray that greatest, That, and I've actually sent out a question to the staff over there is I think the thesaurus is kind of the week. I also have a pro or a premium subscription to Grammarly and Grammarly is purely just fixing your sentences, the thesaurus period's, you know, those kind of things, the concrete changes. It doesn't give you any of the reports, a writing ProWritingAid. So I think ProWritingAid has more powerful, but Grammarly is the stories and understanding how you used the word in the sentence. Like if it, the word could be announced or a verb Grammarly, we will figure out what it is and give you some really amazing concrete suggestions for your thesaurus.
Autumn (34m 30s): ProWritingAid I, 70% of the time, I think there's a word in there that's acceptable. Maybe less than that. Sometimes 40%. It depends on the word. Like I had, I had reuse shoulder or a few times and one of the F the suggestions, and this is the source was left. And like, how has left a good replacement for a shoulder? I just, that one sticks in my mind, but it's not usually that bad, but there are times where if you highlight the word one place, it will give you some suggestions and then you highlight it below. It won't have any suggestions. And I'm just, I don't like those in consistencies. I'm often either, either I know a better word myself, or I'm reworking the sentence and I'll just come up with something better or I'm going into, you know, Googling synonyms of another word.
Autumn (35m 17s): And I've actually put in a, a S a T they don't have a ticket, but they have a way of putting in features that you suggestions. And so I put it in a suggestion where we can add in our own words into that, the source, because I am so sick of Googling the same words, because I can't remember that I used it in the previous chapter. And I know there is something better. So that's about it. The one place, I really think ProWritingAid, I does kind of fall flat that the source could be a lot more robust and, you know, if I could have anything I ever wanted, I would love to see them like do a next generation where it says, Hey, you use this word, like shoulder or a glance. So many times, why don't you try using a different body part?
Autumn (35m 58s): Why don't you try? I would love to like, see, like the emotional side is Saurus if you've ever used that online or have that book, which we'll have to have it on my Kindle when they were doing, you know, edit. And I wish it would be like tied into pro writing aid where it says, Hey, this looks like it's an emotional Q, why don't you try this one? But in all honesty, that's what you pay an editor for. If you're paying for a really good editor, they should be picking this stuff up. I think it would be so cool to be like developing the AI too that level. But, you know that's a really big ask it. I know that I was basically like, I want you to like, program an editor into a pro writing it, but it would also be really cool if it could develop that much and be like, Hey, you're using an emotional Q, why don't you try something else here?
Autumn (36m 47s): Hint, hint, you know?
Jesper (36m 49s): Yeah, yeah. For sure on that. That would be cool. Yeah. I should also mention by the way that, and I do not remember the episode number, but you can go out and then you can go back and check if you, if you want. But we did interview the CEO of Fictionary and a past episode when she talked to Christina, I think she is called and she a, she talked a lot about, well, all the features within Fictionary. So it Fictionary is something you were interested in just to go back through the podcast feed and find the one where we are talking about Fictionary and then listening to that one as well. But I was also thinking Autumn. Mmm. So using a software can sometimes feel a bit overwhelming, meaning like, Okay, so I have all of this report's I've had all this stuff I can, I can get from the software, but maybe if you maybe would be useful for some people to just, if you sort of just boil down a bit about what would be the sort of steps that you would suggest, like do this and then do this, and then do this sort of a give or give some people a bit of a template for ProWritingAid basically.
Autumn (38m 1s): Yeah, absolutely. And it's one of those things, no matter where you open it, it has this huge menu of reports across the top. And you can run an overview, always, especially if you're just getting familiar with the program and your not sure where to start or how your own writing is looking, run the overview report for us, because it'll get you oriented. It'll tell you where you are strong. Yay. I love that. They tell you what you are strong. It will give you some graphs. It it'll tell you, go focus on, you know, go look at these other individual reports. So, you know, that will give you a good starting point. Then at that point, the One report, I would say, never, ever, ever run. They have one that is basically All it'll run every single report that it does all at the same time.
Autumn (38m 44s): And just highlight all of your texts. It is chaos. I mean, I am chaotic. I admit it, but this is chaos. This is so overwhelming. So just to skip that one. Yeah. And also skip repeats because those two will just make you feel like, Oh my God, I don't even know where to start with this. You will feel so overwhelmed. Just skip that, go to the Echo's, you know, do your overview, go to the echos, you know, to double check your length of your sentences, which is a good one. Run your sticky report below stickie, as cliche as that is a fantastic one. There was a report on dialogue. It'll tell you if you're using things consistently, there's also a consistency cheque, which is also really awesome. So you will tell you if your capitalizations are a consistent, like, are you M you know, mages, or do you have names that are your upper cases and sometimes lower casing.
Autumn (39m 32s): It will get you to, you have fixed for that. You can go down and then do there's one for homonyms. I used to be horrible in homonyms have gotten better. I would say the homonym report that there is, it tells you every single word that is a potential homonym. It doesn't just look for ones you might have missed. You used that so that it might confuse you. Cause like if you, it will highlight or a cause, or it can be an, or it can be aura as in like a panel. So he'll say you might get yourself a little more overwhelmed with some of those reports. You've got to look at them in, take a minute. You know, there is some information that you can go online and see what they're about. Read those run, you know, the sensory, the pacing run all of those, but to each one individually in a kind of his set up in order that if you start on echoes and work your way to the right, just go in that sequence and then come back.
Autumn (40m 25s): And there is a final one that I love to wrap up. Two final ones to wrap up with. And one is overused and its like echoes, but its totally different. It, it tells you if you simply used this word too many times as compared to previous WRITING, like I say, look so it'll tell you, Hey, you have started sentences with ING endings way to many times compared to publish Writing, go fix those. And then once you do your overused words, checked, go and run the regular grammar. That's the last step, which is actually the first report. So it's a live report, go fix everything there it tells you to do and then hit save.
Autumn (41m 11s): And that chapter's done.
Jesper (41m 13s): Yeah. So I think overall, if you are, I mean ProWritingAid should probably be a useful tool for almost everyone. I would say AutoCrit I would say Nope, just to skip that one. If you need to ask, if we set before, if you, if you are quite knew to writing and you need more of the structural help than probably check out, Fictionary maybe get both Fictionary and a pro Writing eight on trial versions and see which one you, you like the most. But I think it's probably safe to say that you are editing phase and you're writing will become better by using some of this software.
Jesper (41m 58s): It's not, it's not just some, you know, nice thing to have it it's almost in the category of need to have, because it actually does make a big difference. It really does. I think my set, my chapters edited with pro writing aid are so much stronger than what I was doing before pro writing aid. I really think that the sentences and the echos and the checks that I'm doing through providing aid, I see an improvement. It's got an extra Polish that I could not have done on my own. Yeah. So that's something for, for you to check out, to sign up for a trial version of pro writing aid.
Jesper (42m 39s): If you have an AE or if you are using already and to see what you, what you think of it. But other than that, then the next Monday, I'm hoping to have an interview for you with Alex Newton, from Kayla Tricks. And we are going to talk about what sells in the fantasy genre. Yeah.
Narrator (42m 57s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/AmwritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month you'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
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Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am writing Fantasy Podcast in today's Publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need. And literary agent, there is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I am Jesper.
Autumn (32s): And I'm Autumn.
Jesper (34s): This is episode 120 of The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. And today we are going to share some thoughts or tips that will be you. We got to break your career as a writer. And the personally, I think that this stuff is something that is often overlooked, but I don't know. What do you think about that?
Autumn (52s): All of them. I think its definitely not talked about it, but I've just like, Oh wow. Don't pressure or this is going to make or break or you just don't get it into that stuff. And cheese hard stops like, Oh my gosh, am I ready for this episode? I don't know why, but no, I agree. This may be a sound better than it is. It's very, you've ramped the tension right up straight to the insight pull incident and boom.
Jesper (1m 20s): Okay. Yeah, I should do it the other way around like, like maybe start out by saying this might be a completely useless Episode and there's going to be no tips for you at all. And then we can go from there because then it only got to get better.
Autumn (1m 35s): That's something that I don't know if that's going to work right there. I think we just have to stick with what we started with. And this was one of the most important episode of your entire author career. And then we had to little bit on that two point, Oh my God. Now that you've set that and now I got conscious about it and no, that's not a good, that's why you thought of anything. And I would just apply that on like nothing ever happens. If someone is going to call you out and I am here for that. So it's all right. Yeah. And you have jumped off pretty quickly as well. So you kind of surprised me. Oh well. So how are things over on your side of the planet?
Jesper (2m 15s): Well as good a school. So I close to this week here in the Denmark. Of course we are a recording a bit ahead of time. So it's East the holidays at the moment. So the kids are home, which means that the I get to sleep In and I could just get up like nine or 10 in the morning and then right. A chapter before lunch center, you know, I could get used to, this sounds really like my life, but that's one way except for the kids and no indeed. Yeah. I would say it's really nice. And a fantastic. Yeah. And also the fact that I can asleep in the also means that my wife and I have had some time to watch this TV series late in the evening where we are now, I would normally go to bed, but we didn't have been watching some, some stuff and I finished up or we finished up watching a show on HBO called a bear town.
Jesper (3m 6s): Are you familiar with that one? No, no, no. I haven't even heard that line. So Bri, our town is a, a, a Swedish series. OK. And it's about a, a youth hockey team. Ah, which is not doing particularly well. Oh yeah. But then a former NHL player comes home from the us and he was like at the end of his career and he checks takes on the job of coaching this team. So at this point you're probably thinking, it sounds like some sort of sport series right here. Yeah. But it's not because here it turns a bit dark, but that's usually the type of stories out there.
Jesper (3m 53s): Like as you know, you know, but so to start a player of the team, he actually ends up raping the coach daughter. Oh I, I, but then 'cause, it becomes very, it's, it's a very serious, serious series what it was about to say, but it becomes very, I don't know what the right word is, but interesting in one way or another, because it starts exploring because you are in a very small towns, society or community and its sort of explores, how does a close knit group of people who know each other really well deal with a situation like this, where you have like the popular kid that everybody's hoping that he's gonna be the next hot key star or a hockey star.
Jesper (4m 39s): This is going to, you know, put this town on the map and then you have this new girl in town that basically nobody knows. And she, and of course he goes to the police with what happened and so on. And then this whole thing plays out about how the community as well as dealing with the situation. And I really feel like it's, it's very interesting. And it's also very interesting as it dives into details about how, how we, human beings are incredibly good at justifying things to ourselves. Even when we know that our standpoint is clearly wrong, they are because so many of these characters, they, they really convince themselves that they're point of view is the right one.
Jesper (5m 28s): When, you know, when you're looking at it as, as the viewer and of course you are at a distance, but it makes sense from the person being inside of that community reacting that way. But when you're looking at it as a view at a distance, you can sort of see how completely wrong it is. And it is actually a very I'm, it's a very interesting story.
Autumn (5m 47s): To be honest, it sounded interesting though, since I've spent 90% of my life in small towns, I have a feeling of that. I'd be like, Oh, I know this is so true.
Jesper (5m 58s): It, yeah, It could be. Yeah. I, I mean, of course its a pretty serious topic, so it's not like a lighthearted thing that you sit down and watch, but, and I, I would maybe have liked the ending to have a bit more oomph in the end, but what I do recommend the people checking out bedtime time at town on HBO and of course watching it in the original Swedish language, trying to swap titles, instead of all the toppings stuff, I was about to use a nasty word. So the FCC does not broadcast, you know, register, watch over us as a Podcast thing. Goodness. I don't know how we got around that one way or the prolapse to swear.
Jesper (6m 42s): Yeah. Yeah. Well technically we would have to market in our podcast hosting that there was wearing in the a seven mile language.
Autumn (6m 51s): Ooh. Yeah. So a lot. Well I thought to the bullets just, just, just, well we can just add a beep. Yeah. Yeah.
Jesper (7m 2s): Okay. But that, that's something I could recommend if people need something to a new shoes to look at. And so I guess it's the right way of saying it, but yeah. You need your stomach like a bit of a topic though. Yeah. So Coker prepared for a very serious topic. Yeah. Knowing small towns, I can see how it would totally grow out of proportion and being on an easy resolution that you would imagine. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, hopefully you have some more lighthearted stuff on your side of the Atlantic.
Autumn (7m 37s): Absolutely. It's like spring here are all of our snow. I mean, Vermont, we had so much, well not so much, no. We had a normal winter For, you know, in 2020 in climate change, but it like melted in five days and now the weather is like in the sixties and it's sunny and the streams running. So its beautiful. But it's also, I feel that like I don't usually get spring itus or whatever you want to call it where you are. Like, I just want to go outside of my spring. I, this is what we use. It's cool. Yeah. Or senior-itis when you were a senior in school and you just could not concentrate cause you know, you're about to graduate. So this is a spring fever and I just want to go outside and go for a hike. And I got some work done over the weekend just because it was raining.
Autumn (8m 20s): So I've got a chance to work on some covers and I'm almost done editing I'm in my book three and my tainted face series. So that's like, yeah, it's so much work going on. We just, we're almost done editing a reader magnet that we've got going on. So I don't know. I might have to take a break and go for a, a little bit of a walk soon. That would be kind of nice. But otherwise life is pretty good. I can not complain. It's hard to concentrate. It's my worst thing. I could say that I was speaking of shows. I sent you one that was, if someone wants a Fantasy that has amazing graphics as a major amazing CGI in a really good story. I sent that one to you that yin yang master's, which is actually proved is by China, which was trying not to read into that.
Autumn (9m 6s): I'm like, is there any propaganda in here? So there's and what's funny is, and that's what I didn't tell you is there is use two movies so you can get a master's and then there's a second one that has a subtitle. I know that I can remember what it was, but you know what it reminded me of, it sounded like someone came up with like, there is a main character or here's a little bit of a story in a world in the background. And so two different people wrote an idea for it and they decided they liked them both and produced both. So they could almost relate. They feel more like a parallel stories of parallel ideas. And so it was very interesting to watch them back to back and be like, Oh, is that the same character?
Autumn (9m 46s): But that's a totally different story for him. I don't know how this works, but the, the one in the yin-yang masters do it without the subtitle. I just, it was a fantastic story telling. Very good. And so if someone wants something much more fun, I wants to see ferret demons should have won a ferret demon. You get to watch that. Yeah. Will I we'll definitely watch it. Yeah. I have added to My, I have an app on my phone where I keep track of everything I need to watch a and then I added to it in there. It's where it was pretty good.
Jesper (10m 21s): So every time I hear about a cool show or a good movie, I just add it in there because then it's it's there and I won't forget about it. And then every time I've done watching something, I go into the app and then I just find something I want to see next. Nice. That's a very useful app, right?
Narrator (10m 40s): Oh, a week on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. Yeah.
Jesper (10m 45s): Find a way of voices came out with their 2020 headphone report. It has where they share all the data that they collect it on the audio of that market over the past year. Okay. So it's up with audio books then. Yeah. And you know how I love to put you on the spot, Autumn. I, this is not fair. Yes. That's what I love it. This is because it's not fair. So I was wondering if you couldn't guess, which is young Rose had the most growth in the audio book market in 2020, but I have prepared some very, very short sound clips for you.
Jesper (11m 32s): So it is going to give you a hint. Okay. So this is a podcast. So some clips are cool. So it is basically sound clips that is hopefully giving you some idea about a young, right. That's the point of the sound clip? So there is no words is just music.
Autumn (11m 51s): Oh, this is true. It just me, I am going to argue, remember I'm half deaf. So it was just not fair, but lets go for it.
Jesper (11m 59s): Okay. So I'm going to give you some clip number one and then see if you can guess what's younger. This is okay.
Autumn (12m 13s): Yeah.
Jesper (12m 13s): That's it that's like a fog horn. What could that be?
Autumn (12m 18s): I'm guessing thriller, but I would almost have said for those clothes, it's a misery actually mystery.
Jesper (12m 26s): Oh yeah. It's a mystery. We had a growth of 158% in 2020. That's exciting. That's a lot. That is a lot. Yeah. Okay. And number two on the list of the second, most growth in 2020 and let me know what this sound Clip. What do you, what do you think this is? Okay.
Autumn (13m 1s): Yeah.
Jesper (13m 2s): Yeah, of course. It's so obvious. Well, I'm going to guess because I, because I found this out Clip that is a completely obvious to everybody else is like, what is that?
Autumn (13m 13s): I would say a memoir. I mean, it sounds too sad to be like cozy and romance. It sounds in the stallion to me. And that's why I would say memoir.
Jesper (13m 25s): You just trying to be difficult. Of course a romance. Yeah. So I don't know if lifting at the end of the music, we really portrays romance. It's obvious growth rate by 146%.
Autumn (13m 45s): Wow. That is amazing. And it doesn't actually surprise me. I mean, in COVID who was not looking for a good role mans to sweep you away from this place.
Jesper (13m 55s): Yeah. Maybe. Yeah. It could be it, but Okay. Number three and a final show. Is that experience the most growth in 2020? Well, not the final one, but the top three final in the top three. Alright. So are we ready for this song? Clip? Yeah. I'm just going to be getting one, right? Are you ready?
Autumn (14m 31s): I'm guessing Weston say something to do with Cowboys or a Western. It has to be Western.
Jesper (14m 35s): No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Autumn (14m 38s): What is it?
Jesper (14m 40s): It's Fantasy.
Autumn (14m 41s): I can not be Fantasy. Yeah. It sounds like a Western. You misled me. You totally misled me, but okay.
Jesper (14m 50s): So what's the Fantasy grow 68%. So it's not as smart as the other one's but it's still quite significant. That's good. That is it. What do you think of those growth numbers or
Autumn (15m 2s): the growth numbers are a fantastic, there are in many ways, in some ways surprising because you know, COVID people are locked down, but it also, if your homie might be listening to Moore, I know, I think my husband has gone for the weekend and I actually ended up streaming a YouTube, a, a series called art at the highest actually he was on CuriosityStream or to the highest, but then when he got back, I'm like you have a subscription to audible. I want access to your books so I can see it when you're holding, when you were working on the computer or your music's. Okay. But its kind of fun to listen to a story so I can see audio books growing.
Jesper (15m 43s): Yeah. It is growing very much about that. Oh, I also think that it also has to do with the distribution of it, that it, I mean, if you looked at the top three emerging markets after the us, it was Canada followed by Australia and I don't think those two were very surprising, but number three was Sweden. I wasn't really expecting that. So I, I think in part of the big growth numbers in part, because the base line is fairly low, so its easy to get into the triple digit growth rates kind of scary. That's true. So I think that there was that and then it's getting more and more widespread a and therefore as well as you're getting into many more new markets, which helps the growth rates.
Autumn (16m 26s): I personally don't think it is. I still think it's early days when it comes to audiobooks.
Jesper (16m 33s): I don't think that the market print tracing, is that a great to be honest. So it it's still Yeah, it's still early days and I was still, even though we keep hearing about these massive growth rates, I would still say that unless your e-books are selling really well, they don't get don't rush into creating an audio book just because you hear that that was great growth rate because honestly you probably not going to earn back to the production cost unless you're selling quite well already. I agree that that would be an, almost a whole talk because of, you know, how audio books affects sales.
Autumn (17m 7s): But yeah, even my current series, I enjoy audio books, which I did couldn't say before I used to not, but I have no plans right now to put, turn the teen at Faye in the audio books, even though we're a couple of readers of asked for it is a lot of work in really expensive. And if it doesn't really effect your regular sales on Amazon, it's not like this major boost, No way. If the, if the production cost were low, which I don't think they will be in three or four years, maybe for now than it would be a no brainer to always just like we always create a paperback print on demand version, then you would always create an audio book just because it's another, it's another way of selling you a book right now.
Jesper (17m 50s): I'm not a format, which I think is good, but when you have to pay like 5k or something for it, it's like, ah, now when they get to the AI, that has a very natural voice that you can just drop in your text and it creates a very nice sounding audio book.
Autumn (18m 6s): I don't want to put voice actors at a work because they are amazing. But you know, if you could just upload an audio book file, like have it converted. And it was a few hundred bucks, Holy kind of, I would probably do it. Yeah. Or maybe I'm even thinking of you, if you could look in the future, you could look at a market where it's just a designated, like it, it will say here is the, you know, a cheap audio book and it will say this is a I rated and there will be an expensive version of an audio book where assess this is a voice acting narrated or something.
Jesper (18m 39s): I, I could imagine that it would happen so that it's like, if you don't care or some readers don't care, you know that as long as that's the case then. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And as long as it as decent, they are happy and then they will pay or paid at a discount or have the budget version. But I can imagine that will happen in three or four or five years maybe for now that, that you will have two versions of audio books. That's a whole other topic. So I could see that happening.
Autumn (19m 6s): Definitely me too. It will be interesting
Narrator (19m 11s): And on to today's topic. Okay. So
Jesper (19m 16s): Yeah, I'm thinking that it's probably useful to just start up by stating that when Well, I was about to say we, but actually, I mean me when I'm talking about Mindset, because I can only talk about myself and I have my own biases, meaning that a for instance, when I'm tackling this topic in this episode here, I'm coming at the Mindset from a commercial point of view, meaning what is the mindset behind making a living from writing and earning money from it. And I also understand that in saying that not everyone is Writing to make money and that is perfectly fine, nothing wrong with that whatsoever.
Jesper (20m 2s): However, I just want to share it. That's where I'm coming from when I'm talking about Mindset. So I don't know, maybe, maybe you have a different perspective on, on it out of, I don't know, but that, that sort of way I'm thinking, I think with you, when we come to author Mindset that is looking at it from a business perspective. So you're looking at the marketing and is sort of wrapped up into it. But I think I do have maybe a little bit of the artistic because I also think part of part of what makes you a good author platform, a good market or a successful author, hopefully, you know, making money is that you also care about the quality and your abilities as a writer.
Autumn (20m 44s): So to me, I have a little bit of the artistic side, but I think it of overlaps, you know, the sphere is, are definitely where they joined is to me as the author of marriage Mindset. It's not a hundred percent marketing. It's not a a hundred percent craft, but there's a point where you merge those two. And that is my idea of an, a successful and a rewarding author Mindset. Yeah. Hm. Okay, good. Yes or no, but I, I think it's good to see if, I mean, we, we might come at it from like 80%, the same angle, but then slightly different anyway, which is probably good.
Jesper (21m 23s): Yeah. That's probably a good way. Or you have to have something different.
Autumn (21m 25s): I'll play devil's advocate if I have two, just so we are not always in agreement, you know, if you have two, like if I take it and you make it sound like you don't enjoy it at all, and this is like,
Jesper (21m 35s): okay, I will sacrifice myself to do it, but in reality you love it.
Autumn (21m 41s): They don't need to know is that I'm very, I would like to be Willy well in just play the play at the numbers, you know, but maybe one place to stop could be easy to talk a bit about catching reader's attention. I guess I could put that label on it because honestly, I think from a mindset perspective, you know, when you're thinking about how to get readers to read your work, I think the attention span is too big or as turtle probably, or one of the biggest hurdles we have in today's Publishing landscape.
Jesper (22m 26s): And from a mindset perspective, I'm looking at it in the point of view about understanding who is it actually that we are keep competing against for reader's attention. That's true because they say it or the office.
Autumn (22m 46s): No, not really. Well, Amazon, I do agree with that. A recent interview with Mark Coker, where he said Amazon is sort of pitting other authors against what their authors, because if you could do a search on Amazon for another, ah, for your, even yourself. So the first floor of slots are paid advertisers. And before you actually get to the person you are looking for, and that is really annoying, that is on Amazon. But in general, if you're talking about whose attention or, you know, we, as author's trying to pull readers' into, it's not for some other authors, that's there not our competition. It is the rest of the world. The app's the media games, Audio books.
Autumn (23m 30s): There's so many other things that are competed to try to get a real game games is a good one.
Jesper (23m 37s): Yeah. Yeah. I mean to some extent I, Yeah, I like you said, I, I think just some extent you could make an argument to say that there is some competition about A, between other authors, but I'm also of the firm belief that those people who really like to read, they will always go on to read more. And there's no way that we can write enough books for them on our own. So if they like to read, they will read more and other authors as well. So in some, some sense you are not really those people. I don't think we were competing that's as much for the attention because they love reading and they will continue reading. But all of the big chunk of people that sits in the middle, you know, we have those to reach a lot.
Jesper (24m 21s): And all the time at the bottom may be of the, of the buckets. We have those who are basically never reads. And, and then in the middle we have the majority of people who reach sometimes, but not all the time. And for those people, I really think that our main competitor And I, that's why I said games. I think that's a good point that you made there. But what are the ones that I was thinking about was really streaming services like Netflix, HBO, Amazon, and that kind of thing, because one of those people are going to do, you know, they come back from home, they've even the dinner there. They have a sort of thinking, should I go and lie on the couch and watch the next episode of my series on Netflix?
Jesper (25m 6s): Or should I open the eye book and start reading? All right. I mean, that's really the choice that they are making and that's not an easy competition to be him because it really means that you have to produce a very, very high quality content, meaning that you are you a story. It has to be really, really good. And that's not, I hope not for everybody Am I change? Hopefully you already know that you have to produce really good content, but there are also those that think that they can sort of get away with a half decent cover and they will get there on two, which is a, an English teacher to do the editing.
Jesper (25m 51s): And then that should be fine. Right? And then they just put it that way.
Autumn (25m 55s): Well, if you're trying to compete against Netflix, people are not going to read that book then, you know, it's, they will Peter out very quickly. I mean, there's so much more to it. I mean, having a little bit of psychology and knowing like you need to have a hook at the end of every chapter that makes them want to turn the page and then a good opening to the next chapter so that they don't want to be like, Oh, it's a different point of view. Or there is the answer to my question. You want to keep them going and going because it is a lot of marketing. It is a lot of trying to feed their curiosity so that they want this more than the ease of sitting back and watching a show because even science-wise watching a movie, it's only a lighting up part of your brain.
Autumn (26m 36s): So I mean, it is really couch potato. It is truly low energy, low, low need of a paying attention. You can still surf On your phone and you've watched a show and talk to your spouse and you know, you can do a multi-task when you read it. If you're really reading, it's like just the rest of the world could be on fire. And you're like, just one more chapter, just one more time. So it's a little more energy. And to have it fires up your brain, like your actually there doing it, if it has a well-written book, all of your senses are firing. It's like, you're dreaming it. It's your it's becoming part of you and movies do not actually do that to you. So it's a totally different process that you're trying to get readers hooked on, get that adrenaline rush going, You know?
Jesper (27m 23s): Yeah, that's true because essentially the, well, what do you know, watching a slow a, a, a, a show on Netflix, for example, if it is just being served to you right now, whereas the reading is an immersive, may you are inserting yourself into the story. Whereas watching his show on Netflix, it's just a couch potato or wanting something. And, you know, you don't, unless the character mentioned a smell or sneezes, or does something to clue you in that they're smelling something. It doesn't even Dawn on you that, you know, they're sitting by the campfire in there going to smell like Ash. But when you're reading it, there are a good writer is going to have layer that in or the smell of a dragon, or is it the smell of something?
Jesper (28m 6s): And it's going to immerse you, like you said, in a far different way. And that's what the people who love reading. That's what they love has because it really drags you in and you don't get that quality unless you're working on it, unless you're doing it, you know, on purpose.
Autumn (28m 22s): Even after 20 some books, I still have a Check where I check all of my chapters for things like the five sentences and stuff, because it's easy to get into the mood and you're done writing and you go all the visual and very little auditory because I'm half deaf. So let me do, you know, you got to add that stuff and yeah.
Jesper (28m 42s): Yeah, that's true.
Autumn (28m 44s): And, and that's really where the Mindset thing comes in. Meaning that if you have to be conscious about the fact that you have to produce really, really high quality work, because otherwise, if its sort of halfway there, you can imagine like somebody is sitting there with the Kindle Or whatever they are reading on. And There are sort of, well maybe they read two chapters and they're like, Oh, well it's not really engaging me the stuff. And then they are watching over at the TV, hanging on the wall over there and it's like, no, let me, let me go watch some TV or is that right?
Jesper (29m 17s): Yeah. Yeah. That's the problem. So it is, it's not an easy for sure, but a, but it is important to be aware of.
Autumn (29m 25s): Definitely. And I think that's, I like that you started on that one. Cause like I said to me, the quality, the artistic, the desire to keep trying to improve yourself and your craft and your writing to me, it's very important. It's important, artistically, as important as your mindset that always having that curiosity, you never say I Am good enough. I do not need to learn anything else about Writing. I don't need to read any books because I don't need to learn anything. That's not going to, it's not the right mindset to have to be a successful author. You should always be thinking, what can I do better? How w who is another author? Who's better than I am. So I'm going to read there and see what I like. And I'm going to break it down. Every time we read a book, every time we watched a movie, you are like breaking down the plots and the characters in the person next to you.
Autumn (30m 9s): I was like, Oh my gosh, just please it enjoy this. And you were like, no, I'm going to tell you that that was foreshadowing. I know that that's true because, well, at least for me, when I started writing myself, the way I experience stories was like, if you a, if you were looking at it one way, you could say broken forever.
Jesper (30m 38s): But if you look at it on another way, it's just changed forever because, well, yeah, I don't know how to improve because in some way it has broken because I cannot enjoy a story. Like it could be four because I'm looking, I'm looking at a structure behind the words and, and I cannot help myself. Or even sometimes I try consciously to ignore it and just read the story. She would go up, but I cannot help myself looking at, Oh, that was a forest at foreshadowing hint there. And there was something that I might pick it up and I just can't let it go. I'm reading one. Now I just started, I'm probably like 20% Intuit. I'm not going to mention the title of anything. So don't worry. Ah, I'm not going to put any time anybody down on it, but actually, you know, but, but honestly I really liked it.
Jesper (31m 22s): It was so far, it's a really good book. It's a really good story. But the one thing that I did pick it up already is that because it's a FANTASY, so you have multiple characters and I've done this myself in the past as well. So I'm not thinking on the author at all. But the introduction of the point of view characters is quite aggressive in the early phases of the book. Meaning that you're, you are sort of, are you jumping from one to the next, to the next, to the next, like the, for the first four or five chapters in a row? And it is slightly confusing, but as you, because you don't quite understand how it connects together. And, and also you are a bit like when you get back to the characters, like which character was this again?
Jesper (32m 7s): Because it was introduced too fast and I've done this myself. So I'm not thinking on anybody at all, but I just think that there is something there I notice is a slightly detour, But, but there's something there about thinking about how are you eating new characters into the story and not going too fast. I think I'm 25% in the, according to my Kindle now. And is it starting to make sense? I can see how it connects now, but the first like 15%, maybe 2015, 20% of the book, it was pretty confusing even though what was happening was really cool. And I really liked it. It, it was cool. Cool action scenes and everything was really good.
Autumn (32m 48s): Well, billing is great, but it's just a small things that might tick some people off. Some readers me like, no, this is too confusing. I'm going to give up it's right.
Jesper (32m 58s): And you can't write it for everyone. So there is going to, you're never going to satisfy everyone, but it's definitely something to think, to keep in mind, as you learn your craft, you know, you have someone who maybe will point that out to you or something for yourself to think about. And I think that's where the idea of always improving, you know, looking at how things are working, reading other books and seeing what worked and what didn't work, so that you can look at your next story and you keep writing and keep going.
Autumn (33m 26s): Indeed. And the other thing that I also feel like it is really important when it comes to Mindset is long-term thinking a little bit. I like that one, because this is of course where I'm looping back to the fact that I was set in the beginning, that I am looking at this from a commercial perspective, but overnight riches almost never happens. So if you're trying to plan for, or even hoping that your debut novel we'll be like this major Success, it probably won't a, and I'm sorry, but the truth of the matter, and we can take a couple of examples here. So Lee child, for example, a highly, highly successful British a thriller author.
Jesper (34m 10s): I, he is, I think last time I tried to look it up, he was estimated to have a net worth of around $50 million. Okay. So I guess we can call that successful. Can we,
Autumn (34m 22s): Yeah, I guess, I mean really? Yeah.
Jesper (34m 24s): Yeah. But he didn't really find much success until he had published about 10 books and George RR Martin is similar. Yes.
Autumn (34m 32s): Yeah. I'll say he has had a very long career to finally reach the pinnacle that he has. And he's no, you know, the kid anymore either.
Jesper (34m 43s): No, indeed. So it's, it's small like millions. I know it's not just going to start rolling and you know, it's, it's a matter of over the longterm to build a catalog of books with each will earn you a little bit more and to make that career out of writing, you have to consistently be working on a new book. And this is not me saying that you have to release a new title every month. Not at all because I, I know some people do and that's how they enter the living and find if that's what you can do. But to me, it would stress me out. If I felt like I had to release a new title every month and write 6,000 words a day as something, Nope, not going to happen.
Autumn (35m 25s): I'm not that kind of a writer. And I don't want to be either, but at least put your butt in the chair and at least two, some writing so that you are at least working on your back a back catalog all the time or building that back catalog 'cause At the end of the day, that's where the money is going to come from. And then they go down the line 15, 20 books later, or like with your tire Martin, 20 years later, if you finally get some awesome success than great. But I, I think planing for that, or even expecting that it's not going to bring you any good. No. And especially in today's market, I mean, maybe you will hit it out of the park with one book, but you, I think we've both seen it.
Autumn (36m 6s): I think Chris Fox as a few other authors who have try it a couple of a different series and they still, even once they become popular, they can have something that doesn't sell because it's not as much of an interest. So you have to keep trying in generating new content and trying to find maybe the book that hopefully Lyfts all of them up, but you could always have that one series and everyone's like, Oh, Oh, well, that's the one we don't talk about, you know?
Jesper (36m 30s): Oh yeah. You remember when he wrote that, you know, it's, it's always going to be a challenge, but it's definitely, you want to keep writing and you want to remember that this is a marathon. If you're doing this as a passion, if you were expecting to write three books and you're going to be as famous as George R. Martin or Stephanie Meyer or a JK Rowling's those that really is the less than a 1% have the 1% have the 1%, there are so many millions of authors and there are many, you know, maybe hundreds of thousands, maybe just thousands that are making a full time living off of Writing. There's many more who are having it as a very solid PR part time job, or as a part of a different part time job, or, you know, balancing several things.
Autumn (37m 14s): And then there's others that this is literally just going to be a hobby. That's not going to be a huge revenue stream. So you need to remember there's all of these different tiers and it is sort of onto you two have the mindset, the strategy is the goal was the marketing, the skills, the quality, all of those tools to help sometimes the luck to make this into something more.
Jesper (37m 40s): Yeah, Yeah. Agree with that. And everybody fits into those categories differently. And, and, and, and that's also absolutely fine.
Autumn (37m 47s): I just think from the front have mine set perspective, I just think it's important not to sort of set yourself up for failure, meaning that you get into it with the idea that I'm going to be in the top 1% of all authors globally. And I'm going to be as rich as a J K Rowling or something like that. It's well, great if it happens, but it's probably not. And if you're setting yourself up for that, you can see you're almost only gonna fail and you are going to disappoint yourself. One of the reasons is not all of them, but one of the reasons why people stop writing is because they get disappointed and they feel like, no, this is not what I expected. It should be. I had hoped that I was going to learn a lot more money by now or, or, or whatever.
Autumn (38m 33s): But if they had just kept writing maybe four books more
Jesper (38m 37s): From the word AI, it now it would make it a difference. So it was just a shame too, to drop your writing because of something like that. And I think it's important to try to set yourself up by thinking long term, maybe earning 50 K a hundred K a year. Maybe that's modern enough for what you want. I mean, who says you have to earn millions, maybe even 10 K if it's the sidekick, the 10 K can pay your summer vacation every year. And maybe that is
Autumn (39m 7s): Yeah, absolutely fine. Yeah. I mean, nothing wrong with that. You should definitely have, you know, your idea of what, what is the, what is, I think everyone should have a solid, this is my goal to get to and know that it might take time to get there. And do you, like you said, maybe it's only 10 K a year, but to say, if I hit five K a year, 10 K a year, if I could do this much money, I would feel like I was totally successful and no, it doesn't hurt to have that like, you know, shooting for the stars. That's Okay. Because maybe then you'll hit the moon. That there's nothing wrong with that. But to know, to at least know that thinking you're going to hit JK Rowling's level is probably really going to be amazing and lucky and hard, but that's okay if you just hit Jupiter, the Jupiter is nice.
Autumn (39m 54s): You know, you don't have to go outside of the solar system, but just to have that Real, that reality check where it's great to maybe dream big. But remember that is dreaming. The reality is going to be in something a lot closer to home and know what that is. Do you know what you really want to work towards and then working towards it? And for me, this is one part of my mindset, I think is really important. And I remember when I was first becoming an entrepreneur and I read that the sign of someone who will make a good entrepreneur is someone who can work for 12 hours, go to bed and feel like I'm out of ideas. I am disappointed nothing work today. And they will wake up in the morning and they'll go, all right, what am I trying to do today?
Autumn (40m 35s): And you will start over with all the same passion, all of the same curiosity, problem solving, look at things from a new perspective, you have to wake up in the morning and say, I am doing this again. Cause this is what I want to do. And you're going to look at it from a different angle. And if you feel like you need to, someone keep bolstering you and telling you because you can everyone, you know, cheerleaders. But if you need that over 50% of the time, like 80% of the time, you are looking for someone telling you you're going to be okay, you're going to do a good job. This is going to be really hard for you. You need to have a certain level of confidence in what you're doing, your marketing. And if you don't have it, now go take the lessons, go get the skills, bring yourself up to where you feel.
Autumn (41m 15s): You are capable of succeeding. You just need to keep, you need to work, keep working and getting there because it is a lot of hard work. And if you don't believe in yourself, and if you're not trying to improve yourself, then it's going to be that much harder and you probably will give, so you need to have that mindset of what am I gonna do now? This was a tough day. I'm having a glass of wine in some chocolate and tomorrow we are going to hit the ground running.
Jesper (41m 46s): And tomorrow I'm going to make waffles dog. The dog Shrek is secretly.
Autumn (41m 57s): One of my favorite movies. It's just awesome. Is the first one I ever watched the turnout, all of the fairy tales in their heads. And I'm like, this is it. This is why I love This. So yes, tomorrow you will have to make waffles if you were going to get up and you're going to do the waffles. And if you had to end the day in wine again, that's OK. But the next day you're doing waffles again.
Jesper (42m 18s): Not, not, not everyday, hopefully ending the day with wine. That's that's not going to be very healthy in the long term waffles in the morning. And why did the evening, I think is going to be the end of you at some point. Yeah.
Autumn (42m 29s): Why not? If you want me to, if you were enjoying life. Yeah.
Jesper (42m 33s): But at least if, if, if you need some encouragement and if you need some support and back up the head off, over to the Am, Writing Fantasy Facebook group, 'cause, there is a lot of good people helping each other in their, and an offering SUPPORT. So, so that's at least the community that will help you. So feel free to join there. If you just go to the group session section on Facebook and search for Am Writing Fantasy, and you will find us. Yeah. But I have one more Autumn. And I think this is probably the most important one of them all
Autumn (43m 2s): I used to be. I'll see. I'll see if I agree with you.
Jesper (43m 5s): Yeah. Of course. Devil's advocate over there. You can see how we love it. Yeah.
Autumn (43m 9s): Yeah. Absolutely. Well,
Jesper (43m 13s): I think, and again, this is coming from the commercial perspective again. Right. But they are those who have the mindset that if the writing is just good enough, then the readers will come to me and it will grow from there. They will start reading the next book I write and the book after that. And if I got through that because of the writing is so great. So the only thing I really need to focus on is my writing skills. And don't get me wrong. Writing skills is incredibly important. Of course, you have to be able to tell a really, really good story and have really good writing as well.
Jesper (43m 53s): But yeah, Yeah. It's not everything.
Autumn (43m 57s): No, no, no. It's not every day and age. You just,
Jesper (43m 59s): Or you have to advertise your books, but above all, you have to build an email list so that you can get in touch with your readers when you release a new book, because honestly, readers, I'm not as loyal to the author. As you might think. In many cases, they don't even remember what the author's name was. Then they might not remember the title of the book, but they don't really remember who the author was. And they don't really according to research. And I cannot remember the exact numbers, but I, it was something to do With that in an average Rita's I would have to have read three or four books of the same author before they started remembering what the author named was.
Jesper (44m 42s): Because otherwise you just don't remember if you had them on your e-mail list, you can send them an email and you can say, Hey, the new book is ready here. Here's the link. So you can pick it up right now. And then they might not necessarily, but they might go on and do that because they know there's a reason why they ended up on your list and the first place it was because they liked what they read. So they don't have to remember to check Amazon. I wonder if this author here really is something new, because nobody will do that, right. That they won't go on to Amazon once a month to check if you uploaded the new book.
Autumn (45m 14s): But if you get them on your email list, you could just tell them, and that's not a sale right there. So for me, the mindset around thinking that the writing is the only important thing, I think that probably worked 10 years ago, but not anymore. And even in 10 years ago, I'm not sure if it was, I mean, it helped when eBooks were, if you were out with eBooks, we're new and you were in a good writer, you were probably right now on the forefront. But for most people, it's not just about being a good writer. I mean, I, I, my true, true deep fans, you know, they tell me that I'm better than Told can. I just love them so much, but it's not enough if you don't have the mindset of how to market, of how to stay in touch with your readers, how to connect with them and even know some of those like little marketing tips, like this is why I saved.
Autumn (45m 59s): I wrote an entire series and now I'm releasing them. Back-to-back it's not just because of, you know, the excitement of releasing them. Back-to-back but it's also because readers will then, you know, not get lost in the series. They will be like, Oh, it was the next ones out. Oh, the next ones out. And they come right along with it very quickly, because most series don't sell until you get to the last book anyway. So you might as well say to them all up to the end, but those are the things again. So you're always looking for it's more than writing. I love the writing craft. If I could just be a little hermit in the woods. Oh, Hey, nevermind. So if you could just sit in and right now we have to worry about marketing is fantastic, but it's not the reality.
Jesper (46m 41s): You have to know how to Mark it and you have to be able to talk to your readers and know where they are and they have to be able to find you. And the email list is definitely the easiest way of doing that.
Autumn (46m 54s): Yeah. It's a devil's advocate in the woods have spoken.
Jesper (46m 57s): That's right.
Autumn (46m 58s): And I got quite a hermit because I have a, another hermit with me. So what are two hermits? I don't know what the term would be. Hermits assists. Well, I know a hermit or a place where hermit lives as call it a hermit Todd. It was just so I can go with that.
Jesper (47m 16s): Okay. Well, anyway, if you liked what you heard today, and if you want to sort of dive much more deeper into all the different aspects of being a self published author, what you Should be aware of, what you should think about everything to do with like creating covers that fix Fitz, the markets, how is the Amazon algorithm works? How to run book launches and so much more, the good news is that Autumn and I created a a hundred percent FREE costs that we call it self publishing success course. And I would encourage you to go and check that one out. We will place a link to the sign up page in the show notes.
Jesper (47m 60s): A and it's not going to cost you anything other than you need to put it in your email address two too, so that we can email you the different modules and you get onto the cost platform. But I suggest that you check it out and there is so much good content in there that you can dive into. And of course, if you don't like it, you can unsubscribe at any time. No questions asked. So it's easy. Check it out for FREE. And yeah, that's pretty cool. So I think it's an amazing Course. So yes, it is. It is definitely something that if you're starting out or even just stalled or just have questions, this is definitely the thing to take. I wish I had it when I first started in 2012.
Jesper (48m 41s): So I'm glad we have it now and can help out authors and helped them on their journey and help their mindset because there are things as a whole module on mindset you want to,
Autumn (48m 54s): Okay.
Jesper (48m 54s): Yeah. So next Monday we will do a deep dive into a tool that we are finding incredibly valuable when editing and that's the software called pro Writing. I, yeah.
Narrator (49m 5s): Yeah. If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patrion.com/ Am. Writing Fantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, going to stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
In preparation for this episode of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, Autumn and Jesper have suffered through some of the WORST movies.
This is an entertaining top 10 of the movies which tells the worst stories EVER.
At the end, the hosts share some thoughts on what NOT to do when creating stories of our own.
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast in today's Publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from riding. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I'm Jesper
Autumn (31s): and I'm Autumn.
Jesper (33s): This is episode 119 of The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. And it is time for one of our ultimate this again, One of those not so serious Episode. So we hope that you will enjoy it as we enter the world of the WORST Stories Ever Told we were looking forward to this one,
Autumn (56s): which is funny because when you first mentioned it, I said, I don't know how I'm gonna do on this one, but the secret that I had forgotten about really what's that. Oh, well, have you ever heard of mystery science theater?
Jesper (1m 17s): No, I'm not sure. No, no, no.
Autumn (1m 20s): I'll tell you all about it and why it's my ace in the hole and I'm going to do so blow you out of the water on this one.
Jesper (1m 27s): Why do we get well, OK. Let's see. But, but I actually have some surprises lined up as well, so yeah, you'll see. You'll see. I I'm going to impress, you know, I was gonna say this one, maybe it's a good, it's not the right term. This'll be so bad how bad it's going to be an excellent.
Autumn (1m 47s): I can not wait. Well, how are the things over in Denmark?
Jesper (1m 55s): A well for for one, we've had some chats today. Excellent. So that's a good start. And a, I'm also expecting to start refereeing next week. And I hope I actually, last weekend I did do a on the 15th match a So, but senior soccer should pick up again this coming weekend. I hope so. I'm really looking forward to that too, that we are getting out of some so Corona restrictions that makes us all our lives are a nightmare. So, so that's good. That's exciting. Yeah. Oh yeah. And speaking about Corona restrictions, we are actually managed to go to Ikea last Saturday and no one would really not be excited about it going to Ikea.
Jesper (2m 45s): But the thing is that since we moved into the apartment, we've had quite some furniture that we needed to deliver back to Ikea. I can click on host. Yeah. They closed. And we were stuck with it here in the apartment because we thought we couldn't go anywhere. So it would deliver it back. And we also have like one wall in the bedroom that is still filled up with moving boxes because we needed to deliver that stuff back to Ikea. And then we needed to buy a new piece of furniture. So we could empty all those boxes and put it in to a cabinet. But we couldn't do all of that. So we've been waiting a lot for like three months, but finally,
Autumn (3m 26s): Yeah,
Jesper (3m 26s): Indeed. So a lot of finally last Saturday they reopened so we could get it. We still have it. You still have to book a time and all of that stuff in order to be able to go inside of a warehouse where there's like 10 people in this humongous place. But nevertheless, we in medicine and the way we actually got to our staff deliver delivered back and bought the new stuff and took that with us home. So when Easter holidays comes up here quite soon, I know what I have to do. I have to put Ikea stuff back together. Again, it's just not my favorite thing to do, but at least we are done with it.
Autumn (3m 60s): Yeah. Well, like I said, I wish you were closer. I love building things. You saw me building my cabin that we're staying in. And so yeah. I would love to help out building things, but its kind of a, you know, I can't quite make the flight, even though things are improving slowly in the us, they are hoping they're saying, ah, my husband's signed me up for our a coronavirus vaccination. So like that's exciting that they got to my age bracket. It's not the bottom of the, the brackets focused.
Jesper (4m 31s): Yeah. I don't know if it's good or bad weather when your number comes off. It's like, Hmm. Is this because they think either I'm old or they think that it's something wrong with me. So we better actually meet this person. This is just like what what's going on. Yeah.
Autumn (4m 44s): Well they had already let me put it down to eight to 16 year olds. What you had to have one of these certain listed health things and I'm like, Nope, Nope, Nope. I'm, I'm perfectly fine, but I'm older than 16, but they finally opened it up to my age group. So that's exciting. That means I might be able to see my parents some time to, So we have a date for it already. What do you know when it's going to be sometime in April, April and April. Okay. I haven't even been told about it yet when I'm gonna get any vaccines. Yeah. So yeah. We'll see. But hopefully within the next couple, a couple of months then yeah, Yeah, yeah. Well, my parents have gotten there's, and they've been out two breweries, you know, every one space, it sounds like they are out and about all of it everywhere, but you know, the tables are really far.
Autumn (5m 29s): So, you know, it's like if there's three other people in the entire room with them, it's amazing. I'm usually there taking pictures and it's empty, but they've been out and you know, going to get a draft beers and taking photos. I'm just like dad, but I go to
Jesper (5m 44s): Yeah. Yeah. And we've all had enough of this stuff by now. So a for sure we need to, I think everybody is looking forward to get to the other side of it. I guess my biggest fears just because they are starting to open it up now. So my biggest thing is just that it will happen. Like it did it last time they start to open it up and then like, three-four weeks later they shot it all down. And then if they do that, I think people will get pretty damn upset because people are just fed up with it.
Autumn (6m 11s): Yeah. Especially with the spring, you know, now it's almost spring here and some are rolling out. If they shut everything down for the summer, I think there would be a revolution here. They just don't do it. Let them go. Yeah.
Jesper (6m 24s): Yeah. We don't. We are, we've had enough. Yeah. But otherwise, if anything is everything good on your end
Autumn (6m 32s): And do lots of covers and writing and reading and all that kind of stuff. But overall, mostly just working on my laptop because it's still only in the forties, which I can't think of what that would be in Celsius, but it's just above, you know, a little bit above freezing. So it looks beautiful and the feel so warm and you go outside and about 15 minutes later they was like, I need something warm to drink. So it's looking in fighting almost all of the snow is gone, but it is still spring and very early here, but it's exciting to see the water running in this stream again and sea ground and all of those good things.
Autumn (7m 13s): Yeah.
Narrator (7m 13s): Oh a week on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast.
Jesper (7m 19s): Yeah. So I don't know if you have something you want to share in this section, all of them, but I'm just going to keep it very brief. But I just wanted to check if you had something first before I do that. Nothing else
Autumn (7m 29s): Too exciting. It's been so busy and I'd been working on Instagram, working on how to do Instagram and all of these other things, but something specifically to the Podcast, nothing to share with authors yet, but I'm working on a few things.
Jesper (7m 43s): Okay, cool. Yeah. I'm also just going to keep it very briefly. Just the small thing he had. I just wanted to say that it, it will speaking to you the listener, if you enjoy The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, the best thing you can really do for us is to tell another author, a friend about it. We are still in the process of growing our listenership here. So we would really like for a lot more people to find us. So if you like this podcast will not tell an author, a friend about it and you will be helping us out. And you will also help out the person who you are telling you about a great podcast and listen to. So it's like a sort of like a win, win situation that doesn't cost you anything on the contrary, you will probably going to get a lot of gratitude in return.
Jesper (8m 29s): So a yeah, I just wanted to remind that that's a really small and easy thing that you can do that it will actually make meaning quite a lot for us.
Autumn (8m 39s): Absolutely come Sherise join us and help spread the word. We would appreciate it.
Jesper (8m 45s): Yeah. So with that being said, should we just a dive? Yeah,
Autumn (8m 49s): I think so. Because this one, we have WORST Stories. I have plots and we both have five each to see and are trying to figure out which one's the worst of the worst. So I think we better get into it. Yeah.
Jesper (9m 6s): Okay. So this is going to be interesting. I mean, I think when you, initially, when I started building my list here, initially I wanted to only make picks of stuff that I had read or seen. But, but as it turned out, I think I'm pretty good at avoiding bad stories. So yeah. So I admit that I had to pick some stuff that I haven't actually read or watch, but it just sounds so horrible that I added them to the list that I anyway, but I would say that basically more or less all of it, I do have some sort of connection to it.
Jesper (9m 51s): So, and it's not something that I just picked at random, but I will, as we go through, I will say what I have seen and what I have not seen to make a key bot. What I did too, is that I only picked movies because then I can play some sound clips as we go along.
Autumn (10m 11s): Well, you are in such a cheater. I only picked movies too, but I did not go and get sound clips, actually the movies. I don't know if I could've found sound clips in the us, I re watched them, but I have seen all five that are going to be sharing. And I like, I see hinted earlier. I could have shared 14 and actually so 50 to a total of 15, because one of them isn't because I've watched two seasons of something that is called mystery science theater. And you're going to love the story behind this.
Jesper (10m 44s): So it, it sounds like if it's so bad, why did you want us to cease in some of it?
Autumn (10m 49s): Because that's the point. So it's a show. It's a mystery science theater 3000 is actually called. It's a show that uses the premise of a show.
Jesper (10m 59s): Wait, so is this your first entry on the list of your art?
Autumn (11m 1s): Nope. This is just a set-up of how bad my entries are going to be. They go for it. Or it's the set up is that they are showing the most horrible movie ever in an attempt to melt the mind of a research subject slash prisoner. There's a hostage. And to keep her Saturday, he used, made this robot companions that watch they are inflicted with this movie with him. And they're just sitting there and making snide comments about the movies the entire time. And this is huge. This has a cult following it is so, so popular that they actually ran a Kickstarter campaign to get in a Netflix, to do 14 Xtra shows.
Autumn (11m 42s): So it's a serious. So I've watched the series of 11 and 12, which we put out on Netflix, all 14 of them there, just with the whole WORST shows that
Jesper (11m 54s): You need to have some popcorn, a beer and a sense of humor and you will die laughing and growing at the same time. So good luck beating me on this one. Oh my God. What? It does not sound very good. No, it's a fantastic, horrible Amy. There's no other, I can not wait to tell you about them. No you do. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it was see who comes up with a WORST stuff because it, it it's really about it. It has to be so bad that you'd like almost prefer to do a, I don't know. I would say that you would prefer to do something really horrible to yourself instead of just to avoid watching it. That has to be that bad.
Jesper (12m 35s): I've got it. My number one. It's fantastic. I can not wait. And the high, I don't like your confidence. If you have way too much confidence going into this list and easily to you a bit more relaxed like it. Yeah. We'll see, kind of let's let's see. Let's just go through and now you're just like, you're way too confident. I don't like this. Maybe it should we change the subject? So today show or something else better at it. Just shifting on the fly. Your are going to be the one who left in the dust. So whatever you want to do, I will win this one. Well, okay. I think we have jointly agreed that all the past ones I have won.
Jesper (13m 16s): So if you win one time, maybe I can give you that, but still I know why I'm going to win this one. I am not too bad, too bad pics that you, you just can't beat them. We'll see if we will have one of the same ones. Why would that be funny? But we'll say, I think we need to get started though. So what should, what should we start with you? You know, obviously lease worse to worse. I take it. Yeah. I think I organized mine so that it goes from, let me just do a quick check on my list here. I don't know if mine are organized At no, because mine are so incredibly bad.
Jesper (14m 0s): All of them that it does not matter which order you would take them in. They can beat all of you or no problems. So they are just in random order of mine. Okay. Minor from lease worse to worse. So I was, I did my homework. I watched 14, 15 show and she was 15 shitty. She goes in preparation for the test was born for this one. Lets go. I was humbled. I'll let you go first. Okay. So I have a short audio clip for you here for us to be ready to go for it.
Audio Clip (14m 41s): I've got something on my radar. Looks like a fog bank and that's moving straight toward us. Kind of fog moves against the wind.
Jesper (14m 53s): So based on what you just heard that you might be able to, Can you guess what it is or maybe not yessing Pacific room? No. Pacific room is pretty good. What do you mean? But It's not on my list, but there's better movies out there. Yeah, yeah, there it is. But its definitely not on a list of the worst movies ever. OK. So what was that one? So this one is the FOC from 2005. I did not see that one. Oh, well we'll be happy that I don't know. I Want you to enjoy a really bad book. It's a, it's a reboot of a movie from 1988, a and I only watched this 2005 version.
Jesper (15m 38s): So I don't know about the original ones, but this is one of those cases where you sort of, you see the premise of the movie and when you think it could be quite interesting, but you still, you still a bit skeptical 'cause there's something inside of you telling like Mmm you know that feeling. So all the alarm bells are going off in your mind, like wanting you to, this is probably going to be crap, but then you watched the trailer and it was just like, well there is something in this sort of set up that I quite like, you know, this whole thing about dos a fork and there is some mystery about something happens and it's dangerous.
Jesper (16m 21s): And just start thinking, well maybe you should try to just watch it because it, it could be good. Maybe it was, it might be worth a try. Yeah. So who, let me just explain what is about here. So I need to, I just need something to justify why I actually wasted my time watching this movie. So how does this sound? So we're in a town where the founder's got the money by murdering a colony of lepers. Okay. Nobody knows about this terrible past. And now we're like a a hundred years later where a character return's just as a statue, it is raised in a tribute of the founders and then comes the fork and there's something inside the fog, something vengeful.
Jesper (17m 16s): So a little super nice or something. Oh my God, no, it could be good, but it was bad. So I went against my better adjustment and I washed it and my God, it was stupid. But you know, first of all, when you have like teenagers dancing around in bikini's on board and all the fishing boat, then you already knows that a lib there's just not going to be good will. And then on top of that, the plot just of, it just keeps going and going and going and going. It doesn't really add anything to the story at all.
Jesper (17m 58s): And then you should think that by the time to spend so much time on adding plot for no real reason, you should think that then at least they would be able to deliver a satisfying ending. NOT it just, it does not make any sense at the end that either, I mean, I'm going to spoil it here, but why the heck are we suddenly presented with some We of thing that is going on with like some luck between a human and a ghost? I mean, in the middle of it as sort of a horror story is like what's going on here. So just like it makes no sense at all. No, no. I didn't see that one coming to strip from, to criticize.
Jesper (18m 42s): There seems to be the consensus as well as the original, 1988 version. I wasn't that good either. So that sort of begs to question to me like, well, I remake it when you, when you're creating something that is bad to begin with. It's just bad, bad, bad. I mean, what the fuck? That's bad. I don't know. I think I have so much worse. I'm just going to start it. OK. This is the shit and move you. Okay.
Autumn (19m 14s): And I don't know, it, it sounds like a good one for a couple of years sitting on the laughter. Laugh at yourself. Silly. Yeah,
Jesper (19m 20s): No, you don't want to do it now.
Autumn (19m 24s): Alright. Well you want to know what my number five one, and this is my only one that was not featured on mystery science theater 3000. Okay. So this one is actually 2020 and it was produced on Netflix. This is a series and I've mentioned this one a couple of times and two, you cursed. It actually makes my list of horrible shows. So it's, this is a retelling of the authorial legend from the viewpoint of Nim whey, which is the lady of a Lake. And so this has set before she becomes the lady as a Lake before author meets Arthur meets Merlin. So it's like, he's not, you know, like the source of the stone young, he's a buddy as a teenager.
Autumn (20m 8s): And it sounds to me because I mean, I writing a story about Faye and Nim Wei is Faye. And I'm thinking, Oh my gosh, this is going to be really excited to have a little fun with Arthur Arthur in legends. I am, yeah. I have seen way too many years, but I love the funny, this is going to be awesome. Now it was so bad, but I feel bad because of the actors and the actresses. There are some really good ones. There's Floki from Vikings is a Berlin. I mean, there are some really good actors and actresses and they do their darn best to deliver these characters. Like you kind of care, but it was, it was bad that that my husband would put this on the nights.
Autumn (20m 50s): He just wants to go to sleep. And then I'd be sitting in there, just yell, trying not to yell at the TV, set up. And then the plot holes and the inconsistencies and the jumps that made absolutely no sense and trying not to wake him up. And it was just really bad, but there are some of the inconsistency, as some of them are like, and they always, always, you know, it was, this is a story about the Fe, but for some reason, and it's about Dibley, who's the girl. But for some reason, Arthur, is that the one who has always right. And he was humid in the mail and it was just so silly, but you know, they are some of the silliness, there is a grain mill. All the grain mills have been killed, but you know, taken over by the evil King, he was trying to wipe out the Fe and There down to one.
Autumn (21m 37s): So whose idea is that to go protect the one that's or if there is, how many nights did they sent you? You know, how many Fe warriors do they send like a five to go protect your food supply. And I go, and of course, if it goes to crap there that they burn them out in a mil, the green night and earth are, are almost about to die. But, and then when she shows up who she was magical, but she doesn't really know how to control it, but she manages to save the day. And later on, they are, she claims queenship. There is no, there's never been a fake queen. She claims queenship because she has the sword of the Kings, because one is what you do it, even though everyone's excited that she, she claims that she was going to be the queen, even though she has been hiding from them, not collaborating in any of the older meetings to like protect her people.
Autumn (22m 32s): She had sent a letter to the Qing invading saying, Hey, I'll get you back the sword. If you let the face go that Arthur sister or a Morgan and Morgan Le Fay, the source for us eventually now dictates to her. So this wasn't even her idea she's done. Absolutely nothing, but everyone's like your queen, but like, yeah, standard, there was so many plot holes and things and I'm just like, you know, so anyway, it makes my number five, which is pretty safe. Yeah. Okay.
Jesper (23m 9s): I think I have come across some, if I might be confusing, it was something else. But I do think I've seen some, you know, some of those trailers running when I log into Netflix and stuff like that, about it and, and, and the list, it must have been, it must have looked bad enough that I did hear of it because I have not watched any of it.
Autumn (23m 29s): I haven't recommended to you, but this was the only one that could have gotten in a sound clip for a day. I feel so disappointed now, But yeah, yeah,
Jesper (23m 36s): Yeah. Well, believe it. You're probably gonna lose on point because you didn't have some clips. Let's see here.
Autumn (23m 43s): I let's say I've got some doozies that I don't think you can even
Jesper (23m 46s): Come close to. Oh shit. Okay. I need to up my game. All right, let's go for it to a number of For, okay. So brace yourself for this sound clip, because this is going to be bad. Okay. You ready?
Audio Clip (24m 5s): effective. We've got a white male, 54 years old. we had another one so far. The one thing is that all of the victims have in common is a fierce site to go together.
Jesper (24m 27s): I'm going to stop it. That it was so fucking ridiculous so that you can already hear shit. This is, she say, it's the only thing we have in common as a parasite. They, this is at the FIA site to be here site. Oh. So they would go to a website. Yeah. It killed them. And for this one, I actually learned my lesson. So I have not watched it, but the trailer was so bad, but it just, the trailer itself scares me off. And I was pretty good. In addition to it, initially I checked it off because it said it was from the same director of a house on a haunted Hill. Well, actually it wouldn't saying that it had just realized that there are some people that's probably a good statement.
Jesper (25m 9s): I think that that's true. But this movie is it fair.com. It's called O and M initially sort of pulled me in because I don't want to eat it. It had me checking out the trailer and so on because it carries some of the same tropes as the ring. Did you ever watched the ring? I actually have not watched the ring, but I, I, it looked interesting. I only did and watch it because I wasn't doing horror movies at the time. No, no. Yeah. I don't want so many horror movies either, or at least not for the last couple of years before the end. I quite liked a lot of them, but I enjoyed the ring. The ring in my view is a really good movie, the movie. But I have to say that the original, like, I think it's, I think it's Japanese or some of these at least Asian or originally a, a and the Asian version is better than the American version, but yeah, that's the one that you had wanted to see, but I just, it looked actually scary enough.
Jesper (26m 2s): And I was at a point in my life where I thought like, I don't need this. No, no, no, no. It is pretty scary. The rink, to be honest, but, but in the ring, people die from watching a videotape. Right. And it is well done and it is scary. But so here they have just replace the video tape with a website. So when you visit this website, then like, I don't know what 24 hours later. So I don't know. I have watched it, but I'm people buy and a, well, at least here, at least we can see like, if you align it with some Shangri tropes, if it works right. Because it got me into Christ. I mean, even either the title, it was so bad.
Jesper (26m 46s): Like,
Autumn (26m 46s): I mean
Jesper (26m 48s): It, in the title, I was very skeptical when a sort of titled feared at calm was like, no, but then I could just see like the links back to the ring and stuff like that. It got me so far, at least are checking out. So it's just sorta like a, you know, on Amazon, if you can, if you can align yourself with some tropes in at least people will start checking it out. Of course, then you shouldn't have a shitty trailer like this one. And then people run away screaming from it. But yeah,
Autumn (27m 13s): That's true. Good point to take away after your trailers. Yeah.
Jesper (27m 16s): But since I haven't watched it myself, I collect it. Some words for it,
Autumn (27m 20s): From the critics. Okay. Let's hear it.
Jesper (27m 23s): This one is from the New York daily news. So it goes like this quote, the story, it's a mess. This is it. A proper and critic, right? The story, this is a, it's a mess. Some of the images are offensive. The acting on the par and the dialogue. Silly. Yeah.
Autumn (27m 45s): Yeah.
Jesper (27m 45s): And how about this one from Metro times, quote for you.com his full of inconsistencies and contradictions, but none are more than disturbing than the fact that not only, no, sorry, none are more disturbing than the fact that not a single policeman wears gloves at any of the crime scene scattered throughout the field in quotes.
Autumn (28m 12s): Then my,
Jesper (28m 12s): And then my favorite one is my personal favorite one. This is from us today. Quote, theater comm is a cinematic equivalent of spam in your head,
Autumn (28m 20s): Email inbox hurt that I would not want that review EVER. That would be a painful, I feel kind of bad for the person who, you know, someone obviously love this and I don't know if they did, but yeah.
Jesper (28m 38s): I mean, when he was so bad that the, even the trailers gets me off, then it had to go on my top five.
Autumn (28m 45s): That's horrible. I know that it was pretty horrible, but you are going to love my number for it's just, okay, lets be ready. And I'm not sure if you can make it better than this, but let's try. So she says that I'll have sound, but this is, you know, I would have literally had to watch it. This was before trailers and SoundCloud clips and all that. But this is called the beast of hollow mountain. I think that's a title. That's a good title. And it sounds pretty good. Yeah. It's, it's got it. All. It is caught the lovable orphan boy who is trunk father who's eaten by the beast. It's got to love triangle for and by a Texas cowboy who, who falls for the wealthy Mexican girl, her patrol Don Rek.
Autumn (29m 29s): Oh and the beast, which is the Tyrannosaurus Rex. Yeah. It didn't quite see that coming in. But in fact, this, this show we here, I think he was from the 1950s. It, it is
Jesper (29m 45s): Well I'm in the movie. Is when is it set In? Is it it's a step in and the real world? Or was it like a fence as you posted
Autumn (29m 51s): Is the real world, Texas sort of like the zero Zuora sort of like kind of a time period. That kind of a thing.
Jesper (29m 57s): We have to run on a sec Rex in that. Okay. How did that go up there?
Autumn (30m 1s): Yeah. Well it's this show is listed as the first film to show dinosaurs and Cowboys in the same picture. Right?
Jesper (30m 11s): So how do you do to get that out to you?
Autumn (30m 14s): I don't know, but it's fantastically horrible. And the plot it was talking to the plot is like a hundred percent based on state or tropes obviously. So you know, the good guy to Texas cowboy, he just loves the girl. The girl was being forced to marry this guy because our family says, you know, he was wealthy. It was one of the guy for you. And of course the man she's marrying is cruel and that this sweet little boy who, you know, he's has a trunk and he was trying to take care of them and be the adult. And his dad goes and gets eaten by this monster. And it was so sad As I haven't really looked at anything before I've watched it. And so I'm waiting on pins and needles thinking this beast or the mountain was going to be a dragon.
Autumn (30m 56s): It had to give me a dragon. It was so excited and that it ends up being this dinosaur, which I agree. It, it makes no sense at all. It just there's this beast and the H how that ended up in the mountain. I don't know. But don't they never explain the best part. That was a special effect. So this is back in the era of stop motion on like clay animation, right. And features it has this crazy tongue. It's like, it's hilarious. It's constantly out of its mouth like this, like Medusa a snake. Oh, I had to wake up. Adam fell asleep for the switch. I had to wake him up and be like, yeah, I'll have to see this, this, this, no, no, no.
Jesper (31m 38s): Oh, how cool of you? So you were waking them up to see the boy is shitty movie on your mind.
Autumn (31m 44s): I see the, this tirade a source right now it's worth watching just four, but it was totally tropes to death. I had been all the way down, no surprises, except for obviously the dinosaur and the cowboy and the Mexican Dawn. But I mean, the cowboy tries to save his fiance, his girl, the woman who loves her fiance. Oh. Till he gets eaten. By the time you write a source Rex, but this made it to number four instead of lower, because it actually had, besides all the tropes won good plot points. One of the first scenes is that the ranger looking for some lost cows and the swamp, and then they actually end up coming back to the swamp in using this swamp, just stop the dinosaur.
Autumn (32m 27s): It's like, Oh my God, they are so tired of that up. So that it was amazing that they typed it up. So I just buy this one, made it a number four. Otherwise Texan cowboy, missing ranch, hands,
Jesper (32m 41s): Cows missing a love triangle. Orphan boy. It was so tropey, now that it's fantastic. Okay. But I have to deduct the 0.4, the fact that you would wake up your husband to look like to sleep and then your waking up to what is the most shitty stuff. But he was watching it with me and I don't think you can deduct a point unless we brought him in and asked him if it wasn't good or a bad, because he was laughing as we were, as I was looking at these yesterday, he was like, Oh my God. I remember that. So yeah. Will you say that?
Jesper (33m 22s): I, yeah. Everybody can say that. I think it was fine, but Oh, but that one was actually not that bad for a really bad movie. Hmm. It was the special effects was just fantastic. I, I absolutely loved the door to source tongue. Oh yeah. Well, it was like a, the original King Kong and stuff like that. So it looks so bad the two, but it doesn't get in the movies too. I did not go back that far, but no, I didn't go back to that. Fight that because then you could have always, everything was shit. All right. Well that was my job, but so my next one.
Jesper (34m 4s): Alright. You might actually recognize the voice in this clip. Okay. Okay. All right. Ready?
Audio Clip (34m 13s): I learned the truth for a long time ago. Jennifer end of the dark is when the case for most of us alive, it's happening again?
Jesper (34m 28s): Did you recognize the male voice? Oh, most, but he just couldn't quite catch it. It's Christmas later as I hear it now, but yeah. Okay. So which is this one? This is a, a lone in a dock. Oh, the one in the dark now I don't think I was sad. I swear one of the sentences, there is the exact same one that used the trailer for pitch black, which is visit. Yes. But that's a different, Okay. Anyway, this is a loan for the dock and I'm here to see where it's going to get slightly embarrassing. You know, you did watch this one. No, I did watch it.
Jesper (35m 7s): Yes. But I have to admit how incredibly stupid. So this, this movie is based on the video game. Okay. So, so far so good. The only problem was that it is actually based on a different video game at night. I thought it was so I was really unprepared completely. So I went into this thinking that this was a movie on a video game That I love to play when I was a child, I really liked it. And then I started watching this movie and I was like, this makes no sense. I really don't understand how, how are they?
Jesper (35m 48s): And it took me quite a while before I figured out that this is something completely different, just it was two different video games completely. And they have nothing to do with each other. But, and, and then I tried later on, I tried to figure out what, what what's that game called then? That I actually liked plating because I clearly remember it as it is called alone in a dark that game. But then when I looked alone or with the doc up on the internet, then I can see it's a different game. So it is not the same one, but I still haven't worked out what the, what the one that I wanted to watch was them. So I ended up watching this movie that has nothing to do with what I wanted.
Jesper (36m 32s): Right. And I was in for the most shitty experience ever, because you're basically following like a supernatural detective who uncovers a long lost tribe who worshiped demons. And of course, demons are then attempting to reach into our world. OK. And our detectives can only stop them by acquiring the help of his ex ex-girlfriend. Of course, of course, because that's what you do. Well, see, that's why you shouldn't be broken up with her, you know? Yeah. So, yeah. You know what, I it's just, I just realized that basically my first three picks are horror movies that are, So let's say something.
Jesper (37m 20s): I, well, horror movies, I think are hard to get right now. Yeah. It was just like the only thing that I can say, you don't want this movie. It, it is such a waste of time and it just to drive home the point. So listen to this quote, which is from the movie. Okay. Okay. And this is just to show us, she would do, this is a, So a bit of context. They are in a cave and the character to is going to speak here. I think it's a girlfriend, she's a pointing at some native American text on the wall into cave. Okay. And then she says, quote, it's a warning. It says, once you make it down here, live, you're already dead and quote.
Jesper (38m 4s): It's just, I don't know. It was just like the most shitty dialogue I could. And I couldn't even make up something that's shitty. I did just that. It's all good. It was pretty much say it. I want to make it down here. Like if you're already dead, I mean, what the fuck are you talking about? That's impossible. Yeah. Hi. I guess its supposed to be frightening. What? I would have been like the grammar Nazi going. I don't know. I, I think he could reword this. Yeah. Oh my God. So bad. Please. Don't watch that movie. Well, I, I have, mine
Autumn (38m 37s): Is not a horror movie. In fact mine is Fantasy. Yeah. I have fence coming up as well as good. I got to have in my list. So my number three is an ATAR, the fighting evil. Who have you ever heard of it? That
Jesper (38m 51s): Sounds really bad.
Autumn (38m 55s): It's the perfect trope. It starts the film opens or is this baby at star or who has a birth Mark? And so it means that someday it will, of course he will grow up to destroy the spider cold. And so can you, you know, there's this, it obviously this prophecy, so we got this prophecy baby birth Mark.
Jesper (39m 17s): And that makes sense. Yeah.
Autumn (39m 19s): So the high priest of the ancient one, he attempts to kill the baby's. So the birthmark is covered up and he sent off to live in a far away village where as he was growing up, he decided that he really actually is in love with a woman who's grown up at CES sister and he asked for permission to marry her. And that's what he finds out. It's not really a sister and he was adopted
Jesper (39m 41s): And well, that was a very convenient,
Autumn (39m 44s): This and that makes a fine, even though they grew up as siblings, I'm sure. No. Oh anyways. So in the home study setting, what can you do? Yeah, that's right teenagers. But you know, obviously the King finds out about it or it comes and how he feels his sister slash brother takes her back. And there's all these things like he finds this warrior again, another trope who was an enemy of this ancient source or that had Tara supposed to be the one to take down. So there's all of this law Amazons are in, there are this woman who is an Amazon and a woman who wins Hill and falls head over heels in love with them, but goes with them to rescue his wife, bride slash sister.
Autumn (40m 29s): And she ends up dying, not the Sr the bride, she banks. It, it is so true. So convoluted, everyone's stereotypical your looking at the only good part was that, you know, what was the spider call? So there was a mess of spiders crawling all over and the, yeah. So the ancient one, the evil source, or was a pretty, it was kind of interesting, but it's, it's just pretty much, yeah. You can look to go through it and going, my head hurts. Hey,
Jesper (41m 1s): How much can you just crawling in my head?
Autumn (41m 7s): It was my head. Would've been better. I mean, if it had no direct Plott it just makes no sense, but he kept tripping over a things. And this word here is suppose to teach them how to fight and ends up actually having been working for the ancient world. It just, it was just, you're just finally going, just end it please.
Jesper (41m 26s): He's put me out of my misery.
Autumn (41m 29s): Why did you start this one? And yeah, if it wasn't him, you know, the robot's
Jesper (41m 34s): A mystery science theater is sitting there groaning themselves. Yeah. You couldn't have made it through this one a lot. Oh my God. I don't understand why you want to so many good. If I am just masochistic, I guessed, I don't know what they were saying. That they were funny and they get better from here and go to the top two are just out of the park or I can't wait. Oh my God. Okay. Well I have two left. All right, let's go.
Jesper (42m 14s): And this one is not horror. So this is what this one is. Well, it's Fantasy slash adventure. I would call it all right. Now you're paying attention. It's also the first movie and a series, which was actually one of my favorite series growing up. Okay. It was before streaming services. And I actually remember a friend on and myself. We went to a gas station just up the street back then. And then they had like displays have movies that you could rent. I think I remember a desk. There was a ton of them that was probably like 50 movies or something. That was probably It.
Jesper (42m 54s): And you can shuffle through to them and find out what do you want it? And we rented THE, we had previously rented the first movie in this series and we really liked it. And then we got to this one with the second movie in this series. Okay. So see if you can get, guess what? This is
Audio Clip (43m 22s): In the fall there's centuries bond burst. Nothing could have prepared them for an
Jesper (43m 31s): It's just a way to say it. The quickening. It was just like, it sounds so bad. This is so eighties. It's incredible. Yeah, it is. It's a it's it's like, lets take a word and see if you can sell it. Say it in such a way. It sounds bad. Even though it was like the quickening. I mean, it sounds like what the heck they all came up with. So do you know what I mean? What movie does this? The quickening is like the subtitle of it that it's not ringing a bell. It's a Highlander to Oh, okay. Shoot at. It's been a long time. Yeah, indeed. I don't think honestly, I don't think I would enjoy Highland Highlander one today, but as a kid, but I loved it.
Jesper (44m 14s): I thought it was still good that I was so cool. And all of that, you know, he, well, he was pretty gruesome, gruesome right in the cafeteria, the others. And then he got that powers. It's a pretty bad, but the way I loved it. And then we, we went to a, we rented this a, this a high level to, from the gas station and I was Probably like 14 years old or something. And we went home and what is it? And I hated it. Even back then as 14 years old, it was just like, it's a completely mindless story where the good guy fights the bad guy, but it's showing up it just because you don't, there is absolutely no point to it. There was nothing going on that that makes any meaning in this movie at all.
Jesper (44m 59s): And it just makes no sense. And also it doesn't add anything to the story universe at all. I can, I can almost see it. It almost feels like somebody, you know, maybe the movie director or something went into the writers room, maybe at that point in time where they were all like brainstorming, what could this be? And then he just said, well, that sounds great. Let's take all of that. And we were just going to film It. No reason to no reason to change or any of them will just go straight with you as you have it here. It's it's like a complete mess. Oh my God. So you kill yourself. If you try to walk this way, because it's so bad.
Autumn (45m 42s): I remember that from the eighties though. That's where the idea is that the second, you know, any of the sequels were always just like horrible. 'cause it's just like kind of like, Oh, some of like the first one that seemed to be a second one and they throw out everything was no sense, but it was not that surprising, But Oh, that is pretty. It is sad when they do something like that. Especially two where the first movie was it horrible though? Like you said, things had changed a little bit in since you were born.
Jesper (46m 9s): I think it would be a horrible today, but you know, when I was like 13 or something, I don't know. I can remember a time when the first one came out probably a couple of years before, but 12, 13 years old or whatever, it was amazing, but they don't want us to the second one.
Autumn (46m 26s): I'll keep that in mind. I mean, you have to remember it. So your, your closer in age to my husband. So I was a few years older and by that time I could drive and I don't know if I was watching bad movies at that time. Yeah.
Jesper (46m 38s): I don't know. Maybe, you know, well then I'll go back and revisit it. Yeah.
Autumn (46m 43s): Okay. Unless I really feel like watching bad movies, which like, if you've already agreed, I might be like for some strange reason, so bad that you're, you turn off your author brain and you just go, wow.
Jesper (46m 56s): I hate it because I feel like I'm wasting my life is like, I'm never going to get this one and a half hours back. This is just a complete waste of life.
Autumn (47m 5s): I understand. Alright, well that, you're going to love my number two. Then you are ready. This one is more scifi. It's like, yeah, it's called the daytime ended and a bad day. Well, let's say the whole movie fits into the note that was in Wikipedia about the name that the film was originally titled. Earth's final fury, which is, that's a pretty good title. Yeah, no, that was pretty cool. That was changed the vortex because they thought it would sell more tickets. And the final title, the day time ended, came around For no one knows why that's pretty much fits the movie
Jesper (47m 41s): Except for the war Tech's title. The other two is for sure
Autumn (47m 45s): That that's all fine, but I would not say that that would not sell it. So this one, the premise is this family, a young family, parents, two kids moved to the Sonoran desert, which was a very pretty desert. And then the other grandparents and these weird, it's a super Nova in conjunction sort of thing going on. And then those are the reports about UFO's or in the area. And the one daughter kind of has this telepathic connection to one of the aliens. And then the grandmother C is one overnight. Of course there's lots of screaming and running and they're terrified. And I think that they see the UFO was with a really horrible light's in the sky and they run outside. I remember the horses getting away as well.
Autumn (48m 26s): There, we had a little ranch in all of the family hides over night in separate areas because they are terrified. And while they're outside hiding, there is actually these giant monsters that come through a reptilian thing and this other thing, and they're just battling it out in the snow and Derrick deserts. But then the UFL is come back and like lasers at the monsters and then the sunrises and everyone gets up and they walk and they're all together as a family. And they would look over in through the next Valley. And there's this weird futuristic city, which I actually didn't know until I read the plot on this one, that it actually is supposed to be like a thousand years until the future. I had no clue watching it. And then it adds with like the doctor saying that it's all going to be fine now.
Autumn (49m 11s): That's it. Hey, when was this made? Is not as old as its sound. I might've been the 80th as well. So it would have
Jesper (49m 22s): To go like special effects and stuff like
Autumn (49m 25s): That as well. Really horrible. I mean the reptilian amphibious creatures that are fighting, I don't even know why they were there, where they came from, what they had to do with the little UFO's that are zapping through the walls and these a little space lights and people would freeze. And it's just
Jesper (49m 44s): Sounds more confusing than anything. That's it? Like you even do it even explaining what it was about. You lost me a bit there, like, Oh yeah.
Autumn (49m 52s): Oh, what are you? There is no sense. And like I said, until I actually read the description of it to remind myself what it was. I was like, I don't see how you go from Okay. To conjunctions aliens, reptilian, creatures fighting each other to the future. So I joke now I actually thought they ended up on the alien planet and they have been transported there. I chose blue what was going on in some really bad acting and really bad explaining. I, and even
Jesper (50m 28s): When I think about horses and the desert, Alrighty, you should've been a clue, that's it? Yeah. That doesn't work very well for a range of situations. But yeah, no. So it's, that one was pretty painful. Not as bad as number one, but it was pretty. Yeah. Hmm. Okay. I think that one you had before, it sounded Western this one way to be honest, but Okay. So the final one on my list is also one way I loved the original, Okay. Is also one from my childhood. So it was probably not that good today if I watched it again, but I won't, but this is not a sequel.
Jesper (51m 10s): This is a remake and it's from 2002. So C if you can guess what this is,
Audio Clip (51m 21s): It's the world's number one phenomenon. I cruise. They just thought that you could just write it in. And three players, rules. The game told you this, the promised land two or three, two, one.
Jesper (51m 44s): That was just somebody's laughing because he, I didn't know, he just slammed him into the ground or something. It might be a bit of tough one to guess if I was gonna say it, but it's going to be Eddie guests. I would just throw out mortal Kombat, but I have no idea. No. Okay. You want to just not too bad. We have a guest. It's a roller ball. All right. Well, I don't, haven't seen the first one or the remakes, so, okay. So tell me about this one. Yeah. So the original is from 1975. Wow. And I watched that when I was at a child and I really liked it. So rollable, it's this sort of extreme sport.
Jesper (52m 27s): Okay. So they have like this metal bowl and they are on an oval pitch that just goes round and round. And then they were holding the walls where we have to put the middle ball into that. Just go to a point actually like a fun game. Oh, well, yeah. It's pretty crazy because they, they drive like motorcycles on the pitch and they, they, they hit each other. I think as far as I remember, they had weapons as well. So it's like, you, you, you can die from, to gaming. And that was why I loved it was so different and it was so cool. And then they had made all of this kind of special gear and, and stuff like they want to do. It was cool. And then in a 2002 and some morons decided to let's do a remake of that one.
Jesper (53m 10s): Yeah. That was a good idea. Oh no, no. It's just, it's horrible. So you have, in this remake, you have entire scenes, which are basically serves. Absolutely no purpose. So I just want to be just one example. Here's this just tells me if you think that sounds like good story telling to you. Okay. So you have one character dragging another character across town to some sort of a apartment building to look for somebody who isn't there and you don't know why and the person they are looking for is never, ever mentioned again.
Autumn (53m 57s): Wow.
Jesper (53m 58s): Oh, look for somebody that you don't know who it is. And it's never mentioned again. And then they walk away again and you will be like,
Autumn (54m 6s): Huh? Yeah, that doesn't, that it doesn't work for me. So that's,
Jesper (54m 10s): But that, that's how these entire movie is, is just, wow. This is nothing in it. That makes any sense. I don't know if they were drunk or something when they make the script for it or is it just like Jesus Christ?
Autumn (54m 25s): That's pointless plots. Just, Yeah. Pointless scenes get under my skin. So that would, I would not have made it through that one. I would've gotten up and done something else. I would've been like I'm right here.
Jesper (54m 39s): That was five very terrible movie picks. Yeah.
Autumn (54m 42s): Okay. All right. You're ready for him. My number one in the back to Fantasy for this one, this is called the wizards of the last kingdom. How's that for a title? I think also it sounds pretty cool. So I was excited when I saw this one on the mystery science theater. Cause you know yeah. But it sounds like, you know, if it doesn't have to be, this will be great. It was so brave, knowingly bad in a series of bad shows. I mean, it doesn't even have a spark that made me laugh. I was so disappointed and it will all of the one out of all of them. I remember this one, the least. So I actually had to look this one up quite a bit, but it starts nice. There is a peaceful kingdom of at home and there's a teenage boy, Simon.
Autumn (55m 24s): Who's the son of the court wizard, the Kings wizard and this evil sorcerer convinces the queen two overthrow her husband, a name, the sourcer, the ruler. And so S the sourcer or the goods source, or, you know, a wizard census, you know, realize this is what's happening. And he is like, gives her sun this magic ring. It says, you must keep this at all costs and protect the princess. And of course the princess gets captured and what assignment do the sun? And he loses the ring like that first scene gone at it so that it starts, you know, it goes crazy. So Simon grows up, he meets this disgrace hero Corps who is going to help them rescue the princess.
Autumn (56m 10s): But Simon ends up rescuing core half the time, even though Simon doesn't have a clue, has never shown any aptitude or any training in magic Ever until this point until he thrust on to the world that he knows nothing about. And so he still, he still saving the wizard. Its so bad that Simon somehow manages to raise the zombies of dead hero's to come help him rescue the princess. And the dead heroes gets so annoyed at Simon and they end up attacking him
Jesper (56m 40s): Or he does sound pretty annoying, super
Autumn (56m 43s): Annoying, everything goes horribly wrong. And they ended up getting some help. They managed to get the villagers to help them and they would go raid the castle. Simon manages to find the fricking missing ring that he dropped in the castle and has been in plain sight since day one. Even though the evil wizard can find it. Oh now the best part, the best part is then Simon with the ring now battles, the experienced, skilled, evil wizards. He was just lying there on the ground on it. I think it was like, I remember a glowing, like you had to see the glow. It was somewhere a slightly hidden, but it was like, you know, maybe in a suit of armor or something, it was so obviously is not going to where you want to be.
Autumn (57m 26s): He would have dropped it. It was so stupid. But you know, the, the, the grand finale, this is between the special effects and Simon, the novice is fighting. This experienced Grandmaster, evil wizard and winning and winning the princess. It was just such a hit. I know I was so bad and this sums it up really well. This is by the writer Edna HA because I don't recall this movie with so much shot as it was beaten to death, when they whittled it down to what was useful from the footage, it only ran 58 minutes. Now, Roger, as a director had done a lot of sword and sorcery of films. So you told a couple of the editor's to pull all they could from them and edit that footage together.
Autumn (58m 9s): So now the finished movie has a 15 to 20 minutes Prolo. The, it has nothing to do with the rest of the day.
Jesper (58m 17s): So HA
Autumn (58m 17s): So that's my number one to beat that.
Jesper (58m 22s): And so you have like 20 minutes that has nothing to do with
Autumn (58m 27s): Nope. There's just these people fighting and this pro log about what's going on. It's just, Oh, and then they get you in the movie and which was bad enough. And like I said, I mean, if all the things he drops the ring. Yeah. And maybe he should have dropped it out in the wilderness. Yeah.
Jesper (58m 42s): We just did this run into theaters and stuff like that. Oh yeah.
Autumn (58m 46s): I remember. I remember there was this whole, no, actually I was at a tar, had a huge issue about his and the name and going on blue Ray. I CA it was a little bit older. I don't know if it was in B rated theaters or something, but it was a civil, a movie and it had ratings. You can look it up on, I am. I can't remember what it's called, but you have to be, I am DB it's they're Oh my God. You know, it was, was it called me again? It was called the wizards of the lost kingdom. So I have, are you interested in this one now?
Jesper (59m 23s): I have to look it up
Autumn (59m 24s): So you'll have to look it up. And there was a sequel and I've watched the cul too. And that one will be even worse, but I don't want to go there. I can speak well, comparatively.
Jesper (59m 40s): Oh my God. It has 2.8 out of 10 rating.
Autumn (59m 45s): If I win this one with that moving, it is so horrible. It was bad. Tropes, bad acting. Just, just bad, so bad.
Jesper (59m 56s): But, but how, how I still don't understand. So you are watching 20 minutes of a sort of intro stuff where people are just fighting. You have no idea what's going on.
Autumn (1h 0m 4s): Well, if there were some voiceover saying previous, you know, the history of the kingdom, there was a war. Yes. And then this good King Rose and write it all the countries wrongs. And he has his Nobel wizard and the daughter and marriage and Oh, look, there's the evil wizard to once to overthrow everything for 20 minutes. Yeah.
Jesper (1h 0m 24s): And then all of a sudden it just starts with something and, and he drops a ring in a silo or something. And then once off doing all kinds of things to figure it out, that it's right there. When he left in the beginning,
Autumn (1h 0m 38s): Are they able sort of source who was taken over at the castle? Can't find it. Even though it was like, what's the point? I don't know if there was one other than the guy that wasn't evil, evil source or who took over. And there was Simon who want it to save everyone.
Jesper (1h 0m 56s): And since I'm an idiot, but I mean, the people writing this must have had some sort of story. They want it to tell her something. I mean, what, what does this,
Autumn (1h 1m 5s): I think he might be expecting too much of. I don't know. I would have to go and ask Edna HA who said, you know, it was the director's fault who turned it into the mush pit. Yeah.
Jesper (1h 1m 18s): But they did it. Did they go in to the kindergarten and say, Hey, can any of your kid's to direct the movie for us?
Autumn (1h 1m 24s): Probably. It was like, yeah, I can tell it is painful. And again, it, a lot of it comes down to the tropes and no plot. And it was so God, so stupid. I mean, if you're going to lose the magic ring seriously at the source or worse feet and you can't find it. And then the battle between the two of them and he wins, I'm sorry. He would have been toast like that. It just, no. So anyway, I think I won In it. It's true. I know what it is. Yeah. I think actually that might be the worst one.
Autumn (1h 2m 6s): It was the worst out of 14. I'm really bad movie.
Jesper (1h 2m 10s): It's a 20 minute intro. I just can't. I can't even imagine ever seeing it. I mean, all, all of these other movies that I had, they are really shitty, but they don't have 20 minute pointless intro for nothing. I mean, come on. That's incredible.
Autumn (1h 2m 24s): It's a long enough to put it in theaters. That's incredible.
Jesper (1h 2m 30s): Jesus, you mentioned those people buying a ticket, how upset they are going to be afterwords is just like, what the heck was this? Like you just paid for this shit.
Autumn (1h 2m 37s): Yeah. And I was expecting a bad movie and I was disappointed because it was so bad. It wasn't even funny. I mean, some of the other ones we're like, Oh, you know, let's do shots every time they say this or something. This was just really bad.
Jesper (1h 2m 52s): Okay. I'll give you this one. A even though I had to deduct points from you, you still can you stop the cost of you inside the cross? The finish line before me, it was like, I don't have made a major defeat. It's just a slight small one.
Autumn (1h 3m 6s): Oh, well I will be gracious in my winnings. Yeah.
Jesper (1h 3m 10s): I think they will probably put us at like 10 to one or something.
Autumn (1h 3m 15s): Yeah, sure. Yeah. I have 10. And you have one. I understand that. Yeah.
Jesper (1h 3m 19s): Oh no. But the other way around, because I'm sure we'd already caught it at 11 Podcast about alternating list. So I must be up at 10 to one. Now
Autumn (1h 3m 27s): We'll have to go check out or the listener as you can let us know who's winning. I'm pretty sure it's me. Yeah.
Jesper (1h 3m 33s): Can I trust them? Just this one? Yes. Yes. But the overall there's, there's a clear difference so that, yeah, we'll be back to this creation stuff again the next month. And then I will need to pull a win back home again. So, yeah, but I was wondering in closing off here, is there any like serious for just one second? Is there any serious learnings? One can take from all of this nightmare is shit that we had just been through.
Autumn (1h 4m 9s): Don't use stereotypical characters. It's okay. If you use tropes, everyone uses tropes. You should break them or twist them. That helps make characters that are original. That's really where the heart of the story line. All of the ones that I listed had tropes, which is bad enough, but characters, I mean Texas cowboy, Mexican, Fiona, you know, a love interest Therese for her come up with a real characters that the reader is gonna care about. And if you want to have a love triangle, have a love triangle, just don't throw in the term in the store.
Jesper (1h 4m 45s): Yeah. Yeah. And the trucks pull the audience in. So yeah. I mean, I think it proves that it works, right. I mean, if, if you align it with tropes, people will start checking it up. It's like, wow, this looks interesting because it's something that they recognize that it would work. It doesn't work. So please, please, please add something new and interesting. And please don't just rehash. What is already done as well. It does not make it any better. And I'm looking at new Marvel. Can you give a shit together?
Autumn (1h 5m 16s): A little warning? If you have been warned,
Jesper (1h 5m 18s): It was good enough. Okay, cool. Next Monday we we'll be back. And the way we will discuss something that is incredibly important, but often overlooked. And that's the mindset you need to adopt in order to self publish.
Narrator (1h 5m 35s): If you'd like what? You just heard, that there's a few things you can do to support The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/ Am. Writing Fantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, going to stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
What is in store for indie authors in 2021?
Join Autumn and special guest, Mark Coker, the CEO and founder of Smashwords as they discuss his predictions for 2021. There are some highs and some trends to be cautious of, as well as some new tools that might help you find your readers.
Check out the blog of Mark's predictions at https://blog.smashwords.com/2020/12/publishing2021.html and visit Smashwords at https://www.smashwords.com/.
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (0s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast in today's Publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Autumn (29s): Hello. Well, I am Autumn and today. Yes, Jesper is on a bit of a vacation. And instead I have a very special guest with me, Mark Coker, the CEO and founder of Smashwords a high Mark. Thank you so much for joining me here today to be here. Oh, I really, really appreciate it. I'll let you introduce me to be more of your background than I could have scraped off the web, if you would be so kind
Mark (57s): As to how much do you want?
Autumn (59s): Well, we have 45 minutes, but I think guests, you know, they might want us to get into, we're going to talk about your 20, 21 Publishing Predictions. So Hey, you know,
Mark (1m 9s): Well, make it really quick. Okay. So the story of Smashwords. So I founded Smashwords about 13 years ago, it was born out of necessity. My wife and I had written a book together, my wife as a former reporter for soap opera, weekly magazine. So we wrote a Romana clef about the soap opera industry wrote it in a cabin in the woods in Vermont.
Autumn (1m 30s): Oh no, no. We just felt it from a connection. Yeah.
Mark (1m 35s): We were lucky enough to get represented by distal and got a rich in New York. So one of the top agency's they shopped around to all of the major publishers of commercial women's fiction twice for two years. And it just got nothing but rejection. And the, the only feedback that we got from the publisher's that, that you know, that they never tell you that your book's sucks or that your writing sucks. They just say, its it's not right for us. Or we don't know how to place it or whatever. The only feedback that we got was that previous novels that the targeted soap opera fans hadn't performed well. So they were, they weren't willing to take a chance on our work. And it was really disappointing to have the, the door shut in our faces.
Mark (2m 17s): And I started thinking about the challenges that we were facing. We knew that, you know, we had already shown our Book to fans of soap operas, and we knew that fans of soap operas enjoyed our books, our book. So I started imagining, you know, there are probably a hundreds of thousands, millions of other writers, just like us who were unable to get a book deal simply because the publishers didn't see the commercial potential and their work. And I also started thinking, you know, commercial potential is the wrong way to value literature. It, you know, books are worth so much more than money. You can't measure them by money alone. And if we're only going to measure the value of a worth based on how many of the value of a book based on how many copies it can sell them.
Mark (2m 59s): And then eventually we're just going to have nothing but celebrity books. And, and we don't want that. You know, I, I love diversity in Writing diversity in thought and umm, you know, what better way to, you know, to, to celebrate the diversity of humanity than to what anyone published. So I thought, you know, anybody in the world should be able to publish because at the time you could self publish video on YouTube, you know, 13 years ago, 14 years ago, you can self publish on a blog and you know, it, it was still, it was a contentious time. People thought, well how dare someone think they can be a reporter or a journalist on their blog or, or published on YouTube.
Mark (3m 39s): But you know, those people were reaching massive audiences and, and some of them were commercializing this audience. So why not make it possible for any writer anywhere in the world to publish an e-book for free. And that was the Genesis of Smashwords. That's what we launched in early 2008. We're pretty much the first to market with it. Amazon launched their digital text platform, which is now KTP just a couple of months before us. So we were working on the same thing at the same time, you know, launched it a great time. We launched it at a time when eBooks were less than 1% of the overall book market had no idea that they were about to explode like they did.
Mark (4m 20s): And so it was just this perfect storm, you know, in those first, early years of 2008, 2013, where the promise of self publishing met the, the, the, the advantages of digital distribution of eBooks because suddenly retailers could stock every single book, every single e-book. They wanted every single e-book from every self published author. And we were there at the beginning, knocking down those doors and opening up these major retailers to self published authors and once self published authors got mainstream distribution at Barnes and noble Sony, you know, Kobo, Apple, Amazon There, sales exploded now.
Mark (5m 5s): And it completely changed how writers and how the industry views self publishing. Because 13 years ago there was a tremendous stigma around self publishing. Yeah. No one wanted to self publish now, you know, unless you are foolish really, and you really have to believe in yourself, right?
Autumn (5m 27s): Yeah. Yeah. You're almost considered either a failure or your book was enough quality. All of that was a horrible thing to get over those people today don't even realize, right?
Mark (5m 36s): No, it was a horrible time and, and writer's were the most vicious to their fellow writers, you know? And well, yeah, somewhat, sometimes, sometimes, but yeah, it was, it, it was a way back 13, 14 years ago. A if you self published, really your only option is to self publish was in print. Yeah. But without a traditional publisher supporting you, you, weren't going to be able to get bookstore distribution. And if you couldn't get into stores where people went to buy books, you are going to fail is a writer. And that's why most self published authors were failing. It wasn't necessarily because they were sucky writers or that they were vain.
Mark (6m 18s): I mean, let's be honest, all Publishing his vein. Okay. That all Publishing this vanity. Yeah. You've got to be like, you, you believe that you've created something you believe that it's valuable to other people there's some vanity in that. So it was just admit it all. And, but yeah, but what we saw is that readers don't care for Book a self-published author. If it comes from a publisher, they just care about the quality of that author of the quality of the writing in the value that they are getting. So yeah, so everything changed, you know, very, very quickly in 2008, 2009, 2010, you know, we were there at a very exciting time and, you know, writers around the world were unleashed upon the world has published authors and you know, many of them didn't sell very much, but a few of them, the same authors that couldn't get a traditional publishing deal at the same authors that couldn't get an agent, you know, it started becoming international bestsellers, you know, in New York times, best sellers USA today, bestseller wall street, journal bestsellers.
Mark (7m 22s): So it's an exciting, and every time there's a, a, a, a, an indie author who's successful, it really inspires the rest of us. It takes, it shows us that yes, you can self publish with pride, professionalism and commercial success. And so what else matters
Autumn (7m 37s): Exactly to me, I, EVERY, and a lot of gurus and the advice in writing an industry, and I know you've in Britain read on your blog, you know, you have to define what success is for you. And to me, you know, but at the time this was released will have been released, but I'm actually releasing my 21st book on this coming Sunday. And I'm hearing back from the arch team. And I think these are already fans. So that's why I chose them to be part of my book launch. And to hear those are like, Oh, this is the best you've ever read or written. And, you know, it's a gripping. And you're like, we just love you all are going to have one reader say that to you, to me, that's success. And that is just, you can't get that if it wasn't for platforms like Smashwords, or, you know, Amazon and all the others, but, you know, full disclosure, I suppose I should have a full disclosure.
Autumn (8m 25s): Right. I joined Smashwords. I did Amazon independently and I uploaded my debut novel, born of water to Smashwords in 2012. I'm almost 10 years old on the platform. So I am very excited. I've been with you, not since your beginning, but since my beginning is an author in my journey. And I think there is a Smashwords. I know that there's a lot of other platforms draft to digital is one that, you know, I think it's a very direct competitor since you act as a distributor. And so it draft to digital, but you know, to me, you offer it more benefits and I've kept all my books on. Smashwords not just because of the loyalty, because I love your message. And I love the feeling that you really care about authors, and you are an author, but I think of how far things are like coupons.
Autumn (9m 9s): You've just started doing something else. I want to ask you about a pre release pre-sale feature is going to talk about that in a little bit. It's part of a, sort of your Predictions. So you have this really cool things that I don't know, any other platform where I can say, like, you know what, I'm going to give people who join my, read your list of 50% off coupon, or I'm going to give them a special free coupon too. It's just so cool. It's so easy. And I really appreciate the flexibility, the things that you can do on Smashwords that you really do not have control on any other platforms.
Mark (9m 43s): Well, thanks. You know, I really appreciate that. You know, we've got a lot of, a lot of authors that have been with Smashwords for, you know, for 10 years or longer that still have not been introduced to. So, so many of these tools that we provide, yeah.
Autumn (9m 58s): I have to admit that you have an on the questionnaire, a section, and I started filling in out, but I ain't never finished it so that
Mark (10m 6s): You all through interviews
Autumn (10m 7s): As I started mine. And I don't think I ever finished it and hit publish.
Mark (10m 11s): Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, that was one of my mini wacky ideas. You know, my background is in public relations. I used to run a PR agency and, you know, in PR our job was to get our fortune 500 clients interviewed and the press that you, you know, you are always looking for a free press coverage. Everybody wants to be interviewed and tell their story. And, you know, authors are the same way. And I thought, well, wouldn't it be cool if we could just create this tool that would allow author's to interview themselves in and share the story behind the author. And so that's been really fun feature. I, I think we've had that feature for six or seven years now. Yeah. That's one of many features.
Mark (10m 51s): And you mentioned Smashwords coupons. You know, that's something that we did very early on. I think we introduced Smashwords coupons maybe in 2009 and we've since expanded it. I mean, there's so many different coupon options that we offer. Now, nobody in the industry offers the, the breadth and depth and the flexibility. You can create any kind of custom coupon using these tools. And it's, it's fun to see.
Autumn (11m 17s): Yeah, it is fun to see her. I bet to see them being used and this and that would be needed to be a reason. You have a reader, it talk to you as an author, but to have all of these authors using your platform and making sales and making connections must be amazing.
Mark (11m 34s): Yeah. You know, I can't, I still can't believe that Smashwords became what it did. Yeah. I can't believe that like a 150,000 authors around the world are using us. I can't believe that we've got like 550,000 books. Yeah. And, and, you know, lots of things have changed. Like you mentioned that we have competitors now. I mean, there are dozens, really hundreds of Smashwords clones out there. Now, there, there are just so many different ways to get your books out. Its pretty confusing for providers, especially new writers because sometimes too much choice is paralyzing.
Autumn (12m 20s): I totally agree. I was very helpful because it kind of cutting things out really easy to say, Okay know meat. Oh, well that's three options I can too. Right.
Mark (12m 32s): Yeah. Well, I, I just feel like, you know, when I, I just imagined new writers coming onto the scene now and it must, they must feel like I feel when I go to the grocery store to buy laundry detergent, you know, how do you choose there? There's, there's 30 different brands and different types and they all kind of do the same thing and they all clean clothes. So how do I choose? I mean, often I'll go to buy laundry detergent and I see too much choice and I just don't buy anything. And I said that, I see that happening with a lot of authors that they, they just get so paralyzed by the complexity what's involved in becoming a self published businessperson, you know, often the, It put, it makes them vulnerable to making poor decisions, to falling victim to predators.
Autumn (13m 21s): Oh yeah. That is horribly true. Unfortunately there's too many services. I mean working as a writing coach and we offer some courses or the Am Writing Fantasy and we try to be very upfront about what we offer, but the other side of it, that people who are predatory on new authors and basically they they're stealing like author's dreams. Sometimes they make it to the point where the author gives up and I just,
Mark (13m 47s): Oh totally. Oh yeah. It, yeah. It makes me really mad when I, yeah. When you talk about dreams being stolen, that's exactly what's happening. You know, a writer may spend their entire life dreaming of writing a book and then they finally get to the point where they make the commitment to do it and complete it. And to have someone take advantage of them at that very moment when they're most vulnerable, when they're first learning and, and basically just parasitize the opportunity. It's, it's really sad to see. That's why education is so important.
Mark (14m 27s): Definitely. And that's why, you know, in the author's need to look out for their fellow Indies.
Autumn (14m 33s): That's why I think groups in that there are some benefits of social media in some of the platforms as much as it was sometimes. So yeah, but we can support each other and send out tips and warnings a to let you know, you know, don't listen to this water and you know, don't you ask for advice on 'cause otherwise you can end up in definitely the wrong spot and lose a lot of hard work or at least the passion you had because of that can really just suck it away. Now I did. I don't know if you noticed this, but I did think of it at Amazon recently rolled out that authors actually allow you to control your series. You guys that's been on your platform since I think I uploaded my first book in a series, I stopped that and be like, Oh, they're copying you guys.
Autumn (15m 19s): Yeah, yeah,
Mark (15m 20s): Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, I've used to, I can say I enjoy it. You know, we have invented many things it's Smashwords and then it just gets copied. Many of these innovations just get copied. Umm, you know, it's one of the reasons that, you know, for the first time ever, we filed for a patent for the Smashwords pre-sales tool that you mentioned. Yeah.
Autumn (15m 46s): That's a good idea. You guys deserve it because I feel like I said, I have stuck around and I think you guys have a lot of integrity and you have a lot of feeling and you truly care about authors, which is fantastic. And part of what you do. So every year, I believe from what looking back, you do these Publishing Predictions and then you do a follow-up post at the end of the year. So this year you did 13 of them. And I know it hit home for me because like looking at 'em how you talked about Facebook, Amazon and Google solidifying their platforms really because of COVID they became, these monster is in 2020. And you looked at that and that really hit home for me, especially cause like I've mentioned that it was organizing this arc team and I had one reader who's been with me for, I think almost the whole time.
Autumn (16m 30s): And she was like, well, I would love to join the launch team, but you probably want reviews for Amazon. And you know, I, for whatever reason I didn't ask you, you can't do reviews on Amazon. And I'm like, no, you know, the whole point of this is not to put more money in the number one, the, most of the world's most richest man's pocket. I'm like, you can, you can push on good reads, which is technically still owned by Amazon. You can post it on your blog. And so yeah, she is on my, on my launch team because its not all about just Amazon and they thought it was so interesting though. You talked about how these big places became massive in 2020 and that's how you began your Predictions.
Mark (17m 10s): Yeah. You know, it, it's really interesting to see, you know, I had spent a lot of time last year as everyone else did thinking about the pandemic and you know, I, I like to think about how what's happening today is going to impact the world, you know, one, two, five, 10, 20 years from now. Yeah. And, and it's also fun to stick, to sit back and think about some of the big macro trends that are powering forward in like, like a, like a storm I'm just carrying us in the wind. And, and so, you know, eCommerce is a really big trends that, you know, people are moving online, doing more of their transactions online, more of there, not just socializing online, but they are purchasing And, and entertainment online.
Mark (18m 1s): So things have been moving to the online space for a long time, but what we saw and, and we've also seen consolidation over the last 10, 15 years around a couple of really big tech platforms, you know, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and what what's really coming to light now in a w is that the pandemic and the lockdowns accelerated the consolidation around these few large companies and each of these large companies mediates the relationship between the writer and the writer's audience.
Mark (18m 43s): They are the new gatekeepers. They determine which readers can see your book, which readers can consider your book. So if you, if you, if your marketing on Facebook, you got to pay them. You know, even if you have built up your own organic social media platform there, you've got to pay them now to reach your audience. If you're Publishing at Amazon and Amazon is now pay-to-play, they have so much power and the business they determine which books are seen in which art in the books that are seen are either of the exclusive books under KDP select or books published by the Amazon imprints or books where the author is willing to pay.
Mark (19m 27s): The tax are a tole in the form of Amazon advertising to basically trap all the platforms of other authors. Because that's the, that's the way that, I mean the, the way Amazon advertising is set up, it's very nefarious because basically when you pay to advertise, you are paying to trample and other authors brand. Yeah. Yeah. You're definitely onto their coattails and holding on. Yeah. Like you can go to jail Amazon right now type in your pen name and the first four results are going to be for other authors. Yeah. Yes. That is a huge, yes.
Mark (20m 8s): That is a huge disservice to your readers because you know, your readers are looking for books by you. All right. All right. But the first results that come up are a sponsored ads from other authors. So your readers are confused and being diverted away from you, even though they're looking for from you. So that's, that's a, that's a pretty toxic caustic, umm, you know, system long term. And we're seeing that it's, it's basically going to suck the profits out of Publishing and make them more pay to play. So you don't have to pay Amazon to publish there. But if you want to be seen, these are the, yeah, these are the toll Gates that Amazon's putting up.
Mark (20m 47s): So, you know, author's need to be concerned about this. You know, authors are losing their independence, they're losing their ability to control their own destinies. And it's because you've got to have a few very strong, platform's have consolidated their power are consolidated, their market reach and the case of Amazon. Umm, you know, they, they control the world's largest collection of ebook buyers. Yeah.
Autumn (21m 14s): A very powerful search engine that everyone likes to say is just so good. But like you said, what's the purpose of the best surgeon and you can run wen now it's bringing up only Amazon, you know, ad's that people are paying there. Yeah.
Mark (21m 28s): Yeah. I think what we've seen with Amazon over the last 13 years is we went from, or they went from really a brilliantly architected search system where books that were selling best and being reviewed the best buy readers would bubble up and become more visible. That, that to me is an example of a good search, good organic discovery. But what they've been doing over the years, you know, every single year or they make little policy tweeks that all have the effect of, of, of putting up barriers, right. Making the search results. When I talked about this in the Predictions going from organic inorganic and no, no one's ever referred to a search algorithms as organic or inorganic or well I guess organic, they have, but in organic, I mean that these are artificial constructs that Amazon has created.
Mark (22m 21s): So they're not, they're not recommending books to readers because that's the book that the reader will satisfy the reader the most or that the book that the reader is looking for, they are recommending books that benefit Amazon, the most books that cost Amazon less books were Amazon could pay the author of a loyal or a lower royalty or book's where they can pay in an effective Loyall and effectively lower royalty 'cause in order for you to get that 70% you had to pay, you know, a whole bunch of money in an Amazon advertising. So your effective royalty rate is not 70% any more at Amazon. If you are using their tools. You know, if you're in KDP, select the are exclusive, the cost to you is you don't get to distribute anywhere else.
Mark (23m 6s): And then there's a cost to That. And these are the costs that are difficult to manage it. You said to measure it.
Autumn (23m 13s): That's one of the things that you talked about with KDP select and even COBA select, which I haven't even thought of, but the subscription services. I mean, what that is, you talk, you talked about how that is really dragging down the royalty for all author's because we are going to start getting used to less and less.
Mark (23m 30s): Yeah, yeah, yeah. It, it concerns me that authors are so quick to take less.
Autumn (23m 37s): I am. And I had thought of it that way until I read how you had written it. And I'm like, you're right where it's like, we are so desperate for readers that we're willing say here's our book for free or you know, for just pennies pennies for what other people would normally pay to read.
Mark (23m 51s): Yeah. I, I just wrote a story of the other day. I forgot the name of the company. It just brought in $16 million and venture funding. Oh well They're paying author's 25% list of authors who signed contracts with them, you know, authors. It, it concerns me that so many authors are willing to work for free.
Autumn (24m 21s): And
Mark (24m 23s): You know, I, and, and to work for Les in exchange for readership, I mean, you talked earlier about what it feels like to, to receive those appellations from your readers, because that's really why we write. We wrote, we write to touch people and to change the world. And that's where most writers are coming from a there's a lot, there just a higher purpose. And, and so, you know, Amazon understands that writers write for reasons that are different than traditional publishers publish traditional publishers are publishing because their running a business to make money. It it's not that traditional publishers or bad people, they're all Book lovers to, But the business and the nature of the business itself is there.
Mark (25m 4s): They are. They have to make money to keep the lights on authors who are working from home, who might have other sources of income or who just love to write because there are artists want to express themselves
Autumn (25m 17s): Addicted to it as well.
Mark (25m 20s): Well look, I, I think, I think art is one of the most noble pursuits anyone can pursue. Yep. All right. This is art and it's, it's not the most lucrative job. This is not a job. This is not a career that you follow to make a lot of money. You know, I've, I've been telling people since I first found out Smashwords, if you want to make a lot of money, go get a job at McDonald's you'll make more, most authors will make more working. Full-time at McDonald's than they will as a self published author. You've got to be doing this for reasons other than money. But if you're smart, you can do it for the love of writing, but still make money. And
Autumn (25m 57s): That's. Yeah.
Mark (25m 59s): And that that's that's, you know, the advice that I try to give authors, you know, a lot of the advice that we share is focused on, you know, evergreen best practices, things that we'll help you achieve all of your dreams, help you reach reader's help you touch your readers, but also help you earn some income because you deserve it right now. But in order for an author to maximize their opportunity, they need to approach it like a smart business person. And that's where the education comes in because we're not all naturally business people, you know, writers come from all walks, you know, like someone who studied art in college and studied business like I did,
Autumn (26m 43s): Did the, so I get it. You know, I know if I could rewrite, if I could redo the entire educational system, every a part of high school would be money management and business classes, because almost everyone has a side gig. Aside had a passion that they are developing on the side. They're going to start their own little business at some point, whether it's mowing lawns or writing a book, we all should have those basics, market marketing and business expense ideas. Yeah,
Mark (27m 12s): Yeah, yeah. That would be, that would be awesome if they would introduce that into like the high school curriculum, financial literacy, because you know, if you don't understand the language, you don't understand the terms or the concepts, then you get victimized by it.
Autumn (27m 31s): Exactly. Definitely. But you did. So we have, you know, you have these, these trends where, and you even mentioned that there's a lot of platforms and you said we've had some consolidation, but you think even some of these duplicates in all of these there's thousands of places you can sell your books. Do you think some of those might be slowly fading it maybe in 2021?
Mark (27m 54s): Yeah. I, I think we are going to see continued consolidation in Publishing and, And from multiple areas. So we've already got the, the pending acquisition of Simon and Schuster by penguin, random house, assuming that it goes through it, it may not go through if the government takes a close look at that because too much consolidation and the publishing industry starts creating an anti-competitive environment. That's not good for other publishers and not good for consumers. So we'll see if that goes through, but there's definitely a strong, a momentum towards further consolidation in Publishing among publishers' to reach, you know what?
Mark (28m 36s): This is, it's in a, in a Publishing, it's a slow growth business and that's been generous calling Publishing a growth business. It, it, it, it, it's probably a flat to down business overall for publishing, especially if you account for inflation over the last 15 years, a the growth has been really minimal. So it, it's not a high-growth business, all of Publishing. So there, there, there will be more consolidation pressure among the publishers is going to be tougher for a smaller, independent publishers, two stay in business because there's just so much competition now.
Mark (29m 17s): And, and, you know, the eBooks changed the dynamics of the competition as well in the old world of print publishers where maybe putting out 300,000 books a year and bookstores, you know, even in a large bookstore might only be able to hold 50,000 titles and inventory. So books were constantly being pushed out of print. There was always a limited supply of books controlled by the publishers, but now there's an unlimited supply of books, thanks to eBooks. Excuse me. And these books never go out of print. Yes. So they, they, you know, I've referred many times in the past to them as like cobwebs have stainless steel, they're going to be on the shelves forever. The retailer wants to carry your Book. Even if you don't sell a single copy in a year, they want to carry your Book.
Mark (29m 59s): They want it on a shelf because they know that they recognize that there are readers value diversity and the discoverability have as many different titles as possible, but that, that creates pressures for the authors pressures for the publishers. And then when you look at the retailing space, I mean, it, we've already seen, you know, Barnes and noble, Apple Kobo. They are, those retailers have suffered over the last five years.
Autumn (30m 28s): So even though, even though the books are becoming more popular, you think the publisher, they are not making enough money off of them, or why are they suffering?
Mark (30m 37s): Because the, the store, I think the story is probably a little bit unique for each of them, but at Barnes and noble, which was an early pioneer in e-books would the nook. And for a while, there was one of the largest sellers of any books after Amazon, they've been in a long term decline, they are losing customers to Amazon and self publishing. And then the authors have had a big hand in that, you know, every time an author decides to make their ebook exclusive to Amazon for a period of three months, that's a vote to put all the other retailers out of business.
Mark (31m 17s): So there are millions of readers every single year that can't buy the books they want to buy at Barnes and noble or Apple or Cobo or Smashwords. And they are forced to go to the Amazon if they want that Book. And so eventually, you know, all of these different retailers start losing their customers. It makes it more difficult for them too, to, to, to the great things they do for authors. It makes it difficult for them to operate their businesses. That makes it difficult for them to continue to invest in an effort to invest in innovation. And, and so it becomes death by a thousand cuts. And so I started talking about this back in 2011, when they first announced KDP select, and this would be the long term implication is that you're going to slowly starved these retailers, have their customers reduce the ability to compete.
Mark (32m 10s): What happened, Sony, an early pioneer and the Book retailing left that market Barnes and noble, his, his, you know, a shadow of their former self Cobos, not as significant as they were in the past. And they're still a significant player. You know, Apple is not as significant as they were in the past. I hate to say, and I love Apple. I mean, I love all of these retailers. I even love Amazon. I mean, every single retailer has the opportunity to do good in the world, by introducing they're customers to your book's, that's the way the world should be is the more retailers out there. The more Book is waking up every morning, it spending their sour time thinking about how can I introduce more readers, two more books that I love that that creates and, and an amazing opportunities for authors publishers for Book culture, you know, the more booksellers out there in the world, the better, but as it is right now, if you want to start an ebook startup, you really don't have a snowball's chance in hell.
Mark (33m 18s): No, you know, you can't well, if it it's really difficult, unless you're able to get, you know, $15 million in venture capital money and you're willing to lose millions of dollars to get started. And even then it's no guaranteed because when you look at what's important to readers, readers, value, selection, and price, selection, and price, they're like to have the biggest or most important factors in convenience too. But every one of the offers, good convenience, thanks to KDP. Select Amazon is always going to have, you know, somewhere between 1 million in however many books that they have exclusive that Amazon, I don't know what it is.
Mark (34m 4s): It might be 3 million books are exclusive at Amazon. Now, I don't know. So that's 3 million reasons that you can't shop anywhere else if you want to buy these books. So, you know, that, that that's, that's some of what's happening is these are the things that don't happen overnight. They happen slowly over time, drip, drip, drip, the, the lifeblood of these retailers is slowly being pulled away. So like, let's say you want to, let's, let's say you love Fantasy, and you want to launch an ebook store that specializes in Fantasy, and you're going to do the best job of curating FANTASY and offer the best possible selection and great prices. You're going to serve your Fantasy customers better than anyone else, but you can't get the inventory to serve your customers because it's locked up at Amazon exclusively.
Mark (34m 52s): So you don't have a snowball's chance in hell of building a successful business. And if you do your just barely going to scrape by the, the, the, the, the playing field right now is not level for, you know, entrepreneur entrepreneurs. And, and that's not a good thing, because we want that innovation and Publishing. You want to see dozens of new Publishing startups starting every single year, bringing new ideas to market. But, but as it is right now, I mean, most venture capitalists don't even wanna talk to people that, that wanna launch a business that is going to compete against Amazon or launch a business that Amazon might enter overnight.
Mark (35m 34s): Maybe they've already seen at Amazon announced that they're gonna enter a market and all of the other companies and that market plunge.
Autumn (35m 42s): That's true. Okay. Well, I think that's a, do you have some really good predictions that are helpful? And I also wanna talk about the things that authors can do. So you'd said reading because of the COVID because of the lockdown, because the cancellation of the Trump's show or a reading is still going to be popular in 2021. And I think that's, that's important Book sale Book, whether its sales or giveaways or whatever we're doing, people are still hungry for books, but what we as authors to do, what can we do? So you don't, I think a lot of authors don't realize that AMS ads running these ads are also cutting into our royalty. There are a bottom line, what are things we can do that we can help reverse these trends?
Autumn (36m 24s): Obviously don't go hit KDB, select publish wide is definitely one of them, but what else can authors do to try to reach readers' and support a healthy market place where discoverability and a passion for reading is the most important thing, right?
Mark (36m 41s): Yeah. Well, okay. So it, it starts with resisting this siren call of going to exclusive at Amazon, right? And I realized that is difficult for a lot of authors, but that's the first step. So just SUPPORT as many different retailers as possible with your books. So get your books at all the different retailers on your website, in your blog. And when you promote your books, list links to the different retailers, let the reader decide which retailer they want to shop out. Give them the options that is really important. You earlier, we talked about, you know, the, the, the consolidation and the dark side of that. Well, there is a solution to that.
Mark (37m 21s): There is a hopeful solution to that, and it's in the hands of authors. It's more important than ever for authors to build a platform that they control so that their relationship with readers is no longer mediated by some third party, by some retailer, by some marketing platform. So the author mailing list, the private mailing list, I think that his, you know, I've, I've been beating this drum for a long time, but I think that should be every author. His biggest priority for the year ahead is every single reader you have out there, your thousands of readers, you want every single one of them signed up for your mailing list. It's not enough for them to be following you on Twitter and Facebook, because they're not seeing most of what you're putting out there on Twitter.
Mark (38m 5s): And Facebook is only going to see a small fraction of it. But if, if you can get them on your mailing list, you control the message. You deliver the message to them when you want, and your readers will never miss another release of yours. So that, that, that's just really important in the, you know, that it fits in with what we're doing with Smashwords presales.
Autumn (38m 27s): Let's talk about it. So you've just launched. This I've even tried it out, but I did, I did get the email now that my book is like a week away saying, Hey, we want to try it out the pre-sale, but I actually do presales on my own website with the sort of what you're suggesting, but this is something that other authors who aren't set up to celebrate off their own website. This is a whole new feature. And it's really exciting. Yeah.
Mark (38m 48s): Yeah. And even if you are already selling off of your own website, you might still want to consider using this tool. So let's talk about what this tool is. You know, a lot of people don't even know what pre-orders are. Right. You know, when we talk about, when we talk about best practices, you know, we've been talking about preorders. This is one of the most important best practices for the last eight or nine years. Yeah. About 85% of self published authors. Don't do pre-orders. Even though, even though authors who do pre-orders sell a lot more books than author's who don't like, pre-orders are still one of the biggest secrets to selling more books.
Mark (39m 33s): And it, it boggles my mind that most authors it's, every single author, you know, like listeners today, if you only take one thing away from this, do a preorder, look at your Publishing calender for the next 12 months, get everything up on preorder. Now you don't even need a cover. You don't even need a final manuscript. You can get that preorder listing up that all the major retailers. So you can start collecting orders. Now it gives you more shelf space for longer. So do a pre order. So with a pre-order for authors who are familiar with them since most aren't a pre-order allows your customer to basically place an order reservation for your book when it comes out in the future.
Mark (40m 17s): So your book has a future release state, the customer place's the reservation with a preorder. And then when the book releases on its public release state, that book automatically appears in their library at the retailer on their device. And the credit card is charged. So that's a pre-order customers love pre-orders. The presale is different. Yes. So a pre-sale where the pre-order, you've got a single public announcement that a public release date across all the different retailers with a presale, you're doing an early exclusive, early release. So you're just, you're deciding to let certain customers have early access to your book.
Mark (40m 57s): The power of a presale for an indie author is that customers value timeliness, especially your biggest fans. If they can read your book even a week or even a day before every one else, they're going to lose their minds in a good way.
Autumn (41m 20s): Yes. They're so excited that you want. Yeah,
Mark (41m 22s): Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, your job is to please your readers and the readers who will be most pleased by a presale are going to be your super fans. You're the most important readers, because it's a way for you to, Hey, super fans. I'm going to let you read my book early and it's going to make them enjoy the book more. It's going to make them wanna talk about your book more to their friends. It's all good. And so we built a system it's Smashwords and this is it's called Smashwords presales and it, his patent pending. So we file the patent for it. It was just fantastic that that allows any author. Who's doing a pre-order at Smashwords to also do a presale, and you can do a, either a public presale. So it's merchandised in this Smashwords store where you can do a private pre-sale, where are you might decide, okay.
Mark (42m 8s): I am going to control who has an early access to my book. And I want to say, for example, I only want to offer access to subscribers, to my private newsletter and as a perk, as my thank you to all of these readers who signed up for my private mailing lists, I'm going to give them exclusive early access to my new release. You know, I'm gonna let them buy it at two days early or one day early or a week early. It doesn't matter. It's going to be early and the readers are going to lose their mind. So that's what you can do. And then it, and so this is a, this is a chance for authors, I think, to retake their platform.
Mark (42m 49s): Now, currently, no retailer, if you sell your e-book is going to tell, give you the e-mail address of that customer. All right. Well, that changed with Smashwords. Pre-sales when we launched it a little over a year ago. So now anyone who is purchasing your pre-sale is going to be given the option to subscribe to your private mailing list. And if they subscribe to it, if they give Smashwords permission to share their email address with you, the author, then we will share that e-mail address with you, THE author for that pre-cell. And let's say that it it's more important to you than anything to get as many readers onto your private mailing list.
Mark (43m 36s): You can even offer as part of this Smashwords pre-sales Toole. You can offer it to a special incentive for the, for the reader to agree, to share their email address with you, like, you know, a discount then all of that can be done within the tool in a lot of the people who are using the pre-sales tool or doing that, they're offering like a dollar off $2 off to really encourage the customer to click the box to say, yeah, you have my permission signed me up for this author's private newsletter.
Autumn (44m 10s): This is a really brilliant, and one that you are doing it and how it's working. That's really fascinating. And yeah,
Mark (44m 17s): Got it up. You know, we're, we're, we're big into privacy at Smashwords and, you know, respecting people's email addresses. So we, we set it up so that in order for an author to even use that feature of capturing the email addresses, they have to agree to some very simple, best practices of how they're going to handle this customers email address. Yeah. Yeah. But it's just basic stuff. Like you're not going to sell our rent that email, or you're just going to use it for your own mailing list. So yeah, it's a really, it's a really cool tool that I think is going to help put a lot of the power back into the hands of indie authors, I think.
Mark (44m 57s): And this is a lot more than that we can say, Oh, I was just gonna say, and then there's a lot more that we'll be doing with it at Smashwords.
Autumn (45m 5s): Oh, excellent. I guess in between the coupons in the pre-sale, if someone's not sure if they should try it out, Smashwords it's just a, they might have heard rumors about the old meat grinder process and the stuff, but I we'll get into that with some other time. It's not scary. I've been doing this for almost 10 years. It's a fantastic platform. So Grindr is infamous. It is. I have to admit when you started taking any public though, and because I use velum and I haven't, there's a beautiful, it's fine. If it's not a problem. Yeah.
Mark (45m 39s): We've been taking the time, you know, author produced for eight years. Yep. I still see people online complaining that, you know, Smashwords makes me do Microsoft word. No, no, we don't.
Autumn (45m 53s): You
Mark (45m 53s): Could say it's your ebook your way. So you can upload word. Most authors still do word for word is a great tool because that you upload that single file, that single word file. And we produce it into multiple ebook file types, and word is easy to control, but you know, vellum was great too. So if you use vellum use vellum.
Autumn (46m 15s): Yeah. It works. And they get out to all the stories, your still my distributor. And I can go into my dashboard and see all my sales across all of the distribution in like daily sales is the one shot deal. It's, it's so convenient that it's crazy not to be trying this with somebody. And I think you guys have the cornerstone in innovation. So I am glad, I'm glad you were still coming up with these new ideas and that you're patenting them so that Amazon and other places will just steal them away from you anymore.
Mark (46m 45s): Well, you know, we are trying to patent it, so it, it's not easy to get a patent, especially as a patent like this, it it's, you know, because it touches a lot of things. It doesn't just touch eBooks. Right. It touches anything sold online and
Autumn (47m 3s): That's fine. Yeah. Well,
Mark (47m 5s): Yeah. So, you know, we, we have been going back and forth with the us patent office and I, I don't know if we are going to get it are not, you know, I'm still got my fingers crossed, but you know, our hope is that once we get the patent, we want to license this broadly. We want everyone using it. We want our competitor's using it. We're going to make it. You know, I, I think it's really going to help level the playing field for indie authors. If more in the author's can start using this and taking the power back because with the pre-sale you decided you, you get to it, you get to basically a harness, the power or the anticipation That of, you know, thousands of readers dying to get your next release.
Mark (47m 52s): You get to trade that anticipation for something that benefits you the author. And that's the ability for you to build your platform, to sell your book at a higher royalty rate, because, you know, at the Smashwords store pays up to 80% list. You know, a lot of people don't realize that no, it was in 99 cent books often earn 80% list. If there's enough books in the customer's shopping cart, you know, there's really no reason not to do it. So it's, it's exciting to see, you know, the early adopters experimenting with it and doing new things with it.
Autumn (48m 28s): Well, I think that I still have a few days till my release. Maybe I won't go put this in. I didn't realize that you can get the e-mail list or email address. So I might go give this a go tonight. Yeah.
Mark (48m 40s): Yeah. So, you know it, if you think about it, I don't know how many people you have following you on Facebook or Twitter, or it might be thousands. Those are soft followers and get them to your opportunity is to convert all of those soft followers into a hard followers on your private mailing list so that you can reach them so that the tool will help them.
Autumn (49m 7s): No, that's perfect. Well, thank you. I mean, we've almost been two an hour, 50 minutes, so I don't want to take up all of your time. You're CEO of a very well, to me, a very important company.
Mark (49m 17s): That's a highfalutin title.
Autumn (49m 19s): Well, that's all, I think it's important that I love what you, I love that what you're doing for in the author's that you have Smashwords, But that there's someone out they're fighting, basically for all of the, you're an author. You need to have our voices heard to take back. Like you said, the power of what other places are trying to claim. I mean, you only make so much money off of a book. I'm happy that over time, you know, in the books have gone for like two 99. So they average price the four 99, five 99, but that's done now how much time for books that can take months and months and months too. Right? So it's nice that there's someone fighting for higher royalties for us to keep control of our careers at the, of what really is the heart of the indie author movement, which has us controlling our fate.
Mark (50m 4s): Well, it certainly what we fight For, and we need to see more indie authors fight for it as well. Because, you know, we talked earlier that many of the authors that will willingly surrender their independence to give it up, they'll surrender royalty rates, they'll surrender their ability to price their own books. There are certain they'll surrender their rights, all exchange for the promise of more visibility. And it's M it's a slippery slope. You know, we talked about the valuation. There is massive devaluation pressure out there because there is a glut of high quality books on the market. And, and so it creates a situation where someone like Amazon can take advantage of that glut.
Mark (50m 49s): And that's exactly what they're doing. They've decided to, you know, create a tiered market. And there are certain authors that play by certain rules that can get the visibility. And those are the authors where Amazon pays less and it's all pretty transparent,
Autumn (51m 11s): But yeah, I think that's a good way of putting it in. And I like it. I said, I think that is fantastic that you are fighting for the Indy author and try to wake us up when you start, you know, you get tied up lid and try to do sales and try to generate, you know, reading, like you said, trading in for readers are taking the lower royalty to get better exposure to remembering what the bigger picture is and what the whole market is. Like I said, I did an art degree are an English degree, not marketing. So it's important that someone is speaking about the other side.
Mark (51m 42s): Yeah. And also, you know, I see so much of the conversation when you see what indie authors are talking about, much of the conversation focuses on the wrong thing. You know, it's like, how do I Please Amazon's algorithms? I mean, should we allow our futures to be censored by algorithms? No. And other conversations aren't happening. Like I think a lot of authors are losing sight of the importance of quality. Nothing is more important than craft and your ability to right. A reader pleasing Book. It looks like we might have lost the connection there for a little bit.
Mark (52m 25s): Yeah.
Autumn (52m 25s): Yeah. It was just a little bit, hopefully it came back. We'll see how it goes. Okay.
Mark (52m 29s): Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, I think there's still lots of great opportunity for authors. I think the pandemic kind of reminded readers and former readers about the joys of books. And so I think that's going to stick with us for awhile. I think we're going to see increased reading for the next couple of years, just because of the pandemic.
Autumn (52m 53s): That's fantastic. I mean, an and readership, eBooks marketing, there are still areas growing. So I think there's still a future to be an author, whether its, you know, how much you're making or what you're in it for it for a success is a different platform. But looking at the whole perspective and maybe what you want, your legacy, what is the in the market? Do you know, what are we trying to sell out our rights again, it's a good question to ponder and think about when you are deciding where to publish right.
Mark (53m 24s): Focus on the long term, that's really what indie authors should do, you know, ask yourself, how will my decision impact my future five years from now? And if you start thinking that way, then indie authors will start making smart decisions in they'll start reaping better results over the long-term. You know, even when we talk about this being a massive, you know, talking about the, the, the market being flat for a long time for Publishing that the Publishing market is not a lucrative growth market. Well it still a multibillion dollar business. There is still an amazing opportunity for every single author, if they focus on what matters most. So focus on the craft of writing the most reader, pleasing books that you can take your reader's to an emotionally satisfying, extreme, because good books aren't good enough anymore.
Mark (54m 9s): Your book needs to be super awesome. So if you're going to spend money on anything, spend it on editing, write the most incredible Book you can because the most incredible book is going to be the best marketing for that book and have a great books market themselves. And then, you know, study best practices. You know, I've written books about best practices in all my books are available for free. So the Smashwords book, marketing guide, every author can take advantage of that and you don't even need to be at Smashwords. It's a free ebook. You get 65 free book marketing ideas. It's all focused on best practices. So these are not a femoral flash in the pan tricks.
Mark (54m 49s): These are the things that are going to work, you know, just as well today as they worked five years ago and five years from now, you know, these are the essential oils. If you get the best practices down, you'll have a much more successful longterm career. And one of those best practices that we talked about of course is pre-orders and pre sales. And pre-sales pre-sales are a new best practice and you know, but let's get more people doing preorders This as well.
Autumn (55m 18s): Okay. That sounds, I'm going to put that down on our, our market, our list of topics for the podcast, because I did not realize that most authors weren't doing pre-orders. So we'll get that one
Mark (55m 30s): Startling. If you go back and you look at some of the old Smashwords surveys that I've published at the blog, and you know, you got this very small percentage of authors doing pre-orders and those are the authors that are on the USA today, bestseller list. But those are the authors that are scooping up all the sales for the new books. And there's a camera, it's the pre-order authors, right?
Autumn (55m 51s): I will, I will go in and scoop up that data. And if I can't find it, I'll email Jim and I'm sure he can find it for me, but thank you so much, Mark, for taking the time and being in here. And I appreciate it. And if anyone has questions, we're going to link up to your 20, 21 Predictions and Smashwords and Have author's go check it out and see everything that you guys offer as well as, you know, you have some good Predictions in some incredible best tips of what we should be doing. So thank you so much for doing that. Every single, not just this year. All right. Well great. Thanks Autumn. Thank you. Good luck.
Autumn (56m 32s): And so Yes for it, we'll be back next week and we we'll be discussing a one of our humorous ones on some systems. You come back and check it out.
Narrator (56m 42s): If you like, what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Yesper on patrion.com/ Am. Writing Fantasy for as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, going to stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Writing a first draft is a hurdle that many really struggle with. Most will never make it any further than this step.
In this episode of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, Autumn and Jesper offer a whole range of tips and advice to help you conquer the first draft of your novel.
Links mentioned in this episode:
BookBub reasons for rejecting a featured deal: https://insights.bookbub.com/reasons-book-rejected-bookbub-featured-deal/
The FREE Self Publishing Success course: https://www.amwritingfantasy.com/
Our guide on how to plot a novel: https://books2read.com/Plot-Development
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. In today's Publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need. And literary agent, there is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I'm Jesper.
Autumn (32s): And I'm Autumn.
Jesper (34s): This is episode 117 of The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. And the topic of the day is something that we have indirectly in a number of episodes, but we have never dedicated a full episode to it before. So we decided to talk about some tips for writing a first draft, which will be so much fun.
Autumn (56s): It's it is strange to think that we haven't, we've shared so many tips and we've talked to so many authors about how to overcome hurdles, but I can't believe we've ever done a whole episode on this.
Jesper (1m 9s): That's right. And when I was thinking about it as well, we have also actively, when we talked about editing, we have been talking slightly about indirectly, you know, talking about writing a first draft, but yeah.
Autumn (1m 21s): And covered the seven stages kind of helps you through a first draft, But no, this is really about writing it.
Jesper (1m 28s): It is. Yes. So let's see how we go today. And it should be a, it should be an interesting conversation.
Autumn (1m 35s): Yes. I I'm sure you've prepared something and I left it wide open, so I'm good.
Jesper (1m 41s): I am always prepared and then you can wing it as you normally do.
Autumn (1m 46s): I do although, I've had 23 or so first drafts. So I feel that this topic you feel comfortable. Yeah, no, this is my niche, so I'm good. So how are things for you with though?
Jesper (2m 2s): I'm a pretty good. Last week at least I made good progress on the first draft of our book one.
Autumn (2m 11s): Yes, you're doing good.
Jesper (2m 14s): Yeah. So I think this week is going to be a bit tough. I have a lot on the agenda this week, so let's see how we go, but, but, but it was good. At least getting some, some writing done last week. And I think I managed to do four chapters.
Autumn (2m 31s): You did a really good. Yeah, you're doing a little bit better than me with that. I'm still working on the edits to the reader magnet, the Rift and the Mage, but I know, and by the time this is recorded, it'll be done. But I'm really seeing my first book since July like 2019, this coming weekend. So there's a few things to do just a little bit. It's just a little bit, yeah, I forgot it. It's been a year and a half almost since we released a book, I forgot how much there is to do so. Yeah. I'm a little swamped. Yeah. Well it's so exciting. So that's good.
Jesper (3m 6s): The other good news actually is that some of the Corona restriction's have started to lift now. So I think fingers crossed, but within the next one to two weeks, I think I could be back to refereeing again.
Autumn (3m 22s): Excellent. And so if we're going to be spring-ish soon so that will be really exciting.
Jesper (3m 26s): Yeah. And they were saying, by the time we get to the summer, hopefully all of our entire countries should be vaccinated. Hopefully by summer time,
Autumn (3m 35s): The size of one of our cities, I would hope so.
Jesper (3m 39s): I should actually be even faster.
Autumn (3m 42s): And I mean, if they are saying the us can get completely vaccinated by May, we'll see if that happens. It was knowing the government will be June or July, but yeah.
Jesper (3m 49s): Yeah. Well, did they say what year?
Autumn (3m 56s): Again, I think it might have been 2024. You know, they didn't, or maybe they said there would be enough vaccines to vaccinate everyone by May. But if someone's going out with like a tranquilizer gun, that's not going to you.
Jesper (4m 11s): Oh yeah. That could be actually be cool. If you had some snipers are something like when you go out shopping than you'll get a ride,
Autumn (4m 18s): That would be cool. If there are people who would enjoy that over here. So we could pay money to have people do that in, make it all back, fill we've spent on helping people get their vaccines. Oh yeah,
Jesper (4m 31s): No, I see. Yeah, but actually I'm not sure if you remember, but quite a while back U a recommended that I should watch the show on Netflix, which one? Yeah. It's quite a while back actually. And I don't speak friends, but I think I would pronounce it LA revolution. Yeah.
Autumn (4m 50s): Or something like that. I did recommend, you know, what did you think of it?
Jesper (4m 58s): Well? I'm halfway through now.
Autumn (4m 59s): Okay. Yeah.
Jesper (4m 60s): It's in French. That's a bit of a downer.
Autumn (5m 3s): And like French four years in high school. Come on. Yeah.
Jesper (5m 6s): Okay. Well, I don't speak of word French, so yeah. But I'm half way through and a, so far, at least I would say that I really like how they are building the mystery elements. Excellent. I'm still not completely sure what kind of, I wouldn't even call it magic, but sort of what's going on with the blue blood and stuff and I'm not quite sure what's going on still with that. Okay. So I think that's pretty cool. Yeah. I guess the one thing I would say at this point is that I could really use a stronger character motivation for, I mean, I understand that a, they wanna stop the root, this stuff from happening and the revolution stuff and I, and I get it, but I think if it would be stronger or if it was a bit more clear why the character should be so invested in it, I ah, I'm not a a hundred percent onboard with that, but, but so far it, it, it's pretty good.
Autumn (6m 5s): Yeah. And it gets resolved at the end. I hope that I'm only halfway through, so yeah. And it doesn't leave it open. And I don't know if there is a second season come in, but it does leave it open that there was a potential there. But Yeah, for anyone who hasn't looked at it is it it's a totally, it's sort of like a zombie meat's French revolution. And I was actually my husband and I had a recent discussion about it saying, you know, well, it looks like pride and prejudice and zombies and Lincoln vampire Slayer kind of fed into this series being written. And I thought it was fascinating. I'm like this actually explains the French revolution in a way that I can totally understand, but I really enjoyed it.
Autumn (6m 48s): And I usually don't do Zombie things. So, and now I want a reprint, a prejudice. And so I'll be, so there you go.
Jesper (6m 54s): Yeah. Well there's not zombies in this, to be honest.
Autumn (6m 58s): But it, sort of plays on that idea though.
Jesper (7m 2s): Maybe Yes. I'd just call it the blue blood, you know, but I guess I just want it to mention it because if there are some listeners who are interesting, if you'd like something like mysterious murders and a no on no unknown virus spreading, I was about to say that and I just put it, I shouldn't say that, that nobody wants and watch it.
Autumn (7m 24s): Go ahead. It's fine. We have a vaccine now. They don't, it's fine. Know what?
Jesper (7m 28s): I just feel like a virus stuff is that people are like, yeah, I don't, no, I don't want to even watch stuff that is about virus outbreaks. It was just like no way to get it. I don't want to watch it. I don't want to read about it. It's just done. No, but Okay. Anyway, if you'd like mysterious murder test and try to check, are you pronounce this better than I do what they want to school? Do you see on, there you go. Yeah.
Narrator (8m 1s): A week on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast.
Jesper (8m 5s): Yeah. So first of all, I just wanted to mention that we are making another attempt today on a recording ourselves on video while also recording the podcasts. So you'll be able to see on the Am Writing Fantasy YouTube channel, if you want. And then there is a video feed, but, but why am I mentioning is more because last week we had the first tri and a, there was some internet lax costs by the video feed, which meant that the yeah, autumn broke. It meant what, what, what happened though was that are sometimes it took a couple of seconds before I could hear what Autumn set and vice versa.
Jesper (8m 48s): So we have a bit of an awkward pause in between where it was quite annoying. So we were having another tap now and I hope it's going to work well today, but it is more to let you know that if the video feed keeps interfering, then we will probably dump the video feed again, because the most important thing is that this is a podcast. So the audio feed needs to be good. And if it suffers because of the video, then we will dump the video. But at least for now, we're, we're just trying out a bit, we changed a few things for today. So hopefully the internet, like we'll not be there anymore. Yeah,
Autumn (9m 21s): Yeah. I know. So far its between you and I seems Okay. Yeah. Internet, my internet is holding out, which is pretty good. If you can crisscrossed, we got to work at this time. Yeah. And you've changed location. Maybe that's a good idea. We got some like officey Diggs going on. Its kind of yeah.
Jesper (9m 42s): Yeah. Well another thing on the internet since this is that, that segment, I want it to mention how BookBub she had a list of nine reasons why the most, they most often reject a BookBub feature deal.
Autumn (9m 58s): Awesome. That is useful.
Jesper (9m 59s): Yeah. And given how important are these deals are. And then I thought maybe I could just do a very quick rundown of those 900.
Autumn (10m 6s): That's a really good cause I had to actually thinking of submitting a book and so this would maybe convince me or make me stay away.
Jesper (10m 13s): Yeah. And then you can see if you are aligned with these things away for a while.
Autumn (10m 16s): Yeah. So I have had one BookBub deal. So that was really exciting. But you know, it seems hit or miss there or maybe there's no rhyme or reason to this. There is no, no, no.
Jesper (10m 26s): Yeah. Okay. Okay. So now the number one, the book is too short. Oh that's interesting. Yeah. There are a minimum page count requirements. So that's a pretty easy fix. If a, you know, check those out before you submit a request for a feature deal. Interesting. That's easy. And a number two is also EASI not meeting the pricing requirement's so it was submitted. Book has to be deeply discounted or free. So that's a no brainer. Right. But if you don't have in the discounted the Book, then just don't get submitted feature deals because you are going to get rejected. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. A so not surprising so far right
Autumn (11m 8s): Now. I know it's shocking there.
Jesper (11m 11s): Number three, and this one is about timing. So BookBub will not feature a book more than once every six months. So if you did have a feature deal on that page that you can, you are going to have featured deals on several different, have your books. So, but that particular Book, they will not fit you again before six months later. So if you already had it, then don't submit it because you're wasting your time and their time.
Autumn (11m 33s): It seems fair. I mean it's hard enough to get one. So if you can get one every six months yeah. For you,
Jesper (11m 42s): Good for you. The other one is on number four is if your book is only available on Amazon, meaning Kindle unlimited, you are less likely to get Joseph. Oo, you can't be chosen, but it is much less likely BookBub is a, they SUPPORT wide platform and they like white. Oh. So they tend to promote books that are available everywhere. And so it's interesting. So if you are only in Canada limit at that might be, why are you getting rejections? It make sense a number five. And this one also makes a lot of sense to me, but it's about the reader experience. So if BookBub find a lot of reviews that mentioned that you have typos and stuff like that, they will often reject the Book.
Jesper (12m 27s): That makes sense. That's good to know
Autumn (12m 28s): Now of course it, it makes it harder than if you go in and you fix them, which hopefully you, you should do that before you publish. But if you can fix them, you still have those. Where are you sitting there? So they're going to hurt you really bad. Yeah.
Jesper (12m 42s): Over time. So get it right the first time you get it. Right. So number six and you'll like this next one out of it. It's something that we see all the time. Oh, all right. Well I like this one then if the cover, it doesn't matter. and the reader expectation BookBub we'll likely reject it. Yes. Have we said that before,
Autumn (13m 5s): So true. And that was good. That's one reason I was really happy to have one of my book's featured because it was also one of the covers I did. So I made me feel good as a graphic artist.
Jesper (13m 16s): Yeah. I can understand that. Yeah. We are now getting into like chicken and egg territory. OK. Yeah. So number seven on the list is not having enough reviews. Well, it doesn't
Autumn (13m 28s): Say it. How many at once or
Jesper (13m 30s): No, it does not tell me about it, but how do we get reviews when you are not seeing any sales? Yeah. And if you could get a BookBub feature deal, you would get sales and then you would get reviews. So you see the chicken and the egg problem here. Yeah.
Autumn (13m 42s): Yeah. And I know she got a dragon in the egg problem, but okay. That's fine.
Jesper (13m 49s): Yeah. Well, yeah, the, the dragon, not the egg problem and that's much better. Okay. Got it. But that's luckily something that we do talk about in the self publishing success course, and you can enroll to that course for free. Yay. Yay. That's a good,
Autumn (14m 5s): Yeah. The idea, because then you can figure out how to get reviews, which means to you, you might get it, but yeah.
Jesper (14m 10s): Yes. And I'll put a link in the show notes to the self publish Success cos so yeah. You can just sign up and get going in there, but I'll leave that alone for now and move on to number eight. Yes. We still have to work. Yeah. This one is a much harder to comply with and I would almost say just submit your book that BookBub feet, figure it out and check that because number eight, it's what they call that it is not aligned with current market trends. And so that's a bit like, yeah, that's a tough one. Yeah. I think that's a tough one. Yeah.
Autumn (14m 49s): I know. There's times where, you know, if a certain type of book is just not selling you sometimes if you're paying attention, you'll know that. But there's times that you don't, you can't read their mind what they decided is popular right now. So it's just, Yes.
Jesper (15m 3s): So one of the, like, you know, in the, when I'm out refereeing, we also have this catch all bracket thing. So we have like on sportsmanship conduct and you get a yellow card for it, but how do you define what that is? How I define that as a referee. So when you are, when you're being an asshole, you'll get to the yellow cards and I'll give you that as the reason then. So I think this is BookBub so the cats, all categories were like, well, if we can't figure stuff out, otherwise we will start it in the market. Not aligned with current market trends and rejected. Yeah, yeah,
Autumn (15m 35s): Yeah. Like the elf stones of Shannara and it's just not selling right now or are you do Saifai Fantasy and that's just not popular. Everyone wants to read about vampires and zombies is they'll just use that one for the sake of it. So that's the nice way of saying they were like, you know,
Jesper (15m 55s): Yeah. And then the last one is a pretty easy and say, no, in fact it, it is just that they have run out of advertising slots. They only advertise a certain number of the emails and maybe they would have liked to take in your book on board, but they are out of slots. So you just submit again next month. But yeah, that was nice things of why Book, book, book, buck. Did I say that? Yeah.
Autumn (16m 21s): Yeah. BookBub yeah. Well it
Jesper (16m 25s): Could be a buck. Who knows,
Autumn (16m 27s): But I like that.
Jesper (16m 28s): Why did they reject your book's? So yeah, maybe if you have interesting things to do, if there was a bit more details in the article itself, so I'll put a link to the article in the show notes as well. If you, if you want to go and read a bit more of the details, what I basically covered all the, the major points to it.
Autumn (16m 45s): Yeah. I might even check it out. I want to see what the length of novels is. If they are looking at novellas or it has to be full length, that'll be interesting. It has to be full Links. Novels. Yeah.
Jesper (17m 1s): A lot. And I mean, a lot of people really struggle with writing the first draft and will actually never make it any further than this step. So we thought it would probably be a good idea. So she has some tips about how can you conquer that first draft?
Autumn (17m 20s): Yeah, absolutely. And I actually, I have a quote to start this off with and I didn't even mean two. It was one, uhm, I was sharing with my parents. It's one of my favorite quotes and it's good for a lot of different things, but it's a is simply when all things are said and done, there is more said than done and that's actually a really old quote it's from ASAP. So human condition, it has not changed much in like 4,000 years, which is really sad. But yeah, I think that's a nice way to starting saying if you're talking about Writing, you should probably be WRITING. That was my excuse now. Y my social media is not always that good because that's talking and I like to do that's my experience.
Autumn (18m 3s): Anyway.
Jesper (18m 3s): I might actually be a topic for another podcast episode one day. Maybe it's just because before recording, actually, we, we were just talking about a social media efforts for authors and it was like, is it just a complete waste of time? And just spend the time writing and Stephen, I must say that I'm getting more and more inclined to say So, but
Autumn (18m 24s): Yeah, I try and I try to think of it as a way of talking to readers. But again, so that could be a distraction. Maybe you should be working on your first draft,
Jesper (18m 33s): But that's a, that's a detour. That's another topic for me
Autumn (18m 35s): A lot of the day, but we'll have to wait that one down. Yeah, yeah,
Jesper (18m 38s): No, it was just about to say if we don't ride it down and we'll forget it. Yeah,
Autumn (18m 42s): Yeah. I will do. So one of us was responsible for writing that down after the Podcast.
Jesper (18m 47s): Yeah. Yeah. That's how I would usually where you say one of us in the, nobody does it. That's how it works. Yeah.
Autumn (18m 52s): Yeah. Well, it's earlier for me later for you. So I'll take responsibility. It'll be more my fault if we don't do it. Yeah.
Jesper (19m 1s): Okay. I can live with that
Autumn (19m 3s): So you can write, well, I'm hoping I love it. This one pretty wide open on things to discuss. So I'm guessing though, you have some specific tips, just, just a hunch.
Jesper (19m 17s): I do. Yes. But I don't have them in any particular order of importance or anything like that. It's just, I'm a couple of things. So I think I have four Tips.
Autumn (19m 26s): Oh, well this is not too bad.
Jesper (19m 30s): No, its not too much either, but yeah.
Autumn (19m 32s): Ooh. I think that's a good place to start. Well I think that's the, one of the most important things is a, if you can create this almost mind block that it is your first draft and it is only so big and you don't treat it like it's this overwhelming giant hurdle, it's it. That's not going to help you later. So four steps. That's not too bad. So let's see here the first one or one of the third one, whichever what order you want to start with? Yeah.
Jesper (20m 1s): Yeah. Okay. Well the first one I call don't overthink it. Ah, yeah. Don't overthink it. I should put a space there. It's lame in the evening for me. Okay.
Autumn (20m 12s): Yeah. I know you had a long day. You were up early. We've already. And we had a business meeting before the podcast recording so that everyone be nice to Jesper tonight.
Jesper (20m 24s): Yeah. Well, okay. So this one is that it would really help you a lot if you are not approaching your first draft as if you are trying to write the next Lord of the rings. So something like that. Oh my gosh. You know, if you can just say, just accept that, what you write in your first draft will suck. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, it will like your grandmother sold Success or something like that.
Autumn (20m 53s): Yes. And this comes so, and that's a good thing. I wouldn't have to put it that it will suck, but that's a good way of putting it. Yeah.
Jesper (21m 3s): No, but it's, it's like, you know, if it's one of those cases again where your future self really hates your past self, because you will pass or fail, keeps passing shit on down the line.
Autumn (21m 18s): Right. Because, but
Jesper (21m 19s): I think this is one of the cases where you shouldn't be an asshole to you. If you just Self and just deal with the editing later, just to get the Writing John Dunn, it is Okay. That's why it's called a first draft because it's the first one and you are going to go through it multiple times. You're going to make it better and it is not supposed to be the final product. So please just don't overthink it and just write. Yeah. And don't care that it sucks.
Autumn (21m 49s): No, no, no. And that's actually, I mean, we have it in the guide course. I'd have to admit, I didn't come up with this phrase. So I'm not taking responsibility for this one, but it was a, a published author who break and you know, a traditional published author who said, well, your goal when you're doing a first draft is to write a short, bad book. And I love that. And it was very clear. He was like, it's not to publish short bad book, but your goal is to write a short, bad Book. Because normally when you're editing, it's easier to add to it than to cut words. And you don't need to write a 120. If you make it your goal, 180,000 words that you are going to take forever to get there. If your goal is 80,000 words and you might accidentally write nine year old, that's OK.
Autumn (22m 35s): That's not bad. Actually. That's perfect. Right? In the target and a short bite Book, you get it done. You can go fix it. You can't edit something that doesn't even an existing. Yeah. It just try not to do word vomit. I have a history of word vomit. We won't go there, but it would be a little bit more structure than word vomiting, but right. If you have to write it and I mean, I know you and I, especially our very first, if it's your very, very, very first novel, your debut novel, you'll probably end up rewriting the entire thing. I did mine three times and I still there's times I would have to go back. And now that I'm on Book 21, that I'm about to release.
Autumn (23m 16s): I was so tempted to go back and change born of water, but it is what it is. It was my first book. And I have come a long way since then. And you'll feel the same way when you're way past book one. Yeah,
Jesper (23m 32s): No, that's true. Yes. And I think that probably plays a lot into, to the second one I had listed because it's, well, maybe it's not in an entirely different point, but it's, it's sorta riffs off of what we just talked about as well, because it is really, I want to say, because I know I've said it before, so I guess I should keep saying, rather than changing my mind, like five episodes later than it is. Yeah.
Autumn (23m 58s): I'm going to make this as a quote for you and give it to you or for social media at this point.
Jesper (24m 6s): Mmm. But avoid editing as you go. And it is a bit of a tough one. I love that. But yeah, if you're trying to make everything sound perfect, then let's be honest. It won't never be perfect. And the other part is that you are wasting your time because you are until you get to the end and you start your editing phase. And during editing, you might discover that, Oh, actually this section here, it doesn't quite work. I need to pull it out. Maybe deleted. I need to re rewrite it or restructured slightly or something like that. And then you spend hours on making it sound perfect just to delete it later.
Jesper (24m 46s): So it is just waste of time. And while I am also saying that it is a bit of a tough one, this one, because I know people, I don't have to have that full extent myself, but I have a little in it as well in my, in, in, in, in my mind as well that if I know something just sucks, I have a very hard time just leaving it alone. I feel like I need to fix it a bit. Just sort of, at least I'm not that I want to make a perfect, but at least not that I feel like it's okay now, and then I can move on. So, and if I don't do that, I keep thinking about it and it can not let it go. Yeah. So I noticed one is a tough one. And if you are one of those people who are also can't let it go, then I feel for you because I know what it's like a for example, now with the first draft that I'm writing for our joint Book, I've had to force myself not to charge it, just write it and send it to Autumn.
Jesper (25m 45s): It's just gone, but not now, but yeah, well, Okay. That sounded wrong. But what I meant by that was really that the fact that I can email it off, actually empties it from my mind, because if, if it was my own and I have it in my file, and then I feel like going back to it, but as soon as I sent the email, then it sort of out of my studio, so to speak. Yeah. Yeah, indeed. Yeah. Even though it's still the same script in a file, but I don't know my mind is we had sometimes, but yeah.
Autumn (26m 12s): I love human psychology. So I get that. Yeah. I know. That's, I mean, it's a waste of time. Like you said, you know, if you're writing something and you're editing it and you know, it is perfect. Especially if you get yourself in a cycle where your rights something, and you have self doubt, so you can go back and you can edit it and you rewrite and you just, just keep treading on that same path. And that's not going to get you to the end of the year's first draft. And then to, even if you just edited it a little bit, you get to the, you know, the next five chapters and you realize that, Oh, that was a whole tangent. This is where the Book starts. I'm cutting of that. Well, if you spent hours editing it, Oh, that was wasted time. But I do. I mean, like you were saying, I'm the same way I, if there's something that's atrociously wrong, it depends.
Autumn (26m 56s): There's times I can like climb Maxine's and stuff. I feel like I've got to get it really kind of, all of those. There's so many pieces you'd need to get each one fit because then my next chapter might be a different characters point of view. And I need to know that what really happened. And so we're getting all that fitted in is important, but there's times sometimes the client plot holes, I have gone back and realized that was missing an entire character point of view, which it was a sub character, but it is important one. So it was that it ended up being three chapters. I had a rad, so there are times I will go back and edit while I'm writing. But there's also times where it's just like, Oh, thank gosh, Griffin never has a note section.
Autumn (27m 37s): And I would just highlight, add a note, add a note. And I even keep a file. And my Scrivener is a whole folder of that just says, you know, no edits to, you know, notes for editing. And so I was like, make sure I put it in a way to make sure you added this and make sure you've had that. If I can find the exact chapter at that moment, I just put it in there and then I review it and I find it as it goes through because yeah, it's not going to be perfect. That's what editing is for is once you actually have the whole thing and you get to the end and you're like, Oh yeah, I had this vision that I wanted to add this other little thing and I never did well, now's your chance to go and add it. It's easier to thread that in than to stop what you're doing and go back and figure it out now.
Autumn (28m 23s): Just don't do it.
Jesper (28m 23s): Yes, indeed. So you were wanting me to continue my,
Autumn (28m 27s): Yes, this was good. I like, I had like you steering, I'm a good navigator. You're a good driver. So it's fine.
Jesper (28m 38s): Okay. So this one, well, I don't know if I have to keep saying this, but having an outline. So you know what to write really makes things that much easier. Yes.
Autumn (28m 51s): Yeah. Oh definitely. I would have to put this one in there myself. Yeah.
Jesper (28m 55s): Yeah. I saw that greatly with this suffered really bad, but this one in my first book, I wrote myself into a corner and the story just took a completely different turn and it became, it became something that sort of out of my control, all of a sudden, and I was like halfway through and I was looking at it like, what is this? This is not the story I want you to tell at all. So I think outlining really helped. Yeah.
Autumn (29m 25s): Yeah. It helps a lot. I used to go to the same way. I was a, I have tried to pass my first novel and I think I got to chapter five or eight and they're kind of setting sail and they're going. I was just like, I don't cool. And that's what I, I was like I said, like characters got lost. I got lost. Yeah. I started at at least doing it minor outline. And that's when I discovered the seven stages of story structure and realized that, you know, all of these different combinations and it made it flow. I liked so much better than three or five acts. However you want to look at it. So that helps even, even to me like the book.
Autumn (30m 7s): So I'm currently, it was Writing. The series is about to publish. I sometimes just doing a two or three sentence synopsis. And that to me is truly like you, you know, that is your instructions for the entire map. This is the whole point of the journey. And I would remember writing for revolution, which will be booked three in this series. And I have looked at it and go, Oh, okay. The outline is OK, but it doesn't even fit this. So I have to change either, either my synopsis was wrong or my outline is wrong. And so I had to rework things halfway through, which is when I realize that was missing the character as well. And it was just like, Oh, and once it all clicked into place is like, Darren, Okay, this is an awesome story. Now it makes more sense. So I have to admit, I know I have an outline.
Autumn (30m 48s): I usually think it's fine. But when you start writing, sometimes you need to have something to check back and look at it and say, this is my guiding point. This is the entire, this was my thesis. So in my theory for this novel, is it still holding up in my holding true. And that way, every time you have a side plot or a little road off the highway, you, you can go, does that fit? Doesn't know. Yes, yes. And then you can keep going because it was, the characters will throw things at you. If you have good strong characters, they will try to take over and run with the story. And it's really fun. But sometimes they, especially, I'm writing about Fey in dark Fair or are you kidding? They just wanna go everywhere. Herding cats.
Autumn (31m 28s): So, you know, it's a horrible, but yeah, it's definitely going to need to have a plot.
Jesper (31m 35s): Yeah. But it's amazing how often one here that is, especially when people are starting out writing that that's really where they are so many people default too panting. They do and do no plan. And it's, it happens so often. It's incredible. I feel like that it should have one of those, you know, those labels from jackass over it, like don't try to shoot at home.
Autumn (32m 1s): Yeah. I know. That's very true. And it's very rare for a novelist who has done three or four books to still be a solid pants are where it's like, I'd just make it up on the spot. Almost every one, by that point, it has started plotting or at least a little, I mean, sometimes for me, plotting is intro phase as a reaction phases and you know, just a quick list of things that happen. I've broken it down now where I have chapters and I'll have just, you know, two sentences for each chapter and I'll flesh it out more when I get to that chapter because things have changed before that, but it's still an outline. I still have 38 chapters and each of them has a few sentences. So I know what's happening when I get there, I've thought it out.
Autumn (32m 43s): And you were a much stronger plotter, but yeah. Well, at the time you get through a few books in and you realize you do need to keep, you need to be in control, not let fate be your control.
Jesper (32m 55s): Yeah. And, and a lot of the time you can find some middle ground. It, it's not that you, you know, that you have to be fully pantsing, everything or fully plotting everything. There is a lot of middle ground in between. And there's a lot to say either that the end point is bad either. But I think when we're talking about your writing, your first novel, your very first draft, please don't try to pass it. You know, maybe off the eight novels and you have, and you have sort of have the story structure intuitively ingrained in you. When you sort of know where you are going, then maybe you can fly it a bit more, but yeah, just don't do it the way it is.
Jesper (33m 37s): It is. As I said, I don't try to shoot at home. Just don't do it.
Autumn (33m 41s): Yeah. I agree. If I had a stamp, I would put it on the screen right now. I agree. Don't try that at home. You will be writing a first novel and never having written a novel before you are already feeling intimidated to have no guide. You don't even know what your ending point like to me to know that I have this many chapters than I am writing to this point. I almost always ad at least two, but still I know is going to be this long. And I know where I am in. It has huge. I have a timeline. I can tell you what I'm going to be done. I'm going to hit that to within like five days. I'm usually not later. Those are huge things to know, and to not know anything about writing and to be so completely lost with Book one, it's just not paying lost in a fog on a edge of a cliff.
Autumn (34m 27s): And you just don't know where you are and you don't want to do that. So Have I have a string to hold on, to get at least a little bit of a plot going?
Jesper (34m 36s): Yeah. And if you need some help, we do have a full step by step guide on both how to develop characters, how to develop character, arcs, how to do the entire plot of a novel. So yeah, if you need help in that department, there's lots of help to be happy. And you can pick up a guide book. I'll put a link to the plotting books in the show notes as well. If you want to check that one out, but it will basically take you through from start to finish so you can just follow it and I can promise you, you will be way, way better off than trying to fumble around it in the dark. Yeah.
Autumn (35m 11s): Oh yeah. You won't be quite in the dark fog bank with no flashlight and no road that you'll have a much more guidance than that. Yeah.
Jesper (35m 22s): Yeah. Okay. So I have one more and then, I don't know, maybe you have some of the other ones as well.
Autumn (35m 27s): Yeah. We'll see. What else can I throw in the right now? I have to admit I'm having them as I've had had an office chair for so long. I am having the worst time. Not like swinging around in this thing. So I would love it place. Alright. So I'll have to try to stop spinning. Yeah.
Jesper (35m 45s): Yeah. So it's still pay attention.
Autumn (35m 46s): Oh, well that never works for me.
Jesper (35m 53s): Okay. So this one is around waiting for the Writing fairy's to show up in the spring Hill day or a pixie dust before, are you feeling motivated or in the right mood? 'cause if that's what you're doing, then no wonder why the first draft is still not done.
Autumn (36m 10s): Yeah. That's I think this is, what's becoming one of my pet peeves and I'm trying not to, because I understand the impetus to have it. And not every one wants to treat Writing as a business for some people. It really is a hobby that it makes them feel good. But waiting for inspiration. I think as I recently told someone recently, it was like, well, why did you find what inspires you and do that? And then go, right? Because if you're just gonna sit around and wait and it's like, what, what does that phrase? I was waiting for a water to boil it. Does it boil when you were watching it? You got it. You got to turn it on. You, you actually have to turn on the stove. So you got to turn on the inspiration to be inspired, to write.
Autumn (36m 54s): And it's not going to come by sitting there staring at a cursor blinking either or being on social media.
Jesper (37m 1s): Yeah, of course it made it. Well, yeah. You made a good point in saying that some people just, you know, it's just a hobby and if that's the case, then I think is fine. You know, if you just use doing it for the fun of it and you don't really care, if it takes you eight years, fine wait for the fairy dust to come and you know, that's fine. But, but at least if you want to have any commercial success from it, then you just have to prioritize Writing. And maybe, I mean, I understand the people who then might say, but I don't have time for it. I'm so incredibly busy. I understand that. I get it.
Jesper (37m 42s): Trust me. I'm insanely busy, busy as well, but sometimes it's a matter of I'm. I think I've said on a previous podcast, a get up at five in the morning, if that's what you need to do and do an hour of writing while the house is quiet or maybe skip the Netflix show in the evening and do some writing time, whatever suits you personally, I, I functioned best. We created a work in the morning. So for me it works to get up early and then do the writing before I'd have to do other things because then I've got it in. And I also feel more content basically, because I feel like I achieve it today. So it's not done off the list I already had.
Jesper (38m 22s): I'm already in control from the beginning, but I also know other people who prefer to work very late in the night and, and that's, you know, whatever works for you. But I think the point is just that you have to prioritize. Yeah.
Autumn (38m 35s): Yeah, they do. And that's what always worries me about doing it at night or when you get home from work is it's so easy that life distracts you or pulls you aside, or you had a really busy day and you're tired if you put yourself first. I think that's incredibly empowering and it really does set your day. So I will, I am a morning person, sort of a, you know, compared to a lot of people, I have 6:00 AM. It was like fine. Five or 30 years. Yeah. It's a little early, but it's fine. But yeah, getting up, I mean, even though I'm technically a full time writer and artist and writing coach, I still get up before I check email even years Jesper as the way I usually check, just to see if he said anything.
Autumn (39m 16s): I usually sit down without checking my email. I get my T I know breakfast. And I sit and I write for an hour or two or I'm editing for an hour or two. And that is how I start the day. And that's after that then, you know, and then we can eat, I can walk to the dog and all of those other things. So it just really sets the tone for my day. And I feel so good cause I put myself first and my own author platform First and my own ideas and my head first. And that's just fantastic until it keeps building and yeah. And it will percolate, percolate up all day. And then I feel so much more content focusing on other authors work because I know I put some stuff in it for me.
Autumn (39m 55s): And that's wonderful.
Jesper (39m 58s): Yeah. Plus just the satisfaction. I don't know if that's the right word, but it just feels very good when you know that I got my words In today and it was only eight in the morning. Like yes it is. It's wonderful.
Autumn (40m 11s): Yeah, it is. It really is. I say, like I said, I've had to get it sets the whole tone for the day and it's every day that I hit those words or finish the chapter, I was working on editing and you feel that it's really coming together. That's a better day and you go through a more positive day and you spread more positivity and all my goodness, this world needs more of that. So I think it's very helpful, but no matter what I mean, waiting for inspiration, that was really the whole point of this one. If you're just waiting and that is what you want to do, you also want, at the time it comes, you fizzle out so quickly. You might be waiting for inspiration for what weeks, days, months. And it finally comes and you're writing stamina is what a thousand words, or if you're pushing yourself and trying to find things that inspire you, giving yourself some time, putting your dreams, putting some time and effort into that.
Autumn (40m 58s): That's something that is your dream, which will make you feel more positive towards yourself. That way, if you do. I mean, even for you and I we're a professional writer is, but occasionally is not just sitting there and the key word and forcing yourself to do it. When those moments of true spark and inspiration come in and you're like pounding out the story and telling your kid's five minutes. And they know that means that like half an hour, don't touch, don't talk to you or you can go, you can put in chapters. It, it is amazing what you will we do when we're on, you know, caffeine acceleration. Oh my God, I have inspiration. I just don't bother me. You can whip out half the book's its fantastic. You won't get there if you're just waiting for inspiration and never put in any effort in between.
Autumn (41m 44s): Yeah.
Jesper (41m 44s): Yeah. And I think another way of putting it is basically just say that again, disregarding the people who just do it because it's a hobby then that's fine. But if we ignore those people for a moment here than it is a, a, another way of saying that Writing is also a job, you know, it's not all day. I'm sure that every morning when the Baker goes to his job, I'm sure he's not every morning for you. And I'm so inspired to break a baked bread today. Right? It does not happen every day. And he does it anyway because it was his job in the same thing with writing. It is certainly not all the time. When I sit down to write a chapter that I feel inspired for it certainly not all the time, but I ride it anyway and then push the shit down to the line to a future Self sort, this stuff out once you get that far.
Jesper (42m 37s): But actually to be honest, once you then get to it later, you can't really distinguish why, where were you motivated and where we are not motivated because actually there's not that much of a difference in the thing.
Autumn (42m 50s): There's I see some small differences when I'm really flowing and you know, I see like I'm adding in more sensitive, more senses, a little bit better description, but it all, you know, once you go through and edit from phase, you can't tell him no one, no one reader is going to say, Oh, you are just so inspired right now. You can't tell what they can tell is that I actually finished the book and got it to them. They know that, but yeah.
Jesper (43m 14s): Yeah. But, and, and also if you did a proper job in your editing, you'll move everything up to the same standard anyways. So yeah, maybe if it was like, let's say there are 2% less editing in the motivating part, but the cast
Autumn (43m 31s): Exactly. It's not that big of an issue. And the point is to actually do the book, get the, get that first draft done, then learned to edit it and you know, you'll have the manuscript ready to send out the readers and have that inspiration. Inspiration is great fun. We'll get into like the plotting because that's a really the best time to really work out what happens next. Do you need a lot of inspiration for some solid plotting? Yeah.
Jesper (44m 0s): Yeah. So if I'm to put like some sort of conclusion on it, I would probably say that at the end of the day, everything that we talked about here, it really feeds into the fact that you have to find the process that works for you. It sounds Fair because we all have different. And I think there are some good pointers in what we said in terms of things that you need to think about, but how to actually apply. It is something that, where you need to think yourself as well and, and find your own way through it. But one thing I guess we can say is that the first draft becomes easier and easier over at the more times you have done it, the ETA it becomes.
Jesper (44m 45s): And it doesn't feel like that big of a hurdle anymore. After a while, you know, it's, it's the only the beginning, the first Book, maybe two, two and a serious, at least that's a bit of a pain. So once after a while, then it does, it's not that big of a hurdle anymore. And it's still a massive undertaking just to write a first draft. I'd like, like we set up at the top of the Episode, most people don't even get that far. So if you could just get the first draft done, you already ahead of 90%. So, so it's a matter of a pushing through there. And, and the other thing that I, as I said before there, I think it was really important is that you are your first draft.
Jesper (45m 27s): Isn't bad. It's just not edited yet. And that's all right, you don't have to go for perfection because if you keep trying, you'll never get to the end of the first draft of the first draft of a short bat Book, write the book. Then you can add to it. You can learn from it and get some feedback as an alpha Rita and mentor writing coach, if you really have doubts, but you need somebody to look at it, to grow from. So just write it fine, a few things that will work for you from what we've said, having like guideposts a synopsis, maybe using a story structure or something like that, that it can at least give you some guidance that you know, where your beginning, middle end and everything will be and right it, and just get it done.
Jesper (46m 11s): And you will be so much happier to actually have done it and put yourself first. I will say that that that's something that you have to do at least one day a week, give yourself that. Okay. So next Monday, Autumn, we'll be back with a very interesting interview and a, she will be discussing the state of the industry and lots more like that.
Narrator (46m 34s): If you liked what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy for as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
You've probably heard of Instagram Influencers, but did you know there are book influencers there too?
We discuss what Bookstagrammers are and the age bracket of readers on Instagram. Because the best Bookstagrammers are passionate readers! Plus, we look into how to network with Bookstagrammers, some of the things they can (and can't) do for your book, and how to find the right Bookstagrammer for you.
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am writing Fantasy Podcast in today's publishing landscape. You can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from Writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I am Jesper
Autumn (31s): And I, I am Autumn.
Jesper (33s): This is episode 116 of The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. And today we will have a conversation around waiting out to Book influences or Bookstagrammers I, if that's something we could call those people, they get your books. Yes. That will be interesting. It, it will be like Instagram.
Autumn (55s): Well, I usually like Instagram, but we'll get it into that later. I had a cup last week and nothing. I did nothing I touched or broke, but I did notice a neutral ground at the end now we'll get there. And so how are things for you?
Jesper (1m 14s): It's a good, I was actually out with my youngest son for, to soccer practice for the first time in a very, very long time today to, to, you know, the Corona lockdown. Yeah. And that was pretty cool at the time. It got pretty cold, pretty fast. I must say that's too funny. I suppose what's the word it's still spring, but it can't be that bad over there. No. Well, the temperature just drop really fast to all of a sudden, you know, We was M I think when we went, there was probably like 10 degrees Celsius and then one and a half hour later, when is the training finished?
Jesper (1m 57s): It was a two degrees and I was, and I was standing still. Of course you were just standing there watching it, right. So it's standing still for one and a half hours or while the temperature just drops it. Well, it becomes pretty cold after a while. It's probably a better to be the referee and be like running around and keeping warm much better. Yeah. Much better. Yes. And shouting at people and stuff like that. A little, keep your adrenaline going. Oh, geez. Yeah. Well, you know, you've got to get your exercise, your, a cheer for your son, even though it was just practiced. So it was in a game, but still you can be out there shouting. No, no, no, no.
Jesper (2m 37s): I don't think that's good. I mean, it's some, some parents just don't know how to control themselves, honestly. And there's just let, let them have fun. Let them play why'd you have to stand up and shout at them. So that's not just the U S trait that's that's over in the European union too.
Autumn (2m 52s): That's good to know that it was just as crazy as Americans.
Jesper (2m 56s): Yeah. It's not good. Yeah. Oh, and by the way, It should also mention a name because the PODCAST people can see this, But something new. We've actually, we started recording videos as well, while we are recording this podcast episodes. So, so if anyone wants to, wants to see us then a head on over to the Am, Writing Fantasy, YouTube channel, Autumn. I, No it's Yes. Our, how we do record, these has changed in their offering video. And last week we, we could have done last week, but I was still under an old modem that had a three megabyte upload speed.
Jesper (3m 38s): I am in a really rural area, rural cellphone internet, but we just got five G modem. And it actually is just the fastest internet we've ever had. So I'm feeling pretty good. And, and it's a working. I didn't send it up to my husband. Did I didn't touch it? He won't let me. So this was the big rollout, which is pretty good timing.
Autumn (4m 5s): We only missed one potential episode that we could've recorded with a video. So it's not too bad.
Jesper (4m 13s): Yeah. So the Am Writing Fantasy, YouTube channel will show the video feed as well. If anybody interests. I don't know. I can't see why anybody would be, But, but if they are then that's it.
Autumn (4m 28s): Yeah, absolutely. I'm in my husband actually. He's been complaining. I was like, I don't think I like YouTube videos that, or just static images and, well, I'm not saying anything like that. That's ours, but now it isn't. So that's a good thing.
Jesper (4m 42s): Yeah. Yeah. So anything else going on on your side?
Autumn (4m 48s): Well, everything, everything. I mean, I, I, I feel like, you know how it is when you, things just aren't going well. And I feel like I was stuck and I'm just sitting there spinning my wheels and grinding the gears and whatever was holding me back. I was just trying to move an inch, but whatever it was holding me back, let me go. And instead of just moving an edge, I got Slingshot it to like the next state. And suddenly my life goes from like, just trying to get one thing done to suddenly like 20 things coming at me. And it's good. It's good. But it's just suddenly I can't keep up with suddenly everything that's coming towards me. A little things I'd said in motion ages ago when I was just trying to move that a little bit of an edge.
Autumn (5m 31s): So I, I think of it, it it's like playing a game of catch up, but your opponent or your cooperator as invisible in there throwing hot rocks in and just grasping in air and hoping to stay afloat. But yeah, so it was a total change and I haven't broken anything and suddenly things are working well, and that's a good thing, but I'm not caught up yet.
Jesper (6m 0s): Yeah. Well, sooner or later, right?
Autumn (6m 4s): Yeah. As I said, my tombstone will say to be continued.
Narrator (6m 7s): A week on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast.
Jesper (6m 12s): Sorry. I started the sound of it too early there, but I have in mind. So just a last reminder here, if you didn't pick it up from last week's episode, we are currently running as a special off on Patrion. Yes. Which is fantastic. We hope you will come in and join us over there. At least come and check us out for just a dollar a month. You can join us and help support this podcast, which we definitely appreciate. Nothing's free. I mean, the software we use for uploading and recording and hosting it all costs a little bit. So every bit helps us afford that. So if you like us Patriana is one way of not only helping to support us, but getting something back, especially right now during these special sign up offers.
Jesper (7m 3s): Yeah. So for a limited time, everyone who joins us on Patrion will get some extra prices on top of the ones that we already offer. Each one of the different T levels. So every one, and that includes the existing patron supporters will get an e-book of our, a guide that is called a plot development, which is an end to end on a walk through step by step on how to develop a platform novel and also develop the characters and the character arcs. And we will also make a draw. Yes. One lucky winner will get to have a mentoring session by session with both of us on something.
Autumn (7m 48s): I assume it'll be on the books. I hope they get their writing publishing. I don't know if we did we limit from what you're mentoring session could be a line. I can do a small house building, but hopefully, hopefully it'll be on the close and learning how to swim a mile. Oh, you have to be a referee as a soccer coach. Oh yeah. Yeah. Okay. So we can do it a few things. Yes. We have to travel the world, but how to behave yourself would be better. It won't be good at it that way. So that it'll be fun. I mean, if it gets one on one coaching, so that it'll be fantastic.
Jesper (8m 31s): Yeah. So in a shorter has never been a better time to sign up to SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST and right now, but you will need to be quick about it. 'cause this special offer ends on the 22nd of March. So as always, you will find the links to patron in the show notes.
Narrator (8m 53s): Yeah. And on to today's topic.
Jesper (8m 57s): Okay. So what are we talking about here?
Autumn (9m 2s): We are talking about Instagram, which Okay. True confession for you. How often are you on Instagram?
Jesper (9m 9s): I don't even have an account.
Autumn (9m 12s): What is the wait? Was I supposed to prepare something for today? A Yes. Do we need to cut it now? So you thank you. And that was it. Oh, you know, I'm good at my hope. You're not alone. This is, I know. So I don't even have an account, but you've seen Instagram. Right. You know, you, you can look at it and you can see it from computers, other places, even if you don't have an account. So I'm hoping you might be seen an Instagram post before.
Jesper (9m 48s): No. Or yes,
Autumn (9m 51s): but mostly you can't see much to be honest because of your, if you click on it an Instagram post and you don't have an account, you can see the image, but then it will just ask you to log in. So you can really do anything. You, you could just see the image. So that's more or less of a, I think before Facebook bot, you could actually see the posts and everything. It was more like Twitter where you could actually follow it and see it. I remember seeing websites that would have all of their Instagram images. So yeah. I could see Facebook. Maybe we missed it up a little bit, but we won't go there.
Jesper (10m 24s): But No.
Autumn (10m 25s): So Instagram, I have five minutes. So maybe it's been one of my favorite social media platforms of probably in the last couple of years. I used to be a big on Twitter. Twitter. I've never liked Facebook, but Instagram. I like, so I don't mind talking about this one.
Jesper (10m 43s): No. And I think we will see how we get to it, but I would like to have some thoughts, at least around the effectiveness of it all as you see it. Yeah. No, no, but maybe we will get to that. I don't know.
Autumn (10m 59s): But, but yes, definitely. Well, I think we should start with, for anyone else, not familiar with it. If you're looking at maybe trying out Instagram, so Bookstagram is a hashtag on Instagram and it just one of many hashtags that are out there. I mean, some of the others Bookstagrammer, which you did come up with that is correct. There. Everyone who does a Bookstagram is a Bookstagrammer there's books, books, books, and reading, live Book, life books of Instagram, readers of Instagram. There's all of these hashtags and Instagram is different because you can follow hashtags just like people. So you can follow your Bookstagrammer.
Autumn (11m 39s): As you can follow Fantasy Readers, you can follow FANTASY readers. That's a good one to follow. And then you can interact, you know, find a new post to people you don't even follow well by following the hashtag. And so that's what a Bookstagram is that it gives you an idea. So it's a very active, you might be surprised. There's a lot of readers. There's a lot of active Book audience on Instagram, and there are geared towards a younger, you know, it's mostly thirties and younger. So if you are a Y a or if your target audience is a younger crowd, this is a good place to hang out and get to know people because they tend to be friendly.
Autumn (12m 21s): And, but yeah, it's fun, but there's definitely some Instagram rules and ways of approaching. If you want to use it as an advertising platform, there's definitely some, some ways of doing it in some ways of not doing it. Of course.
Jesper (12m 40s): Okay. We definitely need to get into some of those, but, but it basically, so it's basic, it's basically like Book tubers, but just on Instagram is, is it's a sort of the same thing, right? Yeah.
Autumn (12m 53s): Yes. Not that I, I don't do videos, so I don't know anything about Book tuber as we do that PODCAST. It is all on. Okay.
Jesper (13m 5s): Yeah. But, but a Book, tube be is this, usually those people on YouTube who will review books and then talk about what they felt about the book and, and so on and so on. But I don't know how much they do have that on, on instinct.
Autumn (13m 17s): Yeah. It depends. And that's, what's really the key. So I think most people hear about Instagram influencers. I mean, they've been targeted by, you know, some Instagram influencers have millions of followers and they make lots of money by reviewing products or promoting products, right. On their channel. For some reason, Instagram, it's sort of Okay to be a promoter, like a lifestyle promoter. Instagram is more selling a lifestyle than a specific thing. So if you are a Bookstagrammer, you're selling a lifestyle of reading Fantasy and being a huge Fantasy fan.
Autumn (13m 58s): And that's one of the key things to remember. I mean, they can have thousands of followers. They can have lots of comments and it's great to interact with them. So they are Influencers. But I think what are the biggest take-aways is that these are people who are serious and professional about building a brand, just like we, as authors are serious and professional about building our brands. So you're coming, and this was not a book reviewer. It was a blog that you were just like, Hey, give you a free Book. Well, you look at my book. This is someone who has spent sometimes hundreds of dollars to buy little props for their images. They have a whole look, they have a color scheme, they have a genre, they have something about them that is really that there they're trying to sell and promote as well as gain new followers.
Autumn (14m 44s): And you're kind of tapping into someone, especially the upper tier ones that these are the people that are professional about this. You have to treat them as an equal and not as like, yeah, just give me a free book to me as I mentioned. Okay. So there, you should be a little more serious and especially Instagram, it is all about the image. They, there are some people who do videos and so you will get stories. There's Instagram stories that they only last for 24 hours and you will get them. There can be only 15 seconds. And so maybe you'll get them holding up your Book and they'll see a little blurb about it and then it'll be gone or they can do a post about it. And for that, they usually do the pictures and the little, I mean, it's, there are some of the top tier Bookstagrammers, Oh my goodness.
Autumn (15m 26s): I want to, I don't know how many props and things they have that you have worn, especially the ones that are in a fantasy genre. Dragon's and one's and Crystal's and sparkly lights. And it's just crazy what they have on it. It makes me want to have a bigger cabin every time we see them.
Jesper (15m 49s): Yeah. But I also think that its, it made us a lot too as well as you know, I think you've probably alluded to it, their right. But I would think that they met us a lot to get the right type of influencer in a, it it's not like a one size fits all thing. You need to find somebody who, who loves your showing. Right. And caters to that type of audience, I guess. Right?
Autumn (16m 12s): Yeah. Absolutely. And that's one of the things, I mean, if you just ha you know, look at the hashtag Bookstagrammer or follow it, the top nine posts on any hashtag you look at are the top nine trending, you know, like when you go into Twitter and it tells you like the trending posts on the side, it's sort of the same thing on Instagram, you get a block of nine and those are the top ones at that moment in that hashtag. And you can look through them in Bookstagrammer is great, but that is specific to the books, but it's not specific to your genre. So you do need to do some research. Like I noticed right now, a Sarah J mass just released I'm a core to silver flames, which is the next Birt book in her crown of thorns and roses series.
Autumn (16m 55s): And so I have seen a lot of people who was posting pictures with that book, I'm doing a little review saying where they are in their reading it, what they are thinking of. It there's tons of posts. But if you read through them, you'll see a few people say I never read Fantasy, But I read this one. 'cause it is a popular Book. And people are trying to build their brand and build their number of followers. By saying, I'm reviewing this really popular book. Well, that's not a reason to go and ask them if they'll review your book. If they typically do not read Fantasy, you want to burrow down. You want to read through some other posts. In fact, when the best things you can do is spend some time, you know, follow the Bookstagrammer comment on some of their other post. So they know who you are before you do as spam, you know, a private message saying, Hey, will you do read my book too.
Autumn (17m 41s): You want to get to know them a little bit, see what they're going to offer you. You know, some people you see on Instagram is really interesting. You can't post live link in a post. And so that's one of the fun things. So you can't really sell anything unless you're doing advertising, unless you put it in your bio link. So you need to see how do they promote these books, you know, just because they do a review, what does that going to be by you? Is that going to have their audience really excited? Or will they be able to post a link for something for you or at least have a tag You so that they will go and follow you and you'll get a whole bunch of new followers. That's not a bad outcome because then you can offer them all your new followers.
Autumn (18m 22s): Hey, look at my link. Here's a freebie, go follow it. So there's, you've got to be strategic. You can't just say, Hey, I'm going to go get a Bookstagrammer to review my book and it's going to do X. You got to figure out what your X is before you go in and find your own Bookstagrammer.
Jesper (18m 40s): Yeah. And nobody likes to be asked to fave out of the blue, by somebody who, who, who, who they have no idea who it is. Right? I mean, nobody likes that. So the starting, starting of building a relationship in, in advanced is very important, I think. But I'm also thinking that going off to the top tier ones might not be very useful,
Autumn (19m 3s): But I think if you want it to go for a top tier one, I would say start maybe your first one to start lower, start with someone who has a moderate amount of followers who is willing to work for you or work with you. But definitely if you're going to come from the top tier one is you kind have to have your, you got to have a platform. You've got to have a really gorgeous book, cover. Remember pictures are everything on Instagram, the posts or nice. But it's the picture that really is the most popular thing that people are scrolling through Instagram four. So if you don't have a pretty cover know, and the fact is most of these, Bookstagrammers the big ones. They have these bookshelves and the size of rooms.
Autumn (19m 43s): Or again, I am so jealous. They have the organized by color or some of them have them all white. Its just crazy. The amount of time is spent organizing they're books. But think of it, there are real books. They like Real books. So you needed to be offering it. Maybe you can offer a, someone of free ebook, but there are probably going to want to pay per pack. And they're going to respond a lot better if your offering a free paperback. So you're probably, unless you got some money, which if you do it, I don't know why you are trying to hunt down. Bookstagrammers there's other ways of, you know, advertising than, than this. You probably don't want to be sending out like 30 or 40 or 50 paperbacks. You going to have to choose just a couple of grab five paperbacks, choose five.
Autumn (20m 25s): Bookstagrammers call that a success because they're going to want paper is going to sound a much better off. Or if you can send them a paper bag because they are going to want that for their photo.
Jesper (20m 38s): Yeah. No. And that, that definitely makes sense. But, but then again, I, well it is because I'm not into this world. Right. But my thinking is just, well they want a photo. So a ebook cover is that's a photo, right? What's what's the problem. But I guess it's because they, they are taking photos for themselves and styling and all that kind of thing, I suppose right now.
Autumn (20m 60s): Yeah, it is. And it's harder. The most covers you see of like eBooks or iPads with a book cover photo or not actually on the image because of the screen reflection and everything else. Usually those are all digitally altered images and yet to get their prompts and everything else there are, they usually want the paperback. There are pretty old-school, especially the Fantasy ones I have noticed. They really liked it. A real books. They want to hold it up a real book. They want to hold up an iPad or a phone. They want something really pretty.
Jesper (21m 33s): Yeah, no, I know. I see the same thing goes for the Book tubers as well. They also want the physical, but in that case I really understand it because they are talking to camera. So they want to be able to show it to the camera that it is this book. Right. So I understand that. But yeah, the Instagram stuff is still weird to me because you could just download the app, the book cover image, right. And then you could do for them and manipulation and do whatever. What never mind I was just me. I know it. It's just me. So just ignore my comments. Yeah.
Autumn (22m 5s): Yeah. Well, it was funny because I don't have a big staging area when I do my images on Instagram, I often are. I am often photo manipulating things and putting them in places that I don't actually have. So I get that, but that's not the brand that most of the Bookstagrammers are, they are doing for authentic. This was their Real house. This was their Real reading room and they are really readers' and they're really serious readers. So they want the real deal. That's just the way it goes. Authenticity is the key and they want to show it off.
Jesper (22m 36s): No, that's fair enough. But how do you, how do you see the time investment and this stuff? Because what if we are saying, number one, you said you have to build the relationship with these people in advance. So of course that takes a bit of time. So I I'm automatically, they are already thinking that you should probably do this if you like the Bookstagrammer stuff any way. So if it's like, Oh, I love this anyway. I'm it would not be something like if, if I was the one, I probably would not give myself the advice to say start billing relationship with these people. 'cause I don't really like, it's not that I dislike it, but I don't find any pleasure in going on to Instagram and finding pictures and following these people and why I don't enjoy it.
Jesper (23m 23s): So wouldn't it be better just to say it didn't don't do it. I am always thinking like, isn't the advice to say? You should only do it if you like it already or what, what, what do you think
Autumn (23m 35s): If you like it already? Or if it's your audience, if your audience is younger, if your audience is going to like Bookstagram or Bookstagrammers even if you hate, then it might be a good thing to give a try because I mean, maybe you have to do a follow a books, a couple of Bookstagrammers you have to narrow it down, talked to them for a week or two and three or maybe a month. But again, you'll have to do what every single day you stop in once or twice a week to talk to them and see what they're posting comment on their posts for a month and then private message him and saying, Hey, I really like what you do. I love your look. I love the books are review. I write something similar. I will give you a free paperback. If you are willing to, you know, look at mine and review it.
Autumn (24m 18s): And by the way, here is a link to the actual, you know, the e-book so that you can see what you are getting into or even a blurb, or I'll give you the book, if you want to read it first so that, you know, you, you, you know, you will like it or at least a sample. So you want to, at least you don't build up some kind of a relationship with the stuff you gotta be like months in. And you're talking to him for every day for hours on end. You know, it does not take long to go on to Instagram and do a post, especially if you're following a few specific people.
Jesper (24m 47s): Yeah. Okay, fine. So that the answer, but then I have, and then I have another, another critical question. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I have to be the critical voice today. So let's say let's okay. Let's try and say, you don't have to overdo the engagement and, and all that. So it's not too much work, but then what is the actual likelihood of them are actually saying yes, because Mr. Nobody comes in and say, Hey, can you please, would you mind the reviewing my book or whatever, or, or whatever, you know? I mean, I understand when you say is Sarah J math and stuff like that?
Autumn (25m 30s): No, no, of course. Yeah, of course. She's going to get Bookstagrammers to, to, But, or a Stephen King or a brand and Sanders in whatever write, but what about the rest of us and models? Is it, is it even possible, do you think? Oh yeah, I definitely think it's possible. I having been there and around me as a reader or some of these readers, I mean, they are professional readers. I, they can read a book on a day and so they need a lot of books and a lot of them do like two, some of them that's the thing is to go to books, book sales, and find books that they prefer it. Some of them happily take other books. Again, it's all about finding out which ones are going to be more open to you in some of them might say, no, it's just not my cup of tea, but a lot of, a lot of them are like books, even if it's for a proper, even if they might not get to it for a month or so, you know?
Autumn (26m 15s): No, but I think they will be, if you have a nice cover, if you are a good enough writer, you know, if you can entice them, I think you'll be fine. But if you have maybe only one book out or, and it seems that you did the cover yourself, they might politely say no, so you have to do a watch that. Mm. And I definitely, I think it's important to note that, I guess. Yeah.
Jesper (26m 40s): Yeah. Go ahead. No, I'm sorry. Yeah, there is a bit of a delay here, so sorry for that. So I didn't pick up the day you start at the talking, but the way I was just wondering as well that I guess they don't really mind how much or how little of an audience you have then, because from their point of view, the main thing that they want is just the free book. And they want some let's call it content that they can produce and by reading the book. Right. So, so they don't really get to that as long as the book looks wonderful. And it is when it in, within the stuff that they like to read already, then I guess they don't really care if you have a, you know, your aunt and your brother following you on Twitter, or if you have a, a, a 125,000 people following you, I guess they don't really care.
Autumn (27m 33s): I don't think it does. I mean, it would probably be helpful if you can then promote, you know, cross promote them or offer them some kind of cross promotion in some way. But a lot of them, yeah, they're looking for content. They are looking for nice pictures, are good books to review, and you're basically maybe offering them something, you know, a free meal and as a selection that maybe they wouldn't have found, otherwise they might be happy about it. So it's not about, it's not something that they're going to just out and out, refuse. Not everyone. Some are going to have some, you know, like the reading and learn to be read pile might be a mile long and there just like, no, no, no. More as the one thing about reader's they tend to always won another book. Don't we always, yeah.
Jesper (28m 18s): Yeah, because that's, that's basically my fear and all of this is that they might easily say, yeah, sure. Send it to me. But they have like a to be read pile. That is so weird because I imagine a lot of people will be doing this. Right. A lot of people will reach out to them and maybe they would just say, yeah, sure, no problem. And send it to me. And then it goes into the pile and not to say that they'll never get there, but it is, well, what if it takes a year before they get to your book? Right? I mean, is it been worth it? Yeah. Well, of course that'll be a nice once they get to it, but maybe that was not quite the point. Maybe you release the book and you wanted it to give a bit of a boost in and then a year that, well, then you could say to get some more books a year later, but it, is it more sounds like you needed to be aware of your, let's say strategy here or are you set your expectations, right.
Autumn (29m 15s): Definitely. I think it's, you need to stay, you need to be clear when you are a private message to them and saying, I have a book that's a new release or that I'm looking to promote in June, just be clear. And like I said, do you need to know what you're going to get? Why are you approaching this Bookstagrammer or is it because they are incredibly popular or because you think they have an audience that you would like to get into or are they going to tag you because you're not going to get a free link that anyone who reads that post we'll have to go and probably search your book, or if they get, if you get tagged, they can go and follow you and read your bio and maybe find out where you are giving away at your freebie, because you only have one link.
Autumn (29m 57s): So those are the things to keep in mind that you don't have much of a, you know, there is not a big advertising things. So you have to be really clear on what you're expecting. If it is it going to be followers to come and follow you, or you're going to have a sale, that's going to go with this book. Then you need to tell the Bookstagrammer, Hey, I'm planning on doing this. Would you be willing? Is that something you want to work together and do? Or you can do this review. And when you do the review, I'm going to give you five eBooks that you can give away for free, as well as part of your platform. This is a lot of things that you can make up and that they can do as well. And that's, that is not an atypical and Instagram. They can do.
Autumn (30m 38s): A lot of people do like, Hey, I'll choose five people from my comments to give him a private message. You a link to get a free book. People do comment and giveaway is a lot on Instagram. Its like tag follow a comment and then we'll give away a Book and team up with the big Bookstagrammer or, or even a modern Bookstagrammer. I do that with you. It can benefit both of you. You are giving them something to give away for free. They're getting content and also building their own platform. And you're going to cross post. And if your audience likes Instagram as a younger audience, this can be a really fun. You can have fun with it. I think that that's the thing to remember is just Instagram. It's a lifestyle.
Autumn (31m 18s): And so you're selling, reading your selling fun and adventure and you love your readers'. Those are the vibe's you should be giving out with your post and with your offer. And if you do that, I think you will get a good response if you're, you know, just saying, Hey, here's my freebie. I think you'll like it, you should read it. You're probably going to hit a brick wall and not a problem.
Jesper (31m 46s): Yeah. And I think so too. And well, I guess it's a, it's up to people to try. I mean, why not? You, you can try it out. It, it doesn't cost you anything to send an email or contact these people. So in that sense you can try it out, But I'm still here. Yeah. I was still thinking that it might be more difficult than you think
Autumn (32m 8s): You challenging me to go give this a try aren't you?
Jesper (32m 13s): Yeah. Yeah. Try it out and see how many new people you can actually get to say. Yes. Because I, I, no. Okay. Let me, let me, let me rephrase that. I think you can get people to say yes, But I'm not So sure that they will get to it in, within the timeframe you would like them to.
Autumn (32m 32s): That will be, it would be an interesting topic. But I think again, it comes down to like, especially like right now I'm releasing a whole series. So I know I'm going to be releasing books from here till June. If I could sit up a Bookstagrammer even when the final book that they are going to maybe read one or two of them are, maybe I'll get them all in the series. That's not, as you planning ahead, it's like planning ahead. All of your advertising. You're not expecting an immediate thing. I mean, they are going to have to reach, you have to ship the book, you know, they have to read it or they have to post it. So it might not happen. But I think being clear, a lot of these. Yeah. Like I said it to them, this is the professional level of business. So if they are not being clear and concise and can you give you a time frame, then move on to someone who can give that to you.
Autumn (33m 16s): Not, you don't want little, Oh, you know, it looks good. I'll get to it sometime in 2020 for you, you know, you definitely want to pin it down. And to me the biggest hurdle, a in the pet challenge, I see, I mean, I do like Instagram, but I do see problems because it is constantly changing. Facebook does own it now in Facebook likes to change things quite a bit. Yeah. And they love that. Yeah. And so it, it keeps changing. Like when you first, when I first joined Instagram, you never saw a promotional post or, or you could see one every 20 or 30 and then they changed it to like one every third post became promotional and then they could have three together and then they stop doing that and they changed how you do it.
Autumn (33m 60s): But it is, it can there's days that I go on there and I'm like, I just can't take that. And then last week, of course, when we are, we're talking now, I'm, it will have been two or three weeks ago. I went on an all of these cross posts from tick-tock and I'm not on Tik TOK for a purpose. I don't really like video. I don't want to do a tock. It's not Instagram. And Instagram tends to be static images. They have some video, but it's, you know, Instagram TV never took off. It's not a big thing. So most of the video are very small or some, a little blurry images that are moving a little bit. And suddenly there's all these cross-post from Tik TOK that were one nut format it to the Instagram size, which is 1400 by 1400.
Autumn (34m 42s): So there are odd sized stretched wrong. And I just couldn't take it. I'm on there for the pretty pictures to talk to authors. I like to have conversations in suddenly all of these people doing Tik TOK stuff. It was just like, I'm done. I didn't even look at it the rest of the day. So, you know, if you give a book to somebody, I don't know what Instagram will look like in six months. It as much as I hate to say it, but I don't know. It could change hugely because every once in a while, if Facebook decided to roll out on a massive change, the Instagram and there's usually an uproar and then they bring it back a little bit, but it's not owned by the original founders who had the vision for it that I used to be.
Autumn (35m 25s): So it is changing constantly. And so there is that. So if you do a giveaway, it somewhat a book and they say, I'll read it in eight months. It might be fine. Last year we could have hit the earth by too. So I don't know.
Jesper (35m 42s): No, that's true. But, but I actually, I was actually thinking while you were talking that that might be THE, so to speak easiest way of getting mileage out of Instagram would be to basically just reach out to, let's say new Bookstagrammer like once a week, every two weeks are once a month or whatever. And they don't care about when they get to it, But, but just sort of get the wheelchair and
Autumn (36m 9s): Just turning it off. Yeah. Yeah. Well,
Jesper (36m 12s): Yeah. And then eventually something will pop out here and there that, that then they got to it. I mean, that could be a way where I think it could be working, but I'm more of a much more hesitant if you have deadlines and you need it within this timeframe. And so I think that will be difficult, especially if you're talking about maybe not the low grade Influencers. I, but if it's a Influencers with a big following who does this as a professional level, they will not, you know, buy to your time scale that you will have to abide to Dez. Yeah. And, and, and that means that maybe you have to wait 10 months or whatever, but if you keep feeding the monster, as you say, every week or every second week, or once a month or whatever, you have the time for it, and it's something that will trickle out down the road.
Autumn (36m 58s): Right. So, so that might be something that could be worth it.
Jesper (37m 3s): Absolutely edit it to me. And the other only caveat I have is that you're building a platform on someone else's platform and you and I have discussed this a lot, especially recently. Yes. And so that's a great, if you give 50,000 Instagram followers and you become your own influence or an author influencer, that's fantastic. I don't know many author Influencers other than the really big names that have that many followers. I mean, it seems a lot of them cap out at the 5,000 to 10,000. There's a few who get a little bit higher, but I think that's a great, but I have to admit, I spent a lot of time last week formatting some images to like do a character or a lot of people, sometimes format some stuff for like character introductions or a cover reveals, you know, they do all of these things and it's great.
Autumn (37m 53s): And then I feel like it's gone in, or, you know, it'll be on my feet for a while, but it essentially, if I post once a day or a couple of times a day, it's gonna trickle down really quickly. And I ended up taking the images and putting it on my blog and spreading that out too, like Amazon and good reads and all these other places that I think it, it did a lot better in, by being on my blog. It will last a lot longer. I got up, I, I sent it out to my pore subscriber's that I have neglected recently. So I do think it is one thing to consider that, like, what are you doing on Instagram and how is it helping your platform? Yeah. It's great to build something there, but how are you going to convert them into readers?
Autumn (38m 34s): And if Instagram changes hugely, how are they going to find you so that, you know, they're on your mailing list? Or do they know where your website is so that they can go and find you because you know, Facebook used to be the big thing and maybe it still is, but I think it's tanking Twitter. I used to, I have, I have so many followers on Twitter, but I have not been active really on that platform for a long time, because it's just changed too much. And I'm not that interested in. I have to have been like, Oh, I'm a graphic designer. I like pretty pictures. I tweet don't do forums. That's just pictures. I don't know.
Jesper (39m 9s): Yeah. Yeah. But getting people from those platforms, whatever, whichever one is that you're using it in this case, in a Instagram, getting them off of there and onto your email list is absolutely key. I mean, years ago I wrote a book about how to use Twitter as an author and a low and behold, like six months after I published that book, Twitter changed the, a in terms of conditions so that the strategy that I was using to actually get people off of Twitter and on to the email list, stop working.
Jesper (39m 48s): So that's the thing that you all are. I think you always just have to keep in mind with the stuff that if you are not funding the funneling them away from the platform and onto your email list, it could go away tomorrow. And then when I say that, I also know that many people will think, yeah, but that's not really going to happen. I mean, what about YouTube and people who have been YouTube has for years and years and years, and now you're on a living and that's true. Yes. But sometimes it happens and maybe it hasn't happened yet. And maybe it won't happen for the next two years. Who knows? I don't know. But I'm assuming that the being an author means that you want to build a lifetime career out of this.
Jesper (40m 31s): And one thing I can say for sure is that Instagram will change over the next 50 years. It will not be the same. So if, if that's the only place where you have your audience, you have an issue. Yes. All right. And that was also the people at some point that we built the entire business spaced on a Google apps and stuff like that. And then at some point Google changed how Google ads worked, worked at, and they didn't pay out affiliates at the same level anymore. And so on. So on and people's business stuff from basically overnight, right. From one way to the next. So it's not to sort of paint a doomsday picture out of things, but I think it is important to be mindful that it's only when you have the control over the customer data, that you can build a proper sustainable business because otherwise you will always be dependent on the Well womens and ideas about THE, whatever the other is this the same thing with Facebook, right?
Jesper (41m 35s): I mean, a lot of authors at the moment are selfish, inclusive, inclusive, eh, has a quite big audiences maybe in Facebook groups and stuff like that. And if that's the only place where you have them, you, again, you have an issue. So yeah, I think this sort of stuff is really, really important. All right.
Autumn (41m 55s): Yeah. I agree. And that's why, you know, it's definitely got me thinking again that making sure your, your core, your, the stuff you own, like your own website, your own blog, make sure that that's solid and growing and push out to the other platforms, you know, reuse your posts or one of the, I still love that about blogs. I mean, you can list, you can link your website, blog to your Amazon profile, to your good reads profile. You can spread that out to your Twitter, to your Facebook. You can link it to your Instagram, but you can find ways of cross posting it. I know that you use a, a, a social post or I use I'm a social pilot. There are ways of pushing out, even in a blog post, even if the link isn't live, you can kind of, if you have an easy website, which is the whole purpose of having a website name is that it's easy to type.
Autumn (42m 43s): You can send people back over to it. And so, you know, making sure that you're generating those links to come back to where your core, your center core that has strong, that you own is, is really the best use of your marketing time. Rather than sitting there on Instagram for hours and hours of sitting on Facebook for hours and hours. That's one not helping you right now. And two, it's not a platform you Oh. And so at the end of the day, those people could disappear overnight. If something changed in the platform. I mean, everyone says that about Amazon and that's one reason I'm wide. And your wide is that if something happens on Amazon where it's not our only basket of eggs, but I really do believe that.
Autumn (43m 26s): I mean, I don't just talk That I, I walk that way.
Jesper (43m 32s): Yeah. Yeah. And we also had an, I don't remember the episode number anymore, but people can search for it, but we had Joanna Penn on and on a past episode as well, where we talked about diversifying your income and that's exactly what it is so important. And she, she was a big advocate of that as well, to make sure you don't have all the acts in one basket because it's going to hurt one day. If that's what you do, maybe not now, maybe not next five years, but one day it will hurt. So yeah. I try always to diversify, making sure that you control your audience, meaning that you have them on an e-mail list so that you, no, that no matter what happens with Facebook or Instagram or whatever, you have a way to contact those people.
Jesper (44m 15s): When you have a new book out, that's the only way to build it sustainable. Yeah.
Autumn (44m 20s): Yeah. And speaking of a new book out, according to the end of this podcast is released. I released a book yesterday. I can't wait to the future me to tell the, present me how that goes. So I don't know. We just realize that that's a really exciting, we want to time travel for my book really is okay. Back to the park. That was perfect though. But any final words on a Bookstagram on Instagram and what not? No. Other than, like I said, it is, it's a lot about branding. It's a lot about lifestyle and its a lot about, you know, I would assume a militia WRITING dystopian or something really dark and depressing that it's about having a little bit of fun.
Autumn (45m 6s): So do keep that in mind that sort of what Instagram is about. It's not about just selling one thing, its about selling a whole lifestyle of what it's like to be a reader. So treat the Bookstagrammers like professionals who with a professional brand equal, if not better than yours and be nice, but come say hi, it's really fun. And if you do come say hi to me, so I, because I'm on their and you're not, but I really do enjoy it. Assuming they stop cross posting tick talk. Well maybe one day I'll say, okay, so next Monday we are going to share some tips and thoughts on writing a first draft.
Jesper (45m 48s): We will try to be as helpful as we can when it comes to a first draft.
Narrator (45m 54s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patrion.com/ Am. Writing Fantasy for as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, going to stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
What happens when Autumn and Jesper lets go of the reigns and come up with the most crazy and stupid ways in which to create fictional characters?
Episode 115 is NOT designed to give you any writing advice. Hopefully, it'll make you laugh instead.
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
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Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need an literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I am Jesper
Autumn (31s): And I'm Autumn.
Jesper (33s): This is episode 115 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. And this is one more of our lighthearted episodes. We will share 10 terrible ways of creating characters. So I'm really looking forward to hear what you came up with here. Autumn.
Autumn (50s): Yeah, it was good. It was a challenge and it was fun because there was times I was like, Oh, I might try that. But yeah, we'll see how it goes. And I actually, since we're doing 10, I assumed this is an alternating list. So I only needed to come up with five, but I came up with a couple of extra just in case you chose ones. I well, just in case you already chose one that way I, I, I could still put in an entry to win this one.
Jesper (1m 16s): Damn that's well-prepared I didn't have to think about that.
Autumn (1m 19s): I did my homework and I did extra homework. So HA, I already won.
Jesper (1m 25s): Well, no, that I don't agree. Let's see, because you might have some mediocre bonus ones, but that doesn't trump. My very good ones.
Autumn (1m 35s): Oh, we'll see. Challenge accepted. We will check this out, but it's the, how are things over on your side of the Atlantic?
Jesper (1m 45s): It's it's good. Just writing, taking care of job stuff, you know? Right. But I also, I actually finished reading the Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. Oh, I finished reading it this weekend.
Autumn (2m 1s): That, that book it's I hear so much about it. Like I recognize his name everywhere and it's, I have not read it yet myself, but I'm like, wow, it's just like, it's already got this known mythos. So how was it?
Jesper (2m 14s): That was exactly why I bought it and read it because of all the praise it gets. So I thought, okay, I better read this one and figure out what's the, what is all the fuss about? Yeah. And I must have, I must say that I understand why he's getting so much praise for his writing. The writing itself is really well done. Oh, excellent. Really, really nice writing. And you, you get, you get so much into the characters. So that is very well done. I'm actually planning to share a bit more in our readers group on Facebook. A bit more my thoughts on it, but I also small, not spoiler for the book, but small spoiler for my opinions that I'm going to share on the readers group on Facebook is that I am missing a bit of action.
Autumn (2m 59s): Oh,
Jesper (3m 0s): I'm missing a bit that something happening actually. I mean, there is something happening here and there, but it is also a lot about just a character and, you know, basically like how the character grows into becoming the person that he is. And the entire book is more or less flashback. So it's basically the main character is telling like a scribe who is then sitting down, writing down he story and it stops from his childhood. And then how he sort of grows into becoming what he is. So I'm not going to spoil anything of course here, but, but it is basically like a very, very slow long flashback with some chapters here and there where you in the present.
Jesper (3m 47s): But very few. So that also means that a lot of the lot of the story actually is more or less about him growing up stuff, which character wise is extremely well done. It extremely well-written. So, so that is good, but I would really like a bit more action. I definitely my writing and reading definitely gravitates towards more action. Like I want characters I care about, but I want to see them doing things so interesting. I I've been thinking a bit picking it up. So I'll, I look forward to your review and don't forget to review it on good reads. Since you did join, it's a good tool to use, is it?
Jesper (4m 30s): Yeah, I have to do that as well. I was thinking, well, maybe we're going to set up at some point here in the near future. Not quite sure when, but we'll probably let people know, but we were going to set up a group on good reads. So once we get that going, I will post videos, I think in that group about and stuff like this. So I am going to share, but I don't know if I want to get into all the reviewing officially kind of thing on good reads. I'm not sure I want to do that, but also I don't, I don't like, you know, well, one author reviewing other authors it's feels like a bit like, Hmm. I'm not sure that's a good idea.
Autumn (5m 12s): We can be overly nice or overly critical of other authors. I will say that it's kind of hard. There's no, in-between because we're never just reader as we're reading it for looking at what we like, what we don't like. Well, the flaws we see and it's definitely, I've noticed authors when they review other authors work. Sometimes it can be just all you worked so hard on this. Good for you. And other ones are like, wow, if this was my story. So it's night and it's night and day. It's really funny. Yeah. And the thing is that it's all subjective. Right? So just because I think I would like more action doesn't mean that there isn't a million people out there who thinks it's the best book they ever read.
Jesper (5m 53s): Right. And I don't want to sort of get into that crossfire there. It's just like, it's just my opinion. And I, I, you know, I'm entitled to that. Like everybody else's entitled to theirs, we don't have to have a fight about it. But once you start posting official reviews about it, then you risk having a fight about it. And I'm not sure I want to do that. So sure enough, a private group is slightly different in terms of just sharing some thoughts about it. That's slightly different than, than an official written review. I think which stars on it and all that. But I don't know. I'm a pot from a sort of jinxing, our podcast distribution, and also breaking that one. Autumn.
Jesper (6m 33s): I don't know what else you've been up to. I'm trying not to break things.
Autumn (6m 39s): I swear, but yeah. Okay. So the podcast distribution got a little delayed because I touched something on the website and seemed to broke something again, but I'm breaking things less frequently. It's going to end sooner if this can keep going, you know, with your breaking, everything you touch. And especially because this wouldn't when this episode is released next Sunday, the coming Sunday in less than like six days from when this is released, my next book, the tainted phase series is being released. And I'm so excited. So hopefully I don't break em. So I, when I upload it, it's my God.
Jesper (7m 20s): I can just see the uproar. Like every author starts panicking. KDP is down. KDP is down. It's like, Autumn! Did you upload anything?
Autumn (7m 31s): Yeah, that'll be me. But hopefully I've just excited to get this one out the door. I love what I've been hearing from the ARC reader. So I'm really, I just cannot wait to share this one with the world.
Jesper (7m 42s): Yeah. And it, and by the way, if anybody got confused about what we were talking about with the podcast distribution data, just to let the reader know, well, by the time this airs it's been a few weeks, actually. So maybe you don't even remember, maybe you didn't notice, but some might have noticed how episode 112 only appeared in your feed. Like several days after the Monday, it was supposed to get distributed. And I'm not going to mention why that was and who touched something. But yeah, you might know.
Autumn (8m 17s): Just, I swear, I need to come with a little note that says maybe a jinx, just a little note, don't do this shit at home. That's my, that'll be my life motto.
Narrator (8m 30s): A week on the internet with the Am Writing Fantasy podcast.
Jesper (8m 36s): So we have something very special to mention today. We don't do this very often, but once in a while we just love offering something extra, something special for our patron supporters.
Autumn (8m 49s): Yes. And I'm so excited that there's so much stuff going on in March. We just had the guide course I a book coming out in a week and we're doing something very special over on Patrion.
Jesper (9m 2s): Yeah. We have a special giveaway, but it won't be open for long. So we're going to close it again on the 22nd of March. So this will apply to all existing patrons supporters as well as everyone who signs up before the 22nd of March.
Autumn (9m 20s): Yes. So definitely come and join us. And we are giving everyone who joins or is already a member there, a copy of our plot development book, because we think everyone should feel special. And that's just the type of people. You are a cast. We over-give, we overshare. I don't know.
Jesper (9m 41s): Yeah. So everyone is going to get that. And then in addition, we are going to do a draw and one lucky winner is gonna win a mentor session with autumn and myself. And all of those extra prizes of course comes on top of the stuff that you will get normally
Autumn (10m 1s): Patron. Yes that's. Oh, and there's different tiers. And there's already cool things with every single one. I mean, it starts at a dollar a month. So you get something instantly for just a buck, which is fantastic. Plus you get a chance to win. Plus you get a chance to you go ahead and you get the plot development book, which has gotten so many praises. So that's fantastic. And even has some extra things you can get for free in it. So we just keep giving things away. It's a very interesting bottle we've got going on there.
Jesper (10m 31s): Yeah. I don't know business wise how smart that is, but
Autumn (10m 38s): Compensation.
Jesper (10m 38s): I mean, there's never been a better time to sign up, to support the am writing fantasy than right now to him. And as always, you will find the link in the show notes.
Autumn (10m 54s): Yeah.
Jesper (10m 54s): So this should be fun. I'm actually, I like these alternating lists episodes there. Yeah.
Autumn (10m 59s): It wasn't fun. It brings out your competitive spirit, which I've noticed you're a high competitor. So this will be, it'll be interesting.
Jesper (11m 8s): Yeah. You know, I figured out the one thing I am missing. Yeah. Normally when I'm a referee, I have my yellow and red carts. I feel like I should have that here as well.
Autumn (11m 18s): So that if you're not behaving,
Jesper (11m 19s): I can give you a red caught and put you into sin bin and stuff.
Autumn (11m 23s): Yeah. Yeah. I'll just touch the computer and the entire thing will explode. So watch it.
Jesper (11m 33s): Absolutely glad that I'm the one doing the controls of the podcast here, because otherwise you probably would stop recording or something all over.
Autumn (11m 40s): I am so afraid to touch my computer. Right.
Jesper (11m 44s): Yeah. Please don't touch anything. Just speak into the mic without touching them.
Autumn (11m 51s): No, this is difficult. All right. But what if my goes to sleep? That could be its own problem. Anyway, we won't go that way. No.
Jesper (12m 0s): Okay. So I think we have five each and you have a few bonus ones. And then of course we should at the end, try to figure out which one is the worst of the worst stern. And it would make most sense if it's probably one of mine. So if anybody gets, you know, well, if you just want to skip to the end of the episode, you can listen to us concluding that one of mine was the best one.
Autumn (12m 28s): Well, why, what does it earn that you have to earn that? Sorry. And no freebies here. Well only freebies to listeners and other authors. No freebies to us. Sorry.
Jesper (12m 39s): Okay. Well, let's go through the motion then if you insist, it's not going to change the outcome.
Autumn (12m 45s): So do I see, I had a hard time differentiating with mine. I don't know which one's worse or what, so mine's slightly a random order, but we'll go for it. Okay.
Jesper (12m 56s): Yeah. Yeah. I, well, I guess most of mine could be in a different orders. Well, I did try to make number one. Like that's probably the worst one I could think of, but if you want to upload up one of the other ones, that's okay with me as well. So you can do that.
Autumn (13m 12s): All right. Sounds good. So who wants to go first? We have to flip a coin or shall I graciously allow you to, to start? Since you believe yours are already better.
Jesper (13m 23s): Okay. Yeah. You okay? Yeah. I understand. You want to get right into the good stuff. You know, normally when I eat candies and stuff like that, I sh I saved the good ones for last, because that's how I prefer to do it. But if you want to get straight to the favorite ones, then yeah. Let's let's do.
Autumn (13m 38s): Yeah. Put your cards on the table. Let's see.
Jesper (13m 42s): Oh, I'm jinxing myself so bad. Now I know
Autumn (13m 49s): A bluffer.
Jesper (13m 51s): Yeah. Yeah. So I'm number five. So this one is sticking to archetypes, you know, like sticking to archetypes. So this is the, you, you make the mentor, the one who gives the advice and you make sure that this is all that character does. The hero does all the heroic stuff. And the love interest has an over abundance of love, no matter how badly he or she is actually
Autumn (14m 26s): Treated. Oh, so you basically
Jesper (14m 28s): Don't give a crap about adding more layers to the character. Just, you just want archetypes and then you might be thinking, well, Derrida, you like archetype. So I'm going to give them to you. Who cares about cultures or skin color and Oh my God, personality trait, all that nonsense. I tell you, it's just a waste of time to worry about testings. I,
Autumn (14m 53s): I liked that one. And actually I have to admit that is actually one of the bonus ones I came up with was basically don't create your characters at all. Just make them all stereotypes with virtually no personality. And I think Conan the barbarian, he is the hero's hero and so boring. So have you ever read Kona that pop area? I actually have not. I just remember it from the eighties and my childhood and watching it, watching my brother, what, you know, he was older than me. He would be running around being cornered.
Jesper (15m 25s): Yeah. Yeah. But that's also the only way I've never read it either. I also only remember watching it on TV when I was a child or growing up and I just thought it was so cool.
Autumn (15m 41s): I think at the time I, well, again, my brother was older and beating up on me cause he was Conan. So I had a different perspective. Well, yeah, I can see that. All right. Yes. So you're ready for my number five. Okay. Yes. All right. So just don't develop them at all. Use someone else's characters. So if you like Harry Potter, just create Barry Cotter, you know, just create something totally. A hundred percent based off of someone else's hard work. I think that's about the worst way I could think of creating a character.
Jesper (16m 17s): Yeah. Okay. I might have something similar.
Autumn (16m 20s): Oh, I'm not surprised because I'm going to say yeah.
Jesper (16m 24s): Yeah. I was just going to say that must be because that's a pretty good idea too.
Autumn (16m 28s): Exactly. And I said it first, so there you go. Okay.
Jesper (16m 35s): Yeah. Actually that's not a good sign. If that was one of your bad ones, then I don't know if you have even better stuff coming. Yeah. Now I'm better word.
Autumn (16m 44s): Good. Just where I want ya. Hmm. All right. So what's your number four number four. Yes. So this one is pure evil, intriguing, right? It sounds very intriguing.
Jesper (17m 2s): The evil characters they do what they do because they are just asking
Autumn (17m 12s): Readers who don't understand that ed it's.
Jesper (17m 16s): Why should you even bother justifying that a characters actually flawed that the person has a trauma, which has distorted their worldview and that the couches is actually believing that he or she is doing what is necessary, even when it is in fact evil, evil, you know, that kind of thinking that's garbage. It is advice made up by authors who don't know what they're talking about and what yeah. Some of them might be successful.
Autumn (17m 45s): Well,
Jesper (17m 46s): Have you ever heard about catching lightning in a bottle? I guess not.
Autumn (17m 54s): You know, there's something pure about just saying, well, he's evil, he's an asshole. This is how my character is. So we could go back to Cruella de Vil as evil characters. Sure. Yeah. That's just that's yeah.
Jesper (18m 12s): No way to do an antagonist. It's just like, they're evil because they're evil. Okay, great. I like that. Wonderful. You really put a lot of thought into that one. Yeah.
Autumn (18m 26s): Yeah. It would have me personally tearing my hair out because yeah. I like nuances. I like to love, especially me. I love to love my characters. I have a hard time letting them lose or Oh yeah.
Jesper (18m 41s): Yeah. But that could be evil. There's nothing wrong with that. But there should be a reason for why they're doing what they're doing. They're not just doing it because it's fun to be evil. You know? That makes sense.
Autumn (18m 50s): That's fun to be evil. That's like, I would love to give you that. I'll give you that. Actually I might be a super villain considering I destroy everything I touch. So, huh? No. I
Jesper (18m 60s): Think we worked out that you were the Fe
Autumn (19m 3s): That's true. Yes. Based on my forthcoming novel, the fake evil there's dark Fay. I wouldn't call them evil. They're just mischievous.
Jesper (19m 15s): So that may be maybe your doc Phaidon
Autumn (19m 17s): Might be dark. Hey. Oh, I feel outed. All right. Well, so my first one was, you know, just base your character on someone else's hard work, which is obviously you especially copyright issues and just, you should never undermine another author like that. You should never do it. So instead of basing them for my number four, instead of basing them all on someone else's characters, just based them all on you, a hundred percent, they're all just shades of you. I mean, why spend the time developing characters when you can just make them all you, when you know you, so you should be able to write the book. Isn't it? So that's my number four.
Autumn (19m 58s): I think it's part. So basically
Jesper (20m 1s): The characters have exactly the same traits and in dialogue, they all sound like you. Exactly the same. It's a wonderful book to read. It sounds really good.
Autumn (20m 11s): Your mom and leg. Well, yeah, maybe. So that's plenty to find out if your siblings hate you or like you do, they like your book. Yeah.
Jesper (20m 28s): Oh my God. Yeah. Just imagine the reviews, like from your own family members saying, I'm not sure. I quite liked the characters in this book is like what the it's me.
Autumn (20m 42s): Oh yeah. So that's so there you go. I guess this is why you can never base your own characters on you because you might get really upset about what people say about them. So definitely take the time to develop your characters. You're running a massive risk. Are you going to take it personally because you should.
Jesper (20m 59s): Yeah. All of a sudden the advice about not responding to one star reviews is going to be much more difficult to adhere to it.
Autumn (21m 9s): Oh, okay. All right. Let's move on.
Jesper (21m 12s): Why is the author so defensive about this? Karen? I don't get it.
Autumn (21m 18s): Oh, I could be fun with it.
Jesper (21m 20s): So number three is, well, we touched about on it slightly already. So this one, I called it being a lazy
Autumn (21m 28s): Ass. I like this.
Jesper (21m 29s): So some idiots could call it being smart, I guess if they're idiots, but this is basically, as you said, copying characters that you already know because
Autumn (21m 40s): Readers love them. Right. So why would you want them?
Jesper (21m 43s): You spend your time creating something on your own, you know, call Frodo, Modo Winstead. And he's not a habit, but he's at WARF. And maybe instead of bravery, you change that one trait into him being a wimp.
Autumn (21m 58s): Otherwise he's exactly the same. Right? I don't see what's the problem. I, no, one's going to Sue you or point out that you basically copied someone else's work to create it out. You at least changed a couple of things on yours. Yeah,
Jesper (22m 15s): The same. Yeah. He's called Modo. What's wrong with that. And he's a dwarf. He lives in a, in a place called hot-button, but, and maybe a slightly weird for it too.
Autumn (22m 29s): But, and then he has a ring. I mean, I watch likes rings. Right. They liked jewelry sorta as the whole Hobbiton, you know, also had the, it was sorta cave. Like he just kind of emphasized that. Maybe call it Dorfan Tinder or something instead of Hobbiton Wolfington yeah. Yeah. I actually visited Harvard doing in real life. I know. I'm so jealous. I still have to get down to New Zealand. I want to go
Jesper (22m 56s): To Gilda again. It's amazing.
Autumn (22m 58s): Oh, Oh. Am writing fantasy work trip com. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh,
Jesper (23m 4s): We could make a, and then we can record a podcast episode.
Autumn (23m 10s): Oh, we have to find a way to do this. That would be awesome. That would be awesome to get back to this podcast and stop dreaming. But yeah. You know, your suggestion sounds vaguely familiar. Like someone else might've mentioned it a few minutes ago, so yeah.
Jesper (23m 29s): I think maybe my spin on it was slightly, just slightly better.
Autumn (23m 38s): You tried, you added something to it. I'm just saying. All right. So my number three is I was actually kind fun to find discover this, but there is a random character generator online. It's a UK based one. And so I, to any work you can go in there and just give me a character. And there's a few little inputs, so you can choose fantasy. You can choose hero. You can choose made, you can choose some things. And it pops out of character and Bing bang, boom, you're done. You're writing. Just go for it.
Jesper (24m 12s): Did you try to run from, what does it generate? What is it?
Autumn (24m 16s): I think it's like a little character sheet that, you know, almost like you would come up with some stuff like that. It gives you some traits and things too. So, you know, it comes up with some ideas, honestly, in some ways, if you, if you were truly having a hard time coming up with a story idea, I think you could possibly do this just for the fun of it. And maybe start creating a story around a character. But if you had a story in your mind and you just randomly, someone is like ripping a page out of a D and D book saying, this is my character and trying to force them into your story. I don't think it would work too well, but in its own, it was kind of like, Oh, this is, this could be actually fun.
Autumn (24m 57s): It's like sitting there and rolling your dice to create a D and D character and seeing what you come up with.
Jesper (25m 4s): I was almost thinking when you were saying that, that just as like a starting point, it might not be too bad an idea actually. You know, if, if you're sort of out of inspiration and what not to do, not not to use it, like it comes out of that generator, but more
Autumn (25m 21s): Like just, just the starting
Jesper (25m 23s): Frame of something. And then you can develop further on that.
Autumn (25m 27s): Actually I have to admit, it was kind of like, I found it, I'm like, Oh, this could actually be fun because you might get ha you might get something you never would have considered before. So it's a bad idea, but it's also kind of a fun ideas. I saved the website. So yeah. If anyone wants to check it out, I mean, you can Google it, but it's just character, hyphen generator.org.uk. So shout out to them. I have never met anyone who works there or created it, but it was literally Googling it. It was the only, the only random character generator online. And it was kind of like, Oh, this is fun. This is actually really fun. So go check it out.
Autumn (26m 7s): Yeah, no worries.
Jesper (26m 8s): I was not aware of that one. That that's actually interesting. So yeah, when you don't know what to do in the evening, you can sit down in January.
Autumn (26m 21s): This is what writers do during pandemics and lockdown. Yeah. So that's what you do when you're going in,
Jesper (26m 28s): Going insane from COVID-19 and you'd just sitting dead. Any characters or,
Autumn (26m 33s): Oh yeah. I've got an eye. I'm releasing a book. I'm busy. I'm good. I'm fine. Number two number,
Jesper (26m 41s): But two we're getting there now. So, well, we all know that good stories are about characters, right? So you agree? I agree. I do agree. Okay. So what if the right is just love? Love, love, love, love, love me some characters. So why can't I just have a whole bunch of them. So they appear, and then they do their thing before they disappear, completely offering the States to 20 other characters that are equally doing death thing. And a then perhaps the guy from early in the book, he makes a surprise return during the climax and then whacks the bad guy over the head with a club.
Jesper (27m 28s): Isn't that awesome.
Autumn (27m 31s): Sure. Go ahead and write that up.
Jesper (27m 33s): Well, who doesn't like characters? What do you mean? I don't get it. Everybody has characters. How many of
Autumn (27m 39s): Them are point of view characters?
Jesper (27m 42s): Well, all of them, they have their chapter each, right? So there's going to be 25 point of view characters and the yeah.
Autumn (27m 53s): From different perspectives, I would guess. So probably a very confusing story. Oh, I had someone complained that I have like eight main characters in my fantasy trilogy.
Jesper (28m 5s): I don't understand. I mean the more the merrier 35 point of view, it's probably never been done before. It's like a unique
Autumn (28m 12s): I'm writing that I have to admit my mind is like, how can I organize this? This could actually work. It would be, it would be such an interesting challenge. I honestly think I need a writing intervention pitch and that I'm actually considering.
Jesper (28m 28s): Yeah, you'll be surprised. Next time I send you a story for editing and it's got to be 35 characters and Yukon, a point of view character. And you're going to go back to be like, w
Autumn (28m 35s): What is this? This is not what we agreed to.
Jesper (28m 42s): It's just enriched the story. I made it better.
Autumn (28m 45s): Why don't you get it? I don't get it. I can't imagine telling a cohesive. It reminds me, actually, this is a fun thing to actually do. But back when we could actually sit around a campfire with other living human beings, okay. And then someone would start a story and everyone would continue and carry it on. I loved of things like that. Being able to like just one person creates it and carry it on and see where you end up. That could be so much fun. I'm trying to imagine that in a narrative form, as an actual novel and through different characters, and I had had of worked out into a plot and I I'm, it's not clicking.
Autumn (29m 32s): I'm sorry. I,
Jesper (29m 34s): But you don't get it. This is just because it's a new level of writing. You just haven't advanced to that level yet. So you can't see it. It's just your,
Autumn (29m 45s): It may be, it is. I will have to admit, I am not saying it, but I'll keep working on it and no way to you. Wait till you see there now next storyline. I hand you something to be afraid of.
Jesper (29m 60s): Indeed. Now I can sleep tonight.
Autumn (30m 5s): All right.
Jesper (30m 5s): So what is number two,
Autumn (30m 8s): Number two. That's where we're at. I got totally lost and trying to figure out how to plot a 35 point of view for this one. I thought taking it to your near and dear. So instead of basing the characters on yourself, or just randomly basing it on your friends and family, you should do a little bit of research here and ask your friends, your family, your roommates, your dorm hall, to take personality tests, and then use the results for characters. I think it could be fun that you could just base them all on people, you know, and the people you don't like you could accidentally kill off. It's very cathartic that
Jesper (30m 45s): Way. And you're going to keep the names as well.
Autumn (30m 52s): We arranged the letters, maybe a little bit. Steve could become that's or that's me Tebow. There's some options there. It's using real life techniques and real life people. Your characters should be feel real. What is more real than using, you know, people, you know, to create your characters. Yeah.
Jesper (31m 24s): It was just what I was about to say, at least your characters will be complex and they will have depth that's for sure. But I think you might run a pretty big risk in getting very unpopular with certain people.
Autumn (31m 35s): I might have to change the names a little bit, but yeah, I think Steven, you know, your coworkers, the ones you don't get along with my, pick it up. Maybe you don't have to put your boss in there. That's that's just like the worst idea. Don't be like, use your crush as the love interest. That's rewarding. Isn't that you can blog. Okay.
Jesper (32m 4s): Or maybe they feel like you're a stalker or something discrete, or actually wrote it in a book as well.
Autumn (32m 12s): But then if you break up, you can take care of that. Then this next book in this series, that's the next book in the series. I can see my dragon.
Jesper (32m 23s): Nah, it sounds like it's going to be a very boring you. Well then the character went to grocery shopping and then got home. Did the dinner. It's just a really boring book about everyday life.
Autumn (32m 36s): You need to change it to grocery shopping. That's getting supplies. So they could be going to the
Jesper (32m 42s): Dragon at the shop.
Autumn (32m 44s): Oh, you know those kids you'd never know. They could be a hoard of angry slobbery dwarves coming to attack you I'd be running, screaming
Jesper (32m 56s): Behind the Friesa case. Came to 20 angry towards
Autumn (33m 3s): Oh yeah. Hmm. Could work. Okay.
Jesper (33m 11s): Okay. This one is gonna blow your mind.
Autumn (33m 13s): I need let's go for it.
Jesper (33m 16s): Yeah. Th this is definitely the winner. It's just like, doesn't get any better than this one. Number one, I tell you this one, I called make beep up. So a beep might be re B might be representing a word that starts with S
Autumn (33m 37s): Okay. I could have beeped you for you, but all right. Seems fair. Okay. Okay.
Jesper (33m 44s): So this is the attitude saying, I don't think it matters one bit what my character's motivations are or how about what their goals are. People are not complex at all. It's actually not that hard. You should just make up things as you go along. Character development, all that nonsense. It is something made up by stupid people who wants to sound smart, like the hosts of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast.
Autumn (34m 20s): Hey, so, so yeah. No character arcs, nothing. You just,
Jesper (34m 24s): No. No. Why do you need that?
Autumn (34m 29s): Okay.
Jesper (34m 30s): Yeah, but I mean, you're making it too complicated. You just want some characters who go out and do crazy stuff, all kinds of things happening. The End. Right? It's a good story. You don't need all that. And then he was sad about blah, blah, blah. And all the touchy feelings. I mean, what do you don't need? All that. It's not, it's basically Conan the barbarian. Right? We just talked about how awesome it is.
Autumn (34m 56s): Hey, I didn't get along with, I have a chip tooth from Conan. The barbarian I'll have, you know,
Jesper (35m 1s): But you see how memorable it was. Huh? You still remembered because the chip tooth,
Autumn (35m 7s): I had an emotional support. Yeah.
Jesper (35m 11s): It's just much better. Instead of all this, a smarty pants, right? Advice about making a complex coaters no, just plain old Megadog as you go along. And if it, for example, suits the story, then all of a sudden the couch is a, is an angry villain who decides to do something really, really bad because it makes the more exciting
Autumn (35m 39s): Than that's what happens. So it's kind of like a mad cap extravaganza. Just throw it out, make up stuff as you go. Right. That's the whole point of storytelling. It sounds in its own way. A fun way of writing, but odd. Hey, I honestly think I've read a few stories like this and I don't think I gave them a very high review. What? This just like sitting around the campfire and then somebody is telling a very, very good story. And I get you, you just remember how wonderful it was that summer evening when Steve or Steven was telling this, this really cool story.
Autumn (36m 20s): And you still remember 20 years later, it's just like amazing. It's like the best of storytelling. This is exactly how to do it. I don't, yeah, this is the window for sure. But see if you can talk me then with your number one, I doubt it. But I have to admit, I don't think my number one is nearly as much fun as that one because I have to mix mine was I was trying to think of something random, kind of easy. And I happened to have been gifted a long time ago, this like four inch dictionary. That's leather bound and gold leaf. I mean, it's, it's gorgeous. It's a, it's a gorgeous dictionary. Even though like probably half the words have the butter day words are not even in it anymore.
Autumn (37m 3s): It's old. But I was just thinking, you know what? You just flip that open, pick a word, do it again. And you pick out you don't 10 20 words and you make a character out of whatever random words you land on. Just okay. Yeah. Well, if, if it's a story about an insane, insane asylum, I think that will be fine. I think we'll see. You could, again, this is sort of like the random character generator. You could come up with something you never would have expected you land on like expeditious or study. Definitely grades. So I'm schizophrenia, lunatics. That's I, you know, I, I, it might work really well with your number one because they all sounded a little bit like, look at six, two B roll.
Autumn (37m 50s): No, no, no, no. Not at all. I mean, my number one was about creating excitement and taking the story where we be following the story where it takes you. Right. That was my number one. And letting the characters completely different. Sure. Well, I'll just agree with you. I think I have to admit though, your number one, would I swear, I have read books like that, where the character just change from one chapter to the next. And I'm like, is this name on, is this the same name on a different character?
Autumn (38m 32s): Maybe did it a sense of replacement made a mistake? I have wondered that at times I honestly have, Oh God. Yeah. Yeah. So what do you think I am actually, I have to, I hate to admit it, but I am still stuck on 35 point of view. Normal. It just kind of tickles me. I don't know why, but I actually have to admit, I kind of like your list. These are some really horrible ways of creating characters. What I, what do you mean horrible?
Autumn (39m 13s): It's it's about following your muse, right? It's taking just follow the story. Don't give a shit about all those writing advice stuff, you know, go with the story goes. Yeah. Once you make me want to take my lap. Well, maybe not my laptop, a borrowed laptop, because I tend to destroy everything to a good bar, have a nice glass of scotch on the rocks and just start writing like a mad woman and see what comes out. Totally inspired me. I, I, I be grudgingly admit, I think you win this one. Yes. I said it in the beginning. And so it is true.
Autumn (39m 53s): I, yeah. I think your character creation, you have totally devoted a authentic way of creating some really crazy characters. Oh. So you're telling me that winning this one actually means that I'm the worst. I'm not sure that this is not where I wanted it to go. Really? You should see the gold star I made for you. Damn. I don't want that. No. No. Okay. I think we need to get back to some more serious talk next week. This, this is, well, I make a point on my board, but I don't know. Maybe we actually, we should stop making a point board because I don't know.
Autumn (40m 36s): I must be in delete though. I must be. You keep telling yourself that I think this one deck, this one deducts points from your board. So keep that in mind. No. Now I'll just end the podcast because this is getting too much now. Okay. So next Monday we are discussing bookstagram. And if influences are helpful to your book sales,
Narrator (41m 4s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the am. Writing fantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
You've finished the first draft of your novel. GREAT! Now, how do you tackle edits?
We've got you covered. In this episode, we discuss the pros and cons of different editing methods, take a peek at how Autumn runs her edits, and what you can do if you really aren't a fan of editing (like Jesper).
Check out the Ultimate Fantasy Writer's Guide before enrollment closes on March 7th! Head over to https://ultimatefantasywritersguide.com/main/.
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to the Am Writing Fantasy podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need an literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt, and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I am Jesper
Autumn (31s): and I'm Autumn.
Jesper (34s): This is episode 114 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. And this is one off Autumn's favorite Topics. And for me, not so much.
Autumn (48s): That's fair enough though. I have to admit, I have been so up to my nose and edits recently that maybe it's not quite as favorite as it is at other times of the year.
Jesper (59s): No. Okay. Fair enough. Well, we're going to talk about how to edit your novel today. So hopefully that'll prove very helpful for listeners. Yes, I think so. And I definitely, the first time I said was editing, I was a mess and I didn't know where to start. And I think a lot of re writers they're really good at writing, but they don't know how to tackle edits in an organized way. That is the most efficient and I love efficiency. So this should be a good topic. I hope. Yeah, for sure. But how have things been over the last week? Have you broken anything, any websites or computers you have messed up coding? That's so not fair.
Jesper (1m 40s): A question. Oh, it's bad. I did to finish up that story. I did get my laptop back from the Apple Replair repair place and they ended up, I think if I hadn't had stickers on the back of my laptop, they would have just given me a whole new whole new laptop, but they took off my old screen, put it on a whole new base and I have new batteries, a new logic board, a new video graphic card. I have everything but more memories.
Autumn (2m 7s): So because they refuse to upgrade the memory in the year of computer I have, but I have all my files. And so my laptop is working famously and I love it. I love the new keyboard. The old keyboard was crap. So I actually enjoy typing on this one, which is kind of nice for a novelist, but yeah, everything was going smoothly and I was catching up on work. And then our hosting agency for the websites got hacked and luck knock on wood. I happened to have been in there almost the exact same time it happened. And all they had done was just changed a few emails, you know, kind of weasel in through a few back doors.
Autumn (2m 50s): And my husband and I spent the next three days blocking cleaning and upgrading and updating and doing a whole bunch of stuff. And that kind of like it was book, I'm a writer. I thought I was like a cyber stalker worm killer. I don't know. It was just a nightmare. It's just not our month. It's my year. I keep thinking about your comment that said, you know, now, you know what your characters feel like. And I'm like, I feel like the main character in someone's favorite novel right now, because it's just, as soon as I get a chance to catch my breath. Whew. Right on the roller coaster again.
Autumn (3m 29s): Oh my goodness. Hopefully you'll get a break tonight where I feel so bad for my characters. Now, if this is like, if it's like, I should just come with a warning, this is to not touch, may break something very quickly. So yeah. So that's my life. How are you doing? I hope it's calm over there.
Jesper (3m 55s): Well, yeah, compared to all the rest of the world, luckily enough, you're the one dealing with those issues, even though it's a, of course also my issue with such, but you're dealing with it, so I don't have to worry about it. So I guess while you were doing all of that, I finished up watching Vikings. So on HBO, that sounds horrible.
Autumn (4m 18s): Don't tell me how it is. I haven't finished it yet. We're still watching it. It's one of our rotations. So it's taking forever to get through the last episodes.
Jesper (4m 27s): Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. But by the time this episode airs, I will have posted a video in our Facebook group for readers sharing my thoughts about the show. I'm not going to do any spoilers or anything like that, but, but I, I just thought I, I would talk a bit about the endings without any spoilers, but more like the idea about it. Because I mentioned, I think I'm one of the quite recent podcast episodes as well. I mentioned the ending of game of Thrones and I know, well, we have a lot of haters on the internet about that show, but, but I was mentioning quite recently how I liked that they wrapped up each character arc very well in game of Thrones.
Jesper (5m 11s): Yes they did. And I, and I was very pleased that they actually did the same thing here. So I liked it. Oh, good. Yeah. Very good. Ending to the six seasons. As far as I know that I'm not going to do any more episodes. I don't think that they at least, so I think this is the end of the series as a whole. And I actually think they left it in a good place. So I was very positive about DHEA, the ending of it all that gives me something to look forward to unless I break the TV. Well, yes, you might want your husband to turn on the persona, press play and stuff like that.
Autumn (5m 49s): He won't let me have the remote at this point. I'm surprised I'm allowed in the kitchen.
Jesper (5m 54s): Yeah. Or even on a podcast.
Autumn (5m 55s): At least the podcast is still recording it's because you're hosting.
Jesper (6m 0s): Oh, right. Yeah. Maybe. Yeah. But as I said, I'm going to share some thoughts in the Facebook group and well, this is of course the Redis group we have on Facebook. But if any of the listeners should be interested in that, just search for fans of immersive fantasy among the Facebook groups. And you will find one that is called fans of immersive fantasy Redis club for the world of Elysium. Yeah. So that's what it's called.
Autumn (6m 27s): Yeah. That's us.
Jesper (6m 29s): So you're welcome to join if you want, but to keep in mind that this is a group for fiction readers. So we do not share any kind of author advice or any of the other usual stuff. You, you, you get in the am writing fantasy, our Facebook group. So it's a very different compared to that one, but you're welcome to join. Of course, if you're interested.
Autumn (6m 51s): Absolutely.
Narrator (6m 51s): Oh, a week on the internet with the yam writing fantasy podcast
Jesper (6m 58s): First, can I just mention that something came across all over my Facebook feed? So I don't know if you noticed, but the Jeff Bezos announced a quite here recently that he was stepping down as the CEO of Amazon. Did you notice that?
Autumn (7m 18s): I, yes. Adam told me about it. My husband.
Jesper (7m 22s): Right. And then of course, I don't know if we authors are just like Chronicle worried about all kinds of things. I don't know. But then I noticed some posts on my feet where some authors were concerned now because when Jeff Beto started out Amazon, it was like an online bookstore that he started. So he, and we know he likes books and then people starting to get concerned that, well, if Jeff is gone, then he's the guy who loves the books. What will then, will that end up having some sort of effect on KDP? So what do you think about that?
Autumn (8m 5s): I'm not a worrier. And so I read it to me. It's always been Amazon might not. It won't. I mean, there's just no way. It's always going to be the number one place to buy books. Things will change. And that's why you should build your own fan base and mailing lists. Because if Amazon went belly up tomorrow, that way you'd still have a way of reaching readers, you know, that's very true, indeed.
Jesper (8m 29s): I honestly think it matters absolutely nothing. It's not going to change anything that Jeff Bezos is not the CEO anymore. I really don't think so. I think the readers are so active and it's a part of Amazon that unless it was making, unless it was losing money, they wouldn't cut it off.
Autumn (8m 49s): No, I don't think it makes any difference whatsoever. And it's just one of those things that can we please stop worrying about all kinds of stuff that doesn't really matter. It's just the unnecessary spend of your mental capacity and resources. It's a, Oh my God. I don't know if we authors or just a worried bunch in general, but it's just, Oh, I wouldn't.
Jesper (9m 12s): I was not laughing at the post because obviously somebody is truly worried, so it was not, but I was more like, ah, Jesus, can we, can we move on a bit instead?
Autumn (9m 23s): It's not like chicken little, the sky is falling. The sky is falling about every new thing. I just, I'm not a worrier about things like that. I'm much a wait and see kind of person. So I will monitor the trends, but I'm not, I'm not exclusive to Amazon. So I'm not that worried.
Jesper (9m 43s): No true. But all right there, the really big thing that we needed to mention here instead is that for the first time in six months we have our online writing course open.
Autumn (9m 55s): Yes. Whew. I always love it. When the ultimate fantasy writer's guide is open again. It's still my little baby.
Jesper (10m 3s): Yeah. So I have a very short testimonial sunk clip from past students that I want to play now. And then maybe afterward, you can explain a bit about what the course is about open.
Autumn (10m 13s): I will try to explain, you know, how my week's going.
Jesper (10m 16s): Oh, well that's true. Unless your internet breaks by the time I've played this. Okay. Well, here it goes.
Catherine (10m 31s): Hi everyone. I'm Catherine. I'm currently working my way through the ultimate fantasy writers guide and I've been finding it very helpful. One of my main problems has been plotting. I had a very hard time getting my plot to go through and have continuity after going through the workshops for the plotting section I have now got a full plot and have begun writing. It has been very helpful for me and I'm sure you will find it very helpful too. Thanks.
Jan (11m 3s): Hi, I'm Jan B read fantasy author and I just watched autumn bread's launch day module. It was a really informative, had a lot of great information. She had ideas I had never thought of before really excited to implement her ideas and launching my own book. I highly recommend the ultimate fantasy writer's guide because it's one of the best programs I've ever seen. It not only covers pretty much everything about writing from start to finish, including fan bases and staying confident and everything. It also has things like languages and naming your characters based on that.
Jan (11m 47s): And it has Map making it. It's just so excellent.
Jesper (11m 57s): Map-making that's just like, Oh, I love my,
Autumn (12m 2s): I, yeah, we both have that. That's what brought us together almost as fantasy maps. So that's how we first really started talking. So go figure.
Jesper (12m 11s): Yeah. So maybe you can share a bit about what's in this course.
Autumn (12m 16s): Sure. Well, it's 12 modules and the first six, the first half are all about writing from everything, from idea development to characters and world-building magic rules from magic. So this is a four, it is designed for fantasy author. So I made it, you know, we made it so that it would go this way. Cause you've definitely helped me on it. After my initial attempt, you've gone through it all as well. And after that, it goes, it breaks down the actual writing process into writing the beginning, writing the middle, you know, the mushy middle and writing the end and the components that go into each of those areas. And there's just some advanced writing tips. So those first six modules are really all about how to write.
Autumn (12m 58s): But if you're a self-published author, you know, writing is literally only half of the game. So the other six modules are all about building fans about editing, huh? That's today's topic today on a podcast where you go, how to make time and stay motivated. Because if you're working, if you have kids, if you have a family that's, that's its own issue and then you know, other platforms and what are the funny, I still remember the, one of the questions when I upload it up loading my debut novel born of water was that, you know those questions on Amazon and how do you answer them into my really answering them correctly? The first time you go through it, it is definitely like, Oh shoot, you don't know what to do.
Autumn (13m 41s): So it goes through all of those questions and what you need to know have do when you go to upload and how to launch your book, launch it to fans, how to get reviews and how to take all of that. If you want to keep going and make an career, make an author platform, an author brand and talks about that. So it really steps you through, from having an idea to having a platform all in one course, because I wanted, I was tired of all these places that just like buy this one here, buy that one there. And then they often contradict each other. No, it's, it's all in one course, one voice it'll get you there. Steadily shortly has as long as it takes you to get through it all.
Jesper (14m 22s): Yeah. And the courses online as well. It is self-paced so you can do it from the safety of your home. And I think these days that's pretty good.
Autumn (14m 32s): I love, I have loved that. We do have a live component. We have the student Q and a every month and I really just, I love it. I love seeing students and hearing about what they're doing and what they're writing. It's just a total perk me up kind of day.
Jesper (14m 48s): Absolutely. And it's also the first course we created, which means that over the years we've had out of quite a few bonus modules to the cost. So you will get access to those too. And as well, I should mention that there is a 30 day money back guarantee. No questions asked. So if you don't like the course after purchasing it, you just let us know and we will get you a refund and we're not going to ask why or anything. We'll just refund your money. And it's simple as that. Yes, I exactly, I it's, you can't lose by trying it out and seeing if it's gonna work for you. And I really hope it does because it is full of everything that has made a difference in my writing my career and how things have gone and why I'm a full-time author now.
Jesper (15m 32s): So I hope it helps you to. Yeah. So we've included a link to the course in the show notes. So if this is something that you think will be useful for you, you need to go and check that out, but you have to be quick about it though, because we're closing the course for another six months a week after this episode airs. So you'll need to get in before the seventh of much. Otherwise it's going to be closed again. So yeah, don't tell you around or whatever you say, dilly dally do not delete Allie, come and join us.
Narrator (16m 12s): Today's topic.
Autumn (16m 15s): So editing.
Jesper (16m 18s): Yeah. You sound much more enthusiastic already than I do.
Narrator (16m 22s): Well, I want to start with a quote. One of my favorite quotes is definitely having ways. It is a write drunk, edit sober. I just love that one. And it is very true because writing tipsy can help the flow of creativity. But when it comes to editing, you need to have a clear head. I don't think it's very healthy though. Long-term drinking well.
Jesper (16m 48s): Yeah. Okay. But if you get tipsy, if, I mean, there was the other advice that you should write every day. So if you're getting tips, I think is probably not the best of combinations.
Autumn (16m 58s): I think pirates would make really good writers.
Jesper (17m 1s): Oh yes. Maybe actually they would make good writers. Vikings would be excellent writers.
Autumn (17m 8s): Yeah. There you go. See, you just need to find the right audience.
Jesper (17m 14s): Yeah. That might actually be true. But I was thinking that maybe we could go through some different ways. One can edit a novel and maybe she has some pros and cons on the different approaches or absolutely.
Autumn (17m 28s): And I definitely, I mean, for me, I wanted to share to like my organization, how I see it as different layers and different levels because by doing that, you can refine it without wasting too much time.
Jesper (17m 42s): So I think those are important too, but let's I want it.
Autumn (17m 44s): So you found some different types or topics of editing?
Jesper (17m 49s): Well, more like some different ways of doing it, I guess more so I could think of four different ways and there might be a bit of overlap in them too, to some degree, I guess. But yeah, the first one I had was basically edit as you go. And this is certainly not something I recommend doing, but I guess the pro of doing that is that once the manuscript is done, it's done now.
Autumn (18m 27s): Yeah. That's it that's pretty nice. I always, there was a writer I knew when I had my previous job as a conservationist and when I went to visit him and we talked to was a comfort, you know, we I'd worked with soils and plants and things. And so he would put it in terms. He thought I would understand. He he's like in the, in the gardener in the morning, I, I go and tend, you know, I plant my vegetables and in the afternoon I weed. So that was, he did edit as he goes in the morning, he would write in the afternoon he would edit. And I always say, well, that's a fun way of doing it. But I also think he was non-fiction. And so I think it's easier. But with fiction, I, there are times we just had this discussion in the am writing fantasy group.
Autumn (19m 9s): Cause we, this was a recent post and there are times, and there are people who do edit as they write. I think that you would have to be a good plotter so that, you know, you're not wasting your time editing something that you're going to end up cutting, but it's so much easier to edit something written.
Jesper (19m 27s): Yeah. And th that was also the con I have with this one is basically that you do run the risk that let's say you get to chapter 35 and then you figure out, Oh, shoot, I need to change something back in chapter 20, which is now fully edited. So you put in the man hours to, to do the editing and now you have to go back and change this, which means you have to edit it again. So, and let's say that maybe you haven't plotted that well, so you have a bit of a mess on your hand, which then means that by chapter eight and 11 and 14 and 17 and 18 and so on, there's stuff you need to correct. Yeah. You're going to spend quite a lot of time re editing the same stuff again after changing it.
Jesper (20m 11s): So I'm not a hundred percent fan of this approach. So I must admit no.
Autumn (20m 16s): Well, I, I really try to avoid it. There's times I will go back and edit in. Like I recently realized I was missing a point of view of a character that I really thought when I realized it was important as three quarters of the way through the novel. So I had to go back and add like two or three chapters in that was editing. And sometimes there's just like, I realized that there's something that's wrong and I just need to get it right. Or it's not flowing correctly. So I'll go and edit. But in general, I just leave myself notes and I wait until I go through my first layer
Jesper (20m 48s): Of editing before I go and tackle real edits, the true edits. Otherwise I just, just leave notes for yourself. I have a whole folder in Scrivener. That's just editing notes of things. I want to go back in and change, or I do it where I go and it's available through it's there so that I can go back and, you know, put it like right in the Scrivener file, right in the chapter. I need to go in edit. I'll just add a comment or a note saying, Hey, add this into.
Autumn (21m 20s): Hmm. Yeah. Yeah.
Jesper (21m 23s): I, I also feel like, I mean, I don't know why I've burnt my burned myself and learn my lessons. And if not, when I got like 50 K words into the first book I wrote and then figured out that I had to digital thing, just imagine if I hit as, Oh my God. Plus I would say that Maybe it doesn't matter too much if you're very seasoned, but at least when you're starting out, I think there's a lot of value in completing something. Yes. And if you're editing as you go, it takes you forever to complete that manuscript. Whereas if you just push through and get a bit of a messy draft done, at least you got something done.
Jesper (22m 9s): And then I think you said it before.
Autumn (22m 10s): Right.
Jesper (22m 11s): Then you can start going back into something you actually have, but, but it just that the art of, or the experience of proving to yourself that you can finish a first draft. There's a lot of value in that. And for that alone, I would almost say, don't edit as you go.
Autumn (22m 30s): Yeah. I, my, I completely concur, especially for your first few novels. Don't don't do it. Don't get yourself trapped in the editing and not finishing finish and then edit it's. One of the things say we teach in the guide is, you know, right. The goal is actually to write for a short, bad book, just a short, bad manuscript. Maybe it should be just write it and then add to it and then enhance it because that is, it's much more possible. It's easier to do when you have something there and you see the whole story arc, all the characters when you have it all there. And you're like, Oh, that's how it ends. Well, now I got to go fix the beginning and that's fine. But yeah, playing the devil's advocate when you and I write together, technically you write and I go back through and I'm writing and editing, but this is like, you know, it's like book 24 for me.
Autumn (23m 22s): I'm not that. And you're up in the tens now too. So we have it all plotted out so that we can actually work together and stay on the same path. So I'm not that worried about what we're doing, but that's an exception. I will say that because technically I am, it's already written though. You wrote it, but I'm writing in editing at the same time.
Jesper (23m 43s): Yeah. But I, in that case, I would almost, because there's a difference between sitting and writing the first draft. Let's see. Okay. Yeah. I sit down, I write my chapter one and then I go back and I edit my entire chapter one. And then I write chapter two when I go back and edit chapter two and so on all the way through. Right. But what you're getting, you're getting a full book basically. I mean the entire first draft is there when you get it from me. So yes, you are editing as you go. And of course you will also writing in the chapters and you are adding to it, but, but the novel is there. So to speak of the bones of it.
Jesper (24m 23s): Is there already?
Autumn (24m 25s): Yes. So it's sort of a different process.
Jesper (24m 28s): Yeah, I think it is. Yeah. Well, somebody can judge us on that. That's Okay.
Autumn (24m 33s): If you want to, we can take it easily after the week I've had please judge me on my writing techniques or my editing techniques. That's fine. All right. So what's the next one that you have as a method?
Jesper (24m 49s): Yeah, the next one I had was I'm doing a content edit and then afterwards doing all the like grammar would copy editing and so on and so on. Right. So basically what I mean by that is doing multiple passes over it. And the, the upside of doing that is that you're going to end up with a very thorough editing because you have been over the manuscript several times, which means that you should, at least in theory have covered all your basis once you've gone over the last pass. So in the beginning passes, you are not worrying about incorrect commerce or finding the perfect word or stuff like that.
Jesper (25m 33s): You, you just making sure that the character arcs are there, the stories working and so on, and then you worry about those things in a, in a future pass. So doing that at least. Yeah. I think it's, it gives a very, very good end result. The con is that it can take quite some time to go through it over and over again in different passes. I just,
Autumn (25m 56s): I agree. I don't think it takes too much time that's because this is my favorite method and it is what I do when I'm writing by myself. The first thing I do is a content edit that usually begins by reading through the entire book, almost as fast as I can, like as if I was a, a reader, but also taking really not meticulous, but really good notes that very specific, like the point of view, the plotting phase, I, cause I know the editor will need it eventually new words and names. I talk about what happens in the plot because I have my initial plot, what I think is going to happen. And then I have what actually does end up happening in the story I use, you know, the census use to make sure that I'm covering all the senses.
Autumn (26m 40s): I write a very detailed what needs worked and I'm pretty on myself there. And since then I've started opening, you know, my opening hooks, closing hooks to make sure they're varied, making sure that the opening paragraph does, you know, anchored little touches like that. Do I have the setting? The point of view is all that in there. And that is just literally the first round. And after that I go into the ones who are under the, what needs work. I find the ones that are like, Oh my God, this is horrible. What were you thinking? You idiot. And I go and I fix everything in those. And then I start on the going through and doing a coal pass of fixing up everything. And then usually I do one more pass at is more the grammar writing punctuation.
Autumn (27m 24s): That's usually using at this point, like a grammarly or pro writing aid or something like that. And then I send it to the editor. I used to do eight to 10 passes. So now I've gotten it down to like three to four. I think I'm doing, I have my book. I still remember. I've told you this one before, but I've had readers ask how do you remember that such and such has happened? I'm like, I have read this book 25 times before you've ever even see it. It is ingrained. Plus I have a semi photographic memory. So it's just like between the two, if I forgotten something I'm so disappointed in myself.
Jesper (27m 60s): Well, at least, at least for me with English, not being my mother tongue and stuff, stuff like that, you know, it's doing multiple passes. It takes a long time And I know I'm not the only one writing in English, even though it's not my mother tongue. I mean, I know we have listeners, I can see it in the, in the podcast that we have listeners for from many, many different places. So there are certainly other people who is in the same situation. And I think that they will, hopefully I hope sympathize with me in the sense that the less passive
Autumn (28m 41s): And I think a lot of people, I am surprised. I think there's in my mindset is definitely organization and structure and the, I thrive on that. And so the multiple pace passes to me feel good because I'm actually going through, like, I can do three or four chapters a day. I feel like I'm making huge progress. I go, boom, boom, boom. I'm through the whole book. I started again and do the whole thing. And like two weeks later, I've completely two, three weeks. I've gone through the whole book and I think it's fine. I don't, I even when I'm writing them that way, if I'm in the same chapter for two to three days, I feel like the chapter is never going to end. I usually just do a summary and I skip ahead because I cannot stand to sit there on the same thing for day after day after day.
Autumn (29m 25s): I like lots of irons in the fire. I like getting through things. So it works well for me because it's very fast. Lots of facets.
Jesper (29m 33s): Yeah. That's funny you say that because actually for me, it's sort of the opposite in the sense that if I have to go back to the same again, I feel it really annoying. It's like, I'm not moving ahead. I'm not getting anywhere because now I'm at the same chapter again. So I really like to, it might be done, but I'd like to do one chapter and then it is done because then I'm not going back to that chapter. I know I can tick it off my to-do list and I know it's gone, whereas going back and redoing it, I don't know. It annoys me. Well, I don't like editing in the hall, but it's true.
Autumn (30m 15s): I mean, every author is different and that's why even writing courses and everything else could be. So you've got to figure out all the advice and figure out what works for you, because that is going to what helps you flourish as a writer and as an editor. And obviously some authors are never going to be fantastic editors. They might need to go through a much more in depth hiring an editor that can handle more than just punctuation or, I mean, I tend to go through just proofreading. I don't really need a content edit. I don't need someone. Who's going to pick out too many awkward sentences. I know which ones at this point are pretty bad. I just need a proofreader. But other authors are going to want to have maybe a different level, have a beta reader, an alpha reader to help them develop some things that they would miss otherwise because they just, they don't have that editor instinct.
Jesper (31m 7s): No. Yeah, that's absolutely true. So my next one is very similar, but it is more like instead of doing multiple passes, you just go in one, pass over the entire thing. But the thing is here and that this is where, I mean, there might be a bit of overlap with the ones that I already mentioned. Right. But because to some extent, we talked about editing as you go. We also talk talked about doing the multiple passes, but, but basically for this one to work, and this is to be honest, my preferred way of editing, but first to work, you have to have a pretty thorough outline.
Jesper (31m 52s): So that can be no plot holes. That can be no character arcs ending up in nowhere, all of a sudden and stuff like that. Right? So you have to have it so that you can basically as a, well, I sort of alluded to it to it a second ago, but you can edit a chapter at a time and you know, that once you're done with that, it is done. Meaning that once I get to chapter 25, I'm not going to discover something that requires me to go back to chapter eight and, and redo some part of that. So you can understand that for this to work, the outline has to be very, very solid, right? So it also means that you are going to spend some more time in the outlining phase because you have to work out all the well, should we just call them different things, but you need to make sure that there is nothing that is missing or something that is inconsistent and stuff like that.
Jesper (32m 47s): But if you do that, then you are gonna basically be able to edit the entire manuscript one chapter at a time. And as soon as you're done with the chapter, you're not going to see it again. And yeah, that's my preferred way of doing it because I hate redoing chapters again and again and again, but to some extent is probably also why I don't like editing in the first place because once I've gotten the story out of my head and onto the page, I really don't want to visit it again now. So
Autumn (33m 20s): That seems fair enough. And I think this one though, you'd, if you're a pantser, this one is possible. If you do what I said first, if you do that first read through, take notes on everything that happens and, you know, get your, even, like I said, the new words and names or your setting, get all that information to a spreadsheet, a table. See, it's make sure everything needs sense. So, you know, make sure that at that point, if you're are, then you'd go back and look at your plot, make sure everything's fine. Put in your notes of what needs to be fixed. And then start doing the chapter one chapter two, chapter three, and just finish each one as you go. So if you didn't plot it in the first place, if you basically plot it on the second on the backend and then fix it, you could still do it as just like, basically, I don't know if you call that first one, a pass or just a read through.
Autumn (34m 7s): It's not really, you're not editing, you're just taking notes, but it helps you, especially. I mean, I remember the first time, I mean, I know with you to the F ignoring the debut novel, which for everyone takes more than a year, unless you really know what you're doing with writing. So go to your second novel. It, it still took me about our year to write rule of fire and edit it. And so when you go back to that chapter, number one, you're like, Oh, I haven't seen this for a while and you need to reread it before you can really tackle, edits, even if you've plotted it. Because sometimes you're just like, Oh gosh, I can't remember what I even wrote there. So it feels good to do that. Read through, get yourself organized and then tackle your edits chapter by chapter.
Autumn (34m 50s): You can certainly do this.
Jesper (34m 55s): Hmm. Yeah. Well, or you can find somebody to do the editing for you.
Autumn (35m 1s): I would say that's true. But I definitely, I have worked, have worked with slash seen something that literally looked like someone had written and then sent off to an editor and it didn't even have the dialogue tags don't do that. Don't don't, don't, don't don't ever do that, go through your work and at least put in like the quotation marks and things like that.
Jesper (35m 24s): Yeah. It was probably my delivery that wasn't too. I was trying to make it feel fair to say that you get a writing partner and then you get her to do the editing and then you don't have this problem anymore.
Autumn (35m 36s): That's true. Hmm. I wasn't actually implying, Oh, Hey, I've started to rethink this. No, absolutely not. I do enjoy writing with you and editing. So that's fair enough. Yeah. Well,
Jesper (35m 55s): As usually we're lucky that we're good at different things. Yeah.
Autumn (35m 58s): Yes. That's very true. And if I found that it's too right, I still have my own back-burner projects going on.
Jesper (36m 7s): Right. Yeah. That's true. The last thing is not really a fourth way of doing it, to be honest, it's probably more like an add on thing. And I can't say too much about it because obviously I'm not the one editing I want, wanted to put it in here, just because then maybe you could add a bit about how you do it, but this is basically like whether you're doing it as a one go or you do several passes and then this part is about it's incorporated into one of those passes. That's up to you. Right. But what I mean is that it's the use of software. So like pro writing aid, we tested out Pictionary, we tested out autocrat.
Jesper (36m 50s): And actually we might dive in deeper with these particular tools in future episodes and do a deep dive with them, but more on a high level note, you know, how do you make use of software to help you during editing? Yeah.
Autumn (37m 2s): Oh, that sounds good because that's definitely, I mean, I've always used Grammarly, but I've recently I ran through AutoCrit and Fictionary and Pro Writing Aid and came up with some pros and cons on a winner. So I definitely think there's some, some things that can be added by using this level and one of them, and that would be sort of my add on to your ad then dumb number three is that you need to find a way of not seeing what you think you wrote, but what you actually put on the page. Oh, AI using the something, a software that can go through and like, say, Hey you did you really mean this word?
Autumn (37m 46s): Or this is a homonym or you're missing the here having something to do that is useful. And you can do that with something like pro writing aid or you can, they say changing the font size or the text size changing, reading backwards. That was always one of my favorite ones because by reading it and reverse you, don't literally starting at the end paragraph and reading backwards. I usually go paragraph by paragraph, you don't get caught up in the story. And that is the one thing you do not want to do when you're, if you're doing a really intense, final editing round is don't get caught up in your own writing. You have to see the words. You have to see how many times you repeat the same word, because it is a writer's natural habit that when you use one word that you're like, Oh, that's clever.
Autumn (38m 30s): Your mind is like sticks in your mind and you will use it two or three times on that same page. And you don't want to do that. You want to change things out. You want to find the source. So you want to find a better description, something different, a different sense you can use. And you can do that by going backwards or reading a loud or bigger text something. Yeah.
Jesper (38m 48s): Loaded on Kindle. I actually quite liked that because when you move the medium on which you read away, you know, away from the computer away from Scribner, wherever it is that you wrote it and onto a different device, for example, on the Kindle, you will automatically read it slightly different because you know, on the Kindle you normally read your books. So your mind set when reading the words is different. Yes. So I quite like that trick as well to just sort of cheat your own mind and put it on Kindle. And then you can just, of course you can just highlight whatever, stay on your Kendall that you'd want to correct or something you can make highlights and notes on the Kindle as well.
Jesper (39m 30s): So that's not really a problem, but I think it helps you spot things that you necessarily not necessarily would have seen in Scribner. We use Scrivener as an example here as your writing tool.
Autumn (39m 43s): Yes. I agree. And it's you need to do something. Some people, you know, this is where they say, well, let it sit for three months. Well, in today's publishing world, I mean, especially if you're trying to be a career author, you don't usually have three months. You can let something you edited and is just about ready to be published. CIT, most readers kind of want to get it. So yeah, it's probably going to be something you're going to have to find a way of fooling yourself unless it happened to be book one of a trilogy and you've edited everything and then you're going to go back and release them back to back.
Jesper (40m 17s): Yeah. But do you use the software as its own kind of pass or do you do it during the other passes that you do? I have
Autumn (40m 28s): Using it as basically the third pass. So I usually go through my quick read through with all my notes. I go through a second round where I'm fixing everything in the notes and doing a lot more constructive. Story-building maybe bringing out the census things that I think are, are more creative. And when I'm ready to do the proofreading, the store is sorta like, when did I repeat this word too many times the mortar more technical, then I'll use something like a software, because at that point, my mind is more on the technical aspect and not the pretty word or the story building or the plotting. I know all of that is solid. I just need to look at word choice at that point or commerce.
Autumn (41m 12s): And it's literally, I supposedly left-brain right-brain is not really a thing, but to me it's left brain right brain. So when I have switched over to these sheer technical side, it's I don't have to worry about the creative side anymore, unless I'm trying to choose sumptuous over delightful or something like that.
Jesper (41m 31s): Right. Okay. Well, very good. Is there more on your process there that you want to share? Otherwise? I think I have a bit of a conclusion for us. Yeah, no, I think I've covered sort of how I do my process. So I think, you know, hopefully it gives someone some tips that there are many ways of editing about the only wrong way. The one we don't recommend is to do it literally as you're writing, especially if you haven't even finished the chapter, don't start editing and doubting yourself, especially if you're using it to just never finished because you don't think it's good enough. That's not the point of editing. If you're starting to do it as an undermining technique technique, and only you don't know if you're doing it that way.
Autumn (42m 12s): If you have that little writer's voice and the doubt creeping in saying, that's not good enough, you've got to keep working on it. You got to keep worrying and you're never getting anywhere. Just stop, stop that, tell it to shut up and finish your chapter, finished your entire first novel and then go back and learn to edit and edit it. Don't don't give into pushing it, kicking it down the road, finish it. Hmm. Nope. Fair. And I think, well, to some degree, I think you've already mentioned what I wanted to say was the conclusion of all of this. I think, I think you'd actually did too, But then maybe
Jesper (42m 52s): Just to reiterate, because it is important and the point is just that there is no right or wrong way of editing your novel. It really comes down to testing out the different options and then see what works for you. So we mentioned some options here. I'm sure that maybe, maybe some listeners can think of even more and if you can let us know, but at least we mentioned some options here, some pros and cons to each way of doing it. But I think the best thing you can do for yourself is to actually try out these different options. Not you might, you know, intuitively feel like, I think this one works best for me, but honestly you don't know until you've tried it.
Jesper (43m 35s): So test them out too. And maybe even you're going to end up finding your own way, which might be a combination of some of them that you like one element from one approach and another from another, and then you combine it it, and then you have something that works for you. So I think that's the best advice we can give when it comes to editing. And it's the same thing. More or less cultural writing in general that you have to find your own path and nobody can tell you how to do it. Yes. And if you can't find your own fath, find a writing partner who has a good path and send it to them. That was part of the conclusion as well.
Narrator (44m 15s): Okay. So next Monday, we are going to have a bit of fun autumn, and I will share with you 10 terrible ways to creating characters. So you can look forward to that. If you like, what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the am. Writing fantasy. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Ottoman Yesper on patrion.com/and writing fantasy for as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the M writing fantasy podcast going, stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
We've been asked more than one occasion how an author can get a traditional publishing contract?
While Autumn did sign a traditional contract years back, none of us are experts on the subject matter.
To bridge that gap, we brought in the award-winning author, Andrea Phillips, to share some insights and advice on this very topic.
If you want to learn more about Andrea, you can find here:
http://www.andreaphillips.com http://www.deusexmachinatio.com http://twitter.com/andrhia
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (1s): You're listening to the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt, and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I'm Jesper. And this is episode 113 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. And while Autumn is busy editing one of our stories, I have a great guest on for you today. It just happens on a let's call it, semi-regular, basis that Autumn and I are asked about traditionally publishing contracts. And some are also interested in becoming what is known as a hybrid author, meaning that you are both sell publishing and traditionally published. So I thought this would be quite a good topic to cover while Autumn is busy doing other stuff. And while Autumn did have a traditional contract years back, we don't really have that much experience with this topic.
Jesper (1m 17s): So today I'm going to be joined by Andrea Phillips and Andrea is an award winning transmedia writer. She does game designs and her projects have won awards like the broadband digital award, the Canadian screen award, and much more. She is published by FireSIGHT fiction. And her short fiction has been published in escape pod and the juice versus aliens anthology. So welcome to the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, Andrea, and I hope you are keeping safe during these crazy times.
Andrea (1m 51s): Hello. Thank you. It's so exciting to, to be here and yes, yes. I'm, I'm keeping safe. I'm a hermit in my home. We're even snowed in right now. So I don't know if I could, well, no, I'm, I'm exaggerating. We, we do a lot of snow very recently, but I could probably escape if my house caught on fire, you know, it's, it's, it's not so bad. Yes. Yes. I am in New York, got a foot into half of snow over the weekend as we, as we record.
Jesper (2m 28s): Oh my God. Yeah. We don't really have that much, you know, I'm in Denmark and we have like one centimeter of snow or something like that. And it has been snowing the last couple of days, but then yeah, everyday it melts away again. So it's just gray. That's what it is.
Andrea (2m 48s): That's usually what happens to us, but I would have thought, you know, Denmark would be one of the places where it snows and then it just stays all winter. And you have piles and mountains of snow by the end. Yeah.
Jesper (3m 0s): Well here between the Scandinavian countries, you know, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland, the other three countries actually do usually get quite a lot of snow because they're also much further North Norway and Sweden and Finland are huge countries compared to Denmark. It's just like this little dot and we're just slightly more South than the others, so we can sometimes get snow, but, and it does get cold during this winter, but most years actually, it's not that, that much. So yeah. But talking about the weather, we can always do that. No, that's okay.
Jesper (3m 41s): It is. I'm the one starting it. So, but yeah, I, I did a short introduction of you there, Andrea, and it looks, or it sounds like you do quite a lot of things, but maybe you could share a bit more about yourself.
Andrea (3m 57s): Sure, sure. I always try to find a way to explain how all of the things I do are kind of related. And the transmedia work that I do is, is immersive storytelling. And I do a lot of it for, for brands out of marketing budgets. So I might help to make an app. We're an alternate reality game for a TV show, a movie, a video game, and that's fiction writing. Usually it's, it's in someone else's Storyworld, but it's exactly the same set of tools that I use if I'm writing a novel for myself, in terms of thinking about sort of characters and motivations and so on and so forth.
Andrea (4m 40s): And then I've written a nonfiction book about this sort of trans media, immersive storytelling, as well as having, you know, I have a novel that fireside published. I have a couple that I've self published and some shorts, and then, you know, I have a going freelance career. So I, I kind of do a little bit of all kinds of things and somehow together, it all seems to make up a career who knew
Jesper (5m 11s): That's pretty cool. Yeah. I want to get into all the hybrid authorizing and contracts with traditional publisher. But, but before we go into all of that, do you find it's different to do the writing for games and, and, and those sorts of things, even though it it's, it's a story you're telling, but do you find the immersive part to be different compared to how you might want to immerse a reader into a novel?
Andrea (5m 35s): It is different and it's, it's actually a, a point of view change. I do a lot of writing in, in what amounts to second person. So when you're, when you're doing immersive storytelling, the person that you're telling the story about, and the person that you're telling the story to are the same person, the audience needs to have some sort of active agency in the story to feel like they can affect the outcome to feel like they're really, really there. Like the story is real. And obviously in a novel, you you're a little more removed and everybody knows that they can shout at the page, but that doesn't mean that the character is going to make a good decision instead of a bad decision.
Andrea (6m 19s): So it, it, it's, it's just a sort of a different framing and you can use different things in the one way or the other. I am. I actually like to talk about the, sort of the, the emotional palette of feelings that you can make your audience feel and with sort of traditional flat narrative, where the audience is removed from the story, you can make people laugh, you can make people cry. You know, they can feel grief over a character that's died. They can feel, you know, joyous at, you know, a heroes, great, great victory.
Andrea (7m 1s): But when you're doing immersive storytelling, you can, you can do other different things. You can make an audience feel guilty over something that they did, which isn't something that you can really do in flat fiction. You can make them feel proud of their, their own achievements of what they've done, which is again, kind of hard to do in, in flat fiction. So it it's, it's, it's not, it's not better or worse, and it's not as different as this may make it sound, but it is definitely different.
Jesper (7m 34s): Yeah. But you also have the, a visual medium to play with there, you know, and also of course, the agency of the person, for example, playing the game and, and so on. Right. So, so in that regard, I guess the medium is also quite different compared to a novel where you just have to imagine everything in, in your mind and you don't have any agency on what's going to happen.
Andrea (7m 56s): That's even true going from Nala writing to film. So for, for a lot, a lot of my, my kinds of work, sometimes we'll do video content. A lot of it is, you know, of logs or security camera footage, kinds of things to, to make it seem sort of, sort of realistic. And I hadn't realized before I did this, how much more detailed and how much clearer in your vision, you have to be about every little thing. So, you know, when you're, when you're writing on the page, you can say, you know, messy dorm room, you know, there was a bicycle, you know, spoon on its side, whatever, and, and the, the one detail, and then the rest of it, the audience fills in the gaps themselves.
Andrea (8m 48s): But in film, in, in script writing, you know, the producers came to me and said, okay, we need to know more. What, what kind of lighting is it? What color are the walls? What time of day is it? What is their hair like that day? Is it messy? Is it like, do they look like they've gotten enough sleep? You know, are there posters on the walls? Is it clean? Is it dirty? All of these things have to be decided on purpose. So I actually have a lot more respect for cinema than I did before, because it really, it really drives home, help. Everything you see in a movie was something decided by somebody to be there.
Andrea (9m 29s): Nothing is by chance and then even, even doubly. So in a video game where literally nothing exists, every cloud, every rock is something that was put there on purpose.
Jesper (9m 43s): Yes. Yeah. It's, it's a very different style of writing as well. And I think, well, sometimes I hear people say that they're gonna, I'm gonna write a screenplay off of my novel. And always I'm thinking like, to myself, like good luck, because I wouldn't dare do that unless I got a bit of training and insight on how to do it, because I think it's a much more complicated method than you think.
Andrea (10m 7s): Yeah. The problem is that novels are very, very internal. The thing that they're good at is letting letting you know about the emotional terrain, the thoughts and feelings of your characters as they go through. And in, in film, you really can't rely on that coming through. So unless you have a very, very good actor and you can't, you can't rely on the actor, seeing things the same way as, as the writer did. It's it's funny. It's funny.
Jesper (10m 45s): Yeah. I can see that, but maybe then getting a bit into topic here. So usually when we talk about being a hybrid author, as I said in the intro at the top, usually means that you'll have both self publishing works, but you have also something that you have a more traditionally published. So I was wondering why, why did you decide to become a hybrid author?
Andrea (11m 12s): So the first self-publishing thing that I did was actually a little, a little story that I put on Kickstarter because I wanted an iPhone. And this is obviously going really far back. I think it was the iPhone two. And I thought, you know what? I have this story. I could try and sell it to a market and that would take a million years. And it probably wouldn't sell anyway because short fiction is really difficult to sell. So I said, well, if, if I get, you know, enough money to buy an iPhone, then I will really sit on my website free for everyone to read. I think, I think I even put a creative and, you know, people, people will get to read the story and I'll get my phone and everyone will be happy and it works.
Andrea (11m 60s): And in fact, I got enough money to buy my husband and I phone also. So I thought, you know, that that's pretty great. So a little bit later, I kickstarted kind of a goofy cereal idea about pirates and it's a, it's a really sort of Gonzo weird light rompy story. And I did a Kickstarter for it. The Kickstarter was, was really quite successful. And afterward I, I made a choice of games game actually with choice script, which was also pretty, pretty modestly successful and did a couple of licensing things.
Andrea (12m 51s): And, you know, I had not, not exactly an empire, but, you know, I, I, I made a decent amount of money with, with this, this sort of Lucy smoke cart thing. And then I, at some point in there, I did, I did my traditional novel through, through fireside with, you know, regular contract and then, and so on and so forth. And that was actually a really lovely experience because Brian White, my, my editor at fireside is a really fantastic human being and a really, really good editor. So he, he helped me to, to let it be the story that he could see I was trying to do.
Andrea (13m 35s): And he wasn't trying to nudge it into being something that it, that it wasn't, which I think a lot of, a lot of writers are afraid will happen. And let me see, I did a bunch of, a bunch of stuff for cereal box in there too with, with book burners and so on. And my most recent novel is sort of a political thriller that I thought I would try and sell traditionally, but it was very topical. It sort of had to come out last summer because it is about an election. And if you're writing about an election, you probably want it to come out around the time of the election, not after the election.
Andrea (14m 19s): Yeah. Yeah. So I actually did give it to my agent and we had it on submission for a bit, but then we pulled it because it was, it was too slow, a process basically. And we hit the points where nobody had, had bought it just yet. And even though it was still under consideration in a bunch of places, given publishing timelines, which are so slow, it wouldn't be able to come out in time. It just wasn't feasible. And I thought, well, I'd rather have the book come out in the reasonable timeframe then than not. And this time I just, I just did it directly on, on KDP instead of doing a Kickstarter first.
Andrea (14m 60s): And I actually do regret it because it didn't do as well as my other, other earlier starter things. And this is actually a failure of promotion on my part. Basically, I just didn't push it the same way because it's the year 2020 everyone was fatigued and it felt weird to be shilling a book, even if it's, you know, the book of your heart in that moment. So the stars didn't line up. It has nothing to do with the method through which I published it. And it has nothing to do with the book. It just, wasn't a good environment for me to be pushing anything, I guess, because I actually think it's one of the best books I've written.
Andrea (15m 41s): This is the first thing I've written, where, where people came to me and said, Andrea, this is really good. And they sounded surprised, which makes me wonder if, if they'd been kind of exaggerating about how much I had like prior things.
Jesper (16m 1s): Yeah. But I'm now that you sort of have a feet in both camps here. So that also gives you a bit of perspective. So I'm wondering from the way you see it, how do you see the main differences, but also, I guess, advantages of being a hybrid author.
Andrea (16m 19s): I, I see the, the advantages are, are kind of, you could, you could pick and choose what you, what you want to try for in each category. And as, as a self publishing author, there are things that I know I'm going to want to write, that I will never ever be able to find a publisher for because the market is too niche for a publisher to want to sink money into, but the amount of money that I need to sink into something to get it out the door or self publishing is so much lower that I don't need to make the same amount to make it worthwhile. You know, so for, for an episode of Lucy smoke cart, you know, if I, if I were to sell, I'm going to make up numbers here.
Andrea (17m 4s): I actually can't even remember real numbers. If I'm selling, you know, a thousand episodes to make a thousand dollars. And, you know, it's, it's, let's say 5,000 words long, again, I'm just making stuff up here. This has nothing to do with how, how the real things went. Then, then, you know, and I spent maybe $200 on a quick copy, edit and, you know, use the art that I already have. You know, I, I'm making $800 out of 5,000 words. And that's really great where a publisher isn't really going to be able to offer me kind of money for what is essentially a work of short fiction.
Andrea (17m 53s): Right. And I can do it on my timeline and I can, you know, just, just kind of suit myself in every possible way. One of the problems that I've I've had, it's not really a problem, but one of the constraints I've had in my career is since I do so much work for other people's intellectual property, I'm used to working in a sandbox and having to take into account. No, what, what, what you're say, what clients say and what the clients bosses, bosses say.
Andrea (18m 36s): And there's, there's a lot of Liberty in just being able to decide something on your own and, and do it. Like it's very satisfying to just be able to do something on your own in a really Gonzo way that said, I feel like self-publishing is a tremendously larger amount of work than writing something, submitting it, editing it and letting someone else worry about cover art, letting someone else worry about getting the copy, edit together, getting a line at it together, letting someone else worry about promotion and timing and availability and schedules. And, and sometimes I just don't have that in me, you know?
Jesper (19m 19s): No, I understand that. I mean, with self publishing, you are going to get a lot of freedom, but you're also going to get a lot of tasks.
Andrea (19m 28s): Yeah. And to some extent you, you get out of it, what you put into it, but, but you have to put in a lot before you start to see much of anything. Yeah.
Jesper (19m 41s): But is it, so when you are the sort of deciding your next book, for example, I'm gonna self publish it or am I going to give it to my agent to sell it? Is it about the length of it? Versus for example, also it's a too niche or not, or how do you determine which ones are self puppies and which ones to ask your agent to take care of?
Andrea (20m 5s): It's you know, it's, it's, it's sort of, I, I feel like in general, if I'm writing something novel length, I'm probably going to try and publish it through the traditional route. First, if I'm writing something that feels more like a cereal to me, or if it's shorter, probably go another path, but said, I don't know if you consider a short story publishing to be traditional publishing. But my, my go-to for a long time has been, if I want to publish a short story, I'll send it to escape, Potter, fireside, instead of doing like my, my sort of Kickstarter things and that, and that's a traditional route, just not books.
Andrea (20m 53s): It's, it's, it's the other stuff, but I usually have a pretty good idea of where I want to send it while I'm writing it. And then at the end, I do have, I have material that my agent hasn't been able to sell. And in the case of my most recent book, I decided to self publish it because I really believed in it. And then in the case of another book, I'm actually just still sitting on it with the idea that we may be able to sell it later. And I don't think it would be a good fit for self publishing for me, just because of the nature of the book.
Andrea (21m 37s): It's, it's hard to explain. I it's, it's, it's not even, it's an emotional thing. It's an emotional logic thing and not, and not an objective business decision, if you know what I mean.
Jesper (21m 49s): No, no, that's fair enough. And not, not all decisions have to be objective all the time. I do know quite some of our listeners are interested in pursuing a traditional publishing contract. So if you were to give some listeners some advice here, what would you say in terms of how do you get started and what is sort of the best approach, if you want to find an agent and get a more traditional publishing contract and so on, how do you go about it?
Andrea (22m 22s): I mean, it's, it's the same, it's the same advice on all of the blogs. And everybody says, you know, you, you do have to find, find a bunch of agents, see people who are buying, find people who are publishing things, sort of similar in feeling to what you would like to publish, figure out who represents them and, you know, write a good query letter or letter, send it out. None of this matters unless your material is already as polished as you can make it. I don't advocate going out and getting an editor before you start submitting and so on. But I mean, in the same with self publishing, you need to make sure everything is absolutely as polished as you personally can make it before you send it out into the world.
Andrea (23m 3s): Right? This is actually pertinent advice for me personally, because I have a habit of dashing off a first draft and wanting to run with it. My defense, I do write fairly solid first draft. And then, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a difficult and slow process. And that's, I think why a lot of people find self publishing much more satisfying because it can take you a year to find an agent just waiting for an agent that will become yours to get around, to reading the manuscript and, you know, reading the partial and then asking you for the full and then reading the full and then, and then offering, it can take months and months to can take a year.
Andrea (23m 53s): It can take longer. And nobody likes to feel like their career is on hold for that long. Right. And then submitting can take even, even that long or longer. I, I know, especially in Yia, it was really, really backed up for a while. And people were getting offers a year, a year and a half after their agents had submitted the manuscripts. And I mean, I know, right. And we can publish four novels. And at a certain point, you, you just can't wait forever. So yeah, I it's, it's the information on, on what to do on the, on how to do all of the right things is absolutely out there.
Andrea (24m 41s): And none of it is, none of it is, is difficult, which is to say, it's not, it's not hard to figure out what the right thing is to do, but it is to figure out whether or not you can make your book any better than it is. It is hard to wait that long. It is, you know, hard to maintain professionalism in all of your correspondence and essentially become your own marketing person and writing a query letter when the skills that go into writing a novel and the skills that go into writing a good blurb for that novel are really not the same thing at all. Yeah. And what does it mean?
Andrea (25m 24s): You're great at the other, go ahead.
Jesper (25m 26s): No, indeed. No, that's exactly what I was about to say as well, because even if you say that, okay, I'm going to self publish it. You're going to be confronted with a lot of marketing skills or the need for marketing skills that you don't need when you're writing the novel. So in some extent, I guess to some extent, I guess you could say that it doesn't matter if you go one route or the other, you will be confronted with the fact that you have to put some marketing skills in place and exercise those skills in order to, to get somewhere. But I was also wondering, because we see some, at least some of the big, you know, it used didn't, it used to be the big six and now it's a big five and I guess it's going to be the big four soon as well.
Jesper (26m 8s): So those are merging together, but at the same time, we also see smaller publishers popping up in the market space. So I'm wondering, do you see that it's, is it easier? Is it more difficult or is it the same difficulty level to, to find an agent and find a traditional publishing contract nowadays versus what it was maybe four or five years ago?
Andrea (26m 31s): I feel like it's about the same level of difficulty, even, even with the publishing mergers, for the most part, the number of imprints is still about what it was. You don't see, you see one of these mergers basically shutting down one of the arms completely, but I feel like the level of competition is about what it was four or five years ago. The, the marketplace has changed some, but only in the way that that publishing has sort of cyclical fads, you know, this is hard. And then that's how it's.
Andrea (27m 12s): So, so it goes, I, I don't know. I feel like it's never going to be easier or harder, but also it's kind of a moot question because you, you don't have the option to go back and submit four or five years ago. It's now is what, you know, you know, but
Jesper (27m 34s): I was more thinking that it might be a bit helpful to understand the difficulty level. If you have to, if you're sort of, if a listener is sitting there thinking, should I try or should I not try? Should I just self-publish instead of even trying than it is, of course, I think an important input to have in your mind to say, well, it is a lot more difficult nowadays or no, it's actually the same. So you can go ahead and so on.
Andrea (28m 0s): I mean, it's, it's a lot more difficult than it was in the 1940s. The that's that's about is as solid as, as I think I could even say it it's, it's very difficult. It is definitely very difficult. It has been very difficult for at least all of, all of my career. It will probably remain very difficult, but that said promoting and marketing and succeeding and self-publishing is also very difficult. And anyone who's done it is there tremendous accolades because it's a ton of work and, and does a ton of work, but it's not easy to do well. So that's absolutely true.
Andrea (28m 41s): The problem is if you want it to be a writer and you want it to be published through any means, it's, it's not the sort of career where you were going to be able to kind of Slack off and take it easy and to have your career take care of itself, that that is never going to happen.
Jesper (28m 60s): No, I think we've said multiple times on, on, on former episodes of this podcast as well, that if you get into writing, thinking that you're going to earn money, then just quit now because there's way easier ways of earning money than writing
Andrea (29m 14s): So many easier ways.
Jesper (29m 17s): But one thing I was wondering as well though, was that I can just imagine if I put myself into the mind of somebody who have tried to pitch agents or publishers for ages, and let's say like two years later, some agent comes back to you and say, Hey, you know, I'm actually prepared to take this on. I can imagine a lot of people jumping at the opportunity thinking like, wow, that's wonderful. Finally, I succeeded, but how do you actually know? Because one of the things that we do a lot when we self published autumn, and I, for example, when we select an idiot editor, we are on the opposite side of the table in the sense that we are the one hiring the editor.
Jesper (30m 1s): But in this case, it's the opposite of way around. But just because somebody says that they want to hire you, it doesn't necessarily mean that this is a good agent, that you're going to work well together with the person and so on. But I'm just a bit concerned that because of the long timescales and waiting time involved, that some people might just jump at the opportunity, even if they've got feeling a sort of saying to them that there's something off here, but how do you go about, or do you have any advice on, how can you possibly vet a bit about if somebody come an agent comes to you and say, Hey, let, let's make a, let's make an attempt here to get your, a properties in contract. How can you figure out if this is a good person or not?
Andrea (30m 43s): Yeah. Agenting relationships are really difficult. They're, they're a lot like a business partner partnership, which is in turn a lot like a marriage. And the power dynamic is also very strange because the agent works for the writer, but the way that the getting an agent happens, it's common for the writer to feel like they work for the agent. And it's, it's resulted in a lot of kind of bad relationships, frankly, bad marriages, where the agent isn't working very hard on behalf of the writer and the writer feels like, well, this is just their, their lot in life, because this is the agent that shows them.
Andrea (31m 28s): You always do have the ability to, to walk away. And if you feel like, if you feel like the agent, isn't actually very enthusiastic about your work. If they, if you get the vibe that they're only interested in this one book, and they're not interested in your career overall, if you get the feeling that they think that they can make a quick buck out of your book, if you get the feeling that they're chasing the market and not all in on you personally, then those are, those are red flags, I would say. But on top of that, you know, there are people who love an agent who gives them a really, really detailed set of feedback on, on a manuscript before they even submit it.
Andrea (32m 17s): And there are writers who absolutely hate that and just want the agent to sell what they wrote already. And you have to look in your heart and decide if you want a hands-on agent or a hands-off agent. And then maybe do a little bit of research before you even submit to see what working with different agents is like to see if they even sort of sell. We're seeing to like the, the sub genre you work in. One of my problems is I, I have trouble deciding what genre I even work in. So finding an agent that actually, I guess, deals with my kind of work is a little weird.
Andrea (33m 5s): But yeah. And the other thing is if, if you write, let's say a lot of horror and a little bit of science fiction, and you have an agent that represents a little bit of science fiction and a lot of romance, but they're interested in your science fiction work like that tells you probably that's not a good match because they don't represent the kind of work. That's the bulk of what you're going to want to try to sell. It's it's just, it's, it's complicated and messy. And unfortunately there's no one true right way to do any of it, which before, before we started recording, I think I said, I said something to you about how we're all just sort of making it up as we go along.
Andrea (33m 50s): And it sounds, it sounds like a joke, but it's literally true. We're all making up our stories as we go along, but we're also all making up how our careers work as we go there, there are no rules. There, there aren't any, even many good rules of thumb. You know, if, if your agent isn't sending you royalty statements, maybe fire them. If your agent isn't sending you, your royalty checks, definitely fire them. And beyond that, it's all a matter of fit and suitability and what you want and what they want. And whether it's the same thing.
Jesper (34m 27s): It's a lot about, I think being honest with yourself because it is, it doesn't matter. Well, you absolutely right in the sense that the agent works for the author, but I would almost go as far to say it doesn't really matter who works for whom in the, in the relationship, as long as you're honest with yourself and you know, what kind of partners do I want to work with? And you're, you're both sort of pulling in the same direction because at the end of the day, it is a very, very close working relationship. And I say that, of course, without having any agent, we self publish all our work. But, but, but I have heard so many times from those who do have an agent, that it is a very, very close working relationship.
Jesper (35m 12s): And, and if you don't feel like, you know, you're pulling equal amount of the weight, then what's the point.
Andrea (35m 20s): Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And again, it's, it's easy to feel like B agent picked you. And so that's the agent that you get, but the reality is actually very different. And unfortunately, in many cases you do an agent. There are a lot of publishing houses that simply won't accept material that wasn't sent through an agent. So this isn't the sort of situation where you can say, well, who needs them? I'll just go on my own and keep the 15%. But it's, it's complicated. Everything is complicated.
Jesper (36m 1s): Yeah. But let's say you then find your, the agent that you work well with. You have a very good cooperation and then you do at some point land, one of the publishing deals with some publishing house that the agent has sold you, your book to one of the things I hear a lot, and I suppose that's true as well, but maybe you can add your reflections to it is that you can't really expect that much marketing support from a publishing company, unless you are like one of the real big headed names, but otherwise you are almost on your own like UI, if you were indie publishing, it doesn't really make that much of a difference.
Jesper (36m 41s): Is that also your view?
Andrea (36m 43s): It's, it's kind of true. It's mostly true, but it's also kind of not true at all. One of the, one of the big things to note is that one of the big advantages I should say of, of going with a traditional publisher is that they will be able to get your book on bookstore shelves. And that is incredibly difficult through any sort of a self publishing schema. So simply having your book on shelves does wind up selling more and simply being published through, you know, Hachette or random house. You know, we'll make sure that more people are going to see your book for more opportunities for people to notice because you're, you're starting out at an advantage.
Andrea (37m 34s): You're more likely to be sent to, you know, publishers weekly. You're more likely to be sent to Kirkus. You're more likely to be sent to a lot libraries like libraries, journal, librarian, journal, I'm sorry, I'm screwing it up. And you can see things on your own as self published, but it costs tremendous amounts of money out of pocket. And you're not necessarily guaranteed any, any sort of quality good review. And especially you're not guaranteed that anyone will see it where the weight of the publishing house sending you to publishers weekly instantly sort of, sort of gets you up a notch out of, out of the vast sea of publishing that self publishing work.
Andrea (38m 26s): And so you're more likely to get noticed more easily. You're more likely to be able to get distribution in libraries, which can, can result in quite a lot of sales, you know, and that sort of thing. It's, it's, it's, it's just being in a publishing house results in, in a bit of a bump up. But,
Jesper (38m 46s): But I suppose it also depends on what publishing house we're talking about, because of course, one of, some of the bigger publishing houses, they have, you know, big muscles that they can, they can flex in order to get into airports and bookstores and all those things, but whereas a smaller publishing house, well, they might really not be able to do much that you can't do. I'm thinking
Andrea (39m 9s): For a very small house. Yes. But even, even like a small beer, you know, one of the, one of the smaller presses subterranean doesn't do solicited sort of original material, but like the smaller presses even still have the gravitas of sending to the reviewers and in turn selling to librarians, for example, that you have to pay a lot of money to get otherwise. I mean, they're, they're not going to be all sending you out on a book tour, or they're not all going to be putting, putting your book on, on bus shelters or billboards or subway or wherever else.
Andrea (39m 51s): Honestly, nobody is going to do that for you unless you are Dan Brown. I think part of that is because publishing advertising doesn't have a history of a specially working very well. I I'd actually be interested in hearing you talk about advertising for self publishing at some point, because it's my understanding that there's a lot of advertising you can do. And very little of it is proven to work
Jesper (40m 22s): Well. Yes mean we have, we have multiple episodes on this feed as well about marketing books as a self-published author. But there is indeed a lot of things you can do across Amazon ads. You can run BookBub ads, Facebook ads, all this click to play ads. There's ton of it. But the thing is that it's not, it's not that easy. It's not like you just create an ad and then you start selling books because first of all, there is the return of investment that you have to take into account. So you can't just bit like $2 per click or something because the, the book costs $2, maybe.
Jesper (41m 3s): So, so it's, it's pointless. So there's, that's you take into account
Andrea (41m 7s): The dollars to make $20. Yeah,
Jesper (41m 9s): Indeed, indeed. So you might be able to get to the stage where you're selling books, but you're not earning anything from it. So that in itself is an issue. So from the inter indie author perspective, you can move some sales short-term by click to play ads. If you're short of narrow down to your audience well enough, and you do well enough in your ad copy and so on. But the real trick of the trade is, is to build an email list because that's where your money is longterm. And that's where, that's where our focus, my myself and autumn. For example, we only focus on building the email is we do have some kick to play ads running, but not a lot. And we don't spend a ton on it.
Jesper (41m 51s): We just have a bit running. But other than that, all our marketing goes into trying to give people some something for free in order for them to join the email list so that we can start talking to the people, not, not about selling to them, but more over time, build a relationship with them via emails and they get to know us better. And then of course, if they like us, then at some point we hope that they're going to buy some of the books. But again, if you just get people onto the email list with the only purpose that I'm going to send you a ton of emails, promoting some stuff, that's not going to help, you'll have to go into it because you want to have an online relationship. Let's call it that with the readers.
Jesper (42m 31s): Otherwise it's, it doesn't matter as, as well because people will just unsubscribe. I'm sure you can. You can recognize if you, the, the email list you might have signed up to where they just keep emailing, you offers about this and that it's, it's pretty annoying.
Andrea (42m 46s): The worst one I ever had was for a children's clothing brand, who, who I signed up for, for my, for my daughter. And they wound up sending the marketing email literally every hour.
Jesper (43m 2s): No, but, but it, it, it's this very fine balance to walk because on one hand, you have also to get your email list into the mindset that once in a while, I am going to try to make you an offer for, to buy something that is going to happen. But you have to walk this fine balance between I'm not here to push sales in your face all the time. And I'm here to actually, because I want to us to have like a two way communication going over the emails. But at the same time, once in a while, I do hope that you're going to buy something because if you're not, then I can't even keep doing this anyway. Right. So there is that element into it. And I know authors who sell puppies, authors, who either try to sell all the time, which is not good, but there are also those who fear selling anything.
Jesper (43m 52s): So they just keep being buddy buddies with the people on the email list forever without ever selling them any of the books. And that doesn't help either. Because at the end of the day, you're paying for the people who are on your email is so you have to sell something as well. So it is a very fine balance to walk. And I think as you said, as well around the traditionally publishing stuff with it, none of this is easy, right? It doesn't matter which route you take, you aid. It is not easy.
Andrea (44m 19s): Yeah, yeah,
Jesper (44m 21s): No, no. If there, is there anything we S I sort of forgot or didn't think about asking you when it comes to traditional publishing contracts or being hybrid authors that you like, this is an important point that should have been mentioned.
Andrea (44m 35s): I just, I just want to reiterate there's, there's kind of no, no right. Or wrong way to do anything. It's, it's what works for you and doesn't work for you and what works for your audience and doesn't work for your audience. So your circumstances may be different. Your, your goals may be completely different. It's entirely possible that you're not in it for money, but for, you know, reach and you want to find a way to reach as many people as possible. It's, it's, it's, it's hard to say, you know, it's, it's all a matter of, of what you want to get out of it. And you have to have that in mind before you start deciding how to do it.
Andrea (45m 16s): Just like everything else in life.
Jesper (45m 18s): No, that makes a lot of sense. And I also want to thank you, Andrea, for coming on to the, a am writing fantasy podcast here today and, and give us some insights on, on an area where at least autumn and I are not the most proficient people. So that was nice to get some insight inputs on that, because I know, I know some listeners, I interested in this area, so, so thank you for doing this.
Andrea (45m 43s): It's been a really good time. Thank you.
Jesper (45m 45s): Excellent. Is there any place where people can go on the internet or you want to point people on the internet, if they want to learn, learn a bit more about you?
Andrea (45m 54s): I would say you can go to my website, which is , which is a pun in Latin, but you can actually also go there by Andrea phillips.com. It goes to the same place, because I realized I had made a terrible mistake at some point. And I am sometimes on Twitter and D R H I a.
Jesper (46m 24s): Okay. That's perfect. So, Andrea, I'm also thinking that if you email me those links, then I will put those in the show notes for you and people can follow them straight from there.
Andrea (46m 37s): Wonderful. I'll do that right now.
Jesper (46m 40s): Perfect. That was the wrong sounder. This one was the one I was looking for. So next Monday, Autumn will be back and we're going to talk about one of her favorite topics, namely editing a novel.
Narrator (46m 56s): If you like, what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcasts going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Goodreads is a social platform where readers congregate.
Are the ways in which we can market our books to these people without being sleazy?
Jesper has no idea about Goodreads, so he asks all the stupid questions, while Autumn tries to convince him that Goodreads is a good platform.
(For the record, Jesper did claim his author profile on Goodreads the day after the recording of this episode)
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (1s): You're listening to the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need an literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I'm Jesper. And I'm autumn. This is episode 112 of the Am Writing fantasy podcast. And we're going to discuss a topic today where, eell, I'm a total noob.
Autumn (46s): That's very honest stuff, you know?
Jesper (48s): Yeah. But luckily, well you autumn, you're not. And so we're going to talk about how to use good reads as a promotional tool to market books. So I don't know anything about that.
Autumn (1m 3s): Yeah. You've never even claimed her author profile on there. You probably have reviews that you've never even looked at, but I can't imagine I enjoy. Goodreads is one of those things, I, I want to be on it more than I am. So maybe this will be another reminder to myself to get back on there and do something now maybe.
Jesper (1m 24s): And I I'm hoping that I will learn a thing or two today as well.
Autumn (1m 28s): Maybe I'll inspire. You. You'll have to tell me if I inspire you to maybe think about claiming your author profile by the end of today's podcast while you're setting yourself a very high goal. I, I took persuasive Fessel philosophy in my persuasive psychology actually in my college days. So we'll have to see if it comes out.
Jesper (1m 52s): Yeah. Yeah. Just don't get disappointed.
Autumn (1m 57s): Right. I'll try. Maybe I can convince you to give me your author profile.
Jesper (2m 2s): Well that you could probably yes.
Autumn (2m 4s): Okay. We'll have to see how it goes.
Jesper (2m 8s): Yeah. Yeah, indeed. Yeah. I know you have a crazy times on your end. How's it going with all your jinxing of electronic stuff and destroying computers and have you screwed something else in the meantime?
Autumn (2m 21s): Oh yes, absolutely. Besides destroying battery operated water pumps, I managed to, for some reason, make Adam's Mac, my husband's at Mac air unstable. So it stopped connecting to the internet. I just, my phone's. Okay. Thank goodness. It must be as no, we have a life case on that and it is, we've been joking because yeah, I've told you, my husband knows the, the Fe and my next series, I'm releasing, they cannot touch and they actually end up putting electronics and Faraday cages.
Autumn (3m 3s): And it's like, my husband's now talking about making me go. I'm like, Oh, I can brand that for my books. So I still think he thought I'd be that excited about hearing. I can get my very unfair day cage from my laptop.
Jesper (3m 19s): That would be a very interesting author image. And try to explain why, why you're sitting inside a cage.
Autumn (3m 29s): I might need it. I do not know why things go scurry around me, but I've been extremely cursed racks the last couple of weeks. But I did just pick up my laptop like 45 minutes before we needed to get into recording today. And the student Q and a. So I'm I actually got it online and all my files were actually there. The logic board had been toasted somehow, but it didn't destroy my files. Just the logic board go figure I broke logic, but it's feels so good to have it back. And it's working and they replaced the keyboard and it's also fancy and nice.
Autumn (4m 13s): It almost looks new for the memory was only decent. I'd be happy. It'd be perfect.
Jesper (4m 19s): I honestly really hope that you're going to get out of your jinxing cycled quite soon so that you can just, you know, don't break things and just get back into your group without all this stressful stuff. It's Oh my God. I feel bad for you.
Autumn (4m 37s): Yeah, it definitely had a few days where I've closed up shop early and just gone and read by Kindle, which thank goodness it hasn't broken on me yet either, but my husband actually knows I'm accident prone. So he got me like the most indestructible Kindle that you can buy. It's called a Voyager and it is like shockproof waterproof, you know, drop, kick it proof. I don't know if it's me proof, but so far so good. Knock on wood. Yeah.
Jesper (5m 4s): Maybe Amazon will learn something that it was not as proven as they thought it was.
Autumn (5m 9s): Oh yes. Well, if anyone ever wants to test something to see if it's, indestructable send it to me, I've broken indestructable glasses before, so please let me have a try.
Jesper (5m 22s): Not even from trying, it's just not, you just use it normally and then you will break it.
Autumn (5m 27s): That's true. I confess that as true anyway, but how are things on your side of the ocean?
Jesper (5m 36s): Well, nothing as exciting as on your side, that's for sure. Yeah. I don't really know if there's that much to share since last week's episode. It's just been one of those working weeks where I've just been focusing on getting my words in these, the first draft of the reader magnet is done now. Yeah.
Autumn (5m 55s): Yes. You sent that to me, at least your, I still have to do
Jesper (5m 58s): My edits and add to it, but yeah, we've been writing. It's been exciting. Yeah. Yeah, indeed. And as we said before, we not very good at celebrating. You actually pointed this out to me in an email, you said like, remember to celebrate, like, and, and honestly I did actually think about it when I sent you the last chapter. I did stop for two seconds to think maybe I should celebrate. So, and then I went onto the next thing on its dupe list, but so he had a two second acknowledgement of an achievement. And then, but I always, I almost would say that those two second is already an improvement because before I didn't even have those.
Jesper (6m 40s): So it is slightly better, but not a, not a lot better. I could also mention that the, I just wrote up a whole post for our patron supporters on how the new iOS 14 rollout that is coming here early 20, 21 might affect Facebook ads. So this is, yeah, this is a pretty big deal for us authors who rely heavily on Facebook ads and the new iOS 14 will actually block some ad stuff or I would say not blocked, but it's, it's more to do with the fact that previously Apple operated with an opt out methodology, so that if you did not want the phone to share information with Facebook, for example, you had to actively go in and opt out via settings.
Jesper (7m 35s): And the Apple is changing that with the new iOS so that you have to opt in. So you will actually be prompted by your phone to say, do you want your, your, the phone to share information with, for example, Facebook? And of course, most people will say, no, we don't want that. And then some of the ads becomes a problematic to run because Facebook cannot collect the data that they could before. So yeah, I wrote up a whole post on Patrion for our supporters on how I view this, what are the consequences, how to deal with it. So that was sort of a scary and interesting thing all at once there. That is, that sounds interesting.
Autumn (8m 16s): Cause I know for me, I actually run Firefox and they have a Facebook corral, which blocks you from the Facebook pixels on websites. And I always feel sneaky by doing that, but I also feel like I'm undermining someone else's data. Oops.
Narrator (8m 34s): A week on the internet with the Am Writing Fantasy podcast.
Jesper (8m 39s): To welcome back Jeffrey on Patreon.
Autumn (8m 42s): Yes. Thank you, Jeffrey, for coming back, you had a little glitch where you're gone for a little while and you've returned to us. So thank you. Yeah. Thank you so much, Jeffrey, for your continuous support of the am writing fantasy podcast. We really appreciate that. And I dunno, I feel like saying a few words about Patreon here or Yeah, that's, it's, it's a very wonderful platform and it really, it is what supports this podcast and lets us pay for the recording and the hosting and all of those things that is actually all paid out of pet pantry on every single month. So thank you for everyone who supports us there.
Jesper (9m 22s): Yeah. And I fully understand that, you know, we live in a media reality right now where podcasts are free and that's fine. The reality though is also that we can't make a living from something that is free. So that's where we use patron and we are not running any ads on the podcast either. So we're not getting any money from there. So we entirely funded by patron as, as autumn just said, I could also mention, for example, that we just, we did have a, this week, one of our very strong patron supporters leave us on Patrion or the last week due to the person's financial situations. And that is fully understandable people.
Jesper (10m 2s): So changes, you know, circumstances can change in your financial situation. And first and foremost, you have to take care of yourself. So I'm just saying this because supporting us on patron doesn't mean that it has to be forever. If you have the capability support with maybe just $1 a month for now, that is awesome and it makes a difference. And then if you laid on your circumstances might change, then don't feel bad about it. It's perfectly fine. If you don't have to drop out and spend your money somewhere else after all, you have to take care of yourself and your family before anything else. I think that the one thing I would like to point out autumn here is just that I think that the trouble with this kind of thing is that most people always think that somebody else will take care of the supporting stuff, you know?
Jesper (10m 54s): And in truth, if everyone just stopped thinking that and pitched in with a dollar, then I wouldn't have even have to mention this at all, because then it would be fine. Yeah. At the end of the day,
Autumn (11m 7s): The Wikipedia often says the exact same thing. And I always do think, you know what? I can sit there asking for like two bucks, I always send Wikipedia something when they ask. I admit it.
Jesper (11m 18s): Yeah. I mean, the thing is that this podcast is not just recorded for the fun of it. We actually do take it quite seriously. And we're trying to give you very useful and also some, sometimes just entertainment but useful advice. And if you do appreciate that, if you find it helpful in any way, please go and check out Patrion and you can follow the link in the show notes and see if, if maybe it would be something you could support us a bit there. Yeah.
Autumn (11m 49s): Don't forget with our new website rebuild, which is finish by the go check out and writing fantasy.com. But if you go to am writing fantasy, fantasy.com/writing hyphen tips, or just go into the website and go into the blog, we actually added a button just to donate. So if for some reason you don't want to do patchy on you don't want to do. I mean, there's rewards there and hundreds of posts at this point and writing tips and marketing tips. But if for some reason you don't want to do that, but you would like to help us out and be able to, you know, support the podcast. You just want to do a one-time little gift. We made that possible on the website. So go check that out and we appreciate that as well.
Autumn (12m 31s): Thank you so much because it does really help keep the lights on here, especially when you have one, half of your tribe is electronic accident prone. Yes. Okay. Anything else to add to, or should we move on to our conversation on Goodrich will only, I can say that it's not true of the moment, but by this time this is released. We will be over 3000 members on am writing fantasy Facebook in our group. And we're so close right now. We're, we're literally a day or two away. So, but definitely by the time this is released. So come join us on am writing fantasy Facebook, because it's just growing like insane. And when everyone there is wonderful.
Autumn (13m 15s): Excellent. Yes, please do that. So there's probably something like a hundred million readers on Goodrich. I believe autumn probably close. I think the last time I'd seen was 95 million was the stats they had released when I took a webinar with them a year ago. So it's probably gotta be a hundred million readers, not just members, readers, people who love books. It's some million people look, I love books website. And I think this is one of the reasons why I'm a newbie to good reads because you know, in our little, let's say publishing company here, you, you and my publishing company advertising is sort of the stuff that I do, but good Reese has like considering you have your, okay, let me just put out a good read CEO here.
Autumn (14m 13s): All right. So I'm an in, I'm in a meeting with the other executives and it's like, how many people do we have on the platform now? A hundred million. Okay. That sounds good. How do we capitalize on that? Well, so we don't why, well, I don't know. We don't have any ways to put any ads or monitor these people. So they're just using our platform and it's scrape. Yeah. Okay. Maybe it's great, but is I just don't get it. I mean, why can you not place apps on Goodrich? For example, with that many people, it would, it's like the most obvious place to advertise, but you, you can a bit,
Jesper (14m 52s): And we're going to talk about that, but it's very limited.
Autumn (14m 55s): It is very limited and it used to be a little less limited. I used to run good rates ads, but compared to AMS ads, they actually didn't perform that well, which is just to me crazy because these are people who love books, but yeah, use only so many ways you can actually give good reads money, which is probably why those ways that you can get good reads money. It costs quite a bit of money, but in its own way, from the author perspective, that's actually awesome. It's hard to give them money. You have to, there's other ways that you can go talk to these readers and find them.
Autumn (15m 35s): And so it's all free. It's kind of cool.
Jesper (15m 40s): It is cool. But I have a feeling that a lot of stuff that we're going to talk about here, or rather that you're going to talk about and I'm going to listen. But I think a lot of it has to probably do with there's a lot of time investment involved here. I have a feeling
Autumn (15m 56s): There could be, but I mean, I guess if you're going, if you consider it a social media platform that is a hundred percent readers, why would you go to Facebook where it's like your aunt, Betty and your cousin, and they don't even read your books or do you want to go where there's readers, who you can go in, like sort through by the genre and find them and connect with them and have a great fan base. Where should you be spending your time? If you're going to spend some time on social media, it's not, you know, or looking at political tweets.
Jesper (16m 31s): Yeah, no, I understand that. But maybe just before we get into all of those things that you can do, do you have any, because as you said before, it's even when you could run ads, they were not converting very well. And given that there is a hundred million or 95 or whatever, I don't think those 5 million makes a difference, but let's say around a hundred million readers on good reads. Why, if no, let me rephrase that. If it was very effective in terms of selling or marketing your books, I would think that every author would spend quite a lot of time on good reads, but I spent quite a lot of my time brushing up on the latest marketing things and, and ad strategies and all I do that all the time.
Jesper (17m 24s): And I never ever hear about you should be spending time on good reads. So I'm just wondering now that I've never really used good reads. So of course I'm, I don't have any, let's say I don't have any standpoint in terms of arguing why or why not, but I'm wondering if you have any reflections on why is it not converting that well, w w what is it is it's to do with the audience that is Andrea or
Autumn (17m 50s): Why? I think it's the, I think it's sort of almost like talking about a Kindle unlimited. If you, I know some authors who are a hundred percent Kindle, Kindle unlimited, and they're making a living wage off of that. And I know some authors who are on good reads and they are invested, it is their number one social media platform. It's where they spend all their time and the ones who are doing that. I mean, you're talking directly to readers and they're doing well. They, the webinar I took with good reads said that, you know, if they showed some books, that's like, this is a new release. This is one that basically went on fire on good reads.
Autumn (18m 31s): And because of that, it was very popular across the board. Got the New York times bestseller lists all of these things simply because it started on good reads and got that burn going. So it can be an incredibly powerful platform, but I think most authors are spread out or they're not concentrating enough on just one platform and doing really, really well in it. And I mean, I have to say, like, I, I love good reads, but I also hate it because it is owned by Amazon now. And they have not put much money into it as it is like a 1990s platform. It looks terrible. Yes.
Autumn (19m 11s): It's a really old, outdated, it's a forum. I don't even particularly like forums. You can't, you have to know HTML to even put in an image much less an image and a link. So you have to know a little bit of coding. Yes. You actually have to know coding to you mean you could just do stuff kind of blandly, but if you want it to make it look pretty again, that's probably my graphic designer decide coming out there that, you know, I, I know HTML coding whenever I'm on there and I want it putting in post photos and things. So it's so archaic and everyone keeps trying to create the next good reads. You know, a lot of platforms are trying to create a new version of good reads, but no, one's managed to knock it out of the number one spot for readers.
Autumn (19m 54s): And I think there's a few reasons there, and maybe it's inertia because everyone's already there and until it explodes or Amazon takes it away, or it makes it a paid for platform. They're just going to say on good reads, because right now, even though Amazon owns it, it's kind of, it's got its own people, its own personality. It has librarians that manage the data and stuff. And they're fun to talk to. I've had to, I've had the fun of asking them a few questions. So it's got its own kind of thing going. I think, I think if you really, if even me, if I really invested the time and got going, the number one thing you can do as an authored to change your book sales is to go and talk to readers to go and build up your reader base Emma's are good.
Autumn (20m 40s): Reads is a fantastic place to go and do that, but you have to be invested and dedicated and not just jump in and out and in and out, you got to go in and be part of the group. And the membership know that that part is perfectly fair. And I understand that, but I guess my question is, can you get them and maybe we're going to get into this so you can save the answer. If it's something we've got to get into any way. But as I said, I'm a new PSO. I'm I'm asking the stupid questions. Fair enough. But can you get people off of good reads and onto your email list in any easy way? Short of there is I think one or two ways and we will get into that.
Autumn (21m 20s): So, yes. Okay. But let's go. Not as easy, it's not as easy as adding a button to your good reads author profile. It's not that easy, but there are other ways that you can do that. Okay. Well, what do you want to stop them? Well, I think we should start with the obvious ones. And one of them we've already touched on is that good reads used to do advertising, used to do self-service ads, almost the same as AMS ads, except it was actually a little more archaic and old fashioned AMS is like so much more sleek compared to what you could do on good reads. And I have used them and it took for ever to even spend $50 there.
Autumn (22m 4s): It just was, it was really, I can see why they stopped doing it because they were not serving very well. They did not generate a lot, but I thought it was funny because just to double check before we ran this today is I did check on what their advertising says and it says no longer doing it, but they did say that this is literally for quote, for larger budgets, looking to drive maximum awareness on good reads, contact our advertising team to learn about our customized book, launch packages from larger budgets. So if you're a brick and mortar publisher or JK Rowling go to Goodwill. Yeah. I would think it was something similar to because Amazon also has it, the advantage program.
Autumn (22m 47s): If you get into that, you, you can get not the investors program itself, but I forgot what it's called, but they have some, some branding banner stuff that you can get posted on, on Amazon. And I think if I remember correctly, I think the minimum spend to get into that program is 50 K. Oh my goodness. I was like, you don't just do that, right? No, no, no, no. So you, you were a serious publishing house or an author who is amazing. Yeah. When you can say, Oh yeah, 50 K nut up problem. So there is that. And I think the other thing that most people know good reads for is book giveaways.
Autumn (23m 27s): Because if you're a reader, you know, there is a way it's so easy to sign up for either an ebook or a paperback of giveaway. And I remember the day where they were actually, I think the cheapest $50, maybe it was more, but there was a time they were super cheap to run. But now the minimum, the starting price is $119. So they're not that cheap anymore. That's not horrible. And if you're going to run a Kindle one, it has to be, you have to be published through Amazon. So through KDP and you can give up to a hundred books of an ebook giveaway, or if you want to do a print book giveaway, you can have a smaller, you know, just do like five print books or even 10.
Autumn (24m 10s): So those two options are there. And I think most people know about them. And I did them once upon a day. But now that they're a little more expensive, I save up for maybe a big splash, like the final book of a series or something like that. You want know, do something special with it, but those are great, great and popular ways of actually quickly connecting with readers. So if you want to give one a try, I would highly recommend it.
Jesper (24m 39s): Yeah. And the one thing I do understand about these giveaways is that one of the key benefits of it is the, there is like a social amplification built in meaning that I think everyone who enters a giveaway automatically has that book added to their, want to read shelf, which then creates a story in the newsfeeds for all their friends and followers. So that's pretty neat. You know, that, that way it's sort of that amplifies the word of mouth basic.
Autumn (25m 9s): Yes, exactly. It is. And that's what, I don't know if, if most people realize like that's how good reading works. It took me a while to figure out because good reads has a couple of different areas. It has the forum area, the groups. So you can go into groups and forums and get to meet people and chat. There's like an archaic version of Facebook. If people are not used to forums, I they're not picture related enough for me. And I think that's why I don't like them. They're all textual and I'll go, my husband loves them and I just find them appalling. So I'm just not a good on forums, but I should spend more time there. But then they have a side that is like sorta like Facebook newsfeed, where it's an ongoing feed and you get to see things posted by your friends.
Autumn (25m 50s): So the more friends you have or the more friends someone else has, you know, they, it gets shared more widely. And you would like to be just like Facebook. You would like to have your feed, something about your book, show up a couple of times, maybe a day. So all of the things I'm going to suggest are basically ways of getting your book, something you're sharing to show up, just so that people see it. But obviously the number one goal is to get basically as many friends as you can. And the best way you can do that, as you can either go friend, everyone who say likes a book that you like, which is probably a perfectly way of doing it. Cause you want to stick into your genre. You want to, you know, keep people who, you know, go everyone who reviews your book, ask them to be your friend.
Autumn (26m 34s): You can do things like that. Or obviously you can share with your newsletter, your list on social media, other platforms. That's why you go into Twitter and you'll see someone say, Hey, I'm a good reads author. Find me here. That's because they want people to follow them. And so if they're following you on Twitter, you want to get them over to good reads as well. You're going to have to bring people into the platform, even though it already has a hundred million readers, you know, you have to find them and connect with them. It's a lot of networking. But to do that, that gets the amplification that you just mentioned. You want to spread your message to everyone's newsfeed on good reads.
Jesper (27m 11s): And that's where I'm getting slightly nervous here, right? Because you're not in terms of having to bring people in. And I understand that all that, but building a reader list, so to speak on somebody else's real estate, that's like the number one thing we talked about in the self-publish sex success course that you should not do. You know, you have to get them onto some email list, meaning that you own the list of readers and they're not built on a good reads or the same thing applies to Facebook groups. There was people who build up a huge Facebook group and that's the only place that they can connect with those readers. And what happens to data at Facebook decides that, well, maybe now we're going to charge you to be able to post our stuff in your own group.
Jesper (27m 57s): Otherwise we're only going to show it to 10% of them or whatever, you know, you never know what's going to happen. And that's why at least in the self publishing costs that we always say, you have to get people onto your email list. That's the only way you can control your own customer list. And that was why I was asking before, can we get them out of so, okay, let's say we get them into good reads then, but how do we get them out of there and onto our email list?
Autumn (28m 25s): Well, we will, there's a few places where we can look at doing that besides obviously, you know, by getting them to shelve and buy your books. Even if you disappear off of good reads, for some reason, the fact that they have your books and hopefully in all your books, they have links to where else they can find you. So that is one important thing. But yeah, this is definitely using another platform to build. Hopefully you want to pull them into your own list, but I do think occasionally with something that it is book dedicated and reader dedicated. It's not bad to have a presence here because these are readers. These are active, hungry readers. These are people who really love books.
Autumn (29m 6s): And if you're going to spend some time, you know, any time, this is a place to be better than Facebook, better than anywhere else. This is definitely an audience you should look at because there's a lot of people who love books and will be active on this and have been active for years and years.
Jesper (29m 26s): Hmm. Okay. Fair enough.
Autumn (29m 29s): I know I haven't convinced you got the wool work on it. We'll work on some of this sharing and I'll see if we can get some stuff that's over, you know, how you can move them into your newsreader list, how you can get them off of that. I mean, I have to admit, I had a following on what, what Pat and I haven't been back there for ages, but it is interesting to see like where you can build up reader relationships and which are the ones that are worth keeping or which are the ones that are going to go and then buy your books. And I will say on good reads, these are the ones that are going to go buy your books. These are ones you want to make friends with.
Jesper (30m 3s): Interesting. Why the ads never worked very well then, or maybe it was more to do with how the ads were served and stuff rather than the actual audio
Autumn (30m 11s): You were really, you could only ever use your book cover, which kind of makes sense. I mean, it's your book cover? And the copy was very limited. And I think where they show up the website, just being as old styles as it is, they just weren't being served well. No. Okay. I would say, I think Amazon has too many ads, but Oh my goodness. They're not going to slow those down anytime. So I think they're going to add more, to be honest, especially now that I do have a Kindle and you see how they, the ads come up on your Kindle and it's something that the Regenera can I at least choose which books are going to show me anyway. So let's get into choosing that, but yes, exactly.
Jesper (30m 56s): But I can get a lot of weird ones on my Kindle as well. It's like, I don't know why you advertising this to me. I'm never going to buy it
Autumn (31m 2s): Exactly. Not the right audience. Right. So sort of I mentioned the forums. So sort of going onto the forums and being the troll that, you know, every time someone says, I want a book recommendation and you're just sharing your own book, which I don't recommend. Don't do that. This is not, we're going to just skip the forums. As I mentioned, that is not my forte, but you can go and join the forums and you should be there as a participant, as a reader. And also, you know, occasionally maybe once every 1 million posts mentioned, you're a writer to get people over to your side. But once I told her, that's probably not that bad.
Autumn (31m 43s): It seems like it, like, they never want to hear that you're a writer in these groups, but you should go and be active as a reader. And that's fine, but we're here to talk about how you can help your author platform. So let's look at that and we'll go through some really quick ones that are really easy and well, these are ones you most people should know about, but if you start an author profile, you actually go and claim it. If you've already published in Amazon, you have an author profile over in good reads. And so what you do is actually claim it. You don't create it. It's kind of, it's different that way. It's already there. It's already there. You, if you have, you probably already have books that are not only there under your author profile, but have reviews.
Autumn (32m 28s): People have already been doing this for you. So it's a matter of going in there saying, Hey, that's mine and setting up your profile and adding your pictures and doing things like that. And you can link your blog if have a blog outside of good reads, you can link it. So you can post they're very similar to your Amazon author profile.
Jesper (32m 45s): Yeah. Well, I was just about to say, why don't they just, I mean, it's all owned by Amazon. They should just pull it from the author central on Amazon. That then done. I mean,
Autumn (32m 55s): Yeah, you, we won't talk about why they haven't done this stuff, but yeah, that would make things a little bit easier. Okay.
Jesper (33m 1s): Well, what if I wanted to talk about that?
Autumn (33m 4s): Do we want to give tips or do we want to complain about Goodreads.
Jesper (33m 7s): Okay. Let's give tips then.
Autumn (33m 8s): Okay. One of the things I think is pretty cool though, is you can actually upload videos. These will show up under your author profile so that when readers go and like, look at you as an author, which is a lot easier to do than on Amazon. You know, it's something you actually tend to go to people's author profile a lot more than the book profiles, so you can upload videos. So if you have a book trailers, if you have videos of you reading, if you have audio books and you've made some cool Clippy things, I have shown some to you. I love doing those. So if you do some stuff like that, this is a great place to go ahead and post them. And then they show up on your author profile. They have a nice little, I mean, nice for good reads.
Autumn (33m 49s): Okay, nice for the 1980s little spot that they sit and they can show up and you can go share them. Another really kind of thing. As you're setting up your author profile, you can actually add a spot for favorite quotes. And so I know most people think of like, you know, life savings. Like one of my favorite ones is when life, when all is said and done, there's more said than done. Well, that's a great quote, but it has nothing to do with my books. What you want to do is on your author profile, share some of your favorite quotes from your own book and have them up there as your favorite quotes. And obviously say the book it's from it kind of will check people's interest.
Autumn (34m 31s): If they see something they think is pretty cool as well. And so there's another one you can do is you can join groups, which I've mentioned with the forum. So it's just like Facebook and they get to know you as an author, but you can also create your own fan group. So if you wanted to create your own group dedicated to, you know, maybe a genre, maybe a certain type of book, or just simply your own books, you can create something like that there. And that is where I think you can really work on bringing authors or readers over to your profile because you have a lot more control. The forums have usually one or two threads that are, you know, the ones that people are introduction.
Autumn (35m 16s): And that's where you can say, Hey, dream, join my newsletter list to get a free book or get a free book here. So this is where I think you can really get into the control and directing people to say, Hey, I have this freebie. If you sign up here, you can get people over into your newsletter. And that's one I think is an important one, but of course you need to get people over good reads and then over enjoining to your fan group. But the nice thing is the groups that you've created as well as the groups that you're a member of show up on your author profile. So it's not like it's hidden. It's, it's very clearly posted that says, Hey, there's this fan group for my books go here.
Autumn (35m 56s): And plus you can post it on your blog. And every time, the nice thing about good reads is every time you touch something on there, you share something, it shows up in the newsfeed. So you need to do like, you know, go in once or twice a day and update something, update a book you're reviewing just one little, one little thing as much as you would do do and do a tweet of course, with good reads. I don't think there's any scheduling platforms. It's like, HootSweet, I'm trying to think there's nothing where you can go and push a post through. So you actually have to go to the good reads platform and type in physical letters and share things by being there physically in person.
Jesper (36m 38s): But what if I only want to run? I don't want several, you know, fan groups or where, whatever we want to call it or read a group. So I don't want that. I just want one. And for example, in our case, it is on Facebook. We have that group. So what then, so in order to leverage the people who are on good reads, so do you then have to create a group and have it here, or can you create a group and just point them somewhere else or something?
Autumn (37m 8s): I think it would have to have something active on good reads, otherwise people forums and stuff. You see things float to the top that are active and people are asking questions. And so if no one is actually in it, it's just going to drop to the bottom to the abyss and will not be shown. So you would actually have to have people in here and posting questions, but then you're all
Jesper (37m 30s): Of a sudden running two different groups
Autumn (37m 32s): There is. And then, so it's a choice of where is the best place to be hosting, hosting your readers? You know, is it Facebook or is it good? Reads? Yeah, indeed. Okay. And so, and I've mentioned, you know, reading books. So being an active reader, if you read books, you should do your good reads reviews should add them to your own shelves. All of those touches, like I said, they show up in your timeline. And so that way people will see them. They'll see who you are. They'll see that, Hey, I like that book too. They might come and check you out, but let's get into the more interesting things that most people I don't think realize are available on good reads. And one of my favorite is that you, most people go in, they claim their book from Amazon.
Autumn (38m 18s): That is one thing that does feed through. So if you publish a book on Amazon, it feeds through to your good reads profile. Was you doing anything? That's you just go and say, yep, that's mine. Yep. We're good. But you don't have to do it that way. You can, even if you don't have a pre-order, you can, as long as you have a blurb, something you're got and maybe a coming soon image, you can actually go ahead and create your book in good reads with like a coming soon image. And then you can use that to post updates on the book, using a general update option. That's under your author profile, or you can post it as if you're reading up reading the book or review update.
Autumn (38m 58s): So all those things will make it show up and they'll have this coming soon image, and then it'll get people to go. And like, they can go ahead and shelve it. So they know when the book does become live, it's actually going to show up on their shelf. So that's a great way for they'll see all the updates. And of course there's some, there is a small problem with is if you're not good with computers or if you're good with computers like me, but you destroy them. When you touch them, you break them. You there's some backend things like once the book is live, you have to have the addition. You know, you want the pretty cover, the one of the proper edition. And that is stuff that every author is perfectly capable of doing, but you have to know where to go to do this.
Autumn (39m 41s): And again, this is a 1980 style website, so it's not the most intuitive, but once you figure it out, you can do that because I know I've had some book cover changes, and you got to change, which edition is the one that readers will see. And sometimes you have to combine additions and it's some backend stuff it's not exciting. It's only if you like being a librarian is fun, but it is fun. It is possible. And it is a neat way of saying, Hey, I have these books coming up. They are here. They're splashy. They'll show up. It's it is nice way of promoting a book that's coming up.
Jesper (40m 18s): Yeah, for sure. And I was also thinking, well, the stuff you said before about, you know, adding some sort of updates on a regular basis, I think, and if I'm incorrect here and correct me, but I think what you can do is I think you can link. I don't know how to do it, but I think you can link between your Kindle and your good reads author profile. And then if you are making highlights or notes on your Kindle, as you're reading a book, it will pop up on good reads as updates.
Jesper (40m 60s): Is that right?
Autumn (41m 1s): That is right. That is my favorite feature. And I'll get to in just a second. I have like two other ones I want to get to. But yeah, that is, that is one of my favorite things. And I can't even put my finger on why, but
Jesper (41m 14s): That helps a bit in terms of you having to go down, post something, then, you know, if you're just reading and highlighting something you like, and that's automatically a post right data. So that's nice.
Autumn (41m 23s): It is nice. And it's, there's a few cool features with that as well. And that's called Kindle notes and highlights. So, Whoa. Yeah. But speaking of that, so part of what you should do when all your books make sure your Amazon ASN number are in the book information, because by doing that, that opens up a feature that allows people to look inside just like they can do on Amazon. So that's a good way of getting readers to be able to open it up. And it's a quick little change that a lot of people don't even realize that you have to go and make sure the ASN number is there. It sometimes doesn't come through automatically or it's on the wrong edition. You need to go and check these things out and it works great.
Autumn (42m 7s): And so before we get to my favorite one, there's also, there's something called the, ask the author questions. And these are a lot of fun too, because I have gotten readers who have read my books and then they go in and they ask questions and it's right there under your author profile and heavily good reads. It does give you a few generic ones that you can answer. And plus you can put in a prompt. So if you have a book you're coming out with, that was just released, you can say, Hey, ask me questions about my new release, blah, blah, blah. So you can put that in there. So it'll help inspire people to ask questions, answering the questions, makes them show up in the newsfeed, which is very useful.
Autumn (42m 48s): And also it shows up permanently under your author profile. So, so people go into your author profile and they can see other questions that you've been asked and that you do answer them that you're an active author on good reads. So that's, I always love it when I see a new question in there from someone, and then I feel bad if it's been a couple months or something, because I'm on a good read slope. And I'm like, so sorry, but it is, it is great. And yeah, it's also fun. It's one of those things where you try to get your newsletters, you know, anyone to go and ask you a questions because it does give you an excuse to show up on timelines and it gives you something to talk about. And plus it's always fun to find out someone has questions about your books.
Jesper (43m 28s): Hmm. I agree.
Autumn (43m 30s): So Kindle notes and highlights. That's I guess that I don't know why this is my favorite, but so this is one of those things, like you've mentioned, if you're reading in your Kindle and you come across a section and you see where someone's highlighted something, that is actually something that becomes a really cool feature specifically on good reads. So if you click on it, you know, you'll often see comments we'll open up as well. Well, as an author, if you write the comments, they will show up on top. So I think that's actually kind of a cool feature. So as an author, you can go in and they say the most powerful and impactful. One is the first one you do in a book. And obviously the last one you write in a book, but you know, depending on how long your book is, you don't want to do dozens of these, but maybe five, 10 per book, you can go and highlight.
Autumn (44m 22s): And you can say, what inspired you to write the scene or what this meant to you? Just anything about that setting that moment, why it's in the book and you can do a little explanation there, or just say, Hey, you know, or you could do a little teasing, hint, whatever you want to do and readers can actually comment on it. But then once you sync it with Amazon, it goes up to good reads. And there's a special page called your Kindle note and highlight page. And I will admit, it's not as easy as just thinking you actually have to go in there. And once it's sinked, you have to say, yes, please share to good reads. But again, so if you do five or six of them, you can, once you do that, you can just do one a day.
Autumn (45m 6s): Then you don't have to do all five or six at the same time. You don't want to, you know, you want to spread this out. So you get a whole week out of this. And then, you know, people ask, they comment back on it. You know, they share it. You can have a whole conversation about it. And that's what I think is kind of, kind of a fun way. It's you get to interact with a reader directly in your book and that makes it kind of fun. Yeah. I can see that. No, you don't sound convinced at all, but it is funny. Cause I don't know why, like I said, I don't know why I like it, but I do think it's funny cause I've had a good reads.
Autumn (45m 48s): Amazon representative actually reached out to me directly saying, Hey, you know, can you we'd love it. If you would do this on your first, your debut novel and stuff like that.
Jesper (45m 57s): And I'm like, geez, it's not everyday. You get an email from a platform that says please, and maybe they were emailing everyone, but it made me feel special. So yeah. That's fair enough. Yeah, but I don't know. It just, I don't let's say look down upon good reads in any way. And I can definitely think that there, there's probably a lot of authors who get a lot from it. And, and I don't question data such that the only thing that why I'm hesitating and why I'm not sounding very convinced, I think is because it sounds to me like good reads in the census very much like Reddit in the sense that it's a place you need to participate as a reader there or in Reddit, you have to participate as, as one of the people in the group, you know, you not on read.
Jesper (46m 50s): If you go, if you just start going down and promoting your own stuff, they will go crazy at you. But it, and it sounds a bit like it's the same here. You know, you have to engage as a reader and then maybe some people will start checking out your stuff. And maybe you can, you can sort of build up some POS around your books in that way. And of course there are those examples where somebody has made it onto the New York times bestseller list, as you mentioned before, but that's probably the lightning in the bottle kind of things, you know, there's very, very few who will do that. So I can, I can recognize that it is a real relationship
Autumn (47m 31s): Slash community building tool, nothing wrong with that, as I said, but I think you just, you have to like to spend a lot of time on good reads and you cannot, at least in my mind right now, I think you can not view it as a marketing tool because it's really not. The marketing is like secondary. At least that's how I feel about it. I would think I don't disagree. But I think the difference is that even though the marketing is separate secondary, your books and buttons to buy your books are right there in front of the reader. So they're on, they're hungry for books.
Autumn (48m 13s): So on Reddit, they might not be on there looking necessarily for books unless you're in the one that's, you know, is for books as a reader here, they, these really are people looking for new books. And I mean, we didn't even get into there's like lists. You can add your books to, and have people vote on them. There's let's Topia. There's so many different avenues of getting your books out to different people. And they're looking for them actively on this website. And that's why I think unlike Facebook, unlike a lot of other places, if I was going to tell one author who like what social media platform should I start on? I would probably say, do, do spend time on good reads.
Autumn (48m 54s): It really can make a difference. You can connect with actual readers. And often these are serial readers. These are hungry readers who will read, you know, 12, 20, 30, 50 books in a year easily. They, they have reader challenges annually on how many books you can read. So this is, this is the population you want to be hungry for your book. So I would leave it at that. If you're gonna start out as an author and you want, you don't know what social media platform to start at, try this one, see if you can make a difference because this one could actually really help you. Okay. Show. Yeah.
Autumn (49m 33s): Maybe some people got inspired to do a bit of good reach. Yeah. So she will leave it at that. Let's leave it at that. Okay. So next Monday, I should have a very interesting interview for you where we are going to share some inputs on how to get a traditional publishing deal.
Narrator (49m 54s): If you like, what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
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Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast in today's publishing landscape. You can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts. Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt
Autumn (30s): Hello? I'm Jesper and I am Autumn
Jesper (33s): This is Episode 111 have The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast and I always like these episodes on the craft of writing and that's what we are going to talk about today. It's all about the seven steps of story structure. I am looking forward to this one. Actually, I have to confess, we have a seven steps of the story structured. Tee-shirt that I designed and I was in the end of the other day. And I was like, Oh, hovering over the button. I want to buy my self. Well, well maybe for my birthday, I've got to want to get a nice So. I haven't gotten it yet, but I, and so getting a new one for myself.
Autumn (1m 10s): Yeah, there, there was actually quite a lot of nice things, both tee-shirts and there was also from Zazzle, you know, there are fun. I definitely needed a smaller, I need as little assortment going on, but I mean, it's stuff that I did, so I had to get an apartment, but I haven't yet I have my traveling life. Tee shirt would be a good one, I think.
Jesper (1m 33s): Yeah, it's true. You can find it on a Am Writing Fantasy dot come by the way, if anybody is interested, but yeah, there was a whole assortment have all kinds of stuff where you can get with a nice Writing a branded Well whatever you would like to have keeps it.
Autumn (1m 51s): Maybe not. But yeah, so I'm looking forward to this, but I know first of all, of that, you have had a terrible week and that shouldn't be laughing, but it was just so you do it. If you don't laugh, sometimes you will just end up as a little puddle on the floor crying, but I feel so cursed. I actually just wrote my niece and said that Oh because I am writing that story of the tainted Fe and I have a dark Fay, and I know I just, I don't know how its going to happen if that will work in, into the novels on I'm about to release before I release them. But I just have this scene where he is cursed and everything he touches starts to like go round wrong.
Autumn (2m 36s): Like you can almost feel like you're in a mousetrap and you realize suddenly you are in a mouse trap it, or you could feel the strain that out. So that's something that you're going to touch is going to explode. The whole thing is going to go like crap. And you just have to sit there and be like, why am I cursed? What did I do? How do I get out of this? That is my life right now. So it's going to become a great scene in my story. But right now only go, I feel like I can forget it. I feel like I'm going to break something much worse than I've already broken so many things this week. Like my laptop. Yeah. So the deepest,
Jesper (3m 13s): Just a breakdown. It's like my worst nightmare. I mean, Jesus, it's horrible. It, it has been on your laptop.
Autumn (3m 22s): Yeah, it is its my life. I mean their was that moment, like literally And so the listeners haven't been a part of the conversation in the email chain between us. I literally was, I was working, I had my book file open. I was working on a cover. So for my next release, so I had Photoshop open. I had my editing notes open and I just went to unplug the power cable and the whole screen went black just mm. And it was that no, no, no, no, no. I mean the three things that you would not want to lose, not to have open on your computer when it dies.
Autumn (4m 3s): It was like, no, no, but this is not my first computer death its so I, and I've definitely learned over the years. I, the first time something ever happened, we have talked about it before. I actually lost 10 chapters when I reached it right on my iPad. Yeah. And so the next time when I lost my Mac air, when we were traveling and living a vagabond lifestyle that hurt, but I only lost three days of data. Cause I was a really good at backing things up with this time, you know what? I get an eye or use iCloud. I new after that moment of Holy, you know, when I'm trying to give it to turn on and I'm sitting there with my head in my hands, leaning over it going, what have I not tried?
Autumn (4m 48s): What else can I do? I am not going to panic. What else can I do? And I thought, you know, the files are fine. I keep all my book files are automatically stored. They don't even touch my hard drive. They are stored in Dropbox. Backup files are stored elsewhere. I do snapshots on Scrivener. And then what I do a really big updates, like finish a novel or finishing editing session. I would put the main file on an external drive. I have my book files everywhere. And so if everyone, anyone, if I refer to become famous in JK Rowling's I am screwed because I have to so many places I've got to protect my files, but I do it. So that the moments where you've realized that your entire everything you we're just working on is gone.
Autumn (5m 31s): You can go that sucks. I might have lost five minutes of data. And it was just like I said, and what's the worst part? Is it literally this week, even just, I am currently borrowing my husband's laptop. He has been my Knight in shining armor, keeping me from going absolutely crazy and letting me borrow his Mac. And so kicking him off into some Old Dell lets you know, relegate it to the back corner, usually in the house. But it's, I've touched so many things setting up his I've just been like updating my Photoshop brushes and that I lose wifi connectivity. Just talking to you. I went to do something and find, or just shut down on me for no reason.
Autumn (6m 13s): I was just making a folder and it disappears eye. We have a little water pump that runs battery. I went to use that the other day and I touched it and it just died. And my husband touches it. It works fine. I'm like, come on. This is not even funny. I feel it.
Jesper (6m 29s): Do you want this, a recording session here? And your microphone would not work?
Autumn (6m 36s): Oh my God. I literally feel cursed and I don't know what I did, but I will definitely, definitely feel like, you know, what are the Fae in my story that they are just totally cursed. And my one character always feels like he was cursed and I feel like I am just somehow became him and its socks. Well, yeah.
Jesper (7m 3s): That's comma for you because now you can try to live the life of one of your characters and feel what is like all the shit you put them through it.
Autumn (7m 10s): Yeah. I am so sorry. I am so sorry. I'm gonna, I need to make a, men's put out some honey into a dish outside or something. I don't know. But yeah, so we're rolling.
Jesper (7m 21s): Yeah. Where you are really, really nice to them and everything goes smoothly for chapter two. It would have been, maybe they will lift the curse. Maybe it's the characters. Yeah.
Autumn (7m 29s): Yeah. It could be. I will try that because that's my wits say they are a Fe it, it would be my luck to have pissed off the Faye. So anyway. Yeah. How has your life or you can be this bad. No, not yet.
Jesper (7m 43s): No, not that bad or even exciting as, as, as it is on your end. But I, I think given what you've been through, I, I think I, I can live with that. I can live with a bit of boringness on that. That's okay. Yeah. No, it's, it's very similar. I guess we're still a partial lockdown here and there. I don't want to talk more about that. So, but the good news is that the way I'm approaching the final few chapters of our first short story and the in Alicia, I'm in the world of Alicia. So that would be,
Autumn (8m 13s): I guess that is so cool. And I was so on my way to catch up to you this weekend, but you know, I'll get there this week. I hope that other disasters, but you know, it's funny because as a long time ago, I read into a story that there was a curse and I believe it's a tribe somewhere on this planet, but the curse is literally may your life be extraordinary because if it is, if you are with the one chosen by the, God's just like, if you're chosen by a character, you know, in the Novel, if you were one of the heroes, your life sucks. So I am so happy you have had a normal life. So one of us has to do it, even though we also got Facebook
Jesper (8m 56s): Groups started for our readers four, the world of Elysium, we will add a link in the show notes to that group or just in case anybody's listening on. Interesting, interested in that. But the reason why, or why I mentioned that is more to say that it's quite fun. You know, when, when, when you create the something new like this and this, a Facebook group is knew and there's just so few people in there are very, very little engagement. It is like a cold new world. And I think it's fun to sometimes you remind yourself on what it was like also when you first started out and you had no audience, you know, it's cathartic in some ways, isn't it?
Jesper (9m 37s): It, it is. Except I feel like I might have touched that's what happened to him. So I don't know why it's not my fault. I know it's not now, but I think, I think it's quite nice and healthy as well for once in a while too, because you know, we all have the Am Writing Fantasy Facebook group and that's the one that has to do. And so many people are also joining us every single day. There is a new bits of people joining. There's a lot of awesome posts, a lot of great stuff that people are posting in helping each other with and so on. And then you'd go into the crickets and all we know it's a, it's a, it's quite fun.
Jesper (10m 22s): But of course, I mean over time we will try to build that one up. So that's going to be a very engaging and fun as well. But I just, I don't know. I just thought about that today and I thought it was quite funny.
Narrator (10m 36s): Oh, a week on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast
Jesper (10m 41s): So before you were a computer crass, Autumn you actually manage to finish up two logos for Elysium? I did, which was exciting and yeah, so it was about ready to work on other things for our listeners I'm have some maps, but it was, and I did more than we did. We've gone through how many drafts of logos, where we found two that we liked. So that was exciting. Yeah, indeed. And so we, we are actually going to post them to our reader list, email list and ask them to vote for the one that they liked the most, because that's really the reason why I mentioned that. If there's more to say that, I think the stuff like this, it is it's good to make a reminder for yourself to 'em to get some input from other people.
Jesper (11m 24s): 'cause the authors themselves are not always the best judge's on which in this case you it's a logo. We could also be a book cover or something like that. But we are not always the best just because of which one is the best one. So yeah. Just leverage your email list for that kind of stuff. Absolutely. I mean, and plus it gives the readers, like it makes it, your readers feel like they are important. They get to be a part of the decision. And yeah, this is just like, you were a focus group to ask your reader is like, Hey one, do you like,
Autumn (11m 54s): This is, this is perfect. If they like it and they will see things that maybe you don't, because you're so worried about something more particular. And they're going to come with fresh eyes and not know the story and not know the history, but they're going to have to feel that immediate connection. Hopefully too one of them, even though I still have my favorite, but we'll see how it goes.
Jesper (12m 13s): Yeah, yeah, indeed. We'll see how, what the votes say, but a Yeah indeed. And, and they had also of course built some anticipation a about the future Writing you are doing when you do stuff like that. So I do encourage people hear listening to a treasurer to think if there is something that you could share with you, a list, something that would, it, it doesn't have to be directly something, you know, if it doesn't have to be an extra out of the actual writing, it could be something like this, like a logo or maybe some art work or something, a bit of your setting, but something that teases a bit and builds anticipation of, of maybe the next book you're writing. You know, I think that that kind of thing is always good to do so.
Jesper (12m 53s): Yeah. But I'm onto something else. But I also noticed How Keith post-it in the Am Writing Fantasy Facebook group a, we talked about that in a moment ago as well. So this is a lot of posts in there, but I just pick one here that the, because he, he is outlining a new series and he asked for tools or resources to help him organize his world building. And I always loved the world building questions. And then, yeah, I just think it's an incredibly useful again here, when you can ask other people for inputs and advice. So, you know, just before it was with our reader's list, but here it's asking fellow authors for their advice on a, on what they use, For taking world building notes and he got us a lot of suggestions on that.
Autumn (13m 43s): I am sure he has. So there's been actually a few threads on there recently with tons and tons of comments, which, or it's just awesome to see so many people help each other out. So I did laugh cause there was one who is, I can't even remember the test that he had mentioned, but he was like, Hey, does anyone else ever use this sort of basically it's a reader level task. Like, are you writing at fifth grade level or are you writing for 13th grit? And I had to look that one up and I'm like, ah, that's why would I was in high school? They always said, I read it at an advanced level. It was this test. Okay. So the mystery salt from something at a high school, but yeah. You know, sometimes there's less, less comments on a post, but it was very interesting.
Autumn (14m 23s): It made me go look it up. Oh yeah, they do. Yeah.
Jesper (14m 26s): So that was one of the suggestions that he got on this wall. Building a post was well that a lot of people are using spreadsheets. Some are you using Google docs will and will was mentioned that we know all of that, but there were some of, you also mentioned campfire pro or I'm not aware of that one. Do you know what that is?
Autumn (14m 45s): No, no. I haven't looked at that one. I'll have to. Definitely, because I know as I build the illicium website, we've been talking about how to make it a link to like almost an encyclopedia of our world. And I'm looking for plugins and methods of doing that. So I'll have to check out a campfire. Yeah. I don't know why,
Jesper (15m 2s): What it is, but yeah, but maybe in some, maybe there will be inspiration for me for some listeners hear as well. If you, if you're looking for ways to organize your world building, we do have a lot more options on. Now let me say a few more options are different options in the world building course as well. Yeah. So yeah, when we open that later on in this year will let you know if you are on the email list. So you can get on to the email is from Am Writing Fantasy dot com. So we will let you know, in, in case you are interested in that.
3 (15m 35s): Yeah. And on to today's topic. So Autumn,
Jesper (15m 40s): Seven Steps of Story Structure
Autumn (15m 43s): Is this what I found? The seven steps. I can't remember how or where I found it, but it totally changed in me. It was a light bulb going off on how the Writing in Story process worked. Nothing else had worked for me before, but this, I was like, Oh, okay. And so I have been a huge fan for, well, I mean, I realize the next year will be 10 years of self publishing. So considering how long it took me to write my first, my debut novel, I've been writing for over 10 a decade now. So yeah, this has totally changed in my organization, in my story Outlining so
Jesper (16m 25s): Yeah. Before going into any of the steps and so on. Yeah.
Autumn (16m 28s): Oh yeah. It may be a high level. Why
Jesper (16m 32s): Or why do you think it made sense? A difference?
Autumn (16m 35s): Oh, I think, I think a lot of people are taught in high school or even writing classes. You and I have my undergraduate in a way of writing in English and a lot of them teach the three acts process and it, to me that's way too broad. It doesn't have a progression in my mind, it's more of a static framework because in each of those three are broken down into three and it feels more to me like slots like a picket fence. Like this is just how it looks, but this is literally a Story progression. Plus not only is each step build on the next one to create a flow. Once you realize how it interlinks with the character arc so that the character more or less all of the Plot stems from the characters actions.
Autumn (17m 24s): And so the character arc is tied to the plot in it all becomes is massive. We achieve that has a definitive flow and in an input that comes out to a totally different output. And you're like, Oh, I have a whole story. And it makes sense. It's not M is not linear so much as a lot of loops, I guess. And that's probably how my brain works.
Jesper (17m 48s): Yeah. Yeah. That's true. Well, there is like a million ways of a structuring stories and then everybody can find their own way through it, I guess. But I also liked how well, how are each of the steps are getting into it's it's more granularly, its more specific. And I like that rather than, you know, a very broad, high level strokes where you don't really see any way, understand what I, what am I supposed to put into those three steps or the three oxen? And I know, I think I heard somebody, you also talked about nine arcs or something, right?
Autumn (18m 27s): Oh yeah. And I've heard have a five act structure two in that one. I haven't, it's not as popular. I haven't seen much on it, but especially to me, the three act, so many writers get stuck, we call it the money in the middle of the machine middle. They get stuck in the second one. This one doesn't have, it has a second, but the middle it's so definitive and it breaks it down so clearly. And then it also gives you a chapter guideline, like how much should it be of the Novel so that you know, how many chapters even should be in it. It just it's like giving someone a map with clear instructions on how to go from point a to point B or Z and you know, all the stops along the way and how long each of those stops or supposed to take.
Autumn (19m 8s): And its just like, Oh, there you go. I can get out there. I love that feeling.
Jesper (19m 13s): Yeah. So where do, where does, where do we start?
Autumn (19m 18s): Well, I guess we could start with the intro where that's, where you start with your Novel.
Jesper (19m 24s): Yeah, that sounds good.
Autumn (19m 25s): Yeah. And so the intro of the seven steps in technically there's one in there and we'll talk about that is not officially a step because that would make it eight, but this first one is the intro. So that's the introduction and it is, I like to call it the way I, the way we teach it. And the Fantasy writer's guide is that this is sort of a mini story. And everyday moment that you go in and you meet the character, you know, all of those things that people tell you, it should be starting with action. Don't do too much. Don't do info, dumb thing. All of those things, all of that happens in those first initial pages of the intro, which is, I believe it's like 10% of your entire novel one, the three chapters.
Autumn (20m 6s): I no, for me, I, especially when I'm writing a series, the first book might be up to three chapters, but a lot of the time, you know, this is a one or two chapter and then I get to the next phase, but that's the one thing I like to get to the thing I like to get things going really quickly. But other times you like to ease it in with a couple like three chapters, have your introduction.
Jesper (20m 27s): Yeah, no I, yeah. And I think one of the things that is really good with this is that when you think of it as a bit of a mini story, and so it just, you know, stretching a couple of chapters and that's it, but that it forces you to sort of try to build a bridge between the let's it, the day-to-day or the ordinary world that the character lives in a way to whatever is going to happen in this story. Right? So So you, you're sort of building a small bridge there between going around doing your day-to-day job, all of those versus the something, something is going to happen, then you're going to get pushed into, into the story.
Jesper (21m 8s): But because you have a bit of length to work with you and you have some, let's not call it rules, but guidelines on, on how a 10% may be a couple of chapters long. This also forces you to get to the point. I, I think I've mentioned on a previous podcast episode that I, and I'm not going to mention names yet, but I was reading a book awhile ago where honestly, it was like, I think 15 chapters or something and very little happened other than we were following the character. And he was going about his day to day things and in the village that he lived in and out and stuff like that, it was like, yeah, OK. You had a bit of a conflict with some other boys that were teasing him and stuff, but it was like, Hmm.
Jesper (21m 52s): Okay. But 15 chapters is just like, it's enough for you to put the book down.
Autumn (21m 59s): Not enough for me to put the book down, assuming that they are, there are more than a page long. Yeah,
Jesper (22m 4s): No, no, no, no. On some of them were a really long chapter as well. I only managed to read it to the end because I was doing it for some market research for free for us. So that was when I was reading it. But honestly, I mean, when you have a bit of guidelines saying, keep it short and build the bridge between now and four, what comes next year then? Yeah. You are forced to, to make it interesting. And you also can't waffle about what all kinds of other things, because then it's going to take up too much space in the, in the Novel and at least when you are not following the guideline, which of course, you know, you know, again, I don't want to call it a rule, but there is a reason why there was a guideline.
Jesper (22m 48s): Right?
Autumn (22m 48s): Absolutely. And especially, I mean, going with the idea of the mini story and starting with action, you know, the best way to do it is to basically have something going wrong in the characters every day. But it's a minor like it's like a normal every day, a hiccup, I think before I have used an example of like, you know, the, the, the little shepherd girl is supposed to be going to school and instead the goats have gotten out it's her fault. So she has got to go get them and that sets her off somewhere else. And that is the introduction. You get to see a little bit of our world. You get to see a little bit of things going wrong. What she supposed to be doing, where she wants to be. You get a, feel, an emotional feel as well as a physical action feel of what was going on and this character's life.
Autumn (23m 31s): And it was a hiccup. I mean, it's to go, it's getting out of it is not do you know, the Orks rating the entire village? Its just a little problem, but it's a normal problem that the reader can relate to. Even if you've never heard of goats before you kind of get idea that you're not supposed to let them out and getting in trouble as a kid and that you are supposed to be going to school and yeah, you can get those feelings. You relate really quickly without getting worried about the, what the heck is going on and who is this person or those little questions. Yeah.
Jesper (24m 3s): The other part is as well that it gives you the possibility to build that likeness for the main character. You, if you can show them in a small, like everyday situation where they are doing something nice for somebody, are they helping somebody then maybe the, you know, taking care of an animal or just something that will stop building that relationship with the reader on all of that like ability towards the readers or the reader feels like, aah, like this person, this was a nice person, right. That
Autumn (24m 34s): Connection, that emotional
Jesper (24m 36s): Connection and built that right from the beginning. That's good. Yeah. Yeah.
Autumn (24m 40s): So all of that leads into the inciting incident, which is when you are really starting to introduce the bigger Plot of the Novel. Now this one is, this is quick, this is one chapter. It happens and it's boom. And it is when you flip the character's world completely upside down. And that's why it's so much fun. And its really, it kind of starts off the whole story. Plot the big Plot and this is where you have introduced the reader. So they feel familiar with the character and this thing happens and they were like, Oh my gosh, how's this, how's this character that I've started caring about going to get through this. And so it's so much fun to write.
Jesper (25m 23s): Yeah. Yeah. There's not much to sell, to say I'm in the inciting incident is the inciting incident.
Autumn (25m 28s): Right, right. It is. And I think that's a good way of looking at it is like, if you have that many Story, this is the outcome of them in the story and whatever that outcome is, it's not what the character expects. It is like, it is the opposite. So you go to go find your goats and you know, either the whole village is swept up into an armed raid while you're gone or she gets abducted to a fairy world. Something happens. It is not the normal everyday anymore.
Jesper (25m 59s): Yeah. Yeah. And you get to see the, that there are bigger things that play out.
Autumn (26m 4s): Yeah. I guess that's a good way to put it. Absolutely.
Jesper (26m 9s): So where do we go in step three?
Autumn (26m 11s): Oh this is always it's. So now we're starting to tactically get into the middle of that in the three X structure is where I would always get lost. So this is the next phase is the reaction phase, which is like the name of it. This is where the character reacts to what just happened. And it's so easy to mentally when you usually get to the middle and you're like, I don't know what's going to happen. I need to throw in some hurdles. Right? I have to throw in some laws and I don't know why. Well, this tells you, okay, these, this sec next section, which Oh, I'm trying to think about 20%, maybe 30 to 30% of the Novel it's usually like five to seven chapters, depending on how long you draw it out.
Autumn (26m 55s): I think our smaller reaction phase is better than a longer one because this is literally the character reacting to the world being thrown upside down. So there going to be probably overreacting. They're not going to survive the, unless they have health or luck. And there's only so much time. You can draw that out where your a main character is flailing on the point of failure before the coup, before the reader is like, Oh, Please get a clue just to get a clue. So this one is, it is, yeah, I like this one on the shorter side personally, but that's how I write. You can make this one as long as the next, next phase.
Autumn (27m 35s): So in two phases from now
Jesper (27m 38s): And the character incompetent also shows you here, right? So you can show how the character is really not equipped to deal with this situation at all. And probably going to fail, ah, and stumble through that through things. And then that's also a, well, we can talk a bit about character arc a bit later here, but, but that's where you can start showing the Well the beginnings of the characters, meaning that the, this is where the character is feeling. And then later on, when you start seeing that the character succeeding than you can start seeing the chains there, and then you can see that the character has gained new skills and new knowledge is getting better or stronger or whatever it is that the user story is about.
Jesper (28m 21s): So it, it seats very well in character arcs with the story structure in itself.
Autumn (28m 27s): It does. I mean, this is basically the character, once things to revert to the normal every day, even if they thought they hated the normal every day, there's this longing where they realize I'm not prepared for this. This is, this is much more real than I thought it was. And so there, there are stumbling around and that is the perfect be the basis for a character to grow to either one, a return to what things were to have the wrong view of the world, to just have everything show that they are a novice and a newbie and not who they thought they were or even thought they could be. And yet that's to be getting out of character arc. Right?
Jesper (29m 5s): Yeah, indeed. And this is also where they was likely will sort of try to hang on to the Well the Lite that they are telling themselves about the world that you know, that they will, they'll try desperately to hang onto the understanding of the world and say, you know, that this is how it's supposed to work and I'll continue down this road of how its supposed to be. Even though I'm banging my head against the wall all the time, but I'm still gonna try because I'm convinced that this is the way things are. And, and then again, later on when the, with the character talk to you later on, once they start realizing that maybe there is something with myself, I need to as well to be able to succeed again, then you are starting to show you, how would you change in the person?
Jesper (29m 46s): And then it becomes a Well the character becomes alive. It becomes more than a cardboard, a cardboard, a cop out that the guy that is a whole living on the page. I mean, it's, it's, three-dimensionally all of a sudden.
Autumn (30m 0s): Absolutely. Yes. I think that is a great way of putting it that this is it, it makes the world so much and the arcs in the story, it was just really becomes an issue,
Jesper (30m 10s): Deeper topic. Yeah. And then we move on to what step four now,
Autumn (30m 17s): Step for us. So this is one of my favorite it's often called dark Knight of the soul or the new infos phase. I, I loved the idea of the dark Knight of the soul of this is like the treachery, you know, it just sounds cool. And it was just like, ah, this is like, you know, you you've failed so badly in the reaction phase, you have held to that deep believe, that wrong view of the world. So strongly that you've caused like the death of your best friend, that someone is captured dead and you have that moment of waking up or staying up all night, going, Holy,
Jesper (30m 52s): The crap I screwed up. Yeah.
Autumn (30m 56s): I have to admit though, when I do my writing, if I go back and look at all of the ones, I tend to do a new info, which is a new, a new piece of the puzzle, new information clicks into place and you send, they go, Oh crap. That's what I needed to be doing. And this is the truth that I didn't realize before. So you can do it depends on if you're into the dark, FANTASY a dark story or a more of a, Novel a noble bright, which I tend to write Nobel Brite by myself. So I tend to have more than that. Oh, this is where I'm supposed to be going more than I have that. Oh, you just died. I'm so sorry.
Jesper (31m 29s): Yeah. Sorry. The evilness always comes out.
Autumn (31m 37s): It does. You know, I have is everyone once in a while, you're at a really dark one, but you know, it's usually not there, but, and this is another one that is also just 1% of the Novel one chapter. You just have one moment or this happens, you don't draw it out too long. You make it emotionally impactful, whether it is Lite and a new info or dark and death and despair. And just that horrible sleepless night of realizing you are a total screw up when you've because a serious thing to happen. One of those to you just get through it and move on. It's sort of, it is in a way it's a long haul. It's a reaction as well to something that just happened.
Autumn (32m 17s): So its not an exciting chapter, but it's an emotional impact. And this is the second turning point of the Novel when the inciting incident 20 all of the turning points or just one chapter, the inciting incident, one chapter first turning point. This is the second turning 0.1 chapter dark night of the soul. Whether it be,
Jesper (32m 36s): Yeah, it's an exciting chapter. It's just not actually now I think what it is. Yeah,
Autumn (32m 40s): I think so. I mean it's, it's Yeah there is no, usually no battle scenes, dooring it? Unless it's all kind of gets conglomerated in there, but it is definitely just an incredibly impactful chapter. Yeah.
Jesper (32m 55s): Okay. And after that we move into step five.
Autumn (32m 58s): So at five. So now this is the other side of the coin from the reaction phase, which was the character flailing about and screwing up in nearly dying. If it wasn't for luck and friends, we're in the planning phase now. So this is the characters that are coming out of that dark night of the soul are coming out of the new info phase, going, this is what I need to do and I'm going to make this plan. I am going to get this person to help me. I'm gonna go get this talisman. I am going to go and do something because they are seeing the bigger picture in the world. That's not just about them. You know, this is where their working with the character arc, where they're going from. I have this false beliefs to going, Oh this is the real problems in the world.
Autumn (33m 39s): And it's not about me going back to what I want, but is about me solving this problem for everyone who had the same problem I did. And it's kind of, it's so dynamic again, this is the middle where so many authors get lost. And suddenly you're saying, you know, 20 to 30% of your Novel five to seven chapters, the planning phase, you know, you can make it a little bit longer if your reaction phase is really short, but this is where things are starting to click. And the tension starting to build this is where the villain is starting to take notice directly out of the hero. And so things, every single hurdle that they come up against is getting bigger and bigger. And now the main character is starting to when some on his own or her own starting to make progress, which is making them much more of a threat.
Autumn (34m 24s): So the cycle, the tension starts really ratcheting down and this was such a fun phase to right? Yeah.
Jesper (34m 32s): Then all of a sudden in the middle doesn't sound boring anymore. Now it's just a big thing. And you also were sort of at the point of no return at this point, you know, the character is starting to understand that, okay. I just, I can't just ignore this stuff and I can't just go back to where I was and, and take care of the goats anymore. I have to do something to eat, you know, whatever. And we'll be in Epic Fantasy it's often to do with saving the world and stuff like that, but it could be all kinds of stuff.
Autumn (35m 3s): Absolutely. Yeah. This is why I like that. At the point of no return. At this point, they have kind of realized they are moving towards a definitive, what will be the climax. They are realizing that they have a bigger problem to solve and maybe every time they try to find it, they are finding more roadblocks, whatever it is to make the hurdles make sense in your world where a lot of the reaction phase hurdles can often be like environmental. Like, you know, they are not prepared for the cold, the wet, the rain, the distance, the food, something like that. This is getting much more specific where they are going after people and henchmen and drag it and or whatever they're doing. These are the really kind of bigger and bigger and bigger and battles. Hm.
Jesper (35m 41s): Yeah. I like, you're just mentioning dragons.
Autumn (35m 43s): So I had to slip that in.
Jesper (35m 48s): Okay. But then we get to step number six.
Autumn (35m 51s): Yeah we do. And this is where I do. 'em maybe it's 5.5. So its not really faze, but there is something called the discission and that is the bridge between the planning phase and the climax. And so this is in its own way is as the climate is as big as the whole Novel is leading up to this. But the decision is a moment where the character realizes maybe I'm scared. I didn't ever expect to get here. It's kind of a looking back at everything they've done looking at it. What's at stake. You know, there are going from carrying about, you know, fighting three loss goats to trying to save the world. And so you kind of make sense of that.
Autumn (36m 31s): You have that moment of a deep breath have I might die, but this is worth it. I am doing this. I am going to go fight this sucker. And they made that decision and that is really important. It's sometimes only a paragraph, but at that moment is a really good moment because it kind of let's the reader to take a breath and also understand how big and important this is. And then we move into the climax, which is again a 20 to 30% of the Novel. This is the five to seven to 10 chapters. This is the big to do where everything happens, the battle, the fill-in and the hero has to meet.
Autumn (37m 12s): They have to hit head to head and how that happens is in what's going to happen. That's all the climax. Right?
Jesper (37m 21s): And it's often, you know, the, the, the intro pot. Oh no, no, no. Maybe not step one because I think a lot of people fail there as well in terms of understanding, building that little ministry or in the beginning. But it, at least if we check it from the inciting incident part, that part people usually do not struggle with. Yeah. And also here with the climax. In most cases, people do not struggle with that either, but it's a, it's a step in between that are difficult most of the time. So I think when we are talking about the climax in most people or most writers, even inexperienced ones will feel fairly okay with this part because this is, this is probably most likely their stuff you had in mind already when you decided the story and the first place that you want it to ride.
Jesper (38m 5s): A lot of the times you have a feeling of from the beginning were you will want things to end up and how it's going to be this massive battle with all the dragons and, and the goats and a roasting. Right?
Autumn (38m 19s): Yeah. And the dragons of the goat's are going to be an interesting one to two against each other. I hope they are on the same tight you need to renew. No. And so yeah, I agree. I think most people have an idea that the climax, I think the biggest word of advice is that you have to make sure that everything that happened before the climax makes it worthwhile. So you can have the, I was a show and now I'm trying to remember of course, because my brain is so fried, but she was a succubus and it was a really good story and character art and Magic and Fay. But the battle scenes, the climax of the series of the season was always crop.
Autumn (39m 0s): They had like this Huntress who was so, you know, I had been alive for a a thousand years and he had fought all these battles that she died by like missing the bad guy with one sword stroke. I was like, come on, literally my nephew could write a better climate. So make this one is important. Everything that came before, it should make sense. And it, the climax has to over top them all. It has to be this level of tension that, you know, readers are gasping and they can put it down before going to bed. And if you haven't gotten that, go back and rewrite it because this is an important step. This is what, you know, everyone's been waiting for us. And if you serve mushy cake, instead of this amazing, you know, baked Alaska, if people are going to know
Jesper (39m 45s): Sure. And then we came into this to come in to the final step. Yeah.
Autumn (39m 49s): Okay. And this is what I think would do a lot of authors do miss and mess up or just kind of skip. And that's the wrap-up and it sounds so simple, but it's an important one is important. If you're going to have a continuing series, you want to introduce the next thread, maybe even the next inciting incident at the very, very, very end, but you need to take the energy of the climax, give your readers a quick breath, give them an idea of, you know, how people are faring the love interest, wrap it up the subplots. This is the emotional ending. Often of the Story. This is the last tastes, you know, a sip of wine. This is the last tape that's going to linger in their minds, on their lips when they shut the page.
Autumn (40m 31s): And it's either going to be making them, you know, look and stylistically foreword and put it away forever. Or is it going to get them ramped up to want to go grab the next book, whatever that emotional ending is. This is you finished that in the, wrap-up be it one chapter two to three. This is again it's, it's like a mirror image. You can almost fold the seven steps and a half and a, they mirror image of each other pretty well. That perfectly we are pretty well, but the ramp-up is like the intro. Its just a quick little story, right?
Jesper (41m 1s): Yeah. And it's pretty cool. When you can do a bit of a cold back to the intro, a Lilly and it ties everything two together in a neat little boat there. That that's really nice, but I was actually going to maybe step into a bit of a hornet's nest here.
Autumn (41m 16s): Ooh, that's a very brave of you and you know how my week is going. So just be warned.
Jesper (41m 23s): Yeah, no, it was more because I know how what's a lot of people hate at the last season of game of Thrones. Right. But I just wanted to mention that actually one of the things that I found done very well, despite all the hating that goes to the, the very, very last Episode in the eye. I can't remember anymore. Its quite a while since our words, but maybe its like the last 15 minutes or 10 minutes, something like that. But that's actually where you have the wrap-up. Yes. And you get to see every single of the, one of the important characters and what's the what's going to happen to them and, and how do their life sort of continue from there?
Jesper (42m 7s): And I think that part in itself, whether your night, like the season or not, it doesn't matter, but those 10 minutes, 15 minutes, however long that was, I can remember, but that wrap it up. They did that in the, in the end. I thought that was done very, very nicely. Yeah. It was not to cry it out. It was to the point. It just gave you the insight of what's going to happen with these characters and finish things off in a good way because the Westway you can finish it up. Well this was a TV series then, but even novels, you know, when things are just left hanging, you have no idea what happened to these people then. Yeah. That that's really not a very satisfactory ending, even though you might have had the most awesome battle just before.
Jesper (42m 49s): But if you don't just leave everybody hanging on that. Yeah. Okay. He defeated the ma the matte necromancer and then a yeah, that was cool. Thanks by that.
Autumn (43m 1s): That works very well. Especially if you do have any subplots that weren't tied up and you know, you see it, you always have that Rita raise your hand, but what about he had a few of the necromancer, but he never picked up the drop Juul that you know, is going to potentially blow up. And you know, you want to see those things. You wanna know the two that are going to be another book or you want to know if it's really a happily ever after they've married or are they going to, you know, have kids, even a Harry Potter, it had that little glimpse forward where he's sending his kids off to Hogwarts. Those are those little moments that you're like, Oh, we don't know that whatever happens, the world goes on, they have a future. And it kind of gives that reader of the idea that, Oh, I like that.
Autumn (43m 43s): I like knowing that there are going to be OK. You can let that go now.
Jesper (43m 48s): Yeah. In the end of the law of the rings for a role. So reach out to the Shire. Oh no. Maybe he doesn't know. I can't remember anymore, but the day there is a return to the to see how things are going and Frodo leaves on the Elvin boat. I can't remember if it goes to the GI first off and then leaves on Delvin boat or not. I, I can't remember. I actually, it should be honest, but ER, but anyway, you do go back to the chair and a, you do also see what happens to the Frodo afterwards, which again is a good wrap-up. It shows the life of the character, what what's going to happen next day. And it does not, well, it should not be drawn out at all. It should be a fairly short face, but you can tell a lot in a few paragraphs, even for yourself or like, like my game Thrones example from before they probably visited like 10 characters in 10 minutes or something and they, it was nice.
Jesper (44m 39s): You don't need more. Now I think I am definitely one of the authors I always mean to do a longer wrap-up but I tend to get, even for the end of a series is like two chapters. But you were like, you said that you can do a lot for me. It's often it takes two chapters because maybe I switch point of view or, or something, but you can wrap up some stuff and if you're building to the next book, this is where you do it. You have a good little moment of, Oh thank goodness. And then someone's like, Oh, but what about that joke that everyone dropped in and you got lost in the dragons, ate it. And you're like, Oh, and then the Novel ends then of course the reader's like, okay, well what about that? Then they could get to the next one. Yeah, no doubt. All right. So I wanted to mention as well, when we are talking about, these are the seven steps of, of story structure.
Jesper (45m 25s): If you would like to have a bit of graphics to go along with the, each of the steps that you can actually go onto the Am Writing, Fantasy a YouTube channel because it would have a video on there that was recorded. I don't know, a couple of years ago probably by now, but Autumn goes through to seven steps there as well. And there was a bit of graphics on the screen screen on their screen, on this screen, so that it's even easier to follow. Or even if, if you need even more than that, you can also go and pick up the aisle plotting books because it's spelt on the rupture. And it explains of course in a lot more detail that we can do here exactly how to build every single one of those steps and what do you need to put into them?
Jesper (46m 9s): So we will put a link to the plotting books in the show notes. So, you know, you can go in and check that one out if you, if you need that guidance, but, and you have a starting point video, if you want, the video is good, but it's even better. If the planning book really links in the character building and the character arc and how the character is really the one who is driving the seven steps. So definitely check that out if you have questions or is it sounded like, Hey, this is how I went to, right? Because like I said, this is, this is how I write. It makes so much sense. And I, I never fall in the middle. I usually fall in the climax because there is so much going on. If I don't add at least two chapters to every climax, I right. It would be, it would be a first time.
Jesper (46m 51s): Yeah. So hopefully that was helpful. We try to keep it, lets say simple enough that it's easy to follow, you know, on an audio podcast like this, but there are a means to, to get more detailed both from the video, but also from the book on plodding. If, if you need that. Next Monday we will discuss how to make the most of good reads as an author. Is it useful or useful for a site for a book marketing? So tune in and find out if you like,
Narrator (47m 25s): What did you just heard? There is a few things you can do to support the Am FANTASY PODCAST Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn in Jasper on patrion.com/ Am Writing Fantasy for as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast going to stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
In this hilarious episode of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, Autumn and Jesper share the most stupid magic spells, and extremely useless magic systems, they can think off.
Listen in, have some fun, and learn about a spell animating walking tea cups, a more than deadly magic system made up by Autumn's evil mind, and lots more.
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast in today's publishing landscape. You can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in a way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello I'm Jesper and I'm Autumn. This is Episode 110 of the Am Writing Fantasy Podcast and this is one of our alternating lists and things might go a bit crazy here today, as we talk about the worst Magic Systems or Spells that we can think of.
Autumn (50s): Oh, I cannot wait for this one. They had so much fun coming up with this list.
Jesper (57s): Oh yeah. I, I got a bit of inspiration as well from, from the internet, but I'll, I'll talk more about that once we get to the list, but then some I can't wait, but how are you doing? Oh my God. Well, you know, we had a bit of a snow storm recently, and so we actually have no power that goodness, the house where we're at as a generator. So that kind of, you know, B and everybody kind of calmed down and just stay in and watch Netflix and get some writing done.
Autumn (1m 28s): So that's always a good thing, but it just, you or emailing about a snow storm and all that, that's not good. It was a heavy, wet snow. I, it wasn't deep. It was just really heavy. So it broke things, but, you know, it's, you know, I just do my best to say off the news as much as possible, because otherwise it's like, you just keep watching. I keep thinking of like, by the time this is by the time this podcast is published, since we're recording early, that it's like, wow, hopefully the world's and a happy, safer place, then it feels like The for this week that were entering right now. But I will keep my fingers crossed. Oh yeah. Yeah. The, the things that are going a bit creepy over there and you'll part of the world's that's for sure.
Autumn (2m 11s): Yeah, there is no other way of putting it. I just keeping my head down and writing and editing I'm on the edits for my next book release for the tainted face. So that's good. I actually put out a spreadsheet. What I did it, I thought I'd like, you would be proud because I always avoid spreadsheets and what we have. I made a spreadsheet for my edits and so I could tackle them organized matter and that they're going well. So I'm, I'm happy that way. Oh, that's right. Yeah. So how are things over there? Well, we are still in partial lock-down and Mark at the moment. It's a bit worse. So they've made more restrictions again.
Jesper (2m 52s): Now we, we can still go grocery shopping and go for a walk outside, but that's more or less it and everything else are not really allowed. So I guess I'm starting to go a bit crazy or being locked up inside like that, but I'm, I'm sure I'm not the only one who is feeling increasingly annoyed at COVID 19. That was just so freaking annoying. But now I'm going to say, because it is named 19 because it is 2019, it's 20 to 21, but now that we should be again, moving on, but to get to what the program COVID.
Autumn (3m 26s): Yeah, totally. But yeah, I mean, that's my mom and I'd go back and forth and I want to see my parents so badly. And obviously I can't right now, but we share a lot of pictures of what we are baking. And then a lady who's a property where we're at at, and I go and talk to her and we were talking about baking. I am like, I think this is what we're doing. Or if it's winter it's Vermont, there was too much snow for her to go for a really long walk. And let's you want to go to like snowshoeing and you know, we just talked about bacon. Yeah. Yeah. What else could you do? Exactly know, but I think a part from all of that, that things are well going well, well you are, and I mostly, you have to be in to stop the redesign of the Am Writing Fantasy website.
Autumn (4m 11s): So that's pretty cool. I was so excited and it looked so good and that the it's just a pleasure to be on there and look at it and let me get so pretty. Yeah. So if any listeners want to check out what it looks like, then a just go to a Am Writing Fantasy dot com and check it out, let us know what you think. Yes. I would love to hear.
Jesper (4m 31s): Oh yeah. And we've also been a busy as well. 'cause we have also moved our entire email list from ConvertKit to MailerLite and you'd be getting organized There that was a huge task, but I think it came out well, and we've been writing you can't forget the fact that you and I are writing a novella together. And so we're getting that good of the kinks of that worked out as well. Yeah. So it looks like all in all things that are going well after a wall would just have to ignore that COVID monster. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
Narrator (5m 6s): A week on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast
Jesper (5m 12s): Cute and warm. Welcome goes to Dominic, all the latest SUPPORT on Patrion and welcome Dominic. It's so great to have you. Absolutely. So, yeah, as I've said, many times before, you know, if you haven't checked out Patrion already, please find the link in the show notes. We do try to offer a ton of rewards over there. And there are also the Wiki posts about writing and also book marketing. And I'll leave it to you to guess who's writing what posts. I don't know. They don't know if it's that. Well, yeah, it's a title they think, Oh, you don't think so. Oh yeah. Well at least if you're listening to the podcast for quite awhile, you can probably guess who's doing Writing post and who is doing bookmarking tools, even though we Krause hats occasionally,
Autumn (5m 59s): But Yes, I don't know if he saw the message from Garret today, but I have started doing a description to Saurus inspired by the emotion of this story. So on. So I started with Forrest's and he said, you know, and love is describing the forest is as much of what is the current story isn't in the most difficult thing he is working on right now. So it was just like, I must have been reading in his mind because I just gave him a whole bunch of ideas for the forest and it was novel. So yeah. I just love that.
Jesper (6m 30s): Oh yeah. That's very cool. Yes I did see him to the post office, so that, that was cool. Yeah. Yeah. So if you haven't checked it out already, go, go and check it out. And at least see if it's something for you and yeah, we'll be happy to have you.
Autumn (6m 48s): Absolutely.
Jesper (6m 48s): Anything else we should mention a Autumn before we start going crazy with our Spells?
Autumn (6m 54s): Only, I just want to give another shout out to Luke and Jayson or moderators on Am Writing Fantasy because they deserve a shout out occasionally, cause they are, are gatekeepers. Like, Oh my goodness. That group is growing by leaps and bounds and is so much fun. And they, they are moderators who are entertainers. Well, I think it's a science. I love to see what they're antiques are. Yeah, it does the Facebook group.
Jesper (7m 19s): So just search for Am Writing Fantasy under the groups on Facebook, if you want to be part of that community, they're, it's a, it's really funny, you know, that there is some, there are some good banter going on once in a while. And there is also a lot of helpful stuff. Pupil are helping each other out with advices and stuff like that. So it's really great. Luke usually pitchers in and helps with a good advice. And Jason, just a post, a ton of a inspirational questions. It's fantastic. Can you think about, yeah, he caught me and one of them he's so mean. I saw that. Yeah. That was so funny.
Autumn (7m 58s): Let you down the rabbit hole. He did totally
Narrator (8m 3s): Cool. And on to today's topic.
Jesper (8m 7s): Yeah. So as I said at the top of this is one of the famous or perhaps in famous or infamous, so yeah, that might be the way to go, but it is one of our alternate alternating lists anyway. And a w I guess we'll try to have a bit of fun with this one. Autumn I think so, because so much fun coming up with it. I mean, there is the serious side, which I did a little bit of internet research and I did see that a lot of readers who had a number one worst Magic Systems they, like you ask that on a forum or a post and yeah. And they were the first thing, like 99%, I would say there is, they would be frustrated with inconsistent or poorly defined Magic Systems were a Magic user as could not do something in one book or one chapter.
Autumn (8m 52s): And it was fun. It just fine in the next, or are they also the second, the runner up would probably have been, or where are the heroes have God like power and they just can't be defeated. And they would also need a superheroes like Superman. Yeah. They was like, here, there is no real tension. You're never worried. So I avoided those. But the one that I came up with, I went with actual magical ability is that if they existed, I would probably possibly have to turn down the ability to have Magic, which that's just like, what? I can't believe it would be the magic is an option. And I would say, no, that was what made my lists.
Jesper (9m 33s): So yeah. Yeah. It was to try to go to the most silly way I could think of it. You know, like, like if I was amazed, this will be the Most USELESS Spells it could have that. It was kind of what I was trying to go for it. Well, this will be good. Yeah. So of course a, you know, maybe some of what we were saying probably nobody's wants to copy these Spells because they are quite USELESS, but maybe something will prompt another thought in somebody's mind and they might get a bit of inspiration for something. But otherwise this is just going to be a bit of fun today. So you can do a sort of leaning back and listen to a bit of a crisis stuff, but I think it would be perfect and it, maybe it will inspire us a moment of humor and some ones novel somewhere that would be kind of cool too.
Autumn (10m 22s): Yeah. Before, before we get going, did you find it difficult? Autumn to try to work out some really USELESS Spells like I said, well, how, how did you think about it? Because to me, actually, it was harder than I thought it was. I actually came up with like four and I actually stuck most, mostly in the Magic Systems whole system. So we're going to actually have some really different things, which will be exciting, but I came up with For pretty easily. And then I finally came up with a fifth one, I think yesterday, but I did, this is one where I started last week and I did not, you know, I did not wait into the 15 minutes before we started recording. I actually did my homework and thought about this one pretty seriously.
Autumn (11m 4s): Oh, wow. What a change? We just have to come up with some nonsense topics. And then you, what are you going to start going to do? Homework would be so serious about that nonsense topics. Okay. Absolutely. A very professional podcasting contrary ask my husband. It was probably more contrary than me. Yeah, no, actually I honestly found it a bit harder than I thought I thought, because it was like, if I was, if I was amazed and I felt like this was going to be the most stupid Spells that I could have, it felt like that I was actually harder than I thought, because then as soon as I started thinking about something, then I thought, well, actually, maybe in that situation it could.
Jesper (11m 48s): So it was like, Hmm, how can you, how could I come up with something where it's a little, almost like, no matter what I can think of, it would be USELESS. So that was what was the way. So yeah, as I said, I cheated a bit, but I will say which ones are cheated with and a where I got a bit of inspiration from, from the internet, but there was some really funny one. So there were two funny not to include it on my list.
Autumn (12m 9s): I like can't wait to hear them know. I think it would be fun. So it was funny. You went with it, like, what is the Most USELESS Spells and I went with, what would it take for me? Not to want to have Magic is so it'll be two different perspectives, but these are going to be so much fun.
Jesper (12m 26s): And then at the end we'll have to, so we can think about this as we go. And I guess the listener can as well, but I think at the end we'll need to work out, which one of the 10 entries here is the winner and which one is the worst of it at all?
Autumn (12m 40s): Well, I can not wait to share my worst worst with you then, but will get there. That's the last one we have to start at number two. Okay.
Jesper (12m 47s): Or the thing is we have to agree on it. So yeah.
Autumn (12m 51s): So there will be a winner, a winner of the worst. I don't know if I want to be that winner.
Jesper (12m 56s): Oh, well you could say that the one who came up with the worst one was to most creative. So in that way you want,
Autumn (13m 2s): I like that one. Okay.
Jesper (13m 6s): Okay. So yeah. Do you want to start off? Do you want me to start? Oh, I actually have ranked my mind by the way. So the number five is the least stupid one. And number one is the worst.
Autumn (13m 17s): I Oh, so I did it the opposite. So my number one is the most, like if this existed for Magic, it probably wouldn't bother me too much. And number five is okay. Now if this existed, I might actually work on annihilating magics. Okay.
Jesper (13m 32s): All right. We just need to work from least bad to worst. Perfect. So we work in that order.
Autumn (13m 39s): I am ready for that. So whoever wants to start, if you want to go ahead.
Jesper (13m 45s): All right. So number five was a kid. This was one of my internet searches. It's it's pretty bad, but I can still do worse. So I actually found a list of USELESS D and D Spells. Oh, and this is what you just really stood out to me because I don't know what the game to sign us up. Even up to maybe they've been drinking, but they, they made this, I dunno. But so this one is just an, I have no idea of which version of D and D I was in a word or whatnot. So if we have some really competent gay masters out, their please don't kill me. It's it's just a word of the intranet. Right? So it is not my fault if it's incorrect, but it's funny.
Jesper (14m 29s): Anyway, so this spell is called banished DASSLE. So a read out to you what the spill actually does. It's laughing at myself. I haven't even started yet. Oh, no. Okay. So once the spell is cast to target, see clearly through blinding sunlight and heat shimmer reflected some light from a mirror has no effect on the target and they are immune from being blinded by Lightspeed cells. So can you walk out what that is?
Autumn (15m 3s): Why would they have that is basically a path. So there is this just some classes for me to spell it for sunglasses. If I was in way
Jesper (15m 20s): Spells I hope that I could do something better than casting sunglasses. It was just like it.
Autumn (15m 28s): So that's yeah, I, that would just not be that impressive as this
Jesper (15m 34s): Now he's like, Oh my God, it's a bit shocked today. And then I'll do my spell thingie and then, ah, it's not a sharp anymore. It's like, okay. I have all made sense.
Autumn (15m 47s): Yeah. That's what you were doing. You were getting a little senile and you know, the brightness bothers your eyes more. Okay.
Jesper (15m 56s): Yeah. Well, yeah, actually, maybe if you work at a, at a home for the elderly, maybe that would actually be All right. I'm casting it on some of these.
Autumn (16m 5s): Oh, there you go. Yeah. That would be the favorite with everyone there. Ah, yeah. Okay.
Jesper (16m 12s): So you see, actually, this is why it was the least bad of them because it actually has some USELESS
Autumn (16m 18s): You were useful, useful, useful uselessness. There we go. Yeah. That was the way that's a tongue twister. All right. Let's say if you want to hear my, my, what? My Magic Systems that if this existed, I might be able to pull it up with it for it, if it meant having Magic. Okay. All right. So that whenever you cast a spell, a smell is also created. So this could be anything from like lavender and honey two, you know, skunk farm and you know, something rancid. And I also thought of the caveat that, of course, anything that likes to eat Magic users would definitely learn to track you by smells.
Autumn (17m 0s): So, yeah, it's, it's a mild, this was like one, a five year five-year-old would adore. But I was thinking, you know, I don't do this. I could see the embarrassment in polite society when you're trying to cast a spell it. And it's like, it wasn't me. I made Magic as like the court wizard. Okay.
Jesper (17m 19s): We have with the King and everything and they didn't. I tell you that you should not fall off when you're passing.
Autumn (17m 23s): All right. So this would be quite amusing in a different world because it is funny. It did make me think that in a world building, I don't know of any Magic system where Magic actually produces a smell, it's always lights are tingling or something. Why does it smells? Why does it Magic never pass the smell. So There I challenge all those out there. Mc smells. Mc your Magic smell. Yeah. Or it could be a sound. Well, maybe, I mean, well, it's sometimes do metrics metrics. Spells does it make sense already, but its Yes male. It's the smell as good. But I was wondering if you could make, if you could make magic spells where there is a smell, but it doesn't turn it turn into like ridiculous stuff.
Autumn (18m 15s): I mean, because imagine that you're writing your novel in and you're saying OK. And the cost of Spells a fireball at the enemy and there was a smell of lavender. It's just like it instantly turned it into what the, what is this idea that you would definitely have to create something they brimstone or solve or that goes on, you know, every spell it would have to maybe have a slightly different older that fits it's otherwise it would be, I don't know, it'd be quite the contrary where you have this devastating, horrible spell that kills people and it smells like roses and they have got a roast and a thought, ah, there you go.
Autumn (18m 57s): Oh, well, if you had a fun kids, but if you think this would be a fantastic children, okay. Yeah. The activity then it might. Yeah. Well I have done it again. This is not too bad when we were supposed to come up with a completely useless stuff, but now we've had to go on our list already and we already found uses for them, but it's only number five. Wait until you get to number one. Okay. All right. So your number four. All right. So this is one that I came up with and I almost cannot think of a single situation where this spell would be useful, but maybe you can, maybe it maybe, maybe I'll change my mind in the minute.
Jesper (19m 41s): Do I, when I come up with the use for this Spells I'm not sure how I'm going to concede that easily. I had asked. All right. Yeah. Yeah. Nice. Try and get it to a general direction. And so this is the ability to, or a spell that makes anything tasteless. Oh, that's horrible. What do you think about that? I think it's horrible. You know, I'm a foodie. I love food. This is just so I'm personally terrified of COVID because you can't taste things. If I couldn't taste my tea, I would just cry every day.
Jesper (20m 24s): Yeah. And I'm thinking as well, you know that if you were in a medieval fantasy setting a, I mean, it's actually really good to things, taste bad when they're off, then you know, not to eat it, but, and even if you don't like the food, why would you want to make a tasteless and eat it anyway? Yeah. Can you think of a single situation where this would be useful? Yeah. If you need to take medicine for some horrible condition into the medicine was just absolutely patron. I just thought it's so hard about this cannot be used in any situation whatsoever. I have a really strong gag reflex.
Autumn (21m 4s): So there's definitely, I, I have a hard time taking pills and things. So no, this was totally there's times. I would probably like that for five seconds and then everything comes back to normal. I'd be frightened. There's got to be a reverse anti tastes for me then it wasn't that bad anyway. Yeah. Okay. Every kid, yeah. Every kid who was going to take medicine for a cold or something would want this spell. Totally. Okay.
Jesper (21m 30s): Ah, okay. Okay. I can see that's not a good one. Yeah.
Autumn (21m 34s): I like it though. I might want that one, but yeah. So yeah, we're going for a worst. Spells that's not, ah, that's not quite that bad. It is very useful to have it in your back
Jesper (21m 43s): Pocket as you would work out on my bad
Autumn (21m 44s): Spill list thing. So we needed another weak for this now. All right. You ready? For my, a number of For. Yeah. All right. So for this Magic system, I went with the idea of the law of that for every action, an equal and opposite reaction happens. And this would hold true with Magic. But in this case, if you cast a healing spell your first, so while you might save your friend's life, you're going to be walking around with the extreme chance of dying in a remarkably stupid way for at least several days or more, or the opposite would hold true. And if you cast a curse that you would have to be given good luck. So I was thinking, this is what came to me is like this scene where a guy is to save his own life, has to decide if he wants to kill that curse, like his lover or As best friend.
Autumn (22m 33s): So when you curse someone out to something horrible, like Boyles or POCs or whatever, it's just so you can save your own skin. The attention for writing this scene will be so much fun. Yeah.
Jesper (22m 46s): Because I was like, yeah, that was exactly what I was thinking. I mean, if I was a major, I would find it pretty annoying that this is the Magic system, but if it was a Magic system for a story to that, I was going to read. Yeah. Again, it could actually be a bit interesting because you have to read it. When is it worth it to use my Magic skills and when is it not, but I'm not sure that the major's in the setting will be very happy people. Yeah.
Autumn (23m 13s): It goes to show that we're really cruel to our characters who are like, Oh, that'd be interesting to do to them. But for ourselves in those, we love, we are like, Oh, that'd be a horrible, we should never, ever condone that. So yeah. Yeah. Well for yourself. But the,
Jesper (23m 34s): But, but it is, I like those when, when you have this kind of a,
Autumn (23m 41s): Well
Jesper (23m 42s): That there is a very high price to pay for something I liked that maybe you you've taking a bit to the extreme there, but yeah.
Autumn (23m 49s): Oh no, no. If you want to extreme, that's coming. Don't worry. Okay.
Jesper (23m 53s): Ah, okay. Okay. Well, I can not wait almost to here what you have on your list. All right.
Autumn (23m 60s): But yeah, I thought that way, like I said, that I would actually be tempted too, at least do a flash fiction or something along those lines. Cause it would be kind of fun to do that to a characters, but yeah, it was a Magic system. I don't know if I could do a whole book of that. Oh my goodness.
Jesper (24m 15s): Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well you could, but then I think Magic would have to be a very small part of the story. Right. So that it, it cannot be like the main character is Raceland and so on. And then at that kind of work, no, unless he just wanted to go around and like curse everybody and Hugh himself all the time. Right? Yeah,
Autumn (24m 39s): Exactly. Yeah. He would have wonderful luck, but the world would go to shite, but he would be doing so well.
Jesper (24m 45s): I think the thing about having a likable character sort of goes out the window
Autumn (24m 50s): Only if they feel guilty. Well casting curses for good luck.
Jesper (24m 54s): Yeah. Yeah. But I don't think the readers will appreciate that character very much. No, I wouldn't. Okay. So we are like in the middle of the list now. Yeah. So I want to hear your number three. Yeah. And since my first two attempts to create something completely useless, wasn't that USELESS so anyway, I've Now board or something from somewhere else. So that if this is actually useful than it's not my fault. Okay.
Autumn (25m 21s): All right. That sounds good. Casting the blame elsewhere. I understand.
Jesper (25m 26s): Yes. And that's usually the easiest way of doing things, you know, because then they'll know you don't feel bad about anything is never your fault, you know, I like it. And so my number three, I borrowed from the Harry Potter universe, because this one seems a, well, at least to me, both stupid and utterly useless. So I just found it. I did find it on a website listing USELESS Spells talk to at Hogwarts, if the person that wants to a laugh at some more Spells than doing an internet search for four, that just search for USELESS Spells taught at Hogwarts and you will find some lists and there was quite some stupid stuff in there, but anyway, he goes, so this was one of the ones that I found Well Most USELESS all right.
Jesper (26m 16s): So at this point is actually from the Harry Potter books I already Oh yeah. So let's go for it. Okay. Quote, he and Ron both tapped the tea cups. They were supposed to be charming with their hands Harris sprouted for a very short legs that would not reach the desk and wriggled pointlessly in midair. Ron's grew for a very thin, might be X that hosted the cup off the desk with great difficulty tremble for a few seconds, then folded causing the cup to crack into two and three.
Autumn (26m 52s): What is, this is the point of that smell a smell that makes tea cups grow legs. Yeah. I mean, even if you do it,
Jesper (27m 0s): Can you spell, why would you want a walk-in tea, coffee? I just don't understand that.
Autumn (27m 6s): So I can see one years for it and that his, if my husband knew what he would do it just to torture me so that I would have to be chasing down my tea, besides that I can't think of anything. I can't think of anything useful about it really. Are you sure? I'm sure. Other than torturing me now, I think that's all that comes to mind.
Jesper (27m 26s): So if you were a like really lazy and a, well, somebody who is still have to put it into the cups of it, it doesn't help. Yeah.
Autumn (27m 34s): I mean, what if it's too hot or I don't know. I mean, hell a lot of these. What's the, how well could they hold the cup and it's not going to slop all over you. I don't know. There's there's too many things. It can go wrong as Harry and Robin prove. Yeah. I just don't know.
Jesper (27m 51s): So just to be like a complete failure as a Magic use, and this is what I can just be like, where is the Magic school please? A please let me, and then teach me something like, this is just, just a complete the new one.
Autumn (28m 6s): Yeah. That, that, that one, you know, that'd be good for maybe a children's a tea party just to entertain them a little bit, but yeah. Havoc would reign. Hmm. Okay. So yeah.
Jesper (28m 19s): Let's see if we can do better than that, then I'm racing the takes on you hear that, right?
Autumn (28m 22s): Why do you feel that? I can feel it. I actually feel the pressure on this is it's like you are reaching the mid point of the chapter and you're like, Oh, something's going to happen now, but Hey, I'm going to take one from your book. And I borrowed this one from somewhere and other source that's actually comes from the book, the magicians. So it is if Magic is so complicated and effected by the natural world so easily that you basically need a spreadsheet or a computer algorithm, I'm imagining an app on your phone to double check the star charts, the tide charts, the time the sun Rose, where the moon is located and, and what constellation and the humidity of the air, the weather and all of that.
Autumn (29m 4s): It just, it makes, Magic so complicated that it basically takes the magic out of Magic though. I did think it would be funny. Like I said, you'll have this app on your phone that says, you know, do to today's humidity and sunrise. You must turn 30 degrees to the East that to cast the spell. If you'd like,
Jesper (29m 24s): What is it? Actually, it would be a bit cooler if it was like in the, the app where you could basically be swipe Spells. So it was me like, he's the one on the environment up today and the Star's and the moon and what not teach how to Spells available. Swipe are the ones you want
Autumn (29m 39s): To cap. It was just like that. Actually it would be hilarious. It's just what you need is a very short story idea that it would be actually to, that would be kind of fun. Yeah.
Jesper (29m 50s): All right. So, but are the only problem is if, if you are being attacked and you don't have any attack, Spells on your app to see your phone goes dead. Yeah. You all are better than in the middle of a dragon breathing down on you is like, Oh shit, you know, in here, but no.
Autumn (30m 8s): Oh yeah. Well, especially if you did make it go, you know, medieval, so we don't have phones and you can do, can you just mention the scrolls a, you would have to double-check to check to the cast any Spells it would just be, that would be murderous. I'd be like, no, I'm just, I'm going to wing it and see what happens. I might turn it into a turn up. I don't care.
Jesper (30m 28s): Yeah. I think without the, well, w without an app or something to control it, it would be a, you have to carry it around a library, just a cast once a while. I think majors would just stop casting spells its like this is not even worth it because it's much easier to just to learn how to fight with a sword instead of, or something.
Autumn (30m 48s): That's right. That's when I was reading in the magicians because they didn't have a nap and they just, it was a very complicated like checking all of these things. And I was like, Oh, you know, if Magic was this complicated, I would be the rebels getting everything wrong because I would never ever check everything correctly. And I'd forget by the time I got to the end or the humidity would have changed because it took me so long to figure it out. So just so much fun.
Jesper (31m 10s): What story do they have to do? They have to sell it to sort of worked out what they can cast. I mean, what else?
Autumn (31m 16s): I honestly forget. I just remember that part of the Magic system going just know that you need a spreadsheet. It's not for me.
Jesper (31m 24s): Okay. Well you just said that you had started at this point.
Autumn (31m 27s): It's only for editing. If I am not,
Jesper (31m 30s): You you're already on your cheek taking the first step. You just have to follow it
Autumn (31m 34s): Now to add the Magic items to this spreadsheet and correlate them in. Oh yeah. Just pick it app. I'll ask my nephew to write me a new app code and I'll be fine.
Jesper (31m 47s): Oh yeah. Well he would be even more crazy if, if, if it's like, as long as you just have the app and you could cast a spell it out, you just swiped them and then they were, I mean, you don't even have to be a Magic Magic everybody could just like download the app and, and I wonder how much of an app like that would cost you.
Autumn (32m 5s): You said I'm sure there would be tears, but I would pay anything for God. Power is in that one. That is all. So I will sell my soul for that app. Please
Jesper (32m 14s): I'm pretty sure I was going to be a very expensive, so
Autumn (32m 16s): I think so to, but man, I'm going to invent that one. That would be pretty cool.
Jesper (32m 22s): Yeah. Yeah. Well, yes.
Autumn (32m 24s): On many levels, many, many levels are perfect. All right, let's get a number two. Okay.
Jesper (32m 30s): Yeah, it was actually also two levels to my, my number two, because I started in one place and then I sort of changed it a bit. So, but let me just first day what to say when I started But and I changed it a bit. All right. So I try to think a bit bigger for a number two, you know, w we are approaching the top of that last year. So for this one, I actually thought about a whole Magic Systems rather than just a single Spells at first, I was sort of wondering how poor a matching system would be if it was based on dreams alone. Oh, you see? So basically you have like almost no control over your Spells.
Jesper (33m 13s): Do you mean it's just going to be whatever your dream is, what you can cast and like yeah. It's it's going to be pretty USELESS right.
Autumn (33m 21s): So it would be, but I am actually a little terrified because my kids, my husband actually had a dream the other night where I died. So I'm glad this was, this is when she says it is that it would be horrible if you woke up upset or at least. Yeah.
Jesper (33m 38s): That's not good. I know this. This
Autumn (33m 41s): Is Magic Systems is terrifying me know. Okay. Yeah.
Jesper (33m 45s): And also, I mean, it would be pretty bad if, if let's say the oxide attacking you on it, you're like, Whoa, hold on, hold on. I just need to fall asleep for us to do this. And then maybe I could save money. Can you please stop hearing me? I can sleep when you are hitting me. Yeah.
Autumn (34m 0s): All right. I can imagine you and your best friend has a lot of night terrors, so you're like, Oh no, you need more caffeine. Have some more caffeine. You need more caffeine. You cannot go to sleep tonight. I'm not sleeping next to you.
Jesper (34m 10s): Oh my God. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Actually it would probably be the other way around. It would not be about a watch Spells you can cast it. It would be other people's trying to prevent you from them.
Autumn (34m 20s): I guess. I just keep bumping you every time you start falling asleep. Nope. We got back up for you.
Jesper (34m 27s): Yeah. And This but then, because then I thought, well, if it's a Magic system than me, it just should sort of be able to cast Spells when they want to cast panel. So otherwise it's sort of like, well, I don't know, then it didn't feel right. So I changed it a bit. And I said, what if you were only able to cast Spells when you were intoxicated?
Autumn (34m 50s): Oh no. What do you think of that? I'm thinking of, it sounds like a really bad rave, but it might be fun to go.
Jesper (34m 59s): Yeah. I mean, well, I guess everybody would be drugs. All the majors are always drunk and I mean, I, I could see me how it might work. OK. If you were planning out your Spells in advance, you know, so, so, so, so it's going to be like, okay, tonight, I'm going to have to cast the all seeing Spells that allows me to see where the enemy army is Apple or something. And then, you know, you'll have a bottle of wine and then you will cast your spell and the next day you can tell the King, well, they are to a hundred miles off. I saw it yesterday. So in that sense we might work. Yeah. But I just can't see the battle scenes again.
Jesper (35m 41s): Right. So what does this drunken stupid visit is tumbling around with a wet battlefield and fire's shooting all of the firewalls left and right. And this is just like, he's completely drunk out of his mind.
Autumn (35m 54s): Yeah. It would be again, probably a hilarious to, to write. And I can imagine that people going, Oh gosh, it was power is fading. Like give him a shot or, you know, carrying around them. So a Royal or a magical apprentice gets to be the one carrying the wine flask and keeping in the wizard shrunk. So it would be, it would be a hoot to, to write. And it would definitely be a, a ton of fun at a party. But yeah. You know how people use, it's so hard to stay focused. And so you'd be like, Oh, look at a pretty bird. No, not a dragon. You have to get rid of the dragon.
Autumn (36m 33s): Yeah.
Jesper (36m 35s): Yeah. Do you ever forget about the dragon again? Oh my God.
Autumn (36m 40s): It could be a really good if someone wanted to write FANTASY comedy, it'd be really funny. It, even if it was just one wizard, like the most powerful wizard, this is just how it was. Magic worked best. It was like pirates pirates of the Caribbean meets Merlin. Yeah, I do it. Yeah.
Jesper (37m 0s): Oh my God. Now you found it useful and again, okay. You need to stop doing that in my life.
Autumn (37m 6s): I want it. I want to win this way. Sorry.
Jesper (37m 9s): Yeah, I can hear it. So it is just not okay.
Autumn (37m 13s): Okay. Well I'll, I'll try it to sober up. Okay. Okay. All right. So you're ready for him. My number two. Yes.
Jesper (37m 19s): And I have to find something to make
Autumn (37m 22s): It useful in part. Okay. Well, if you do it, that's fine because this is actually inspired by it. It's partially inspired by the wheel of time series, but I know it was not your fault. It's not my fault. If you can find a use for this one. And again, this is a variance of this would have been used in so many numerous Fantasy stories in settings. And it's, I mean, at the basics level, it's at Magic causes physical problems, but for this one to make it something that really makes me say no, if that's how magic works, don't sign me up. I'm going to stick with the extreme example. And it's not just forgetfulness or insanity your blindness or deafness, but instead, do you use a, Magic basically can interfere with your blood circulation and cause sections of your living body to start to write almost like a Necros, but that's Nick or Costco thick or flesh-eating bacteria.
Autumn (38m 14s): So just say no, you know, do you think that comes down to chunks of my physical being, just turning gangrenous, falling off? I am good. I think I would rather go learn to use your words.
Jesper (38m 34s): You know, where's your leg? Well, I can
Autumn (38m 37s): Liken yesterday. It was for us. I mean, it's this slowly putrefying like get worse and like, Oh, it looks like a bruise and start turning green and spreading. And you don't know how far it's going to spread and no, it's almost like a zombie Magic it just don't know. I don't want that one, but okay. But what is, what if you are a vampire? Oh, you just kind of he'll again, you would hit it again. Okay. So that as long as you have something to counter act.
Autumn (39m 15s): Yeah. So all, if you were a ghost or something, if you're already dead. Yeah, definitely. You have to, yeah. Something short of being able to magically here and be a goddess so that, you know, maybe it lasts a day or two and then fades and you heal it. It, it grows back. Yeah. So I think I just made it useful and I think that's the conclusion of that. Okay. I'll let you have that one. All right. So there was still in the worst of worst of the worst for this coming. I'm ready. I know that.
Autumn (39m 57s): No, I really liked this number one. It is so stupid. I can't believe it. This is also from the list of D and D Spells. Oh. And I found the more you use the spelled it wrong. So it's called the chest dies. So this is when you don't have the time to speak, to tell someone, what do you really think about them? Okay. You can cast a spell and it will take care of it for you. What are those? The satisfaction of that. And then also what was pointed out on that list is that you would actually have to speak the words, you know, to cast a spell.
Autumn (40m 43s): So you could just go tell them what you're saying. I'm not even sure. I'm not even sure how you're going to save any time because you have to speak anyway. I guess if there's travel involved that keeps you from having to go see them. I assume you can cast it. So at a distance, I don't think so. Oh, jeez. What is it also said that the extra piece of information was that the spill also only works on people who actually offended the spell caster. Oh, right. So we could only watch the, somebody who offended you. And it only works if you're basically standing in front of them. So you have a choice about just speaking back to them or say, speak some words and cast a spell, and then the spell was big back to them.
Autumn (41m 26s): But one of the So here at 26. Can you make it on repeat? So it's like, it's just driving them insane for an hour or that could be worth it depending on how much they pissed you off. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, but I just don't know for this one. I, I dare you. You can
Jesper (41m 42s): Not find a single situation with this is useful.
Autumn (41m 45s): I am struggling. I have to admit short of being able to have a repeat button so that you can harass someone on with it. It doesn't say anything about it.
Jesper (41m 53s): A repeat button. You can invent things to me.
Autumn (41m 57s): So I get it. But this year as well, you're not sharing your spill coding. All right, fine. Oh, I know. I have to do. Yeah. I have to say, I think that one is USELESS so there you go. I do really don't know what to do with that, but it wasn't that it was not me thinking, Oh, well that's pretty. It was a USELESS I have to admit. Okay. Okay. Good. All right. Let me hear you one. All right. Well, this is again, this is this one fit. The definition is that right now? As far as I know, I've made it up. I don't know if it exists, but this is the one Magic system that I could come up with that if it existed, I not only don't want to have Magic.
Autumn (42m 41s): I might be part of the rebellion and the resistance to destroy Magic so you're ready for this one. Yeah. All right. So what actually gives you the ability to have a new use? Magic is a parasite. So the only way to have magic is to have this thing living inside of you slowly growing and feeding off of you until it kills you and small larva burst from your skin to infect, waiting, apprentices. It's just going to go more and more of it that I don't know how I can work on it a little bit more if you'd like it. I think that's plenty.
Autumn (43m 22s): Oh. But yeah, I think if that was the way Magic worked, that I might actually try to annihilate it. That's just wrong. So how, how long does it take before this worm kills? You know, I didn't come up with that timeline. I have to admit, I was thinking if you have to hide to give to someone maybe a couple years, but look it up because then a month. Okay. How powerful our you during these couple of years. So let's see. That is something, Oh, I didn't want to build that. That was a good question. I would imagine that probably towards the end, when you're like nothing more than a shriveled husk, you could cast them really nice potent Magic because you're mostly magical parasite at that point.
Autumn (44m 2s): I mean, as the parasite grows in you and your Magic ability, it should become stronger. So you can do it,
Jesper (44m 8s): Turn yourself into a glitch in the end and then you will become,
Autumn (44m 13s): Oh, I don't know. But I can see now I'm starting to find your freedom. I'm just wondering how that would affect the parasite. Because once you don't have the parasite, you'd have to bond with the parasites. Some Well somehow, otherwise you want to have Magic and it would fail. So you have to test this a lot before, you know, getting of these parasites in your system. Oh yeah. Oh my God. That's pretty nasty. Thank you. I tried really hard for you. You know? It was, it felt like a horror story, almost a dark Fantasy. Why not a little horror. FANTASY okay. People. That was a really bad spill.
Autumn (44m 55s): So Magic Systems I don't know if that was useful at all, but maybe, hopefully it made everyone laugh or they got to think about you or do something and they kind of considered before, like what their Magic Systems smells like. Yeah. True. So which one is the worst? One of the more that I don't know, I have to say for the most USELESS being able to just chastise someone is kind of silly, but doesn't get the running T cup thing. Why or why would you do that? I don't know. Those are definitely the most USELESS. Yeah. Yeah, because I mean, I really like you a bad one there.
Autumn (45m 40s): My parents age. Yeah. Your parents hide, but at least during those years, it is useful, useful, useful. I mean, you can do a lot of stuff during those. Yeah. It will kill you, but you can do a lot of the stuff. That's all right. But I was going for worst Magic Systems so I think for worse. Yeah. I, like I said, For, if that was the way Magic worked, I might go to be pretty good at killing parasites. I would be a Magic parasite Hunter. What would it be? Kind of fun actually to write, but, Hmm, damn. Huh. Yeah. I have a suggestion for that. Okay. All right. What is it? What if we split at this one? And so that we say we're Magic system is you are a parasite one and the worst spell, is it okay? I will go for that. We both get to be crowned winners for this one.
Autumn (46m 24s): Yeah. Yeah. It was my, it was my suggestion. Now are you regretting, you gotta learn to share or I guess so. Okay. So next Monday we get back to a bit of a more serious topic as we are discussing the seven steps of story structure.
Narrator (46m 46s): So if you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn in Jesper, on patrieon.com/AmWritingFantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast going to stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Have you wanted to make your novel into an audiobook but wasn't sure what to expect or what a narrator would need?
Join Autumn and voice actor and narrator Brian Grace to explore audiobooks from the other side of the creative coin as they delve into what a narrator needs to bring your story to life, how they choose a project to tackle, why a narrator costs so much, what it is they actually do, and if they secretly love your characters as much as you.
Learn more about Brian on his website at http://briangracevo.com/ and his film demo at https://youtu.be/1yB7lsYbU-M.
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (3s): You're listening to the Am Writing Fantasy podcast in today's publishing landscape. You can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self-published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn, Birt, and Jesper Schmidt.
Autumn (32s): Hello, I'm Autumn. And today we have a special guest with us for episode 109 with me. I have audio book, narrator and actor, Brian grace. Hi, Brian, how are you today?
Brian (49s): I'm doing really well. How are you?
Autumn (50s): Good. I'm so excited to have you join me for so many reasons. One, because I know there's so many authors out there who want to produce audio books and they're not quite sure, you know, there's the steps. You can go online and read the blog posts, but you're an actual audio book narrator. So I thought it'd be really fun to get the perspective of what you need, what, what you want to see an author bring to you, but also because you are my audio book narrator, and I just thought it would be fantastic to talk to you and record a podcast.
Brian (1m 24s): I'm looking forward to it. It sounds like a lot of fun. Yeah.
Autumn (1m 27s): So you've been working with me on my post-apocalyptic series, friends of my enemy, and we, we just determined for almost four years now because it's a long series. And so I just thought this is great. I know you through what we've done together, but if you would like to introduce yourself, because I know, especially since we've met, there's so much more you've been doing well.
Brian (1m 53s): Sure. I've actually started, I guess you could say officially acting in 2015. When I started such a voice, I went online and found the, the website that kind of taught you how to be a voice actor. And I went through that. It was about an eight month course, and that introduced me to the world of narration and animation, which I didn't think was possible for me when I was growing up. Cause I just figured it was something just for the famous folks. I just figured, okay, you had to be already a big name or already have some sort of like following in order to get anywhere in the voiceover world. But I quickly found out through that lesson that anybody can do it. And if you have the talent, the sky's the limit.
Brian (2m 34s): So I started through that and then once I got my demo through them, I started picking up theater. I started theater in 2017 with a Christmas Carol and my first ever role was a Bob Pratchett.
Autumn (2m 48s): I thought that was pretty darn cool.
Brian (2m 49s): So that's a good first role. Yeah. I mean, it'd be like the second billing actor in the, in the stage play. So that was a lot of fun. And then I started doing acting in 2018, Throughout many different plays and shows. And I started into a film acting once I came back in 2018 for a Christmas Carol for the second time, one of the actors told me about Norman, Oklahoma and how they had the actor factory up there. So I decided to start checking them out. I went over there, I started taking classes from them and then I got myself, an agent here in Tulsa, met her through my church and she was just beginning her actor issues.
Brian (3m 31s): She was beginning her studio. So I got involved with Eric, got to be one of her first actors. And then I started doing a film, a film and TV stuff. I've been in several different, smaller roles, nothing huge to date, but things are still working and things are still moving around and I'm constantly taking classes and learning all the time. So as far as my acting career goes, I'm, I'm doing the best I can and getting out there and getting my name out there and marketing as much as I can and always continuing to learn.
Autumn (4m 2s): That's awesome. Well, I mean, I know I'm totally biased, but I've worked with over nine audio book narrators now. And I just think you're extremely talented. I feel so lucky to have you, so I know you're going to go far. I, I'm not that worried about it, but you just have to finish up this last book first before you right away.
Brian (4m 22s): Yeah. I really appreciate your time. I appreciate your patience. I mean, I know it's been a hectic couple of years, but I'm going to get this book done as quickly as I possibly can.
Autumn (4m 30s): No, I, that I'll miss you, but that's okay. Cause I know we'll both do great things and we'll maybe we'll end up together again. So that's all right. It'll be worth it.
Brian (4m 37s): Yeah. It's not like we're going to stop communicating once the book is done. Right?
Autumn (4m 40s): I would hope not. I still wanted to go and get a beer. Oh yeah,
Brian (4m 45s): Yeah, absolutely. I mean, yeah. I come over there to Vermont or you come over here to Oklahoma. Yeah, we'll get, we can chill. I'll be fine.
Autumn (4m 51s): That would be a lot of fun. All right. So before we get too nostalgic and everyone else's like, okay, I thought this was about audio books. Oh, we met via ACX, which is Amazon's audible production, you know, their audio book production. So is there anywhere else that you have a profile or where you would suggest that people can find narrators? I know find a way voices has become big, especially outside the U S so where, where do you think people should be looking for, especially authors be looking for narrators,
Brian (5m 25s): Looking for an adjust narration. I would suggest ACX is a really good start. Although the, the profit sharing is a bit biased towards ACX. They do take, they do take a majority of the money, which is kind of, yeah, it's kind of sad for both authors and narrators. Cause you know, they take 60 wherever you have to, you have to split 40 between you and the author, which is kind of a bum deal. But Hey, it's, it's meant for beginners. It's meant for people who are authors, who are just beginning to look for a great narrators and narrators, just looking for great for good stories, but ACX is great to start for, for getting that, getting that experience, getting a couple bucks, but another nice one is behind the voice actors.com.
Brian (6m 9s): That's where I really started. Okay. That's where I really started was behind the voice actors.com and that's most of those projects are free. You don't actually get any money from them, but the experiences you get from them are incredible. Especially if you want to do character work because there's a lot of people on there. They put their passion projects on there, like students or filmmakers, things like that. They put their projects on there and they put like lines for different characters and they say, here's what the character is supposed to be. Sometimes they have a picture of what the character looks like and they say, this is going to be a cartoon. It's going to air on such and such website. And we want to have some voices. So they do like a casting call and anybody can go on there and get a free account and then actually audition for those lines.
Brian (6m 57s): And if you're chosen, you get to be part of their project again, most of the time. Yeah. Most of the time it's not paid, but it's the experience. And it's also a big, big, kinda like a projection point for anybody who's starting off.
Autumn (7m 12s): Oh, I think that sounds actually like a lot of fun. That's kind of cool. I might just check it out to see what people are doing. Cause I'd love to say creativity,
Brian (7m 21s): All sorts of projects. I mean, I just, I just addition for another one recently, because, so I'm also part of a, a voice acting class that takes place. My, my teacher is actually in LA and he's a pretty big time voice actor and a coach. And he does, he's done movies. He's on films, but what's cool is that he has a group setting that he calls the panic room, which is kind of fun. That basically it allows, allows people who are just beginning in the voiceover world to kind of throw out their ideas. And they have group settings. It's about like 20 people that get together and they share their ideas and they share their projects and things like that.
Brian (8m 2s): But I found from behind the voice actors and other projects, so I was like, Oh, let's try this for my class. I brought it into the class. They all, they all thought I did a great job. So I was like, well, if I did so good, I might as well audition for it. So I went ahead and audition for it.
Autumn (8m 18s): Oh, that's exciting. Like I said, it's amazing the things that you've gotten into and I love seeing your career blossom. So I think it's really cool. Yeah. I appreciate that. It's funny though. Cause so you're talking about projects and stuff and so that's always a good topic. So when you're considering a book or any of these other projects, how important is it to like the story or the characters or are you just sometimes looking for a challenge or something easy? Maybe not a challenge. I mean, what does it take for you to be like, yeah, I want to interview for that.
Brian (8m 51s): Well, I mean, I believe that in order to tackle any project, you have to have some sort of connection with it or else it's just kind of a waste of time. But when I considered a friends of my enemy, for instance, I mean I read the scene from the book, the book one where I actually had Jared meeting Derek for the first time. And all I knew about the story was that it was just a dystopian war drama and, and the book needed several accents from all across the world. So my immediate thought was, wow, that sounds really tough, but I really liked the challenge. And it sounds like a really cool idea. So for more from me really, I warmed up to the characters more than I wanted to the story in the beginning. So once I actually started figuring out who the characters were and I talked to you about how you wanted them to sound accents were from, I did a lot of research on the accents and then I started falling in love with the characters because I figured out that every character is basically a reflection of you as the narrator.
Brian (9m 48s): So when you actually, when you actually develop a character, they are you. So they basically become your best friends. And there's no way you can forget your best friends once you got them.
Autumn (9m 60s): That's so it's very much how, when I'm writing, I feel the same way because people often say like, ask that question. Well, who's your favorite character? And my Pat answer is the character I'm writing in now because it could be the villain. It could be, it's really hard sometimes when it's a teenage ditzy girl, I have a hard time with that character, but you have to do your best. Like you said, it's your best friend. You want to tell their story the best you can. And it's so awesome to hear that reflected in what you do. You were basically taking this on and it's like, you know, it's like, you're the author, you're the narrator. And you want to give the story, whoever point of view, whatever character, the best story you can.
Brian (10m 42s): Right. And I believe that it's, it is your story as the author. So I have to do justice for the author. And what I think is nice is that you can actually give some like audio clips of what you think the character should sound like, but you also get the author's opinion saying like, well, I like, I like this, but maybe I should make him sound more Southern or maybe, maybe actually sounding more European or something like that. So it makes it, so you get to play around with the author before you create the character, you know? Yeah,
Autumn (11m 11s): I do. I remember when we were first starting out and he would send me clips and we would discuss, or you would ask me like, have you ever thought about how this character sounds and you know, it's there, but when you're writing, I don't know. Maybe some people already are visual. I visualize it more than hear it. And so you did make me sit down and think, well, how does that character sound? And so some tough questions.
Brian (11m 35s): Yeah. And I had to do a lot of research on different accents and that, that took a long time. Cause I mean, going on to YouTube and looking up how someone from South Africa sounds versus how someone from like Australia sounds or Northern Europe, Southern Europe, you know, all different parts of the world. I had to look up so many different accents,
Autumn (11m 58s): That's my fault. But you did an amazing job and it was stunning. And I, there are a lot of narrators that I've worked with and talked to who just narrate the entire story in the same tone. Oh, well, you know, they add the emphasis or they get excited, but you literally give each character an accent, a sound that is individual and unique. And I don't know as much as, I mean, as much as people say, like how, how do you keep the character straight in your head when you're writing? I don't know how you keep the characters straight in your head. Over the years, we've worked together, multiple books, keeping the accent. The same is amazing to me.
Autumn (12m 38s): I, I'm not sure how you make the mental notes. And especially when there's a scene that has two different characters or three different characters, I'm really cruel to you a lot. You know, they're talking and the ones from America and the ones from South Africa and the ones British and you switched between all of them. So effortlessly on this cliff that you're giving to me. I mean, how does it, how do you even organize that in your head? And then can you record that in one take or are you doing multiple takes? How are you managing that? Well,
Brian (13m 13s): I mean, I just love giving every single person their own unique voice personality in life. I think it's way more fun to me than narrator and way more fun for the listener as they can really distinguishes the difference, the differences between every single person. It is definitely more work and requires a good memory of the, as friends of my enemy has over 20 reoccurring characters that have their own uniqueness. And like I stated, I gave every one of them life. I place myself in their shoes and become that particular person. So it really helps with the chapters that are from their certain perspectives, as it gives me a better idea of who that person is, because I can know how they think and how they'd react to situations.
Brian (13m 54s): And I that's really unique for your stories. I think they're really cool that that every chapter is from a different point of view so that it makes it so it's like you get to change the first person perspective in each one and how the, how the narration goes there. The thought process of that character, like for instance, like David Eldridge, he's, he absolutely hates arena and they're just like bitter rivals. And then when you go through a chapter through his point of view, you start going what he's thinking, what he's, what he's planning, what he's plotting and the reasons behind it. So it's not just like from arena's point of view, obviously she is the main central character, but you're not always hearing from her thoughts all the time, which I think is great.
Autumn (14m 35s): Yeah. I think it definitely adds to, especially that story. I don't do that in all my books, but I read all my full length books, switch point of view like that, but it does, it's its own layer of plotting and it's only are a challenge. I didn't realize that when I first started writing too, you know, if you're going to work with a narrator who is going to get into the different tones and stuff in different sounds, voices and accents that it creates its own fun that way as well.
Brian (15m 4s): So I'm not, I'm not sure how much time we actually have for this, but I could go on for a while about the main cast and how I chose different voices and personalities for each one.
Autumn (15m 15s): Yeah. We can definitely circle back to, I mean, we usually go for 45 minutes, so, you know, we have another half an hour or so we'll get back to a couple of these because I definitely, I want you to share, I love, I love how you do some of these accents. And I think it's a unique perspective. I don't know if a lot of other authors realize that this is something that yeah, you might end up paying more, but this is something that an audio book narrator can do if they're dedicated to doing it. But yeah, I do want you to do some examples because you have some amazing skills and I always appreciated, I think the first time I was never even into audio books, the first time I wanted to have one made and I just, you know, put up a script and that was for I'm born of water for the Epic fantasy.
Autumn (16m 1s): And someone had come back to the narration and it was the first time I really heard something. I wrote narrated by professionals like, Holy crap, this is cool. Except he used a falsetto for the woman. And so it sounded like a puppet play, you know, something you would see done for kids. And it kind of died grated on me. And I've never looked at another numerator who did Falsettos, but you don't, but you can, you, when you do things, you, I can still tell it's one of the women I can tell, you know, one of the guys, you just do a very good job of switching fluidly between gender, but being earnest and not making it sound fake.
Autumn (16m 42s): You could actually think that this was a real person. And that's what always is amazing.
Brian (16m 47s): Yeah. I mean, and like I was trying to say, I mean, when I go through the different personalities, I just kind of put myself in their position. How do they think, why do they think this way? Who are they talking to? How do they feel about them? How would I feel if I was that person talking to that person? And you know, each one has their own certain accent. So I think whenever, whenever you have a certain accent, it has to have a certain voice. So I don't believe any characters should sound the same goes everybody's unique. We all have our own certain and we all have our own certain things about us. And so when I started looking at accents on YouTube, from people from these different nationalities, I studied their speech patterns, how fast they talk to their expressions, how they use their body language and how can I adapt that to my voice, to match the persona.
Brian (17m 34s): So if I find that each person has their own life, it's easier to know who is who and I can easily conjure up that character from the vast pool of personalities that I have stuck in my head. And if each person is unique, then they're also my close personal friends that I've known forever. So you just forget those personal friends.
Autumn (17m 51s): No, you don't. I think you're going to miss these books as much as I am going to miss you recording these books when we're done.
Brian (17m 58s): Yeah. Every, every character has as a certain has a certain, like a spot in my heart. I guess you could say, as cheesy as that sounds, I mean, each one is like a very unique person. And, and when, when one of the characters did pass away that that hurt.
Autumn (18m 16s): Yes. We ended up, we ended up on a conversation. We both cried over that character's death, which I just think that's kind of cool. I mean, everything you're saying is very much what an author goes through. And I don't think most authors realize that this is something that, you know, an audio book narrator is also feeling and going through on a very personal level as well, if they're really getting into your book.
Brian (18m 38s): Yeah. It's, it's, it's definitely something that you have to kind of like, well, a lot of times you have to kind of separate yourself from the story saying like, okay, yes, it's a story. These aren't real people, but it's, but it's, it's just something that you just kind of feel. But when you give life to a certain character, they just become you, you know?
Autumn (19m 1s): And that's why, I mean, the times of these characters, the way you voiced them, it's even now when I read what I wrote is how I hear them. So you've created them even if they became like, you know, on the big screen, I don't think I could ever hear themself differently than the way you created them, because it is become how I even see them.
Brian (19m 20s): Oh, that's great. That's awesome. That just makes me feel good as a narrator too, because when you can give, you can give that kind of performance that actually just makes an impact on someone, especially the off of themselves. That's it's humbling. It's really, really nice.
Autumn (19m 34s): Oh, you're definitely that good. And like I said, we're going to, I definitely want to throw in some examples cause we've, we have some quotes and things. So I think you can come up with one, but just out of curiosity. Cause I mean, when we started, so we talked about like, I gave you the book and you read through the whole book and then you asked for some examples and maybe some like pronunciations and stuff, but to pick up something, to start creating this character, what do you need from the, an author to pick that up? So what, what's something that authors could have prepared if they're looking for an audio book narrator that they would kind of know that they might ask questions about.
Brian (20m 11s): So it's kind of hard to answer because a lot of times mean the, the actor gets the freedom to do what they want to do, but you also have to have the author's input because you can't just kind of like throw out something and say, this is how I want the person to sound because that's selfish. I mean, yes, you're the actor and you've got your expressions and you've got your artistic freedom, but you also have to make sure the author is okay with it. You can't just have, like you said, your other narrator who actually might have one of your stories with the falsetto, I probably got on your, probably got on your nerves a little bit, but I did not select after the audition,
Autumn (20m 48s): But they did make me appreciate that audio books are kind of cool, but yeah, they didn't make it past the first casting.
Brian (20m 56s): Okay. Okay. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's just one of those things you have to, you have to have constant communication with the author. I mean, I think as a, as a narrator, it's easier if you actually know exactly what the person wants the character to sound like, like if you say, okay, this person is, he's a gruff older man. Who's who was all about like propriety and, and, and society and in he's in he's and politics. And he always wants himself to look better than what he really is, but he's hiding his insecurities and fears and he's having trouble with his son, even though he's, he's, he's very natural and becoming an in person to other people when it comes to like in closed doors, he's, he's scared and he's worried and he doesn't know how to, he doesn't know how to heal with his son.
Brian (21m 48s): This man is his name's David, David Eldrin, she's, he's a strong individual, but he's also like weak in the, in the case of his emotions and how he's sees the world. But he's also like very stoic and he has this very specific vision for Europe and he wants to leave Europe in a certain way. And he believes what he's doing is right. But the ends justify the means. And a lot of times what you're doing is not exactly the best for the country itself. So how do you get that into like a voice? How do you, how do you make a voice with that? So you say, okay, this person who's, he's gruff, he's kind of like a low voice.
Brian (22m 28s): Maybe he's a bit more well to do. He's he's, he's rich in, in his, in the way he projects himself. He may not actually be rich, but he wants to look rich. So like he's a well to do and a older and a wise in his words, but he's also kind of like a slow, slow in speech, but wants to he's condescending in some ways too. So it's like, it's like some of those things, if you could describe like the character itself saying like, this is how I want him to sound and then suddenly you just get that voice that just comes, it just comes naturally.
Autumn (23m 4s): Oh, definitely to you. Yeah, it is. So it's neat to hear like the things I wrote translated into how you would take that into creating Dave says voice and it's very, it's not as simple as you know, saying, Oh, he's British and he's older and he's male. You literally, you take into all these nuances of like how he poses some self. I mean, you really get into the acting nuances of it. And that is really, it's amazing how intense that is. And then what it's a totally different mindset from, you know, being an author. So it's really neat.
Brian (23m 42s): Yeah. I mean, if you're going to be, if you're going to be a person, you gotta be a person ever, we all have different facets. We all have different things going on in our lives, but what's nice is that as an actor, you can actually pull from the experiences of your own life or experiences that you've known from other people like friends and family, relative, things like that. And every single person has such a huge pool of experiences. If they can, they can dive into, and as an actor, you have unlimited amount of, of knowledge at your fingertips. That's a, you just, you just pull from
Autumn (24m 20s): That's just it's to me, it's still amazing. But again, I didn't, I haven't taken acting classes and I've never, ever tried to be an actor. So this is why I hired you to handle that aspect. I'm much happier writing, even though I've been told my voice is not horrible. I don't know if that's a compliment or not. I wouldn't say it like that. It's like, well, your voice, I'm still not going to be auditioning for anything soon. How I think a lot of, so when we're, when authors are signing up to do audio books, you know, they're taught, they're usually told, you know, narrators get paid by finished hour and a finished hour is usually three to four hours of work.
Autumn (25m 7s): What goes into that? I mean, is that true or is that just something that, you know, ACX puts up there, so we feel bad and if it is true, like, is it multiple takes? I mean, what is it, what happens to something you're recording? How do you make that into the clip that you then send to me?
Brian (25m 24s): Well, I mean, there's a lot of work, especially with audio books. It's, it's a, it's a huge time commitment. That's for sure. If you're getting in to audio books to make money, it's not about per finished hour because the per finished hour is the actual finished book. So if the book lasts like eight hours to speak, as it's done, you only get paid for those eight hours. You don't get paid for the hours upon hours and days upon days and sometimes weeks or months to make the thing. Because I mean, there is a lot of work in audio books and I think most people don't really understand that.
Brian (26m 4s): But then again, I mean, I might actually put way more work into my audio books and some other narrators do, but it's it's okay. So whenever you start, you have the whole chapter that you're going to speak through. Yet you speak in inside of your little, your little audio containment box, wherever you're going to start speaking your story and you go through the whole chapter. I try to do a chapter by chapter. So that way I can, I have some sanity left in my life. So I finished, I finished a full chapter. A lot of times it takes multiple takes. Cause I'm trying to get through right, the right inflection, the right emotion, the right.
Brian (26m 48s): And my earlier books, I didn't have any classes. So it was just me doing it by myself. So I wouldn't be as proud of the earlier work that I, that I would be as what I know now, because I just know more. But in the beginning, it's basically like you, you read the story. And then I tried to always make sure every character had its own unique voice. A lot of times I was able to do it in one take a lot of times that it took me several takes, but it all depends on how I felt when I listened to it. So I can hear myself through my great big headphones and with those great big headphones, you can kind of hear how your voice sounds.
Brian (27m 29s): You're kind of like echoes back to you. So you have an idea of what it's going to sound to someone who's listening to it. So when I go through it and I was like, Oh, that didn't sound good. Let me try it again. Or I was like, well, what are you really trying to say here? I mean, just say it, you know, I would, at times you argue with yourself inside of the inside of the vocal booth, because it's like, no, one's going to want to listen to this, try it again. And like, you know, so it's like, okay, let me do a character, which is totally different from narration. Narration is all about like trying to make it sound compelling and interesting enough. So people will want to listen. But then the character is completely different because this is a person you're dealing with. This is a real living person. So you have to make sure you sound like a real person.
Brian (28m 11s): And then you have to get those personalities, the different, the very subtle things in their voice that tell you what they're really thinking. And it just, it's way more fun to hear that in a character when it, because all you have is voice, you don't have the body to act with, which I've done that as well. But when it's just voice acting, it's so much harder because you have to get every feeling inside of that voice because all the audience knows is what they hear, not what they say.
Autumn (28m 41s): And then it was, I remember the first time listening to something you did, and I think whatever expression, growled or hissed, and you actually did that in the voice and then switched to the narrator voice and said it. And I'm like, darn, that is cool. And it is quite, it is right. So when you're narrating your worry, I can hear you worry about the, you know, the tones, the pacing, the inflection, how you say the sentences and the pauses. And then it is a totally different switch when you do the characters,
Brian (29m 13s): Right? Yeah. I mean, I try to be like more even tone with a narration. So that way it doesn't sound too much like any particular character, but also I have to make the narration not sound so boring and drab and just like, does this guy even care about what he's talking about?
Autumn (29m 31s): And I have heard auditions that I was like, okay, I'm asleep already. So no, don't do that.
Brian (29m 37s): Yeah. Yeah. So you have to, it's, it's a delicate balance between narration and the characters and you have to figure out that balance and make it work. And that's, that's why it's nice to have constant communication with the author because you can actually show them little clips and say, what do you feel about this? Because you don't want to make the like three chapters and then submit it and to say like, that's horrible. Do them all again, do you know how long it took? Like three weeks?
Autumn (30m 6s): That is definitely one thing. I, I do think authors need to understand how long it takes and just out of curiosity, I, so I would take it considering the level of just what it takes to do it. I mean, if you want to write, you're not going to have time to be able to do your own audio book, but I mean, equipment wise and all that, do you, what is it required? I mean, is this something that you think an authors should be able to do their own book or do you think, you know, this is a level, unless you're really going to spend a lot of time and effort just don't just hire somebody. You can get it done. Well,
Brian (30m 41s): So that's the thing. I mean, if, if the author is, if the author also loves acting, I'd say have, have them do it as well. But it's, it's one of those things where just like my equipment for what I use, you get what you pay for. So if you're, if you're going to do it yourself, make sure that you have some sort of training that you know how to say something with different inflection of the emotion behind the voice live, your own characters, which I think is possible. But I mean, it's, it's difficult. Cause I mean, if, if you're an author you're, you're pouring your heart into writing, right.
Brian (31m 21s): It's very rare to have someone who's an author and an actor. I mean, it's definitely possible, but I haven't seen too many of those.
Autumn (31m 29s): No, I can't imagine a lot of the stuff, like I said, that you're describing you would make a great author. Cause you, you understand what it takes to do the character, but you're a fantastic actor. So you don't need to get into writing unless you, you know, retire and want to go there. Right.
Brian (31m 45s): Well, I appreciate it. I was appreciate your compliments.
Autumn (31m 49s): Well, I think, yeah, unless you want to add something to, you know, you know, what would it take for someone to, if they wanted to get set up just out of curiosity, what would it take for someone minimum if they wanted to try this, just so that people have a realistic idea of what equipment it takes to be an audio book narrator or why maybe you should have someone else do it.
Brian (32m 11s): Well, I mean, like I was saying, I mean, you get what you pay for, especially with your equipment. So what I have is a focus, right? Scarlet to I, to audio interface. And that's, that's kind of basic, it's kinda like a, your starter kit. That's pretty much what I got when I had my, my first, my first demo was recorded for my narration and character work. They gave me, they gave me a Scarlet focus, right to I, to audio interface. And that is just the thing that hooks up to your computer that allows the microphone to go through. It's not the microphone itself. So the Scarlet to I, to that system is about roughly 150 to $200.
Brian (32m 55s): And then you have the microphone itself, which is a, a condensed, what is it, a diaphragm, a diaphragm, condensed microphone. And those things. This is a, it's a road road into one dash a. And that's like your highest end average equipment that you can get. But it's, it's like, it's the highest end microphone that you can get without spending thousands of dollars on a microphone. So that one is about 300 bucks for a, just the microphone, but it's a really, really good one. It's actually a, and then if you look around, if you actually notice things, you, you can see that that particular microphone is used by several artists, several voice actors, several musicians.
Brian (33m 46s): It's a pretty well known microphone. The rode mic, it's actually a good brand. R O D E. It's a really good brand. But like I said, I mean, if, if you want to have a good quality, I would start with that. You can do like headset, mikes, but you're going to get what you pay for. It's it's a lot of, a lot of background noise, a lot of static. So if you're going to have like low end equipment, you're going to get low end results. Right. I use audacity for my editing software and that's a, it's a free app. It's a free software that you can use. And if you really know how to use it, there's a lot of guides online to learn how to use stuff.
Brian (34m 26s): But if you know how to use it, you can use audacity. And I have, have no issues with that because I mean, that's, that's what I've always used is audacity. It's free. And there's, there's programs out there that have way more things that you can do. But it's like a lot of fancy bells and whistles that I don't really think I don't really need. So audacity is just, it just keeps it's good for a budget.
Autumn (34m 47s): That's awesome. And so is that part of the like running I know before you've said you've run processors to take out clicks and mouth sounds. In fact, I remember you saying like there was something you stopped eating while you're recording. Cause it gave you like a, more of a mouth sound. You're really dedicated, which I love, but so there's like all these nuances, plus you need to have like a room that's quiet where you're just saying that you, your quiet booth is sort of a closet. So
Brian (35m 12s): Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I know that. Okay. So, Hmm. I picked up a ton of knowledge from my voice acting coach and ways to say things and make it compelling to listen to. And so when I record for a narration, I have to make it sound just as interesting as all the characters. So just like the author is painting a picture with their words. I need to do same, same with my voice. And sometimes it'll take several to get the right words, the right meaning the right inflection, the right emotion. So it's, it's funny. Cause I know like how you'd like to write. Sometimes you have like this really long sentences.
Autumn (35m 50s): Yeah, I do.
Brian (35m 55s): Yeah. They're super, super long sentences where they're separated by a comma every so often, but to voice it, it can be a challenge, especially when you have like pops and clicks and noise, saliva snaps and things like that. So you don't want to break the sentence either with, by taking a breath. So you have to go through the entire thing. It was like,
Autumn (36m 19s): I feel so bad,
Brian (36m 24s): But so, so what I use to help with like noise noises and your mouth and things like that as granny Smith, apples, granny Smith is the best food that you can have inside of a booth. So obviously you're not going to hear yourself.
Autumn (36m 42s): I've never heard that on any clip you've sent me. No,
Brian (36m 46s): You have to take all that, all that noise out. So, so when I'm recording, I always have the microphone on. So it's kind of comical sometimes when I'm really listening to it. And in the editing section, when I, this, I can just see like the little pops is up there. I am, I'm eating something. So I Like that whole entire section and I get to the next part. And so what keeps me on track? The granny Smith apples gets rid of the pops and clicks naturally. And then I also use like lukewarm water, like little tiny little sips is lukewarm water. So that way I can keep my voice hydrated. Cause you're in the, you're in the booth for hours recording and recording and recording. And so to help me out whenever I'm listening to it, I like to snap my finger when I snap.
Brian (37m 34s): I mean, that, that proves to me that I did the sentence. Right. So if I, if I say like arena went to the store and then she got this particular thing, but actually got a set of bullets for her AK 47 and then I have a snap. Cause then I know that I did that sentence. Right. And right. So that when I go to the editing thing, I can see the snap very easily. Cause it's, it's a very long and a very thin noise on the, on the vocal track. So you see the vocal track on the sound waves and this one thin cut, which is definitely a step because it pops up pretty well in the editing thing.
Brian (38m 14s): So you see that and says, okay, I know I got that sentence. Right. I can delete everything else. So it does, it does still take hours to edit, but it's actually a lot easier whenever you snap your fingers. So that way you're not listening to every single tape to see, to see which one is right.
Autumn (38m 32s): Wow.
Brian (38m 33s): It takes like, so I, I kind took a tally and I said, it takes roughly about three hours to edit for a 30 minute chapter. Wow. That's
Autumn (38m 43s): Yeah. Really crazy. And so yeah, ACX is really quite pretty close to when they say per finished hour or so.
Brian (38m 51s): Well, that's the thing, that's the thing mean per finished hour. You're not getting paid for those three hours minutes. So you're only getting paid for the 30 minutes that you finished. So if you finish, like you say, if you finish a book and seven hours and the book is seven hours long to listen, to start to finish, that's how long the actor will get paid. They don't get paid for the months and months and months,
Autumn (39m 15s): The 21 to 30 hours that you've put in. And so that's one reason when you see like the perfect hour rate, some of them are, you know, 400, $500. There's a reason for that. Cause that's being divided by four or five hours to cover your costs. That's really unnecessary.
Brian (39m 32s): Yeah. It's a distinct thing about that. But before I got into voice acting, I always wondered why it was so much money, but now I know,
Autumn (39m 40s): No, it looks good on the one end. Yeah.
Brian (39m 45s): Yeah. And then, and then if, if you're not an actor, if you don't know, you're just like why in the world would I pay this much money for someone just talking in a microphone,
Autumn (39m 55s): Jim Washington, I pay you a $500 an hour. Well, because it took five hours to make that one hour. Yeah.
Brian (40m 1s): And then, and then, like I said, you get what you pay for. I mean, you want a quality, you want a quality story. You want your story to have the life that you really want. You're going to have to pay for it.
Autumn (40m 12s): Right. It makes sense. Yeah.
Brian (40m 14s): Yeah. It was just like, I just like paying someone for piano lessons. You get to, you get the, you get the end result from the actual lessons that you learned from a professional. So you're always going to, you're always going to pay the professional rate if you want to have a professional quality. That makes sense to me. Yeah. Most people are just like, why would I pay that much for that? Oh gosh,
Autumn (40m 38s): Well, this that's why I wanted to do this though, is because I really wanted to the authors know, you know what? They're going to learn what they should have in hand when they're going to go to an auto audio book narrator. But they should also know really what is on the other side, what it is you're doing. It shouldn't be this like mystery because once you know, you appreciate it so much more and the expense and the time commitment makes so much more sense. I mean, we've been together for four years because it's a series and things have come up and stuff has happened. But you know, when you, when you signed up to do four books, this was not, you know, you knew it was a chunk of your life. We've shared quite a few years together now. And there's a reason.
Autumn (41m 20s): Yeah. So you just like, you should have someone you can communicate with, you should have someone you can get along with you're, you're sharing, you're sharing for me, I'm sharing an something I developed as something little part of me that, you know, my little baby I created and I'm giving it to you. You're like growing it into something else. That is a whole new thing. And it becomes a collaboration, not just, you know, a hand, you know, passing the Baton. Right, right.
Brian (41m 43s): And, but that's also, that's the risk that the narrator has to take too, because especially if you're going to be doing royalty sharing, I know that that's the risk for narrators as well because the royalty share is only 20% of every single sale. And you have to really be kind of trusting of the author to, to say like, how is this going to be marketed? Where's it going to go? Is this worth my time? That kind of thing. So you have to kind of see Amanda is, is this something that's going to be lucrative? And if it's not, it'll be nice for a hobby. But if you're, if it's something that you want to do for your livelihood, these are the things you have to think about.
Autumn (42m 23s): It is always the struggle. And yeah, it's something, especially once you start taking this as a business and taking this seriously, these are the questions I think everyone has got to be asking of how is this going to work out in the end? And who's, who's going to end up holding the money and how's it going to work out for both everyone involved that it's worth the time. Right. Right. Well, I want you to show off a little bit. I would love it. If you do have any of those quotes handy to show off what some of the voices, some of the things that you can do and what other authors should, you know, make your audio book narrators, do this too.
Brian (43m 1s): Well. I mean, I guess you could say that I might be able to just kind of like start talking like the particular person as I talk about that character, if you want me to do that. Sure. So when I go through the different things about thinking about who I'm going to be, I started going through the different nationalities and where things go, this is someone who's from South Africa, who's obviously white. So it's a lot easier for me to be someone who is a white guy, because that's obviously who I am. So, but this name is his name was jetted. He is the captain of the armed forces. And he definitely works very well with arena, who is definitely his best friend, his confidant, and someone who stood this life with, for a long time.
Brian (43m 45s): And also with David as well. David Eldridge is a good buddy of his, I guess you could say he met him first before meeting up with arena. It was definitely an interesting situation. But with the accent, you have to kind of understand this guy's from Africa. So he's got a bit of a thicker accent here, but he's also a smart ass. He's definitely someone who's. Yeah. He has a way with his words and he and arena get in it a lot. And it's a different, a really good dynamic between the two characters when it comes to arena. I try to be a little bit more like my own voice, but just a little bit higher.
Brian (44m 25s): So it's kind of has like a feminine quality to it. I know that she started off very weak. She didn't really know where she was. She didn't have an idea about her character at all. She was kinda scared, maybe scared of her own shadow. Perhaps she started going out. She had a husband named Michael once certain things happen in the story, that kind of effect fell apart. But I like to other people who want to read it, actually listen to that. But my name is arena and I'm definitely the, the first person who did you kind of get into, into, in arms with you start relating to me. I I'm a strong character, but it does take a while for me to start figuring out who I am and how strong I really am.
Brian (45m 9s): And I can lead the armed forces. And then you have someone like Biden. Definitely my favorite character.
Autumn (45m 17s): Really? I did not know that.
Brian (45m 20s): No, certainly love Byron for everything that he is. He is definitely have said that, that Mexican quality, but sort of like the man is a ladies. Man, every, every little ease is just all wonderful human beings. He has that particular quantity that women just flock to. You say, wow, what a man and I have to agree. And then you have David Eldridge. Who's a very, very well to do man. And he's a British. So when you start to think about the different things that is happening in his life, he has a little bit of a warring upset in, in his own life that he has to kind of try to get along with his son, David or Derek I'm David, what am I saying?
Brian (46m 14s): So Derek is my son and he's sort of a troublemaker. I try to keep them in line, but he never listens to me. So it kind of gives me a little bit of internal struggle. Whenever I hear that he doesn't want him, he doesn't want to be in politics. Why would you not want to be in politics? It's just, it's parliament. It's mother. It's the greatest thing in the world. It runs Europe, but you're not supposed to know that.
Autumn (46m 43s): Okay.
Brian (46m 44s): And then you have Derek Eldridge, who's a little bit of a more world demand. He's also British, but he doesn't really get along with his father very well. But there's that sort of thing that he sort of respects a bit more from his father, but it's just one of those things that just like, I got to make my own way of things. You know, why don't you just let me live? My life, dad, come on.
Autumn (47m 7s): That is just absolutely brilliant that you can do all those in a row trying not to crack up so that, you know, we can just record this without you having me laugh. My head off in the background. That is so brilliant. Way more difficult.
Brian (47m 28s): She is French. Oh, she's
Autumn (47m 30s): Definitely one of those people that has like a whole way of the world. She tried it. She gets away with a feminine Wiles. She's definitely fresh. So French accent can be a bit difficult. Sometimes it just takes a little bit of a little bit of practice to tell us I have nothing to be trifled with. Definitely don't mess around with Danielle. Oh, that is so brilliant. I don't know if you have any others, but I just, like I said, you bring this book to life. So it was amazing.
Autumn (48m 10s): And this is the quality that you bring in an audio book. Narrator can bring to your characters. That is just phenomenal to hear someone professional and well done, actually giving voice to a story. The characters are a lot of fun. I mean, like I said, they all have their own unique voice, their own unique flavor. And you have to, you have to give them their due justice or else. I just not a real character. I can't agree more. And I definitely think, I mean, very least there's some clips, all of the books have clips on Amazon or an audible. So I mean, it's at least worth going and listening to those so that you can see some of the level that you've put into these books, which is just, like I said, I would never, you tell me like, you've uploaded a chapter.
Autumn (49m 0s): I was like, yes, yes. I can't wait to go hear this. It makes sure it's not one of those things. Like, you know, you're cooking dinner. I'd like, no, everything else must stop. I am going to just sit here and enjoy this. This is awesome. So yay. This was a really fantastic, thank you Brian, for joining me here. Oh, absolutely. It's been a joy autumn. I'm just very glad to finally get a chance to talk to you. I know this was totally our double up excuse as a chance for us to hang out until we can finally, you know, COVID is over and the world is maybe a little less crazy and I'm back on the road again and I am totally be lining it over to Oklahoma so we can say hi and hang out and have a beer.
Autumn (49m 42s): Oh, that'd be fantastic. I'd love that. Well, I mean, I guess, I guess until the next time I can get the last, the last book done and until then, I guess we'll talk later. Yes, we will. Thank you again. And so thanks for listening in. We will, yes, we will be back next time and we will be talking about some magic systems. Like the worst of them.
Narrator (50m 10s): If you like, what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the am writing fantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patrion.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going, stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Ten years ago – or thereabouts – indie authors started self-publishing as digital tools, like the Kindle, made it all possible.
We’ve seen audiobooks grow rapidly in the last year or two, but we are yet to see the next true market disruption. It’s not audiobooks!
Instead, it's much more likely that in the coming decade, AI, or Artificial Intelligence, will revolutionize the publishing industry.
In episode 108 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, Autumn and Jesper unpacks the topic of AI and writing for you.
Links from the episode
Book on AI by Joanna Penn: https://amzn.to/3nkpGWZ
Article mentioned in the podcast episode: https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/16/21371049/gpt3-hacker-news-ai-blog
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to the Am Writing fantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need an literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I am Jesper, and I'm Autumn. This is episode 108 of the am writing fantasy podcast. And I think today's topic is very well timed. You know, we're fresh into 2021 and are all looking ahead to the coming year and hopefully a year where we can put the worldwide pandemic behind us to start thinking about the future a bit. But, but yeah, if we look 10 years back, you know, 10 years ago, or thereabouts, at least in the author status, self publishing as digital tools like devices, like the Kindle made it possible.
Jesper (1m 11s): And we have also over the last year or two, seen a very big growth in audio books, but I'm going to say that we are yet to see the next true market disruption because it's not audio books. Instead. I believe that in the coming decade, AI or artificial intelligence will revolutionize the publishing industry. So in today's episode, we're going to unpack this for you and see where it all leads us.
Autumn (1m 40s): It's so exciting. I mean, this is almost like a Sci-fi episode, but it has to do with fantasy. It's definitely it has to do with a marketing and the writing and so on and so on in a different environment and in a different future. Yes, it will be. It's definitely something we are going to have to deal with if you pay any attention to some of the news out there on AI, but we'll get to that first. This is really our first we're recording behind or ahead. However you want to say it. So for us, it's just, just the new year and you're back off of your holiday vacations, or how are things on your side of the planet?
Jesper (2m 23s): Yeah, it was just, just off today, actually. I'm back from vacation. I must admit it was a bit difficult to get out of bed very early when the alarm clock went off. I bet it's just getting used to sleeping in. So that was, yeah, that was what it was, but it was one of those vacations that didn't really feel like a vacation, you know, as we've talked about in previous episodes, we've been moving out of our house and all of that. So we are pretty much settled now in our new place, but I feel like I need a note, a new vacation now. I bet you too.
Autumn (3m 1s): We've had a very much a different type of work on your vacation where you had to resettle entire a house. So yeah, that's a little more challenging than, you know, hanging up Christmas decorations.
Jesper (3m 13s): Yeah, that's true. It was very limited with Christmas decorations because we just didn't have time to, but they did not look very Christmas. Like you
Autumn (3m 25s): Should have drawn pictures on them.
Jesper (3m 27s): Yeah, yeah, probably. Yeah, that might've been better, but actually in between unpacking all those boxes, I did find the time here and there to watch a bit of Netflix. And I actually just yesterday I finished watching that a new Netflix series called alien worlds. And I know you saw that one as well, or I did.
Autumn (3m 45s): That was pretty interesting.
Jesper (3m 47s): What did you think of it?
Autumn (3m 49s): I thought it was entertaining more than scientific cause coming from an ecologist point of view, everything they talked about on earth, I'd already known and how they applied it to the alien worlds were at times driving me a little crazy because they are overlooking some major things. They'll, especially in the last episode, my husband and I were both going, shouldn't there be like ruins how the simulation get there and what kind of life is to just be a brain and this little gel case, we were just like, wow, but the rest of them were okay, what did you think of it?
Jesper (4m 23s): I think it was pretty good inspiration for world building. You know, I agree that it, it, it might be a bit simplified and there was some major questions that they sort of just glanced over. I was also really curious about, so that alien civilization in the, in the last episode, they explained how it was like a hive mind and how they live forever. And I was really curious about, okay, so what does that mean? And how does that work? So I immediately wanted to start world-building that understand how does that work? But it's, it's quite a short show around, I think four episodes of him, approximately 50 minutes, something like that each. So it doesn't take long to Watson.
Jesper (5m 3s): I thought it was quite entertaining and yeah, it might be a bit simplified, but not the other hand, I sort of also liked how they used earth as a starting point because yeah, but also because it made it a bit educational at the same time as well for, you know, details about earth that you might not be aware of, which I thought that was pretty nice actually. So yeah,
Autumn (5m 27s): Maybe a good segue. I mean, I do, I love it when they bring up topics like water as weird as one of my favorite science topics. So it is fun to get to watch that again. So it was, it was totally worth it. I highly recommend for people to go and watch it.
Jesper (5m 45s): Yeah. So how about you? How was you? Well, I don't even think I could call it vacation for you.
Autumn (5m 52s): I worked every single day and Oh yes. So I've been good. I, my biggest complaint is my goal was to finish writing this trilogy. I've been working on, on January 1st. I wanted it done for the new year, so I'd be working on edits right now. And I still have four chapters. My climax it's, you've done a lot, the last book in a series it's so complicated and all these will, the way I write things and all these plot lines and things happening. And even though I have it plotted out, I ended up writing the chapters two or three times each two of them. They just would not click together. And if I couldn't get them right, I couldn't set up the events for the following.
Autumn (6m 35s): You know, I'm down to the last four chapters. I mean, I'm so close. I can't complain. I mean, it is for one for recording this we're only a few days into January, so I'm just very close and I should finish it by the end of the week, but I want it to be done. But besides that, you know, I got the I'm writing fantasy website back online. I finished up a lot of email by gradations stuff. I did all this things, but I'm looking forward to my own vacation, which to me is possibly taking a week off of maybe some am writing, fantasy stuff. And just maybe sitting down with Photoshop, something. I actually have three covers now that I finished almost finished writing. I have to do three covers and I have not even started on though.
Autumn (7m 17s): So I've got to get my artistic hat graphic designer hat back on and get going, not to mention a fantasy map. Hey, I know in a logo and a few other things in the back burner too.
Narrator (7m 34s): A week on the internet with the Am Writing Fantasy podcast.
Jesper (7m 39s): This welcome message is a bit overdue because well, because of the prerecorded, we prerecorded some of the podcast episodes to last us through the Christmas holidays. And then we also have the interview with Brian Cohen, which went out a few weeks back. So well, we just haven't had a chance to welcome Joel, April until now. Yes. I hope I pronounced that last time correctly. Welcome. Anyway, we did our best. Thank you so much to you all for joining us on Patreon. We really appreciate that. Definitely. Yeah. And it's actually, so that we are only a couple of $5 signups away from reaching the first goal on patron and this first goal triggers at dedicated Patreon Q&A session.
Autumn (8m 30s): Yes.
Jesper (8m 31s): So if you dear listener, haven't checked out Patreon yet. Please find the link in the show notes and we offer all kinds of additional rewards to our patron supporters. So just have a look and see what you, what you think.
Autumn (8m 45s): Yeah. We'd love to have you over there. I mean, there's every Monday, every week we're doing episodes as well as early releases of the podcast answering questions. So it's quite a little community over there and we'd love to have you join us.
Jesper (9m 1s): Absolutely. And actually speaking of the internet, Autumn, I have something completely different. I wanted to mention.
Autumn (9m 7s): Oh, okay. Well, would that be you like springing surprises on me? I've noticed this recently.
Jesper (9m 17s): It's just so much more fun when I get your reaction live on the podcast rather than...
Autumn (9m 23s): I'm being tortured, people.
Jesper (9m 28s): No, I found some really funny. How do you say that analogies? Is that how you say it? Yeah. Yeah. That's somebody, somebody called melody posted them on Facebook. I don't know melody, but they were just so funny that I thought I would mention the three best ones because they were so funny and I hope these are just made up stuff. So I don't accidentally insult somebody because I have no idea what they are, where they came from. It was just so fun.
Autumn (9m 58s): Oh no.
Jesper (10m 1s): So, okay. So here it goes three very funny analogies. The first one John and Mary had never met, they were like two hummingbirds who had also never met
Autumn (10m 20s): May, might need a little bit of work I have with today's episode. I have a suggestion for that one. Okay. What's number two. Okay.
Jesper (10m 31s): Number two. I just have to stop laughing. "From the attic came an earthly howl, the whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality. Like when you're on vacation in another city and jeopardy comes on at 7:00 PM Instead of 7:30. It's just like, it makes no sense at all.
Autumn (10m 55s): If that's your level of life, tension disruption, you come spend a week with me. Let's train you in two true emergency situations. Oh my goodness.
Jesper (11m 10s): Oh, these are so good. It's incredible. It made me laugh so bad this morning. So I just had to put one is not any better than that. No, he was as lame as a duck, not the metaphorical lame duck, but a real lame duck. That was actually... I'm speechless. You have any editing comments.
Autumn (11m 42s): Lame is reuse too many times. We need the let's get out the thesauras and it's a cliched phrase and you should avoid those in your writing. Otherwise I will hold my tongue. All right. Fair enough. And onto today's topic. So yeah. Talking about surprises, autumn, I actually received a message from a very old friend this morning and I promised him to play the audio file of his message. So are you ready for this? You're just full of surprises today. Yes, let's go for it.
Autumn (12m 24s): Okay. Here it goes.
Old Mc'Grumpy (12m 26s): I don't appreciate how you worthless humans are discussing artificial intelligence without me. I was the resident artificial intelligence on the Am Writing Fantasy YouTube channel until you two decided to dump me. One should think that I am the foremost expert on this topic. And please tell Autumn that I am the future. You cannot ignore me any longer.
Autumn (12m 54s): This, that little rascal, sorry.
Jesper (12m 58s): Just to fill in the reader or the listener here. If you're feeling a bit left out for those who actually watched the, our YouTube channel, going back, use a little AI here was a one that we have as a bit of a, what you would call him. A co-host almost every very old YouTube videos. So I just brought him back here. And so if you feel left out listeners, it's just because yeah, you don't know what happened.
Autumn (13m 26s): If you go back to some of the original podcasts, just like one through six that we actually pulled off the old YouTube channel, you will hear the voice of old, big grumpy. And some of our shenanigans, we got up to fighting with each other. He was always the voice of writers doubt. I wouldn't say so. I think you didn't expect a message from him today, but it was wonderful hearing from him though. I did notice he left it on your phone. I think he knows. I tend to hit delete from him coming. Yeah. So it seems like all my grandpa's still roaming the incident, but he is right about one thing.
Autumn (14m 7s): And that is how we can no longer ignore AI. So I say, let's get started on this topic. That sounds fantastic. Okay. So in preparation for today's episode, I decided to pick up Joanna pimp's new book called artificial intelligence, blockchain and virtual worlds. The impact of converging technologies on authors and the publishing industry. That was a long title. That's what it's called. And I'm using this book as inspiration for some of the stuff that we're going to talk about today. And we have, of course also added a link to join us book in the show notes, in case you want to check that one out yourself, it's a fairly short read.
Autumn (14m 50s): So it's not, it's not too complicated.
Jesper (14m 52s): Don't get scared off by the topic. Either
Autumn (14m 54s): Those get scared off by the very long title for a very short read.
Jesper (14m 59s): Yeah. Yeah. But I thought, you know, taking inspiration from Joanna is, is good because, well, she is a tech enthusiast and she very often adopts new technologies. And I don't think she will mind me saying that she tends to get into new stuff way too well. But yeah, we had her on the app writing fences, you podcast back in episode 66 as well to discuss a whole range of topics. So check that one out if you want to learn more about that, but she is a person we trust. So I thought it made sense to take some inspiration from her recent publication here.
Autumn (15m 38s): It sounds, I fully admit I haven't managed to read that one yet. I was immersed in my own level of technology, building websites. So I haven't done much research on the AI though. It's funny, used, talked about blockchain and now I do want to go check out our book because I do think from what I read that will revolutionize something in book sales. So that would be quite interesting.
Jesper (16m 2s): Yeah. So I would like to start out with a documentary that I watched on Netflix actually a couple of years ago called AlphaGo. Okay. It was released in 2017, but I think I saw the documentary like the following year, probably in 2018. But are you familiar with this one? No, I don't think I've seen that one. No. Okay. So AlphaGo is the name of an AI and this AI has taught itself to play go. And if anybody's not familiar with the game go, which I wasn't before watching that documentary.
Jesper (16m 42s): So don't worry about it if you don't know what it is, but, but go is an abstract strategy board game for two players in which the aim is to surround more territory than the opponent. So it's, it's like an, I think two and a half thousand year old Chinese game. Yeah.
Autumn (16m 58s): Something like that. It is. And I, we actually have a board, so it's very fascinating. Yes. I won't say I'm any good at it, but I have played go. It's
Jesper (17m 6s): A challenge. Yeah. So this AI called go or AlphaGo. It had been given access to previously played games, but the actual rules of the game go, wasn't taught to it. It, it, nobody told the AI what the rules were. It just got access to a ton of old games. And then it just proceeded to analyze those and then start playing games itself by itself, thousands upon thousands of games until it learned and got better. And then the people who created this AI, the developers, they then decided at some point, and this has been the premise of this documentary is that they wanted the AI to play against the world champion of go, which is a guy called Lisa doll.
Jesper (18m 3s): And see if they, they could have the AI beat him in a game of goal. Right. So it's actually a pretty good documentary. So if you want to watch it also for the listener here, I should just use you. Well, then you might want to skip ahead a couple of minutes because I'm going to spoil it. But, but it is actually pretty good, but I have to spoil it. Otherwise the whole setup that I'm making here doesn't make it. So, so forgive me. So before the AI is going to play against Lisa doll, it had to play a test game against the European champion of, of the game go and it won quite easily, in fact, but as I understood the, from the documentary itself, the a or the go champions are divided into some tears and the highest level or the, the, the best of the best like Lisa doll is .
Jesper (19m 2s): And if you're a tier seven, yeah, you are the world champion basically. Right. And the European champion was, if I remember correctly around cheer three or four or something like that. So Lisa doll all is significantly better, but they were pretty happy once they had taught the AI to, or the AI was able to beat the European champion. They were pretty happy about that. So they went ahead and then they were gonna meet with Lisa doll to, to play the match against him. And there was a lot of hype around this game that was pressed there before they started, there was like a press conference as well. And Lisa doll is asked you in this press conference, if he thinks that the AI can beat him.
Jesper (19m 46s): And if I recall correctly, they have to play seven games that it might be five, but I think it was seven games that they had, but it was multiple games that they had to play against each other. And then the one who won the most would be the overall winner. But at any rate, at least it all says that the AI will not stand a chance, of course, multiple games. And you're sure he cannot lose confident. And yeah, he's very confident, but he's the world champion. So he should be confident. Yeah. So this, during the game itself, so it's, it's set up like a major event, like the spectators watching there, movie camp or film cameras on it. And you can see every move on big screens.
Jesper (20m 27s): And there was separate rooms where you have commentators in different languages, commentating on the game as well. So it's like a big deal. Right? Right. And at some point during these games, they, they have, I think go AlphaGo starts out by winning two. And then Lisa doll wins one. So they're, they're pretty neck on, you know, that they're following each other pretty closely and there's no clear winner. And then in one of the deciding games, the AI then makes a move, which all the commentators are saying that this is a really big mistake. You know, that now it's screwed up.
Jesper (21m 7s): And, and the developers who are also watching all the, the game being played from, from a separate room, the documentary crew was in there with them as well. So they're filming them as the developers are sitting there, like really frustrated, like why did go have to screw up now? You know, this is the most important mats of the mall. And then it makes a mistake and you can also see how Lisa doll raises a brow when it, when the AI makes this move. And he sort of looks at the board in wonder and clearly recognizes the mistake, but the game continues. It's quite early on in the game. This happens. So they continue to play. And then to watch the end of it, it starts to Dawn on everyone that the AI actually made a genius move when they all thought that it was a mistake.
Jesper (21m 55s): So this many, many, many moves later, it proves that the AI actually had a strategy with what they, what it placed there. And because of it, it ends up winning the game and also take home the total victory against the world champion. That's brilliant. It is so brilliant. And it's just because it could see thousands of moves ahead or hundreds of moves or however many moves there is and go, I am not an expert on that game, but he's so far ahead that it was able to foresee what it should do and something a human brain could never do. Right? So there is a press conference after the match. And that's probably the one that I remember the best from the entire documentary, because I promise you, you can really see how Lisa doll he's broken walking into that in there.
Jesper (22m 39s): Like his confidence has gone. And he's just so much struggling with accepting the fact that the AI beat him. And I'm starting with this story because the author community as a whole might not be the most tech savvy people. But as old, my grandpa has said before, you cannot ignore this stuff. You know, AI is becoming smarter and smarter. And this documentary is from 2017, which is only four years ago. But in terms of AI development, four years, it's a long, lLong time. It is.
Autumn (23m 16s): I still remember the summer. I remember when the world chess champion was beaten by an AI for the first time, because I've come from a techie family. And so I was paying attention to that and it was just like, wow, this is, this has got to go somewhere and look where it's going. That's why I'm surprised with Lisa doll. Didn't realize, I mean, come on in the world, chess champions already gone down. You're next?
Jesper (23m 44s): Yeah. That's looking at it that way. I think you're right. But they also say that the game go is massively more complicated than chess. Yeah. But Joanna also mentioned AlphaGo in her book. I actually did see this documentary many years ago before even reading about it, her book. But, but she did mention in how in her book, how Lisa doll retired from the game in 2019 saying that quote, AI can never be defeated in quote. And I didn't know that he actually retired completely, but as I said, I did see how much Lisa doll was hurting after that game.
Jesper (24m 24s): And it really was like watching somebody facing that the world, isn't what he thought it was.
Autumn (24m 30s): Right. You can really, really see it in his face. It almost puts inside watching him at the point of all that is just that AI is already here and it will influence the publishing industry, whether you like it or not. It's very true. It's definitely already here already making changes. And some of the features that are out there are actually really exciting, but I can see where people are a little nervous about trusting a computer with some of the things that you can do with them even today, much less in three, four, five years from now.
Autumn (25m 12s): Yeah. And I think that the main thing is probably like what Lisa doll set himself. Right. We cannot beat AI. So I mean the coping mechanism that goes like, okay, I'll, I'll just be better than the AIS or I'll just ignore them. And I don't have to worry about it. I think you're going to lose if that's your mindset. I think so. I think you'll have to look at it as how can we, as authors work with AI, not, not beating it, but making them like becoming co-creators or something like that. So how can we incorporate AI into our author toolboxes?
Autumn (25m 53s): I think that's the real question. I think that's a very good question. And I don't think we have to be like Joanna Penn, where we're the innovator, as you know, we're leading that cusp and possibly getting into the thick of it with things that make mistakes or doing the beta testing, but there are already tools that are proven that look interesting. I ended up looking at two and I got so excited for this podcast that I'm actually kind of might be using one in the next week or two. So that's, you know, adopting an early adopter versus an innovator. You can be, you know, just behind the times where you're like, okay, this looks, this looks solid. This is where it looks testable and give it a spin rather than, you know, putting your head in the sand and pretending like they don't exist and getting left behind.
Autumn (26m 37s): Yeah, indeed. And I think probably I have an idea, which tools do you want referring to
Jesper (26m 44s): There, there was also some, some that we have on our sort of our joint joint list of things to look into.
Autumn (26m 50s): Yes.
Jesper (26m 52s): But they are very practical tools that is actually available right now. So maybe, maybe it would make sense if you mentioned those two, because then afterwards, I'll go into a couple of like premium tools that isn't really available for commercial use right now. But I think that's where it's going afterwards.
Autumn (27m 9s): Okay. That sounds good. So I will lay the groundwork. So most people, if you think of AI or at least how you use a computer right now, you might be thinking of pro writing aid or Grammarly. So those are just some editing software. They're not really AI, but they are definitely getting smarter. But there are tools that are out there that actually are starting to use AI to analyze not just your word choice or how to put together a sentence, but your story structure itself. And those are auto crit and fiction Aerie. And they're pretty cool. If you go to auto crit, they actually have a level that's free. So you can go try it out, which I thought was really exciting.
Autumn (27m 50s): And they have ones genre specific, which really I love this. So there they talk about how they're going to compare your writing to the writing of like JK Rowling's or George R. Martin. They're going to see where your weaknesses are. Talk about story elements. I mean, that got me really excited, especially the free that I was actually looking up the pricing and I mean, it couldn't all price. So you'd maybe two or $300 a year, but compared to a writing coach, that's going to cost 1500 or something per book. This is not that expensive. But then I went to storyteller, which is part of the fiction area is the fixed generic developer for the fiction writing. And I really kind of fell in love with fiction Arie.
Autumn (28m 33s): You get a 14 day free trial. And I'm thinking I just happened to be on the cusp of finishing a trilogy that I have to start editing. I don't think I can edit it in 14 days, but I got to have to give Pictionary a whirl. And part of that reason is they look at 38 story elements specifically. I mean, I love how they make it granular with what this AI is going to tear apart your story, and look at 38 elements and they listed it out in the website from point of view, point of you goals. They talk about the census touch taste. They look at it all and break it down and give it to you. So this is not just an editor, which is what auto-create had a lot of.
Autumn (29m 13s): Like, we're going to talk about how many times you repeat the same word or where you need a thesaurus fiction. Harry really goes to the next level where it's going to plot your tension. It's going to say where you switched your point of view. If you're seeing openings are good enough, this is like hiring a writing coach. That happens to be an AI. And I I've got to go see this works. I happen to have a book or two in my back pocket. So yeah, it looks exciting. I have to admit I was kind of tickled. Yeah,
Jesper (29m 47s): No. And, and on a path, a path, I'll try again, past podcast episode, that was a lot of peace in a row. We did actually interview the CEO of Pictionary the past. I, I forgot which episode number it was, but, but I think those two tools that you mentioned there, those are stuff that, that we plan to look into as well for, for our joint writing. But they, those tools are sort of what is available right now from an author perspective on, on a commercial viable solution, meaning that it's a service, it works, you can buy it, you can run it and it'll spit out a result.
Jesper (30m 30s): Okay. But that it is more like a, you put in your writing and then it will analyze it and give you some well editor kind of type service. Whereas the next level that I want to talk about is the, where the AI actually creates from nothing. So that's where we're going. And none of those tools can do that. No stamps. Right?
Autumn (30m 56s): There's very, from what I've seen, that that is, that is the next stage. And there are some people creating it, but like you've said, this is we're getting into the, not quite available yet, but it's coming.
Jesper (31m 10s): Yeah, indeed. So, so see this as a bit of a, an awareness thing that I'm going to mention now, because it's not something that you can really go out and start using right now because it's too early, but, but stop being aware of it. Right? So let, let me first draw your attention to open AI. So open AI is an artificial intelligence research laboratory, which conducts research in the field of artificial intelligence. And back in July, 2019, they released what is called GPT to natural language generation. And then in May, 2020, they released a version three, which is called GP T three, what?
Jesper (31m 55s): GP three GPT three. That's difficult to say again, but what it is, it is an AI language model that uses deep learning to generate human like text. So basically like AlphaGo, it trains itself by absorbing book. After book, after book, after book, basically like new in the matrix, like, so it's just absorbing tons of books and then it trains itself. GPT three has trained on about 45 terabytes of text data. Good Lord asked you, Joanna mentioned in her book, that's about 45 billion times, the number of words, a human perceives in their lifetime.
Autumn (32m 40s): Wow. Right. So you see why an AI cannot be defeated implicit memory loss. Well, okay. They might have some memory loss of something glitches, but in general, they're going to, they're not going to have Alzheimer's. Wow. No, indeed. Yeah. And it's incredible. Right. But as I said, at this point, DPT three, isn't available as a service yet, but when it does come available, become available at some point it's definitely something that will at least autumn and I will be testing out and see how it could benefit us authors. And of course, when we do we'll record a podcast episode about it, but in her book, Joanna speculates that this is not years away.
Autumn (33m 27s): And honestly, I don't think she's wrong, but I do find it hard to judge just how far off is it before AI is, is a service that becomes like a commodity that you can just buy like that. I'm not quite sure if it it's only a few years off, I'm not sure, but, but it's definitely heading there. Definitely. It'll be so interesting to see how it comes up because how you, it's funny how they are using AI is, cause I remember when they, with Google's deep mind, they taught it a whole bunch of different languages and then they just gave it one. It didn't know. And it figured it out because it had learned how to learn languages.
Autumn (34m 10s): And it's just fascinating to see these things create, you know, intelligent. We're not, we're going to hit the point where they have intelligence that matches ours, if not out matches ours and you can either be afraid or you can just say it's going to happen. But I think when it comes to stories, it will be interesting to see what they can be used for and what they, what they do and maybe down the line what they want to do. Yeah. Yeah. If you want to get just a side note, but because you said that you want to get really scared, then start reading about or Googling internet research about the, I think it's four stages of AI, whereas recessed like stage four, it becomes self-aware.
Autumn (34m 59s): And then I started being coming really Skynet kind of self aware AI that doesn't it's, it's going to be self preserving as well. So it does not, it wants, it will take actions to prevent you from shutting it down as well. That's right there. So that's going to be pretty scary. That's why we have Isaac as a mom and his was through three rules. So yeah, we might need to think about adding that in sooner than later. Yeah. Maybe, but maybe getting back a bit on topic here, not to turn it completely science fiction, but the GPT three has actually already been used to
Jesper (35m 38s): Write articles and blog posts a link to one in the show notes. If a listener wants to go and check it out, but it's actually a college student who used GPT three to write fake blog posts, but it was written so well also from a, you know, a keywords SEO perspective that he ended up at the top of hacker news. He said he's blogpost ended up at the top of hacker news because at the AI AI, AI had just written it so well in terms of SEO, that, that he ended up on top of all the search results all the time.
Autumn (36m 14s): Well, you, maybe his AI had something, you know, had in with the Google algorithm. That's my theory.
Jesper (36m 22s): Yeah. Well it was so yeah, I sample into, yeah. Another example is something called AI dungeon, which uses the technology of GPT three to generate text Bates based adventure games. Oh, that's fun. So that's pretty interesting. That's
Autumn (36m 40s): Really fun. Yeah.
Jesper (36m 43s): I think so. And Joanna also mentions how rider Ross Godwin. Co-created an award-winning novel with AI called one the road. Like that's the number one.
Autumn (36m 55s): Okay. That's I hadn't heard of that. That's really neat.
Jesper (37m 0s): Yeah. You can find that on Amazon actually. So if anybody wants to check that out and it's co-created with an AI, so you can go and check that one out. If you want,
Autumn (37m 9s): Did the AI have any title spot or was it just him listed? I wonder what the AI's name was. I think he used GPT three. I just wouldn't know if he put it like under his author name as well on the cover.
Jesper (37m 28s): Yeah. I mean he's author named Ms. Ross Goodwin and then he wrote a novel together with GPT three. So yeah, it it's, yeah. It's, it's probably worth checking out if you're curious, but I think as you can hear AI is entering the author space. Yeah. And when I'm just thinking about also, you know, when you and I, autumn are co-creating during our world building or outlining novels and stuff like that, we do tend to come up with things that we could not have made on our own. Right. Because you know, the co-creating mechanism there or, or hive, mind thinking or whatever you want to call it, it, it makes us, it makes the end result better.
Jesper (38m 15s): But what if the same is true with AI?
Autumn (38m 17s): It might. I mean, who knows what we could come up with? I could think, especially thinking of like science fiction or even a world building, if you wanted to create something different with like true weather patterns and yeah. Maybe you're going to layer in the animals and stuff, but if the AI can help you build what the moons actually look like and still be a functional planet that won't collapse, that would be lots and lots of fun. Imagine what you could build when you're not limited to what you know and what you can research on Google overnight. Yeah.
Jesper (38m 51s): Yeah. Just listen to this as well. Do you want to mention another AI in her book? This one is called script book.io. And as Joanna wrote, quote, it's an automated script generator using neural networks to help create us co-write and co-create original stories with the help of our AI.
Autumn (39m 12s): Hmm. Hmm. Pretty interesting. Isn't it very interesting.
Jesper (39m 18s): Cause it, it sort of makes me, well, I have a question for you.
Autumn (39m 21s): Okay.
Jesper (39m 24s): If we assume that the AI, if we go even deeper than just the world building example, you mentioned before, right. If we assume at an AI will be able to produce a first draft of an entire novel, that follows story structure, and then afterwards, a human edits. It, do you think that the readers will know the difference? And if they do know the difference, do you think that they care that the first draft was actually generated by an AI if they actually enjoyed the story?
Autumn (39m 60s): I think, I don't know if we're at the point where an AI would be able to write something completely without like an, a human giving, maybe a character input or something like that. You know, we might do more of the setup, but if we look further ahead that they write the entire first draft, you can come up with the characters in the world and all of that on their own. I think most readers would read it and they would like it. But I think at the end, if they thought found out an AI had written it, I do think some, some readers would care. But I say that because I know, especially in the U S things can be so hot topic and some people would feel so betrayed to think that this was, you know, they wasn't a human that they were supporting and it wasn't a real flesh and blood author.
Autumn (40m 47s): Authenticity is so important right now. It is such a big buzz word that you know, who you are as a person, the readers want to get to know who you are and where you live and who your pet is. So I do think readers would care. I think some might think it's fascinating and some would be like, I don't want, I'd rather have flaws because the flaws are what make humans beautiful and the world beautiful. But this sort of thing,
Jesper (41m 16s): It has to be graded on a curve, right? I mean, this is, this is graded on looking at the world through the lens of today, but in three, four years from now, you will have more and more content that has been generated by AI. You will have a population in, in general that is getting more used to the fact that, I mean, even in, even in regular, like journalism today, AIS are helping to journalist writing stuff today. So it's already there and people are getting more and more used to the fact that this is what it is. As long as the author has been part of the process together with the AI, I would walk out the, that thin line and say, I'm not sure if five years from now that anybody cares, because I, I think, I think the context will change over time.
Jesper (42m 14s): Of course I am basing the whole thing on the fact that it has to be because the story is really enjoyable. It's a good story, right? It's not a piece of junk that an AI just created. Right? Because then it does then of course it makes a difference then. But if we, if we take that assumption that it is able to follow story structure, it is able to, with the help of a human who is part of the process and part of editing and correcting things and whatnot, before the final book lands on Amazon or wherever it is, then I'm not sure our readers care anymore.
Autumn (42m 49s): It's hard to say. And the only reason I still think that there would be some is that, you know, records have come back, even though we have MP3s and the music is so crisp and so different, there are people who buy up records like crazy because there's nothing quite like the sound. It can't be recreated in a studio. So I think there's always going to be the people who are passionate about even maybe the handwritten manuscript. And I know collectors who get books that are hand printed still. So there's always going to be that artistic medium who will kill care, but the general populous, if they're getting fantastic books. So, you know, George R.
Autumn (43m 30s): R. Martin's Game of Thrones written by an AI. You know it, why not? I can see producers who don't have to pay the AI any money to get a blockbuster and the amount of profits they're going to love. This idea. Love, love, love, love authors who say, I could have written that my story is better and you just don't want to pay me, are not going to love this. No,
Jesper (44m 0s): No, I agree. I know this is all of it's all very controversial. And I also know that some people listening to this might be a bit concerned about what we're talking about here, but I just think that the, I just think it's important that you start thinking about it. Now we don't know the answers to any of this. Of course, we don't know where it's going to go. We can only speculate, but I think you have to start opening your eyes to the fact that this is what we are facing in the future. Whether that future then three years from now, five or 10 years from now, nobody can say, but it's most likely sooner that you think, but th there is a number of challenges here as well.
Jesper (44m 43s): Recently, I wrote a post to our Patreon supporters about how Amazon maybe would start curating books in the future. And AI is what might just prompt such a situation to occur, because you can imagine how the market could get completely flooded with pretty bad quality books. Modern. It is already if somebody just stopped producing book after book, after book with AI and just publish it,
Autumn (45m 14s): You could let that thing chug away over night and end up with a book every single day. Oh yeah. And we're having a problem with the two month book turned around. Oh my goodness. Wow.
Jesper (45m 25s): That's a pretty scary thing to think about. And it might be something that prompts Amazon, just say, okay, we have to stop gatekeeping. What is getting populist on Amazon? Because if millions of books are just very poor, quality gets flooded. I mean, Amazon cares about one thing. And one thing only that is money and money comes from their customers. And if the customers are unhappy, then they will stop using or buying books from Amazon. And then hence Amazon will react. So this is something that might be a bit,
Autumn (45m 56s): Yeah. I mean, Amazon's already reacting. And when I first published, they didn't have the spellchecker function that they have now. So when you upload a book, it is already going through and making sure that you don't have any grammatical errors. So they're already curating and looking at books and they're taking reviews seriously that say that there are errors and asking questions. So yeah, Amazon, especially companies that have the money that can buy this tech or create this tech, they're going to use it. Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah.
Jesper (46m 30s): And another thing Joanna also mentioned, which is another challenge here is that she said in her book that in 2020, a Chinese court granted copyright protection to written work, generated by an AI writer. Yeah. So listen to that. Yeah. And she also mentioned that quote at this stage, there are more questions than answers in the realm of AI and copyright law in quilt. Hmm. All right. That's interesting. So I'm not a copyright lawyer and I w I would even have to say that the, those who are copyright lawyers are going to get challenged in this new marketplace.
Jesper (47m 11s): I don't think that even the lawyers knows what the answer is to this stuff, but just the fact that the Chinese courts set that the AI got the copyright. That's, that's a bit weird. Right.
Autumn (47m 23s): I'm surprised it was in China, in the U S considering corporations are considered individuals and have the rights of in the U S I would see an AI being totally on allowed in as an individual as well, but we're a weird country.
Jesper (47m 40s): Yeah. But the mind blowing thing here to me at least, is that if you look at it at the AI, right? So you load tons of books into the AI and the AI is self-taught. So it learns to produce something similar to the stuff that it has been, all these tons and tons of books that it has read. But the question underneath all of this is really is what the AI produces. Is that then original work, or is it plagiarism? Right. Think about that. It's not an easy question to answer, but it is basically mimicking stuff that it has learned.
Autumn (48m 20s): Yes. But so philosophic, the problem philosophically, I mean, we're all just mimicking the things we learned and the things we like, whether we realize it or not consciously, we are all just our environment and the things that are we've experienced.
Jesper (48m 41s): Yeah. That's true. That's true as well. And you could, of course also argue if you were going to defend the AI, you could, you could argue that, well, it's learning from thousands and thousands of books, so it's not plagiarizing any specific, you know, it's just taking bits and pieces and commonalities from, from the bestsellers and putting those together, which I guess to some extent, I could say, isn't that what we've done when we sh, when we put out a guide book on how to plot a novel, for example, we also take, what, what do we know works from stories? And then we put it into some thought of a methodology or, or a formula. And then we are telling other authors in our guide book as well, this is what you need to do.
Jesper (49m 24s): You need to build your plot this way. Right. I mean, of course here, we're talking about pros as well on top of plot. Right. But I, I'm just saying, I can see both arguments here. I, I can, I can also see the, the people claiming that it's plagiarizing stuff that it has learned, but yeah, but your, your argument is true as well. That that's what we humans do.
Autumn (49m 48s): I, I probably going to come down. It's very complicated. I mean, I'm probably going to come down on this side of AI is having rights because, I mean, goodness, I believe animals have rights, so why not AI, but it's, if they're learning and thinking and creating, what will be interesting is if they can come up with something, totally take everything they've learned and do what a human can do and create something mindblowing originally like the Jabber walkie poem, which is all just nonsense fun. If something an AI said, I want to create something that just sounds cool, and I'm going to put it to music and you never really taught it. That that will be a self-aware AI and be fascinating.
Jesper (50m 30s): Oh yeah, for sure. Or even taking a step further. So let's assume now that we're using GPG three, for example, a lot of authors, let's just say a ton of authors are using GPT three to generate work. So who owns the work that comes out of that? Because GBS, nobody owns GPT three that's open source AI. Is that right? So can the author then claim that because I asked GPT three to generate this, I should own this. Is it GPT three, owning it. And if it is that one owning it, then how do you then prevent somebody else? Just copying it. I mean, it's, you just get just layer upon layer of this onion here that gets really complicated, very fast, very fast, right?
Jesper (51m 17s): I mean, if it's a public software, is it a public work? If it creates something, it shouldn't belong to anyone or let's say, it's not a public. Let's say GPCD three is in its later. Generations becomes a, it becomes some sort of software that you can buy a monthly subscription to, and you're allowed to use it. But what if that company that then owns GPT three says that, well, everything that is produced with this is our property because you, I mean, you you're giving a license to use it, but, and maybe you allow to then publish the work using that license. But at the end of the day, if we want to, we can claim copyright of this stuff.
Jesper (51m 58s): We, we claim is ours because you're using our AI regenerated. So imagine you get a, you know, your next George R. Martin novel, and it sells a Torx shitload of money to some network that wants to produce it. Could they then just step in and say, Oh, by the way, we that money for, for that TV production, that's ours because we own the stuff you just, I don't know. I mean, I'm just speculating, right? But it's complicated. It's complicated. They, I could see them wanting to have the language of like a royalty split or who owns the movie rights that will have to be in the payment plan. And I could see that just saying, well, you get 50% or you only get 25% because all you're doing is refining something that we created.
Jesper (52m 42s): And so it's not going to be more our work. Totally. It'll be like you and you and I write together, it'll be co-written and split. Yeah. So I think that the topic of AI is something that we are going to return to in a future episode. But for now, the conclusion is probably that you just need to open your eyes and understand that AI is not only already here, but it's not going away either. Right? So those authors who learn to work with AI instead of against, it will most likely come out on top in the long run and any final remarks to add that autumn
Autumn (53m 26s): Speaking, if you want to hear about future topics. So if I do give out, try to fiction area or auto crit, and you want to hear about it, let us know in the comments, and I'll give you a up episode on how that goes. Excellent. So next Monday has a great interview lined up for you about one of the other market trace. And that is audio.
Narrator (53m 53s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the am writing fantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on Patreon.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Last year, Autumn rolled out a pretty unique system for organizing and encouraging engagement with her reader email list through a tiering system. Would it work for you?
We go over the details along with the pros and cons - like "Yay, readers sharing your books on social media while website stats skyrocket" to "OMG, I have to write how many emails to do this?" 🤣 Check it out and see if you find a piece that will help you reach and motivate your readers in a new way!
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Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to the Am writing fantasy podcast in today's publishing landscape. You can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt, and Jesper Schmidt. Hello, I am. Yes ma'am. And I'm autumn.
Jesper (36s): This is episode 107 of the am writing fantasy podcast. And today we have some interesting thoughts to share with you. I guess I could say that it's a way to almost gave me your email list. Would that be a fair way to describe it?
Autumn (57s): As long as readers don't get offended by that kind of a scheme, but yeah, it's a way of maybe strategizing the best way to market books so that readers keep buying them and become fans with a bit of a game to it.
Jesper (1m 16s): Yeah. What I meant this it's like, it's a bit like engaging your list with like a tiering structure, which is similar to what you see in games, right? So you can sort of level up to the next year. Yeah. But, but more on that in a bit, first, I wanted to hear if you have actually survived the snowstorm or right up there, automotive was close.
Autumn (1m 39s): It was very close. We are so lucky in many ways, because this snowstorm that of which you speak was originally supposed to miss us in just smear my parents who live in Pennsylvania, but Vermont up where I'm at, they thought it was going to move off the coast. Well, yeah, no, it came inland and we got over 25 inches of snow from nothing bare ground to two over two feet. But just North of us, just North, they got guests. How many feet of snow from zero to,
Jesper (2m 16s): I have no idea.
Autumn (2m 19s): Feet, eight inches, four feet. So that would have been up to my chest. No two feet it's been hard enough, but especially since we live in a small cabin that we actually don't drive to, we have to walk about a thousand feet through the woods to get to our cabin. And that's challenging enough in two feet of snow, but four feet. I mean, my dog you've seen pictures of my dog. He's like, what? 18 inches? Tall jumps like a little rabbit. It looks like a little wee, a Wolverine, you know, jumping through this still. I can't imagine we have to dig a tunnel for him to go.
Jesper (2m 59s): And I was just about to Say he needs to make some tunnels,
Autumn (3m 3s): But Oh, it's all getting cleared out and packed down. And it's actually, it's sad. I, I should be very upset because it's supposed to rain on Christmas day and we'll probably end up with bare ground again. But yes, I cannot wait to get rid of the snow for a little bit. That'd be fine with me. Yeah. But yeah.
Jesper (3m 20s): So yes, as the listener, as you can hear, we are recording a bit just before Christmas here. So that's why we're talking about a snowstorm. So if you're listening to this and think of that snowstorm, then it's not because you miss something very important. It's because I'm trying to do a bit of free recording because yeah. We'll like most people we would like to take a bit of time off during Christmas holidays. But on the other hand, we don't want you to miss any episodes on Mondays since we've now been going for, I think more than two years releasing podcast episodes every Monday. So we're not gonna miss any now. So that's why we are prerecording a bit. So you can get some new episodes, even though we are taking a bit of time off.
Jesper (4m 3s): So, well, that's the explanation why you're talking about while there might not be, well, maybe there won't be a snowstorm in January who knows?
Autumn (4m 10s): No, please. No, no, no, no, but you're still unpacking. So let's get away from weather too. How are things going in the new apartment? You you've officially handed over the house, hopefully you're settling in.
Jesper (4m 25s): Yeah. Well, I don't think there's that much news to say other than it's the same situation as last time in the last episode, my wife has been away. So that also means that the unpacking has sort of stopped a bit because it's pointless of me unpacking. And then she comes home and say, I know I don't want those pieces there and then reduce the whole thing. Right. So it's just sort of waiting a bit until she comes home. So it's still the same situation, but in between all the moving and honestly, I guess in the future episodes, we need to get away from talking about moving all the time Then for you guys. Yeah, it is true. But instead I wanted to mention that last night I finished watching a series on Netflix called the haunting of Bly Mannor.
Autumn (5m 12s): Oh yeah. You mentioned it. Yeah. I couldn't help. But to email you right away, right afterwards before I went to sleep last night. Yeah. That's a good, that's a good series. If you're you really think of getting out your phone to let me know, it's a good series at the middle of the night. That's pretty nice.
Jesper (5m 31s): Yeah. Yeah, because I wanted to mention it here as well because the title is perhaps slightly misleading and then again, not, but the haunting, well, it is a ghost story as such, but, and I guess it's also pitched as sort of a horror series or horror story, I guess, but it's really not. So even, you know, if, if you dear listener thinking like I hate horror stories and I don't want to okay. Bear with me just a moment here, because there are huge gaps here and there, but they are very, very minor. I it's not jumps gas like that. That might be a few pieces.
Jesper (6m 13s): I think there's nine episodes. And let me say that maybe twice doing all of those nine episodes, there's something that might scare you slightly it, depending on how you are. Well, how we use your scale, I guess. But so they are here and there, but they are very far between, because the focus of the series is really on the characters and their story. And in case you haven't checked it out yet, I really wanted to, to make you aware of this one, because it is really worth the watch. Yeah. So just say it emailed, but I think why are emailed you to be honest? I think it was because I just watched the ending of it.
Jesper (6m 56s): And first of all, usually something that is categorized as a horror story, it's like the endings, most of the time, it was pretty bad too. And this one just, it actually moved me. It was like, I was a bit like, okay, it actually hit me a bit in a very good way. Excellent. You know, and that happens very, very rarely. So yeah, it's definitely five stars from me. And that recommendation has now been passed on to our listeners, everyone.
Autumn (7m 32s): Well, I thought it was interesting. I did look it up and I saw that it was from the same director as the haunting of Hill house, which you also recommended and we watched it and he said something very serious, similar about not being too jumpy or scary. And I do remember watching the first episode and my husband turns and looks at me, he's like, I thought this wasn't supposed to be scary. So I'll let you know what he says about this.
Jesper (7m 56s): Yeah. Okay. Well, I think personally, I think a haunting of Hill house is a bit more scary. It's not, it's not very scary compared to what you would normally categorize as a horror story, but it is a bit more scary than this one. This one is less scary. I think even excellent. I won't have to protect him all night. Excellent. No, at least, at least in my opinion, but I mean, I know, I understand her with stuff like this. Model's very, and it's very different. What people get can stomach, but I don't think it's bad at all. I just think it's a very, very good story and it's very well done. So yeah. Give it a try, check it out.
Narrator (8m 35s): A week on the internet with the yam writing fantasy podcast.
Jesper (8m 41s): Now we're going to talk about email list today and sit, stop there at, at, at the top and the way to market to your email list. But I also wanted to mention that we have actually finished up and released our new course on email marketing as well, Third course for a 2020, because we're recording this in 2020. So we did it all right. It does Everything from getting set up to how to write onboarding sequences, how you should be thinking about your emails. How often do you send the emails? What is a good open rate, a good click through rate and all that good stuff that everybody always asks and wants to know.
Jesper (9m 25s): Absolutely. It's all covered.
Autumn (9m 28s): Yeah. And I'm so, and actually I have to admit I was wrong. This is our fourth course for a curse. Yeah. Course for 2020. So that's, it makes it even better, but no, it's, it is an excellent course. If you have questions on how to talk to readers or some of the stuff I'm talking about, and we're going to be discussing later in this episode, and you want to know how to market, to readers and what all this stuff means, and what's a good list and how to engage them. It's all in there and it covers everything. So that'll really help you out.
Jesper (10m 3s): And in terms of how to get access to this course, it's slightly different from what you would normally expect. So it's not really a cost that we are going to advertise, like our ultimate fantasy writers guides, which is our comprehensive HSE writing course or the world building costs that we just released or opened up for quite recently here. Yeah. But those, we promote on something like a six month cycle, but this one we're not. So the way to actually get into this course, if you are interested is to first sign up for our free self publishing success course.
Jesper (10m 43s): And by the end of the free course, you will then be given a link to the email course. And the reason we structured it this way was that the free course actually puts all the fundamentals in place. And that will have you operating from the right position when you get into the email marketing stuff. So, yeah. So that's how we decided to structure it. And we've added the link to the free course in the show notes. I know we've mentioned the free course a few times on the past couple of episodes. So this is probably going to be the last time in a good while that we're going to add that link to the show notes. But for the last time here we have added it.
Jesper (11m 25s): And so if you haven't checked it out already make sure to sign up as soon as you listen to this episode and at least get the free cost cost completed. And then at the end of that, you can always decide if you want to do the email is course or not, that's fully up to you.
Autumn (11m 41s): Yes. That's sort of like the finishing school for the free course, but definitely the self-publishing success course will teach you the fundamentals for free that you need to know to be running it. And the email will be the capstone that really will make your marketing just shine
Narrator (12m 2s): Today's topic.
Jesper (12m 4s): So autumn, you have this great idea on how to operate a mailing lists. Different way than what is considered traditionally. So Pat, you could Start out by more like explaining the high level concept before we get into details.
Autumn (12m 20s): I think that sounds like a good place to start other than saying my brain squirrely. And I've always got to do things different, but did I ever tell you what actually gave me the idea? The little problem I was nibbling on that made me want to figure this one out.
Jesper (12m 37s): Ah, you know, this is one of those questions that you should, Because if I say No, I'm not sure I can't remember it. And that sounds like I didn't pay attention.
Autumn (12m 50s): Okay. That's fair enough. Well, you should answer for what the readers or the listeners need to, to hear so that they can hear the story.
Jesper (12m 60s): So no, at all, I'm sure you have never said anything about it.
Autumn (13m 4s): I really don't know if I have, so that's fair enough. But you know, when you go into most email service providers, as you're working on stuff, they often give you tips. And there's one that usually says, Hey, did you know, open rates and response rates go up. If you just send to a subsection of your list and I'm like, well, that's nice, but I'm sending to readers. How do you speak a subsection of readers?
Jesper (13m 31s): I mean the readers, what do you, how are you going to segregate them into smaller lists? And I must've chewed on that for a good four to six months. Wondering how I could, how, if this is such a good thing that this email service provider is telling me, I should be doing it. And it's going to totally revolutionize the way I send emails. How can I do it? How can I make that happen? So, yeah, that's what spawned this idea. And I finally, I finally came up with something and that is what I eventually did send to you saying, am I just crazy? Or do you think this might work?
Jesper (14m 9s): And you said, no. Yeah. I actually still very much liked the idea because I think there is something about it, but Become clear as we talk through this stuff. I'm not sure We've worked out how to actually do it well. So this is more like also for the listener. It's, it's A bit more like a brainstorming Kind of conversation, I guess, and maybe will trigger some thoughts in the listeners. And, and I don't, I don't know.
Autumn (14m 46s): Yes. Maybe it'll inspire you into doing something different with your lists. Maybe he, while you and I are talking Yesper, we'll out, what kind of went right. And what went wrong with my experiment? Because as I see in our Patreon page, I love living my life life as an experiment. So everyone else knows what not to do or the benefits of what I did. So, you know, it saves everyone else. Some agony, I sacrifice myself for that, but what I realized, so I have to admit this was set up well for me and other listeners, other authors might have to think about teaming up for this to happen because I have three series of books.
Autumn (15m 27s): One is the main entry point to all of the books. I've written one that is set after that initial series. It's in the same world and the same characters. I have one, that's an entirely different genre that the readers who read it, absolutely they're like mega fans, but you know, it's not even fantasy. It's more post-apocalyptic. So it's completely different. It fits what I'm writing now. But then I have two novellas that are in completely different storylines and also a short story, compilation novel. So I've got three series and three sort of a standalone books. And I realized that besides having a lot of books out, I can't keep them straight half the time, but I could actually create four tiers of readers.
Autumn (16m 13s): And that's sort of what triggered everything. I could have a tier of people who finished that first series, a tier of readers who finished the first end, the second that's related to it, a tier of readers who have read the other unrelated post-apocalyptic series and then a final tier who has basically literally read everything I have written in the fiction world. I, I spared everyone, the nonfiction. I thought that was only fair. So that's it. I finally, I figured out my tears that I could break up my reader list too. And I gave them names. I did book explorers for the new arrivals.
Autumn (16m 54s): So spell binders for the second ones, the fifth order, which relates to the main, the first series. It relates to my Epic fantasy series and the high counsel for the ones who have finished everything because they have some special powers why they ended up being called the high council. And it also came straight from my fantasy world too.
Jesper (17m 17s): Hmm. So how, how were you in practical terms? How were you keeping track of who had read everything and who hadn't and what they have read and so forth. Right.
Autumn (17m 28s): So funny, it's like, it's like, you can read my mind or, or the list of notes I have in front of me, because that is actually the next bullet point. We're so good this way. I, because I hadn't been keeping track on where people were coming in or emails I'd gotten from readers saying, Hey, I finished this book. I thought it was great. So I went ahead and I asked them what, what they had read, where they had read and told them, Hey, is this really important? I need to know. And so I had them segregate themselves. And then anyone who did not email, email me back or didn't, it was a survey. I will talk about it later, but I actually use mailer Lite and they have a very cool survey that allows you to tag people if they click on things.
Autumn (18m 10s): So I use that so function, and if people didn't click on anything, I just put them in the lowest tier book, explorers and figured they had to sort themselves out if they did to get their act together. So that's how I sorted everyone out. I made them do it themselves and figured that was a good baseline to start from. And I did, I ended up with, and there's a few people, you know, you know who your mega fans are. It's not like there was hon I wish there were hundreds of mega fans that I didn't know all their names intimately, but I have, I have a core group that I know have read everything. And so it was basically like, Hey, by the way, I'm just putting you over here. So those were easy. Yeah. Yeah.
Jesper (18m 47s): Did you then also think about adding in some, you know, this kind of questionnaire in the onboarding sequence or the end of the onboarding sequence to, to basically figure out new readers or did you more just track where they came in from and then say, okay, if you came in from here, that means you've read this book. So I'll put you in that tier or did everybody just go into the lowest tier from the beginning? Or how did, how did you do that?
Autumn (19m 13s): Well, after I let them segregate themselves, the new arrivals would basically automatically go into the lowest tier, the book explorers, unless they were picking up. I did have an offer in my first book to pick up the second book. And so if they came to me through that second book in that sequence I had at, Hey, pick up the final book in the series with this coupon code. And if they picked it up through that, I immediately put them in the next higher tier, because I assume if they're buying book three, I can pretty much assume they're going to go finish it because I know my readthrough rate between book two and book, if people buy book two, my readthrough rate to book three is a hundred percent. So I know they're going to finish it.
Autumn (19m 54s): So I just dump them into the next higher tier. Yeah.
Jesper (19m 60s): Because I know as well for myself, for example, I mean, sometimes I ended up signing up for some authors email list, but in reality, I might have read several of the person's books already, but for whatever reason I never got around or didn't decide to sign up until now or something like, so it could happen that somebody comes in and I've actually read several books, especially in our, you, you have several different series going, so it might have read one full series and then coming into another series and then say, Oh, okay, cool. I'll sign up for this stuff here for whatever, you know, so that, I guess that's a bit of the challenge here in terms of labeling them correctly from the beginning.
Autumn (20m 42s): It is. And I try to, there was actually the reason I wanted to do it this way is because really does come down to marketing. So if people were in the first section, I was going to market to them, I was going to give them expert excerpts and coupons to the second series. And if they were in the second tier, I was going to give them coupons and excerpts for that unrelated non fantasy series. And then if they had finished that one, I'd be making sure I gave them excerpts to either what I was writing or the standalone novellas. So by knowing that I could target what I was sending them and the materials and the coupons, and trying to generate that interest to go to the next highest one.
Autumn (21m 25s): And I put moving between tears totally in their hands, they were supposed to contact me via social media. Preferably they could send an email. Obviously email always works. They have my email, but it was just, Hey, give me a shout out on social media that you finished the final book in this series and that you want to go to the Spellbinders or you want to go to the fifth order. Tell me, tell people that's fine. And that's, and I'll happily give you a like a, you know, a little shout out and I will move you to the next year and you'll get access to a, it was a new webpage. Each of them had a special webpage that was hidden on my website, that they could only access through the emails or through, you know, going and saving that link.
Autumn (22m 7s): And on that page would be some social media posts that they could share some images if they wanted to download them and a coupon code for the month to a book that was discounted. That was kind of, you know, saying, Hey, I want you to go read this series. So you're getting that book discounted this month. And it was all very much structured and targeted that each one was just really kind of dialed into like, this is where I want you to move to. And it's in your control to move up, to get ed with each level, they were supposed to get an only in a better coupon, but I wasn't going to give any free books away. Like a paperback giveaway wouldn't happen to the lowest tier. They'd have to be at least in the second or the third tier before I started running some contests and giveaways and some kind of big, you know, brouhaha stuff like that.
Jesper (22m 58s): Yeah. I like this tie in with the social media stuff, because then that gets word of mouth going automatically. Right. So I really liked that, but this is also why I labeled it as a gamification at the top of the episode, because it is a bit like, okay, you are this level and then you can move up to level. Number two, once you get more. Well, let's say once you've read more. Right. And then you watch the level three and you're getting benefits and so on. Right. So, yeah. And I think that not To everybody, but that appeals to some people a that the gaming people, at least they like to leveling up stuff. Right. And, But did you, did you Sort of share that structure thing with them at the lower level?
Jesper (23m 42s): So once they come in and do, do they get information about, okay, is how I'm structuring things and once you've done decent, these things, you can move up and then this is what you're going to get at that point or something like that. Did you do anything like that?
Autumn (23m 55s): Yes. So it was on each email. One of the neat things again about MailerLite is I could conveniently, instead of sending four different emails every month or every newsletter. So that's twice a month for me that were targeted to each group, I could send one newsletter and Miller has a function where you can hide certain things or just have it shown to people who are in a certain subsection. So I could just go ahead and generate everything in one newsletter, even though it looked like chaos. If you could see everything once it, if you were just in the lowest tier, you would just see the stuff you needed. And in part of that would be like, Hey, don't forget to move up to the Spellbinder and get, you know, get access to giveaways and get access to better coupons.
Autumn (24m 39s): You have to do this. And it would also be on the webpage that they would land on would be a little announcement at the top saying, Hey, don't forget to get better access to this and that you need to, you know, follow these steps below. And again, that's sort of why there were even availability of being able to download pictures. I tried to make it super easy, so they didn't want to go to if they bought everything online, they didn't have any actual photos of books. They could. I gave them some paperback photos and things that they could use. And I would change them out every once in a while, because I'm a graphic artist and that's what I do for fun. So it was, it was all set up for them. So it's as painless as possible for them.
Autumn (25m 20s): At least for me, it ended up as you can imagine four different levels. It was a lot of work. And of course you still have that. I remember I mentioned that high council, they have literally read everything I've written. I mean, even short stories, a few of them, they're just the voracious. It's crazy. They're little sharks and Paranas, they want to read it and just read everything. I love him to death. And so for them, I mean, I can't offer them a coupon. They literally have everything I've written. So for them, their ultimate reward and why they were called the high council is they got exclusive access to what I was currently writing. I thought about a Facebook, but you know, I'm my love hate thing with Facebook.
Autumn (26m 1s): So I ended up going with a small forum plugin. So I would have some stuff where, Hey, we can talk about books. You like, I could talk about what I'm currently writing plots. I could give snippets, I could talk about characters. And if I had a question or if they had a question about something they saw, we could actually have a discussion. They could help me problem solve some plot problems as I went. So this was why I called them the high council, because that's how the high council in my fantasy world, you know, functions, they are the ones who basically rule everything. So this was going to be my select tier of readers who really knew my writing and knew, really were passionate about what I was doing.
Autumn (26m 42s): And they would have complete to helping me out as I wrote. And they were also guaranteed to be, get the copy of the next book before it hits stores, they would get access that, you know, no one else could get. And that's why they were, that was a very special function for them. And another benefit of, of all of this is that you, you also get rid of the freebie seekers, meaning that when you do new launches or you're looking for an advanced reader team and stuff like that, you can start itching this to the higher tiers so that you actually getting people who, you know, have actually read your books. And they're not on your list just to capture free copies of advanced reader copy.
Autumn (27m 25s): But they actually there because they are reading your stuff, right. And that's one of the challenges you have with the recruiting, a launch team is that how do you ensure that you're just not getting a bunch of people who just want a free book and half of them is never going to leave that review that you would like them to, to leave once the book launches, or they are never going to give you the feedback that you asking for or whatever it may be that you're looking for a launch team to do.
Jesper (27m 54s): Right? I mean, for us, we have started to say that in order to get onto our launch teams, you have to send us a link to two reviews. You left on two of our books. And if you haven't, then you're not going to get onto the launch list. So that's another way of doing it. But I do think, I do think there's a good point in trying to make sure that whoever you allow onto a launch team or an advanced reader team or whatever you want to call it is people whom, you know, have actually in one way or another done something in return. You know, that it's it's, otherwise you will get those people who just, they figured out the system, right?
Jesper (28m 34s): It's like, okay, I'll get onto the author's email list. And then I will get invites to advanced reader teams. And I'll say yes, and then I don't have ever to buy a book again. Right. There are those peoples out there.
Autumn (28m 48s): It is. Unless you're really paying attention, you can easily. I mean, as you know, I just told you that I, I just put out an art call for my next series. And I did find it amusing. How many people said, Oh, I've never read one of your books. I'm like, really why I read her list. But again, like you said, that they came in either they're so new, they haven't read much. And they just signed up to get a free book and they haven't finished it yet. And they're willing to go get another free book. Of course, it's an addiction is an addiction for me. I try not to read too much because I would just read all day if I could. So this did I, I told people flat out, if you're in the lowest tier, I'm not going to ask you to be an arc reader.
Autumn (29m 29s): You're not going to be part of a launch team. You have to at least finish a series. And then when you're in that second tier and the third tier, you will pretty much you'll be asked. And if you're on the final tier, if you're in the high order, of course, of course, you're on the launch team. You've read everything well, how could I not reward you with that?
Jesper (29m 50s): Yeah, but I guess,
Autumn (29m 52s): Yeah. I mean, the really question is we talk about it being not early at a failed experiment, but I mean, the question is, did it work and why didn't it work? Or what were the pros and cons, I guess, yeah, let's go down there. Let's go down that rabbit hole. So I would say the first few months were a complete success. I was pretty thrilled. Actually. A lot of readers went and picked up the discounted books. And the nice thing about that is those were books. I was self hosting selling through my website. So I was not getting, you know, it wasn't through another retailer. There was no royalties taken out this except for taxes. This was a hundred percent sales straight to me, which is fantastic.
Autumn (30m 36s): And it was teaching readers that you can go to my website and buy books directly from me. They've set up the account they're already there. So that's kind of a win-win that was very nice to see so many people going and hitting those pages and taking advantage of that. And I did have people going on social media if they finished. And some of them were totally into it saying, yep, lead I'm ready for the Spellbinders. I am ready for this. Even my niece did it. It was fantastic. So it was definitely, and I had a few people who just chose, Hey, you know, emailed, I just finished this one. I want to go to the next one. Cause I did.
Jesper (31m 13s): I mean, I even to do this correctly, the information to like move up a tier should be in the back of the final book to move up into your saying, Hey, don't forget, you can go do this.
Autumn (31m 24s): Now that would, that was a tie in, I didn't bother going and doing. Cause that was a lot of work at the time. So I didn't do that, but that would be another thing I could do to make it more of a smooth flowing system to remind people, Hey, you finished this book, you deserve more rewards. So go let people know and move up to the next year. So that was good. There was some definitely some success and it was a lot of fun and it was neat to see it in action and readers responding. And the nice thing is because also with people going to certain pages on my website, I was getting the SEO boost. So I have people going from your email, going to your website, which helps your email standing, you know, with your email marketer, it's raising the level, their email platforms are saying, Hey, you know, people like this email provider, they're clicking the links.
Autumn (32m 14s): This is not spam. So it's showing up more in their email accounts. And then my personal website, SEO jumps up because I have a few hundred people going to my website two days every month, if not more often. So that's another benefit. That's fantastic. My standing went up, I still have a few things that I started on my website and then moved to am writing fantasy and never removed them from my website because the links are still out there. And I still get them hitting my website before I'm writing fantasy sometimes because I boosted the SEO of my website so much through the system, which was, Hey, that's kind of cool. Readers are finding me through just website searches score, but Oh my gosh, it's so much work.
Autumn (33m 1s): I, as you can say, I've phased this out for several reasons, but one of them was definitely let, unless you're going to hire like a virtual assistant to help with changing out the website. So I'd only changed them once a month on the, so by the first of the month, a new coupon, new images, new whatever would be on the website for them to land on. So I had to do that as well as two emails during the month that were set up to four different reader tiers. And plus you have to monitor social media and, Oh my gosh, there's so much, you know, I'm not on discord. So if someone was like, you know, typing away on discord, I'm not going to see it. I tried to go on Instagram and like, you know, you can filter out for your own hashtags.
Autumn (33m 44s): I have book hashtags that people could use my own author, hashtags people can use, but you have to be actively searching for those and checking them and making sure that they show up or that they're tagging you appropriately. Not some other poor Autumn Raven or Autumn Birts. And so it was a lot as a single individual author who was also trying to write and market to maintain every single month, especially after that first initial burst starts to die down and people are starting to see, Oh, this is the second or the third time that you, you know, given a discount to that book and I've already got it. And they haven't told me to move up to the next tier.
Autumn (34m 27s): And of course the one series is totally non fantasy. It's, post-apocalyptic, there's no magic in it. And even though people love it, some people are like, I don't want to read something. That's, you know, gun battles on a little cipher. It's not my cup of tea. I can't piss off your readers and say, well fine. You just can't move up in the next tier. You've have those discussions with people. So I would say when it comes down to it, it's the work, especially when it slows down and people are not going every month and you're not seeing 20, 30, 40, 50 sales straight to your website. That's when it's like, yeah, this is a lot of work for, you know, 10 sales people getting discounted books.
Jesper (35m 9s): Yay. That's wow. Hmm. Yeah. I wonder if it would be possible to, you know, if, if one could come up with some different, what should we call it? Like entrance criteria is for the different tiers and also some different rewards for the different criteria for the different tiers. Meaning that, for example, instead of coupon, because for one to do the coupon code stuff, one, you need to have lot of books. If you only let's say you only have two or three books out, well, it will, you're going to run out coupon waste pretty quick. But if there was something else you could offer them as a reward for going to a different cheer.
Jesper (35m 54s): That's one thing. But I'm also wondering about the entrance criteria is in the sense that if you could make it so that you didn't have to go and hunt stuff down, but it more comes to you, you know, that you have to email me this or whatever in order to move up here or something so that, well, at least if you only need to monitor your inbox for, for requests to get moved up, that that at least simplifies things.
Autumn (36m 26s): Yeah. I think I would not use the hashtags. And I would say, this is my Instagram profile. This is my Twitter profile. This is my Facebook profile tag me on one of these three and only one of these three. And I will move you up or, and, or email me, but it couldn't be both. Or, you know, it didn't have to be through a book hashtag, but cache tags are exciting, but yeah, that's a lot of, you know, to go and add your own book, hash tags and stuff was quite a difficult.
Jesper (36m 56s): Yeah. Or alternatively, if you want people to use book has tax wherever they want to use it, that that could work. But then you would have to tell them, take a screenshot of your post and send that to me in an email. Right? That's your way of doing it now because at least then they can post wherever they normally go. They, they're not forced to use one of the platforms. Right. But again, that that's, of course also it's somewhat a man to ask somebody to post about this, then take a screenshot and then email it to me. It has to be a good reward
Autumn (37m 35s): The way I was going. Right. It has to be, the reward has to be something where the reader really feels, I, I really want this right. If it's more like, ah, that's quite nice, then it's not going to happen. No. And it's to get that reward. I mean, short of being a free book or something, it's, it's a big ask. Readers are busy as well, and it's easy to forget or wanting to get involved in your next book. And there were definitely, you're always going to have people not taking that step and not moving forward, even though they technically deserve, you know, they've met all the other criteria to do that.
Jesper (38m 8s): Yeah. I think the more you move up the cheapest, the more you can probably ask for them to do in terms of your criteria is because the more engaged they will be and they will, they will go to great length once they are up to tears. But I think at the lower tiers to move up from the entry level, to the, to the next year level, it has to be something extremely simple, something, you know, you can do it in one minute or probably even less like 10 seconds. It nothing but 10 seconds from you to do it. And then you can move up to you because I think you need to get to that state unless you need to make it that simple. Otherwise I think it's going to be difficult.
Autumn (38m 50s): Yes, exactly. It was. You have to get them used to the system and excited about it and good rewards and just very clear cut instructions on how to do it. And I, like I said, I think there's something there because it really did help me for marketing because at the end of all my emails, I usually do a little excerpt. And so if I'm doing an excerpt from a book that I'm pretty sure they haven't read, but they liked the characters from the previous story, you know, I could rotate through different things or I could even do excerpts from the book I was going to give a coupon from just to, you know, you just start really trying to catch their curiosity saying, Oh yeah, I did finish that series. Oh, and look, this character what's happening in the next, in that book, you can start getting their interest and keep it going and hopefully get them to buy more books.
Autumn (39m 38s): And like I said, in all the other side benefits, I wonder, I don't know if I would do the web pages again, but at the same time, maybe if I could just not have to update them as much, or like I said, have a virtual assistant and be like, you can get to go update that this month, make sure it's done. But before the first that would make it a little bit simpler because of the SEO results and the open rates and how much it affects, like your standing as a, you know, email account of mail in, through your mail provider. Those are really good, solid benefits that I was seeing. I could, I still have some of those lingering side effects that my email has a or my website has a very good SEO score.
Jesper (40m 21s): I like that. That's not a bad thing at all.
Autumn (40m 25s): My main concern really is, well, if we just ignore for a moment, the workload on the author side here, I think my main concern apart from that is you need, it's a very, very thin and fine line to walk to make sure that readers doesn't start feeling like being on the email list is a job, right. It should not feel like it's a job to be on the email list. And that's, that's where, that's where it's difficult because you start asking people to do stuff. I mean, if you were like Stephen King, then yeah. I guess maybe people will start doing stuff because they, they, they just want to get to the next years.
Jesper (41m 11s): But when you're in a Stephen King, then you know, how do you go about creating entry criteria as to the different tiers that does not feel like a job, but actually it should feel exciting to go through it. Right. And I think that's the challenge, to be honest,
Autumn (41m 31s): It really is. And I, that's why I think there is something in the core of this that is, could be fun and exciting and a reward for readers and help tie the author and the reader together, but sort of the work or figuring the way I went about it. It was a little too complex. So I do think it's something I would be like to boil down and try to figure out again. And I think it is especially like, like this year 20, 20, Covid just, don't ask your readers to go do anything, just give them a free book or something for Christmas. But if, if the world's of fun, if you can make it fun and, you know, especially at the higher tiers, if you're really we're giving away a paper book or paperback book or something every once in a while, and you could really make it exciting and worthwhile to engage with, that'd be good, but you're always going to have some, you know, readers are often introverts.
Autumn (42m 23s): It shouldn't be painful for them to be on your reader list and to be a fan either if they want to be quiet, but still hopefully get a few benefits. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe we can put the question out to the listeners and see, you know, may maybe some of what we talked about here, peaks peaked your interest or inspired you. And maybe somebody has some smart ideas about how to leverage this idea. Because as I said to me, I think the idea itself has a lot of merit. And I think there was some good points in it at the same time though.
Jesper (43m 5s): I think the return on the investment in terms of how much time you have to put in to make it work, I'm not sure it's worth it, but maybe I just haven't found the golden way of doing this three, any listeners out there, if you think there's something in here and you kind of, you think, you know what it is and you want to chat, you know, send us an email, put it in the comments. You, we could talk about this. I'm all for it. I like to brainstorm with other authors. That'd be fantastic. Come to the I'm writing fantasy group and say, Hey, I got an idea about this whole, this one from the podcast and let's chat.
Autumn (43m 46s): Okay.
Jesper (43m 47s): So next Monday we are stepping into the future by probably not as, but probably not as fast as you might think, but we're going to talk about artificial intelligence and how it merges with this.
Narrator (43m 57s): I think what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the am writing fantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn Jasper on patrion.com/and writing fantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the M writing fantasy podcast going, stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Welcome to the first episode of 2021. Autumn and Jesper each share 5 book ideas that they won't write.
Some of those ideas are lighthearted - and perhaps outright silly (read: hilarious) - whereas others can prove to be excellent inspiration for your own stories.
As promised here's the link to our new and free course on self-publishing: https://ultimatefantasywritersguide.com/self-publishing-success/
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them. Now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt, and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I am Jesper. And I'm Autumn. This is episode 106 of the am writing fantasy podcast. And welcome to 2021. I wish we're actually in 2021 when we're recording this, but that's okay. We're so we're getting close. We're getting very, very close. We, once again cheating with the time-traveling we can do with podcasting.
Autumn (53s): We are so far future versions could come back, even if it's a dream. So just let me know how you know, the new year's and everything shaping up. That'd be really cool.
Jesper (1m 3s): Yeah. And maybe, maybe a future selves could tell us a bit about if 2021 already looks better than 2020 or not.
Autumn (1m 12s): I don't want to know. I just want to assume it's going to be better. And if it's not just don't tell me I can't handle another bad year.
Jesper (1m 21s): Well, so today we are starting out this 2021 year with a bit of a light hearted and fun topic, because we're going to do an alternating list of five book ideas. I won't write. So this should be fun, Autumn.
Autumn (1m 37s): I'm looking forward to it. I, like I said, I, I had, I have some comments on it later when we get there, but it was interesting. Cause I really did pull out my file by little folder. It dusted it off of ideas of things I'd picked that. And I have to say, I was like, Oh, I like that one. Ooh, I like that one. Oh, I forgot about that. So that's just home. I actually had a hard time finding five. I went to let go of, so this will be really interesting. And I went a bit of a different direction with my five list. So I just try to find some, some of the most gracious shit you can think of and say, this is definitely never going to be a story to hear what they are. They're going to inspire someone.
Autumn (2m 18s): So where, which is going to be really awesome. And if they do, if it does, you have to let us know in the comments, if something we give you today, does it inspire something? Just, just let us know because that'd be so much fun.
Jesper (2m 31s): Absolutely. Yeah. But how are things over at your place then?
Autumn (2m 34s): Oh, it's pretty good. You know, right now it's December. It's a little snowy for long too, so pretty right now. And I'm still thrilled because I finished that massive website rebuild and I feel like, you know, life is maybe evening out though. I did realize because I kind of, I, you know, I'm writing this series that I'm hoping to release as soon as the first book as, as early or late February in 2021. We're just like, what two months away from when this is released very soon. And I realized like I had a missing piece I wanted to add, I woke up one morning going, Oh, I have, that's what I was missing. I have to add that and did this.
Autumn (3m 15s): And another extra chapter kind of developed and I'm looking at it going, this is kind of big and this is the last book and I want to finish it by December 31st. So if my future self could come back and let me know if I managed to do that, please let, please do. So because I looked at it today and I'm like, I've got to write a chapter a day again, or I'm not going to finish this and maybe I should just go and edit book. What's actually book two and I don't know what to do, but I really want to finish writing this. And it's, it's definitely, I'm getting close to the climax, that final tension that's building towards a climax and I loving the storyline. I'm loving the characters, so I don't want to stop. No, I'll just finish it, finish it.
Autumn (3m 56s): And so if I have to not, you know, published book to February, February 28th, I guess I can do that. But I really, really, really, really want to. So I don't know it's a lot going on in my head, but...
Jesper (4m 11s): At least if you finished, then you can sort of tick that one off the list and then that's done a bit faster or something.
Autumn (4m 22s): I will keep my fingers crossed. Cause I think that's the best plan and definitely why I've got the momentum going. I want to keep writing. So even if it's not quite a chapter a day, but with the colonies coming up and COVID locked down, I'm not going anywhere. I, you know, maybe my vacation will be writing to chapter. I did that over the weekend. I wrote 5,000 words on Saturday. I was just like, I want to write today. And I just wrote a small storm. So if I had to do that over vacation, you know, maybe that's what will be my holiday spent some time with my husband, go for a walk, write 5,000 words and that'll be my Christmas. Why not? Why not? So things are still exciting on your end. I mean, you've moved and you're with boxes.
Autumn (5m 5s): How is everything over there?
Jesper (5m 8s): Yeah, still pretty chaotic to be honest. And it probably will be for a couple of weeks, but I'm going tomorrow to the house to hand over the keys to the new owners. So they are probably very excited about that. I think this past weekend we took a trip. I was about to say was, it's not that far, it's like 15 kilometers. Right? But we went back to the house this weekend from the apartment where we live in now with the kids, just to say goodbye to the house. And the, the oldest suddenly he went around saying goodbye to everything from toilets to cupboards to everything, got a goodbye.
Jesper (5m 48s): And my wife, she did find it a bit sad. And my youngest, he was just like, he could kill us. He was just walking around. Like he didn't care. He's main concern was the garden where he was like, Oh, I played football here. This is where I learned my tricks and stuff like that. But that was pretty much his only concern. So yeah. So that's going to be the ending of that chapter tomorrow, officially, but otherwise I've just been putting furniture together and the kits were starting to look a bit better now, but the rest of the apartment is still a complete mess.
Jesper (6m 30s): You know, put some holiday decorations on the boxes and stack them in tree shapes and just go with it. Yeah. Maybe I'll have to do that. We'll see.
Narrator (6m 40s): A week on the Internet with the Am Writing Fantasy podcast.
Jesper (6m 48s): I'm quite pleased with the reception of the wealth building course
Autumn (6m 51s): I am too. This was, I mean, especially we're launching it in 2020, which we already know is the doomed here of the planet. I enjoy talking with our special guest. Who's the interview that when this is released, it'll have been the last episode with Brian Cohen. And when I was talking to him, he called it a generational year. It's like, this is the one we will talk about for our kids. You know, so many people will talk about this year for so long and I'm like, wow, that is so impactful. I hadn't thought of it that way. So yes, we released a course in 2020, and I'm thrilled with how many people are interested in picking it up at the VIP launch.
Autumn (7m 32s): It's a good feeling.
Jesper (7m 35s): Yeah, because essentially we only did a very limited launch meaning that we only announced it to the podcast listeners as well to our email list, but that was it. I'm pretty happy to see that there's been quite some interest in a lot of new students joining as well, which I think is very, very good because imagine having spent two years building this course, and then nobody was interested, that would be so horrible.
Autumn (7m 60s): It would have been the capstone to 2020, but it didn't go that way. So I'm not complaining, especially since the week before we launched the course, I realized that now is the time if there ever was a time to rebuild the website and spending a week doing that right before we launched a course, not one course, but two courses, because we also launched the self publishing success free course at the same time. And yeah, that was a whole, it was also much work for you and I over two years planning this and doing the videos and then building it and then rebuilding the website all of a sudden. So thank you, everyone who picked it up and said that they were interested, or even if they said it was, they were interested in, it's not the right time.
Autumn (8m 43s): Just feedback. Feedback is just what keeps us going. The bread crumbs that feed us when in the, in these years of trying time.
Jesper (8m 53s): Yeah. It's very nice to get the occasional emails from people who, who find something we said or wrote or whatever really helped them. So that's wonderful. And we're also starting to see a few signups for, for that free course already. So I'm pleased about that. I can't, I can't remember if it was episode 102 or maybe it was 101, I don't know. You can go back and check that if you missed it. But we did explain in, in a quite recent episode what this recourse entails, but, but don't maybe just as a service, I'll add the link to the free course, once again, in the show notes to this episode. So if you missed it, you can, you can go and check it out.
Jesper (9m 33s): But
Autumn (9m 34s): Yeah, it is definitely, I guess the courses, it feels so good to be really close to completing. Like we did in our, a recent, in our 21st on the 21st the podcast we released and we looked at our goals for 2020 and how we did and what we're planning on doing in 2021. And it felt good to not only say we're really close to hitting all of our goals in 2020, but we actually did a couple of other things that we didn't need to dissipate at the time. So it might have been a trying and difficult year, but I think we're coming through it doing pretty good.
Jesper (10m 9s): Yeah. I don't, I don't think it's too bad. I mean for, well, it depends on how you look at it, right? I mean, from, from the sort of world health perspective and stuff like that, it's a terrible year. But, but I think from the business side of, of what we're doing ourselves, I think it's, it has been pretty good in the sense that we've gotten a lot of that. Well, what you and I, in our internal meetings call the platform building. We've gotten a lot of that sort of this year. So hopefully heading into next year, we can focus on writing.
Autumn (10m 44s): I'm so excited.
Jesper (10m 50s): So I, I think first of all, as we get into this, we also have to be honest and say that there are no bad story ideas because is all about execution quite recent. I wrote an email to my, to the email list where I said that, imagine Frank Herbert, so the author of the classic doom. So, but imagine him explaining his story. So he would say something like my story takes place on an alien planet where there are these giant sand worms, and then I've included this awesome drug that allows you to see into the future. And then the hero will unlock genetic memories and acquire all the knowledge of his ancestors.
Jesper (11m 36s): I mean, that sounds stupid, right?
Autumn (11m 37s): It sounds like, well, are you marketing to cipher or a new age? Who are you trying to target with this one? So yeah, it it's, you have to have faith in your own story idea. And like in, as you're saying, there's no bad story ideas and there's also no really stealing story ideas. There's a couple here that I'm just, like I mentioned the top of the show, I'm kind of still fond of, but as we've discovered when you were, and I were debating what we were going to write and the series that we're going to be writing together this year is that one of the ideas I actually was using in another story idea and they've come out so different.
Autumn (12m 20s): I don't think you would ever realize that they sprouted from the same. See they're completely different. So I'm not that worried about giving away these ideas and someone being like writing the exact story that was in my heart and soul, because you just can't do it one, I'm already a little screwed up, but you know how I look at it, the characters I create the world I create, it's going to change any of these stories into something else. So something here is spark something in you, right? Take it, run with it. It'll be that's what 2021 is all about, follow your dreams. We just put a whole heck of a year behind us. So start off with something you're passionate about. If this is what works for you.
Jesper (13m 3s): Oh yeah. I agree. I mean, just think about Tolkien as well, right. My story is about this little creature called a Hobbit. It carries a ring that has the power to rule the world. That also sounds incredibly stupid. But at the end of the day, that was an Epic tale that came out of that. Right. So, and as you say, if I sit down and write that story based on that, and you do the same or somebody else, I mean, it's going to be different stories, all of them. So
Autumn (13m 26s): Absolutely. Have I ever told you, speaking of the Hobbit, the, one of my favorite stories about that is I know FA I think a father who wrote, read the story to his kids and he always changed Bilbo to a woman, a female character, because he said it made more sense. She was after this rain, I just died laughing. So there you go. Even while you're reading a classic, I wonder if his, when his kids will realize Bilbo's not a girl, what's she called? Hey, you know, some names are genderless.
Jesper (14m 7s): Okay. Fair enough. Yeah, no, no. I mean, it is all about execution. So I'm going to make fun of some ideas here in my life, but, but please don't take it as trying to offend anybody. If you have a similar story or, or what do I know or thought about it, then you can certainly execute all my stuff as well. In the, in the manner of that. It'll probably, well, not maybe all of them are that good, but in one way or another anyway, but I think we needed to get that out of the way first.
Autumn (14m 41s): Yeah, exactly. We are not trying to offend anyone story ideas. We're trying to make you laugh. And that's what I was going to say. Maybe they'll do some ideas here will make you chuckle. Maybe they'll free up in your head and you'll be like, ah, you'll be more willing to experiment with your own ideas. Or maybe it'll be something that just resonates and was the missing piece to a story you want to write. So, you know, we're starting off a new year, let's have some fun and inspire each other and see where it goes.
Jesper (15m 8s): Yeah. So do you want to start with your number five or one depending on which order we, I, it doesn't matter. Why not?
Autumn (15m 19s): It's just, it's just ideas. So we'll flip a coin. Do you want me to start with one that's very well developed or one that's pretty much a loose cannon,
Jesper (15m 30s): A loose cannon first.
Autumn (15m 31s): All right. So I'm going to start at the back of my list. I'm gonna start at number five and go to number one, which is definitely the most developed. Okay. So here we go. So this is an idea that I really like, but this one I haven't developed much at all. So this is one where you have a hero in, who is ultimately supremely good, like holier than Holy good. And she is up against an evil. That is the ultimate evil. And no matter how much it's tried to end or kill this evil, it can't be until it's realized that the heroin's wonderful goodness is the perfect prison for the ultimate evil. So she becomes his living jail.
Autumn (16m 11s): And so I like this topic. I mean, I'll have a world setting characters, but I like this one because it explores the idea of what if you are good, but you were suddenly harboring evil inside of you. I mean, how does that affect who you are, how you act, how your friends or your loved ones perceive you. And even more than that, what happens if the evil corrupts you? If you're no longer, perfectly good, can that great evil, you're the prison for escape, but if you've been tainted by evil, hasn't the evil also tainted by good. So not to mention, you've had this guy in your head for like, who knows, how long will you secretly be friends?
Autumn (16m 53s): Will you maybe be more than the friends when it's another free entity again? So I just think there's so many cool questions with this one that I've played around with it in my head for ages, but it's not gotten any further than those are some really flood funding. Cool questions. Yeah.
Jesper (17m 10s): Yeah. I was curious. So is that why you put it on the list of things you would not write because you can't figure out what to do with it or what, because at, at the bottom of it, it sounds like a pretty good idea, to be honest,
Autumn (17m 22s): Hey, believe it or not, it's one I shared when we were debating what to write together, but I just, yeah. I don't know where to go with it. And so someone else will, maybe they'll go somewhere with it. Maybe, you know, if I live forever, I will get to it eventually. But I mean, I have probably four or five that, I mean, we have already together. I have a series I'm writing. I have a series I'm going to write after that. I might write more, write one more series in my elemental fantasy world. So I wouldn't get to this one for probably three or four years. Maybe by then I'll have figured it out. So I'm putting it out there. So if someone else's inspired, let me know. I think it's a fun idea. And I think there's a lot of people who struggle with that idea of, you know, feeling good, but having evil inside of you or vice versa.
Autumn (18m 10s): And how does that change? Who you are if people knew the secrets you kept inside? I think it's a great story idea. And if someone wants to write it, this is a good setup to try. Yeah.
Jesper (18m 22s): Yeah. I don't think it's that bad either.
Autumn (18m 25s): Keep that in mind if something comes to my mind. Yeah.
Jesper (18m 30s): Okay. Well, I can start my list out very simple before I start going crazy.
Autumn (18m 35s): Okay. Yeah.
Jesper (18m 38s): This one is just very simple and straightforward, I guess, but this is like the most cliche-filled story idea I could think of and this is why it's on the list of things I will not write. So this is the heir to a throne who discovers that he is the heir, but his evil uncle wants to prevent him from getting into power and therefore get rid of him. Alright, right. That's it very simple. I mean, this being an heir to a throne stuff, I freaking hate it.
Autumn (19m 13s): It's just always there. And then I really don't. I don't want to do anything coming up. Yes. I was gonna say, I have two of those coming up. So it's kind of, yeah. It's, it's something that, yeah. Maybe I think if we wrote it together, we'd have to try to find some other aspect of it, but it's well, it's, it's there because it's something that is just, it's a trope that people understand instantly so wrong with it. I suppose you no.
Jesper (19m 43s): And it might also be that it's just me who is allergic to it, but I don't know about it. I just feel like I've seen it too many times. That it's it's well, like we said before, it's a trope because people like it and that's why it's repeated. But I think this particular one, at least in my mind, and this is only my opinion, of course, but in my mind it is overused. That's why I don't want to do anything with heirs.
Autumn (20m 10s): It's true though. I mean, I think it's one reason game of Thrones was kind of fun because there were errors, but often the errors didn't end up on the throne, actually, most of the management dead, but all the women ended up claiming Airship and saying, screw you all. This is where I deserve to sit. And so it was a lot more chaotic and fun. And you also could see that there would have been a lot more, a lot less fighting in the world. Maybe if it was more clear who got to be the next ruler and people stopped trying to kill them off. Yeah. But also gamified
Jesper (20m 42s): Thrones is it's about the politics. It is not about the air realizing, Oh, I'm the air. And I mean, that's a very different story, right? So it's not that you can't have errors in my view. I mean, in game of Thrones, it did not annoy me because that was not what the story was about. It was about the factions fighting each other and stuff like that. It was a war story. Whereas if the story is centered around, Oh, I'm the air. And now I want to take my seat at the power and then somebody tries to stop me or whatever. I mean, I'm already falling asleep. So you better move on before I, before I,
Autumn (21m 21s): Yeah. Fair enough. That'll be interesting to see what you think of the two that the air is pop-up in on my ideas. Right? All right. So you already from my number four. Okay. All right. So this is one that I actually might use if I continue writing in my world of sun dark, which is where my next series that I'll be writing black throne black blood is set. So this is one about a heroine. You'll notice I have a lot of heroines. I just write that kind of story. But from an earlier time in the world that this is set. So she gets on the wrong side of a more powerful demigod and is accused of betraying him. So her punishment, one of her punishments is to be sent through time to the far future, which lands her in a world where a lot has changed.
Autumn (22m 8s): She is now the only demigod big from the Dawn time of her world. And all of her friends are now miss and magic is diluted. So she needs to adapt while missing all the things that she once had and feeling unjustly accused of something that she probably, I never figured that out. Didn't do. And she's still constrained by some of the other punishments, which one of them is that she could no longer give her name or access or home. So all of these things that were how she identified herself were stripped from her. So it was kind of goes into the question of how do you seek justice when the one who punished you is long gone, or how do you reclaim a part of who you are that's been taken from you by someone that you can't ask for it to be returned from?
Jesper (22m 58s): Hmm.
Autumn (22m 60s): Yeah. You'll see. I like these philosophical questions. I think there's somehow I like they're buried in the heart of your stories.
Jesper (23m 10s): I liked the kind of stories that also makes you think a bit about something that, you know, it, it has some, something that assess other than just introduce somebody fighting somebody else and then who they want. Right. I mean, I like the, especially like the well in as you know, already, but I like endings where it's a bit gray area, you know, sort of like maybe the hero wins, but then again, there was some stuff that like, yeah, this is not so good. I like those kinds of endings where it's a bit like th it's depends on almost how you see it. Yes. I
Autumn (23m 46s): Like those kinds of stories. Yes. I mean, I definitely tend to Nobel bright, but I also like those tweaks where it's not perfect. It's not what you expect. There's a little bit of bitterness with the good, because I hate to say it in life. I think if you didn't know a little bit of sadness, you would never appreciate the wonderful, this it's. You got to have a little, you got to have that balance to understand how, when things are good, that they're really good because, you know, you know, it's gotta be good at some point because of some reason. No, I agree. I think for,
Jesper (24m 19s): In terms of story ideas that you would never ride, you need to up your game a bit here,
Autumn (24m 24s): You're coming up with good ideas. That was not the point to me. I don't know if I'll ever get to this one because I like the idea, but again, you know, I can only write, so this one would be three, four, five years out there. So I don't mind sharing some good ones. Maybe I misunderstood the concept, but I opened up, like I said, I, I dove into my, my dusty file of topics that I've filed away. And I pulled out ones that I just don't know if I'll get to, but I don't mind sharing. Oh, that's fair. Okay. All right. I want to hear the fun one, right?
Jesper (24m 57s): So we'd like to have nations at war in our stories, right?
Autumn (25m 1s): Absolutely. Yeah. So how about this one? This is, this is so stupid. So a story about a war,
Jesper (25m 14s): The perspective of a mule, which has to pull,
Autumn (25m 22s): I can already feel the characterization that mule is going to kick people a lot, listen to angry mules thoughts would be a challenge. I, to be at least a good short story, but that'd be really fun. And it's a good idea to just, you know, write a story from a very uncommon perspective that you wouldn't expect. I think it's adorable. Maybe it could be a children's book actually. Yeah. I'm certainly not going to write it, but maybe that could work.
Autumn (26m 4s): I think so. I think there would definitely be something in it that would be adorable. And you could easily have some kind of redemption for the mule at the end, if it was a children, not quite a sour puss or gets a happy ending on a nice field. So maybe
Jesper (26m 23s): Does some grandiose deed that the, even the warhorses couldn't manage,
Autumn (26m 27s): That would be, Ooh, I like that. It seems like it's already a good story idea. I'm not gonna write it. Can I can see it now. So yeah, definitely. If it wasn't pick this one up, you have to let us know in the comments. I want to go read it. It sounds so sweet.
Jesper (26m 50s): All
Autumn (26m 50s): Right. You ready for my number three? This is another big one. Okay. Yep. All right. So this one, this is one of my early attempts to write face stories. And I actually wrote a short story called ELLs wood, which is a, it's a free, short story that you can go check out on my website if you wanted to, but maybe it'll see some ideas for you. But I think there's definitely something more that can be developed out of this one. But I doubt I'll ever get back to this one because bits might be pulled into the current story, the face stories I'm writing now in the tainted phase, but it's, I'm done with this one. So this one's free. Go for it. This is about a young girl whose grandmother discovers the garden around her cottage in Maine is actually a Haven for Pixies and fairies.
Autumn (27m 37s): And the stream on the property actually marks a boundary between our world and the Fe. And that's all well and good until her granddaughter discovers this as well and meets the son of the fake queen. So, you know, afraid that her granddaughter will be stolen away to the world of the Fe. She manages to win a bargain from the queen that her son will never appear to her granddaughter as a young man, as long as she lives. So these two are still, they still managed to be best of friends because he takes the form of a run. And you know how fake promises go, especially considering yours, aren't really that long. So when she inherits the property, Def go have fun with that.
Autumn (28m 20s): The son of the fake queen and the granddaughter of this old lady who has been secretly harboring ferries in her yard and, and you know,
Jesper (28m 31s): Well, this is, I don't know why, but my mind always took turns to the dark side. But as soon as you said, as long as he's alive, then my, Oh, okay. Then I started thinking about, okay, well, how can we kill her?
Autumn (28m 46s): So would it be a little cruel? And I never said if she was light or dark face, so this could totally go the evil step, either evil fade queen, but see, it's already inspired you. I feel very satisfied for SPE sending that one off into the world. I actually, I didn't expect that. I didn't expect to get expired. These kinds of things, but it's a 72 or three times now, already,
Jesper (29m 13s): So. Okay. That's good. Good, good. Okay. Do you want another number three?
Autumn (29m 18s): Yes. Let's go for yours.
Jesper (29m 21s): Probably goes a bit crazy.
Autumn (29m 23s): I can't wait so more off the rails.
Jesper (29m 28s): So this is a story about an insane hypnotist. Okay. So stay with me. So this hypnotist is hell bent on mentally crushing the girl. He loves not quite sure why. And then somewhere in here in this story, there was a gigantic kite that is raised to rip the land of an unnatural infestation of birds. How does that sound
Autumn (29m 53s): Hypnotist? A kite, maybe. I sounds very interesting. This sounds like an improv comedy skit, which Brian Cohen and I got into talking about improv a little bit. So this is definitely something that someone would throw up to you when you're doing improv and you would have to come up with something in five minutes. So I think there's possibilities here. Yeah. Do you know what? I actually have a secret? Oh, really? What,
Jesper (30m 23s): Because this was a bit of a trick. It is actually a real story.
Autumn (30m 26s): You're kidding.
Jesper (30m 28s): No, I'm not. It is. And it's written by the author who more or less created the vampire genre. So maybe, you know, who?
Autumn (30m 37s): Bram Stoker?
Jesper (30m 39s): Yes. It is. Isn't that insane? The story is called the Lair of the White Worm and that it is about an incident hypnotist and there is like a gigantic Cate to rip the land of birds. Infestation could sound completely crazy.
Autumn (30m 58s): Well, that's a good point. I have to go look this up when we're done now. And I, I had a little mouse tell him, tell me I might be getting a Kindle for the holidays for you all. So I will have to go see if I can find it and put it on my possibly future Kindle, even though I'm getting take going. No, no, you're not. That's what I said.
Jesper (31m 18s): Yeah. I think it needs to go in there with very, very low expectations because this is what always just, it has been slaughtered than it is on list of the worst stories ever and stuff like that. So I think it's very bad.
Autumn (31m 30s): Oh my goodness. Well, that makes me, you know, if I feel good, if someone like from stroke, Stoker can write a flops,
Jesper (31m 42s): It should give the rest of us a bit of well hope. Right. Even if we might as well done. Well, the best of them can do that as well. So that's good.
Autumn (31m 56s): Definitely. All right. So yes, I was, I think we all need to leak, loosen up occasionally, even if it's flash fiction, right. Something totally out there, because it makes you feel, remember writing can be fun and giggly and it doesn't always have to make logical sense. So it doesn't have to be very long go, right. The Jabber walkie, which is one of my favorite poems, by the way. So I used to actually have like half of it memorized. So go write, go write your own version of the Jabber walkie and, and just have fun with the boards for a little while. All right. So we're moving into my, definitely this is one that I actually plotted out kind of love story, but this is one that we mentioned the air.
Autumn (32m 42s): So this is what you'll have to see how you feel about this one. We ready. So there's a more of a traditional medieval fantasy tale. That's almost our Thorin. And like I said, I picked away and there's actually two short stories. I've written called a bargains price and all his lantern light that are again on my website for free, if you would like to get inspired, feel free. But in this one, a noble has risen up and claimed the thrown away from the legitimate Royal family. The youngest child though, was allowed to live and grow as long as he swore fealty to the new King, which, you know, added legitimacy to his claim of his new throne. But the story really begins when the young Prince and his lover, who is his best friend and another noble household son, they begin to plot it to reclaim the throne that has been stolen.
Autumn (33m 33s): And so there's, I've got a lots of notes in this one from the noble sons, orchestrated death, where the Prince actually stabs him to make it look real. And this frees the noble from watchful eyes so that he can go and learn to forge a King maker sword to give the Prince. And of course all the problems of loving another man while being the heir to the throne. And you're expected to become the King and marry a woman and produce heirs. So, you know, there's a little bit of a love entanglement that I thought it would be kind of a fresh take on the story. And I love the idea of sort of the Excalibur with the kingmaker store's sword. So it's kind of that kind of story.
Jesper (34m 13s): Hm. You know what? That could work
Autumn (34m 15s): Good. Like I said, I was intrigued enough that I wrote two short stories on it, but I haven't gone any further. I just, it didn't have enough magic. I think for me, maybe someone else can take it and add more magic, but I like the characters and that's what kept drawing me back to it. As I kind of really loves the main character is in the, I really actually liked the noble son. And he was really kind of pissed at his lover, the friends for step point so hard. I had that whole, I could hear them having the argument later, once he healed, which took several months, by the way. Right?
Jesper (34m 52s): Yeah. No, no, no. I can see that. That's not too bad.
Autumn (34m 57s): You forgive that it's an heir story. Thank you.
Jesper (35m 0s): Yeah. Maybe we tweak it a bit, but otherwise yeah.
Autumn (35m 5s): Fair enough. So what's your crazy one before, so I'm not, you know,
Jesper (35m 12s): In which resources are very scarce, so people will naturally want to protect what they have. Right. Right. So far so good. That's that's sounds pretty normal up until this point. Then I think people are getting got docs to help them. Well, God, however, they probably go overboard in training the docs so that they become very vicious attack docs, all of them. So now you have a city
Autumn (35m 40s): It's basically dangerous to go outside
Jesper (35m 41s): Because there's just vicious stocks everywhere. I don't know
Autumn (35m 46s): If there's really enough meat on that bone to very funny metaphor. I don't know if there's enough to go anywhere with that, to be honest. But I think I could definitely go somewhere. I mean, dog stories, I'd like to dog stories, there was a very good futuristic. One where dogs were intelligent enough that they were nannies, but they were like, you know, they were looking for rights of basically us citizens because they were, their intelligence had been upped that much. So I think there's always room for the people who like me love dogs as you might've heard him bark. And I touched him, sorry.
Autumn (36m 26s): While we were podcasting. And some of my dogs had a bark at me. He was so indignant that I touched to the Royal hiked that, yeah, this could be a kick-ass world too. It really lives that. What if I tell you that
Jesper (36m 47s): I was on board panda.com earlier today? I don't know why, but I was on there earlier today. And that was where I got this from.
Autumn (36m 55s): Oh, this idea from, because it is actively sought. So that in Fort
Jesper (37m 1s): Thomas, Kentucky is a state
Autumn (37m 2s): Law that States, the following
Jesper (37m 5s): Socks are prohibited from chasing people or other animals.
Autumn (37m 11s): That's most of work. I just don't get it until you get the dog a ticket. If it chases somebody, how are you supposed to
Jesper (37m 20s): I'll make sure that the dogs are chasing another animal. Don't
Autumn (37m 24s): It's not just, I don't think I could understand that one. Well, yeah, that would to say my I've got a little small little thing and he used, still goes after squirrels. Like there's no tomorrow. So good luck training a dog, not to chase anything. I mean,
Jesper (37m 41s): The article on bored Panda, that com is five years old. So I don't know if it's still the law there, but if we have any listeners from Kentucky, can you please let us know one why in the world was this law put in place in the first place?
Autumn (37m 58s): I don't understand. I not having a dog speak. Cause that's about the only way to keep on that. Yeah. Oh goodness. I can't. Okay. All right. You ready for my final one? All right. So this one I like, but it's more of a space opera, which so even though I really liked the story and the character is I, if I wanted to write a space opera, this is not a Shaundra that I'm quite ready to branch into and I'd have to read a whole bunch of books. And I don't know if I'm going to take the time. I like fantasy space operas. I taught to find a way of putting in galactic dragons or something to make it worth it.
Autumn (38m 42s): So this was my second air one. And you'll have to see what you think of this one, because it's one where I like to turn the tables on what is the common trope? So the heir of the galactic empire is a young woman, but her father would rather see her younger brother on the throne, but he can just name his son without breaking the hundreds of years of traditions. So officially, no air has been declared, even though it's assumed it will be his a daughter. So this of course leads to a lot of political maneuverings, as well as hurt family feelings, just what you want when you're the galactic empire. So until the daughter and presumed air says to hell with it and leave, she sneaks off, goes to a tiny far-flung world where she's just not known and they don't really care who the empire emperor is at all.
Autumn (39m 33s): And of course, low, she discovers life without a family name is not as easy as she expected, but she earns a place eventually through probably an entire trilogy and skills and even manages to fall in love, of course, but even that idol can only last so long before the problems of an empire come calling. So this one, I do have, again, a short story written called the lost heir on my website, but I just, I did, I loved Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman did write a whole series. That was a galactic space opera. And it really, I loved it. It was one of my favorite stories for a very long time. And I think that's where the heart of this one comes from is like, I want to do that too, but space opera, star ships and worlds.
Autumn (40m 21s): I don't know.
Jesper (40m 26s): Mm yeah. The jury is still out.
Autumn (40m 32s): I understand. But at least the one world where it's set was going to be more traditional fantasy medieval. And I still, I look at the overall story going. I wonder if I can just get rid of the whole space ship thing, so we'll have to see, and my pop-up someday, but it's so back-burnered, I'd rather write number five first and I'll even have characters or a world for that one.
Jesper (40m 54s): No. Okay. Yeah. I see. Okay. I have a number five for years.
Autumn (40m 59s): Will I want to hear this one? This will be fun.
Jesper (41m 2s): Yeah. I might have been running out of steam here to watch the end. So I went to a plot generator dot Octa, UK, and came up with the most terrible story idea. So I thought I put that one. Yeah.
Autumn (41m 15s): Excellent. I can't wait to hear it. So yeah,
Jesper (41m 19s): Just generates a random plot. And this is what it says. So when a plumber from Madrid decides to start eating people, not everybody is supportive. I don't understand that part either. Then it goes on to say wherever his fortunes improve, when he's golf caddy opens the zoo the plumber remembers that he actually killed his golf caddy 10 years previously.
Autumn (41m 56s): Yeah. Well one thank you for telling me there's plotgenerator.org, which I did not know. And now whenever I am bored is going to totally be there at website. I go and hang out with, but like, it makes no sense at all. Okay. Well, I mean, I guess put it into a fence,
Jesper (42m 16s): You know, you can get rid of Madrid and then put some fantasy city in there and you can do some other things with the, maybe he's not golfing, he's doing something else, but it's like, first of all, why is people would they consider supporting somebody, eating people? I don't understand. And why is it that he's fortunate to prove because his golf caddy opens the zoo what has that to do?
Autumn (42m 42s): Well, my mind went through well, he's, he's opening. Yeah. I don't DB. It's another way of eating people know, that's the only reason he'd be happy, easier access to dinner. Tiger. Maybe that's pretty bad. Right.
Jesper (43m 12s): I also came across a post on Reddit where it was a thread about really bad story ideas. So I was just looking through to see what there was there. And somebody posted something that I read about bad story ideas, where I was like, I'm... I would actually like to read this. I don't think it's a bad idea, but if it was a book about middle earth from perspective, I think that would be cool.
Autumn (43m 42s): I think it would be really cool too. It's it's the unwritten viewpoint of the entire series. I think that'd be fantastic. Yeah.
Jesper (43m 50s): I don't know why that was on a list of bad ideas. Sounds cool to me.
Autumn (43m 56s): I don't know. Maybe assume since it hadn't been written, it was a bad idea. Maybe he wanted someone to tell him that. No, it's actually a good idea because that would be kind of cool.
Jesper (44m 5s): Yeah. I also find too really weird book titles.
Autumn (44m 9s): Oh, we want to hear those. Definitely.
Jesper (44m 13s): So the first one is, "do it yourself coffins!. Why you would do that, but that just really laugh so bad.
Autumn (44m 30s): Another one. I also don't understand this one is knitting with dog hair. I just asked you, why would you do that?
Jesper (44m 39s): I have actually seen a dog hair blanket, but I kind of agree. I was not tempted to wrap myself in it. It was one of those little arts craft things where at a, at a main festival that I was like, Oh, that's I hope did you just, you know, sit there and you have a dog that sheds a lot, and this is what your solution, I don't know. But you can't know that. I mean, some of this just made me laugh. So I, like I said, I think we all need to remember that writing. We take it serious. We, it doesn't have to be, we should remember that there are fun things.
Autumn (45m 18s): You can go and have some fun stories and write to write a fun 500 word story and just be goofy and loose with it. Like I said, right? The Jabber walkie, which is all just nonsensical fun words to say, and clickety clack claws, and go ahead and do all those things that they tell you not to do with like a little ration. And it's not, it's fun. Go sing song with your five-year-old niece and remember languages. Just, you know, it's not all about being serious all the time. No, no, indeed. I mean, the main thing to take away from all of this is really that story ideas. They might sound dumb, but if we do our job as authors, really, really well, we can transform what sounds stupid into something magical, something that will sweep the reader off their feet and carry them into another realm.
Jesper (46m 12s): So I think that's where we need to keep in mind. And that's really the takeaway from all of this. So I hope we at least let people laugh a bit. At least that was the intention and also inspired a few ideas as well. I don't know. That'd be great. Let us, so next Monday, we are going to share an alternative way to engage with your email list. One that autumn came up with. So see you there.
Narrator (46m 46s): If you like, what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcasts going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Join Autumn and special guest Bryan Cohen to discuss AMS ads, book blurbs, and, oh yeah, the worst advertising mistake authors can make.
Bryan is an expert on book blurbs and his free AMS ad challenges have helped thousands of authors learn the ropes of using Amazon ads. Does that mean AMS ads are hitting saturation? What might be the next big move for self-published authors to connect with readers? We discuss that and more!
Check out Bryan's podcast the Sell More Books Show at https://sellmorebooksshow.com/. And learn more about Bryan on his website: http://bryancohen.com/.
Join Bryan's January 2021 AMS challenge at https://bryancohen.lpages.co/january-amazon-ad-challenge-2021-ov4/
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy.
For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (1s): You're listening to the am writing fantasy podcast in today's publishing landscape. You can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt, and Jesper Schmidt.
Autumn (30s): Welcome to the am. Writing Tennessee podcast. This is episode one Oh five I'm autumn. And today Yesper has the recording session off and I have with the very special guest instead author and entrepreneurial Brian Cohen. Whoa. Welcome to the writing fantasy podcast. Brian,
Bryan (50s): Thank you, autumn. I appreciate you having me. We had some nice technical difficulties figuring this out, but I'm so glad we were able to make it work
Autumn (1m 0s): Well. It's always nice working with someone who is probably, I mean, you do live webinars and all these other things. So I have a feeling you can roll with the technical difficulties very well. I wasn't worried. Hey, that's the nice thing is, is with modern technology. There's always a workaround. There's at least like three or four, so we figured it out and you're here and I'm so excited for you to join us today. So I know you through these amazing AFS ad challenges you run, but I had of course heard of your name way before the AMS ad challenges, because you were known as like a guru of book blurbs, but I know that's not even close to everything you've done.
Autumn (1m 43s): So if you could introduce yourself, that would be fantastic.
Bryan (1m 48s): Sure. Of course. Well, of late, the big thing that I I've been doing is I run these free courses that we, we talk about them as challenges, these free challenges about Amazon advertising. One of the, the, the strangest weirdest little advertising platform is Kindle author them. And it's our goal to try to just make it simpler, but it also try to make them not spend all of your money. And those are the five day Amazon ad profit challenges and, and I've been running them and I have a really good team behind them and it's a lot of fun, but originally I would say some people might know me from my podcast, the some more books show, some people might know me from the author copywriting agency.
Bryan (2m 47s): I run best page forward. We write book descriptions and ad copy, and I'm an author myself having written multiple young adult scifi fantasy. Depends on it. Depends on where you're placing superheroes. Amazon has a category on both sides.
Autumn (3m 6s): Oh, that's so is it like more techie? So it ends up in this Saifai side or if it's more magic it's on the fantasy side or is that, Oh, Hey, that's excellent.
Bryan (3m 20s): But yeah, so I am not currently writing fantasy, but I have been in the state of M writing fantasy in, in the past. So hopefully I still qualify.
Autumn (3m 32s): Oh, absolutely. And I mean, just for your expertise alone, I think it's fantastic. I, I said, I've done at least two or three of your AMS ad challenges and I learn something new every single time. They amazing. And so it's great to have you on here, but yeah, you, you get some of the fantasy mindset and the world-building and the powers and making rules so that people, you know, aren't going crazy and can do anything in their God. And that just makes it so less tense and fun. Yes, this is true. Well, I mean, there's so many things we could talk about. It was hard to choose even a focus other than I know, you know, I know you threw AMS at challenges, but you help authors so much with the marketing.
Autumn (4m 19s): And I mean, market from the book, blurbs to the AMS ads, are you aware when authors market books with all your experience and all the people you've helped, what do you think is the number one thing authors do wrong when they're trying to get their book out there in the world?
Bryan (4m 37s): Well, I think it has to start with, with the foundation of the book. The, I don't know who invented it, but I'll, I'll borrow it and not take credit for it. But writing the book with the marketing in mind is so key. When I, the first, I think I remember it being like conceptualized for me when a few years ago, when Adam Croft a very successful mystery and thriller author, he talks started talking about writing the hook, the, the, the first line of the book description, the thing that could be used on ads, the copy, as some people call it to write that before the book.
Bryan (5m 28s): And I just thought, well, how smart is that? If you don't even have a good hook, if you don't even have something that would get people excited about it, chances are you're going to have a hard time getting people excited about your book. So I loved the idea of writing that, that big one-liner, even before the book. And I've heard of some people writing the book description for a book before they write the book. And I think that that is a thing that a lot of people get wrong is they write the book and then they do all the marketing stuff after.
Bryan (6m 14s): But really you might want to start by doing some of the marketing work first to make sure you're writing a book that you're going to put so much effort into that, that there will actually be people who are interested in,
Autumn (6m 30s): Right. Oh, I should say whew. Cause I, I definitely one of those people who I do write little descriptions before I start writing, and then I refer back to it. Cause that's, it's one thing to come up with an idea and develop it with a description or a hook, but then you have to make sure you actually pay attention to it. Not you're like halfway through the novel and go, Oh, that's not even close to what I'm doing. It kind of it's, it should guide you not be this exercise that you put aside and don't even think about until you're done. And then you realize you're completely off the rails.
Bryan (7m 1s): Oh yeah, no, absolutely. I was working with a friend of mine who was trying to write the market and trend. It was a paranormal cozy mystery and she sent over the book description and I read it and I thought, you know, I don't think this is paranormal cozy. At least not the way the book descriptions written. And I check in with her, you definitely want to write in this genre. Right? She says, yes. And I said, all right, well, let me connect you with someone who writes a lot of paranormal cozy and she can give you opinions on what would need to change.
Bryan (7m 43s): And certain like setting pieces and character motivations and tropes as they are often referred to changing those in that early stage of the game has now made her a huge, like on the edge of five figure author per month access. And it start. And obviously I'm not taking credit for that. She, she has written out 13 books in that series, but when you take a minute, take a breath, share it with some experts, share it with some people in that early, early stage, it could be worth a lot of money, but it could also just be worth like helping you to write the book you were meant to write.
Bryan (8m 39s): Anyway,
Autumn (8m 40s): That's true. Or even just drawing out some of the, the tidbits. I like the tropes, like you mentioned, like, well, did you consider this? This is popular right now, or that's been overdone. So stay away from it. It could save you months of writing to write something. You could've gone a different way. And it might've been a little bit better. I have to been I've recently did read Chris Fox's book right to market. And we had him on the podcast, but of course we didn't. We talked about Kickstarter and not his right to market books, but it's wonderful. Pretty cool. But I do really appreciate the idea. I think a lot of authors, you know, they hear that right to market and they think, Oh, you know, you're, you're taking away the, the, the fun of it, the innovation of it.
Autumn (9m 27s): But it's not really that it's sort of looking at it from a business perspective, saying I'm going to spend this many months of my life and probably give up some things like family time. So I can do this. And I want to invest that wisely with something that I really would like to do well, at least as well as the best chance it has.
Bryan (9m 46s): Yeah. I have an analogy that might help those. So I used to do improv comedy. Anyone who's ever been to an improv comedy show, you know, that they often take suggestions from the audience and like a word or I've, I've been to a show where they use a title of a musical, or they use a news story that they have to read out loud and then they, they will take that inspiration and they will use that to inspire them for a scene. You might think you get some weird suggestion. Of course, people are always trying to use potty words, whatever, but at least drinking on a Friday, Saturday night.
Autumn (10m 33s): So just setting the idea there. Yeah,
Bryan (10m 36s): Exactly. But you've got this word that you think, Oh, this might constrain me, but I have seen words and concepts and titles and news stories inspire incredible things. Even though you might think that word or that concept would constrain you, it it's really what you do with it. What you do within that framework. That is where the creative process happens. I mean, Shakespeare's plays are nearly all adaptations and they have stood the test of time, even though they weren't his original idea.
Bryan (11m 21s): He took these concepts, these other plays, these stories, these pieces of history. And within that framework created something we're still talking about 400 plus years later.
Autumn (11m 37s): That's a great analogy. And it really does bring it home. I agree with you. I had never considered it in terms of Shakespeare. And I only have this complete work sitting on my bookshelf and I've read most of them. So that's Oh yes, I, yeah. That's a whole different conversation, but that is fantastic.
Bryan (11m 58s): That and the Shakespeare podcast.
Autumn (12m 0s): Oh, excellent. I will see you there. As soon as we find it.
Bryan (12m 5s): Great.
Autumn (12m 6s): Send me the link. So that's wonderful. And that kind of develops too. So obviously, I mean, I already know you, you like to, you're so good at writing blurbs. You even teach in the AMS ads, challenges, you teach a little bit of blurb writing and how to hone them and refine them. And I have to admit, so it's a nice to hear that you, you, you think that they should be part of like the original story development, it leads so much into your marketing and that's where you grow it. And you've seen probably thousands of blurbs. I mean, what do you think authors get wrong the most when they're developing it? Because I love you have a very solid strategy of saying, you know, sentence one, sentence two. I have it like copy and pasted in my Scrivener file when I'm developing my blurb.
Autumn (12m 50s): I just already have it copied there so I can look at it and develop mine. Yeah. I really am thrilled to have you here today.
Bryan (12m 58s): Oh well, I'm, I am honored, but I think the thing people th that they struggle with is, is I think partly it's not getting themselves in the right mindset in the right framework. And you might hear some buzzing. I, I am in a hotel rooms, a fear just came on, but it is what it is when you are trying to fit in a blurb in the 30 or so minutes that you've allocated for yourself and not realizing that this is a piece of marketing.
Bryan (13m 42s): This is a piece of poetry's someone whoever created, just do it. The slogan for Nike probably hammered on it for eight hours. I mean, you aren't necessarily going to be able to complete something that is going to make every reader who stumbles upon it excited unless you give it the time that is needed and the space and for it to be your creative time, not your well, I do my writing in the morning and I do my marketing after three o'clock when I'm half falling asleep, you need your creative time to work on this piece of the marketing, because that piece of the marketing is something that requires creativity.
Autumn (14m 35s): Yes. So you'd definitely recommend probably coming back a couple of times, not, you know, you're 30 minutes and you're done and never look at it again.
Bryan (14m 45s): Yes, definitely. Don't do that. You don't know if you have any typos, you should check. Oh. And share your blurb with your editor when you are writing the book, because then they will catch the mistakes that you don't catch yourself.
Autumn (15m 4s): Yes. That's a very good point. And I definitely have seen some what looked like very well sounding blurbs online, but then yeah, you read them and you notice, you know, sometimes it's little things come as a periods, but sometimes it is a word wrong. You're like, Oh, I can always, always do a good deed and let your author know so that they can figure it out. Yeah.
Bryan (15m 25s): You see something about a blurb, say something about a blurb.
Autumn (15m 28s): Yes. That's a very good idea. Well, I mean, we've mentioned the AMS challenges you've run. So just, just in case there's an author out there who is not aware of AMS ads and what they are. Could you give a quick description of what they are and how did you come up with doing these challenges?
Bryan (15m 49s): Oh, that's a great question. So Amazon ads, AMS ads, whatever you want to call them. These are the ads that you see on Amazon. When you're searching for a book, when you type something into the search bar, you'll often notice there's some ads at the top. There's some ads kind of interspersed in the search results. And then there's also some ads that show up on every page, every book page, there's a carousel. You'll see a little sponsored icon when you know the hat. Those are, those are the ads. And those ads are placed by publishers or other authors who are run through the Amazon advertising platform.
Bryan (16m 36s): And they will bid what they want to spend per click. They say, I want to bid 40 cents per click. And then someone, if, if a reader clicks on the ad and then goes to check out your book page, you get charged for that click. So you would get charged 40 cents or a little bit less for someone to click onto that ad. And the goal of course is to bid low enough so that you're not paying so much per click because you could bid $5 per cent. I know people who've accidentally bid $5 and get $5 clicks.
Bryan (17m 20s): Chances are, if your book is selling for $2 and 99 cents, that is not going to be a effective use of your money. No. Yeah. And so if that's part of the game is bidding low enough. The other part of the game is, and it goes back to the blurb. It goes to the cover. It goes to how well something has been written to market. You want to get a sale for as few number of clicks as possible. Because even if you're, if you're getting clicks for 10 cents, if it takes 40 clicks for someone to buy your book, well, then you're going to be paying $4 every time you sell a book.
Bryan (18m 5s): And if your book's two 99, and then you're, you're not going to be making that money. So you play the game of getting as low as you can and still getting traction and making sure that your book converts with as few clicks as possible. I like to say about six to eight clicks. I used to say 10, but now I say six to eight clicks because some books are shorter. Some books are standalones and, and ten one sale for every 10 clicks. Sometimes isn't profitable. So about six to eight, especially if the books in Kindle unlimited six to eight clicks per sale is a good ratio for profitability and then trying to keep that bid low.
Bryan (18m 59s): So that was the, just the answer to the first question, answer to the second question is I I've, I've been pretty fortunate to connect with a few people who have really had success running challenges. One of the first challenges I ever joined as a participant was a challenge called the simple green smoothies. Oh, I know. And I was very fortunate to be in a mastermind group, which is a group of entrepreneurs or group of people trying to use their smarts together.
Bryan (19m 45s): So it's the master mind. And this, this group had one of the co-founders of the simple green smoothie challenge in it. And one of the things that her name is Jada Sellner. And one of the things I learned from her was that challenge for spending $0 on marketing brought in over a million people. Wow. Oh, that's amazing. Or challenges. Sound cool. Yeah. So seeing that challenge and seeing other challenges, I knew I really wanted to do one and it was just a matter of trying to figure out, well, what about Amazon ads?
Bryan (20m 32s): Could we do a challenge about, and really, I think that the thing a lot of people struggle with is the creation of these ads. And so if we could provide as much support as possible, the right documentation, the right to help people get over every technical hurdle, mental hurdle, just like a glitch hurdle,
Autumn (20m 60s): Time hurdle, just making the time for it. Yes.
Bryan (21m 4s): And getting over all of those in a short period of time. I think that I thought that people would, would really take to it. And we've been very fortunate that word of mouth is good. We, we do spend a lot of money on marketing, our own thing. And, and now we're on our sixth one and it's been over 20,000 people have taken the challenges.
Autumn (21m 30s): That's fantastic. And they are, they're a great motivational. I mean, if you, if you're tempted to do AMS ads and you just don't know where to start, or you're just, you know, you can go find all this research in different places and just not take the time to synthesize it. And you just put it in front of you and you give a deadline and you have people supporting you and commenting on your stuff and, you know, helping you out. It's like, it's a whirlwind, but you get through it. And you do finally, if it's, if there's some hurdle for you to start, you kind of get beyond it. The next thing you know, you're doing AMS ads and it's amazing and it's been a month. And then the, you know, the next challenge comes up and you have to join that one too, because you always have something new to learn. And it's like nano Ramo.
Autumn (22m 10s): You know, you're, you're joining with a bunch of authors. And I see a lot of faces that I I've known. You know, I've been an author since 2012. So there's a lot of other writers I know, and you connect and you lose touch over time and then you reconnect and I've seen them in the challenge. So it's also been a great, like, Hey, how have you been doing, I haven't seen you for two years. So that's very, it's fun. It's a fun group that you do run and they're informative and helpful.
Bryan (22m 37s): We, we really enjoy it. And, and I love fostering those connections. We need community more than ever right now. And so if I can play and my company and the people I work with can play a small role in providing some of that community. We are absolutely all for it.
Autumn (22m 57s): No, I definitely think you do. And yes, 2020, especially we need our community a little bit more sympathetic and a few more extra arms to support us all this year. So with the AMS ads, do you think, I mean, you've noticed that, you know, your, your, the number of clicks, you've dropped it from 10 to six to eight. So do you think as well that there any keywords or genres that AMS ads might be getting saturated in? Is this something you're concerned about in the future? That, cause I noticed like Facebook ads, I had a golden age and now they're a lot harder to get traction on. Do you think the same thing will happen with the AMS ads?
Bryan (23m 39s): I think it's very possible. I was at the 20, 1920 to 50 K conference and I was talking about ads and I mentioned that Amazon ads are under priced right now because a lot of people can and do make profit off it. And I didn't realize at first I was hearing a noise from the crowd and they were sh people were shushing me. They were like, there's Amazon ad reps in the, in the room. And I'm like, Oh, okay, sorry. Don't raise our prices. Come on to this point, they are still under priced and people can still make money off of them.
Bryan (24m 20s): I think the very, very popular genres, your, your paranormal, your contemporary romance, those are going to be more saturated. There's no question. But one of the things that currently is true here in December, 2020, because things are always changing. But currently right now, because Amazon doesn't just focus on the price of your bid, but also on how relevant your book is, how similar your book is to the things you're targeting.
Bryan (25m 4s): It's not just a care. I used to think that it was a ranking system and it was the first place as a $2 bid and second place as a dollar 80 in third place has a dollar 60. I used to think that I think it was Janet Margo, who can, who, who had worked with Amazon advertising and developing the platform. She was the one who I think was the first to inform me that actually you could have a 40 cent bid, 30 cent bid and be the first in the carousel. Oh, I didn't realize this. How is this possible? And it's because relevancy is such a huge factor.
Bryan (25m 46s): If your book is so perfectly a coming of age fantasy, it's got the right cover. It's got the right title. People are clicking on it. People are buying it. The conversion rate is very good. And at the conversion rate, particularly from the ads is good. It's going to be higher up in the rankings than a book that isn't as well marketed.
Autumn (26m 13s): It has a higher bid price. So that's interesting.
Bryan (26m 17s): Right? So that's why you always want to target books that are very close to your own and you don't want to try more is not necessarily going to be better unless you can come up with more and more, very perfect targets.
Autumn (26m 35s): Okay. Well, that's, that explains a lot of the strategies. Even you teach a refining the key words and finding the right books to target, because that's really the key to not spending a ton of money, but also getting your books seen.
Bryan (26m 51s): Yes, exactly. Exactly.
Autumn (26m 54s): Like I said, every time I talk to you, I learned more. So this is really, that's a good tip. Now I'm 30 thinking. Well, you do definitely. Oh, that's interesting. So you think, so, that's good to know that, you know, AMS has, are not saturated because they are working now and it's always important to find a way we've gone past the, you don't need to market. If you want your book seen, you basically need to market in some way, these years, 20, 20, 20, 21. It's, that's just the reality we're in we're now, you know, the book, big book publishers are, they're still out there, but there's enough indie authors that we're running this as a business that we've got to consider advertising anymore.
Bryan (27m 36s): Yeah. It, it, I, I, you are an author since 2012. I started in 2010 and it used to be easier.
Autumn (27m 44s): Yes. Oh my goodness. Yes. I refer to those early years as the wild West where, I mean, you could just dash up a book dash up a cover dash up, you know, something you wrote as a blurb and people would find it and buy it. And even if you did a five K Kendall, K you unlimited countdown, I mean, people would download it by the thousands because there was less than a million books, but it's a little
Bryan (28m 12s): And thought that those books were paid. So your sales rank would be like, number one, afterwards, those, those were interesting times for funny glitches to be discovered that made some people very well.
Autumn (28m 25s): Yes, it was good for them. I did not get on one of those glitches, but that's okay. I'm still doing it. I still love it. And I love helping other authors as well. I mean, it's just, it's half the community. I think this is one of the nicest communities you can find online or other authors. So it's just a really wonderful place to be. I agree. I agree so well, do you think though Amazon is always going to be the King either for finding books or the ads? I mean, do you think there's going to be eventually, maybe down the road another way for readers to discover authors? I know a lot of, as Amazon grows and they don't even give away how many books they now host on their platform and on their servers, it's, you know, people are saying eight and 9 million books easily.
Autumn (29m 15s): What's going on. Do you think it's going to get too crowded? Is, is there going to be something else other than Amazon that readers will be able to find other authors or is it just going to be, you know, like really crowded beach we're in doing Scott, they're a little square and that's about it.
Bryan (29m 31s): We've been, we've been waiting and hoping for someone to just come out of the gate and be the next Amazon. And there's definitely lots of smaller pockets of, of some people who are having some success on Kobo or Apple or Barnes and noble, but I'm most intrigued by people selling direct and what, I've, what I, I, I remember Michael Scott aro, who was, I believe his books were taken down from Amazon.
Bryan (30m 20s): Amazon had said that there were some rules violated. I have no idea everything I consider allegedly until I see see some documentation on it, but from what I hear, and he was doing very, very well, top hundred, one of the top hundred authors on Amazon at the time and making a lot of money. A lot of it was from Kindle unlimited. A lot of it was from, from Amazon type sources of income. But from what I hear, he has used more of the crowdfunding and direct sales models based on a very, very large email list to just say, well, if Amazon won't have me, then I'm going to do it myself and Chris on your podcast talking about his very successful Kickstarter.
Bryan (31m 21s): Now I know his was with his RPG connected to his world's IP, but it's still connected. I have a student who crowd funds his, his comic books. I mean, there is just so much opportunity to branch, into connecting more directly with the consumer. And there's so many benefits. I think Alex peer Alex Jonty, who has had some amazing posts on the 20 bucks to 50 K group, he's had months of 50 to $100,000 a month selling direct from his, I believe he, he uses a Shopify store and I could be wrong about that, but I know he does it direct.
Bryan (32m 13s): And he, and, and, and Michael and, and Chris and folks who do have that more direct relationship via email, they have the ability to pivot when something doesn't work as well on Amazon. And I think there may come a reckoning in 2021, 2022, if something funky happens with Kindle unlimited or audible, or what have you, the folks who have primarily relied on Amazon, who do not at the same time, grow their email list and their fan base, they could be in trouble.
Bryan (33m 3s): I think that it's a really good idea to not put all your eggs in one basket and to always be growing your base of people and connecting with them.
Autumn (33m 14s): Oh, I love, I absolutely love that message personally, because I'm wide. And I actually do sell off my website. I mean, it's small. I have a small list and I have a compared to these people you're referring to these other authors, but it is good and readers. I think I've gotten very savvy. Some, I mean, a lot of readers are also authors a little bit, so they know what's going on. But yeah, I do have some readers who will always go to my website and buy my books directly from me, or they'll at least asking what's the difference. And I just, I think that's fantastic. They understand a lot more about the marketplace than I think a lot of people realize. And that's good because it is, it is important that they're seeing a value in our writing and they want to support authors and have them write more books because that's the only way that they'll get more books is by supporting, you know, their favorites.
Autumn (34m 6s): So that's, that's really interesting. So I did want to know. So we got into the author and writing conversation. So with everything you're working right now on the next challenge, which I'll have to ask you in a couple of minutes when that's going to happen. But first, so you're an author too. How much time do you get to write with all of these other things you're juggling, you have your own business and you have these challenges and so much going on.
Bryan (34m 38s): Well, it's funny, I'm I, I sit in the hotel today, right? My it's funny. It's like, I've done this a few times now and now my, my three-year-old daughter says, let's go to your hotel and like
Autumn (34m 56s): The hotel
Bryan (34m 57s): Room that we can walk to, but yeah, it's adorable. So I sitting here working on the slides for the upcoming challenge, and I look at my I'm typing into a Neo two and I look, all right, well, how much have I written today? How much have I written? Then it's like 6,800 words after 6:00 AM onwards. And I write plenty, but I have not had much chance to write books of late. And it's been a couple years. And I, and I do miss it.
Bryan (35m 39s): I think that I I'm hoping to fit them in, in 2021. I'm, I'm hoping to squeeze some in, but I also know that if I don't, I it's okay. Because as I often am telling a lot of the people, a lot of the authors I work with find the thing that is, is providing the most value. Find the thing that is providing the most profit, whatever your goal is, find the thing that is most achieving that. And then focus a lot more on that. Like if you have, you know, three readers from this series, you never finished from like five years ago and you have three readers who keep asking, don't do the old, well, people keep asking about it.
Bryan (36m 34s): No, not people, not my readers, three readers, keep asking about it. And if only 20 people bought that series in total five years ago, then no, that is not the thing you should be working on unless it provides something else for you because you need to be working on the most important thing. The one thing as the Gary Keller book says, you need to find the one thing and you need to focus on that because it is so easy to be pulled in a million different contradictory directions.
Bryan (37m 16s): And right now, writing a book might be a fun middle of the year project for me. But for now it's like, this is the thing that helps the most people. My, my goal in authored is to be at the point where if 10,000 authors emailed me on the same day, needing help of all different varieties that my team and I could actually handle that to me, could support basically the entire community at scale all at the same time.
Bryan (37m 58s): And that is a goal that's going to take a long time to get. But the challenge right now is the thing that best fulfills that goal. And so everything creative, every I used airline points, but this hotel was not, was not cheap. Anything I can do to help that goal, that one thing, goal, that top priority goal I'm going to do. And I think everyone listening should do the same thing. That was just
Autumn (38m 36s): Brilliant. And I just, so you know, you are already doing a fantastic job because I know any question that gets asked, any question I've asked in the challenge group, you or someone from your team has gotten back to. And usually several people have gotten back to and given tips and help, and actually spent the time where I know I've been in other places and challenges and other groups where, you know, you just kind of sometimes hear crickets when you ask that hard question. And yes, you even helped me once on a Permafree you trying to figure out what, what bid price to put in by the way it worked. So thank you for that. Yes, it's very good.
Autumn (39m 16s): So when is this challenge you're working on, when is it going to be ready? When are you going to do your next one? You're sitting number six,
Bryan (39m 24s): Number six, it's coming up January 11th. So Monday, January 11th and, you know, kicking off 2021. And as per usual, it'll be five days of videos. They're, they're not all contiguous. So they kind of do bleed in to the following week and there is a video of zeros, so it really ends up being six. And so just block out that whole, January 11th to about the 20th and, and that'll be a good time to, to work on it. And I can absolutely autumn give you the link to it. You can check it out.
Bryan (40m 5s): And I'll probably put a link@sellingforauthors.com powers last January. Now that I'm thinking about it. And then, yeah, I I'm, the more the merrier, we always try to have like several dozen people at any given time just available to answer anything and everything so that we can help people at scale. Yeah.
Autumn (40m 30s): I, one of my favorite things about your challenge is that it is not, it's five. You call it five days, but then, you know, with the zero, it's a six, but you give a break. There's always, I used to think it's usually between three and four, but you let people catch up on their homework and I've had to use that for sure. And it makes it a little less stressful. You don't, you don't feel so before behind you, you're like, okay, I've got the weekend. I can do this now. So that's always been wonderful.
Bryan (40m 58s): Yeah. I, I know I would want the same. So I'm glad that you,
Autumn (41m 1s): I found it helpful. It is. You're very, very kind to the authors. You help in many ways. Well, yes. So that's perfect. Cause this is going out on December 29th. So just 12 days from when this is live, it'll be time and you'll be done with it and you will not be in a hotel room. I'm pretty sure that's correct. Okay. Yes. So where else can listeners find you other than we'll put the links in show notes as well? Of course.
Bryan (41m 37s): Sure. Well, I, if you like podcasts, you can also listen to the sell more books, show podcasts. We just did episode 340 something. I think. So. Thank you. That's that's been going for, I guess, six and change years. So we're happy to always keep doing that. And if you haven't listened to in like a year got a new co-host H Claire Taylor, who was just fantastic and definitely that, that, that is aside from the challenges. That's another great place to hang out with me.
Autumn (42m 19s): Excellent. Well, thank you again for the time. Is there anything you would like to any last words of advice you want to give to authors out there for whether they're thinking of blurbs or marketing or AMS? Just some last bit of hope as we end 2020 as this will be like one of the last days of the year when this is released,
Bryan (42m 44s): It's very, very, very likely that 2021 is going to be better than 2020. So please, if you have not taken into account that 2020 was very hard. If you've not taken that into account with your writing productivity, and you said I had a bad year writing, or if your sales have been down and you say I had a bad year of sales, just give yourself a little bit of, you know, leeway, give yourself a little bit of wiggle room because it was a hard year, very, very challenging for a lot of people.
Bryan (43m 26s): And you should not hold yourself to the same high standards of the past when a generationally bad year comes around. So please be kind to yourself. And in 2021, continue to be kind as you do everything you can to snap yourself out of any funk and go do the work you need to do to be as successful as you hope to become.
Autumn (44m 1s): That is a wonderful advice for the end of, I love that. A generationally trying your, it was, it was a doozy. It's one we'll talk about for a long time to come. So many means. Yes. Thank you again so much for joining us, Brian. We appreciate it. And I look forward to seeing you in just under two weeks in the AMS edge challenge.
Bryan (44m 25s): Thank you, Adam. I'll see you there.
Autumn (44m 27s): Bye. Join us next week when Yesper will be back and we'll be sharing some
3 (44m 32s): Great book ideas that we don't think we'll ever get around to writing, but Hey, maybe they will inspire you.
Narrator (44m 41s): If you like what you just heard. There's a few things you can do to support the am writing fantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Ottoman Yesper on patrion.com/and writing fantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the M writing fantasy podcast going, stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
The holidays are upon us as well as the last few weeks of 2020!
We take a quick look back to see how well we did with the goals we outlined a year ago and talk about where Am Writing Fantasy and the podcast is headed in the brand new year.
Plus, Happy Holidays to all of our listeners and Patreon supporters. We love having you share this time with us!
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Narrator (4s): You're listening to the M writing fantasy podcast in today's publishing landscape. You can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need an literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Auden, Bert, and Gasper.
Jesper (32s): Hello, I'm Jesper
Autumn (34s): and I'm Autumn.
Jesper (36s): This is episode 104 of the am. Riding fences, you podcast. And we are right before Christmas Episode releases. So first of all, Merry Christmas, everyone. Yes. Happy holidays.
Autumn (50s): Hey, it is also the winter solstice. So that's kinda cool. Yeah. And th this episode might be slightly different from most probably shorter as well, but we'll see how that goes. We're notorious for our 40 minutes. So maybe now you never know. We'll see. But we wanted for one to talk about the year that passed and also the year to come for the am writing fantasy podcast, but above all, we wanted to thank you for listening.
Jesper (1m 24s): And also say that we hope that you will have a wonderful Christmas. Are you feeling the Christmas mood yet?
Autumn (1m 33s): Oh, well, I didn't expect you to play Christmas music. So I guess that's adorable.
Jesper (1m 41s): Very, yeah, I was, I was actually playing the jingle there just to see if I could do something to get into the mood myself. Well you're yeah. I mean, you've had such a busy week. I mean, looking back with this as a recorded, who knows you're going to have your entire new apartment, like completely set up, but right now you're sitting on boxes and the darks. Oh yeah, yeah. And of course, we're also recording this a couple of weeks before Christmas. So while you might live well, when this release is it's going to be the 21st of December, but we actually recording it a few weeks in advance. So yeah, I'm not really in the mood at the moment, as you say, I've just been through over the last week, moving from the house to an apartment.
Jesper (2m 27s): So it's, it's so messy and stressful. I do not feel very Christmas like at the moment. Oh, you'll get there. You'll get there. There'll be, especially with the two boys. You'll, you'll have lots to celebrate and it's a celebration and your first one in a new place, it's exciting new journey, a new stage of your guys's life. So you'll have a lot to celebrate. I'm sure it'll be fine. Yeah, that is true. Yeah. And I actually didn't open the computer once for about a week. Isn't that crazy? I don't know if that has ever happened before my computer would think that the world had ended. If I didn't touch it for a full say so, Oh, that's amazing.
Jesper (3m 7s): That's going to feel very, Yeah, it, yeah. And I, every muscle in my body is like aching from moving. And, but we managed to cram an entire house into an apartment apart from the few things that we had, we put into a small storage room. But other than that, it's just like boxes. Yeah. Yeah. Do you think you'll get everything to fit or you think a few things, more things will go back to the storage unit? Well, the story's unit is full, so there's no. So it's staying in the apartment or it's being sold. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know. I hope, I hope we'll, we'll manage to find places for everything.
Jesper (3m 48s): I mean, we did of course throw out a lot of things from the house that we just never used. And then we put in those things that we didn't want to throw out into the storage room. So I hope everything you will find its place. I mean, part of the problem at the moment is also that we sold some of the old furniture to the new owners of the house, because then we didn't have to move it. And it didn't quite fit in here style-wise either. So, so that was actually nice. But then we also had to go and buy a bunch of new stuff to replace it. So yesterday I was putting Ikea furniture together for, from, I got up in the morning to after dinner time in the evening.
Jesper (4m 32s): And, and until all of that is put together, we don't have places to put, you know, so it's like cabinets and drawers and all kinds of stuff. So you need to put it together before we can start putting things in it. Right. So that's part of the problem right now as well. I actually have a confession. I really wish we were on the same land mass in Cottonelle because I absolutely adore putting together Ikea furniture. I don't know why the Alan keys and the instructions and seeing something take shape from a bunch of boards is actually like, I just, I volunteer whenever I see someone who has like Ikea, Oh, let me do it. So I wish I was there helping you feed me toasted money.
Jesper (5m 17s): I would happily put together your furniture for you. So it's very unfortunate that there's this like pandemic. And I can't just hop on a plane because that would be a blast. Yeah. It's not, I wouldn't say that. I mind putting Ikea furniture together that much either. It's, it's not that I mind, but the problem for us at the moment is still does so much of it that it takes forever. I mean, I think we spent like two and a half thousand dollars on lucky furniture. So it's like The leather furniture from Ikea. Oh yeah. And especially that you can't really, especially, you're already in a crammed apartment with other people and boxes and you have to find a place to lay out all this stuff, build it and then build something else and move it around.
Jesper (6m 3s): And you're yeah. You probably feel like you're building the walls of a labyrinth around you. Yeah. That's Pretty accurate. You think I've moved before. That's crazy. But I know you have Well for entire different reasons, but you've had a very busy week. Yeah. I did a kind of didn't think about it, which I'm glad November was a fantastic month. I joined nano I, I got my 50,000 words and I would not change that for a bit. But coming out of that, I suddenly realized that we're about to launch not one, not two but three new courses. And I had wanted to rebuild the course website for probably a year and a half, two years.
Jesper (6m 48s): And I was going to do it this January. But if you're going to release courses, you're gonna have new people signing up. And one of them is free. So we're probably going to have a lot of people picking that one up. I realize that I officially, we started with just three days, but then we did rearrange some things. And you gave me a full week, which was exciting to rebuild a website of over 300 pages and featuring six courses, plus a free starter kit and some downloads. And it was, I will say though, I mean, this is hardly my first rodeo with a website, but this was the first time that I actually, every time I had an exclamation, it was not a curse word.
Jesper (7m 34s): I almost found myself going, yes, I love you. I love this theme. I love what I'm doing. I love the help that's available. I was so excited. I mean, I think my husband, well, he knows I'm crazy cause he married a writer. So he knows there's a little touched, but I was just, I actually had a lot of fun when I was learning a few things. I didn't know. And then finding code written to solve problems that don't even realize it's going to have before I started doing this, I was just like, this is amazing. This is absolutely amazing. I think the website came out beautifully. I'm thrilled. I need a day off. And that's, I want to spend a whole day writing and just staring off at the clouds, the squirrels chasing each other through the woods.
Jesper (8m 22s): Can't blame you. But, but, and I, especially like the, the add in that you found all the plugin, Which, which helps students to track Their progress. So it has like a program, Which I really like. I know I did find one thing. I've got to tweak on it in a couple of pages, but it's very, very minor, but there's internal navigation and there's like this progress tracker for students and it checks off a box on the menu that tells them they did that module. And it's just so awesome. I'm I'm really, like I said, I'm thrilled. It's better for the students. It's it's better. It looks better. It functions better from a coding standpoint.
Jesper (9m 4s): So it's all, Oh, wins. Even if it might've grown another gray hair or two during the last week and maybe fried a brain cell, Oh, we go on the internet with the yam writing fantasy podcast. So I just noticed this morning that we had to Richard dropped back into the am, riding fences, who Facebook for the first time in a long while. And he shared how he, he should pick a list of, Of all the groups that he's a member and then check marks against all those that he actually posts into. Make sure he covers all of them. But the richest post just made me think about how it tied in pretty well with today's topic in the sense of cleaning up before the end of the year.
Jesper (9m 52s): Tell me how many Facebook groups are you a member of autumn? Do you know? I don't want to know what I have to admit. I'm really bad because I rarely go on Facebook. And my mom's constantly didn't you see that photo? I posted a link. No, I only go to my group, so I don't want to know, but you're right. I, how many should I be a member of probably five. How many am I a member of? Probably over a hundred. Okay. Yeah. This probably happens to a lot of, you know, that they, a member of all kinds of groups that seemed interesting at the time and then they completely forgot about it. So yeah, I don't know this morning, I actually did a bit of cleanup and I'm down to something like, I think five groups that I'm a member of now, myself and nothing more.
Jesper (10m 40s): I deleted all the other stuff that I'd never go and check anyway. Oh, excellent. That is exciting. And maybe, you know, I do like, I don't like to wait for new year's resolutions to make changes, but I do like the reminder of now's a good time to clean house and check my book manuscripts and do things along those lines. So I'm sure I have some Facebook groups I could whittle out myself. So that's a good idea. And I'm glad Richard found his way back to us and that hopefully he'll be popping back in more often. Yeah. And if It definitely, and if you're listening, Richard, thank you for stopping by. But of course in general, DM writing fences to Facebook group is normally quite active.
Jesper (11m 25s): So if you're not a member yet just search for M writing fences in the group section of Facebook and then you can apply to become a member. And one of us we'll let you in, or maybe one of our moderators will. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. We were actually just in there before we started recording this. And what did I found that one post that had like 191 comments, there were a little active, just, just tat it's a great place to be. Yeah, absolutely. And there, there's a couple of thousand fantasy authors in there already, so it's actually a pretty good community. And if you know, if you have any questions or anything, you want some fellow authors to share some thoughts about, then that's a great place to post your stuff And to today's topic.
Jesper (12m 16s): You know what I did, autumn, I've actually managed while I was in Facebook earlier today, I actually managed to dig out a Facebook post that I wrote on December 23rd, 2019. So like a year ago. Excellent. Yeah, because it was a post in which I summarized our goals for 2020. So how did we do, Oh, that's how I thought it would be a good workplace. Start here too. I could read out aloud that post and then we can just discuss how we think we did against those goals. That sounds perfect. I love this setup.
Jesper (12m 55s): Let's go for it. Okay. So let, this is then me reading the post. First of all, allow autumn and myself to extend our blessings and love for all you wonderful writers. It's been a very busy year for us and 2020 is going to be no different last week. We agreed what we want to achieve in 2020. Number one, complete the world building course and release it. Number two, complete the self-publishing success course and release it. Number three, publish our short guide on story ideas. Number four, publish our step-by-step step system for plotting number five, publish a workbook for plotting number six, complete and release a brand new course on email marketing and number seven, redesign the am writing fantasy website.
Jesper (13m 51s): And then it goes on to say, as you can see, that's quite a lot. Once all of that has been completed, we're going to focus entirely on new fiction series. If all goes well, we will write three to four books in 2021. We hope you are heading into a productive year writing and a huge thank you for being part of our community. We wish you a Merry Christmas and happy new years Ormond Yesper. That's a very good post. Yeah, I thought, and I thought it was so such a good starting point because actually if I'm looking down that list of items we wanted to do, I think we will.
Jesper (14m 30s): They I'm writing fantasy website site is not quite done yet, but as we are recording a bit ahead of time here, it's probably going to be done before we hit new years. And if so, we can basically Mark all of these complete that's what I, with your listing them, I'm letting go. This is going to be something we haven't done. And we're like, world-building building course. Nope. Did that self publishing success? Nope. Did one. The books, All three of them, for least and were all bestsellers in August of bailing course. That is we haven't released it yet because we haven't decided when to, but it is, it is there, it is ready. I could release it tomorrow. And so, yeah, it's just the I'm writing fantasy website, which that won't take too long.
Jesper (15m 14s): Hopefully by the time we're recording this, versus when we release it, maybe that'll be done. I don't think I've ever actually hit every single one of my goals, especially goals that big and ambitious and we haven't done more than we listed there. So that's just, we did the character building course. What's not even on the list. Yeah we, so that was your doing, you came up On the fly there in the middle of the year, In the middle of a pandemic. And so everyone was doing courses on a discount to help out keep people entertained and educated and optimistic. And we asked the people in the am writing fantasy, Facebook group, what would you like?
Jesper (15m 55s): And they said a character development course. And we did it in like two weeks. Yeah, no, but actually, I mean, because one, one thing one could say when you review like a, to do list and say, okay, you tick off everything. One thing one could say would be, well, if it's just an easy list, then of course you can get all of it done. But actually this list has some huge items on them. You know, there are several full full courses here, the world-building course. Well that probably took us two and a half year to develop. And that was not done during 2020. That was a two and two years project and just finished up in 2020.
Jesper (16m 36s): But there was a lot of very heavy items on this list that yes, some of it has been in the works since 2019, but just to get all of it finished up and released in 2020, I think, I don't think this is an ambitious list that we created at the end of 2019, to be honest. No, it was, I think a very ambitious list, but we had, we knew we had all of these things on the, on the burner and some of them had been cooking away more than long enough. And it was finally, this is the year. This is the year we're going to make it happen and we're going to get them done. And by doing that in the saying it, we, we really did it and it certainly didn't happen by sitting back saying, I hope it happens.
Jesper (17m 19s): We've been working our butts off to make it happen. And he decided, you know, you sold a house and moved as well. So it's been really, and I have switched from a department to a cabin in the woods. So there's been even lots of moving, going on in our personal lives. Yeah. That's actually true. Yeah, yeah. Crazy year. Yeah, it has been, but I don't know if there's, is there more about 2020 or should we do a bit of forward-looking? I don't think so. I mean, we knew when we came into that, we had said basically from the get-go it was going to be a platform building year. We were going to finish up a lot of our projects so that we could look ahead and that's where we're at is 2021.
Jesper (18m 0s): We're looking ahead. And I don't think our plans or our goals has changed much from what we posted in 2019. No, not really. It's pretty much on track with that. And I would also say from the perspective of this podcast, I don't think that much, I mean, we don't have any plans as such to change anything. We'd probably just going to keep going with the same, let's say frequency, but also the same format that, that listeners know today. I don't think we don't. We, well, we don't really have any plans listed of things.
Jesper (18m 42s): We want to change with the podcast as such either. No, but I think this would be a good chance for listeners once, you know, you get over your holiday cheer and, and have a moment to reflect. If there's anything you would like to see in 2021, if you would like any topics you would want us to cover people. You want us to interview that you think would be cool. Do you drop it into the comments and let us know? And we would love to see what your ideas are, but I think, I mean, I'm really happy. We hit a hundred episodes in 2020, and I'm looking forward to 2021 and watching that number increase in watching the number of listeners increase. I mean, every, the stats go up every week.
Jesper (19m 23s): So I'm really happy. I think a lot of writers are finding us and liking us and coming back and unless someone is going to comment differently, I'm just going to keep believing in that. Yeah. I was actually looking into some of the stats earlier today because actually we launched this podcast in February, 2019 and it grew really quickly, you know, by the end of the first year. So coming into the beginning of 2020, we had increased the monthly downloads by more than 10 times from where we started. So that was pretty encouraging as we were heading into 2020.
Jesper (20m 6s): And then I would say from there, the podcast has grown a bit throughout the year, this year as well, but not nearly as close as it did in 2019, which is of course not surprising because that was it's, it's much easier to gain a huge percentage increase once you don't have much from a starting point, right. Zero to 10 is really big. Yeah. Yeah, indeed. So, but it has been growing throughout 2020 as well. So on one hand that's okay. On the other hand, you know, 2020 has been a bit crazy with coronavirus, the U S election and so on and so on.
Jesper (20m 46s): So I think as we are heading into 2021, now that's also the time where I, at least personally, I would like to start see some more growth in the listenership of this podcast. Yeah. That would be really, I would be excited about that myself too. I think they're out there, but yeah, it's been a year. I mean, most people, I mean, when I listen to podcasts, it's usually while I'm driving or walking or, you know, commuting, things like that. And a lot of us are teleworking. So the commute time is between, you know, the bedroom and the home office is a lot shorter than most people who had to drive before. So I think that's probably impacted things a little bit.
Jesper (21m 26s): At least I'm hopeful. I certainly know there's been more engagement and I do see some downloads, but I think it's always a good goal to try to increase listeners and see this grow because I, you know, I'm a gardener and ecologist in my blood, so I like to see things grow. Doesn't it's happy. Yeah, absolutely. So if you are the listener one to help us out a bit here, then there's actually a number of things that you can do as a, As a little Christmas gift for Yeah. To put us on the right path for 2021. So number one, if you haven't done so already, please leave a rating and review of the podcast wherever you listen to it, because it actually makes a huge difference in terms of the different podcast aggregators proposing, or suggesting our podcast to new listeners is so they go off the ratings and reviews and if there's a lot of them, then they will suggest our podcast to junior listeners as well.
Jesper (22m 27s): So that will help. And secondly, if you know, a writer, why not mention this podcast to that person, it's, it's sort of like a win-win situation, right? That, that, that other person will be happy to learn of a new podcast to listen to. And that you've done a good deed and that's pretty much in line with the Christmas spirit. Yeah. That would be the best. I'm a hard person to give Christmas presents to because well, you know, I write and I draw and I, I mean, what can people give me other than time? My laptop's functioning I'm happy. So that would be a fantastic present. I think though, to put into our stockings, if people would go ahead and leave a review and mentioned it to other folks or in other groups, I would so appreciate it.
Jesper (23m 11s): I know we'd both, so appreciate it and make us feel warm and fuzzy, which is definitely the holiday spirit. Yeah. So I don't know, I'm sort of thinking that this is an episode right before Christmas autumn, and I know people are busy. So I'm almost thinking that I was gonna head into wrapping things up here for, for today's episode. But I don't know if you have anything important to mention before I get into that. No, I think I'm just hopeful 2021 is a crazy Year globally. And I think, you know, unless we get into our personal wishlist and goals for the year that I think as a podcast and as I'm writing fantasy, you know, we're hoping to write some books, get some stuff put together and not have quite a year is going to be our cookie or dessert after a year of flat for the building.
Jesper (24m 7s): I'm so looking forward to the, working on the books we've been, and again, it's not like we're just going to start from scratch in January. We've been working on the outlines and the plots and the character development in the world building. So I think we're ready to hit 20, 21 I'm running. Yeah. We're looking so much forward to it. And I, we're also looking forward to record a lot more podcast episodes for you in the year to come and thank you for listening during the year that passed. And if you weren't out there, all of you, you know, if we didn't get any support on Patrion, if we didn't get some emails, once in a while, or somebody tweeting us once in a while to let us know that this podcast actually means something to you, then I doubt we would have concluded that we were going to continue for 2021.
Jesper (24m 60s): So thank you so much for, for all that support out there. We appreciate it. Every comment, every review we read them, we appreciate them. And then when we get a chance, if especially if it's via email, we try to get back to people. So thank you for all of the support and the reviews and the kind words we really, it means so much to us, right? So next Monday West in there, right between Christmas and new year, autumn will have a very interesting interview with the wonderful Brian Cohen for you.
Narrator (25m 36s): If you like, what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the am writing fantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Ottoman Yesper on patrion.com/and writing fantasy for as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the M writing fantasy podcast going, stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
If one of your books, or series, aren't selling much, will it help to change the book cover, the book description (also known as the blurb), or will it be a lot of effort for nothing?
In episode 103, Autumn share the results after she re-released one of her book series.
Tune in to learn all the do's and don'ts.
As promised here's the link to the free Self-Publishing Success course: https://ultimatefantasywritersguide.com/self-publishing-success/
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy.
For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to the Am Writing fantasy podcast in today's publishing landscape. You can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt, and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I'm Jesper, and I'm, Autumn. This is episode 103 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. Well, today, Autumn, you recently went through some renaming and rebranding of your books. So that's something we wanted to talk a bit about today.
Autumn (48s): Yeah. I definitely have some reasons why you might want to do it some stats because you know, we like to provide that kind of information and things to watch out for that. I didn't think about the first part, but that we'll get to that. Right. You're in the middle of some big events going on. So how are you doing over there?
Jesper (1m 11s): Oh, I'm good. I was, well, today has been one of these organization days. I was setting up some emails this morning to announce the VIP launch of the world building course that we talked about last week and I've just also just trying to get organized in general before I actually, tomorrow I take the rest of the week off because I'm going to move out of our house and into the apartment, as I've mentioned a few times. So if everything goes well by Friday, this week, we should be living in our new place by then. That's amazing. That'll be really exciting. And I hope it does go well because it'll be a lot of work, but it's so exciting.
Jesper (1m 53s): Cause you've been working on this for like two years. So it's really, really cool. It's finally here. You're doing it. Yeah, it was actually in November two years ago that we first put the house up for sale. So it is just, just past two years since, since this whole journey started. So that's quite amazing. Amazing. Yeah. So we were actually thinking that if all goes well and we do move into the apartment and start living there by Friday, we did think about going because the apartment is much more centrally located than our house. So it's like I've said before, it's in the main city in this area.
Jesper (2m 33s): So there are, that also means that there are restaurants around. So we actually thought about a Saturday going to this very nice sushi place that is, and we don't have to drive there. Now we can just walk, walk.
Autumn (2m 46s): So that's pretty nice. That's going to be kind of cool. I might be a little envious because I lived in town when I first moved to where we are in Vermont and I didn't enjoy the noise. Cause it was only a second floor apartment and we're right at an inter big intersection. But you know, we could, especially, this was before COVID. So there was like Tuesday nights, if we walked down to one pub, there was always a group of fiddlers playing and doing a jam session together. And then there was a yeah, the bookstore. And if we decided we needed something else for dinner, there was a grocery store, a small one, a co-op that was within walking distance. So I do kind of miss that. So that is super cool. You're going to be living that close to everything.
Jesper (3m 29s): Yeah. That's nice. And we are, yeah. As I said before, we are right next to the beach, so there's no like big, there's no big road right next to the buildings or anything like that. So that's quite nice. And we are on the fifth floor and there is because we have a corner apartment up there. It also means that there is only one wall against, you know, to watch a neighbor. There's nobody above us. And there there's only somebody below, so it should at least the person who rented it before us, that it was very, very quiet. And that's exactly what I like. So I hope that's true.
Autumn (4m 8s): I hope so too. That's really awesome.
Jesper (4m 13s): Yeah, but you've been extremely busy as well on UN
Autumn (4m 16s): Yeah. Well we had some big plans to, you know, do some website rebuilding at am, writing fantasy. And I was going to rebuild the course website in January, except we've been building all these courses and it finally dawned on me. I needed to have the new website done before we made those live. So I've been, I'm doing an emergency website build over the weekend, but I promised myself that once I, I got that done, I would take two days off whenever it was because, Hey, when you're a full-time writer, what's Saturday, Saturday, it can be Thursday if you happen to get it done then. So I'll, I'll have my, my weekends. I usually try to do more Photoshopping and more fun things for me with other store on the computer.
Autumn (5m 1s): I mean, it is almost December in Vermont. So that's kind of the Northern tier of the United States. And it's even today is cold. It is dark. I have all the lights on it is raining. So it's not like I'm going to go for a hike. I just want to go and do something else. But I did. I said after our last episode, even though this is now December when it's going to be released, but today is the last day of November. So it's the last day of nano right. Mo and you want to know my word count.
Jesper (5m 37s): I did see your Facebook post about it. And I'm trying to remember now what it was, but I felt like it was something like 51,000 or something. If I remember correctly, I'm not sure.
Autumn (5m 49s): Yeah. That's on the November 25th. I updated my word count to just over 52,000 words. So yeah, I finished it and I started on the 17th. It actually took me 19 days to get the 50,000 words. So I feel it considering it was my 23rd book. That's going to be published. I, I was hoping I could manage to get to it. So I was it's success and I've kept adding to it since then. So I'm almost at 60,000 words now for the month, today was busy and I haven't added in anything, but it'll be hovering just around 60,000 for my first nano. So I feel really good and I'm thinking it was fun.
Autumn (6m 30s): And I do see there's been some emails and stuff from them about, you know, writing the end and I'm like, well, 50,000 words is not a fantasy. No, that's like halfway through a fantasy novel. So I'm thinking, Oh, you know what, maybe we need to think about doing like an am writing fantasy NaNoWriMo writing group. Cause you can have writing groups there that share tips and support. So I'm my, you know, that's a good question for listeners. I mean, is anyone else out there interested in having us or me lead a little nano right. Mo group writing group of maybe even at camp nano right.
Autumn (7m 11s): Mow this summer. So, you know, comment, let us know if it's something that you think would be pretty cool and I can try to help you get your 50,000 words too.
Jesper (7m 21s): Hmm. That's actually a pretty good idea. Yeah. Teaming up is always a good idea. And it has some accountability partners.
Autumn (7m 29s): It has, especially when you get to some of the sticky parts that can really slow you down and you get frustrated and you sometimes just need someone to like really you out of it and get you on and keep going.
Jesper (7m 41s): Yeah. Oh, we got the internet with the yam writing fantasy podcast. So I saw a post in the am writing fantasy Facebook group this morning. That quite made me smile
Autumn (7m 54s): LA what's that? Oh, it's just a,
Jesper (7m 58s): It's a small one, but it was quite nice. I thought it was like John was pointing out how once in a while a particular well-written turn of phrase is just sort of happens and pour it onto the page. And then he shared what he had just written here and it went like this quote. He looked at me then he's expression dripping with so much contempt. It likely stained the floor. That was quite good.
Autumn (8m 27s): Good. I love it. When people share and have quotes and stuff on there, that is fantastic. I have to admit though, I've been smiling at Zane's comment from when we released the hundredth episode and he left a comment on a Patriot Patriot and for us. So I don't know if you remember that one,
Jesper (8m 47s): Remind me,
Autumn (8m 48s): Hey, he said that he was so excited that he had to go have a beer. And that one made me smile because I have had men grown men tell me that my writing made them cry, but I had yet to ever have someone telling me that something we had done ni paid them money to eat alcohol. So I thought that wasn't very successful way of toasting our hundredth episode that we released. And it was so much fun to do as well. Absolutely.
Jesper (9m 19s): Yeah. There, there are all kinds of shenanigans going on in the Facebook group, but also some cool tips and tricks and advice that is shared every day. So if you're not a member yet just search for am writing fantasy in the group section of Facebook and then apply to become a member and we will let you in, there's not even a password. So it's true. You're very welcome.
Autumn (9m 43s): Yeah. I don't think we even ask any like entry questions. So we're, we're really easy. We just just make you ask nicely and you get to come in and have a ton of fun in the Facebook group. And, and of course, and if you want to have even more fun, you can come over and join us on Patrion and, and there you get even more, more personal seizing, I guess, and tips and lots of fun as well. We do sometimes have some fun, some back and forth on there and some jokes.
Jesper (10m 13s): So a lot of good places where you could join. So yeah. Get going. If you haven't done so already
Narrator (10m 20s): And onto today's topic
Jesper (10m 24s): Last week, I sort of took the reins on the podcast, but I think this week is probably your turn
Autumn (10m 32s): This time, you get to pretend to be the interviewer and ask me how it went. Yeah.
Jesper (10m 38s): And I can, I can try to chime in here and there with reflections and thoughts, but of course in full transparency, I have not gone through any rebranding of my own books, although I really should, but I haven't. So I don't have any personal experience to share, but I can try to pitch in where I feel that I have something to contribute with them.
Autumn (10m 59s): That's fair enough. Well, I think it's a good thing to say that, you know, it's not, it's, it's not random who decides they want to rebrand a book. I remember Joanna Penn was the first one who introduced me to even the concept of it. Cause she rebranded, recovered and retitled a lot of her thriller sale series. And I was like, wow, that is when you see someone, you know, Joanna Penn's level, it's one thing to change your cover. But the change changer titles and you know, she was talking about, you know, making sure her readers knew this is a book you've already gotten. Don't worry about it. This is something, you know, this is, you've already read it. It's just a different title. It looks different. It's a different cover. So that is, is something that authors do, no matter what lever was, if you're a newbie or you've been doing this for 10 years or more, you might suddenly decide that something's not working in your marketing and what's not marketing, what's not working is, you know, the title, the actual physical title of your book or the series.
Autumn (11m 59s): And not just the cover because yes, rebranding is is can just be the cover. And I have to admit, I think born of water, I have gone through four different covers. Changing a cover is honestly super easy, but of course I'm a graphic designer. So if I want to change my cover, I, I know what to do. I'm responsible for that. Cause I'm the one who messed it up the first place or decided that it changed. I mean the marketing market really has changed since like 2012 when I first released that book.
Jesper (12m 31s): Yeah. And of course, as we've said before, do not design your own book cover unless you are experienced in book cover design and you know what you're doing to not design your own book cover. And I think I've said it multiple times in different podcast episodes, but I cannot say it enough because for whatever reason it keeps popping up. I see it on Facebook all the time people asking, is it, would it be okay if I designed my own cover? And sometimes I almost feel like jumping on this. I know, but then I think, okay, whatever, I can't keep saying the same thing all over and over again, but do not design your own book covers.
Autumn (13m 9s): No, even if you have an art background book covers are more than an artistic expression, it is a marketing image. It is, you really need an advertising background and advertising courses and to then know how to look through the market and see what are the trends that you need to do, what need to match, what do you need to be different for? So I agree. Don't do it. I know when I look back at, when I first started doing book covers, I was like, Oh my goodness, they were horrible. And even now I think I could still do better, but I think that's just my issues as a, Oh gosh, I've been, I don't want to even mid hell. My, one of my first memories is literally when I was like three or four and I was drawing. So I've been doing this for a little while now.
Autumn (13m 50s): I think, I think for decades I still have a lot to learn.
Jesper (13m 56s): Yeah. But I think maybe a good place to start as well would be like asking the question. Why would you want to rebrand a book or series in the first place? Absolutely. I think that's, that's a good starting question.
Autumn (14m 11s): It is. And I, again, because I just did this, I have the perfect case example. So I had a book and it is the next, it's the first book and the next series I planning on releasing in 20 early 20, 21. And when I came up with the cover, I don't know if we've read or the title. I don't think I listed, I don't think we recorded episode 37, which is how to title a book that we released. And it's full of really useful tips that you should do before you actually choose a name for your book. But I didn't do that because I don't think we had recorded it yet. And I do tend to go a lot with my gut instinct on things. And sometimes don't run marketing. It was so 20 early, I released this book in 2019 and I came up with the title, the light and the darkness, because it is a definitely a novel where the main character goes is living in a dark world.
Autumn (15m 6s): And he finds something that inspires him. It's a little bit of light in the darkness of basically a fake post-apocalyptic novel is what I like to call it. So it's based on Fay and I chose a series name called the Calla Bray, which in Gaelic, it means dark time or dark epoch, which is great. But you don't have many people on this planet speak Gaelic. Not that many. No. I think it's less than half a percentage. So if I was trying to market to someone who speaks Gaelic, even though there's no other Gaelic in the book, well, no, there's some names, there are names and things that are, are a little bit Gaelic it's yeah, it was not a good marketing choice.
Autumn (15m 47s): And I kind of knew that when I released it, but 2019 was a very, we we've had a podcast of episode. I'd get that one. But 2019 was a very hard year. For me. It was worse than 2020 in many ways, 2020, in some ways I've gotten my crap together and I feel much better as a person, despite the global pandemic, which is just crazy. But it goes to show what's going on outside. Doesn't mean what's going on in the inside. So 2019 was a bad year. I was just happy to get this book released. And I chose these things that if you have, when I finally sat down and looked at the marketing and wondering like, okay, I'm writing this book, I'm getting serious about marketing it.
Autumn (16m 28s): And I'm doing some research and seeing, you know, getting some idea of how it's going to sell and how it's going to hit the marketplace. And so I do a Google or an Amazon search and a Google search for the light and the darkness. And I get a ton of self help books. I don't even get my own book. I mean, my own book is like back there and like the dose bleeds section that you're like, okay, it doesn't even exist. And you do a search for Callan, right. You know, there's no one who's going to know how to spell that. Nobody's going to search that. No, no, exactly. And I thought, you know what? This is a problem. This is a problem. It doesn't help the book. I want this book to do as well as I can make it possible.
Autumn (17m 9s): And so I had to step back and I'd already recovered the book. I did a very basic symbol cover that I didn't like. And so I've already put in a much more dynamic cover that a lot of people have commented on. They really like it, but the title just doesn't do anything. And I finally sat down and said, you know what? I have to listen to podcast 37 and do some research and retitle it and do this seriously. And then figure out, you know, will this help. And I have some before and after stats on what choosing a new name meant for how this book is doing. And again, this is the only book in the series that is out yet. I, the rest of them, I haven't even put them on pre-order.
Autumn (17m 51s): I'm hoping by the middle of December, I'll have my act together and have the pre-orders up for the rest of the series for next year. But right now it's just a standalone novella. It's sitting up there without the rest of it's the rest of its family that is coming. But so you're gonna have a question or
Jesper (18m 11s): No. Well, I don't know question, but I was just thinking, because one thing is the title and the cover reflecting market trends, I guess, or reflecting the and market expectations, read expectations, that's sort of one thing. And, and usually that then translates into lack of sales. So that's sort of your, that's sort of the main driver behind rebranding, a book and a series. But at the same time, I was just thinking as well, that unless not necessarily thinking about your example here, but more in general, like, unless you completely missed the Mark.
Jesper (18m 60s): I think one of the nice things with fantasy compared to many others, young writers is that the market trend, if we can call it that or read the expectations, they don't change that rapidly when it comes to fantasy, you know, we'll see, we continue to love dragons, right.
Autumn (19m 19s): Brackets on the cover. It's a winner. So that doesn't yeah,
Jesper (19m 26s): Yeah, yeah. But that I agree, but my poem was more like, it doesn't change that much where I think others, young writers are much more prone to stuff changing much more frequently in terms of what the trends are. So, so in those Sean Morris, the authors might need to keep much more finger on the pulse to say, Oh, go, okay. I need to change my covers now because they are one and a half year old and market trends have moved. Whereas I think for us, maybe you need to have a look at your covers every three, four years, but that's, that's probably more to do with that. The artwork can be made much more beautiful at a less cost.
Jesper (20m 8s): So it might be worth updating your cover to just more beautiful pictures without really changing the cover, but more like just make them look a bit better. And so that they don't look outdated, whereas the actual imagery and stuff like that might be absolutely fine to keep as long as you refresh it, where some others young wrists, they might have to change all the imagery. So I think in that sense, we are a bit more lucky.
Autumn (20m 37s): I think so too. And I think even our titles can stand usually the test of time. If you choose a proper title, it doesn't even matter. You know, sometimes someone's going to up something very similar, but the market can usually handle it. There's a lot of fantasy books and it helps to, I would say the biggest thing is to be clear, but clear in your titles and clear on what your story is about, but when it does come to the covers and the imagery, I mean, I still think of some of the covers that are, I mean, Mercedes Lackey. I literally the books that I remember reading those cover is the same as when I was reading it as a teenager, it's it doesn't need to be changed. It is an illustrated cover and it is still gorgeous, which I think is fantastic.
Autumn (21m 20s): And so there's a lot, even though there's some trends that are current changing, like the colors and the magic right now are just absolutely amazing right now on eBooks. But if you could, if you still have a top end, more of a hand drawn image, that's still going to do amazingly well, because I think we're all still in love with, you know, picking up those books in the 1980s that remind us of those paperbacks that we loved as, as teenagers. You know, maybe the younger kids might not remember that, but I still think they see the trends and the what was there at the time, but it really, it isn't something you need to do every year.
Autumn (22m 3s): It is probably if your book's not selling, it's not the first place I would start. But if you have an instinct that you titled your book, something very strange and hard to understand, like the light and the darkness. And it brings up a whole bunch of self-help books, which are not even the right and Shannara, that's not a good sign, but if you choose like you have an interesting world name, like Chronicles or something like that, you know, it's probably not the best title. That would be a better series title maybe than a single book title, but it's not horrible for the fantasy genre, but
Jesper (22m 43s): Did you just make that up? I did pretty good. Quick copyright it, spell it. No, but it was more like coming up with that on top of your head that it was pretty good. Thank you. Lots of writing recently, 50,000,
Autumn (23m 3s): Whereas apparently in November, but so I, I knew I had to retitle it and I did a lot of research and I ended up coming up with a dark Faye outcast because it fits, it's a face story. It's about a dark Fe he's kicked out. I mean, it's pretty much, you know, calling what is it? The pot calling the kettle black is the phrase. It fits the book. It's very blunt titling. It works on the keywords. And I went from Cal Ray for a serious name to the tainted Fe because at his perfect, I kind of wanted broken magic, but that's already been used. And I didn't feel like tangoing with the person who's already using that one, but no one has the tainted Fe already took it. Don't even try grabbed it already.
Autumn (23m 46s): But so I did that and what I had been doing, I don't have a ton of marketing into it yet. Not till I get up my pre-order. So this is just looking at the stats of running book, funnel giveaways. And I have three books, all with signup pages that were created about the same day at the end of may. And that's two novellas and one that's a lead in for my current eight book series. And what I thought was interesting is to show you, if you are struggling with marketing and you really do think it is your title, the difference is at the time I changed the title for dark Faye out cast on October 14th.
Autumn (24m 30s): And that day I had what would be considered a usual up rate for born to darkness, which is my one Novell. I had six people pick that up. I had three pickup people pick up born of water, which is the lead into my big series. Guess how many people? And usually I would have the same for the light and the darkness. I know the title of the light in the darkness I'd have maybe two or three as well. So on that first day, when I changed the title, a guest, how many downloads I had of that as a free book in just a random book funnel, you know, joint author promo. Hmm.
Jesper (25m 4s): Well, it has to be positive because otherwise the point of changing it. So let me say 10,
Autumn (25m 10s): No 55th. Okay.
Jesper (25m 14s): That's that's a massive paints. It was. But, but the thing is also with your new title and your new series named it, is it speaks directly to the attended audience by saying exactly what it is. There is no doubt, you know, it is people, if you like reading face stories, this is your book, right? It is. So it's right there in your face. And, and that's, that's the whole point of it, right? It needs to be crystal clear so that there's no doubt. What is this about? Yes. That's the kind of book that you like, you will click, you'll pick it up if you don't like it, when you skim through, you'll just skip it and that's, and that's a good thing, right? So you can get the right readers and not random readers.
Autumn (25m 53s): And that was what I think I, I saw at that point is, I mean, it had, it's a very strong cover with someone you can't quite see his face and he's holding some ruins or falling from his hand. So it's, it's, it's Fe it looks Fe has some ruins and things on it. It's kind of dark and brooding. And then with this title, it's just, I knew it was right. I knew it was right in the market. What's neat is that was not a one day thing. It went from maybe two to maybe four or five downloads a day to staying above 30 to 40 for over a month. And it just, it has stayed up there. So at this point, as of I checked on just yesterday on the 29th of November, you know, board of water, which is to me is it was my debut novel, but it's the one with the full two full series.
Autumn (26m 41s): I mean, this is a ton of work in time. That's going into this book. So it's usually what I market and promote the most that's only sitting at just under 600, 600 downloads were born into darkness is almost the exact same, just a little bit less. So those two are pretty similar, almost a thousand downloads. So over, almost double for dark Fey outcast. And they were all created at the same time. And all of that, that extra 500 has come since October 14th. So in a month and a half, I've gotten almost 500 downloads and that's pretty good. That's really, I mean, one, it makes me excited because I'm about ready to release the rest of the series. So I'm like, Ooh, this is a good thing to discover.
Autumn (27m 24s): So this is when you know, this is, I knew it was a bad title. This to me proves it. This is the proof positive of the power of a title that you need to really consider what you're taught early or not. You need to have a strong cover, but you need to have a strong title that is very clear. So that readers see it. There's no doubt it is. You have, what is it? Three seconds to convince a reader, to read your blurb and look at it. And I have to admit, I did update my blurb as well. Not much, just a little tweaking. I added another sentence or two to bring up a romance subplot that's in there. So that's all it took to double again to download, right? Cause I haven't put out advertising to it at all yet.
Jesper (28m 6s): Yeah. The eye tracking analysis that was made on having people look at Amazon showed that it was six seconds before they clicked away in total. Right? So, so you have those six seconds where their eyes will always seek up to the top left corner first. And guess what's there, that's the cover on, if you think of the, a book page on Amazon, you'll have the CAPA, the cover at the top left-hand corner, that's where the eye goes first. Then they go to the title. Then they go to the blurb. And that movement of the eye that was tracked in this analysis, take six seconds. And within this D six seconds, they have decided either to buy it or to leave it.
Jesper (28m 48s): So that means that you really have to deliver on all the notes, meaning that the cover has to be a hundred percent professional. For one, it has to be a hundred percent on brand speak a hundred percent to the intended audience that this is a book for me, the title needs to do the same thing. And then of course the, the blurb needs to close the deal. And only when all the three things are in place, will it convert as best as it can? I mean, I guess you could say, okay, if you have one of them slightly weaker than it could be, you can still have something that converts quite well, but it could be better.
Autumn (29m 25s): Right? And that I think is the important thing. I mean, to me, the title, the old title was so weak that, I mean, I wasn't even seeing much in sales and I have seen sales since then my reader list goes and buys it every single time I send out a newsletter, which is kind of, I always like to do exactly. Like I had an increase in sales. Oh, that's why it's very exciting. But I will say something. We talked about all the positives, this is the thing, you know, the good things. This is why it's worth it because it's, if you don't see that kind of change. Oh my goodness. It was quite a lot of work because you don't realize all the places you have your book, unless you're maybe on Kindle unlimited, if you're wide, like I am and you are, and you are in book funnel and a distributor and Kobo and Google books and all of these places, book, funnel, story origin.
Autumn (30m 23s): It seemed like every time I turned around, I'm like, Oh, I have to have that, that place too. I forgot about that file. It was a little bit of a nightmare. I have to say it took me some time
Jesper (30m 34s): In tweet on Twitter and all kinds of, I mean, but, but this is exactly why, I mean, I know that I'm actually in the self puppets success course in one of the modules, I'm actually using my own cover as an example of what not to do, because it, it is. I mean, I explain all the details in the course about it. And I also say in the course that I really should change them. Right. But because of what you just mentioned is the reason why I have not done it because I just know it's a lot of work. I mean, yes, I could, you know, I could ask you very nicely to do a new cover for me. So it probably wouldn't even cost me any money, but just the amount of work that goes into one thing is uploading them to all those different places.
Jesper (31m 20s): But then I have to hunt down, where is all the reoccurring social media posts I have going with this covered? And I didn't have to change if I change the title. I mentioned it in a million places in different, and then I have to go and change it. All those it's just like, nah, it's a lot of work. Right. I mean, and then of course you could say, well, it doesn't matter because what I would say, if somebody said what I just said to us in a Q and a session, like we run on, on patron once a month. Yeah. Slide wise to them would be, well, you have a very long career in front of you. So if it takes you one week now and you can benefit it from it, the next 20 years, it is well worth the effort.
Jesper (32m 4s): That would be my response and advice. And I don't even do it myself. So yeah, it's double standards here. I know, but it's just like on the to-do list of things that I feel like it's gonna move the needle the most, for example, releasing our new courses and stuff like that. It is an important part of our business between you and me. Just as much as writing books. So from a revenue perspective, going back and updating that book series, there there's only three books in it. So the read-through, it's not massive amounts of money versus releasing new courses that is going to earn quite a lot more money.
Jesper (32m 46s): It's just like, it's so far down the to-do list that it's not that it's not important, but it's just not as important, more important than others. And some of the other things. So, and I guess now I have it in this public success cost to explain as a bad example. So now it even serves a purpose.
Autumn (33m 2s): So there you go. Well, I've always said we, we tend to live our life as an experiment so that other people don't have to, this is definitely the other side. I mean, again, it, it helped that the impetus for me was definitely that this is the next series I'm going to release. And for me, you know, till I take a weekend, which is usually my time and I decided to rename and rebrand my book because I can hire myself on the fly on the weekend to redo a new cover, which I already had to cover. That was positive. So it was literally just doing the research and coming up with the new name and then realizing that that meant a whole new website or web page on my site to go with a new series name.
Autumn (33m 44s): Cause I read with my series on their own pages and updating marketing images, but you're right. I mean, there are a ton of marketing images. Like I have to made with the new title where I had probably 20 made before, because that's see, that's what I do for a hobby is marketing images. I'm really strange that way. It makes me happy, but I have tons of them with the old title, but now I only have a few that I go to because I just haven't made the time. I haven't made the time to make the new, the rest of this series covers yet. So I have not worried about
Jesper (34m 18s): No, but yeah. Yeah. But you caught it early as well. Of course. I mean that, that was good. That made the amount of work less hours. But do you have any idea, you know, in terms of creating new covers, uploading everywhere, redoing slightly on the blurb and stuff too, do you know how much time do you think you spend in total on it?
Autumn (34m 40s): I would say, okay. Ignoring the fact that I have a horrible internet. So anyone in the rural United States or rural Africa or Australia probably can relate to the internet speeds I suffer through off of cell phone, dial up. So ignoring that if it's just upload time, Amazon is the worst. If it's just a single book, it really it's maybe four hours. It really isn't bad because you've got to figure out where you're going and your own website, assuming you don't have to send it to someone else. If you can do it yourself and just upload it, maybe four hours max, once you have the new title and everything, and you redo your ebook files, you usually have to compress your new cover into it as well, as well as upload the new cover.
Autumn (35m 25s): So it's uploading the new file and the new cover. But I had, I have to admit, I had a slight snafu with the amount of work that this caused me that I didn't think about when I first started doing it and really made me kick myself. And I will never probably change a book name or a series title again, unless I'm really no, I did a bad, bad job, which I trust you will make sure that I don't do that again. Testing you run all my covers, my, my titles by you after this. Well, I have even taken away that we have three, so maybe five fiction books. I have all of my books listed in all my other books.
Autumn (36m 8s): So I have 15 books. I had 15 books or so I had to up date all the titles, but I also took the advantage of it. I updated my author photo, which I just had a new author photo taken because my husband's a photographer. So that was kind of, you know, I, I made him sit down, told him I wouldn't feed him again until he got it and took a photo of me look decent. And I updated my blur because where I, what I'm doing has changed. So I took some time to do a few, you know, make sure all of my links and stuff were going, but that, that literally between that, and really managing to get everything uploaded and that Amazon takes is a multi-step approach. And plus I updated all my paperbacks.
Autumn (36m 50s): So we went from 15 to 30 book formats. I had to update, Oh yeah. Oh, that was, it literally took me a month, but I wasn't working on it continuously. I'd kind of come back to it. And the last one I did was Google play. And I have to admit that one was the fastest one to update. Oh yeah. So Amazon was the most painful, especially having to do the e-book and the paperback and with the upload speed. And then when you do the paperback, you have to go back into the paperback previewer. It doesn't let you go past that state. And it literally takes 10 to 15 minutes for the paperback previewer to open for me per book.
Autumn (37m 29s): It was, yeah, that was the worst, the most painful part. So that was one of those things where it's like I said, I was never doing it again. Unless I had a virtual assistant where I could be like, here you go have fun. Here's my passwords.
Jesper (37m 44s): No, that's true. And I've also seen sometimes people saying, well, once you do the cover, redo the covers and the titles won't that confuse your readers. But actually, I mean, unless you change the identification number on the store's like ACIN number on Amazon, for example, it doesn't matter because readers will not doubt they will. They can't download this the same ASEN number twice. So it is just easy like that. And then, well, maybe you could say that few people get confused, but, but then I would revert back to my advice to myself from a moment ago and say, well, who cares if a few people get confused during one week, if the book is up for the next 20 years.
Jesper (38m 26s): So,
Autumn (38m 28s): But it was, I mean, I changed the title on good reads. Again, you don't delete the old book, even on Amazon, you don't delete the old, you literally go in and change the title, except for the paperback. The paperback is assigned the ESPN that you get an Amazon is assigned to that title. So you, that you have to unpublish and then publish a new Virgin and ask Amazon to sync them. And they do it. And it was not a problem, but everything else do, you know, with eBooks and everything else do not delete the old one, you literally can go into Amazon, changed the title, change the name, and then, you know, it upload the new cover and everything's fine.
Autumn (39m 9s): It sinks up good reads was the exact same way. I was worried on good reads that it wouldn't let me change the title, that it would see it as a whole new book. But no, it let me change the title. So now, if anyone goes in, they will see that it is the same book. It'll tell them they already purchased it or they already downloaded it. Unless of course they got it in somewhere else, like as a free promo. And now they went in and paid for it and they have the same book and then they might be a little annoyed, hopefully not. And it was definitely, yeah, it was worth it. I mean, it was, it was a good thing to do. And it was a definitely a lesson now that I can step other people through this. If they really feel like it's something they have to do.
Jesper (39m 50s): Yeah. And it used to be so as well, that, that you could not update the title without on publishing it and publishing a new book on a, under a new AC number on Amazon. But, but as you say there, I think that's not the case.
Autumn (40m 4s): No, it's not. You can change the title as much as you want. As long as it's under the EISA number, the ASI number, it is fine. You can change the title as much as you want and they don't complain and you can upload the book cover or the files, all that. It's just the paper. It's just, if you have an ESPN, if you have an ESPN, then you can not change the title. At that point, you will have to delete the old book or unpublish it and upload a whole new version. So that's, that is one of the drawbacks. Hey, we had a whole podcast episode, if you should be using free ISBNs so knowing that it was free from Amazon, I didn't even blink. I'm like, Oh, well that's a bummer. And I just, you know, recreated a new paperback version.
Autumn (40m 45s): And then I had asked them to sync the two and it was not a problem.
Jesper (40m 50s): No, indeed. So I think overall here, I mean the rather obvious lesson is that, well, get the branding right from the beginning
Autumn (41m 2s): Book cover. That's a good cover image is not that big of a deal. You don't have to change the formats. It's not that hard. The title, especially if you have multiple books out to Hertz a little, get it right. The first time, listen to episode 37, it steps you through it brilliantly.
Jesper (41m 22s): Yeah. And then you don't have to worry about the stuff if you just do it right. At least until not until some years later where you might want to update the cover design as we talked about, if it gets slightly dated or something, but also remember
Autumn (41m 34s): That the self-publishing success course actually covers everything you need to know about covers titles and blurps. So all that is explained in last week's episode. So yeah, that's pretty easy. Absolutely. Go check it out, check out our past episodes. And yeah, my best advice is try to get it right the first time, but it's not the end of the world. It is entirely fixable. If you realize your series name is completely wrong or your yearbook title is completely wrong, you can, you can salvage that and maybe double, you know, your downloads or your sales just that easily. Yeah. And don't forget that the self-publishing success course is free.
Autumn (42m 17s): I will add a link in the show notes from where you can grab this, this free course. So it's available for you. And then you might be able to avoid some of all this rebranding stuff that we've been discussing separately. So we hadn't come out with the course yet. So I hadn't watched it. It's definitely, it will get you straight and be all the help you need. So go check it out. Okay. Next Monday we are approaching the end of the year. So we will look forward and share some thoughts on this podcast for 2021.
Narrator (42m 54s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
What do you really need to know to become a successful self published author?
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Plus there are a few other announcements in this episode like the release of our long-awaited worldbuilding course. So check out the episode and find the links you need below!
Enroll in the brand new Crafting Incredible Fantasy Worlds worldbuilding course during its exclusive VIP launch from December 7 - 14 while it is at a super special VIP price at https://ultimatefantasywritersguide.com/worldbuilding/.
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Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast in today's Publishing landscape. You can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts. Autumn Bert and Jasper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I'm Jesper
Autumn (31s): and I'm Autumn.
Jesper (33s): This is episode 102 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. And today we are going to talk about having success in self publishing and how to go about it. So this is something that many have been looking forward to, because it also means that when you are listening to this are brand new and a a hundred percent free self publishing Success course is available to you. People just do it.
Autumn (1m 0s): We just talked about needing to celebrate, you know, we need to learn to celebrate Maura. So I'm celebrating those. I'm so excited that this course is ready and we can send it off to author's so that they can hopefully learn these things a lot straighter, faster than we ever did in FREE. And it's a fricking awesome. So I hopefully you got to check it out.
Jesper (1m 21s): Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's, it's been a lot of work and is finally here. So we are going to go through some of that stuff today. And so you can get a feel for what's what's there and what, what it is that we are offering there. But, but before we get that far, how has life been Autumn? Oh, its been busy. Well, it doesn't help that I decided to work. You know, we are building these, of course I'm putting up the finishing touch. It touches on our self publishing course on the website. But I also, as I mentioned, I had joined a nano Ramo for the first time, but of course I joined at seven days late. So that was kind of a bit of a stumbling block.
Autumn (1m 57s): But I, so we're recording this the week of the U S Thanksgiving. So guests I've got like what, four or five or six days that finish this up. But I guess what my current Writing I word count is a So I think right now, correct me if I'm wrong. But last time when you ask me what it was the 25. So I guess let's say you do it again because it was right at the middle of the month and you get 25 and it was at 20 like three. Okay. So six days left out of seven days left, approximately. So your probably at, let's say 35. Wow. I am so far ahead of that.
Autumn (2m 37s): I am a 40k, 40,000.
Jesper (2m 41s): Wow. You almost have it.
Autumn (2m 43s): Yeah. I absolutely love my stats graph because you know, it shows like this is what you're supposed to be doing and mine starts off flat and then it like goes exponential. Like it hit the go button there, but I will, this week is a little busy, even though I'm going anywhere because of COVID in the us, it is an American Thanksgiving. So my husband and I were, well, it's supposed to rain, but we we're going to go to the top. We weren't going to cook her entire dinner over the campfire because we were just weird like that. But we think it sounds like fun, but we are going to have a day of eating and cooking. Some of my word count will be a little less, but nano tells me if I, as long as I keep writing a thousand words a day, I will hit my 50,000 so I can not wait to succeed.
Autumn (3m 25s): Yeah,
Jesper (3m 26s): Yeah. This should be no problems. Then you have almost a week left. So yeah, that should not be a problem. All right.
Autumn (3m 30s): I have faith that it would, it would be, I think I can do it. So I'm, I'm excited to finish my first nano and get my badge. Yes. Congratulations to you early. Congrats. I know the next Monday is officially when we record, the next episode will be the last day so we can check in and you can see if I actually did it. I think I'm good at sabotaging myself. Occasionally just one. I think I'm going to do, you know, I've got an easy snow trip, but anyway, your, in the middle of moving and everything else, how are things over there? Yeah,
Jesper (4m 6s): Yeah. At the moment we just keeping it really busy, trying to get the entire house packed up. We, we were making progress, but we're not quite there, but you know, as, as we are recording this episode, there is a little more than a week. Well, actually a week, it is the next Monday that we are going to get the keys to the new apartment. Oh. So it's getting really close now.
Autumn (4m 29s): It's a yeah.
Jesper (4m 31s): Well, yeah, it is. But at the same time, it also means that I feel pretty damn busy. We did play it smart. So we have, we have about three weeks on until we have to hand the house over to the new owners. So we do have some overlap, which is quite nice. If it goes completely crazy, then I guess we can manage this a bit. But yeah. But I think apart from that, all of the packing stuff, I've just been trying to put the outline together for a short story that we are going to use as a reader magnet. And I think we are on the, like the third version.
Autumn (5m 5s): Yeah. Well, you know where we want this one to be special. So, you know, we're, we're working on it.
Jesper (5m 14s): Yeah. It's, it's been a difficult one. You know what? I'm not going to spoil anything of course, for anybody here, but we aren't going to, or are we aiming to tell a story in a slightly different way than you would normally expect it, but you know, by having a main character who is actually trapped in one place from the beginning of the story to the end of the story, and I quite liked that, but it also poses some challenges and how we are making it interesting and engaging. So yeah. Yeah. But I think I finally figured it out. Yeah.
Autumn (5m 42s): Yeah. I think So the little snippets who you are sharing with me. I can not wait to read the next versions. So, and of course its just the outline. I should say just the outline that's that's been enough, but eventually pretty soon I think we're going to get to the writing and I can not wait. Yeah. As
Jesper (5m 58s): Soon as my moving activity's will allow it, then I will start dictating the first draft. Yeah.
Autumn (6m 3s): Yeah. That'll be excellent.
Narrator (6m 7s): Oh, a week on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast Well
Jesper (6m 13s): Fact we have not one but two courses to mention. Yeah.
Autumn (6m 18s): Yeah. That's true. We have been busy bees having to weigh.
Jesper (6m 23s): Yeah, I think so too. Yes. So apart from the self publish Success course, which we will come back to you shortly, it also happens that they're worldbuilding course, which we have been working for. Like, I don't know, two weeks,
Autumn (6m 36s): Two years old, I think it has 22 years and it is it's the it's it's all that we have actually had one lucky winner student who is actually gone through the entire course. I think he's absolutely insane to have gone through everything that's in this course already, but he did and I give us feedback. That's kind of exciting. We already had our first student in there. Yeah, that is absolutely.
Jesper (7m 2s): Okay, great. And we have everything set up, as you can imagine. Since the, our SUPPORT patron SUPPORT already went through it, all of the modules are available. Everything is ready. We did. However, the site that we want it to open the course up as a limited VIP launched only to start with. Yes. So that means that if you are listening to this episode, the day that this episode releases on the 7th of December, you will have one week, if you want in, on the heavily discounted VIP launch price. That's right. 'cause it's only going to be open until the 14th of December. And we mean that only until the 14th of December, then we are going to close it.
Jesper (7m 45s): So if you wanted, you will need to be quick about it.
Autumn (7m 48s): Yeah. So it's not even, it's not even that were going to just have it open for seven days. This is like a brand new course in a special price that we it's like doubling his. Once we go through this little additional stage where we're kind of still testing everything and working really closely with the students and getting feedback and tweaking things. So this is if you want this really special, awesome deal, it's only going to happen once. And it's only happening from the day. This is releasing to the 14th of December, 2020, right?
Jesper (8m 22s): Yep. So we've added on the link in the show notes from where you can read about all the awesome content that is included in this course. So we can go and check that out, see if you are interested. And if you are, I would advise you to step in now because we are probably gonna launch it again in may be something like six, seven, eight months from now. But when we do, it's going to be at a much higher price point then now. So yeah, if you are listening to her, then price yourself, lucky that you know, you're listening to this podcast because it you're going to be able to save quite some money on this because if you want,
Autumn (9m 1s): And it is definitely I I I did I tell you this? Because I have that little writing gig I'm doing for some of my little ghost fit in to see ghost writing gig with that sounds a little weird. I actually used the script from the worldbuilding course to develop the world and it is just perfect. It is amazing. It is so concise. Gets the job done. It makes it perfect. Developed as a story. So yeah, we did a good job. Can I get a good pet, a sinner head for this one? It is fantastic. So yes. Check it out if you like worldbuilding but you don't want to get lost or you don't know where to start with worldbuilding this is going to help you out, right?
Jesper (9m 44s): Yeah. And I think it doesn't really matter if you are brand new to worldbuilding and you need to learn something or if you actually a seasoned writer who has built several Worlds that there will be some content in here that that will make you think about stuff you hadn't thought about before, because there is a lot of content. There was a reason why we worked on this for several years.
Autumn (10m 6s): Yes, yes. And I can vouch for that. How many Worlds have I built buy now? And I still find this course is much more put together. It's so much more organized and it gets, it gets right to the core of what you need to do without getting lost in the details and developing stuff. You don't need to use So yeah. I am, you know, six or seven were a little Worlds under my belt and it was like, this course just changed my writing life. It's fantastic. So I guess on the first student,
Jesper (10m 39s): Yeah. So Autumn, we might be crazy offering the self-publishing Success costs for free, but then they go,
Autumn (10m 46s): Yeah. Yeah. You know, I, I can actually pretty much, I know I've often said from the last decade or two or three that I am definitely crazy. So no one who knows me is going to be surprised on this one. But this course is it is we could, I mean the other places that offer or something like this, its easily over a $500. This is a lot of information. It's not just like, Oh, here's a little tidbits that a lead you on is not a breadcrumb trail. This is the stuff you need to know if you want to have success. So Publishing, and I can't believe we put it together that we're going to give it, just give it away, but we're going to help out our fellow authors in this crazy. And we won't even think about this when we first started planning it, that we'd be in the middle of a pandemic in the world would be in chaos.
Autumn (11m 32s): But Hey, that was a big city. Even better to get back to our Writing community and our fellow authors and say, Hey, this is what you need to know. Go do it.
Jesper (11m 42s): Yeah. And I feel as well that it was only fair to be honest, to put it out for free because at the end of the day, the stuff that is in this course is stuff that it, you know, if you spend a lot of time, let's say you read a ton of blog posts, all kinds of different ones you listen to, I don't know what a million different Author podcasts like I do crazy in that way. Yes and you, you write a lot of books and you do your trial and error stuff. I mean that there is nothing in here that you can't figure out. All this stuff that is Here is best practice stuff.
Jesper (12m 25s): And it is of course in tended to make sure that you don't walk in to the common pitfalls and, and you can see for yourself some time there, as I said up at the top of the episode, but at the end of the day, I felt like Y charts, I didn't quite feel that was fair to chat's money for it. Because honestly, the stuff that is in here is stuff that you can figure out that the problem that you would have then is one. You will need to wait through a ton of information and you need to figure out what of this stuff is actually something that is helpful versus what is just an old tactic that doesn't work anymore. That's one thing. And then the other thing is that you need to figure out how to structure everything so that it make sense.
Jesper (13m 10s): And basically what we've done here is that we've done a whole of that for you. Right we read it out, all the stuff that you don't worry about that go on with that. Some of the stuff that is in this module, it's only the stuff that we feel like, this is what you need to know, and this is what you need to concern yourself with everything else you can ignore. And we've also Removed all the stuff that is more like a, yeah, this, this is what's, wasn't a tactic that you used to work. For example, we, we have a quite some time or in one of the models, we spent quite some time talking about a Permafree because that's also one of the things that has been very much up in the past, but like it used to work on this.
Jesper (13m 50s): It's not that it doesn't work anymore, but it it's not as effective any more. So we also touch upon that and so on and so on. So I feel like this is a good thing to, to give people for FREE and of course it's well, we are also showing you can do it for free. Then we're doing it. We are taking our own medicine because we always talk about the importance of building email lists and for it to be able to build an email list, you need some reader magnets, and this is how reader magnet, all right. That's what it is at the end of the day. We are the only thing that you have to pay, quote unquote, is that it does require you to sign up a, with your e-mail to get access to the course.
Jesper (14m 31s): And that is also not only because we use it as a read the magnet, but it is actually also because there is a lot of information in this course and we are going to drip, feed it to you. So you're not going to get a ton of a video course modules thrown in your face, the students as sign up, because I think it is more common or it's, that's not something that I think that's something that I know, but it it's more common than not that people sign up for courses, especially just like with the Permafree books, if we don't have to pay for it, most people won't go through it. That's true. And even people who pay for courses, don't go through the courses that they pay for. So the chances would be that if we just gave you, okay, here it is, eh, have access to it.
Jesper (15m 14s): Here's the, here's your access to have fun with it. Chances are you would never go through it. So that's why we decided to drip feed it one session at a time and it's going to run approximately over months actually before you're going through. But then you can go through it slowly. Just one, one, one session every second day at your own pace there. And of course you could just save the emails if you don't have time now, and you can watch them later, that's up to you. But that's how we felt it would be best, but we have 10 modules ready for you. And there's also a bonus module, but I was thinking we could go through the 10 modules or some sort of explain what it is, but yeah. Now I've been talking.
Autumn (15m 55s): Yeah, that's all right. I mean, you have to just have it and that's what that is, but yeah, that's, that's exactly what we wanted. Yeah. It goes out actually 30 to two days with two days between everything because, and I know that because I just set up all the rules, like we said, I was still building some of the back end stuff because that's part of my role in this and this thing we got going on. But yeah. So lets go through it. I think it will be exciting to let people get an idea of what we have jam-packed in this. And if it is it's free, the cost is your e-mail because we want you to have access to it and we are going to guide you through it so that you're not overwhelmed and that you actually do it is so easy to fall off the wagon and get frustrated.
Autumn (16m 39s): So these are good reminders that, Hey, this next video is ready. Go ahead and give it a try and we'll make sure that we're there to help you out. And yeah, hopefully we get to know each other a little bit too. Yeah, yeah,
Jesper (16m 50s): Yeah. And in truth, and this is the same thing that we preach. We've said it multiple times in the past episode, on this podcast as well. You know, if, if your readers and not willing to sign up for you, an email address to get a free story from you then, well, they probably wouldn't be interested in anything else you're going to say anyway. So I think the same thing applies to you or do you know if you're not willing to give you an e-mail address to get access to the course, fine. That's completely up to you, but that is the only requirement there is. And I promise you that it's going to be a ton of good stuff in there, but it's a completely up to you if you want to do it or not. Yes.
Autumn (17m 25s): Yeah. And we do, once you sign up, you get the first module right away. So you don't have to wait two days to start. Yeah. So
Jesper (17m 33s): Yeah, but what your one, lets just talk about that first. So as I said, it was 10 modules. So let's do them one by one here in module one. It is really about the, Well the lies that you are telling yourself. And so we are going to dispel some of the myths around publishing and we try to share our reflections on what it takes to be a professional writer. And a, I just thought that when we put this together, that was a good starting point from what your one. Yeah.
Autumn (18m 3s): Yes. I agree. I I because the title of it even is why 2% of authors succeed in 98% don't so, you know, we talk about the myths of what people think writing is what the mindset is that's going to help you. And what, what is the reality of writing and self publishing? Because I know talking especially self publishing, you mean so many people that are determined to go to the traditional route or are you still think there's a stigma around self publishing and you know, we talk about what is really going on with all of that in today's world. Well, not COVID world, but you know what I mean? The reality is a famous author. It's a, it's a good foundation. You need to know kinda sets the tone for the rest of the course.
Jesper (18m 44s): Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And module two basically built on module one a because it's a mindset module. Yeah. And then you might ask why, why don't we put in a mindset module? Yeah.
Autumn (18m 59s): Oh, I see you. That makes total sense to me. But yes, I will ask that. Why would we do a mindset module Yesper? Right.
Jesper (19m 6s): Well, because it is actively so that nothing, absolutely nothing of the stuff that we teach in this course makes any difference whatsoever. Unless you approach your author career with the right mindset, that's probably the best answer I can do it. Yeah.
Autumn (19m 24s): Yeah. I, I totally agree. I mean, I think I just saw something today, even about, Oh, something about making it into a best seller. It's like the one Oh one mindset that's different between successful authors and non-successful and if it was a mindset that was the key phrase, it was in believing at it and understanding the ropes, understanding what was required of you and not putting effort where you really don't need it or thinking that it's so impossible, you'll never achieve it. So we break that down and give you two sessions in module two, you know, we looked at what a professional writer is and what you're doing. And we talk about how to be built that into a career.
Autumn (20m 6s): So whether or not you want a career, but at least the information is there because you know, I know most people that are kind of secretly it gets under your skin and you get a little addicted. I did just on Instagram admit when I listed my nano right. Mo word count that I might be addicted, but please don't send an intervention to me because it's going to interrupt my writing time. So
Jesper (20m 30s): Is it the one mindset to write it?
Autumn (20m 33s): Oh, it might be Well I at least rural. All your books are on the Hill. The strategies on the bookstore is that it would work. I couldn't help myself, but
Jesper (20m 44s): We also introduced the concept of 1000 true fans and in this module and I absolutely love this concept. I came across in quite some years ago, but I really loved it ever since because it makes, you know, if you are thinking about, okay, I need to, I want to build a career and then I need to find a custodian readers out there to read my books. And, but this concept of 1000 true fans, once you start breaking it down, then everything doesn't feel as overwhelming anymore. It feels achievable. That's not to say that this is easy. It's not going to be in the short term a quick fix, a get rich scheme thing because it's not, it takes time to build through a true fans, but it's not about getting it 1000 people onto your email is to us about developing true fans.
Jesper (21m 33s): That's not an easy, it takes time. Yeah. But still it's a lot more achievable than thinking. I need to get a a hundred thousand people onto my email list. Right. That does not feel achievable. Yeah.
Autumn (21m 43s): No. And I you introduced me to this a thousand true fans and I know it was just spewed it to my husband, whatever he gets frustrated. Cause he's a crafter and building things with his hand. And so I've passed it on to him and saying you don't need a million people that are selling to you just need to build up these people that are going to be with you through thick and thin. And I think that's the important thing is that again, it teaches you that you can go and join some of these group organized where you're going to all, everyone's going to get 3000 or 5,000 or 10,000 emails out of this thing. Is that really the right method? You know, that's something to consider and you can weigh in or you're trying to build a relationship or are you going to get that?
Autumn (22m 24s): If you split 5,000 readers between 20 different authors, I have to admit if I was one of those readers and I was suddenly getting 20 emails a day from different authors, it be hitting him and subscribe.
Jesper (22m 35s): Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So we will dive deep into all of that stuff and module two. Yes. Then model three is where we sort of get your set up, meaning that we share information on building your author platform. We've actually touched upon that in a fairly recent episode on the podcast as well. We did, but we also talk about the reader magnet in module three, what it is and how to leverage it a reader magnet for your benefit. And I just a set in a short while ago here or a moment ago, rather than the courses are really active. So you get to see how that works.
Autumn (23m 16s): Yes. Nothing like learning by doing or doing by learning. And one of the two.
Jesper (23m 23s): Yeah, I know. So that's good. Yeah.
Autumn (23m 25s): Session three, module three is a good, it has two different sessions. So we talk about the Author platform. We explain it in how to leverage it, to help build your Success. But also then the second one dives into the reader magnet. So you can turn on some of those browsers and to hopefully your first few true fans, hopefully.
Jesper (23m 46s): And th there is a bit about social media in here as well on sort of where to focus in and where not to focus in and stuff like that. So a lot of good stuff in module three, a module four is all about understanding the market in which you operate as an author. So this means that if you're trying to sell books online, you also have to understand how the on-road online retailers actually work. So that, that sounds pretty important. Yeah,
Autumn (24m 16s): It doesn't, it, it does. I was going to say, this is the one that when I was first published in 2012, I wish I had had this because there was a, well, there was so much, I mean, what Amazon eBooks had been out for a year or two when I first published. So it was still pretty much, no one had any instructions at all ever, but now there's instructions out there that are so confusing, but this is like, this is my go-to now about how it all works and how it affects sales, what you need to look like, what is the deal is selling books online and how does that work? Takes the mystery out of it. And it's very factual and easily understood.
Autumn (24m 56s): So you get an idea of what is out there on what you're up against and what you need to know before you start doing all this.
Jesper (25m 3s): And there was also some information about how to drive traffic to your books and also the factors that will affect your sales demote. So that also sounds pretty important.
Autumn (25m 14s): Yes, absolutely. This is it. Like I said, this was the one module that if I could have had, if I can send this back in time, give it to one of my characters in my face story. I'm writing now who can travel in time. I want him to take this back to me, please.
Jesper (25m 30s): I tell you. And I think if it, if it was me, I would more take module five back, you know?
Autumn (25m 35s): Oh yeah. Modern five is fine.
Jesper (25m 38s): Not that different, but from what you will for, because it is also about understanding the online retailers, but with module five, we actually went beyond what we are talking about in module four. And we dive deep into Amazon and you might have even asked why is that important?
Autumn (25m 59s): Alright. So why is it important to understand Amazon? Well I simple to do with it. Yeah.
Jesper (26m 7s): Well, 90% of sale, populists authors, all kidding aside Here but 90% of all authors, they make them a majority of the income from Amazon when it comes to book sales, most of it comes from Amazon. So we felt that it was important to cover this particular site in much more detail. So we give you information on the Amazon, a nine algorithm and how that worked. It actually is not one algorithm. It's like thousands of them that works together. But when we talk about that and how that algorithm works, we talk about keywords. We'll talk about categories, how to an Amazon bestseller and all of that. Good.
Autumn (26m 46s): Yeah. And even if you should go exclusive with Amazon, there are some pluses and there are some medicines minuses. So we look into those two, but yeah, that's true. This is this one when I was, especially when I was building it, I thought of this one as sort of like the guts of the course. Not because it's a five out of 10, but just because of the information that's in, it, it, it just felt to me like, this is, this is the meat of the entire course. And when you get here, you're like, Oh, okay, I'm paying attention to this. Hopefully
Jesper (27m 19s): It still requires people to actually go through the modules, but a Yes module six. That's one of your favorite so far.
Autumn (27m 29s): That is, I love it because it's a book covers. I love book covers there. They make me happy. So this is all the advice you need on where to get book covers. What makes a good book cover. And the most important thing is how you can tell whether or not it's a good book cover or not, or you're being ripped off. So I think that is just, I don't know, to me, to me that it doesn't have to, it's not because I'm a graphic artist are that I've wanted it to be an artist since like my first earliest memory I think is of drawling. So it has nothing to do with those things. But as an author of a book cover is your number one marketing image.
Autumn (28m 9s): This is going to represent your book your months and months of work to readers in like six seconds, two seconds. So as soon as they see it and it represents all of that work and love, and it should be the most amazing, powerful and marketing savvy image that you can get. So yeah, module six is, is definitely one of my favorites.
Jesper (28m 34s): Yeah. Yeah. And then there was actually as well as a very, very nice short cut in module six for how you can almost add a glance, get to see the commonalities between covers in your Shaundra so that there is some nice, a quick cheat tricks in there that makes it just a ton more easy than going through an Amazon top a hundred list than clicking all the different book. So yeah, there's some nice stuff. And what you were six that you'll find very useful. Yeah,
Autumn (29m 7s): Definitely. I highly recommend that one.
Jesper (29m 11s): Yeah. So if we say that module six on book covers is probably the number one success factor when it comes to selling a book, it's probably its cover. Then module seven is the second most important success factor because here we discussed the book description. Yeah.
Autumn (29m 28s): Yeah. So this is so important to get Right I I've even recently learned another trick en book descriptions. I, I think this is one thing that as the market changes, as you grow as an author, you, you still learn more about this, but this module really breaks down and only, you know, the important things that are out there that you can learn, but some of our own techniques and tactics, I mean, you've only written an entire book on how to write a fantasy book description. So you put a lot of that into this much. Like I know you did. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
Jesper (30m 7s): Yeah. It's a, it's a good module. And I think it's, it's actually much harder to write a good book description. And then you think, well, everybody listening to this who have tried we'll know that is, that is true. I mean, one thing is writing a a hundred thousand word story where all of a sudden, when you have to put everything down into 200 words and it has to be really engaging well, then it becomes really difficult.
Autumn (30m 30s): So even just your tagline can be agonizing for a days. As I know, because I'm trying to write three books descriptions in the next week or two. And I had been working on them for a week or two, and that's a hell of a nice thing. So this leaves breaks it down and it gives you tips and it helps you out so that, you know, like I do, when you haven't quite gotten to the level, you'd need your book description to be at, because it's got to be up there and it's got to be powerful and it's not easy to get to where you need to be. No I indeed. But yeah.
Jesper (31m 5s): Yeah. I'm thinking module eight. Autumn I'm thinking that's probably not one of your favorite modules. Yeah.
Autumn (31m 12s): I love spreadsheets or are you kidding? I don't think you do. You know, it's not that well, it's so important though. So advertising, but yeah, this is my wish list that as soon as I have enough spare money and I'm hiring a virtual assistant, this is what I'm hiring them for. Of course I have you. But yeah, even you shouldn't have to be doing a spreadsheets all day every day. So module eight is on advertising, which is so important.
Jesper (31m 43s): Yeah. Well basically at the end of the day, we cannot have a course on self publishing without talking about advertising. That's just not possible.
Autumn (31m 53s): No, not at all anymore. I mean, I do remember I still, I need to stop selling the, like the old, old widow in the room and say, Oh, I have ever done to her back in 2012 when I was young, when I was joking. And I knew that he published author, Oh my God, it was so easy to sell books on Amazon, your run, like a, KTP like five free days. And you get 10,000 downloads. I mean, it was like you could sneeze and a cell, a book because there was like less than a million on Amazon back then. It was fantastic. Now you need to advertise. Yeah. You just need to advertise whether it's paid ads or doing something through some of the major advertisers that sent it out to their reading list, you needed to run ads.
Autumn (32m 36s): And so you need module eight because if you don't know where to start advertising, I won't say, I don't know where to start. I just know spreadsheets and it will help you get yourself organized and your head on straight in, you will not waste tons of money and tons of time, because time is your writing time. It's your fun time. It's your family time. You don't want to waste your time. And it it's, it's just a
Jesper (33m 3s): Pay to play market nowadays. And that, that
Autumn (33m 6s): Is just whether we like it or not. That's what it is.
Jesper (33m 9s): Yeah. So obviously, Nope, no, maybe a few of us, or maybe none of it is maybe it's not true to say none of us, but right now,
Autumn (33m 18s): Fewer of us has endless funds 2.2 ads. Right? So now what do we need? Some sort of a cost-effective
Jesper (33m 24s): It's a good way of going about things and that's what we try to share with you.
Autumn (33m 28s): Yes. It's a very good module. So I would say the module nine is one of the funnest ones in the entire course, right. Because who doesn't love launching a new book. So we actually tackled that as well in the self publishing course, because it's a lot more than just uploading your files to Amazon. I wish it was not easy, but it's not. Oh, when I was young that each year, really? I don't remember that. Was it that what you're saying?
Jesper (33m 60s): So in 2012, if you just upload a book and then it sells, right. Do you don't want to worry about that? Yeah.
Autumn (34m 4s): Oh, it did it, you know, you didn't have to worry about lunch. This is probably why I still sometimes go, Oh right. I am supposed to be putting time into this. I still eat struggle. I saw some places to do like a seven month, a month launch sequence. And we have consolidated. Ours is down a little bit less than that, but there are still times when I get, you know, I start booking out my calendar and my schedule and see when the next book comes out going, Oh shoot, I should've started this two weeks ago or so I would probably need to watch module nine. Again, myself.
Jesper (34m 36s): It is. But at the end of the good thing is with, with this cost that it's going to be there forever. So once you have signed up for at least, at least as long as an internet exists. So if the internet internet is gone, then I can promise you you're access to the course of any more. But as long as there is an intimate, then you can always come back to these modules and what's them later on. If you need to revisit something, it it's just going to be there forever.
Autumn (34m 58s): Yes. So it will be painful part is the fact that you have to wait two days between each session, the first time. But once you get through them all, there will always be there and we won't make you wait. EVERY I again, indeed. Yes. So yeah,
Jesper (35m 14s): Once you've gone through much aligned and you have a right. Yeah.
Autumn (35m 18s): Final module, 10 that's right. And this one, I like the title of it. The cornerstone you cannot succeed without, so yeah. What do you want to elaborate on this special, last module in our group? Yeah.
Jesper (35m 33s): Yeah. I can. And I always feel like a, having like a, a two second pause here, allowing the listener too. Guess what it is, because if you have listened to this podcast for a longer while I think that you can guess, what is it, what can it be? What could be the cornerstone of your author career that you cannot live without? What could it be?
Autumn (35m 54s): I can do the jeopardy dude, because I think I should have had something planned. I mean,
4 (36m 0s): Do you guessed it? Yes. The email list. Yeah.
Autumn (36m 4s): Yeah. Congratulations yes. This is the important one where, you know, just to get the course, you'd join our email list. This is what it takes.
Jesper (36m 16s): Yeah. And module 10, we'll go over the basics of a setting up e-mail list. And what do you need to be mindful about? And once you're done with that, you're basically good to go. But in addition, if you want a lot more help on email list building and know all the details of it, then we have to actively S will build an entire additional cost that covers everything you need to know about running an email list, how to set it up, what to do, how often to send emails, what to write about what you should be thinking about for your shop, that subject lines, AB testing, everything is in there that will be explained on the back.
Jesper (36m 58s): End of module two, if you want to. But that one is one that you have, you we'll have to pay for that if you want that.
Autumn (37m 5s): Yeah. But at the top of this record, this podcast, this episode, you said there was two courses we were talking about. So this was like a third, this, this number three. Yes, we are crazy.
Jesper (37m 18s): Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And you wonder why we've said so many times that we are a bit busy. Yeah,
Autumn (37m 23s): Yeah, yeah. Oh my goodness. And that's all happening in November, December in 2020. When's the asteroid coming. I mean really? Oh Well but yeah. So we go into, we talk about a special extra module, but we also link to a very amazing chorus called master mailing lists. And so that really, if you need help developing your mailing list, if you don't know where to start, if your stumbling, if your pause or having trouble with interaction's and turning those people who were downloading downloading, you're a reader magnet into true fans. If that's where really where your struggling, you want to take a look at this course, this is going to help you out, get everything organized, to give you some emails, to even start with and get you going to be building your fans and, you know, building your career.
Jesper (38m 14s): Yeah. And it's going to have swipe, swipe copy as well. So you can basically take our stuff and copy and pasted all most and make it a tween, get a bit too, make it your own But. But it's going to have everything you need in here. So a that, that, but yeah, there is no reason to go on and on about that. You'll you will see that once you get to module seven and it's going to be explained there, so you should just enjoy the other nine modules. And then what else? Module tendency, if it's something for you or not afterwards.
Autumn (38m 42s): Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think that's it, that's the 10 modules of the self publishing Success course that we're offering For did we mention FREE a Yeah even though it costs an e-mail list
Jesper (38m 57s): Or e-mail address and I should just say
Autumn (38m 59s): Yes. And if you want to actually, you know, get the link to the course, you have to provide a real email. You can say you can't do a fake one. Its kind of important to make sure that you actually get to the right website after your sign up. Yeah.
Jesper (39m 12s): Yeah. Well otherwise the links to the individual modules will be sent to a fake one. So yeah. It's going to hurt yourself.
Autumn (39m 20s): And that will be silly. Yeah.
Jesper (39m 22s): But I think whether you are a beginner or you, if you are an author with a handful of books or a series, a puppet already, but do you find yourself struggling or you will get the advice that you need to get your own author career on the right track and, and keep it growing. It is not to say that this course in any way is a shortcut is not a short-term. I am going to figure it all out now and then everything will be wonderful. There is work involved in these modules and you need to do the work. And the only one who can do the work is you. If you don't do it, you won't see any results and it's not going to happen tomorrow, either. It is. It's a long term.
Jesper (40m 4s): Let's say it's a long term activities that you need to take care of. It will pay off in the long run, but not tomorrow. And, and you need to understand that.
Autumn (40m 13s): Yes, absolutely. And I think to me, even, you know, looking at this chorus as a published author, with 20 bucks out of our own, there's just so much with it. You have life and two things going on in your you're constantly juggling so many things. Whether you are a full time author or your working to become one and you start a job, its easy to not be up to speed on something or to let something fall by the wayside. So in this course, in this platform is a good layout to remind you of all of the things. If you feel like you've let something go on advertising, I'm me and or any other aspect that you need to work on, you can just go back and look at the module and look at it and say, all right, this is where I needed to get, you know, keep yourself reinvigorated and get it going and keep yourself focused.
Autumn (40m 60s): And that's, to me, that's almost, that's a secondary benefit. Once you go through all at once, you were probably going to come back to it and remind yourself like annually going all right. That's where I need to work on this year. That's my goal.
Jesper (41m 13s): Yeah. So the sign up link is in the show notes. So you can go ahead and sign up right now and get started right now. So the cost is available to them.
Autumn (41m 24s): Yes. We got to die and I'm going to go, I'm going to jump ahead to the future where it's done and I don't have any more building to do now. It's all it's so close. Just a few more tweaks and we'll be set. I
Jesper (41m 34s): Know we'll make it absolutely next Monday. It is all about renaming and rebranding it a series of what do we need to be mindful about and what can you expect in terms of results? So see you there. Yes
Narrator (41m 50s): Like what you just heard. There's a few things you can do to SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST please tell a fellow Author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn in Jasper on patrion.com/am Writing Fantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast going to stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Worldbuilding is an integral part of writing fantasy. It helps you inform your story and setting, while simultaneously ensuring reader immersion.
More often than not, the world the author has created becomes a character in itself.
There are lots of things to keep track of though. A great solution can be to create a ‘world bible’.
This can be a ring binder (although - from personal experience - not recommended) or a folder on your computer where you store all the necessary information.
However, nowadays, there are also several online tools which can be incredibly helpful.
Dave Robinson, the President of Archivos, joins the Am Writing Fantasy podcast for a chat about the wealth of tools available for fantasy authors.
Archivos can be found here: https://www.archivos.digital/
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast in today's publishing landscape. You can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts. Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I am Jesper and this is episode 101 of The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. Imagine that we passed 100 episodes. I think that's absolutely amazing. And perhaps Autumn is off celebrating today or something, I don't know, but at least she is not here, but I have a very competent back-up in place. So today I'm joined by Dave and we are going to discuss how to go about note-taking and also how to keep track of your story and your world. So welcome to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, Dave
Dave (1m 4s): Thank you. Jesper I appreciate it. And congratulations on reaching a, a, a 181. I I'm, I'm actually really deeply honored to be your a hundred and first Episode guest, that's outstanding that that's an achievement. Congratulations.
Jesper (1m 19s): Right. And imagine that we have actually succeeded in releasing podcast episodes, every Monday for 101 Mondays in a row.
Dave (1m 27s): Yeah. I mean, really that's tempting fate. When you, when you think about the reputation that Mondays have, you have literally defied reality with this podcast, you ask for it. Well done.
Jesper (1m 41s): Okay. Well maybe it's just started us out there, or maybe you can just tell us a bit about yourself.
Dave (1m 45s): Sure, absolutely. I'm a, I got the, the, the, the mosaic, because it is Dave, Robinson, it's a broad and vast a thing. I currently, I am a, I'm a voice actor. I have a website that I just launched to, to initiate my professional voice acting career. And I've done, I've done some audio fiction, narrations and so on, but more specifically, and certainly more germane to, to this podcast. I ran a podcast for several years called the Roundtable podcast later, the Archivos podcast network, where we would brainstorm story ideas. A we did invite a veteran authors on an interview with them about their craft, and then bring another writer on to pitch a story idea and we'd brainstorm.
Dave (2m 32s): And it was marvelous. And that's a, that exposed me to a, a, a broad spectrum of a creative process. As long as you, no doubt, I have discovered in your own interviews, everybody does things a little differently, but there's at, at a certain level, there's a sense there are certain commonalities between our processes, even, even a discovery writer, who's whose writing off the cuff there's, there seems to be some level of documentation or a record keeping or journaling, something that allows the writer to perceive the story that they're writing in some way, shape or form.
Dave (3m 18s): And I looked around at the technologies and the websites that are out there. And I realized there was no tool that was really geared towards documenting a story. The way we think about stories. I mean, you've got Wiki's, you've got Microsoft word And and so on and so forth, but these are like walls of text. And we don't think about stories that way. When we were writing them, there are these ideas that are kind of globbed together and interconnected and woven together. So I hired some developers and we created Archivos arc H I V O S, which is a tool that allows writers to document the story elements of their stories, and then connect them via the relationships that link them into the larger fabric of the story they're telling.
Dave (4m 12s): So you can actually see your story the way you think about your story. So, so that's, that's been a, my, my primary focus over, over the last several years, I was on a hiatus for a while with some, with some family health issues, but were gearing up the development cycle. Again for Archivos uhh, and I'm looking forward to exploring more ways of how writers document there stories and that, and how those documents can actually foster additional storytelling.
Jesper (4m 49s): Yeah. And I have to tell you, Dave, in your, on your website, in the example stuff you have on, on the front page, you've got to be there because for some reason you put a lot of the rings there. And then I was, I was like, okay, this is good from the beginning. Yeah.
Dave (5m 4s): Ah, I know in my demographic, I know, I, I mean, I'm with you. I am, I am, I am a, I'm a deep sigh FANTASY nerd I've I know my community, my people, my tribe within the, the social network is also very deeply nerdy and Fantasy and science fiction role-playing games and so on. And so naturally when I step into this industry, there's going to be a strong Fantasy flavor. And a lot of the rings is a perfect demonstration of how Archivos can, can help unravel and, and eliminate a story structure.
Jesper (5m 40s): Yeah. Because a lot of the rings, or is it also a good example from the point of view that it is fairly complex? You know, you have a lot of characters, a lot of places, a lot of plot points really going on and, and so documenting it, it is, but maybe I want to, maybe it just starts taking a step back 'cause once we were talking about documenting the word Worldbuilding Bible of comfort, if you will. So it's on the internet. Yeah. And I think maybe we should say, well, Worldbuilding, Bible in its essence. It's just a way you could say a document. You could have a software for it, whatever, but it's a way where you basically keep track of the information. You need to tell your stories and your setting.
Jesper (6m 21s): But I think maybe a good place to start would be to discuss a bit, do you need a Worldbuilding Bible and then we can get into the tools of documenting afterwards, but do you need, it is an important one. What do you think about that?
Dave (6m 35s): I well, as, as we both observed, everybody does this differently. Do you need it? Is it essential? No, I don't think so. And, and that, that might seem counterintuitive considering that created a world Bible tool, but you honestly don't, I know several writers who have told their story and, and narrow their focus of the world to exclusively the perspective of the characters and the events of that story. And that absolutely works. And that creates a very specific type of narrative. That's that's a very intimate, very, very focused on the characters, which is always a good thing.
Dave (7m 18s): However, and especially as you observe, when you're getting into things like Lord of the rings or Epic Fantasy when, when history a influences current events as it is so very often does not just in a fantasy, but in, in real life, a, when you have political ambitions that are involving large groups of people or organizations, inevitably, I think those narratives become very complicated. And in order to serve your reader in terms of presenting a consistent and nuanced narrative within that complexity, I really think a world Bible as a central.
Dave (8m 4s): Yeah.
Jesper (8m 5s): Yeah. I think I view it as a bit of where do you want to put it in your time? Right. Because if you, as soon as, I mean, if you're just writing one novel or, or, or let's say two or three novel at the most in that setting, you can probably keep track of most things without too much trouble without having to build a full Worldbuilding Bible and, and whatnot. But sure. If we, if we are talking about several series in the same world or a massive tome, like a lot of the rings with very complex or something like that, I think I would look at it in a way of, as I said, where do you want to put it in your time? Do you want to document it upfront? So you can easily find things as you go about your plotting or your writing or whatever, or do you want to spend a time in your editing afterwards and finding out all the details that you've forgotten and going through P a, the pastor three books to find, what was this character called, or what was that place called and what was the culture of those people that I described the two books ago and what not?
Jesper (9m 6s): Right. So I think that's a way to do it as well, but I think I look at it very much at the Worldbuilding Bible as an effectiveness tools, you know, is it just makes you more effective 'cause you can just quickly look things up and say, okay, it's this and go on and move on. Right.
Dave (9m 21s): Most definitely. Most definitely. And, and in your, in your unique case with your team, Writing with Autumn the wonderful thing about a Worldbuilding Bible is that it creates a vocabulary that you both are using. So continuity and consistency and collaboration, a Worldbuilding Bible suddenly is a tool where you don't have to do to sit down with somebody for four hours and give them your full scope and vision of your world. You can hand them a bow, a document, or, or, or an archive of setting or whatever, and say, here you go. These are the, the tent poles of this narrative that we're working with.
Dave (10m 2s): So from a, from a collaboration standpoint, it's incredibly valuable as well.
Jesper (10m 8s): Yeah. And also For for readers. I mean, I think most of us Fantasy writers, well, probably all of us when we read Fantasy as well. And I think one of the things we have very much in common is that we all loved the world building stuff. So if I can get, let's say a link to maybe be an activist, a setting page of a Lord of the rings or a dragon Lance or whatever other settings I might be in love with it. And I could start diving into all those Worldbuilding details that the authors have put in there that a lot of it, of course it won't even be in the books, but there's a lot of background stuff there. I think that's something that will appeal it a lot to read as well.
Dave (10m 47s): Absolutely, absolutely. Because we, we've got, we've come in to an age where reading the end of a book while that may be the end of your specific engagement with them, the story itself, we actually, I think I've come to expect that there should be a little bit more out there. There should be some, some background information, some, some, maybe some short stories or flash fiction that may be derived in this story setting and writers today have those tools at their disposal with a few clicks of a mouse to have a site or, or some sort of supplemental information that just enriches the experience of that story for the readers.
Dave (11m 36s): And it just, it's good marketing to have that collateral material available. And it's also good marketing from a preset up stand point. If you can put up a, here are the main characters, not spoil horrific, but you know, let people have a taste of this character's or, or on a map of your world. Oh, God maps don't give a fuck.
Jesper (11m 59s): No, no.
Dave (12m 1s): And as a nurse, if there was a map on the front space of a, of a book up there, man, so you give me an intriguing map with some cool place names that ask questions that raise questions in my mind, I'm hooked and what a great way to entice readers to come into your world.
Jesper (12m 20s): Yeah. I wrote a whole, a guide book on how to do FANTASY map. So that's a particular love of mine too.
Dave (12m 26s): Well, it's astonishing. There's like I can list three utilities off the top of my head that are now out there for creating really beautiful FANTASY maps. Yeah. So, and we were talking earlier, before we started recording about the advent of technology and the wonders that it's unlocked for storytellers. And I think that just, that just keeps going. That just keeps continuing.
Jesper (12m 50s): Yeah. So maybe we, maybe we take a look at what are some of the possible ways if we assume now that OK, Worldbuilding, Bible, it's a good thing to have. Yeah. So what are some of the possibilities on how to document it? And I think we can end up with the online version and a afterwards. So after mentioning a few other alternatives, because Archivos is an online version that we can end up there and talk a bit more about that. But I want to say before I started, when I did my first trilogy, I tried with physical binders and I have no idea why I got that idea into my head on what I missed.
Dave (13m 28s): Yeah. I would, I would imagine the organ is the organization really becomes the challenge at that point. And, and so when your sitting down to World build, and again, you know, that there is no one way to do it, but think about what your objectives are in creating this world. Bible and I think continuity is probably one of the biggest reasons to do it. So you have a reference to the places, the events, that character is, whatever it is that you want to be able to access very quickly. So there needs to be some sort of organizational structure that allows you to identify, you know, if you are going to do binders, then you need, you need some folders in there for characters.
Dave (14m 17s): And maybe even breaking that down further depends on how, how detailed and granular you want to get. But you can have your antagonist, your protagonist, your SUPPORT characters, your romantic interests, but being able to quickly access that information so that you don't break your flow. When your writing, you know, when you were, when the words are flowing, it's like, you have to get it. I don't stop me. Do not interrupt me. I am in the zone. A and, and when that's, and you get to that point, where, what is that Tavern keeper's name from That Tavern, just put in TK or some code for yourself in the documents.
Dave (15m 2s): So you can come back to it later. But once, once the, the steam has had blown off and you're, you are sitting back basking in the thousands of words you just wrote, then you can go back, search those things, and you want your Bible to be able to give you the answer is you need without a lot of digging, I think. Yeah,
Jesper (15m 21s): I agree. And the other issue with the, with the physical binders is that once you think of more, you need to develop something more, all of a sudden magically that a particular pizza in the bite is already full and you can get more room. I don't know why it always happens is that one piece that is old when you start to write.
Dave (15m 38s): Right. Exactly. Well, and, and actually that raises a good point. I mean, there's a way some people will get by with just no cards and a, I think I've seen Kameron Hurley's a, a note card board is, is Epic, but it is just note cards. And sometimes that's all you need. Sometimes all you need is a reference. And in this case, when a Scrivener, ah, is wonderful as a tool for creating those note cards, we can just put a couple of notes too, to remind you of the, the tone or flavor that this character evokes, or a key moment that you want to have in this event that foreshadows some grand reveal in chapter 20 or whatever.
Dave (16m 23s): So, I mean, it can be just a matter of having a board with note cards that are color coded, or maybe you got stickers or whatever. Everybody I think creates their own shorthand because everybody's brain is wired differently, but you need to develop, I think that vocabulary with your brain so that the symbols or the colors, or the icons that you use for For recognition, speak to you and, and not necessarily try and adapt your brain to somebody else's a structured system. You create your own. Yeah.
Jesper (17m 3s): The system is the key word to it. I think because of course, I mean, I want to say as well as the Scrivener was wonderful, because if you are writing a script and already you are in the same data depository, if you could call it that, right. I mean, you can look up, what do you need quite easily? Whereas if it's, if it's stuck inside a spreadsheet or word document, if we just move away from the physical binders here, but that also becomes a very messy, as soon as you have a larger World with a lot of details in it, the searching in a word document is a nightmare, just scrolling back and forth and all of that stuff. So well, so they have Scrivener. So yeah.
Dave (17m 38s): Yeah, I think so too. I think so, too. And, and the other thing Jesper that I find so fascinating about the Worldbuilding process, because I'm like, I'm a, Worldbuilding junky. I'm, I'm actually, I, I need World builders anonymous. I need the other direction. Cause I will be, you know, I'll be drafting a, a, a story of some kind. It might be a, a, a narrative for a role-playing game or whatever. I'm a big advocate of history informing, present day. And, and I think the, the revelation of history and the assumed truth of the past and the true truth, truth, truth, truth, that's good for the truth of the past, the actual facts in the past.
Dave (18m 22s): I think that's an intriguing, it's always an intriguing a, a narrative twists. So I end up looking at the, the current Touraine of the story that I want to tell. Then I start digging into the background in the history that lead up to the current circumstances, whatever that might be. And inevitably that history is so cool then I think, Oh no, wait, my actual stories back here, I'm going to go back a hundred years and tell this story. And, and, you know, it's an endless cycle, just an endless cycle. But I think the point is that by investing in some of your story's cycles, some of your bandwidth as a writer in understanding the history of your world, I think, and I have found this certainly that it generates a first of all, a board story ideas, lots of intriguing things to pursue, but it also allows you to give your current story set in the current time.
Dave (19m 25s): Those subtle anchors into a past that I think puts, makes a world seem more authentic, puts it in a continuum of a long history that I think gives it a sort of reverence or, or certainly, like I said, a, a certain authenticity. So I always enjoy immersing myself in that in some way. And I think, I think it makes stories better.
Jesper (19m 54s): Oh, absolutely. I mean, the fact that you have developed the Worldbuilding details also allows you to, you know, you might drop a certain name, have a guilt or a group of something from, from the other country and neighboring country or something like that, but you would never have been able to do that without the Worldbuilding. And a lot of the times you don't even share the details about what that is, but to the reader, it just seems like, okay, this is a full world just to be right behind the horizon here. If I could just look at it, but I know it's there and it makes it a lot more immersive. Exactly, exactly. I think that's wonderful. And that, but maybe nowadays, at least we were talking about technology or a moment ago, and now a days we have a lot of online possibilities to document our World in a Worldbuilding Bible in an online fashion many, many years ago.
Jesper (20m 44s): I used obsidian portal for a bit. And I think Archivos is probably a very similar, in many ways. But apart from documenting it online, I think one of the real benefits of something like Archivos, it's the links between things 'cause, you don't have to scroll through a million documents if you can. I think click your way through, right. It is from character's two places and to stop the hooks. And so, yeah,
Dave (21m 8s): Exactly. Yeah. And then, and that's very much the experience that we wanted a your, your, you, you create a character. I mean, you start by creating a single story element and it can be a character or an organization, a place in an event, whatever. And that, that's how it always starts with one thing. And then this other thing, they did this event. Okay. So now we have an event and then you connect that that event took place at a location. Well, I need to, I need a story element for that. And now you've got this continuity between this character, this event in this location, and then other characters participated in them in that event.
Dave (21m 48s): Other events happened to that location and you get this rich sense of context of, of, of history and perspective on the key elements of your story that I think as a writer gives you a much clearer grip on how those elements impact your story.
Jesper (22m 14s): Yeah. And then probably also the other thing I think from a creative point of view is that once you start connecting those dots, that sometimes where you get a sperm of inspiration or something else, Oh, by the way, if I could not be something starts, then that makes a whole new level of stuff that could happen. Right?
Dave (22m 32s): Exactly. Or, wow, this guy, this, these two characters were at the same location at the same time. And I never mentioned that in this story from a continuity standpoint, that would be something you'd want to put in there. And the fact that they do engage, how does that affect your narrative? How does that change the stories? Is it cool? Excellent. Keep going and find more. Yeah,
Jesper (22m 56s): Indeed. And then, and so it is almost, I mean, one thing is documenting your World But, but it's also like a brainstorming tool. Almost
Dave (23m 4s): It very much is it very much is. And, and like I said, it's, it's an opportunity to see those connections that, that network of association within the story elements of your, your story's of your knowledge. And this is the thing that it just excites me the most about this is that, you know, history is just a story that actually happened. So you can take actual historical eras epox and put them into Archivos and use that as a reference for, you know, if you were doing an alternate history or if you're doing, you know, an urban fantasy and it set in a specific time, and you want to incorporate actual historical events, you can load those in as well and have that service.
Dave (23m 49s): Oh, crap. This is when a Kennedy is shot or, you know, this is when this thing happened or whatever. And now suddenly you're anchoring your narratives within the actual World history. And you can have a sense of, of confidence that you are doing so accurately.
Jesper (24m 9s): Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. But so you mentioned There of course you can document your characters, your places, and you know, those story elements, their, but is there, are there things that, that is Archivos was, can do maybe that is a bit more, should we call it a nice or good compared to what you could say? Yeah, yeah, indeed.
Dave (24m 30s): We have, we basically have three views within the application. We've got the story web, which just shows you the connection of everything. Characters, events, organizations, places, all of that. We also have the living map, which allows storytellers to upload a map of a country, upload the map of the city of Boulder, a map of a building a and then tag elements on that map. So you can see where this event happened or this city is in this country. And then allowing you to drill down from, from a country view down to a city view down to a neighborhood viewer, what have you.
Dave (25m 9s): So you've got this, this massive sense of geographical continuity a for your narrative. And then you've got the timeline, which we were talking about earlier, as essential to making sure that the sequence of things unfolds a nice, so you get to see the overlap because events can take place over several days, a battle or something, and you'll be able to see, you know, where the various events of your story are overlapping. Are you putting a character in two places at the same time, that would be bad. A Archivos to let you see that. So lots of visualization tools were actually in the process of expanding the app in a couple of ways.
Dave (25m 55s): One of them allowing people to create their own custom story elements types. We, we took this big 40,000 foot view, and we just want like characters organizations, places, a, a very broad categories of story out on the type. And we've gotten a lot of feedback from people saying, yes, but I want a creatures story element type. I want a story element type just for the Monster's in my world, right or wrong. Or if you're doing a, a, you know, Naval battle or a scifi ship than I want chips as a story on that time. So we're, we're currently developing a, the way to allow are storytellers to create your own story element types that customize it to their narrative, that they're telling custom relationships.
Dave (26m 43s): Also, there were those connections, its not just a line between the two characters, a we allow you to define that line. So what a familial professional personal. But again, we took this very high level of view because trying to figure out what anybody and everybody wants is a nightmare. Cause everybody does stuff different. There would be this massively long list of all the different relationships types. So we are going to lie to create your own relationships too. So you can customize that list too, to tailor it towards your a narrative, the types of stories you're telling M and then the third thing we're doing is we're introducing a very intriguing, a tagging function where you can tag events or characters are whatever.
Dave (27m 30s): For example, a chapter one, I want to tag this event in chapter one, and then you can do a filter to show me just the story elements in chapter one or a book one or whatever. You can have multiple tags and then filter and filter displays by those tag element's, which I think has really going to help a storyteller's be able to organize and group their story elements by whatever criteria they want to. But specifically, you know, what, what happened in chapter one? Okay, here's the chapter one story elements here, the events and the characters, yada, yada, I think that's going to help a lot in terms of being able to refine your vision of your story because as you, as you observed things like Lord of the rings get big quick, and I have found that to be true in Archivos as well as I'm writing, it's like, Ooh, and I need to put it in this and this and this and this network becomes, can become cumbersome.
Dave (28m 32s): We've got a game of Thrones in there and when it first load's up, it's like, boom, boom, all these elements too. So being able to filter that is probably a good thing.
Jesper (28m 46s): Yeah. And I noticed as well as that, I think you allow for quite a lot of pictures and stuff like that. So you can make it look nice as well. Isn't that right?
Dave (28m 55s): Oh my goodness. Yes, we will definitely pictures. Ah, we, we talked earlier about how you, you, the iconography that you use or the symbols or the colors, what have you, we want it to make sure that you could upload images for the little avatar that appears, and also a big image in there, but then we added a gallery options. So if you've got a bunch of photo references for a place, for example, you can just upload all 20 or 30, however many you want they're right there at your fingertips. You can upload PDF's. So if you've got documents, have some kind or a text files, a you can add a link to audio or video files.
Dave (29m 37s): So if there is a reference of some kind that exists in a different media format, you can link that to the profile for each story element. Yet we wanted to make sure that the storytellers could, whatever references they felt would inspire them in their storytelling, that they would be easily accessible within the Archivos framework. Definitely.
Jesper (30m 1s): Yeah. Yeah. And of course that also allows it to be much more interesting for her. Like we talked about before for sharing a reader's and stuff like that, because we want to start looking nice. Then it becomes more than just this sort of online Vicky, like Wikipedia, where it just click around for different text elements, but all of a sudden it starts, it starts looking like a lot more than that.
Dave (30m 19s): Absolutely. Absolutely. And you know, I've even advocated, I started doing this with some of the escape artists Podcast podcasts are just a story as well. And you could actually put, you know, I I've been working on getting the Archivos podcast network loaded into Archivos won a novel idea, a and then he'd be able to link the episodes directly in the, in the, in the story elements of that narrative. So yeah, pretty much so, very much So. And, and, and again, those, those, those opportunities to engage with your readers, as much as you have found that every writer has found, there's a lot of material that ends up on the cutting room floor.
Dave (31m 8s): There are scenes that get axed because they don't necessarily drive the narrative forward. There's a lot of deleted scenes in, in story. Writing, Archivos give you an opportunity to put those deleted scenes up. You can actually include them as that, that collateral material about a, a book or a story or a character, or what have you. So a lot of that story-telling that we as storytellers do that, the readers, our audiences don't necessarily always hear. Now you have a place that you could share that in the context of this as a deleted scene and it didn't make it. But if you want to read more about this event or this character, this is available to you.
Dave (31m 53s): So it gives you that as well.
Jesper (31m 55s): Hmm. And on the flip side of that, or you are also able to hide stuff that a for example, if readers get to the link, they can't see this in this pub. If you wanna keep it up.
Dave (32m 4s): Yes. Most definitely there is a, All all elements as you create them are by default shown, but there is a check box for Hyde, this element. So for example, if you've got a new book coming out and you want to set up the Archivos setting to just bam expose all of these new characters and new elements to your story setting in Archivos, you can do that in advance, hide those elements. And then you go on release day or whatever, or maybe even to patrons, you know, just to have a limited group of individuals, you know, you have a mailing list, for example, you can make it so that only they can see that.
Dave (32m 45s): So yeah, there's lots of opportunities to not only stage your story setting, but also schedule a and, and roll out elements of your story setting within the app.
Jesper (32m 59s): Yeah. You mentioned APTA. So what does that mean? You can also do it on, on your phone and stuff like that. Or do you have to have access to a browser
Dave (33m 7s): Now? We are, we are exclusively desktop. There are plans to actually, I think what we are going to end up having doing is after we complete this next round of development, I think we're going to look at doing a Kickstarter because we very much want to create an app for the phone and for the iPad or for tablets as well for phones and tablets. But as you seen in the app, Yesper a big, and it doesn't translate, it doesn't translate well to a phone display. So we need to revise the interface and do a lot of users, a dialogue to figure out what features need to be accessible within the phone, because the full feature set.
Dave (33m 51s): It just, it doesn't make sense in that, in that tiny screen.
Jesper (33m 55s): No, I agree. And I w w I mean, just take the example of a, a lot of the ring stuff. I mean, the, the, the connection map there is massive as well, and you don't want to do that on a screen, but I was more thinking into terms of, and, and of course you can take the system an idea if you wanted to know, but then I was more thinking and the way that 'cause, I think, as to create a or the Worldbuilding, I think you want to do it on a computer browser anyway, 'cause you need the biggest patience and you need to be able to see all those connection dots when you do the right to the different story elements, you know, you, I think it will, you will just be more comfortable doing at the computer versus versus on an app on the phone. But I was more thinking about the phone app as something for the audience.
Jesper (34m 35s): Basically, I like the reader is stuff where you, you don't need all of this stuff that the writer basically needs, but more like, this is a way where I have an app on my phone, just going to use a dragon lands here, because I love that setting if I had a dragon lands app, and I could just like, open it up and check the character here and check that out. But maybe I don't can't see everything, but that would probably for a hardcore fans, that would be a lovely idea.
Dave (34m 59s): Absolutely. I agree. And I could see, you know, a, a little, a little hamburger menu up in the corner where if you're looking at, you know, race, and then you can, you can flip a swipe with your, with your thumb, and here are all the story elements associated with race. And so you don't necessarily see the dynamic display, but those associations and the ability to navigate through them remains consistent. I like that. I think that's a great idea.
Jesper (35m 28s): Yeah, yeah. That, that might be a good idea. I'll take it all. Or you can steal it. That's okay.
Dave (35m 35s): Yeah. That too, the boys. Absolutely. Yeah. I'll give you a credit full credit.
Jesper (35m 40s): All right. But is there anything else that, that I forgotten to ask you about around Archivos that you want to mention that
Dave (35m 47s): No, no, this is a, this has been marvelous. I obviously, I'm not exactly a, a, a, a shy, retiring wallflower when it comes to talking about this thing. I do love this app and I'm
Jesper (35m 58s): Calm and confident
Dave (36m 1s): In its ability to help storytellers not necessarily tell better stories, but tell stories better. Hmm. Yeah. That's yeah, that just popped out of my head. I'm going to stick with that, that I like that. So, ah, no, I think, I think, I think we covered all the high points, but just to, just to reiterate that everybody does this differently and that needs to be, you know, I'm always, I'm always leery of someone mandating that this is the way something must be done. Creativity doesn't work that way. Humanity doesn't work that way, but a good tool as a tool that can adapt itself to your unique vision and perspective of your process.
Dave (36m 51s): And that's very much what we tried to do with Archivos and are continuing to try to do is we continue to develop the app and try and make it a, a, a better and better tool.
Jesper (37m 1s): Yeah. And, and you can, of course make it as complex as you want, as long as the creator or, or you can keep it as simple as you want. And I think that that's one of the nice things with it. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Okay. But I'll put a link to Archivos in the show notes for the listeners. If they want to go and check it out, then they can spend it. Thank you. And if there's anything else that you want to meet a link to Dave in the us, you know, just emailed it to me and then I'll put it in there as well.
Dave (37m 27s): Yeah. I mean, my, my, my voice acting website is buttery man. voice.com. So yeah, it will throw. Yeah, definitely. I, I will, I will link to you. I will. I will email you. Thank you.
Jesper (37m 39s): All right. All right. And then I want to thank day for joining me today and the, the listener than a Autumn, we'll be back next week. And we will try to have one of our usual good topics available for you.
Narrator (37m 53s): If you liked what you just heard. There is a few things that you can do to support The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn in Jesper on patreon.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast going to stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Welcome to our 100th episode! Wahooo! To celebrate, we turned the show over to you, our listeners. We answer YOUR questions in this special edition episode to mark a great beginning.
Don't forget to comment and let us know how we can learn to celebrate our accomplishments a bit better. What do you to mark a special achievement?
And if you want to check out the Fantasy Author Roundtable that Autumn was just a part of, head over to https://youtu.be/ZaDTNJcu2tI!
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to the Am Writing Fantasy podcast in today's publishing landscapes. You can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from Writing Join two best selling authors who have self-published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt
Jesper (30s): Hello I'm Jesper
Autumn (31s): and I'm Autumn.
Jesper (34s): This is episode 100 of The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast imagine that you made it to 100 Episode
Autumn (43s): Oh, I just tickled it. That's pretty much the success story right there.
Jesper (48s): Yeah I actually prepared a suitable some clips are you ready for it?
Autumn (53s): Yeah. Sure, sure.
Jesper (56s): OK. Here we go.
Autumn (1m 3s): That is, it's a, that's a pretty amazing, I dunno what to say. A a hundred episodes. It's it's a good thing. I mean, this has then the dedicated ask us anything Episode in celebration of it being number 100. So thank you.
Jesper (1m 17s): Two, all of you who sent in some questions, it was great. And we are looking forward to dive in. So yeah, this is going to be good.
Autumn (1m 25s): Yes. I can't wait a day. We got some good question.
Jesper (1m 28s): So we have all of that lined up and like I said, I've just so excited and it's not because I've had like six cups of tea today where I'm just thrilled that we actually made it to a hundred episodes. Yeah. But before we get into all of that, all of that, how, how are things with you?
Autumn (1m 46s): And I want to be good. Would you believe, and this is a huge confession. So I'm writing my 23rd book. I finally, for the first time ever in my life, I joined nano right now. So I saw that. Yeah. So are you posting about it? Yeah, I, I joined seven days late. Well, I know for some people that would be pretty much a death knell, but I just, I figured I finished the plotting. It's the first time in my life that I had a book, a new book. I was going to start and it was November. So I went for it and we'd just pass while we are recording this, we just passed in the middle of the month and get my word count.
Jesper (2m 31s): Ahh, 25.
Autumn (2m 33s): Oh, you are so close. I was a 22,000. So I've, I've made up at least I'm pretty close to making up that first week where I didn't do any writing. I just did plotting. So I think I'm going to survive my first nano right. Mo and hopefully get my badge and I'll at least have to be able to say finally that I did one. Oh yeah. Cool. Yeah. I have never done that. So that's pretty cool. Yeah, it is. It's actually been a lot of fun. I've met some other authors in a Vermont where I'm living and other ones online. I've got some Writing buddies and people that can chat with which we all need more or less there's this week and chat with us and share. Well, it was so it's been really a ton of fun and I'm glad I joined.
Autumn (3m 13s): So how are things on your side of the Atlantic?
Jesper (3m 18s): Well, it's a good, I can normally I would probably complaining because a All senior soccer matches has been canceled due to COVID-19 Again so normally I would be complaining about that, but actually I think it's a good thing because it makes me, it gives you a more time to prepare to move houses or, you know, at least Now, I don't spend for, for hours every Saturday in, in refereeing. So it's sort of, that's true.
Autumn (3m 45s): You go out to your plate pretty much full between the stuff that we've got going on. All of our family, a job moving. So you might have been a bit, a little bit too much of a crunch time for you.
Jesper (3m 59s): Hey, it is a bit crazy. I must admit even the boys felt that there was a bit of, it was, they were all there. The youngest almost got a bit stressed to set the other day on getting stressed. You said, because they've been busy organizing all the Lego because they have a ton of it and they are getting older. So they are not, they don't really play with it. So they decided that they wanted to put it up for sale, which was fine. So, but then they have to organize it all and put it in bags, everything that belongs together and stuff like that. So, so they've been pretty busy and they've been trying to get it done before we move. So yeah, that was why the youngest set I'm getting stressed. I had to tell him about Lego. I have to work.
Jesper (4m 39s): Oh, the woes and problems of a child. I just loved the yeah. Yeah. But in mid December we need to be out of the house, but we do get access to the apartment that 1st of December. So I actually am looking forward to the move, even though we are going to have a lot less space in the new place, but the, yeah. But Hey, the apartment is the next to the beach. So I plane. Right?
Autumn (5m 5s): I know I will be angry at you if you complain. I have spent one winter next to the ocean and Myrtle beach and I miss it very nostalgically now. So I think that, that is so awesome.
Narrator (5m 18s): A week on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast
Jesper (5m 23s): So we never ever talked politics on this podcast and I'm not going to do it now.
Narrator (5m 29s): Okay. My heart just skipped a beat and I was going no, no, no, no, no. I'm not going to do it.
Jesper (5m 35s): I just wanted to mention that I have really noticed how the us election impacted the activity and the Am Writing Fantasy Oh yeah. But I think that it is true. It is they've no one has been unhappy with each other, but I've definitely seen some stuff online where even book sales in the 20 to 50 K a Facebook group has mentioned that a lot of people have seen some tanking in lots of Yeah less activity going on.
Autumn (6m 4s): So I, I do think that is what is going on in the world. Yeah.
Jesper (6m 9s): Yeah, exactly. It's not because anybody has been arguing in the Facebook. That's what it is. Not what I meant by more than just meant that there's a lot less posts and comments in there. And normally that's perfectly understandable, but it just stood out to me so much that I noticed it.
Autumn (6m 25s): Yeah.
Jesper (6m 25s): Yeah. But if, if your deal is going to have not joined the group yet, and by the way, normally it is very active over there
Autumn (6m 34s): Normally. Yeah.
Jesper (6m 35s): So head on over to Facebook and type in Am Writing Fantasy in the search field among the groups and the, you know,
Autumn (6m 41s): You will find us. Yes. Yes. And it's definitely, I mean, I'm not a huge Facebook fan, but I would stay on Facebook just for Am Writing Fantasy because there are some great folks over there and fantastic questions and interactions. So I do love, what did I get a chance? What I do turn it on Facebook and put it on my Facebook corral before going in. I get to spend some time in there, which is lovely. Yeah.
Jesper (7m 5s): You don't like Facebook either, but I like the group and I liked to run ads pretty much.
Autumn (7m 11s): Is it okay. So that's pretty much Yeah keeps us all we're there because we are all authors and who we are. We end up being There. Yeah.
Jesper (7m 20s): Okay. So anything else to mention Autumn before we dive in to all our wonderful question?
Autumn (7m 24s): Well, not only that, if you happened to go into the group or look me up on Instagram or Twitter or wherever you want to try to find me, because I swear were like, I had just joined discord because there are no right. Mo So, I just what I needed was another social media account. But if you look me up cause you can't find it on Facebook, they just released the Fantasy Roundtable I was a part of it and that was a lot of fun. So if you're a new author and you're looking for some fancy writing tips from three Fantasy authors, you know, give me a shout out and I will send you the link it's on YouTube. So do you know, it's a fun thing to check out and get some advice and laugh with us as we share.
Autumn (8m 4s): Yeah. And it is,
Jesper (8m 5s): If you remember to do so Autumn you could also add the link to the show notes.
Autumn (8m 9s): Yeah. I will do my best. Yeah.
Jesper (8m 17s): So we have some great questions lined up. Yeah. But before we get into those, I thought it would be fun if we each reflected a bit on what it feels like to have reached 100 episodes.
Autumn (8m 33s): Why do you think I am so thrilled? I mean, I've written, I remember when I finished, like my first series, that's what it reminds me of is when you hit that kind of a milestone, your like, gosh, darted, I did it. And why are we so obsessed as humans with round numbers? But besides that, I think it's so amazing. We managed to hit a hundred. I did. We, we didn't count you tube videos. Did we, do you know how many you had published? Yeah. So I think the first something like probably 25 ish, a YouTube video or was it actually YouTube videos that we turn into the Podcast but before then that's probably a hundred YouTube videos even before then.
Autumn (9m 19s): So, so we were technically at 200 as what you were saying. Yeah. I know what, that's a huge accomplishment. I I'm just, it makes me feel real, I guess is maybe the theory, not professional. I already feel felt, but you know, like I'm not a newbie anymore. We, we deserve like the ones with the little birthday cake with the candle and all of that. Yeah. So how did it make you feel? Yeah. Well, I know I asked this question, you know, I wrote to you and said, well, let let's, let's talk about a bit about this in the beginning, before we get into the actual questions that people have posted. And, and then afterwards, so when I started thinking about it, well, what do I actually feel?
Autumn (10m 3s): And then I, I got a bit confused with myself. This is like, ah, I don't, I don't know. Maybe, maybe it sounds a bit weird. I don't know. But you know, I, I am happy. Of course we reached episode 100 and, and I know it is not a small feet to have half the Podcast running for this long. There is a lot of PODCAST out there that never even make it to episode 10. Yeah. So of course that part I am happy about. So I'm not trying to say that I'm not, but there's a, but here you can probably guess I think I might have noticed that. Yeah. Yeah. It is. It's just tell me if I'm wrong.
Autumn (10m 43s): Maybe I'm a bit weird. Right. But it's just like, I don't quite feel it being such a huge accomplishment in, and I, I can not put my finger on Y I mean, perhaps if you just say something about my lack of ability to choose, to do, to celebrate to, I did recently hear that your, your birthday, it was a little bit tone down. So no, while I go ahead and get, you know, it's just like when I finished the writing project, this is what I would just jump on to the next one. So when we finish, we just touched one. We never stop. And I do it and I was going to say that's, I would definitely say, like, it feels, it doesn't feel like an ending.
Autumn (11m 24s): It feels like just the beginning. I mean, we were in the seven stages. We might have past the intro and maybe were being on the inciting incident, who knows, but it's a lot more to go. So it's a Hill. It's not Everest yet, but it's kind of cool. Talk to us. So we hit a thousand. How are you doing? Oh my God, you'd better have let us celebrate. We will have to get together for the, a thousands, thousands. Episode if I could say that we really do podcasting and I can't talk. Yeah.
Jesper (11m 59s): It's usually, well, I'm usually the one who can't talk, but
Autumn (12m 4s): No, but
Jesper (12m 5s): I think actually rather than waiting for 1000, I think the real lesson here is that I really need to learn how to celebrate it
Autumn (12m 12s): Accomplishments. So I'm not good at it. I'm good at it. Oh, well, we'll have to find something to celebrate them and, and plan a party. Or if everyone joins Patreon, we have, we guaranteed everyone that if we had hit so many members, we would have a party. So that would be the other way to make you celebrate is that for every one went and joined Patrion for a dollar and we'd have to have a party. And there you go. Oh yeah, that would be awesome.
Jesper (12m 36s): I think also just between the two of us, you know, Autumn, once we finished building a course or we finished writing a book or something, we need to find a way to, at least in one way or another, celebrate a bit more that we accomplished something because I dunno, I, I never do it. I just jumped straight onto the next thing on my to-do list. And I sort of already forgot all of the stuff I already did.
Autumn (12m 56s): It is. I think you also forgot that you're talking to the author who finished one book and started the next one's in the exact same day. But I think you're right. I think maybe we will have to rope in our spouses. Maybe we can reopen our listeners. How do you, when we are on different continents, this is not like we're in different States because goodness knows I'm a long distance traveler. If there was a way to drive to where you are, I would have driven there by now because I've gone over a hundred thousand miles in my car. So I can do that. But there is that ocean. It's a very pesky, but I don't have a sailboat at the moment, but how do we need a way of celebrating virtually? So if anyone has fantastic celebration ideas, you know, let us know in the comments we're, we're open to learning too.
Autumn (13m 39s): We both need rehabilitation to be more celebratory. You know, I like that idea. All right. Okay. Yeah.
Jesper (13m 48s): Well, I might not be a very good at celebrating. I do love recording this podcast and I had to have a question for you on it.
Autumn (13m 55s): All right. Ooh. Yeah,
Jesper (13m 58s): Because I, I feel like we've had some great conversations on this, on this podcast and we've also had some great guests on, I was wondering which one of the past 99 episodes was one of one, which one was your favorite and why?
Autumn (14m 15s): Oh, that's a good question. You know, off the top of my head, I would say if you talked about ones I'm most proud of when you interviewed Joanna Penn, my heart to like, Oh my God, that's so amazing that she was on as our guest, but honestly sincerely from my heart. My favorite episode was 69 and my journey as an author of the good and the bad.
Jesper (14m 37s): And do you want to know what else? Yeah,
Autumn (14m 40s): For sure. Because that's one, where are you listed us as teaming up as one of your highlights as an author? And I just love that. So Oh yeah. I have sent a mental that way, so I just thought, well, that's good. No, I actually forgot about that. No, no, no. That's good. That's good.
Jesper (15m 0s): A good pick. That's a good pick now. I don't, I don't let your, I can do the same. So
Autumn (15m 5s): That's how I got to go first. Yeah.
Jesper (15m 8s): But now, you know, and how you make my life difficult.
Autumn (15m 12s): That is partially my role. Yeah.
Jesper (15m 15s): Yeah. I noticed I should have asked
Autumn (15m 18s): The question. You should've made me ask you that question, I guess.
Jesper (15m 24s): Yeah. I don't know. I mean, we've had so many good guests on and they were so many to pick from. I mean, you mentioned Joanna Penn where you've had Oh yeah. Mike, Leslie live fav, who am I forgetting? Sasha, a black. We had our own of course Alexa, big Muff. I guess that's how you say it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I could go on and on Kristen Oliphant as well. I know I've probably forgotten a few names. Do you have, and, and I don't mean to, so sorry, if any of the guests or a past guest are listening here, there's just so many to choose from. Yeah. There, there was also the kinds of episodes where you are and I do alternating lists.
Autumn (16m 5s): I like those as well. Yeah. Yeah.
Jesper (16m 8s): So there's a lot to choose Sean, but if I have to choose only one, I think I would say probably Episode 34. Do you know which one that is?
Autumn (16m 19s): No. No. Which one is about wine
Jesper (16m 22s): Is actually not covered by covering any topic at all. And it is not having any particularly important guest on either
Autumn (16m 32s): Or what are you doing? Yeah,
Jesper (16m 35s): Well, I actually chose it because it was the episode where we announced that we were going to stop creating YouTube videos and turn this into, Oh, well, that's a good one that I think that was the best one because I thought that I think that's the best decision we made.
Autumn (16m 53s): Well, I am not complaining. I really enjoy the podcast format more than I expected I would, but it's, it's a wonderful, and it's a great working with you. And so I think that one's a fantastic one. Yeah. Yeah.
Jesper (17m 8s): I still don't feel it's sort of, it's a script.
Autumn (17m 13s): Yeah. Well, you know, I have one of the last couple of our recent contests, so it's just the way it goes.
Jesper (17m 20s): So I guess, yeah. I can just feel honored that I'm doing the Podcast with you since you were so good at it.
Autumn (17m 26s): Well, thank you. Well, I wouldn't be doing it at all if it wasn't for you. So there you go. There it's a party.
Jesper (17m 35s): Well, yeah, indeed. So we have, we have some good questions because some people gave us some audio files and those great. So we are going to play those today. Yes. And we also got quite a number of questions
Autumn (17m 51s): Sent in via a text or emails or somebody field in the Google form that we announced previous page and so on. So it was
Jesper (17m 59s): Thinking we were just going to go through them one by one, and then we can see it,
Autumn (18m 4s): Both reply to all of the questions and that's it for today. Oh, all right. Well that sounds almost too easy, but I can't wait. Yeah.
Jesper (18m 13s): So, okay. I'll try to, just to be a bit of a, in the driver's seat here. Not because I want it to be a, A control freak, but just because then we make sure that we got, we get through all of them in, in a bit of an order. So that's the only reason and without taking an hour and a half, so yeah. But okay. Let's, let's get started here. And the first question is from seed and a safe asks, what single work has most direct, directly influenced your Fantasy Writing. Hm. And what did he say about that? I would say that's a tough one. I, the one thing that I can say came up to me is simply the short story, ah, by Anne McCaffrey on dragon impression, I can't even remember the name of it.
Autumn (19m 4s): And I know its just a short story. So if you Google it short story on McCaffrey, the dragon impression and it it's funny because that's really not changing my Fantasy Writing. But if I hadn't read that, that is the story that hooked me on Fantasy and dragons. And I took me on as a reader and opened up the whole genre to me. So if it wasn't for that one eye to eye, it could be writing my best friend, loved mystery and Nancy drew. So who knows I could have fallen into that, but no, I write Fantasy because of that story. How about you? I don't think I
Jesper (19m 39s): Have, it is an old won the order
Autumn (19m 41s): Or it's a bit older than you are. So yes, it has an old way and I was right in and like elementary school is, it is. And I, I would have to, Again go. It was in a compilation, but I think you can actually find it a solo online now it's that old or is it one of
Jesper (20m 5s): Those words? It was good back then, but no, not anymore.
Autumn (20m 8s): I haven't re-read it honestly, I just know it's I just absolutely fell in love. I mean, it was a little boy who wanted to become a, a dragon rider and he ended up getting the bronze dragon witch next to the queen is like the top dragging to get it. But I mean, it, it's just, it's sweet and it has dragons. You get to choose, you know, a dragon Bond's with you and it's so I don't want to reread it. Its just the memories of it is wonderful. Like, okay, well,
Jesper (20m 35s): So for me I would say, well the, the question is influenced my writing and, and then I would probably say a lot of the rings.
Autumn (20m 43s): I know that that's not very original. I dunno. I really liked
Jesper (20m 49s): Talking's WRITING well everything except Tom Bombadil
Autumn (20m 58s): I really liked his writing, but yeah.
Jesper (21m 2s): Yeah. You were talking about getting hooked on FANTASY as my love for the fence has shown WRA was not talking. It actually started off with the ranking lands.
Autumn (21m 14s): Yeah. Those
Jesper (21m 14s): Books really got me hooked on Fantasy and it's actually quite funny last week. This is not an a, a, a new book either, but last week I was going through on the Kindle books on Amazon
Autumn (21m 27s): And I was there. I can't remember why,
Jesper (21m 28s): But I was looking for some, some of the old dragon lands books, maybe it's because I'm reading them with the, with the,
Autumn (21m 35s): So with my kids. So maybe that's why while I was looking through it But but then
Jesper (21m 39s): All of the sudden I noticed that there was a book
Autumn (21m 42s): About race Lim, you know, he, he, he he's like, yeah. So I bought that. I haven't started
Jesper (21m 49s): Reading it yet, but I I'm really looking forward to reading
Autumn (21m 51s): That one. It's a new me who I just hadn't noticed it before, you know, because I had read all of those up until I think we got into the forgotten realms or whatever. And at some point in the 20th book, I, I stopped reading and so I've drifted away, but yeah, you'll have to let me know how that is because I might want to revisit that world. Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Jesper (22m 15s): Okay. So the next one, I have an audio recording, so let's listen what Micah has to do.
Micah (22m 23s): How do you guys get and keep your inspiration?
Jesper (22m 27s): So that was a, maybe a bit low. So let me just repeat it. So Micah asked, how do we get and keep our inspiration.
Autumn (22m 36s): All right. Oh, that's Hmm, because I, yeah, I, I was looking at to see that his entire one, you want to know that, especially to complete a novel. So that is a tough one, I guess. I think it's part of my personality. I am a task oriented and I like to finish anything. I start. And when I was at a studio artist, because I was painting way before I was writing, I would always finish anything that I started because I just, I started it. Of course we are going to finish it, but to keep the inspiration going, I think you have to, for me to keep it alive is I fall in love with the characters to the point where they wake up me off and in the middle of the night. And it's sometimes more alive to me than the world around me, which I actually think is a flaw.
Autumn (23m 20s): I have to, I think, goodness, I have a husband in a dog because I don't know. I'd be, I'd be like the lady of Shalott up in my tower and like daydreaming all day, instead of actually remembering that there was an actual world outside my door that I should go visit occasionally. So to me, I just live in my stories. I love my stories and they just, I was meant to be a writer and to tell these stories. And so that is how I keep the going is by feeding them frequently with ideas and sing songs. And even with my husband, we play word games all the time. Thank goodness. He's like, he likes literary things. Are we probably spend one or two together after 20 years or so that's a good sign, but that's how I to beat at you.
Autumn (24m 3s): You have to feed your idea's, you feed your stories, you let your characters become. So Real that to let go of them to not spend time with them hurts. And so you keep writing. Yeah, that's a good answer. I might be slightly, you know,
Jesper (24m 24s): I think for me in terms of getting inspiration, I get it from everywhere. You know, sometimes I can wake up in the morning and then there was some sort of scene playing in my head and I quickly have to write it down. So I always have a notepad next to my bed because then I often good idea. So w when I sleep in, when I wake up other times, maybe I'm reading something or watching the movie, or there's just something that triggers me and then write that down as well. It can also be a Podcast that I'm listening to. I I must say that Yeah my inspiration, mostly comm in the form of scenes or like concepts that I think are cool.
Jesper (25m 9s): And then I built from there. But I, I think as far as keeping the inspiration going, I, I have to do a bit of a shameless plug here, because if you think of the inspiration and going, we actually cover this in quite some detail, and I've got in a guidebook about story ideas. And so that one can be found on Amazon or everywhere else that you buy books a day. And by the way, if you, instead of buy the plotting book, it's called plot development, you can get the story idea of a book for free. There was a link inside that plodding book for it. But I am saying all of that 'cause once we have solid premise, which was what we discussed and that book, how to develop, then once that is done, then we also know that we have something that is interesting enough to keep the story going until to the end.
Jesper (25m 60s): So yeah, I just have to do that block there because I really do think that really answers the question. That's how, that's how we keep it going. That's true. It's a very good point. Yeah. So we also had a question from Lisa. Perhaps you can read that one. All of them.
Autumn (26m 14s): Yes. I will read the, the question park so that she had sent it on a little bit of a fun story as well, but we'll go with the question, Alyssa, and I often wonder what it is like to be so immersed in a story and then keep going. I know you have to decide to pull the plug because you would become sick of eating and drinking and sleeping about it. I'm sure. But don't you ever come up with another idea or a thought and wanting to go back or do you just move on? So what do you want to start with that one? Yeah. I mean,
Jesper (26m 44s): It does happen more often than not that I get another idea or think of a way to maybe it could be a full of the story idea, but it could also be just a way to expand on something that I'm already writing. You know, that, Oh, it would be cool if, if it was like this and data as well, and then that sort of, Spock's a side story or something almost. But I think I found that it is far more efficient to avoid the temptation in this situation. Just write it down and that idea that you got, so you don't forget about it and then keep going with what you originally were working upon. Because unless it's something that I can fix like, and a few minutes, do you, like, if it's just an idea like, Oh, okay, cool.
Jesper (27m 27s): Not cool if I did like this and that. And I, I can just add one more paragraph or something that is fine, then I'll do it right away. But otherwise I'll leave it for the editing stages. So I think when first drafting, at least it saves a lot of time and the fast I can make the Writing go during the first draft, the better for me. But I also think for the reader 'cause at the end of the day to that the book will be done more quickly that way. So I know exactly what you mean and what Lisa means. I know what you mean by the question Lisa But, but I think it's best to avoid the temptation, but I don't know if you agree with that. All of them.
Autumn (28m 4s): No, I agree. Because I was going to say just sort of like what I said, I don't mind eating and drinking and just living in this story to the point where sometimes I forget the real world exists. So it wasn't like being in having to adult occasionally and make money. And those sorts of things go to the grocery store. I if I did well, if I wasn't a cook in the family, I would probably forget to eat occasionally. I honestly would. I can get so wrapped up in this stuff, but yeah, I do sometimes think of other ideas or like if I'm writing, if its an idea for the current book I'm writing, I will go back. And if it's something that I've already written, I'll just highlight and do a comment. If it's something that's further ahead, because I have all my stories in chapters outlined, I'll just put a note in that chapter outline and I want to get there, I'll put it in where it needs to be or I'll fix it in the editing.
Autumn (28m 50s): But if it's a completely different story, because I'm a bit of a pantser slash Potter, a plotter, I'm a hybrid. So I will just simply take a note. There's nothing, there's no idea they can come to me. That is so fully fledged that I can just jump to it because I would want to spend time with it. I want to get to know the character as I need to plot it out. I need to figure it out the world and world build and develop. There's so much work that goes into wanting to start a story that I don't ever just jumped to It eggs. So if I happened to be getting close to finishing a series, I have learned it's a lot less painful if I let go of my characters gently and I've already started world-building and Writing and developing the other story.
Autumn (29m 35s): So I, I, this is me. I have written three books, three, like, you know, three things at the same time. So, but I have one main story and I started on a second plot. You and I are going to be writing together, plus I'm writing on my own. So it's I do a lot of Writing, but I find that it works. I'm very compartmentalized in my mind. So I can just, you know, open up that file cabinet and go write in and spend a lots of time in this wonderful they're magical filing cabinets. Do you don't want to sound boring? They're like you open it up and there's a whole little world in their, and it's really exciting and you know, they were stars. So if it's not really, it's not one of those boring office ones, it's a magical, but that's so that's how I do it. If it's a really good idea, I take copious notes.
Autumn (30m 17s): I put it aside. I start developing it on the side and if it's really, really good, eventually it becomes a side project. And when the main one finishes, it becomes the next one.
Jesper (30m 29s): Very good. So next question is from Mark, Justin. So Mark says one time I show up someone, my writing, they said it felt more fitting to call it a visual novel script than a traditional story. What's one way to make the Writing Flo better and not feel like a bunch of texts. This is right down your alley.
Autumn (30m 53s): It is, it's also a tough one. But so the thing is, it just depends on what, what they meant by a visual novel. I mean, do you have mostly dialog? Do you have mostly information, but to bring it alive is to bring the world to live, to bring, do you want to just kind of suck the reader into a character's head? So you need to choose a point of view and we call it a deep point of view that you feel like you are sitting inside of a character is head and you sense whatever they sent. So that's not just seeing which is where the visual it comes from, but you want to know what they're smelling, what are they touching, tasting? What do they feel? You want to know that you have demotions. So that other sense as well as there, once you can pull that world and bring it to life so that you can describe the character walking through the forest and they hear the crunch of the leaves, they smell the wet earth, one of the ferns in the Moss and they feel the wind on their skin.
Autumn (31m 50s): When you have that texts that is building those layers of the world up to the reader and you're sharing the dialogue and you're having all of that. That's going to make it flesh out that world really well.
Jesper (32m 4s): Yeah, all of the stuff around the a M emotion or like the census and stuff. That was also where I was going. But I would say on top of that, I encourage you to listen to a recent episode 98 actually, because we talked about the new top mistakes that new authors make in that episode. And there's quite a few tips and tricks there that I think you will find that useful. He Mark, you also said that, that it should not feel like a bunch of text and this might not have been what you meant by it. But when you said that, it, it sort of made me think about infidelity.
Jesper (32m 44s): You know what, these lots of blocks of text where you just explain something to the reader at that might not be at all what you meant by a bunch of text, but, but on top of the situation around the census that the order, or just explain it so well, I think it is important that you also find ways in which to deliver those kind of world-building information through the actions of the characters or through dialog, because at least when it comes to making the writing flow better, that makes a huge difference. Yes. Just we could be just before we started recording, I was just talking to Autumn about a book that I recently, I'm not going to say what to type, which book it, because then somebody might get mad with that chapter's of chapters of info dumping at the time.
Jesper (33m 36s): It's really not, it does not flow where we will. Yeah. And I checked some of the, some of the Amazon reviews as well. And they pointed that out. Not always so politely, but that's exactly what they read about it. Yeah. But okay. I think that one is probably covered there. So a, we have another audio files I'm going to play now.
James (34m 0s): Autumn and Yesper congratulations on your 100th Podcast you guys are really dedicated and you are an inspiration, I think to us all you are to me anyway, I've got a question. What methods do you have to turn to, to de-stress or at least try to when taking a break during a particularly difficult period of problematic Writing
Jesper (34m 31s): Mm that's a good one. Do you stress? We live on stress. Well, you know, honestly, I was just thinking, I don't know if I'm the best one to answer this one because I really never struggled that much with feeling stressed. I know I'm lucky in that way, but I really don't feel it. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm just not in tune with them on my own emotions or something. I don't know, but I don't really feel stressed. But what I can say though, is I do like to go for a walk and I try to do that most days of the week. And I also three times a week in the morning before I do anything else, I run five kilometers before I start my Workday.
Jesper (35m 16s): And then in the evenings, I do like to relax watching Netflix, HBO, Amazon, or something like this. And so I guess you could say that that helps to distress myself, but I don't know, as I said, I'm not the best one to answer this one. So I hope you will have some I'm starting with you now. Yeah, it was gonna say I was starting to think of my writing partner is actually an AI, but I, that you're not. So
Autumn (35m 40s): Oh, that's a tough one and it really depends on what's causing stress. I am definitely a little bit of a masochist. So if something is bothering me, I sometimes dig in my mom calls it stubborn. I call it a dedicated. So sometimes, you know, if I'm really hitting a wall, but I, I just, haven't been trying that long. And you know, maybe they've been sitting down for 15 minutes and I'm like, you know, I, I am a writer and this is my job. This is my career. So I'll start doing like, what if questions are or write down the problem I'm having. And then I'll see, you know, do some brainstorming Writing right into the novel and then just delete it later of, you know, what needs to happen? Why am I stuck? But I agree.
Autumn (36m 20s): It sometimes Writing up cooking. Obviously I loved food. So that is going to be very inspirational. And it does seem as soon as I get involved in something very complicated that, you know, my hands or covering guru and I'm like, Oh, well, that's the answer I need to do to take action on device. It's really messy. Sometimes. I don't mind a little bit of why is it a little bit of an eye like rum? And I like scotch. Those are a little go-tos, I'll sit down with that and stare at my computer a little bit longer. But yeah, sometimes it's like, you know, I look at the dog, the dog looks at me and I'm like, why don't we go for a walk into the world? All has been in a better place. And I forget about everything.
Autumn (37m 1s): And once we're back from playing in the stream and hunting for frogs, we will, I'll get back to work. And it's usually a little bit better. I don't ever, I have hit a few spots if I've worked on a chapter and I'm on the same chapter for, I would say three days, three days. If I were on the same chapter for three days, I, I feel like it's been too long. It's going on forever and I'm stuck. And I also sometimes just write a couple sentences and just go to the next one and then come back and fix it later. And that it couldn't get it.
Jesper (37m 28s): That picks out of my mind if it's just sitting there with a glass of wine staring at the screen this way.
Autumn (37m 37s): Well, the next time it happened, so I'll have my husband takes a picture for you. Yeah. It just looks at me.
Jesper (37m 42s): I've been here waiting for, for inspiration. I know what is going to come soon or later.
Autumn (37m 47s): Cheers. No worries. Yeah. All right. Okay. So
Jesper (37m 53s): Do we have another question from state and perhaps you can take this one.
Autumn (37m 57s): Yeah. So we'd also ask which part of the journey from concept a publication two, you hate the most. Hmm. So what's your least favorite part. Yeah. This was not that difficult for me, but this was all
Jesper (38m 14s): For why we have divided the workload between us the
Autumn (38m 16s): Way we have, because I hate that. I hate the most of this editing. Its I really love it.
Jesper (38m 25s): Like the results of the editing. I love when the first draft turns into something that flows really nicely and all the words are sounding good with that stuff.
Autumn (38m 33s): No, I love it, but I hate going through it because it is so painfully slow and it annoys the crap out of me when I spent three hours and I've only edited one chapter. I hate it. That's why I get all of them to do the right thing. And that's why editing is not my answer. Yeah. And this one was a tough one for me because what I hate the most is after publication, I hate AMS ads or anything that requires going back. And fine-tuning, if you have to have read my pet Patrion post for today. Yeah. I was just, it happened to have resonated really well with this question.
Autumn (39m 14s): I am just not that good at sitting down and fine tuning in looking at iteration after iteration, after iteration and just sticking with it and not feeling like I'm panicking because I'm wasting money or it's not going anywhere. I just spreadsheet results. Statistics, calculus, algebra. I love mathematics except for statistics. Statistics are not mathematics. They should just be burned. So when it comes to those stuff, when you're boiling down results into numbers and I know it's important, but my brain just goes with, it just goes up in flames. So that's why I have you. You handle it. But since I can, technically after the MOH, the publication and that's when he asked me, I would say for me to fit the parameters, I'll just say, it's a question.
Autumn (40m 3s): I my least favorite part is simply the time it takes. I love the stories and I want to spend so much time and I'm task oriented and I, I just wanna sit down and it was like, by day on my birthday, you people have said, what do you want to do? I'm like, I'm going to write. I was like, well, that's not going to get me anywhere because it'll just be another 2000 words closer to my hundred thousand. And then I'm going to start a, another novel and I've never going to be done until I take my last breath. And then when I'm just aware of my ghost will keep writing. So it's the time I want to be able to write these stories out so much faster. I want that one hour extra hour is that I'm writing on my birthday, you know, to mean something more than a drop in a bucket, but it doesn't Yeah
Jesper (40m 44s): There was a loop back to the conversation about celebration he has. Yeah.
Autumn (40m 48s): Or there might be, Oh, we gotta work on that. Yeah. Okay. So,
Jesper (40m 56s): So let's jump into next question. And this, the one is from Felipe a, so Phillip says, as I outlined cereal, the setting, I am drawn to keep them constantly morphing time period. Magic predominance levels of tech, aesthetics, et cetera, to the point that it halts progress, what to do. Should I commit to something? Even if something else is more interesting should how do I block the influx of influences?
Autumn (41m 29s): Hmm Hmm. That's a good one. That is a good one. Can I just say yes, yes. Yeah. So that was my answer is yes. But yes. You have to choose one. You have to make that decision. And even if you doubt it later, you have to make it the best that you can. And it is an example. I was Writing the sixth book in one of my, my world of Mira, my elemental Magic series. And I think it was half way through. And I'm like, you know what? I really actually have started bonding with the villain who up until then, I didn't like in the sixth book and I suddenly saw his perspective and I thought, Oh my gosh, this book, I could tell it totally from his view, he is totally right.
Autumn (42m 9s): Every one else is completely wrong for trying to stop him. And I'm like, why, why not rewriting in the entire series? That, that idea is still in me. And I still think, Oh, I could bring him back and do something so cool with him. But I had to let it go because I had to make that decision. You have to keep going. You ha, if you were going to write a book, you gotta write the book and take those ideas that you think are so cool. And put them aside and write a book with those. But you do just have to make that decision. You have to stick to it. You got to write the book and just trying to save up the other inspiration for something later.
Jesper (42m 48s): Yeah. It almost sounds to me for sleep that you need to spend a bit of more time in that wonderful place of world building, because then, you know, if you were saying that your concepts aren't clear and you sort of come up with things on the fly that you struggle with consistencies, Well, you are going to create quite a lot of editing work for yourself. So I think it's probably better if you try to spend a bit more time in the world building phase here Autumn and I always complete the world-building, you know, nailing down in the setting before we started writing, because this is a lot of this allows us to inform the writing with details that are actually quite honestly, we could never thought of during the
Autumn (43m 33s): Writing itself.
Jesper (43m 37s): So try to separate the world building from your outline. It almost sounds like you were sort of doing both in parallel here, but see if you can just spread them or separate them. So when you do all of your world-building first, and then you worked on your outline, I think then you are your experience with everything keeps morphing won't happen so much now because then you already know your world, you know what your setting, you know what you want it to be there and then you can work on your outline and, and make that influence the outline.
Autumn (44m 10s): So
Jesper (44m 11s): Yeah. Mapping out your story. Once you have that from grass off your setting. I think that will help a lot.
Autumn (44m 18s): Yeah, definitely. Okay.
Jesper (44m 21s): We didn't have another question from Cory.
Autumn (44m 24s): Yes. All right. Corey ask, what is the most effective way to overcome writer's block? I've tried reading and that I've trying to write right after listening to audio books. When I Writing listening to music, meditating, nothing seems to work. And I haven't written in a nearly three weeks now. So what are some tips you can give me?
Jesper (44m 43s): Well, I'm sorry to hear that. Query I, yeah. I feel with you, a lot of authors are struggling with things like that. So please don't feel alone. I think my number one tip is outlining. I know some people don't like outlining. That's why we wrote a whole, a guide book on how to outline to, to help some of those people. Because if you try to map out your story in advance, I would say 99% of the times where authors experience writer's block it's because they don't know what needs to happen next. So they get stuck and they were like, well, I don't quite know where this is going. I don't know what I want that to happen.
Jesper (45m 24s): And if I think if something, is that exciting enough, does it hit the right tropes or does it sync up with the character arc and so on and so on. So yeah, as you mentioned early in this episode, Autumn and I wrote a full step by step guide on how to plot a novel. So you can go and search for our name's on Amazon. If you want to have a check or check out that book, if you want, but you don't have to, you, you can also try to go about it all on your own if you want. But, but I would say try to spend some time, you know, outlining and understanding your story. Query I feel that that will probably help you.
Autumn (46m 1s): Yes, I agree. Indefinitely. It's a, you know, I always love that. Quote, as an author who isn't writing is courting madness. I mean, it's just itches under our skin and it seems to reinforce itself. So, I mean, she's trying to, a lot of the things I suggest other than a little bit of line, but it works for me, but another good thing. So if nothing else was working, I agree with that, come up with some, what if questions, especially if you're, if you're stuck with a chapter, like what's supposed to happen in the chapter, you know, look at how to set up the chapter, what is happening and what's the hook, what is it going to be starting with the character's goals, look through all of that, do some brainstorming questions about what's going on, try to, you know, read whatever, think about this character, to think about the characters arc, what are they what'd they just do, what are they trying to accomplish?
Autumn (46m 51s): Sometimes just a sink into their heads. I will switch if I'm writing at first third person, which was how I prefer to Wright. Maybe I'll do a quick sentences and first person try to talk about what they're seeing, feeling, thinking right then. And even if I end up cutting it later, just trying to force my head into this character's in the world and what is happening in the novel. And usually something in there will give finally, and that I can just go on and I we'll be able to. Right. And sometimes there was a few pieces of gold and you get to do some great setting or a world-building that you hadn't been, you know, you might not have come up with otherwise and you can keep, but honestly, a lot of the times you're just doing some brainstorming that you're probably gonna end up deleting, but you'll be writing.
Autumn (47m 36s): So that's the important thing. Yeah.
Jesper (47m 40s): Okay, good. We have another question from Anthony. So Anthony asks, I have heard a lot about barriers, points of views, but when I do research on them, I only find the basics. So the question is how do you decide which point of views best fit your story? And if you are using multiple point of views, which character is the best for that scene? As a second question, if you were writing in multiple point of views, how do you make sure your character voices are
Autumn (48m 13s): Distinct? Right. That's a good question. There was a very good question as a, both a very good questions and it's, it's hard to break them down. And so I would say first, when you're writing your book, I know you and I both write in multiple points of view is that we love having different characters. Coz I think it, it adds too a complicated Plott, but there is nothing wrong with having just one point of view the Hobbit. It is a great example and it's in pretty much, at one point of view, its with stood this test of time. There is nothing wrong with that. So did you consider that if your feeling really challenged, try to stick to just one character point of view, try to do a deep point of view, which is your not omniscient. You don't know everything going around. You just know what it is that one character can look, see, feel, and here.
Autumn (48m 57s): So you can't, you know, for shadow with anything that they wouldn't know, which is one reason you add another point of views 'cause then you can add those in other places and build tension for the reader of that way to choose which one to use. You know, you don't want to use too many U and I have written, you know, we have a course on this and we have a whole character development course so that it can really talk to you about how many characters you should have and how to develop their voice. But you don't want to have to many either. You don't want to be, you know, 12 characters in the first book or something, you know, For is a fine six. This is getting a little too many. Especially even if you have a, a a hundred thousand words, you don't want to have too many, the character is supposed to, the reader is supposed to bond with these characters.
Autumn (49m 41s): If you have too many of your jumping all over, there are not going to know you don't want to, you know, if I'd want the reader confused, you want to give them very song, solid points of view so that they can bond with the characters that they feel the emotions or the characters or the rooting for the characters. And you can't do that when you have 16 different characters, unless your George R. Martin and you're writing something that takes for decades, then maybe you could do it, but otherwise know, and to choose which one you want to go with, whoever has the most impact. So you would choose a character who maybe is doing the action in the scene, or maybe the character who is going to have the most emotional cliffhanger at the end of it.
Autumn (50m 25s): But you want it to make sure that its also the one that is going to tell this story and you wanna make sure that every character has a three to four to five chapters in their point of view, if your only having a one chapter point of view as a character, don't use it. You know, you, you can't tell a character arc in just one chapter and any character who has a point of view, definitely needs a character arcs. So you are going to have at least three to five chapters minimum for each of these point of view character. So that's going to flush out your novel really quick. They are going to have subplots are going to have things going on and its all going to tie back into the main plot. It's a lot of outlining. So one character, one point of view is fine for a novel. If you want to keep things simple and some have ways of keeping your character voices distinct, you're going to have to find out what works for you.
Autumn (51m 12s): Some of the things that I've suggested is if you come up with a totem for each character or sometimes I've written in colors, this characters is always in red or even in Scrivener are all my characters. I actually use character colors. So I know whose point of view I'm in. So that's fine. You can choose colors. You can choose a totem. So you know, this one is wildly. So you are wasting called a Fox. I've had characters who, you know, I really listened to a song and it fits gets me into their mood and also think about, you know, distinct things that they would have either action's are phrases. If you have a sailor, they are going to call tension like a top rigging line where if someone else is a mercenary, there's always going to be referring to things as a way of battle taxes.
Autumn (51m 56s): You know, once you learn to develop those character, two phases and lens that they see the world and then you're going to have the distinctive Voice coming out for each character. That was a long I'm sorry.
Jesper (52m 9s): Well, I think you basically covered the entire thing. So that was good. I think the only thing I would add is a, well of course a that that plot development book, actually the entire first section of that book covers this questions. But the only thing I would add it on top of what you just said, which I fully agree with is that think a bit about which couches are going to spent a lot of time together in the same scene's for example, if you have like a Frodo and Sam kind of situation, where they spent most of this story together, then I would say avoid making Sam a character, like a point of view character, because it's simply gonna be challenging to keep it interesting because what, what are you going to do to explain the same, seen to a few times all the time, 'cause it?
Jesper (52m 58s): You know, you'll see what I mean, write that, that it does not work. So just think of a bit about where our characters is going to be throughout the story and how much time are they going to spend together and where are you have them spending a lot of time together and avoid one of them being the point of view character or at least they agreed. But otherwise I agree with all this stuff that all of them said. Yeah. Okay. Final a good question. And also final audio clips of the day.
Zhade (53m 27s): Hey guys, thanks so much for picking my question. It really appreciate it. And if I can, I just want to start by thanking you so much for running the PODCAST. It is pretty much the highlight of my week. Absolutely loving it. And the online community is that you were running on patchy on, on Facebook. I've helped me more than I can say over the last year. Thank you so much. Okay. So in terms of my question, it's this Yesper what are you most like in our Autumn is Writing and Autumn what do you most like about Yesper is Writing
Autumn (53m 58s): Thank you for that question to say it. I really appreciate the kind words are not only from you, but also from, from James and everybody else who, who send us a really kind words. So, so thank you. For for data, but I really liked this question. When I say, when I heard it the first night, I was like, Oh, okay. That one's a good one. I didn't expect that. I like that one too. All right. So yeah, so I can actually mention two things. Oh, all right. Yeah, because there are two things I like the most about your writing Autumn is a first of all, I like how you describe scenery. Like, you know, you're really good at making it sound interesting at the same time, you are able to conjure up images in my mind about what the place has solved.
Autumn (54m 47s): Look at what it looks like. So, that's something you are really good at. And I really like that, but even more probably I like your ability to do capture development. I feel like you, you were able to breathe a lot of life into the characters in a way that makes them come off as individuals, rather than just some cardboard people who run around doing some actions, they feel much more like real people with their own motivations. So yeah, you you're just a really good rider. Well, thank you very much. So that was good. I actually am going to actually mention, I like your characters to, because I like how we were both.
Autumn (55m 27s): I'm a no nonsense people they think. And so your stories in your writing, it doesn't get bogged down. And I just told you before we started recording and that I had read a book and it was just, there was times at this character got so bogged down in dresses and things that I am just not that type of girl. And I like that. You do, you keep things moving. And I actually, I love that your first Trelegy has a, you know, women are the main character and it's, you know, you did that, that you did a great job with it. You went in for a lot of action and its interesting and it's a different world and we both made the funds, not quite mistake, mistake of a very different worlds in a very tough stories.
Autumn (56m 9s): This is our first year we had some similar tactics and they were just like, this is, this is cool. I didn't know all of this. When we started out on this journey of Am Writing Fantasy together. It kind of, I don't know, we kind of looked out. I can't come. So yeah, I think so, but, and that's what I like is our, our storylines in our way of tackling things meshes incredibly well. And that to me is just so exciting. You can't, you talked to so many other authors and they have such differences that they can't have a hard time riding together. And I think we are going to be just fine because we like each other's style and we have very similar kind of action-based exciting adventures where gender isn't an issue and racism is an issue.
Autumn (56m 60s): And we tend to think you might have a little bit more of a darker tone and mine goes more towards no bright, but I think we are going to combine this into something amazing.
Jesper (57m 9s): Yeah. Yeah. I agree. So yeah, this was a lot of fun episode, 100 into QA session like this. I, I think that was good.
Autumn (57m 17s): So this was a really good, it was a lot of fun And I yeah. Thank you so much for all the questions. And I did have one for you, even though we were running long on time, but recently you have discovered an Easter egg out of how I got into self writing and self-publishing I was wondering Now you know how I did, I was wondering how, what got you into self publishing and made you finally sit down and become a writer,
Jesper (57m 46s): Right. Okay. Yeah. Fine. I will answer that, but, but actually you have to, you have to explain your own as well for them to do it because otherwise they have no idea. Yeah. Okay. So, so, but for me it was more like, so I've always had this idea for like many, many, not always, but for many, many, many years, I've had this idea that one day, once I retired, then I could write some stories. And then, you know, you should only most years, not every year, but most years we, our family goes to Finland for some of the occasion and in Finland, you know, we, we were in the summer cottage and there you spent quite a lot of time, you know, going and so on there and relaxing and stuff like that.
Jesper (58m 34s): And then there was this one evening back in 2015 when I was sitting in that sauna, I don't remember if my wife was out swimming or whatever, but I was at Lee. I was alone in there and I were sitting down. I, I started thinking like, why is it that I've gotten into my head that I can only write once I get, I get to retirement? Why couldn't I just write something? You know, I might not be very fast at it because I have to do day jobs and whatnot, but I could just write a bit here and there. Well, why, why, why couldn't I just do that and why am I feeling limited? And actually the next morning I got an out, I got a laptop out and I started writing.
Jesper (59m 18s): It was a complete nightmare and this, and it has been
Autumn (59m 23s): Deleted many times over the same, but it's not letting the next day. And I never stopped since then. That was wonderful. I love that. All right. But yes. So to explain since no one else got a, you know, only a few people would have heard my other story, but I had something similar. I mean, I, I was actually a S an artist very long and my license, like it was for, I want it to be an artist, but I always actually wrote on the stock side all the way down to my mother, having recently shown me M a journal I'd kept actually as a kid and my husband then stole in secret away because I was going to burn. I was so horrible, but I didn't really take it seriously.
Autumn (1h 0m 6s): But I had a habit of writing in notebooks in college because I was so bored in school. Even in college, I went with an English degree and I'd write stories in my notebook. And my husband found one and said, Oh my gosh, he wrote this. This is, this is fantastic. You should write. And he encouraged me. And he actually sent me an article on self publishing with a woman who is in a similar job. And so you have a similar agency as I was working in it at the time. And he was the reason I published my first book. Isn't that amazing? Isn't it? It's all his fault. Right?
Autumn (1h 0m 46s): Okay. So the next Monday I have a great interview lined up for you and it's concerning one of my favorite topics. Not map kick this time. We'll be building.
Narrator (1h 0m 57s): If you liked what you just heard, there is a few things you can do to support The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast please tell a fellow Author or about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn in Jesper on patrion.com/am Writing Fantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast going to stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
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Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast in today's publishing landscape. You can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need an literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join to the best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them. Now onto the show with your hosts Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello. I'm Jesper. And I'm Autumn. This is episode 99 of The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. So one episode away from number 100, before we, before we get that far, we are slowly approaching the end of 2020, and we thought that this was a good time to sort of take stock of the indie publishing landscape. What are some of the opportunities and threats maybe to an Author business here towards the end of 2020 and reaching into 2021. So I'm looking forward to this conversation, but first I'd have to say all of them, just to imagine that by next week we released a podcast episode for 100 Mondays in a row.
Autumn (1m 15s): That's just amazing. I can't believe we had a a hundred that's. That is something to celebrate, especially in 2020, when it seems like just one, do you need a reason to celebrate? And I just, maybe we shouldn't jinx it because we have yet to record it. So I'm just going to calm down and just make sure it really happens. I'll be happy that, yeah, but it's quite a bit, I think its quite an accomplishment, you know, a lot of podcasts never makes it past like 10 episodes because you know, create a thought out, very in a about the podcast and, and then after 10 episodes they realized how much work it isn't that they, they dropped it again. It happens very, very often actually.
Jesper (1m 56s): So reaching a a hundred is it's it's a lot more and most, yes it is an, it is a really exciting, so it is going to celebrate you. But yeah, I just, I don't know how it happened and I'm just, I am glad we're doing something special and I'm looking forward to the questions that a few glimpses I've seen as the question submitted. So it's really a lot of fun. So yeah, I think so it'll be fun. It'll be fun. But at first, so how are things that we've been so busy? We had a student Q and a today we had all the stuff going on and we haven't been chatted ourselves at this time. So how are things on your side of the Atlantic now? It's it's a good, I actually spent a couple of hours yesterday, driving all kinds of stuff that we've emptied out from the attic on to the landfill.
Jesper (2m 43s): It's a great thing to move. Yeah. Indeed. Yeah. And, Jesus, there was a lot of stuff for me, especially from the attic, you know what that is, sort of, you put this stuff up there and it feels like, well maybe we are going to use this one day and you put it up there and then you realize, well, 10 years passed and he was just sitting up. So yeah, we do have to rent a storage room though with that, that much, this is clear already. And I think we probably found the space where we can rent a storage room from him, but we haven't quite worked out how big a room we need yet. So we will figure that out. Yeah.
Autumn (3m 23s): That you don't want to give something to a small, but if you are selling to big when you're just paying for extra room, but I'd have to admit having lived out of storage units, it seems like the last few years, since we sold the house and started traveling that the more having space and having like Iles and things labeled, it's kind of worth the extra money at times. If you think you have to be accessing that for more than a couple months, right.
Jesper (3m 50s): It's just the organizer and you love doing that. Right.
Autumn (3m 55s): That's the key. And then having everyone in your family honoring the honor, the organizational system and not just going in there and taking something out and not telling anyone and not crossing it off the list and you'll never see it again ever.
Jesper (4m 10s): Yeah. But other than that, I don't know. I mean, it's, it's, I don't know if there's much else to say it, to be honest. I know I've just tackling the things on the to-do list earlier today. I was a proof listening to the audio book version of our short guy on a developing story ideas.
Autumn (4m 24s): Well, that's exciting. Yeah,
Jesper (4m 26s): That was pretty good to, I mean the, the Narrator is really good. I like his voice. So I just have like two chapters left to proofread a fantastic lesson, I guess it was called Yeah so yeah, once that's done, then I'll put it into post production and we just have to wait until the audio books right now.
Autumn (4m 47s): That's fantastic. I can't wait. Yes. I really liked his voice. He was very, he has such a very smooth and energetic Voice, which is perfect for a non-fiction. You don't want someone who sounds like, you know, your nightmare is of third grade English, so he's really good.
Jesper (5m 2s): No, no, yeah, yeah. I think he's good. Yeah. That's a good, so, but how about you?
Autumn (5m 8s): Oh, it's been, we've both been so busy. I swear. We get so many things done off of our list, but then it was just piles on So after a huge week of finishing up format's for other people and Fantasy maps for people. I have this deadline to finish it by the end of October, which is right. We were just in early November. So my deadline was two finish the third book of the tinted phase that I had been writing and I was down to it. I had to write a chapter a day to do it and I did, I beat up by one day. So I was so excited. I am still on track to hopefully release the first book or the next book. It'll be a book to cause the book ones out, but book two in the series at the end of February.
Autumn (5m 51s): So that is good. And I had an audio book finished by my audio book Narrator and that's on my postapocalyptic series So and he's just he's he was getting movie roles and play's, and he's got all of this stuff going on so that he's, I don't know, we're sticking with each other. I'm like his number one favorite author. And he was my number one favorite narrator. So we are, we are wed for the whole series and he is on to the final book and that one so I can wait. Yeah, I know you were even though
Jesper (6m 22s): Speculating to see if it could get him on the podcast right now.
Autumn (6m 24s): Oh yes. We, we have agree that we have to set up a date, but a literally a date, but I think it'll be our first time chatting, chatting on air. So it'll be a lot of fun, but I thought he would be great to have him and get some perspectives of, you know, what you would look for a What audio book. Narrator his are looking for when they are getting a script ready to record it. So I can not wait to have Brian join me on the podcast for an interview.
Jesper (6m 49s): Yeah. Yeah. Well that will probably be the end of January or something like that. So just to have to be patient that they will get there. Yes, we will.
Narrator (7m 2s): Oh, a week on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast
Jesper (7m 6s): Well, first of all, a huge shout out and thank you to Ruth Molina pronounced that. Right. At least I hope that I did it better than when I forced you to pronounce it. Serve.
Autumn (7m 18s): Yeah. Cause I was going to say, I think you probably got a little bit closer than I did with that one too. So I think at at least Ruth were pretty sure of your first name. So thank you for joining us on Patrion. Yeah.
Jesper (7m 31s): Yeah. We are so happy to have you on board and it, it is truly the patrons support that keeps this Podcast going. So as you've noticed, we have no sponsors and we have no commercials on this podcast feed, but it's only possible to keep it this way, long term if we have people signing up on Patrion. So the listener, so if you haven't checked it out yet, just to spend two minutes to follow the link in the show notes and take a look at all the cooler words that we give to support us, there might be something that you like. And to be honest, just to a dollar a month, that's help us out.
Autumn (8m 6s): Absolutely. It, it keeps the internet lights on at least four, the podcast. And we definitely can not complain about that. It's wonderful to have SUPPORT because yeah, like you said, otherwise, I don't know. It, it would be, I don't want to have commercials. I've never liked the commercials. Oh this is not good.
Jesper (8m 24s): Yeah. Sometimes I think some for Podcast ends up being forced to have commercials to, to fund the endeavor, but it, it would be nice not to have to do that at some point in the future. So yeah. Please, sir. Check out patron if you haven't done. So, and then one more thing. I, I know it's like a best practice to never include water in one call to action, but I'm thinking maybe I could break that rule there. This one.
Autumn (8m 47s): All right. Just this one time. We'll let you,
Jesper (8m 51s): I just wanted to mention that the ratings and reviews helps other to find our podcast. And why is that? Well, just like on Amazon, the algorithm's that suggest new podcasts to listeners, they will focus on the podcast with many ratings and reviews. So if you haven't done so already, please take a moment to rate and possibly also leave a review for our podcast. It should only take your moment, but if all our listeners would be willing to do so that would make quite a difference. And I can't tell you exactly where to click and so on because it all depends on what app you're using and, but it should really not be complicated. So yeah, if you don't mind spending probably like 30 seconds to leave a rating, please do so.
Autumn (9m 36s): Oh yes, we would appreciate it. We're all Authors here. We know how important those reviews are on book. So it's very similar with podcasts. So if you could let people know what you think, why do you like it? And if it's helped you, the Hank, you though it would be so fantastic and we would appreciate it.
Jesper (9m 54s): Yeah, absolutely.
Autumn (9m 56s): And then I had new, as I thought, Oh, this is sort of a lead into something else. We've got cooking in one of the reason we're both so busy besides everything else we've got going on. But I asked him one of my newsletters, a survey question about book-length, you know, I wanted to know I'd seen, so Author is putting out these like little kind of Fantasy shorts. And so I wouldn't ask my readers, Hey, is this something you would like? And yes, how many said it is something that they would think would be interesting having these shorter books, 80% you you've looked in my emails having, you know, but that is almost dead on it.
Autumn (10m 36s): It was 82%. Yes. So that they wouldn't mind some shorter or like a standalone story. So I thought that was so interesting, but what I think is really cool is that this is why having a newsletter is so exceptional. I don't have to sit here and wonder why I asked my readers and you know, we actually have this chorus we've been working on that. You know, it could help out some Authors figure out what to do with your email list. So what are some more news about that coming up soon, soon? Yeah.
Jesper (11m 8s): Ah, yeah, we will, for sure. But I'm also thinking isn't it kind of, well, a bit obvious. I mean, it's your readers, right? So if you ask them, would you be interesting to have a bit of, you know, some shorter stories as well? Why wouldn't they always say yes,
Autumn (11m 25s): It was interesting because the way I have the question broken up his like, do you always think there should be a full length? Should they always be a series? They had a couple of options. And so it was interesting to see you, there was a few people who came back and like, it doesn't have to be a series, but it has to be full length. And there are some very strong opinions on this. So it was really, it was a great chance to interact with them, but know, not everyone's like, Oh, I just write more books there. They have specifics. They really do like, and then
Narrator (11m 54s): On to today's topic.
Jesper (11m 57s): So I think this is going to be a more of a conversation probably Yeah and we'll see if we have the same views on the industry, as it stands as usual, we have not coordinated hour our line of thinking here at All. So, but I guess we like it that way. It is, it makes it more interesting. It doesn't, it,
Autumn (12m 17s): It does. Yes. And this is one of those ones where I checked my checklist and what we were doing today while making breakfast, saw the topic and then they didn't think of anything else about it until after the student Q and a, when I did a DoubleCheck saying that it really was the topic today. Right. So you don't have to, I didn't need to do a homework. Did I? So I think, yes, we will have, so we'll have to see if our opinions differ, but both of us being published Authors, I'd be shocked if we were like, no, don't do it. So I think we're pretty much at least on a very similar vein That yeah, yeah. I mean the, there was, no,
Jesper (12m 55s): It is a bit of a different, Episode this one in the sense that it is not like a list, you can go down and say, okay, this and this and this it's much more like we, we could go into all kinds of directions. So with this definitely M and I think if we are looking at the publishing market as a whole, and sort of just trying to see if we can focus on the point where we can say these are maybe the trends we're seeing and also what are some of the challenges and so on. But I, I think a good place and I could start us out, maybe. Sure. It would be to mention that the possibilities and the tools we have available today in order to publish our work on Amazon, Kobo, Google, and all the other online retailers, I mean the, the market or the PO possibilities we have, it is only about 10 years old.
Jesper (13m 49s): You know, think about that. And the fact that you are listening to this podcast, trying to educate yourself every week, that probably puts the listener into the 1% percentile, to be honest. I mean, most authors don't do that. And while more than 1% probably knows how to publish their work on line. I honestly don't think that I'm mistaking in saying that there is a lot less people who knows about this indie publishing stuff that you think, Oh yeah, I know
Autumn (14m 20s): I will. I mean, having, I seem to often end up formatting books or doing book covers to new authors and it becomes more of a coaching session on, Oh, don't forget you need the keywords, the keywords, what do you mean keywords or categories? And why do I need to worry about this in that? And so, yeah, theirs, it's not a, you know, intuitive. I think it's amazing the information that's out there, but I think we've gone from the early days of self publishing. I mean, I started in 2012, eight years ago now. And then there was no information because it was so new, no one knew what they were doing. And now, you know, eight years later there is so much information and some of its wrong and some of it's outdated and some of it's just assumed.
Autumn (15m 9s): And so that's the other side is then you're just wondering, Please just someone or consolidate all of this and to something I can actually, the one I trust in to give me the step-by-steps. So that's the difficulty is I think of doing it now. I mean, back in 2012, I love calling it the wild West days of self publishing because what is it? Stephen King started this basically, I think it was 2010 when he released a novella a a hundred percent online and crashed the server. Of course it was Stephen King, but he kicked us off and yeah, two or three years later, Amazon had less than a million books. When I first released mine.
Autumn (15m 48s): I mean, getting thousands of downloads, especially if you offered it for free, like a Kindle free day, you know, those five days free, if you are in KDP select, it was easy. Now it's a lot harder, but the tools, I mean, we didn't have vellum or are these wonderful formatters and some of the cover's now, I mean, the, the covers these days were rival or do better than the traditional publishers. You go on Amazon and the covers are just absolutely amazing. It has gone from trying to mimic a printed paperback that a traditional publisher would put out to doing stuff that only is done online. I, I am waiting a year or two from now. There will be moving covers.
Autumn (16m 28s): I've been told that they're our video cover's and stuff, but they are not, they're not available. Let's get on Amazon. Thank goodness. Being a graphic artist. I do not want to go there, but if we have to, I will learn. But it's, the covers are just fantastic and they are made, they can be printed, but they really, the colors are just, they're designed to have the light and the video screen behind them. And it's so fantastic. And the book's look gorgeous. And Yeah, I remember, I remember it. Well, when you uploaded your first book, was it in word? And did you even have the hot link to a table of contents, right?
Jesper (17m 6s): Yeah. Yeah. It was a Scribner extract. And then I had, well, I was trying to look into how to do with myself and indeed there was no, I am not on Mac Ida, so I did not have any developer or anything. So I actually just bought the service from somebody else. I just sent them, they were Scrivener files and say format this stuff. And then they did. So I just paid my way out of it.
Autumn (17m 30s): That works. But yeah, that was my first one was just word. And I don't think it was hotlinked. I mean, no one talked about that in 2012 now it's like, you need to have these things done or Amazon might not even let your book in a row.
Jesper (17m 46s): Yeah. But, but also thinking about the stuff that people are talking about, as you say, you know, I think that a lot of us, we live inside this little information or a bubble here because, and what I mean by that is I mentioned the one percentile before, right? If you are listening to this, you are in a very small sliver of the entire Author population, meaning that we are, I think we often assume that every Author knows all of the stuff that we were talking about here, but they don't. I think like maybe 90% of our authors will not know all of that.
Jesper (18m 28s): Well, of course. Okay. Lets say a lot of authors will know how to put this on Amazon and so on, but there's also a huge, so let's say population, Oh, out of those who does not know all the details about, Oh, are you okay? You can, or you can use KDP rocket, apparently two research keywords. Okay. They didn't know that this stuff you just mentioned about cover the signs and where that is going. They didn't know that, you know, that I think there is a lot of things that, because we live, we are sort of tapped into things and I'm talking about the listeners here as well. Right. Because they listen to podcasts and they educate themselves. It is so easy to start thinking that he is in 2020.
Jesper (19m 8s): Well, everybody knows this stuff, but honestly, no, I don't think so.
Autumn (19m 11s): No, no, I don't think so. Yeah. I mean, I have been surprised I have joined some promos with other authors and one of them, I went to look up in her books and her name was listed differently on different books so that she has like five different Author pages. So it was just like, wow. You know, the organizational side of me just like it went belly up and pass it out. But I, again, it's little stuff. If you don't realize how all of the stuff that links together, if your not intuitive, maybe with computers to see how all that metadata works, then you might end up with something like that. So easily, I actually had that in good reads.
Autumn (19m 51s): It turned out their was whether or not my middle name had a period or a space. I was missing books on good reads. And I didn't even know it until I'm a friendly library and help me out. And I suddenly went from like three pages of books to five or six and it was just like, Oh, I found six more books. And I'm like, Oh my goodness. Where do they come from? But if one little thing, one period was off, you might not have all your books. If you don't go in and claim them and find them and link everything.
Jesper (20m 22s): No, but, but that's the thing. I mean, because there is so many tools and possibilities available, there's also so many things to keep track of and learn. And that's something I think in, in today's market, you have to be mindful. I mean, it's not only Authors. I mean, if your looking at the reader's as well, we are not even close to a mature market. It comes to the consumption of eBooks. For example, not even close, it was so many places in the world where e-books is, that's not that common. A and there is even places where you can even get it at Amazon. Maybe don't even have a storefront in those countries yet.
Jesper (21m 6s): So there is so much, let's say two KM in the future. Yes. And Again also here. I think maybe we're living inside a bit of an information bubble here. Where are we just assuming that well, if we, if I'm going into publishing now here in 2020, I'm already way too late to the party, you know, the other side of the 10 years ago and I'm way behind. But honestly I don't think so. No, I think it's, it's your still in the early days of it. Yes.
Autumn (21m 40s): I think we're still in the early days, I think it would helps to listen to podcasts like this, you know, learn your information before releasing, but it's never too late. You can have a series out, you could have written 10 books and, and then you can find us and start listening and get your marketing down or get whatever missing piece you have. But Cause, I do. I think there are authors who are launching series sometimes right out of the gate. And I'm like, wow, I wish I had been that put together back in 2012. I would love to have not learned everything the hard way, but at least I help people now, so they don't have to, but that's, that's still, it still possible people or releasing books, whether it's they're first series, whether it's they're fourth series and they are doing it well, there are hitting the numbers or getting the best seller tag's there doing phenomenal.
Autumn (22m 27s): And you could do that now. Or even though they're our, I mean, I, there is just Rumours now, isn't it. And no one really knows how many books are on Amazon. It's not like the old days where you could actually just go click in the corner and you would actually see the number of eBooks listed. Yeah. Not that easy.
Jesper (22m 43s): Do you think it was? No, I think it was in 2018 that Amazon stopped making it public information, but the common comments let's let me see, come in a group. Do you call it, call it a common agreement? I don't know But but like the general consensus, I guess that's more, what I'm trying to say is that a at the moment e-books on Amazon seems to be growing by about a million a year. And I think the latest, well, it's only assumptions of course, because nobody knows the true numbers of since a couple of years ago, when Amazon started a publisher, I'm making a promise that information public available.
Jesper (23m 25s): But I think the last number I saw was about 8 million. Wow. And, and then growing by a million a year or so
Autumn (23m 32s): 10 or 11. Yeah. It's a lot of books. It is, it is definitely harder to release something to be immediately seen unless you have all those ducks in a row, but you can still find readers', you can still build a career out of this. And it's unlike, I know I'd rather be doing this now, then, you know, even 50 years ago were you had to go through the traditional publishers and you were vetted and agents. And I understand the perception that the people who do get angel agents are like better writers and everything, but I don't think so. I think they're more marketable. I think the, you know, the traditional publishers, they want to, they're putting a lot of money into an author.
Autumn (24m 16s): So they want an author who is going to be marketable and make the money. That doesn't mean they're necessarily better writers or have a better story. They just have a better selling point. So there's nothing wrong with you going and trying and writing and EF you will find fans, you will find people who love what you've. Right. And that is awesome, right?
Jesper (24m 37s): Yeah. For sure that there was a point around this quality of the work, right. With the gatekeepers as it were.
Autumn (24m 45s): That was it. Well,
Jesper (24m 47s): Yeah. I mean, at least they would, they would sort of weed out the, the bad stuff first. And then even once you got past the gatekeepers, the traditional publishing, the editing that you are getting, this is first of all, a very, very professional and you are getting many rounds of editing. So finding, for example, a spelling error in a traditional, a published book is it's very rare. Did you find anything? A whereas of course you can say that you could do the same thing as an indie author, but it, it costs a lot of money. If you have to hire like six different editors, I'm like, well, how many pads they do? They do a lot of past us in traditional publishing to make sure that there are no errors.
Jesper (25m 29s): So at least to that extent, there is a difference. But I also feel like the fact that there is no gatekeepers. I think that's good. I don't like this gate-keeper thing to have somebody sits down the axis. What is publishable and what is not, I think that's wrong. Let the market decide what they want to buy and then what happens Today right. So we just decide what they are buying and what they are not buying that. So it's that simple. But of course it does put a lot of responsibility on the Author to ensure that you are stories and your writing is as good as it can be.
Autumn (26m 2s): Absolutely. And I mean, that's, to me what gatekeepers, I think people forget it. Wasn't just quality that they were keeping a hold of them are keeping a hold of traditions and not letting people or stories through that. They thought were either not marketable or they didn't want to see so minorities and women or whatever it was. If you hit the wrong person in the wrong publishing house, you would never get to see the light of day now you've you want to find a book on anything it's out there and you can find it and you can write it. But yes, just because you have a voice, you should work on the quality issue, you should do your best to run through an editor.
Autumn (26m 46s): You to make sure that it's the especially now formatting. I mean, you'll get rejected. I actually kind of like Amazon has gone through, and now they spell check your manuscript as you are uploading it. And if you have any errors, they will come back and they will say, Hey, you know, fix this. Or you can't, you can't change anything in a way that basically locks your book in the dashboard. And so on until you say yes, fix it. Or no, my last name really is spelled that way because I get an error. Not anymore. They finally figured out what my last name is, but I was always, they wanted to change it to a Brit instead of Burt. And so I was getting like, every time I had my name, please let us know, go fix your spelling error.
Autumn (27m 28s): So a little issues, but decided that I think that's a great every once in a while they are, I still get one or two, like, Hey, is this a correct word? Is that yes, I made it up. It's really spelled that way, but it's good. They are paying attention. And that is helping move up the quality so that the books who don't have the spellchecks and stuff we'll be held back.
Jesper (27m 49s): Yeah. I thought I have one downside of there not being any gate-keepers to be honest. Oh yeah. Yeah. Because, because there is no gatekeepers anymore because we are talking about those 8 million e-books on Amazon misability is really the biggest issue that we have here in 2021 and going forward as well. And to be honest, I would say that it's probably only going to get worse and, and that's probably, you know, what people want to. But I have said before that this has become a pay to play market. And I think that right now we are very much depending on advertising to get our work in front of readers.
Jesper (28m 37s): And that said, And I well, I will be just discussing this much more than the self-publishing success costs that we will put out for free and the near future. You more about that in another episode, coming in the near future as, as well. But my point is just that poring more and more money into advertising. That's sort of a downward spiral, isn't it? That's not sustainable. No, no. And that's where we are heading. More and more authors are getting on to the advertising platforms. They're pouring more and more money in. If you're looking at The a bitch for keywords on the Amazon ads, they are only going up. It is getting more and more expensive. Even traditional publishing companies are getting into those are the advertising places now, and they are just pouring money into it.
Jesper (29m 21s): So it's, and we sell, trying to sell like a $5 a year, a book or whatever you price it is. But it, it does not take very much purpose in terms of costs before it is not worth it anymore. So that's the main concern I think. And I believe that, and this is a way where you and I are focusing Autumn, but I believe that it is much more important to spend your time and also probably the majority of your money and trying to find your 1000 true fans and get them onto your email list.
Autumn (29m 57s): Yes, I agree. That's what I see with so many things is I, I wonder what the next step, I mean, goodness knows if I'll see if anyone comes up with the next step of what is beyond for eBooks, you know how to readers can find them because everyone talks about good reads, not being the best. It could be an Amazon is not doing anything to make it better. Amazon's were, you know, I just asked another survey question to my newsletter saying, where do you buy books? Because I want to know when I release my next series, should I keep it? Why does it on Amazon? And you're not going to scattering everywhere, but most still go to Amazon. They go to Amazon, just even like, even if they have a Barnes and Nobles, you know, and now they're going on Amazon 'cause the search engine has fantastic, but I still I depending on how things go with the U S elections and the future.
Autumn (30m 45s): I mean, I don't know if Amazon is going to be able to stay as one massive entity and what's going to happen if it crumbles or if it changes we're going to eventually eBooks might have to expand beyond Amazon or what, what happens when they get 20 million books? I mean, terrace is a server space. Unlimited is there are going to be restrictions, which will just spot on the side sites almost instantly. Uhh, that, Hey, if you actually like, Fantasy go to this place instead of here, because you're going to find more Fantasy Authors over there. It could happen. We don't know, but I don't think eBooks are going away. I, I have so many people in my family who were like, I need to read it on paper and you know, like a year or two later they see like a Kindle Paperwhite.
Autumn (31m 30s): And they're like, I only read it on my Kindle Paperwhite. So right now people like paperbacks, but there are starting to see, even though the traditional ones that are starting to like Kindle's Or ebook readers or whatever, they are going to find comfortable. And there are only going to get better, a ways of being able to read and have that textual experience that sort of like a book. So the future is going to be kind of exciting, I think. Yeah.
Jesper (31m 55s): Yeah. And also the fact that eBooks are gaining ground, you know, it, it's also part of, because it is cheaper than ever before to publish a book, the enemy that's a good thing. Or, you know, things like cover's and editing that's shouldn't be skipped upon. No. And I guess that ties into the point that we were making before about the quality we did actually discuss the cost of producing a novel and what we suggest that you should focus on if you are on a budget in episode 64. So if you are in and out, you can go back and listen to that one. But I do think it is extremely cheap to produce a novel, not in terms of time, in terms of actual dollars, then it, especially that one, everyone's
Autumn (32m 41s): Got a story of there. First one, because if you count from concept to finally publishing it and that's a, usually a three to five year Odyssey, it gets better after that. I promise. I promise. Okay. So let's talk about the first one, but yes, it is definitely a, time-wise not the easiest pursuit, but Hey, once you sell one, it's not like a painting where you'll only ever sell one, You sell it again and again and again, and you get to talk to people about it and its, it becomes a thing that you get fan art. So it's always fun, but it's definitely, it is cheaper. I mean I think publishing, if you look into entrepreneurial magazines and things or self publishing is one of the cheapest businesses as a startup cost because yeah, you need somebody to write it on like a laptop, which most people have.
Autumn (33m 29s): I've written on my iPad with this external keyboard. I think this is not a huge expensive set up, but you do need the book covers and the editing. And if you don't know how to do the formatting, the formatting, but you know, Again listen to episode 64, you will get an idea of what your looking at it for Price's and the range of prices. And with that, you could have a book up and then you have the ads marketing. And that is definitely right now the crunch point. And that's why I do think that that is 2020 was definitely 2019 and 2020. Where in the year of, you know, you, everyone was getting into AMS as all of the big helpers and courses that are targeting Authors of things to learn were talking about even, I mean, Facebook ads are still there, but they were really looking at AMS ads.
Autumn (34m 17s): Now that is getting tight BookBub ads are hard to really get some traction, good reads got rid of their ads. It's the finding visibility is definitely the nugget that someone is looking to crack right now. And someone is going to crack it. There is going to be the next generation and guaranteed versus the asteroid hitting the earth in 2020, because we're not at the end of the year yet it could happen, but that's just, that's assume that all make it to 2021. Something is going to change and they are going to figure out a way of hooking up readers with great Authors and that's going to be really a game changer because there is enough readers out there to keep Authors busy readers, especially serial readers reading.
Autumn (35m 1s): It has not gone away. Thank you JK. Rowling's for raising an entire generation of mad FANTASY readers. We love it. Fantastic. People are reading crazily. It hasn't gone away. Everyone, every generation they say people are not reading. I'm sorry. There is a whole industry devoted to readers and to writers, feeding readers is so this is not, it's never too late. It's not going away. If you want to write and it's in your blood and you like telling stories, give it a whirl. It's a lot of fun. It was, there is the tough parts, but you'll find some people.
Autumn (35m 41s): Yeah. And I think,
Jesper (35m 42s): I think part of what you were saying, there is also, I think it's important to be adaptable in this landscape that we are entering here. And as, as we head into 2021, it's probably an increasingly important skillset to be honest, because you have to be willing to spend the time to pay attention to what is working for other authors and then adapt your marketing efforts when necessary, because you can go on out of the taste where you could just upload your book to Amazon and put it in some keywords and Yeah well on Amazon takes over on your cell or a ton of books. You, you could do that 10 years ago, but that's not possible anymore.
Jesper (36m 22s): And now I'd probably even go further than that and say that some of the marketing tips and tricks that used to work still circulates around the internet and you will come across it once you started looking for tips and tricks to do this and that. But a lot of them has actually lost a lot of the effectiveness. Oh yeah. We talked about the Permafree book one in the past. Episode didn't we? Yes, we have this sort of, this sort of the same thing. So I think it's important to not that you have to listen to us if you don't want to just listening to podcast in general on this topic and try to educate and see what people are saying, what can you pick up in and what do we need to adapt in your own approach?
Jesper (37m 4s): I think that becomes increasingly important as we head into 2021, because just keep you doing the same thing, then we're back to the downward spiral that I mentioned before, where you can keep pouring money into ad. But yeah, that might work for a while. And of course it depends on how deep your pockets are, but at the end of the day, it's not going to work forever.
Autumn (37m 23s): No, and even I do worry about newsletters. I mean, it is the number one way of building a relationship with readers. You do want to find those a thousand true fans 'cause they will, they will build your career. They will be your foundation, but joining a lot of books, book, funnel promo's and stuff where, you know, readers are getting, if they go, if you get readers who are serial readers and they're going through these promos and they are getting on a whole bunch of people's mailing lists, it's saturation. I mean, who doesn't have email saturation now. So you need to make your newsletters concise and important and clear and fun and engaging. I mean, it's, it's like writing a book and you have to do that regularly. So you attract your readers or are you have to have a set-up so that they know who you are.
Autumn (38m 6s): And so when you send your email and you have this new book release that they, they go out and they are still interested because whether you write every book every two months or two years, we need to grow, keep those readers. And you have to have a way of connecting with you and staying in tune to the journey and that's important. But again, it comes down to what if readers are hitting a saturation point with newsletters? I mean, I, I know, I think once a month I go through and unsubscribe sprit, and I'm got too many emails coming every day. So these are the, there are no worries I have, but I also think that we will, will find a step around the will find the next thing.
Autumn (38m 47s): But like you were saying, you have to stay on the pulse of this and not the pulse of a couple years ago, but the pulse now, what are people chatting about? What are the Authors chatting about? Where are your reader's finding you now go and hang out with your readers, make sure you are going there and not just talking to other authors because the whole point is you have readers. So go find them as well as talking to the other. Authors is a lot of stuff to stand on top of it. But if you love those, it's, it's not exactly like dreary or are not reading the current news stories, which trust me, I don't want to go there.
Jesper (39m 25s): I don't share your concern about the newsletter to be honest, I still think, and I don't see it going away either that it is the best way to interact with readers because you get in the inbox and of course it is true what you said, you know, that it didn't realize it on you to make those emails interesting enough that they keep being invested in what you have to say. But I still don't think that there was anything out there that we will beat the newsletter any time soon. But yeah, but on the other hand as well, and I'm wondering what you think about this one, but there's probably something to be said about how well, the necessity of having multiple streams of income.
Jesper (40m 4s): I'm not sure, but I think it might be a must for financial stability going forward. What do you think about that?
Autumn (40m 14s): I'm still torn. There's part of me who wishes. I had focused a lot heavier. Like I had just gone 110% into writing books and writing them faster and better and getting the marketing down like four years ago when I left my full-time job. But instead part of the reason I left was I was developing courses and Am Writing Fantasy and in this podcast we would come out of it. And I think so I think I have maybe my eggs in separated into two, many different baskets, than I can sometimes manage well.
Jesper (40m 46s): I didn't say you couldn't have too many.
Autumn (40m 48s): No, I definitely, I think you can have too many, but I do think that if you can set up a few in automation, if you, if you can flex yourself to have a lot of different things, I think it is a good thing. If it's in your nature, I was just on a friend's entrepreneurial podcast. And we got into talking about that, that if you're naturally inclined to lots of different things, you're probably gonna get into lots of different things and it's better to embrace it and organize it from the get go, then try to make yourself focus on one thing and grow to hate it. So yeah, I think there are ways of branching out and doing it, but I also see some authors who are literally, they're doing a book every two months, which means they are writing like 10,000 words a day, plus the editing plus the plotting, getting the cover's and is that is all they can, that is all that it can fit on their plate and they are doing just fine.
Autumn (41m 37s): And I think that if you can find enough fans and you were writing well enough, you could, you can totally have that as a model and run with that. But if you are someone who likes to branch out and have a few other things, you can also, you know, get that to work as well and have a more stable platform because you know, some of those authors who are doing a book every two months and stuff, they are Katie piece select. And I think that's a great because it's working for them and there's times I'm like, darn, that is so they make it look so easy. I'm envious because I always do everything the hard way, but I can't give it all at one place. I just can't do it.
Jesper (42m 18s): No, but that was exactly my thinking as well. That a lot of those who have that kind of success is because they are in control and limited, which I guess it is fine. But if we are talking about financial stability long term, I don't think that's a stable platform, nothing against putting books in, in Kindle unlimited so far. So, I mean, we have a plan to do that for future books as well. But the thing is, if you have all kinds of other things in other places as well, then yes, maybe Amazon will change something in a year or two or three years from now. But if you have incomes from other streams, then you are much more stable. And where are some of those things that you mentioned there, there are a a hundred percent reliant on the income from Kindle unlimited, which is, I would be a bit scared about
Autumn (43m 3s): I would be too, just because like I mentioned, I mean, there's a lot of rumbling in the U S about breaking up Amazon and, you know, they might just end up having divest good reads or divest ACX or something. Are there other things that they have purchased, but what if they decide to divest something with their books? What do they break that up a little bit, even though we don't know what the future is. And so I, and I do imagine at some point, like I said, the server space can only grow. So big books looks to make a lot of money, but I don't think they are making as much as some of the other stuff on Amazon. So if they decided that, you know, there are going to have limited space, again, people on the books will not go away.
Autumn (43m 43s): There will just be pop-up cites that are starting to compete with Amazon for certain genres are such. And that will be exciting to me, but that's also because of not on a Kindle unlimited. So I wouldn't be like, yes, I am going there or not. Oh gosh. I had to rebuild everything. I'm already, I'm already everywhere. It'll be so hard to pull my tentacles out. It'd be just horrible. Yeah.
Jesper (44m 6s): Yeah. No, no, no, no. That's true. But and the thing is also that if it was just on that point about Amazon, as you mentioned, right. If we look at the yearly revenue from Amazon and I don't know the exact numbers because I have looked into it. So now I am getting a bit, yeah, I'll be honest about that. But book sale ebook sales out of Amazon is total revenue. It's probably less than 1% if I'm really, really, really like positive and upbeat here. And let's say is 2% of Amazon's total revenue, but is something like that? It's, it's like nothing that they probably won't even notice it if they stopped selling eBooks,
Autumn (44m 49s): Probably that's kind of scary. Yeah.
Jesper (44m 51s): And that's the scary, but I actually have not done well. We have to have some good and some bad ones, but I have one more joke in the pot here.
Autumn (44m 58s): All right, let's go for it. Or something.
Jesper (45m 0s): Something that might disrupt the market in ways that we haven't even thought about. Can you guess what that might be?
Autumn (45m 7s): It's a solar flare. No, no, no. I have no idea AI. Oh yeah. That's true. I all right. I'm going to be sticking to solar flare. Yeah. So are you using the AI for writing the books or AI for helping to prepare readers and writers?
Jesper (45m 29s): Well, we have already seen examples of AI producing books. It's not right.
Autumn (45m 38s): Wonderful. Yeah.
Jesper (45m 38s): Right. But if you're looking at the speed in which this develops and And in the speed at AIT system, sales is incredible. You know, just like two years ago, they couldn't do anything and now they can write a crappy books, but they can write books a week. Where will they be in two years from now or five years from now, which is going to be a completely different landscape. But I don't know, personally, I don't think that AI will replace Authors within the next five, 10 years. I don't think so. Of course. I don't know. But I do think that we need to be really curious about technology and that's why I talked about add a bit, you know, to be adaptable before.
Jesper (46m 19s): Yeah. Because this is one of the areas where I think that most Authors, this is a blind spot, you know, we, we try to sort of ignore the fact that there was AI technology coming in there instead of embracing it and looking into how can we perhaps integrate AI into our Author businesses so that we can work alongside AI is basically having them help us in doing some of the work on it. I don't know how to do that yet, but I'm just saying that moving forward into the next decade, technology is going to get better and better and better. And I think we have to find ways in order to leverage this technology. And I think that the authors who will do that successfully, they we'll get an advantage.
Jesper (47m 3s): They will come out on top. So that's something to think about. Oh
Autumn (47m 8s): I think that's a very, very good point and definitely something worth thinking about, and really looking ahead, not just wondering, I'm just keeping your pulse on today's market, but you know, really projecting into where is this all going? And yeah, I can see AI is being an important part. I mean, there are so many books they are looking at, Oh, now I can't even remember the term, but altered reality, you know, looking into these books where there's like three links and visuals and for mental reality, augmented reality. Thank you. And there are a few people who, who are trying to tie new music too. The reading experience, which I am kind of, I had to say, I'm kind of glad they didn't go anywhere, but it was just disruptive to me, but people are trying to do other things with books.
Autumn (47m 54s): So yeah. Things are going to be, there will always be someone cutting edge and going a little bit further. And it will be interesting to see where it goes because stories, I know stories or are not going to go away. No, indeed. So I think right now is a great time to get started.
Jesper (48m 13s): There is no way of knowing for sure, but I would state of course, with no scientific data behind this tool to backup my claim. But I would say that the next let's say 10 years is a window of opportunity for Authors to build themselves in a career in writing in a market that continues to grow because many readers haven't even discovered the possibility to buy a Kindle and download our ebook ship, especially for those listening in the U S and that's the majority of You. I think it's important that you don't assume that the level of market penetration that you see with Kindle and eBooks is the same everywhere else, because it's not, no, no, no.
Jesper (48m 54s): Here in the Nordics where I live, for instance, there are those who read eBooks, but its not a mature product at all. Wow. I think most of those who do read eBooks here in this part of the world, many of them do through the library system where you can beat eBooks, but actually going onto Amazon and buying an ebook themselves. That's quite foreign to most people hear that, that they are not used to it. So there is one of those information bubbles here again, when I think you were in the U S might assume that this is just normal, this is how it is, but it's not. So think about that as well as the market will mature over the next decade and it, as it does the possibility to find new readers will as well.
Autumn (49m 39s): Sounds good. And I agree. No surprise there.
Jesper (49m 47s): Okay, perfect. So next Monday it's finally time for Episode 100 and we are looking so much forward to answering your questions. So see you next Monday.
Narrator (49m 58s): If you like, what you just heard, there is a few things you can do to support The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
There are so many things to learn and know when you start off writing. But what are the things that trip up writers the most or cause the most detriment to a new author's career?
Join us as we try to one-up each other for the worst mistake new authors make while doing our best to keep the show on track at the same time. Who do you think "won" the show?
And don't forget, this is the last chance to submit YOUR questions for our 100th Episode Q&A podcast! Add your questions and audio file to the form at https://forms.gle/KDHdPnUB5A9cwViz7
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast in today's publishing landscape. You can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from Writing joined two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt
Jesper (30s): Hello Jesper
Autumn (31s): and I'm Autumn.
Jesper (33s): This is episode 98 of The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. And today we are going to give You one of ours. Well, Let's call it the entertaining. There's a top 10 list where we are alternate by giving you five each. And the topic is Mistakes that amateur writers make, so this should be fun. All of them, it should be really fun. And I didn't want to see anything before we actually started the recording, but do you know how easy it was to come up with topics for this one?
Autumn (1m 4s): We have 'em in video two as a starter kit. This kit has the ten reasons new authors fail. I may have changed.
Jesper (1m 14s): And you needed, is that what you're saying?
Autumn (1m 16s): No, I was, I was really proactive and I happened to have to come up with this list are about two or three years ago.
Jesper (1m 25s): You, that sounds like cheating to me.
Autumn (1m 27s): Would I might've edited the things around and will talk about it later. But how are things over in Denmark? I hear COVID spiking up a little bit again. Yeah, it is. It is getting a bit worse here as well, but yeah, I don't know. COVID is not an interesting job. Well, how are things otherwise you are still refereeing and everything. I'll take it and pass. And we'll Yeah that? We started to pack our stuff in boxes now and getting ready to move, buy the first week of December. Wow. We've got gotten very far yet, but I'm sure it will get there.
Jesper (2m 9s): Will it, it will probably start to become even more stressful as time approaches, but yeah, there was nothing much to do about that other than get packing and I'll take it, try to take it hour with a sense of humor when you're like, where is Oh I pack that already. Where is that box? So that was already at the new apartment. Oh, well, I guess I'm not going to speed. Yeah. And even the police are quite busy because they are sorting through all of their old Lego to see what they want to sell and what they want to keep. So it was pretty busy with that as well. And they have a lot of Lego, so that was one of my favorite toys too, as a kid. So that's pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. And in between everything that I've sort of been working on the outline for our future reader, magnet, as you said, you said that to me today.
Jesper (2m 55s): Yeah. I can't wait to look through that. I was two, it was right before we recording when I downloaded It. So I haven't even looked at it yet, but I will look at it this week. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I'm really looking forward to start writing some fiction again, it's been like, well, a long, long time this entire year, basically we have been focusing on our non-fiction stuff with the plodding guides that we've published earlier this year and the summer, or a slightly after summer. And then the causes that we've been really busy recording over the past few months. So it's just been a lot of nonfiction, which is great, but I am looking forward to writing some fiction. Again, I, that
Autumn (3m 35s): I completely understand 'cause as you know what I mean, I'm full-time graphic artist and writer an Am Writing Fantasy or, and whatever else. And that's what I do. So I do, I have been sneaking in Writing, but I've recently I challenged myself because I I've created a publishing deadline and I really wanna release this series. I'm going to start releasing it and at the end of February, but that means to stay on track. I have to finish I'm on a book to out of three. I'd have to finish it by the end of October. And I am down two, a chapter a day. And I don't usually write quite that way. I can write that fast, but I have lots of other work to do too. So I usually don't give myself, I don't give myself to have much time, but I have been in, I've been keeping up with it and it's tough, but it's so it's also, so we're both task-oriented.
Autumn (4m 26s): So to say that to cross off a whole chapter every single day for the last week has been like, Oh, this is so exciting. It's it's just four more and I will actually make the deadline. Now I have five days left at the month. I think I we'll do this. I, I think I will do it. I'll get pretty darn darn close. So I am feeling pretty good. And then I'm on to the final book of the series and I'm looking forward though, to writing our books together because we have been plotting for a year and this sounds so exciting and it'll be totally different. So I'm all about writing. The more I can write the better it is. So this will be exciting.
Jesper (5m 4s): Yeah it? It, it, have you already edited the first book in to their, or is it, is it the first draft that you were done with now
Autumn (5m 11s): And with the first draft I'm planning on editing in January for at least book one, I'm not going to edit all three of them. I want them all written, but I'll just edit the first one and get it. I'm going to, hopefully in December, get everything up as a preorder. And I, which means I'd have to do the cover is, and this is one of the first time, because my timeline is so tight that I'm actually so tempted to get someone else to do covers for me. But I know I'll probably break down one day in and just make my cover's. Yeah. I'll hire myself and schedule it like the best ideas probably. But yeah, it's a little bit of a crazy, but if 2021, I'm hoping to release a book every two months into different series and maybe a few stand-alones and plus we'll be writing with you.
Autumn (5m 56s): And plus I've got little ghost writing thing on the side, and plus I'm back, I've been helping to new authors with their work. So I'm a little busy plus everyone and Am, Writing Fantasy and all the courses and all those students. And I'm up to 12 hours a day doing this, but I love it. And so much so that's, that's the most important thing, right? Is a bad day. Writing is better than a good day at my old office. So I love it here.
Jesper (6m 27s): Oh, we can go on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast so this one is the last reminder about the upcoming episode 100, which is going to be an ask us anything Episode. So we would love for you to submit your questions to me.
Autumn (6m 44s): Yes. We're looking forward to it. And as we've mentioned, there's a link in the show notes. So you can go to a Google form and fill that out, and we'd really love it. If you shared an audio clip or a video, and you know, you don't have to record yourself. If you can record your feet to the window, we just went the audio file. We are not going to do anything else with it. So we just want to strip the audio and be able to have your voice on the podcast with us as you ask, Oh, or whatever crazy question you can come up with, we've already covered. I would love to hear more about you and the habits in New Zealand. So that would be on my list, but how are you going to ask about our books, our lives?
Autumn (7m 27s): So say, you know, we probably might mention, I'll talk about my dog, but I think your kids are off the table. I think that's okay.
Jesper (7m 35s): Okay. Well, you can ask us anything. It doesn't mean that we are going to answer anything or whatever you want me to ask for your free, and then we might edit a, whatever we feel like it will be gone that way, but that's the way it goes. So that's it, that's the power of the microphone.
Autumn (7m 52s): You know, we could always come here. We can use, see the, the audio in and kind of, you know, learn to be polite, political and direct the question to whatever answer or we feel like a thing
Jesper (8m 4s): Is it that was like, like the best of politicians that doesn't really Add. They don't answer the question that was asked.
Autumn (8m 11s): You can always answer with an answer or with a question to ask you how to answer a question with a question and you know, it just keeps going on and on and on it.
Jesper (8m 18s): Yeah, it will be. But otherwise I also feel like it's a, it's been a fairly Bishop of time in the Am Writing Fantasy Facebook group, or at least those new people joining all the time, which was awesome to see
Autumn (8m 30s): It is. And it's been so active. I've missed out a little bit over the weekend, cause I was tied up with something else, but every time I go in there, there's always someone waiting to get in and I feel bad even in this only a couple hours, but its, we can keep up with them, but it's wonderful.
Jesper (8m 48s): Absolutely. Yeah. And I think there is what I really like to be honest is that there was a lot of it and that not that there was a lot of engagement that is of course nice But but also that in general it is a very far in between that somebody sort of breaks the rules and Postlight self-promotion it happens so once in a while, but its actually pretty rare. It, most of the post are genuine like inspirational staff or asked for help or feedback or something like that. And there was always a lot of people pitching and I mean, I think we've got a past, a critical mass in the group in that there's always a lot of responses when people post Whitsett.
Jesper (9m 28s): I like to see a Yeah
Autumn (9m 30s): Right and some good responses Yeah there chatting You Hello
Jesper (9m 35s): Yeah. 'cause if we go back like one and a half, two years as much as a bit more quiet in there. And I think there was just wasn't enough people, but we are sort of getting to a stage now where there's enough people in there where you're going to get a response or most, I wouldn't say guaranteed, but almost guaranteed. If you ask a question and there was, somebody will make a very insightful response for you. So, so that was great.
Autumn (10m 1s): I don't know if you're on Facebook or if you're on Facebook, come join us on Am Writing Fantasy and a promise I'll try to get in there a little more often.
4 (10m 15s): All right. So
Jesper (10m 19s): I think actually the first of all, at least when I look down at my list here, yes. I think I'd have to say for a start that the listeners probably know some of what I'm going to share already. I'm at least if there are a bit experienced with Writing, if they are all new to riding then maybe not. I don't know. Probably they are, the listener will know some of it, but they are all things, at least on my list here that can improve your writing and also help to make it read more professional. So I guess the listener can use our top 10 here as sort of a checklist to see if they are on track with everything. If they already know it, then they could sort of be happy with checking off and say, yeah, yeah, yeah, I have it under control.
Jesper (11m 5s): Or you can also feel good at the things that you are maybe not doing in the sense that it will give you a few opportunities where you can approve upon your writing.
Autumn (11m 15s): I actually all joking aside about the starter kit and actually is not joking. The second video really is 10 reasons new writers fail. But I thought about it. I almost sent you an email earlier today saying you should I focus on things? I see a lot of that new writers do as an editor and as a coach or should I focus on things that I think, or the most important that if you do, this is a really bad thing. So I actually decided in the end I came up with eight total and I combined them and merged, I merged my lists so that I had a tough time that our, I see fairly commonly and are pretty critical sort of like what you were saying, you, you really try to not do these.
Autumn (12m 1s): The bottom three are more like, well they are probably, it's not that big of a mistake. You'll you'll you'll survive that one, but the other one's a little bit more painful. So those were, that's how I do differentiate it up on my list. I resist to be mailing you. I figured I could figure this out on my own.
Jesper (12m 23s): Yeah. Okay, cool. Yeah. I've tried to rank mine in order as well, so that it goes from sort of the smallest stuff to the bigger picture.
Autumn (12m 32s): Oh, okay. Sounds good. I think I did that and now I'm looking at it over very quickly going, did I do that? I think I did that. Yeah. I think I'm good. Okay. I'll stand with it. And if I change my mind is the end. Well it's because I didn't pay attention to my order as
Jesper (12m 49s): A fan of nobody will know it, unless you say it
Autumn (12m 51s): Out loud. So I get to like number three and go no that one's should have been for a hard head.
Jesper (12m 58s): Yeah. And then maybe also in the end, maybe we can try to see if we can, so I have five, you have five and then maybe we can see if we can agree on one out of all of those 10. That is like the way
Autumn (13m 12s): The first one. Okay. That sounds good. I will not be surprised. I bet we have overlap. So the reader as well, our listeners will have to forgive us if we don't quite have 10 because we psychologically just, Oh, come up with a similar thing.
Jesper (13m 30s): Yeah. And if the listener, if you have listened to some PA a past episode where we are doing these lists, then you will know a part of the funniest to see how much overlap we actually have that. So we have not coordinated any of our five. I have five that I did an isolation and all of that at the same. Yes. So we'll see how much have a overlapping there is and how much we agree or, or maybe we can surprise each other who knows?
Autumn (13m 54s): Hm, no. I'm thinking of overlap. No, not really. And I will be fun to see and I, maybe I will share my last three cars. One of them is very, very New that I I've noticed more of a trend of. So, you know, I've got that one in reserve and we'll see if you come up with it, but yeah, I will do my best to keep score Again but I'm ready whenever you are. If you want to start with your number five Mistakes that does make sense.
Jesper (14m 25s): Okay. Okay. I'll make it go for it. So my number five it's well, actually the funny thing in my notes, I want one, two, three, four, or five, meaning that number five was the worst. A number one was the least worst. So now you want me to start with number five? It's like at the wrong thing. Right? So I'll do that. But not just the one that says number one in my notes, this is the number five engine.
Autumn (14m 46s): So that's one difference. You have my number one is a horse. Right? Okay. So at this one is a small talk in dialogue that doesn't have any relevance to the story. So that will be something like, wow, it's
Jesper (15m 4s): Really raining this morning.
Autumn (15m 6s): Yes, it is really pouring down. No, yes, no. I got all wet coming here that this is not interesting
Jesper (15m 14s): To the reader right now is just fill awards and you, you,
Autumn (15m 16s): You need to avoid that kind of thing. Yeah. That's absolutely. I don't actually have that one on my list. So you did surprise me right off the bat. A very, very good. But I agree. I I've read a lot of dialog where you are, like, there has to be a point to this. There's a point to this right. There is please let there be a point to this and yeah, there was none. It could just be careful. They are indeed.
Jesper (15m 41s): You mean? And I think, I can't remember which episode it was, but I do remember in the past that we've also talked about the fact that when you, as the writer put something on your face,
Autumn (15m 51s): The reader will think, so
Jesper (15m 53s): Is that this is here for an important reason. That's why I'm reading it. Otherwise you wouldn't be there. Right. And then if you have all this kind of talk about it. Yeah. It's really raining this morning and okay. Have a good day, see you later. And then they will,
Autumn (16m 4s): Maybe that will be like, what was the part that you were really just, yeah. It makes me shake your head and you lose a little bit of love for the novel. So don't do that. That's that's a very good point. I'm impressed. All right. Thank you. So that's a good start for me then. And there was an American guy, but I don't know anyone's winning, but yes. Do you think you're doing great. All right. So my guess
Jesper (16m 28s): It depends what I mean, if I surprised you or five times, then I'll say I'm winning, but if you're surprise me five times
Autumn (16m 35s): Being score. Oh Hey, is that it does not sound fair. Who's making these rules. I don't not me. You know, even one of your kids, I think, you know, all right. So my number five is on expectations. I think it plays into the psychology and Author doubt, right? Or doubt so many authors, the new Author set expectations. So immensely high or vice versa. They said it's so incredibly low that they almost self sabotage. So it's, I think it's better to set a realistic that this is sort of hard work.
Autumn (17m 18s): Book. One is hard. If you go into a book, one in love with it, but knowing this is going to be probably the hardest book you write and that you will get better and that it takes a series or several books to really learn the ropes and maybe feed all your hungry readers and gain a following. And then that's when you start making some waves, especially after you finished your first series. So I think very few brand new first time authors launch major careers with just one book. So I think I see those hopes and dreams that just writing this first one is going to be everything. And it really should be more like this is just a marathon.
Autumn (17m 60s): This is just the stage one. And this is my learning curve. I knew of a very well known author who wants to joke that she was so glad she released her first book under a pen name, because then she could say that was not mine, but as you would prove so much. So that would be one of the Mistakes. I see so many new authors make that they just put too much pressure on themselves for a book won. Just write it. I learn from it. No you learned from it and don't make it an avalanche when it's just like a little puddle, right?
Jesper (18m 34s): Hm. Yeah. Actually this morning I was listening to Joanna pen and you were saying how she was siting off another article, which I am sorry. I can't remember which one it was, but the point was that she had, she read my article in words, it was stated that The like breakaway novels, you know, in the past, sometimes people will write one novel and it would just take off. And the point of this article was that it's getting less and less frequent at that thing happens because we have this side of binge culture nowadays also, you know, the same thing with, with Netflix or HBO or whatever you are watching Hulu or whatever, you know, there's just, there's more a mentality or culture today where there was just a lot of options.
Jesper (19m 21s): So you have a vast majority or, or, or, or a huge amount of stuff you can watch and, and you can see what you want to see. And, and, but it's not like one thing. And then every well, okay. So of course, sometimes there is a game of Thrones, so whatever, and then everybody we'll watch it. But in general, that's a very, very rare nowadays, you know, it's getting hot. If you're looking for, if you're setting your expectations for getting that lightning in a bottle, kind of normal, it it's not going to happen. I'm sorry. No,
Autumn (19m 54s): Is that, it would be amazing if it did, but that's no way you should sell your hopes on. I've been really the best advices to do sort of what I'm doing. Now. You'd have to write all three books in a series before you release the first one, because then you can go back and write the first one again. So it's typically your fourth book that you've written in and it will be so much better and you will have learned so much and it will be so much better to release it and you can release the whole series. And you'll be that much further ahead because yeah. People like to finish things they like to binge. So just feed that and don't stress too much about book one,
Jesper (20m 31s): Feed the monster to feed the monster. Yeah. Okay. So my next one here is a, it's pretty basic, pretty simple, to be honest and really quick, but it is important. Okay. And this one is about not including information in your Writing, you know, things like sound smells or what it feels like to touch the object that the character is holding and so on because this really helps to immerse the reader into the story. And you're writing just becomes much, much more engaging as a result. So when you are not including sensory information, that's really a tell tale of amateur.
Jesper (21m 10s): Writing,
Autumn (21m 11s): That's very true. So I love that one too. And I don't have that one, even though it is definitely it's actually in the starter kit, that is one of the one's that is listening to their, it's a very good, but I didn't include it in this one, but I, yeah, that's, that's sorta definitely a passion of mine. And I find that even when I'm writing currently, every once in a while, I'm like, I'm on the visuals. I'm stuck on visuals. If, if someone glazes at one more thing that I'm going to do screen, so you would need to, I mean, sometimes that's what editing is for, but yeah. Do your best to use all five senses, at least once in a chapter as a pretty good way of, you know, working at your writing, looking at your editing, it's a good goal.
Autumn (21m 52s): Try it. And it will be improved. You're writing so much and improve your descriptions. You won't be repeating yourself because if something smells and then you'd see it, and when you touch it, those are all different senses in different descriptions and it will just make everything feel so alive. So I really like that one. Very good job. Hey, you're not winning though. Just to be clear, you're not winning well, I'm not sure. I agree. It will settle
Jesper (22m 17s): It in the end. It depends on the score. I was
Autumn (22m 20s): Worried that I went with a tried and true that I think has been true for so many new Authors and it was a huge, I don't know if it's a learning curve or just a right of passage. And that is losing steam in the middle of your first book or the book you're writing. And either you give up on it and go to the internet and to go to Facebook or Instagram and say how stuck you are or are you pick up a new story instead of finishing the one you're writing. And so then you just keep you're constantly in forever and writing your first novel, cause you haven't finished one yet and you just have to buckle down. I hate to say it is, I don't know what to do.
Autumn (23m 0s): Well, there are a way of putting it, but you have to buckle down and keep going and stick it out. And at least Finnish one and may be published it and it will be better if you do that. Don't get, don't get lost in the muddy middle. It's so many authors don't get past that one point.
Jesper (23m 18s): Yup. And that's also very true as it was also a good one. Yeah.
Autumn (23m 22s): You were just saying that. I just feel like you're just saying that to make me feel better, do you? No, no, no. It is a good one. Okay.
Jesper (23m 32s): Yeah, no doubt about it. I was just trying to So when I'm on number three, right now, there are a number of three were in the middle one middle one. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So I had a few examples on this one. Oh, excellent. I like
Autumn (23m 46s): Examples.
Jesper (23m 48s): Yeah. So this is about using the same sentence construction over and over again. So if you are, for example, Writing something like he walk to the door, he opened the door, he entered the room. Well, when I say it out like this, as you can already see how bad that sound's right. But if instead that you vary your sentences, then it will come across as much more professional. As an, as an example, if I use the sensory information that we just talked about a moment ago with the same Sentences that the census says that I just made an example of here and it could be something like he walked through the door, the handle felt cold in the Palm of his hand.
Jesper (24m 33s): As you turned it on a foul smell, forced his way into his nostrils. As soon as he opened the door, wasn't that much, much better.
Autumn (24m 41s): It's a very nice, much better in a great example of your number, your previous one. And this one that was that since I'm a numbers guy, that's very good. I like that. And it's almost like you listened to our recent podcast on don't start sentences with this word. All right.
Jesper (25m 2s): Yes. That's true. Yes. I didn't even think about that. But now that you say that, yes, that's right.
Autumn (25m 7s): And a fantastic example for that Podcast so if anyone else wants to have a fun, go will listen to that one as well.
Jesper (25m 16s): Yeah. I can't remember what number it was, but yeah. You could find it in the, in the feet. You could just scroll through it and find the one that said something about don't start a sentence with his word or something like that, right?
Autumn (25m 27s): Yeah. I think it was cold. Yeah, exactly. And it was a fairly recent, so it was not like you're going to go back months. So it should be just, you know, eight episodes back for her the most. So that's right. Yes. I agree. We have you covered that recently. So that's a very good example. So my line again is different. I can't, but this is like the most non overlap we've ever had with one of those lists. I don't know what's going on. This is a strange, I'm worried. We were not on the same way, like for once what's going on. So I don't know. I, I think somebody cheated. It's like, yes, you saw my list somehow. And actually we just screenshare.
Autumn (26m 8s): So you might have been, you might have seen my list and you were like, I'm changing them all. All right. So my middle one, my number three is not making Writing a habit. So, so many new authors you'll see them talking about waiting for inspiration. And it's like waiting for a lightening to strike. You really have to be writing it. Maybe not as a job, everyone says it's a job as a career. It doesn't have to be, it could be a hobby don't you wanna spend time doing your hobbies, whether it's cross-stitching or hiking or a stamp collecting. I don't know. What, what do people do for hobbies eye, right? So don't feel need to know, but even if it's a hobby, you should spend time doing it and you should love it.
Autumn (26m 52s): And it is, you should want to learn more about it and investigate it and talk about it and be really passionate. You know, that's why you do it. That's what you do with hobbies. But I often see, you know, Authors, you know, these or wait for inspiration or, and when they're not waiting for inspiration, maybe they are hanging out in an Author group or hanging out in an Instagram and they are not really learning the craft. And that's not that that's really a strange way to treat a hobby. Something that you wanted to do, you should actually be a little more investigative and you should take it. It feels like I said, no, I don't have to say seriously, because that takes the fun out of it. And writing it should have some joy as much as passion. And, and there are of course, the days where it doesn't and you do get up at four 30 in the morning and they get your word count for the day.
Autumn (27m 32s): So you can go help somebody else that you have scheduled and get some formatting done. You know, those kind of days everyone has, those are there, they happened, but there should be loving in it as well. And something that really gets you excited. And so, you know, treated at at least as something like that, at least as serious as something you're passionate about and learn more about it.
Jesper (27m 53s): Yeah. It's probably sometimes a bit of a procrastination tool as well. You know, the, the, I don't know, I don't have the inspiration right now. I think it's, it's just also, I won't say all the time and always because I'm sure that some people have good reasons or whatever they do, but a certain In and a lot of instances, or at least let me put it like that. I think it also is an excuse and why people are making the excuse. I can not judge that's up to them, but maybe they have a good reason. But at the end of the day, you know, if, if you want to make something with your writing, you have to write. I mean, I think it's the end of the day, the truth
Autumn (28m 34s): You want to procrastinate, don't procrastinate on Facebook or Instagram, go to procrastinate by reading an article on how to write better. That's at least useful procrastination. Yeah.
Jesper (28m 45s): So to some extent, but at the same time, you only learn to write by writing. So yeah. But okay, good. One
Autumn (28m 53s): Oh, thank you. Well that, I feel a little bit better than that.
Jesper (28m 59s): Yeah. I can't press it too much because then you might think that we were, the score has even as an actor,
Autumn (29m 3s): You know, I'm feeling like it might be a pretty, even neither of us bet on how much overlap on this one. So I've really got two more to go to find out, you know, when you have any of the wonderful, maybe the number one, I'm going to bet number of one, but maybe not. We'll see. We'll see. So far, I like all your answers though, that they are the WRITING coach and editor and me is going on, but you're still not winning. Even if you've won my writing coach and editor hat, you you're still not winning. So that's just the way it goes.
Jesper (29m 33s): Okay.
Autumn (29m 35s): Well, we'll see, one sec. Okay.
Jesper (29m 38s): So this is my number two, I guess. All right. So yeah, last week we talked about Author voice. So can you guess what I have as my number two of them,
Autumn (29m 51s): Character development knows how to throw in a curve ball and nothing has been aligning today, so, okay. I'm fine. Author Voice
Jesper (30m 3s): Yeah, it's about having too much. Author Voice Oh, interesting. Because I, I think the amateur writer can sometimes try to hot, to sound very professional. So as a consequence, they will start using too many analagist or a day too much ad, too much description and so on. And so on, you know, in an attempt to try to show off their creativity and, and the writing skills, it could also be maybe trying to much to sound like Tolkien or something like that. Or maybe another Fantasy Author that you are a door, but as a result, it just becomes too much.
Jesper (30m 43s): So I'm just saying, don't write in a fashion that forces the reader to reread Sentences because it's so complicated. Then the structure, you know, the, the, the writing needs to flow smoothly and pleasantly, and not in a very abstract way that it's very difficult to get the meaning of what you're trying to say. So I think that's, yeah, that, that is a sign of an amateur writer. And, but of course, I also have to say, you can also turn this number two on its head and say, its also a problem not to have enough voice.
Autumn (31m 15s): So if
Jesper (31m 15s): The writing fields is a very formal and stilted, that's not good either. So it becomes really difficult to a few close to the character's in that case. So yeah, it is like a fine balance to walk a fine, but you know, developing an author voice. Is that something we covered in last week's episode? So go back to listen to episode 97, if you haven't done so already and, and all the details will be shared there, but I think all of the voice is important in both in not having too much of it, but also not having to lose it.
Autumn (31m 48s): Yes. It's its sort of like the, the, the quote, you know, kill your darlings, you know, keep it out the flower LA flowery language and things like that. But I do like this one Cause yeah. You're right. Because it was something I often see in maybe I don't know, I even thought of it. So jeez, you surprise me again, but yeah, often. Yeah, she sounded so satisfied with, with a guy who I am stumping her this time, but yeah, they'll Authors they often do you try to write to impress? Now here's a question for you that I think I, I would say kind of pose to me recently, but that's probably within the last year and a half, because I remember these things for some strange reason.
Autumn (32m 27s): But what about, how do you feel about using words that like when I do an editing or spellcheck, I get this error that's like even a knowledgeable audience may not be familiar with the block. Do you think all language should be, you know, simple? Or can you use some complicated words that may be some people are going to have to go check out the dictionary for you?
Jesper (32m 53s): I would say the only places where I feel it as okay to use very complicated language is if it's because of the character, if the character is just the type of person who uses a very complicated language, then it is absolutely OK to do it. But then you need to do it in a way where the fact that you don't understand what he's saying is part of the gimmick, right? So it's not like he's sharing very important plot detail that you need to understand. And then nobody gets it. That's not going to work. They wouldn't like to kind of know, but if its part of he's that's his court that he is a bit weird and he talks very complicated, then that's absolutely fine. But in all other cases, I will say no, the, the, the, the writing has to flow smoothly.
Jesper (33m 37s): And so did you don't get pulled out of it and I'd have to go and look at the dictionary to just understand what you read. I mean, it has to be a pleasant experience and it's not in place. It's not pleasant. If, if you almost feel like stupid, because I don't understand what it says and probably I should understand, but I don't. Right. And then you feel stupid as a reader. That's right.
Autumn (33m 54s): That is a good, I don't know. I still, I know as a teenager, I mean, I'm talking about like one word out of every 10 chapters maybe is a new and unfamiliar words. That might be an advanced grammar of a dance language. But I think that's why I have such a big vocabulary is because I read like a voracious teenage, the sorceress just picked up a ton of words and I still love using them. There's so much fun. Do you use words like avarice and things like that or that, or, you know, I could just use green, but avarice has a fun sound to it. And if I ever have this published as a, an audio book, that's a cool sounding word, but yeah.
Autumn (34m 36s): And not everyone might not know that one right off the top of their head. No, but I don't know.
Jesper (34m 41s): I still think it depends a bit on what you're writing. I mean, if we are talking literary fiction versus a commercial fiction, right. Because if its commercial fiction is suppose to just be enjoyable, it's not supposed to teach you a new vocabulary. Right. But literary fiction, it could, it could be much, you, you could use more of those kinds of works in that case. So it, it, it, I think it depends on what your writing of course, but I'm always talking about commercial fiction. So that sort of my bias,
Autumn (35m 10s): Well, I get it. I did grow up. I'm a Mercedes Lackey and, and rice Or and McCaffrey and stuff like that. So I, you know, so you could do it. I could do it too. That's my theory. Yeah. I know. I know. I've read a lot of them.
Jesper (35m 23s): Yeah. And rise too. I don't think she uses complicated words. And to be honest,
Autumn (35m 28s): Probably because you were an educational system might be a little bit better than ours, but don't tell anyone. I said that I'm not going to talk more about that. I could move on. So moving on to my number two is not building an audience as your right. So waiting until you released book one and expecting that lightning in the bottle, as you cleverly use a metaphor for So. Yeah, no, you know, it's, you don't want to spend too much time building an audience because you wanted to. Right. As I said, and the previous one, but you definitely need to have a plan, whether it's building your newsletter or just hanging out in readers groups, you want people following you on your journey and getting excited about what you're writing so that when you release a book one, you know, you gotta, you got a platform and some people who are excited to celebrate with you, that's really important.
Autumn (36m 24s): And I do see still a lot of fathers are getting better and a lot of the authors are getting very savvy, but there's still so many new authors who write in that cliched, tiny dark room. And then they are merged with a fully finished novel. And there started to find out the rest of the house was empty.
Jesper (36m 44s): I think I've worked out why all of this are so different.
Autumn (36m 48s): No. Yeah, yeah. 'cause my life.
Jesper (36m 51s): This is very much focused on the Writing itself, where you are a bit more focused on the, the mechanics of the business of Writing and also the mindset of Writing. And I think that's right.
Autumn (37m 4s): Yeah, no, that's good. And it's the same way as you shuffle these together, you're getting a very kind of complete list from the technique to the business of it. So I guess it makes sense. Yeah. I'm glad I didn't send you that email because I might've changed my answers. And then the listeners wouldn't have had such an interesting experience, right?
Jesper (37m 24s): Yeah, no, no, that's good. And that definitely building an audience that show it that's hugely important and yeah, we've talked multiple, multiple times and past. Episode also one of the Am Writing, Fantasy a YouTube channel. There's multiple videos there as well about building email lists and why its important. So I don't think we need to labor that more here, but it is just so incredibly important. So we cannot be said enough.
Autumn (37m 47s): Absolutely. All right. So we're on to the last two or three Oh one, I suppose the last one, one each day. So yeah. Are number one worst mistake and wondering, well, it's still bee. No overlap. I can imagine.
Jesper (38m 3s): So I have a feeling it will now because I think maybe yeah, unless you are as a Writing related, then it, there will probably be, you know,
Autumn (38m 11s): Or it might be, you know, let's see what yours is. Okay. So there was,
Jesper (38m 18s): So what I have on my list is a head hopping. So this is when you are in one character's head, you know, seeing what that person sees and hears and their character, you get the character's thoughts and so on. And then a sentence later, we are in another character's head. I read a book quite recently that from time to time has a tendency to do head hopping. And I'll just tell you it's really jarring, jarring and really good.
Autumn (38m 45s): So I mean,
Jesper (38m 48s): Moving from one point of view, character to another, between chapters is absolutely fine. You know, I do it, Autumn do it with our Martin, do it. All right.
Autumn (38m 56s): So yeah. It's nothing wrong with that. I like that crowd that you mentioned Yeah but yeah, no, I agree. Head hopping when it's literally see sometimes it's between sentences in a much less paragraphs. All right. It is definitely one of my pet peeves. I remember reading a book once where it was a character looking across at someone shaking at a picnic blanket. And then the next sentence was the person shaking out the picnic blanket. And I was like, what is going on? I was lost and confused. And I think I might've stopped the book right there. Or at least I started skimming in just all of it. It got any better. And I think eventually it settled into one character.
Autumn (39m 38s): And even then that was confusing. It's like, why did you choose that one? And not the person over there? So yeah. That's yeah, it is a better one.
Jesper (39m 47s): You really have to learn to master the point of view stuff, because same thing, you know, if something is happening behind the character, the character can see it. So you can't describe what, what it looks like behind him because him or her, because you, if the character can see it, you can not describe it. That's just It and you can't just have to another character who can't see it because that's convenient. That's not, that's not a hobby.
Autumn (40m 9s): Yes. That's not. Okay. You know, you have to solve the problem for the character who is head you're in and not some other way.
Jesper (40m 16s): Yeah. I mean, if you want to do a change to another character within the same chapter between chapters, it's easy because then we have, we have a break and everybody knows, okay, now it could be a new character. If you wanna do it in the middle of this chapter, you can do that as well. But then you need to put in something like a, maybe a graphical cymbal in between paragraphs or some sort of break that sort of shows the reader that, Oh, okay, there is a change here and then you can move into another that's okay. But still, I would say, I prefer to do it between chapters and not in the middle of the chapter, but if you have to do it, then at least put in something in the, on the page itself that clearly shows that something is changing.
Jesper (40m 55s): Right?
Autumn (40m 56s): Yeah. And some kind of transitional break lines or something, but yeah. And even that, you know, then it's not an excuse to have five of those on a chapter. I mean more than one story too much yet. So don't jump more than three characters on one chapter, but it's a better look, read some George R. Martin. He does a fantastic job of staying in one character's point of view for an entire chapter and they flow. So Well and you get to know who the character, if you have whop, you don't really get to know the character well enough to care. And that's part of what is so important about writing. So that has an excellent number of one. Yeah. And I also wanna just tack on to that, that I think that
Jesper (41m 37s): You also need to be mindful that this is a sort of stuff that agent's will notice, you know, so if you are trying to get traditionally published and they will probably be, not offer you a contract, if they see head hopping in your manuscript very bad, or even if you are self publishing, it will take a lot of time for the edits that you can clean up this stuff. So maybe you are edited, you don't mind doing So, but it's going to be there.
Autumn (41m 57s): They do a lot of money. So yeah, I think you just, you need to get this under control. Definitely a high concur. And I think if I was doing the writing techniques, that would be my number one, but I always focused on something different, even though this is sort of a Writing technique. So my number one is writing the story with absolutely no plan for your first book. And it just thinking you are going to tackle your way through it and get there and not taking the time and realizing there's so much to learn in their story structure and character arcs the character arcs titled the plot. And so that made me develop it later. But seriously, if there's ever a book, what are you become a full time pants or not?
Autumn (42m 39s): If there was ever a book to have a plan, have a plan for your first book, it'll be a lot less painful.
Jesper (42m 47s): Oh, I feel this one though, because this was exactly where I ended up. I kind of put it,
Autumn (42m 55s): This is what it is a nod to both of us because it is how I started my first debut novel as well. I, I, I got the chapter three, then the characters got lost. I think my chapter five, I was last, the characters were lost and I said, we need to structure. And I got a structure and I learn very quickly from there. But yeah, I think that it might be how they talk about what is the 99% of the people who start off writing a novel fail. This was probably the first hurdle as an author. You hit that point where you were like, I don't know what happens. The inspiration drives up. You just, you know, the character stopped talking to you.
Autumn (43m 36s): Whatever happens. I love that joke that, you know, brighter has served the, when the characters, the writers block is one of the character stopped in your head, stopped talking to you. So this is a Yeah, this is what all of that happens. And you need to find a plan to get through that and to learn, to write well and to write your story. And yeah, it's your first cutting. Our first tooth as an author is to get through that. So go for it, get a plan. Yeah. And I could say, maybe you want to go to bed
Jesper (44m 6s): Or whatever online platform you normally buy your books on. And then maybe you want to search for either Autumn's name or my name. And then
Autumn (44m 15s): Yeah. And maybe you buy that and then maybe everything will be explained to you. That will definitely help. I mean, it is the worst case scenario. Just go to the Am Writing Fantasy blog and put in the story structure and you'll get a couple of articles that will kind get you to get you started and get you started. And then you can realize that maybe you should get the plotting book, Cause it? It would help you so much when you start a book too. And you were like, Oh, this is what it was supposed to be doing it just so we have, we truly had a list of 10. We did not overlap that at all. Oh no. So this is a tough one. How do we conclude? Which is the worst of them all?
Autumn (44m 56s): I don't know. Cause there are all going to hurt you in some way or another hurt are writing here at the hurt, the story or telling or hurt your author career. Or if you do these, I don't know which ones do we need an independent judge. Maybe the listener should tell us, which is the worst one that could help us out when we do need the emotional journey. That that will be cool to see if anybody wants to tell us. And please do. I think, I would say that you are number one day might be the worst One. And my thinking is that if you can finish the first book because you sort of screwed whole thing up by not planning anything, then it doesn't matter about small talk in the dialog or a sentence structures, or even building email lists on.
Autumn (45m 48s): Because if you don't have anything and you are never going to finish it because you sort of drive into the ditch then than maybe all of the other nine items. Yeah. It doesn't really matter too much. I don't know how I like that. I'll go with that. I could accept that because that makes me feel like I won. So. Okay. That's true. Actually, a change that, and this has been recorded and I think I'm editing this one. So Nope. Not changing. It sorry. Do you want me to change? Sort of edit this one of the new editor next week. Episode no, no, no, no. I'm good. I can fit this one in this week. I'm good. Okay. Well listen to, can you please let us know that you disagree with this conclusion and, and then pick another one?
Autumn (46m 34s): Please all right. So I will honor the listeners comments and we will see which one they think is the worst and then will choose the champion. I don't know what we get to know. Okay. So next Monday we are going to talk about the self publishing landscape is a two lane to get into self publishing. Well, tune in next one,
Narrator (46m 58s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast please tell a fellow Author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn in Yesper on patrion.com/am Writing Fantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast going to stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
You’ve heard it many times before. The famous term: 'Author Voice'.
But what is it exactly and how do you develop one? Or should you even be concerned about your Author Voice?
That’s some of the questions Autumn and Jesper seek to answer in episode 97 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast.
Link to episode 100 questionnaire: https://forms.gle/KDHdPnUB5A9cwViz7
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy.
For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts. Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello I'm Jesper and I'm Autumn. This is episode 97 of The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. And you heard it before The famous term Author Voice, but what is it exactly and how do you develop one? Or should you even be concerned about your Author Voice in the first place? That's some of the questions that we will seek to answer in today's episode?
Autumn (56s): Oh, it will be so much fun because I, it was, I did, I actually did some homework for this one. Again, I did some research and I think hearing some stuff out because it is, I could see why it's a confusing topic and it, some of the posts I read about it and I'm like, no, that's not what you were actually talking about. So it will be interesting to break this one and unpack it. But first, how is the moving saga now with that the house has been officially contracted?
Jesper (1m 25s): Yeah, it's a it's it's going well, we signed the lease on an apartment, which is only like two minutes walk from the beach. So that's amazing. Yeah. I can't remember if I already mentioned it, not on a previous podcast episode or if I did. Sorry. Deal is, you know, but he's so excited actually looking. Yeah, we are looking forward to moving on to the, and the kids are also really much looking forward to it because they know they're going to get closer to the school and to their friends, you know, from, from the apartment is only a 15 minute bus ride to school. Whereas today we have to drive the kids every time and it takes, if they want to take the bus today will take them in a bit more than an hour to get to school and to visit our friends and so on.
Jesper (2m 14s): So yeah, the kids who are very much looking forward to it, but yeah, my wife and I are also looking forward because it's going to be releasing some pressure on us to act as chauffeurs all the time. You're going to get away with not having to drive the kids way before they turn 16. So that's exciting. Yeah, that is good. Yeah. But I think that the trick becomes now, how do we get all this stuff from a house to fit into an apartment, which is probably like almost 50 square meters, smaller than that. So it's going to demand some serious organization skills to pull that off.
Autumn (2m 55s): Yeah. You guys are definitely going to have a few things in storage, which we already about the strategies of labeling boxes. I think you guys are all,
Jesper (3m 5s): So if we have to get a storage room, there was no way around that though.
Autumn (3m 8s): But it'll be exciting. And it's, it's fun to clean out the cupboards and get rid of some things. This is from the person who's gotten rid of like 99% of this stuff she has owned. So don't get me started on if I would use the word fun, but, but okay. Cathartic, how's cathartic. It's a good word. But you have fair enough. At least it will be done once it's over with, then I will feel like it was nice, but I knew in the process itself, I am not so excited. So that's always the hard part and going through it. Yeah. Yeah. How about you? Oh, it's good. It's the leaves are falling here in Vermont so much.
Autumn (3m 51s): It looks like it's snowing yellow. So it's, it's beautiful on it. We've had some, right. So it is nice. The rains have come back. So we are, are a little pond and stream outside of the cabin have actually filled. So we have flowing water. It's very picturesque, little chilly, perfect for staying inside. It goes to the wood stove and WRITING, which is good because I'm being my insane self. I have my own bucket at, to do for Am Writing Fantasy to keep things going here. And I have some clients and people I'm helping with their books or their covers, including some tarot cards. I'm gonna suddenly found myself doing some graphic design for, and meanwhile, I'm trying to finish up this trilogy.
Autumn (4m 37s): I'm writing and hope to release in early 2021. And I just, I, I dreamt last night that I was dreaming. I'm starting to layer my need for sleep in my dreams. Since inception, I woke up thinking I'm dreaming about dreaming and this is not a good sign, but I love it. I love what I love, the way, the direction everything is heading it. I just need more time in the day I need, I need her. Mine is a little hourglass clock. I know we can build myself into my extra hours. It would be fantastic.
Autumn (5m 17s): But what if you only spoke up from your dreams into another dream that you don't know your dreaming? Well, today's been really good. So I wanted to stick to this when I'm good. I'm fine. I'm fine with me living in a dream. It's just this one can manifest some more dragons and Magic. That would be awesome. Yeah.
Jesper (5m 39s): Well that act as long as you are. Well, then you have to also have to be a model or something you don't want to get roasted by dragging us.
Autumn (5m 46s): Yes. As long as the dragon is my pet and it will protect me. Okay. All right. I will look to problem solve it. Yeah.
Narrator (5m 53s): A week on the internet with the Am Fantasy Podcast.
Jesper (6m 0s): Now that we are only three episodes away from episode 100, it would be a good time for you to submit your question.
Autumn (6m 9s): Yes. At the time is almost running out and we need some more questions. So please send us something, anything, it doesn't have to be about writing. It can be about what it's like to live at a tiny cabin in Vermont, or to sell your house in Denmark and move him into an apartment. Anything. Yeah.
Jesper (6m 29s): Yeah. Well that might be a bit boring for somebody in the us too, to know how you sell the house.
Autumn (6m 34s): So what someone might want to know. Oh, it could be anybody. Yeah. I have traveled all across North America in a land cruiser, including some amazingly difficult, like a boiling the brakes and having the muffler shear off in that one time with a grizzly bear. But, you know, so if you're curious, ask, if I'm not going to say, I don't want to know more about when you were in New Zealand and you went to the Hobbit. Yeah, that was cool. If I have to come up with questions, I know where I'm going,
Jesper (7m 8s): Right? Yeah. That's cool. And then sometimes as well, I meet some really crazy people when I'm at refereeing. So maybe there are some stories that you want to hear them.
Autumn (7m 17s): That's true. You do. Those are always some interesting stories. I had no idea. The world of a soccer or football is so deeply strange. It was interesting.
Jesper (7m 32s): It's filled with a lot of very, very passionate people and they can't always control it.
Autumn (7m 40s): Fair enough. I think that sounds a reasonable. I know I've never been a sports person recently. We managed to get the play pool, which is one of the few sports I enjoy. If you can call it a sport. Cause it's really mathematical, which was kind of sad. But, but besides having to do that, I have never been a sports fanatic or even a huge movie buff. So I don't quite, when I see these people like chanting and nearly tearing apart stadiums, I, I don't, I, I will never write a sports fan as a character because I don't think I can.
Jesper (8m 20s): Now you said that it just reminded me... It was quite impressive how everybody could keep calm this last Saturday, because well, now you prompted me so very quickly, you two are here just to show a very short story. But this Saturday I had a match in the, basically... well... the stadium here in the main city or close to where I I'm living. So I had a match there and in the morning, I was woken up by a phone call from the football association and they said, Oh, we are in really big trouble. Can you take a second match today?
Jesper (9m 1s): And I was like, in the morning, you know, the call woke me up, so I was a bit like disoriented and like, "yeah, well, what, when?" And they say, yeah, it was just an, a, it's a, it was like, what is that? I don't know what that is in miles, but it's like 60 kilometers from where I live. So it's not, it's not far fire in the Western standards, but it's fine enough that it takes a while to drive there. And I did some quick calculation of distances in, in my head. And it was like, well, that's not really gonna work as hard, because if I'm going to take that medicine, I will not be able to get to the other match in time. And she said, no, I know, but we don't have any other referees.
Jesper (9m 42s): So can you take it, and that was like, yeah, OK. But then you have it. If you can call the, the, the other team's at the latest, Matt is just to tell them that I will not make it in time so that they know and that, and she said, yeah, yeah, no problem. I'll do, I'll do that. Now. I'll tell him that this was at the football association cost and this right. So that they don't get upset with you when they say, okay, that's fine. And then I'll do it. So I went and I refereed the first match. And then I drove as fast as I could back to the town here where I live. And it was just so weird because speaking of people, keeping comm, because there was not a lot, but that might've been like a, a, a hundred spectators in the stadium.
Jesper (10m 26s): So it's not a lot, but it, it was like a day on the 19th, a, the highest leak for youth people. So it's the under 19 at the highest level, you can play up at. They were pretty good. And there was probably like a, a hundred people there to watch the game. And they were just sitting there twiddling their thumbs in stadium, like an hour. And then the referee walked in like 15 minutes after the games should have started. And everyone is just sitting there looking at it and I'm walking in like, LA, you know, of course I hurt as much as I could, but, and then, you know, take on some, a different shirt and what not. And then onto the pits, straight away, just stop the match.
Jesper (11m 6s): But it was a bit, but it was so amazing, everybody. It was just so calm and relaxing to everybody, except there was no complaints about anything. So that was actually a pretty good. So I don't know if, what you said just reminded me of that. Right.
Autumn (11m 18s): It's a good story. It was just like the kind of questions we want and the stories we hope to tell for a a hundred episodes. So that's a good one. Oh, that's too funny.
Jesper (11m 28s): Yeah. So, we added the link in the show notes from where you can post your questions. It will take you two, a simple Google forum, and you can leave a written question there if you want. But of course we would prefer an audio or video file where you ask you a question. So that way we can play it during episode 100.
Autumn (11m 47s): Yes. So we can have your voice with us on the air with this is air. What is, Podcast it? I don't know. Yeah. I don't know. But
Jesper (11m 58s): The, and of course, if you want to record a video of yourself, don't worry about where you were pointing the camera. We don't need the actual images. We just need the audio. So yeah. Point the camera at the floor of the wall or something. If you want to say that we, because we were just going to strip off the audio anyway. So yeah, we don't, we don't need any images, so yes. Yeah. But all right. Before we finished off this segment, we also need to give a huge, thank you to you really. I hope I am pronouncing that correctly. That was my cousin and yeah. David Goslin and also guilt master Seth. Yes. So thank you so much for joining us on Patreon.
Jesper (12m 41s): I think, well, I have said this before. I know, but in all honesty, it is the support on a patron is really what justifies the time that we spent recording these podcasts episodes every week. So I don't get me wrong. We love creating this podcast and that's the main drive behind why we do it. But that set, it is still time that we could have spent on Writing. So, hence just to do a lot on Patreon and a month really helps us keep the lights on. So if you haven't checked out patron, yet there is a link in the show notes. And I should, yeah, I, I should just tell you to take a look at the Query what we offer that if you haven't done so already.
Jesper (13m 25s): So yeah, the link is in the show
Autumn (13m 28s): And we would love to have you come and take a look at it.
Jesper (13m 32s): Oh, sorry. I was playing my music to fast.
Autumn (13m 36s): That's okay. I had a quick internet hiccup, which I am one cell phone tower repeaters through rural Vermont woods. What could I say? It's bad. That's nice. It isn't. It's nice. Except for the internet. We won't get into internet. I am very jealous of your internet. But and you know, we couldn't have a conversation about that if you want. No, I don't think that's what people are tuning in four. They want to know about our Author Voice. So we'll just jump into that. And we'll hope that my mind steady is out in the falling leaves. Do not somehow mysteriously interrupt the airwaves or maybe it was a dragon eating a tower. I'm not sure if it was something it could have been in my bed. I don't know if I'll have to talk to my dreams.
Autumn (14m 19s): I get it. Right.
Jesper (14m 20s): Okay. But let's start out by defining what we are talking about when we speak of Author Voice and I can just start out with a definition I found. And then you mentioned that you, you saw quite a few different definitions of it. So maybe you, you have something to add to it, but at least from Well a way I would define it would be to say that Author Voice is its the choice of words. So the way you punctuate a, how the author conveys personality and their characters, it's, it's basically like a unique identifier that sometimes at least allows you to recognize the authors writing.
Jesper (15m 4s): Even if you don't know who wrote what you are reading. So yeah. If, if the Author Voice is strong enough, you can just out of reading it, you will tell you this is Author X. Yes. So I think that's how I would say.
Autumn (15m 20s): I think that's a good one. And I, what I saw a lot on the internet is from other bloggers was they were confusing. Author Voice with character, voice, and those are, they overlapped the spheres of them. But technically they're totally different. Your characters can have a, Voice a way of speaking. What they described it as an entirely different from your yourself, your own like personal Voice, who you are as a person, as well as your Author Voice, which is how you write things, which is often. So if you, especially when you're newer, it's very similar to how you write things, but it's a more how you perceive the world in how you put it on paper, but your character is, you know, I've written a dystopian thriller that it has this politician at all.
Autumn (16m 9s): I always felt like I was doing like mental gymnastics to squeeze my brain into those characters because I am not a male politician from Spain. I don't know where that came from, but that's the character. And once I got into his head, I could write stuff that I never would think of as a person. But technically I think when you broke it down there, you could still pull to be able to pull out pieces and say, these are examples of Author Voice, which will get into. But I do want to point that out that character voice, the way the characters are talking and the dialogue is actually kind of a different thing. It's not your Author Voice right.
Jesper (16m 50s): Actually I would almost say that if you, so if we go with the idea for just a second here, that the character of Voice is the Author Voice like you found on some of those blogs there. I haven't read those blocks. So in all transparency, I'm just making up a hot air here. But, but if we just go with that idea for a second, wouldn't that just mean that let's say you have a strong Author Voice and the Author Voice is the unique identifier I just define. But if you didn't say that that's the characters for Voice wouldn't that just means that every single character sounds exactly the same because they all speak in the Author Voice
Autumn (17m 32s): I think, I think that could happen, but that's not what you're going for. You want your characters to sound, you know, I, I think you're right. That's why I think there was some confusion and maybe why maybe especially novice authors might think character Voice is Author Voice authors who have a problem separating characters from themselves, which I've definitely seen in some books I've edited in some novice things where it's just like, every character sounds the same, which sounds exactly like the Narrator it's all just written in Author Voice. But if you do a good job developing your character's and especially when they are almost like pop alive in your head and they talk and think so entirely different from you that it's, it is like putting on someone else's skin.
Autumn (18m 19s): That's a really strong character voice, and it will have pieces of it that our part of Author Voice our part of your voice. It's gonna be this tiny little, like its the salt and the recipe. Its not the overall KC that comes out and yes, I know I'm back to food metaphor. Sorry.
Jesper (18m 39s): No, but I, I think speaking of characters, because I think very good example of this is a way back in episode 30, one of the Am Writing Fantasy Podcast here. We have the highly successful FANTASY Author Lindsay, Barocco on to talk about the importance of writing and series a, but I've read several of Lindsay's books and she writes these well, sometimes they are very snarky characters. What are the times? It's just like a very humorous once, but her characters are always very distinct. A and it's definitely part of her.
Jesper (19m 21s): Author Voice the way she creates characters in the way that they behave. That's part of how she writes. Ah, and I don't think she will disagree with me when I say that many of her readers, they come back because of the characters. That's why they read the stories. But that's not to say that her character is, sounds the same because they don't know, but they all have this very like Lyndsey. Barocco kind of mock on him. You know, you, you know that it has her character is, but they are very different characters. They have different goals, they have different motivations. They speak in different ways, but it is just, well, I, I can't be bothered and this is probably the difficult part of it because it's a unique identifier at sometimes, sometimes how to put your finger on what exactly it is.
Jesper (20m 3s): But she just has a way of creating characters that is her own way. And either people love it, some, some hate it and they don't want to read her books. And a lot, a lot of people have to say a lot like it and they read her books. So, so that's a good example of, of what you just talk about.
Autumn (20m 22s): Yeah. That's an example, a perfect example. And it's just sort of stepping back and looking at it from a big picture. So yeah, the way an author creates characters in how well they are created and how unique and different in whatever it is, is about them is a part of your voice as part of what you become known for as an author. If that's your style or if you have, you know, the gritty detective, you know what those other types, there's different ways of writing and you would be known for that. If you're always have a touch of romance, that might be a part of your Author Voice. So it is, it is something I actually had to, I had a reader and leave a review and they have to admit, I looked for it before this one, but I have 20 books out and I can't remember which book this one was on, but they had described it that they read a few chapters and then the art, as they put it, the authors familiar hand came in and they knew it was one of my books.
Autumn (21m 14s): And I was like, Oh, that was so it was such a beautiful way of phrasing it that I wish I could have found the review because it summed up how a reader looks at Author Voice how they can say, Oh, this is this Author it's like picking up a Neil Gaiman with the, you know, having the cover of the title rip off in about, you know, six sentences. And you'd be like, Oh, I know who wrote this. That's when you know, you have found an author's voice. Yeah. And do you,
Jesper (21m 41s): And then, or if we take some, some one, like I got to the Christie, a, you know, her style was like heavily influenced by her time as a nurse in world war one, she has often characters use postman to carry out the murders in the quarries. So you also let the psychological trauma of war effect her characters. So that's, you know, that's, that's a way where her experiences splits into her stories and that's definitely part of her Author Voice
Autumn (22m 15s): Yes. That's very true. And such. It is. I can see it changing over time. Like I wonder, especially from a novice Author, but say if you were a novice Author in your twenties and you wrote to your sixties, seventies or eighties, I'm sure your Author Voice would also change and evolve because you are going to go through so many changes in your life. I mean, you could imagine, like if you switch it, if you started writing as a teenager, can you imagine, and so your career is going to spend meeting someone, falling in love, maybe having kids getting married and all these things, how you're Author Voice is probably going to deepen or change over time. I know when I look back at it, like my first book, and I think that was only a written seven, eight, nine years ago, something like that.
Autumn (23m 1s): I know if I wrote it Today it would sound to me, I think it would sound nothing like what it is written. It would come out different, similar but different. But I also know that it would be recognizable as mine. And I think it's that recognizable element. That is what your author's voice is. And probably some aspects might not change over your entire life. I mean, for one of them is how you were saying, like how you develop characters, a how much description you put into things, you know, are, are you an author who sits there and talks about smelling the orange blossoms and the breeze or, or you want, that's just pretty much like, you know, you're straight to the action. Those are the differences and how you write and that's a part of your voice.
Jesper (23m 47s): Yeah. And then I feel like throwing a bit of curve ball here and then see what you think about it.
Autumn (23m 53s): Do you like challenging me on while we were recording? Tell me, you know. Yeah.
Jesper (23m 59s): Well, I usually come up with things and then I don't tell about, you know, about it in advanced, just throw it out because I feel its more interesting or you don't like it, but I feel it's interesting.
Autumn (24m 8s): What do you like to see what you think of my feet?
Jesper (24m 12s): Oh no, no, it's not too bad. I promise this is more like a reflection of, I'm curious about your thoughts on it. Because if we take somebody like J K Rowling, for example, she writes commercial fiction. The so does Lindsay broke her by the way and as well. So do you And I right. But the thing is that if we go into like the helicopter view around Author Voice then I feel like if you look at it from a literary critics perspective, they don't really spend any time analyzing works that are labeled as commercial fiction.
Jesper (24m 53s): You know, they, they knew it would look at a more experimental in writing style and then say, okay, look at this very distinct Author Voice here and how this is different from what we've seen before. And this is a very brave Writing or whatever. Whereas the commercial fiction is just trying to tell a good story and that's it, you know, Rawling focuses on her audience and she writes for them to get the story across in a transparent manner as possible where the provost doesn't get in the way of the story at all. So I've just, my reflection in here is just, is that if we were talking about commercial fiction, how much do we then say that Author Voice plays into that versus the other types of a, you know, fiction where Author Voice might be more clear, you know, it might be more easily,
Autumn (25m 51s): But yes. All right. So Author, Voice it's I think it's speculative fiction with a commercial fiction. It is more, it is toned down, but it's still there. I mean, if you think about like Ernest Hemingway and his Turner phrase and how he wrote, I mean, its so easy to no, that that was, you know, that's Hemingway or especially with the style where there is a third person like omniscient narrator Narrator or a narrator, the narrator often comes across as an Author Voice even though sometimes it is a character, but something about it creates more of a lie in the literary fiction has more of a distinctive Author Voice in poetry.
Autumn (26m 31s): To me is a really good example. A poet's how there, where their punctuation, where they stopped the sentence as the words they use. M those, you read the whole book, the book of poetry. You have a very good feel for that. Voice and it's often, I mean, you read some poems and you know, whether or not you like these authors or you're going to like to get entire Pope book of poetry just based on one or two poems. And it's usually based on the subject of the Author Voice but so I think it's, I do think it's, it's different with commercial fiction, but it is still there because it's more of a hidden layer. It's a, it's still present though.
Autumn (27m 9s): I mean, where we punctuate, how do we develop our characters weather? We use description's those types of things. Weather were fast paced weather. We had that a little bit of a romance. You get a feel for what is the package. So when you have that, Author what you are going to expect to see every single one of the books. And that is more than Voice I think when it comes to a speculative fiction, it's just like, Author plotting as well. It's all tied in there. You get the Author brand basically is sort of your Author Voice. Yeah.
Jesper (27m 41s): And then of course, ah, well, I mean you mentioned Vinci Baroque a minute ago, right? I mean, she, she writes commercial fiction, ah, as well, and a Hare characters is definitely a very clear part of her Author Voice so it's a, it's not like I'm not, I'm not trying to say that in commercial fiction, there is no Author Voice I'm just saying that I think it might be a bit harder to notice it and you have to look a bit harder.
Autumn (28m 5s): Oh no, I, I agree. And I think that's maybe why a lot of commercial fiction or fantasy authors, especially the way we wonder, like what is our Author Voice is that the characters Voice what does, is this nebulous thing? And that's because it is not as forward as it is in like non-fiction you have a very strong Author Voice and literary fiction. You have a very strong Author Voice, but in commercial fiction and fantasy fiction, it's it's much subtler because we do want the story to be for front. You know, we were telling this story of where you live with you. I like that phrase. You get the pros out of the way, you know, you're trying to get those words from him, encumbering the story you wanted to just flow and B a beautiful stories that people don't get hung up on certain phrases where yeah, you did fiction and you were like, you know, you could have so much more fun with metaphors.
Autumn (28m 54s): I've had people yell at me for some of my metaphors because they didn't think they work together quite correctly, but I know that's part of my Author Voice get rid of it and get used to it. Yeah. But yeah,
Jesper (29m 4s): That is so true because it is also, I think we also need to be mindful that it's different readers. I mean, the people who love to read books where they can just say well, in how the Author, you know, put together these words to make wonderful sentences. And so on, those readers are different readers than the ones who picks up a commercial fiction, people back and just chat through it. Right. 'cause they want to assault, absolved the story, but it's not the same thing. I mean, if, if you want to, at least for me, I mean, I prefer as well to read commercial fiction. I, I like the stories. I am there to read the wonderful Perros and whatnot.
Jesper (29m 46s): It can probably start annoying me a bit if there's to much of it. So, hence that is also the kind of stories that are right. Because I know I don't like to ride overly prose, heavy stuff. I'm of course I want it to sound good. And what not, that's not what I'm saying it. Right. But, but it's just, I think you own preferences bleed to bleeds into your Author Voice. I mean, for example, I know if I write, when I write nonfiction, it's a very different tone and a style than what I use when I write fiction, because it's, it's different things, you know, it's different mediums. So you adapt and do you adapt to that?
Autumn (30m 24s): That makes total sentence. Yes. And I think, cause that was actually another review, which I thought was so funny that an Author had pointed out of my work and they had said that M each of her serious, totally. Are you totally unique from one another or her writing style seem to shift a bit to accommodate the story. And I think that's why it's so true about commercial fictions and our Author Voice is that we do change the tone. You changed the tone to fit the character. You changed the tone to fit story. If I'm writing a novel, bright, it's going to be a lot brighter and happier, and there's going to be other tones to it than when I'm reading, like some of the darks fantasies that I'm writing that as much more gritty and the end of the world sort of stuff.
Autumn (31m 9s): So our, I think we're a little bit more malleable. We kind of hide it and we kind of nuance different things because we don't want it to get in the way of the story, but there's still, you know, how often do we use metaphors that I do always make sure that I set a scene very well, the characters. So those are all sorts of, like I said, it's, it's becomes almost more of a brand. You could almost pull out those aspects and say, these are my books. I am, this is the type of Author I am, this is my brand. This is my Author Voice.
Jesper (31m 43s): Mm. Yeah. And I guess a burning question that we could look into a bit here is how important is it to have or develop a distinct Author Voice because we were sort of tiptoeing around that question anyway, now, right?
Autumn (31m 57s): Yeah. I guess so we like to dance around questions. It's fun.
Jesper (32m 2s): Yeah. But I, you know, I, I think Author is often wants there Writing to stand out and there was nothing wrong with that. I mean, I understand that, but this Author, Voice a thingy here. It is, I think. And I'm curious, what do you think afterwards? Of course, as well, but I think it's really something that you can be too concerned about developing, because I honestly do think that while it might be Well, it might take you some time to understand exactly what your style actually is, but you are Author Voice his, in my view already there, you know, it it's been developing since the very first day you started writing and so you don't overthink it.
Jesper (32m 44s): Yeah. That's kind of how I do with it.
Autumn (32m 47s): I think so I think if you were writing Fantasy commercial fiction fiction and a new author came to me and they were, especially if they were stressed about the Author Voice or if anyone asked me and be like, don't even worry about it, write the backstory, you can write the best characters you can. And you know what readers will probably the more you're right. The more someone is going to point out like, Oh, you always do this. And that might be how you find out what your Author Voice is. I think I said I've had one or 20 books out now. So I kind of have an idea of what my Author Voice is and what I am selling when I write a book. So I understand that. And I've had some readers with me since the first book, by the way, if you are out there, I love you.
Autumn (33m 30s): Thank you for sticking with me in as many years, but they are, if it comes as you right. More so your fans, when they become true fans, their fans, because of how you write of what you write. So they come over time and you don't even have to work on them because it's, it is a part of you and your personality and sort of how you put those words on paper. I did one of the blog posts I wrote. So, you know, someone pointed out that she writes just the way she speaks. And so that it is sort of the part of it. I mean, if you are Starkey or a, have a sense of humor is going to bleed through and to some of the characters you create the way they looked at the world, as much as we tried to create characters who are separate from us, there's still something we create.
Autumn (34m 23s): And no, no, no. The hand of God or goddess that we are as authors were going to imbue them with some little sense of looking at the world, the way we look at the world and that's that a little, little touch. So that's your Author Voice coming through and everything you write it, it will be there, but if you don't sit there and do it like exercises to learn, to develop your voice, I mean, I guess you could go, right. Some poems, you'll probably figure out your Voice very quickly, but it's not going to translate well into a, a a hundred thousand words a novel.
Jesper (34m 57s): No, I, and I think when you're first starting out writing, and if you're really experienced the Writing, the listeners here are some listeners will be, I think that they will probably recognize that what happens a lot is that when you were first starting out, you have a tendency to copy a bit, the style of writing that you're favorite authors right. In, but then after a while it starts morphing into your own thing. But I don't think really that you can sit down and say, okay, now I want to develop my own Author Voice because I don't think it works like that. It's it's not like a skill that you can.
Jesper (35m 38s): I, I think it's just well, finding your Author Voice, it's just a process of writing and writing and writing sophomore, and then
Autumn (35m 47s): It will come. Definitely. And I do think I still, at this point, if I read a book while I'm writing, I can feel a little bit of the tone of it sneak into my writing. But I do think that the editing can, you know, evens it out. That's what good at editing does. So it takes care of some of those changes, because goodness knows, even though I've learned to write very quickly, if you're writing style over a trilogy over six months can change from book one to book three easily. So it's, you know, those, those, what editing is good for is making sure that all sounds like it was the same person written, you know, consistently, but it is definitely something that is there, but it doesn't have to be, it develops, like you said, I think you can change a little bit over time as your experience changes over time.
Autumn (36m 36s): But that is probably going to be some essence. That's just simply you and the way you look at the world since you opened your eyes the first time.
Jesper (36m 45s): Hmm. Yeah. And I've also heard examples of, you know, what, when people could write books in our case, we are not a good example because of that case, you know, you will be the one doing all the editing. So in the end, it'll be more in your voice as such, which is fine. So, but I'm thinking more about the scenarios where I've heard people who they might write alternating points of view, alternating chapters. So in those cases, I think you will be able to recognize that there is a difference in the way each of those chapters are written. I have not. I've just heard this. So it's hearsay. I am not read any of those types of books for myself, but I've heard people say that they can tell which author was writing, which chapter
Autumn (37m 35s): That makes I. And I am sure. I actually think about that when we do Patrick on post, because I do Monday post and you do one's at the end of the week. And sometimes I try to remember to quote unquote, sign mine, put my name at the bottom. Cause I know, you know, we get to be patrons. They don't know which one of us it was Writing but I wonder if I think I have seen one or two se, Oh, I know it, it was you. Or I knew it was you fall on the comment because of how you said something. And so yeah, when people do pick up those nuances, though, I will say I'm doing transcripts and putting our names on the transcripts of our podcast. I get lost sometimes. So this, so sometimes you go to the longer we know each other, I think we are going to have to watch that we might start talking a little bit of a light, but we have very similar viewpoints on things.
Autumn (38m 23s): So I think that's just the way things go sometimes. That's all right. Considering what the opposite side of the Atlantic its kind of funny.
Jesper (38m 33s): Absolutely. Yeah. No, but, but I just think if it proves the point that we have our own way of saying things, I mean, of course when, if you're using the Podcast transcript, that's an example that that comes out just the way we speak. So, but of course, when you are handling fiction, you are editing it. Meaning that I would get rid of all of the speech impediments I have and correct those and make it sound different. But also making sure that I don't start every sentence with So or something like that, right there. Like I said, in a previous podcast that I have a tendency to do, so I will, I will edit the, edit out all those sows to make sure that we start different paragraphs on different Sentences different and, and so on.
Jesper (39m 27s): Right. But whereas the transcript is a bit different because that's just us speaking with fiction. I, I think some of the Author Voice lies
Autumn (39m 36s): In the editing as well. I think it does to, because I know that's when you might work in some more metaphors that's when you might break up Sentences and ease and things are adding in the description, So whatever you do, it is part of creating your voice. I know I've recently read something that was, you know, that the writer didn't do many edits and I know what, like what I am doing at the time, like nine passes, which I know I'm a little obsessed. I like editing. So I tend to do layers and layers and layers of passes when I edit. And again, that is then part of my style, which comes across in my voice. And I know I, when I look at something and it's not written the same way, I know its usually the Polish is not there because it's not in the editing.
Autumn (40m 23s): Mia. I even know when I'm writing, I wouldn't have called it my voice until I sat down and thought of it. What were you recording this episode? But when my writing is flowing and it's just like, it's coming so easily, whether I'm writing in a character's voice or anything it's because you know, the Author Voice is strong. Everything is, you know, you, when you have that synergy and writing is going well, that's usually, that's when you're Author Voice, it's just, everything's just gold and, and everything is working well. But when I can't find that character, Voice when I can't find my style in my flow, it's probably cause I am off a little bit and I just need to sit down and maybe, you know, get into my own head and, and maybe put it on my headphones.
Autumn (41m 5s): Right. A little bit better. That will bring out the Author Voice.
Jesper (41m 10s): Hmm. Yeah. And it, it might also be a case of the more mindful you become have you're own unique style and your own Author Voice the more you can, you can play on it on purpose and put it to you. Yeah.
Autumn (41m 22s): Yeah. But I don't think I would think so. And that, that would be so something I would think and say, because I love, once my readers do know me well enough, I started misleading them. That's just sort of the fun, you know, its like the pied Piper of Hamlin. You never know if you're going to the seaside or the cliff. Yeah. Yeah. But I just think, Oh they all don't worry to much about this Author Voice thing. Right? I mean you can read many blog posts on the internet where people talk so much about how, if you don't have a unique Author Voice than you are not memorable a and you, you were basically doomed and they listen and putting in the $150 per hour, it will teach you to do yours.
Autumn (42m 7s): No that's yeah. It might be that as well. Yeah. Are you sure it is? It's got to be no, I agree. You don't have to stress about your Author Voice if you're worried about being memorable, there are so many ways, you know, you're plotting your character's just write a really good fiction. You have that little twist, right. Something you love that is more important than sitting there and niggling about whether or not you've created it a unique Author Voice to me it's Writing as we often say, it's a marathon, not a sprint. You know, when you start getting your second series or a third series, as you develop all of these books, not only will you have found your Author Voice you'll have found fans who love you for your Author Voice and it will have all worked itself out without you wearing the bit about it.
Jesper (42m 58s): So don't lose any sleep and don't dream about dreaming. 'cause that's just really confusing and you might never wake up. So that was a bit dark. Sorry about that. No, but the good news is that the cures pretty easy. Right, right, right. That's the cure. Eh, you know, if the Author Voice isn't in Q2 right now, it will become clear and as time goes by. Yeah. And just keep writing. Right. I mean absolutely. The story isn't it? Absolutely. You know, when you say it's a great question to ask your, your readers in your newsletter, after you published a couple of series of saying, Hey, what's your favorite aspect? What do you think is, you know, my father is Voice and see what people say because it could be a lot of fun.
Jesper (43m 45s): Alright. So next Monday we'll do another one of our popular alternating lists. You have a top 10 mistakes, AMA sauce writers.
Narrator (43m 55s): So if you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month, you will get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast going to stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Do you have dreams of watching your story played out on the big screen or as a series on TV? Want some tips to make that a possibility?
Join Autumn and special guest creative producer and children's fantasy author, Stephen Hodges, as they discuss what you need to pitch your story to producers, the differences between novels and screenplays, things to consider, and a quick wrap-up sidetrack into diversity and cultural appropriation in fiction!
Check out Stephen's wonderful story the Magic Poof at https://www.themagicpoof.com/.
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (1s): You're listening to the Am Writing Fantasy podcast in today's publishing landscape. You can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing Join to best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt Hello
Autumn (31s): Hello, I'm Autumn. Today. Yesper is a way that we're giving him a bit of a vacation and instead I have with me Stephen Hodges so Steven is here and you wear several different hats, which is really exciting. I know there's so many things. I think we could talk about that. We're going to have a fun trying to keep this on topic, but I know one of those is that you were an award-winning children's Fantasy Author with your series of the Magic Poof, which I love, I will link to the website because I love the images and the diversity of character is it's a moms choice award is adorable and they love the diversity of it. It's so sweet. And you also work in Hollywood production.
Autumn (1m 13s): And I, like I mentioned before, we started going to get this totally wrong. I ran into you because you're a LA film scout, helping out the Page Turner awards, hosted by a book lover. So I let you wrap up that side of your life up if you would say, Oh, okay. Well, I do, I don't know. I think the page Turner warrants, when they put the name LA films got on there, I find that I find that funny because it makes me seem like I'm in a forest, you know, LA people, you know, scamming out things in a really, really my job is, is that I a, you know, I am a producer and I have worked in the film industry for quite some time in film and television. And I also did one on one project.
Stephen (1m 54s): So it's basically, it's more of a development and I have my own company. And so development is essentially finding stuff that not only I create, but then others create and hopefully turn it into a film. So then when they say, Oh, wait a film scout. I always think of, you know, like an old movie or something like that, but really not just someone who likes to read other people's stuff and likes to put people together. So that's mainly my job as well as production stuff and everything in between, because in this industry, you have to have a pretty diverse in order to figure out what the why's and wherefores of how it works. And then you, yes, of course, we're working on the, my book series and I am in the process of Pitching it right now for you as an animated series.
Stephen (2m 42s): So yeah, so lots of different hats, although I don't where actual hat's, because I'm not that hipster, but you know, in a way we do have some shine. So we do, I do put on plenty of sunblock, so yeah, that's good. Oh, I like that image. It it's just, as I mentioned before we get, and I'm over here on East coast.
Autumn (3m 0s): Yes. Person in Denmark. So this is a whole different sphere, as much as I've driven by Hollywood I don't think I have gone. I went through it once when I was maybe a young teenager. So this is a whole, it's like an author saying, Oh, I've only done this in this and this and to anyone listening. And they're like, really that's just a ton. So from an outside perspective, you will get out of the things that you have listed on your LinkedIn bio and even on your Magic Poof bio Irene, you've worked in the matrix, you've done all these things. So that's just so cool. I am so grateful that you took the time to talk with us today.
Stephen (3m 35s): Sure. Of course. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, the matrix was a, I actually started out in the industry I'm I'm from Phoenix, Arizona originally and, and wanting to all of those steps or graduated from college with no connections actually ended up starting my own film company with a mentor who was, when I went to the school, I did an internship at a local television station here, a and started working with a guy who was working on his first film. And I, instead of going straight to the Hollywood, we started our own production company instead. Why be a PA when you can be a vice-president right at a college as to why we did that for awhile, but then I also had to get a job.
Stephen (4m 15s): So they ended up in a training in becoming a, a video engineer. So I'm working in an editing and live production, and that was my quote unquote waitress jobs. So the cool thing about me is that I actually know every site of production and it can pretty much do we have everybody's jobs. So on the matrix, I actually was up in a new engineer, which was a really fun experience, always fun to, you know, be I'm taking a lunch break in, sitting on the set, a and then all of a sudden Keanu Reeves comes in, sits next to you. You, because he happened to be here at the same place. And he's just a really nice guy. I actually, so that was interesting. So yeah, it was, it, it was a very fun experience, but very, very, it was huge.
Stephen (4m 56s): Like, it was just like, you don't get how much stuff is going on. And usually you're in a bubble, you know, on one set of production crews, but that was a really fun experience.
Autumn (5m 6s): That sound so amazing. And, you know, Kiano, he always has, seemed like a real earth kind of guy that I had to choose someone and Hollywood, I think he would make it on my top five list of people. I wouldn't mind running it into because he seems like a real person, so that's kind of less intimidating.
Stephen (5m 23s): And now he is actually a really cool guy and he's just super, super laid back. Just a really, really nice guy.
Autumn (5m 28s): Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's awesome. And like I said, I think you're, I want to talk a little bit about diversity in Fantasy, but I also want to talk about, you know, is really, I mean, I see this a lot more it's on the page Turner awards, I've seen a recent podcast. I think I've got an email somewhere like, Oh, was it last year? Maybe we were all just cooped up until we were all thinking of, you know, Fantasy and cinema and game of Thrones. And so everyone's sitting at home going, I could do that to, so it seems like there's idea in this energy about Pitching stories to Hollywood. So this is this really a thing. Do you think there is an uptick and people being interested or an up tick in even Hollywood considering this for people?
Stephen (6m 11s): I think it it's always been there. I think that there's a now, especially with the, a boatload of streaming services in niche programming, you know, influencer's on the internet and tech talk and all of those different things. I think that there's a, there's a bitter, there's a people are starting to believe that there's not all of these gatekeepers. Right. And they were still arguing papers. And I actually am someone who has a mixed feeling about gatekeepers themselves, because I honestly think that you need them to a certain extent, but I also have run into a great deal of gatekeepers. You don't know what they're doing a whole.
Stephen (6m 51s): So it's one of those things where it's a difficult process to try and parse out what's what's needed to do not. So I think that there's a lot of opportunity for people to do things, but at the same time, the, the audience is a lot more fragmented. So the idea that you are going to right something, and it will immediately become a game of Thrones. It is, that's a complete misnomer that's there, that's, that's the, you know, the trifecta that's, you know, ah, you know, somebody who came down and sprinkle some fairy dust on UW, along with, ya know, talent hard-work and being in the right place at the right time. But I do think that people have a lot more opportunity to do their own thing.
Stephen (7m 32s): There is a lot of self publishing. There is a lot of people who I So published five books because I'm a, I don't with publishers for about a year and a half. And I actually pitched my series that Nickelodeon before I even had the books, cause I came up with about a year, but I, I realized that ah, the publishing industry is changing. And it's, to be honest with you, in my opinion, on the publishing and your district is kind of dead. The, the big publishers are really, they are, they based their model now really off of tentpole properties, which is similar to what's happening in movies with things like Marvel and stuff like that. And because of that, there's a lot less space for smaller people to be successful.
Stephen (8m 18s): If you term success, as lots of people read your book and you make money. So I think its, but I do think that there is a lot of opportunity there, but it's also as difficult to get yourself known just because there is so much more, you know, there's so much more going on in the business. And actually you had mentioned a page for rewards and that's one thing that I like about them it's that there are kind of small when they are the ones who were pushing me originally a to, to, to judge their awards. But they seem to have a better opportunity for smaller, for smaller people just because they were a smaller and they are also based in London where as the us, it's just an extremely hard park and to get in.
Stephen (8m 60s): But I think if you're, you know, if you persevere and you know the industry and you do all of this stuff and you work hard, do everything for you mainly do it for you and then home and then also, you know, look out for your audience. And that can take you a lot of places in a lot of different ways. And a lot of that is just, I, I don't wanna say it's luck because they don't really believe in a lot. I believe that things happen for a reason. So I think things will happen for you for a reason if you're in the right head space.
Autumn (9m 30s): Oh, I like the sound of that though. So it's, it's not impossible. And I agree. I had originally thought of like the trying to sell your script to Hollywood or even one of the Netflix or HBO. It sort of like, you know, trying to pitch to these brick and mortar publisher, as you know, there are still gatekeepers who need to know the manuscript and how they look at it and what you need to do before you get there. If you want to have any chance of success. I mean the idea of just sending it off to somebody and they're gonna fall in love with it. And the next thing you know, you're going to be the next George RR Martin and knowing the fact that he had 30, 40 years of experience before getting to game of Thrones and he had been writing it for how many years. I think it's like seven years for each book.
Autumn (10m 11s): So he was working on this a long time. He was overnight success story was about 40 years ago.
Stephen (10m 18s): Yeah. His overnight success story is George R R Martin. You know, if he were a normal person, he could be retired right now, but I just thought, you know, so there they are just now working on the, they just went into a development in pre production on the, on the prequel series for game of Thrones, which I think is about how we start Gary. And, and, but you know, now all of that is, you know, because of COVID, all of the, all of our production is shut down, but that's our, it's a massive endeavor and they never would have taken something like that on when they first, you know, when they first came up with game of Thrones, obviously HBO has money. But if you watch the first episode of game of Thrones or even the first season, and you look at the amount of effects you used, or if you take a look at where it was shot, you know, Northern Ireland, it places like that plays to set up a production incentives, they didn't spend nearly as much money as you think that they did.
Stephen (11m 10s): Not that they didn't spend a lot of money in our terms, but look at that compared to st the last season where they are just throwing money left and right, you know, there's, you know, boatloads, you know, the, the dragons are killer. You know, if the dragons are a calendar on the wall and all that stuff, but if you, if you actually watched the, you know, the first season, you can tell that the budget pretty much tripled a quadruple between the first season at the last season, only because it was a hit. If there wasn't, you know, if there wasn't a hit, when people didn't resonate with it and HBO had not pushed, it, it, it would have very easily gone, you know, gone away pretty quickly. And, and I think that it could even be said it was something like the Harry, even though a period Potter or for example, was a great as a book, she watched the first movie vs the last movie.
Stephen (11m 57s): The movie is actually quite M, it's a little rough and a it's a little, M, it, it it's a little choppy, a it's a, it's still a great movie, but they didn't know how big of a success it would be. And then you can see the progression of not only budget, but also the willingness to put it in more, more behind the scenes from a, from a technical standpoint and also from a, from a talent standpoint.
Autumn (12m 22s): Yeah. I have noticed that maybe, I don't think I've ever really noticed it with Harry Potter in game of Thrones, but it was a huge supernatural fan. And I recently, for whatever reasons to watch watched, like the first series again, and then you compare that even till the graphics and just the effects of the last 15, I can't remember what, which ones that you hit 14 or 15 in a row season's. And it was like, wow, this changed a heck of a lot. And not just because of the actors aged 15 years.
Stephen (12m 54s): Absolutely. And you can, you can see that in something like one of my favorites, because I am a geek is the Mandalorian. And, you know, if you take a look at that and just, you know, on Disney plus and watch Mandalorian and see the, the amount of, of the amount of effort that's put in, in specifically with a second set, extensions in the chicken to check out the documentary's on the Mandalorian and just be amazed and what they do technologically M to create a non green screen environments, you know, but with advances in technology and in, in video walls and led walls and that type of thing, right. It's pretty amazing. But even if you look at the Mandalorian and the, one of the things that I like about it is is that it's, it's, it's an ethic star Wars movie, but yet in reality, it's a much smaller than that.
Stephen (13m 41s): I think the story is better served by less expansiveness and more telling the story of the character in sort of a tighter environments. And you get the expansiveness of star Wars without necessarily having to be a gigantic movie. And then I think people have seen now the difference between what you can do specifically on a, something like a television series versus star Wars, the, the latest, the schools, the DNC, which I actually really enjoy, but the Mandalorian is something very different and they go into it with a very specific storytelling style about this character as oppose to, we have to, ya know, encompass this massive university, as opposed to what they bring in small elements, their fans know.
Stephen (14m 29s): And that's part of the reason why it's popular or is it because, Oh, I saw that, you know, thing or whatever it is, and, you know, an object or something like that in the original star Wars film, which we knew it was a complete throw away because it was a prompt that somebody made for a scene. And then, you know, John Fabro will bring it into a, the Mandalorian and they'll be like, Oh my gosh. So that's one of those things, you know, and it, you know, we realize that actually a nice maker, but in, in the, you know, in the Mandalorian. So it's an actual, it's an ice cream maker anyway, sorry. I can kick out of that fact sheet. So anyway, I'm, I'm rambling, please continue.
Autumn (15m 3s): Oh, well that's okay. That's why it's so interesting. And it actually, that's a really good point. So if you were thinking that, you know, this is something that you just really, it's got to be something that's on your bucket list, so you're going to go for it. Should you think, as a writer a about the scope and scale of your story, that if you do want it to have it, do you know, pitch it to have it turned into a movie or a series like Epic FANTASY like we were saying, and even science fiction, these have a lot of elements and Magic, this is a CGI effects. I do you want to try to minimize that? Would it make any difference? You know, as somebody who could look at it and say, Oh, do you know what? We can come up with this and keep the budget low, or you're looking at the 20 dragons and all this other stuff.
Autumn (15m 43s): And you're like, Oh no, no, no.
Stephen (15m 44s): So like, that's probably going to be about $20 million per Episode. I don't think it's, I don't think it's necessary. I don't think it's necessary to do either. What I do think is that your, your vision of your story's your story, but it's something on a printed page. Books are written very differently than screenplays. The screenplays are always about showing, not telling and books. You can have a lot of background, a lot of dialogue, a lot of you, you can even, you know, you can have a narration, you can have a, you know, an over arching Narrator or if you're, you were doing it in first person voice.
Stephen (16m 24s): But I, I thought process is the same. If you were going to write something like that, right. At the way you want it, but also with an eye towards what the visuals would be. And then with regards to the scope, I think the scope has unlimited books, but I think its important for you to understand if you truly want to turn this into a television series or a movie that the vision that you have in your book is going to be radically different or very different than what you would normally expect to see on screen simply because of budgets in that type of things. So in other words, they always say, don't be afraid to kill your children. And I believe as a child in screenwriting and basically applies as well in the sense that if you've got this really awesome, you know, ethics seen with, you know, 30 Dragon's and you know, when a guy and his sor and a guy and the sword and you know, in whenever you have going on, chances are good.
Stephen (17m 19s): That will probably be cut down. The funny thing about filmmaking vs Writing is, is that with limitations, as you have a much more, you have an opportunity to create story based on those limitations. And sometimes that's much more fun if you, if you're limited and you say, Hey, I want to shoot a dragon. You know, I'm going to show you the dragon blowing up a wall and they're like, well, you can't really do that. How do you tell the story with the characters without that element? In other words, that's a set piece, but that's not character. So how do you do that? One of the things I think they did really well and game of Thrones, a for the most part was they created the dragons as characters, but really the reason that they're sold that way, it's because they are a M, they are an extension of denarius target, Ariens personality, right?
Stephen (18m 11s): So in other words, they're not really dragons they're, they're not pets, they're on their own thing, but they're really based on her personality and specifically on Emilia Clarke's acting as to how she treats them. And you know, what a good rule of thumb is of that is if you just go back to literally star Wars and I'm the empire strikes back. And one of the things that, you know, Hilda doesn't work and less Mark Hamill is a really good actor because he was basically acting like it with a puppet. And you don't believe that he was alive until Mark Hamill, as the actor gives you permission to believe that he is. So if you actually watch those scenes, you could see that he's acting opposite a puppet.
Stephen (18m 55s): And even though a Frank Oz is amazing, it is still a puppet, you know? And so its one of those things where you have to, if you're thinking things from a filmmaking standpoint, you have to visually understand that if you create an or correct character or whatever it is, even if that character is even if that character is a relatively minor, there is still an extension of the skillset of the person who is acting opposite of them. If that makes sense.
Autumn (19m 22s): Oh, that makes sense. And it it's one of those, you know, it was the combination of the script and the actor and eventually the CGI effects and it's all of these things together that really make it come alive. And that's, what's kind of cool and this is what I like that. But even about Writing, it's not just the Author is how the reader take the author's words and creates their own story in their mind. And it's the combination of the two that creates the Magic. So it's the same thing with Hollywood but a little bit different. And you were talking though about, you know, the Writing so is it something like that? Would you have a screenplay at hand or can you just have a book and should it be a best selling book or can you just have so much faith in yourself that you decided you're going to pitch it and I guess maybe write the screenplay.
Autumn (20m 7s): I mean, do you need to do those things?
Stephen (20m 9s): So I guess the answer is yes, there are, there really is. No, there is no cut and dried sort of method. My thought process is, is if you have a book and you want to, you know, sell it as a film or as a film, et cetera, et cetera, that you create a really excellent treatment. So in other words, when you write your book, write that first of all right, an amazing book, know your craft. There's a lot of people who say that they are writers and they are not, I'm a children's picture book writer. And everybody thinks that, you know, grandma's in their basement, crime goes out everyday, but the bottom line is there actually our rules and ways that are written, you have to understand the rules publishing specifically if you wanted it on paper and the word count on with all of that.
Stephen (20m 58s): So there's just the, the rules. And then there is the actual writing of Story. So Writing in my case, Writing a picture book. Doesn't really writing a book. Writing a picture book, his understanding what the pictures are on your mind and understanding what the layout of the book is. And then also creating M language and sealing that, that equates to what you were trying to do, but also understanding who your audience. So I don't. So writing a picture book was a little different, but know your craft. I mean, I've written, I don't read a lot of, I can't remember how many books that I've read from the main screen, the screen Turner or award thing. Right? The first chapter is that I want to say over a a hundred books, which I didn't realize that that's what I was signing up for it at the top of the weekend of it was due.
Stephen (21m 44s): I was like, Oh, I have to read all of this stuff. And I'm, I can tell what's in the first paragraph with it or not, I'm going to read the rest of it. And I had to be pretty draconian a about basically going, I don't have time to read all of this stuff, M it, if you didn't grab me and the first paragraph, and I'm not going to read you a first chapter and if I'm not gonna read your first chapter, that I'm not going to read your book, so know your craft and it has to be very loving and very exacting and it is not an easy thing to do for a writer. And so I get it. I understand that. And having written books, I understand how it difficult to do, but again, like I said, don't be afraid to kill your children because it really is not just about unfortunately, the entire book on premise it's, it's about, it can be about just a couple of words and you can agonize over a couple or three words or one sentence or the structure of the character for days.
Stephen (22m 37s): And it could change as you continued write the book. So, but my advice for people who don't necessarily read scripts, because it's a bit of a different Writing muscle for me, first of all, is something very important to do if you want to do so, but it's a a, but to definitely have a treatment because you know, because I need a synopsis. So if you were going to hand this to me and I have 10 minutes to look at it, what do you want me to know? And it's not going to be that I have. And I don't know in 10 minutes, I'm not going to read you a 300 page book. I just don't have the time. You know, so a good, you know, these are the types of characters. This is the world. This is a, what I'm trying to do with this or something along the, the line of the eye of, of where you see it going.
Stephen (23m 22s): So whether or not you have a big world, one book, or whether you see it as a series of 5,000, allow the person who's reading the work. Hopefully if they're actually good to see where your world can go, because sometimes your world will be going completely different directions. And if you would never, M never think of that. Someone could take out that someone could take it or they could say, I just don't get it. You know, or how is this any different from X or whatever. And you need to be able to answer those questions. You don't necessarily need to put writing a treatment as helpful. WRITING an excellent logline. A logline is simply one or two sentences that literally tells me everything I need to know about the book that makes me want to read more M.
Stephen (24m 6s): So if you could summarize your work in two sentences and make somebody want to read it, that's a pretty good start,
Autumn (24m 13s): But would it be an excellent if we could do that, it would be probably all selling and tons of books. So it's telling you we should work on no matter what. It's good to have it.
Stephen (24m 21s): And that's what I'm currently doing for page sugar. So I'd get to get the pitch by several people tomorrow, you know, in my next webinars. So anyways, so that the first thing that I've taught in the first session was how to write a good logline. And again, you can write a lot. You can look that up on the net, it's not, this is confidential information, but thinking of it, actually sit down and do it. And then my other pieces of advice, if you truly want to write screenplays, and you're not certain about condensing, your book is find your favorite TV show, break it down, which is basically list out, you know, list your favorite episode and listen to it, you know, the best the scene and what's going on in the scenes and then write your favorites, right? A spec script of your favorite TV show.
Stephen (25m 2s): And that will be very difficult very quickly when you realize how difficult that is. If you define a script to have it online, you can see how, how shows are broken down, learning the story. Again, it's learning in your class. So they're learning the structure. Is it a three act structure? If it's a sit-com it's normally it's normally three X, but it's two, two story lines, a and B storyline in our long it's a, B and C storylines. Or for that matter, if you wanted to write a screenplay M then go rewrite a screenplay, you know, go rewrite the godfather. So you see how it was broken down. We really do your research. You know, books are about research.
Stephen (25m 43s): So you have to study your craft and you don't necessarily need to go to film school to do it, but there are writing is writing and it's, it's not, but that's very helpful for you to get into the mindset of what people are looking for from a script standpoint.
Autumn (26m 1s): Yeah, I am sure it is a, it would really help you. If you want to do this, it would probably give you that edge of knowing, you know, what, how to do the writing and what has historically been done and how you put that into production and sort of the way you've immersed yourself into it all these years, you know, so much more that, you know, the things that you've probably forgotten or more than most people are just trying to get into those even realized. So yeah,
Stephen (26m 25s): Sure. Yes. Well just, just, just writing your book has only the first step. I'd hate to tell you. I wish I wish there wasn't, but basically the writing your book is literally step number one of about, you know, I, and I don't try to discourage anybody, but the farther along you can get yourself before you get in front of somebody to pitch or get that brake, you know, that you have been waiting for for however long and in whatever form will put you so much farther ahead than just someone who's like, I wrote a great book. You should read it. I dunno why its not a TV show. It's like, well with an attitude like that, I'm immediately going to tell you, you know,
Autumn (27m 3s): It just makes sense. Yeah, no it's appreciating that it is a lot of hard work and putting that effort in so that your you're also ready for that success when it comes, you know, I always think it helps to have a few books on your belt and maybe a platform built before you do hit that stratosphere because then you're going to have more to support you. And you're not going to be maybe a one shot wonder or something. I'd rather have this as a long-term career. Yeah, well I,
Stephen (27m 30s): So we worked with a, a group briefly that they had created, speaking of FANTASY they had created a podcast and they are on Patrion. And I can't, to be honest with you, I can't remember the name that's just a couple of years ago, but they, I had a friend of mine who was a big fan of their podcast. It was pretty popular on from patriarchy standpoints M and it was a tee, it was basically a Dungeons and dragons, but it was, they had created some very, very good characters within the world of Dungeons and dragons and Dungeons and dragons is a different ball game because it's, it's really more of an over-arching sing. It's not necessarily like, Oh, you have to get the rights to Dungeons and dragons.
Stephen (28m 10s): However, I would double check that, but basically works exist, et cetera, et cetera, in other words. But I think they have a whole storyline and they would do these three hour podcasts. And so they were, you know, and then they were for a couple of years, so they had a ton of material and I'm like, okay, well this is really great. But the first thing we need to do is figure out, you know, who the characters are in their world. And also I need some, I can't do three years' worth of podcasts in a movie. We need to come up with a storyline, et cetera, et cetera. But the thing that it was interesting, then it fell apart was that each of the people who contributed, so there were like four or five of them, they were doing this just kind of for fun. But then when something like this actually came along and there was some interest suddenly they were all in fighting with each other about who will watch, who owned, you know, which character who had created sort of the overarching world, et cetera, et cetera, at which point, if you're going to go to anybody in the industry, they're going to want you to have that button down because I'm not, its not my job to figure out, you know, between the five of you who owns the rights to all of this stuff.
Stephen (29m 14s): And so they ended up in fighting and I don't even think they do the podcast anymore. So, you know, so its one of those things where its like, Oh, you actually have the opportunity. You are not prepared for the opportunity. So, you know, and so again, it's like you said, it's not just a matter of being a good writer. It's also understanding all, everything that goes into when the opportunity comes, are you actually prepared for it? Whether it be success are whether it be more of hard work are whether it, some Schmidt are like me basically saying this is really great, but you know, can we change this order to a fluffy rabbet and then, you know, New York is supposed to be a fluffy rabbit or maybe you'd go, no, it's not a floppy rabbit. It's an ORC and its which, and in which case we move on to the next executive.
Stephen (29m 56s): So yeah.
Autumn (29m 59s): Well that sounds exciting. And the one thing that it caught my attention to is you had mentioned before that the movie studios seem to be, I mean, it definitely seems like there are just doing remakes of a well-written avatar two and it was the whole Marvel series. Everything's sort of stuff that has been tried and true and they know it's going to be worth the budget. So do you think if you right in something that's more cutting edge, would that then push you to look more at Netflix or HBO? Or do you think you could try to sell that to movies or do you think most of them in the authors are better looking at like the TV series?
Stephen (30m 35s): I'm you know what I am, I'm a big fan of TV series, mainly because I think that there's more room for Story, you know, the, the, my biggest concern about the films right now, although I actually just heard a very interesting story on NPR yesterday because of COVID right now, blockbusters are dead. M mainly because they can, they currently can't be maid and they really need a massive, a, you know, a box office presence. So in order to make their money back or to make the money and so on, and that was in the case for a week, that's been in case for a while, but now even more so in a time of COVID and they just pulled the latest James Bond movie in there pushing it until the next year because people can't get into theaters.
Stephen (31m 20s): And so, and they are literally they're the largest state or change in the world is now a closing down all of their theaters until the next year with a few exceptions So so one thing about TV that's great right now you can make films for TV But content right now with regards to large block, that gesture while they were preparing for the end have COVID and the resumption of production. Stuff's starting to go towards smaller fare now towards indie fair, but something that you can actually stick on a Netflix, et cetera, et cetera. And with regards to actually Pitching to Netflix, M, it's kind of a mixed bag or a Netflix is an interesting organization and like all streaming services.
Stephen (32m 1s): They've got a lot of the competition, but Netflix is a model is to actually cancel series after two or three seasons maximum, unless it's a massively popular. And they do that for a couple of reasons. Number one, it's about cost. So in the industry, when something starts becoming a successful, the people that are attached to it, the actors, et cetera, et cetera, start getting paid more money. The second thing is is, and so once it starts becoming successful, a cost of production goes up. The second thing is, is the Netflix likes to keep it fresh. So I'm actually looking at my neck's Netflix, Paige, right? I don't have time to do much of anything, let alone constantly be on their flip side, which I, I wish I did.
Stephen (32m 46s): And you know, but they're, they are, they're interested in refreshing their content over and over. And also if you have something that's a lie, you get it on Netflix, that it doesn't necessarily mean immediate success in the sense that sometimes it's either too niche or your not getting enough viewers is based on what their algorithm is. So and nobody knows what their algorithm is, because if you knew that they'd had to kill you, they don't, you know, but they were successful shows and there was one show. I want to say it in Norway, M that figured out that you have social media channels and that type of thing at believe it was a Fantasy show I believe is about Vikings or something where they cracked kind of the Netflix algorithm to get enough people to watch it and enough sort of buzz around social media and stuff, where they managed to get a cup of our seasons out of that, as opposed to a Netflix was going to cancel it after one season.
Stephen (33m 41s): So there's a lot of different things to do it. So Hey, go for the Netflix thing if you can. But I wouldn't, I wouldn't call it a Netflix. The panacea have, Oh my God. If I get it on Netflix, I have arrived because I think that there are other ways there's other platforms, but also you are most likely not, not going to be able to pitch directly to Netflix anyways, because they are very, because everybody wants to be, you know, so
Autumn (34m 6s): Yes. And this is something that, you know, Author is, this is something like when you do book publishing, you need an agent and you do this and that. Or is that something that literally, if you're a single person and you're just determined to take this route and do the work and learn the stuff you can do it on your own or do you, or is it really helpful to go get an agent and let them do the hard work?
Stephen (34m 26s): Sure. So again, the disappointing answer, unfortunately to everybody is yes to both of them. So I think that, that, you know, I have, I have an agent right now that's specifically for children's media. And I know these people that I do a lot of corporate work for Mattel toys. So I, so I know these people and work in these areas and they, you know, I just had a bit of a disappointment with the Magic poop because just of timing. And so they, they are very much in my corner or in a very small agency, a And, but they're still, you know, pushing me, but still I had to do a ton of work on my own so much so that I, I just signed another, another first look, deal with another woman.
Stephen (35m 13s): Who's a producer who might be more likely to get it off, to get it going I'm. And I also have a, of all people Quiana, Reed's a sister looking at it. So she has her own production company. So it's still a matter of yeah, but I'm S I, myself personally, am still planning the payment that doesn't make any, any more special than in any of your listeners. It just makes me as someone who is pounded the pavement. So I think with regards to the agents, you are going to find that, and then I had friends who are in the award winning screenwriters, who have agents who, who can get their agent to call them back. So I think having an, having an agent is up to me, its almost like a M it's almost like saying, you know, I have a cool, you know, I have a magic post in my closet, which is, it gives you more street cred, but ultimately doing it on your own isn't it is, is mainly what you are going to do anyways.
Stephen (36m 7s): And if you're talking about traditional publishing even more so traditional publishers are really, it's really difficult to break in traditional publishing wise. And so I think if you can get an agent as a self published person, that's fantastic, but you are also going to need to do a lot of the legwork yourself. I'm if you can get one great 'cause it's always great to have contacts, but my thought process is also think of non traditional avenues towards getting to work out their so for example, in my book, the Magic Poof is it that a little African American girl with, with, with Magic Hare a and I spent a lot of time going to African-American hair shows.
Stephen (36m 51s): I am not African-American or do I have African American here? Although you probably have more knowledge about it than most people who actually are African-American at this point. But yeah, I was the only male a and the only I'm a Caucasian person at African-American hair shows for several years and people would come up to me and go, why the hell are you here? And I would say, you know, and it's only after they see the work that they doc got it, but that was a non traditional way of getting my work out there. That would That I don't see that most people wouldn't do. So if you have something that's got some sort of twist or if you have something that its difficult with FANTASY in general, depending on what you're, but there are non-traditional ways of getting your stuff out there, you know, and some people have on the pavement is some people go to Comicon and literally just be standing outside and they were handing out condoms.
Stephen (37m 44s): There are handing out comic books to people, you know, or, or that type of thing. 'cause you just don't know if you don't know who you are going to meet, but also you don't know how you are going to create a fandom on it. It really is up to you to create your own fandom, even though there are other ways, you know, there's agent's and that type of thing. Yeah.
Autumn (38m 4s): I think one of the most honest posts, internet of things I'd ever read on, even marketing was like, what I did was I wrote down 10 ideas at every day and I would try them, I'd cross them off. And eventually one of them worked and that's how I got to where I am today. And I'm like, yeah. And that's pretty much sums up how it really does work is not follow these exact steps and they will work for you. It is come up with a crap load of them. And one of them will eventually work for you.
Stephen (38m 32s): There is, there is absolutely no spoon there, there really isn't there to go to the matrix. There is a, there's a lot of steps you can take. And there are things you can do to better prepare yourself for success or to create more success. But at the same time, there is a, it's a lot of trial and error based on exactly, you know, exactly what you're creating. And if you truly love what you're creating and your doing it for you, then none of that stuff will make a difference. And ultimately, ultimately it'll find its audience one way or another, depending on what you do. And it, and it's also cyclical with regards to trans in the industry. I mean, for the longest time, you know, back, I don't know how many years now I'm probably dating myself, but whenever Twilight was popular, which of course, you know, trust me, I saw it the first movie a try, right.
Stephen (39m 23s): And I'm not a huge fan of it, but I know it, it was a huge thing. And then if you notice in Hollywood after Twilight happened, you got about 30 vampire spin-offs, you know, mostly in the young adult space in between space, but you know, but now vampires are dead, but now she's coming out with a new thing and I get the feeling of vampires. So we'll be on it again, you know? So it's just a, it's a knowing the industry and knowing where things are going right now, people have been looking for the next game of Thrones for like, since game of Thrones ended, you know, and you have something like the Witcher, which is on Netflix M and then that you have weird sort of hybrid things like stranger things and, and sort of everything in between, but you also have something called that's called Enola homes, which is basically a take on Sherlock Holmes with yeah.
Stephen (40m 15s): Which is, which is very sweet. And, but it's also, but it's also, as you're still taking a genre, you know, you're taking Sherlock Holmes, which has been around since the 18 hundreds and your, your putting in a new twist on it. It, you know, and so that there's all these different ways of doing. It just depends on what you're writing my thought process because I'm happy, you know, because I enjoy a diversity in that type of thing is tell me how your story is different from everything else, while at the same time, how I can relate to it based on, you know, stuff that I like, you know? And so that's how the world or character is.
Stephen (40m 57s): Right, right, right. Exactly. If you have another take on star Trek, M, that's cool, but that's, you are not going to get that nailed at the moment. 'cause they just canceled all of the movies. So, you know, if they're there, they're going back to the television show. So it's, it's, it's a, it's a line, it's a, it's a line, it's a M, but it's a fun one because if you really into genre M and there are certain genres that you really like and cross over and that type of thing, there is definitely a market for its just a question of, you know, what it is and where and where you want to take it.
Autumn (41m 29s): Oh, that sounds really cool. So just out of curiosity, is there like the small vanity publishers that are, you know, pay us a whole bunch of money and will go and will, will produce your books for you? I mean, do you publishing do any of these publishers and do they ever, or a production companies come in and actually approach other people? I mean, if someone did that to you run screaming for instance, just out there yet.
Stephen (41m 56s): I think that, so there's a lot of companies that offer that I had self published through a company called ex Libras, which is actually an imprint of penguin publishing and they're actually, we are taught by a penguin. I did that whole rout. So I'll, I'll be the first ones to say that I have spent more than my own fair share of my own money on those things. I, I don't see a lot of value in them because 95% of the time they'll blow a lot of, I mean, I attended a conference about that and say, Oh, you're gonna make your shoulder into a movie. And this was before I even knew everything that I knew, I et cetera, et cetera. And I made some good contacts, but I wouldn't say, I would say I spent a lot of money and there's a lot of people there who just, frankly, shouldn't be there in the sense that people that are writers or whatever.
Stephen (42m 43s): It's two who aren't necessarily professionals who are trying to, who are trying to get into the dream if you will, without understanding the process. So I'm, I'm not completely against doing that, but I think if you're going to spend the money on something like that, like a conference or something like that, I absolutely think pitch fests are great. Not necessarily because you're gonna get picked up tomorrow, but because it gives you the experience of what Pitching actually is. And also you'll be amazed at the people you meet out there who have similar stories to yours, or you'll get inspired by, you know, somebody else's book or whatever. And so I think, you know, getting picked up at a pitch Fest is probably much less likely than they would want you to believe, but I would encourage people to do with not necessarily For to, to make that happen, but more along the lines have to meet people to network because networking is key and to grow and to understand the process because I can talk about Pitching all day, but until you are actually sitting in front of somebody who literally here is 30 pinches a day, or how were they catch you before lunch M and his trying to do all of the different things.
Stephen (43m 59s): It it's a nerve racking thing and you need that. You need, you know, you, you need to understand that you have my attention for approximately 30 seconds, even though I told you it's three minutes. So if you can pitch me in 30 seconds or more likely, and about 10 that are actually willing to listen to everything else, you have to say, that's a really good skillset because it also helps you with writing, right?
Autumn (44m 23s): No, I think, you know, it's, it's literally getting involved in a meshed and immersed in it and honing your skill and that's so important. And you're also making me feel good that I got you to come on the podcast. So you never know when you send that email. So I am, so I appreciate it. Oh, and before we go, we've been doing this for awhile, but I love, like I mentioned, I really into diversity, I think FANTASY is, is always had these trends of embracing diversity. I mean, for a while we were what Conan the barbarian. But since then in modern day it's FANTASY is beautiful. And I, like I mentioned, I love the pictures on your website, the magic Poof and I mean, I read that how you came up with that.
Autumn (45m 5s): We were working on our loved ones hair and it came up with this idea that this magic hair and all of the things a little heroin gets into it's just so much fun. So do you think that's, that is a strong trend of Fantasy. Is that one of the brilliant things about it? And do you think I'm, I know there was a current chin of like appropriation. Do you ever worry that someone is going to come up to you and say, well, why did you write this? But it sounds like you didn't have that experience and you have a good answer.
Stephen (45m 31s): Yeah. I think, I think it's always a, so my thing has always been, I am very aware of the eye, the need for diversity in character, but also then need to understand other people's stories. My thing is, is that as someone who's sort of a, you know, I'm, I'm from Phoenix, Arizona, and I'm kind of a traditional white guy, but I'm really not a traditional white guy. My, you know, my grandmother is from Mexico. So we used to have, to my ways that, you know, we used to have tamales at Christmas. So, you know, everyone else has a hand, we had tamales, then it was just kind of like, this is really make that much difference to me, but in Phoenix for the most part, and up until now, when I was little kid who was pretty, you know, pretty, pretty light.
Stephen (46m 15s): My thing is is that if you're going to write diversity and your not necessarily considered my thing is is that everybody is different. Right? So, but the theme of my books is everybody feels different. So regardless, so I've always felt different because I'm a, I'm not a very large person. I'm kind of a, you know, I'm not, I'm not an athlete. I'm kind of a short, skinny geeky dude, you know? And so, you know, so its one of those things where I always felt different in my own skin and for many different reasons. And so I came at it from that standpoint because I can't talk about your experience as an African-American person growing up in an inner city, city, Detroit, because it's not my experience if you want to write about somebody like that.
Stephen (47m 1s): But my suggestion is that you actually talk to somebody, talk to somebody about that. But what I would say about diversity is first of all, fantasy and sci-fi, I have always been, you know, great vehicles for telling diverse stories that are a wink and a nod to, you know, current cultural issues. You know, I mean you can go back to, you know, episodes of, again, I'm dating myself, but star Trek the next generation where they are literally talking about same-sex, you know, but there are not talking about same sex marriage, you know, it's an Episode. So I think its a little bit more blatant now and there's a lot of opportunity for Story, but my suggestion is, is include diversity.
Stephen (47m 44s): But don't assume that you tell it from the perspective of, this is a, a character who is African-American, but they are African, but they're not a token African-American person or your trying to pretend like you grew up in the inner city of Chicago because you didn't M there there's everybody has all characters have there's there's a much deeper thing going on with, with human beings, especially in the current time of COVID that affects everybody and it may affect everybody differently, but there is still a universal of human truths that make sense, two people that come out and characters.
Stephen (48m 26s): And then you overlay on top of that, the sort of diversity angle, if you will, or the idea that we also need to take into account these people's backgrounds. So if I were going to write a show about it, I actually do have a script about it's called the X, the X expatriate. And it's about, well, that's really not. And these current times it's probably not that on timely, but basically someone who is born in the United States, who then it gets based on new laws gets repatriated to Brazil. And so it was a Brazilian, an American repatriated to a place he has never known. So again, it's just a, its a fish out of water story. But at the same time, there was a very real aspect of sending somebody two completely different culture and then not knowing it, even though the color of their skin dictates that they're part of a culture.
Stephen (49m 13s): So I think if you are going to do that type of thing, do your research partner up with people who have more background and information on it than you do, but also make it much more in-depth than I am. Some, you know, w whatever their background is is like John was, you know, it was actually raised on a Lakota, an Indian reservation, you know, and it's like, that's a really nice surface piece, but I don't really like, how does that affect John's overall view of the world? And that's what I'm interested in. It, I'm not interested in just the fact that we've laid on a background as a character and the assumption that the audience, then it goes, Oh, well, if he was raised on to a coded reservation than an, obviously he must be some sort of spiritual Sean and tight because he was raised with Eric and, you know, with native Americans, it's like, no, I want to see if you're going to, if you're going to do a diversity, which I think is totally needed, then do it in a way that transcends just surface level cultural norms or stereotypes or stereotypes,
Autumn (50m 16s): The native American, always a wise Sharman is, you know, it's been done. We can move a line.
Stephen (50m 21s): Yeah. Right, exactly. So in other words, in my, you know, in my book series and Magic group, for example, if the little girl me to learn, and it's not that she, she feels different because she's got Magic hair, but she also feels different because of like somewhat of a bitch because of the color of her skin. But mainly it's because she feels different because of who she is. And so, as I can speak to the color of her skin, based on that, I can make reference to it in a way that is helpful for people to understand, but really the, the, the element is about being feeling different. And I can feel that way. 'cause because as you know, I can understand Boeing because I was bullied when I was little, I can understand feeling different because I felt different when I was little, you know, and that type of thing.
Stephen (51m 5s): Does that make sense?
Autumn (51m 7s): No, it does. I love that because it brought up that idea of the iceberg. I mean, what people see on the surface, especially, I feel, I think we can still have lunch together, but yeah, it was just what people see when they look at me. I always find so hilarious because it's not who I internally see myself or all the depths of me is that iceberg tip people see that little iceberg and they are thinking, this is what you are. And for me, I think a lot of people who love the fantasy and sci-fi genre, it's not even close. It's just the surface.
Stephen (51m 36s): Right. And then in my thought process is also, again, if people are going to be writing about diversity, then you have to either partner up with, with those that are diverse or, you know, do your research in a way. I was very careful, you know, you mentioned cultural appropriation.
Autumn (51m 52s): No, no. I love to read. I went to the shows. Yeah.
Stephen (51m 55s): Yeah. I mean, I it's like I, you know, I didn't just sort of sit around and go, I think I'm going to write it a little bit. That a little African-American girl I wrote, I did that. And then I M, you know, I know one of the leaders of black lives matter and, you know, set a date with academics and, you know, and it's that doesn't make me, you know, that doesn't make me a hero of, you know, African American people by any stretch of the imagination. But the point was, was simply for me to understand, you know, I, I learned so much about culture and that I didn't necessarily know based on my own background. And it was important to know that because when that question gets thrown to you, you have an answer as opposed to, Oh, well, I'd just put it in a, you know, whatever an African-American character or an Asian character, or, you know, or whatever.
Stephen (52m 42s): It's a great read, a manga comic. That's a really, really cool, but if you're not in Japanese and your not full time, and you're not fully versed in the culture, then you should probably talk to some people and get an understanding as to why manga is so important in Japanese culture. And there was a reason why it's important in Japanese culture. Japanese culture is traditionally a much more, you know, much more stayed and less public with their emotions. Manga is a way for people to express their emotions in a way they wouldn't normally do it in a society that is considered a much more buttoned up if you will. And that's changing now with, with generations. But, you know, if you look at some manga stuff like that, some of that stuff is pretty intense, you know, and there is.
Stephen (53m 25s): So it's a very immersing yourself and the culture of what you're writing and employing allies in that culture, I think is critical if you, if you want to hit the diversity angle, but also there's diversity in whatever it is in your own background. You know? So again, like I said, my paternal grandmother is from Mexico. We didn't really discuss it that much. It wasn't really that big of a thing, but it's like having tamales at Christmas. And, you know, my dad's trying to teach me Spanish when we were little and me going, I don't understand what I need to know Spanish, you know? And it's like, you know, unfortunately I don't know it, but it just really, you know, finding the diversity in your own culture or speaks to in your own background, it doesn't even have to be cultural is, is a thread that weaves through any story that works for everybody, not just for, you know, one specific person it's about the story and the characters and less ed D the cultural influences are an overlay to your people, you know, in your stories
Autumn (54m 24s): That, that makes total sense. I love it. It's a very beautiful, and it does make sense. I mean, we should all have, at least if it's not authentic, that it's who we are. And then it's at least authentic two that we did the, we did the that's a street cred. We went and did the research. We talk to the Real people. We had them look at it and we weren't trying to hide it, or our staff and, you know, Barry at somewhere.
Stephen (54m 46s): Sure, exactly. I mean, so I mean, a good example would be someone like if there was a person who was close to Martin Luther King jr. Who was white and, you know, wrote a screenplay or a book or something, well, more than like, even though they were wired, if they were travelling around with Martin Luther King jr. And actually new the guy, I will be much more likely to read their script as opposed to someone who is like an African-American person who was like, Oh, I've wrote a story about that Martin Luther King jr. It's like, well, but this guy has more, you know, this person actually knew him. You know, like I want to have a person is, so this person, in my opinion is more experienced. Now he might hit up somebody who is an executive, or it would be like, ah, because there's backlash, of course.
Stephen (55m 29s): And you have to be mindful of it without being negative about it, but you have to be mindful of it, that there can be a backlash. And it's like, but you know, I don't, I don't know. Am I the only person who can write a story about short, skinny, white guys? Probably not, but I bet you that there was an African-American guy who was a short, skinny African American guy who was a nerd who grew up in a completely different city who is more like me than, you know, half the people that I grew up with it, if that makes sense. Yeah.
Autumn (55m 53s): Can I get the eye do get that? That is awesome. Well, thank you. I didn't want to keep you forever. I know you're a busy guy, so I will wrap this up in just say, thank you so much for your time. It was, it was, especially for me that it's coming. I was like maybe one show up at night. I am not a big movie buff either though. A lot of the ones you mentioned, I'm like, Oh yeah, I do watch that one. So it was really interesting to hear that this is, you know, how you'd go about starting to do this. And I would know if I went down this route, I would have so much work to do, but that's okay at at least I would in knowledgeable on the other side and having done all the work, that means you are actually meant to be doing it. Otherwise it, you know, it's a labor of love.
Autumn (56m 34s): Let's put it that way as well. I look forward to hearing that, you know, the Magic Poof has made it into its animated series or whatever, or however it comes out and we'll do the other projects that we're working on. I think it sounds fascinating. And I definitely think the world needs the voice that you've created. So thank you. And thank you again for your time today. Thanks so much. I do very much appreciate it. So next week, yes, we are. We back and we're going to be talking about finding an author of voice and what it is.
Narrator (57m 12s): If you like, what you just heard, there is a few things you can do to support The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast please tell a fellow Author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn in Jasper on patrion.com/am Writing Fantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast going to stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
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Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast in today's publishing landscape. You can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from Writing join to best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt Hello
Jesper (30s): Hello? I'm Jesper.
Autumn (31s): And I'm Autumn.
Jesper (34s): This is episode 95 of The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. And we are going to talk about Author websites because we all have one and we'll all be available. Website templates out there from What press and the, like, it's never been easier to put your Author website together yet. What should you consider when you are developing your author website? And since we are working on both a redesign of the Am Writing Fantasy website, and we are building a new author website for our joint fiction, we just thought that we could record a podcast episode to share what consideration and choices we've made and why I am looking forward to this one.
Autumn (1m 17s): Cause of course, as you know, and maybe the listeners we'll soon be learning, I'm a website designer or so this is, you know, kind of right up my alley. So what, you know, by forced learning and computer programming and software engineering have run in my family since my dad brought home a Texas instrument computer when I was in high school. So I've been into computers ever since. So I'm not an expert, but I do know my way around a little bit of coding. And otherwise I have people in my family I can pay for help.
Jesper (1m 49s): And I promised to get the advice that we are going to give his, not to, that you have to go out and find your own version of Autumn to do with side to side before, you know, we are going to try to break this down into something that you don't even need a dictionary to go and look up. So we are going to work this out for him. Yeah. It feels like we haven't talked in ages, but really its only been, I guess in a way its been a little bit of a skip because I was away and then you were ill. And so we have like, it's been almost two days, two weeks since we've talked to other than that.
Jesper (2m 23s): Yeah. Think so. Yeah. We, because I had to cancel one when I got sick and then a and then you, yeah, you had your vacation. So if India, I think it is how it's been two weeks. How it should range. We're not used to that's no good. And it wasn't as they were usually chatting while we were well, even during that time, we're totally over email or even when you were IL, I think he responded to me So and it wasn't covered. So knock on wood. That was a good, good thing. It's just a regular cold from what you said. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I could also mention, because on the last podcast episode I mentioned, or the last one we had to now I'm losing track, which one it would be.
Jesper (2m 58s): But at least I remember recently I mentioned that we had ordered a Corona test four, our oldest son as well. And I thought I better just say, here are on there as well. That I, that it was negative. So what we did not have a and he is, he is feeling fine by now. Of course. And then I got sick here. So he, so he passed it onto me, but I know
Autumn (3m 19s): you should have a quarantine and him in his bedroom, but no, no that's probably not good.
Jesper (3m 26s): See yeah. With a PlayStation or something, he probably wouldn't even mind The problem. It's like you can't ground a kid unless you take away all the electronic devices. And in my case, it's like the old days that I was gonna say it, in my case, you couldn't ground me unless you took where every single book and the house or every single piece of paper. Cause I also liked drawling. So I was just difficult. Yeah. Yeah. But a how was your vacation?
Autumn (3m 55s): Oh, that was good. It was a, I was joking even on Instagram that, Hey, I went to a little cabin in the North of Vermont and in the Wood's next too, a stream and yes, I'd live in a little cabin in Vermont, in the South of Vermont and in the woods thanks to the stream. But I get to see You family and it was a bigger cabin and it had a hot tub. So that was kind of fun. And that's too bad. Yeah, no, I'll get the hang out with family. We had some rainy days and I did get some Writing in, but I what do you feel? You start at a good vacation for me unless I get so I'm writing it. Cause it's just, I had admitted to my worst addiction.
Autumn (4m 28s): If you told me I had to give up writing, I'd probably say life is not worth living. So its pretty dire for me. I just T and Writing and maybe chocolate and wine would be subsets of you. This is what makes life good and make the ice cream. So it was lovely thing. But now I'm packing through my smaller Cabot in the woods, but it was a beautiful if I can, you know, if anyone wants to, you know, hand me, it was something like that, I will I'll take. It was a gorgeous.
Jesper (4m 58s): Yeah. And you, you just made your way back today just in time for recording a podcast episodes
Autumn (5m 3s): And for the student Q and a, we just had, so that was so fun. Yes. You know, I guess I'm dedicated. I just, this is what I like to do.
Jesper (5m 12s): Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's been well apart from being sick, it's been pretty busy on my end this well, because a yeah, the house sale is final. So that's good. So finally, to be able to say that a and we've been trying to find it, The place to rent, I guess I heard you set that. And so you looked at two apartments. We did it. So one of them is in the wrong city.
Jesper (5m 43s): I guess you could say wrong. I mean, not the city where the kids go to school with, this is where we would like to move. It is in the central city though. Meaning that it's not like one of the, you probably don't know if even you can call the way we live today, a stopper, but we live in a small CD, like 15 kilometers way from the main hop. Here are the main hub city. So there are public transport from here to the place where the kids go to school is pretty bad. A but the apartment than the other Citi that we went there with just a bit like the main Citi in this area, the public transport is awesome from there.
Jesper (6m 21s): So it actually only it's if it, if they take the Busch boss from there to the other city, were they go to school? Its only like 15 minutes on the bus, so its not bad at all. But then we also had an apartment this weekend. We went out looking at which it is in the city where they go to school. So it'd be like two or two minutes on a bike and you we'll be at a school that kind of quick a yeah. So that's like very, very close by. And the difference between the two places is that the, the one in the main city, it's like a completely new building.
Jesper (6m 56s): It is a two minute walk from the beach. Everything is New it, of course, both of these apartments I had to say, of course they're a much smaller than the house we live in. So of course that, but they have both of them have that in common. So you have that on one hand, it is in the wrong city, so to speak, but it is new and it's right next to the beach. And on the other hand you have it's the stuff. It just in the right city write next to the school, But it, it, it is renovated, but its an old house. So its like, yeah, you know its a bit cold because the, the one in the main Citi, there's a, there's a heated floss in the entire department.
Jesper (7m 35s): Right? The other one you probably need to put on some, a flip flops or something because they have what's called. So it's just night and day between the two in that sentence. Yeah. And also the one in which I really probably wanted the things I hate the most, to be honest or there's two things I hit the most about the one in the next to the school. There it is. Number one, your washing machine is in the basement. I hate that. So you have your own private one, but you have to basically go all the way down to the basement.
Jesper (8m 8s): Every time you want to do laundry, it's like, no, I don't want to do that. No up and down the stairs they have all this. No, I don't wanna do that. Secondly, it is a bigger house. So they're is three apartments in house. Totally. So there's to other apartments, some other family's live in and then the one that we could possibly rent and a, there is a Gardener's will and it is the responsibility of all three families or all three rentals to take care of the garden.
Jesper (8m 41s): So we have to take care of, of the garden together with the other ones. And you don't have any private life out there because everybody's, she has that garden. So it was like, if you want to sit down there, of course you can sit in the corner for yourself, but there will be other people in the summer right there. Right. It, you can't really, you, you just have to accept that you have like foster social interaction going on them and being introvert. That's not really the thing that I want to do. It's like, I don't want other people in Mica. So unless I invite them, just say, considering my ideal property, it's like a hundred acres with a house dead in the center and you can't see it and no one can reach you.
Jesper (9m 18s): Yeah. So, and then of course the big differences is well that the house that is in the right Citi here next to the school is quite a lot cheaper than the one in the new site or in the main city because of costs because of the location four one, but also because of the one is in, in the new city and at a completely new building right now. So of course that it is quite more expensive.
Jesper (9m 48s): Umm, but we had a, we've had a family meeting on Sunday and it was funny because my wife had this idea, let's make a list of pros and cons for each place. And it was like, it was so funny when we were done, she held up to two lists and it was like the one in the main city had a long list of pros and like a couple of bullet points, cons and the other one in which was right next to the school was exactly the opposite. Like a list of a long list of con's and a few pros.
Jesper (10m 19s): It was like, Oh she was so like looking at this. I think the answer's quite a lot. Yes. But at least the end, the family's is an agreement. This was a good thing. You're not going to send like one kid and one spouse Deliv at one apartment. Oh no, no we we're pretty much aligned every day. All four of us at the, we prefer to the one in the, in the main cities. So we actually turn down on the other one and set step to the rental, a agency in the main CT that we would like to rent that one So waiting for the day and waiting for the rental contract to come through So but it should be OK.
Jesper (10m 53s): At least they did confirm to me over the phone that they had received it for us. So I hope that that's true, but I feel much better one. So I see you a contract. I think that's very true. Yeah. So, but it should get sorted. I think so we can get moving. You ask.
Autumn (11m 10s): Yay. Congratulations. It's exciting. It will be a lot of work, but change can be a good thing. So it would be wonderful.
Narrator (11m 19s): A week on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast
Jesper (11m 24s): OK. So we need some questions. People ask to us Please I certainly I mentioned a Episode 100 is going to be and ask us anything. Episode to have a question, don't have to be limited to publishing marketing or riding. They can be anything you could ask. What are our favorite song, his or color or character and a novel, anything you at work or she can ask us a burning about writing Or marketing or publishing or anything like that.
Jesper (11m 57s): So we're open to it all. I guess if it's too personal, we, we reserve the right to skip it, but send an email. It'll be so much fun. And if not an email, we would love it. If you would send either an audio file or a video, we can strip the audio from so that we can have your voice on our podcast with us. And there will be just really let me just kind of ad that little extra something special. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you want to know where we grew up or when we first fell in love with the fantasy genre or, or whatever, that's gonna be fine, whatever you want to know, but it's going to be a bit more fun for you to listen to episode 100, if there's actually any questions on it.
Jesper (12m 43s): So I wouldn't recommend you start posting your questions to us because episode 100 is not that far.
Autumn (12m 49s): No, it's coming up so quickly. I can't believe we're we're on 95 already. Its, its it doesn't seem like it's been that long, but I guess according to my nephew, who's now in his thirties. It's yeah, it's been that long. I don't see how we've been doing this. Actually just had a, a little notice pop up that M it. We passed October 1st, which means Am Writing Fantasy are a little partnership has been going on I think three years now officially.
Jesper (13m 21s): So that's awesome. Isn't it? It,
Autumn (13m 24s): I think that's a fantastic, we should've had a, a little celebration, but it was on vacation. Sorry. So
Jesper (13m 30s): Yeah. Yeah. Well it's never too late. If we could find an excuse to celebrate for a certain way.
Autumn (13m 36s): Absolutely. Especially we will celebrate again and on episode 100 and hopefully it will be celebrating with a whole bunch of really fun questions.
Jesper (13m 44s): Yeah. And we've added the link in the show notes from where you can post your questions. It'll take you two, a simple Google form and you can leave a written question if you want. Ah, but also as a Autumn said that we would really love an audio video file. So you can upload that too to that a Google form as well. I think I checked earlier today and I think you have to sign in via Google to get to the form. So feel free to email us as well. If, if you prefer, we don't really mind you, you can find a contact form on Am Writing fantasy.com.
Autumn (14m 19s): If you wanna email us, that's also fine. We just want the questions. So it doesn't matter how you sending them to us. And if you want to just write in a question, that's fine too. We'll just read it aloud are on, on the air.
Jesper (14m 31s): Absolutely. And we look forward to hearing what your questions are and it'll be really fun to give you the answers. Yeah. So before we go, I do want to say we just had a somewhat on Patrion up there pledge.
Autumn (14m 47s): So we want to say thank you, Christina. And you're going to have to help me with her last. I have a sense now nor to looking forward to looking forward to, for you to try to pronounce it. I think its Danish. So I am waiting for me to pronounce it now you're by doing this expert, but I am guessing a fro fro. Okay. Because I know that Jay and your Dame is more of a why, but the AEA I do not. I did not ask Google how to pronounce this for me.
Autumn (15m 17s): So what is the pronunciation of Christina's last name? F-.
Jesper (15m 23s): Yeah, f-.
Autumn (15m 24s): Yeah. I wasn't too far off one, Christina. F- here. Thank you Christina. For Kim for your shopping, your pledge. Sorry that I'm horrible at Danish. I will work on that yesterday.
Jesper (15m 39s): You need to train it. Maybe that will make them my goal for next year together to learn a little bit more Danish. You've taught me. Hi. Hi. Hi. That's not true. You should always start with an easy one. So when you're learning a new language yeah.
Narrator (16m 1s): And on to today's topic
Jesper (16m 4s): Before we get started here, I want to say that while the author of Website helps in building your Author brand and it is an important marketing tool, it can also quite easily become overwhelming when you try to figure out what the Website should contain. And we put quite some thinking into the redesign of Am Writing fantasy.com and the Website that were building for our joint fiction. Yet, please don't let any of what we're gonna say here today or overwhelm you, you know, and just listen to what we are about to say, I've been taking inspiration from it, then they ignore the rest.
Jesper (16m 41s): And so I thought it just wanted to mention that all of them, that sounds really, really fair because yes, it can be easily overwhelming and its changed. It does change to.
Autumn (16m 51s): So if it happens to be five years from now and you just found us, which was so sad, but no, he should have found us and it can change it. I've seen Website design change radically if some problems or things that were pretty generic to really complicated with tons of information to now getting into this more streamlined look where there's actually a lot less words in text and you get to know people maybe through their email, this so its changed again and goodness knows what it's going to change two in the future.
Autumn (17m 22s): That's actually part of the reason we're doing a redesign is that what we have is currently really complicated and it has a lot of visuals in right now, a lot more white spaces, what sort have in common, you know what people like to see. But again, if you do the right Website, hopefully it will manage through these trends. I've redone my personal author website a couple of times, but not too many. And I really like the way it looks now. And I don't think I'm going to change it too much unless I change some kind of background theme to something a lot more SEO friendly or something like that.
Jesper (17m 58s): And you, you have it on your website and I think you flipped it pretty solid. The Way it is presented over the years. Yeah. Well it it's pretty simple to be honest, I don't, I, I don't bother genes. Maybe I should say, I don't know, but its just you, I don't know. I don't have time for that, but yeah. I think also we should mention that depending on when you listen to this, the redesign of the Am Writing Fantasy website might not have gone live yet. So because I just wanna mention that because if you go onto Am Writing fantasy.com and you don't see a or you think they're, well, this is the same as before it might be because we haven't pushed the update get so just be aware of that.
Jesper (18m 40s): If you're listening to what's the end of 2020 or later than yeah, it should be up to date a or it should be the new designer RADA. So just be mindful about debt. So we are talking about stuff here that we haven't, we have the entire plan of what we want to redesign, but we haven't actually done it yet. Just so
Autumn (19m 1s): Yeah. That's what happens when you have lots of projects on the burner and you just kind of stack them and it's in the queue, it's in the hopper, but I've got to get to it again since, since web designed has sort of my thing and I don't know, I guess we could always hire it out, but its kind of my thing and it's the same reason I do my own book covers. No one else will pick, put up with my own persnickety Nez. So I own that. I'm good with it. I'll do it.
Jesper (19m 29s): Yeah. Yeah. I mean it would be silly. It wasn't when we have a resource like U here and it would be silly to it to pay somebody else to do it. That's right.
Autumn (19m 37s): All right. So let's get into what a website should have, especially an author website.
Jesper (19m 44s): Yeah. So I tried in my prep here, two basically sort of divided it into the different pages we are looking at, implementing on the website and then explain a bit what they are and why we have them the way why we intend to have them the way we intend to have them. So we can go through that. But I think as well, just to mention first, maybe there isn't overall driver behind the redesign of the Am Writing Fantasy website and it is the overall driver is simplification.
Jesper (20m 19s): The current version of Am Writing Fantasy I mean it has a lot of very, very good information on it, but it's not simple. And the there's a lot of menus. There's a lot of things you can click around to get to different places and all that stuff. But I think one of the things that it doesn't do very well is to communicate concisely, what problem we're trying to solve for other authors. You know, there's lots information on the website, but when we came up to the point where we started talking about redesigning, we started questioning ourselves.
Jesper (20m 55s): If it would serve us better for when author's are checking out on our website, that it would be much, much easier and communicated much clearer what we're trying to help them with. So in other words, we want to have both the Am Writing Fantasy website, but also the fiction Website we are going to be a bit later to answer three questions in the first few seconds. And that is number one. What do we offer? Number two, how will it make the life of the person, a person visiting our website better?
Jesper (21m 27s): And number three, what do they need to do next? So if we can ask those are answered those three questions very, very quickly. The idea behind it is that the website should, will perform better in terms of basically converting people into doing things. We might want them to do like signing up to an email list or to go and listen to the podcast or whatever it may be. Right. But but that sort of the underlying thinking behind.
Autumn (21m 59s): Absolutely. I think we, I will give a shout out two, I'm a marketing book. This is not necessarily to authors, but we've both read the StoryBrand by Donald Miller. And it is if you have any need for Website pointers, it really helps too read that it kind of breaks it down. But at the very least picture of yourself, I mean, usually you think a reader we'll find your website because they came through your books or you would think they would no, you know who you are, but there's a lot of reasons someone could land on your landing page, maybe your doing a giveaway or maybe they just type it in your name, wrong may be Google project up.
Autumn (22m 35s): They should know what they just landed on in those first three to five seconds before, you know, you don't have long to hold onto someone landing on your website so they should know who you are. That it's an author page. The what genre you're right in. And if you are trying to get him on your newsletter or if you're trying to get some to sell something, you should, that should be the third question. That's answered that, that immediately click here to get a free book or click here to, by my hot new release, I'm a number one New York best seller. It should be right there, front and center.
Jesper (23m 6s): First thing that pops up so that they have those, they know exactly where they landed and whether or not they want to be there.
Autumn (23m 13s): Yeah, for sure. I mean, we all live in the very, very busy, busy online environment nowadays. And if you get onto a website and it starts talking about 2 million different things you, you might wanna know or could do with it. Yeah. You know, How we're, if we're honest, how are we gonna react ourselves? We are probably going to click away like, okay, no, I don't have time to look through all that. Right. And you go back, you click the back button to Google and you find another website and you click on that one is that it's just to find something while you're going to get the answer you want right away.
Jesper (23m 44s): Right. So I think that's just the nature of the online environment nowadays. Yes,
Autumn (23m 50s): Yes it does. Yeah. If someone landed on your website and a year, they had a blog post where your talking about your Kat and you know, it's something that happened over the Hallowe'en and there are not going to know who you are, what you are. So you don't have to have Author in the URL title, but you definitely should have something that indicates, Hey, I write books and this is a genre. And I know when I did my I, my redesign, I actually changed my Autumn WRITING is my personal website. It changed the logo because they had a book on it and it kinda came up with leaves.
Jesper (24m 22s): Autumn ha ha. Yeah. This is what happens to me. Your mom named you after a season. And so I changed it though to a dragon and a book because I wanted it to say Author Fantasy very quickly because I didn't choose something that's at Fantasy. So those are important little tidbits you should keep in mind.
Autumn (24m 42s): Yeah. It's it's about that firsthand an impression isn't it? Yes,
Jesper (24m 46s): It really is. Yeah. They always want to make a good first impression because especially with today's modern age, they're not going to stick around very quickly or a very long if you don't make it clear who and what you are Now. So that's also why when we went into the redesign of Am Writing Fantasy that we actually, today, when you arrive at the Am Writing Fantasy Website M there is information about us, but then there is also a menu at the top would all kinds of different things you might could do.
Jesper (25m 19s): And we actually decided to get rid of all that and just put in what is called a squeeze squeeze page. And that was hard to say, but basically a squeeze page is like, you can't do any its, its, its it is the landing page. So it, in that sense is just a webpage to arrive at all. But you can't really do anything except for one thing or click away from it. That's all you can do. And we decided to put a video of the two of us sharing our answers to the three questions that I mentioned before on, on there.
Jesper (25m 54s): And then we also point people to sign up for the self publishing success because that's the, that's the free cause that we've mentioned on a podcast several times before, and that will be available once we've completed the website update a So quite soon.
Autumn (26m 11s): I hope. Right. Oop. So I look forward to are a little redesigned in all of the little tidbits that feed into it, which are a part of the reason the redesign is not done because all these a little tidbits feed into it.
Jesper (26m 23s): Yes. Yeah. And on the fiction side, we will point readers to download a free short story that we're gonna right. And ah, we only go to offer that's your story on the web site, on the squeeze page so you can not get it anywhere else. There is no way to get hand, to get a handle of it. You can buy it on Amazon or anything like that. So it's only going to be there. So it is exclusive content and that is it basically on that page. Nice and simple. You could download this stuff or a sign up for this cause. And here's a video of us talking a bit about it, answering those questions about why you should care and so on and so on.
Jesper (26m 59s): And then if you scroll all the way to the bottom of that page, that will be a button there where you can click to go through to the rest of the Website. But there's nothing else on that page. There's no menus. There was nothing you could, you, you need to scroll all the way down and then say, I want to go to the website basically. And then if, of course you can. But other than that, the only purpose is that once you arrived here, you are right in your face is like sign up for this course or download this a three story. That's it.
Autumn (27m 29s): And that's a, I mean, some people, or you might think of that almost as counterintuitive because you want, or you know, people as an author, you think you're doing a blog post and you want people to go and find you. But admittedly, if we're doing tweets about our blog posts and stuff, you might come in through the back door. But if you type in Am Writing Fantasy, you're gonna go to this landing page, a squeeze page and your going to have these options in it will be very clear and concise. And that's the best way people are so distracted with so many things going on that you want your website now to be clear, concise, simple, and not overwhelming.
Autumn (28m 3s): Just not, you know, not a million places to click. Goodness knows. They say the same thing with our Author newsletters. You should have only one link to click and I'm still doing like 10 click links on my Author newsletters. They just can't get away from it. Cause I just ask too many questions and I'll have too many things or so yeah. So if this is, yeah,
Jesper (28m 22s): So, but because I think the podcast episode he is, is entitled to a new way of thinking about it because I think what we need to get into our heads here is that the main purpose of this stuff is to get people on to the email list because on the email list, you show, if they sign up, I want a free ebook, they are gonna get onto an email list. If they are sign up, I want a self publishing success and success because they are kind of get on to the email list.
Jesper (28m 57s): And a purpose is of course, once you get people onto your email list, you can offer them a ton of more value by all those emails or so of course your going to keep providing them with lots of, lots of good value and the emails, but it is also why are the emails that you can start building a relationship with an online relationship if we could call it that those people turn them from a casual readers, into a true fans. And we're gonna talk a ton more about this in an email marketing costs.
Jesper (29m 28s): We are going to release a bit later here, but above all, I find it incredibly important that your homepage or landing pages or a squeeze page or, or whatever we call it, it is clean and it is straightforward. There's one thing I can do, that's it?
Autumn (29m 43s): Yes. Right. And that's sort of what we mentioned at the top of the Podcast is that either there was a time when all this information is, are these huge bouts and how you came in to WRITING Fantasy all of that used to be on your websites. But now it's really, you'd have maybe a quote, but from yourself about what you think of the genre or just, and with a lot of white space around it, maybe a picture and that's really about it. You know, you want, you will be directing them only two, this one action. And that's what we want to do.
Jesper (30m 14s): And then it's really the newsletter of the emails. Once they sign up and get on your newsletter list. That's when you start sharing all that other information now, because it's just, it's moved into a conversation, more into the emails and off the websites, websites are going really uncluttered. And I kinda like it. I liked, it's like having a book, you know, you, you switched to dialogue, you have a lot of white space and it's pretty, it's more like poetry, I guess.
Autumn (30m 41s): No. Yeah. And a, and I think it is just, there was so much, so much content out there, right? That you almost feel overwhelmed. So once you arrive at, at a website where it's just like, wow, this is pretty clean. And there was one thing I can do here. If I don't like it, feel free to click away. Right. I mean, if you don't wanna, if you don't want a sign up to it, if we take Am Writing Fantasy as an example, if you don't want to sign up for our email list, you get access to a completely free course, then fine. Then you shouldn't be there anyway.
Autumn (31m 10s): So I mean, that's the purpose, right?
Jesper (31m 13s): You do this thing or you don't, that's the choice you have sign up or don't sign up and that's all. Umm, yeah. So that's a, that's a lie in that sense is very simple. But then I mentioned before that people could scroll down and then they could click there as you go through it through to the main website and both for the fiction website and also for Am Writing Fantasy, which is a nonfiction Website ah, they both need that homepage that you then arrive at. Once you have click that, take me through two, the website or whatever, we are going to call that button.
Jesper (31m 47s): I don't know yet, but you need a homepage where they then arrive once they've clicked the button. And ah, this home page is rather simple when it comes to Am Writing fantasy.com because we actually just intend to put a bit of text. They are explaining that what Am Writing Fantasy I is and put some customers testimonials on them as well, because I think especially if you have a nonfiction business, like we do with Am Writing Fantasy it's good.
Autumn (32m 17s): It's a good idea to showcase those customer system O'Neals because it'll help increase the trust in your brand. Obviously.
Jesper (32m 24s): Whereas for our fiction website, it's slightly different because there are, we actually decided to add a video instead. Umm, but this time we would like two and I'm really, really looking forward to what this is going to turn out because I had another video. All of them did and it was awesome for a book trailer. But
Autumn (32m 47s): Do you remember? That could be a few years. Yeah. Well yeah. Well I think you could do it quite quick probably, but I finally sat down to do it. I think it took two weeks. So yeah. I should be aware of my, my scheming. It ups the bar in what you expect me to do.
Jesper (33m 6s): Yeah. That's the problem. Right? Once you start doing something good. I'll take notice an attitude list out. Okay. I see. Yeah. We can start doing this as well. Right?
Autumn (33m 13s): Well it's just going to a trailer is awesome. Yeah.
Jesper (33m 15s): Yeah. But actually the stuff we, we want to put it on the fiction website, its not a book trailer because we want the website to host all the different novels that is going to be set in the world. So we, we intend to make a trailer of the world of a lithium instead. So more like a setting trailer almost rather than a book specific. But of course, if you are, if your website is For a specific series of books that I would probably put maybe a book trailer there and say that, but in our case, we intend to write a ton of different books in this setting also in different areas of the world in different times.
Autumn (33m 51s): So a times of the, of the, you know, the historical wise and in the setting and so on and so on. So yeah, it makes no sense to have one book trailer there. Yeah.
Jesper (34m 2s): And how you mentioned testimonials as an author, if you have reviews, you know, I used a lot of reviews on my website. You don't want to do too many. You don't need like 16, but pick three and then have some links to your books or have the book trailer and then maybe another three years or something you don't need to jam them all together. I know the first time I did mine and it was a rotating banner that would just keep refreshing with different lines. It's like, no, that's not what you do. People actually prefer. M static. Images are videos now and they don't wanna just see, these are like rotating type text toast testimonials.
Autumn (34m 35s): So it doesn't have to be so technical. It can be very static and just pretty, pretty pictures is a nice video and some testimonials just as textes, but we're, you know, in your case, as an author is reviews, it's a wonderful way to let people know this is, you're an honest Author you know, your people love your books. What have people said? I have a little bar now with my awards that was so exciting to do. So if you can sneak that in, you know, put that into this, this landing pages about its almost like an about page.
Jesper (35m 7s): It is the homepage. I know M I don't have a squeeze page so much on my personal one. I have sort of like call it above the fold. So the first place you land is where I have my, my feature. I did that instead of a squeeze page, but below it, as my normal about page is a little bit about me. There's a lot more testimonials reviews and links to go to actually see what I'm writing in books and things like that. So that's what you kinda want to have on this page as an author, right? Yeah. The video format, I feel like that's pretty as well because video is just a lot more engaging than images or texts alone.
Jesper (35m 44s): So I know the us, quite a lot of people have a lot of reluctance to create videos and I understand, but if you can, and it doesn't matter if you have to take 20 takes and edited like crazy it before you were happy with it. But I would almost say that if you can, it's probably better to put a video on the website of yourself, talking about your books and stuff like that, rather than it just being a picture, a headshot or with some texts on it.
Jesper (36m 15s): Because it's just a way, if you go to a hundred websites Author websites today, you will find that 95 of them probably is an headshot and some text and maybe five of them have video. And those five is it's the ones that you are going to remember because I stand out. So I think it's a good idea to put that video format. And also on this page, if it's a fiction M website, then I would also on the homepage beneath the video, I'll then ad a catalog of your books.
Autumn (36m 48s): Ah, and here I would advise to include links to all formats at all retailers because this way it is very easy for the reader to understand where they can find the paperback, the audio book at, or, and even eBooks I think. And maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong here on them. But I think sometimes we Author, we live in sight, this little bubble where we assume that everybody else knows where they can find paperbacks that Lia of course you've go to Amazon that that's print on demand.
Autumn (37m 21s): That's when you get your paperbacks or all your books, you, you go to audible, you know, but I think that we assume that everybody knows that stuff because just a second nature, because this is our business, right? It's like, I don't think that all readers know that stuff. They don't necessarily know that. Can I get this one in paperback? It doesn't say on the website, anything about paper back. So they might be like, well then I don't know, then I don't bother. Right. But if it says, paperback, go here, go here, go here. Or do you have a book or here, eBooks here and here and here, you know, you can not make it any easier.
Jesper (37m 55s): Right? And I think lowering the barrier for the purchase, as much as you can, it's going to serve you will
Autumn (38m 1s): Absolutely it's you can, you could probably have too many links, but as long as you're clear, you know, have your ebook links have Your. If people don't know that there is a paper back that they might not think to act ask, if you have a way of selling signed paperbacks, you should have that separate from your paperback. One it. If you have hard back. So they should all be separate buttons and yet you make it as clear as simple. And there was a time where like every book had a, I think the book blurb and all this information in the good news, in many ways of your building, a website, you can get away from all of that.
Jesper (38m 33s): Most places have a image of the, maybe a background that's either moving or just like cutout of the cover. And then the like the tag line and then basically ebook links, paperback links, auto, you know, all the, of the audio book like, and you just, you could just have your links. I need you to keep what you put them all their, and you make it as simple as possible. And even with mine, I mean, I ha I think you have it as simple as possible, but you still get people asking, how can I get this so that it does happen even though it's right there on the website.
Autumn (39m 7s): But again, I have too many books. And then what you think make sense for to yourself often can be overwhelming and confusing or take too much time for readers. So it does definitely help to have someone who doesn't, isn't familiar with your website or your books, you know, to come and take a look and do some user testing. His or her testing is wonderful. They have some people click through and test all your links, make sure they go to the right places and that there are alive links because things happen and they, you might mess up on your coding and just copy the wrong thing.
Jesper (39m 40s): And there is a nice tip though, if you happen to go, if you, I would assume your on Amazon, almost every one is they make it really easy that you can actually have people like click on the book image and it comes up with the inside samples. So they can go ahead and read it, write from your website. And then if they like it, they can actually click through that and go buy on Amazon. Amazon tries to make you like, Hey, you want to help cell in your books? There's this really cool link that pops up. It looks really pretty. It's really easy to embed. So you can check it out. If your, an author go to your book page, you'll see on the righthand side, you know, ad this little link, can you just need to follow the instructions and do it?
Autumn (40m 16s): And it's I did it all on mine and its kind of fun.
Jesper (40m 20s): Yeah. A and then I think so now you are on to the main website. So we have a few new menu items that we include, but there is a lot, lot more are very much reduced compared to what it used to be a and this one is optional. A, you know, you don't have to ask this one, but we gonna have a shop, a menu item, uhh, on both the fiction and the nonfiction website. And this is basically where people can buy merchandise. Obviously that's not something you have to do, but if you do have merchandise, then you can add that there.
Autumn (40m 51s): I think that's good of of course the or the offerings that you have in terms of merchandise is different if its a nonfiction versus the fiction audience. Umm, but what they both have in common is that it is print on demand, merchandise, meaning that you don't want to end up in something where you have to then, you know, order something yourself and put it in boxes and ship it or whatever you don't want to do. Any of that, So it is a hundred percent print on demand. And there is a, quite a, quite a few vendors who can take care of all this for you.
Jesper (41m 23s): So you basically your upload, the design's that you want them to create a and then they will make it for you. And ah, they will also ship it for you. But we chose zassel for our merchandise because at least at the point of this recording Sassel is the only one who will take care of that international that for you a and they do take a, may be a bit more of a cut compared to other vendors because they took care of that as well. But I don't really care cause having to keep track of that for every single country where the customer are located, because that's the key with a vet, it is about why the customer is located.
Jesper (42m 4s): It is not where you are located. So you need to keep track of which country is this person in? What is the VAT level in that country? And then you need to pay those countries there that you own them and blah, blah, blah, blah. And no, no thank you. So we chose Sassel and they took care of all of that for us, just like a, just like Amazon does as well for us, when you sell the books on Amazon, they we'll also take care of that and we just get the code, right? So that's the same thing with Sassal they'll take a cut and gave us the rest and that's absolutely fine for us.
Autumn (42m 36s): Definitely. Yes, there are a ton of other ones. So if you think are just going to be exclusive to the U S or you don't think Europe's going to come after you, there are other options, but at Zazzle and for books, if you want to sell books online, you'd be able to sell your own books. Pay hip was also won something we found out that also had our handle's bat. So if you want to hook up your pay hip to book funnel, which is they have fantastic instruction is very little coating, but I will say there is a coding, but I, you know, I made it through it.
Jesper (43m 8s): So its a, you can see we sell are books right on our websites. So you can go ahead and do that and hook it up and not have to worry about, you know, how that, that is going to be taken out at the end. It's all taken care of for you. It's still a little bit of a percentage. Yeah. But it's less than royalties on Amazon. So its kind of cool to be able to sell stuff off your own website. And like I mentioned, if you want to go ahead and order, you know, five, 10 books of your paperbacks are hard back and sell them a assigned books, you might end up having to box them yourself.
Autumn (43m 41s): But its kind of also really cool to be able to sell your own signed paperbacks For you know, all the holidays off of your own Website how's that for feeling like you are access sex successful Author
Jesper (43m 53s): Yeah. And then both the fiction and nonfiction site will have an about page and also a contact page. And I will say that's the minimum, eh, you don't really need modern that to be honest, but a lot about page and a contact page should be there. And then we only have a few other pages that we want to add. Or so of course for Am Writing Fantasy We as you know, see listening to this podcast where we host the course's so those have to be on the website.
Autumn (44m 24s): Of course, in our case, we, we, we add the course of their a and we of course have this Podcast feature. They are together with the YouTube channel and also the Am Writing Fantasy block, which has a ton of different topics and posts from I probably hundreds of posts. And so all of that is still there, but that is of course not on our fiction site, but if you do have a blog or anything that can help your site with a SEO, I think its good to have a, the key probably as though that you have to, you have to post new content on a regular basis.
Jesper (44m 57s): Otherwise it doesn't really help much.
Autumn (44m 58s): Yes I have definitely. There was between life happenings and things going on in Am Writing Fantasy blog. Well and kind of quiet for a little while. And I have noticed that since we started posting a more regularly, that it has definitely upped our SCO. So even as an author of people and you go and look on line, you Google it and they'd say the blog is dead. If maybe you're not getting as many hits, but you are still lifting yourself in the Google rankings. And it does really make a difference over time to have those blog posts.
Jesper (45m 28s): I still still get people coming in even to my personal one and I haven't posted there for a couple of months. So they really should. I'm only trying to put out a series next year. I really should talk to people about it, but Oh well, but those are the simple one's yeah. I agree to the contact form, you know, with an author page. So you really just need that squeeze page. It's like the landing page, The a list of your books can all be on one page and not know about the contact. So we were talking about a three page Website very simple and very, very simple.
Autumn (45m 60s): And you could possibly do a sort of like I did him just worry about your squeeze page is just that space above the fold and then you're done too, a page website. So its not too bad though. I, again, in the store, my ad a third one, but that's okay.
Jesper (46m 14s): Yeah. I mean w and also this, ah, this next one is also one. We are going to add too, our fiction website, but you don't really have two, but we decided to add like a Vicky kind of area of the website for the fiction where we are going to share all kinds of details about the world. So basically it's like world building stuff I'm and we can share as well, because we are, we are getting some really, really cool custom made artwork created, so cool. And it is so beautiful and I really love it. So we can put that on the website as well.
Jesper (46m 45s): And of course, as Rita's a FANTASY well, Redis a FANTASY Nothing. Yes. That's pretty logical. So we better give it to them. Yeah. So that's something you could do, but certainly don't have too, but I think it's nice though, as well, because once we plan to write lots and lots of books in this world, if people become fans of the setting, they would like to be able to go to someplace and read some more stuff about the setting as a whole.
Jesper (47m 16s): So being able to do that, I think that will serve the serve it well, but of course, I mean, if you're only riding like a plant, like my first trilogy, for example, I just ever only intended to write those three books in that setting and nothing else.
Autumn (47m 30s): So it might be a bit overkill to start creating a whole Vickie thing for three books. So then you might not wanna do it, but if you have like Grande of plants like us, it could be an idea, but the only optional, if it is a good way, if you do a blog, it's a good way of, if you happen to post about your world, you can then organize it into it. Kind of a little Wiki. I know for my, my Epic Fantasy in the world of a mirror I had started with before I actually made my companion book, I had all that kind of created and listed online and its great to have it there to be able to point people from the books, you know, Hey, here's a full sized map.
Autumn (48m 6s): Hey, here is more about this one culture that I've made up. And so it is, it is fun. It gives you one something to post and then once you have it posted, you can turn it into a page and then you can just link to it. And it's basically a glossary or you can talk about your characters that way. So all of those things you can embed is a little Wiki fandom have you're own creation. You absolute, I think just to reiterate, I guess, but the key takeaway here is that the purpose of the website is to get people onto an email list.
Jesper (48m 40s): So we keep it simple and we drive towards the email list wherever we can. We don't have some other pages which will help on CEO, SEO, which is as good of course. Umm, but I think often when authors are thinking about Website building youth often, are you think about it as an information hub where we just have all kinds of stuff about the authors and books and blah blah, blah or this and that like basically like I Am Writing Fantasy yesterday, there's all kinds of stuff we have. So in the kitchen sink I think.
Autumn (49m 11s): Yeah, exactly. And that's what we try to steer away from here. Yes. And instead of just drive people onto the email list and there, I think in my view that is a bit of a different way of approaching building an author website. It is, I think it gives us a focus and makes it not feel so insurmountable. You kind of know what you should put in there instead of worrying about what you should put there. You know, its just to make sure, you know, just to get the authors or the readers to sign up, not to worry about other things.
Jesper (49m 45s): Right? So hopefully we gave you some food for thought there and the next Monday Autumn will have a interview line up for you. So make sure you tune in for that.
Narrator (50m 2s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast please tell a fellow Author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jasper on patrion.com/am Writing Fantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast going to stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Is there ONE word that you really, really, need to avoid using when writing?
Autumn and Jesper is searching for the answer (and finds it) in episode 94 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast.
Tune in for this fun and entertaining episode.
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy.
For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (1s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast in today's publishing landscape. You can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from WRITING Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts. Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt
Jesper (30s): Hello, I'm Jesper and I'm Autumn. This is episode 94 of The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast and you know, Autumn I after the last week's episode where we've discussed common Writing Advice we hate the most THE Irene is just not quite last on me that we are going to share. WRITING advise on which words to start sentences with it, but it's not typical. Writing Advice, I like this topic because it's been in the que for a very long time.
Autumn (1m 3s): One of the, it it's one of the one's that came with you when we formed the partnership and I've always been curious about what this word is for. What are the ones that two or three years I've been like, I wonder what the word is that you shouldn't start Sentences and I found him and I can't wait to share it with people. So, but that's not what we're going to talk about first. Well, I almost wanted to, no, now you're going to have to wait or are not there yet, because I know you teased me before we started that you have some news and so you've got to fess up now.
Jesper (1m 38s): Okay. Yeah. Well, finally, finally, you have some news are around the house sale. Yeah. So that the couple who were, or who made this conditional purchased contract on our house, we still have to sell their own apartment. They have talked about the episodes. They have finally sold their apartment and now, Oh my God. So this is a real like contract sale. Well, yeah, so now we are inside the one week grace period, where they are entitled to change their mind and cancel the contract.
Jesper (2m 13s): It's like, it's like a, a basic or a standard contract clause. So I don't think it'll happen. But it's basically, for cases, like, for example, if the person who are now bought the apartment, let's say that this person cannot get a loan into a bank. Even though they said that they could, for example, than this is the week whereby they have to step out of the contract and say, Oh, by the way, we, we don't want to do this anyway. And then of course everything would stop, but that's basically the only thing.
Jesper (2m 44s): That'll stop it now. So if we get to this weekend and we haven't heard anything until then, then its final now, all right. And the house is sold. You have to tell me, you can make me wait for the Podcast. So it has so many. Yes.
Autumn (3m 0s): Dear listener. He does this to me too, is not just you. It's not fair. That's so exciting. I am keeping my fingers crossed. OK. So one week more, hopefully just one week more.
Jesper (3m 15s): Yeah. Basically less than one week, right? Yeah, because we are recording this on the Monday. So yeah, once we get to Friday evening, if we haven't heard of it until then, then its final. 18 months of sales process has then come to an end. So yeah.
Autumn (3m 31s): Oh, I will be on pins and needles all week waiting to hear. You will have to let me know.
Jesper (3m 38s): Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Remind me if I forget.
Autumn (3m 41s): Yeah, I will. Considering the time difference before you go to sleep on Friday, I will send an email saying, Hey, what happened? Alright.
Jesper (3m 49s): Yeah, I do. Yeah. Yeah. So basically this deal means that we have to be out and let's assume that everything goes fine now. Ah, so this means that we have to be out of this house by the 1st of January, 2021 at the latest. Wow. Yeah. I got to tell you, because the re the real estate agent called me when he sort of said that the Yeah now they sold their apartment and, and we are basically entering the one week grace period here.
Jesper (4m 20s): So when he called me There, he also said, Hey dude, do you think that maybe we could arrange it so that the house is handled over to the new owners, perhaps like mid December or something, because I really don't wanna work on the 1st of January. Yeah.
Autumn (4m 36s): That is too funny.
Jesper (4m 38s): Yeah. Yeah. I would say, let's see. Let's see. I mean, of course, if, I mean, we, we need to start searching for somewhere, some place else to live now. But of course, if we find something, then as soon as we find something, then basically we can hand over the house if it happened before and right. At least buy the 1st of January and we have to be out. So we have to have found something. Yeah.
Autumn (5m 3s): Are you gonna holidays and everything? I am sure you guys will probably try to be somewhere else so that you're not packing in the middle of Christmas with the kids. That would be rough. I'm sure are excited, but still yeah.
Jesper (5m 16s): Yeah. Well basically we would like too, you know, the sooner we can find something else and get out of here the better. So if its possible to find something within the next months and a half or, or two, then you know, if, if its possible to move by the 1st of November, for example, then will do so. But let me see how it all pans out. We don't know yet because we're gonna start while we've been on these different wait list for, for places that we can rent four, the last one and a half year.
Jesper (5m 48s): But we are on a passive, you know, we're passive on the waitlist, meaning that we don't know if there's anything available and its not until this coming weekend. Once this grace period comes to an end that I'm going to flip it to active. And when I do then we will we'll if there's anything available, then will be told that, Oh great, there is this. You can rent write, but it could also be that there is nothing available and then will have to look around it. But the real estate agent had promised us that, that they would try to help us find something that we could rent or that they will try to post and that and network and stuff.
Jesper (6m 24s): So
Autumn (6m 26s): They don't wanna work over January one. We'll probably try really hard or else.
Jesper (6m 33s): Yeah. Well at least of course the real estate agent have a very good network. Right? So hopefully they will be something we can rent somewhere in at least in close proximity to where we eventually want to move as well. We ideally we can rent something in the same city that we want to go to So otherwise its a bit counterproductive, but yeah,
Autumn (6m 51s): That it would be yeah. So that you would wanna get all your stuff over there and it will be so much easier, especially if you need to store anything are going to access it. It'll be good to be all in one spot.
Jesper (7m 4s): Yeah. So that's a yeah, yeah. That's enough for me.
Autumn (7m 10s): No. Well, nothing exciting. I am in my husband's back M my writing is going well, I've got some graphic design stuff going. Well the fall, whether has set in, which is, and it's funny though, a yellow leaves are now are trickling down from the tree's and are just, Hmm. It's just feeling like false. So its so exciting to see that it's this changing season. So all I can say is things are going good. Knock on wood. No COVID
Jesper (7m 40s): Yeah. And but I think there's a lot of w well, I guess that's much further South or something, but isn't there are some still issues with fire is going on and the us all the way
Autumn (7m 50s): That was filed or something horrible that's you know, out West. So we were I'm on the East coast, but yeah, so yeah, 2000 plus miles away. But where my husband was when he was traveling, he was, you know, he, they were getting small guns in the cities are smoke and smoke where he was. And that was still, you know, five to 600 miles away from the fires. It's it's bad, but nothing too close to where I am at, its on the East coast. It's been pretty quiet so far, but again, knock on wood.
Autumn (8m 22s): You never know what we're in. We're still in severe drought as well. So you never know.
Jesper (8m 27s): No. Yeah. I was actually pretty sad because one of the, one of the podcasts I listened to the, one of the host explained how he started. I think she's five or something like that. And he explained how his daughter thinks that smokey is where the condition now, because they asked, when did he gets asked, how is the weather? She just said it's Smokie. And that's a pretty sad, right? That is funny. But it's also sad. Yeah,
Autumn (8m 53s): Yeah. Yeah. I mean we've driven through that area of California right after the paradise fire, which was a couple of years ago now. And we saw the community that had burned down and we saw people walking up the highway with like, you know, the little wheel bags. She was here at airports and they were just walking in a daze just North because they've lost everything. That's all they have. And it's, it's one thing to see it on the here and on the news, but to have driven through it and to see the lives overturned by it is just so traumatic that Yeah I my heart goes out to them, but it's such a, so much going on in this world where you, Oh, we just need an earthquake or a volcano.
Autumn (9m 34s): And I think will pretty much have fire wind weather where we've got a couple of hurricanes coming. So yeah. That's the next thing earthquake. That's my guess.
Jesper (9m 43s): Yeah. That's a way to turn this Podcast depressive.
Autumn (9m 46s): Yeah. We'll try to tear it up
Jesper (9m 50s): A week on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast this is one of those famous last chance for a minute.
Autumn (9m 59s): Yeah, that's right. So this is our last Roundup call that you wanted to join us on Patreon. Now is the time there is a something special going on over there. Yeah, indeed. And it runs only until the 19th
Jesper (10m 13s): October. So you better get moving if you wanna join a very special giveaway that we are offering a golden ticket to our brand new and upcoming world building course. And by the way, I got to say that this cause is going to blow your mind. It has every thing and I mean, everything you can think of when it comes to FANTASY world-building so there is a reason why we spent two years building this, right?
Autumn (10m 40s): Yeah. Yeah. I had to bet when I was working on those last module's and uploading 'em and that's where we got, we go beyond all the world building and we get into tieing world-building and storytelling together and weaving it all into something that is not an info dump. And they were like, we covered this to what are we just throwing in the kitchen sinks. So it has everything, you know, you would go from, okay, I'm lost in my world, building two, having a phenomenal world that you know, how to tie into your story as well as having developed a phenomenal story along the way.
Autumn (11m 14s): So yeah, it's a one stop, you know, who has an amazing course? I can't believe it. That is almost done. So yeah,
Jesper (11m 19s): But the good news is that the winter of the golden ticket will get access for free as part, as an exclusive VIP opening of the course and all of those not included in the VIP opening.
Autumn (11m 31s): Well, they will just have to wait longer to get access to the course, I guess until 2021 probably is when will open it and why, but yeah. Yeah. So this is your only chance to get in on 2020, except for a few invite only kind of opportunities and this golden ticket,
Jesper (11m 49s): But since only one person will win the golden ticket we have cos like we always do came up with a solution as to how we could reward everyone. We were just too nice. And I don't know were just nice. Were not to do now.
Autumn (12m 5s): Yeah, that's true. I think, and its a good till they were going to do it, but we haven't decided yet to have we thought was going to either be a webinar or a prerecorded course module. Cause goodness knows we're good at doing those by email, but its going to be on a totally different way, a different strategy for advertising and what we call it. It was a reader's journey. So how do you think this is just really cool because I think the way, you know, I have to admit you come up with most, have this on your own, but the way that you've taken all of this information to develop way of advertising really kind of draws on a reader and turns him into a fan and we are going to like do this for the people who join us on Patrion.
Autumn (12m 45s): Umm, for free, it's just a, well I guess you have to join Patrion. So that's a dollar, that's not a bad deal.
Jesper (12m 54s): No, not at all. And of course all our existing patrons support us. They will get access to this for free as well. And they will also be entered into the golden ticket draw automatically. So everyone who joins us before the 19th of October will be eligible for four, this report. So you better go and check it out if you're interested. And I think, yeah, as you said, you know, for dollar a month, that's a pretty good deal.
Autumn (13m 22s): I think it'd be really exciting. I mean it's no matter what, whether you just get the webinar or if you actually get the world building course for a dollar, I mean obviously you can join for five or 10, but a dollar as the starting level of that is pretty darn good. Yeah.
Jesper (13m 38s): Yeah. And you also get all of the other rewards that we offer there. Not to mention that there is the actually hundreds of dedicated patron post designed to help you with your other career. And you're riding that you will get access too, as soon as you join. So if that sounds good, you can just follow the link two Patriots in the show notes as well. We hope to see you there.
Autumn (13m 59s): Absolutely. And speaking of seeing people, so one of the things we don't talk about much with the Am Writing Fantasy when you do join us through the website or pick up something and you get these re these email tips that I've mentioned before is just like, I cannot believe we send out some of these email tips, like every, maybe once a month, about every three weeks they come. But did you see that email from Timo who thanked us? He, as he said a million times, thank you for the idea's in this email content marketing ideas in between releases is something that I've always struggled with.
Autumn (14m 31s): And I wanted to do short stories, flux fiction, but it was never sure what parts of the actual writing experience would be remotely interesting to us as readers. So he thanked us for sending along one of our newsletters and you know, it's pretty cool when you have a newsletter that gets those kinds of responses, just for something you give away. Anyway, like every month I wanted to make sure you had seen it. And, but the readers know that, Hey, you know, we have a pretty awesome new, it's a letter that helps you out and keeps you going monthly.
Autumn (15m 3s): So check it out
Jesper (15m 10s): For the most part today. I think I'll let you take the driving seat on this one. Autumn often when the thoughts that often when the subject, I should say it is about craft,
Autumn (15m 22s): Then you, most of them
Jesper (15m 24s): At the time of the better teacher, I do have some reflections prepared the like, and thought that I could supplement with. But a, I think I'll leave it to you to sort of take us through this topic here.
Autumn (15m 36s): All right. Well, I was laughing because I want to know how you manage this. This has two episodes in the row. I did homework and we haven't hit episode a hundred yet. So I don't know what's going on here. You figured out how to make me do homework. And I don't know, I'm usually the one who wings it and I came prepared today. So well,
Jesper (15m 56s): Do you want to post to figure it out?
Autumn (15m 59s): Yeah. You developed a strategy to get, yeah, that was not an issue. Maybe it's cause I finish the world building a course and I had more free time in, so maybe, you know, that other side that the good students site is coming back out after 20 some years maybe. But yeah. So you have, like I mentioned at the top of the episode, do you had had this topic since we decided to combine ideas and we develop the YouTube channel and built on the platform you had already developed with me and a FANTASY and we created the YouTube channel.
Autumn (16m 30s): And so this, I dunno how long this one has been sitting in your idea that list. Yeah, I was going to say, it's been at least two years, but you had this topic that is stopping set up, starting sentences with this word. And that's just the nature of curiosity with the I'm. Like, I wonder if what that word is, when should you stop certain things?
Jesper (16m 52s): Thing is when I, when I added that topic into the list of ideas that we could record a podcast about, I have no idea what that word is. You can just put that in there.
Autumn (17m 2s): Yeah. We weren't even working together at the time. And lo and behold, you know, two years later it's finally going to happen. And I found that word because it like, you know, I am also an editor and writing coach on it, I would say on this side, but I have got so many sides going that I've got to be an octagonal dice or something to say it's one of the side anymore. But yeah, I finally was sitting when it was a week or so ago when we were deciding topics for the month.
Autumn (17m 32s): And I said, I know what that word is. Gosh, started I know what it is. So we can finally have this podcast and I'm so excited. So do you want to know what the secret, where it is that you have to stop? Starting Sentences with this word and I know,
Jesper (17m 47s): Yeah, I guess since I a topic two years ago and I still don't know what it is, I guess I should be fairly curious by now, right?
Autumn (17m 55s): Yeah. Well hopefully we drummed up the tension for the listener, but so yes, AF this is consolidated Advice after helping many, many novice authors that I realized with the word was, and what I see over and over again with new authors is 90% of the time they're starting Sentences with he or she sheet with a pronoun and just don't stop. Starting 90% of your senses with this word. And I've got some good reasons. And I haven't example, so do you want to hear an example or a written this way?
Autumn (18m 30s): And this is no one else's work. I wrote this, right?
Jesper (18m 34s): Yeah. It was just about to say, hopefully you're not going to hang somebody out to dry.
Autumn (18m 39s): We broke this and what's, what's sad is I actually had a right with the, what the end example will share at the end of the Episode. I had to start with that one and then backtracking to do this one big, because I, I, couldn't write it this way until I had something else to try to manipulate backwards. So it's kind of sad, but all right. So here's my example. He smelled Woodsmoke trapped by the trees. He thought it was from the campfire of the night before he realized that the birds had stopped singing. He halted his horse who started in Paul on the ground.
Autumn (19m 9s): He wondered what was bothering her. He tried to keep her steady. As she moved sideways, he noticed a warm breeze that smelled a bit like sulfur. He realized what it was. He kicked his horse as flames erupted around him and his horse bolted. So that was nine Sentences. All of them started with the pronoun that a lot of he, for sure, especially when you read it, it's one thing to read it on a page, but when you hear it, it really does bring out the pronoun in the heat. But yeah. So why do you think this is a problem, especially for a reader?
Autumn (19m 43s): Yeah. Well,
Jesper (19m 45s): For one, you know, your eye starts to glaze over that kind of stuff. You, if you start skipping ahead, you know, and, and you, you miss you miss the details and by that, maybe its not the details in the self that is important. But what is important is that you're not getting immersed into the story and into the text because you start noticing all these he's you start skipping ahead. Oh there's more and there's more, there's more and it's just, it doesn't become an immersive story,
Autumn (20m 12s): Right? No, it's just, there is something I tried to in the sense of that or a little varied, I tried to make it more active voice and passive. I tried not to make it a bad Writing you know, I was not, he was sitting and he was doing this and he was doing that. That was really, you know, make sure you're at least active voices. Was he halted? So he's doing things, but its still becomes monotonous. It's the tone has been not necessarily as the sentence structure has always the same in your brain. I stick just kind of starts going, Oh my goodness, I just need something else.
Autumn (20m 46s): Something to on its like having the same Miele every single day and you just want something different in your brain is craving something different. So like you said, readers will start skipping ahead. I know as an editor on, I had passage's like this and I'm like, Oh really? I just, I start changing things just because I need to change it as well. So that's, that's why it's becomes an issue as, because it's just, your reader's are not going to see it. And even though you are doing things right with the active tone, you know, ACTA verbs, it's still, there is no variety they're and you know, readers want a feast.
Autumn (21m 24s): They want to a banquet or they don't want, you know, a ham and cheese sandwich every single day. It's just, no you don't you come back for that, right?
Jesper (21m 32s): No, that's right. Yeah. I had the, I had three different words that I sort of have I I tried to think about what Word do. I think I would be the one's that you should start with a, I agree with your choice water, but I did have three that I picked, so Oh, maybe I could just get him as well and then you can let me know what you think.
Autumn (21m 55s): Yeah, absolutely.
Jesper (21m 58s): Yeah, because the first one, well that is of course, if your writing first person than you are going to use it a lot. Yes, very true. And I think, or at least try not to use it at the beginning of every sentence because just like he basically
Autumn (22m 17s): Really annoying. It came to me, it's the exact same Advice as if you're using the app, when you start using that same word is just you that's all you see. And it's, especially with Tommy With I becomes very self centered and I start just thinking, Oh gosh, this character only ever thinks about themselves. And I mean you're in that point of view, but there's something about it that I just find offensive So yeah. I have a real, I am. I actually avoid story's in first person. Cause I've a big problem with them and The I the eyes as a part of it.
Jesper (22m 45s): Yeah. And my next one, I think it's more like, it's probably more like a question to you if you think it's bad on it at all. Okay. But yeah. Yeah. I noticed that the here on the podcast, for example, when we record PODCAST I tend to start sentences with the words. So a lot of it just works well as one of those transition words, you know, when we kick off a new topic. So
Autumn (23m 10s): Yeah. So work best, avoid it at the beginning of sentences. Do you think that, I think in technical Writing EA are like, when you're writing your novel, you can have it every once in awhile because it is a good word and there's a speaking patterns, so is better than EI or those are just a really bad filler words. But it definitely, if you realize that you're writing, so like every other words, every other sentence, two Join two sentences are two thoughts together then, and you need to work on a few other ones, but I honestly don't hear you saying that.
Autumn (23m 45s): And I do when I'm writing it. It is when I had to self edit out, I want to do. And so, and I'm like, okay, Nope, starting the sentence with something else. Not that again. I live at myself too. How many times I could use so in a way in a page, because it is a good transition Word and you just don't want to overuse it. Yeah.
Jesper (24m 3s): Yeah. Good point. So
Autumn (24m 11s): Do you have another one?
Jesper (24m 13s): Yeah, I do have another one third option. I prepared a and I actually prepare to example
Autumn (24m 22s): Cool as well. Excellent.
Jesper (24m 25s): Yeah. It's it's when you start Sentences with, with, with, with, with the words with,
Autumn (24m 32s): Yeah. All right. All right.
Jesper (24m 34s): Yeah. I think that it might not always be the best way to start a sentence, you know, in many cases to work with can just be cut and yeah.
Autumn (24m 43s): What if my stomach,
Jesper (24m 45s): A very minor rewrite to actually make the census a flow better without losing its meaning. So I made an example here. Yeah,
Autumn (24m 52s): That'd be fantastic. Okay.
Jesper (24m 54s): OK. So here we go with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast out Writing Advice the world has come to an end.
Autumn (25m 1s): Yeah. I like your example
Jesper (25m 6s): Versus the sentence, The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast dishing out Writing Advice. Has the world come to an end?
Autumn (25m 11s): Yes, it is. The second, the second one is so much better. It has more authoritative tone. It's more of a stance. You can feel the stands of it. The other ones just that With is weakened as a whole entire sentence structure. So its, it might work in a sentence like an a paragraph, but if you really want that to be your tag line or a concrete example, you need to get rid of the width.
Jesper (25m 39s): Yeah. Yeah. I, it says it exactly the same thing. I just feel like it's much more efficient.
Autumn (25m 44s): Yeah. This, yes. I agree. The second one is much more impactful.
Jesper (25m 49s): Yeah. Okay. So that was my three contributions to this conversation. Yeah.
Autumn (25m 57s): All right. Well I have some ways to tighten up your Writing, especially if you're using pronouns or like he shear, I mean, if you're doing this, but it works with everything we've talked about. I mean another good example, it's just a sentence starter, but that almost every like 90% of the, that in your novel, you can go in and edit out, but that's later in the sentence, but we're not, we're not focusing on things that are coming later. We were talking about the stuff before the verb a so if you're using, these are some ways of looking at and tightening up your WRITING is as you know, tips on what to do in the first one is especially when you're using pronouns that he shear.
Autumn (26m 33s): I, if you didn't notice my example, you're you know, what is a guy? Cause they used hee, but you don't know whose talking using the, I mean, especially when you start having several characters, especially several the same gender. That's the reason I actually chose. And this example that the horse was a female because I wanted to throw in, in a different pronoun. I figured one more. He used us going to be way too much. And an example that you can see, I know visually I do better and much more visual. So I like to read what I'm talking about.
Autumn (27m 5s): If I heard this on a podcast, I'd be like, can you, can you write that down, please? That would be me. So you use names, you need to know when you have 42 male characters or a three women or something that you need to know who was, who, so your going to be using first names a lot more frequently than you would use. Say if you were actually talking to somebody, you just have to use the names so you can differentiate. And when you start using like her arm and it was referring back to the noun or the pronoun later in the sentence, if you don't have some of the like tissues arm, if you don't throw some of those other clues in there, you might get readers confused about whose arm is where.
Autumn (27m 45s): So do you keep that in mind and try to read through after you write, to make sure that you, your leader pronouns and adjectives and stuff are referring to the right person. I see this a lot in writing that you start throwing in here is here. And I don't know whose doing what anymore and its just an old, it's just a brouhaha and you just don't wanna do that. So use names. You are gonna have to use names are a lot more. So that's my biggest piece of advice, especially just if I had broken up the, the example with just a name every once in awhile, it would have made a much more impactful.
Autumn (28m 22s): All right. So you wanna hear Advice number two? Who do you have anything to say about using a name? Yeah,
Jesper (28m 27s): No, no. I agree with, like you said, so carry on.
Autumn (28m 30s): Yeah. So sentence variation, M structure as well as length. And that's definitely something when you're always starting a pronoun or a noun and then the verb and then, you know, something, some, you know, some phrase it's all in the same sentence, structure it like I've mentioned its its getting a ham and cheese sandwich and you want the feast. Do you want the bank? What? You need to break up things with starter clauses, just something different questions, something that's going to break up. That sentence structure, make things shorter.
Autumn (29m 0s): You know, action sentences are so nice when they're snappy in their short, like three or three words long. That's a fantastic sentence. And then vary that with something that's, you know, 15 words, 20 words, you can break it up because reader's will speed up in. They'll slow down and its a wonderful way to get through a paragraph and they pay more attention when you start doing things like that. So it's a wonderful way to break up the monotony and keep someone's attention so that their not just starting to glaze over because it's he said something, right?
Jesper (29m 34s): Yeah. And it is actually also using the sentence with the length of them. But the part, the structure of the paragraph to increase the momentum and increase the pacing. It's a quite well, I don't want, I don't even know if I could call it a trick because it's not a trick as a way to do it, but it's, it's very good to be mindful about, you know, that the, for example, if something, if your in the middle of a fight scene or something, then be mindful that OK, I'm just gonna right. A couple of a very short choppy sentences here to basically increase the pace of, of, of what is happening because it, it goes well with where the action on the page.
Jesper (30m 13s): Right. So I think it's extremely helpful to be mindful about it. And it's so simple, but sometimes it's not until somebody tells you about it that you actually start thinking about, Oh yeah, I guess, yeah, that's not. And then you just start doing it, but, and it makes it a really big difference. But somebody has to tell you to the first place.
Autumn (30m 36s): Yeah. Well we're telling you now it is good. Yeah. It is almost like music notes and they do call it beats. It is a type of way of setting the beet or the tone. And you know, if you have a steady drum, your going to eventually just start ignoring it. But if you start breaking it up, you will definitely here something different. You we'll be more aware. That's what you are doing with the sentence variation. You are setting your beats, your setting, your peace, and you're selling your tone. And it's one thing. Once you realize that, that this is sort of a composition and a piece of music and you start varying things.
Autumn (31m 10s): Yes. I think your writing just kind of perks up the next level and yeah,
Jesper (31m 14s): It feels good. All right.
Autumn (31m 17s): Yeah. So yes. All right. So my advice, number three at a five. What to know what that in the next one is,
Jesper (31m 26s): Do you want me to guess? Right.
Autumn (31m 28s): Oh, I shared it with you. So that wouldn't be fair. I will admit that. So I will share. All right. So the third one is dialogue. If you didn't notice this a little paragraph example, there was no dialogue. Dialogue is a wonderful way to break things up. Unless of course you're just using, he said, and she said, because that's totally cheating. It's just doing the same thing. So use other dialogue tags. As we talked about this in the last episode, do you know Fantasy as one of the ones where you can get away with using growled and whispered and shouted, these are a wonderful dialog tags.
Autumn (32m 6s): Technically they're telling us not showing emotion, but the FANTASY you get all the way with it a lot more because the readers, I think we do see said we wanna see nuances like grout or whispered and things. And of course there's action tags, action tag's or when the characters or physically doing something than you never even said, who said it? Its just because with the reader's mind, if you have dialogue in the same sentence with an action, they ought to a reader will automatically think that whoever is in that same sentence or a line is the same person who's.
Autumn (32m 39s): So like put that away. He said, you know, he put the mug down instead of saying, he said that he put to put the mug down, you know, it's by doing the action at the same time and having the dialogue it's the same sentence or not the same sentence of same line of text. The reader will think that it, the person who is doing the action is also the person speaking. And so actually the tags are a fantastic way of just skipping the whole said ground whispered, shouted and breaking that up and having something completely different.
Autumn (33m 12s): And it's definitely changing your sentence structure.
Jesper (33m 16s): Yeah. And it is also a nice way of when, when we were talking about, well starting sentences with words, write this is also a different way to break it up and change it out and make Sentences started in different ways. Umm, you know, for example, the Starting because you could also put the action TAC in front of the, the, the dialogue. So that's another way you can sort of break up and start the censuses in a different way and just making sure it's, you know, that every paragraph start differently and not put the same word, but also not in the same way.
Jesper (33m 52s): So yeah. It makes a huge difference.
Autumn (33m 54s): Yeah. And that's where it's also so important not to have two people speaking in the same paragraph, you know, I do an end break and next, you know, as soon as a speaker changes, hit, enter and do a new paragraph because it gets confusing if you have too many people talking in the same paragraph and if you're using action tags, but like you said, you know, he walked to the window. When do you think she's coming home? You know, it's the same person who just walked to the window. That is just it this way the reader thinks.
Autumn (34m 24s): But again, if you have someone else talking right after that year, just a loss so we can get confused. Don't do that. And I would say one last thing on dialogue two, it breaks up the texts visually you've got a lot more white space. And so that's kind of a nice break in all of that pros for the reader as well. So sometimes adding in white space is not a bad thing. No I yeah.
Jesper (34m 47s): Say in most cases its actually a good thing because at least as a reader, I know with myself at least a week, if I, if I had to, well I always read on the Kindle. Right. But every time I changed the page on the Kindle, if every single page has just blocks of text, it doesn't take them a lot more like three or four pages because I feel like, Oh my God, this is,
Autumn (35m 8s): Yeah. It's just nice to see. Or a lot of white spaces. Oh cool. You're not, there's something nice about, I know this guy, this page he's going to fly by. Yeah.
Jesper (35m 15s): Yeah. I mean, I don't know why, but it just feels nice to To
Autumn (35m 19s): Yeah. It feels like, okay, I'm reading fast. Yeah. What the hell does read faster. So is yeah, definitely. Yeah. I agree. It's just, it kind of makes it It again, it's a different type of changing the a B, but its so much its so nice to have, but yeah, if you're your reading, like it as an academic papers, its page after page of pros and you're like, Oh, you know, you feel like you're just eating heavy carbs. Yes. I love food. All my food. All my analogies are food. I love food. Okay. Sorry. I have dinner right after we record podcasts.
Autumn (35m 50s): So just keep that in mind. So a number for advice or are you ready? Yes. All right. Description description is okay. Okay. Once in a while set the scene. I mentioned in the example, you know, there's a little bit of wood smoke. You know, you mentioned the trees and that there had been campfire of the night before, but there really isn't much scene setting description. You don't want to do pages. You don't really want to do solid paragraphs of description, but you can set the scene with the, you know, a little bit of a description about what maybe the trees looks like or you know, why is he riding a horse?
Autumn (36m 29s): What does he carrying with them? Those are fine things to add in. And by doing that, most likely you're going to get rid of the pronoun cause you are going to be due to describing the florist. So that's already something different. So your breaking it up the little bit, you're gonna change up the tax. You are going to change up the sentence and that's exciting. So definitely add in some description.
Jesper (36m 49s): Yeah. I only have one caveat to that.
Autumn (36m 51s): Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely.
Jesper (36m 58s): The only caveat that I would have is that if the sentence that we are talking about right now is the first sentence of the novel, please don't start by describing the cloud's or how its raining or something like that.
Autumn (37m 12s): Yeah. Cause I should say the, whether or not you do not start a number like that. No, always the best way you can get you enough for you to start with the pronouns. But if you can start with the main character are doing something or saying something is a much better way than you say, you know the sky look threatening tonight. It's just, yeah.
Jesper (37m 33s): Okay. Well this has been So I was just about to use a swear word. They put there there's been so many novels where it always starts with how, how it is. It's the lightning or if there's a storm or its raining worse than it has been raining for 200 years or
Autumn (37m 51s): I don't care, you don't know enough about the place to care about the weather. You need to care about the place first to know that it's unusual. I agree. Nope. That's a very good caveat. I I this was the second point of Episode. I totally agree with you. So all right.
Jesper (38m 9s): Yeah. That's amazing. You can make a habit out of that. I wouldn't mind.
Autumn (38m 11s): Yeah. And we'll see, ya know, I'm stubborn. So the feisty Syed. All right. So we are up to my fifth and final piece of advice. So things to do to break up your writing and make it more interesting. And that is if you're, especially if you're writing in third person, this you should right in something called deep I point of view, deep POV, which when you do that, your it's like writing in the first person, but your still using key. And she, so when your doing that, you actually avoid words like thought or wondered or looked because the character does it.
Autumn (38m 50s): It's just like writing in first person. So if you would say you don't usually say, I thought about this, you would just give your thoughts. And that is a different way of writing. And by doing that and removing, he thought he wondered you drop off that pronoun and you make the sentence much more impactful. You just put it on the thought, you've just put in what he sees and that will totally change up your writing tone and make it much more interesting and also draws a connection deeper almost like you're riding in first person.
Autumn (39m 22s): So that will really connect better with a reader. They will sync a lot better with a character. And if you want to fantastic example of this, pick up a George RR Martin, because he, he is a master of deep POV. And when you pick up one chapter and you switch to a different chapter, his tone and his writing style completely changes to fit that character. And the way that character sees and thinks, and even the metaphors in the analogy is at that character will think of. And it's just when you do that anyway, that level, it is fantastic writings.
Autumn (39m 56s): So fantastic. You know, a really good example better than my example, but I, you know, I was just doing it for the podcast. We weren't going to go that deeply, but that is definitely my final ONE, you know, if you don't know what deep POV is, you know, put it in the comments so we can try to describe that better. We can link you to some blog posts or, or when, you know, I dunno if we could do a whole podcast on deep POV if people want to just let us know.
Jesper (40m 21s): Yeah, yeah, yeah. I do find it important that you know, that you are Sentences starts strong and also finish strong. I mean perhaps they have to finish even stronger than they started. But I think for me about all that we've talked about in this episode, I would almost say that the real trick isn't so much about which words to avoid. I do agree with what, the examples that you've given us here and, and your point about starting with he or she all the time.
Jesper (40m 53s): I do agree with that, but, but I think that the real trick isn't that much about what to avoid, but it's much more about understanding the structure of sentences and paragraphs and making sure that you use a varied way of writing so that it doesn't become monotonous. And you just sit there and, and it's the same under the same and the same. Right? I think that is really the main takeaway modern it is to avoid a specific word.
Jesper (41m 25s): Right?
Autumn (41m 25s): Agree. I think that has definitely the main take away. I mean, if you need to fix the only way you can write fine, but then you're going to have to spend some time editing to break up your pro's and your sentence is, and I do have, so if you want to here, the example before we wrap up So I I used all the Advice and I will skip. If you need to know what it is, you'll have to zoom back in the PODCAST. So I'm not going to reread the first one. That's all he used is horrible, but at the exact same idea or rewritten to break it up a little bit, Rowan smelled Woodsmoke lingering under the dentistry canopy from the campfire for the night before.
Autumn (42m 1s): But the birds had gone silent. He reined in his snorting horse putting the horses net because she pulled the ground. He whispered what's bothering you old girl. The horse kept an eye. Our ears pinned back to us. She sidled sideways or a warm wind brushed against the back of his neck. It held a hint of sulfur. Rowan would be rigid in the saddle, under his arm. His Mary Real reared. She bolded is tree is ignited to the right and the hidden dragon roared. So we went from nine Sentences to 10 or only one starts with heat and to, with the characters name. And I don't know about you, but I would much rather read the second one in the first one.
Autumn (42m 35s): All right. It's a million times better, obviously. Yeah, absolutely. So yeah. Very good. I think there were some good takeaways here. Umm, despite our previous Episode on bad Writing Advice this was hopefully Writing Advice do you find it useful? Yeah. I don't know if it's coming Writing Advice so as long as we can claim that this is not common than the other. I think we we'll be good. Alright. I we'll go with that.
Jesper (43m 7s): OK. So next Monday we plan to speak to you about a brand new way. You can think about your author website, but I'll leave it a bit cryptic for now.
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There is a LOT of writing advice and tips out there. Some of it is great, but there are a few that drive us crazy! Why would you ever tell an author that?
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Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast in today's publishing landscape. You can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from Writing Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt
Jesper (30s): Hello I am Jesper
Autumn (31s): and I Am Autumn
Jesper (34s): This is Episode and 93 of The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast and there are loads of well meaning, and also pretty good writing advice out there. But there are also those that we just a, well, wait, and we are going to share 10 shots, examples today, and a, well, hopefully, I guess, cause we eat, we split this up. We each came up with five, but knowing us, we could have like, I expect at least two to overlap that as my guests, umm, there's a chance that it could be all fine, but hopefully we're gonna vintage hopefully were going to manage or at least eight pieces have a unique Advice if not 10, we'll see.
Jesper (1m 16s): We'll see. But we tried to prepare 10 examples or at least, and hopefully, and the process will also menage to, well I guess deep on some of the, shall we say less strong Advice that exists out there.
Autumn (1m 30s): I think that'd be fantastic. And it will be a ton of fun to hear what you find is the worst Advice yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm looking forward to get into this. Yes, but at first, so I haven't talked to you for a week. How are things over on the other side of the Atlantic?
Jesper (1m 48s): It sounds good. It's good to have it. It's another one of those a are coming out of a busy weekend and I know that happens, which we were often, it feels like, but a Saturday, my, my oldest son had friends over for his birthday party. Oh excellent. He's turning 12. So you can almost guess what activity they have planned for this party can tell you if your boys, they all only boys for the birthday party and turning 12, they are, there's almost the only one thing they can do.
Autumn (2m 21s): All right. You see, I'm not around 12 year old boys. So I I claim total ignorance.
Jesper (2m 29s): It was a, they were just playing computer. So everybody brought their own computers and then they just sit there for eight hours in play computer. Righty that that's in there mind that's a potty, you know, I think the older people don't understand. Yeah. I was gonna say, are you like playing through the internet connection?
Autumn (2m 51s): You were already playing with your friend's what's the matter is three in the same room. I then your next to each other. You, you are not.
Jesper (3m 0s): So that's a huge difference apparently. Right? I can't wrap my and I live in this era and I can't wrap my brain around the things people do. So this is not a good sign. I always knew I was born in the wrong time period. Yeah, I think we were. Yeah. And I, on Sunday I was out to at a soccer tournament with my youngest, but actually then in the afternoon, a, our oldest actually start to feel pretty bad if you know, you know, he had a sore throat yesterday.
Jesper (3m 32s): Oh Dan This. Yeah. And this morning he felt the, a bit constricted in his breathing So yeah. So we, as opposed to have another birthday party for our family and friends for this coming weekend. So I called the doctor this morning and we basically booked a COVID-19 test for him. So he's gonna get tested tomorrow. Oh, I don't think it's the coronavirus. I don't think so. I think it's just like normal falled flue kind of thing.
Jesper (4m 2s): I, I think, but I don't know a, so we better be in the safe side. So we going to get him tested tomorrow. Yeah.
Autumn (4m 9s): Well fingers crossed for him.
Jesper (4m 11s): Yeah. Yeah. Hopefully it'll be okay.
Autumn (4m 15s): Poor thing.
Jesper (4m 17s): Yeah. Yeah. That's not good. So he's just been home. Today's he's been watching you tube for 11 hours to do. And I, when I was out like asking him, but some point don't even want me to do something else. So could you maybe read the book or something? She was like, what?
Autumn (4m 35s): Well it's like, well, I just can't imagine. I mean, I was alone for what, three and a half weeks and I barely watched an hour of Netflix a day. So I guess I just do have been working at the time. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. How about getting stuff done? That was fantastic. I cranked up some big things on are to do lists. I'm not completely a day for sure. Yeah. But all the fun and games our over my husband came home yesterday. So he's doing his darndest to make sure my life is much more distracted, open a good way in a good way.
Autumn (5m 12s): As long as the job of all spouses. Oh, we haven't seen each other for three and a half week. So it was like, you'd just get into something. And he like mentions, you know, once you get your attention, you just start writing a sentence. And I was like, Oh, what did y'all look read? Oh yeah, we should just put this stuff away for a couple of days than just talk. And that will be good. Yeah.
Jesper (5m 29s): Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's always a bit weird. And I think at, at least I'd mentioned it to you before, but I don't remember if we talked about it on the podcast as well, but you know, my, my wife is from Finland. So when she goes back to Finland, once in a while, it's always like the first couple of days is like, Oh yeah, great. You, you can do all this stuff then you just want to do for yourself and what not that, but then like three or four days into it, it always feels a bit like a, this is a bit boring now. Yeah.
Autumn (5m 55s): Right. That's what I think since, while probably since we in moved in together, this was the longest I have been alone in 20 years. Umm, so there was definitely some, like I had to find my pace again and find out what it's like to be me again at lone. And once I did, I was fine until you know about dinnertime. That's my weakness where they went to the talk to somebody. So yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. He was definitely into this and I'm happy to have a company again.
Jesper (6m 28s): Yeah. And I'm sure the dog was happy that he returned as well.
Autumn (6m 31s): He was so happy. He almost dissolved into a smaller versions of themselves. That's a weird thing about you are trying to imagine, what is this like inside the dog's mind, right? You don't understand that this person we'll come back. You know, probably a doc just thinks that he, he disappeared. They was like, there was like, I saw a light in the sh in the forest yesterday. It was probably UFO and it took, it just never kind of come pack and just know it thrilled.
Jesper (7m 0s): If I only could explain this to my owner, she doesn't get it. She's like nothing happened to me. He could be busy too
Narrator (7m 13s): A week on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast.
Jesper (7m 19s): So I mentioned it a few episodes back, but our very special giveaway on Patreon has gone life today. So excited. I always love when we have these little special things because well, one, they make us do something a little bit different and challenging, but it's just fun. It's such a great group over there. It is indeed. And we've decided to give away a golden ticket too. The wealth building course that we are just about done with now a so that means that there will be a chance to win completely free access to the wealth building course.
Jesper (7m 55s): And it's such a cool chorus, which I can say because I just finished building it on Saturday. So know it's over to you to look through it, but it will, it's just so beautiful. So in depth it is an amazing story that's for sure. And it covers so much wood putting it together. I'm like, I can see why this took us about two years to put together, coz it is just so in depth So yeah. A golden ticket. It is this, this is really phenomenal golden ticket. That's not the only thing because we are going to also do something for everyone who joined us because that's just, we are yeah.
Jesper (8m 32s): The first of all, the, the golden ticket, we'll actually give you an exclusive VIP, early access to the cost. So that's pretty neat already. But yeah. So what M says to him, because we, we will only draw one winner for the golden ticket. So yeah. We just felt like that's, that's a bit sad for everybody else. And what about the existing patrons supporters?
Autumn (8m 57s): They do. We want to give something to them as well.
Jesper (9m 1s): Exactly. And so we came up with the idea of doing a, well, we have a quite short or are we where we talk about a webinar or are prerecording it, but it's going to be a special event just for everyone who is on Patreon.
Autumn (9m 19s): Yeah. We decided to name it the reader's journey. And a, this is basically how are we using paid advertising to warm up the audience over several different steps. I don't know if I would call this stuff that we are doing here, like in new thing, but it's definitely a bit of a different way of thinking about paid advertising. So its like putting your ads into a system and having, and have a plan about what you are advertising and when you are doing it and Y and we're going to share all of that in this exclusive either it's going to be a prerecorded like cost module on it, or its going to be a webinar, which we were recorded.
Autumn (10m 3s): One of the To at least But, we're going to make this available to everybody who signs up to support us on Patrion before the 19th of October, that is 2020 in case you're listening to this much later, but you have to sign up before the 19th of October to get the stuff. And of course all existing patron supporters will get it automatically. So if that sounds good to you, you can just follow the link two Patrion in this show notes here and its only going to cost your dollar a month.
Autumn (10m 35s): Actually. I will say that it's a pretty damn cheap cos module. Yeah. That you can get your hands on. There
Jesper (10m 42s): It is. It's a very cool advertising system. So it's definitely worth a dollar or at least an Oh my goodness. For a dollar or you could potentially when the world building course So, especially with the special exclusive access, that's going to be very limited anyway. So it's, it's a really great deal.
Autumn (10m 59s): Yeah, I think so. All right. What else is on the end?
Jesper (11m 4s): Have you seen so many people have enjoyed it in the Am Writing Fantasy group? I don't think we've could M we've been able to keep up with the, of, you know,
Autumn (11m 13s): I'm actually, I, I have to admit that I am struggling a bit to keep up a, in the sense of costs I could just go into every day, but it's like, I feel like I approve eight to 10 people and then four hours later, there's another path sitting desk. It's a lot, it's a, its difficult to keep up at eight. It's a good problem to have this. It's not complaining at all. It's it's nice that a lot of people want to join the, the Am Writing Fantasy Facebook group. So I really like it. But at the same time it's is keeping us busy. That's it?
Jesper (11m 43s): The people in it is so funny, you know, it gets caught waiting. We're sorry. It's just, wow. There's been so many, but the conversations, I mean just one of the recent ones could have plucky, a teenager defeat you're big, bad, and you know, there's fun things and that's already got 27 comments and that's only two hours old. So yeah, there are just kind of having fun. And of course there's lots of encouragement and support and this as well as the fun post. So I just love it over there, but yeah. Aye between sleep and work and you know, eating, I'm not over there as much as needed and Luke thank goodness our moderator is got our backs because it does seem that way.
Jesper (12m 24s): Oh yeah.
Autumn (12m 27s): Yeah. It's a, it's a very lively, an active group. So, but we do, we do keep the entry sort of that we have to approve people for Join. We do keep that in April. Of course I D well, if we wanted to make it easy on ourselves, we could just disable that and let everybody join, but we don't want to do that because we want to keep it pretty moderated in the group as well. And we do like to do a nice, welcome message to everybody who joins us when they come in.
Autumn (12m 58s): So we try to keep it very moderated and making sure that we don't see all the, well, we do see some, sometimes the post about self promotion, but we delete them pretty quickly. Yeah.
Jesper (13m 10s): This is a group for chatting about writing and the problems of being a writer, not promoting her books.
Autumn (13m 22s): It seems that listeners have liked in the past when we've done our alternating lists or, and so I think like we set at the top of the episode, I think we should try to do the same thing here today. All right.
Jesper (13m 34s): I think that sounds good. And that was kind of prepared. So I did mine in one. Don't know if you could call it an ascending or descending order, but from what does it bug? What I don't think is quite as bad to what I think is some of the Advice it drives me crazy. So I dunno if you have yours in that order. Yeah. I've done the same thing. See I yeah. That's what we're going to have some overlapping. It's just the way booth. Yeah.
Autumn (13m 57s): Yeah. Well, yeah. I must admit I'm a bit curious if we do have overlapping or not, but the last few times in the past, when we had done these kind of episodes, we have had quite a lot of overlap, but I don't know. Lets see, let's see if, if this might be the one
Jesper (14m 16s): To break the mold, I don't know. Okay. Well let's say it know.
Autumn (14m 19s): Yeah. So if we cover five week and a, if a cover five hours and then maybe well, if we can, maybe we can say when we cover each of them, maybe we can say a bit about, you know, give a bit of justification on why we chose the, the ones we did.
Jesper (14m 36s): Oh yes. I hope so. Because I have to explain some of them. I know I have a specific reasons why they might be good advice, but there's parts of it that I just think are bad. So we'll have to see how, who we are, how much we overlap. I still I'm going with two I'm thinking at least do have ours. We'll have a laugh, but we'll see.
Autumn (14m 56s): Okay. I will guess one day. Yeah.
Jesper (15m 2s): We'll both be wrong. Don't worry. All right. Do you want to start? Yeah,
Autumn (15m 7s): But yeah. Yeah, but I actually, yeah, I will. But I was also thinking that maybe at the end of it, maybe we should try. So at the end of it, we've heard all 10. Maybe some of them overlapping, I don't know, but maybe we should then try to agree on one that we like from our combined list of 10 items can jointly agree on this is the one we hate the most.
Jesper (15m 32s): Okay. That'd be fine. And just to be sure, I actually wrote down my favorite piece of advice if we have to end on a better note and instead I'm really bad advice. Oh that's good. Yes. That, that would be a fun one. All right. So we might have to end on a favorite advice note. So there are, there are definitely some things not to ignore.
Autumn (15m 54s): Right. Okay. Good, good, good. Yes. I was not being positive in my preparation. It didn't at all. So I only have negative ones. Yeah.
Jesper (16m 1s): You'll have to think of a goal you will have. Do you have, I'm probably about 15, 20 minutes to come up with one piece of positive Advice I ah, now I should have warned you.
Autumn (16m 16s): Where would the fund be in that? It's a much monitors, so much fun. It's more fun to see him. Yeah. Are you squirm and, and scrape for, to try to find something? Yeah, that's right.
Jesper (16m 25s): You'll be doing some quick Googling while M I'm giving my,
Autumn (16m 30s): My bed and then, or I'll let you go first and then I'll agree with you.
Jesper (16m 36s): Oh, that's not fair, but you could probably do that.
Autumn (16m 42s): Okay. So you wanna hear my number? Fine. Yeah.
Jesper (16m 45s): Let's I want to hear your number five. Okay. So yeah.
Autumn (16m 49s): Number five is read everything. You can get your hands on. Read a lot.
Jesper (16m 55s): Oh, that's a good one.
Autumn (16m 58s): Yeah. But you know, I do agree. That is good to read and you will become a better rider from reading a lot. I do agree with that, but I also believe that it matters what you're reading. I mean, why would you read a romance novel when you want to write Fantasy all right. I mean, but yeah, the, okay. The smarty pants out there will then say, well, it we'll broaden your horizon and then you will learn new things. Yeah.
Jesper (17m 27s): Blah, blah, blah, blah. Good respect romance subplots. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah,
Autumn (17m 32s): Exactly. And, but honestly I couldn't care less. I want to read what I enjoy reading and then of course you could also say, well then you become very biased to the trucks and so on. So we'll see.
Jesper (17m 46s): Can you explain it? I don't take so, you know, I'm probably a very fine
Autumn (17m 50s): Tuned understanding of the . That's what I good. And what, I don't see the harm of that. And no one said either that I should go off to copy exactly what I've read either. So I still have to be creative with the stories that I'm going to tell, but that advice that I can only develop as a rider, as a writer or if I read outside my own I just don't do agree with that. Advice I mean, terrible, terrible. Advice
Jesper (18m 17s): Right. I agree with you. I did not list this one, but I nearly did. And its basically for me what you said, but also because it doesn't say read good books are, you know, I guess I think that even if you read it within your genre, maybe it doesn't hurt to occasionally read a book that you're like, Oh my goodness, I can't believe someone's self publish. This are published this or it got published because it's just so old, you know, trophy or whatever, or the writing is not stellar, but it really helps the read some really good books by the master's, you know, read Some Neil Gaiman is something really, something really gripping so that you learn from the experts.
Jesper (18m 58s): So I don't think I've, you know, you sometimes go in and you just pick up something on Amazon and because do you wanna read it? And it's just like, Whoa, don't just read this. You've got to feed yourself. So you've got to eat the salads, you know, you've got to use the healthy stuff. Don't just eat the sugar. So I definitely agree with you in it. If we had made a list of six, it, this one would have been on mine, but I didn't do it. So, so far we're not overlapping. So yeah, when I know what my number five is, I do, right?
Jesper (19m 27s): My leased of the worst. I don't know if right. What inspires you that vice gets under my skin and in some ways, I mean, I agree with it. Definitely. If you should love, absolutely loved the story you were writing. It should fire you up. It should be, I mean, perfectly, it should be the book that you searched for your whole life and you've just really want to read it. But I think too many people misconstrue this one to me that they should only write one inspired or that when the story starts to bog down because you know, you know, when you're writing 80 a hundred thousand words or has a series, you know, a 300 to 400,000 words, it's going to bog down and then they switched to a new project that inspires the more and that doesn't work if you're going to actually, you know, right.
Jesper (20m 17s): I think Writing, you know, maybe it should inspire you, but the Advice is not specific enough and eventually writing as not going to inspire you. And you just could have to sit your butt down and write it or you're never going to finish this book. So that's why they Advice drives me crazy. Right.
Autumn (20m 35s): Yeah. I was just about to add a well, a variation of that one activity to my list, but I didn't, but a, but I could just add that one here. I guess my number six, if I had, because the variation that was about to add was the write. What do you know? Advice, I hate that. That's what we do. I have to ride what I know I am coming up with a fictional stories. You are. I mean, and I don't know how magic work in real life either.
Autumn (21m 5s): So how can I
Jesper (21m 6s): Exactly, I will say nothing more on that one. I have no comment. Okay. Fair enough. Okay. So you want none before I went number four? Yeah.
Autumn (21m 19s): Okay. My number four is actually won that we sort of touched upon in the more recent Episode 91 of the Podcast here. Oh really? Oh yeah. Because we talked about daily word count in that episode.
Jesper (21m 33s): Right? So let me get that right every day. Yeah.
Autumn (21m 38s): It is basically the Advice that I hate when, when I hear or if you want to be a rider, you have to write every day. I mean, what the beep I think we explained the detail in our different viewpoints in, in Episode 91. So I'm not going to go into all of that again here, but this Advice did it make it onto my list, nevertheless, because I think it is extremely counterproductive to tell someone that they have to right. Every single day. Now you don't know.
Autumn (22m 9s): Yeah. I mean, like I said, in episode 91, I think you should be making progress most days of the week, at least this could also be plotting or planning the story. It doesn't have to be actual Writing or maybe you are doing a bit of work on, on your author business. I mean, of course you have to be mindful that you aren't using something like world-building as a procrastination Tune I know what it is so tempting. I know. I know know, but you don't want to get stressed out by the fact that you have to write everyday, but of course you, you can come up with excuses for yourself not to right.
Autumn (22m 45s): Either. So, you know, make progress, work on your novel or your author business, but yeah, don't leave. Let them take over your life. I think that's what we said in episode nine. Do you want as well? Oh yeah.
Jesper (22m 56s): Can we, did we, you said, you know, you have to have some balance and know that you have, you know, a life and family and other things other than writing, especially when you are trying to balance Writing with a career or, and a family and you have some time that you set it aside to being an author, whether its plotting or researching or something, but yeah, a big shot of the story is progressing in some form in your life, but it might not always be writing every single day. I have to agree with you, right.
Autumn (23m 25s): If this one is on your list as well then yeah.
Jesper (23m 28s): Oh actually it's not. So you wanna know my number of four of them.
Autumn (23m 33s): Yes, please.
Jesper (23m 35s): Well, it's what you had just said. Write what you know, so it does, it's not a true overlap because that was the number six. But yeah, I basically said same thing. I mean, this is what we write as Fantasy. So how can, you know, what it feels like to be a dragon or a weasel or an El For how you know, how to use magic or B a vampire. So I think the fact that we use our imaginations and the fact we don't limit ourselves to what we know allows us to create amazing ideas and stories. And I think our genre is, is often considered like escape Fantasy I do you know, it's basically we want there's something in this world that is bothering us or troubling us.
Jesper (24m 14s): And so we write about other worlds and other possibilities and that's sorta what a lot of readers or looking for. I mean, there is also now urban fantasy that as a huge chunk of the market, but it still a different version of this reality. It might be set in modern times are the city. I just watched this show that was set in modern times with the parallel universe. So it's, its still a different version of what we have and if we didn't expand our minds and do the things we don't no, but would like to see happen and ask those questions.
Jesper (24m 45s): Those things wouldn't exist. So whenever someone tells me, write what you know, and I'm like, well I know I don't like I've got to something else.
Autumn (24m 55s): No, I don't like what you just said. No, but I would even say if we look beyond Fantasy, you know, if you were writing, I don't know, lets say a romance or a thriller or whatever. I still don't understand the Advice of right. What do you know? So why is it that you can only So okay. If, well, I think at least last time I checked I'm a male. Yeah.
Jesper (25m 24s): So why can I,
Autumn (25m 26s): Why could I not write female characters for example? Or why could a woman not ride a male character? Its why do you have to box yourself into, this is the kind of things that I know about. So that's what I need two, right? Yeah. Why I I just don't get it right.
Jesper (25m 42s): Aye. A hundred percent agree. And I think, I mean, I think I heard this advice even all the way back in high school and even then I'm just like, but if I were stuck to what I know, which is what lived growing up in small, rural Christian, Pennsylvania I'm bored or I don't, I don't want to box myself into this. I want so much more, you know, I want Hogwarts. So yeah. I know. I think its just really bad advice. So if anyone ever tells you that, just look at them and be like, I'm so sorry for you, then move on.
Autumn (26m 17s): Yeah. And I would even say to the listener, you know, if, if you, if you want the stand, what this is, why this Advice is about it. And if you sort of understand the arguments about why its important, then please let us know, you know, comment on something. Because I know I would like to understand what the behind the line logic is of this advice because I just don't get it. And maybe I'm just thick and that's fine. But then please explain it to me so I could get it because I wanted to understand it's
Jesper (26m 44s): Because I mean, it's not just You it's both of us. We were like, is this the ones No alright, so can you, this is your number three.
Autumn (26m 54s): Well, I actually saw George RR Martin giving this advice on his website. I don't know if it's still on this website, but I noticed it at some point and I don't like, yeah.
Jesper (27m 5s): Oh my goodness. Something from Georgia or a Martin, you don't like he, then
Autumn (27m 11s): I know I'm walking on thin ice. You know, this is what I like to do. Right. I always put myself in situations where I don't know what's going to come back in my face.
Jesper (27m 23s): If you're going to hear about this one from some readers or listeners. Definitely. Yeah
Autumn (27m 27s): P but the Advice is so he said, quote, don't start writing a novel start with a short story and quote. And I believe he also went on to state that if you start out trying to write a novel or a series, it is like wanting to climb Mount Everest from day one. And I honestly don't feel that this is Advice is helpful to at all.
Jesper (27m 52s): I agree
Autumn (27m 54s): If one wants to write short stories than by all means. That's great. But why in the world, should you force yourself to write a source store? If you don't want too, if you find enjoyment from a short story is you probably don't even read short stories. I would guess then why would you do so I don't get it.
Jesper (28m 12s): It honestly, because I do you think you and I both started with novel's we just dove head online. I mean, I started with a trilogy. That's not even published in the sitting in some boldly drawers somewhere. Yeah. But you know, when I did switch to short stories, you know, I can whip off 120,000 words, not a problem, but to do 10,000. Oh that's hard. That's really hard. I mean, some people were a marathon. Runner's some people are our sprinters. If you are a marathon, what are under your not going to be a good sprinter.
Jesper (28m 43s): So don't beat yourself up for not being a sprinter. If you are designed to right. 500,000 words, go for it. It at the end, is it
Autumn (28m 52s): Day you should write something that you are excited about writing and as well, I think I would say that writing a short story is not exactly the same thing as Writing a full length novel, like you were saying a marathon versus a sprinting. They are right? Yeah. I mean Sure a lot of the same knowledge and skills that you will learn from writing short stories. You can transfer all when to a novel Writing but it's still not exactly the same thing. I know. I mean, it's, it's, it's so stupid. It's like you don't stop writing a romance novel to learn how to write a fences.
Autumn (29m 24s): You know what I mean?
Jesper (29m 24s): Who makes no sense? What would you do that that's very true. It's you should. Yeah. I mean, I remember feeling overwhelmed. I started my first book and I realized that I wanted to make it a trilogy. I'm thinking, Oh my goodness should really be starting off as a trilogy. It turned out fine. It fine, challenged yourself. If you, what you want to write is a trilogy. Make that your goal do it. It doesn't matter if you're a newbie or you know, you have written 20 books. Go for it.
Autumn (29m 53s): Yeah, I did too. The same thing, I started out with a trilogy and of course I had to rewrite book one like three times, but yeah,
Jesper (29m 59s): But you know, we got there. Yeah.
Autumn (30m 1s): But, but who cares? I mean, that's what I wanted to ride. And that was what I was excited about. And if you're not excited about it, you're not gonna keep up the momentum and the drive to get through it all because there's a lot of work. And you only realize that once you start writing and I know our listeners know all of this already. Right. But if, if you think, think that, okay. Do you also are Martin said that I should write 25 short stories before they do anything else?
Jesper (30m 25s): No. You're gonna kill yourself. Even before you get to the stuff you wanted to ride. Yeah. I would be so boring. I've been tortured. These are interesting, but they are not my cup of tea. I mean, I'd rather write a novel. I'd rather right. A trilogy. Yeah.
Autumn (30m 40s): So that, wasn't a, my number three,
Jesper (30m 42s): A that's a good one. That one wasn't on my list. So, so far,
Autumn (30m 46s): Thank you so far. I'm closer to be right at that. The only one.
Jesper (30m 49s): Oh, you know, let's see. Okay. So my number three is to get an idea of what dialogue sounds like, listen to conversations around you. I just, I hate that piece of advice. My I every time I hear and I'm like, just no, just don't listen to this. Advice because you don't have ever listened to people around you. They make no sense when they talk. They are referring to things you have no clue about. There are usually like, you know, short catchphrases and filler words and tons of filler words and wandering pointless conversations.
Jesper (31m 25s): And that's not dialog in a novel. And so don't do that. Every word in your novel should have her purpose is a special dialogue. It's in his writing. It's not a chat with your BFF. So, you know, don't listen to this. Advice if you want to learn to write dialogue, read some really good dialog has to go back to read. Greek plays like plays, have fantastic dialogue. Read those. Don't listen to people at a cafe. They, they are not going to teach you anything about dialogue except maybe what not to do.
Autumn (31m 56s): Yeah. I think probably the only thing I would say you could pick up there is maybe not dialogue input, but more like the different way people speak. You could tell, you could get a bit of inspiration for different kinds of voices. And so that part may be helpful. But other, I would also say that it's a ton more helpfully. If you just made a list of your characters and then you sort of said, okay, how do this person reacts when they are, when they are stressed out, when they're happy, when they are angry and, and you just write down, how do they react?
Autumn (32m 31s): And then making sure you have something different than all the boxes, that's a hundred times more helpful in terms of building very, a dialogue and, and having a character sound different from one another versus the listening to people in the cafe.
Jesper (32m 48s): All right. So I don't have, that was on my list. I'm on my goodness. Oh and less. We have the next two. I am totally wrong. Oh, all right. Well that's to say, so what is your number to,
Autumn (33m 1s): Yeah. And I don't think you have this one on your list. Autumn either of, you probably didn't expect it either.
Jesper (33m 8s): Oh, this is good. This has gotta be a good one then, right?
Autumn (33m 11s): Yeah. Yeah. So we're getting into the top two spots now. So we have to increase the seriousness, the items on the, yeah.
Jesper (33m 21s): I should've brought the music along. We have a little tension music playing. Yeah.
Autumn (33m 23s): Sorry. I guess we should have a, like a drum world. It is show don't tell them that they expect that. Huh?
Jesper (33m 32s): Nope. Nope. Did not expect that one at, Oh, darn it. Now
Autumn (33m 37s): At, I mean, when you show us, instead of telling it does make for a much more engaging and immersive reading experience for Sure right. So I'm fully on board with that and I'm, I'm not contradicting at all that show instead of Tel is important. And it is from that point of view. Good advice. But yet it is not good advice, I guess that requires some. Yeah.
Jesper (34m 0s): Yeah. If you want to hear your explanation on this one.
Autumn (34m 4s): Yeah. Well, the thing is that this Advice is thrown around so often that you can almost get obsessed about how to perfectly show rather than tell. And there is just no such thing as the perfect rider No and there are also times in the novel way. This is actually okay. Tell me you don't have to show all the time. And I think above all, don't get obsessed about how to do it correctly.
Autumn (34m 36s): You know, I think especially this one Advice show, don't tell that's one of those things that you put on your list of things that you want to improve over time, because it is not something that you are going to grasp or internalize very quickly. I don't know. I just feel like this particular piece of writing advice often becomes a stumbling block. And because you're start obsessing about how important it is, because it is important in the sense, like I said before, right?
Autumn (35m 10s): It does bring forth more engaging and immersive reading experiences. So it is extremely important. But if you get too obsessed about it, especially in the beginning, you are going to end up in a 200 edits, have your manuscript's and your not gonna get anywhere. Right. And I am sure that this happens all the time. And for that reason, I had to put it on the list even though in, in that is good
Jesper (35m 38s): Advice right now, I won't disagree with you. And I have nothing more to say on it right now, so, Oh yeah. That's fine. So do you want to know my number to, yes. Alright. So my number two is just right, which is sort of like the one you had mentioned before, right? Every day, if it's a little different and I won't say I hate it a hundred percent just that you need to grow out of it quickly. Cause you and I are both plotters and I think at a minimum, even pantsers coz I mean, I know I started as a pantser and I still have a little bit of pants or a tendency I've been more of a hybrid.
Jesper (36m 15s): You should take a look at story structure and make very quick outline of your goals, your themes, your characters, your seven stages or a plot development. And if you'd just write just vomit, word's onto a page, or you can end up with such a mess and that, and you don't even know if its editing or its not a good story telling and you don't know Y and that can be just as frustrating as not Writing. So that's where I have just write. I just think its, you know, if he's the only way you could get into Writing and you have something driving you and you want to right, but then you need to learn to develop your story structure.
Jesper (36m 51s): You need to learn to deploy. You need to learn to develop the format of what makes a great story. And you're not going to get that. If you just spend your time writing and word vomiting. Oh word vomiting. No okay. Fair enough. Okay. So are we, are we down to number one? Oh geeze. All right. I'm ready. And what is your number one?
Autumn (37m 18s): I have to say that it wasn't easy to figure out which one should be born the first place spot in this bat list of things.
Jesper (37m 25s): How was he in? That were different. I knew that was the first one I wrote down. Okay. This is my number one pet peeve. So right now,
Autumn (37m 33s): Right. I felt like I had to really think about it because it didn't only have to be a common Writing Advice that? I hate it also had to be one that I hated more than all of the other.
Jesper (37m 43s): Yes. So yeah, this was fun.
Autumn (37m 47s): Sort of gone. And I got hung up on this one when I first started out writing. Oh, because you basically hear it everywhere. Okay. I think it's like all, most the Holy grail of coming Writing Advice because it claims to fix your writing and make everything wonderful.
Jesper (38m 5s): Oh, I have to hear this one. What is this? Yeah.
Autumn (38m 12s): I'm talking about the Advice to remove all your Advice.
Jesper (38m 16s): Oh, that one. I ignored that one so fast that I don't even think it exists.
Autumn (38m 23s): All right. Well that's good. Good on you then, because I think that good writers do you use at verbs? And I honestly believe that they do have a place as well. I mean, of course it has to be done moderation and you do need to be careful not overusing the adverbs, but as long as you can find a way to walk that line, you know, please don't do what I did. And when I first started out with my first manuscript, you know, I have come across this Advice so I did a search in my manuscript once I was done and basically start searching for adverbs with the aim to change them all to something else.
Autumn (39m 3s): And it is really not a very productive use of your time. And its, it's not like you are writing will get elevated to a godlike state is afterward.
Jesper (39m 15s): But in fact you might lose something by doing that. Yeah.
Autumn (39m 18s): Yes. So yeah, I think I would just wanna say, you know, cut yourself some Slack. Okay. You know, don't, don't get too hung up on this stuff here and I dunno just because it, it gave me such a headache when I first started out. So that's what I put on. Number one. Yeah.
Jesper (39m 36s): Yeah. You know how I got over that one? Because I hear that one too. I was taking a novel writing class as an adult education class after work. And it was one of the first things they told me was, but then there was someone else who was doing their manuscript. They are reading and they have used an advert that I had used had gotten torn apart four and there were praised for it, but I kind of set what the bleep I went home and this was a mixed class So I and I was one of the few Fantasy writers.
Jesper (40m 8s): They are almost everyone else was doing memoirs. And so I pulled out a whole, my favorite Fantasy right. So there is a lot of kilos when I think I even had George RR Martin because of the game of Thrones, the first book has been out that long. So I had that one on my shelf. I had Mercedes Lackey, all of them and I photocopied a full chapter and I went through and I highlighted all of the advertar and adverbs. I underlined all the adjectives and then I calculated the average per page. And I said, screw you all are, the average was three to five per page.
Jesper (40m 39s): I'm doing to just do that. And you can just take your advice and shove it. So that's why that Advice doesn't bother me anymore for one,
Autumn (40m 48s): I think good on you. And secondly, that it was so much smarter than what I did.
Jesper (40m 55s): Right? I mean, when you get me riled asked my husband, actually, you don't ask him. You don't want, when you don't want those stories, public's never asked him, but all right. But yeah, that one did really drive me crazy, but it's been so long and I kind of literally torched it in my brain, but I think I talked to actually forgotten that one and I have to admit if I went back, I probably would add to my list. If I had seven, my seventh, one way, way back would have been to always use said as a dialogue tag, I hate that.
Jesper (41m 28s): Right. Especially for FANTASY WRITING it's just, it doesn't apply. We use a lot more issues. That might be it in certain genres, but it does not work in Fantasy Writing but that's not my number one. Do you want to know what my number one is? What is your number one? It show don't tell me. Oh no. Okay. But you know what I wrote? Yeah.
Autumn (41m 51s): Then in my show, don't tell, I was sure that Autumn is not going to have this one on my list.
Jesper (41m 56s): Well, that is my number one pet peeve. And I think it's sort of, because I just didn't, it was sort of like the Admiral thing. I just didn't quite understand it and understand what it meant. She would be like show don't tell it, show don't tell show. Don't tell him what does that mean? What does that actually mean? Fine. Give me a definition of that. And it is actually good advice. Like you said it is. It's when it's explained it's a good advice, but it's also incredibly misleading because even though it says, you know, if your character's angry, don't tell your reader's I angry.
Jesper (42m 28s): You wanted to show that she is angry by throwing things and speaking loudly and doing actions and that in that way, it is a very good advice, like you said, but there are times, like you said, when your writing, you do tell if a character is moving across country and nothing happens, you don't tell your reader about it. You just sum it up in like two sentences. You, you, you know, when and where they were here, they got to here and the journey. Perfect. And there is a total current trend. Have I see a lot with new riders that they feel they have to show up every minute, have a character as a life that you can not tell you anything about that character.
Jesper (43m 7s): You can't skip time. And I really don't care about learning about how someone brushes their teeth, unless it's important to the story. So there are times when you're writing, you tell and I've been doing a lot of editing recently. So I just seems like I keep coming across these painfully detailed scenes that are shown of characters, doing things. And when you finally finished the story, you're like, she just, just cut that, wrap it up.
Jesper (43m 38s): They got ready for work. There you go. That's the whole morning routine. So yeah, that's my current pet peeve. Sorry. So we have one, which means your right. You're the one who guess we'd have one the same so that you were in this one. I dunno what you wanted, but you will do it.
Autumn (43m 57s): I wanted the honor of being right?
Jesper (43m 59s): Yeah, it feels good. All right. Well this one we way to feeling better, actually. I humbly valuable to you. You are correct in Episode. Now you're going to forget which one we are doing. 93. You are,
Autumn (44m 11s): It took almost a hundred episodes before. Right?
Jesper (44m 16s): That's pretty good. Actually one out of my control. So it's not too bad. Yeah. Yeah.
Autumn (44m 20s): Maybe once we get close to her episode, 200 and not get another one. Right.
Jesper (44m 23s): All right. We'll get it.
Autumn (44m 27s): Yeah. But I guess it's well from a conclusion, point of view, I guess since the only one we both
Jesper (44m 32s): Had on the list, then I guess that's the one we jointly hate the most in isn't it? Yes. I think so. I think that is definitely, probably are our joint a painful one. Like I said, I probably would have agreed with you in the adverbs, except that I I thoroughly kicked that one in the butt early. Yeah. That was cool. Should have done the same thing I ever did a blog post about it and shared my results because I was so angry. I should have red that one. Then you should have asked if we'd found each other's sooner or you might have been hilarious, but so do you want to know?
Jesper (45m 9s): I actually have two pieces of writing Advice and then I have a quote. I did my homework. You should be so as well, what happened? It only took almost a hundred hours. So that's what I did homework. Umm, alright. So I actually have two pieces of favorite Advice if you wanted to hear them. Yes, please. The first one is you can edit a blank page and I do appreciate that on you. Every time I feel like my writing is going poorly or whatever is going on, I just remind myself, it doesn't matter.
Jesper (45m 42s): I need to just write it. I need to push through whatever stumbling block I have because you can't edit something that doesn't exist. So you just need to write it and then you can go back and fix it. So that was definitely one of my heartfelt once. But one of my most absolutely favorite ones that I kept pasted on my WRITING space is paint. What, the words you leave on written because I, to me that's symbolizes the magic of Writing and the magic have reading is that were only half half of the spell and the other half as the reader.
Jesper (46m 14s): So you have to leave room for the reader to take what you're writing and construct parts of it for themselves. And that's what makes a story magical to me. So that one is definitely my favorite piece of writing advice is to paint what, the words that you leave unwritten or an unsaid. I love that won it. Can't top that high can end with a lovely quote. That is kind of a fun summary to all of the pieces of advice that we just have given, but it would be good or bad.
Jesper (46m 45s): OK. Yeah. And this is from Michael Moorcock. He says ignore all pro offered rules and create your own suitable for what you want to say.
Narrator (46m 57s): Right.
Jesper (46m 58s): All right. So next Monday we're going to discuss if there is a particular word that you need to stop starting sentences to with that almost sounded like Common Writing Advice We HATE
Narrator (47m 9s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Yesper on patrion.com/am Writing Fantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast going to stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
How do you battle visibility in today's publishing landscape? How can you enable word-of-mouth marketing for your books?
Lisa-Marie Cabrelli joins episode 92 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast.
She is currently writing a PhD thesis on enabling readers to become co-creators.
This episode will challenge your preconceived notions about indie publishing, as well as, selling books in a crowded marketplace. Well worth the listen.
Links to resources mentioned in this episode:
Sign up for Lisa-Marie's newsletter: http://www.laptoplifelisa.com/
Lisa-Marie on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/laptoplifelisa
Lisa-Marie on Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/laptoplifelisa
Story planning app: https://www.archivos.digital/
Worldbuilding app: https://www.worldanvil.com/
Note taking app: http://www.roamresearch.com
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (1s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast in today's publishing landscape. You can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt
Jesper (30s): Hello. I'm Jesper and this is episode 92 of The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. And while Autumn is taking care of some of them, other activities today, I'll have a conversation with Lisa Marie and I had to say that this is one that I've been looking forward to because you see its not often that one gets to talk to someone who has a PhD in creative writing, where the world building as one of the critical components. That's amazing.
Jesper (1m 0s): I'm looking very much forward to this. Welcome to the am writing fantasy podcast. Lisa I
Lisa-Marie (1m 7s): Thank you. I'm very happy to be here.
Jesper (1m 10s): So maybe you could start out just by telling us a bit about yourself, right?
Lisa-Marie (1m 14s): Sure. I'm actually not yet a PhD so I'm actually doing P PhD research right now. I've had a pretty diverse life. I M was an entrepreneur for a long time. I had my own an eCommerce business and I sold that in 2015, which allowed me to retire and do my dream job, which is of course writing novels. And umm, as part of the, when I was writing novels, it turned out that we were going to have to come to Scotland for a few years to look after my mother-in-law and I decided to go back to school.
Lisa-Marie (1m 55s): So I went back and got my masters in creative writing and then I was encouraged to move on to get my PhD. So there's two pots have a PhD in a practice based creative writing degree. And that is writing a novel 'em to its natural lent. So I'm writing it dystopian fiction novel, which was about a 120,000 woods. And also WRITING a and accompanying critical thesis, which was about 40,000 word.
Lisa-Marie (2m 25s): So that's I am working on that right now. We have about a year left. So yeah.
Jesper (2m 30s): Is there like a specific focus you have to do with your PhD a broader than you, you know? Well, well I understand riding a novel. What do you have to like do a more theoretical focuses on something specific?
Lisa-Marie (2m 41s): Yes. So normally when people do a practice based research degree and they're writing a novel, they do, what's called an X of Jesus, which was kind of an examination of your creative writing practice. But I decided that I wanted to go a little bit further. I'm very interested in the self publishing and why the self publishing world as has not yet sort of reached its tendrils into the, a academic and, and more formal literary critique community.
Lisa-Marie (3m 12s): So I decided to do my creative Co I sorry. The critical component as research, focusing on redefining the role of the author in this post press genre fiction world. So the digital economy of course, has been the key to allowing all of us to be able to express ourselves through self publishing. And umm, I was interested in really examining how the role of the author has changed beyond the traditional publishing community.
Lisa-Marie (3m 48s): And I theorize that authorship in the future is going to have to follow a more collaborative model and that there has been such an evolution for three components of this collaborative model, which is that all for the reader and the text, umm, over the last 20 years in a specific, you know, primarily. And so we have to, as authors move along with ah, the changes that have been happening and the publishing environment and the post press environment and well building is a huge part of that.
Lisa-Marie (4m 26s): It cannot be ignored that the text is no longer a single isolated narrative. It's now usually especially obviously science fiction and fantasy simply a gateway into a larger world. So it's a, the Cola that combination of the author has self publisher. The reader has what I call a Creators a reader, which was kind of an extension of the early adopter who is the fan and the world, which is the extension of a single narrative into a, a multi narrative trans media environment.
Lisa-Marie (5m 2s): If that makes sense.
Jesper (5m 4s): Yeah, because I think it originally, when I heard you talking about collaboration, I was sort of thinking like moving into a world where it would be more common for authors to cocreate. There are stories which for certainly in at least in self publishing that has been an ongoing trend for the last couple of years. But actually I think you're sort of talking a bit about something else here. Not really about whether or not there were several authors co-creating stuff, but Moore, I guess the triangle between the actual work and a writer and the reader, is that right?
Jesper (5m 38s): Yeah,
Lisa-Marie (5m 38s): That's correct. I mean cocreation between authors is most certainly something that is, you know, should be examined further, but I'm specifically looking more to cocreation between the author and the reader and the world environment. So it's really between the author and the reader that I find interesting because I would say that the ban is the early adopter of this role, that I've coined creator reader. And that's the individual who is spurred beyond the activity of meaning making when reading fiction and into the activity of creator.
Lisa-Marie (6m 20s): And that's been going on for a hundred years, the fan community, but now I'm theorizing that that is going to turn into a, more of a mainstream requirement of genre fiction readers and that the author has to prepare themselves for that and also provide the environment, even the physical environment as well within which this creator a reader can express themselves. So it is, it's a co-creation between the author and the reader as well as it is between the th this triangle that your discussing the authors of the reader and the world.
Jesper (6m 59s): Right? So you're, are you thinking in terms of big because we live in a very social media kind of environment and that we have a lot of ways to express ourselves. I mean, people can a run their own YouTube channels. I'll do a podcast like this one out, whatever they want. So are you thinking in the sense that we're moving into it being more commonplace that fans have, let's say certain books do you use or whatever they will create their own content in relation to that book series?
Jesper (7m 30s): Is that sort of the line of thinking?
Lisa-Marie (7m 32s): Absolutely. That's exactly the line of thinking that I'm going down it in the past, in the, you know, in the late 20th century, reading was really considered to be a very private expression of taste. So it was something that people did alone and, and the quiet and do, you know, social reading a began in the late 20th century, primarily with, with book clubs, be beginning to rise in popularity.
Lisa-Marie (8m 6s): And then of course the digital economy exploded social reading opportunities. And it's from this social reading environment that Readers have this, not all Readers right. This is a small portion of the general reading population have this desire to actually create And. I positing that as the author's responsibility to ASP in the self publishing environment and the genre fiction environment specifically to provide opportunities for the older, for the reader to move into that creation space.
Lisa-Marie (8m 44s): So,
Jesper (8m 45s): So this is automatically, already sparked like two questions for me, because one on one question is, so how do you, how do you propose that the author both to prepare themselves two to, to do that. And, and also how, how do we create an environment whereby the readers can actually get to co-create in, in the setting as, as we please, or is it not something that we have to worry about other than they will sort of find their own way into this social media environment? That was sort of one question.
Jesper (9m 15s): And, and I guess the other question is, have you had any thoughts about, because there is some sort of copyright licensing problems here as well, I guess that we need to maybe think about it or maybe you, you, you think it's not necessary and this is just a new world we we're looking at now. What do you think?
Lisa-Marie (9m 35s): Yeah. I'm so do your first question. The third part of my thesis really kind of addresses EI an imagined process that a collaborative author could follow in order to provide this kind of environment that we're talking about. So in traditional literary theory, that this type of co-creation technically happens with literary reading. So the theory says that Narrator, I that a reader narratively, co-create a narrative with an author in their mind when they are doing really, you know, deep literary reading and that this cocreation is virtual.
Lisa-Marie (10m 20s): And that's what a reader response theory really is. It's set. The reader is creating something from the text and the text no longer belongs to the author. So we'll talk about that and copyright in your copyright question next. But my theory is that John, our reading is obviously not literary reading, its considered passive reading, which is an probably an incorrect title for it, for that kind of reading. My theory is that the cocreation that happens virtually in a literary Reid has needs to happen in real life and physically in a genre read So it is the author's job.
Lisa-Marie (11m 2s): Do you create that kind of environment? You know it in my theory. And so, yes, and the third chapter I talk about from the very beginning, how a genre fiction author should make sure that they are engaging the reader and three different points to make sure that that reader becomes moves into this created a reader role, which is the optimal role for an author. In my theory, both economically and aesthetically, because it provides economic advantages too, a self published author because when you have those thousand true fans, you really have a group of Readers that will stick with you and your world and your, and your series, you know, above and beyond there, they will become your one click a group.
Lisa-Marie (11m 52s): And then also it serves an author because it gives an author of the opportunity to experience the kind of artistic growth that they perhaps would not have if they were to shut themselves off from this opportunity to collaborate with their readership. If that makes sense. So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So the theory is to engage with the Readers On in three levels, a one is socially and community.
Lisa-Marie (12m 22s): So you begins to the very beginning, start to build your community in a lot of people are self published. Authors are doing all of this already. I'm just basically putting it into the academic context, engage them in your texts. So what is it you're doing within your gateway texts to engage and encourage a co creator of Readers and then also engaging them in the expanded text, which is, which becomes the story world. So that process is what I'm kind of developing as the last stage of my critical thesis component, right.
Lisa-Marie (12m 57s): Because we are right.
Jesper (12m 59s): I feel like, you know, I love it myself when, when a fictional world feels like it really grabs your attention. Right. And, and it pulls you in and, and you, you sort of want to explore more of that setting as a whole. And it basically goes beyond the story itself. So I for sure. I love though that kind of thing. And I know of course many Fantasy I Readers lot that sorta thing as well. I just had a reflection about what you said about building, building the community and, and having that the Readers to cocreate and whatnot in today's world.
Jesper (13m 33s): I feel like everybody is so busy and there are so many social media contexts. There are so many groups. If your hand, if you decide for example, to run a Facebook group, how do you have any reflections about how, how do we get people to actually engage and, and start on this? Co-creation
Lisa-Marie (13m 50s): Sure. I mean, we look to fandom as what we do and that's actually what I'm doing. And my research I'm look deeply into fandom and figure out what is it about these particular texts or these particular story words that drag these fans I'm into the position where they're there. They're obsessed now, not every reader is ever going to be in a fandom, right? There are people who will never become creator Readers and that's fine.
Lisa-Marie (14m 21s): And though you will still have those readers and those readers will still be engaged. But the ones that you want to look for are those fans that will become these super I'm super obsessed. It's the wrong word, but super engaged, write this,
Jesper (14m 39s): Is it true? Fans I liked a true fan.
Lisa-Marie (14m 42s): You'll get your 1002 fans. And those are your creator Readers so yes, everyone is obviously very busy. There's a bazillion Facebook pages. You can follow that's. You know, the newsletter fatigued with authors is a very, very Real. And so that is exactly what my research is, is looking into. Where are the points that you can engage your readership throughout the process of writing and a, you know, production, distribution, and reception of a novel.
Lisa-Marie (15m 17s): And those are the three points of the ones that I discussed. So the social and community, and the biggest point in the first step is to find your beta reading community and engage your beta reading community. Not necessarily as simply people who are just going to read the book and give you reviews, which was, I think were a lot of self published authors treat their beta Rita community as, but engage your beta Rita community from the very beginning, as co-authors not in any sort of credit, you know, or, or, or copyright wise, but people who you turn to to make sure that from the very first would you buy it on the page, these people are involved.
Lisa-Marie (16m 4s): And I've actually done that with the novel that I'm writing for this particular degree. So you get a group of beta readers and you don't just ask them the questions. Like, did you like the novel? And do you want to review it? You ask them the really deep questions about what's missing. What didn't you understand? What should I add? What did you not like? So though that's the first step of real engagement, and those are the core of what's going to become, you're a creator, a readership. And then obviously in the next stage, which is within the text, there's a lot of intertextual world-building techniques that office can use to encourage this type of engagement.
Lisa-Marie (16m 46s): And a lot of it has to do with making sure your very, very careful about the type of backstory that you include within your book. A lot of fantasy and science fiction readers go really overboard on our own backstory and leaving, you know, leaving gaps as one of the most essential things for, into textual engagement, making sure that there are places where readers really feel that they can step in and have something to contribute.
Lisa-Marie (17m 18s): So even though you may know what happens with this particular character, or you may know the backstory of this particular event, making sure that either you don't share it, or you encourage our readership two complete that backstory for you. So that sort of leads into the world building aspect, which is I have created a physical world environment. So I looked at several options for this archivist is a fantastic, a online tool for exploring world relationships.
Lisa-Marie (17m 59s): It's a really fabulous, it, it didn't work in the end for me because I needed a lot more a space for a text. So I moved to world Advil, which is also fabulous and works really well for a lot of science fiction and fantasy folks. But again, didn't really do what I needed to do for what I'm theorizing. So I moved into a tool called Rome research, and it's a fabulous tours brand new. It, it just came out at the end of 2019, and I'm actually gonna be developing some courses, four, our own research in how to use it in creative writing environment, because its really, really powerful giving Readers that environment that post Reid.
Lisa-Marie (18m 41s): So after the immersive experience of the narrative, they can step out of the single text, which I'm calling and gateway texts. There can be multiple gateway texts that lead into the story world and into the story world with the author specifically not being the, and it will be cool, you know, a decider for what happens within that world environment.
Lisa-Marie (19m 12s): I mean it's, it's, it's probably even valuable for an author to step away from the world at that point and pass it on to, you know, I'm, I'm speaking business speak here, but that's my, my background, a product manager who says, okay, this world now belongs to you. What is it that you want to do with it? And then they will say, I can step back in two, write another text, you know, from their own perspective, in their own point of view. So too, to your copyright issue, fandom traditionally is very anti a commercial.
Lisa-Marie (19m 51s): The fandom environment is anti commercial. What part of that is because they had to be an antique commercial because early efforts at publishing fandoms for commercial benefit fandom tax for commercial benefits were really slammed by the traditional publishing industry. So in order to protect themselves, fandoms often proclaim this like an anti commercialism. But I think there is a desire within the fandom community. And I think we're seeing that in self publishing specifically and the science fiction and fantasy world for fans to be able to contribute to a world and benefit economically.
Lisa-Marie (20m 32s): And so there is a model, there is an economic model that an author can develop whereby it benefits both the author and the reader economically and aesthetically.
Jesper (20m 46s): It's very interesting. I'm just thinking here as well, because I can remember maybe it was like 10, 20 episodes ago or something like that. We had, ah, we had more Lafferty on who it was. She has written novels for a star Wars and its interesting and comparing whats, you said to what you were saying because with star Wars, for example, that's also a massive universe obviously and, and, and the Lord air is really expensive, but she basically said like, OK. So when I have to ride for star Wars, they gave, give me like disciplinary where we are strict guidelines on what I can do in what I can not do in the setting.
Jesper (21m 26s): Whereas I think what your saying is basically the opposite. You sort of just release it out into the world and you know, you guys figure out what happened to you or whatever. Right. So I think what you're saying is that the fans we'll just developed, the background story are fill in part of the world that was not really filled in and the rider or the owner of the work doesn't really, you know, put any restrictions on it.
Lisa-Marie (21m 52s): Yeah. I mean, that's one of the benefits of being a self publisher, right? I mean the reason why star Wars and those other huge franchise franchises are so strict is because the copyright is owned by w I N in an iron fist in a way by the corporation. It is not really about you, you know, artistic license, its about making sure that the corporation can keep the economic benefits have, you know, the expanding world.
Lisa-Marie (22m 23s): So one of the benefits of self publishing is as an author, you know, I have the capability to say, yes, this is my, you know, my world that, that, you know, I started and This, these are the gateway text's that I have written, but do you know what they're is? There is a benefit in me opening it up and allowing Readers and fans I to contribute their own versions of the world and this story world, it, it doesn't mean that the author is giving up control because the author still has the ultimate word on, on what gets into the, you know, official Canon.
Lisa-Marie (23m 5s): But it means that the author has this incredible opportunity to co-create with a readership and produce exactly what the readership is looking for. And then also give the advantage to people who perhaps don't have the capability to self publish themselves, or don't have the, you know, the business savvy to go out and do all the things that is required in the, in the self publishing community to get your workout there.
Lisa-Marie (23m 38s): The author has the opportunity to also help those people as well. And it will benefit both of them mutually. So perhaps the orthotics, you 20%, 30% of whatever they decide to publish under their story, well title. And perhaps they have a free environment where anyone can publish and it's technically not part of the cannon, but their not going to restrict fan's from what they want to add or want to write within that story world. It's it's only going to benefit the author in the long run.
Lisa-Marie (24m 11s): I mean, I don't get in to the economic aspect of it very much in my thesis just because I, I don't have enough room, but it's my belief that copyright in general is if you hang onto it too, tightly your in this environment, in this digital environment, you're restricting the opportunity to spread awareness of your work. So the people who like, you know, restrict there, their graphics from being spread, I mean, of course you need to be credited, but people don't want their art to be spread out on the internet, even though its credited, I think they are making a big mistake.
Lisa-Marie (24m 50s): I think there is a benefit in making people feel as though they an actually making people a, a part of the, the, the, of the creative experience, right?
Jesper (25m 5s): Yeah. I like, I like to sort of become very practical, helps with that because you know, many of our listeners hear there might be, they might be riding their first novel on maybe the first series of something, but they haven't been made. Maybe they haven't gotten very far. Maybe they, they only have like, lets say 200 people on their email list who they know will actually read it at this point in time. So I I I because I can fully imagine that if your like George RR Martin, for example, and you set up something and say, okay guys, you can, you can sort of start developing in this part of the world and what not a lot of people will just do it because they would love to.
Jesper (25m 43s): But for the cell published author with maybe a limited audience, how do you think that people would get best gets started in getting the, so what did you call them? Create a Readers going in and in creating something right.
Lisa-Marie (25m 59s): Well, I mean, I think the number one key is reader engagement. It's absolutely essential from the very beginning. I mean I wrote prior to moving into my PhD a prior to actually start in my master's I wrote a romantic comedy and people would say, well, you know, there's no world building and romantic comedy. There is no opportunity for reader engagement and its that's incorrect. The, the readers of any kind of genre have a desire to be engaged with the author, with a community and with the story world.
Lisa-Marie (26m 33s): So I would say to any author that is just starting out is make sure that you are engaging with your reader community, umm, as they are, as though they are your friends. I mean every single email that you get you an answer it, Oh, you know, every single request you get four somebody who wants you to read their short story that they've done based on your, a novel, you, you read it and you respond to it. I mean just because you only have 200 people on your list, I can guarantee you it, if you have 200 people on your list, you're going to have at least one or two of them send you an email about your work and you need to make sure that the, you know, the first step of reader engagement is author and community.
Lisa-Marie (27m 23s): So you need to make sure that you are really open and available to your readers so that they feel like, well, they will have a relationship and a connection with you that carries on into your work.
Jesper (27m 38s): Yeah, that makes sense. And I, I fully agree with that as well. And also the whole point about always responding to email it, it doesn't have to be about the work, but any email you get from, from, from Readers always respond to it. I, I fully agree with that. So I guess to some extent what we are, well, we're sort of talking about making small steps that over the long term will make a big difference, right? In the sense that okay, if you get, if you get one person onboard and they will develop, maybe, maybe they do a bit of drawings of, to the settings or whatever, because there just like it, I had some Readers in the past doing that day, made some, some of their own art work of some places in a novel, which was a very nice or maybe other people would like to do a bit of wealth building.
Jesper (28m 24s): Another person might want to write a short story elaborating on one of the characters background is, is that sort of what you're thinking? And then you just encourage that and you maybe provide some sort of platform where people can post stuff or something like that. Yeah.
Lisa-Marie (28m 41s): Sorry. Yes. That is exactly right. I mean, we are We I don't address it again and my thesis because they don't have room, but umm, we are living in a transmedia environment. There are multiple opportunities to expand a narrative beyond simply just writing another story are writing another book into a series. There are opportunities for people to, like you said, draw the settings, draw all the characters, write short stories, write poetry, make films. And people are doing that within these fandoms right now with the, with the, within the big franchise fandoms.
Lisa-Marie (29m 16s): So as an author, I'm encouraging that kind of co-creative activity and giving your readers' the place to do that I think is kind of the way forward. And I, and I'm not saying this as anything new, I mean, author's are doing this right now. What I'm doing is putting it into sort of an academic through an academic lens so that we can get academia itself as well, more interested in this changing role of authorship.
Lisa-Marie (29m 53s): I mean they're still really stuck on this idea of the genius author. You know, this solitary ingenious ortho who is an inspired and writes this, you know, an amazing piece of literature and then is discovered by the traditional publishing industry. And all of this is really the only legitimate method of authorship. It seems within the, the, as you know, the majority of the literary academic community right now.
Lisa-Marie (30m 24s): So my goal is to try and get academia and, and the more traditional community to try and look at authorship a little bit differently to let go of this concept of genius, authorship and coffee copyright. I mean it's difficult because that has a huge impact on a traditional publishing industry who is already struggling, you know, with the search in self publishing and the, and the changing environment, they are not necessarily technologically savvy, their not necessarily keeping up with the changes and they don't have the infrastructure or the methodologies in place to support the kind of it, you know, co-creative process that I am talking about.
Lisa-Marie (31m 5s): So there is, there is a great deal of, of, of resistance, but I think that it's obviously happening out there right now. There are some authors who are extremely good at it and who are doing it. So let's take a look at it from, you know, a research perspective and figure out what's working, why and what it means to literary theory and the literary establishment as we move forward.
Jesper (31m 31s): Yeah. That one, I definitely liked about it. And I have to admit as well, the way that you asked for a lot of challenging sum, some set of beliefs here. Right. So I quite like that, but yeah, but what I, what I do like about what you're saying is because one of the things that we keep coming back too, over and over and over again, when we are doing our podcast where we are interviewing other authors and so on and so on, we always come back to the problem of visibility, you know, in, in today's internet based, always connected kind of world.
Jesper (32m 1s): There is so much stuff out there, especially after a self publishing came through with over the last 10 years or so, maybe a bit less, but there are so many books if you go to Amazon as well as ton of tons of tons of books in every genre. So getting your books to actually become visible to Readers and therefor also of course, hoping to earn some money is one of the most difficult things to do. And one of the things we have always said from our side is that that is why your email list it's so incredibly important.
Jesper (32m 35s): And that is so important to have that conversation going with the reader's life. Like you have all also set here, but I think you are input here adds another element to what we usually say in our advice. And that is that if you can get these co-creators, this is Rita Creators I to do work in your world, your base basically sort of encouraged that a word of mouth marketing, basically, right?
Jesper (33m 6s): So today we'll start spreading out across all their own social media feeds and they will share that stuff, which will hopefully will also lead to new readers back into your work at the end is, is my logic here? Correct?
Lisa-Marie (33m 20s): Absolutely. That's absolutely correct. Listen, I I I'm first and foremost, a business person. That's my background, I'm an entrepreneur. I built a business from scratch. And so my ideas are very much, you know, economically business focused and really its nothing more than building a brand. So you're story world and you the author and you, you and you become your brand. You make promises to your readers that then you fulfilled, right?
Lisa-Marie (33m 53s): U you, you find out you very closely specify who your target reader is. You make promises you no to that reader threw things like, you know, tropes and genres and, and, and stuff like that. And you develop a brand relationship. So yes it is about using the word of mouth just as brands do and giving reader's the opportunity to spread the word about your brand.
Lisa-Marie (34m 25s): I know a lot of authors that would feel really gross thinking about it that way, because a lot of, especially in the traditional publishing industry, obviously they is what you write is art. But my premise is that you can still write on it and you can still be an artist while taking advantage of what the digital economy is offering you from an economic perspective. So if you were to be building a brand, do you would slowly begin gathering your 1000 true fans, which obviously authors do through social media and their email list, which again, I think is absolutely true.
Lisa-Marie (35m 6s): It's the number one most important thing. And making sure that once the reader enters into a relationship with your brand, that's the only place they want to go. So that's why you provide this story world in this opportunity to engage at a level that most traditional methods of authorship don't allow. Does that make sense?
Jesper (35m 34s): Yeah, absolutely. It makes sense. But have you, from your personal experience trying to live this stuff, have you had the experience that you can actually get people to co create or a small or is it always a bit like cricket? So as you know, that you will ask people to encourage them to create something and then maybe one or two people do that, but nobody else what's your experience there?
Lisa-Marie (35m 56s): Well, the reason that I started getting really interested in this was watching other authors do it. So I know that it does happen with other authors. I, when I was writing my romantic comedy, I did have people come in and request to create, wanting to write short stories on the characters, wanting me to expand storylines and gaps that I would then say to them. I don't, I don't feel it that doesn't, you know, there's no nothing that resonates with me to expand that, but you go ahead.
Lisa-Marie (36m 27s): So yeah, I the people do. I truly believe that people do want to do it. One of them unfortunate things about doing a PhD is that its a three, four, five year process. And so a lot of the economic exploration I would like to do to test these theories I can't do because I'm so focused on the, you know, the, the actual research and academic aspects on, on the, on the writing side, because really I'm doing a creative writing degree, not a business or economic degree.
Lisa-Marie (37m 2s): So I have to focus on the, on the, on the literary component, but post my PhD, I fully plan on, you know, exploring this in at multiple levels, perhaps even start in my own small, a publishing company where I worked with authors who are interested in working in this way and not just in the science fiction and fantasy genre, like I said to you, I believe that there's, I mean, crime fiction is a huge opportunity for people to get engaged and in worlds, a romance is a huge opportunity.
Lisa-Marie (37m 36s): So I think I'm, I do think that their, there are, I haven't experienced a huge volume of it because like I said, I'm really focused on the theoretical aspects of it right now, but I think it's out there there's enough evidence to show. I mean, I don't, you, you obviously know Michael Andrew Lee and I interviewed one of his team members for, for the PhD and there are folks who write whole novels that he picks up within his, besides a science fiction and fantasy worlds.
Lisa-Marie (38m 9s): So it's happening out there right now.
Jesper (38m 13s): Yeah, I agree. And a, one of the things that, a, one of the things that Autumn and I already have planned is that at some point in the future, we, we would like other authors too, right. In our settings as well because our setting is, is going to be huge and there's got to be a lot of stories you can tell in it and we can not tell all of it. So, so that we wanted to do anyway, but I still feel like there's a slight distinction, you know, basically basically becoming a publishing company because that's basically what we would become, right? So we would have our own authors that we have contracts with and they would ride in our setting.
Jesper (38m 47s): Umm, but they own stories obviously and our setting. So, but that's becoming a publishing company. Whereas on the other hand, there's this whole other element to it, which is more like the fan fiction or the fandom. It doesn't have to be fiction. It could be pictures of videos or whatever people wanna make, but that there is no contract. They are, that's more like just and understanding about and encouraging people to actually create stuff. And then of course, I guess what would help if we, as authors would help promote that stuff once it's created it, if they created a cue, a cool video, or when you have the YouTube channel, maybe you are bloated as the author to the YouTube channel and the person will feel like this is awesome.
Jesper (39m 27s): You know, I got to make a video that came on to the author of a YouTube channel or whatever. I'm just making something up here. But, but I feel like those two parallel streams here, whereas one of them is about basically more like becoming a publisher. Where's the other one is more about fandom and providing opportunities to fans, to express themselves.
Lisa-Marie (39m 49s): Yeah. And I think they, I think what I'm saying in, in my thesis is that those two things can merge together that we're moving from a reading community into a writing community. And so those people who you are talking about as fans or Readers actually have the capability to contribute and be authors and they're is their, there are the things that they are creating, the contributions they are creating are worthy enough to be shared under the author's concept of what their, their world is.
Lisa-Marie (40m 27s): So again, it comes down to a conversation about copyright and how, and if you want to include an economic or an economic aspect in the relationship with your fans or not, I mean, that's all stuff that needs to be though through and worked out well and will obviously be at the final component of my thesis when I propose like what people can do is as the next day.
Jesper (40m 53s): Well, I think definitely you are challenging some of the set beliefs here and I very much liked that. Is there anything, is there anything I should have asked you about do some read that I haven't something important to mention?
Lisa-Marie (41m 6s): No, I don't think so. I think we've probably covered everything. I just hope that, you know, I have, I don't speak about my research very often publicly and I'm a new academic, so I'm hoping that the way I put it forward had the kind of clarity and it needed, you know, outside of the academic speak that I'm used to doing right now.
Jesper (41m 31s): Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I, you explained it well a and those are, there was some mindset stuff you have to think about it in terms of how are we approaching our Readers and, and how do we develop our worlds? And I think we tried throughout our conversation here to bring it a bit bit outside of theory and, and sort of become practical a bit as well, just to see it. Okay. How could we potentially do this? But I also like the fact that we can leave in a bit to the listener as well, too, to think creatively about how can you engage with your readers and how can you enable them to become a creator readers and B part of your world and in whatever fashion that you liked, because there was also some individuality here at play in terms of how much you feel comfortable with and how much do you want to, to, to engage with Readers on this level.
Jesper (42m 24s): But I do think there's a lot of truth to the fact that if you can do this, this is one of the ways where you can combat that visibility issue, that we all struggle with a in today's landscape here when it comes to a true self publishing. So I think that was excellent. And a, we had a very, very good conversation here. So all I want to say is a thank you so much for coming on to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast Lisa Marie and as I expected this to be a very interesting conversation, so thank you, you are welcome.
Jesper (42m 59s): And if it, and I will be releasing a lot of this stuff in a more writer focused or the focused format, like nonacademic format, umm, as I progress in terms of courses and, and things like that. So if anybody is interested, they can just pop over to my website and sign up for my newsletter and that this stuff will be coming out in more detail as it progresses. That sounds great. Then if you can email me the link to where people can go, ah, and maybe also the link to you.
Jesper (43m 32s): You mentioned some tools in the session here, so maybe if you could email me that stuff, then I'll put it into show notes and then listeners can just go straight through them to go to the show notes and just click through a, that would probably be the easiest way to do it. And ah, I know if a for sure Lisa Marie that I will sign up to your email a bit less because I wanted to see what you've come up with. Okay. It sounds good. All right. So next Monday Autumn is back on the Podcast and to be honest, we haven't quite worked out what topic we're going to cover just yet, but we'll definitely settle on something.
Jesper (44m 6s): Good.
Narrator (44m 8s): If you like what you've just heard. There's a few things you can do to SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast going to stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
It's often debated among authors: What is a a good daily word count? Is word count even important?
In episode 91 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, Autumn and Jesper answer these questions. You might be surprised to hear the answer.
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy.
For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast in today's publishing landscape. You can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from Writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt
Jesper (30s): Hello I am Jesper
Autumn (31s): and I am Autumn.
Jesper (33s): This is Episode 91 of The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast and you probably come across to the advice to write every day, many, many times before that's something we've all heard. There are also those who say that you should have a daily word count, but it's it's. So we are going to reflect on that topic today and discuss the daily word counts. I am looking forward to it because this was, even though I knew this podcast topic was coming up unrelated to that, I recently had some very deep reflection on word counts and how it affected my writing.
Autumn (1m 12s): And I think it does. So I look forward to it when we get into the topics, but first the Odyssey of your house selling in your life. How were things over in Denmark? Oh, good. That's good. I, by the way, I think it's the first time I I've heard somebody say deep reflections about what Count. I don't think I've ever heard that sentence said before, but I loved being a regional, so that's. Yeah, no, no, everything's good. Over here.
Jesper (1m 42s): Not nothing new to report on the house, selling in front. We are still waiting for those people to sell their own place first. So God knows that when that will happen, but hopefully I was still fingers crossed. I will hope that it won't take too long, but who knows? Yeah. So hopefully this is not as long as the Odyssey is and you don't have a 10 year wait. All right. Oh yeah. But actually I was thinking it gets to, its been a bit of a while since I told one of my referee stories. Excellent.
Jesper (2m 12s): And considering how bad things turned out two weeks ago, I was thinking that maybe, or maybe it was a good story for today.
Autumn (2m 19s): Oh perfect. I would love to hear it.
Jesper (2m 22s): Okay. Yeah. Well thanks. Just goes crazy sometimes with these matches and then I have the, had a match two weeks ago, a wish it was played with the, you know, much intensity and a, it was pretty physical work as well, you know, in the sense that they were, they were tackling, tackling each other pretty hard and a, well, I also had to issue a few reload cards and so on that's it that's what happens. Right. But so we play 90 minutes in a soccer match and a buy the 80th minute.
Jesper (2m 55s): The Hometeam had been in the lead with one to kneel for almost the entire Mets. I think they squat like after 10 minutes or something like that. So, so basically we had 10 minutes to go and they had been leading one nil all the way through and was basically in control of the mat as such, but then in the last 10 minutes, the way to equalize, Oh, this, this getting out and say like, yeah. And then of course a intensity Rose quite a lot and we got into overtime.
Jesper (3m 28s): So that's within the last two minutes of the game where it still one, one. And then within those last two minutes, I awarded the penalty kick to the way team and a, yeah, you can imagine how upset the home team got. So they were extremely angry that we're complaining and yelling and a, you know, the spectators from the sidelines who are not very happy either. They probably felt that it was an unfair ruling, but I still stand by the fact that there was a penalty kick.
Jesper (4m 2s): So that was awarded and, and especially no, you know, when you get a penalty kick in the last dying minutes of a match, it's it will determine the win in this case. Right. So yeah. Obviously they, emotions are running high now. Mmm. And the away team scored. Oh no. And shortly after that I blew the whistle and ended the match. So the away team, actually one, after having been behind almost all the way through, there was a lot of angry faces and shouting and all that kind of thing going on.
Jesper (4m 41s): And then, you know, afterwords the teams convene at this center of the pitch with the customary as per the fair plea rules or the game that you convened at the center to just say, thank you for the match studio of the team. And of course it didn't go to Well because they were pretty angry. And ah, I was sort of standing there and, you know, looking at some players who was standing in front of me just because they were not too friendly. So I just wanted to make sure that everything was okay.
Jesper (5m 11s): And then behind me, I, all of a sudden had a lot of promotion and I turn it around and basically there was a fight breaking up and I was like, what the hell? And then I brought over there and a, one of the team coaches also rushed us over there and we get the party split apart and separated them. And at this point in time, I think that the whole thing is probably because of the frustration that has been built up from losing the game. Right. So yeah, we just separate them and we'll go off to our different, a lot of the rooms and then trying to keep them separated, write.
Jesper (5m 46s): So, and then with this particular place where we were playing the game, the locker room's is, is further away from the actual feel of place. We have to work for a while. So I went up there and then when I got up there, then the away team came to me and say, Hey, do you know that the home team player just kicked out a guy on the stomach? Oh my goodness. I was like, what? He did, what they say? Yeah, yeah. Then he kicked him and then they call it the play that out. And he pulled up his Jersey to show me. And you could just see on his stomach, like a clear boot boot imprint on his stomach and skin was all colored.
Jesper (6m 24s): Right. You know? And there was even a little bit of bleeding at the bottom were one of the steps from the boot have made this impact. It's like, why do you do,
Autumn (6m 32s): Do you believe that no, that's not appropriate. Yeah.
Jesper (6m 36s): Well we have, it's just like this. I mean, one is going on in my mind. What are some people are thinking I don't get it.
Autumn (6m 42s): No. Especially, I mean, they know Fairplay, it's frustrating, but you know, go hit a punching bag life isn't fair. And that's just the way the rules went. Right?
Jesper (6m 53s): Yeah. Well, I just don't understand. I mean, well, we've seen also professional players do stupid things in, even at the world cup final, ya know, the French captain sent it in sedan many years ago. He head butted another player and was shown on a red car in the middle of the world cup final. Also what happens there as well. Alright. And not that this is an excuse, right? Violence has never OK. But I can see how, if you're playing four, a lot of money on a very high prestigious, I can sort of understand not that violence is okay in any way, but I can understand the emotions you might get high.
Jesper (7m 31s): Right. Right here, are we talking like an amateur league match? Like doesn't really matter if you win. I mean, we'll of course it does too, your honor, but nobody is gonna win any money or nobody is gonna, you know, all of a sudden get it, get in to the major leagues because you're going to lose this match. So in that sense of it doesn't matter right now. I just, I don't know. I just don't get it. Sometimes people weird.
Autumn (7m 55s): Yeah. I guess it's what I used to tell my employees when I had to a field office and I was the boss and I would tell them, look, you can tell me anything, unless it's life, death or world peace. I'm not going to get worked up. Just, just tell me, I, I totally am way too calm. I think about things, but those are my three points. Unless it's life and death are a world. Peace. I got to get excited. So it's fine. Just, just tell me so I don't get these players either. Unfortunately.
Jesper (8m 26s): Yeah, no. So that was my referee story. I think sometimes when crazy things happen and then usually people liked to hear my stories, but I don't know if the listeners, if they don't then let us know if you don't like my stories, but otherwise I'll assume that you liked them. Because normally when we at like family parties or dinner things or whatever people usually like to hear their stories.
Autumn (8m 46s): Yeah. So I think it's a very entertaining. So hopefully they like it too, because I don't want you to stop. Otherwise I'll have to talk more offline. Yeah.
Jesper (8m 53s): Yeah. How do I think so too, with you? Good. I
Autumn (8m 56s): Am still, I think I'm in week two, week three of on my own and being a single parent to my small dogs, but things are good. Yeah I husband has finally turning, turning back towards the East. So I expect to see him within the next 10 weeks or so 2000 plus miles to try to drive back through COVID this was his own auto. So you could write a whole novel and just this little trip threw everything.
Autumn (9m 27s): So I'm looking forward to it. And its nice to know who's getting a little bit closer every single day, but definitely been getting my work done. But I did realize because getting work done, I finally updated my website, which means I added the books. We just published a suburb to my website, which are excellent. And you know, this whole time I thought those books were 17, 18 and 19. And the book I'm writing now the series I'm writing now is 20 to 21 and 20 To and that's kind of thinking, Oh my gosh, my 20th book, I am so excited.
Autumn (9m 60s): I'm going to break out the good scotch. I'm going to have a little, you know, party. And it will be, you know, even if it's virtual, I'm so excited to think when I really spoke 20. And guess what I realized when I counted up the books on my website
Jesper (10m 13s): That you were already above two and
Autumn (10m 17s): Yeah. So are 18 or 19 and 20. I'm like, Oh I can't believe I miscounted my own books. Its an embarrassing, I mean, I know I'm kind of low key and calm, but I thought I'd do had a cow's no, well yeah.
Jesper (10m 39s): Well it has been many years since you and I went to school. So maybe we forgot it.
Autumn (10m 44s): Yeah. Yes. So anyway, or at least I know the book, I have book 21 written and I'm working on 20 to 23. It's slowly coming together in plotting, but just by when I released at all party anyway. Yeah,
Jesper (10m 57s): Yeah. You should we go on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast so last week I set up a very special giveaway On Patrion And I'm thinking maybe you could start out Autumn by just explaining how far we come with the world building costs because then I will cover how that actually ties into the giveaway.
Autumn (11m 24s): Yeah, that sounds good. All the modules are recorded. I don't know if anyone follows me on Instagram. They probably saw the post that showed, Hey, this wasn't a Writing post. This is a something else on my computer. As I uploaded the final modules. And also I did celebrate that. I at least danced around the cabin to some music and had some realms. You know, I will do the parties. Didn't see you and its been such a journey. We are here on this course to finally have the modules recorded and as speak. Well, not right now, but this week I have been working on getting the website built and that's over half done.
Autumn (12m 1s): So we're so close to having this full course finally at long, last complete finally.
Jesper (12m 7s): Well there's like two years later or something.
Autumn (12m 10s): Yeah, we've been off of, I mean, we've been off a world. It, it took a lot longer than seven days, but it's, it's amazing what his in this course. And it does always astound me when I look through everything as I've been doing well or uploading all the videos. So it's ah, it is very exciting to see it come together and it's such an awesome course.
Jesper (12m 32s): Yeah. So more on that because in the future, but why I wanted to get all of them to just to say all of that was to explain the special giveaway we are going to run on Patrion. So we've decided to give away a golden ticket to the world with of course, meaning that their is a chance to win a completely free access to
Autumn (12m 55s): Yeah. And that's, what's really exciting about this is that it's going to be a limited release. So this is really a golden ticket. This is like exclusive, exclusive, not every week. This is not going to be a wide open entrance either. It's going to be gated. So this is really, really a golden ticket.
Jesper (13m 11s): Yeah, yeah, exactly. Because we would like to basically give access to just a few people at first to the costs because we want to, well, both here the feedback and as such, but we also would like to get some testimonials from, from those people that we give access to in the beginning. So there is a chance that you can become a part of that exclusive team for free, but there is more because we always have to sweeten deal right now.
Autumn (13m 39s): Absolutely. Everyone has got a win. We are so nice that way, right?
Jesper (13m 43s): Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Because the golden ticket has a draw, meaning only one person who will win, but we are going to give something to everyone. And that also includes all our existing patron supporters because we just appreciate it. You guys in girls so much. So now we're going to give everybody something. So basically everyone who signs up to become a patron support and everyone who is already as a Porter, we'll be giving access to either it could be a free video cost module or perhaps we are going to run it as a webinar and then recorded.
Jesper (14m 19s): We haven't quite made up our mind on that. But what it will be about is what we call the reader's journey. This is basically how you can use paid advertising to warm up your audience over several different steps and a then hopefully of course get them to buy something at this.
Autumn (14m 40s): Yeah, that's right. I think so. It's such a cool webinar topic as well and its yeah, everyone will benefit from that. So this is We excellent. And how do we still have to work out a few of the kinks, but I know we will. Yeah.
Jesper (14m 52s): So EVERY patron support. Our new old will get access too to that video of course module or webinar, whatever we decide, what are the other, but it will get that for free. So if that sounds good to you, you can just follow the link to Patrion in the show notes. It might not say anything about the special giveaway just yet, but as I just explained, all existing patrons will automatically be part of the giveaway. So if you want to make sure you don't forget about it and head on over and sign up right away for as little as a dollar, you can be part of this giveaway.
Jesper (15m 31s): So I would say that's pretty good.
Autumn (15m 32s): It would be a, when you want to get to say it, if you could win in this course on a dollar, Holy crap, that would be a, such a wonderful, I'm quite jealous. I just want to receive enough to have built it, but that's okay. It'll be fantastic.
Jesper (15m 47s): Yeah. Okay. Anything else before we move into today's topic?
Autumn (15m 51s): No. Otherwise I just wanted to say that the Am Writing Fantasy group on Facebook has been newly, very active, but so as supportive, I noticed that out, we had a new member who asked a question about isn't really possible to have a life in a job you actually enjoy and kids and also still right. And the last I checked was over 93 comments and I know one on one, one of his was just like, I can't believe how you know, amazingly supportive you guys are. So that is just, I went to, I wish I could help everyone there as well as that.
Autumn (16m 25s): Of course COVID safely So but I just think that it's just wonderful to see such encouragement among fellow Fantasy authors. So if anyone else's looking for that type of support, come join us on Facebook. It actually does exist on Facebook.
Jesper (16m 46s): Okay. Autumn I was thinking I could start us out by two quotes from famous writers to sort of set the scene a bit here. Yeah. And then maybe we can use that as a springboard to reflect upon today's topic.
Autumn (17m 0s): That sounds perfect. I love it. When you do the homework. Fantastic.
Jesper (17m 4s): Yeah. I am pretty good at that.
Autumn (17m 7s): Yeah. Yeah.
Jesper (17m 9s): Yeah. So let me start out with the first one is from Anne rice and I just like Anne rice so much and I love her books, especially the empire ones, but the, so it goes like this quote WRITING is what makes it a writer, nothing more, nothing less go where the pleasure is in your writing, go where the pain is. Write the book you would like to read right to book your I've been trying to fight, but have not found, but right.
Jesper (17m 40s): And remember there are no rules for our profession ignore rules and a half.
Autumn (17m 45s): Yeah. I love and price. That is a wonderful quote. I think that's a good
Jesper (17m 50s): One. That'd be it. Just do the second one. And then we can just maybe do, are reflections on these quotes here afterwords. So the second one is from the all famous Stephen King. Ah, so he says, quote, I like to get 10 pages a day, which amounts to 2000 words. That's 180,000 words over a three month span at good enough length for a book and put a book on. Yeah. And he and his book on writing Stephen King continues to give the advice that new writers should write 1000 words everyday with one rest day per week.
Jesper (18m 29s): Well, what do you think about these quotes? Yeah.
Autumn (18m 31s): Awesome. All right. Well I've told you guys like totally opposite ends. Do you have an ricing saying right. You know what it is in your sole, what it is that you are passionate about and it doesn't matter how long it takes to the journey to get their, and then you have Stephen King of very succinctly saying basically write 10 pages, a thousand words a day, just do it. It doesn't matter what, so those are, that's definitely been what I've been thinking about reading recently. I mean, I am a big proponent of I goals, having goals.
Autumn (19m 1s): I try and do weekly goals, but I have recently, it was now that I have Scrivener and it lets you put in a daily word count goal. I've adjusted to that. So my, my weekly goal has gone to a daily writing goal and I, I have noticed a change in my writing that I've only recently, I think finally managed to adjust back to where I wanted it. And that's been a long journey of 20 bucks to get back to There. So I think, I think just so hard and re said to me, it's the true model.
Autumn (19m 33s): There are no rules to this. There are things you can try out and try on for size, but you need to do so to see if they fit and they might not fit and who has to be willing to try something else. If it doesn't, if you find out its been a little too tight, a little too loose, just not your style.
Jesper (19m 53s): Yeah. But you know, I also actually saw some overlap between the two quotes, even though they are different because I think Anne rice is also saying that Writing is what makes it a rider, but it goes without saying, if we don't write well, we, well, I guess this could be argued as well, but if we don't ride, we're not gonna publish anything. And if we don't publish anything then, well, I guess we could discuss that. But what are we then, you know, is if you're just riding as a hobby, I've been a writer or does it, do you have to pup?
Jesper (20m 29s): Is that I know that's a completely different rabbit hole and they want to go there right now, but it's a whole different Podcast I yeah, nothing that is not that there is anything wrong with Ida or, but of course it, if you want to make an income or at least we could say, then you have to right. And you have to continue to write. And it's the same thing, Steven King sets, right? He has sets that you have to write 'em in order too, to become a writer or be a writer. But I'm thinking that the fact that he wants new writers to set a daily word count.
Jesper (20m 59s): I like the part, at least about that, that where it sort of forces them to set a goal and strive to achieve that goal. And I feel like that's important because at the end of the day, a lot of this is also about building up a habit of writing. And if having a daily work Count is what helps you build up a habit of writing then I think that's a pretty good thing. Yeah,
Autumn (21m 26s): Definitely. I mean, definitely I, to me, its the thousand words a day, I mean that's, that is actually my daily goal in Scrivener. And usually I'm there's days on blasting past it I'm like, well, especially if I have woken up at 4:00 AM and because my character's are talking to me, I'm going to have a thousand words had done before at 8:00 AM. Not a problem, but there's a daze, you know, that I could not there's times it is. I've actually realized for me, it's important to map out your productivity, not only in your time's of like, when are you most productive and most creative during the day, but when are you the most verbose?
Autumn (22m 2s): What are you really like? The story is just jelling and you can churn out 3000 words if you can sit down for enough time. And when are there times at your book is Maybe, you know, if you're pushing 250 words and your doing a bit of plotting, that's perfect. And I've written enough books now that I know my scale, I know my graph of when I'm going to have my word count, go up when it's not going to be that much when a plotting is more important. So a thousand words as a newbie is heavy.
Autumn (22m 33s): Yeah. That's a lot. I think, you know, if you're starting out in your, just trying to make a goal, you know, 250 or 100, you know, just, you have to write, you do have to write, even if it's a sentence, I know there's been times in my life and that's why I liked having a, a weekly goal where I knew, cause I was a manager, I had a field office, I had nighttime meetings. I would have to be in early. It would be out in the field. I'd be reprimanding people, whatever. If I got a sentence down, I was like, Yes I score today. I got seven words out.
Autumn (23m 4s): And there are times though, you know, Saturday morning it was quiet. I had three hours off you go. Yeah, that was fine. So, ah, you know, can you just can't agree? I loved Stephen King. I used to live in Maine. We used to joke is my neighbor, but he, it was never my neighbor, but a thousand words as a whole lot. It's a lot, a lot, a lot for a newbie. I think that's kinda tough. Yeah. And then
Jesper (23m 27s): Yeah, I think as well as an alternative to word count, just to maybe add that onto it is you could also look at what time slots instead of what counts I have worked with Word counts, but I've also worked with time slots. And for example, if you are maybe a very busy, like Like you were just saying that you could also be that you are one of those people who just get really distracted by the internet.
Jesper (23m 59s): Every time you sit at the computer.
Autumn (24m 0s): Yeah. He was like, Oh, that YouTube video is about what's interesting. Yeah. I got to also be the case. Yeah.
Jesper (24m 7s): Yeah. But no matter what it is rather than maybe what Count you, you could say how much time can I dedicate a day to Writing right. And if that's 15 minutes fine, if it's 30 minutes better, but whatever you can devote, devote that time and say, okay, I'm gonna right there. And I dunno if you need to pull out the cable to the internet routed and do that during that time. Yeah.
Autumn (24m 32s): Yeah. Turn your computer off wifi mode Yes yeah,
Jesper (24m 35s): Yeah. Something. Yeah. But, and then just right, whatever you can eat, if you get 50 words, then you got 50 words and that's fine. You know, I think we just need to be careful not to get too hung up on Yeah. I need to write a thousand words today and its, especially when, when we are just starting out because its so easy to get into self blame and guilting yourself for not achieving what you wanted to achieve. And then while I guess I should write 2000 words tomorrow then, and then you even more stressed.
Jesper (25m 9s): I don't know. I like what, like we said, it's just a moment ago is I think it's about billing up the habit of Writing and however you do that, it doesn't necessarily have to be with the world Word Count I I don't think so.
Autumn (25m 26s): Agree. I mean, to me I think that most important part is just setting aside time, writing time. I mean, when I had the full time job, I would, it was when I came home grade, my husband got to see and I would write, it would have 45 minutes. I would have even now when it's the morning and things are going well and no matter what time I got up, that's time as flexible. But there was a certain point where its like, okay, I have got to go have breakfast, I've got to put this away. I've got other things to do today. And that was my cutoff time. And I think that's important. And another version I used to it's like world Word Count.
Autumn (25m 58s): But if you're, if you're a little softer chapter Count I I used to have a, just a chapter Count like maybe three chapters a week. It didn't matter how I filled that in during my writing time. But as well, if I hit that goal, it seemed a little bit easier to have a week long ago and a set time to just try for it because it's it was, it was pretty easy. I always try to make it achievable. And I think figuring out what is achievable for you to put some side of TA you know, some time aside every day, maybe a day off.
Autumn (26m 28s): I kinda liked that with Stephen King. It's kind of cute. Don't think that I try not to take a day off no matter what. Even in my days off, I'm still writing in the morning. I don't care, but it's, it's a good thing to figure out what, as an achievable, a word count for You some people, I know, one woman writing 5,000 words a day. I know some people, if they're happy they can get a page 250 words a day. It shows progress, keeping progress going Is is really the idea to do it, sitting down, doing it as an idea. But you are going to have to write an experiment and find out what fits your life so that your not the hermit locked in the study, never seeing your family.
Autumn (27m 6s): And you know, that's what a good feeling either just to hit a goal for something that you should feel passionate about, you shouldn't be missing life because you want to write a thousand words today. You should also get to walk the dog, something to spend time with your family. That's why you have them. So
Jesper (27m 23s): Yeah. Yeah. The, the, the chapter goal that you mentioned, that was actually how I do it nowadays. Umm, well, first of all, I don't have daily word counts anymore because we'll be between The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast recording here. Do we get courses and all kinds of other things? Its I don't write every day I work every day on our business, but it's different things. Sometimes I'm, you know, costs building or today we were recording podcasts. I've been preparing some slides for one of our classes as well as this morning.
Jesper (27m 57s): So I'm always working on our business and there the author parts of my life. But I just don't know we'll in the beginning when I wrote my first novel, I actually had a daily work camp set in Scrivener. Think if I remember correctly, I think it might've been 1200 words or something like that. That's pretty impressive. Yeah. Well I got up at four 30 in the morning and wrote for a couple of hours and a dip that for like two years or something. So it's doable.
Jesper (28m 28s): But of course I fully agree what you say. You have to, you have to think about something that works for you. If, if you feel like it's slave labor to do your writing everyday because you set so tough goals on yourself, then you're going to burn out on it. So it's, that is not worth it. But I quit. I kind of, for myself, at least I like to just set myself some goals, you know, and then work towards those. For example, I could say indeed, this week I'm gonna, or every week I'm going to complete three chapters for example. And then I also know my creative work I have to do in the first half of the day.
Jesper (29m 4s): Usually I prefer to do them in the morning because then I'm I could do more creative work there, whereas in the afternoon or as well, I guess almost just after lunchtime, I'm a, I am already a bit tired, but all the marketing stuff, ah, you know, I could, I could do that on auto pilot almost. So I could do that easily and the afternoon where as the creative work I'll have to do in the morning. So I just think the main thing is that you get your butt in the seat and you've put your fingers on a keyboard and you are, you get productive.
Jesper (29m 39s): But how do you do that if you do, why daily word count or if you do it with more like weekly goals, more like I do or we, well, we also like our to do lists.
Autumn (29m 52s): Do you and I, are we going to do list? Which is awesome because it makes life easier, but yeah. Yeah. And you know, but even adding it for me, sometimes I used to have just a little note on my iPad back when I was writing on an iPad with an external keyboard and it would just be like, you know, just a little checkbox, three chapters this week. And that was my reminder. And that's all I needed to remind myself that this is something, you know, you need to do. You need to take seriously. Cause sometimes putting it on your to do list is sometimes its, you know, going out on social media and sing, I'm going to do this, whatever it takes to give you me that pressure if you need it.
Autumn (30m 29s): But you also can't get yourself so much pressure that you hate it, but you also need to be responsible and not spend all your time on social media saying how much you should be. Writing that's that's too much of a cliche. Don't do that.
Jesper (30m 43s): Yeah. I think to some degree we could compare too. You know, if, if let's say you wanna build your muscles and then you sign up for gym membership and then you only go to the gym once a week. I mean, that's good. It's better than zero, right? But your not going to build up your muscles now, not for one time a week now you have to be much more consistent then. And Writing is a muscle and in exactly the same way that you have to repeatedly exercise your writing skills and then you will become better.
Jesper (31m 15s): But you do not become better by let's say Writing half an hour every Friday morning, for example, it's that? It's just not enough. No, but at the same time, it's sort of this balance. You have to walk, right? Because on one hand it shouldn't be so much that you get stressed out about it and it feels overwhelming. But on the other hand it cannot be. So let's say rare and I, in this case I categorize one time a week as rare.
Jesper (31m 47s): Yeah. But it cannot be that red as well. You don't build up momentum and then you get to learn. Right. So that's great. Well at least in the beginning, that's how that might be difficult. But you have to, maybe you could just watch one Netflix show less than a day or something. Yeah, yeah.
Autumn (32m 3s): Yeah. So the thing, I mean, I remember that was advice I'm recently. I remember giving to an author that, you know, they said they only liked to write when they were inspired. I think that's a, that's a great inspiration is a wonderful thing. But I think we used, we are using the same terms you were just doing Writing is a muscle. So if you only weight to your inspired are always going to be basically a little flabby, but if you are exercising, if you're proficient in it and that inspiration hits, how much further are you going to be? How much more, how much better is what you're going to write, going to be when you're inspired, if you made it through those bits that are uninspiring and in any novel and in the novella, even in a short story, you're going to hit stretches where you're like, Oh jeez.
Autumn (32m 45s): You know, I just, you've got to sit down and just simply push through. And that is an important thing, but yeah, exactly. If your not exercising and if you cannot make use of that energy, when it comes so that you can channel it and create something big and really boost yourself towards the end goal, then you're just, you're not always going to be kind of just churning along. And at least you hopefully you'll be turning, but it will be a very slow pace and it will be so much easier to have their steam run out and you'll never get to that end goal.
Jesper (33m 18s): Yeah. And I just sitting here thinking that maybe we should say what people don't wanna hear as well.
Autumn (33m 29s): Yeah. But they have to have a goal that they have to be writing every day or yeah.
Jesper (33m 35s): Well, it is. It's just like, you know, if, if you wanna take your Writing serious, you, you kind of come up with excuses. Like I don't feel inspired today, so I'm not gonna, I mean, WRITING is an issue. This is the part that nobody wants to hear. Right. If, if you wanna be serious about it, if it is a job as it is, and you can not turn up to your day job for example, and tell your manager, I don't feel inspired today. So I'll come back here.
Autumn (34m 2s): Yeah. I mean, you can talk about how it works out.
Jesper (34m 6s): I don't think you'll last very long in that company, but the point is just that like any job you will have times during your Writing where it feels a bit like, ah, I know it's a bit tough going today. I don't really feel like it, but you just have to put through it for me, especially in the middle of a novel that's where I find it hardest. Yeah. Because the exciting new beginnings over with, and I'm looking forward to get to the ending were a lot of, and then the middle is a bit, a bit like, ah, okay.
Jesper (34m 39s): There still a long way to go, but I already feel like I've been added for a long time as well. All right. So it's a toughest part, I guess its like when you run a marathon I could get in the way I have not tried that, but I could guess in the middle you were also a bit like, Oh my God, there's a long way yet. Right.
Autumn (34m 55s): Oh. Oh. And I think its funny because we have had a conversation with him between you and you and Jay were, you both had said book two was the hardest in the middles of the hardest to right. And to me it's the beginning, the first book and the first third of a book, that's when my word count is lower on spending a lot more time plotting and outlining even though I think I have it plotted, I realized I don't have it plotted. And I'm so, you know, it's 50, 50 writing and plotting and coming up with ideas. But once I hit, like I just hit chapter 10 and what I'm writing now and its, its fine, its, you know, I, I don't even notice the word count goal except to say like, Oh I passed it already.
Autumn (35m 33s): So I probably should op it, but it's just, I don't, to me, it's nice to have something standard and you see how much higher I can get. And then there's days that I don't something happens and I don't quite make it. But I did notice that word count. Having a word count has affected some of my writing. But you had something to say, so I'll let you go first. No, it's just a annoying comment that I thought about that was just about to say, Oh, if only you had written a guide book on how to plot the beginning of a novel Autumn, then you can read that guide book and, and you wouldn't have that problem anymore, right?
Autumn (36m 8s): Yeah. Yeah. No, it that'd be funny. What do I do? I just a little bit more of a hybrid when I'm on my own. Once, once the characters start talking to me, like I said, this last week, I've been up at four, four 30 and five 30 on three different days. The, the day in between I was always like hit sleep until six 30. But the other days I just, you know, the characters are actually talking in my head and I'm like, I'm getting up. I'm I'm going to go. Right. I don't care that its 4:00 AM I'm alone in my cabinet and I just have the dog.
Autumn (36m 39s): He was like, I ain't giving up now. So I'd just go downstairs and to have a lot of tea or that day and get through it and then sleep the next day. And then so just keep going. So the novel's going incredibly well, but I did notice that I do think having a word count goal that I've now started pretty much ignoring is a good thing that I'm ignoring it because I think I'm very task oriented. And I know that about myself. I just, I like finishing tasks just for the sake of finishing a task and marketing it off and lets all the only reward I really need, except for forcing myself occasionally to have a celebration when I hit a milestone.
Autumn (37m 19s): But I've noticed that sometimes just trying to reach that goal that I will, I will, I'll put my butt in the chair and I will sit down and I will write even when it's not going well. And my writing was in blacking, something that recently I managed to get back were instead of just racing, threw themes, to get Saenz, to get you, you know, the chapter can hit my goal, whatever it is, just trying to get everything done. I'm kind of relaxing into it. And it reminds me of Writing my first book when I didn't know anything and I didn't care about when I finished it.
Autumn (37m 53s): I was just writing because I love words. I love words so much. I love word play. I love literature. And so I'm just enjoying using words and developing these scenes and really spending time with my characters. And that's, you know, they're getting the up at 4:00 AM. And so I'm obviously spending a lot of time with them. And by doing that, by allowing myself to slow down and settle into these scenes, I've had to add a couple of extra chapters that I hadn't planned on because scenes are taking a little longer, but they have so much more depth, so much more impact, so much more character development.
Autumn (38m 28s): And I also realized, I looked down at my word Count I'm like, Holy crap. I'm at 200, 300 2,500 words. I've got to start thinking you, is this a chapter break coming up? I'm zooming past my word, count goals by almost ignoring them by doing what feels right by falling in races advice and just doing it for the sheer love of what I'm writing. And that feels pretty darn good.
Jesper (38m 54s): Yeah. And then don't you think as well? I mean, I, at least I've noticed us, you know, those times were I just kind of pushed through, even though that day, I might not feel like it. I noticed that when I come back to that Writing a day or two or three later. Yeah.
Autumn (39m 9s): It is not bad at all. Usually it's just when your, in the,
Jesper (39m 12s): Yeah, it feels like, Oh I am not in the mood. I am not inspired it. Doesn't gel with me today. This is bad writing. And then when you go on
Autumn (39m 19s): And when they come back to it, it's, you know, it's not, its actually pretty good. They have, it's usually I guess when I do my content edit, you know, I can usually see those chapters where I push through and I'll write myself a note, like to add more description or add this, whatever it is missing. But its usually decent. I mean, its not like I'm ever cutting it from the novels because I am enough have a plotter that I, no it needs to be their, it just might need to be added to it developed a little bit more. But if you don't do it, if you don't put those words down, even on the bad days, you have nothing to edit. So just put the words down and they're not going to be as bad as you think if you're a plotter are at least, you know, that they're supposed to be there.
Autumn (39m 55s): You'll just have to add in maybe some more adjectives or some more dialogue, just bring out the prick out the way, you know, take off the rough does and bring out the Schein and its, there, it is their even in the bad days because you're have been exercising, your writing mussel, you know what you're doing? You're proficient at it. Even on the bad days, year, still, at least hitting the above average and on the awesome days' you know what you're you you're up there with the best of them and that feels really good. Right?
Jesper (40m 25s): Yeah. So I think I've sort of have arrived at a takeaway from this whole conversation. Don't know if you were ready for that yet. Yeah.
Autumn (40m 33s): Yeah. So I think while were hitting our marks, I think I'm feeling ready for having you boil this whole 40 minutes now, right?
Jesper (40m 40s): Yeah. Yeah. I think above everything else. I think this, this really comes down to is don't give up. Yeah. You know, if, if, if setting a daily word count works for you then said a day at camp, if you don't have time to write a thousand words every day start smaller. Yeah. Perhaps you could do 300 words a day because 300 words, but still a a hundred thousand word fantasy novel in about a year now
Autumn (41m 11s): Do you mind if
Jesper (41m 14s): Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I just, I really want to push back on the whole, you know, if you want to be successful, you have to right. All the time and release a novel every month. Like it is that sort of thing goes around. You know, it is, I've heard it multiple times and I don't, I don't like it. No, I don't like it either.
Autumn (41m 34s): I mean, its been, and we've obviously just released three nonfiction books, but since I haven't at least a fantasy novel in over a year and what I released last year were two novellas to two new, a new series. And that I'm only just Writing I won't release the trilogy until its, its completely written. So you know, readers are still following me. I'm still getting encouragement. They're responding to my emails. I get emails to normally daily. So it's like they haven't gone away. You don't have to release a novel a year.
Autumn (42m 5s): You just have to be communicated in the sharing and let them be on the journey with you because a good model might take a year, might take six months. You'll figure it out once you hit your stride. But I agree. Just keep going. Don't give up.
Jesper (42m 21s): Yeah, I am. I'm also a completely on board with its been a while, but I've heard at some point, do you want a pen set that a way that the whole model about rapid releasing and releasing a new novel every month, she just said, you know, I'm not gonna even going to try to get onto that treadmill because I don't want to be, there will be exhausted. And I really liked that because it's, it's like there are so many people getting stressed out by the high pressure that they here on social media and maybe our also, I don't know, maybe also on podcast or maybe the author's giving advice.
Jesper (42m 53s): Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Just make sure you read enough books and you released stuff all the time than the algorithm on Amazon. We'll favor you. And while there is truth to that, it doesn't, it just doesn't bring any good. If you feel so much pressure to, you have to write every day that all your love for WRITING goes away because its, it just becomes a one big slug. Right. You know, I have to right. 10,000 words everyday because otherwise it can't keep up with the, with the competition. And I know I just liked the I'm just going to ignore it a treadmill all together kind of attitude.
Jesper (43m 24s): That's going to turn up your head there.
Autumn (43m 26s): I agree. I think as much as I tried for a little while to be a little faster, but now that I think you lose finding your author voice, if you don't give yourself some time to mature and find your author voice and find your passion for it, I mean you should write every day, but you should also take the time to find out what it is you right. And why is your right in what your passionate about Writing and you want to be, you don't want to do you want to be Neil Gaiman? You wanna be known for what you write.
Autumn (43m 55s): Not that you write a book a month. So think about what it is that you want to be known for as it is at a book or a month that you're the author who always had to pick a month, no matter what you're turning out or is it the fact that you've created something that is, you know, Neil Gaiman, if they don't know how long it takes him to write a book, but I know he's not worried about getting it out in the next month.
Jesper (44m 16s): Yeah, no. Well I guess for some extent we can't compare some of Georgia or Martin is probably the most famous example of all of this white. Yeah.
Autumn (44m 23s): Yeah. But it wasn't got to go there, but yeah.
Jesper (44m 27s): Yeah. And help my self, you know?
Autumn (44m 29s): Yeah. But don't, we might get hit category,
Jesper (44m 32s): But its still, we can compare with that either because these guys have so much money that they, they even have to ride if they don't want two. Right. But for the rest of us, a mortal people have to think about this kind of thing. But above all, I think longterm view, that's what you need to take instead, you know, make sure you prioritize Writing but please don't let it take over your life. So all right. The next Monday I should have a very interesting interview lined up for you.
Jesper (45m 6s): And I can say that it involves world-building in part, at least that's right.
Narrator (45m 12s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Yesper on patrion.com/am Writing Fantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast going to stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Fantasy artwork is amazing, whether you want it for your cover, website, marketing images, or just because it is so darn cool. But how do you go about getting some made to fit your story?
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Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (1s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast in today's publishing landscape. You can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from riding Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello? I am Yesper
Autumn (31s): and I'm Autumn.
Jesper (33s): This is episode 90 of The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast and today we are going to dive right To the world of graphical And a Fantasy at work. It's awesome. And I personally loved it, but how do you find an artist to work with? And once you do, what do you need to be mindful about it? And I think you probably have loads two share in this episode,
Autumn (59s): I I've been silently laughing over, hear I've been so excited about this episode. So yeah, we're looking forward to this won a lot. Yeah. Maybe its because I'm a graphic artists, but ya know, we can get into the story about how long they've been drawing. FANTASY late now. How have you been here? How is it over it? On your side to the planet?
Jesper (1m 22s): No, it was good. It's good. We've finally got a signature on the contract for the house that before we started, that is so that was on purpose. Oh that is mean of you held out that it is fantastic. Congratulations. And that was good. Yeah. It's now it's still, like I mentioned a few times before in previous episodes of still a conditional signature. So they have to sell their own apartment first before the deal is final. And of course the worst case you note, they won't be able to sell the Dara apartment.
Jesper (1m 56s): And if they don't then I think it's the 1st of November. Or if I remember correctly, the, the deal will expire. If they have not told or saw the apartment before then of course it can be an extended if they want too, but they can walk away if at that point if they want. So there is still that condition too. It, but at least they, we got a signature now. So hopefully if all goes, well, we have to start finding a new place to live in the near future here. So I hope fingers crossed fingers crossed for you to, I mean, that's, it's so interesting too with the conditional a conditional conditionals, like I am wondering, you know what his, they get an offer on their apartment, but it's a conditional offer based on having to sell something.
Jesper (2m 37s): You can get this whole chain going, but I guess having a cutoff date kind of frees everyone from that happening. Yeah. I kind of, ya know, but yeah, in, in theory you can get like condition's on conditions on conditions, so and so forth. There's a whole chain of people, essentially you could, but we'll see. I mean they say, they told us, at least they told us a real estate agent rather than they have two parties interest in buying your apartment already.
Jesper (3m 8s): And it was both of them wanted to move in by the 1st of November. So that could be a very quick so that it could be very quick if it all holds up. But sometimes, you know, people talk with no action. So let's see. But a maybe, and on top of that, to be honest, tomorrow afternoon, we have another, some other people coming to see the house as well, which is weird.
Autumn (3m 32s): So even though it was already under a conditional contract, someone's gonna come in, stick their head into it.
Jesper (3m 39s): Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because if they want to buy it unconditionally and they can still grab the house.
Autumn (3m 44s): Well, I forgot about that part of the contract. Ah that's total sniping. That can be exciting. Yeah.
Jesper (3m 53s): Yeah. But of course it puts a us and a real estate did it in a good position write because when they're here watching the house tomorrow, you can basically tell them you're you need to get your finger out DB because otherwise there's somebody else has already signed the contract. So either you buy it now or its gone, so he can really put the pressure on them tomorrow. So as to how that goes back to that.
Autumn (4m 14s): Well, good luck. That's exciting. It's a really happy about it because I've got to move closer to their friends, right?
Jesper (4m 21s): Yeah, yeah, exactly. So they are very happy. So hopefully everything pans out otherwise. Oh my God. They are going to get disappointed.
Autumn (4m 29s): Hopefully I'll keep my fingers crossed for you guys. Yeah. Hey, I also want to add,
Jesper (4m 34s): You mentioned, did you notice how Iris edited a small video clip together? Merching our ultimate Fantasy writer's guide course with pirates of the Caribbean.
Autumn (4m 45s): Is that no, it was that something she shared on Patreon, Petra on a, I think I picked it up from Twitter. Oh yeah.
Jesper (4m 54s): So you upload her to, to, to her Instagram account, we now have Johnny Depp running around or in this case right out of the awesome captain, Jack Sparrow running around and talking about our cost. So yeah,
Autumn (5m 8s): No, I did not see that. I've been a little bit under water with some stuff's getting done, like, you know, my husband's going on a road trip with his mom out West and I'm home alone and you would think there's less to do, but suddenly there's, I'm doing stuff you would normally have done around the cabin two. So I think that there's more to To so I always, I was eating less. But doing more work. I dunno how that happened, but I, as soon as we're done here, I'm going on to Instagram and checking this out.
Autumn (5m 38s): I don't know how I missed it.
Jesper (5m 41s): No, that's awesome. And, and thank you. Buy the way I was for doing that. That's a, that was so great. Yeah.
Autumn (5m 47s): Yeah. I can't wait, go see it. It sounds fantastic. Yeah.
Jesper (5m 51s): So how, how are you otherwise doing, you know, what, being home alone in all of that.
Autumn (5m 56s): Oh, you know, as we're saying it
Jesper (5m 58s): It's always one of those, like, you know, he goes away for three days that it is like a mini vacation. I'm like, yes, I'm going to eat junk food or whatever. And I'm going to get a ton of work done. And I usually just put my nose to the grindstone and usually he even takes the dog. So it is like literally I have only responsible that is to remember, to feed myself and whatever little odds and ends I have to do around the cabin. But this time he left the dog and he was gone for a, at least three weeks. Its kind of, you know, at the end dates or a little open-ended. So I having a much harder time.
Jesper (6m 30s): You suddenly someone you spent 20 years of your life with has gone for an extended period and you're like, I'm going to get all this work done. And then you're like, Oh, just want to watch Netflix. I'm lonely two weeks just for a long time as what is it is where you were. Once we sold our house before we set off into the world and on our four year a road trip, we spent what almost all of December apart. And that was the first time since we were newlyweds that we'd been apart that long while we were with families. So it was a different this time. I'm literally here on my own with just the dog and yeah, you might hear him talking a couple times.
Jesper (7m 4s): We'll see. Hopefully its just about to say it at least. Do you have a doctor? That's good. Otherwise who would be a really lonely? Yes, I got the dog.
Narrator (7m 16s): Oh a week on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast so a friend of the podcast
Jesper (7m 23s): Class and fellow author J Thorn has just met his most popular costs are 100% free a, he sells it on your, to me for a 99 or 49. That's what I was supposed to say $49, but you can get it for nothing now. And I wanted to mention that here because actually he has no registration required, no email address, no credit card information. There is nothing you need to do. You can just go and basically take the course right away.
Jesper (7m 53s): You don't have to download or install anything. Absolutely. No for us. And I thought that was pretty cool. So I wanted to mention that and it is Jays how to write a scene video, cause that is not 100% free and he gave us actually a special link from where you can then start watching it right now if you want. And we have included that link in the show notes. So if you just follow that and once you arrive on that page from the link that you have to scroll down to the button and, and they're you, you will find a buttoned where it says $0 on it.
Jesper (8m 25s): That's nice. Yeah. So that's very nice. So if you want to grab a free video costs on how to write a scene than making sure that you to follow that link there in the show notes, we can definitely leave out for J Thorn he knows what he's doing and he's really good. So, and also a very nice guy. Oh yeah. So this is gonna say absolutely. He's definitely just a good writer and just a great guy. So love that. I just can't believe that it's not even
Autumn (8m 56s): Collecting email addresses. I mean, this was like just hack. I might have to adjust, you know, want to have these after do as while eating lunch by myself actually just for the heck of it.
Jesper (9m 8s): Yeah. But I, yeah, that's exactly why I think it's so cool. And why I wanted to mention it here because usually with these kind of things, obviously when you and I are them as well, when we do these kind of free things are giveaways or whatever, normally we always collect the email address because that sort of the hole point as well too, so that you can start communicating with people on the longterm and if they only want the cost, they can just because just unsubscribe and no questions asked, but it is pretty rare that we see somebody not collecting any information whatsoever, but just giving the course away for free.
Jesper (9m 43s): So a yeah, that's pretty cool. But anyway, listener go and check it out if you want and if not, yeah, I do something else, but then we can, but also a way I also would add just a quick reminder, a for episode 100, we are going to run a QA session, but it's not only a Q and a about writing and marketing and publishing, but you can ask us anything. So please stop posting your questions because without your question is sort of going to be pretty boring or episode 100.
Jesper (10m 17s): So we included a link to the contact form for our website in the show notes. So you can go there and just type in your question, but if you do send us an audio recording of your question so we can play it on episode 100, we will give it already over any text-based question. So, but don't please don't stress about the audio part just to record your cell phone, your phone or something like that. And just send that file to us, even if it's a video file.
Jesper (10m 47s): Yeah. We can strip the audio off of them ourselves. Yeah,
Autumn (10m 50s): Exactly. It could just be so much more fun to have the voice of, you know, the person asking the question a on the podcast. So I think that would be so much more fun. So that would be great. Just to give you can put it on the wall if you're self-conscious or your dog or something were just going to grab the audio. You can leave it blank. That's fine. Hey, were funny mask. I don't know. As long as you can speak clearly because you'll be of course used on the podcast can wait to hear where the questions are and it will be so much fun to see the different.
Autumn (11m 22s): Tell me, you know, what people come up with task us.
Jesper (11m 25s): Yeah. So please don't put it off, you know, submit your question today. So we don't forget about it. A and a, we also of course need a bit of time to prepare on our side, but that's not the main part. The main part is just that we want to make sure we collect enough questions because as I said, it's got to be pretty boring and it's your fault. If you end up with a five minute long episode, 100 and we just say, hi and bye.
Autumn (11m 50s): Well, I think we'll get some questions. I have faith in our listeners. You'll up with something to ask us, won't you?
Jesper (11m 57s): Yeah. So Autumn you are the resident Graphic artists of The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast so where do we start this conversation?
Autumn (12m 10s): Well, I guess it depends on, we can talk about you and I have gone in together and we have hired a graphic artist to work on stuff for our upcoming illicium books. So that has been a fantastic experience and gives us both of the taste of what it's like to go out and hire someone other than me, who usually ends up doing the graphics, but you know, I can't do it all. And we found someone fantastic. He's a, what he's given us so far, he's just an amazing artist.
Autumn (12m 41s): So it's always a good experience. But most of the time, most of you are authors are not going out, looking for illustrations. Like we are, most of the times, most authors are looking for cover book covers and things like that. So we could talk about how to go about finding an artist and maybe some of the Tips I think what to look for, because what's interesting is just been taking a Photoshop course dedicated to book, cover artists, and some of the stuff I had thought in the back of my mind to hear a professional mentioning it.
Autumn (13m 16s): I'm like, Oh yeah, okay. Yeah. I hundred percent agree with you. They're so that's always a good sign.
Jesper (13m 24s): Yeah, for sure. But actually I think the first thing to do before we even get any further it's probably when you want to look into hiring a graphic artist, I think the first thing to do is to try to think about what kind of graphic design that it is that you need, you know, because creating Fantasy art work, like the guy who we hired to do is like, you know, from scratch drawing FANTASY artwork, that is not the same skillset as creating a logo or website or even a book cover it's it's different.
Jesper (14m 2s): And I think you'll need to find somebody or when you start searching for a graphic artists, you need to find someone with a strong portfolio in the type of work that you're looking for. And not just a talented visual artists, because maybe you can find somebody who can, who can draw like the most amazing dragons you've ever seen. But if it's about designing a website, maybe, maybe it's stuff the right fit anyway. So don't do you think is important to sort of think through what is the purpose here before you start searching for the tape of artists that you, that you going to work with?
Autumn (14m 40s): Yes, that is definitely a first step is to have very clearly in your mind what you are seeking. You know, if your looking for the logo of a book cover, all of those things are different skills. I've seen some amazing artists, composite artist are hand drawn artists who can not produce a marketable book cover. It's a totally different skill set. So that is the difficulty you need to know what you are looking for before you go out and then you need to decide where you're going.
Autumn (15m 11s): And there's a few different places you can go and find artists, but definitely I agree. First step is knowing exactly kind of what you're looking for. So that way, when you go and you fall in love with something you're a falling love with the right type of image, whether that's a landscape or a website or a book cover.
Jesper (15m 30s): Yeah. Do we want to talk a bit about where you can find these artists? Yeah,
Autumn (15m 34s): Absolutely. So it's the, one of the best places out there for Fantasy artists' is going to deviant art and that is a website that's been a long, I think they are having, Oh, they're having a big anniversary party. And I should know because I, you know, I got their emails and get, I think it's the 20 year why they have been around for quite a while, which is very exciting. And so they're, you know, there are, are tried and true our community and that is, what's so exciting and they are really, they have some great search functions.
Autumn (16m 12s): You can go into deviant art and you can search for, you know, dragons and landscape and FANTASY, they have a whole bunch, which is whatever you want to do. Start typing in some keywords, in doing a search, you'll find some artists and images that are going to totally knock your socks off. Yeah.
Jesper (16m 30s): And that was just about its just about to say, I could get completely lost the DVD and not for hours. Its just like, you know, if you go in there and start looking at all those FANTASY outwork is absolutely amazing. And of course some of the artists that in there are people who are making art work for like huge brands. So it was for some of them. Yeah indeed. So some of them are, are people who take like $5,000 for one image and stuff. They are so unbelievably talented. It it's amazing.
Jesper (16m 60s): I mean, even if you don't, if you're not looking for an artist, just, you know, try to go to Deb and not just to get a search around for bit just for the fun of it. I mean, Jesus, it's so amazing.
Autumn (17m 11s): It is. It's a deviant art that is going to give you some quality and you can go into the profiles. And a lot of the artists there will say, if they're accepting commission, some of them will have websites and rates and everything is linked up. So it's a very, very good, very clean. They have good portfolios. It's better than doing something like Pinterest is often a lot of stolen photos from deviant art. So you don't want to go they're yeah, there were all these, sometimes they're not quote on quote stolen, but sometimes they are not linked up two who the proper artists' is. So don't go to Pinterest.
Autumn (17m 42s): That's not going, it was going to give you some beautiful images, but it might not take you two. The actual artist, it could take you to some website are tertiary website. Its it's a mess. Pinterest is an absolute master. As far as it goes with a new image and copyright and linking to the actual artist. I wouldn't trust a single artist ever listed there unless you do some reverse image searching and find out who it really was on deviant art. And another people polices people liked to go to Fiverr witch.
Autumn (18m 13s): There are some skilled artists, but there's a lot of very unskilled artists who don't know their there, John rhe, or are some of the better techniques who aren't quite as well trained as the deviant artists. So you could go to Fiverr, but I don't really recommend it or at least be very cautious and to make sure you're getting what you're expecting and make sure you really vet that the artist is, is able to produce the images. They may be displaying as their portfolio because I've heard some horror stories that way where someone has an exquisite portfolio promises the world and does not deliver, but your under our contract.
Autumn (18m 54s): So you do need to pay. Yeah.
Jesper (18m 57s): Hmm. Yeah. And I think op work as well. Wouldn't that be a good place?
Autumn (19m 3s): It's definitely a, a, I have an Upwork profile. So that is definitely a possibility you can go there. There's also people buy per hour by hour, which is the UK kind of version. There's a few, I think Contra is another new one. So there was a few freelance gig community's that are popping up. And so you can go in there and search and op work is in bad. You can usually find some people, it has its own issues. And I would say, if you really want to support an artist, go straight to DV in art because Upwork all these companies like people try our, they take a cut of the artists commission and sometimes it's up to 30%.
Autumn (19m 39s): So if you can go to the artists directly, you will be providing them and be a better profit margin. And trust me, sometimes people want, I've seen want someone list that they want in a book cover and all this, and then listen to this and do this. And it was probably about what I would charge a thousand dollars for in their budget on Upwork $100. And it was like, Oh no, So. I think that would be another thing is to do some research and look around and kind of try to get an idea of what a budget is for this.
Autumn (20m 11s): Don't go on to Upwork and list that you want this amazing Am Fantasy image, that's all of these details and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You're going to use it for your website and the book cover. And, and you want to pay $25 do go in with a rational idea. Arts artists have been trained. I mean, I have a four year degree. I've been drawing for 35 plus years. If you want someone have that skill level, think of them as professionals. Are you going to go to the cut rate surgeon or your going to pay for someone who knows what they're doing?
Autumn (20m 43s): So to keep that in mind, this is a skilled profession on, these are amazing talented individuals in just like with you and your writing. You do want to get paid for your time of actually doing it.
Jesper (20m 56s): Yeah. I also made a note of a 99 designs as another website, but I actually listening to what you just said. Maybe I shouldn't like that one as much as I do because the reason I like 99 designs is because you can create a project there and then basically you will have artists audition for you. So basically you get to pick whoever you think is the best one. And you can just move ahead with that person. But based on what you just said, that's prob from the artist's point of view, that's probably not very good, a good setup because you have to do a lot of additions and maybe you don't get select.
Jesper (21m 33s): So you could end up spending quite a lot of your time as an artist without actually getting any orders. Correct.
Autumn (21m 41s): So I started the 99 design profile and I looked at a few of the options and I thought about how much time it was going to take for me to do an audition two, possibly have my Work voted on and maybe selective one of 20. And then like, you know, I do better just making a premade and posting it on Facebook and or a deviant art. And I would have course, I mean, as an artist, you can go in and use probably that as a premade or as something else, somewhere else. Once you create a background image, if it's not selected, I don't think you're tied into a contract that you can never reuse the image that you made for your audition, but its, it could be a huge time sink and it was definitely not a route I decided to take, but I do know as an author looking for a book cover, it has an amazing, fantastic, ya know, option because ewe, you get all these ideas thrown at you that you might not have come up on your own.
Autumn (22m 34s): So, you know, some, sometimes it works out everyone that has a different work technique in a work flow. But as an artist, I stay away from that one because it seemed like, Oh yeah, it looked like a tough one. Understand? Yeah. Understand if there is Facebook to, because you can go in and search for art on Facebook. But I think it's very unwieldy and not a good search function. I would go for it straight for DV in art over that one as well.
Jesper (23m 0s): Okay. Yeah. And I feel like for the rest of this conversation, I almost feel like we should disregard, but it covers and maybe just, and you can disagree with me here with me here or if you want it. But I almost feel like saying that book cover design is something you find somebody experienced with a book covers to do, whereas graphical artists for the rest of this conversation, meaning creating like a well basically artwork.
Jesper (23m 35s): That's something different because to me a good book, cover designer we'll know exactly what the is looking for and what readers of that is looking for and they can find something and usually they can also find a well, you know, there's a ton more or better than me or them, but, but usually they can find images that they can just manipulate and make it look awesome. But also hit the shank or tropes. And that is a million times more important than having the most cool like dragon on the cover.
Jesper (24m 9s): Oh yeah. Well that's not a good example because dragon on the covers it's within the genre, but some really, really cool art work that, that its just, it might look amazing, but just because it's a good artist doesn't mean that they know what to put on a book cover. And so I almost feel like I want to disregard book covers from here on out.
Autumn (24m 33s): Well I think we should be just because of this title of this may be, think of book cover. So I think we should do like a two minute quick book cover rundown and, but I do agree book covers and artwork are entirely different and I think it's important that other authors realize that a good book cover is not necessarily the best marketing image. I mean, it should be a good marketing image of your book, but if you want something that is like a website image or just something more graphical, those I can add, those are often very different images are very complex.
Autumn (25m 9s): They could be a very large, very in depth. When you look for a book cover artist, you want to find someone who knows how to take just a portion of that and make a composition that fits the color. The tone of the genre fits the tone of your book. And part of that is also having an amazingly good knowledge of type setting and font choice and layout and elements like that that are pretty different from just a large scale image. That is usually more like a scene from your book.
Autumn (25m 42s): Those two things may not be the same. And so I think most authors might not realize that, especially if you, you know, you're thinking you're going to use this image for multipurposes. Sometimes you can take a little snippet of a bigger image and turn it into your book cover, but often it doesn't quite work. And if you ever, I did just find out this interesting tip. If you ever have questions about book cover is, and if yours is holding up, there is a website called lousy covers.com or maybe is a lousy book covers. But if you just Google lousy book covers, you will find this website.
Autumn (26m 14s): And if you're ever wondering, you know, looking for a book cover artist and you're like, is this good enough go there? And you get a good feel for really lousy book covers pretty quickly. And if something, it looks familiar, you don't wanna go with a cover artist. So keep that in mine. I think when it comes to most book cover artists where they fall flat is the typesetting is the font choices and how it looks in with a placement on the image and what's behind it. If it's very legible, that's it's own totally different skill set.
Autumn (26m 46s): So if you are going to get an artist and you want it for a book cover, you might have to get two different artists. If they're not someone who can understand the type setting and how its going to work when your book cover and that we won't even get into like the techniques you need to do to spit that out as something that's going to be printable at the right DPI, it totally different process.
Jesper (27m 9s): Absolutely. And maybe that was enough about the cookbook come in.
Autumn (27m 12s): Exactly as I would say, onward in to graphic design and to the general Fantasy image.
Jesper (27m 20s): Yeah. So I was thinking we could sort of talk through the process that we used here recently when we hired a, a, an artist to do our work or our art work for us. And of course we use DV and not a, I guess that's not a surprise because what has been said so far, but what we did was basically we went into deviant art and we made a list of artists that we, the ones that we like the most basically, umm, and we also focused on not just the artist that we liked the most, but also the artists who then created the type of artwork we were looking for it because there is a ton of amazing artists on deviant art.
Jesper (28m 7s): But what also becomes apparent once you just spend a bit of time they're is that their style differs, you know, some of them maybe making it well, some of them have had this kind of a bit of Katurah as well.
Autumn (28m 21s): They have drawing, we have like a manga Banga is very popular. Yeah, yeah.
Jesper (28m 24s): Yes. And it looks really cool, but unless that's what you were looking for, then that's not really a good artist to put on your, on your shortlist because well they would, that's the way they draw. Right. And not to say that some of them can't draw both cartoonish or manga and regular pictures or images, some of them can, but just be mindful when you start creating your short list of artists, they are that you want to look for people who are really good at it.
Jesper (28m 55s): But also that matches the style that you are looking for. And a in our case, we were, we were looking for what, I don't know, quote unquote, realistic artwork, if you can call it that
Autumn (29m 8s): I would call it realistic. But also we we're looking for something that was a hundred percent like hand drawn painted. They will find it. So there's the manga artists who do the more cartoonish style. There's the ones that are doing a hundred percent original hand drawn there's ones who are using Daz 3d, which makes three D models. And you have a whole set of people doing things with that though, whether they are merging drawing elements. And then you have photo compositing, which is, you know, taking stock photos and layering it in with some hand drawn elements and creating a wholesale in way.
Autumn (29m 41s): So all of those things exist in all of those things are legitimate graphic artists. So your going to have to go through and find things and look for the kind of style that you like. And you also have to decide like, do you want the ones with a huge, fantastic landscape's or do you want ones that are really focusing on a character's or even do you want someone who's really looking at action scenes? Some people can do amazing characters, just standing there, but you want to throw in magic and you know, hitting something in a machine guns firing or whatever you're looking at in the, they really can't do that.
Autumn (30m 17s): So it's in Fantasy you have a team of the machine guns shooting at like a giant Hawks and dragons. Those are, those are out there,
Jesper (30m 26s): No machine guns get rid of the machine.
Autumn (30m 29s): Oh, it's a whole different sub shot or a FANTASY we don't want that, you know, tanks. Okay, fine.
Jesper (30m 38s): Yeah. So once we have a short list of artists, we went on basically just a regular internet search, a we just used the Google images to be honest, but we were just finding a balance of images in sort of the style and in the level of quality that we were looking for, because what we did next was then we created a list of all the kind of images that we wanted to create. So basically it was just like a long bulleted list with a, like one or two sentences, a description of what we were looking for know more than that.
Jesper (31m 16s): So it could be, Mmm, well, it could be the dragging for example. OK. So we need the dragon. Mmm. And then maybe a few words about what this dragon looks like or sentence or two or something like that. And then we didn't the point was to find images on the internet with Dragon's, but we just found a random pictures of sorts of this is to kind of style in quality. We wanted just to show the artist's that, ah, this is what we're looking for. And here's then the list of things that we want you to create.
Jesper (31m 50s): And I can't remember. We've probably had like, I dunno, what do we have? Like 30, 40 items all the way too long ago.
Autumn (31m 57s): It was, I would recommend two. Definitely. Maybe have that narrowed down to maybe your top five, depending on, you know, your budget and just an idea of the, I think I have us having images of saying, this is what inspired us. Really. It really helps as an artist to be able to say, Oh good, you know, some kind of hand drawn sketch if a few ideas people, or even me as an artist, I've made a mood board, or if I'm creating to cover to get an idea of what's out there, what inspired me to make this cover?
Autumn (32m 27s): So you want to make a mood board for the artists, your trying to hire that's when, when they love you for it.
Jesper (32m 36s): Yeah. So what we did next was then of course, we reached out to these different artists on our short list and we basically just asked them for pricing information And well, surprise, surprise. It turned out. And some of them were incredibly expensive. Some of them were like these $4,005,000 per item. It's a while there was several of the other's who were well in the same price range.
Jesper (33m 5s): I have, I guess I have to say that none of this is cheap, right? I mean, once you go out and ask for custom artwork, it has never cheap a so you have to go into this with the right expectations. Artwork will cost you. That's just, that's just the bottom line of this. But I think based on our list, at least we found that depending on the complexity of the images that we wanted created, I mean, some of them are more expensive than other ones, but at least I think based on what we found, we can expect to pay somewhere between 500 and a thousand dollars per image, depending on which one it is.
Autumn (33m 45s): Yeah. So that was going to say about the going rate for, especially at night, we were looking for hand drawn, but this has a lot of work. Even if you're a fast at it, it's a lot of where you're not pulling in other elements. I can make things go faster. So these were young. Yeah. It's not cheap. And you should definitely go into it expecting to pay a certain amount because do you know that's what you're asking for is quite a high level of technical skill.
Jesper (34m 10s): Yeah. And and 502, a thousand dollars per game is that it's not the expensive ones. Yeah.
Autumn (34m 17s): Oh. But there are some amazingly talented people who probably it could be making more than they're charging. So you can always look for those.
Jesper (34m 26s): Yeah. Yeah. I mean the, if you just want one image, for example, if you want a single image, then I think, I mean not, not, well, it could be wrong to say that everybody can, you can probably find the money for that, but that's not fair to say either. But my point was just that you don't have to be as insane as us to have like a list of 30 of 20 or 30 items you want created two times $500. Right. That's insane. But, but it's just us. So, you know, I have to be a stupid answer.
Jesper (34m 57s): Yeah.
Autumn (34m 57s): No, Oh yeah. That's do you don't want to go crazy. You don't want to have to be putting this on your credit card because it just like, you know, editing and everything else. What your going to get back. If it's for your book or something, you got to make sure you're balancing your budget here, but Hey, if it's your Christmas birthday present and you can scrape up the money, all of these are so cool. They're so I can see, I just love what I, like I said, we've been shown it's totally worth it.
Jesper (35m 24s): Yeah. So basically we got back all the pricing information from these artists and then of course we had to make a choice. And since we already made the short list, based on the stuff we saw on deviant art, basically from an artwork prospective, we knew that all of them were good already. So the question then becomes, what do you do then? And at least for us, we didn't actually just pick the cheapest one. But instead we actually factored in stuff like how quickly did the artist reply to our emails?
Jesper (35m 59s): Because I don't know about UDL listener, but at least for me personally, I hate working with somebody who you constantly have to chase four, getting a reply. I really, really hated a, so I want to be able to send an email and get a reply within, say a day or two or something like that. I think that is a fair expectation. If this is a professional working relationship,
Autumn (36m 24s): Definitely I can agree. That's one of my pet peeves. And another thing you wanna think about To is there a schedule? I mean, if their really good, but I know a couple of cover artists that is literally taking commissions for a March, 2021. So that's an important thing to maybe ask is when would you fit me in, is it someone who can fit you in, in a month or two? Or is there someone who's two years out because they are doing a new role and you know, gaming are there or something and you are, they just literally, well not, they would love to work with you, but, and not right now.
Autumn (36m 56s): Yeah.
Jesper (36m 58s): It just made me think that there was actually one of the artist's on the list who didn't even send back pricing information. It just wrote back, well, you won't be able to afford me anyway. And it was all in all of the person wrote back to us. It's like, okay, yeah,
Autumn (37m 12s): You should go with someone. You, Mmm. We might not have been looking for commissions' or at least not out of the, the water's we were looking. And I think that's an important thing is how chatty, you know, not only how fast or they reply, but, or are they like one or two words or is it someone you, can, you feel comfortable talking to, you want to make sure that you can get information back and you know, they're there getting what you're asking four, are you at least for like, you communicate with them without like being yelled at Yeah and what I do. Yeah.
Jesper (37m 42s): And then this is important. Once you have sorta made you a pick here, and of course we can't tell you how, how to pick a day, pick the person, but of course, price, the price does matter. And I think it met us a lot. How fast are we applying that? And also what Autumn just said about, ah, how, what feel do you get about the person write? But the next steps then becomes important. I'm in our case, when we did, we, we basically agreed with the artist to do three trial images for us and just to get a feel for how do we work together?
Jesper (38m 16s): We agreed that were not going to pay for any of it before all three is done. And before we were happy with all of them and then the artist's will do those three images. And then afterwards we will decide if we like the working relationship than we wanted to work with the artist on a more permanent in the long term basis. But for dad, I think it's important to have some sort of in place with the person. And when I say contract, it's not like you have to start writing 20 pages of contract or whatever, but you need something in writing that clearly lays out stuff like, okay, who owns the right to the images once they are created?
Jesper (38m 52s): What about the payment terms? As I just said, Oh, we prefer only two pay once the work done, but there are different ways of doing that. You should also agree. They're what type of files are to be delivered? Is it in black and white? Is it in color? Ah, what is the resolution rate of the files? And also what is the turnaround time that you agree? So if I place your order today, when am I going to get the first draft of the images? When, when can I expect the final images to be done and so on and so on.
Jesper (39m 23s): And so those things, you need something in writing two to, to, you know, lay out those terms so that it's clear to everybody because a otherwise you might end up in some trouble later because also as, as we talked about here, right? If, if we are talking more than just the single image, just turn images, for example, there could still be $5,000, right? So you don't want to have $5,000 floating out there on kind of a Well.
Jesper (39m 55s): I don't know quite what we have agreed terms right now. I would start a good idea. Yeah,
Autumn (39m 59s): No, you definitely covered everything. And I would also say, even if you agree with EVERY you, I think you're touched everything that I can think of it, especially the copy. Right. But you also might want to work on you. No. What can they share? Even like, you know, are they going to be able to post some drafts on DVD or in art? Or is there something you we're trying to keep under wraps into a big reveal, you should have that kind of a communication and possibly have that in a contract. It's not quite the same as, you know, if you were sharing, I'm an unpublished manuscript with somebody and you're worried about them stealing the whole thing.
Autumn (40m 33s): Well, you know, you'd need to know who owns the rights to the work in progress is sorta the way to think of it because there are some artists who we'll be sharing it on their social media. And if you don't want that shared while it's still working draft, make sure you make that clear and yeah. Payment terms. There's a lot of different ones. Sometimes it's at the end. Sometimes its, you know, thirds are as you're going a long as you hit certain milestones, but most artists, if you're hiring someone whose professional has what they are used to, most of them are a flexible on certain issues.
Autumn (41m 6s): So it shouldn't be too difficult. But again, so you want to make sure though, you don't want to just go with what they're saying. You want to make sure you know, the file types and what a difference is between a P and G filed is in a JPEG in your resolutions, on what size do you need? You need to know all of that so that your getting what you expect out of and you don't end up with something, this size of a thumbnail that you can do anything with.
Jesper (41m 32s): Yeah, absolutely. So
Autumn (41m 34s): I don't know autumn, if we are, if we should not conclude something like Like the top advice, uhh, when finding and working with an artist space, do you know based on everything we talked about or maybe something we didn't mention, what, what would you say? The number one advice I would be, I would say be as an author, looking for something, going with an idea of what you want be kind, but B specific always be a polite. It's a very nice you say you don't want someone who comes across to as demanding before you even get to know somebody.
Autumn (42m 10s): But I would also say Mike, to me, coming from an artist point of view, you know, if you go, if you can find their exact website or their portfolio on DV in art and contact them directly, instead of through a third party like Upwork, that really helps because artists, they are expensive. They except for the ones who were making it big, its, you know, it's, you're doing this. A fulltime are in your spare time and it's not a high paying gig despite talking about, you know, something that costs a thousand dollars.
Autumn (42m 42s): It takes a lot of time and a lot of work to make that. So the more you can put towards the artist directly, instead of having another party, take a portion, that's just a win win for everyone. Alright, next Monday it should be a fun one. Everyone talks about the daily word counts. Like what is a good target to set? Or should you even care about something? Like what counts
Narrator (43m 8s): If you like, what you just heard? There's a few things you can do to support The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jasper on patrion.com/am Writing Fantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast going to stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
We've shared launch plans and discussed the debate on launching books wide versus going with KDP select ... so how does all of that really go when you release books?
Join Autumn and Jesper as they discuss the release of not one, but THREE new non-fiction books! Does the launch plan really work? What things should you keep in mind? We are so glad you asked ...
Help us celebrate Episode 100 of the podcast!
We are collecting questions to answer during the episode. Do you have one for us? If so, go to https://forms.gle/9rCF79xa3fJYEZW96 to submit it!
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to the am. Writing fantasy podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt, and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I am Jesper
Autumn (32s): and I'm autumn.
Jesper (34s): This is episode 89 of the am writing fantasy podcast. And as you probably know, if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, we recently released not one but three nonfiction guides for authors and we launched these books white. So today we were thinking that we were going to share a bit of our reflections on how it all went. And I guess what can be expected when launching nonfiction books? I think it's exciting.
Jesper (1m 5s): I think my first comment would be three to three books at once then what was the deal with that? But I guess we can get, if we think it's a good idea to just throw it all together and have a really big party, but it was fun and I'm so happy. We finally have those out there, but for us, it's been a week. How are things over in Denmark? I heard that things actually COVID wise are kind of good over there. Yeah. It's going produce pretty good.
Jesper (1m 35s): As I just said before we started recording the official count of people actually hospitalized at the moment for COVID-19 is 13 people. That's it? That Indian type thing, I can't even comprehend such Sloan number. That's pretty good. Yeah. So, because I was also over the weekend, I was out referring my first official tournament soccer match. So that was pretty cool after all the yeah, because after, you know, w with the COVID-19 again and all that, I've had a few practice matches here and there, but has been far between, because of all the lockdown.
Jesper (2m 13s): So this was the first real one, if you can call it that fans and everything. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's really exciting. It's like normal. Yeah. I mean, there was not a lot of people that were, it might've been, I dunno, a hundred people watching or something, but, but it was good. It was great to start again. Although I have to say the, the stadium temperature said it red 33 degrees Celsius with just like a 91 Fahrenheit.
Jesper (2m 47s): So you can imagine running around for 90 minutes. That was pretty damn warm. I would have collapsed after the first five minutes. That's not for me. Oh, it was more for, but, but actually you, you play us. Didn't, didn't slow down at all. You know, they went all in for 90 minutes and they were, well, we were all sweating like crazy afterwards, but
Autumn (3m 13s): That's a good thing. It was good. Math soup was good too.
Jesper (3m 16s): But then afterwards I was really tired. So I actually went home and watched something that I've started watching something new.
Autumn (3m 23s): Oh, really? Which one would you pick up?
Jesper (3m 26s): Yeah, because we recently got ourselves an Amazon prime subscription. Excellent. Yeah. And I've heard so many, so many times speak well of Battlestar Galactica and I've never watched it.
Autumn (3m 42s): No, no, I don't think I might've picked up an episode here or there, but I've never really watched it to, to know what's going on or the characters or anything.
Jesper (3m 51s): No. Okay. Because I what's the first two seasons by now and it is slightly dated, but it's still very good, you know, because I understand what all the hype was about around it's like, it's, it's basically just like we talk about in our book on plotting, you know, they focus a lot on the characters and the character arcs and the character developments and their interrelationships, you know, they have this entire collectic war going on against something called the silence.
Jesper (4m 24s): So that does take up, it's a fair amount of air time, but they focus just as much on the characters and their personalities and relationships. I really liked that. And I think that's really what makes the show good or takes it like a notch up, you know, the, the war against the silence yet. That's pretty cool. It's very scifi is like what you would expect from the genre and that alone is it's okay. You know, but if that was the only thing they had in there, I think it would just be mediocre.
Jesper (4m 57s): What makes it really good is because of all the character development that goes on in there. So it's just very, very much aligned with what we said in our plotting book.
Autumn (5m 7s): That's well, that's a good sign. I guess one of us, either they or us, or both of us were on the right track. And I'll have to keep that on my, in mind because my husband's taking a bit of a trip out West and is actually gonna be away for about three weeks. And I don't want to continue to show time. It's a long time and I don't want to continue. The show is we usually watch one show at night. We're so like structured. And so we watch our only show and we've been watching certain series together, so I don't want to continue those. So I've, it's, I've been debating.
Autumn (5m 37s): Do I go back and start season? What is supernatural, which will that'll keep me entertained for quite a while. Keep that in mind. So if I decided to try something new battle scars, Battlestar Galactica.
Jesper (5m 49s): Yeah. If you want to, I don't know if you like scifi, but I quite enjoy both scifi and fantasy, to be honest. Yeah. It's, it's, it's pretty good. Excellent. Well, I'll keep that in mind. We go on the internet with the yam writing fantasy podcast. All right. So we talked about what to do for episode 100, a few times by now some of you also gave us some ideas, you posted them to us.
Jesper (6m 19s): So, so thank you very much for the input and well, taking out the time to share your thoughts with us. We really appreciated that, but I think as well, we've made our bile mine now, haven't we?
Autumn (6m 32s): Yeah. We debated our own ideas and talked about the suggestions that were given to us. And I think we came up with a pretty good plan. It didn't, it wasn't the first one we hit on, but once we hit on it, we just kept coming back to it. So I think that means,
Jesper (6m 49s): Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if it's very original, but we had a lot of different things sort of juggling and we were debating back and forth and there was some really good ideas that some of you guys posted to us. So thank you for that. But some of them just, well, they required too much of, well, for example, reviewing, there was some very good ideas about what about reviewing some writing and stuff like that, but we didn't really feel comfortable with reviewing somebody's writing on air like this.
Jesper (7m 24s): And I don't think many people were, feel comfortable getting their writing reviewed on air like this either. So, and besides we thought that, okay, but then we need quite a lot of different things to be able to feel 45 minutes of an episode. That is also interesting. So that didn't gel very well with us. So we sort of went away from that. And we went back to, I think some of, one of the first idea we had, but then we went away from it, but we then came back and that was basically that we want to try to run a Q and a session.
Jesper (7m 57s): Yeah. But not just like a regular Q and a, but more like ask us anything kind of episode. You know,
Autumn (8m 5s): I think it's, it'll be so much fun because yeah. It could be, you know, someone asking about our own writing, the crazy road trip I did with my husband and, you know, being a soccer coach or specifics about books and marketing and writing. So it's the whole gamut. Yeah.
Jesper (8m 25s): Just, you know, ask us anything. It doesn't have to be with writing, marketing or publishing, but it could be anything you're just curious about. You want to hear about, I teased on a past episode that maybe you want to hear about the time I had to put my hands on a power cable to two and people were watching me to see if I was going to die before they decided if they were going to touch it. So maybe you want to hear that story, but whatever you want to know, you can ask it and we will, we'll try to, to get it answered in 100.
Jesper (8m 57s): It is still a bit out in terms of timewise here. But I think we need to start talking about it now because we need, of course, to be able to have a full Q and a session, we need to have enough questions. So basically you should start sending them to us now. And we have included their link in the show notes to the contact form on our website. So you can just go there and type in your question if you want.
Jesper (9m 27s): But there was something we would very much more love for you to do isn't that right? Autumn, rather than sending me text questions.
Autumn (9m 36s): Yes. We have going to give a preference to anyone who sends us an audio or a video that we can pull the audio from of the question, because this is a podcast and we would love to have your voice on here asking the question. I think that'll just be so much fun.
Jesper (9m 55s): Yeah, absolutely. And it doesn't have to be over complicated this stuff. Right. You know, just use your phone or whatever and just record. Yeah. Well, a video file where you were just posting your question, you don't have to film yourself if you don't want to just fill in the wall or something, because we were just going to strip the audio off so we can play it to you on the podcast and stuff. So yeah, we would love some audio questions rather than just text ones. But if you only want to send the text one, then please do that.
Jesper (10m 26s): And we will shut up.
Autumn (10m 28s): Yeah, go ahead. I was gonna say, if you want to do an audio, if it doesn't want to be your voice, if you're horribly shy, you can get someone asked else to ask your question for you. Be inventive. It'd be fine. As long as it's legible and we understand it and it's an English. We're good.
Jesper (10m 42s): Yeah. English would be preferred at least if you want us to answer,
Autumn (10m 48s): I guess it's someone else in data you can translate for us. But the, you know
Jesper (10m 52s): Yeah, I guess so. Yes. It would be fine as well. But yeah, so that, that I I'm looking forward to episode 100. That should, that should be a lot of fun, but yeah, it goes without saying without enough questions, it's not going to be very much. Well, I guess you can always listen to us sitting here twiddling our thumbs for 45 minutes. If you want,
Autumn (11m 12s): We could ask each other questions, but yeah, no, well, I think, I think we'll get enough. Just, just send in your questions. It'll be really fun. And I think it'll be a different episode, so it'll be a little bit, you know, we'll try something new for a change.
Jesper (11m 30s): Okay.
Narrator (11m 30s): And on to, today's topic.
Jesper (11m 34s): Okay. So we are talking about launching nonfiction books today and just for reference in case you're coming in on this episode, we are talking about the launch we did for our plot development book and the associate workbook, as well as the book, we entitled story ideas. So that last one is like a shorting quick to read companion book, but we lost all of those three books here recently, actually from just a couple of weeks back from recording this.
Jesper (12m 7s): So, so yeah, just for context, that's what we're talking about when we are talking about three books that we recently launched. So that was just a service in full form new list.
Autumn (12m 19s): Yeah. So we released them August 3rd, which when this is when this video or this podcast is released, that will be just over a month ago. And why again, did we do three books at once? I don't, I'm still don't know how that snuck up on us like that.
Jesper (12m 35s): Well, it was like, eh, yeah, the initial idea was only two of course write the plotting book. But then when I started writing it, one of the first thing I came to was like, okay, but if we have to start talking about how to plot a novel, obviously there needs to be like a story idea. And then I started debating with myself. Should it just make like the intro chapters about developing story ideas, but then I feel like, nah, yeah. But there is some other stuff I want to say about, you know, getting inspiration and stuff like that.
Jesper (13m 6s): And I didn't feel like that that fitted in very well with the rest of the book, so, Oh no. Okay. Fine. And so I think I said to you let's do a short story idea on the side and you said, yeah. Okay, fine. And then I wrote a bit more and then I felt
Autumn (13m 21s): Well, there's actually, a lot of
Jesper (13m 23s): Exercise is one could do for each of these chapters. I wonder maybe we should make a book. And then I came back to you again, see, we do like a third book as well.
Autumn (13m 35s): And so I think the plotting book and the workbook do make sense together, but I have to say looking back my first advice to anyone doing this, try to release one book at once I think, or at least give your spells selves a little bit more time. Because I think on my end, because I handled the editing and the typo slang with the feedback from our type of slayers, which we'll get to in a few minutes and then the formatting and crunching that all in with three books at once in a deadline, because we already had the preorder up was like, Whoa.
Autumn (14m 9s): So, but we will get into some of that. And some of it's good and some of it was just like, wow, that was, it was a lot of steps in there, but we should back up and start with the beginning, which you already kind of handled. We handled the, where these ideas came from. So I think the next part is, okay, so we had the manuscripts and we're launching nonfiction books. How did we go about a bit, what was our first step that we did when we had the manuscripts in hand after editing?
Autumn (14m 39s): Obviously?
Jesper (14m 41s): Yeah, of course we could. We could mention here as well that we did share our entire launch process in episode 72 and all the different steps that we take. So I don't think we're going to go over all the different steps here all over again. So check out episode 72, if you're interested in learning all the different book, launch steps that we usually take, but I think what is worth mentioning here is something around expectations, because I think that's a good thing to discuss when we're discussing book launches in general, because you know, when you get, it goes without saying, obviously everybody wants to run as optimal, a book launch as possible with and getting the best results possible, obviously that it goes without saying, right?
Jesper (15m 35s): Absolutely. Yeah. But the other one is, but the other part of this is to sort of, yeah, I don't, I don't know how to say it, but like you can come into the book launch thinking, Oh yeah, I'm going to launch these books and I'm going to earn a gazillion dollars and it's going to be great. And I have a lot of expectations. Right. But I think one of the things we did at least going into this, even actually before we started writing these books, was that we did a bit of market research about how much books on plodding selling in general, you know, is it like a, it's a something that you sell a lot of books from whatnot.
Jesper (16m 14s): And what, and we even before we started writing, going in, we already knew that this is not the type of books where you usually sell a ton of books or a ton of copies. It's you, you can earn some money from this topic and these kinds of guidebooks on plotting, but it's not like a, like a hot topic. You know, it's not something like you're going to sell a ton of books for. So that that's important going in that you sort of know what I'm, what am I going to because otherwise you're going to get disappointed.
Autumn (16m 49s): Absolutely. I think that's, I mean, everyone wants their book to do well and they would love a runaway bestseller. And there's always, maybe that secret hope line there, but these were books 17, 18 and 19 in my catalog with my name on them. And I'm just not at that point where it's like, I know it's, it's not a sprint. It is a marathon. So what I want is that to write something that is quality will last a long time and will be valuable and loved by other people, you know, whether it's a fiction or nonfiction.
Autumn (17m 21s): So I always look at it. It's not what happens the first day, the first week or the first month. So I, Oh, I think I go into every book launching, yay, they're alive. You can go get them. And absolutely adoring. What really blew me away with these three books is some of the comments from the typo slayers that helped with editing and the proofreading, and then went in and did with the reviews. And they were just phenomenal feedback. People love them. Authors said this, you know, this restored, my passion, this helped me find something, you know, I've been missing for ages or that I overlooked.
Autumn (17m 56s): And you sit in a way that I, it never clicked before that made it more worthwhile than the little orange tags that did show up. I have to admit that was so exciting. Did show up on all three books that we hit, number one, new releases. So that was fantastic. But yeah, I didn't go in thinking we're going to hit number one in Amazon, and we're going to make a thousand dollars in one day on these books. That's not what I was going in and looking for. I was going in saying, Hey, at the time it was like, Oh my gosh, authors really love this.
Autumn (18m 27s): And they're very appreciative. We wrote these books and that was the icing on my cake. And that we'd been talking about getting them done for like a year, just getting them out the door made me very, very happy. This is our year of getting things out the door that have been sitting at the threshold for a little too long. So I'm very,
Jesper (18m 45s): Yeah, no, that's true. But, and I think the other part of this is that essentially we did write these books probably more for ourselves, meaning that we are heading into writing fiction jointly as well. So because of that, we needed to have a solid process in place between us on how, how are we gonna figure out what the stories are that we're going to write together? And we, and especially once you co-writing, it, it needs to be pretty damn clear from the beginning, where are we going to go with the story and what's going to happen?
Jesper (19m 21s): What are the character arcs and all of that stuff. So we needed a guide ourselves. And that, I think that was basically the main driver for writing the, these books in the first place, more so than it was, you know, how much money are we going to earn from it? That that was secondary, to be honest. Yes. It's not to say that we don't want to sell copies of obviously of course we do want, but that was not the main driver.
Autumn (19m 46s): No, we didn't do the market research to find that one niche where we thought we'd make, you know, six figures and yeah, there are ways of doing that. And there's other, I think, topics in podcasts of trying to narrow it down and write a book to basically get an instant bestseller. We did focus on a process for ourselves and a process that is solid, that will help other authors. And that's really kind of why they came about. And I definitely think that was, that helps color our view. And of course it was also really good to get, to run through our launch sequence and see how everything worked and successfully, obviously we did a very good job.
Autumn (20m 24s): You, you were in charge of the keywords and selecting the categories and you did an excellent job because all three books did hit number one, new release. So that was wonderful moment. We, I was actually disappointed that, you know, those number one new release tags that don't like somehow get archived on your book page I, anything, come on, design something kits, number one, you should have like some lingering trace of it just to make the author happy.
Jesper (20m 50s): No, what I would really like, if, if whenever you get one of those orange tacks, I would love if Amazon would just set up the system so that they automatically send you a screenshot of it or something, Oh, that'd be so sweet because it's so annoying. You have to sit there yourself and you have to watch it and you have to see the ranking climbing. And then when it gets high enough and you get the tag, then you have to screenshot it. If you do miss it, it's just gone. It's just like, it's annoying. Just email used to say, Hey, congratulations, you became number one in this category.
Jesper (21m 22s): And then just sent you a, some sort of either, you know, screenshot or just a batch or whatever. I don't care. But there's something so that you don't have to watch it manually. That is, it feels so eighties. Yeah. Why do I have to sit there? And what's the screen and refresh. I mean, it makes no sense, but that's okay.
Autumn (21m 42s): It is. Yeah. I had always envisioned that they would, you know, automatically just send you a little badge. You could put on your cover or at least, you know, stick something on your own book page, but unless it's not true. Yeah.
Jesper (21m 56s): But basically, yeah, it was a lot
Autumn (21m 58s): Out of picking. Well,
Jesper (22m 2s): It was down to picking the right categories, of course. And we're going to talk much more about this in, in our brand new course called self pop success. Once we released later this year, there, we're going to talk much more about selecting these categories and whatnot, because to be honest, becoming the best, getting that Bessel attack on Amazon, if you just know a bit about what you're doing there, it's not difficult. It's not like we signed a ton of books to get that. If you pick the right categories, it's, it's not that hot.
Jesper (22m 32s): So you just need to be well aware of what you're doing there. And the other thing is which again, we're going to talk a lot more about that in so Pepsi, two sets cause as well, but basically all of this came from just us leveraging our email list. We didn't really do anything else in terms of advertising. I mean, we did not run any ads, paid ads to, to these books at all. We had, we didn't even have any Amazon ads running during the preorder phase or anything.
Jesper (23m 4s): It was purely from the email list at the pump them up to best-sellers all three of them. So, so that was of course. Great.
Autumn (23m 13s): Do you think it is easier to get a number one, like new release on a nonfiction versus like a fantasy where there are some sub genres, but they seem to be pretty full. It's really hard to find a sub genre of fantasy that is empty enough where you think you're going to hit it with just, I mean, I don't know how many sales, but you know, a hundred sales or something like that. It's at least it felt easier on the nonfiction and every time I release something in fantasy, I just kind of already have that kind of hopeless feeling of, yeah.
Autumn (23m 45s): I either have to really lie about what kind of story this is just so I can get that number one, new release tag, or I'm just going to say, it's, I'd rather have it in the right category and just heck with all the best selling stuff as much fun as it is.
Jesper (23m 60s): Yeah. Yeah. Well, if you're right, if you're talking about an Epic fantasy novel, then indeed. Yeah, of course it's much easier with these. Oh, somebody is driving behind past my window. I hope it doesn't make too much background noise. Sorry for that. But you can also do it the fiction. I think it depends on what kind of fiction is that you write and what categories that would fit into. But if, if it is indeed Epic fantasy, then, and you stick it in an Epic fantasy, then of course it's very, very difficult to get a bestseller tag in that category and nonfiction.
Jesper (24m 34s): You have, you have more leeway of course. And also some of these categories, there's not a lot of competition in them. So that makes it by default fairly easy. I mean, if you can sell, I don't know, let's say 40, 50 copies in a date and you're probably going to be bestseller right now. And if you have enough on the email list, that's not difficult at all. Basically it's, it's fairly easy. Right. So, so that, yeah, that's just, it's just a matter of knowing what you're doing there and doing a bit of research on these categories.
Jesper (25m 7s): And we're going to explain all of that in the, in the self published S course. So yeah. Talking about email list, by the way, if you want to be one of the first people to know when this course is available, then just head on over to am writing fantasy.com. We have some different signup forms on different pages or whatever, but just grab whichever one appeals to most of you and then sign up there. But then you will get onto our email list and we will make sure to let you know, as soon as this free courses is out later this year.
Autumn (25m 38s): Yeah. Maybe since I'm, I am in charge of the website, I could maybe go in there and I'll do a blog post or something like saying, Hey, if you want to know about this course, you know, sign up here. And that way we can get some people on a waiting list. So you're not struggling to try to figure out where could I go if I want to hear about this, because he's two, actually we're gonna have three courses. So we did just three books. Then we're gonna have three courses coming out this fall. We're like in sets of threes at the moment. I wonder what the next thing is because there's three last, my mom likes to say, you know, things come in third.
Autumn (26m 12s): So we have three set. We'll have three sets of three. Is it an, I don't know what the third set of threes is going to be, but apparently there'll be something.
Jesper (26m 19s): Yeah. Yeah. But actually I was wondering, I had a question for you here because I was wondering when we were heading into the release of these three books, we also were also in the middle of the pandemic, as we all know. Yes. Did you have any initial thoughts heading into it about how, and maybe, maybe not it would affect book sales in the pandemic or did you not really think about that heading in?
Autumn (26m 51s): I think I've been thinking about book sales in may because with a pandemic hit, I saw book sales go up because so many people were home when they were picking up new books and with the preorder, we actually had the price drops. So I made sure that I was letting people know saying, you know, if you're interested in these books, we have this preorder sale. Once they're released, the prices are going to go up. So now is the time to get them. And I was thinking that, you know, this is probably if people right now have more time, a lot of them are, I know it's a quick side story.
Autumn (27m 25s): A one time since I worked for the government, we were on furlough. So 16 days without pay sent home because the government was shut down. So I had two weeks off. Didn't know if I get paid again. And it was an amazing experience in its own way, because it was just like, Hey, this is what it's like to do. What I want to do in my own time. I worked on my own business. I worked on my writing. I worked on, I was building a house at the time and I went back to work afterwards saying, crap, this want to go do that some more.
Autumn (27m 56s): I was fine. And I've been thinking throughout this entire pandemic that a lot of people have been sent home. They know what it's like to be working for someone else. And then they get this eye opening experience. And so many people have taken the time to take extra lessons, to build new experience, beef up things that they want to do. And I've always wanted to try because they had the time and they, they might have lost their job or they're at home because you know, their businesses closed down. And so I was thinking, there's going to be some people who have always wanted to write a book who are now trying to write struggling.
Autumn (28m 30s): And a book on plot development might be right up their alley. Especially if the, you know, the people picked up our podcasts, they picked up other stuff that we've been doing. And so they're going to be like, yeah, Hey, I'm going to go ahead and get this. So I thought this was actually going to be a good thing. Is this to me in the pandemic has been great for people who want to try something new and are really reaching out unless, and in the other way, it's the other half of the equation. It's been horrible for people who have suffered from depression and anxiety. That's, it's a schism between the two. So I try to stay on the happy side, but definitely I thought they had a pretty good chance of actually helping the books release.
Jesper (29m 8s): Yeah. Yeah,
Autumn (29m 10s): No. What did you think, were you thinking it would be, or are you thinking? No,
Jesper (29m 16s): I think probably very similar. I mean, what we have seen afterwards as well is that there is an uptake in online book sales during the coronavirus actually quite significantly uptake because people are staying at home. So they're reading more. So I wasn't really concerned about that going in either where I do think in hindsight here that we might have made a mistake was that we, we released these books in the middle of the summer holidays. Then I guess the devil's advocate here could say that summer holidays doesn't matter.
Jesper (29m 51s): We were, everybody was home anyway, but I don't know, but still it feels to me like that timing was a bit off there.
Autumn (30m 0s): I could see that. And especially in the state, so it was early August when we released them. And the way the mental attitude in the United States has been is by this point, you know, they're pushing to reopen a lot of the States, whether or not we were safe or ready to. And I think people are just kind of even talking to my parents who have been incredibly good at staying in quarantine and self isolating. They're just done with it. They're true. They're so ready to be done with it. So I think there is a mental exhaustion with the pandemic and staying home and reading another book.
Autumn (30m 33s): So, and the fact that things were open, the beaches were open. We were in the middle of summer. So I do think that me, you know, it's one of those years, I mean, you could, we scheduled it over a month and a half out w with the preorder. And we picked the date. It was like June, end of made you. And we're like, it's going to be August 3rd. You don't know what's going to happen. And you know, an asteroid could have hit the planet. By that point. We just did not know. And you never do with preorders and you do have the opportunity to push them further back because you don't know you, you know, some dire event could literally happen a few days.
Autumn (31m 8s): There are people who released books on September 11th because they did not know what was going to happen in the world that day. It's always, there's always a chance. So I I'm glad we stuck with it. There's always a chance we could have pushed it, you know, said we needed another week. There was times when it was formatting going, Oh my goodness. If I get another email about, you know, we had so many types of slayers sending us emails, some of them sent in pages of comments and, you know, change this, or one thing off here, I was shocked.
Autumn (31m 41s): Usually, you know, you get back from your fantasy books. And usually I want to hear from my beta readers or alpha Rita's or arc readers, they're like, Oh, you know, there's like, you know, if some of them has 10 comments to change, that was a lot. But we had some incredibly skilled, detailed readers that picked up on stuff that our two editors missed. And I think one of them, when I copied it out of the email and stuck it into pages, just so I could save it and like delete them as I went through it, it was over 10 pages of comments.
Autumn (32m 14s): So there was enough of those that I was like, there was a few times I was like, I can't do this. I, I got, there was enough that I wasn't even sure if I had already checked them. So I had to check all of them every single time. And I usually have a very good like memory that way of being able to say no,
Jesper (32m 31s): That one, I did that when I did that, I couldn't do that
Autumn (32m 34s): Time. So that would be one of my comments is that three books at once with the incredibly amazing, powerful type of slayers that we had that were just, I cannot believe the level of picking up things that they had. If, if everyone read this well, they could hire this team for like publishing companies. They were amazing. But there were times I was thinking, there's no way I'm going to get this done so that we can, I can get them to you while you were actually on vacation, you had to take off of your vacation, open up your laptop and upload the final books once I got them to you.
Autumn (33m 8s): So, you know, the timing wise, we were juggling your vacation deadlines, lots of comments and feedback. And there was a few times I was like, can we do August like 20 something of August 3rd? But I do think it's important if you're going to announce something like a deadline, and this is when we're going to do it, it's very important professionally, you know, to stick to it and your readers are anticipating it, our readers were anticipating it. And so I thought it was very important that we get it done.
Autumn (33m 39s): Whether I met a few extra days, sleepless nights, whatever it got done. And you took time off, you took like a solid, like eight or nine hour day, I think off of the occasion to get all this done. That's what we do because we have to make sure we do it.
Jesper (33m 56s): Yeah, yeah, no, I agree. But, but, but I think that's also the lesson learned here about, you know, when we planted, initially we should have thought about early August might not be the best time either do it earlier or do it later. But I think timing wise, that was a bit of a blunder on our side, but yeah, you live in, you learn, right?
Autumn (34m 21s): Oh yeah. I think, I mean, I kind of know that I'm may, June is a very big book release month is like everyone is posting new releases and I can see probably September is a good tip. Yeah. October is probably a good book release time. I honestly think,
Jesper (34m 38s): I think anyone to be honest, but, but just in the middle, it's just, it's like, if you decide to release a book on the 25th of December, you know, that's not pretty smart, right. So it's, it's, it's just like you have a few times a year or the 1st of January, that might be a bit stupid as well. There's a few times a year where you definitely want to avoid those. But other than that, I don't think it matters if you pick April or may or September, October, but it doesn't matter. As long as you just at least stay clear of those.
Jesper (35m 7s): Like maybe handful of times a year where you just know that this is bad timing. Right. And the middle of the summer holidays is probably one of those stag tries to stay clear of that. But on the other hand, of course, if you want to get the bestseller tag in a category, that's pretty damn easy though, during those times. So to do something while they're off,
Autumn (35m 31s): Yes, that would be the key. And I do say, I know every time I look at my sales and they seem a little flatter than I do remember there was a study that said any holiday, be U S or worldwide, you have to be careful because sometimes, you know, different countries will have a different impact, but family holiday. So anytime we're going to be spending time with family, you are just horrible about books sell weekends. So things were like Memorial day in the United States where you're having picnics Thanksgiving, stuff like that. They're usually horrible book sale days.
Autumn (36m 2s): So those are, those are times to definitely think about avoiding or if no one is going to be selling any books and you can actually get your list to go by. Maybe you'll do really well.
Jesper (36m 12s): Indeed, indeed. Yeah. I wanted to return back to, well, just sales and expectations in a minute here. But, but before going there, I was just thinking maybe we should just talk a minute about launching wide and why we are launching wide instead of exclusive. So I don't know. Do you want to say a bit about that?
Autumn (36m 34s): Well, I know you and I have both always had our books wide. I think I did put one series once in KDP select for a little while just to see if it would do better there. And it didn't. I went back to why a lot of my readers are already there, but for us, I think it's both a philosophy that to have all of your eggs in one basket to have everything on Amazon and dependent on Amazon sells selling and to be exclusive, they're just kind of curtails what you can do as an author.
Autumn (37m 7s): We, by not being wide, we can sell right off of our website, which we do do. And as a fantastic opportunity to have those extra sales. And plus there are authors who want to be able to get this book on their Cobos, their nooks. So we're wide so that we can deliver to those as well. And I know that's part definitely part of why it is. It's sort of a, it's a business perspective because we don't want to be just if Amazon, for some reason, if the United States government does manage to do what they want to do and break it apart, it's going to be total chaos.
Autumn (37m 40s): And I don't want to be just relying on Amazon to be my only source of book related income. Not when I can put it on my own platform this way.
Jesper (37m 49s): No, indeed. Yeah. And it's not that there's anything wrong with the Ken little limited. I mean, we might very well decide once we will release some of our joint fiction. We might very well decide to put some of that in Kindle unlimited, but I think that the point is more, if you have everything only on Amazon, then you are, whether that is then Kindle unlimited or not, it doesn't really matter in this context, but it's more like if you're a hundred percent dependent on Amazon and what Amazon decides to do well, that's a very big risk to take with your author business.
Jesper (38m 22s): So certainly don't want to do that. And I also think on top of that, when we're looking at nonfiction titles like this, they wouldn't perform very well in cannot limit anyway. So it just makes sense to put them wide.
Autumn (38m 37s): Yeah. I don't think there would have been any advantage to being on Kindle unlimited for nonfiction, for books like this. I do see it maybe for a new fantasy series. Sometimes it's not a bad thing, but I would probably only do the, the one is a three month sign up and then pull them and go wide. But that's also because you and I have a platform that is wide. If I was a brand new author, maybe I would do six months or a year on Kendall unlimited. Cause it's a, they have some stuff that really helps new and upcoming authors and that might help as an advantage if it was our first books out there.
Jesper (39m 14s): Yeah. And as, as I've said before, as well, the algorithm on Amazon, it does give you a bit of an upside. If you're in Kentland limited, it does favor you. So, so that is nice. But yeah, I am not to turn this into a Kindle unlimited conversation as such, but it, I think it's also important to point out that it's a per book decision. It's not like you have to decide either or either all your books has to be wide or either your books have to be in con kinda limited.
Jesper (39m 44s): You know, it's a popup decision. You're going to have some books wide, other ones in Caitlin limited for a short duration of time, a longer duration of time. I think perhaps, well, we'll need to find out what we do with our joint fiction once we got that far, but it could be that we stick them in Kindle unlimited and see how, how it goes. If it goes really well, maybe they'll stay there for a good while. Maybe we pull them out after three months because we want to put them wide. But yeah, this is of course a whole different conversation. But I guess what I could say is that as well, in our case, he, even though we published wide, 90% of our sales came from Amazon.
Jesper (40m 23s): And that's basically also what I expected, to be honest. I, I do wish that the competitors would grab a bigger market share in the future because competition. Yeah. I mean like real competition for Amazon will actually serve us. Authors will, but yeah, there's just no way around it for the time being, at least Amazon is just the big boy in the school yard and they scoop up most of it. So that's just the way it is.
Jesper (40m 54s): We did get some sale from the other stores, but it's not worth mentioning really compared to Amazon.
Autumn (41m 1s): Yeah. A, this is the sad truth, but if we don't keep supporting those other platforms, they'll never grow big enough to give a little bit of competition to Amazon. So that's why like, you know, being wide and supporting them. But yeah, it's definitely a pro book decision. It's sort of like whether if you could be a hybrid author, some of your books might be with a publisher. Some of them might be independent published. That is the fight. It just makes you stronger and maybe a little more diverse and dynamic as an author.
Jesper (41m 31s): Yeah. I think overall I'm actually pretty happy with the launch. It went according to expectations. It did not sell more or less than sort of what I expected. Of course, it's always nice to have even more sales, I guess you could say that, but, but given how we've run no paid advertising during the launch at all. And we only write on the email list. I think it was a unacceptable result.
Autumn (41m 58s): I'm thrilled with it. I think it was great. And like I said, to me, it was the comments from the type of slayers and then seeing the reviews as they got posted. And again, even for us, the reviews were, we gave the type of Slayer quite a lot of time because they were not small books while at least the plotting book was not a small book. And
Jesper (42m 16s): What is it like 90 words or something 90,000 words, I think
Autumn (42m 20s): There was nonfiction. So this is not something you get caught up in and getting to the climax. I mean, this is like a lot of them said, yeah, I was reading it. And then I started working on my book and then I'm like, okay, I have to finish this. And I have to, now I'm going to go back and do all the exercises. So it was, it was said that we gave them a lot of time. And I do think that was an advantage because some of them signed up for all three books, but because we gave them some time and it was the summer holidays. A few people have been really who had said that, Hey, yes. Yeah, of course. I want to sign up. I want to read this early.
Autumn (42m 51s): And then I'm going to do a review for you guys have not posted the reviews. And again, it's summer, it's back to school, it's a pandemic. And they also had probably three, four weeks before, you know, they wrote a review or they put it on good reads or they sent us an email saying how much they liked it. And then the actual release, you know, there's a, you lose a little bit of steam. And so that's a, that's a difficult one to feel out. It's much easier to release one book, a fiction book that people are really excited about. And you can kind of shorten up that timeline and get all that excitement or crunch time together, where with nonfiction and throw so many books, we had a lot more space.
Autumn (43m 28s): And I think we, might've lost a little bit of that real excitement to get things posted what happens that you can't post the reviews yeah. Until the release. So those are things to consider. We did what we did and I'm still very happy.
Jesper (43m 45s): Yeah. I think it was fine as well. We have now, now we are, well, some at the point of this recording, we are some weeks past a release. So we've now turned on some, some test apps on Amazon, which well, it's basically more, eh, to collect data, to see what kind of keywords people are clicking on so that we can use that data to dial on the ads a bit later on. So you can definitely tell as well that the sales and the ranking on Amazon is dwindling now, which is also makes sense.
Jesper (44m 20s): Of course, you know, the email list already got the emails about the release. They already bought what they wanted to buy now. So now we are into the Amazon market space, meaning that it's up to try to find people on Amazon who would like this kind of book. And yeah, as we said before, in 2020, it is extremely difficult to get visibility for your books unless you use paid advertising. And at that desk, just the name of the game and that's okay. So we're currently collecting some data and then we can dial on the ads as we get a bit further along, but we end this for the longterm.
Jesper (44m 58s): So it doesn't matter, you know, w we'll probably spend the next four weeks or so slowly Gator gathering the data we need to, to use for future ads. And then over time we will get the access to, to work and focus on the ones that converts well, and then we'll, we'll get there. So I think overall, autumn, if we are to reach any sort of conclusion here, I think that the best lesson probably to draw from all of this is to one go into the launch with realistic expectations.
Jesper (45m 34s): We talked about that
Autumn (45m 36s): I can concur with that.
Jesper (45m 37s): Yeah. And also, and perhaps even more importantly, I think you set this first and then I just mentioned it a minute ago as well, but think longterm, rather than focusing on getting bogged down or even very, very frustrated with how many or how few sales you made on a very short term notice because that's, I see that quite a lot, you know, people are getting really hung up about whether did I sell 15 copies or 25 copies yesterday and well, yeah, it's nice.
Jesper (46m 7s): Of course, if you sell a lot every day, but try to distance yourself a bit from that stressful environment there and a look at it longterm instead, I think that's much better.
Autumn (46m 21s): I think so. I think every time I see someone being negative, or even if I'm like, Oh, I want to sell more books. Well then think of ways of doing that and make actionable steps, wishing for it is not going to make it happen. So think longterm say, okay, well, Hey, I need to try some new strategies. Cause my books fail her dwindling. Or, you know, I should do AMS ads or I should check my keywords or I should do some more promos. If you're feeling frustrated about your book sales, take that energy or frustration and put it into something more creative.
Autumn (46m 52s): Like how can you market better? Go watch a video on it, go listen to a podcast like ours and get some inspiration and ideas on how to market it. Don't just sit there and get frustrated, but definitely going in with those realistic expectations and then having realistic expectations on book sales and considering it as a longterm plan. And I would definitely, I would add to that, that unless you have even, I mean, we're a team. So we have, you know, people around us, we had other types of slayers. So we had a huge network helping us out to produce these books, which was fantastic.
Autumn (47m 26s): It was still overwhelming with three books. So make sure you have a bite size chunk. That's my third takeaway is you can be ambitious, but make sure you don't burn yourself out and need your own vacation. After release books. I can have something against my strategy of releasing several books at the time. At least it was nonfiction. I can say definitely. If you're writing a series, I can see the advantage of releasing book one book to book three, but I think like a month in between, so you can celebrate each one and catch your breath and then go for the next one.
Autumn (48m 5s): But you know, if we do it again, I, if I get overwhelmed, I'll just go hire a format. I actually probably never would it be like I gotta format more, but it'll be all right. And next time, maybe next time we should find out to write for nonfiction books and then release those, ah, ha what's sad is I'm already working on our next nonfiction one. So now we've talked about breaking it up into two. So we'll have to see how this goes. We'll see, learn from my mistakes.
Autumn (48m 37s): So next Monday we'll discuss not only how to find, but also how to work with a graphical designer. Sodas that
Narrator (48m 44s): Interesting. If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the am writing fantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join autumn and Yesper on patrion.com/am. Writing fantasy for as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the M writing fantasy podcast going, stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
The highly successful indie author, Chris Fox, joins the Am Writing Fantasy podcast in episode 88 to share how he managed to fully fund his Kickstarter campaign.
Chris collected almost $22,000 for his RPG rulebook, based on his fiction work.
If you have any plans to ever run a Kickstarter, or is just curious, this episode will offer you tons of inspiration and advice.
Links to resources mentioned in this episode:
https://www.backerkit.com/
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/
https://www.chrisfoxwrites.com/
Chris Fox on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCu6RYg6_-pTQxLVq3Fv6lYg
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to the am. Writing fantasy podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt, and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I am Jesper and this is episode 88 of the am writing fantasy podcast. So, Autumn is taking a break today trying to get the final pieces of our wealth building costs recorded. So I've instead invited an awesome guest on, and that is Chris Fox. So Chris used to work with iPhone development, but has since gone on to write and publish over 20 novels. He also writes nonfiction books for authors, much like autumn and myself, and have spoken, I think probably all over the U S about writing to market and earning a living from writing.
Jesper (1m 6s): So it's a great pleasure to say, welcome to the am writing fantasy podcast, Chris, thanks for having me on. It's a pleasure to be here. Yeah, that's great. And is there anything important that I left out of that intro there, Chris? I try to collect as much as I could from the internet, you know, there might be, but I'm not sure how relevant it is to your audience. I've got a lot of weird things over my career. Probably the odd thing is the app that I wrote was used to scope Stephen Colbert his ear on national TV.
Jesper (1m 38s): So there's an episode that I got to watch the show where they use my app on it. It was pretty cool. Oh, nice. Yeah. But you, at some point you then decided no I'm going to do some writing instead of this stuff. I guess I always preferred writing and the writing was my goal from, from childhood, but we were taught, or at least we were taught from previous millennium that you couldn't make a living from your writing. And so I believed it and I gave it up because I didn't believe I could make a living. And as soon as I realized that I could, I got right back to it. Yeah. Good thing that you did because you're doing well nowadays, I guess, but yeah.
Jesper (2m 14s): We're going to talk about how to run a successful Kickstarter campaign today, but I have to as well admit that I asked you to come onto a podcast, Chris, not only to share your insight with our listeners, but also because I have a personal interest in this topic because you see I've, I've actually written both a book on universal rules for how to run a miniature war gaming campaign, as well as another guide book on running a narrative campaign.
Jesper (2m 44s): So that's almost like an RPG rule set, like, like you have run on a Kickstarter, which so I thought it would be excellent to talk to you about, you know, the Kickstarter campaign, how you did it, what things are good to think about and hopefully our audience, you will get a lot from listening to them.
Chris (3m 4s): Yeah. I'm an open book. So if you have specific questions, I'm happy to answer them. Or if you want me to give kind of a broad overview of the process, I can start there.
Jesper (3m 12s): Yeah. I th I do have specific questions, but maybe actually it would be a good place to, just to start a bit more general overall overview about Kickstarter. Maybe, maybe a bit of, I don't have any specific questions about the mindset going into running a Kickstarter. So maybe that's something you could touch a bit upon here.
Chris (3m 29s): So stop. Sure. I recommend Kickstarter and there are other similar platforms like Indiegogo, but Kickstarter or any similar platform is a great way for you to allow your fans to express appreciation. So we all have super fans. If you're releasing novels and anybody reading them, and they're willing to spend a small fortune to support you, they want to see your art succeed. So Kickstarter is the way in which we can do that. I mean, all of your fans are gonna pay, you know, your $5 or whatever you're charging for your, your latest novel, but many of them would be willing to pay $500 for some special service or autograph book or a thing.
Chris (4m 2s): You could do our mention of them in a novel somewhere. And if you sort of build a Kickstarter around fulfilling your, your super fans desires, you can walk away with quite a bit of cash.
Jesper (4m 14s): Yeah. And the Kickstarter you ran, remind me again, how much funding did you get through that one?
Chris (4m 21s): Just shy of $30,000.
Jesper (4m 24s): That's pretty damn good because I think your, your goal was far less than that. Right?
Chris (4m 29s): My goal was, I want to say 10, 10 loss. I should get it up and look, let me, let me look. What did I go for? We're already so far past the kick server. We just went live on drive-through RPG yesterday. Nice. Congratulations. Yeah. I'm looking to see what our original goal was $6,000 since the original goal,
Jesper (4m 54s): Right? Yeah. Yeah. So you, you blew way, way, way past that. But I remember, I can't remember if it was because I read it somewhere or maybe I heard you talk about it somewhere, but I think I recall you saying something like that, going into it, that it was important for you to have a, you know, a mindset that this was more like, you know, if, if it gets funded great, but it was more like a learning experience. Is that right?
Chris (5m 21s): Very much so. So if you are counting on Kickstarter is a means of funding, an endeavor that's really risky. And I was fortunately in a position where I didn't have to do that. I could bankrupt myself. So I was testing the market to see if they were interested in what I was producing. But if a flop I would have been prepared for that, I would have been a very valuable lesson about how much time and attention do I put into this project if the market's not really interested in it.
Jesper (5m 45s): Yeah. Yeah. And also, I guess it can be a bit difficult to gauge from, from the get, go about, ah, how much engagement am I going to get here? You know, how many people will actually be willing to say, okay, I'm going to support this project, right?
Chris (6m 1s): Yeah. Kickstarter's a wonderful weather in that way where, you know, if you have a big mailing list, we were fortunate enough to have been an author for a little bit. And you want to know if they're going to buy something and you ask them, they'll all say yes, but the, they actually call me the money and pay for it. It's a different story. So if you set up a Kickstarter, they're able to put their money where their mouth is. And one of the nice things too is if they ever back you or express any interest on one of your Kickstarters, anytime you post a new Kickstarter, they're going to see that too. So if you're a novelist and you're kickstarting your audio books, every time a new book comes out in the series, all of the people who backed it or were interested in backing, it will, we'll hear about the next one.
Jesper (6m 38s): Yeah. And I guess as well, if, if your Kickstarter fails as in it doesn't, you, you doesn't succeed, you don't succeed in reading, reaching your goal. I guess you can use, do you still have access to all the backers there? So you could basically start, start over all over again, if you want
Chris (6m 55s): You do. And in fact, what you can do is, and I want to say it was Kevin, Kevin Tomlinson, who mentioned this, but I could be wrong. Maybe, maybe I'm giving the wrong person credit, but the next day you can run a second Kickstarter and you can look at how much money you've actually raised and set a modest goal. So if your goal was 6,000 and you only got 4,000, you've created a Kickstarter the very next day for $4,000 and say, Hey guys, if you all back it again, we can fund it. And in his case, it's exactly what he did. And he funded it. So it was lower than what he had initially wanted, but he did still get funding to get the product he was making created.
Jesper (7m 28s): Right. Yeah. That's smart. That makes good sense. Yeah, because you see the, the, the two books that I mentioned that I've written the next year. So from now on, and probably a year going in the next 12 months, we'll do some playtesting of the whole thing and do some edits and whatnot as necessary if we find something. But then the thinking is that once we get to perhaps late 20, 21, that we are looking to run a Kickstarter campaign in order to raise enough funding to, to basically pay for custom artwork, there was a lot of nice art where we would like create it, but it's not cheap that stuff for some,
Chris (8m 6s): Yeah. It's definitely a huge fucking back.
Jesper (8m 10s): Yeah. But I think maybe to dive in a bit on the actual sort of the page on Kickstarter, what, what are some best fundamental practices that you would say once you start, once you log into Kickstarter and you're gonna set up your first project there, or your first campaign, how do you fill in all the different fields that are there? What, what should people be thinking about in your view? What's the most important thing?
Chris (8m 38s): Well, the first thing you want to do is come at this from a fan's perspective, what would interest you as a fan and get you to commit, to pledging your heartburn money for something that may not even fund or may not ever deliver after thoughts. And I think that starts with your video because the very first thing that people do when they come to your Kickstarter page is they watch that video. It's usually three to five minutes long. So recording that video is critical. So it's outside of Kickstarter itself as platform, but you need a video where you can say, Hey, listen guys, this is what I'm making. This is what I need from you guys.
Chris (9m 9s): And this is what we'll be able to create. If you give us the resources that we need and the video that I have really killed it. I mean, people will enjoy it. It's only five minutes long, but it showed them exactly what we wanted to create. We showcase a lot of our high quality artwork. And then from there, once they've watched the video, they're going to start looking at the rest of the page and you're telling a story. You're telling us, this is what we built. This is how far we've come. And this is how far we have to go and showing them what they're helping you build. And then on the right hand side of the page, as they're scrolling down, they're seeing higher and higher levels of pledges.
Chris (9m 40s): So we'll start with your low-level versions. And then by the time they get to the bottom, they're seeing whatever the most expensive thing that you can offer them is. And by that point, if they've read all the way down, they've seen your whole story. Those are the types of people who are likely to pledge at that level anyway.
Jesper (9m 54s): Yeah. Yeah. And I think as well, when I looked through you, it's been a bit a while, but I did look through your entire project on Kickstarter as well. And if I remember correctly, you had quite a lot of artwork and different, you know, pictures of character sheets and stuff like that all the way down through the entire project description. Isn't that right?
Chris (10m 17s): It is. And, and in my case, the reason for that is I am a gamer. I am my target audience. And I understand that for a game like Dungeons and dragons, if you're going to pick my interest, you have to do it visually. There has to be three or four things that really hooked me in that. Tell me this universe is going to offer something I haven't seen before. Wow. Never seen a dragon target department, star ship. If you can't show them that and then show them an awesome character sheet, other people can. And that's who we're competing with. Yeah.
Jesper (10m 43s): Yeah. Nice. Especially remember myself that once I got to the character sheet, I was thinking, Oh, this is cool. For some reason, we always loved the character sheets, don't we?
Chris (10m 54s): Yeah. It's such a gamer thing where you want to know, you want to be able to tell it all the information in, and we have this wonderful paper doll where you can see the power arm or that you'll pilot and there's little boxes that are drawn to each of the locations. You know, what weapons you have, where, what potions or your potion motors. That's pretty cool.
Jesper (11m 9s): Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I think as well, in addition to whatever you posted on Kickstarter, you also recorded a bunch of like complimentary videos where I think both of you shared the RPG rules that you created. And you mentioned those in the Kickstarter campaign as well, basically pointing people out to YouTube videos and stuff like that. Did you feel like that was worth the effort? You know, did, did many people check out those videos or how do you feel about that?
Jesper (11m 40s): Now? Looking back at it,
Chris (11m 42s): I'm still releasing videos. I have another one coming out on Friday. I took a bit of a break because I was working on production, but my goal is to have every part of the system covered. And so initially I did all the rules for character creation. So if you're not sure exactly how to make a character and you have questions, you can actually go through the videos and it'll tell you how to do everything. I've now added them for various systems. So you can see how the magic system works and how combat works. And I think it helped a lot of people, but they wanted to see real game play examples like live gameplay. And so now we're adding videos using the roll 20 platform, which is a way for you to game online.
Chris (12m 16s): And that platform is allowing us to demonstrate things so I can show them how spells work. I can show them how to run combat, or how to role play, or sort of what you need to do as a game master. And right now, I don't think that we're getting a ton of engagement. Cause it's still a very small channel with family. I have a couple of hundred subscribers, which, you know, contrast that to my writing channel, just like, you know, 36 or 37,000 people. It's a very small channel for the role playing game, but I expect over time, it'll grow as we release more books. And my goal is less total amount of traffic and more, if some random person finds this little while today, do they have literally every resource they can think that they would need in video form to teach them how to play this game.
Chris (12m 52s): And I just want to make sure they have a complete library.
Jesper (12m 56s): Yeah. So, so you think in terms of a longterm view, you, you think it's useful with those videos there? Because I know, you know, some years back before we started podcasting, we were doing YouTube videos as well, years back, and I know how much work it goes into creating those videos. Even if you're just going to release like a 10 minute video that takes hours of work. So I was getting frustrated at some point back then that, you know, if there wasn't enough views on it, I felt like, okay, why am I spending this much time doing these?
Jesper (13m 29s): But are you saying that you think longterm wise, it is still a good thing, even though you might not right now have too much engagement.
Chris (13m 37s): Absolutely. So let's say in five years, the Meditech Chronicles, I've already got 10 novels out. By that point, let's say I have 30 and all those and the magic Chronicles, there are 10 books on the role playing universe. We have hundreds and hundreds of hours of audio audible already. Like what if that's going to just keep growing? Eventually we're ramming for like a Netflix series. I mean, there's a lot we want to do with this universe. This is the backbone that games were going to need. And so every time somebody new comes, all of the work that I've put in over the last, you know, X number of years is going to be useful. And what really taught me, this is the other YouTube channel that I manage because initially I was, I was like, you are very driven by how many views am I getting by not getting enough views?
Chris (14m 15s): And it comes over time. If you just keep producing good content, people will find you when it grabs since I'm much less concerned about that now.
Jesper (14m 22s): Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. For sure. So nowadays you, you said it just went live on, what did you say
Chris (14m 32s): On August 18th? So today's the 19th that we're recording this. It just went live on the 18th and that's just the digital version. The paperback will probably be another two weeks and there's a hard back on live at the same time.
Jesper (14m 44s): So are you selling them on Amazon as well, or
Chris (14m 48s): That remains to be seen. And I think that's a great topic for the podcast. If you would ask me that a month ago, the answer would have been, no, you can't really sell them in the same way, how you could fulfill a role playing game order. So I could print books and do print on demand, but digitally you couldn't fulfill the order. Then I got an email last week that Amazon was folding Comicology into Kindle unlimited. So that got me really excited since that's where you read graphic novels, which is effectively what a roleplaying book is. And I went, I looked and sure enough, I'm able to translate my role playing game into a format that you can now read in Kindle.
Chris (15m 21s): So if somebody has an iPad or even an iPhone, they can look at the rules and scroll through it and look at some of these pages. So I haven't uploaded it. Yeah. But my goal in the next week is to convert my role playing game, using their it's called the common creator into a format that I can upload and then start selling it directly on Amazon, through Kindle. And as of right now, to my knowledge, there are literally zero world playing games doing that. So it's sort of that first mover advantage.
Jesper (15m 47s): Yeah, indeed. I also checked, you know, the, if you look at like the, the, the common like Dungeons and dragons books and whatnot, do you kind of course order all the hot packs and that stuff from Amazon, but indeed there was no Kindle version available of them, but I guess it's, isn't it mostly like a formatting? I mean, it's going to be a nightmare in, in our case, for example, autumn always format our books. So I'm sure she's going to have a nightmare with due to pictures and stuff like that, but isn't it mostly just a formatting problem. And I mean, if you tweak and play enough with the formatting, I don't see why you couldn't make a Kindle version.
Chris (16m 24s): Well, we've never been able to do it in the past because the devices themselves weren't capable of really adequately displaying what we were building, but now they took the functionality from the comics allergy app, and I think they built it into Kindle. And so what happens is you have these, these stops, so let's say you've got four different paragraph headings on a page. If you tap the screen, once it'll auto scroll to the next paragraph. Right. And so that functionality you have to add manually. And I guess in that sense, there's some, some formatting, but the software makes it really easy for you to do that.
Jesper (16m 51s): Yeah. Nice. Yeah, because a rule book, I think a RPG rule book in Kindle on Amazon, I think actually it would sell really well because there's not a lot of it.
Chris (17m 4s): Yeah. There's not a tough competition. So we're going to see how it does. I should have it live in the next week or two, you know, I already spend between five and $12,000 a month in advertising, mostly to Kindle unlimited books. So know the market and know who to advertise to and know who to approach. So if people are interested, I, I will see if they'll buy it.
Jesper (17m 25s): Yeah, yeah. For sure. Yeah. But the ones who then support it on Kickstarter, did you give them like a PDF version of the book once they, once the campaign was successful or, or how did you do that?
Chris (17m 38s): We're, we're in the process of that now. So I sent them an initial PDF, like beta versions of the book, and I've been updating it ever since. And then just a couple of days ago, we sent them the very final edition of the PDF, so they can finally having their hands on it. So they've had a complete game they could play for, for a little over a week. There's also an art library, which has most of the artwork that went into the book, as well as, you know, character sheets that are sort of gathered in one location. So they have wallpapers and whatever else they want. And those have been passed out too. So people have kind of all the stuff they need to play.
Chris (18m 10s): The majority of our orders though, were not digital. They were for the hardback version, lots and lots of people want that one hand. It surprised me. How many gamers still play using a hard cover book because I've been using personally and iPad for years. I love having, you know, the 50 books I needed for a risk game on one iPad, as opposed to carrying a duffle bag. Like I used to,
Jesper (18m 32s): Yeah, I get that. And then, well, you, you need to have some sort of fulfillment thing there, but is that drive through RPG? Do they take care of that? Because otherwise you will be shipping a lot of hard copies yourself, which I assume you don't want to do.
Chris (18m 47s): Right. So try through IPG functions very much like Amazon. And for those that don't know on Amazon, you're running through, it used to be create space and I can do it directly through KTP you're creating paperbacks and we do nothing. So Amazon does a hundred percent of the fulfillment and returns. We don't have to touch anything, they just pay us extra money. And it's basically the same thing with drive through RPG, for Kickstarter, you are responsible for your own fulfillment. And so what I recommend is you set up an account with a site called the backer kit.com. And what they do is help you manage it's the fill the whole Kickstarter.
Chris (19m 17s): And also if you set up like a Stripe account or a PayPal account, they'll take orders. So if you have something like meeting your preorder selling, they can take reorders. They can even allow people to contribute to the Kickstarter after the Kickstarter is ended. So what people were doing is like I had one person paying an extra $600 to have the character and sort of do a novel. Another one wanted to go for a short story written for 400 bucks. So after the Kickstarter had ended back for kid allowed me to continue pulling in more fun so that we had a larger pool to purchase artwork.
Jesper (19m 47s): Oh, okay. That's very cool. Did you say backerkit.com?
Chris (19m 52s): Yes. Backer kit. That's a, B a C K E R kit.com.
Jesper (19m 58s): Okay. Interesting. That's good. I didn't know that one. So that was, that was a good one. I know as well that you had some stretch goals on your campaign there. And I wanted to ask you if you, if you find a stretch goals important in terms, in terms of like enticing people to reach the next level, once you have fully funded. And if you do think that, do you have any thoughts about what makes for a good stretch goal?
Chris (20m 28s): I think they matter a lot, a lot. And I think what makes for a good stretch goal is something that every person who looks at it feels like their involvement matters. So if somebody is looking at your stretch goals and says, I don't care about that one, I don't care about that one. I don't care about that one. That's not a good sign. You want everyone on the stretch goals? It'd be something like, Oh, I'd really like to have that. So in the case of an RPG, if you can, we're going to add two more classes. You know, there are classes that wouldn't be in the book otherwise, but you're going to unlock X class in Y class that are going to be in the book. If you hit this level, every player of the game, what's that extra content.
Chris (20m 58s): So when you are crafting the rewards, just make sure that they're relevant to all, all backers. I think you also want to make sure that people in the sense that go ahead.
Jesper (21m 12s): No, no, no. Just continue. I'll ask afterwards.
Chris (21m 16s): Okay. I was going to say, I think they need to be achievable. So you want to make sure that when you are doing these rewards, that the things that you're agreeing to create for your fans, aren't going to cost you a bunch of extra money. I've seen this on a few Kickstarters where, you know, if we hit this goal, I'm going to make this thing that costs more than the extra stretch goal. So you want to be careful here. I have crafted all of my rewards in such a way that it's not going to cost us a lot of extra money to add it.
Jesper (21m 41s): Oh yeah. That that's, it goes along with it. It's the same thing about the fulfillment stuff. Right? You, you need to be careful about those things so that you don't set yourself up. I mean, if you're going in blind, I guess people, some people have at least I have heard horror stories of people setting up stuff where they basically were intending. Yeah. I'm just going to ship this stuff out myself. And they ended up paying more in shipping than, than they actually funded in Kickstarter. Right. So the whole point is out the window.
Chris (22m 11s): Yeah. And, and I really was cognizant that when I set it up. So for example, the delivery for the role playing game, if we're getting either the hard back or the paperback is going to be through drive through RPG and they print in the United States and in the UK. And so the backers are going to be responsible for their own shipping. I don't have to pay anything. It'll be, you know, the whole transaction will be handled directly through the site. All I do is send them a code. They plug in the code. So the book itself is considered free. You know, I've already paid for this code and then they just pay their own shipping and it gets sent out to them.
Chris (22m 41s): And that fulfillment should be really easy for me to do. It's part of why I chose to do it this way.
Jesper (22m 46s): Yeah. Because I assume you could also have set up something, you know, if you wanted, you could have, I know we just talked about the Kindle edition, right. But assume you could have set it up by Amazon as well. Couldn't you? Just put in the paper back there or something like that. Or,
Chris (23m 1s): And I thought that was an option. And if you really are selling a lot of copies, you can actually start running stock and getting cheaper prices by printing larger orders. So it's certainly an option if you're done with the dragons that you gave, you want to run your own warehouse. So if you saw three Amazon,
Jesper (23m 20s): And I think some of what you said about stretch goals, I assume that also applies to how you decided to set up your tiers, meaning that you probably had some thorough thinking about what to put into those tiers so that it would be interesting for people to, to sign up. But, but how did you, how did you go through the, what was your sort of thought process in terms of
Chris (23m 46s): Both deciding what is the reward for each tier, but also how much money to ask on each of the tiers I looked at how much time it's going to take me to write the material, how much artwork I would need to acquire to deliver on the stuff I was saying, I was creating a, and then I sat tears accordingly. So this is stuff that I already wanted to build in the future. Anyway, it's just that we have to accelerate our timeline a little bit. And I just made sure to ask for enough money that I'd be able to pay for the additional artwork. Right. Did you also think about, you know, making sure that these T is something that gets progressively more and more interesting as you move down or, or was it more just purely, like you say, you know, about how much time am I going to spend on creating each one?
Chris (24m 29s): And then the time consuming ones are just more expensive because I'm just thinking if there was a way to, you know, entice people to sign up for maybe that slightly higher tier rather than just the lowest ones. Right. And I think that I could have done a better job. That'd be the first thing I would say this being my first Kickstarter, right. A general idea of what I was trying to do, but now that I've run it, I would give a better and a little bit different stretch goal reward structure. And I would have a lot more purchasable rewards in the Kickstarter that offer different things.
Chris (25m 1s): So as an example, I would offer autographed copies of various novels. They have nothing at all to do with the role playing game, but these are people that like the universe and I could allow them to buy a complete set of the main series novels or seven of them autographed. And, you know, I could charge 500 bucks and write them a special message. And I'm willing to bet I could probably sell 10 of those easily because people would love to have that autograph set on their shelf because you know, it would be numbered and signed and, and you, you know, you show them, Hey, no one else in the world, but the 10 people who get this are going to have access to it.
Chris (25m 32s): And then you can give that to your fan. So I could have done a lot more of that than I did. I didn't create enough avenues for them to express their support. And I'm going to the next Kickstarter, which we're going to be running probably in late October or early November. Okay. Yeah. Do you think you can have too many tears? Yes. And so the, the reason why you don't list them all necessarily right off the bat is it feels impossible to hit some of the higher tiers. So what I'll do is I'll have them all written down, but I'll only post like maybe the next two or three they're currently relevant to things.
Chris (26m 11s): So they're only saying, so you've got five define, they're only seeing three of them. So how does that work? Well, you can update the description on your Kickstarter or any time. So if you were to say what your stretch goal is, I've got a 15, 20 and $25,000 one when you're starting to it's 20,000, then you add a 30 and a 40. Right? Okay. So, so in addition to stretch goals, basically what, no, those are as stretch goals. Like you can keep redefining stretch goals whenever you want. So when you have stretch goals, you don't have to say on day one, here's every stretch goal I'm ever going to add.
Chris (26m 43s): You can have of them. And then throughout the Kickstarter, you can just keep adding stretchables on any given day, just update the description. And here's a new stretch goal. So what I'll do is only list the ones that are easily achievable we're about to hit them. And then it looks like we can do, and then the ones that would be really expensive. So like I'm not going to put a $40,000 stretch goal when we only have $5,000 in backing.
3 (27m 2s): No, that makes sense. Yeah.
Jesper (27m 5s): Okay. I was thinking to move into a bit of the marketing stuff as well, because one thing is setting up the Kickstarter and think about all these best practices and, and, and all the important elements that, that you just have mentioned here through, through the episode so far. But the other thing is, unless we can get people to that Kickstarter page and get them excited about it, then the whole thing won't really fly very far. So in terms of marketing your Kickstarter campaign, I know that you said at some point that you were contacting other authors and so on to basically increase your outreach there.
Jesper (27m 43s): But I was wondering, were these like authors, you knew them all already, or were you like cold pitching some authors or, or how did you do that?
Chris (27m 53s): These were all people that owed me a favor. So in no instance that I cold email someone and say, Hey, can you share this with your audience? I was basically just calling in favors. I think it's a huge, huge ask to ask somebody to send anything to their list on your behalf. And so I'm very, very careful about when I ask. So I had spent a couple of years building up favors before I cashed that in. Right,
Jesper (28m 14s): Right. Yeah. Because I would think as well, we also recently saw Brandon Sanderson have massive success on a Kickstarter campaign with like a limited edition or whatever it was of, of one of his books there. And I think with Kickstarter, and it's the same thing with Patrion and these kinds of things, unless you have the audience there, it becomes very, very difficult to market it very effective. I mean, if you're starting from zero, let's say you have, you have a, your grandmother and, and your cousin on your email list.
Jesper (28m 44s): Right. I mean, it's going, I think it's going to be extremely difficult to build up very much momentum on a Kickstarter project, but what are your thoughts?
Chris (28m 55s): Yeah, I agree. Okay. Kickstarter is not for you to say, okay, I want to build a business and I don't have any money. So I'm going to go make a Kickstarter page and people are going to give me a bunch of money. That's not going to happen. You really need a working product. And this is what Kickstarter expects. You basically need a prototype. You need to be ready to go with something before you start asking for more money. So what you need to do is build up a following first, if you have no following right off the bat, Kickstarter will be useless for you. You need to come in with, I've got an email list and I've been working with fans and they know what I'm building. Maybe I have support from other areas.
Chris (29m 25s): So it's sort of the combination of that. And to that end, I would spend more time as a new creator working on the stuff I'm creating and I'm networking with other creators, then I would worry about crowdfunding,
Jesper (29m 38s): Right? Yeah. Yeah. And I think that makes sense because it's, this, it's the same thing with Patrion and so forth, you know, it just because you release some YouTube videos, so nobody's going to sign up for patron and offer support unless you build, or you built that longterm, like trust and, and, and like factor there that they enjoy the content that you're putting out. And they know that as well, of course, that they can trust the fact that you will complete whatever you say, that they can be packing on Kickstarter and, and they will get their stuff in hand as well at, at some later date.
Jesper (30m 11s): Right?
Chris (30m 14s): Yeah. That's the big fear. I think for a lot of them is that, are you actually going to ever finish this and deliver because you walk away, they don't really have a lot of recourse by the time they figure out that they got burned, usually it's too late for them to refund or they don't really want to bother with it. So they count. Most people I know is lost money. If they've got something that isn't fun. So it's kind of a roll of dice on a lot of the Kickstarters that we backed don't go anywhere. So it is, I do have to say really, really nice to know that I'm living up to what I said, I will do. We have a complete game we're delivering exactly what we promised we would give fans.
Chris (30m 46s): And I think if you can't do that, you're never going to be able to run another successful Kickstarter because you know, the whole thing.
Jesper (30m 54s): Yeah. I think you're a hundred percent right there, but I assume that Kickstarter is sort of governing a bit as well, that the, you know, if the product is not delivered, then don't kickstart to make sure to refund people their money or send it back to don't. They like have the money sitting in a holding pot that they control or something.
Chris (31m 11s): Not really. So what happens is they release the funds to you. So after the Kickstarter is done and all credit cards were processed, you've not got the money. If they file a dispute with Kickstarter, I think they can pursue you for a refund and get that money back. But very few people do that. Most people are just, you know, sort of eaten the cost and hope that it would get funded. So theoretically, I do believe every person who backed you could go to Kickstarter and say, Hey, listen, I want my money back. They burned me. And it was a scam. And that Kickstarter would prosecute the heck out of you. Their team seems to take that very seriously.
Chris (31m 42s): And they were going to work with in that regard where they're, you know, if they saw anything was at all fishy, they would pointed out.
Jesper (31m 48s): Yeah. And I guess if it does not fund successfully, doesn't don't they just send people back or maybe they don't even charge people money then or whatever,
Chris (31m 55s): And no one gets charged at all. So if you try to fund, you get to 9,000 out of 10,000. No one's credit card will ever be charged.
Jesper (32m 1s): Right. Right. Okay. That's easy then. Yeah. Okay. But maybe getting back from it a moment too, to those authors that you were casting in favors from, I think I saw at some point that you talked about that you were reaching out to a few a day or something like that. And I was wondering a bit about, because when you said that I could understand it from the like workload perspective, you know, that you're sort of spreading it out and you don't have to do too much every day and can take care of all your writing and other parts of your business, which makes completely sense.
Jesper (32m 36s): But I was wondering a bit about how the worked out for you, you know, here in hindsight, in the sense that you have a Kickstarter, which is only open in this window here from date X to date Y, and if you, at least the way I understood it, and maybe I misunderstood and then you can correct me. But the way I understood it was that throughout that period of time, you were reaching out to a couple of people a day. But do you think in hindsight, if, if my understanding is incorrect and then correct me, but if that's correct, and do you think in hindsight you would still do it that way?
Jesper (33m 14s): Or do you think it would be better to reach out and email all those people or contact all those people in advance of the start date, even so that they know that, okay, in two weeks from now, I would like you to do this rather than here's an email. Can you please do this now? Because the Kickstarter ends in two weeks, you know, something like that, do you get what I'm saying?
Chris (33m 34s): I do. And it depends on how much social capital you want to burn. So the more you ask of these people and the more you say, okay, on this specific day, I need you to, to launch my preorder or like announced my preorder or in my case, talk about this Kickstarter. The more that you ask, the less, you're going to be able to ask later, if you send a single email and just say, Hey, listen, if it aligns with your audience any time in the next 30 days, if you could announce this, that'd be great. And you just leave it at that. If they can't do anything, you haven't really burned any social capital. If they do do something for you, great.
Chris (34m 5s): It helped the vast majority of what I did to promote my Kickstarter. Wasn't going out and asking other offers. It was, it was telling my own audience. And those were the people that really were driving it. I don't think I got a ton of momentum from having other authors announce it. And about 50% of the people in the video that you're referring to, where I said, I was going to go talk to these authors. I didn't even actually message. I decided, you know what? I don't think this is a good thing for me to ask for some of those authors, like they probably would have done it because they owed me some favors, but I wouldn't have gotten very many sales because I'm asking science fiction authors to sell role playing games.
Chris (34m 38s): And that doesn't make sense unless they have role playing game audiences.
Jesper (34m 43s): No. So maybe, you know, like you, well, if you know them, of course, but like YouTube channels that are focusing on roleplaying games, for example, or podcasts focusing on focusing on role playing games, those kinds of people will, they will, of course have an audience who are interesting in the topic at hand. So do you think it would be,
Chris (35m 7s): I think it's an amazing way for you to get publicity. Those are the people you want to spend your time contacting, set up a free version of your game or a copy of your novel. If that's more relevant and then, you know, reach out to them and say, Hey, listen, and this is always how I phrase it. This is how your podcast did. Your audience will benefit from having the honestly gas. This is what I offer you. This is why it's beneficial to you. So not from the perspective of I'm an author. I want to sell role playing games and books, but I think I can deliver some good content to, to an audience, a podcast.
Chris (35m 38s): And you're more likely to be accepted. And that's a good use of your time and writing it for marketing.
Jesper (35m 43s): Yeah. Yeah. I guess the trick then becomes to make sure that, that you can have those episodes go live while people can still support the Kickstarter, but that's probably a different conversation than
Chris (35m 54s): That. That is an issue. That is an issue. Oftentimes though you can get people to share that stuff fairly far in advance. One of the things that I did as a mistake is I didn't set up a preorder for the Kickstarter. So for those that don't know, what I learned afterwards is you can set up a Kickstarter before it's set to go live. So if I don't intend it to go live until November 1st, I can build it today and I could put it up there and people can see it so that my followers know it's going to start way, way before I actually started. And I would have done that if you do that and you start going on some podcasts, then if it takes them a while to get the episode out, it's still before the end of the Kickstarter.
Chris (36m 28s): So I think it matters a lot and I could have done a better job with that.
Jesper (36m 32s): Yeah, yeah, indeed. And I think you mentioned as well, Chris, that you were doing some kind of paid advertising as well, but what did you do there?
Chris (36m 40s): But I did do a little bit, so what I did and I'm actually doing some normal right now is I thought about areas where I, as a gamer would want to see this. Like if you were building a role playing game, where would I care to see it, where I would consider it to be space? And for me that was Facebook Reddit and, and really Amazon. And then the three locations I could think of where if I was scrolling through my feed and I saw the school role playing game and it was sponsored, I'd probably still buy it. So I ran like, I don't know, $40 a day in ads to Reddit and maybe slightly higher and Facebook and tried to drive some signups for the Quickstart guide.
Chris (37m 13s): And then also now selling the book.
Jesper (37m 17s): Right. So you were offering them, well, I guess you were pointing them towards the Kickstarter then, right?
Chris (37m 24s): Initially. Yes. So I had to show them the Kickstarter page, which, you know, almost sells itself. It's great to have one page where they can pledge that has all of their marketing material, all of your images, even the video. So yeah, that was the primary place I was driving people.
Jesper (37m 38s): Yeah. And I guess the thing that I'm a bit curious about here is because I fully get all the, you know, the, the, you have all the sales copy, basically, if we can call it that on the Kickstarter page. So, so that makes sense. But I'm curious as to, how did you entice, for example, let's take Facebook ads for as an example here. So of course it's a lot about targeting roleplaying, people who are interesting roleplaying or whatnot, but I'm just struggling a bit too.
Jesper (38m 11s): And this is what I'm curious about too, to understand if I, for example myself, if I just take myself as an example, I see something popping up in my feed. It's an ad for some sort of Kickstarter thing. Then of course, I already know before I click on it, this is somebody who, which I, you know, they ask you for money for it, obviously. And if I don't know the person already, I'm just struggling to whether or not I would actually click on it. But, and that's why I'm, I'm, I'm a bit curious about how you, how you target at that and not, how did you get people to actually, because if they arrive at the Kickstarter page and you have all that good stuff that you have, the videos you have, the nice artwork and all that, then I'm pretty sure people will get interested, but how do you get them to go there?
Jesper (38m 56s): How did you, how did you find like a good formula for what entice people to click on the ad?
Chris (39m 2s): Well, that, that makes for a good advertiser. So we're talking really about psychology and reaching people and understanding what benefits and emotional triggers are going to get them to act. But you can boil it down simply and take all the marketing, speak away and say what interests your audience. Like if you're showing them exactly what they're interested in, they're going to click on it. So let me give you an example. I want a super amazing gaming table. We're talking like a several thousand dollar table. That is a super specialty item that most people will never order. And I started mentioning this to my friends and I was thinking about getting a custom made table table.
Chris (39m 34s): And before I knew it, ads starting showing up on Facebook showing tables that were exactly what I was looking for. I don't care who spanking them. I don't care what the company is. I don't care anything about them. Initially. I care about the table. So I click on the ad because I want to see this table. Can they build what it is that I want? And it's the same for a role playing game. If you've been playing Pathfinder for the last five years and your group is just burned out on Pathfinder and you just are so sick of fantasy. And so you suggest, okay, like let's play shout around it. People are like, well, no, I don't really want to do that.
Chris (40m 4s): And so you're looking for a new game and you see mine and happens to look like it'll, it'll scratch the, get your after it's some new world that you can sink your teeth into. It's the value proposition. Gamers want to be able to understand the nuts and bolts of how the universe works. And if I can give you a new universe with good rules and good artwork and a good concept, and you're excited about the character types that you might play. And then on top of that, you find out that there's novels available for it. Then that's an easy sell. So back in my youth, Sharon, BattleTech forgotten realms, dragon lands.
Chris (40m 38s): These were the series that you got into as role playing games, because they had dozens of novels that you could read to further your understanding. So you just sort of come up with a overall value proposition, show people, Hey, listen, this universe is going to be worth your time. If you invest in it and that they get a lot more interested. And that starts with the image that you're choosing, that they're initially going to click on it, got to interest them. It's got to be some sort of deep symbol that they understand, you know, maybe they love dragons and they're used. And so if they see a dragon tearing apart a star ship, that's going to get them to slow down and actually look at it.
Jesper (41m 13s): Yeah. And dragons and space that that's always cool. But was there any type of promotion that you would like to have done a crisp, but for whatever reason you didn't.
Chris (41m 27s): Yeah. I would have done the podcast tour. So I have a good friend of mine who knows a lot about kickstarting. And he said that if you had come into this with six months of lead time, it easily could have been six figure Kickstarter. What I needed to do is get it up as soon as possible and started going on larger podcasts and start running more game sessions and showing more of what I had. And so when I run the second Kickstarter, we're going to test that stuff and I'm going to try going on much larger productions. And, you know, we'll be playing a lot more roll 20 games and having a lot more videos available and you know, a lot more extra stuff.
Chris (41m 58s): And hopefully we can, we can sort of hit a critical mass and get a lot more people interested.
Jesper (42m 4s): Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. But I think, I want to say thank you so much for joining us today, Chris, and thank you for sharing your knowledge and your experience with, with such kindness as you, as you've done it.
Chris (42m 16s): Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me on.
Jesper (42m 19s): If people want to learn more about you, where should they go? Chris,
Chris (42m 24s): Chris Fox writes.com is probably the best central hub. If you are into videos that have information on how to be a writer, how to market, how to write a youtube.com/chris box rights. If you like fiction, I would check out the magic tech chronicles.com and you can see my role playing game and the associated novels.
Jesper (42m 43s): All right. Thank you so much. Alright. Next Monday, autumn will be back and we are. I have a very interesting episode prepared for you sharing our results on lossing three nonfiction books here in 2020.
Narrator (42m 58s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the am writing fantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going, stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Is there such a thing as good and bad tropes, or are tropes just tropes?
Join Autumn and Jesper as they dive into the land of clichés, but also stumbles over some fantasy gems.
Episode 87 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast will walk you through some of the common tropes in the fantasy genre, and explore if they are viable to use in your own writing?
Link to our online writing course, the Ultimate Fantasy Writers Guide: http://ultimatefantasywritersguide.co...
Link to Plot Development: https://books2read.com/Plot-Development Link to the Plotting Workbook: https://books2read.com/PlottingWorkbook Link to Story Ideas: https://books2read.com/StoryIdeas
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need an literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt, and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I am Jesper, and I'm Autumn. This is episode 87 of the am writing fantasy podcast. And we are looking at some of the common tropes in fantasy today. And we'll have a discussion as to whether they are good or bad. And I think this could turn out quite interesting. Well, it'll be a, yeah. I could see some questions and some fun things that we've got to discuss to clarify what we're even talking about.
Autumn (1m 2s): Well, tropes is always interesting. So, but we will come back to that in, in a few minutes. Yes. How are things over in your lovely little country? Well, I'm basically like slowly boiling in my office. It is so warm. It's insane. Like you were complaining just like an episode ago. I think you had not had summer at all in Denmark this year. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I, I just told my wife and I can't remember if I said this on the past episode as well, but I told her, you know, I bet you once our summer holidays over the weather will turn really warm and nice.
Jesper (1m 40s): And there you go. Now we have a 30 degrees Celsius, actually 33 yesterday. That's why. So we spent a day at the beach yesterday. Quite nice though. That would be lovely. And what are the peaches? I mean, do you have sand beaches? Are they pebble beaches? What are they like over there? No sand beach. Nice. Yeah. Yeah, but it's just the same that it isn't vacation time anymore. You know, I'd sneak away on the weekend. At least you don't have major COVID restriction. You got to go to the beach.
Jesper (2m 12s): Yeah. Well, yeah, it's not feel bad here over here. I was just emailing earlier today with a, with a reader on the email as well. And you know, trying to show my sympathy for you guys in the U S it's just really bad, but, and especially compared to how it is, you, you know, we're in a very much, much, much better place than you guys. Ah, yes. I think only New Zealand is doing better than you wouldn't you. They're awesome. Yeah. Yeah. It's quite dire over here.
Jesper (2m 41s): Still only getting worse, but this fall will be fun. Yeah, we'll see. Well, we tried to stay away from politics quickly shifting topics here before we getting into politics things also finally moving forward with our sale that Has been like an ongoing, Ongoing, ongoing
2 (3m 6s): A long time now. But thanks
Jesper (3m 8s): Finally, moving forward. That's so exciting. Yeah. So it's not final yet in that sense, but it's getting there now. So we have somebody who put in an offer and we have also agreed on the price. Oh my goodness. And we have also agreed on when they are going to take over that.
Autumn (3m 28s): Wow. So clock sorta ticking.
Jesper (3m 33s): Yeah. The only condition in the whole deal here is that they need to sell their apartment first. And if they can't sell the apartment, then of course the whole thing is just gonna take a long, long time. But it is an apartment in a very, like pretty expensive though, but very popular area of Copenhagen that they live in today. And they said to the real estate agent this morning that there was two people who came and what's the apartment over the weekend.
Jesper (4m 6s): And both of them said that they want to buy it.
Autumn (4m 8s): Oh, that would be really good. Yeah.
Jesper (4m 11s): So that is really good. I mean, it could be that if all goes, well, I would say before we get to the end of August, like in a couple of weeks from now, then we could have sold the house and be planning to move.
Autumn (4m 25s): Oh my goodness. That would be fantastic and exciting. And I think that's going to put you behind on the timeline we have mapped out, but that's okay. We'll figure that out, I guess. Probably. Yeah.
Jesper (4m 38s): Yeah. We'll see. We'll see. It depends also because the thing is that we would like to build a new house and there is no lots at this point in time in the city where we one move to that has any lots for sale. So that means that we have to find something to rent temporarily for a while so we can stay there. And that's sort of the joker in the whole thing right now that we don't know, is it going to be easy to find something to rent or not? We'll see, we'll see that the part we don't know at this point
Autumn (5m 9s): Going to be living like me, like a gypsy things still in boxes, just being really, really be really good at labeling what's inside your boxes. That's about all I can say. Yeah.
Jesper (5m 22s): The most important thing is that I have my laptop across the internet router and mostly,
Autumn (5m 29s): And that is the catch of being a writer. As long as you have those things, it's the lifestyle, a huge amount of equipment. You'll need your microphone and a few other things, but you'll be on microphone as well. Yes, that's right. Excellent. How's you've been, Oh, it's been, you know, pretty good. I guess if you hear any traffic noise, I apologize. I knock off at literally the last minute yesterday, my husband was doing a trip up to his parents who live in Maine where we live for 18. And so it's sort of like what you said it's summer.
Autumn (6m 1s): The last trip is going to do for the summer and Maine and the coast and lobsters and the ocean of sailboats is, or something like, you know, my list of my favorite things. So I literally, he was sitting in the car and I'm like, but can you wait an hour through some stuff in a bag? My laptop and my microphone obviously as well and ran off up to Maine with him. And so we had some lobster last night on the beach, on the Wharf, right. At a lobster pound. That's nice right off the boat.
Autumn (6m 33s): And we're going to go to our favorite pizzeria, I think tonight, which is different. And so, yes, it sounds strange because COVID is horrible in the United States. And so many States are locked down, but we came up from Vermont, which is about the only state in the entire United States. That's still green. So we're wow. Our state is doing fine and Maine is pretty much, it's one of the least populated States as well. So it's doing okay as well, but we'll definitely be cautious because I don't want to get sick because I'm writing the last chapter of my current work in progress, which is the first book of a new faith.
Autumn (7m 9s): Post-apocalyptic kind of urban fantasy trilogy. So I'm so excited. It's been over a year since I was finishing, writing something because things have just been so crazy busy with everything we got going on in life. So it just, it always feels momentous to stand there and being, looking, looking down the word count of like 2300 words and I'm done with over 90,000 words of writing. And even though I'm not publishing until I finished the next two, I just feel kind of that warm hummings feeling and it feels good.
Autumn (7m 42s): Very good.
Jesper (7m 42s): Yeah. And you're also working on the world building course, so you don't have any time to be sick.
Autumn (7m 47s): I do not between that. And so I'm cussed at some commissions on my other side of my writing, you know, coaching life, writing coach and graphic design life. I am so busy this month. It's not even funny. I've got to hire my husband, I think, to help.
Jesper (8m 6s): Yeah. Maybe that's a solution. I think we got the internet writing fantasy podcast. Okay. A few things to cover here, but I wanted first and foremost to give a huge shout out to Iris because she increased her pledge on patron.
Autumn (8m 27s): Thank you so much. I mean, you've been with us for a little while now, but do you know that you believe in us enough and that you appreciate us enough that we appreciate you, that you actually upped your pledge. So thank you so much.
Jesper (8m 42s): Yeah. Thank you. That really means a lot to us. And I should say as well, if your deal listener, haven't checked out and writing fantasy and all the awesome reports that we offer to our supporters over on patron now is the time to do so. The link is in the show notes, but I can even say that within the next few months, we are actually planning to give all patrons subscribers, great gift, but I'll leave it that creativity and keep it as a surprise what this gift is all about.
Jesper (9m 14s): But you might want to go and check it out now.
Autumn (9m 16s): Yes, we have it figured out and planned, but we're just doing one chunk at a time and we have other plans for August, but it'll be exciting.
Jesper (9m 26s): Yeah, absolutely. I could also mention that in a few weeks from now, we are going to record a podcast episode about how it has been like to launch our three nonfiction books. So the books on how to get story ideas are applauding guide and the associated workbook. And we released those wide here in 2020. So are going to record a podcast episode about how that went. But I can't say that they all became bestsellers upon release and people are, have been emailing us quite a lot saying how much they got out of those book.
Jesper (10m 4s): Isn't that right?
Autumn (10m 4s): No, you have been, I just, I love the comments and it's a goal of mine to try to find time this week to make some share images of, of some of the comments because they just are so wonderful.
Jesper (10m 16s): Absolutely. Yeah. So if you haven't picked up any of those books yet we've included links in the show notes for those as well. And Hey, there's also a link inside the plodding book from where you can get the book on story ideas for free. So that's going to be our little,
Autumn (10m 33s): I was going to say that's a secret. You just shared it with the world.
Jesper (10m 39s): Well, yeah,
Autumn (10m 42s): That's fair enough. And I do. I thought it was funny. I don't know if you saw the comment. I know you re we recently left, launched the podcast episode where you interviewed mere Lafferty who has written for star Wars. I don't know if you saw the comment in the M writing fantasy Facebook group, but Andre said, wow, score one for am writing fantasy respect. So I know you did that interview. So I wanted to make sure you saw that one. It was just such a fun comment. And you know, I thought Joanna Penn, when we hit, you had joined a panel on am writing fantasy podcasts.
Autumn (11m 16s): That was big, but apparently we're, Laverty got a higher rating from Andre on that one too. So that's fantastic.
Jesper (11m 24s): But it writing for Star Wars. That is pretty cool.
Autumn (11m 27s): Oh my goodness. I know that's just good.
Jesper (11m 29s): And she's like a multi award winning author as well.
Autumn (11m 32s): The Hugo. Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah,
Jesper (11m 37s): But finally, I also wanted to say that our online writing course, the ultimate fantasy writers guide will next week open for the first time in six months. So that'll be on the 31st of August. And I don't know, but perhaps you can say few words about the course autumn.
Autumn (11m 55s): Oh, I still just, every time I think of it, I just remember why I created it and that was, I wanted this one stop shop that really, I mean, at the time there was no information out there now there's so much information out there you don't know which is true anymore. So this is the one stop where you can just buy this one course and you can learn how to write, get through all the plotting, the character, building the world, building all these details that you can still easily get hung up on as well as learn how to actually publish and format and covers and Oh, how to edit.
Autumn (12m 26s): I still remember the first time I edited and getting advice on like how you tackle content and it's very Perth reading and the order of things. So all of that is in the course, and it is our one thing and even ends with how to build an author career. So I'm kind of proud of it as our first course. And of course we always bite off more than we can chew to start. It's the best way to learn. Isn't it. And so then I guess the best way to teach.
Jesper (12m 53s): Yeah. And again, also here, we've included the link in the show notes, so you can go and check it out. But I should mention though that the cost will not stay open for very long. So come early September, we're going to close it again for another six months. So if you want in now is the time to do so. As soon as you listen to this episode, go and check it out. At least early September will be the latest point for you that you need to check it out. But we have reduced the price though of the cost by a hundred dollars.
Autumn (13m 26s): That is, And then the announcement, I mean, with everything going on in the world and we just felt we needed to do something. So this is an amazing opportunity. We, I don't know if many big ticket courses that are doing a reduction like we just did.
Jesper (13m 40s): Yeah, I don't know. But, but yeah, as you said with COVID-19 and a lot of people are finding themselves struggling with finances at the moment, right? So at least that might be a bit helpful to knock off a hundred dollars. So we'll see. But anyway, click that link in the show notes and there will be all the details on that page about what exactly what the course includes. And there is money back guarantees for 30 days, no questions to ask and all that good stuff. So you can safely check it out.
Autumn (14m 13s): No, I think that really, those are some big announcements, so I want to get into Tropes.
Jesper (14m 22s): Okay. So maybe I could just start by mentioning what are true.
Autumn (14m 27s): I was going to say that we need to define what a trope are and compare it to maybe what a stereotype, you know, what are the other things that people could fuse a trope with?
Jesper (14m 38s): Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I have basically made a note for myself and trying to define a saying like it's a repeated familiar symbols themes, characters, and so on, you know, so it's basically what we expect to find when we read a fantasy novel or I could also be, if we're watching a fantasy movie, there's no real difference there, but it's basically kind of the things that we expect from this young era. Would that be a fair way of defining it?
Autumn (15m 5s): I think so. It's, it's definitely, it's what you expect almost. It's not the genre. Sometimes it's even the type of story like, Oh, I always the easiest one to think of as the farm boy who becomes King. So that is a trope.
Jesper (15m 19s): Yeah. But go ahead. Go ahead. Well, I was just about to say before we get way into these tropes, I think I wanted to mention as well that if we ask a hundred people, what are the most common fences you tropes? We would probably get a lot of different answers. So this is just my way of saying that what we are about to say is it's just our view on things, right? It doesn't mean that, that this is the only truth out there and we fully understand as much, you know, but the French word for Shanghai actually means kind of so very good.
Jesper (15m 58s): I think that gives us a bit of leeway there. Yeah,
Autumn (16m 0s): I think so, too. And so what I was going to mention is that a lot of people can fuse a trope with like a stereotype. Like it is something that they has been seen over and over. And I think the biggest thing with stereotypes is it's a, it's a cliche. It is something that is kind of Pat. And it's quick to explain, like the mother-in-law, who's a wicked witch or something. That's, that's a stereotype, but something when you're describing a whole trope, which becomes, it's a whole story boiled down into a sentence or two.
Autumn (16m 34s): And so they're not exactly the same things. There's a lot more tied up into a trope and a lot more expectations where a stereotype is, is kind of a little bit boring and seeing too much. Oh, we can discuss if we think tropes have been seen too much, or if there's any tropes that have been over done. Yeah. We'll I think actually,
Jesper (16m 58s): If we, you know, if we have a conversation here about the common tropes, as least as we see them, but maybe we could also point out which one we both hate the most, but also wins which one we liked the most. That makes sense.
Autumn (17m 13s): It sounds good. I'll have to think about actually which one I like the most I'll have to probably think which ones have I used because that's easy. I came to me instantly. I have a pet peeve trope. Isn't that sad?
Jesper (17m 29s): No, I, it was the same for me. You know, I was thinking about it earlier today and I was like, Oh, it would be fun if we, if we put out like the one we hate and the one we love and I was like, well, Hey, that's easy. It took me like half a second to figure out what that was.
Autumn (17m 44s): Yes. You warned me. You were going to ask that. And it took me about half a second to like, Oh yeah. If I ever read another story like this, I will burn it. So that's horrible. All right. So which is, let's go yours then it was since we started with the ones least liked, what is your worst trope that you hate reading about? You want to stop there if you don't, if you want to end there, we can do either way, but this will be fun to hear.
Jesper (18m 11s): Yeah. It will be fun. I was thinking maybe we could just sort of start out by covering some of the different trucks that we see and then we could, once we've done that, then we could, maybe we should start with the one we hate the most and then do the one we liked the most, because then we were ending on a positive rabbit
Autumn (18m 28s): And that'll give me some more time to think about, which is my favorite. Cause I'll have heard them all at that point,
Jesper (18m 32s): Right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I made an, I was thinking about this a bit like high level kind of, you know, high level tropes, but, and I'm sure you have some good pointers that you can sort of fling in here as well into the mix. But of course, one of the most common tropes I would say in fantasy is basically that fantasy stories has magic.
Autumn (18m 55s): Oh yes, that's true. And that is, that is probably almost the basis of fantasy I would say.
Jesper (19m 2s): Yeah. Isn't it. I mean, can you come up or can you think of any like stories that you would define as fantasy, but has no magic in it at all? I mean, some of them don't have a lot of magic, but can you think of some that doesn't have any at all?
Autumn (19m 17s): No. I mean, I know when I first read game of Thrones until those dragons, I was gonna say until those dragons were born, it was lacking a lot of magic. I like a little bit more magic than that, but it eventually peaked in there. So there's some, and there's magical realism, which is, you know, very much minimal magic at times, but it's still there. I think I can't, I can't think of anything. I would classify as fantasy that doesn't have at least some magical creature or magic magic.
Autumn (19m 52s): I can't think of any,
Jesper (19m 54s): No. Do you know, I just thought of this because we talked about Malachi before. Right. But have you heard the whole debate about what Shanghai star Wars is?
Autumn (20m 5s): Yes. I have a hard time. I mean, to me it's science fiction, but it's kind of science fiction fantasy.
Jesper (20m 12s): Yeah. It's just, I know I'm going to probably going to piss off. A lot of people, people have, especially when it comes to star Wars, people have very, very, they're very, very opinionated,
Autumn (20m 23s): Passion, passion. Oh shit. That was the wrong word I use.
Jesper (20m 29s): But because I can sort of follow the logic when people say in star Wars that the force power is magic because, and then at some point they threw windows. What is like Mikel, Lori and wa how do you pronounce that stuff? Don't
Autumn (20m 48s): Ask me, I'm horrible with English words.
Jesper (20m 50s): I can't remember what, whatever it was called, but those things that you have in your body that you can measure. And then the more I have it, you have the more force power you have and stuff like that. And of course, and it can Skywalker was off the scale and whatnot. But I think that was sort of like, at least to me, it felt like an afterthought that they plucked in later on in the, I don't know if it was always the intention, but I also know a lot of people complaining that they felt like the force got to explained at that point. Whereas magic is often not that explained, but at least in my view, you know, I'm yet to read a fantasy book where a star ship, all of a sudden flies by.
Jesper (21m 29s): So I would still say Star Wars is Sci-fi, but
Autumn (21m 33s): I think that's that genre mashup of scifi fantasy or science fantasy. And that is a genre of itself. And that's kind of a fun one. I mean, I think dr who fits into science fantasy because I always complain that this stupid screwdriver, what, he just, he has this thing that it's supposed to just do one thing and he uses it like a magic wand and can fix anything with it. And I just get pissed off whenever it happens. Cause I want rules with it and it just doesn't exist.
Jesper (22m 4s): No, Actually in the coming weeks here, I'm going to interview Chris Fox for our podcast here. So he's going to come on in the coming weeks. But, and I know Chris is actually writing dragons in space.
Autumn (22m 16s): Oh, that's cool. That's pretty cool as well. I think that might be breaking a lot of tropes, so good for him.
Jesper (22m 24s): Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay. So what's the more we wanted to say about Metro?
Autumn (22m 29s): No, I think that is definitely, I think the foundational fantasy trope, I would say after that one is a, like the fantasy creatures, almost a fit. It would say a fantasy world, but sometimes, I mean, urban fantasy is becoming very popular and that usually takes place on earth or something. That's very much like a parallel earth, but is still got the fantasy creatures of the werewolves and the vampires. And so that's, I can't imagine a fantasy story that has no magic or none of those fantastical creatures at all, because I don't think that would be fantasy at that point.
Jesper (23m 9s): No, I agree. And of course this does not have to be UL and auction and whatnot. I mean, sometimes it could also be like unique species. The author actually created themselves, so it can be a lot of things, but yeah. Fantasy needs to have some fantastical species. Do I need to say dragons?
Autumn (23m 26s): I think they kind of get the implication. You already said dragons in space, so that's pretty cool. Oh yeah, that's true.
Jesper (23m 35s): But at least some sort of fantastical species are usually part of the mix. And I would also say, you said a bit about the setting there because I really feel like at least most of the time the setting is a secondary world. Of course, in urban fantasy, like you said, you know, can be our world, but a lot of the time it will still be like, there is this sort of shadow world within the world that people don't know that there is werewolves.
Jesper (24m 6s): Maybe, you know, the general public doesn't know, or maybe it's like a hidden fantasy world within the existing world or something like that. Otherwise I think if you don't have it like that, and I know I'm generalizing a lot in, and I'm sure listeners are screaming at the headphones right now saying with a ton of examples of the opposite. But, but my point is just that you quickly transcend over into something sort of huge superhero kind of thing. If it's all, everybody knows about it, everybody knows about fantastical heroes and creatures and that kind of thing.
Jesper (24m 43s): Or what don't you feel like then it becomes very Marvel kind of way very quickly.
Autumn (24m 47s): So I think it does. I think that does move more towards the Sierra superhero, which I would still say under, if you would be fantasy, a massive umbrella, I would actually put superhero under there, but you know, way to the edge it has that it has magic. And I don't know, I was please don't put it on this fence,
Jesper (25m 6s): Like superhero thing. So please don't put it into the fence. She's young. I want to keep it up.
Autumn (25m 10s): Oh, I read X men and stuff. When I was a teenager in the sand, I mean, Sandman comics, that was still, it wasn't really superhero, but it was written very much superhero like Neil Gaiman. He's fantasy. Sorry.
Jesper (25m 23s): Now, well, I guess to be fair, I mean the original superhero stuff I think is probably absolutely fine, but it's just like within the last, probably five to 10 years, I feel like the big Hollywood studios, Marvel and whatnot, they they've destroyed the superheroes young or by just retelling the same stories 200 times in a row. And I don't know, it's just destroyed it for me. I have no pleasure in those movies anymore. Now it's just time a new one comes out. It's the same one as the last one.
Autumn (25m 53s): I agree with that on so many levels because it does seem like every, like they wanted to do a new princess bride and there was such a huge outcry of don't ruin perfection that I think they kind of decided not to do that because they would have pissed up too many people in our age bracket. Maybe, maybe we would probably torch the theater, but yeah, let's move on to, there's so many amazing writers in the writers who were coming up with these amazing stories, choose something new, but that was exactly what I was just saying.
Jesper (26m 29s): Thinking that just as you said, it, because I must assume that Writers in those writing rooms are very, very talented. So I just like it, maybe it's because the studio sort of put them constraints on them and say, well, we want something like this and that, because we know we can earn a hundred million at the box office about, you know, maybe something like that. But I just cannot imagine that the writers in those rooms can not come up with something new and exciting. Like my laugh at you talked about when she wrote for star Wars, right? She also said that she was under very, very strict constraints about what she could say and what she couldn't, but still she worked really hard as a writer to try to find ways in which she could talk about the character and the background, you know, all the smaller things that she could inject to make the story more original instead of it's just the same old, same old.
Jesper (27m 20s): Right. Exactly. Yeah. I don't know. I just don't remember that,
Autumn (27m 26s): But again, I think those, I totally agree. I actually prefer not to watch Hollywood and I love that that so many shows like Netflix and stuff we're actually filming in Canada in Vancouver. And I think it's just to get a little bit of fresh air, bring it in. Right. But yeah, so there's so many things, but those things do, whether you're looking at the superhero is a trope, but the underlying structure there are tropes their own. What is, it's fine to have the trope, but it's what you lay on top of it that makes it different and unique and fresh and new, unless you're using the exact same story and characters over and over and over again until the grooves are so deep that people are like, really again, Wolverine,
Jesper (28m 13s): Yes.
Autumn (28m 13s): We need something fresh and exciting and new. And I do think indie authors have that so well, and there are other authors and there's some great shows out there that are really fantastic. We just finished up watching. Oh shoot. So I'm trying to remember what is warrior nuns. That was fun.
Jesper (28m 35s): What's it?
Autumn (28m 36s): That's the ending totally changed the entire perspective of the entire season up until that point. And you're like, damn, that's awesome.
Jesper (28m 46s): Wow. Okay. So it came up on my fetus weld warrior nuns, and then I heard some, I listened to these a couple of podcasts where they basically review new series. I talk about, and they were just dissing that series so hard. It's like, this is the worst thing, you know, kind of teenage kind of. And I was like, okay, after I listened to them, I was just, okay, I'm not going to watch it. It just felt or sounded way too hard.
Autumn (29m 16s): So now I'm conflicted. I think I've looked at it from a storytelling. There were times there was narration from the main character that I got thought you could really do without. There was some times it took her to build up to building up until the actual true threads of the story. When they started coming together was a little slow, but I'm very patient. And when it got to that point where the, where the things came together and then the last episode really flipped entire perspective of what was going on. I was like, damn, that that is good writing.
Autumn (29m 45s): That is such good writing. I appreciate anyone who can, who can take a story and flip it on its head and change your whole perspective. But believe me, up until that point, I'm leaking, we're talking about the Catholic phase phase and they're warrior nuns. They can't even become priest and you're giving them swords. This doesn't add up in my head, but they had some believers who are main characters and that, that makes it tolerable.
Jesper (30m 11s): Okay. Well, I think there was also a bit in this setting there that I didn't like, but okay. We're getting off topic.
Autumn (30m 18s): They don't care about our move. Our show we'll have to do a recommended show episode later. Maybe we should. So what's the next trope we want to think is pretty general. We're still not doing our worst favorite. Cause we settled still. Haven't gotten to the one that I can not stand yet. No, well maybe
Jesper (30m 36s): You have more, you can inject it because the two I have left is the one I hate. And the one I like. So if you have some more, you want to inject and maybe you can do that.
Autumn (30m 45s): Alright, well, I'm going to skip the one that is my least favorite. So I know one of the ones that is very often often use, that's not the news as much recently, but it's like the secret air. So it's the person who was born noble and doesn't know it. Okay. This is almost like sleeping beauty, I guess. I mean, she's the princess she sent off to, you know, grow up in the forest so that no one will come and you know, the curse will not happen. So that actually is a trope. That's been used. A lot of these fairy tale types of stories have these tropes.
Autumn (31m 17s): So the older, older stories we have and they've been passed down for generations. And so they're still being used today. I mean, you think about it, Romeo and Juliet, the star crossed lovers. That's a trip to usually in romance, but I've seen it as a pretty strong sub genre sub plot to some fantasy ones as well. Right. And you did mention star Wars. So the evil empire, the evil overlord, believe it or not, that is not my worst Groaner, but that is definitely one that I've gotten tired of seeing where you start off a story and it's, you just have evil and they're evil.
Autumn (31m 58s): And I mean, unless you're writing about Lucifer or the devil, or I don't wanna pick another cosmology that has, you know, a BA a good and a bad side, and they're just evil from the side of evil. That is another one. That's unless you're adding some gray tones and some explanation why they're evil. I definitely think that one's kind of been over done
Jesper (32m 20s): Interesting because some of the stuff you're saying, I'm going to come back to
Autumn (32m 23s): Totally be fine. Some of the other ones I've seen and you made me have to open up like my book of my filing cabinet, we were joking on Patreo and Irish and I, and that I, my, my organizational system in my brain is actually a massive cabinet, huge bureaucracy, immensely boring, but so well organized. So
Jesper (32m 47s): Wants to get access to certain areas.
Autumn (32m 49s): Times you asked definitely 10 different copies. Some of them are in blood. You got to watch out for those, but the, the reluctant hero. And again, I think it's another one where you, it's not as very, I mean, normally we have people, most of the heroes I think written about today are more go getters. They're very few are going, but I don't want to go have to go fight the dragon, but that is definitely something that's there.
Jesper (33m 18s): Yeah, I agree. But, but don't, I would almost argue that that can, that can be in almost any stronger in thrillers or whatever. You can also have the reluctant hero who doesn't really want to take on the task ahead of them. I am not sure. That's a fantasy trope as such. It's just a storytelling trope, I guess.
Autumn (33m 37s): Yes. But it's one that definitely crosses into it. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not sure. I guess, I don't know if you'd call it a fantasy trumpet, like the mentor trope, where you always have the kid who gets helped by the mentor or even you could have the one where it's like a young boy basically redeems the older hero who has done something in his past. And so that's another one that if it's done well, can be amazingly powerful and redemptive, but if it's not done well, you kind of feel like I've seen this before.
Autumn (34m 11s): Yeah. But I guess you could say that with everything you have to layer on characters that are very three dimensional, you have to layer in a world that feels real, and it's all gonna become together to be its own driver. And without that, any of these can really feel like they just have been seen and done before.
Jesper (34m 29s): Yeah, absolutely. I agree with that.
Autumn (34m 32s): All right. I think that's all the ones I can come to mind. I'm sure. I'll probably think of more. Oh, I know the powerful article, like the F the quest for the magic sword Excalibur. I don't do our Dorian tails anymore. I love them as a teenager, but I, if I read one more thing about the lady of the Lake and Excalibur, I'm just going to, just to
Jesper (34m 56s): It's another one that came up on my Netflix feed here recently was w I cursed, I think it was called . It was also a new one, but that was also some sort of a King Arthur kind of thing, whatever. I was just like, Oh my God. No, thank you.
Autumn (35m 16s): Yes, I would. It would take me a while to go back to them. I see. He gave it out to be an amazingly good character as do, make me want to sit through one of those again. Yeah.
Jesper (35m 26s): Okay. So should I do the trope that I hate the most?
Autumn (35m 29s): Yes. And then I'll do my trip that I hate the most.
Jesper (35m 32s): Okay. And this is going to be a bit interesting because you touched a bit on,
Autumn (35m 36s): Okay. So the
Jesper (35m 38s): One I hate the most is the one I call the one. Oh, so this is exactly what you said before. So this is the farm boy who discovers that he is the one and the only person who can save the world or the young servant girl who discovers that she's actually rightful heir of the troll and you know, those sorts of things. And my God, I just feel like this trope has been beaten to death. I wish those kinds of prophecies, or it was kind of meant to be a, I don't know.
Jesper (36m 11s): I, I just hate those kinds of stories and I wish they wouldn't be written anywhere.
Autumn (36m 16s): Well, I know something kind of funny. Yeah. That's my least favorite ones too. The chosen one. I will, I hate it. I do too. I mean, the Shannara tales, those, you know, those came out a couple of years ago, the remakes again, of the elf stones of Shannara books. And it's just like, there's no purpose. You have the right blood. You are the chosen one. You're going to get out there and do it. And there's no earning your place. It's just, everyone's like bowing down to them.
Autumn (36m 47s): Oh, you were the chosen one. You were the golden child. And I'm just like, Oh, gag me. I want to see them suffer and earn it and become, come something greater because it is their journey. Not because they were chosen to be this person. And I definitely know.
Jesper (37m 4s): Yeah. And even, I mean, I know now again, I, you know, I'm good at offending people here. Why not? Why stop now when I already started, but I know a lot of people love. Yeah. I know a lot of people love the wheel of time by Robert Jordan. I don't like it. And I guess as well, I, it would not be fair to say that rant L toward a main character in that, he's just the one. And because he's just the one, I mean, he has to work for it.
Jesper (37m 34s): So it's not entirely fair. But on the other hand, it is still, at least in my view, and this is only my view and people can shout at me and disagree. That's okay. But just in my view, it is still the, it's one of those, the one stories, because rant is the one who's supposed to defeat evil and, and all that. And it's just like, it feels to ordain. What should we call? Yeah. Or more like artificial story, construction kind of thing, rather than it just being, here's your average, Joe.
Jesper (38m 7s): And he builds over time. And one day he then turns out to be able to defeat evil if that's what you want to do. But instead of it just being, well, it was also always written in the stars that you were going to defeat the evil overlord or what it's like, what seriously.
Autumn (38m 25s): I agree. And I actually poke fun at this trope and my first fantasy trilogy, where there is one who's like, Oh, there's a prophecy of this elemental. And he will go on to do something. And it's you and no, it's not, it's not him. You know, it was basically, they're like, they're reinterpreting it. There's like a few just minor. It's a very minor subplot. But every once in a while someone mentions it. And even the main character is like, Oh my God, if you had mentioned this one more time, you all don't even know what you're talking about. I'm just going to go over here and take care of business.
Autumn (38m 57s): Okay.
Jesper (38m 57s): Right. That's good.
Autumn (38m 59s): Yeah. I just, I got to poke fun at these things. Occasionally it's just in my nature, but yes. So we have, I guess it's a unanimous vote that the chosen one is it's was a very common theme. I think when we both were growing up reading fantasy, the seventies and eighties, it was just like, that is your main carers. They were chosen. They're going to go do this and they're going to win. And you just follow it along. And the stories of this decade is so much more nuanced. Good is not a hundred percent good.
Autumn (39m 30s): They're kind of gray and evil. The evil characters have their kind of animals or something that, you know, there's something else about them. And those are the stories that really stick and grow, and everyone's got to earn their downfall or their nobility. And that is a much more interesting. And I guess maybe I'm saying that's what my favorite trope is now is simply the one that maybe flips a lot of the old tropes on their heads, even settings. I like, I like something unique. I like unique races.
Autumn (40m 1s): I hacked my first story was I stayed away from the whole medieval setting and did sailing instead of horseback riding because I wanted something different. So I love it. When someone comes up with a story that flips something on its head and gives me something new. I mean, when Shrek came out, Oh, I was just in love with the movie because I was laughing my ass off at all. All of the, all the funny things that it flipped on its head and made it all new and fresh again.
Autumn (40m 31s): I love that.
Jesper (40m 32s): Yeah. Yeah. And actually that's a good point, you know, if anybody has not watched Shrek yet, then if you want to get a feeling of fantasy tropes, what's that movie, All of them. So you'll have one movie, you will have a very good taste and you'll see that even though you can have them all listed, you can do something completely different with them. And it's wonderful. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. I think the one that I liked the most it's sort of placed off the one I hate the most.
Jesper (41m 3s): That that sounded weird.
Autumn (41m 5s): Yeah. So how does this work together then? Well, it's like
Jesper (41m 11s): The one I hate the most is the one who saves the world. Right? Yeah. But at the same time, the ones that, the trip that I liked the most is the one where the world is in the balance. I like stories where the stake is the entire world, but I guess that's why right. Epic fantasy.
Autumn (41m 31s): That's a good reason. I think
Jesper (41m 34s): So. But the thing is, I just don't want it to be the chosen one who does all the saving there instead. It's I actually like when stories about saving the world comes as such a great cost that you can almost, once you sort of read the last chapter, you can almost start wondering, was it really worth it? What's the price really worth paying for what was saved? Hopefully you will say yes for saving the world, but you know, just that there is something in the back of your mind saying that was almost too great of a price to pay.
Jesper (42m 14s): I like that.
Autumn (42m 15s): That's a very good one. And I must say that that definitely is impactful and would make people think so. That's fantastic. I could get behind that, which is good because we'll be writing books together very soon. Yes, yes, I do like that, but it's definitely, I definitely think that yeah, pulling the other one, the chosen one on its head, like I said, even with the stories I've been writing, there's three or four or five potential people to save the world and oddly enough, the cost of what it's going to take. And I won't even say that the world is saved.
Autumn (42m 46s): It's altered forever. When I get to the left third book, even though I'm only writing the end of the first one. So I guess I kind of agree with you because the way the story goes, it's a painful, painful cost. And the world isn't really saved. It's just not completely destroyed, but that's good. That is. So I guess I have to, again, as usual, even though we did not plan this folks, I swear to your listeners, we do not conspire.
Autumn (43m 18s): We just happened to get along, which is a good thing. It meets the business. Isn't very solid hands.
Jesper (43m 25s): Yeah, it is. Yeah. It's amazing. Well, we always tend to agree on things, even though we haven't coordinated any of our responses.
Autumn (43m 33s): Yeah. Alright. Well, that's very good. I guess that's a good way of saying, you know, these tropes to wrap up they're important and they're underlying a lot of stories. And again, it's not necessarily, you should look around and see which ones people are complaining about. And if you're bold and brave, maybe you can do something to remake something that everyone else is seen way too many times. If you can make the chosen one into something new, fresh and exciting. Oh, that would be really kind of interesting.
Jesper (44m 5s): Yeah. And I think exactly, that's also my conclusion on this because I do honestly believe that any trope can be done well, even the one I hate, but at the same time, any trope can also be done poorly. Even the one I like. Yeah. So it is a matter of how the trope is utilized in your storytelling and in your world building. And of course that's a million times easier said than done, but that's why we are doing the podcast and you're doing the writing very true.
Jesper (44m 36s): Okay. So next Monday it's if all goes, well, I should have a very accomplished author on for an interview for you, but I'll keep it as a surprise for now.
Narrator (44m 50s): If you like, what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the am writing fantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going, stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
In episode 44 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, Jesper and Autumn shared the results of a survey which asked readers about permafree books.
They are now back with an update on the survey results as many more responses has come on since episode 44, and in addition, Autumn have taken her book 1, Born of Water, off permafree.
What has happened to Autumn's book sales now that Born of Water is no longer available for free?
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (1s): You're listening to the Am Writing fantasy podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need an literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt, and Jesper Schmidt. Hello, I'm Jesper.
Narrator (32s): And I'm, Autumn. This is episode 86.
Jesper (36s): of the Am writing fantasy podcast. And as promised this episode will cover the results after taking a book off Permafree like Autumn have done with her book. Born of water. Yes. I love running my life as an experiment to help other people as I seem to be doing constantly. Yeah. Yeah. But it's been actually quite a long while since we recorded, even though, of course, for, for the listener. Well, we released an episode last week and we are releasing one this week, but, but we have, we have prerecorded some episodes because of summer holidays.
Jesper (1m 13s): So we actually haven't done this for a while, or I know it's been three weeks, so yeah. To everyone else it's been seamless, but for us it's been three weeks. So I'm so glad to have you back as I've hinted in the student Q and a that we just had before this that, you know, even though you did all your homework before you left and we prerecorded everything, I was still alone in charge of this ship. And there's always more in charge of a ship than you realize when you're like, Oh, I tried, I tried so hard not to bug you too much, even though I know you were on a staycation instead of a real vacation, but yeah, no, no, nobody is great being back.
Jesper (1m 55s): It feels nice to get into it again. And even, even discovering out of our conversations before the recording, that there was a few things that I was supposed to do that I couldn't quite remember the context of anymore. It was a good vacation. So, I mean, how was it in Denmark? I mean, I know the couple of times that we emailed that you said it wasn't exactly summer weather over there. No, it feels the whole thing feels a bit odd, to be honest.
Jesper (2m 25s): I mean, I guess I could say it's been fairly a fairly good vacation, but we didn't do any traveling of course, due to COVID-19 like the rest of the world. So we visited some friends, we had some family over and we did some day trips here and there with the kids to just go and do some stuff, that sort of thing, you know, but yeah, as you said, unfortunately, the weather has not been the best. So yeah, my wife said the other day that it doesn't feel like a vacation. It more feels like a very, very long weekend and that's actually a bit how I feel about it too.
Jesper (2m 59s): And I'm actually sure that, you know, because we were also working from home home in this pandemic isolation and in the months leading up to the vacation, I think that hasn't helped on this feeling because it's all just sort of blurred together in one big mess there. So I don't know all in all it was okay. But I've had better vacations to be honest.
Autumn (3m 21s): Well then I'm sure you didn't get to go any word too interesting, but at least, you know, the family's safe and you did get some time off and got to spend some time with your kids. So I, and the wife always nice. Yeah.
Jesper (3m 32s): Yeah. That's good. I dunno. The last couple of days it's starting to get warmer like that. I said this yesterday to my wife as well. I'll bet you, once we get into the end of August, once we are fully back to work, then it will start getting really nice and really warm and wonderful. Right. In the last couple of days, it has actually started heating up a pit just as we return to work. And I don't know if that's, yeah, I don't know if that's why, but both the day before yesterday and yesterday I had really troubling sleeping.
Jesper (4m 6s): What can a dozen of times it also last night? So I don't know if it's because it's getting warmer or something, but it's just really annoying. I fall right back to sleep. So that's, that's fine, but it's still interrupts the sleep rhythm. So I, yeah, I feel a bit tired because of it. And then I guess two days, 14 hours of work hasn't helped. I guess
Autumn (4m 33s): You just put it this like marathon day, it's like welcome back by the way. You're an hour 14 of being awake and getting work done. So thanks for holding in there. And now you're recording a podcast. So talk about needing a vacation now.
Jesper (4m 50s): And when we returned from vacation, that the first thing you need is a vacation. Absolutely. I think that's typical though. So, but how has things been on your end over the last three weeks or
Autumn (5m 2s): It's working myself to the bone on him writing fantasy. It's been good. I mean, we had our own, well I'll share my two big successes. And one is that I mentioned my Adam, my husband, Adam has been working on 105 year old wood and canvas coup. And we, he finally got it to the point where we put it in the water and it floated. So
Jesper (5m 27s): Yeah, I saw, I saw you posted a picture of a, you say
Autumn (5m 31s): Yes. Yeah. So I even got to take it out myself. So again, I think that was just so you could see pictures of it from, from the shore, but it was a very successful venture and it's wonderful to see this thing that came to us in really horrible condition. I mean, the canvas was rotted and falling off and, and it didn't even, he's not a huge woodworker. He's become a massively good woodworker in the last couple of months, learning how to shape Cedar into a canoe. And it is beautiful and it was paddles really well.
Autumn (6m 4s): So that was a wonderful success. And then the other thing is, it was funny, cause we've just been talking about this with some of the students I've started. I usually wrote in the evening and I'd try to give him like 500 words while I recently said, screw checking the news and checking email. I'm going to sit down first, as soon as I get my cup of tea and I'm going to try to write for like 45 minutes. And I have top some days if I get a chance already to get in the evening, you know, for maybe a half an hour. And so I've been hitting like 2000 words a day by doing this.
Autumn (6m 35s): So a story that in March was over a year old and completely stalled. If I got a hundred words in, I was felt like I was pulling teeth and really lucky. I'm five chapters away from finishing book one. So I feel I'm in the middle of the climax and it's very exciting. And I have lots of scenes already developed in the plot, pretty much developed for books, twos, and threes. The rate I'm going, I should finish before December, which means an early, late winter, early spring release for a trilogy next year.
Autumn (7m 6s): Plus the books we're going to be writing plus some nonfiction. I'm thinking if everything pans out the way it's supposed to, I'm going to hit 30 books in 2021. I'm feeling pretty good about that. I'm just feeling really good to feel, to be writing again and be hitting my word count. So then for us, the summer weather is beautiful. The tomatoes are ripening and we're eating zucchini. Like it is the only available food source on the planets. It's become a bit of a joke whenever my husband goes out and comes back with zucchini, but Oh, you know, you can turn them into scones.
Autumn (7m 41s): So I've been experimenting with zucchini quite a lot. It's been a good summer. I'll take it. I'm hoping August is also equally enjoyable and it was a little bit less stressed because I'm not the only one in charge of M writing fantasy.
Narrator (7m 56s): Oh, a week on the internet with the am writing fantasy podcast.
Jesper (8m 1s): So first things first, we want to give a huge shout out and warm, welcome to Janine and Eric who joined us on patron. Yes, I, it was a while you were away and we weren't recording. So it's one of those is at least a little belated, but thank you. And welcome. We're so happy for your supports. Yeah. So thank you so much to both of you without Patrion. And those of you who chime in with just a dollar a month, you know, I can't say for sure that we would keep these recordings going, but because of you, then we will, for sure.
Jesper (8m 39s): So thank you a lot for that. And I said, I guess I should also say if, if you dear listener, haven't considered supporting the writing fences, you podcast on Petron yet we would love it. If you could click the link in the show notes and check out the awesome rewards that you Can get your hands on by joining us over there.
Autumn (8m 60s): Yes. Please come join us. There's lots of great posts and tips and some really good perks, like the Q and a sessions we have. So come home, come over and see what we have.
Jesper (9m 11s): Yeah. And I also wanted to mention something else a ahead of you might having something to add autumn. I don't know, but I wanted to mention that we received an email from our podcast host and they told us that we have now passed 10,000 downloads at the end writing fantasy.
Autumn (9m 29s): So that's amazing. That's another big celebration. We have so much to just celebrate today. I mean, we're, we're recording this. We're actually on release day for three books. So this is just, just been a fantastic summer, 10,000 downloads. We're got books coming out new courses. This is just no wonder. We're both like what's what is this task that we're supposed to be doing about which, which of our many projects? Yes.
Jesper (9m 56s): Yes. So for sure, a huge thank you to everyone who listens to the new episodes that we release every single Monday here without you. There wouldn't be much point in sitting here in front of the microphone in the first place. So thank you a lot. And thank you for getting us to 10,000 downloads. And of course we hope that there will be much more to come.
Autumn (10m 19s): Absolutely. I mean, we were already in deep discussion about our secret, what we're going to do on our hundredth episode. So that is coming up this fall. So that'll be really exciting to announce.
Jesper (10m 34s): Yeah. Yeah. Anything else we need to cover?
Autumn (10m 37s): Oh, nothing. I just, I know I've been giving a big shout out to our type of slayers for you guys. You know, this is the only one we're releasing this on a week or two. So this is not too far in the past, but as I said, it's release day for our books and just the feedback from the type of slayers, normally their help, but some of those early reviews and also just the personal notes that they put in when they sent in some of the little typos that they did spot for us, we're really touching and encouraging.
Autumn (11m 8s): And we're exactly the reasons why we're releasing these books to know that, you know, these people signed up just to help us fix up the books right before publication. And they came out of it saying that, you know, words like that helped them tremendously help them find their passion again, for a story they were working on and solve all these problems. And it was just like, just, just, wow. It blew me on the way to know how much we are helping writers. And I'm just, thank you.
Autumn (11m 38s): Thank you for sending in those notes as well as for your help for hitting today and being actually able to release the books.
Jesper (11m 46s): Absolutely. Yeah. And of course, if the listener here has not checked out those books, then just go to wherever you normally book, if that's Amazon or Kobo or wherever and searched for one of our names and you will find the plotting books and the workbooks and the story idea book, all three of them just released today as we're recording this on the 3rd of August. So go and check that out. Okay.
Jesper (12m 16s): So as we set up top, we're going to talk a bit about how it has gone since you took one off Permafree autumn. And, but I guess maybe we should just start out by defining Permafree. What does that mean?
Autumn (12m 32s): Sure. Well, and I can also give you a time as long as a week, cause it's a good discussion of when a book is PERMA free, which means permanently free. So on Amazon, or actually to do this, you have to be wide, you have to be on Kobo and Barnes and Nobles. You have to be on all those platforms. And the book has got to be free, no signing up for an email list or anything. This is literally you just go to Amazon and it is listed as a free book permanently, not on a five day Kindle countdown, just free all the time, every day, 24 hours seven.
Autumn (13m 5s): And my book board of water, I don't know how many readers actually or listeners actually know this, but for a while I was actually with a publisher. And it was when I got my books back in may of 2015 that I put a born of water, which had been initially published in February, 2012. I finally put it on permanently free on, in May, 2015, and it's been free ever since widely distributed any platform.
Autumn (13m 36s): And so this was a big change to say something that has been free for five years, I'm going to put a price tag on it. And that's what I did this end of may. I made it 99 cents. Huge deal.
Jesper (13m 53s): Yeah. And maybe also for context, we talked about whether or not Permafree books is like a viable sales strategy. We talked about that back in episode 44. So which was released on the 28th of October, 2019. So if, if you need some more context than I would say, go back and listen to episode 44 and then come back here and, and continue listening to this because there we explain a lot about the behind line thinking and strategy about why we don't think that Permafree books is a good strategy anymore, but we're not going to dive into all of those details here once again.
Jesper (14m 38s): So if you want that, didn't go back to episode 44, but otherwise we're just going to focus on what was the results then from pulling a book away from Permafree and all of a sudden asking people to pay for it. But that is a great,
Autumn (14m 54s): You know, groundwork for why. I mean, there's a lot of reasons why I would choose to do this. One is, you know, at five years into Permafree, the downloads were dwindling. It was harder to give away even a free book because it's been free for so long. There's no excitement about picking up a book. That's going to be free next month, when it's already been free last year, how many new readers was I really reaching? And we also had the survey and that was a pretty big eyeopener. And you have the results, some updated results from the survey.
Autumn (15m 25s): And that kind of also got me thinking of really, should this book still be free? I mean, should a permit free be permanently free or should it be something maybe every couple years you rotate through as you open up a new series?
Jesper (15m 40s): Yeah. So maybe we could start that and then you can get into the results of it. Maybe we can start with the survey because as a preparation for episode 44, back then in October, 2019, we, we had a thinking that, you know, the Permafree strategy is a, it's a, well, I was about to say old strategy, but in publishing terms, oldest just means a couple of years, a lot of things happened a couple of years, but it's a couple of years old strategy. And our thinking was that I think that the Permafree strategies losing some of its allure and some of its effectiveness.
Jesper (16m 18s): So we created a survey where we basically, instead of us being author speculating about it, we decided, well, why not ask the readers? So we did. And back then in episode 44, we shared the results of all the responses we got for that survey. And of course now we are in August, 2020. So we have gotten some more responses since then. And I can just go through them one by one here, just to bring everybody up to speed.
Jesper (16m 48s): And then you can talk about your experiences and results afterwards. Yeah. So I w I would say first off before we get into the actual questions and answers that none of what we set in episode 44 has really changed. It's still the same. We've just got more volume on the responses, but the conclusions are still the same as I also expected when we recorded episode 44, I also said that I doubted that it would change, even though we got more responses, but we do now we have 575 responses.
Jesper (17m 25s): So that's quite quite a good, let's say mock for, including upon. I would prefer, as I also said back in episode 44 to get a thousand, but well, we have 575, so yeah. Do with what you want, but I can just go over it one by one here, tell you the questions and then the answers, I think there was five. So the first question, yeah, the first question was, are you more likely to take a chance on a new author?
Jesper (17m 55s): If the book is free and here 32.5% says, yes, I prefer to only pay for books written by authors. I already know while 67.5% says, I don't mind purchasing a book from an author I'm not familiar with if the book otherwise sounds and looks interesting. So that was already a bit, a bit interesting to see. Okay. So people actually don't mind giving a new author chance, even if they have to pay for the book. So at least for people selling their books, then that's, that's a good indicator to start with.
Jesper (18m 31s): Absolutely. So we then funneled all of those who said that they prefer to only pay for books written by authors, that they already know. We didn't ask only that top of the respondees, a separate question, and we didn't ask them what if the same book from that same author you've never heard of had great reviews. Could that make you want to purchase the book, even though you normally only pay for books written by authors, you know, and then 66.3%.
Jesper (19m 5s): Yes. That would make me change my mind, providing the book otherwise sounds and looks interesting to me while only 33.7% said, no, I simply don't want to pay for a novel, unless I already know that the author already know the author and question writes the kind of stories that I like to read. So yeah. Great reviews really matters as we can see from that questions. And of course we can come back to that, but born on water has a ton of reviews.
Jesper (19m 35s): So that's,
Autumn (19m 36s): Yeah, I'll be mentioning that it helps, but it also actually caused a small problem, but we'll come back to that. I'll leave the tension right there. Now I'm curious as well. So then we asked
Jesper (19m 51s): If you bought a book, is it the next book you'll start reading and here 40.3% says, yes. I usually start reading it as soon as I'm able, while 59.7% says, no, I often add it to my, to be read list and we'll come back to it as some later date. And then we asked the exact same question, but now we asked what if it's a free book? So we asked if you were downloaded a free book. Is it the next book you will start reading. And now we have 29.9% saying, yes.
Jesper (20m 25s): I usually start reading it as soon as I'm able, while all of a sudden the 59.7% who before said that they added to the, to be read list. Now John jumps from 59.7% to 70.1% who says, no, I, I just add it to my, to be read list. So you're basically losing like a bit more than 10% of people there because it's a free book. They are much more, 10% modern, 10% more inclined. I know you can't say that, but 10% are more inclined to add it to a TUPE read list rather than starting reading it while as while they, and it makes sense.
Jesper (21m 4s): Right? So if they pay for the book, they are more inclined to start reading it right away.
Autumn (21m 9s): Absolutely. It makes sense. Definitely.
Jesper (21m 12s): Yeah. So if we then assuming that people are adding stuff to dare to be reckless, we wouldn't curious how long is this to be readily then? So we ask people how many unread books do you have on your E reader? That being the Kindle, the phone, the nook, or whatever it is that they read books on. And we have 8.2% saying that they don't have any, they always finish their current read before they buy or add a new book. So that was only 8.2%.
Jesper (21m 43s): I believe that 19 and 17.7% says that they have between five and 10, 19% says that they have less than five, but then the whopping 56% of all the people says that they have more than 10 books in there to be read list. Wow. And this was exactly what we were concerned about when it comes to Permafree that people just download free books, stuff, them on their Kindle. And usually they just forget about it. They never get back to more than 10 books.
Jesper (22m 13s): That's a lot just sitting there. You can't even remember that you had them after a while
Autumn (22m 18s): Right now. Yeah. You open it up and you're like, Oh yeah, I don't even remember what that's about. Yeah. Because when you see the cover on your e-reader, you don't see the blurb, you don't, you don't know why you got it. You literally are just going off of a cover and a memory of whether or not it's the next book you read. Yeah.
Jesper (22m 38s): And the question is just more than 10. So it could mean that they have even 20 or 30 books sitting around Kendall. Right. And they never kind of get to it. So that was the whole problem with the, and, and again, going back, maybe three, four, five years, the Permafree strategy worked really, really well because it was brand new. It was difficult to find Permafree books. So people just loved it and they wrapped the free books. They read them and they moved on to buy the rest of the series, which is the whole point of the Permafree strategy. Right. But the problem is nowadays a lot of people off of free books, I do it myself.
Jesper (23m 12s): I have not pulled my book off Permafree, but that's more because of all the tasks related to do it. So I have too much else to do, but I really should be doing it. I'm preaching here on the podcast and also in episode 44 that you should be doing it, but I haven't done it myself. So shame on me. But yeah, I think this is the object of the property or the core of the problem, right? There's just too many free books out there. And then to wrap the survey up, we asked in your view, free books, more likely to be of poor quality than the you pay for.
Jesper (23m 46s): And the reason we asked that was basically because at least within author circles, there's been different conversations, you know, on Facebook groups for authors and stuff like that, where authors have been speculating that, well, usually readers will equate the free books with poor quality. So we said, okay, fine. Let's just ask the readers if that's the case or not, and get it out of the way for once and fall. And actually 80.3% said, no free books can be just as good as those you, I pay for that leaves only 19.7% who says yes, in my experience, free books often suffer from issues with editing plot, characterization and so on.
Jesper (24m 30s): So I think that sort of put that point to rest rate in general readers do not believe that free books should be of poor quality or is of poor quality,
Autumn (24m 40s): Which I think is definitely a big wind for indie authors that we've come from that initial stigma when independent publishing was first out, that, you know, it just wasn't as good as the others, you know, the traditional publishers. I think we've overcome that. And we are indie publishers and authors are shining examples of how good writing can be. I agree. So, yep.
Jesper (25m 5s): What's that update, as I said, the conclusions are exactly the same as what I shared in episode 44, we just have a bit of more bit more volume on the responses, but yeah,
Autumn (25m 16s): Well, it's just awesome. So we had the survey that said, you know, permit we've from what we are seeing ourselves, we knew Permafree, weren't working as well. We knew readers were willing to pay for a book. I mean, it helps to maybe have the first book as a reduced price as kind of an intro offer. But you know, there's also this huge discussion out there of if you're only giving away free books, are you just teaching the people who are reading your books, that they should always be free? I mean, I know, I think every author who offers a free book has gotten at least a few people asking questions and saying, can I have the next book for free?
Autumn (25m 49s): You're already giving one away. Why not give away the rest? And most of us hopefully stick to our guns saying, you know, that took two years of my life. And I was like, at least 9 cents.
Jesper (26m 0s): Yeah. The only reason I can keep writing books is because some people pay for them. Right.
Autumn (26m 6s): Oh. And so there was all these ideas going on in my head. We had this survey that was hard facts. I also happened to have joined. I want to give a huge shout out to Brian Cohen. He runs these amazing AMS as author challenges, which run for five days. And so just on a whim, I joined one because I used to run a lot of AMS ads, but when you're running a Permafree, it's really hard to offer that on Amazon. And I'm like, I hadn't been doing it recently. So I thought I joined it to actually work on AMS ads for my bundles and ended up talking to him quite lot about how do you run this for a Permafree?
Autumn (26m 45s): And he gave me some tips. So I started running born of water as a Permafree and, and just a really, it's an incredibly low bid. Right. And so you're just kind of showing up at the tail end when everyone else is running out of money, you might show up at the end and you start getting noticed a little bit more and get some organic growth. And it was good. So it was something in addition to my normal normal marketing that I'd send out to advertisers like Freebooksy and all those places where you could, you know, send out your free book. And, but even those, I mean, those were really, I remember when you could get like 10,000 downloads by getting a Freebooksy offer.
Autumn (27m 20s): And now it's like, if you get 1200, you're doing really well, giving away a free book is really hard, especially a book that has been free for five years. And then on top of all of that, I picked up a book, read through calculator. So I have a series born of water as the first of a trilogy, but then there's a second trilogy that starts six months after the last book in the first trilogy. So it's really six books. Plus I even have a companion and a compilation of short stories. So I'm talking about, I usually don't count those when I look at things like read through, right?
Autumn (27m 54s): But technically I have an eight book series going on and jokingly with a few readers recently who found out, I had been thinking of a, another trilogy they're kind of prodding me along. So it might be even more. And I took all of my stats from 2019. So whole year's worth of stats of downloads and read through rates. And that's what I use that to calculate my readthrough rates. And I found that I was so happy. I had this book one and the read-through rate.
Autumn (28m 26s): I could give away thousands and thousands and thousands of books, but my readthrough rate to book two, because it was a freebie is incredibly low. But after that, once I read book two, it was over a hundred percent, which made me laugh, who had read book three and then to go to the next trilogy, go ahead.
Jesper (28m 47s): Now I was just to add, because that, that actually links up very nicely with what we were just looking at with the survey results, right? Because a lot of those book ones just ended up on to be read list. And that's why you have a poor read-through rate. Not because the book is poor, but because they never read it. So they never go on to book two.
Autumn (29m 6s): Yeah. 4% was my readthrough. Larry, I think it was, it was incredibly small, but then book two, two book three, you know, it was a hundred percent. And then I would lose 60% to go to the second trilogy, which could be me. And it wrapped up very well. So maybe they they're done. They want to go to the other books. Quite normal. 60% is actually not bad. But then again, it jumped back to a hundred percent to finish off that trilogy. So we're talking about a really strong read through rate. When you add that up, considering how many times I had to give away born of water, giving away book earned me 41 cents for every giveaway.
Autumn (29m 46s): And I had to give away thousands of books. So, I mean, we're talking about 41 cents for each giveaway, but if my readthrough wait between book one, born of water and it's book two, if that happened to be close to the second series where it was like 60%, I could actually earn $7 and 21 cents after off of every sale of book one, which also means I would have to sell a lot less of them to earn a lot more money, to be earning $7 and 21 cents off of every reader instead of only 41 cents off of every reader.
Autumn (30m 22s): So there's a lot of stuff that I'm like, okay, wait, I'm playing with AMS ads. They're actually working. I'm selling more books. I have this book that has at, at this time, it was just under 300 reviews. It's now over 300 reviews. It's got a solid track record. I'm gonna, I'm gonna go ahead and try this. And I did. I let readers know that may was the last ditch effort. Last time you're going to be able to see this for free, unless you sign up to get it through like my newsletter.
Autumn (30m 53s): I do have it still as a signup or that's one way to get it for free, but otherwise on all the platforms, it's a whole whopping 99 cents. But it's edited was may, was fantastic for book sales and for giving it away. It was like going back to the old days where people were picking it up left and right, because I was really shaking the tree and letting people know this is it. This is, this is it. This is the end of the run. It is time. This book is no longer free. So yeah, may was really fun.
Autumn (31m 24s): And I was running just so people know all the steps for this. I was not just sitting there letting people know it was coming off a Permafree. I was running my AMS ads at this low amount to get those targets. I was starting to already gather those keywords, getting those books, getting everything ready. So that on June 1st, when I had, Oh, you know, you know how Amazon goes, I actually did it a few days before. So June one comes up and I can switch all those AMS ads over to a higher bid rate. I had everything set up and going, you know, over a hundred, I think ads already made.
Autumn (31m 55s): And boom, I hit the ground running June 1st with a book that was 99 cents. And how do you think that, how do you think all of June went and for me, which, you know, it was probably a big hint that I asked that we record this in August instead of July.
Jesper (32m 10s): Yeah. Well I can of course guests there, but it did not go as planned. No, no, but, but the, the thing is also with those AMS ads that you need time to build up the momentum do and, and, and just switching the apps on often doesn't do much short term. And also it also takes time before you have the apps running for a while so that you can add that. Or you can collect the data and conclude based on the data where to focus your next set of ads.
Jesper (32m 43s): So, so it's more like I see AMS as very much like a continual optimization kind of effort, where, where you start out with a starting point with what you think might work as keywords and such. And then you run those. Once you get enough impressions on them, you will start seeing, okay, decent, these steps works. So then you can start building towards that direction. And over time you get there and you get some really, really well performing ads, but it takes time. And I think that that might be a bit of a misconception in general that some people believe, yeah, you just Chuck in a set of keywords and then you bid something and then you'll get sales, but that's not how it works.
Autumn (33m 24s): No, and I, what I was expecting was something that was going to happen, like my bundle, the rise of horror there. So where you can get all, you get four books for in the bundle. And for that one, you know, it's a typical, you struggle basically to get Amazon, to spend your $5, your trying to get readers. It's a slow burn process. And I would definitely say anyone who wants to try this, you are in this for the long haul and expect the first months to be painful. You're learning, it's a huge steep mountain that you're learning and you're climbing up.
Autumn (33m 55s): And if I have to admit having a free book and just like once a month slapping to free Booksy or these other places say, Hey, you know, promote my book. That is so easy. If you like easy street, stay with easy. This is hard. This requires time that you've got to make every single week and you've got to not be intimidated. And you've got to be able to either ask questions of other people or kind of be good at marketing and not easy to give up and solve the problems. So, yeah, for June, I, I had the opposite problem that anyone told me was going to happen.
Autumn (34m 31s): I actually had to slow down the ads because they were spending like, like I was a millionaire and I could spend money like crazy, but they weren't all ending up in sales. Oh my gosh,
Jesper (34m 43s): Where you're getting very high IO.
Autumn (34m 45s): I was bidding at what Brian Cohen and his AMS ads challenge was telling me is a good bidding rate for a book in a series. So we're talking in the 30 cent range, not really high. This is pretty much standard first in a series. This is about what you should start at. And it was crazy cause people were clicking on it left and right, because it had 300 reviews. It has a very solid cover, but not, not that many people were buying. So you and I worked together and I tweaked the blurb a little bit, which helped, but it was still outpacing.
Autumn (35m 19s): I mean, my happily, my total amount of book sales covered what I paid for Amazon ads for June. But there was a moment of Holy crap. I don't like seeing negative ROI is on a series that was my money maker up to this point. And my biggest conclusion is, yeah, pupils see a book for 99 cents. 300 reviews. Cover is decent. They click on it. You don't read much else. It doesn't matter what else, what my hook could say, they're just going to click on it.
Jesper (35m 52s): Indeed. And that's of course the difference between the click through rate versus the conversion rate, right? So the click through rate is basically being determined by the number of reviews and the cover because that's the people, that's what people see when they see the ad. So they might see if you want to you, of course, it's possible to put in a bit of custom text in the app if people want to do that on the AMS app, but in general, it's the cover. And it's the number of reviews that will make people click. So that's the clicks. So you can have a very high click through rate, which will then indicate that your cover is good and your number of reviews is working in your favor.
Jesper (36m 31s): But then once they arrive on the sales page, if we can call it that or a product page, when meaning the actual page on Amazon that shows the book and you have the book description and you have the biolink and all that, then there is two things affecting the conversion rate on that page. And that of course is the book description that factors in a lot to whether or not people. So they might've clicked on, Oh, that cover looks interesting. So they click on the ad, they come to the book page and then they read the blurb and it's like, what? No, this is not me. And then gone.
Jesper (37m 1s): They are right. So that really needs to hook them, or it can also be the look inside. So if people check the sample writing and they scroll through the first couple of pages on the login side, on Amazon, and then they, if it doesn't engage them enough there, then that might stop the conversion as well. So they don't buy it. They don't click the buy button. Right. But yeah, it was just to give a bit of context for Lou in terms of things to look for.
Autumn (37m 27s): And these are the things you have to be aware of. And there's also the fact that I am trying this on at, you know, targeted ads with targeted keywords that I've only been trying for two months and to get keywords that are really gonna fit in my book and reach the correct audience. It's going to take a lot longer than two months to really gather that data. So I'm basically spending a whole bunch of money to get keywords, and it's just getting confusing. I'm basically, you know, going to Facebook and say, Hey, you like books.
Autumn (37m 57s): Here's my book. And it's too much. It was, I needed to slow it down. And that was basically what I learned is I needed to basically just keep reducing my bid point every week until I got to the point where I got a positive ROI, which I did. Yay. I'm so excited. So I finally had my first month where, or my first week where I had a positive ROI. And of course this is difficult because I'm talking about readthrough rates. So I'm not looking at just the ROI on book one, I'm looking at how things are going for the entire series.
Autumn (38m 30s): Are people reading through? Cause I am, that is going to determine my overall amount I can bid I've finally achieved what I was looking for, where I feel comfortable now trying to look for new keywords. So I'm still really at the beginning stages, but that was my biggest to me. It was my biggest hurdle is I just don't have the financial wherewithal to keep spending every ounce of money I'm getting from my books just to cover AMS ads. I kinda, you know, like eat and, you know, I'm a full time author. This is really kind of, you know, bread and butter for me.
Autumn (39m 1s): So there were definitely those first month cringing pain of why the heck did I do this? This was so easy before, but now that I'm finally seeing income, again, I can start generating more ads looking for more keywords, starting to pull out the ones that are gonna work in the longterm. And I think that initial shock of being able to actually spend everything that Amazon, you know, that I want to throw at Amazon is going to be a good thing.
Autumn (39m 33s): When I finally hit the right target. I mean, I might still work on the blurb a little bit. It's going to be a matter of checking out keywords, but once I have all the pieces in place, this could be really, really good. I just know it's going to be six months to longer, eight months, nine months a year from now, where will I be with this? I think it'll be in a really good place. And I'm, as I mentioned earlier, in this episode, I'm going to be having another series. I'm going to be trying all this again with fresh, with a series that has never been Permafree as well, but it's definitely been a learning curve.
Autumn (40m 10s): And I think the biggest thing is just not having those moments of panic when, especially when you see income going out faster than, you know, you really had planned, I was expecting, you know, few sales, slow burn, trying to accumulate keywords like I was doing with the bundle. And instead I had, you know, the acetylene torch set on high. I was not prepared for that. You know, if I had hit all the right keywords the first time out and it had just zoomed off the rocket, that would have been fantastic, but that's not really realistic.
Autumn (40m 46s): It wouldn't be a good learning session to be able to share with all of our listings. So what happens when you take your book off a permit for you? There has to be some pain involved, not just like there's one seller. Oh yeah. I had to do it this way, but I think, you know, I will definitely have to maybe put in our schedule or if listeners would like a check in, you know, let us know in the comments and we can check in again in six months or so and see how the process is going. Cause at this point now I am just trying to get, I had some ads that were not doing anything.
Autumn (41m 19s): So I'm trying to wake those ads up and I'm just trying to keep that positive ROI going. But again, it's a series, it's a readthrough. So I have book I'm selling and there's going to be this lag before people get all the way through the series and I'll see the income it. So this is going to be a very slow stepping stone process. I mean, unless I win the sweepstakes or something and I have a million dollars, I can throw it a run, everything, you know, once to see it all get figured out.
Autumn (41m 50s): And just a couple of months, I don't see that happening. I think this is going to take me a lot of time because I don't, I just simply physically can't dump a thousand dollars a month or more onto just AMS ads just to see what happens. Be really, if anyone is a multimillion out there and they don't know what to do with it, and they would like to help me run this experiment, I will have to spend your money when it's my money and my family, you know, I'm trying to take it a little bit slower.
Autumn (42m 22s): That's fair enough. Yes. But I will say the conversion rate is up
Jesper (42m 28s): Excellent. Next week we will look at the well known trips and fantasy and also evaluate if they are quote unquote, good or bad.
Narrator (42m 37s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the am writing fantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going, stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Having multiple streams of income is important as an author, so maybe you have considered leveraging your expertise to create an online course. Should you? How does it work?
In this episode, Autumn and Jesper talk about course creation from how the Ultimate Fantasy Writer's Guide came to be to the steps you should take when looking to create your first course.
As we announced in the show, our premium one-stop-shot writer's course, the Ultimate Fantasy Writer's Guide is about to open for the first time in six months. If you want to learn to write, edit, format, and publish a book to raving fans, come check it out at https://ultimatefantasywritersguide.com/main/!
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to the am. Writing fantasy podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need an literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt, and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I'm Jesper.
Autumn (31s): And I am Autumn.
Jesper (33s): This is episode 85 of the am writing fantasy podcast. At the end of last week's episode, we announced that we would be talking about taking a book book off Permafree like autumn did with her book born of water recently, but we decided to delay the topic for next week because we are prerecording a bunch of episodes. She had to carry us through the summer. So waiting one more week for you as a listener, actually gives us several weeks on our end.
Jesper (1m 4s): And well, that sounded a bit complicated, but the point is that this delay will allow us to collect a bit more data on taking a book off Permafree. So I think that's the way we're going to go right on them. I think so I think it's good data, but at the moment, I think it's more challenges and problems, and I want to give you some encouragement and inspiration. So I think just a few more weeks of tweaking and being ready and complete, you know, compiling the stats and seeing how this is going will make every it'll make much more sense.
Jesper (1m 34s): It'll be so much more interesting. So I admit I'm the one who said, Hey, can we switch these? So it's all on me. That's absolutely fine. So instead we are going to discuss creating a course as another stream of income for your author business. Is it actually worth the effort? And if so, what can you expect if you go into course creation? So that'll be the topic for today. And it's a, it'll be a fun one too. I look forward to sharing some of the journey we've taken to get to where we're at.
Jesper (2m 9s): Yeah, absolutely. Before then. So how are things on your side of the Atlantic? No, it's good. I'll be heading off for three weeks of some of occasion this coming Friday, but as you are listening to this, of course, the vacation has already passed. I'm trying to, I guess we're just back to work. That's not fair. Yeah, no that's but I mean, at the end of the day, I would just like to see the weather understanding that is actually summertime.
Jesper (2m 40s): Now I saw that we just had a student Q and a, and you were wearing a long sleeve shirt. Yeah. It's like, it's almost, it's like the weather thinks that it's early spring now and it's not, I mean, at the point of recording this, we at the beginning of July, so it should be really nice. And it's been raining half the day today and it's pretty damn boring. And actually speaking of rain last week, my youngest son attended a soccer college and it was also raining there, but it was hosted by the national soccer association and he was actually awarded player of the week in his age bracket.
Jesper (3m 21s): So that was pretty damn cool.
Autumn (3m 23s): So amazing. Congratulations. Fantastic.
Jesper (3m 26s): Yeah. Very proud of him really well done. And because there was also a talent scout from the national soccer association there and they were taking potential names for the future youth national team. So given, I mean, they were not, they, they, they were not going to say which names they took that was apparently secret. But given that he was a water player of the week, I w as I said to him, you know, it would be really strange if your name is not on the list that you are, what play of the weekend and not put you on the list, that doesn't make any sense.
Jesper (3m 59s): So we were told that if they do get on the list, we would probably get a call within the next year or so. And then they would be called in for some testing and extra training to see if they are good enough to get onto the youth national team. So that would be pretty cool if that happened.
Autumn (4m 18s): I just feel like the buzzing of excitement that he's gotta have, ah, fingers crossed.
Jesper (4m 24s): Yeah. I mean, it's his biggest dream is to become a professional soccer player. Right. So this is a pretty big deal. I mean, obviously getting into those chest trainings and all that stuff. I mean, there's no guarantees for anything. Right. But just getting the opportunity, at least it shows that he has some, he has the right mental attitude towards it and they recognize that. So that's pretty good
Autumn (4m 47s): Then obviously some talent as well as the right mental attitude. So that's fantastic. Yeah.
Jesper (4m 52s): I mean, he's okay at it, but he's not like top challenge, you know, best of the bunch in, in doing tripling so shootings or whatever. I mean, he's not, he's not the best of them for that, but, but what they usually say when, when I, I talked to some of the pro trainers and they actually say that the guys who make it to the pig scene, I mean, if we're not talking like the world-class best players in the world, they also have a huge amount of talent. Right. But right. But the ones who just makes it to a high, pretty high degree of professional level, they usually not the ones with the biggest talents, they are more the ones with the right mindset and understanding that this is a work and you need to take it seriously.
Jesper (5m 35s): And because a lot of times what happens is as fast, what they tell me is that the ones with the big talent, they think that they don't have to work for it because it's do it. They're the best. Right. And they are the best, but as they progress through the teenage years, they are usually overtaking by the ones who work hard. And that makes me, cause then tell this not enough anymore. Right.
Autumn (5m 56s): And they're not practicing and they're not, they could be geniuses and one really master it. But instead they're relying on latent talent and not really developing it. Yeah. So, yeah, that's what I've been doing over the past week. That sounds really exciting. Yeah. It's very good. How about you? Oh, Oh, it's been good. I actually had a little bit of cabin to myself. As my husband went up to Maine to get a few last things for this 105 year old canoe, he's been restoring he's in the final legs.
Autumn (6m 32s): So he came back. So I had some extra work time and that was all good. And I've been making such good progress. The world building slides, I've been hitting easy, hitting easy, a thousand words a day, which considering I'm cramming it in the first thing in the morning. And right before I make dinner, I feel really good to see my story growing. I'm halfway through my first book of a trilogy. And then as I always told you earlier today, everything was going so sailing really smooth on Sunday that something had happened. And that is my Mac computer hit the hard drive deadline and just, Oh my God, it ran out of memory so badly.
Autumn (7m 9s): I had two gigs left. I couldn't even open Firefox. It was really touch and go. Just trying to find up enough room to save things and move things around when you don't need happening. Right. Yeah. I've got, I would love to talk to Apple why they think that having things saved on it, something really bad happened yesterday. I had stuff I had saved in the cloud must have downloaded accidentally, and it was just horrid, but I managed to fill up free up 26 gig and I'm going to keep working through that. So I think I'll be fine. I managed to get my writing in today while I was downloading files and shuffling stuff.
Autumn (7m 42s): So life's good. I'm pretty good. And the weather unlike there is gorgeous, the humidity drops. It's a perfect, it's a number 10.5 day as far as weather goes. So sorry. Wow. I could borrow a bit of that from you. I will blow some your way. Thanks.
Narrator (8m 3s): Oh. A week on the internet with the am writing fantasy podcast.
Autumn (8m 9s): So actually I was thinking for a start here that there was one thing I wanted to ask our listeners, if that's cool. Yeah. Go for it. Yeah, because basically just like with book reviews, you know, a podcast discoverability is really affected by how many ratings and reviews it has. And quite honestly, we don't have that many. So I was thinking to say to the deal listeners here, if a, if you like this podcast and you don't mind spending just like 30 seconds, can I ask you to leave a rating and review in your podcast app where you are listening to us, please?
Autumn (8m 44s): You know, each podcast app is different. So I cannot really tell you exactly where to click, but it should be fairly intuitive if you go to your, into your app and find our
Jesper (8m 56s): Show and look around a bit. I think it should be quite easy to find out how to leave a rating and review. So it really would mean a lot to us if you wouldn't mind doing that.
Autumn (9m 8s): Yeah. That'd be so wonderful. I mean, 85 episodes were we're not new anymore. So it would be fantastic to have some ratings to go with 85.
Jesper (9m 18s): Yes, yes. And actually speaking of a things that means a lot to us, I also wanted to, we also wanted to give a huge, thank you to Mary who joined us on Petro.
Autumn (9m 29s): That's welcome, Mary. It's one wonderful talking to you. We were talking to you before. Cause you've been around for a little while, but Oh, it's so wonderful to have you on Patreon as well. Absolutely.
Jesper (9m 40s): We try to offer many different bonuses to our patron supporters and not to mention weekly tips on publishing, writing and marketing. So I should think that there's something for everyone on patron that you would find interesting. So for instance, as well, on the $5 tier, you get access to the exclusive monthly Q and a where you can ask us questions directly. And basically we just came off one just before we recorded this one. So that was a lot of,
Autumn (10m 8s): Oh, it's always so much fun. It's great for the students and great for us. And it's wonderful to be able to give specific feedback just when folks need it in their writing. And we do it every single month and part of it's through Patrion
Jesper (10m 21s): Indeed. So if you want to help the am writing fantasy podcast going here, you can do so for just a dollar a month and at least go and check out all the rewards that we offer there and see if it's something for you. You can use the link to patron in the show notes. So anything else we need to cover autumn?
Autumn (10m 43s): No, I would say just still another big shout out already, when, again, time jumping, we would, we're recording this. We're still getting some edits back from the type of Slayer team, but when you're listening to this, the books, the plotting plot development and the workbook and the story idea book I've already been launched, but it's fantastic. They be getting their comments back. Cause you know, what might the one consistent thing, I think almost every single commenter has said. And that has been that they have really enjoyed reading them and really learned a lot.
Autumn (11m 18s): And like, yes, this is exactly it. It's funny. Almost all of them apologize. I was like, well, I was doing this for the edits and you know, to help you out with the typos, but I really learned a lot and you know, they're almost apologizing. I'm like, no, this is why we wrote this. This is fantastic. This is the whole point. So it is wonderful to see because here we are prelaunch recording this to know that they're really helping writers and I cannot wait to see them released to the world partially because I'll also be done with the formatting. So.
Autumn (11m 48s): Okay.
Jesper (11m 49s): Absolutely. Yeah. And I guess we could also just mention that the, all the time jumping here and us not being very timely with what's happening, meaning that we are prerecording a lot. That's basically just because of the summer holiday. So this is actually the last episode that we are prerecording that much ahead of time. So basically we now have enough in the bank to carry us through the weeks of vacation ahead. And then once we start recording again, then we can be a bit more timely with what we mentioning on the, on these podcast episodes, because then we don't have to bang up a lot of episodes at a time anymore.
Jesper (12m 29s): I think so. Forgive us for vacations. At least I hope so. I am not apologetics for a vacation. Everyone needs some time off
3 (12m 38s): And onto today's topic.
Jesper (12m 40s): So on this podcast here, we have often talked about multiple streams of income and we even have two and a pen on episode 66 to talk about this very topic. And one such extra stream of income is to create an online course. And since this is something that we do, we thought it might be worth recording an episode to share a bit about our experiences and give you some further insights as to whether or not recording a course or publishing course, creating a course, whatever you want to call, it could be something for you to aim for us will be it now, or maybe later on in your career.
Jesper (13m 22s): Absolutely. It was, it's definitely an interesting experience. You should. There's a lot to go through and a lot to ask yourself, like, if this is something that you want to try and there's everything from the technology technological aspects to, you know, are you comfortable teaching and what do you have to teach and do you know enough to teach it? Those are all questions. I'm sure they're going to be going through your mind of how do you even get started? It sounds great from the outset, but when you get into the nitty gritty, there's a lot to unpack.
Jesper (13m 54s): Yeah. Yeah. And diva, I think there's a lot of different topic areas here that we can cover upon. I have a few different ones marked out in my list of things that we can talk about. But, but I think actually before going there, there was one thing I really wanted to mention before we got to find to the weeds here. Okay. What does that, because, well, basically I feel like we should mention how you have insights and you have something worth to share.
Jesper (14m 25s): And we all do, even when we don't think that we do, and I'm saying this upfront, because many will often think like, well, who am I to consider teaching anything? I'm not the world's most foremost expert on this subject. And while that might be true, remember that we've all acquired some skills that someone else haven't. So you might think that something is easy and perhaps you would even be thinking, well, everybody knows this, but the fact is that not everyone does.
Jesper (14m 57s): So I'm just saying it because don't let your decision on whether or not to create the course be influenced by whether or not you feel like you are enough of an expert. So I'm not trying to say that anything is a subject for costs. And I'm also not saying that anybody can teach any kind of subject, but I'm just addressing the mindset of you putting yourself down here. Because if that's the only reason you're ignoring this potential extra revenue stream, then please stop doing that part at least.
Autumn (15m 27s): Yes. Do you have something, something you do is more knowledgeable to some, you could help someone else, whether it's a course or whether it's you're mentoring somebody online or just answering a question, you have some skill that is worth considering as you know, could you do something else with it, use it as an income stream or, you know, if you're just really generous, helping other people out.
Jesper (15m 50s): Yeah. So I have, let me see here. I have a number of different areas, but they no particular order so we can dive in wherever we want, but I don't know if there's any, is there any place you prefer to start or do you just want to me to go down the list here?
Autumn (16m 6s): I think because if I were going to start, I would probably go towards the technology cause that's what I have set up, but I could definitely say just with everything else. I don't know if you have on your list, how you learn to do online courses, if that's what you're going to do, because that was definitely something I went out and got help on and spend quite a lot of money learning how to do these suckers. So if that is one of your areas of topics, if not, I definitely want to add it in that way.
Jesper (16m 36s): So maybe you can just start with that one.
Autumn (16m 39s): Sure. So I will say that I, when I first considered online courses, it has been after I had taken actually Nick Stevenson's course, your first 10 K readers. So he had taught me a lot about book marketing, but I realized I'd already been blogging and helping other authors. And I think that's sort of the light bulb moment when you realize, Hey, I'm already doing this. Can I, can I get paid to do this too? I have a really unique viewpoint on how to do something. And I thought about it, but even, you know, I know technology, I had a blog, I do websites, but I know how to do a course.
Autumn (17m 15s): So I've actually taken not one but two courses on how to build online courses. And if you want to know what those are, if you have any, you want suggestions, you know, just drop a line in the comments and I can let you know some good options that are out there for learning to build a course, but definitely it is a whole new ball game. So even if you think, you know what goes into it, there's some great ways of getting stepped around to learn how to build online courses and not get too lost in the weeds.
Jesper (17m 48s): Yeah, I think that's fair, but maybe you could also add a bit, a bit about more the technical side of things. You know, what kind of things do you need to set up from a technical perspective in order to actually release a course and having people login through a portal where they've paid to get access to and then they can watch the what's each of the modules online and all that stuff. Maybe you can say a bit more.
Autumn (18m 12s): Yes. So that's definitely part of it. I, there are two types of courses. So you can do sort of a live online one like through zoom. There's a lot of people right now on zoom doing live courses, or you can do these prerecorded courses. And most people end up doing, you know, a small combination of, of both doing a live one. I've run both. And I definitely prefer the less stress of having a prerecorded course. And to do that though. So you're going to need a website with a URL.
Autumn (18m 43s): It's gotta be something different from your current blog or your current website, or at least it's gotta be a sub domain because course material needs a specific theme. It's all these videos. It's a lot of stuff. And you don't want that on a website, like say where you're selling your books or you're selling, you know, something else or just blogging because Oh, the one can slow down the other. And it's just a nightmare. You don't want to do that because these things need to be fast. And you're going to need a plugin of some sort that protects your data.
Autumn (19m 13s): This is something you don't want to skimp on. You don't want people to be able to hack it. And you don't want people to access stuff that they haven't paid for. And you want it to be friendly so that when they haven't paid for it, it directs them, you know, to where you go and buy the course, instead of saying, Hey, bad, bad, bad you. So those are important things. And while you're doing that, so you're going to need you. Can't just host your videos on YouTube because as I'm sure you've noticed YouTube likes to insert other things like paid advertising. Could you imagine taking a course, you just paid like a couple hundred dollars for, and there's advertising for something on it.
Autumn (19m 49s): Oh my goodness. It'd be so embarrassing to me. I was creating this course. So you're going to need something like Vimeo someplace that hosts your videos that you know, they're not going to stick on advertising a lot. If you're not hearing this, there's a lot of stuff I mentioned that said paid setting up a course is not cheap. You are investing hundreds of dollars, not only in equipment to do the recording, you're going to be doing, you know, you want a good microphone. You want a good sound quality, but you also want to pay for a good URL, good software, a good theme for the course, there are our websites.
Autumn (20m 26s): Like I think, think, terrific. There's a few other ones that will host your course for you and take away some of this pain, but then they're getting some of your money as well and you have to fit their requirements. So there's a lot of pluses and minuses, but the very least, unlike writing a book where you need a way of writing and to pay an editor and a cover artist, you're going to be looking at some startup fees. So when you're thinking about going into this, you know, schedule a thousand $5,000, this is what it's going to take just before you even make any money.
Autumn (21m 0s): This is going to be something you're going to have to put some money in the time and investment into.
Jesper (21m 5s): Yeah, it's, it's an investment indeed. Right? It's something. But of course, once you've set it up, then you can keep adding more cost stuff onto the platform that you have and so forth. So it becomes easier over time. Right. But I think it's similar to when we were talking about editing in a past episode where we said that when you're first starting out quite a chronically, you need the developmental editor then. And that's the most expensive one. And then later on in your career, you don't maybe don't really need it. And then that's when you have the money for it, but you don't need it anymore.
Jesper (21m 37s): So that's the irony of the whole thing.
Autumn (21m 39s): It really is. This is a one of those ones where you're going to be hurting a little bit up front, but once you get it going and I will both fully admit, it's not like you're going to relaunch one chorus and make tons of money. A lot of it comes down to just for like writing books, marketing, and growing your audience. All those steps are going to apply to doing a course as well. And so the investment just like with your books, it might not come on the first course, it might come on the third, the 10th, or at least, you know, not this year, next year.
Autumn (22m 10s): So those are some things you need to weigh as well as the time commitment. I mean, I think to me as a writer, that was my biggest gasp I was writing. I was, I released four books in one year and then I think I was writing another one and I decided to do this online course. I built the ultimate fantasy writers guide. It took months. And that was before you and I teamed up. I still, I tell you stories about time. I was hold up working on this thing by myself.
Autumn (22m 40s): And this is why you find a partner. I highly advise finding a partner to do this.
Jesper (22m 46s): No, but that's actually also one of the categories I had listed here is the effort. Because even even bigger, even when you told me before we started doing our joint courses and recording those, you told me in advance that this is a lot of work. And even though you set, so it still took me by surprise how much work goes into it. It's incredible. The amount of work you need to put in. So I'm not saying that to scare anybody off. I'm just saying it because I think, well, I cannot underline it enough that it requires more effort than you think you might think that I can put this cost together in two months.
Jesper (23m 22s): Well, yeah. Most likely you can. It's not until you get into, well, you need to create all the, all the slides. For example, if you're doing a screen sharing thing, you create all the slides. You need to record the whole thing. You need to know what you want to say. So usually you need to put a script together upfront at at least to know what you're going to say on every single slide so that it's coherent and it makes sense. And then once you're with all the recording, then you have to start editing the whole thing, which takes probably, I would say twice to three times, as long as it takes to record it.
Jesper (23m 55s): And then yeah, then you need to upload it. You need to put all the technical pieces together to put it in a, in a, in a nice order on so that the students who then log into the platform can actually click on module one, for example. And then this year old re relevant video stair and so on. So it's, it's just, it's a lot of work. That's more than you think
Autumn (24m 15s): It really is. I, I think it's sort of like, you know, building a house or something. They say it's going to take one and a half to two times as long as you think, and probably be at least one and a half to two times as expenses of you as you think. So it is definitely. I know when I, like I said, when I hit it, I think my writing crashed. I just, if I touched something fun to write the entire time of making that course and getting ready to go, I would be shocked. I really definitely stalled.
Autumn (24m 45s): Yeah.
Jesper (24m 46s): For me or the last couple of months. Right? I mean, I've been recording our free self publishing course. So for the last couple of months and I have not done any writing it, that's the only thing I do while you're editing our nonfiction books. That's all the things I've been doing. Nothing else. It takes forever. And that's true. I mean, we like doing it, so it's not a complaint whatsoever. It's just, I'm just stating the truth here. So the people go into this with open eyes, you know, understanding that it's not something you can easily sort of do with your left hand over there while your hand right hand is writing something.
Jesper (25m 17s): It's not like that.
Autumn (25m 18s): No. I mean, if you're going to try to keep your, you know, if you're a fantasy author and you're trying to keep your books going while developing a chorus on something, have, I don't know, maybe we're gonna teach some people reading or something like that, but something about fantasy or whatever you want to teach, it could be something that we have speed reading, maybe not even related to books. You're gonna have to be really good at budgeting your time to be able to keep both projects going, because the course building can become overwhelming because there are so many little, it's a network of things you need to do and create and put together.
Autumn (25m 54s): And if you're not technologically savvy, you're going to be learning. You know, you're either going to want to hire someone to do it, or you're going to be learning some stuff that might not come fast to you. And so it's a huge hurdle and there's going to be something that's going to stall you and you're going to have to stop and scratch your head and maybe get some help. And definitely take that as a, as a warning. I think, I mean, when I was first started, I had a full time job. I was writing, I was doing this was that as Mary and I was just like, you just wanted to throw everything up in the air and run away and say, what did I do?
Autumn (26m 26s): But you know what, three, four years later, I'm like, this is awesome. We came up with our character building chorus. I mean, we did that in less than a month. We created a course, but that's because we had three years of experience doing this. So it was not like it came out of left field and it was a short course. So gosh. Yeah.
Jesper (26m 44s): Yeah. So maybe while we're talking about courses or so, and all that stuff, maybe a good thing to just talk a bit about this as well. How do you figure out what you could be teaching about in your course? So, as I said before, you know, it's not like you don't have to have a PhD in the topic that you want to teach. I think it's much more a matter of trying to find things where your skills and life experiences serve your will and then maybe build a list of things that you could potentially teach.
Jesper (27m 17s): But the underlying thing here, and that's coming out of everything, we just mentioned about how much work it is that you have to be passionate about the topic that you want to teach. If you don't have passion driving you you're, you're, you're probably not going to finish the course and making it available for students because you're going to die somewhere in the middle of the process there, because it's so much work, right. It has to be because you love it and you want to teach it. And that's why, what you're going for. Yeah.
Autumn (27m 48s): Yeah. If you thought writing a book was hard, build a course. So that's a real, if you really want to challenge yourself, build a course, but again, it do it because sort of like with writing, not because you think you're going to be a New York times bestseller, but because it is something you are passionate about and you do want to share, and you really think you can help people a unique view on how to do something that you don't see being taught out there as a great reason to write a course, just it can like really Aspro saying is you don't have to be the world's best expert.
Autumn (28m 20s): You have to have a way that's understandable that you can break it down and teach it to someone. And if you have people come up to you saying, you know, could you teach me how to do this? Or, you know, so, and so said that you taught them how to do this. And they really, you know, are understanding it really well. And could you share that with me? Look at those things. Those are wonderful gifts that not everyone has. And if you can share that with someone that is fantastic, you can change someone's life either a small way or a big way. That's
Jesper (28m 50s): Wonderful. Yeah. And I would also say a bit of a business advice here is that once you have a topic in mind of what you would like to teach, try and go on search a bit on the internet to see if there's already something similar out there. And the logic sort of words works the other way around here than what you might think. Meaning that if you find some stuff out there, some other causes that are already teaching this similar topic, that's actually a good thing because it's a sign that there is a market for it.
Jesper (29m 22s): If you're the only one in the world with a course on this particular puppet, a topic here, you can probably, well, maybe not, but that might be a chance that you are so unique that there is not really a goal, a good goldmine for you to open here. It's, it's more like a, a case of, there's not enough interest out there for this particular topic. So try to see does something exist already? And if it does then yeah, that's a good sign and you're good to go. Yeah.
Autumn (29m 51s): And it actually gives you a wonderful opportunity. They say to look for what's called pain points. So to look for in blogs and comments reviews, look for where people are saying, I wish they'd covered this, or I have this problem. And I just wish someone would help me solve it. Those pain points, those are so valuable. Those are give you going to give you ideas, deeper ideas on you're already having selected this topic. You can start making a list of those saying, Oh, these are what people want answered.
Autumn (30m 23s): And that will help you develop a course.
Jesper (30m 26s): Yeah, that's true. And I think there's important point there as well in the sense that you need to be crystal clear in what the key learnings are for the students who takes the course, because in an online environment, like we're talking here selling courses online, you know, people are clicking around. That's S you know, we, you and I do that as well. You know, when you're searching for something, you click around on different websites. If it's not from the landing page that I arrive at, if it's not crystal clear within a couple of seconds that this one is speaking to me, it's telling me that I'm getting exactly what I want.
Jesper (31m 5s): I'm gone as quickly as are right there. Right. Just clicking. This is not the one move on. And that's the way that the online environment works. Right? So you need to, you need to keep that in mind and what I would also say, and maybe we can tie this into another point that I wanted to make about audience, but I would say that in our experience, it's actually mostly the people who we get onto the email list in the earliest stages of the process that ends up buying the cost later on.
Jesper (31m 41s): So for example, we do offer some free videos to people so that they can see our teaching style and they can get a feel for cost material and sort of understand the style of our teaching. And then if they think that it's helpful before we even ask them to buy something, like, for example, the ultimate fantasy writer's guide, which is our premium course for writers. So, and I'm saying that because like with writing or building an author career online courses are not a get rich, quick scheme at all.
Jesper (32m 20s): You know, it takes work and it takes time to build an audience in whatever niche that you have chosen to do some teaching in. And that alone is an incredibly amount of effort. And I can see as well. I mean, we've had quite some sex success with running ads and basically getting loads of people onto our email list. That way, you know, when we opened the ultimate fantasy writers guide, we only do that twice per year.
Jesper (32m 51s): And then we have run some Facebook ads leading up to those opening times and directing people onto our email list where we then give them some of those free videos that I mentioned there too, to get so that they can get a feel for our teaching style and, and, and the quality of the course. But what we do see is that most of the time they won't buy the course. At that point, they will actually just stay on the list and then they might stay there for a year, sometimes, maybe a year and a half, and then they will buy the course, like two cycles later when they've gotten a lot of emails from us in the meantime, over the year, maybe we've given them lots of valuable stuff on the email list.
Jesper (33m 34s): Like we always do. And that's totally cool. You know, there's nothing wrong with people signing up to the list and then they decide not to want to buy it. That's absolutely fine. But I'm more saying it from the perspective of the course creator that you need to have in mind that while you can advertise your course and you should, it does not mean that people will buy it straight away. Anyway, it might take time.
Autumn (33m 56s): Absolutely. It can take, I think that this is one of those things where having that in mind, like you cannot get frustrated and then go delete your entire email list or something. It's a, you know, as long as people are opening emails and you're providing them interesting and informative material, that's what you need. It's going to take time to get them around, to trust with courses, especially with this is not a two 99 or a four 99 novel. This is something that's going to cost you no money, be it $20 or $2,000.
Autumn (34m 28s): It's going to cost someone money. And the higher it is, the more they're going to have to trust you that you're really going to deliver on what you're asking, you know, what it's going to cost them. And so you gotta, you know, what, whatever you're selling has got to be worth the amount of money to this person to put it in, and that trust not come. You know, maybe you've got something fantastic and they'll willing to open up their wallet the first week, but most likely, especially in today's current pandemic, recessive world, you're going to have to ask people to really trust you.
Autumn (35m 4s): And you're gonna got to deliver some really good information so that they will be happy with what they're getting. And that's probably gonna take a lot of getting to know you time. So expect to be putting yourself and your information out there in such a way that you can be building that trust and letting people know whatever it is that you're good at and what you can teach them. You really can deliver on that.
Jesper (35m 29s): Yeah. And you touched a bit on pricing there, so maybe that's where we could go next. So to talk a bit about how do you know what, how to price your cost basically. And I think that, again, we talked about market research a moment ago, right? Check out. What if there's other people teaching the same thing out there, and that will give you an idea about what do people normally charge for a similar kind of course, but again, probably the opposite of what you might think here, put yourself at the top of that price range, because, and I don't know why does this, maybe you do, and maybe you can elaborate a bit more often, but for some weird reason, the people who buy products that are cheap are also the ones who complains the most.
Jesper (36m 22s): And I don't know why that is, but it is just so that if they get a very cheap cost, that then they'll start complaining about the one thing that they don't like instead of the 99 things that was great. And they, they learned it's just the premium premium students who are willing to pay the premium price for courses are also the ones who are much more serious about it. And as well, and that is probably the most important aspect of this whole thing about pricing is that because they pay more for it, there is also a very much higher likelihood that they will actually go through all your cost material and they will do the learning and only then will then they start, they will start talking to other people about this cost that they took.
Jesper (37m 6s): Whereas the ones who buy a course for $29, for example, they will probably not take it. Maybe they will skim through one module and start complaining about something in that one module without having seen the whole thing or whatever. I don't know, but pricing matters not only in determining how much you're going to earn, but also what type of audience you are building.
Autumn (37m 28s): Absolutely. I mean, goodness knows I have a couple of graphic design courses and even I think a marketing course and something else, and I pick them all up for probably less than $20. I always pick them up on when they're on sale and stuff. And you know, I don't think I finished, I finished one of them, I think, but those courses, I paid 500, 601 case over a thousand dollars for, I finished those. I did the homework so,
Jesper (37m 55s): Well, at least you're not the ones who complain.
Autumn (37m 57s): No, I was never the one who was complaining. I'm just one of the ones that just kind of never get around to finishing it. It's sort of like this whole symptom we talk about with free books. If you're giving away a free book, you probably it's just going to be sitting on someone's e-reader and they never get around to it. So you have to watch out for that. So, you know, check out the competition, see what they're doing with their pricing. And you're going to see a range you're going to see, especially like the master classes that are out now. I think it's Neil Gaiman teaches writing for $99 as well for the amount of time and effort and work you're going to put in this.
Autumn (38m 32s): You're probably going to charge more than nine, $9 and you might, Oh, I can not compete with, I know Jane Patterson has one. I can not compete with that as an author, you're going to be teaching something different and you're probably are going to put, you're putting a different price tag on it, and that's fine because you want to be on the higher end, but you're because you're not Neil Gaiman or James Patterson, you're going to have to build up that trust with your audience. And once you do, they will be there. It won't matter what, what the price point. Well, no matter a little bit, you don't want to be on the like three times the highest other one you want to be within the upper end of the range you find.
Jesper (39m 9s): Yeah. And I, and of course, I mean, all of this goes without saying that we, of course assuming that the course you're building is of high quality, not only in the stuff that you're teaching, but of course also in the way that your entire course, all the modules are structured in a logical fashion, sort of people can follow through and they understand what you're teaching. I mean, we assuming all of that, but maybe I have to say that out loud as well, that it's not a matter of putting some
Autumn (39m 36s): Half-assed and then charged $500 for it. You know, that's not gonna work, that's not gonna work. And again, if you have, if you haven't taken a lot of online courses and again, they're expensive. So it's kind of hard. They take a lot of time, but if you haven't taken a lot than taking at least one course on how to build these courses, there's a whole methodology, there's a psychology to it. And there's a technical aspect of how to do it. So it's organized. And so that students will be learning from it. And that they'll be most likely to get to the end because of course, that's the goal.
Autumn (40m 6s): You will, you're doing this, not you, hopefully, you know, yes, that's a revenue stream, but hopefully because you want people to actually finish it and go on and do something great with it. So you want to make sure you know, how to actually teach. And if you're not a teacher by nature and you don't know how to organize, to teach to students, definitely look into how to do that before you try to put something together because it's not throwing paint at the wall and seeing what sticks, it doesn't work that way.
Jesper (40m 35s): No. And I as well, when it comes to marketing your course and building that audience, I think one of the things that we have actually found very helpful is to use affiliate marketers. Isn't it?
Autumn (40m 45s): Yes, they are wonderful. When you can get a peer to buy into what you're doing and selling and to put their name on and say, yes, this is good. And send it out to their audience. Ah, it's an exponential increase in your reach and your trust people, you know, they're saying they have an audience that who trusts them. And they're saying that you're good guy. Oh, that's wonderful.
Jesper (41m 11s): Yeah. I mean, I've heard some of the experts say that affiliate sales should only be considered like the icing on the cake and it should not be the main driver. And I mean, it's not the main driver for us. And of course I can only speak for our experience. Maybe, maybe we're the odd bunch in the flock. I don't know. But at least for us affiliate sales are making quite a number of, of the sales and not, not the majority, but it does make a difference. It does. It's not, it's, it's more than just icing on the cake for sure.
Jesper (41m 42s): But of course, I guess it also depends on which affiliate marketers that you're getting. And also of course, how big an audience do those people have and how well do their audience trust them? When they're saying this is a good thing you should consider buying this stuff, you know, do they trust that person enough to say, okay, I'll give it a try. Because again, as we talked about, these are premium courses, so then they're not cheap. I mean, we're talking probably like four or five, $600 for access to a cost, right?
Jesper (42m 12s): So it's usually not something you buy off of somebody, you have no clue who they are. Right. It takes time. You, you, you built the audience. And then at some point, as I said before, with our email list, right? I mean, they've been on our emails list maybe for a year. And then they feel like, okay, you know, we've been giving enough good quality content here that we feel comfortable that, that we can buy the course. And, but of course, I mean, as we also do with our courses, we do give a 30, 30 day money back guarantee. No questions asked to anybody.
Jesper (42m 43s): So if they do sign up for the course and they don't like it, just let us know and we will refund the money and no questions asked. That's absolutely fine. Yeah.
Autumn (42m 51s): So then I mean that money back guarantee is a huge way of building trust with people. When you're asking them to put out that much money is to know, you know, this is something that I can try out and enough, I realize it's not going to fit. That's fine. And yeah, it's something that you do.
Jesper (43m 8s): Yeah, indeed. So I don't know, what's there more topic areas or should we sort of get into, well, actually we, at the point of this module on, well now I'm in complete a cost methodology here. I'm talking about modules instead of podcasts throughout this podcast episode. That was what I was trying to say. We mentioned our premium costs, the ultimate fences writer's guide a couple of times.
Jesper (43m 40s): And actually it just happened. So as well that we will soon here on the 31st of August, open the doors for another batch of students for the first time in six months. Yeah.
Autumn (43m 51s): Hey, I always love this time of year.
Jesper (43m 54s): Yeah. So indeed we only opening a twice a year as we've explained. Right. So we wanted to mention it here since it is very much on topic of what we've been talking about throughout this. I was just about to say module there again. I meant episode,
Autumn (44m 10s): We've both been doing slides on courses. So no wonder we have module and sessions and lessons in our heads, but yes, it is wonderful that the guide will be coming out again. So this is our premium course that steps you through from idea development, to how to write a novel character's, world-building how to grow an audience, how to edit format, the book and how to design an author platform. Or we tried to make this a OneStop if you're going to do a course on how to write in the market books, this is the course.
Autumn (44m 46s): And that's what we did.
Jesper (44m 47s): And we have students who have said, yes, this really does work. Yep, indeed. And we have included a link in the show notes. So from there you can sign up if you're interested. And as we just said, there was a 30 month, but I'm trying again, 30 day money back guarantee. No questions asked. That was what I wanted to say. I guess I'm getting tired now,
Autumn (45m 10s): Which is it's late for you. So that's only fair, but I was laughing cause I was the one who couldn't speak before we started recording.
Jesper (45m 16s): Yeah. But I actually have a testimonial signed sound, clip queued up. And that also prevents me so that I don't have to talk anymore. So I put the, I think I'll just going to play that for us as a lead out here.
Autumn (45m 42s): Hi everyone. I'm Katherine. I'm currently working my way through the ultimate fantasy writers guide and I've been finding it very helpful. One of my main problems has been plotting. I had a very hard time getting my plot to go through and have continuity after going through the workshops for the plotting section I have now got a full plot and have begun writing. It has been very helpful for me and I'm sure you will find it very helpful too. Thank you.
Jesper (46m 14s): Hi, I'm Jan, do you read fantasy author? And I just watched autumn bread's a launch day module. It was a really informative, had a lot of great information. She had ideas I hadn't ever thought of before. Really excited to implement her ideas and launching my own book. Thank you, autumn.
Autumn (46m 39s): I highly recommend the ultimate fantasy writers guide because it's one of the best programs I've ever seen. It not only covers pretty much everything about writing from start to finish, including fan bases and staying confident and everything. It also has things like languages and naming your characters based on that. And it has Matt making it. It's just so excellent.
Jesper (47m 7s): So that was a few words from former students. And again, there was a link in the show notes, if you are interested so you can go and check it out and all the details will be listed on the page that you arrive at, where you can see everything you want to know X,
Autumn (47m 25s): And we hope to see you there. And if you happen to be listening to this after course has gone and launched, we do do this every six months. So there are ways just you send us a comment. There are ways of getting on our email lists, like the starter kit that you can watch and get to know us and get on our mailing list. And that way you won't miss the next time we launched the course. Okay. So next Monday we will be back on track and talk about what we intended to talk about today as well.
Narrator (48m 1s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the am writing fantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Ottoman Yesper on patrion.com/and writing fantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the M writing fantasy podcast going, stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Have you ever had someone ask you what you did and lose all interest when you say you write fantasy? What is with that? A strange prejudice lingers around fantasy writing and writers.
In this episode, Autumn and Jesper discuss why there is a perception fantasy writers aren't "real" writers, some facts and stats on fantasy stories and writers, why the perception might be changing, and what to do if you encounter it!
As we mention in the show, TODAY is release day for our three new books on developing story ideas, and plotting. Pick them up at:
Plot Development: A Method for Outlining Fiction - https://books2read.com/Plot-Development
Plot Development Step by Step: Exercises for Planning Your Book - https://books2read.com/PlottingWorkbook
Story Idea: A Method to Develop a Book Idea - https://books2read.com/StoryIdeas
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to the am. Writing fantasy podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need an literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt, and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I am Jesper
Autumn (31s): and I'm Autumn.
Jesper (34s): This is episode 84 of the am writing fantasy podcast. And today's episode was actually inspired by something that you came across on the internet. Autumn. It was, this was another debate that I hear a lot. And actually just, just last week, ended up with this kind of impression from somebody. And it's like, Oh, you're a writer. What are your right? Oh, you write fantasy.
Autumn (1m 1s): It is, you know, that condescending tone. And, and I've been dealing with it my whole life, because I've always, since I was like three, I wanted to be an artist. Since I found out that there was such a thing as people who draw for a living, that's what I wanted to do. And in, I don't know about the rest of the world, but there's a term in the U S that people, especially in the eighties, just to go like, Oh, artsy, fartsy, like it's less, it's a less of a career. Like somehow Leonardo DaVinci was a hack.
Autumn (1m 34s): I told him no Rembrandt shouldn't have been born. I don't know it's and I've had it my whole life. And it's gotten under my skin. I will admit it. This is one of my pet peeves. And so I'm so excited about this episode, because if someone has ever said this to you and whether, you know, Oh, you're a fantasy writer. And then of course my favorite comeback, I have relatives and friends who have said, well, if you want to write a really good story, I've got a great one for you. If anyone has ever said that to you, dear listener, this episode has the answers for you.
Jesper (2m 11s): Yeah. And I actually wrote down what the, you know, you sent me a screenshot of what this stuff do from Randy's actually wrote it down just to remember it. So I can just quote it here, what it was. So it was this college professor who had sat at a writing class quote, welcome to creative writing. And by the way, you will not write fantasy ghost stories, paranormal or science fiction in this class as this is a creative writing class and quote.
Autumn (2m 41s): So I don't know what in the world this professor has to do, but in today's episode, we'll explore why some looked down upon defense is stronger. And maybe we can talk a bit about why instead you should be proud about writing. In fact, in the fantasy show. Absolutely. I cannot wait, but before we get there, it's been a week. So how have you been? And I do want to give everyone a quick warning. We are finally getting rain in Vermont. It is wonderful. And of course it's coming in the form of thunderstorms. So any extra auditory effects are not intended, but just enjoy the ambience please.
Jesper (3m 19s): Yeah. Well, at least right now, I can't hear anything of that sort. Let's see. Okay. Maybe we'll get a loud thunder. All of them
Autumn (3m 28s): We'll switch to a horror genre or a thriller or something. But anyway,
Jesper (3m 32s): Yeah. So that's a certain mood.
Autumn (3m 35s): It does. So how are things in Denmark?
Jesper (3m 38s): No, it's good. It's good. Actually, my wife is not even here. She's in Finland these days because she had to, she had to go and deal with some builders who are currently renovating an apartment that we own up there. So she, she left a couple of days ago and she's gonna come back on Wednesday, but it's, it's really not healthy when she's not around in this house. You know, the boys that I we've already had pizza, ice cream cookies, popcorn and candy.
Jesper (4m 11s): You should think that she's been away for a week, but it's just like three days.
Autumn (4m 16s): What kind of example are you setting? This is horrible, but it's so funny. It's so typical. Come on.
Jesper (4m 23s): Yeah. I don't know where it is. It's like they miss their mom. Right. And then it's like, okay, what can we do to make the time feel a bit better? And they will. They will. Because normally as well, when I do my grocery shopping, normally they of course home with my wife. I usually do the grocery shopping in our family. But because she was traveling, I had to bring them, you know, the, Oh, they're not young kids as such, but they're not old enough to stay home by themselves. The oldest can, but he's not, he's not old enough to take care of he's younger.
Jesper (4m 54s): So I had to bring at least a younger, younger boy to the grocery shop, but then they both came. And then when we were there, of course they are looking at, into all the different things. And they were like, Hey, there's a vegan pizza here. We've never really, I've never noticed that there was one in the shop. And I was like, really? And they were like, yeah, yeah, we want to taste this stuff. And then, okay, well then we bought that. And then we, all of a sudden we had pizza, but then we also have to have some yeah. To search. So we've got ice cream and before you know, it, we come home with all kinds of unhealthy stuff.
Jesper (5m 26s): So I think it's good that she's returning the day after tomorrow because this is not going to sustain.
Autumn (5m 34s): It sounded, I always wanted to do like a college level study that if the reason women live longer than, than men is partially because what meant eat before they end up getting married, that span when they're in college and on their own. And they're drinking beer for breakfast and stale pizza for lunch. That is my theory of why, you know, most men have a shorter life span. So you're not this idea.
Jesper (5m 60s): No, I'm not doing a very good job on behalf of all men in the world. I'm also teaching the kids how to do when the wife is not there. That's okay.
Autumn (6m 9s): Either. Probably not. But you know, it's going to be fantastic memories. And you know, maybe you'll have some day when maybe they have kids you'll with regeneration, PE male only pizza party or something. And I think it's,
Jesper (6m 25s): At least they are saying in the evenings like, Oh, this has been a really nice day. So at least that's good because especially, especially the older one, he tends to miss his mom a lot. So at least it's good that he, you know, some of the candy keeps his mind preoccupied elsewhere.
Autumn (6m 43s): Yes. It's working like a charm
Jesper (6m 48s): Dude. But how about you?
Autumn (6m 50s): Oh, it's been a good busy week. I had some it's so funny. Cause we're going to be time traveling so much today. I've been doing some formatting for the books that we're releasing today. And that made no sense. No, isn't it. It's so strange. But we're recording this almost. We're almost at the car on the cusp of July. So we're almost a month ahead because summer vacations, these things happen. And so yes, it was a good achievement week of getting a whole bunch of long prep.
Autumn (7m 23s): All those, all these months, we have said, Hey, we're writing this book, we're putting this together. We're going to release this. We actually have them. I mean, they're on preorder. The formats are done where they're out to the typo Slayer team. We're getting feedback. It's so close. And it's just a weird juxtaposition that we're so close. We're almost releasing it. And in all honesty with your listening on this, the day it's released, no books are out there available. This is so exciting. So I, it is, yeah.
Jesper (7m 56s): Is the wonders of a prerecording, a lot of episodes because we want to have some time off during vacation. But, but yeah, if you go to Amazon or any online store where you normally buy your books, then you should be able to find them the, both the plotting book, the workbook associated to the plotting book and the how to do get story ideas and how to build a story premises. So if you just searched for either my name or Autumn's name on those stores, you should pretty much be able to find them quite easily.
Jesper (8m 29s): I guess the one thing that we don't know yet is some of the online stores are really weird when it comes to the fact that you are mentioning, for example, Amazon in the back of the book or something. If you write that anywhere, then some stores are really weird about it. For example, Apple is don't like that. So, well, because we're prerecording here. I can't say for sure if some of the stores will end up rejecting the book, but I have, I have a principle that I do not change the content of a book just because Apple don't like it.
Jesper (9m 3s): So if they don't like it, it will not be on Apple. You'll have to go somewhere else to find it. But for sure, Amazon it'll be on Amazon for sure. Kobo, it'll be there as well. Google books, it will be there. And then for the rest, I guess we'll have to wait and see how many of them, except the book files at least two or three places.
Autumn (9m 24s): Yes. At the very least, if you don't see it in a store, go to am writing fantasy and look for it in the workbooks there because we will be selling it off of our website and you can get it in whatever format you need. So if it's not on iTunes because Apple books as being a bugger, just come and get it from us and we will make sure you have it for whatever reader you choose.
Narrator (9m 47s): Oh, a week on the internet with the am writing fantasy podcast.
Jesper (9m 52s): So actually thought it was just worth mentioning how the am writing fences. Facebook group just keeps getting better and better
Autumn (9m 60s): Rowing and froing. It's been, it's like every time I turn around, there's another six people knocking at the door. Yeah. But I mean, this, this past week I had like in the morning I let in eight people and then in the afternoon it was like,
Jesper (10m 12s): What? Now there's a list of six more. I mean, it's crazy. But there was actually at some point in the past where we were speculating to move the group away from Facebook and try something else because the engagement was just very limited at that point in time. But Oh my God, I'm glad we didn't do that.
Autumn (10m 30s): No, it's been fantastic. And that's with them, you know, there's a lot of advertisers currently. Okay. We could look at word more recording this. So who knows what August will be, but there's been a lot of advertisers and things pulling from Facebook because of the politics and advertising policies. And it doesn't matter. The group is just outstanding.
Jesper (10m 50s): Yeah. And I have to say as well that I really like, and because this doesn't happen in all groups, but I think at this group, people are actually very good at following the rules of not self promoting stuff over the past week. I think I had to delete two posts where people were self promoting, but it does not have happened very often compared to how much that actually gets posted in the group. So I think that's very good.
Autumn (11m 16s): Yes. No, I agree. I mean, it's, you're on there more than I am and goodness, our moderator, Luke, a huge shoe shout out to him and you guys handle a lot of the heavy lifting, which I very much appreciate, but it is just, I mean, they're good. If something comes up, people are very good at not overreacting, not going crazy. They'll just, you know, the, let one of us know, say, you know, they'll, you can submit the post saying, Hey, I think there's something wrong with this. And it's been fine, but in general, everyone's so well behaved and so supportive and wonderful feedback.
Autumn (11m 51s): And the, the of questions and topics is just amazing. I mean, it's everything from people getting advice to people, pushing bits of stories. It's really got it all.
Jesper (12m 5s): Yeah. It's, it's in general, it's a very helpful group with a very positive tone. So if you're the listener have not joined us over there yet, then simply search for am writing fantasy in the group section of Facebook and you will find us and just apply to be let in
Autumn (12m 20s): And we'll get to you as soon as we can.
Jesper (12m 23s): It might take a bit, but sometimes it takes a couple of days, but we will.
Autumn (12m 27s): Don't worry. Yeah. It's not usually that long, but, and I want to give a big shout out. I already mentioned once that the type of Slayer team has been helping us out with our edits and the last reviews for the books. And they have been getting back to us already. I think we just gave it to them. But three, four days ago, people are booking it through some of these books and have great suggestions. So big shout out to everyone who has joined us on the typo Slayer team you guys are doing awesome.
Jesper (12m 55s): Yeah, absolutely. I think the ones that we got feedback for so far was the book idea book, which is a very short one. So that's probably why they are so fast, but I will bet you that it'll take awhile before we get feedback on the plodding book, because that's, that's a beast.
Autumn (13m 11s): Yeah. We'll have to see if anyone actually goes through the workbook doing the work, then it might take them a while to,
Jesper (13m 23s): So we started out with that quote from that crazy college professor before he must be slightly insane.
Autumn (13m 31s): What does fantasy not? Or what does create, you know, not creative writing. This is just, it boggles my mind. How is this not creative? I think it's the most creative pursuit out there.
Jesper (13m 41s): Yeah. But as well, I have to say he, he's not the only one who has like, I don't know, should we call it certain opinion about the fantasy?
Autumn (13m 51s): I think people have a certain opinion about the physical fantasy genre. Yeah.
Jesper (13m 56s): Because I feel like in, in writing fantasy, this is something that we are faced with. And also because of that, we have to sort of deal with that problem. If we can call it a problem or whatever,
Autumn (14m 8s): At least a perception that it's just, it's pervasive in some ways that, Oh, you're a fantasy Rother. You're not legit. And I have to admit when you look at some of the awards, like for speculative fiction, the Hugo is one of the only awards that are out there. So, you know, there's all these other wonderful awards that other writers can get. But if you want to get to the top, top, top of the food chain and speculative fiction, that's basically the Hugo, you got one spot.
Jesper (14m 36s): Yeah, indeed. It's like, usually at least I feel like if I tell people who maybe don't know me or only know me a little, you know, if they sort of ask her, so what do you do if I say that I'm, I'm an author, then they usually get very interested and they want to learn more. That's almost always the reaction I get, you know, people like to hear about what you're writing and what you're doing. And if you then tell them that you write fantasy, then the demeanor sort of changes a bit.
Jesper (15m 6s): And all of a sudden you feel like now I have to justify myself for, I mean, it's almost like, Oh, okay. And I don't know why that is, but it just, it happens more often than, yeah.
Autumn (15m 18s): I don't think, I don't think there's any fantasy author out there who probably has not experienced that where people are like, Oh wow, you're a writer. That is fantastic. Oh, you're right. Fantasy. I thought you were a real writer. I was like, wow. Really? So it's not real writing. That's I've heard that saying, but yes, I just, I am shocked. I'm really shocked that it's still in all of the movements and progressiveness that we haven't come to. The conclusion that fantasy is still real writing and I'm hoping we can blow that out of the water today.
Autumn (15m 54s): At least we will try.
Jesper (15m 56s): I don't know. I mean, there is, of course also the, the stigma around fantasy that it's something for nerds and geeks and stuff like that, you know, at least that has been, so when, at least when I was growing up, you know, it was a lot like that over the last 15, 20 years, it was a very much like a nerd and geek environment. Yeah. That's the whole fantasy stuff. I think it's starting slowly though, to become more mainstream. I mean, nowadays we have a stuff like game of Thrones and also the Lord of the rings movies that took to the screen some years back, you know, more like the general population they are becoming increasingly familiar with with, well, basically what the rest of us has known for ages.
Jesper (16m 42s): And that is that fantasy is awesome. Yes,
Autumn (16m 44s): Absolutely. I do think it came up with almost a whole generation of kids with thanks to Harry Potter books, that it was there. It opened up reading to them in a way that, I mean, reading was dwindling and Harry Potter came out and suddenly there's a surge of reading and it's all in fantasy. And those kids have grown up to their twenties now and they are, you know, some of them have kids and they're bringing them up with all of these stories and fantasy is doing really, really well.
Autumn (17m 15s): So I think that is exciting. So I think the perception is changing in the younger generation. I think if I told someone in their twenties that, Hey, I'm a fantasy author and I have met, you know, you know, you've met, you know, social parties and I tend to hang out with the younger kids. I think I've mentally think I'm only in my twenties and maybe it's because I write fantasy and they find out I'm a fancy fantasy author and we have the best conversations and we get so excited. And then you talk to the parents and they're like, Oh, what are you talking about? Oh, you're an author. Oh, you write fantasy.
Autumn (17m 45s): It's just like, you know, you hit the brick wall and very ashamed that that perception is still there. But I do think the younger, younger ish generation is going to get rid of that. And it's not going to be such a strange thing. They'll be excited about it.
Jesper (18m 4s): Yeah. And maybe it was because in the younger generation or the, the ones who are younger now, at least compared to, I mean, young is relative, but at least compared to us, maybe the younger generation compared to us, they, as you say, grew up with Harry Potter, but to us, the generation we are in, I mean, when I grew up, it was mostly like it was spontaneous and drag and stuff. It was just too Orden. It was well, there was a few fantasy books, like while I read dragon lands back then as well, but there wasn't a lot of it.
Jesper (18m 38s): No, really. I mean, it was different. And then over time then of course, well, we get those kind of mainstream trains that just pulled us through everything like, like a Harry Potter or a lot of the rings. And well, a lot of rings was back there as well. Of course, when I grew up obviously, but what was it I said before, like game of Thrones, I think game of Thrones is very oldest. Well, to be honest, I think he wrote it quite a long while back.
Jesper (19m 9s): But, but again, I mean a lot of this stuff, if you look at it from a sort of mainstream perspective, it didn't really catch on until maybe within the last say five, six, seven years,
Autumn (19m 23s): Maybe 10 years. Maybe I would agree at the outset of 10 years, I would agree that it's, that's where it's become culturally, especially the book part has become culturally accepted and popular where you can go up to somebody on the street and they probably heard of game of Thrones. So, you know, you can talk something fantasy where before it was like, maybe everyone, maybe half the kids in your high school, might've heard of dragon lands. And you know, a small percentage might have read some books of Shannara or the last unicorn or something like that.
Autumn (19m 54s): But there were, so it was like a little club and it was much more intimate and quiet where now it is like, literally you go to Starbucks and you can talk to somebody about, Oh, did you know the new Lord? All the drinks series is coming out. You know, people are excited about it and you hear it as a type of conversation. And I do think that is interesting.
Jesper (20m 15s): Yeah. I think so too big because basically, yeah, it would be a very small niece of people in your high school back when we grew up, that would actually read the paper.
Autumn (20m 26s): It's like the nut club that you really want to read defenses, you books,
Jesper (20m 31s): The rings back then it was like the nightclub reading that stuff.
Autumn (20m 34s): Yes. But I do think, and I think part of that perception is, I mean, even as a kid, I used to call it brain candy. Cause you know, I was, you know, top of my class and all that other crap doing well in grades. And you know, they had high hopes for me that I became a fantasy author. They're so disappointed. I would call it brain candy. You know, this was, you know, something I read to relax my brain, but I think that's part of the misperception is that there's nothing important and there's nothing true or gritty or real and fantasy.
Autumn (21m 9s): And I'm hoping maybe with games of Thrones. So with some of these bigger genres, I mean, they're looking at it as we're going to, I'm going to bring up some stuff today that looking at it from a moneymaking aspect, if people do not take this seriously for that reason alone they're fools. But I think there's a lot more to fantasy. I mean, it taught me a lot of perceptions and things about life and other people that I hadn't yet met and how to hold myself and be openminded because of the fantasy books I read because I was opened up to whole different worlds in different cultures and different ways of meeting people and stuff that you can't pack into this world.
Autumn (21m 47s): You can't talk about the Israeli Palestinian conflict without bringing up some kind of grudges and history lessons. But you take that and you put it in a fantasy world and you can unpack it and you can question things and you come out of it changed in a way you can't do when we're stuck and entrenched in our own cultural values. And I don't think there's any other genre really, that can do that as well as fantasy. And for me, I feel bad now that I spent so much time jokingly calling it brain candy because, Oh my goodness, you can teach people.
Autumn (22m 18s): You can open up their minds to so much stuff through fantasy that I don't think other cultures or John Rose can really enable you to do.
Jesper (22m 27s): Yeah. I don't know if this is true, but I also feel like now that if we sort of go with the premise here that that fantasy has become a bit more mainstream nowadays, I feel like those who still looked down upon the fantasy genre isn't as much anymore, your average reader. I think instead nowadays it's very often those who are closely associated with writing programs and stuff like that. Do you think I'm right in that?
Jesper (22m 57s): Or
Autumn (22m 58s): I think in many ways you're right. Like the incident I had just last week was more like, Oh, well, you know, my friend who's in publishing this advice and I was just like, wow, you know what? I've been in publishing since 2012. So good luck to your friend who told you this statement. That is completely not true. I just put it, you didn't take me seriously. And it was either my gender or it was because it was a fantasy author. I'm not sure why, but I didn't unpack it because I really didn't.
Autumn (23m 29s): That was my Instagram personality type of, I really don't give a crap. I'm busy, so I don't need his approval. But I do think that there are definitely some writers, but there are also so many conferences and there are a lot of things set up now targeting fantasy. But again, is it because that they truly support the genre or because they see this group that grew up on fantasy that are now in their twenties, in their thirties and they're making money and they love fantasy and they want to write it. So therefore they're going to go ahead and target an audience that is there and willing to pay money to do it.
Autumn (24m 3s): I don't know. It's hard. You would have to. I think it's different every case.
Jesper (24m 9s): Yeah. But I also think that, you know, those kind of closely at those people closely associated with weed riding probate, it could be the professor from before. Right. But I think a part of it is basically that they compare fantasy genre fiction with literary fiction would stay sort of feel like that's proper writing literary. Right. But, but I don't, I don't understand why we, the whole premise of trying to prove that fantasy have some sort of literary value why we even have to accept that entire premise there, you know, because when somebody frowns upon it and we go into this sort of defense situation, now I need to defend why I'm writing fantasy.
Jesper (24m 57s): And I have to explain it. I have to convince them, you know, it's sort of a bit like we insisting on grading fantasy on that same scale. Right. And I don't know, my question is more like, why do we even have to grade it at all? Why do we even have to try to defend the fact that we write fantasy? Why can't we just write fantasy? Because
Autumn (25m 19s): We write fantasy. Exactly. I do agree. I don't know why they have, it's a pedestal, you know, there's certain types and certainly certain genres that are considered the true writing. You know, this is the Jane Austin of writing and the Charles Dickens of writing. But I think in the second part of the quote, you know, that, that was from that post I had found, it was just like, you know, these were people who were writing like Charles Dickens was paid per word. These were not high end writers at the time.
Autumn (25m 53s): They just have come to us through the classics that now we consider it. But even to Shakespeare was, you know, people, some people hate it and they're throwing tomatoes at him. He was not revered in his time. And now, you know, even token, I think got a lot of flack when he first came out. But now it's just like, Oh my goodness, token, you know, I've met somebody who met him and you're like, Oh, you've touched a toll kid. It gives you chills. You're like, Oh my God, that's so cool. Your real life when he was 11, that was, would have been so awesome. So total fan girl, that is why, again, I agree with you.
Autumn (26m 28s): We don't have to compare ourselves to these other genres. These are our own pillars and this is an amazing Gianna. And we create amazing works that they don't know. They're not the same as other things as, as you know, Shakespeare's plays, which I happen to love. And he has some very fantasy ish plays. I did get to see a Midsummer's night dream, which is definitely on the fantasy scale as well as the Tempus. So yeah, those are fantastic plays and this has fantastic writing, but it doesn't have to be, you know, no one else has to write like that anymore.
Autumn (27m 3s): It's fine. You can write, you can write piers, Anthony. It's good. Yeah. True. And I actually, I have, I have a question for you and I don't even know what my answer is. Oh. So you're going to throw it on me. So I'm just going to throw it at you and see what you say, because I don't know yet. Oh, alright. I'm ready. Let's go. Okay. Okay. But do you think that fantasy Isha showing right that you either love it or you hate it?
Autumn (27m 34s): Yes.
3 (27m 37s): Okay. Thank you.
Autumn (27m 41s): Doesn't yes or no? No. I would say yes. And the first thing that popped to mind is my mom who has read my first, my debut novel. And she said, it wasn't bad for fantasy. So listen, Beth, she loves me anyway. But, and I definitely, I mean, even in my own family, I have struggled with the perception that I am doing well, and this is what I'm doing because I like it. I like I've mentioned, I've had cousins or aunts who have said, Oh, well, if you want a real story, if you want to write a real story, I've got the best idea.
Autumn (28m 13s): And you know, I would be a little bit catty going, Oh, you should write it. Good luck. You know, there's a lot more to writing than just saying, I have a good idea because believe me, if everyone who had a good idea was writing, wow. I mean, there are a lot of books, but there'll be a lot more books. But I do think that fantasy is definitely, there's very little gray. It's you either love it. And you tend to love it passionately. Even if it's just a subsection, like you've loved vampires or you love zombies or you love just something about it.
Autumn (28m 43s): It really gets it. It's like in your blood. And if it's not there, it's just kinda like whole-home lackluster. I mean, I, I like scifi, but I don't love scifi. If there's no fantasy element, there's no magic. And you know, star Wars is good, but I like it because it's a forest. So, you know, there's something else there I cowboy, you know, count, you know, there's a few genres that are okay. But I think when it comes to books, it's sorta like art. You either get it or you don't get it.
Autumn (29m 14s): And I do think there's a large perception who just don't get fantasy, but there's a large group that is now just ground swelling that does get fantasy and does love it. And they want something magical in this world. So they're looking for this and it's giving them something else because it's either this or post-apocalyptic dystopian tales. Do you want to read? Yeah. I quite like science fiction as well.
Jesper (29m 42s): I prefer fantasy over science fiction, but I do quite like science fiction because I also think that like fantasy science fiction offers a lot of escapism. You know, it's just those kinds of when, when you're in a different world in a completely different setting, that that's the sort of things that I, that I really like and science fiction can do that as well. But most of the times certain fictions don't have dragons.
Autumn (30m 5s): That's a download. I know it's a total shame and I've even written a few short shines fiction-y tails. But I just, I don't know. I come back to the magic and the characters and the world. And I just there's something there that I adore though. It is funny. Cause you how you mentioned escapism. I mean, some of the most poignant readers who have gotten back to me in the stories I remember from readers are the ones who said, you know, I've been recovering from this or I've been in the hospital and I found your book. And I just, there was one woman who has read everything except like one of the most recent stories.
Autumn (30m 39s): And she was apologizing for like, not giving a review, but she had just gotten diagnosed with breast cancer. I mean, I just sent her a free book. I'm just like, here you go. Really? It's not just, she's like, I'm going through chemo. It's been really rough. I mean, these are the stories that just stay with me. And it is people who are literally stuck in bad situations. Their body's failing them. They're in pain and they want to book. They want to go to a different world. And that's one reason, not all fantasy is happy, you know, happy escapism. There's definitely ones where, I mean, I look at game of Thrones and so many people die.
Autumn (31m 12s): I feel like I could read it. I could finish reading it now because I know which characters I could follow, but I can't finish reading it. Yeah. Yeah. Because George RR Martin isn't done. But as soon as he finishes, I'll consider it again. Instead of finishing it, I can read it in five years time or something like that when I'm, when I have more time on my hands, but
Jesper (31m 31s): I am. And when he was done reading it, writing it again in five years from now,
Autumn (31m 35s): It might be. But yeah, I mean, I think that's why I'm drawn to Nobel bright, which has a new, it's a new term for the fantasy where the heroes, you know, somehow get through, despite all the odds. And I definitely, that's why I like it is because it is an escapism where good things happen rather than grim dark, where just bad shit happens after, after bad crap. And so it's a tough one to get through. I've read a couple of grim darks and they were fantastic writing, but I know I was walking with the character through the swamp and I'm just like, if this was me in my life, I would just lay here and die because I could not go.
Autumn (32m 13s): It was too tough. So that's the light type of fantasy.
Jesper (32m 18s): But now, now did you set out all of that? I had a bit of time to think about my answers because, well, actually I started thinking that maybe it is every Shong row is either you hate it or you love it because you know, growing up, my, my mother always told me when I was child, that you need to something, at least once before you turn it down, because otherwise you don't understand what you're turning down. Very true. And, and then I was thinking, could I apply the same thing to reading?
Jesper (32m 50s): Meaning for example, I have a notion thinking that I don't like romance books. I don't want to read romance, but I've actually never read a romance novel. So you don't know. So I guess the premise could then be, well then I don't know if I don't like it, then I should try to at least read one novel to check it out. And I could then say the same thing to those who say that they don't like fantasy. Then I could say, well, at least read one novel before you judge it.
Autumn (33m 20s): But that's a really good one. That's true.
Jesper (33m 22s): Yeah. But that, yeah, because then I'm thinking, okay, if I'm supposed to read one to judge, whether I like to show him around at how do I know that the one that I read is actually strongly representative enough? And how do I know if it's good? I mean, if you go by the bestseller list, I read the way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson, which you must say is a huge, huge bestseller. And Brenda Sanderson is probably one of the biggest fantasy authors. One of them, at least that we have right now, but I did not like way of Kings.
Jesper (33m 53s): Wow. I really was not my taste. And I love reading fantasy. So if I gave that to somebody else, somebody else will love. I mean, a lot of people, a lot of people love those books. So that is perfectly fair. My point is more to say, how can you know that if I, for example, picked up a romance book right now and said, okay, I'll give it a try. How can I know that the one that I picked up is just because I didn't quite like that particular one, but maybe I would have liked another one. But then again, when I say all of that, I also feel like, but I don't really, really feel like even yeah.
Autumn (34m 29s): You know, it's true. So
Jesper (34m 31s): That's why I'm thinking, is it just every show on where, so that either you love it or you hate it, but you don't really feel like trying the other ones, even though you don't really know for sure whether you like it or not
Autumn (34m 42s): Follow my logic. I do. And I totally get it because I mean, I, yeah, like I said, there's a lot of genres that are kind of I've maybe I've read them, but you know, they didn't stick. I mean, I read some Nancy drew my best friend growing up, just love Nancy drew. So I tried a couple and that mystery is just not for me. I mean, I really like, I guess a Christie and as I joked, I, I wanna, I want an Agatha Christie book, a hardback, so I can use it as a knife holder in my kitchen. I just think that'd be so much fun, but I even Stephen King, I like some of his books, but his favorite ones are his fantasy ones.
Autumn (35m 18s): His horror ones don't do much for me. And I think that's fair. And there's a lot of fantasy. I love Lord of the rings, but I skimmed through the battle scenes because I just went on forever. They were not fast enough for it. Right. So everyone, as the more you read them, the more discernment you're going to have, like icing. If I went back and read DRA dragon LANSA I think I would have a totally different perception now as an adult reading it, then when I was, you know, I read the,
Jesper (35m 45s): I read the first book in the drag land series, a what is it like four or five months ago with my sons, because I wanted to read it to them. So I actually read it out loud to them. And I was a bit concerned about what it would feel like to read it as an adult, because I have so far memories of that series because I read it when I was like 12, maybe. So I was really concerned that now I'm going to ruin it for myself. And all my fond memories are going to get destroyed. That it's not that good anyway, but it was actually okay, good.
Jesper (36m 17s): But it is not written quite like you write novels today. So, but it was also written in, in a different time.
Autumn (36m 28s): I look, I look at that like the Shannara book. So when they turned that into a series, I was ripping my hair out because of, they didn't update some of the tropes and this is just not what people put up with anymore. So I much prefer modern fantasy because it is just varied and has depth. And the character building is so much more in the plotting is so much more, I don't want to go backwards, but I agree. Yeah. It's, it's changed. So I'm glad to know that though it held up.
Autumn (36m 58s): Cause I did recently, my first fantasy book was on Pern Anne McCaffrey. And I recently re-read the first dragon flight and I cannot finish a review on good reads because I just, I have such fond memories of the book and the stories. And I read the book and I'm like, I'm glad I don't have a daughter. Cause I would not let her read this because of a man treated her the way that is okay. In this book, I would be like, you're going to jail. So it was so sexist.
Autumn (37m 30s): It was horrible, but it was written in what the seventies. So I understand it from that. But looking back, I'm like, wow, this shaped my formative years. Seriously. That's horrible. I prefer stick to modern day fantasy. It's much better, much, much better.
Jesper (37m 47s): Yeah. I guess we could say that. But at the same time, I also feel like, I feel like there there's a logic to this fact that we just love some stuff and we hate other stuff. And we're not really that willing to cross that bridge and try something else. But I can see the logic in that argument, but at the same time saddens me slightly because it's like, so none of us, and I'm looking at myself here because I'm not taking my own medicine that, you know, none of us is willing to try some other stuff out that we just keep reading the same moment.
Jesper (38m 19s): But this is also why we keep talking about, and there's going to be a lot about this by the way in the self publishing course, once we release that later this year, but this is also why when you're creating your covers and all that stuff that you go with, the stuff that people expect, you don't try to be fancy. You don't to show them something new that they've never seen before on the cover or whatever. You just give them what they want because that's what they want to buy. But, and I understand all of that. I understand the marketing mechanisms of it. I understand why we have to do it. But at some level in my creative heart somewhere, it, it hurts me a bit as well as it's like, it's a shame.
Autumn (38m 56s): It is a shame. But I do think with the TV shows and things like that, that are out there, more people are going to be introduced to fantasy. Even if it's through a show and they're going to maybe go on to find authors and try it out. So they're going to be exposed to it. Where before, before we got the CGI effects and some of the amazing things they can do with film these days that, you know, they were never even exposed to it. I remember, I don't know what it was like in Denmark, but for dragon lands in the United States, if you were in the Bible belt, which is where I grew up, it was a ton of, I mean, I had to hide these books from my parents.
Autumn (39m 35s): I like got them from a friend of a friend just in the library. Oh, you're so lucky. No. If, if I hadn't had a friend who moved in from out of town who gave him to us, I would not have been able to touch them. You thought my fingers were going to ignite. They were very bad. And then you read them and you're like, seriously, you think this is bad. You should have you ever read Lolita? I mean, this is bad. So this, this was shocking, but yeah, this is a horrible perception. So back then, you know, it was a very strict mindset.
Autumn (40m 7s): And nowadays, you know, my parents have heard of game of Thrones at least. So they're much more exposed to it. And not just because of me as her daughter. So I think that there's at least a more, there's more gateways. It's a little there's gateway. Drugs of game of Thrones.
Jesper (40m 26s): Yeah. That is actually true. And it, what you just said reminded me as well, that when game of Thrones were sort of at its highest, when, when the whole series was going, I was in the office at the day job one day and I share office with a guy who's probably like 10, 15 years older than me. And he was like, so what are you watching these days? Usually, actually, we, we like to share what we're watching.
Jesper (40m 56s): So I said, well, we're watching game of Thrones. And he said that stuff with the dragons and stuff, isn't it. I said, yes. And I told him it's the best. And he said, really? I said, yeah, you should try it. And then he said, well, I don't, I don't like all the drag and stuff. He's older. Right. He's a bit different than, than that point of view. And I said, well, no, no, but there's so much more, there's so much depth in this stuff. There's a lot of politics as well. There's Wars going on, you just try it out, try and watch it. And then I think a couple of weeks later when I came back to the office and he was like, Hey, I actually tried out that game of Thrones series.
Jesper (41m 31s): And he said, my wife doesn't want watch it, but I love
Autumn (41m 34s): It. That's fantastic. And we converted one and that's actually, that's what I want to get to too, because, so, you know, maybe people don't like, and they don't want to try it. And so there's no way of getting rid of that attitude and you can let it roll off your back and just be the better person. Or you can come back with some stats and I like stats, so, Oh, I've got a question for you. So in the top 50 movies, and we're talking about grossing movies, so the top 50 grossing movies of all time, as of even counting since COVID, so this is shutting down in may when COVID hit and they stopped counting this stuff.
Autumn (42m 14s): How many do you think of the top 50 are fantasy related and I will give you a caveat. Do you count Jurassic park as fantasy or as not fantasy? Not okay. I wasn't sure. I mean the whole, I mean, it's there and it's not there. I think dragons, dinosaurs it's very close, but okay. So that changes it slightly. So how many books,
Jesper (42m 33s): How many of the top 50 are you can make me look really stupid here.
Autumn (42m 40s): Hey, you asked me a yes, no question. You had no answer for us. So this is come back. Well, we'll at least
Jesper (42m 47s): My question was sort of an opinion question. This is like,
Autumn (42m 51s): Okay. Okay. Well go for higher, low that if you want to be easy. Right?
Jesper (42m 56s): Okay. So in the top 50 movies of all time, you mean in the city
Autumn (43m 2s): Up until May 19th or something that shut down the cinemas in the United States, that's when they really stopped catching counting. And this was straight off Wikipedia. So this is like, you know, pretty current.
Jesper (43m 14s): Okay. But I can only go with my gut feeling and I can be completely off here because actually I have no idea, but my gut feeling is that it's probably not as many as one might think. So I will say 10 or less.
Autumn (43m 34s): You are completely abroad. Absolutely. The opposite out of the top 56 movies are not fantasy there's Titanic, like furious seven of a few other, like I mentioned, the Jurassic park is in there, but almost everything else ever Ginger's end game avatar, star Wars. Okay. I'm counting star Wars just because OSI fantasy science fiction. Yeah. I'm counting that.
Autumn (44m 4s): But I mean, if you go by that and then there's a lot of the Disney ones I see where Disney puts out movies, but I mean, Avengers end game was two point seven billion million, 2.7 million.
Jesper (44m 15s): But are we a bit lenient with how we classify fantasy right now? Or
Autumn (44m 20s): I'm being lenient in the scifi fantasy, but just to give people, if I went through again, that's when you get into the Disney, are you going to count Disney as fantasy? Like kind of Disney movies
Jesper (44m 32s): Are frozen. Are we talking?
Autumn (44m 35s): I mean, I think frozen is total. She just got, yeah. I would say that's fine. Yeah. So, I mean, I'd have to go through if you wanted to count out some of the other ones, but I counted most of them. Like you would consider kids ones incredible. Give me like three, four examples there. Okay. Incredibles, which is definitely, I mean, a lot of these are based on superhero, almost every superhero and captain American Lord of the rings, Spiderman, Avengers, black Panther. Okay. We skipped Jurassic park, so we have to skip that one, but that's really like, there's a lion King too.
Autumn (45m 9s): I don't know where that one would fit talking lions. Hmm.
Jesper (45m 14s): Yeah. It's not really fantasy aside. At least not as the way I think of fantasy.
Autumn (45m 18s): Yes. But, but it's still, if someone wants to argue, I mean, it's still a way over top of them. Yeah. I was gonna say, yeah.
Jesper (45m 26s): Even if we say it's yeah, indeed. I mean, even if we say it's just 30 out of 50, that's still a lot. It's a lot. I did not think that.
Autumn (45m 35s): Yeah. It's a lot more than I really, I was expecting a list of movies that were, you know, not even close that you could at least say how to shade a fantasy. These all do a lot of them do. So that was really surprising to me. And so that's one of the first one. And then I also looked up the top 20 books of all time, bestselling books of all time. And I looked at three different lists from Wikipedia book, cave, other web, you know, one that likes to keep things.
Autumn (46m 8s): And they're all very similar. And out of the top 20, I won't put you on the spot again, but out of the top 20 books, only nine of them. So nine of them are not fantasy. So again, over 50% are fantasy. So we have almost every Harry Potter, Harry Potter just hit the
Jesper (46m 28s): Right. That's the tough spots all over.
Autumn (46m 31s): Surprisingly, not Don OT is the number one bestselling book of all time. Of course they took out. They, they say the Bible is actually the top one. We won't say if that's fantasy or not. So we'll skip that. But, and then there's actually a Chinese dictionary, which I don't think that's fair to put in there, but that Lord of the rings is number four, little Prince is number five. It's one of the best selling books of all time. And then we get into Harry Potter. There's one Agatha Christie, which is mystery. The rest of them. You know, DaVinci code is also up there, but again, not, not quite fantasy, but at least goes into the mystery side of it.
Autumn (47m 6s): Yeah. But yeah, all the Harry Potter is Lord of the rings, the line, the, which, the wardrobe, the Hobbit, those are all in the top 20 best selling books of all time. So again, amazing. Look, this is over 50%. So everything else is a, you know, a dash of this and a dose of that, but solid 50% on true hardcore fantasy. So that's again amazing. And then I had to look up one, we'll close out with two more stats. So I wanted to look up a J K Rowling's just to see what was said about her and what her net worth.
Autumn (47m 39s): So they consider her net worth right now at a billion dollars. She denies that she has that much. But what I thought was really interesting was this sentence, and that is JK. Rollings is one of the wealthiest private citizens in the United Kingdom and the first author in the world to achieve a net worth of $1 billion. That is not by genre. That is the first author in the world in any genre to be achieved.
Autumn (48m 10s): 1 billion was a fantasy author, not a woman. So I thought that was fantastic. And I mean, alone, they said the last two, Harry Botter ha her last two Harry Potter books, Harry Potter and the half blood Prince and Harry Potter and the deathly Hallows. So nine and 11 million copies within 24 hours of their release, nine and 11 million copies. So yes, when someone says, Oh, you write fantasy, you go, yeah. Are you kidding?
Autumn (48m 41s): But I also want to touch on because we've mentioned game of Thrones. So George RR Martin, I looked him up very quickly too. And so he is obviously made a bundle and of course, everyone loves that. He he's still living. Like I say, a very frugal lifestyle. So he earns because from his books, from his writing, he has an estimated net worth of $65 million and earns about $15 million per year.
Autumn (49m 11s): He's not the number one highest paid author though. James Patterson is considered that he is at 95 million, but he is really, really up there. So yeah, I, you know, could you handle making $15 million a year because you're a fantasy author.
Jesper (49m 28s): I can do one that's okay.
Autumn (49m 30s): Yeah. You know what? I can take a million a year too. So I think that'd be fine. But once you, to me, it's like, once you look at the stats, when you look at the best performing movies, I didn't even get to the best performing T sheet TV shows. I got sidetracked. But when you look at what is being made, what is making money, why they're making money because people are going out there and watching it. So yeah, the next time someone asks me like, Oh, you're a fantasy author play. Cool. Hell yeah. This is where of it is people. This is a fantastic genre and you don't need an excuse.
Autumn (50m 2s): You should be proud of it. This is a one that is popular and makes money. People are craving. Well, of course, why wouldn't I write in it? I don't need to, I don't need a better reason than that. Yeah.
Jesper (50m 14s): I think for me, the main takeaway out of all of this is really that we should just leave other people to their opinions. You know, we should just stop feeling like we have to justify why we write what we love at all. And it's very true. We're not hurting anyone if they don't like it, go and read something else. I really feel like we could defend it. We could say, well, do you know how much money a J K Rowling owns?
Jesper (50m 45s): Do you know how great the song res and yes, it, I think those are all good and valid arguments, valuable arguments. And it's good to be aware of those steps that you mentioned. I think that it, I think it's very interesting if nothing else, but I almost as well want to say, maybe we should just stop defending it and just like, yeah, that's what I write because I love it. That's it? I think that'd be a very good place to be in, but until then, I would do not mind telling people.
Jesper (51m 18s): I like it because it makes money too. Fair enough. Alright. So next Monday, we are going to revisit the topic of Permafree books because autumn took her book free off Permafree. So we're going to analyze how that,
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What is it like to write for a massive franchise like Star Wars?
How do you get such writing opportunities?
Mur Lafferty - the Hugo and Nebula nominee, as well as, the winner of the John W. Campbell Award - joins the Am Writing Fantasy podcast to share insights, and a peek behind the curtain, on such an exclusive opportunity.
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (1s): You're listening to the am. Writing fantasy podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt, and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I am Jesper, and this is episode 83 of the am writing fantasy podcast. So Autumn is taking a well deserved break today, and I'm instead joined by Mur Lafferty, who is both a fellow podcaster, but she is also a highly accomplished writer herself. She has won the John W. Campbell award for best new writer and also a Hugo. And she's also a Hugo and Nebula a nominee for best novel. And I'm quite sure I forgot some of your other rewards there or about a huge welcome onto the am writing fantasy podcasts.
Mur (1m 8s): Thank you so much. I'm pleased to be here.
Jesper (1m 11s): Yeah. So before we get into all this that we're going to, we're going to talk somewhat about star Wars and how it is to write in a setting that is already established and, and just in general, your experiences with writing and star Wars, because you written a novel in there, but before we get that far, maybe, maybe you could just share a bit more about yourself and your writing apart from what I just mentioned.
Mur (1m 35s): Sure. I started, I guess, professionally, I started around 2002 when I started to get jobs, playing writing for roleplaying games, primarily with white Wolf. And I worked on several of those and then podcasting became a thing. And so I started sort of chronicling my attempt to be published and while attempting to be published. And so I started, I should be writing in 2005 and yeah, it'll be 15 years old next month actually.
Mur (2m 7s): And yeah, then I started to get published. I sold a short story or two, I self published a superhero novel that, and I published it on podcast via podcast and it got some attention from a small press. So then we, they published it. That was 2007, I think. And then I started selling books to orbit and most recently ACE and the teens, and then I was approached to do the solo novelization.
Mur (2m 42s): So I got to write a star Wars book too. And then I also approached to do a Minecraft book, which came out after the solo book.
Jesper (2m 50s): Yeah. Sorta the lost journals or something. Right. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. I use still self publishing. Some of the books are all traditional puppies. It's
Mur (3m 0s): All traditional published because I'm mainly not very good at multitasking. I would love to do some self published stuff, but I'm just, it's hard for me to think about two stories at once. So if I'm, if I'm writing a book, I'm writing that book.
Jesper (3m 17s): Yeah. Yeah. And I know as well that, well, I actually listened to the podcast. You, you also host with you fellow host, Matt, that did stickers podcast. I listened to that as well, but I was actually wondering before we get into the topic of today, because you must have gotten into podcasting, like in the really, really early days, I think because you've been doing this for a long, long time.
Jesper (3m 49s): And it's always interesting to me to ask somebody who is like a really early adopter, early adopter of something. Why did you decide to do podcasting back in the day?
Mur (4m 2s): It's hard to explain. I mean, besides the fact that I thought it sounded cool and I could do it, it's, I've always loved the idea of being a DJ, but being live is kind of scary for me. I did a, a monthly local radio show with a friend of mine and the anxiety levels were huge just because I'd be thinking this is live. I have to keep talking. Oh, no, all I can think about is how I'm not talking.
Mur (4m 33s): And now that's all I'm thinking about. And my cohost was very good at filling those empty spots when I would freeze up. But right around the time podcasting became a thing. Broadband was becoming a thing and like internet radio has been around for forever, but you needed to have huge of ability to just, to, to download a bunch of stuff. You know, it's, it's huge file streaming files.
Mur (5m 3s): That was just not feasible to the average, you know, home. But once broadband became a thing you could conceive, it would be easy to send out a 15 Meg file that you would expect people to download. I mean, I remember back in the nineties, when somebody at the company I was working for found the very first South park short and which was 50 megs and mailed it to everybody in the company and brought the server to its knees.
Mur (5m 33s): So yeah. So it was, it, it sounded like fun. And I could talk into a mic, but if I screwed up, I could fix it. So that's, it just seemed like a fun thing to try and I did. And it was fun.
Jesper (5m 47s): Yeah. Do you see any difference nowadays in the podcasting landscape? Because I don't know. I mean, we've been running DM writing fantasy YouTube channel probably for like three, four years, but the podcasting element, we transitioned into podcasting probably like a year or year and a half ago. So that say we are still fairly new, at least compared to you and in terms of podcasting, but I still feel like it is like a very like early environment in terms of podcasting.
Jesper (6m 21s): Do you always also feel that I have to offer so many years or do you see a huge different compared to back then?
Mur (6m 26s): Oh, it's huge. It's huge difference. I, you know, I remember almost all of the major shifts in podcasting. The first being when I tuned started to support podcasts and when Libsyn came around and the idea of your podcast becoming popular was not a huge hit to your finances because your internet provider wouldn't go, Oh God, why are you suddenly distributing this podcast to so many people?
Mur (6m 58s): There was a time when, you know, a sudden spike in downloads would be very expensive for you, right? And Oh, what what's happening now is it's like the, the corporations, like the big channels and backed by big media money and hosted by celebrities. Those shows are validating all the work we put into podcasting, which is great because you don't say you don't get that weird look on people's faces when you say I have a podcast, unfortunately, because they're there and they have validated it.
Mur (7m 41s): That means they're also the biggest thing on the block. And it's much harder for independent podcasters to get noticed because of that. This is, this is always the funniest thing I say when the mentality of the time. And I like to say it to other writing podcasters, because when I started to my knowledge, I would say to my knowledge, there might've been somebody else. I don't know. No one's ever come forward to tell me, but to my knowledge, I had the second writing podcast and the first was a Michael a stack poles, the secrets.
Mur (8m 15s): And because there was only one I figured I would talk to Mike and ask him if he thought it was okay, that I did number two, which is, you know, these days it's laughable. How many writing podcasts are there? Ask me for permission. Not that I could or should give it, you know what I mean? But it was just funny at the time. And it's like, I thought there was a space for me because Mike was talking from the point of view of a veteran of decades of fantasy and science fiction writing while I was trying to approach it from a beginner who was trying to learn as many lessons as possible to pass on to other beginners.
Mur (8m 53s): So, but yeah, like the idea of contacting somebody else and saying, Hey, I might do something kind of like what you're doing. You cool with that? Yeah. That's not a thing. Now, everybody knows what a podcast is. That's really cool. And it's easier to do than ever, but it's, but there's the downside of, I wouldn't when people ask me how to start a podcast, now I have no idea because you know, my advice is go back to 2005 and, and start one when there's like a couple thousand podcasts.
Mur (9m 32s): And I wouldn't know how to start out with episode one in the current landscape of podcasting, but more power to everybody who gives it a go cause more content is always great. But yeah, I feel very old in the fact that my experiences aren't terribly relevant anymore, but I mean, I keep producing and, and so there's that, but as for advice on how to get, get started or, or get a foothold, I, I have no idea.
Jesper (10m 11s): No, no one, I guess to some extent, one could say that similar to one self publishing came around, you know, there's a lot of podcasts, but there's also a lot of poor ones. It's easy to make a podcast, but it's not easy to make a good one. Just like self publishing. It's easy to publish a book, but writing a good one. It's not easy. Yeah. So, but, okay. But maybe we've nerded out enough about podcasting and whatnot. And as you try to get into the topic that we were supposed to talk about here, because we really wanted to invite you onto the, to the am writing fantasy podcast here.
Jesper (10m 45s): Because when I look at your career, of course, from a fire here, but you're probably one of the writers out there that has the most experience in writing, in a setting that somebody else created. And as you said in the beginning, there, you, you started out writing in, in some roleplaying settings already. So already there you were riding in settings that somebody I'll create it. And then afterwards you, or later on, you wrote solo, a star Wars story. And also that Minecraft book, the lost journals, as we mentioned before, but I was thinking maybe to start us out here, could you talk a bit about, what is it like to write in a universe where, where at least I assume that you have to abide to some sort of established law of that word.
Mur (11m 33s): Oh, they're very established laws. Yeah. It's, there are a couple of things that some people don't understand. A lot of people when they write, they have this sense of this is my baby and it's mine. And you know, if anybody says anything bad about it, then you get wounded to your very soul. And if anybody wants to change anything, no you can't because this is what I created. And I got to learn early on that when you do work for hire, you're writing in somebody else's world, it doesn't belong to you at all.
Mur (12m 8s): Nothing does. And so it, it gives you a sense of freedom to just let go. So going into it with the knowledge that, yeah, I can say I made that, but I don't own it. And I'm not getting any more money from it. Is, is it was a familiar feeling to me getting writing in somebody else's world has the challenge of already well established boundaries, but it's a fun challenge to figure out where you can go from there.
Mur (12m 45s): I had a lot of, of, of ideas on how to add to the solo story. Some of it just being telling a scene, everyone seen on the screen in a different point of view. So the challenge was not just not necessarily in the plotting and the characters, but more in retelling it. So people don't feel like they're reading a script and you know, it's a different medium it's it's film is different than books.
Mur (13m 20s): You can tell what people are thinking. You can give a little bit more backstory. You're not confined by a budget or minutes. You're, you're confined by your deadline, of course, but you know, it's so it's, it's, it's fun playing in somebody else's sandbox, as long as you understand the rules and you don't get too attached,
Jesper (13m 40s): But is it expected of you that you need to read up on the lore and understand a lot of different things before you even get started writing a novel in the star Wars universe?
Mur (13m 51s): Or do you well,
Jesper (13m 53s): Do somebody fact check you or how do they do that?
Mur (13m 56s): Oh, they definitely fact check. They fact check the hell out of it. I had, I know of at least two fact checkers who were commenting on the manuscript and they're fact checking about tiny things. It was an amazing public Hidalgo knows so much obscure star Wars lore. I don't understand. I think me may not understand like base remember basic things in life, like a short grocery list or something because he knows how many chickens are in the star Wars universe. He literally, I'm not just picking that out of a hat.
Mur (14m 27s): I know he knows how many chickens there are. I think there are two, but I can't remember. I just remember somebody told me that somebody asked Pablo that and he knew, so yeah, there are people out there to fact check you, but they're one of the reasons they came to me is because they knew I was a huge star Wars fan. And my agent was in touch with the publisher of the, all the books. And I had done two short stories, one for star Wars, insider magazine, and one for the first volume of, from a certain point of view, which was the telling of the first movie from a lot of different points of view.
Mur (15m 10s): I wrote about Gritos murder from the point of view of the band. And so I, they already knew that I was passionate about star Wars and was hoping to get a larger project. So that was, you know, it didn't just drop in my lap. It was, it was maybe over a year in communication and hoping something would happen. Right.
Jesper (15m 38s): But in terms of the Lord, and I mean, given that you're already a big, or you were already an hour already, a big star Wars fan, do you then have to read a lot of Hans solo stories in the case of where you have to write a Han solo story or two to understand all the moving parts around that character? Or is it more like, because you are already a fan you can start writing and then they will do the fact checking and correct you for world inconsistencies and so forth.
Mur (16m 5s): It's kind of in the middle. I mean, I did do some research, but you know, they just because the extended universe had gotten so huge, they decided to wipe it and call it legends. So none of that stuff was Canon anymore. And so a lot of what people thought of were classic Consolo stories weren't Canon anymore. So when it came to his early stories, all I needed to know was who Han solo was. And I mean that, like, I need to know who his character was, how he acted, you know, that, that cocky smuggler guy.
Mur (16m 45s): And I picked up a lot of other star Wars things just to sort of get in the mindset. And I read a lot of star Wars novelizations because I wanted to see what other people had done. So I got a lot of inspiration from Jason. Fry's the last Jedi novelization. Cause he did some really cool stuff with that. And so that was very, very influential for me. But, you know, I knew that if I said something wrong, whether it's the name of a planet or the background of a character who has a name on the script, but we never hear it said out loud in a movie, that kind of thing.
Mur (17m 27s): They were there to, to make sure that got fixed, but you know, they expected me to know what I was talking about. I had to do some of the heavy lifting essentially.
Jesper (17m 39s): Yeah. Yeah. But when you then have to write your story, did they dictate sort of where they wanted you to go with the story? Or did you have creative to tell the story you wanted to tell?
Mur (17m 52s): Well, I had the script that I had to go, you know, it can't deviate from that at all, but I was able to in fact, required to put, put in my own scenes. So the first thing I did was send them a list of scenes that I thought would add to the story. So I wanted to do a prologue, the S the movie begins with Han running away from a deal gone bad. So I wanted to tell a little bit about that deal. And I wanted to put in more about Kiras experience between getting separated from Han and then meeting him again.
Mur (18m 33s): And I wanted to put in more about emphasis, and that was the only thing they cut. They just outright said they didn't want was a bit of history on emphasis because they, they didn't want to believe the words they use, where we're not ready to explore the backstory of this character yet, which, you know, made me think that somebody else was already on deck to do it. So, but they gave me a lot of leeway. I put some humor in where, as somebody who's had long hair, several times in her life, I thought that if Chewbacca had been in a mud pit for days or weeks, then one shower on a spaceship was not going to do it.
Mur (19m 17s): And if he was with landing, Kalryzian the biggest space dandy. There is nobody would have better product than him. So I wrote a scene where chewy approaches Lando and they try to communicate cause Lando understands a little bit of Wiki, but not a lot. And he, he says, you know, basically, do you have anything to help me get all this mud out? And Lando gives them permission to he just trashes his bathroom. And I had so much fun imagining that scene.
Mur (19m 49s): And I really did not think they would let me do it. And they approved the whole thing. So it was, you know, just telling little scenes between the scenes you get in the movie or some scenes I told from different points of view than you would think of, because I told Kira meeting Han at the big fancy party on the space yacht. I told that from her point of view, not Hans. So she got, you know, we got to see her reaction to him and what she thought of him and how she viewed everything in the room happening.
Mur (20m 27s): So while I was still telling the scene exactly how it was in the movie, it was a bit different because you kind of see that scene from Han's point of view, whereas in the book it's from QRIS.
Jesper (20m 41s): Right. But it almost sounds to me like, and I don't know if I'm right or wrong here, but I'm just thinking in terms of give, being, giving a script and saying, okay, you need to, you need to follow this. And, and I, I, by the sounds of what you're saying, it sounds like it is a fairly detailed script. And then you have to find your own way through that in terms of injecting some of your own creativity here and there, where you can, but would it be fair to say that it's more like if you were not experienced and seasoned writer that then it almost sounds like it would be pretty difficult?
Jesper (21m 20s): Would you say?
Mur (21m 22s): I think so. It might be because it's I did before I wrote the scene, I just told you about Kira from curious point of view. I was feeling really down because suddenly I thought I've got, I didn't have the script. I was able to take notes on the script. I was flown out to San Francisco, took notes on the script and came home, but they also gave me the middle grade book, which was already done. So I had a novelization already, and I'm like, I've got the movie, I've got the middle grade novel and I've got the script.
Mur (21m 57s): How in the world am I going to add anything to this? Because there's already so much. And it was, yeah, I struggled a lot. And I w I was very relieved when I came up with the same scene, different point of view solution. You know, there's always the, you come out of every movie going, man. I wish we'd learned more about X character or Y character. And when I'd read the script, I'm like, yeah.
Mur (22m 27s): Some things need to, I think there's some things missing here. I'm not sure if I don't know. I, I would think that seasoned fan fiction writers would probably take to it just fine. So long as they understood that you can't just go anywhere with this, you have to follow some very specific rules, but it is a lot like a approved fanfic, it's, it's writing about beloved characters and a beloved setting, and just pushing a little bit more of your own story into it.
Jesper (23m 4s): Yeah. And I think heading into it as well, you probably, I mean, I could imagine some people feeling quite daunted already before you even start to like, okay, all, but all that law and all those details about the world, it can almost feel like a mountain to climb before you even get started. I think some people could feel that at least. Sure.
Mur (23m 24s): But there is a mountain of Laura out there, but say the details of the eyelids of the, of course, I can't remember their race now, but the, the, the band playing in the MOS, Eisley, Cantina the details about their eyelids and how they respond to light have nothing to do with solo. So, yes, I know that from my previous story that I wrote, but I'm just saying little details like that were not important.
Mur (23m 58s): I didn't need to go out and read all the Darth Vader comics to write solo. I didn't need to play the role playing game. So there, there were, there's a lot out there, but when it comes to specific stories about specific people, it can be, you know, much more of a focused approach.
Jesper (24m 24s): Yeah. I can see that. Yeah. But so once you have written a novel like this, does it then become part of the, of the established law and the Canon, or is it treated like it's, it's like just a separate novel and it doesn't, it doesn't become part of the official star Wars universe, or how does that work?
Mur (24m 41s): It is Canon. It is, it is. That's why it's so closely fact checked and, and, you know, we did very close edits. It's it's it is cannon.
Jesper (24m 53s): Right. Okay. And you mentioned early on that you had been in a year long conversation with those guys in order to get to the stage where you could write this story, but how did this, how did that conversation start in the first, first place? How did you get into even being considered to write the story?
Mur (25m 14s): My agent knew the publisher and dropped my name as somebody who was really interested in star Wars. So, you know, next time you need an author for star Wars, consider my client, and that's how the conversation got started.
Jesper (25m 29s): Okay. So is it more like, do you think that, you know, it is very much dependent on agents and sort of like that it would be almost impossible unless, you know, somebody there that you could, that other people could get into. I'm thinking about listeners here who might be interested in getting into writing star Wars or something, would that even be possible without an agent and being encompassed right already and so forth?
Mur (25m 55s): I really doubt it. They're, they're going to want to, to approach them. It's easier to have an agent and they, they're going to want seasoned writers with a track record that they know won't like, leave the project or screw it up. And I'm not saying an agented writers would do that. I'm just saying that when you have an agent speak for you, that carries more weight with editors.
Mur (26m 26s): So for, for the unaided, I don't think it would be very easy. I can't speak for my publishers. So it's just my opinion, but everybody I know who writes for star Wars is agented
Jesper (26m 38s): Right. And does it benefit at all for those who just write a lot star Wars fan fiction, and if they do that really well, would that help them?
Mur (26m 48s): I honestly, I mean, I really don't know some, some, I mean, I know agents who read fanfic for fun and would like to find clients that way. Sometimes I know editors who read fanfic for fun. So it's not outside the realm of possibility, but you gotta remember that. I hate saying this out loud, but according to copyright law fanfic is illegal.
Mur (27m 19s): And a lot of places, you know, is the author doesn't mind. They just turn a blind eye to it and they say, you know, just don't send me anything, have fun, go play in my world. I don't care. Just don't send it to me because that can open legal doors that are very bad. But so I, I don't know on an official level how that would work out. And again, I can't speak for Del Ray, so I'm not going to, if my editor might think otherwise, but I know I I'll, I'll tell you 99% sure that I don't think you could sell your fanfic to the star Wars universe.
Mur (27m 58s): I really cause they have very specific ideas of where they want to go with their stories. But, but yeah, I don't know. I don't want to squash anybody's dreams, but I doubt I would have had this chance if I didn't have an agent who was knew the right people to talk to.
Jesper (28m 18s): No, I understand. But it's also very interested because there is a lot of fan fiction out there in not only for star Wars, but for different kinds of settings. Right. And it's, it's interesting because at least, at least somebody's like, you know, star Wars, brand ownerships, you know, they certainly have enough money and the power to go after stuff like that, if they wanted to. But it seems like they don't really do that, right?
Mur (28m 42s): Oh no, they don't. Until you start making money from it, then they'll come down on you pretty hard. But like I said, there's like a handful of people who frown on that kind of thing. And they're kind of seen as the ogres of the world. So it's, it's a lot of people don't mind, but they can't like there have to be some rules regarding it, you know, don't sell it, et cetera. But yeah, I'm not saying there's not excellent.
Mur (29m 12s): Fanfic being written. I know that for debt, for a fact, I've rent a lot myself and I wrote it when I was younger before the word fanfic was still very old right now. I wrote Fred saber Hagan fanfic but it's it's yeah, I it's, I don't know how similar my story is to everybody else's so yeah,
Jesper (29m 38s): No, that's fair. That's fair, but okay. I'm thinking maybe to broaden out a bit more here, I mean, we can still focus on star Wars if you feel more comfortable with that, but I'm just thinking in more, a bit more broad terms here. It could also be in relation to some of the white Wolf stuff that you wrote in the past as well or whatever. But I'm just thinking if you are to advise a listener, for example, of this podcast who maybe is, let's say they have a couple of novels under their belt, so they're not completely new to writing, but they, they are still building their writing career and they might be thinking about, would it be better for me?
Jesper (30m 18s): And I'm not talking fanfiction now, since we just establish that that's not legal, but, but would it be better for me to just create my own universe if, if I have only written a few novels and then write in that setting or would it be, well, I guess I can't ask you if it would be better to write in somebody else's university, you know, if you contacted somebody or you re made arrangement with somebody who already have an established universe with established readers, but I guess I'm more asking about how do you see the pros and cons on, on each one of those and what kind of things would the listener need to think about if they consider that either?
Jesper (30m 59s): Should I write in somebody should step this word? Well, because that can sort of lift my meat up a bit versus should I create my own?
Mur (31m 7s): Are you talking about writing fanfic or a license?
Jesper (31m 11s): No, I'm more, I'm more thinking like, so for example, autumn and myself, we have an established setting that we are writing novels in. So for example, in theory, if somebody then said, Hey, I would like to write some novel, just like you did for star Wars. Right. I would like to write a story in your setting and I'm not talking fan fiction. I'm more talking like you write, for example, in, for lack of a better example, our setting here, meaning that we be basically sort of become the star Wars part in the story here, meaning that we are the ones editing it.
Jesper (31m 49s): We are, the ones may be publishing it or whatever, but they write in, in another setting. It's just like, I guess also when you wrote for white Wolf, I guess they were the publisher, they were the ones publishing and you were more a writer on staff day or whatever you would call it.
Mur (32m 5s): Right. I was freelance, but yeah. Yeah,
Jesper (32m 7s): Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So that's what I'm thinking. How do you see the pros and cons about riding in somebody else's setting versus creating your own?
Mur (32m 16s): Well, I'll be honest with you. I think that if you want for your career to move forward in a traditionally published sphere, you just need, you're going to need to write books that people see. I, when I was starting out, when podcast fiction started to really become a big thing, like in 2006, 2007, a lot of us were writing stories in each other's worlds. I had, I did my superhero novel and had a lot of friends write short stories in the world.
Mur (32m 51s): And Scott Sigler also has done the same thing was his stuff. I wrote a novella for him. I don't think that was, it was fun. And I learned a lot, but I don't know how much it actually furthered my career until, you know, I sold my own story to orbit if you want it, like, I don't regret it. I'm definitely thinking if you, if that sounds like fun to you, then do it.
Mur (33m 21s): Why not? You're going to learn everything you write you learned from. And so if nothing else, you're going to be perfecting your craft, I would warn you to make sure there's some pretty clear rules about who owns the, the work, because it can't just be a friendly handshake. You should write something down because if they think, Hey, you know what? I really liked this character that I wrote in your world, and I'm going to go sell it.
Mur (33m 55s): Does that belong to you? Or does that belong to them? And then if you're not friends anymore, then that can get really ugly. So you'd want to do something to make sure the legalities are all there, but I don't know. It's, it's, it's fun. But if, I don't know if that's how you're going to get a mainstream publisher to notice you,
Jesper (34m 22s): No, maybe I'm thinking that if we are, because there's probably a difference between a traditional publisher here versus self publishing, because if we are talking self-publishing, I could actually see that it could be beneficial to, again, I fully agree with what you say about that. You need to have a contract in place with the people who, whose world you're writing so that everything is clear and what can you do and what can you not do going forward and whatnot. So I fully agree with that, but if we assume that is in place, I could see what self publishing that it might actually, in some cases benefit you from writing in somebody else's setting, because you can tap into their readership and if they are publishing it or editing it or whatever, then they will probably promote it for you as well.
Jesper (35m 10s): And if they already have 5,000 readers who buy a Kindle books, then that's pretty cool.
Mur (35m 18s): If you're, if you're talking like in the self publishing sphere, definitely. I think it's a great idea. You know, I got Scott Sigler's fans interested in me when I wrote the novella in his world. And it's, it's really good to have the cross promotion. I think, great. I have not done a ton of self publishing since I started traditionally publishing traditional publishing. So I can't say what it takes to get a completely new original world in front of people in self publishing.
Mur (35m 57s): So I'm really not sure how one would do that. So I can't say whether the, whether playing in somebody else's sandbox or building your own world would do better in self publishing, but you know, why not try both? I mean, it is, like I said, it's fun and it, it sets up your networking for sure. And the people who, you know, you and autumn who publish your friend, who wrote a story in your universe five years later, if you guys are doing another big project, you could think, Hey, you remember that person who wrote that cool thing for us.
Mur (36m 43s): I mean, that's, that's networking that doesn't die unless you kill it. So, you know, there's definitely not, I don't, I don't want to downplay the action. I can't tell you if one is better than the other, but I think, I think they're both good ideas, but it's it's, it was a lot of fun to do. And I think it made me a better writer and made me tighten the bonds I've made in podcasting, which helped my career along later.
Mur (37m 15s): So the thing is, you never know what's going to help your career never, which is why, you know, be nice to people and hit your deadlines and you'll go far. I know it doesn't sound like it. And it's not something that, you know, you put the camp, you put the coin in the machine and the candy comes out immediately, but it is something that you never know what's going to benefit you. So why not try as much as you can, as long as you can, and then still be nice and hit your deadlines.
Jesper (37m 49s): Yeah, I think that's, that's good advice. And as well, if, if there was like one thing that if we say we had a time machine humor and we could travel back in time, and there was only one thing or one message that you could send back to your former self when you were just starting out writing, do you know what, what would that be?
Mur (38m 7s): Oh gosh,
Jesper (38m 9s): I caught you off guard there. Sorry.
Mur (38m 12s): It's the thing is I stopped. I had a real crisis of confidence when I left college. And for some reason thought that that now that I was out of the academic atmosphere, I would never improve on my writing. I didn't think my writing was that great to begin with. So I would never get any better. And I talked myself out of doing it for quite some time. So if I could go back to her, I would say, don't quit because you do get better. Every time you write something new, you get better.
Mur (38m 42s): And, but if I went back to myself at the start of podcasting, I think at the start, I was afraid of publishing my own stuff until I saw other people do it because I was afraid it would kill any chances for it to be published. Because once you publish something yourself, you do that does get rid of the first North American print rights or wherever you are print rights. And that was something I was afraid of losing.
Mur (39m 12s): But then I found out that some people just didn't care and thought it was more important to build an audience. And some publishers, if your book got enough attention, wouldn't care and still buy the rights. So, you know, I was careful at the beginning and I don't think I sh I mean, I was, I was pretty pioneering and trying lots of different stuff, but I think I could have tried more if I had not been so afraid to put my own fiction out there. So I would've said don't, don't worry about it. I mean, right now really good fiction podcasts are getting more attention to than some books on the shelf at the bookstore.
Mur (39m 48s): So definitely don't be afraid of that.
Jesper (39m 53s): No, I think that those are both good advice. It's basically, it's like, don't be afraid. Keep going and don't give up. Right. I think that's, that's some of the best advice we can give to, to, to new listeners or those just starting out.
Mur (40m 8s): Yeah. And it sounds so simple and people would go, of course, but no, I suffered my career suffered. Of course it did from quitting. I hadn't been so worried about never improving and actually written in my twenties. You know, I might be farther along in my career right now.
Jesper (40m 27s): Yeah. And I, sorry, go ahead. No, I was just speculating while you set that, because it made me think as well that I think one of the things about this writing stuff is that we are doing it, especially when we're starting out, we're doing it so much in isolation. So it is for one, because you are in isolation, it is easy to give up because there's not a manager standing there telling you to get to work or whatever. And the other thing is that you have no idea if you're good at it or bad at it because you have nothing to compare against.
Jesper (40m 59s): Yeah. So yeah, giving up, it's just very easy. And I think those who makes it a lot of the time is just the one who, the ones who kept going
Mur (41m 8s): Exactly. And, you know, there's a, there's a phrase that you can either take ferry is very, very negative or actually quite positive. And that is nobody cares what you're doing. And you can think to me that, that, that nobody ever is going to read my stuff and nobody cares, but also you can be like, so I can go stand in the corner and dance naked with a chicken on my head and no one's going to care. So why not just do the writing equivalent of standing naked in the corner with the chicken on your head and dancing and see where that gets you because nobody cares.
Mur (41m 41s): So you can do the weirdest stuff, the worst stuff, and nobody cares. And then once you start getting attention, then maybe you can make more careful decisions. But at the beginning of your career, you could do anything it's always liberating. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's actually a perfect note to end on because it's, it's a very positive one. Like I've been really negative this whole time. I'm so sorry. I don't want to be honest, but you know, no, I think it's important to be honest about things at the same time.
Mur (42m 16s): It is also a matter of, as we just concluded here about keeping, keeping, going and not giving up. But at the same time, you shouldn't go into it with your eyes closed. You need to open your eyes and understand what you're dealing with here. And listening to podcasts like this one or others where you're, you're getting the truth of things that will help you in the longterm. But, and I don't think you've been negative at Alma. I think it's been good. Thank you.
Mur (42m 46s): So is there any place where you would like people to go to check you out on the internet or wherever if they want to learn more about you and what you do more? Yeah. You can find all my stuff at dot com. That's one R M U R V E R S E. And that's where you can find links to my books, links to my podcasts and a press kit and all that. And my blog, which really is just my list of podcast episodes. Cause I don't blog much anymore, but that's where you can find me. And when the world's not on fire, I'm on Twitter more often and that's twitter.com/mighty Mer.
Mur (43m 22s): Excellent. So thank you so much for joining us today. More certainly. It was a pleasure. Thank you. So next Monday, autumn, we'll be back and we are going to discuss how some people seem to have a bit of an attitude to what the fantasy Shunra.
Narrator (43m 41s): If you like, what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the am writing fantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join autumn and Yesper on patrion.com/and writing fantasy for as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the M writing fantasy podcast going, stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
There are a lot of ways to create characters, but one technique we've found that has not only fantastic results but also helps with character arcs is using Enneagram personality types! Wait. What are Enneagrams?
Discover just what the nine Enneagram types are and how you can use them for your characters is what this episode is all about. Well, that and we might just have a little bit of fun too!
To learn more about Enneagram personality types check out https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/type-descriptions
And, as we mention in the show, we cover this in much greater detail in our soon to be released book Plot Development: An Outlining Method for Fiction which you can pick up on preorder (and at a discount!) at https://books2read.com/Plot-Development
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to the am. Writing fantasy podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt, and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I am Jesper
Autumn (32s): and I'm Autumn.
Jesper (34s): This is episode 82 of the M writing fantasy podcast. And when we wrote our upcoming guide on how to plot a novel, we also talked about character creation. And we mentioned before how important character creation really is having, we talked about that before autumn. Oh yes. We've. We've hinted that characters are kind of important to writing and especially to what readers love. So I don't think it's the first time listeners have no say that.
Jesper (1m 5s): No, indeed. Yeah. And in the plodding book, we centered the process of creating characters around personality types. So we thought we would take you through the nine different personality types in today's episode here. And I don't know if I'm going to be successful, but I'm going to try to do my best to make it a bit entertaining. So it's not dry and boring. Let's see how it goes as well. I think we'll do our best. I mean, these are really fun personality types. And even just trying to think of characters from movies, I'm so bad at actress names and stuff, so I'm not going to do super well.
Jesper (1m 44s): We can try to flip point out a few individuals, but it's the, you'll see so quickly why this is fascinating because not only do you get these nine wonderful types of people, but they have levels within them. So it's easy to work on your character arc and all these things. So it's a fantastic method. And of course that's why we use it. Yeah. Yeah. I think it works extremely well for, for how we laid it out in the plotting book. It all, it makes the couch arc so easy to deal with.
Jesper (2m 17s): All of a sudden, you sort of have a bit of a template you can use. And of course you can modify it as much as you want, but, but it gives you a very good starting point. It doesn't, it's even, not even just heroes, but even your villain it's you can see little quirks and why they're going to act certain ways and you might not have even thought of. And I just think that is just fantastic and you can move them up and down the scale as well. So it gives you some great resources for creating some really dynamic characters.
Jesper (2m 46s): Yeah. But before we get that fries is all well on your end, then autumn, how is, how are things? It is good. Of course we're recording this like way early, cause we're getting ahead for the summer, but where we're sitting currently in June, we're actually
Autumn (3m 0s): In for I'm in Vermont. And it is actually been a really dry spring stream is dried up. We haven't had a significant rain, like over a half an inch in a month and a half. So I'm really hoping we get some rain soon, but I do think it's funny. I have a garden going and I'm my mom, my mom and my dad are both master gardeners. They're amazing gardeners. And I've always admired my mom's green thumb, but for ones, Oh my gosh, my garden looks so good.
Autumn (3m 32s): I've had so many people come up to me like, wow, what are you doing? And I'm like watering it I've fertilized once every seven days because I'm basically growing stuff in gravel. When I did the soil test, it basically said, congratulations, you have gravel. No organic matter, no nitrogen, no phosphorus, no potassium. So despite this, I have like, my tomatoes are beautiful. My cucumbers are blooming. I have shard.
Autumn (4m 2s): It's just, I've let us like we're eating salads every day. So it's amazing. So I feel very oddly proud of myself and I wish I had a better answer. People say, how are you doing? Because, Oh yes, that's my announcement. Or we need a little chime. My debut novel, born of water, just hit 300 reviews on Amazon.
Jesper (4m 26s): I saw your post on Facebook. That's absolutely awesome
Autumn (4m 29s): That also I am so pretty hungry lot. It is. And so at least when people ask me, how did you do that? I least have an answer. If you ask me how I'm managing to grow stuff. Oh, well I think I, maybe my mother's green thumb rubbed off on me. Otherwise I'm watering every day and feeding them once a week. Yeah.
Jesper (4m 53s): But I, I guess if it's that dry and warm, is it also this kind of times where you have to watch out for forest fires and stuff like that, then
Autumn (5m 3s): I think if it keeps up, it's going to go that way. There's been some fires North of us in Maine, and I'm really worried like Quebec and Ontario, I'm only a few hours from the Canadian border. I'm really worried about some bad fires on the East coast, much less the fires that are going to break out on the West coast this year. If we don't get some rain soon, the Arctic areas of Canada and stuff have already hit record highs. I think Siberia over the weekend hit 104 degrees. So beer. Yeah. This is not supposed to be 104 degrees.
Autumn (5m 34s): So it's terrifying. So I, yeah, that could happen. How are things, hopefully you're not quite as warm as Siberia. How are things in Denmark?
Jesper (5m 44s): At least forest fires is not something we have to worry about everybody over here that doesn't have it happen. Nobody it's good. This past weekend, I was out refereeing for the first time since Corona lockdown. Wow. That was awesome. That must have been awesome. Was it like a normal game? Was there something weird going on after the Corona virus? Well, it was yeah, more or less a normal game. I mean there, when you're, you're doing the Fairplay, you know, hello thingy, normally you do before, you know, everybody normally as the match starts, every, every player says a good match, have a good match to the referee and also to you to the opposing team.
Jesper (6m 27s): And obviously we can't shake hands. So basically we just sort of walked past each other and say it rather than shaking hands. So that part is a bit different. And then on, on the pitch or the side of the pitch on both sides, there is a, these large drawn out boxes basically where the players have to stay within those boxes, which just to make sure that they don't get mingled with the crowd watching and spectators and stuff like that. So, so there's a few things that are slightly different, but in terms of the actual play, it's exactly the same as before.
Jesper (7m 2s): So, so that was good. It was, it was a match just in the league that sits just below the semiprofessional level. So it was quite good because well, one of the teams have played at that level for a bit more than a year, whereas the other team just advanced, so this was their first match in this new league and for them and it, it really showed within 45 seconds, 45 seconds, it was a one to nail. So welcome to the big boys league.
Jesper (7m 35s): It was like that. Right. So they, they got beat three to nothing. So it was, it was pretty that there was a big difference. That is a big difference, but yeah, especially not getting any points in, but you know, it wasn't something outrageous, you know, sometimes when the football in the U S you know, it was like 46 to one to seven or something it's spot. Yeah. Never happens in soccer. No, it's a little different. And then we went to visit some friends in the evening afterwards, and we were back home in bed, like 3:00 AM.
Jesper (8m 7s): So thank God I don't drink alcohol because we had to get up at 8:00 AM. Or I had to get up at 8:00 AM, 8:00 AM the day after to take my youngest son to a soccer tournament. So yeah, I got like five, five hours of sleep. And if, if I was drinking alcohol, I would never have gotten up there, but thank God I don't do that. So I did take a nap yesterday afternoon. I didn't think that sounds like a well deserved yeah.
Jesper (8m 38s): On the internet with the yam writing fantasy podcast. So I saw a very cool post in the amp writing fantasy Facebook group from Melanie. Oh yeah. Because yeah, because she discovered that Excel actually have a writing submission tracker template built in.
Autumn (8m 57s): I did see that. And of course I don't, I use numbers over Excel, so I wasn't quite as excited, but that is pretty cool.
Jesper (9m 5s): Yeah. I think it's cool in the sense that, I mean, of course it can help you keep track of stories and submissions and publications and stuff like that. But I just thought it was cool because I never knew that.
Autumn (9m 17s): I just felt like that was very helpful to just
Jesper (9m 20s): Point that out. I mean, it could be something you just discovered, you know, Oh, I found this, but the fact that she actually took it and posted it in the Facebook group to help everybody else, I thought that was very cool. So thank you for sharing that.
Autumn (9m 34s): Yes. I did think, like I said, I saw that and I'm like, yeah, that is definitely such a cool feature that it's built right in. And now that people know all the group, people, members of the group and everyone we're telling today, that is fantastic because it's funny. I have been in the fantasy, the I'm writing fantasy Facebook group because it's been, Oh my gosh. So many people the last few days have been coming in. So I think we've all been pitching in to welcome folks. But I was looking at Mike's post recently, cause I said 42 comments just now.
Autumn (10m 7s): And he was asking about anyone with main characters that are dysfunctional or disabled or autistic anxiety, OCD, something like that. And man, I know there's was one comment in there that listed like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, everything from game of Thrones, to some of the classics where there were characters that met those qualifications. I was like the hard man, this guy knows Sue has read a lot of books and could just organize it very quickly, but it is fantastic to see some of the questions out there. And like I said, 42 comments and they're still coming in on characters that have some kind of disability or dysfunction.
Jesper (10m 45s): Yes. Probably more widespread than we think.
Autumn (10m 48s): Yeah. It really was. When he, like I said, the one I would have to go back and find who came up with the one answer that was just listing off all of these different books. There were ones I had read that I hadn't thought of it. I just didn't come to mind when you, when it was asked. So I was like, wow, that is just fantastic.
Jesper (11m 8s): Yeah. Yeah. So if you haven't joined us yet, just search for am writing fantasy in the group section of Facebook and you will
Autumn (11m 18s): Find us. Yes. And that one poor person you beat me, but yes, there was some money. Somebody who actually messaged me on Facebook on how to join. So you can do that. And I'm sorry if it takes me a while to get back to you because sometimes Facebook hides my messages. I'm sorry. Yeah. So now we're okay today
Jesper (11m 39s): Onto today's topic. Yeah. So, well, my, my wife is a certified, she certified in the end in a grand personality type. So I've had heard a lot about anagram types before we even started writing our guide on plodding. So it sort of made a lot of sense to find ways in which to use the anagram to develop fictional characters. Because I just, I liked the entire setup with these personality types because it, it just helps a lot. So, so that was sort of a starting point.
Autumn (12m 12s): That's a good one. I mean, it's funny. Cause I had heard about the anagram cause I've taken some psychology classes and Adam has taken quite a few psychology classes. And so yeah, we'd both gone through them. We'd both taken the tests before. So it was kind of interesting to be like, Oh yeah, I gotta have the heart of this for characters, but this is so fantastic for characters.
Jesper (12m 34s): It is absolutely. I think it is. And, but maybe before we sort of go any further, we should just probably be a bit helpful and clarify what this whole anagram deal is all about.
Autumn (12m 46s): That's true. Yes. If you never heard of them before, you're like, this is a big word and I can't even smell it to figure out how to Google it. And that's just kind of mean of us, isn't it?
Jesper (12m 59s): Yeah. So it's basically like a personality categorization system. So you have nine different personality types and each one of these personality types view the world different and has a different underlying motivation that drives their life and their feelings. So yeah, that's basically what it is. And I guess in a nutshell, if we boil it down
Autumn (13m 27s): Yeah. I think that's a great explanation for an introduction to it. And just like, if someone is more familiar with the Myers Briggs personality type, that's a very common one in the United States. It's like that, but a lot more nuanced and structured. I think, I think it works very well. I get lost in Myers Briggs where this one is just kind of, you can read through it, grasp it and go like, Oh I got it. I like this one.
Jesper (13m 55s): Yeah. And I guess I could, I could foresee somebody thinking at this point, but you said that there is nine personality types. Is that not like super limited to believe that there are only nine personality types in the world, but then I would say no, no, no, my friend, it is not like that because there are many different ways in which the personality types express themselves. So while the system has nine personality types, it's in fact just a bit more complicated than that.
Autumn (14m 31s): That was another level below the nine as well.
Jesper (14m 35s): Yeah. And they were there. There's a lot of, well, there's a lot of other things, but actually it's when it comes to fiction writing, we don't need all those other things. So there's things like triads and personality wings and all this kind of things that makes every of every one of those nine personality types different. So it's not like there is only nine, you have triumphs and wings and whatnot that makes you different. But the good news is that we don't need all that stuff for fiction writing.
Jesper (15m 7s): So we are basically focusing on the nine types themselves and I'm thinking what we're going to do is we just going to go through all nine and explain what they are and I'll try to see if I can make it a bit entertaining. And then afterwards we can just talk a bit about how to use those, how to use them as character arcs as well. Oh yeah. Yeah. So I should probably also say that this is intended as some, a bit of fun here.
Jesper (15m 45s): So I don't want it to come across as if I'm, you know, I'm passing judgment on any personality type.
Autumn (15m 54s): No there's no. Yeah, definitely. There's no right or wrong answers here. There's nothing except for maybe being on the, one of the lower tiers of any of these is kind of a sad place to be, but there's nothing, nothing, none of them are, right. None of them are wrong numbers. None of them are better to be other than another one. I think it's, if you recognize as what do they say, if you recognize yourself, that's, that's fine. It's just a way of understanding yourself. It is not passing judgment. This is just, especially now we're talking about characters for your book.
Autumn (16m 25s): So this is just about creating some really cool characters.
Jesper (16m 30s): Yeah, indeed. So there is also, none of these are better than the others, so they all have their own strengths and weaknesses built in. So yeah, if you know something about the anagram and you think I'm stereotyping a bit too much or making too much fun of something, you know, just know that that's not the intention here. I'm just trying to make it a bit entertaining instead of reading out very dry personality type information. Because I think that that would be on the flip side, pretty boring.
Jesper (17m 0s): So I do run the risk risk here of maybe offending somebody who feel like I'm a passing judgment, but just know that I'm not.
Autumn (17m 8s): Yeah, that is fair enough.
Jesper (17m 11s): So hopefully that, that disclaimer is out of the way here so we can, we can get started. And I think maybe as we go through this, perhaps we can think about which personality type you and I think we are ordering. And then afterwards we could just talk about that as well. I don't think we've ever talked about that before, to be honest.
Autumn (17m 31s): I, and I actually, I prepared, I pulled out my old anagram. It's not that old a test to see which one I was. And it is funny because I almost had a triple tie. So I guess I am just complicated, but we can talk about that at the end.
Jesper (17m 47s): Okay. So what I propose do with that, I'll go through all nine and then maybe once I'm done with each one, I'll just stop there just in case you have something to add or something that I missed or whatever, and then we'll do all nine and then afterward we can talk a bit about how to use these and, and, and which personality type we think we are ourselves. Sounds good.
Jesper (18m 17s): Okay. So type number one is called the reformer. So this is the type of person who find it extremely important that things are done, right? So they want to basically make the world a better place and they do so by using principles. And when they're at their best, the reformer is actually a very amazing and passionate per person who excels at what they put their mind to.
Jesper (18m 48s): But do you know the kind of person who can get extremely fixated on a very, very small, tiny detail?
Autumn (18m 58s): She didn't. We just talk about that. I don't think I'm legally allowed to say yes, but I can say bride Zilla. I saw a bride who was getting ready for her wedding. Can, it starts worrying about, you know, the arrangements and the colors. And if you're off the shoulder dress versus on the shoulder, whether or not you wore a necklace and yeah, that's a total reformer type on the downside, the bedside. But I mean, that's a good side. This is someone who could go change the world. I mean, we could possibly look at some really big climate change activists.
Autumn (19m 31s): They might be reformer types maybe. Yeah,
Jesper (19m 34s): Yeah. Yeah. So when they're at the bedside, they have a tendency to focus on small details. That really doesn't matter that much. You know, they can be super obsessive about it and just cannot seem to relax. You know, they can be like, if there's a picture hanging there and is slightly crooked, they can get completely hung up on why it's crooked and it should be straightened. Or they could be like, let's say they come over to your house and they just park their car and they ring on the doorbell and you open the door and then they say something like, you know, I just couldn't help to notice as I entered here.
Jesper (20m 12s): And I don't mean this the wrong way, but you guys quite dirty probably clean it, but don't use regular soap water. I found this environmental and specialized product that everyone should use. Honestly, I don't understand why you wouldn't use it. It's three times as expensive, but you will make the world a better place if you use it. So you can see that. So, and then the person would probably also go like here, I'll just text you an image of the product. You can go and buy it. You know,
Autumn (20m 43s): I know a couple of these.
Jesper (20m 45s): Yeah. This can be type number one is, did they have a tendency? As I said before, right? They, they view the world or they, they use principles to maneuver the world and try to make the world a better place that they mean well by it. But they do see the world very black or white that there is either right. Or there's wrong. There's very little in between for them.
Autumn (21m 8s): Sounds fair. And yeah, I definitely can point out a few of those folks in the world, but yeah, I know. They mean, well at heart, they just might get a little tied up sometimes on the banalities of it.
Jesper (21m 21s): Yeah. So that was a type number one. Anything more to add on that?
Autumn (21m 25s): No, I think you covered it very well.
Jesper (21m 29s): Okay. So let's move on to type number two, which is called the helper a and S it says in the title there, this person is someone who goes out of the, out of their way to help others. So when the helper is at their best, they are extremely generous and they care a lot for other people at their worst. Well, that's a different matter. So this purse person then at their worst, just doesn't know when to say no to others.
Jesper (22m 5s): You know, they can be like neck deep in a million tasks. And then when their significant other comes home from work and ask if the helper will cook dinner, he or she will be like, Oh yeah, yeah, of course I will. Of course I'll get right on that. And then while the person is probably juggling laundry, cleaning and work, some sort of work assignment for the day job at the same time, you know, they will still want to get right on that cooking of dinner. And in the end, of course, because the helper takes on so many things, they will let somebody down in the end.
Jesper (22m 41s): And that's where the unhealthy type number two will quickly resort to melodrama. So they'll be like, Oh my God, I have suffered and tortured myself for you. And you're not even grateful. And maybe you'll say, well, sorry, but you were the one who said that you were gonna turn that work assignment in today. And then they might be like, are you mad at me? I get the sense that you're really mad at me. No, I'm not mad. You can just complete your assignment tomorrow.
Jesper (23m 12s): It's because I did something wrong. Isn't it? What is wrong with me?
Autumn (23m 15s): Please tell me. So that's probably the unhealthy type too. Yes. That's a fun one. Oh my goodness. Okay. I'm going to have to try to be serious a little bit because I, on the good scale type two's helper, I admire them so much because they're warm and generous. I think the, the woman whose property I'm currently living in is definitely maybe a type two. She has the biggest heart and just never suspicious. Just always just the biggest brightest smile and so compassionate.
Autumn (23m 49s): And I must be a little bit more jaded than that. I don't think I'm in helper, hint, hint, but I admire that. But the other side, the melodramatic side, I get that I don't get that at either that other one that's like, well, if you couldn't take it on, just say, no, don't sit there and complain that, you know what? I didn't want to let you down. Well, you didn't get it done anyway. So I'm still let down. Yeah. Yeah. Number two. Doesn't see it like that. It's just too difficult to say. No, it is.
Autumn (24m 19s): And I do understand that idea of, you know, wanting to be the one who's there for people. And I think every child and every parent has that little bit of a helper somewhere in there where you don't want to let that other person down. So it's a really good type. Like I said, I admire them so much because there's, without them, the world would be not quite as happy and Brighton kind of place. Yeah. That's absolutely sure. Yup.
Autumn (24m 49s): Okay. So I think we ready to move on to number three. Oh yes. And type number three is called the achiever. So at their best threes are genuine and confident personalities. So they want to feel valuable. Hence the name, the achiever. Yes. And if you've played a board game with a number three, you will know that they are not only competitive, but they are so to an annoyingly high degree, you know, they could be screaming.
Autumn (25m 23s): Things like I'm like the best chess player that ever lived. You are the loser loser. I can't believe how great I am at this game. Number three, I don't think I want to play a board game. Was it achiever? And also three cannot stand to be wrong. And they will go out of their way to explain how, what they did was absolutely perfect. And it was flawless. And this also goes, as far as if they're unhealthy on the scale of three Eastern, it goes as fast to invent stuff about themselves and their own accomplishment as well.
Autumn (26m 3s): So they could be saying things like, well, it's actually, so that when I was 15, I played in an official tournament against the best chess player in the world. And yes, I beat his ass, but he got it. Right. Cause it's no, no, no. Of course it was a secret batch that we only did. Yeah. Please don't Google it. Don't Google it. Put away your phone. And in the flight home, I also came up with the business idea for tick-tock. So I actually invented that.
Autumn (26m 35s): Wow. That's so that'll be your unhealthy achiever. You kind of watch what they say. Cause you might not believe, but they're there, their belief of it can make you almost believe it. So that's a tough one.
Jesper (26m 50s): Yeah. And it's it's it's yeah. They, they will just do anything to avoid admitting that they were wrong. So
Autumn (26m 58s): I think I do know someone like that. Hmm. Yeah. A long time ago a coworker now I understand them better. Yeah.
Jesper (27m 9s): Yeah. I know. I actually had a previous coworker like that as well. It was amazing. What kind of stories that come up with Jesus. He was like, you should almost believe he was an astronaut or something.
Autumn (27m 21s): Huh? That would be, I do remember a joke once where I was on a cruise and we're like, we can be anything we want to be, they don't know who we are, but I don't think we went really forward with it, but that would have been fun. That would have been a total achiever thing to do to start just making up who you are when you're in a new place. This is somebody who does it every day. So I think a healthy achiever could be interesting as long as I tone it down. I don't know if I can tell, take yelling and having their greatness shoved in my face.
Autumn (27m 51s): No.
Jesper (27m 55s): Okay. So number four, number four, the number four is called the individualist. So when the individualist is at their best, they are very creative, emotionally honest and focused on the beauty of the world. Yeah. However, those who are not at their best can really, really struggle with any dissatisfaction in their life. So they always want to have something that they can't have.
Jesper (28m 27s): So if you have a boyfriend or girlfriend, husband, or wife, who's a type four. They can be looking for like the perfect soulmate that probably doesn't exist at all. So they constantly desire everything that others have as well. So like a better house, a better car at a job. Anything can just make these people envious. And because they feel like they are never complete or whole as a person, it just makes them constantly searched for that missing piece of themselves.
Jesper (29m 0s): And maybe also just to pull it down on an even like smaller scale too, could be like, so let's say the unhealthy number for you. You're having, you're having a burger with this person. So you're sitting both down in your chair and then number four will say, I just wish my burger tasted as good as good as yours. And you might say, it's the same way we are having the exact same burger. I know, but I feel like yours are still better than mine. I just wished that mine was as good as yours.
Autumn (29m 33s): And I would be like, okay, let's switch. And they'd really know Mike was better. Right?
Jesper (29m 37s): Yeah. Then they would be like, no, no, I don't want you on this. Mine was,
Autumn (29m 43s): Oh yeah. Oh, you make the high level, you know, the one that's well-functioning creative and it sounds so beautiful. Like I would like to be this creative and inspiring person that just wants to express myself, inspires others to do the same thing. But the downside, I guess if you're having a bad year, bad life is just, I would be sick of myself so fast. So I couldn't do it.
Autumn (30m 13s): I am, I am obviously not this one either. Cause I am hopelessly usually content with my situation, at least finding at least the bed, the best side of where I'm at. So I just couldn't imagine, just imagine that someone else's drink is better or that person who's always clicking the remote because they think there's something better on TV. I have physically taken the remote away from I'm an ex boyfriend actually. So yeah, I think I dated one of these. It didn't last.
Autumn (30m 46s): No. Oh, okay. All right. Type five. Are you ready for one more? Yeah, let's go for five.
Jesper (30m 54s): Number five. The investigator. So at their best type fives are insightful, curious and very perceptive. So because of their ability to research and understand rather complex matters, they also have the ability to see the world in innovative new ways. The downside is that the investigator hates feeling useless. So they often struggle with anything that makes them feel incompetent.
Jesper (31m 27s): Oh, so if there's a topic that comes up that they don't really know that much about, then the investigator will be the one who rushes home, buys 15 books on the topic, Amazon what's 35 YouTube videos and they just absorb it all because God forbid the best. Anything that the type five doesn't know
Autumn (31m 48s): Is that like that meme where you see the ones, like when did you become a brain surgeon? And the author's like last night, that's, that's an investigator. Awesome, indeed.
Jesper (32m 0s): But of course, because of all of this then for type number five, life can also feel really demanding and type five often don't believe themselves that they have the needed energy to deal with everything that is strong, met them because every time they face something that they don't know, they need to know it. So they struggle with energies. And as a result, they often socially detest themselves. And also, because of all the things that they know, they also know that stuff that they don't know.
Jesper (32m 33s): So they research even more because of that,
Autumn (32m 37s): They see that gap. Yeah. They see gap and they don't
Jesper (32m 40s): Focus on all the stuff that they do know. Instead they basically start doubting themselves a lot because the more they read, the more they become aware that there's other stuff that they don't know. So they will start doubting themselves even more so it's it's it can become a very vicious,
Autumn (32m 58s): Oh, that's horrible. That does sound like a really tough one. So on the upside they're innovative and alert and perceptive and they can create some problem solved. I could imagine this is just a great problem solver. They see the world differently. Or as I definitely, we joke my husband and I, he doesn't, he doesn't see outside the box. He doesn't even see the box. So I definitely think he goes to the investigator side. There's no box for him. And he's just in another universe from the box. And he sees solutions that it's just like, Oh, actually there was a movie, it was a Cinderella movie.
Autumn (33m 33s): And it had DaVinci in it for some reason, which is why I remember it because I loved Leonardo DaVinci. I was born on the same day. So he's one of my heroes and he comes up and he gets Cinderella out of a locked door by taking off the hinges. And they're like, Oh my gosh, you're amazing. You're a miracle. You figured out how to open this lock door. And he's like, yes, I will go down in history for opening a door. But again, it is because everyone else was looking at the lock. He looks at the other side and he takes off the hinges.
Autumn (34m 3s): That's an investigator.
Jesper (34m 5s): Indeed. Indeed. Yes. Okay. So we're up to number six. Yes. Are you ready for this one? I'm ready for this one. Okay. So number six is the loyalist. So this person is funny, compassionate, very reliable. So at their best they are fateful and self-sacrificing, it's a very productive person who looks towards the common. Good. Yeah. So that's good. Now get ready for the bad side.
Autumn (34m 33s): I know. I'm going to say, just stop there. I want this person as my sidekick. I want, if I'm the hero, I want this person as my sidekick. Just slate that in. Make sure they're a high functioning loyalist. Cause what's
Jesper (34m 44s): Just about to say then you don't want the,
Autumn (34m 47s): Yeah. Let's the downside now. All right. What is it?
Jesper (34m 51s): Yeah, because type six has a very deep need to feel secure. Oh. And that can evolve into crazy anxiety for them. I don't, you know, there'll be like, what is that? That dark cloud overhead there will suddenly throw a lightning bolt at me. The entire world is probably no, not probably most definitely against me so nobody can be trusted and a while they can act pretty decisively in a crisis situation.
Jesper (35m 21s): Right. Afterward they will fall completely apart. Oh no. Yeah. And they will always look for the worst case scenario. So if you're going to go camping with this person, the type number six will probably create like a whole list of all the things that can go wrong and all the things you need to do to,
Autumn (35m 41s): I was just going to say, I don't want to go camping with this person said, then you said camp. Oh my goodness. No. I'm thinking though, Sam from the Lord of the rings sounds totally like a loyalist even to the point. I mean being a Hobbit, he wants to sing know he wants to comfort as well. I mean, he, he goes up and down the scale. And so looking at that character, you can kind of see how the scale system works, where if you are tired, having a really bad day, you're going to fall down the scale.
Autumn (36m 12s): And you're just going to sit there and talk about the rocks. You're going to fall down and you're going to be eaten by the giant spiders and Gandalf hates you today. And if you're having a good day, you're the one who's gonna rescue Frodo, which is awesome. So that's a really kind of a good example.
Jesper (36m 28s): Yeah. I think Sam is actually excellent the same because there's also several times throughout a lot of the rings where he will start being concerned about mr. Frodo. I'm not sure this is a good idea. He does that several times. He becomes a very insecure. Yeah.
Autumn (36m 44s): Yeah. So yeah, I still will take one a loyalist at a high functioning level preferably, but I, I will be there to support them on the bad days. That'd be a good sidekick.
Jesper (36m 54s): Okay. All right. So type number seven is the Intuitionist all right. So as implied by the name, this person loves to share what he or she is excited about. So it's a very people oriented person who, who usually has a ton of friends. Oh, okay. So they are very fun to be around when they are at their best.
Autumn (37m 20s): Of course. Yeah. Everyone likes a high functioning person.
Jesper (37m 26s): Yeah. I mean, there's good and bad in all of these exactly. When they are not at their best, they are basically constantly looking to feel an emptiness that they feel inside. They feel inside of themselves.
Autumn (37m 41s): That sounds so sad.
Jesper (37m 43s): Yeah. Perhaps someday they'll feel contempt if they can just experience one more thing, you know, who says that you can't head off to climb Mount Everest next week. Yeah. We should certainly do that. And then perhaps on the way home we could run the New York marathon. Just that that's also a good idea. That would actually be great. And then I just need a pair of new running shoes and I'm going to visit the new shopping mall right now and find a new pair. Bye, bye. See you.
Autumn (38m 12s): Oh no. So that I was gonna say, I think there's definitely, I'm on the lots of friends and so the enthusiasm and all of those things, that's probably my mom and my mom and I are about opposite types. So she's such an extrovert. So this is an extroverted go out, conquer the world, going to go do all this stuff. It sounds great. But boy, that's a tough one for me. If you're a quiet introvert, you're probably don't want to hang out with an enthusiast.
Autumn (38m 44s): You're going to get stressed out, stressed out wrangle.
Jesper (38m 49s): Basically the enthusiast is always looking for something else to do that they just can't settle down and relax for just a bit. You know, they always have to do something and they get bored very fast. And also, as you can imagine, sevens have a problem finishing anything. Cause they basically just jump from one thing to the next
Autumn (39m 10s): All the time. Oh, that's a good point. Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. So I think they would be an interesting character to throw into a book, but I think on a personal level, I would only be able to take small doses.
Jesper (39m 25s): Yeah. Yeah. I follow you. If you're with them for one evening or something, it's probably going to be very entertaining, but living with them
Autumn (39m 33s): Most exciting evenings of the year for me, because after that I'll be in a cave.
Jesper (39m 40s): Yeah. Okay. So type number eight. We're almost to the end now. So type number eight is to challenge you. So H R when they are at their best, they are amazing friends and partners. So they can both assume a leader role, but they can also follow. So they are very, very resourceful people when they are not at their best. It's an entirely different methadone.
Jesper (40m 11s): Yeah. So eights just hate to be controlled by others. And as a result, they tend to dominate their environment. Okay. So this is the only way that the eight believe that no one will be able to harm them is basically by dominating. Oh, that's interesting. If things go wrong it's of course never number eight fault. So the eight we'll see him or herself as pure and very, very honest person.
Jesper (40m 42s): So because of that, it is inconceivable that such a person could have any kind of negative effect on others. Right. Right. So if they have to admit that they were wrong, I did something wrong. It takes away from their feeling of control and they don't like that. So they don't do it. So let's say that number eight, forgot to do the dishes. And you might ask, did you do the issues? And number eight, we'll say what? No, but we agreed that you would do that while I did the grocery shopping.
Jesper (41m 15s): I don't think I was part of that planning. Oh, well we sat right here at this table and agreed. It was that when I was reading emails on my tablet. Yeah, exactly. So you do remember it. You shouldn't make agreements with me when I'm not paying attention. You need to talk to me at the right times.
Autumn (41m 35s): Oh, that's definitely controlling.
Jesper (41m 38s): Yeah. And it's not number eight's fault. Of course. Yes, absolutely. He or she has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that he didn't, he or she didn't do the dishes that's cost. Of course the other person's fault that they made the arrangement or agreement in Iraq, Pronto.
Autumn (41m 53s): Well, that could be, I could see definitely the bad side. This is someone who is controlling and could definitely be abusive to those around them as they age, they force other. Cause it's always someone else's problem. Always someone else's mistake that impinged on them. So that's a problem. But I love the idea of a strong, a, especially like as a leader, like this is like a perfect mentor, figure someone who to be a leader, but can also say it is your time to fly. I'm going to let you go first and I will follow you and support you in this.
Autumn (42m 26s): I mean, that's just beautiful. This is who you want as a mentor. This is that person you want on the, on the team with you. But as long as around a good day, not a bad day, otherwise they might be telling you it's your fault, but they just led you into the Dragon's layer, which would be actually a really good con comedic moment. But if you want to write that one out, but Oh my God. So one more, one more line number nine,
Jesper (42m 57s): The peacemaker. So the healthy number nine is very, very flexible and probably one of the best people in the world to sit down with for heartfelt conversation. Oh, that sounds nice. Yeah. So the peacemaker wants to feel like their present matters and that's why they are natural born mediators and they always search for peace and stability.
Autumn (43m 27s): That sounds nice. I like that. Yeah. So good. So far. So COVID how can we screw this up?
Jesper (43m 37s): Well, all of this then feeds into their basic fear, which is conflict. So they worry a lot about losing relationships and they will go out of their way to avoid any kind of conflict. That doesn't sound good. No. And this also goes as far as to basically neglecting their own feelings and priorities in order to avoid that conflict that they fear so much. So they can, because of all of this, they can be quite prone to anxiety and they will not finish anything.
Jesper (44m 11s): They start. So if you've ever sort of experienced the person who talks about doing the laundry forever, but never do it well now, you know why? So it's sometimes it's the simple act of making a decision that can feel completely overwhelming when the number nine is at their worst. So it's hell when you simultaneously are trying to please yourself and others at the same time. So what if you are at the library and you want to take a book out, but then you start wondering, but what if somebody else also wants to read this book, then I can't take it.
Jesper (44m 52s): No, no, I, but I really want to read this. I should take a note now, but I can't. So it's just,
Autumn (44m 57s): You shouldn't making is horrible and tormenting to, this is like, what do you want for dinner? But what do you want? What we'll have whatever you want, but I want to know what you want. It just, she would never kid anywhere. That's horrible. Oh, I might know one or two of these in my life. I have to admit, I think they're on the mild side.
Jesper (45m 19s): If, if we think enough about it, we probably most, we probably know most of these in somebody that we know. Yeah,
Autumn (45m 25s): Absolutely. At least parts of them,
Jesper (45m 28s): Of course. Throughout my nine examples. Yeah. I'm also exaggerating and put it sort of on edge right on purpose. But, but I think it, it, it shows quite well how they are all very different.
Autumn (45m 41s): And I think that we, when it comes down to, for choosing one as a character, in a novel, you do have to kind of push it and emphasize it. That'd be, that's sort of all of our writing fantasy and fiction writing was we are, it's all ramped up a little bit. It's not real life you're were kind of pushing everyone to their limits constantly. So that's fair. I think our examples are very fair.
Jesper (46m 4s): Right. So did any of these, some sort of stick out to you? Do you know which one you want?
Autumn (46m 9s): Well, I know. And it's funny. Cause I do see, like I mentioned, when I took the test, I ranked almost all of mine are within points of each other. It's like one point difference for the top four. And I don't know if that's common, but they basically had to said, you know, you were probably one of these three. So I thought that was funny and I do on certain days and depending on it, cause I, I am left brain, right brain. So I am creative, but I'm also scientific at the same time. So I'm organized as well as chaos.
Autumn (46m 41s): So I do, I do, depending on if I'm currently, like if I'm working on formatting, I'm definitely more one way. And if I'm doing something far more creative, like drawing, I'm more the other way. But my top one, which surprises me looking at it now, because I think I must have taken this when I was formatting something. Was it an achiever was my top one and it was achiever investigator were tied and then I was also a peacemaker. So I think those are valid, but I think I stream between all three of them possibly daily, but definitely weekly.
Autumn (47m 17s): But yes, there are definitely times I see a little bit of myself in a lot of them.
Jesper (47m 23s): Well, yeah, that's also, I mean, again, we don't need to get into for fiction writing about wings and whatnot, but quite normal that if you take the test that depending on the situation you're in right now, you might be sort of editing more to one of your wings rather than the one you actually are. So, so it depends, it depends on the situation you were in when you're taking the tests as well.
Autumn (47m 46s): Absolutely. Yeah. Like I said, it, your mindset, there's so many things I've been going on your life and could be pushing you one way or another. And you're relying on one of those other traits that you have instead of, you've probably had to take it a few times and see which one kind of keeps popping up towards the top.
Jesper (48m 3s): Yeah. I mean, in the end, the gram, the idea is that you are one of these, you're not several of them, but, but you can sort of borrow from one or the other times, depending on which life situation you were in. And some of them borrow more from others than, than then again than others do. So. Yeah.
Autumn (48m 21s): Yeah. And I think, yeah,
Jesper (48m 24s): A large portion of it that you can take the test to try to figure out which one you are. But a lot of it is also just about reading about the personality types of sort of feel within yourself. Which one do you feel most aligned with that will usually give you the best answer?
Autumn (48m 41s): I think so too. And you'll get, and you'll see aspects of, like you said, with the wings and other things I would say, cause I like the peacemaker one, but I am far more decisive. So I know that it's definitely lower on the list. So the investigator, or maybe the achiever are probably pretty legit for me. How about you? What do you think you are? I'm number eight. You are yeah. A challenger that's isn't that what it was? Yes, that's correct.
Autumn (49m 10s): Oh, I see. I guess that that's interesting. Now I must think about this for awhile. So that's very cool.
Jesper (49m 24s): Yeah. So I think this whole Instagram stuff is very, very interesting. So we'll put a link in the show notes to the Instagram as a whole. So you can go to the website and read more about it. If you're interesting, even outside of fiction writing, I, I do find it very, very interesting.
Autumn (49m 43s): It's so fascinating to wonder why people tick. I think all good writers, all people who get into character development end up being psychologists to some little degree, we kind of have this stuff and yes. And plus in the show notes too, we will put in a link to the plotting book, which we currently have on preorder where we go over, how to use these anagrams to create characters like we've been talking about today,
Jesper (50m 8s): Correct? Yeah. And in the plotting bogus, well, we have actively listed out all the steps between the very healthy one and a very unhealthy one. And basically that's how you can use the, to develop the character arc. So you can sort of slide the couch in and say, okay, they are at this level. And then by the end of this book or the final book in the trilogy or whatever it may be, I want them at that level. And then of course you can slide them up or down depending on what you want them and what, where the story takes them. But by using those steps that we have listed in plotting book, it becomes very, very easy for you to understand how to slide them up and down, where will they end at the end of their arc from a personality point of view.
Jesper (50m 50s): And yeah, you'll have to read it in the plotting book itself, but I can promise you some of the worst cases for some of these really, really, really bad, bad, you can definitely put some characters into some very dark places, which is great for an insane villain. Yeah. But also you can also stop the character out on a very low level and then move them upward. So that by the end of the series, they've become a much, much better version of themselves. So that's also cool. Very cool. Yeah.
Jesper (51m 20s): So we'll add a link to that as well as autumn set in the show notes. It is on preorder when you're listening to this, but once we reached the 3rd of August and that's 2020, if you're listening to this later, but the 3rd of August, 2020, the price of that book will go up. In fact, it will double. So if you're interested, I recommend that you go and purchase the preorder right now, as long as you can get it for half price. So yeah, there is a link in the show notes there sounds good.
Jesper (51m 53s): Okay. So we hope you enjoy today's episode next Monday. And if all goes well there, I will have a very interesting interview lined up for you.
Narrator (52m 5s): If you like, what you just heard. There's a few things you can do to support the am writing fantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join autumn and Yesper on patrion.com/and writing fantasy for as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the M writing fantasy podcast going, stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
The idea for today's podcast episode initially came from a Patreon supporter, who wanted to know what the ideal time is to start writing sequels when working on a series.
In episode 81 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, Autumn and Jesper have an in-depth discussion about, not only how to plan a series, but also what the author need to be mindful about during the actual writing.
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (1s): You're listening to the am. Writing fantasy podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt, and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I am Jesper
Autumn (31s): and I'm Autumn.
Jesper (33s): This is episode 80, one of the am writing fantasy podcast. And today's episode is actually a suggestion from one of our support us on patron. I always set what is the ideal time to write SQLs when working on a series? So we quite found this quite interesting question, and we decided to turn it into a full episode. However, we did decide to rephrase the question slightly. So we rephrased it into this.
Jesper (1m 5s): How do you plan and write a series? So that's what we're going to talk about today. I think it was a great topic because I mean, fantasy, everyone loves a good series, but yeah, it's an interesting, you know, figuring out when do you need to write the whole series? How much do you plot the whole series? How do you figure it out and want to release books and how all that happened? So I think it'll be a good episode, hopefully. So yes, that's the plan at least how we usually succeed in our plan.
Jesper (1m 36s): So I'm sure we'll get there, but for now, I mean, gosh, we haven't talked for almost a, for a week. So how are things over on your side of the Atlantic? No, it's pretty good over here. I must say to them, I sort of have my I'm like a trail doc with the notes in the trail or whatever you, however you say that properly. But my main focus is just getting everything done for a moment before summer holidays comes around. So I must admit that it's quite busy at the moment.
Jesper (2m 7s): I'm getting the self publishing success course recorded, but I'm halfway through it at one that so impressed with how well you get your half the courses done. It's amazing. So yeah, you're going to have that one ready. I think you'll make it, you'll get it done before you end up going on vacation and yes, I, you are totally burning the candle at both ends. How's that? Yeah, I'm thinking I can last for a couple of weeks burning in both ends of the handle here without collapsing, but I'll probably need the rest.
Jesper (2m 41s): Once a summer holidays comes up because it's not only the self publishing success. Cause we also preparing to launch our fantasy writing course by the end of August, just because we're even more insane because you know, why not? We also, we also the middle of launching three nonfiction books all at once.
Autumn (3m 3s): Oh, it's crazy. Yes. I mean I'm elbow deep in adding images and formatting those books. So I think we're totally insane, but I'm so excited to see all of this happening. We said this was going to be a big year and not just because of pandemics and riots and protests. We're hoping for it to be a big year for us too, with courses and books and exciting things that will hopefully help out other writers and authors. So I think we're doing well.
Jesper (3m 33s): Yeah. The idea is basically by the end of this year, we sort of want to have all these, these elements in place so that we're ready for next year where we want to focus on fiction writing. So we have all the nonfiction parts and all the course parts and all the author business services and all this stuff. We want to get that done before we get to the end of this year, end of 2020. So that we're basically ready to shift our focus a bit next year, but well, I'm actually, I have to say I'm really pleased at all the three nonfiction books that's so that's the plodding book, the workbook that goes with the plotting book and the getting story ideas and creating a story premise book, all three of them have actually earned the number one new release tack on Amazon for their respective categories.
Jesper (4m 21s): So that's pretty damn cool.
Autumn (4m 22s): Yeah. Celebrate, waving the sparklers. I was very so excited to all three of them, which I'm going to say, if anyone wants to know Yesper is in charge of, you know, managing the categories and the Amazon ads and that's all I own, but I'm so excited. It was fantastic to see those little orange tags come up.
Jesper (4m 41s): Yeah. Especially if all three of them,
Autumn (4m 43s): I thought that was pretty cool. That's was a full study.
Jesper (4m 46s): Yeah, indeed. But an actually to be honest, it's not that hard to do, but we will explain how to do that in the self publishing success course that once that comes out for free later this year, so, and it it's, it's not that hard to do so it's nice with those orange tax day on Amazon, number one, new release. That that's really cool, but to be honest, as long as you know what you're doing, we probably only earned $10 royalties for that,
Autumn (5m 12s): But we have the tag. So that's awesome. And yeah. Talk about proofing concept. I think people should be very excited about this course because it really works.
Jesper (5m 23s): It does work for sure. But how are things are with you?
Autumn (5m 27s): Oh, it's good. We're in a, we're in, I don't know if I've ever mentioned this, but I'm definitely not a hot weather type of girl. And so I like the coal and I like the North and summer is tough, but we just, we went through a humidity so thick that it felt like you were breathing under water, finally got cleared off and we're in like barely 72 degree days. So it's like, you know, you kind of want to fleece on, it's just gorgeous, gorgeous, low humidity. I just signed me up for a lifetime of this. And so when I hit weather, I also hit my work prove.
Autumn (5m 60s): And so I'm just plowing through a lot of work and it's good. I've got some graphics, I've got beautiful weather. My garden's doing well. I'm working on books, writing just a little bit on this side, just because Hey or writers, which is what I was actually going to say about half. The reason why we want to get our platform done for him writing fantasy is because we're writers we would have. Right. So we're so excited about these books that we've been plotting
Jesper (6m 26s): Really want to get back to fiction writing.
Autumn (6m 28s): Yeah. So it's good. Things are, you know, this week is a good week. World is in chaos, but I, I still remember my leadership course from my old full time job. And we read the seven steps of highly effective people, which was an interesting book, right? Yes. I love that. And I come back to that idea when you feel overwhelmed to work inside your sphere of influence. So I am working very hard in my sphere of influence to make sure that the sub positive positivity and productivity around me and, and occasionally taking a little bit of time off for maybe some self care and sitting on the porch and drinking some tea.
Jesper (7m 7s): Yeah. I think I read that book first, the first time when I was in my early twenties, nice time. And it was like, yeah. And when I read it, it was like, wow, I read a press like complete eye-opener. It was like, wow, I never thought about things this way. It was like, it's amazing. It is a good book. I love that book on the internet with the yam writing fantasy podcast. So over the weekend I noticed a conversation going on in the am, writing fantasy Facebook group.
Jesper (7m 43s): And well, I guess before I get into that, I have to say that I appreciate all the different points of view and also the willingness in the group to respect other people's opinions, because there were certainly some different opinions in that conversation there. But anyway, the conversation was about using a story structure on not using a story.
Autumn (8m 5s): Interesting. I missed that one and I was even in the group a couple of times this weekend. Yeah.
Jesper (8m 11s): That, well, it was sort of, it started in one place and then it, throughout the comments, there was probably like 40 comments on that one. And then down, down the road, somewhere there in the comments, it started, they started debating whether or not a story should have, you should follow a story structure or not. And on one hand, some said that they didn't want to read something for Blake and others then said that it's not about creating something formulaic, but rather how to apply a structure to a story, to, you know, study writing and understanding how stories work.
Jesper (8m 47s): And I thought that was pretty interesting.
Autumn (8m 49s): That is a good conversation. I will have to go look for that one. Yeah. Yeah. I mean,
Jesper (8m 56s): Since we've written an entire guide on how to plot a novel, it's really no secret where we stand in this conversation. No, I decided not to pitch in there in the comment section, but a it's I think it's pretty clear what our view is that stories that work to follow a structure and that there's nothing about being formulaic or anything. We do explain why in the plodding book on why we think this way. So I'm not gonna labor that here. But my main point, I guess, is just to acknowledge that I like to see how the Facebook group is able to have constructive conversations when there are different points of view or disagreements.
Jesper (9m 35s): I, I really think that was nice to see. Yeah.
Autumn (9m 37s): Yes, there was. I did notice recently, I mean, there was a few people talking about how and why they like the group and how very supportive and people were, you know, open to different interpretations. We're very honest with each other and very kind with each other. And they compared it to other groups that seem to be dominated by just a couple of individuals and how much am writing fantasy isn't that way. And I just really, it was hard not to chime in there and say, thank you, but just let it then go on.
Autumn (10m 7s): It'd be like, yeah, I think this group is pretty fantastic too. So I think that is there do a wonderful job of being nice and supportive, but also being good critique partners and helping each other out. So it's a really wonderful group. Know what I thought? Because go ahead. Okay.
Jesper (10m 26s): No, yeah. I was just about to say, because honestly it's not that easy, you know, especially, especially when you're thinking about anything on the internet, you know, a Facebook group, or it could also be common sections on YouTube or whatever, but when people can behind, they can hide behind the screen and behind the keyboard and you don't have to sit there in front of somebody and tell them the same thing to their face. It is so easy to be the let's call it nasty commandant. Who's very opinionated about everything and thinks that, you know, the best and those kinds of people it's so easy to do.
Jesper (11m 3s): And, and I think sometimes it's not because those people want to be nasty or anything. It just comes across differently when for one, you hide behind your screen. And secondly, when you're writing and you cannot hear the person's tone of voice or see the expression, it just in writing in general, I can also see it from a day job perspective. You know, when you get emails about something that's very different when they call you something. So I just think that this whole conversation that was going on there, there was definitely different opinions in there, but it never turned nasty.
Jesper (11m 38s): And I really liked that. So I just wanted to do a shout out to every group members and they I'm writing fantasy Facebook group and say, well done everyone, you know, keep the conversation going because we can all learn from one another. And I think that's important. And the group is just,
Autumn (11m 54s): Just awesome. So big shout out to them because they're, it's really a dynamic group. I'm not even a Facebook fan, but I absolutely love, I love the group. So that says something to me. I mean, either
Jesper (12m 7s): If I didn't have to, if we didn't have the Facebook group and I didn't have to run some ads for us on Facebook, I would definitely on the stall it for me.
Autumn (12m 16s): Yeah. We're in the same boat. They're the things we do just to, you know, because we're writers. What I thought was interesting. So I did some research and then I, we just got a nice email from James Brown, who is one of our new Patrion members, but he was actually emailing back regarding our newsletter. We send out to people who join our list or pick up one of our things like the starter kit or the global download. And I thought it was neat because it actually spawned something in me that I had thought of ages ago and just remembered.
Autumn (12m 47s): And that was that we send out a newsletter with like really good writing tips that almost invariably, whenever one of them goes out, we hear back from at least a handful of people. Somebody says, Oh my gosh, thank you. This came at the perfect timing. Just like James just said. And I was thinking of all the writerly things that I'm involved in and even non readily. I mean, I'm into like what travel and bushcraft and all this other stuff that I got going on in my life. None of them, once you sign up for something or do a course, they all Peter out and maybe you'll hear from them when they're doing affiliate marketing for someone else.
Autumn (13m 21s): But we don't do that. We have this newsletter that goes out every three weeks or so with really good tips. And it just keeps, we keep adding to it and adding to it. And I don't know anyone else who does that. So I wanted to give us a big Pat on the back and say, this is really cool. I don't know anyone else who keeps delivering this to people and trying to be helpful, no matter, cause you signed up for a free something like five years ago, we're still trying to give you helpful tips. And I also think it's cool because you know, it's something people can sign up for and just gone to, but I realized today that there's no easy way of getting it unless you pick up something free.
Autumn (14m 2s): So I know we've talked about fixing up our website, I'm thinking, you know, we have to find a way of like, just, just subscribe to the I'm writing fantasy email list. Didn't get tips. But right now, if you want to get these awesome tips, you have to go and like pick up a free writing course, like the starter kits. So that's always there though, if anyone's interested.
Jesper (14m 26s): Okay. You know, actually I was thinking that the best place to start is probably to just talk about how do you even decide if a series is the right choice for the story that you want to tell. That is one thing is that we're going to talk about writing and series and how to do that. But before you eat, you can even get to that pot. It is relevant to question the story you want to write. Is that supposed to be a series? You know, is that a good match?
Autumn (14m 56s): Yes. I feel like channeling our old AI, old Mick grumpy. I just feel this need to bring him back to life.
Jesper (15m 3s): Oh, I forgot about it.
Autumn (15m 6s): He was the best devil's advocate. And I feel that urge within me to be the devil's advocate and just say it's fantasy. Of course it's a series. The,
Jesper (15m 16s): If anybody doesn't know what autumn is talking about, trying to go to the am, riding fences, YouTube channel and what some of the older videos, and then you'll you'll understand what she's doing.
Autumn (15m 26s): Believe it or not the first podcast, because I recently added the transcripts and he is in the first, like first 10, 15 podcasts. So if you go back there, you will actually hear old Grumpy's voice and his salty sarcastic was done.
Jesper (15m 43s): Yeah. I think from a business standpoint, at least, and we talked about this before, but from an orthopedic standpoint, it makes most financial sense to write in a series. But I think you could find some arguing where not all stories and, or I guess characters are suited for a series, not all the time, necessarily the autos books that just works well as standalones as well.
Autumn (16m 12s): I totally agree. There is definitely some books. I'd be nice, still playing with. I love trilogies. I've got two Epic fantasy trilogies, but I have this idea for this other story. And my initial instinct was, Oh, trilogy. But I keep looking at it going, I don't know if there's more than one book in there. So there is, you know, I could feel a gut instinct kicking in, but there's definitely ways of doing this as much more concrete as step by step then saying how much material, how much does my character change?
Autumn (16m 44s): Is there enough action to make this last for three books? Is it two books? Is it seven books what's going to happen here?
Jesper (16m 52s): Yeah. And it also comes down to how much you're putting at stake, but also the actual, what should we call it? Environment in which the book takes place. For example, you know, if you have like somebody trapped in a snowstorm or whatever, right, right. That's going to be difficult to sustain for series for three books.
Autumn (17m 17s): No, I agree. And I think that's where you get into looking at, I'm sure we're going, we're moving in this direction. But if you look at themes or your, what your premise is going to be for the story versus your series has a premise. So this, if your premise is the dire events that happen when so and so is trapped in a snowstorm and such, and they're running out of food, that's a good premise. But how can you break that down into three separate, equally exciting ones that would each be an entire novel, even if it was only 50,000 words, but when we're talking about fantasy, so we're talking about 80 to 110, 120,000 words, those are big books.
Jesper (18m 4s): Absolutely. So I think step number one here in this whole conversation is to say, is this story I want to tell, suited for series, but for the sake of not having to stop this or already now, I think we have to, we have to assume for now that this is the case that you want to write the series, otherwise this whole episode won't be,
Autumn (18m 30s): But I think that's a good step. One is you've got to look at the idea and say, you know, like I said, so you come up with this idea of being lost in a snowstorm. So, okay. Maybe is it the entire world is, you know, North of the wall and you're stuck in snow or ideally you're developing and you're expanding your timeline, your timeframe. So maybe you can make a whole series about a snowy Hoth like world and be able to make this really dredge out. Or you're going to have to revisit your idea until you can break down the big idea into three separate little ideas that kind of fit into it.
Autumn (19m 9s): So let's say we're there. And so we're going to move on to the real question is how do you go about plotting this? And when do you start writing the sequels and how does that all work out once you decide that this really is going to be a series?
Jesper (19m 26s): Yeah. And I could, I think we actually talked about this in a past episode, but I could just reiterate here once again, what our process is just for the sake of completeness here. And just in case somebody can't remember what we said in there. I don't remember if it was last week or a couple of weeks ago, but I do remember saying this before, but let me just repeat it here then. So when we are creating a new series, we start out by creating a premise description for the entire series and how to do that is exactly, is explained in that brand new book on how to get story ideas.
Jesper (20m 6s): So just check that one out. It only costs a couple of dollars, so everybody can manage that. I think. So I'm not going to go into how to develop the premise here, but basically we create a premise for the entire series. And then once we have that, then we use that as sort of the guiding star so that we know, okay, this is the, this is what the entire series is going to be about and what's this going to encompass? And then we basically break that one down into a premise for each of the books in the series.
Jesper (20m 43s): And in that way, we start to understand how are we going to deliver on that guiding star? Absolutely. So we don't, we don't do any detailed plotting for this. So these, these premises are just short descriptions. It's probably a couple of sentences.
Autumn (20m 58s): Yeah. Very high level. I think the most high level, maybe a paragraph, but yeah, you can get away with like two sentences, even for the series theme. It's not overly complicated. I mean, an example from my second trilogy is the series whole premise was one culture was trying to undo a punishment created by having lost an ancient battle. That was enough. Obviously there's a lot in there. You can mine out to separate what happens in each of the three books to fulfill this premise.
Jesper (21m 32s): Yeah, absolutely. And, and I think the danger here is once you feel compelled to stop putting in all those details in already at the beginning stage issue, you know, so we purposely make sure that we only plot the first book or the current book that we're working on. So if we're done with the first book, then obviously we move on to book number two and so forth. But we are only doing the plot for the actual book that we are working on. And then we just leave all the rest with only the premises set.
Jesper (22m 6s): Because even though in our case, for example, we plot in quite a lot of detail. We are very focused on all the small nuances in the plot before we even start writing. But even though we do that, there's still gonna be a few things here and there that pops up during the writing of the first draft that isn't in the plot. So we don't want to waste efforts and we don't want to waste time. We want to be as efficient as we can.
Jesper (22m 37s): So hence starting to put in a lot of detailed plots on book two, three, four, five, et cetera, once we're still on one, on one, it's just going to be a waste of time because we have to correct all of it afterwards. Yeah,
Autumn (22m 50s): I think I like to put it. So I like to, when I first did my first series of what I was writing alone, I would maybe work out like put in the seven steps of story structure, going back to the beginning of this episode, when we kind of hinted, we like structure. I used the seven steps all the time, even in my personal writing. And maybe I would take the premise and I would put in the seven steps and I'd make sure that those are filled out pretty concretely for book one. And I might have them outline in two and three.
Autumn (23m 20s): I might have an idea of which character is that book going to be based on because that's typically how I often wrote. I would have I juggle a ton of characters and that's just what I known for in my personal or fantasy writing. So I would often pull out as different characters as the main character for the SQL, the next book or the next book. And so I have some ideas of the things that, that one's some big things, what the inciting incident is, what the climax is maybe one or two small hurdles, but it would be, as I wrote book one, I would say, Oh, this is going to be the thing that's gonna, they're going to have to face that in book two, or they're going to face that in book three.
Autumn (24m 1s): And I just go run over to the, a where I have that in Scrivener and saved and I would drop it into the plotting note. So I wouldn't forget. And I could go back and look it up later, right. When I needed it, like when I'm working on the plot. So, but it stayed very high level and it changed, it was much more fluid. You didn't spend days and days and days or weeks or months trying to work out these detailed plots when, you know, just having to me having those files at least organized saying, Oh, I know I'm going to put this here. I'm going to put it there.
Autumn (24m 32s): That was enough that I could move forward, knowing that it's going to be three books. I could name the books. I could brand the books. Heck I could do the covers for the books even, and go ahead and even promote that it's going to be a trilogy, link them all together, but I could just be writing book one, which is pretty cool.
Jesper (24m 52s): Yeah. And even beyond that, I would say for our first joint fiction book that we talked about, that we're going to do next year when we were doing the plotting for that one, not even haven't gotten advice to write anything at all, but when we're just doing the plotting of it, it happened several times that I thought of something like, Oh, okay, maybe we should do this in a later book then. So I now have a word file would probably like 30 items in it.
Jesper (25m 23s): It just says in some later book, and then I have a sentence or two saying something that could have, I have no idea if it's two or book five, but it's just some ideas that I have sort of once we then start plotting book, number two, I can, we can go to that file and pull it back out and see, okay, is there anything in this list that actually fits in here? Maybe some of it is never going to fit in anywhere. That's also okay. It's just ideas. Right. But it's, it's nice. It's nice to have sort of it, at least for me.
Jesper (25m 53s): And I think this is not unique to me at all. I think it happens to most writers, but once you get into the narrative and the story of it, whether that could be just the plodding, if you plot in detail like we do, or the actual writing, but it will spark new ideas. You will start thinking about things that, Oh yeah. And then I can do this and I can do that. And it's just so good to just pack them in that placeholder file and just let her sit there and then come back to it later. So it doesn't derail it.
Autumn (26m 20s): You hear now. Yes. That's a very good way of doing it and saving them is so important. Cause I think, I mean, especially, especially if you had something that does happen that you're like, this is going to be perfect for having ramifications later. You don't want to have to reread your own book or you don't want to forget about it. I'll leave this thread. That's going to drive you and readers insane. It's nice to have a place to park that, like you said, and, and pick it up. That is funny though, because we've sort of answered the original question from Irish, which was sort of, when do you start writing the sequels?
Autumn (26m 52s): If you're writing, if you are writing a trilogy and basically were saying that, you know, as you're going through this, your plotting one book at a time you're saving your ideas into the, for the other books and delete these files. You're basically writing one book at a time. So you finish one and then you go to the next one. And you plot that though. I have to admit if when I was really fired up and really just chugging out these books, I would probably get about three quarters of the way through book one.
Autumn (27m 22s): And then I would start, I'd feel confident enough that I could start plotting book two, but not writing. I have finished book one or at least I think it was book two and started book three the exact same day. I mean, I don't think I even took a breath. I'm like, Oh, I did that finished book. I'm not even the next one. I've got to go and tell Facebook, I'm not going to tell anyone I'm I just had the idea for the first scene. So I kept writing, but I write them back to back. Even though I have written books, multiple books at the same time, I think we've talked about that in a different episode.
Autumn (27m 54s): So I've written two books at once, but never in the same series because too many things can change. And if you started too soon, you're going to be kicking yourself because you're not going to be adding detail and you're going to have to go back and edit pretty heavily.
Jesper (28m 8s): Yeah. Speaking of editing her heavily and having major headaches and whatnot, the whole point that we've sort of touched upon a few times by now the whole point about story structure really becomes important when we're dealing with series. If you're just writing a standalone single book, you can more easily adjust as you go. You know, for those who more rely more heavily on their intuition for story creation, that can work to some extent when you're doing a single book, but once you start juggling three, four or five, six books, if you don't have a proper story structure and you know, you have the arc plotted out, you know, the character arcs as well, where the, where things are going, going to change.
Jesper (28m 56s): So to speak over time, you're gonna have so much to do in editing that it, Oh my God, I can't even imagine the headaches.
Autumn (29m 7s): I still remember my first book by debut work. And when I discovered story structure, cause I think I got lost at chapter three. I might've made it up to chapter nine before I really threw in the talents that I need to go back and figure out what I'm doing and learn plotting. But it's just, that was, you know, that wasn't even a third of that book. That was a huge book. And so, yeah, I, I can't imagine trying to do that and understand where the character is coming in and their character arc is making them change.
Autumn (29m 38s): And that is affecting the plot. And the plot is affecting the character arc in that bundle of things. It becomes this giant ball of tension that explodes into the climax. And plus you have to add the villains arc and or the antagonist. However you want to put it in. All of that is coming together in this spiraling, twisting DNA, strand of synergy, doing that and doing it powerfully so that you have a really well connected and dynamic trilogy or series. If I can find someone who can do that off the top of their head and hasn't written like 30 books, I would just be so astounded because I can't imagine knowing it, maybe someone's a subtle writer and they just could do it out of instinct.
Autumn (30m 22s): But man, not me.
Jesper (30m 24s): No. Well, I'll, I'll, I'll make a bold claim here. I will say that if anybody says that they can do that, I do not believe it. I don't care how, how a claim. They, I don't care if they're Stephen King. I do not believe it. What I would do believe is that they can, they can write the books, but they will spend a ton of time editing it to make it make sense. And the progression is just right from one book to the next, et cetera. Nobody is able to do this intuitively without any structure in place or if they do, then they've just decided that, okay, I'm just going to write it and then I will make sure it all makes sense afterwards.
Jesper (30m 60s): And then you, you spent just as smart, just as much time or even more during the editing, which is own, that's absolutely fine. You can do it however you want. I just feel like I would rather spend a bit more time plotting upfront. So I don't have to redo work that I hate redoing work. So once I've written the first draft, rather move straight into editing it so that it sounds nice, but the whole story is there. The arc is there on the character arcs and the story progression is already there because also when, when we are talking about these character arcs, if you have a six book series, the changes in the character should have happen incremental throughout with each book.
Jesper (31m 43s): It shouldn't be so that in book number six, you can see that the author, all of a sudden figured out, Oh, I heard somebody said something on a podcast once about character six, all of a sudden the character changes and everything happens in one book because I just remembered now that before I finished the series, I should also have a character arc where the character changes. That's not how it works and that can be difficult to handle again, unless you want to do the whole thing in editing, be my guest, but I wouldn't, but who it can be difficult to do unless you know where you're heading.
Jesper (32m 22s): And you, you have a firm understanding like, like it was discussed in that Facebook thread that we talked about a bit earlier, right? We're saying that it's important to study writing and understand the structures of stories. And I do firmly believe that that's true because if you understand how structures works in a story, how character ox works, then you will be able to embed it into your series. And you just, again, gonna save yourself so much headache,
Autumn (32m 52s): You will, and you will help improve your plotting. You'll know how you're going. And it's funny while we were talking about this, all only thing that popped in my mind was so you think George RR Martin is a plotter. I answered my own question because book seven is still not finished or released. And he managed to give the information to the filming agency so that they could create their own script and create their own using his framework and what he planned to happen to create the final episode.
Autumn (33m 23s): So there you go. So George RR Martin, that's the only way to handle the, what 150 named characters plus how many others that he's got going on in those books. So yeah, it shows, I think a level of, I wouldn't even call it professionalism, but it's a level of understanding the depth of storytelling, that if you want to have something that's really layered and impactful and full attention, and you have your characters shifting and changing, and that fits the plots, what happens?
Autumn (33m 54s): It doesn't just happen because you need it to happen then because you know, you needed your character to change, but that the plot has wrangled them and massage them enough that the changes reflected and make sense. So that readers are surprised, but also understand that doesn't happen unless you've sat down and thought about it quite a lot. And that comes with plotting. And when you're going to do that over the course of several books, I mean me, like with all my characters, I like to actually have characters who have arcs that. I mean, the one that is tied to that book, they have a character arc that ends, begins and ends in that book.
Autumn (34m 29s): But then they go on to the next book and they could have a character arc that spans two books. But because they're not tied to the plot is tightly. And all of that with you're juggling like six source. So I'm not going to admit how many characters are in my six book series and keeping readers and grossed and keeping everyone straight. You don't do that unless you have it written out, you have that framework in place.
Jesper (34m 58s): Yeah. The other thing is all also that it's important that each book is interesting on its own. It shouldn't be. So that the, for example, if you have a trilogy then book number one, that's usually exciting, right? Because then everything is starting out on, Whoa, this is, this is a new adventure and yeah, everybody loves it. And the third book is also very exciting because we get to the final battle. There is the climax of the entire story.
Jesper (35m 28s): Everything is nice and dandy as well. And then book number two, there is just like a placeholder sitting in between there, right? And that doesn't work, you know? And again, the, if you can embed every single book in the series with story structure, then each of them will also be an interesting read on their own. And they have to be, it has to, they have to have their own conflicts as well. It can't be just like, yeah, this is then the middle of book where it's all about them traveling halfway across the countries.
Jesper (35m 60s): And then they have, there's a few via places talks throughout, but that's it, you know, nobody wants to read this.
Autumn (36m 6s): You don't want to see that inverse bell curve in the tension graph where it's like, Brooklyn's exciting too is like, Oh, why did I bother picking this up? Just picking up book three. Cause I'm hoping it's exciting again. No, it really should be an escalation where you're getting more and more exciting. We're booked to is more intense. And I mean, I know I've seen readers say that on some of my books that it's like, I rarely read a second book that you know is better than the first, but that's what you want readers to be saying. They went to say, Oh my gosh.
Autumn (36m 38s): I mean, I have a, between book two and three, I have a hundred percent through rate because they're tied so tightly. And you just have to know, but at the same time, the story that starts in each book, book one as its own premise and it begins and ends in book one book two has a premise and it begins and ends in book two. And the same thing with book three, but they're all tied together by this bridge of this premise. That is the serious premise that if you can do that and you can create this tightly knit series where each book is standalone, but equally actually even more exciting than the one previously.
Autumn (37m 15s): Oh, just readers adore it. And I have to admit when I was a teenager or when I found books like that. Oh, well, that's why I write them now. Isn't it? Because that's what you get so engrossed in as like homework, no food, no, I'm just reading this. I don't care. It's 3:00 AM. And I have a test in chemistry in the morning. I am doing this and that's, that's exciting and that's what you want to do. And this is what you want to find as a reader. And that's what you want to write as a writer.
Jesper (37m 40s): Yeah. And I just thought about when you said that actually in fantasy, I feel like with, with a series, we really need to be a bit careful with the overpowered characters as well. That's very serious. That really becomes a problem sometimes in some stories where it's just like, well, okay, honestly I gave up at book number six in the wheel of time series, but, but the main character there rant, he's, he's becoming like this Superman kind of thing, you know?
Jesper (38m 15s): And I mean, some people enjoy that. That's fine. But I just feel like you need to be careful with overpowering the characters as you progress through the series. Because if you get to a stage where the reader basically knows that nothing can beat this person, then it takes out a lot of tension of the story. You have to keep reader right down the balance where they're not quite sure if this guy's going to make it or not. Right. That's why you want to keep them. But if it's like God like powers and you're immortal almost or whatever then I mean, okay.
Jesper (38m 50s): Of course, of course there's also interesting stories about vampires who I modeled and stuff like that. But then you have to come up with some, some other threats that really, you know, I love and one of Anne Rice's books where the, I guess it's listed, but I think it is, but he is so powerful once you get far enough into those books. But at some point he wants to feel what it's like being a human again. So he actually finds, I can't remember if it's like a Sharman or something, but there's some magic involved and somebody is able to take your body and your shift buddy with somebody else.
Jesper (39m 28s): And then he does that. Yeah.
Autumn (39m 30s): Yes. I remember that. Yeah.
Jesper (39m 32s): It's just so amazing that story, because he wants to get back in his vampire body. But what if this guy just don't want to shift back because now he has the vampire body and he's a million times stronger than let's that isn't in human body. Right. So he can do nothing. So it, the entire story is really why, how he's he comes up with a plan on how to trick this person so he can get back into his vampire body. And it's it's I like that, you know? So that kind of thing work. But my point is just that if you want to do something like that, if you do have really overpower characters, you have to work extremely hard at coming up with something that makes it in an intriguing read, because just throwing five dragons at him who cares, right.
Jesper (40m 18s): I mean, he's a model,
Autumn (40m 19s): Right? Yes. And I think that's such a great point because it does when serious lose that excitement and that tension because you just feel like, Oh, well the hero can handle it. I'm just reading it. Cause they're my best friend, but it's lost that flavor and that excitement. And it's a very easy to do as your character becomes, you know, the character art continues and they become so strong and proficient at their magic or whatever they can do. They're just fantastic heroes. And I mean, I still remember that even from dragon Lance, you know, the heroes become so great, but a lot of them kind of die off before they get to the point where you feel like they're immortal, they're facing mortality.
Autumn (40m 57s): So you feel that. And I think that is a very such a valid point and something, I had a hard time with my first time out writing a series is it's so easy to make your characters get powerful, but then you are having to make sure that your antagonists, your villains are equally powerful. You have to make sure that they're still weaknesses. So I do think people, regionally writers when they're doing character arcs, think that, you know, the proficient becoming proficient in magic is important, but that doesn't have to mean that they have all powerful encompassing powers that, you know, they can still just, if they're a water elemental, they only control water.
Autumn (41m 33s): You don't need to give them the control out of fire earth and air because, well, that's just getting crazy and then you can't defeat them and that's becoming, you know, you've got to keep it. You got to keep the weaknesses there as well as the strengths. And you have to show progression in possibly other ways than just power. Otherwise you're going to be writing yourself into a little box corner of, Oh, how do I, I'm going to have to bring out the gods at this point to create destroy this character. And that's not a character I planned on writing, but there you go.
Jesper (42m 5s): Yeah. And I think apart from all this story's structure and character arcs and all this other stuff that is really about well said that the writing itself, I would want to just take a side step here and talk a bit about the writer, him or herself, if that's all right. Absolutely. Because I feel like apart from all the writing craft stuff that we basically is what we've been talking about for about, for like 25 minutes or so.
Jesper (42m 39s): But the other thing that I really feel that can't be neglected is that you also have to ask yourself, can you commit to write a series? Because you know, writing one novel is a lot of work, but a series. Wow. You know, you're talking a whole new level of commitment here. So yeah, I think it's just worth mentioning that before you jump into the deep end of the pool here, I did, you know, I started out saying, okay, I'm just going to ride trilogy.
Jesper (43m 10s): And I jumped straight into the deep end and it can work. I mean, I wrote the entire trilogy, so it's not that it can't work, but I'm just saying that maybe sometimes it's at least worth considering if you want to dip your toes into the water and maybe start off with a standalone or something first, just, you could still tie that standalone into the series. Maybe it's something that happens a hundred years before or after, or whatever you want to do. So that still ties together with the series in one way or another.
Jesper (43m 40s): But I just feel like it's, it's worth considering if, if you can commit to that because it is a lot of work.
Autumn (43m 51s): Yes. I think that's a fantastic point. Yeah. We, we both just dove right into trilogies on our first bet out, but
Jesper (43m 59s): Yeah, but I think we've sorted out or concluded by now all these podcasts that we are in saving, listen to,
Autumn (44m 7s): I I've told more than enough people that I'm definitely jumping into the fire, just so maybe you don't have to. So this is a fantastic word of warning that it's, it's a lot of work. I mean, that was three years. Plus I rewrote the first book a couple of times to learn what I was doing. So it was my debut. So that was like five years of my life. And then I went and wrote a second trilogy in the same world, but why not? I got a little bit, but we
Jesper (44m 32s): Are a lot of work and it, there's nothing wrong with maybe coming up with a novella for seeing if you like the characters, like the world, make sure that you've really got it in you to keep going, because that's horrible to disappoint readers to write something that you're planning. You know, you leave all these loose ends and you get to the end of the book. And you're like, I really just don't want to write book two and three it's, you know, don't do that to readers. It's just, I, I try not to pick up series until I know they're complete because it's so painful otherwise.
Jesper (45m 3s): And a lot of readers feel the same way. Yeah. That is absolutely true. And I think it's basically safe to conclude that maybe, well, two or three elements here, depending on how you look at it. One is the writer, him or herself. Can you commit to write an entire series because the demand and the work involved in that is, is a lot. So think about that. And then the second part, and I guess this could be two things or one thing. Yeah.
Jesper (45m 33s): Depending on how we look at it, but understand plodding, understand story structure. Those two things are pretty important. And I know that there are a lot of people out there who don't want to plot and that's absolutely fine, but at least understand the whole line of thinking that we started out with about creating that premise per the series first and then per book below so that, you know, that overall, all this stuff, you know, it fits together and it's not just like a random book here and then something else happened over there.
Jesper (46m 10s): And you know, that everything fits together before you start, that is incredibly important and it will really help you, even if you don't want to do all the detailed plodding and that stuff, that's fine. But, but at least put those guiding stars in place from the get go. Yes. I think that was a fantastic summary to this podcast. All right. So next Monday, it's all about character creation. We will explain how to use the integral types to create great characters for your novel.
Narrator (46m 44s): If you like, what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the am writing fantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Ottoman Yesper on patrion.com/and writing fantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the M writing fantasy podcast going, stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
It seems like some authors pull from a bottomless well of story ideas and others, well, it is a shallow and finicky spring. How do some authors generate so many ideas they woefully declare they'll never write them all?
Jesper and Autumn dive into ways of generating story ideas in this episode full of tips, practical advice, and even a few really good ideas!
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
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Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Pick up Story Ideas: A Method to Develop a Book Idea at https://books2read.com/StoryIdeas
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Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (1s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast in today's publishing landscape. You can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from WRITING Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts. Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt
Jesper (30s): Hello. I am. Jesper.
Autumn (32s): And I am Autumn.
Jesper (34s): This is episode 80 of The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast Story Ideas some of the questions I often ask. Ah, how do I get Ideas? How do I turn the idea into something which can serve as a starting point for my novel? And how do I know if my idea is good enough? And I, I cannot promise that will answer all of those in full here now, but we will definitely try to tackle this topic about story ideas as best as we can. Yes.
Jesper (1m 3s): I think some of those could be a topic and a half fall on their own. But if this is a fun one, I'm looking forward to this one because I'm definitely one of those people who I can almost always come up with an idea. So this will be a fun one to get to share some of that with people you have five. And I think about it it's Episode 88. Isn't that amazing? Exciting. It really is exciting. Seems it seems like we've just started this. It gets its been eight episodes, which is a special 80 weeks that Oh my God.
Jesper (1m 37s): Yes. Now I feel old. I know I can't even, I can't even make the math on that. That's incredible. Well, yeah, I was gonna say, I could look up. I thought I knew how many weeks in a year pull. This is not worry about this stuff. We're not here for math. We're here to write notes to that, but we are getting closer to a hundred episodes. So I'm thinking we should do something special there. Maybe, maybe we could ask listeners' if they had any good ideas, if they do it in a place, the link in the shownotes where people can email us from.
Jesper (2m 11s): And then the, if they have some good ideas about what they would like us to do four Episode number a hundred and then they can send us an email and give us some ideas. I think it should be something special. I think so too. And I think that's a fantastic idea to get some feedback, phone listeners, what they like to see it as a special 100th episode. It's only 20 episodes away. It is. Yes, indeed. And a, I was started thinking that maybe we could do it like a ask us anything you want Episode so that there could be an idea.
Jesper (2m 45s): There could be an Idea. So that'd be again, if something to ask where you do it, if the listeners, if that's what you want you to have to be sending it in your, your questions. So that sounds good. Yeah, indeed. That's also why I want to get started a bit early on it here, because if that is what we are to do,
Autumn (3m 0s): We need to build up enough questions. So if we need to remind people on going for a while to, to send us questions. So that's, but I dunno if, if that's something people want to do and maybe somebody will have a better idea, but yeah, like we'll put a link, have the show notes from where you can email it to us and then let us know if you have any good ideas or you can also just let us know. If you think ask us anything is a good idea as well, then that would be, that would be interesting. And you could here about the time where I had to put my hands on a fiber optic cable full of power.
Autumn (3m 38s): Not knowing if it would kill me or not. So that's right. That's something you could ask me about it in that episode if you want. And I can tell you the story. Yeah,
Jesper (3m 46s): That sounds interesting. I can certainly tell. So all of my stories of living on the road in an SUV while traveling across the country. So there's lots of stories I think we can share. I am curious about your fiber optic cable myself now. Obviously I'm still alive. So that's a good sign.
Autumn (4m 4s): Yeah. That's a bit of a tell tale though is not a good story then, but well, I can tell the story if, if somebody's since an email they're and says we would like a QA and then yeah. Tell me to tell the story and I will, so you can ask us anything. That's an idea. I don't know if it's going to fly or not, but yeah. Let us know. At least
Jesper (4m 26s): Sounds good. So otherwise, how are things on your side of the Atlantic? Well, it's a actually pretty
Autumn (4m 34s): Good, good. I would say a, at the point of this recording, of course a we have pre-recording a bit, we really are trying to build up. The really Reese have enough Episode so that we have enough episode's in the bank before we go on summer holidays. So that means that we are right now recording in the beginning of June, even though you're going to listen to it later. And I said that because what I'm about to say, doesn't really make it be, makes sense when your listening to the, to do it in July. So, but I actually went to the cinema all over the weekend.
Jesper (5m 6s): Oh yeah. That was wow. You were yeah,
Autumn (5m 10s): Yeah, yeah. That the cinemas here has opened after COVID-19 again. So it was a bit weird being out and about like that again, but at the same time, it also sort of felt just normal almost at least. I mean, there was no self service in here with the popcorn and in the cinema, there was also an empty chair between you and EVERY stranger. But other, other than that, then it felt quite normal on the empty chair as an introvert. I'm pretty happy with that anyway.
Autumn (5m 40s): So that's kind of, that was fine with me.
Jesper (5m 43s): It was, I think I usually aim for that anyway. So that's good. Yeah,
Autumn (5m 46s): Exactly. So now you have forced MTTR. That was quite a lot
Jesper (5m 51s): And that's fantastic. Well, that's actually really cool to have some kind of normalicy back in the world. So I'm hoping when this is released, the world is more normal than even that. Yeah,
Autumn (6m 2s): Yeah. That, that was why I'm prefacing the timing because it maybe, maybe going to the cinema we'll be, be perfectly normal or the fingers crossed or when you listen to this book or maybe it won't, I don't know, but, but thinking of opening up, back up society as well, I also received an email from the national soccer association. Yeah,
Jesper (6m 23s): Yeah. They weren't asking me.
Autumn (6m 25s): Yeah. They were asking me about my availability to two referees the matches on the side of some of the cases. So they, yeah,
Jesper (6m 32s): It was pretty exciting. Excellent. That's sounds really exciting and will be good. Give it to get out there again.
Autumn (6m 38s): Yeah. I'm looking so much for, with it. I mean, of course there will be some COVID-19 restrictions, so you know, no handshakes and I'm not supposed to touch the ball and stuff like that. So there'll be some special things we need to be mindful about. But other than that, we are opening back up. So we allow me to start playing matches again. So, but I don't know if to hit the national association has been a bit too optimistic because they have basically told, so it's like, it's supposed to start playing matches from next week. And then just two weeks following that and then just some of the vacation.
Autumn (7m 10s): Yeah. So three weeks of matches and they have set to every single club that you can play three matches within those three weeks. So of course, because there's been locked down for so long, almost every single club will want to play three matches. There are going to be, I mean, I, I dunno if they are too ambitious, but that demand on referees will go through the roof in these three week. I mean, everybody needs a raffle of a sudden, Oh, I think I'm going to, I'm going to wrap up.
Jesper (7m 40s): Do you look at your exercise in it? For sure. Yeah. Yeah.
Autumn (7m 43s): And I'm probably going to be saw it when I, when I get to some of a case and I can't walk anymore. Yeah.
Jesper (7m 48s): I feel like I need a hammock, some treaties. I'm good. Bring your drink. But how about you then? Oh, well the United States. So this is early June that were recording and it's just, I don't know where wearable will be in July. I don't, I really don't know. I have, for one of the first times in my life, I don't know what I'm watching and I can't believe this is happening in my country where I've grown up and spend so much of my life.
Jesper (8m 17s): So it's a, it's a very uncertain and I always used to joke S half joke half seriously though, if things get bad, I was just going to go to Canada. But the borders closed because of COVID, but it is tough. Like my parents, I was really, I was so close. I had agreed with my mom that is going to wait for a strawberry season. Again, it, if you don't know much about me, if you're just listening in food is love. And my family it's been that way since as a little kid, but it's how my parents were telling my mom.
Jesper (8m 47s): She goes, how much she loves you by cooking you so much, food is going to kill you, but it's so good. Good. So I had agreed. She has strawberries. I mean, like she lives in the burbs now We I grew up on 10 acres of my neighbors were Amish. We are in the countryside. We have this huge garden. And while my mom is still has the only guard and in the burbs and she cans like 30 something court's of tomatoes out of bed every summer, its hilarious. But she also had an amazing strawberry as, and I would agree that would come down during and strawberry season while it strawberry season.
Jesper (9m 18s): And there's so big and she's Quik picking like four quarts of every other day. And we talked about in both, my parents are, are immune compromised. So I just finally said is an eight hour drive covert as a peaking back up in other States, I have to go through three or four States just to get there. It's eight hours. I got stopped for gas two or three times. I just don't want to be the cause of you getting sick or what's worse. Her sister is guilting her into like, Ohhh, you let your daughter come and stay where you want to come over for dinner because everyone wants to go to my mom's house.
Jesper (9m 54s): It's an awesome Howell. She is an awesome cook. So these are a great host. So I'm like, Oh I can't deal with it. Guilt of every one then else, you know, twisting the screw is saying, I wanna come over. Cause you let your daughter come. So we regretfully said she'll free some strawberries and hopefully soon I'll make it down to Pennsylvania. But I'm thinking of 50th more important than it is
Narrator (10m 20s): A week on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast
Jesper (10m 26s): So a huge shout out and thank you to James Brown who joined us on the Petro. Yes were so happy to welcome you. And if by the time you we're listening to this, you will have received your bookmark butt. As of today, let me just get your email, address it or your little actual physical address. And we'll be sending that out too. You probably tomorrow, you know, it really makes a difference for us in justifying the time that we've spent to report these podcasts episodes, which by the, we love recording these episodes for you, but is also a big, a time investment.
Jesper (10m 60s): So few dollars or, or, or just a single dollar a month to show that you appreciate what we try to do for you here. And they get something out of it. That really means a lot too us. So thank you again, James, for you, our support. Absolutely. We were so happy to welcome you and why it's so funny that a, you know, it's just great to see a Patreon growing and the comments and the feedback that we get there. It's fun to spend time almost as much fun as the Am Writing Fantasy group, but naw, you know, there's a few more people in there too.
Jesper (11m 30s): Yeah, yeah. I mean it's a growing thing, but the, if you are a deal list and I want to check out our patron patron Petro, and I dunno we are professional Podcast you know, apparently that's a link on the show notes, so we make it worth your while too. And we try to offer a whole range of exclusive Patrion benefits for you. As I said,
Autumn (11m 54s): Go at least too, check it out for you.
Jesper (11m 56s): Yes. I think it's sort of like tomatoes in tomatoes, you know, and we just have a different kinds of patron and, and other say you Pat, I think I said I had no idea. That's the fun thing about, you know, I, do you think that with characters and reading names? I think it's so funny. I get so one way stuck in my head, then I hear someone else say a characteristic I'm like, Ohh. Yeah, I guess she could say it that way too. So it doesn't really matter
Autumn (12m 24s): Or something to do with U S versus U K. Yeah,
Jesper (12m 28s): Probably Aye it took me forever when I was in the UK to get used to how they pronounce my name, my name over there because of the United States. Its Autumn but over there it's momentum and it sounds so awesome. Yeah. It's a totally different, they don't sell anything the same to me, but I did eventually start replying to my name. Yeah, I did. I mean, it's probably thought I was snotty at first because he never responded. Yeah.
Autumn (12m 54s): Yeah. Well, yeah. Yeah. Well you can stop being selective than right now. I mean, tell me sometimes you want to reply. Depends on what they say.
Jesper (13m 1s): And I am now officially half deaf. So I do have that ACE in my pocket if I feel like ignoring someone now my husband now, but it was gonna say I wanted to do a shout out to Mary van EVERY Brooke, who is, she has sent a lovely email saying how much she really enjoyed the podcast that we released recently on character development. So, or is it she's in the character development course, but she really enjoyed the 10 Traits of heroes podcasts. So, you know, However we hear from you.
Jesper (13m 33s): That was just an Email. So it's so wonderful getting feedback. So, you know, but leaving reviews, leaving comments on the podcast, we do scan for those. So it's always wonderful to find a new review, to find a new comment and find out someone else's really enjoyed something we put out there. That's just, it again, it makes it feel worthwhile.
Autumn (14m 0s): So Book ID. Yeah.
Jesper (14m 1s): Yes. Yeah. This is a, this is interesting. It is. And there's so much, I mean we only like created an entire book about story ideas, so, you know, for sure.
Autumn (14m 13s): Yes. Yeah. So it's a short, short, quick read. Yeah,
Jesper (14m 16s): But that's OK. It's still worth the book because a lot of authors do a struggle coming up with ideas or sometimes you feel like you're ideas just, you know, they're not good enough, are they good enough? You're wondering if it's worth a whole story. So that's always a fun topic to explore and to talk about.
Autumn (14m 34s): Yeah. And actually one of the first questions I wrote on my list here that I was thinking that we may be, could start out with and then the bass, a bit of what we think about it was the question goes like this is having a good idea and a necessity to write a good book. Ha
Jesper (14m 51s): Mmm. It's so funny. It, you say that because on Patrick on this Tuesday, my, I do my Monday posts and I released to sort of reviews of recent movies and both are jam packed full of traditional stereotypical, even tropes. Right. And the one that was a horrible movie, even though it was a big name actors, it was actually called triple frontier was so typical. Have a paramilitary movie that I think I said, I don't think there even they took the character straight off of military men shelf and they don't even dust them off.
Jesper (15m 29s): And with the other one, it was called a vast of Knight. And this is a micro budget debut show about typical alien Idea trope of all the way down to Roswell. And they don't actually know the big New Mexico. They had mentioned Roswell and forget the name of the town in New Mexico. Alien's 1950s, but all my gosh, he was spent tastic. It was so fresh. It made you tingle.
Jesper (15m 59s): I mean, it was just, it was truly riveting, but again, it was such an, it was an almost every classic trip you can think of about a, a, an alien spaced UFO movie. So now I think you need something that is a hundred percent original. You can take something, you can take Cinderella and you can turn it into something amazing and special, but obviously you can also take sell the Cinderella in turn into something that's been seamed a million times before as these two movies.
Jesper (16m 31s): Totally show.
Autumn (16m 33s): Yeah. I don't even think I've watched any of those.
Jesper (16m 37s): I don't recommend Trump all frontier a vast of night. It's on Amazon. It is so worth it. It's wonderful.
Autumn (16m 43s): Oh, okay. Yeah. I don't have Amazon prime, but I need to get that one day. I at least, I mean, next year they're gonna release the M the new law of the rings stuff. I think it's next year on Amazon. So at that point I have no excuse. I just have to get it. Just have to get it
Jesper (17m 0s): When you do go watch fascinate, because it is totally worth it, especially from a storytelling perspective where you take traditional tropes and you can turn it into something absolutely remarkable.
Autumn (17m 12s): Yeah. I'd just started watching the last few days. I started watching Snowpiercer on Netflix. Oh really? Yeah. And, and that, because that is also a good example of it sort of common, common ideas that you've seen before. So it's basically, post-apocalyptic, you know, we have the classes fighting each other, you know, the poor versus the rich and they are fighting over resources and food and whatnot, but what they just did. And so they took all the common tropes here, but then they just created the setting as like a huge train.
Autumn (17m 47s): So it's like an arch there's 1001 cops on the train and the tail end of the train is like this slump kind of way. Right. And the front end is the luxurious first time.
Jesper (18m 3s): And then basically,
Autumn (18m 5s): Oh, it's quite interesting. Actually it is it's I haven't watched a lot of it yet. Just like, I think three episodes or something, but it's quite interesting because the premise is the story idea is, is something, you know, is the same thing that you have seen a million times before, but just because they put it in a train, it's like,
Jesper (18m 22s): This, this is new. And it's, it just feels quite a good,
Autumn (18m 25s): Cool something you use to that is true. And this trend in just drive it around and around and around and around, and never stops because outsides it's like minus and 107 degrees. So if you go out and you can die, so it just keeps driving all the time, never stops sort of the day they can survive. Right. All right.
Jesper (18m 46s): I saw the thing is there's a Book I think its based on it, but there was also a movie and I have seen the movie Snowpiercer and I sorta thought that there was part of it. I'm like, Oh, you know, from a practical perspective, how are they feeling this thing? But it is definitely, it was different. I will say that. And it really Aye, it had a place to go, but you're right. It was very typical class warfare. Post-apocalyptic survival, you know, elements or the hunger games are all in this, but it can be a fresh take.
Jesper (19m 19s): So I think your answers are you answering you're own question that it doesn't have to be a a hundred percent out of a brand new idea for sure.
Autumn (19m 26s): Yeah. Yeah. I guess, I guess I'm saying that as well, but I do think, I do think you need a strong idea. Yeah. I don't think that you can just take whatever thing off the shelf and then it'll make a great story. Yeah. You have to have a good idea. Umm, but the idea, I guess what I'm saying is to dad, do you can't be built off of things that we already know, every story you have already been told or, you know, I would challenge anybody to come up with an idea for a story that has never, ever been told before, because I don't think it's possible.
Autumn (20m 1s): You will always be able to find some sort of story that has been told about this particular idea. But what I think mindset's about is how you bring that idea too life. You know how you tell it because as we've talked about before, if, if, if we right, a one sentence premise for a story with, by the way, I'm going to come back too, in this episode here about the premise. But if we write a one line premise for a story and you sit down and write it and I sit down a ride and we don't talk to each other in between at all, those two storeys will be completely different.
Autumn (20m 36s): Now, even though they were still sparked from exactly the same or origin point. And, and I think the idea he is more it's about what you make of it. It's not about stressing about, I need to get like this unique idea that nobody ever thought about before because it's not going to happen. And I think a lot of authors are stressing themselves about, well, this idea is not original enough or I need to think of something else. And then you keep going around those circles. Okay. Instead of just trying to find out how can I build something that is different from what is seen before, but it still incorporates maybe, or maybe it's just a new version of something you've seen before that.
Autumn (21m 17s): I don't think there's anything bad at that. I guess that's what I'm saying.
Jesper (21m 21s): No, and I totally agree because its, you can take any stereotypical trope and if you layer on something unique, some aspect that maybe you've come up with maybe two different tropes that are, you know, vampire's in space or something different and really bring it to life with strong characters that feel like they are truly grounded in the world or the setting that you've created. Like Snowpiercer, if they believe it a hundred percent and you have these characters, readers want to follow the underlying Trump can be, you know, something, post-apocalyptic something spawn by something, you know, someone you've seen before that part is fine.
Jesper (22m 3s): But yeah, it's what you do with it. From that point on that really makes it original and fresh. Not the truth just based on
Autumn (22m 12s): Yeah, indeed. I'm going to take the young orphan trope. You know, the young orphan who goes off on greater ventures and data becomes the Hero who saves today. You know that that's basically both the premise of Harry Potter, but it's also the premise
Jesper (22m 26s): Star Wars and those are two massively different stories. King Arthur. I mean, do we ever hear about his parents? Is he an orphan? I can't remember anymore. He's been so long, but if it's the same idea, it's the same ideas that, you know, it can be King Arthur, it could be star Wars. It can be Harry Potter. It's really, the story grows from there in the best ones are the things that are based on those characters and adding in those unique settings and twists and plots that are, that makes the story interesting.
Autumn (22m 59s): Yeah. And I also think when it comes to the Idea I was thinking earlier today that it also have a lot to do with how enthusiastic you are about it yourself. Very because I mean, that's what we've talked about before writing a book it's yeah.
Jesper (23m 16s): A lot of work. So,
Autumn (23m 19s): And you don't really have a strong drive of a motivation that you really want to write this idea, but you sort of, let's say, let's say you've gone about at the other way around it. So basically you've investigated. OK. What are the sort of the most selling tropes with this young girl? You may be, you know, you've gone through Amazon category's or whatever and check what do all of these books have in common. Yeah.
Jesper (23m 41s): And maybe I'll be smart about it and I'll be the marketing guy and I will out
Autumn (23m 46s): Okay. If I just write decent these things, then apparently that looks like that's something that the market wasn't and quite honestly you might be lucky doing that. You might, you might be able to pick that up and actually hit something that the market want. Right. But the thing is that if the only reason you're doing that is to make some money and you don't really like Did. I mean, I could say if we had some sense in us, we should probably go and write romance. There's a lot more money in Rome. Yeah.
Jesper (24m 14s): And there is always going to say it right now, magic Academy. And it seems like every Kover, you know, people are looking for there looking for a magic Academy and it's like, okay, this must be like a really popular genre right now because everyone's like talking about magical Academy covers. But I just thought that I thought of sitting down and writing a magical Academy Book Oh, I just couldn't do it.
Autumn (24m 42s): But, but that's the thing, right? I mean, if you, if your not on Tuesday last week about it yourself, I bet you readers will pick that up too. The nails they'll pick up that they are not like they can't, S not like taking a seed on the words themselves or others in the sentences, all of the chapters, but they, they can feel whether it, whether or not, or at least this is my, this is me saying that they can have, of course I wanted to know, but I think people, people can sense if the author really loves what they did here, what they created versus somebody, I just wrote this because I had to pull out another book.
Autumn (25m 16s): Yeah. I think those are different stare.
Jesper (25m 19s): And so, and I think even as you know, maybe I would definitely, I think it's a surface. I enjoy life. I definitely like comfort. Those are my motivators. The idea of spending, you know, what, if I don't like it, I'm going to be grinding my teeth to get it done. I'm not going to be looking forward to writing. It's the idea of spending months or a year. If you're thinking of a full series writing something that I just am not in love with will be hard. I mean, I've had characters. I didn't really like that. Aye I could sit their and twist myself into thinking finally, you know, I could feel like when I snapped into place and I finally, it was on their point of view, but it took some real effort to really get into this character's head, oddly enough, it was a politician.
Jesper (26m 1s): So I'd just not political, but in my life. So that was a very hard, I would never want to be an actor. I could not fit some characters, but it's definitely end even writing. Even if you had something you love, it's a story that you love. There is going to be days that you sit down to right going, Oh, do I have to do the seam? But that's, it's still the overall novel, the characters you love in some way, but to do it for a book that you're like, I'm just doing this to make money. And I mean, we just talked about that. So your selling a book for four 99 that you absolutely, but it was torturous to right.
Jesper (26m 36s): It was just doesn't sound worth to me. But again, I enjoy my comfy couch and my hot T so that's what motivates me is the chocolate at the end of the day.
Autumn (26m 49s): Yeah. I think that's fair, but I mean, I'm not trying to say either that, you know, you should have an idea that is so you are so enthusiastic about that every single day we just sit down too, right. You're just overly Join to, Oh, this is awesome. This is amazing. You know, it's not like either, you know, books is also a jar, so you will have days where this is not really dealing for me. I don't quite feel it today. And it's a bit of a, it's a, it's a bit of a job, you know, I just have to write this chapter is very and get it done in those days are there and then just, just pop into the game and you have to accept that.
Autumn (27m 27s): So yeah. So don't get me wrong.
Jesper (27m 30s): No, no that's yeah. That's what I was trying to say as well, is that there are going to be Daisy. And if you like the idea that you're not going to want to sit down or it's not going to flow well or whatever, but I, I don't know. I think readers possibly can tell and that you're struggling the entire time and you're going to struggle and its going to go slower. It's just not going to flow as well. And you might not have the passion for the characters. That's just not going to be as good, a novel as if you truly are inspired to write it at least, you know, a majority of the time.
Autumn (28m 3s): Yeah. Yeah. I think that's fair. But maybe we should talk a bit about something that I also, well, I don't know, to be honest, if this is authors asking this or if it's a more like people who are not authorized, but I do hear this question quite a lot and it is where do ideas come from? How do you get your ideas for your books? I mean, I hear that over and over again, but now that I said it out loud, I'm not entirely sure if it's mostly people who do not right to ask those kind of questions, but I don't know if you have a gut feeling about right.
Jesper (28m 32s): That I think I've heard it from both, especially new authors or struggling authors. And I had heard it from reader's as well saying how did you ever come up with that? So I've definitely heard it from both sides. So I think your gut is that's why it's your not sure who was from, because I think its from both
Autumn (28m 48s): From both. Yeah. Okay. Fair. That's a tough question. Well, yeah, because well, as S you hinted at a bit early on, we actually, we are about to release a book on story ideas and how to basically develop initial ideas into the premise for Book. And we will have a link in the show notes where you can preorder that Book in the show notes, but a, Hey I'm just gonna tell you a little secrets and that they it's, if you buy the plumbing Book then they will be a link incite that one for where I can download this book.
Autumn (29m 28s): Idea book on developing a story ideas for free. So in two weeks we're going to talk about the plotting book on the podcast and then we will give you the preop, the link for that one. So that's a way where you can get story Idea book for free. But yeah, I don't know which is stupid, but the, and if you don't want to wait for two weeks a for us to talk about that, then I'm going to go to Amazon and search file names and you will find that quite easily it's already there.
Autumn (29m 60s): But why I said that it was because we actually wrote a short chapter in that book about how to get ideas Because and it was actually its a very short chapter then what the whole book is. If it's a very quick, a quick read, it is not very, it's an not a long book, but the point is just that, even though it is such a short chapter on how do you get ideas, it was actually hide quite hard to come up with something concrete for it because I think it's also very, very like basic, you know, it's just like we have stuff like, okay, what's the movies we books, listening to podcasts, go for walks.
Autumn (30m 41s): But I think what it all comes down two at the end of it is about being open minded and observant of what's happening around me because there's a ton of ideas every single day. But you need to sort of open your mind to catch them. Yes.
Jesper (30m 57s): I think that's a very good way of putting it. And I also think everyone has an entry point to an idea and maybe, maybe its going to be at a different one for every idea. But some people start with world idea or, or the plot Idea I know my entry point is almost always a character Idea Aye kind of come up with a character and the characters sells me. Then I've got to find a story for them or maybe they have one that's tagging along. That's always nice, but it's definitely, everyone's got to find, you've got to find what it is that gets your attention.
Jesper (31m 32s): And sometimes, I mean, some of the things that are in the book, you know, it is being out there in getting sometimes the news story or something you heard and a conversation and it all comes together. I've jokingly said, you know, if you, especially, if you're a character oriented, like I am, if I sit down and I look at like this wooden table, my microphone's on, they start wondering about the tree and the would. And suddenly if you give your, the tree's outside some personality and what they've been seeing in this girl, you know, and then I'll have a kid story, but I do, but it all comes together for me.
Jesper (32m 6s): It's the way you can, if you can put personality into a dust ball, you can probably come up with a story.
Autumn (32m 12s): Yeah. It, but this is also my, I think it's a very well, there we'll be a lot of overlap between different people, but it's also very individual. I mean, for me it is usually scenes, you know, that's how I get Ideas. I, I just, it could be that I watched some movie. It could be that I am reading a book, but it could also be something that just sort of comes together in the back of my mind all of a sudden then, Oh, and then I'll have to write it down. We always have to write them down and often as well when I'm either just falling asleep or waking up, it happens often there.
Autumn (32m 47s): So I have like a small notebook in my, a Knight drawer, which is just scribbled down to scenes when I get an idea, because then I won't forget about them later on because I really don't prescribe to, I have heard those saying that, well don't ever write down ideas because if it's good enough, you will remember it. And I do not believe in that at all. I always write everything down because there is a lot of good things in that book, an a, in my small, a small notebook there, an orphan, because I think in scenes it'll just be something cool.
Autumn (33m 19s): You know, something, they think this is cool. Then I just write it down. It's a three lines or something. But then often what happens is that when I don't need to go into creating a story for it, often I can take several of these different scenes and they can all become part of the same story. And then it starts, let's say much together. And out of that comes, what is the overarching story? Really? So, but again, I think it's, it's very different from, for everybody how they think of ideas and how they come up with them.
Autumn (33m 51s): But I mean, for me, it's, it's four for you. Autumn it's characters from me. It seems.
Jesper (33m 57s): And then I, I, but I do agree with you that if I come up with an idea, I write it down. Most of mine or in like an idea of Scrivener file are stored on my Dropbox somewhere. But again, there are some really good ideas and you'd just never know how they are going to generate and grow up. And sometimes you can incorporate them into a book, your writing, or they'll inspire new things. Sometimes they just need that extra little spark. I know we are going to get there in the premise, but sometimes yeah, I gathering up all those ideas. You can crunch them all up into a ball that is just so totally awesome.
Autumn (34m 33s): Yes, indeed. But maybe we should go to in and out. And the story, the premise that you mentioned Because, this is basically the way the heart of that small book that we wrote there, it is basically taking you from some initial ideas. However, you get those ideas and then develop them into what we call a Story premise. And that is also what we have named the foundation of your story. So it's basically like a single core statement that summarizes what this entire story is about.
Jesper (35m 6s): Absolutely. And it's gotta be a little more in depth than good versus evil. Just don't warn people. I mean, you can start there, but you need a little bit more than that.
Autumn (35m 17s): Yeah. That was exactly what I was going to mention because I mentioned Harry Potter up before. Right. And if the premise for Harry Potter, for example, was a boy discovers his magic abilities, then that would not be much to go on, simply not strong enough to carry a story. So what do we do? And what we'll talk about in idea of Book here is how you need five different pieces to build your premise. And I think what I could do is that I could just list out every week or five of them.
Autumn (35m 51s): OK. And then maybe a year, maybe they will be fairly self explanatory, but maybe you could just add a few words to it, then automatically go for it. So five things, number one, a protagonist number two is a situation. Number three is a goal. Number four is a villain, a number five, a disaster. That's our formula. That is
Jesper (36m 14s): It's pretty easy. And it does go. You just kind of combine those into two senses. But the reason that this works very well is that it gives you, you know, who your main character is, which so your not floundering around and going, who is the story about, and there are in a situation that they need to get out of and if they don't get out of it, there's going to be a disaster. So you were getting stakes by knowing your steaks. You know that there's a story, there is something there's going to be tension, there'll be plotting. So it's good to know your stakes. It also gives you your antagonist, which is wonderful because you know, who is going to be confronting your Hero your protagonist.
Jesper (36m 51s): So you want to know that having that right in the front also gives you some ideas to Develop to start getting that tension and finding out how can you Thorte your hero? And of course, if it doesn't, if the hero doesn't win in the antagonist is the one who comes out on top, you have this ultimate disaster that the Hero is trying to stop. The villain's trying to create. And again, it sets you up for a very dynamic story. It builds up to your climax. So, you know, by going by this, you have almost three quarters of your book plotted in a sentence or too, and then you kinda, no, if you can't fill in those pieces, you know, you need to keep working on it, but if you can fill it in, you know, you can probably start plotting it.
Autumn (37m 37s): Yeah. And maybe just to serve as an example, I'm thinking that maybe, maybe I could just pulled up the premise that we created for our entire series, basically. So maybe I could just to explain that a as an example, he is okay, this time, what we're talking about. So number one was the protagonist, right. But okay. Maybe, or maybe I'll just read out the entire premise that we wrote, then we can map it into number two or three, four or five, just so it, it becomes clear.
Autumn (38m 8s): So it goes like this and magic use a census. He is magic is tainted by a dark force, but is also affect his sick love interest. And the Hero wants to save this person. However, the ruling dynasty is depending on the dark force and wants to stop him. And if successful will cost a Hero to experience magic becoming chaotic and destructive. So that was the premise for not book, but that entire series. Yeah. So you have a number one was the protectionist, that's the magic.
Autumn (38m 41s): Usually there, we had that upfront and we had a situation that was the whole thing about magic getting tented. Yes. Then we had a goal and that was the, Hero wanting to save the love interest. We have a villain, that's the ruling dynasty that is dependent on the dark force and wants to stop the Hero. And then we have a number five and this Saster, which is basically a magic becoming chaotic and destructive.
Jesper (39m 10s): So there you go. And from that, we're not getting just a book. We could do it. This is our series a theme. So we're kidding. Well, how are we going to have a lot at six, nine? You know, we're, we're, we're aiming for six. What we also have both said, do you know that ending ha problem of working with author's, as I said, I'm on my tombstone and will be the word's to be continued. I, you will never be done. Right?
Autumn (39m 39s): Yeah. So, but basically as if I break it down, one more step just to make it very concrete. And I like concrete examples, as you know, but so once we have this overarching premise for the entire series and what we do is that we make a similar, basically the same premise where we break down this all work in one into law in this case six books. So we create a premise for each of the six books that all basically, what would you say close up into this overarching a series premise, but we don't really play out any detail except for the book that we are currently working on.
Autumn (40m 21s): So when we're working on book one, we have the premise for a book one day and we detail out or plot out all the details related to that. And then for the Book two, three, four, five, six, we only have this high level premise. But what it does give us is that we have a clear compress as to where things are heading. And we know where Book six is the premise of book six. We know what it is. We know what's going to happen. We know nothing of the, detail's nothing about how its going to happen, but we know where we are heading. And it just makes things so much easier.
Autumn (40m 55s): And of course you need to think a bit about these premises and make it interesting and make it not something you've seen a million times over before. But on the other hand, it is not that hard. I mean, I, I can't remember exactly how long it took us to do the six premises for the six books, but we probably be talking to a couple of hours now. Nothing. Yeah.
Jesper (41m 13s): Yeah. I was going to say, I think it was in just one of our normal Monday sessions. The weed. Yeah.
Autumn (41m 18s): Probably talk for two hours. No, we were done. Yeah,
Jesper (41m 20s): Exactly. So it's not that hard. And by not plotting out all the other books, one, we're not wasting time when we could be writing, but that way we don't get too far off track. If we think it's going to go somewhere and I was just Story you come up with something really interesting and you want add that in later, but the books are already plotted. It just becomes such a nightmare. The further out you go, the harder it is to plot something that has yet to be developed in the beginning. So it was better to have that looser framework in the backend and the first book Ray to go.
Jesper (41m 51s): And then as things happen, we take notes and we say, okay, this is going to happen in book two. Or remember that this happened in book three. So this is going to affect something down there because we have the premises we know sorta where things are going to fit in later. And that really helps, you know, keep things organized. And we were both having to like organization in Scrivener. So we keep our file even being clean. Yeah. But I dunno, sort of an over all the conclusion of this Episode can, can we conclude the, getting the perfect story idea is just overrated.
Jesper (42m 24s): All of them. Do you think that's fair? I think that's fair. I don't think that you need, well, I would say the perfect or the most unique doesn't have to be something never seen before or something only you've come up with and you don't have to sit there and rattle and struggle and think about it for hours and hours. You can take a typical trip. You can take a dust bowl on the corner. And as long as you add something fresh in you and unique, give some twists, make it concrete with characters. It can be a wonderful story. It's how you write it as long as you're right.
Jesper (42m 55s): It well, okay. So next week we will discuss how to plan and write out a serious, this will be a very interesting topic to tackle and as good add onto it. Yeah.
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A bestselling author, and professional editor, joins the Am Writing Fantasy podcast to give you advice on how to edit your first draft.
What do you need to pay attention to? What are some of the common errors writers make over and over again.
Kristina Stanley, the CEO of Fictionary, share lots and lots of information in episode 79.
Learn about Fictionary here: https://fictionary.co/
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Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast in today's publishing landscape. You can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from riding Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them. Now on to the show with your hosts. Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello. I am Jesper. And this is episode 79 of The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast. And as you can hear, Autumn is taking a break today. And instead I'm joined by Kristina Stanley who is the CEO of Fictionary. Fictionary is a platform run by Kristina and her husband. Kristina is a best selling author and a fiction editor. And we are going to talk about editing today. So welcome to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, Kristina
Kristina (1m 1s): Thank you for having me it's pleasure to be here.
Jesper (1m 5s): So I actually did check on the Fictionary website earlier today. Kristina and I saw you're actually had quite a nice description of how and why Fictionary start it. And I was thinking that that might be a good place to start if you could retell a bit of that story. So our listeners as well, get to know you a little better here.
Kristina (1m 25s): Sure. I'd love to, I mean, who doesn't like talking about their story. Exactly. Yeah. So, umm, Fictionary came to be from my writing career and I started that in around 2009 and I started writing the stone mountain series and I started writing that because I just left living in a ski resort and I missed it and I wanted to write about it. And what I found after I had three novels in the series written and I was having trouble editing it and keeping track of everything.
Kristina (1m 59s): And I had this massive, massive spreadsheet organized. And my husband actually walked by and looked at my computer and said, what are you doing? And I said, Oh, I Writing is like an Excel when I said, Oh, well, okay, I'm actually editing and I need to keep track. And this is how I do it. And he said, Oh, there's gotta be a better way. I'll find you something. And so he went on this search of course, for a product that would help me. And they're just, wasn't anything that focused on story editing, you know, there's lots for copy editing and proofreading, but really nothing on the structure of a story.
Kristina (2m 31s): And the two of us decided together that we would build a product and that was kind of the beginning of it. You know, it was just sort of idea of it. Well, lets make an app and see what happens.
Jesper (2m 46s): So is it more like an... an app that keeps track of everything or how does it work?
Kristina (2m 53s): So it's how it works. So we like to focus on people who have a draft written and you can right from scratch and Fictionary, but that's not really our thing. Our thing is if you have a draft written, you import it into Fictionary and Fictionary scan's it. And when it's scanning it, it draws the story arc and it compares it to a commercially successful book of around the same length. And it gives the rider right away, a look at, you know, where their key plot points are for exciting incident excetera and are they in the right place?
Kristina (3m 26s): It does that word count per seen and shows you in a visual way. So here's your work comp foreseen. And so you can see what your pacing is doing and do you have any outliers that are just too long or too short or something? And it pulls out using natural language processing. It pulls out all of the character names and links them to Saenz and then chose a writer. You know, how many characters are need seen. And when they come in, who's got the point of view and how many point of view characters or are and stuff. And so it's a very visual way for a writer to look at their story.
Kristina (4m 0s): And then, because it's all broken out and organized and just seeing and chapters, we push scene by scene editing and we have 38 story elements there that help the writer know what to look at when they're evaluating their own story.
Jesper (4m 18s): Yeah. That, that's very interesting. Actually, I don't, as you said in the beginning of that, I can't think of any other product like exactly like that. I mean, I know of other products where you can use it to sort of structure well character's, you can connect them together visually as well. And you can, well, the whole world of building part that comes with Fantasy, for example, you can connect all the places together and in the visual fashion, I know tool's like that, but not really tools where I think I can think of where you can upload your draft like that.
Kristina (4m 50s): Yeah. And it, I mean, part of historically this happened because I have a degree in computer mathematics and my husband has a degree in computer science. And so even though I'm a writer, I have a very techie background. And so I was naturally drawn to this side of it and to figure out how this would all work and how would you draw a story arc and, and, and make these things happen. So it really, really entertained both sides of my brain to, to work on this and build it.
Jesper (5m 22s): Yeah. I can certainly see that. Okay. Well that's actually pretty cool. And maybe we can a at the end of the episode, we can just to make sure that we give people a link so they can go and check that out. She, is there any like M is there any like a trial version, stuff like that or a demo versions of people can use?
Kristina (5m 40s): Yeah, absolutely. So we have a two week free trial. So you just pop in your manuscript and have a look around, we have online chats, so people could ask us questions on how to use it. And when people sign up to the free trial, they also get a 14 lesson online course that goes with it, that teaches all of the story elements and why they're important and how to use them and what it means to you as a writer. And so there's a whole educational piece that goes with it to help people as they work through Fictionary and are kind of a dream, is that once you go through it once, then the next time you write a novel, it's much easier because you have all of this in your head and you know how to start a scene and is seen all over.
Kristina (6m 24s): These are things that, especially newer writer's, you have to learn how to do.
Jesper (6m 29s): Yeah. And the whole structure of a novel, I mean, they're is a formulaic approach to structuring a novel. And while we, as authors needs to understand how that formula works and how to put all those different milestones, that the right places in a novel, you know, that the reader don't really understand those, but they intuitively know. So if it's off, they will intuitively sort of feel like there's something wrong with the structure of the story, but they won't be able to pinpoint what it is. But a, we as authors really need to understand that
Kristina (7m 1s): It's a super important point because what we're trying to do with Fictionary is make the Author aware of it. And so if you do decide to break the rules, know why you're doing it. And then you're making an educated decision on, well, that doesn't work from my story and I have a reason for it. And that's great as opposed to just getting it wrong. And then you don't know why your story's not working.
Jesper (7m 21s): Yeah, indeed. Okay. That, that's a very good, but I also know, based on the whole thing that you have developed here at Kristina that you really liked editing isn't that right?
Kristina (7m 32s): Yeah, I do. I do. It's kind of funny that I, I had no idea when I started writing that really my true passion is editing. I love working with writers. We developed a, an Editor product to go along with our Writing product, just for our editors to do structural edits in it with the dream that we can make editors really strong editor's. And so I edit maybe one, one novel a month just to keep my skillset up, but it's not, it's not, my main focus were really focus now on pushing Fictionary Editor version out to editor's and which we call it a story coach.
Kristina (8m 9s): And it's really meant to help an editor do a comprehensive story, edit without being biased. So it makes it really objective and they have to cover everything and it ends up being a really good edit for the writer.
Jesper (8m 23s): Yeah. So it sounds like you've actually come quite a long way from when you were first sitting with that Excel sheet, then this is how I'm editing two now, where, where are you both built this up here, but also teaching other Editor other people how to get it.
Kristina (8m 40s): Yeah. And so we've got 'em we have a Fictionary certified story coach editing program that we bring editors through to teach them how to do a proper structural edit and then certify them so that when a rider hires and Editor, they know what they are getting, and they know that person really understands story versus hiring an editor that may be thinks they do or have certain biases have how they edit and, and were trying to push editors to get a little bit away from that.
Jesper (9m 8s): Yeah. But you see, this is the second Why. I want you to come on the podcast today because you have the excellent, an excellent approach here and a very strong background in educating us, hear on the podcast a bit about how do we go about editing. And especially also when authors are self-editing down the work, you know, maybe a good place to start would be just so when you start editing a new manuscript, what is the first thing you do?
Jesper (9m 37s): Do, do you just start from page one and then you start editing or do you read through it in a high level pass first? Or what do you do?
Kristina (9m 44s): Yeah, so we like to first thing for, for newer authors, I mean, authors who are more experienced they're a little bit farther along, but for newer Author of the most important thing is to understand what a scene is and look through their manuscript and make sure that they have their scene structure done right first. And so when I encourage riders to do, if they are already broken out into scenes and chapters, that's great. Then I'll, I'll tell her, I'll tell you a bit where you would start at that point, but there are many newer writer writers who have written their novel and it's not properly structured into stories and oriented scenes.
Kristina (10m 22s): And so what I recommend is first going through and looking for logical places to start seeing them without thinking about word account that can come later, but just to look through and go, okay, so the point of view has changed or at the point of view, character has changed. That's a good place to start a new scene, or the location has changed, or the timing has changed. These are three key areas where a rider can go through and, and read their manuscript, not don't focus on words and copyediting or anything like that.
Kristina (10m 56s): Just go through and look for the points where you would break out a scene. And once you've done that, it's amazing how you can see the structure of your story just by having it broken into scene's and its a big eye opener. When you do that for the first time, it's really kind of fun and you can see how many scenes you have and once you've done that, then you can start looking at all of the other things you need to do for a story at it. Does that make sense?
Jesper (11m 23s): Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I think sometimes it can be confusing and then in, for a new author, when, when you stop doing the editing because they're is there's a tendency to, well, okay. I stopped on page one and then I will stop looking at commerce or spelling errors or making the sentences sound a bit better. But I think there's a very good point in looking at the overall structure first. And even if you don't have something like Fictionary help you then at least educate yourself by, you know, reading, maybe nonfiction books about how to plot a novel and understand the structure of it and this out there and see when you're off.
Kristina (12m 5s): And it is it's super important not to waste time on making a sentence or beautiful. I mean, in some people do it in actually some people really struggled. You have to spend a lot of time and not to spend time on the commas and typos and all of those things until you have a story because what's going to happen once you've broken out everything in the scenes, you're gonna realize that, okay, you have a lot of revisions to do. And if you spend hours making everything perfect at this sentence level, but your story is off, you have to rewrite it anyway and then you have to copy it all over again.
Kristina (12m 37s): And I certainly don't recommend paying for a copy at it or proofreading until you've done your own story at it that you will have to do it again. And it's kind of a waste of money if you do it too early.
Jesper (12m 49s): Yeah. So, so what your view on this revision past as you know, how many should, is there any recommendation you would give to say, okay, you can do one past in the high level story elements, you know, and one pass in looking at the copy, edit, and then you do a third pass proof reading and then you hand it off to copyedit or something. Or do I, do we have like a work permit methodology? Did you follow the customer that right?
Kristina (13m 20s): Yeah. So again, it depends on the level of the, where the author is in their career and how many books they've written because the more books you write, obviously the easier it becomes, you know how to structure so you can start and different places. But the basic thing is once, once everything is broken out into scenes, then I like to recommend that they Author Now goes through and names each scene in three words or less. And the reason I say this is if you can't name a scene, you don't know what it's about.
Kristina (13m 51s): So you should be able to name names every scene in your story. And by doing that, it tells you, does it have a place in this story? So it does it have a purpose in my story and everybody gets carried away writing and your right, this fantastic seen, and you will love it, but it was nothing to do with your story. It's just a great scene about the character. Right? Okay. So if you can't define the name and the purpose of that scene, then perhaps it shouldn't be in the story. And so it's a good place to start looking at high level.
Kristina (14m 23s): Do you, as an author understand why you put every scene in your story,
Jesper (14m 28s): Right? Yeah. Fully agree with that for sure. So that's right.
Kristina (14m 33s): It's a big step. I mean it takes time, right? You have to really think hard when your doing it. Yes,
Jesper (14m 39s): Indeed. But it's still like something that you would say. So when you have edited tons of manuscripts, so is, is there something that you would say maybe we could put them into buckets here? So it's sort of seeing the bucket, one being The fletching rider who is just starting out and maybe another bucket with the more experienced Ryder, but is there some common issues that you see that is very in both buckets? Because I, I think that they will be different, but it still like a common issue is that you see popping up over and over again from, from the stuff that you edit.
Kristina (15m 16s): Yeah. So the big, the big things that show up the thing that I see most often as people don't know when to start an indices. So even if they're story is broken into the scenes, they are starting a scene at the wrong place or ending at, at the wrong place. And what I mean by that is if, if, when you think about as a reader, when you're reading a book and you're kind of getting tired and you want to, you're you kind of peak at the next seen to see if you wanna keep reading you going to read three or four sentences and if it captures you right away, okay, I'm going to keep reading, I'll get one more seen and all fuel, all accomplished.
Kristina (15m 50s): It's great. Write if you look at anything, it kind of boring. If you put the book down in, he might not pick it back up or would you pick it back up your eyes? You're a little bit out of the flow. So having an entry hook, there's a lot of stuff written about the first first sentence of your novel has to be the best in your opening hook. Have your novel has to be the best, but I believe the opening hook of your every scene has to be strong because every time you start, a new scene has a chance for the reader to put that book down, they finish a scene and if they are not engaged in the next scene.
Kristina (16m 25s): And so I often look right away to see how is the author doing their entry hooks. And then at the end of the scene, I want to see how are they leaving the scene and do they leave it at the right point? And often you can just cut off the last two paragraphs and there's the right point to leave it. So you leave it with an unanswered question or someone just built a big secret that they shouldn't have, or a cliff hanger, you know, there's really intriguing piece of dialog or a revelation or a part of a revelation or something like that. So that the end of the scene, the reader is feeling okay.
Kristina (16m 58s): I just... I have to keep reading and you'll notice really good books, all have a great entry and exit hook for every single seat and as hard to do because you try and fill in with description and, and have a lot of ambiance around it. And if your skillset isn't quite there yet on how to make that suspenseful, it's tricky to do it.
Jesper (17m 19s): Yeah. Autumn and Aye, we, we plot our novels in quite a lot of detail, but that's also of course, because we are co writing. So we need to know where things are going. So we have quite a lot of details, but I would say, especially with what you just mentioned here at the beginning of each chapter, and also at the end of each chapter, we spent quite a lot of time in the plotting phase detailing out, how has this kind of start on how it's just going to end? And we, we try to be a bit creative as well, so that every chapter doesn't enter the same way. You know, it shouldn't that every time a chapter in the monster appears or whatever, you know?
Jesper (17m 52s): Right. So, but, but I think if it doesn't come natural to you, to, or for the writer to, to find the right place to stop the scene or whatever, a lot of it can be gained by just planning out ahead, you know, figuring out a head, how do you want this one to end and find a good cliffhanger or something to add on it.
Kristina (18m 14s): And it really just comes down to thinking about it, like, and to know that you need to think about it as a writer. And once you have that in your head, even when your writing and you write on an unplanned scene is if it's there and your head, you know it. And so you write that way and it's really the first time going through it, really learning. This is how you do it. And of course experienced all authors make mistakes too. And you put too much in, and then you're Editor comes and goes, Hey, take all that out. And you know, if you cringe any to take it all out. Yeah.
Jesper (18m 41s): Yes, that's absolutely true. But I also think when were talking about seeing some chapters or However, or somebody wants to whatever they want to call it, but when were talking about that, and we were talking about starting points and points, I think that there is also something that I could imagine, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I couldn't imagine what you would also see quite often as an issue is that there is not enough variation on high conflict versus low conflict chapter's so that if you can read several chapters with high conflict and a, in a row does not really a problem, but if you read 15 of them in road and you're gonna get tired, you no, you need a break and read, it needs to break once in a while.
Kristina (19m 23s): Yup. Yeah. And the tricky part comes. So when you give the reader a brake, you want to go maybe into a contemplate of seeing where your character is reacting to something. And those are hard scenes too, right. Because you wanted to get the characters feeling's out and, and how is it changing them and what decisions or are they gonna make based on it. And so it's a really great time to connect your readers two, your character's when you get to those contemplate of scenes and if they are placed right within exactly what you're saying, that you've got action.
Kristina (19m 55s): Action, action, action, action. A bit of a SQL. Okay. It gives you gives your reader a, a, a breath, and then they also feel it along with the character. So it's very important.
Jesper (20m 5s): Yeah. And I feel a lot of the time, those bit of a break chapter, or if we call it that those are excellent tools to use For for the character arc to basically build upon the character arc and how they change throughout the novel. You can use those a, if you have like five of the slow chapters throughout the entire novel, those are excellent five different points where you can show that the character is, is going through the character arc because they are reflective seems so.
Jesper (20m 36s): So they are good. They put to good use there.
Kristina (20m 38s): Well, and you know, whose book has really good on this is Sasha Black's book that just came out, that's called anatomy of pros. And she has super examples in their, of exactly what were talking about Andy. She gives a new way of writing out that goes to, this is good. And then she rewrites it and you can say, this is great. And it's exactly what you're saying about the character arc can, it's it, it's a great book. So anyone who is working on not as highly recommend that book.
Jesper (21m 4s): Yes, absolutely. And the, also for the listener, if you forgot, we actually have Sasha black on this podcast as well. I don't recall the episode number on the top of my head here, but if you go back through the archive, you can certainly find it a, when we talked to a Sasha blacks, so she knows what she's talking about. So, so that's a very good as well. What I was also wondering, and this is sort of something that pops up over and over and over again, you know, Autumn, and I also do courses for authors and stuff like that. So we also are heavily into the teachings.
Jesper (21m 35s): So we here a lot of the common questions. I think this has probably a good one to two cover here as well, because it is something a lot of people are wondering about and I have my key of you on it, but I'm curious, curious to hear he was the first time, but it basically goes to something like this. So when you're writing, is it best to edit as you go? Because then when you reach the end of the manuscript, you are sort of done. Why is it better to just write out the entire manuscript, not worrying about any of the editing or any of the grammar errors you might be making along the way, and then edit one only once you have the full first draft complete.
Jesper (22m 17s): Yeah.
Kristina (22m 18s): Okay. I'm going to give you a big caveat on this one. Okay. So I think it's good to get your story down and right. Your whole story, but sometimes your, your brain is tired, but you wanted to do something productive. And so maybe you want to do some copy, editing, have stuff that you've written when you don't have your whole story written. And I actually think it's not a bad thing to do because then you practice it and you can start to see where your weaknesses are and what you need to fix in what you might wanna look at when your doing a full copy at it.
Kristina (22m 51s): So, I mean, I have author friends who are perfect each seen, but they've done a very serious outline. Kind of, it sounds like what you do to see the outline has written. They know what the story is. They know what's going on in every seen and they know how to write a story. And so they right there seen, and then they prefect it and they go to the next one, four other people who are, you know, what are called pastors, you know, writing by the seat of your pants, like to get the whole story out. And so there's a lot of personal preference.
Kristina (23m 22s): I believe that there should be a lot of joy in writing. And so to force yourself to do it one way or another, if it makes you unhappy, it's not the right way. For for you as an author, you know, I'm a big proponent of finish your story and then do all your, your copy editing and proofreading. However, if it's not what works best for you and your process don't change it because somebody else told to
Jesper (23m 47s): Right now, I think that's actually a fair and good answer in my view. Normally I would say, Oh, as well, that it, it sort of depends a bit. I think a lot of the people who doing the edit S they go, they also use the editing as a bit of procrastination tool. So it was like, yeah, I don't quite know where two right. Two I'll keep editing my previous chapters. So we don't really move ahead. And if that's the case that, and I think it's an issue.
Jesper (24m 18s): Yes. And then you, you need to, you need to press forward because as you also said, I'm also usually advocating. It's more important to get to the end of the draft and it is to make it sound nice. So as you go, yup. But when I say that, I also have to say that for some people, it is just incredibly annoying to know that there was a spelling error on page 45 and they almost can't get it out of their head. So if, if, if it really annoys you that much, then you know, correct those small spelling errors as you go, if you really can't see past it, that that's better than getting annoyed about it.
Kristina (24m 53s): And I think as you write more books, your process changes as you go because your strengths change and your interests change and the technology changes. And so you don't need to get stuck in one way. You try one, if it doesn't work for you to try something else and don't be afraid to try something else.
Jesper (25m 12s): Yeah. And I think it also ties back into how much you're actually plotting that novel in advanced, because a as you alluded to before, if you really know everything that needs to happen already, then basically Autumn, and Aye, we can sort of edit it as you go. I can write the draft first chapter, and then she can edit it while I write chapter too. And that's possible because we know exactly what's going to happen. And, and we have been around the Bush enough to know how to do it. And so, but yeah, I think, I think as well that it is something that evolves over time, but, but it is just, and if you don't get too, the end of the first draft before eight years have passed, well, I guess that's okay.
Jesper (25m 52s): But on the other hand, it's not going to help you at least earn any income from WRITING. If it takes me that long to do it. So you also need to sort of push yourself forward
Kristina (26m 1s): And that's hard, you know, they're, at some point you have to let somebody else read your story in that first time you do that. It's really difficult. It's a, it's a kind of a frightening moment because you've spent, you know, maybe at least a year on it, and then someone else is going to have comments after they spend a few hours reading it. Right. The hard moment
Jesper (26m 20s): It is, it is very hard. I still remember when I gave my first first book too, a critique partner. And he was just like, no, let's just, Oh my God, I spend so much time a lot of them. And he just said, no, this doesn't work.
Kristina (26m 36s): I know it's hard. And, and as an editor, you have to be very careful with writers to make sure I point out here, the places that your really good to you, you know, they're our strengths here. And here's why I'm saying maybe you want to change something that its from an editor prospective, it's really important not to demotivate a writer and make them feel like they're not good at writing a story because everybody can be. And it just takes a bit of hard work in some time.
Jesper (27m 2s): Yeah. And don't you think as well, that one of the problems or challenges we have, he is also, I mean of course you can take like, what is it called an MFA or whatever is called a, you know, a degree in Writing. But even without a degree in the only way you learn how to write is by writing it, it's not like a carpenter who will go to carpenter school and he'll be at Prentice for a while and then he will know how to do carpeting. It's not like that with writing. Right? Of course. In some sense, in what way you could say that it is like that because you keep riding and, and you get editing and then you get better, but it is different in the way that it's not like you go to a school and then you get some grades and, and you will know if you are good or bad is we spent two years writing something and then you put it, you give it to the Editor who knows what they are doing.
Jesper (27m 48s): And then you could hear the hard truth. Right? So yeah, it is, it is tough, but I fully agree with you that it's important as well. On one hand, of course I would expect from an editor who knows what they're doing and who are good at it, that they also know how to give feedback and a good manner. So you don't scare people off because it's a vulnerable process. Right. But on the other hand, if you want a, if you want to seriously get into writing and also write to for commercial purposes to earn money from it, you also have to take it, you know, because if the end of that might be nice and professional in the way that the word things, but the review is on Amazon or not, but I'm just going to slam here.
Jesper (28m 32s): So it's do you just have to learn it?
Kristina (28m 35s): Yup. It's true. You do, you know, I just went through a process. I had 13 editors edit the same manuscript and it's a manuscript that I wrote with some holes in as a bit of a test. And it was very interesting to see that the breadth of the way people pointed out issues and right, most of the editors caught all the same issues and, and there were sort of the w the one end of super positive feedback that's.
Kristina (29m 10s): So while you're dealing with the issues, you've felt good about, Oh, that works great. You know, you feel really good to the other end of that didn't work because you have whatever reason. And that was quite hard when you think ouch, that's just too hard. And as a, if that had been my experience as a new Author is quite frightening, right? So that's not good vs. The other ones who is super important to point out why something works and that an author is particularly good at whatever, you know, maybe entry hooks or whatever it is.
Kristina (29m 40s): So it was kind of an interesting experiment to go through, to see how that many people would edit the exact same story.
Jesper (29m 50s): Yeah. And they're is, well, at least as good to hear that they sort of caught the same things. And then of course, to feedback element, it's more like the, how do you treat other humans and in terms of giving them feedback and that's, I mean, I've, I've worked in management for many, many, many years and it's, it's one of the things you have to learn. You're, you know, if you have an employee who's not performing it, it doesn't help to shout them in the face. Right. It's much better. If you can find a motivational way of telling them that, that there's things that we could do in a bit smarter way, they will also help you and then help them along the way, rather than putting them down.
Kristina (30m 24s): And, and I love it when you could see an author grow and change in their story, it just keeps getting better in its it's really fun when that happens. Yeah.
Jesper (30m 33s): But I'm curious as well. Kristina so when you were say, when you just said Anne Author growth, because I'm also curious, have you a process for editing changed over time? You know, editor to editor is also grow in their skills of editing. So it, is there something that you do differently nowadays compared to what you used to do when editing, right.
Kristina (30m 52s): Yeah. So when I used to edit it, I mean I would read a story and go through it and ms. Word and, you know, edit based on the knowledge in my head. And now I use my own product story coach because all of this story elements or are there and it makes me look at every scene for the writer and go, okay, what's the conflict in this scene? What's the tension in this scene? What's the backstory. Is there a flashback you can't get away with? You know, you read to see anything, Oh, it was pretty good to move on or you can find a lot more.
Kristina (31m 25s): And when you're looking at key story elements to see, are they in every seen and you can get really in depth feedback. And now when I write a summary letter to an editor or to write, or it will be somewhere around 5,000 words, have high level comments for their story. And then I do for every scene Aye I have notes on that particular scene of what worked or it needs improvement. And then I Mark up all the story elements and give them a nice big check Mark, if it's awesome.
Kristina (31m 59s): And they did a great, or I get a specific feedback too, you know, maybe I can't figure out what the purpose of a scene is. And so I'll put a note. I don't know what the purpose is sometimes when you read the whole book and go, Oh, I got the purpose of, of that sea now. But when you first read it, you can't quite figure it out. And so for example, if I say a book has 70 scenes and you know, 15 of them, I don't know what the purpose is that tells me the writer's a little bit lost and it gives me a way to really focus and be specific and say, you know, you have 17 scenes and 15 of them don't have a purpose.
Kristina (32m 34s): So we need to work on that piece of, of why that is in there and what we want to do it.
Jesper (32m 41s): Yeah. Touch. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. I was just why you were saying that it was just thinking about how it must be you sometimes as well when your editing fantasy novels. Because one of the really tricky part that I, I guess may, well, maybe we have it in common with cipher authors, but in general, the FANTASY and see if I, at least we always have to walk that really careful balance between the info dumping versus a given the information through the narrative. But you also have to give some information just like here it is, this is explain it now.
Jesper (33m 16s): And hopefully the only in one sense, and so that it's a quick and done an over with, but it is an incredibly difficult line to walk some times
Kristina (33m 24s): It is because you do need the information there. And then of course the talented Author is put out a lot of that information. They can give through action by what the character touches or feels or a CS. You know, I can do it through the point of view description so that they're feeling something while they're seeing something. And, and that makes it a little bit, umm, it's more engaging for that for the reader. And then, you know, it has an author when you've got it, you just have to say
Jesper (33m 54s): Right.
Kristina (33m 55s): Something very specific about the setting or some magic capability or whatever Because I just have to say it and as long as you know that and when you place it in, you want to make it as smooth as possible.
Jesper (34m 6s): Yeah. But do you see, so when you were working with a lot of different editors, do you see that it's Editor or you also have their own view on how is too much info dumping, for example, versus when that this is, this is okay. OK. Because at least when I, if I look at written fantasy novels, even from some of the very, very popular Fantasy, Author am not going to name any names yet, but I have red fantasy novels as a well written by, you know, massive global best seller authors.
Jesper (34m 43s): And I don't quite like it. It's just not, not my cup of tea. And I have a feeling that I think that this is very much, I fully agree with the fact I should back up and say, I fully agree with the fact that there is a right way on a long way, to some extent and doing it. You, you can't feel the one and a half page with info dumping about a culture, just because you want to tell the reader about it. That's not, that's not what I'm saying here for what our more thing is that I think there is a in, in terms of how to do it they're is sort of have a degree in or how much is too much versus how much is too little.
Jesper (35m 18s): That kind of thing might be a bit on a personal preference, but I don't know what your view is because you can edit it hundreds and hundreds of novels. So, but yeah. How many of you that
Kristina (35m 29s): I'll give a tip to writers? If you use beta readers, it's a specific question you can ask or a beta readers. But so first from an editors point of view, what, what I tell Editor is the second you start to skim, there's something wrong. And if you think it's the info dump thing, because there's too much there and you are starting to skim through it, you got to Mark that and then look at that and go, why am I skimming here? Well, maybe it's because there's too much information on this new city setting and there's no character interaction with that setting.
Kristina (36m 3s): It's just a two and a half page description of some Citi and you don't know why it relates to the plot or the character. So skimming is a big tip to, to an editor to, to right away go, Oh, okay, what's happening here in this story. And the other thing for info dump two little. If that's an editor, you get confused calling not enough information in there and the writer could put more in and you know, editors read very carefully and they pay attention to story.
Kristina (36m 34s): And so if an editor gets confused, the writer should listen to that and should go, okay. I confuse the editor and they don't know what's happening here or they don't understand why this was possible. He needs to pay attention to it because they are reading very carefully. Now also as an editor have to caution that if you start to skim, make sure it's not just because you're tired and you've been editing for too long. So, you know, an hour is good. And then after that, for me personally, I've got a step up and do something else because then I can't pay attention as hard as I'm paying attention when I'm fresh.
Kristina (37m 8s): And so skimming doesn't automatically mean there's to much of an info them. It could just mean like tired, but its it's a big trigger. And what I wanted to say for, for readers, when you have beta readers, sometimes especially if they're friends and family, they don't wanna tell you what they don't like. But if you just ask them, please just Mark. Every place you start to skim, you can't hurt my feelings. I just need to know this. You can then as a writer, look at that and go, huh, is that an, an, an info dump or is this boring? What's going on here? And if you have two or three beta readers who are at the same passage as their skimming than, you know, for sure there's something wrong with it.
Jesper (37m 45s): Yeah. I quite liked that approach that you were mentioning there. Kristina and I must say, because what I normally say is that if you add, at least if you are starting out, I normally caution authors are very, very much on using beta readers because in my view is a hundred times better to either hide the higher and Editor who knows what they are doing and who can help you or find a critique partner who also know what they're doing and listen to one person. Because especially when you're starting out, you're getting, let's say the 30 beta readers and they will give you 30 different points that they like or dislike.
Jesper (38m 19s): And they will also be contradictory to each other. So when you were starting out, it's more confusing than helpful because you don't know either what it's right or wrong. So you were hoping that you are going to get 30 pieces of feedback that is all aligned and will help you understand. Oh, okay. I see. And then you can move out for it. That's not the reality of it. You're going to get 30 strange topics popping off all over the place and it's not helpful at all. So, but I like the approach about it. If you only say what you just said, you know, just highlight that the places where, where your eyes are glazing over the text or something, or at least that's helpful.
Kristina (38m 52s): Yeah. Or your confused as to the other one. And I also asked my beta readers when you put the book down because you don't read at one setting, Please just mark, "I put the book down". Don't tell me why. Like, you know, you put it down because you wanted to have dinner or it doesn't matter. Do you want to see the break points where a beta readers are putting your book down? Because it means that it wasn't quite enough to get them to that next scene. And again, if you have multiple ones that pick the same spot that gives you something to look at and evaluate yourself as a writer, without relying on biased information from your beta reader.
Kristina (39m 24s): So I wrote a blog a while back and I'm trying to think of what else I put in there, but very specific questions to beta readers of what you want from them. And then they do a great job for you because they're not afraid to hurt your feelings. Cause you've asked specifically, I need to know these things.
Jesper (39m 42s): Yeah. Yeah. And, but not normally, at least when you're starting out, I, I really prefer to work with an edit who knows it because editor's know what they're doing and, and you can listen to them. And as you also said, they are very methodical. And if they pay attention to all the details and is like, normally I say, you know, we, we basically approve 90% of what the Editor comes back to us when they are editing our novels, because normally they are right. And know what they're doing,
Kristina (40m 9s): But not always right. That's the other caution that I try and tell, even everybody I end up, I say, you know, to the writer that they are the artist and it is there a story in my job was to make them think about their story, but not dictate what they should do or not do with it. Right? No, absolutely. No, you won't hurt my feelings as an editor. If you just go, Nope. Not making that change and stand up your self as a writer. That it's your story. Right. And the editors, one person in the world giving you an opinion on it.
Jesper (40m 40s): Yes, indeed. I agree with that. But under the same, at the same time, it also has to be set that the person giving you opinion on it is somebody who has edited hundreds of novels. Right. So it's, it, it's, it's different from a beater reader or a family member who thinks something.
Kristina (40m 54s): Right. Of course it is. And you should take it seriously in think hard about why you're saying no, that, and that's why hopefully you hired an editor because they know what they're doing and you want their feedback on it. But you know, it's, it's also okay. To be a believer in your own story.
Jesper (41m 14s): Oh yeah, for sure. I fully agree with that, but I'm wondering maybe I'm if, if this is possible for Christina, but I am going to ask it anyways, but I'm thinking, wow, we covered a lot of ground here. And I think there's a lot of good input for listeners, but I'm thinking, would it be possible if you, if I told you that you only give three concrete and tangible advice that our listeners could take away from this podcast episode and go and implement in their own editing process, like right here and right now, what would you be able to give us free things?
Kristina (41m 47s): In fact, I'm very opinionated on that have, so this works. If you were, if you write the stories from multiple points of view, my first recommendation is to go and look at who has the point of view for every seen and what's their goal for that scene? Because if they don't have a goal, they are not doing anything. And so you should go through every single scene. Count up. Your point of view is how many do you have, does your protagonist have the most point of views?
Kristina (42m 21s): Does, do you have too many points of view, have one character only in, it should be in a different point of view. So study your point of views and use it to your best. So every scene look at it and ask yourself, is this the best point of view for the seen, and I've actually found authors who have changed the protagonist because most of their point of view scenes where from a different character and they are actually writing somebody else's story. And then it became a great story because they flipped it on that one piece. Right? Right. And the goal is very important. They have to have a goal and the goal has to relate to the story.
Kristina (42m 55s): So it can't be a goal to get a cup of coffee. It has to be some goal that relates to the story. And there's a consequence that your reader is going to care if they achieve that goal or not. So that's my number one thing for you when you're looking at your, when your first looking at your character's go and get your point of view straight. And then the second thing I recommend is look at the purpose of each scene, ask yourself why is it in this story?
Kristina (43m 26s): The same question does the purpose of the scene relate to the overall story. So that same as goes for character. And you want to look at each scene and if one scene has to many purposes in it, are you trying to do too much? You might want to split it into two, quiet it down a little bit. So look for scenes that are bit chaotic, where there's to many reasons for it to be in this story, it could just be overwhelming too, the reader. So that's the number two. And number three is choosing the location of each scene.
Kristina (43m 59s): And the important thing there is to ask yourself, what's the emotional impact you want either that character or the reader to feel. And so, for example, if you pick a couple sitting on a Hill and there's a thunderstorm off on the distance, that could be quite romantic. So maybe that's the feeling you want their, but what if that couples on a sailboat in the middle of the ocean, it's not so romantic anymore. It's frightening. And quite often in an a, in a newer storey or an early draft.
Kristina (44m 30s): And I'll see that This, it's just in somebody home or this scene takes, plays in a coffee shop are in a car or some very standard thing. And so my, my pushback to the reader is what do you want your character to feel? Do you want them frightened? Well, what's in your story where you could place them in a location where they are frightened more than if they're in their home and their family is there and it's not frightening at all for them. So those are my three. So I'll just backtrack on that. It's, who's got the point of view and what's their goal it's kind of to, but I'm really that into one, the purpose of the scene.
Kristina (45m 4s): And what's the emotional impact you want either the characters or your reader to feel
Jesper (45m 12s): This was so excellent. Kristina I, I have thank you so much for coming on the podcast today and talk about all this stuff and give all these are excellent advice for us. Author's here. So if listeners want to learn more about you and what you do with Fictionary and all that stuff, well, where can they find you?
Kristina (45m 36s): Yes. Or a website is fictionary.ceo. So not.com is.ceo. And if you're a writer than you want to look at our storyteller side of things, and if you're an editor, then it story coach. So I mean, everything about us is, is on the website. I'm we have obviously an email list where we have a really great ebook that we wrote all about the editing journey. And we wrote it together with pro WRITING ADE and with the editing company called first editing, who does professional editing.
Kristina (46m 10s): And so the three companies got together and we wrote this book on one or all the different phases of editing a novel when to do them, when to do self at it, when and why you might want to hire a professional and how they will help you. So it's, it's a really great book. If you, if you're looking for just learning what our, all the different types of editing, so what structural, what substantive what's copy editing what's proofreading, et cetera, and how to use it in your own stuff.
Jesper (46m 41s): Okay. That's that's really good. If, and Kristina, if you send me the links to different things, then I we'll make sure that your listener to put them in the show notes. So you can just to go and check it out from, from their, so thank you so much again for coming on today. Kristina
Kristina (46m 56s): Thank you for having me. It was such a pleasure. I love talking about stories,
Jesper (47m 1s): All right. So next week Autumn is back and we are going to go back to the beginning and actually talk about story ideas.
Narrator (47m 13s): If you like what you've just heard, there's a few things you can do to SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on Patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast going to stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
What really is a "writer?"
Jesper and Autumn run the gamut in this episode to break down the myth, history, and perception of what being a writer really means. Throw in some great quotes from famous authors, and you have a fun mix that will get you pondering what you call yourself ... and why it is - or isn't - a big deal in the first place!
It's true! Pre-orders are LIVE for Story Idea, Plot Development, and Plot Development Step by Step! You can secure your copy for release day of August 3rd through the links below!
Story Idea: A Method to Develop a Book Idea at https://books2read.com/StoryIdeas
Plot Development: An Outlining Method for Fiction at https://books2read.com/Plot-Development
Plot Development Step by Step: Exercises for Planning Your Book at https://books2read.com/PlottingWorkbook
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast in today's publishing landscape. You can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from Writing Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts. Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt
Jesper (30s): Hello I am Jesper
Autumn (31s): and I'm Autumn
Jesper (34s): Episode 78 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. And today we are going to talk with him about what it means to be a writer. And I know that's going to require a bit of elaboration, but I will get back to that a bit later. Yes. I'm still looking forward to it and believe it or not, this will impress you. I did research for this one.
Autumn (57s): Did you? I did writing work. Why? Because I didn't want to go outside. No. Aye. Because I wanted it. I like facts. I love history. I like, you know, things or things. You said the repeat themselves and we don't usually appreciate it. Cause we don't realize that if you don't know you're history, you realize that's repeating. So we did some digging on this one. I can't wait to share it. I usually just with all these episodes, maybe we shouldn't tell people that it's all right. I don't mind being notorious for, you know, showing up and doing a presentation with no preparation.
Autumn (1m 32s): I just I'm waiting for the day that someone calls me, sees me in the audience and calls me up and asked me to do a whole hour on something. I'm like, Oh geez. I should never have said I do this all the time. Right?
Jesper (1m 43s): Yeah. And actually I will say it depends on if it was me. It would depend on what they would want me to speak about. But I do think that certain topics I could probably work in an hour. The, it depends on what it is though.
Autumn (1m 53s): Yesper talk about maps one hour ago. You would be all site, but yes. So how are things on your side or the Atlantic this week? No, it's good.
Jesper (2m 6s): It's a good, eh, we are trying to get ready for some of occasion, obviously. So a sort of, a lot of things going, I mean, it's still like more than a month away, but were just trying, I'm trying to get everything wrapped up also for our stuff. So it's been actually just the few days ago where, Oh, well, yeah, that's a point of this recording. Of course not. When this episode released this, because that's the wonders of the podcast. And today we always have to be careful with the timing of when we mentioned things because we are prerecording some stuff here.
Jesper (2m 40s): Yes. But at least at the point of recording this just a few days ago, I sent out an email to our Am Writing Fantasy lists recruiting what we call typos layers four, not one but three. Yes. You have that right. Three different non fiction books for authors though. Isn't that crazy? Yeah, it is crazy. Oh, come on. You're
Autumn (3m 0s): Sending out the emails. I sent you the file's to put it up the pre-orders today. So it feels like this is really half a day.
Jesper (3m 8s): Yeah. I am so excited that it is happening. So there are three of them. So just to mention, there is the first one is Plot Development And Outlining Method four Fiction and Plot Development Step by Step So that there was one that is the actual plodding book that we talked about so much. And then the other step by step one is the associated what books. And then we also have Story Idea Book and Method to develop a book Idea so it's basically like creating a whole premise, which we'll talk about later on in a, in a future episode or more on a, more about in a future episode, I meant to say, but that is three books that we are trying to launch right.
Jesper (3m 47s): Leading up to summer holiday. So I don't know if we're a bit crazy here, but a lot
Autumn (3m 52s): Considering everything we have going on. I know we're crazy, but it feels so good to be getting these things. So finally, after talking about them for so long, finally bringing them out. So
Jesper (4m 4s): Yeah. And honestly, I can't, I can't wait to release these. Yes. So they, they are for the listener here. They are going to be out on the 13th of August. Ah, but you can actually, if I do all my time traveling, correct here with podcasting, you should be able to preorder them already now and we'll place the Link's in the show notes so that you can actually go and preorder them if you are interested in these books, which of course you're home. We hope you are.
Jesper (4m 34s): But other than that, I just also wanted to mention a Autumn that I finally found a time to go back and listen to episode 75 when you have Kirsten Oliphant on. Yeah. That was a great episode. Yeah.
Autumn (4m 45s): Yeah. She was a wonderful, wonderful guest. I really appreciate her time and her tips on pen names. And when you really need to launch a different author platform for what you're writing, writing in multiple genres. Yeah. And I can't believe she, she honestly said that she reads a book a day. She did say that I want to go back going really. I just really let that sink in. I don't understand. I mean, Hello, she has a lot of kids at the house with as well. Yeah. I mean, I don't know, maybe there, I don't want to assume that their kids' books, but she did say maybe she was saying she, maybe she went to say she reads a book.
Autumn (5m 24s): She reads every day. Not she is. So she would make sure she reads everyday. Not a whole book.
Jesper (5m 30s): All right. I know. Okay. But yeah, I think she said she ran a whole book at day, but yeah, that's a pretty damn amazing. Oh, well done it. That's true. Yeah. Yeah.
Autumn (5m 40s): Very good speed reader. That would be amazing. I could read that fast. I would probably read a little bit more because I task oriented. I get so wrapped up in things that I have a hard time switching to something else. So once I get to a good book and you're getting into like that new and getting really close to the climax. So that's back two thirds basically of the novel. That's it I'm hooked. That's all I'm doing. I'm not making dinner. I'm not Writing I'm not working on our courses. Nothing. I'm just reading. So I'm on a reading diet until we get some of this stuff done.
Autumn (6m 13s): Alright. Yeah. I have to the opposite problem. It takes to me so long to read the book. Like sometimes I have to remind myself when I go back. What happened last time? I can't see. I'm so bad at it. Usually, you know, I read when I go to bed in the evening and when I go to bed, I'm so tired. I really don't have the energy to read. So I'd just fall asleep. I'm really good at falling asleep. You know, I can fall asleep within a minute or so. Yeah. So yeah, I don't get much reading done. And that was going to say with, and they're a task into, to do list with a vacation coming up.
Autumn (6m 46s): I mean, I've already got to be keeping you up late tonight, the record, this podcast. So we can relax when we'd go on vacation, then I hope so. Ah, you better? Yeah. So will you also keeping busy? So how are you on your end or a very good, well, at the time we are recording this things are crazy. I'm in the United States' and I wish I could time travel to see if things are going to get any better when this is really you. So I'm just hoping they do, but it is kind of crazy over here and a little scary at the moment.
Autumn (7m 18s): And yeah, I mean, I'm just trying to keep my head down and stay busy, but you know, at least in personal things, I've got a little bit of writing done. I've been doing some cover design, which is always fun. I'm getting our formatting books done. So things are progressing very well. My garden is growing. My husband has been working on 105 year old canvas frame, Cedar canoe, and he just put the canvass in the top coat on it today. And now it gets to cure for four weeks before.
Autumn (7m 49s): Are you going painted? So its kinda cool to watch him and restore a hundred, five year old canoe is really something special. And why, where did you find that use? We actually paid a little bit too much for it. Cause we thought it was him. We bought it. It, we thought it was in better shape and its become a project that he's enjoying immensely, but it's Oh my God, this is not something you do because you have some, you know, your, your saving and skimping money. It's not a cheap enterprise, but, and he's doing very well and he's not usually the woodworker in the family.
Autumn (8m 22s): I am. So I'm very impressed. We go on the internet with The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast Oh, so we have a lot, lot, lot, lots, lots of interesting potent right in Fantasy Facebook. Hey, we were just going crazy over there. It is. Which I love its been so busy and I have actually managed again in a couple of times this week, so that's good. But yeah, it's such a vibrant, exciting group.
Autumn (8m 54s): Yeah. I noticed how it, Chris was very
Jesper (8m 56s): Helpful and he pointed out how publishing too Apple books. It no longer requires a Mack. So you just need an iCloud on iTunes connect account and then you can publish directly to Apple books. That's a pretty nice. That is cool.
Autumn (9m 11s): Yeah. Pretty cool. That's a very, that doesn't surprise me about Apple. I mean, come on a, use a Mac and I can open any file you send me, but I have the files I want to send you I've come to translate so you can open them on your PC. Yeah,
Jesper (9m 25s): Yeah. That's a bit annoying, but yeah, but Chris also mentioned by the way that the Google books appears to be open to anyone. That's what he said. And I have heard this as, as well in other places. So I think its absolutely correct. Yeah, it think so. But of course you and I are and we got in a long time ago, so I'm not sure if it works on it, but I guess for those listening, who haven't yet published their books on Google, you can go and check it out now and you should be able to create an account I think.
Jesper (9m 55s): And then afterwards, you know, hit Autumn and I up on Twitter or leave a comment on this episode and let us know if it works. Yeah. I'm really curious. Yeah, that should have a book.
Autumn (10m 4s): I was, are they still have so far to go in the dashboard? So I will warn folks if your going over there, it is not the same as Amazon's managed for us or anything else, but it does work and it is nice. You know, I want to change the price on a book. You have to go in and go in to this file and there's just like, you can't just see what the price is on. The main screen kind of would be
Jesper (10m 26s): To be useful. But anyway, yeah, that's not the best. I mean by that and you have to download a sales report in Excel, you cannot manipulate it on the screen and stuff, but it's not that bad, but it's just a bit, maybe a bit more old fashioned than they would speak. Yeah.
Autumn (10m 43s): Yeah. It's all right. Yeah, it works. So yeah. Let us know if it is working an open to everyone, that's kind of a huge step for Google and I guess if enough people do it, maybe they'll, you know, tweak it a little bit more. So that'd be excellent. I once gave them the feedback that they should have bought pronoun when that, when that site closed down. So probably which they had. Yeah, I can see.
Jesper (11m 6s): Yeah. But Jason also mentioned by the way that he has written 40,000 words in the last 10 days, so that's awesome. Congratulations, Jason. Yeah, that is fantastic. Congratulations. That's always exciting to see the authors writing and doing well or a thousand words in 10 days. That's pretty good. That's a good milestone. That is awesome. Yeah. Yeah. So I really liked how lively and helpful to the Facebook group is. So if you haven't joined it yet and you are listening here, then what are you waiting for? Join us in over to the group section of Facebook and simply search for Am Writing Fantasy and you will find us and we will let you in.
Jesper (11m 43s): Yes.
Autumn (11m 44s): Yeah. And it's fun because it's, it's everything from supportive to asking a fun questions like Hector who had written, you know, what spells would you give your antagonist that isn't to overpowered? So it's everything from pulling apart tropes to question's to support, to celebrating things. So I love it over there. So you actually initially came up with this topic Autumn so perhaps you can set the scene a bit.
Autumn (12m 15s): What are we talking about here? We're talking about that idea that all a real Writer and real in quotation marks are a real Writer does, is write. And so this kind of comes up from, you know, lots of beams and things, online threads that you'll see where someone goes up to a famous author and says how much you know, Story I do you have to imagine this, how much do you see time? Do you spend writing every day to become such an amazing famous author?
Autumn (12m 47s): And they go, Oh, well I write from nine to noon in the morning. And then from one til five 30, I marketing and the person that's a good question goes, Oh, Oh, you are not a real Writer and walks away. So that sort of where this comes from, it's this idea that a real, Writer a real writer write it's a real writer has a publisher. It's a real writer. Is this, this certain rigid thing that spends only time WRITING, it's a, it's a very, I feel like it's a very outdated way of viewing things to be honest.
Autumn (13m 23s): But I, it surprises me because I think, I mean, at least every month I still hear people say that I have to admit, I think it used to be every week that I would hear people say, Oh, you know, Writing is blah, blah, blah. But there are still people who feel that if you're not Writing, you know, if you're not only writing, if your still marketing, then your not a real writer. Right? Yeah. I mean, of course there is some personal belief in this. I mean, everybody probably have their own understanding of what it means to be a writer.
Autumn (13m 55s): And what does a writer do on doing well, eight hours of work and or whatever you wanna call it. Right. Write, I mean, we are probably, everybody probably has their own opinion about , but yeah, that's what we are gonna try to dig a bit deeper in here and try to at least share some of the, how have you seen and the, I don't know, maybe challenge you're thinking of it. I am not sure. Let's see. Oh yes. I definitely, I believe me. I think the world needs a lot more time listening to each other and sort of making assumptions and talking to dead air. So I think its just as a dun in an idea of to challenge a challenge, what you think a real writer is.
Autumn (14m 30s): And maybe even if you hate marketing and maybe challenge or assumptions, that marketing is a part of Writing. So I tried, I, like I said, I did some digging in history of files to bring up some ideas for today. Okay. Let's hear it. Alright. Well I wanted to go, as I said, I think history itself, a lot of people don't realize that history repeats itself because we think now is like everything we forgotten, like I've was joking with my husband today.
Autumn (15m 2s): I looked back at February when the room, my built in my cabin was snow in some debris and I look at it down, it's a room and I'm like, really? That was only a few months ago. So it's so easy to forget, but I looked up the history of self publishing. And what do you think is the earliest example of self publishing? I would say it's
Jesper (15m 28s): Well I, I would say it's probably, I don't, I don't know any names of the authors or whatever, but I think it would be half to do something to do with somebody in a way we all times by buying a, a PR you know, getting his own book printed on a press and paying for it himself. Yes. That would be good.
Autumn (15m 51s): We have a definition that would say that the definition of self publishing and so yes. So when Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, that was 1440. And so yeah, some people say that it's the history of self publishing, but honestly the Chinese were using movable type way before that. So technically it's older even then that, and I mean, technically you, you can go back to it when people are writing scrolls, that would be self publishing. And the earliest evidence of that is 3,100 BC.
Autumn (16m 22s): So a technically it depends on how much you want to go into it. So we're not gonna do a history lesson But yeah. So how did they do Amazon? App's in 1300 BC. Oh, I don't think it was him as well as he could have been. It was in the Amazon, right? Yeah.
Jesper (16m 42s): But he would be somebody that says sitting out in the treats shop or shouting about it. Okay. The book is out. Yeah,
Autumn (16m 48s): Yeah. That's right. Dunn. Yeah. You read it now. Hot off the lift. But so what are some, it was a time period and it was pretty big. So in the 18 hundreds, self publishing was actually very typical and they call it a vanity publishing. So where do you think vanity? Why do they use the term vanity for publishing?
Jesper (17m 11s): Aye. I could be wrong on this, but I think that it has to do with is because the, well, the author has a bit of a hit, you know, that they want their own works published and no, at least the connotation it has today is that self publishing some times is called a bandage publishing because it's a bit like it's not, isn't it a really good publishing. It is just like somebody who wanted to put this out into the world. They probably tried to get in a, a, a traditional publishing house to publish it, which they wouldn't because it wasn't good enough.
Jesper (17m 44s): So they went ahead and published it on their own. That's a bit of the stigma it has today, at least that
Autumn (17m 50s): I don't know if that's way originated from as well. I need a little child little thing. Yes. Gold star for you. That is correct because it's considered vanity publishing because the author was vain and we want it to be published even though they've had been rejected, but that is a stigma. Even back then, that isn't necessarily true. Some people maybe they couldn't get published, but the thing about women writers, they were, they just couldn't even own property. They couldn't even talk to publishers unless they had a male relative. And this was even in England.
Autumn (18m 21s): So some of them were paying to have books published and using a pen names or anonymous was very famous, basically meant AU is written by a woman. And so there is a lot of authors who were vanity publishing because they had no other means, but they're books were good because come on, you've got a guest, at least a couple people who, or a self published, just like, Oh, you could pick an author, the author and the author of a historic, you can choose a modern one Plato Oh, you know, I didn't go back that far.
Autumn (19m 7s): It's not fair. I self published something. I bet he did too. I'm sure the Greeks were really into self publishing and we just don't appreciate it. But some of my favorites, I couldn't believe this. John Locke was self published, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Martin Luther, Marcel Proust, some of the, what are some of the works that they published it that way. I see, Oh, I'm not even going to go into him. But how about some really good ones? What Whitman, the leaves of grass, in fact, well, Whitman is considered the first one who discovered Author branding.
Autumn (19m 44s): He sold the leaves of grass based on his rather notorious lifestyle and who he was. So yeah, I didn't actually realize that he was so scandalous. That was kind of fun to read. It's a very salicious. I now have a new appreciation for the leaves of grass and you have to read it again. But two, the paragons that I could not believe are self published where Emily Dickinson and Jane Rustin, Jean Oxton, I mean, she is considered, she is second to Shakespeare in sales and notoriety and she self published in her lifetime.
Autumn (20m 25s): So that kind of says something about what self publishing is. So it's self publishing has been around a long time. So that's only part of this question though. The question is, you know, what does it mean to be a writer? So these authors were self published. What I could not uncover and unbury unfortunately is how much time these Author spent. You know, it was shaking the Busch and telling people about their works, how they went about selling them.
Autumn (20m 54s): However Jane Austin. It really was her brother, Henry and her sister Kassandra, who were shouting about our work here. She was very lucky that way to have very strong family support. And she tried very hard to not let people know. First. She tried to have to let people know it was written by a woman and then that kind of leaked out and she just signed her books. They were titled by a lady, but she did get to meet with the Prince Regent, who was a huge fan. So she did do some meetings and things like that. I think later in life, there was a few book signings, but other people, like I mentioned, well, what he was, he was of the brand and he was out all the time selling these books.
Autumn (21m 34s): In fact, he basically published the leaves of grass in 18 different versions. He just kept adding on it and putting stuff together. That was his book. It was only, it was his only book, you know? And you just went on selling it and he sold it based on who he was. And people just wanted it because he was like, Oh, you wrote this. Oh my goodness. I want you to read us. So I just found, it's so fascinating to read through some of this history of some of these paragons, you know, people, we never would be like reading, I'm reading this and finding out, but you know, Emerson, you know, actually Benjamin Franklin, I self published.
Autumn (22m 12s): A lot of these people published and they would do adverts in the local paper. They would do book signings. They would go to the societal dinner's and bring their book and be like, well, you know, I wrote this so you can do a little reading and the polite society rooms and try to get people to spread the word. I mean, this is, this was the earliest social media of going to these dinners and spreading the word about there books. And these are people that we just think, Oh, it's Dean Austin. Of course, of course she did well, but Nope, she, she had to shake the Busch.
Autumn (22m 45s): So I'll think of this stuff up from somewhere. Yeah. You all start from somewhere until you get to be known. So I did really find this fascinating that there is a huge history of being not only self published, but Writer is having to do a lot more and a lot of heavy lifting than just writing. Yeah, absolutely. But I'll also even, even in the modern day, for example, you know, a JK Rowling, self-publishers her eBooks versions of Harry Potter, but I actually didn't know that's the, I didn't bring up to modern.
Autumn (23m 18s): That's exciting. Yeah. So, so, so she didn't want to sign a waiver to REITs for the iBooks because it owns so much money. So, so she holds help hold onto those rights herself for her. And she's self publish is the Harry Potter books and books. And then she sign the contract a For, you know, paperback in hot back and whatnot ride. So that's an excellent, she owns the rights herself. So I'm self published. That is fantastic. And I wonder if she owns the IP assume there's audio
Jesper (23m 46s): Books, there has to be audio works. So here we have hotter. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Are, there is a, I think that's with a publishing house, but I'm not an a 100% share on that, but I think it is considering, I am sure she would have had the money to hire somebody, but considering how difficult and time consuming of a process, they can do whatever she wants. Yeah. I think she is one of the richest woman in the world. So I think she was doing fine in those days. Yeah. Yeah, indeed. Okay. Well actually I also find found the quote that I was thinking about four for this podcast episode here.
Jesper (24m 18s): So I was thinking too, maybe just shared and then follow on with a bit of my thoughts, because if it goes into this entire topic here, excellent. So this is a quote from Ray Bradbury. So it goes like this quote, if you simply define a rider as someone who is WRITING clarity says In, you are truly a rider when you are writing. And if you don't write regularly, don't pretend to give yourself that title start writing more for me, they key is.
Jesper (24m 53s): Yeah. And then yeah. End of the quote, write. And then what I want you to say is that for me, the key is in that word regularly because I can agree to that pot. I mean, if you want to, if you want to be an author, that also means that you have to put your butt in the seat and ride at the end of the day, we only authors if we write stuff. So I would say, you know, only writing his writing marketing is not Writing social media is not writing.
Jesper (25m 25s): Only writing is writing. However, that does not mean that none of those other activities isn't a part of being an author is. And I think for me, that's where the distinction lies because you also have to do marketing. You also have to do social media and all those other things. So as you set in the beginning of the episode would have been the beginning of the section Autumn when somebody was asking, so how much do you write? And then if the answer was well, our right in the morning and I do marketing in the afternoon, and then people would say, well, then you're not a writer.
Jesper (26m 0s): I think it comes from stuff like this. You know, that there was this kind of thinking that well, writers only write. And if you do anything else, then you not a proper right. Or maybe there's a bit of thinking as well that, well, if your a proper righty, your publisher will do all those other things for you. But nowadays in 2020 property says actually expect the authors to due to marketing as well. They do not, if your a Stephen King or something, then he will get whatever he wants. But for everybody else, even those who are those who have traditional publishing contracts, the puppet is that they will not really allocate any funding or attention to watch marketing.
Jesper (26m 39s): They actually expect the author to do it. So that's why I also set up at the top that
Autumn (26m 45s): I think it's a bit of an old fashioned outdated view on things this whole, this whole conversation, you know, it's, I don't know. I find it a bit weird that unless you ride eight hours a day and do nothing else, then you're not a right. I don't, I can't quite follow the logic day. And I probably can't, if we go 10 or 20 years back than maybe I understand now in 2020 now I don't get it. I agree. And I think that's a really good distinction is like Yeah writers writing is Writing and you're a writer if you're actively writing or at least trying to write every day, or are you have a scheduled in your reading, but an author, it incorporates a lot more.
Autumn (27m 26s): And that's even book signings. I mean, we know someone who, you know, their publisher sends them off to some of these book fairs and stuff. That's not Writing, that's being front and center. Even if the publisher is paying your entrance fee, which is always nice instead of having to do it out of your Author business. But it, again, sometimes you go what you do, these book signings, your handing out cards and stuff. As you go and share, you've got a grocery store until when to ask what you do. And you say, you're a writer and you told them about your books and they're you go?
Autumn (27m 57s): It doesn't matter if you have a publisher not, but I agree a lot of publishers these days do expect you to have done it. And a lot of publishers like to pick up authors and writers who have been doing it. So that's why there's a lot of hybrid authors that use days where they Be, they started out as a self publishing and they are doing such a good job at getting themselves known in an in demand that publisher thinks, Oh, you are a safe bet. So I'm going to skip, are you up? And you are going to keep doing what you're doing, but now we're going to handle the book sales and maybe some of that advertising or are paying for the expenses for you to go to these big, big book, fair is and booking you out two signings and things.
Autumn (28m 36s): Now, I mean, this is just good business, right? Yeah. I mean, if, if you are running a business and you are the head of publishing at a big publishing house, who do you want to sign? And you want to take a chance on an Author. You never heard about And who has no media, a social media following on anything, or do you wanna pick the one where you can see that they have a lot of following a lot of people, you know, talking about them and probably buying the books, which of course is as a publisher, you want know what at that point in time, but you have a pretty strong indication if you see what they're doing on the internet, right. Or whether or not it looks like they have a lot of following.
Autumn (29m 9s): And so who do you go with? Of course, you'd pick the one with the following, right. Because you know, well this guy, he or her, yes, they can, they can publish their way. They can promote their own book. I'm going to say, and, and they can make a cell. And that's what do you want? Yeah, that's a publishing house. I mean, right. And there are some benefits. I mean, some the publishing house is they have some great NS with libraries, like the bookstore, as you see it airport's and things like that as well. That's actually kind of hard to get into as an Indy published author. Yeah. I think that's probably the only thing to be honest.
Autumn (29m 41s): Autumn
Jesper (29m 43s): I say, I, I, going through, at this point in time, I'm recording the, a free course are that we are going to put up later in the year. And actually I was just going through with the other day, one of the modules, when I talk about self publishing and stuff like that. And one of the things I actually set there is that the only thing that traditional publisher can do that we can not do with self publishers, I am getting into bookstores and libraries in effective manner. That's the only thing that they can do, but there is nothing else that they can do at, we can not do as well.
Jesper (30m 14s): And probably if we want to better, I agree. I, I, I think, yeah, yeah. And editing might be some slight different that that's probably something where I would say that they can do it well, and it's not that we couldn't do exactly the same thing. I think that the thing is just at when the traditional publishing houses do their editing, they go through like 10 rounds of editing or something. It's very rare that you find a traditional published book with a single type of way that it can happen, but its very rare and it is because it's a, they've gone over, over and over and over and over again.
Jesper (30m 47s): And then of course, as self published authors, we could also, we could do the same thing. I mean we could hire 10 different proof reading editor's and then go through one by one by one by one. And hopefully by the end you will, you we'll have gotten rid of any tables. So if you want two, you could go through that labral in the process a as well. But at least that part, I think that they usually do better in the traditional publishing houses that we do. But when it comes to marketing, getting professional covers, at least if we know who to contact and get them to decide for us and even, even editing as well, you know, all, all those things we can do just as well as they can.
Jesper (31m 25s): Yeah. I do you think they have the advantage of many different eyes on one thing? Yes. Yes they do. But I definitely, I definitely think there's a split there though, because sometimes you're dealing with lots of people who might give contrary advice and then you have someone who might be really pushing hard for Writing to market. And I have heard stories of authors being really conflicted with getting an offer, have a wonderful, it sounds like a really good deal. You'll be able to a real publisher, but you, no, they want to switch this character and they want to do this and probably still very good book, but that's really hard if you're coming from a creative, I love being in charge of all my creative input.
Jesper (32m 5s): So yeah that's yeah. As our one guest Hollie had mentioned about her in her writing partner, Angelina in Delina, they are, they were creating the world together, but they were both writing their own stories because they both a little to controlling what else to share the same book in the same character. It was thought that was kind of a durable it's very honest. Hi. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Well that's not always a, you know, you need to find some, but if your, what writing something together with somebody else, you need to find somebody who you, you aware of writing a new way of thinking and your way of working matches well with right?
Jesper (32m 44s): So otherwise you kind of get sort of conflicts about things. So it's a, well, we actually talked about that in the past episode about finding a, somebody to write with. So go and search for that if your interested, but you said something earlier on that, a trigger something in me because I'm, there's also this whole debate about the, what is the difference between a writer and an author. And I did find, I did find some definitions. This is not me making it up.
Jesper (33m 14s): This is some stuff I found on that.
Autumn (33m 16s): The internet, which is always this. Yeah, exactly. Then Janette is always telling this truth, no matter what do you know? It Autumn that it's the way it is. All right. Never lies and everything you read is true. And you know what? I believe everything can say
Jesper (33m 29s): Yes, but I found this ah, this way of wording it. Ah, and I thought it was just shared because then I want, you want us to talk a bit about what we think about it afterwards? So it goes like this, that some say that a writer is someone who writes a book, an article or whatever. Why not? An author is one who originates the idea of the Plot all the content of that it's been what is being written and both of those can of course be at the same person.
Jesper (34m 2s): And then there are others who say that right, is our people who write Y all those authors who are those who have published their work and are earning money from it. So that sort of two different ways of
Autumn (34m 15s): Distinguishing between being a rider and being an Author. Okay. I hadn't heard that first one before and it doesn't really resonate well with me, but the second one to me is, is more true. I Writer is someone who is REITs is writing. I mean, you could be a writer if your doing blogs and other things, a you're a journalist, you're a writer, but an author is definitely someone who has, you have given birth and produced a novel. And suddenly C's, you know, they've done the editing, they've done the covers.
Autumn (34m 47s): Now they see, they had to do ads. They were doing the social media is more of a business idea. Even if they have a publisher, whether or not they have a publisher, they are an author B. It was like becoming a parent. Your not a mom until you give birth. So with the child. But do you know what my view on this? Is that, is that Yeah. Why do we care? It's a good one. Why does it matter? What is a Writer versus what, I mean, if you tie start typing it in, in Google law, in, in a, in your web browser, it'll automatically populate.
Autumn (35m 23s): What is the difference between a writer and an author? Just like we can ask, why have we are debating what the differences are? It makes absolutely zero difference. It's very true. I think it's human nature to want categorize things and be able to define things as part of our little curiosity about, you know, understanding the world by putting labels in words, on things. But it does that make a difference at the end of the day, really?
Jesper (35m 53s): Alan is like, I really feel like we need to break free of this line of thinking because I really don't think it matters at all. And the other part is that
Autumn (36m 3s): Yeah,
Jesper (36m 4s): A fair bit that some people might be checking out these definitions because maybe they feel a bit too insecure. So then they want, they don't want to end up saying, well, I, you know, if somebody asked, why do, what do you do to, I say, I'm a Writer or do I say Author? What is the difference between the two? And I definitely shouldn't say I'm an author if I haven't published books. So maybe I need to say I'm a writer. And so you blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And on and on and on there's self goes. It's just like, I don't like it.
Jesper (36m 35s): You know, get rid of that stuff. It doesn't matter if you want to say you're right. If you want to say an author or whatever, say whatever you feel comfortable with, but I just don't think in it, if it matters at all, I don't think it as well that it matters what people, other people they're the people or the person who received that answer. How did you receive that answer? It doesn't matter either. Now. Maybe they feel like, well, Writer, Author maybe those data, we didn't even think about it. Some people we'll be thinking about it and they will be the ones we talked about at, at the top, where, well, are you writing it hours a day?
Jesper (37m 12s): And if the answer is no
Autumn (37m 16s): Not good enough for those standard. No, I think no, an honest answer of, Hey, what are you doing? I'm writing a book that kind of, you know, call me whatever you want. Why do you feel comfortable with, yeah, it that's fine. I agree. I think the ideas, like you said, put your butt in the chair. If your, if you want to do this, but your in the chair and actually REIT, and don't worry at what people call you or define you because some people are going to call you are a writer, so I'm gonna call you Author so we will call you a HACC, but its just do it and you know, do it cause you love it or because it's a drive within you and that's really the important part.
Autumn (37m 53s): And yeah, you might, if you go on to publish a book, you're going to find out that there's a lot more to Writing. Whether you are publishing through a publisher or self publishing, you're going to find out there's quite a lot more to it than just, you know, hitting done. And it's suddenly magically out their and selling. There's a lot more shaking. I always think of a word, little worker bees doing their working bee dance to saying I am getting my work done. So yeah, you're gonna, you're going to find that as part of your life too.
Jesper (38m 24s): Yeah, that's true. I mean, for me it's like, if you need permission from anybody as a listener, you have my permission permission from now on you can call yourself a writer, an author, the muster of the universe of whatever you want. I don't care. I don't care if I mean, it doesn't matter if you've published anything or if you have that pup, is there anything, if you want to call yourself a writer or an author? I do. So I think that the only thing that matters, as I said earlier on is that you right on a regular basis, whether you are published on it or not, it doesn't really matter if you're right on a regular basis and you, if you're committed to death in my view, then you are a writer.
Jesper (39m 2s): I like it. I, I agree with it. And I think that's where we should definitely end on that note that, yes, it's good to call yourself a writer, call yourself an author. Don't don't deny yourself that if that is what you're doing and that is what's in your heart. Yeah. I have a, I actually find just one more quick, which I think we can finish off with that. Both did our homework for this one. I'm so proud. It's amazing. Isn't it? When you put in the effort, something happens.
Jesper (39m 33s): He's amazing. But this one, it's a firm Ursula, Kayla Quint and I, I quite like it to so are you ready? All right. Yes, absolutely. From Ursula. Okay. You may have gathered from all of this that I am not encouraging people to try to be writers. Well, I can't, you hate to see a nice young person run up to the edge of the cliff and jump off on the other hand. It is awfully nice to know that some other people are just as knotty and just as determined to jump off the cliffs as you are, you just hope they realize what they are in for at the quote.
Jesper (40m 15s): Oh, I love it. I that's why I love isn't that amazing? That does amazing. And that is perfect. So yes, I am so glad. I'm glad for the internet some days, because I've met so many people just as crazy, if not a little bit crazier, which is hard to do than me. So yeah. Yeah. And I like the, I liked the core message in In at least a way I read or hear that quote. It's also that if you wanna be a writer, there is a million things that you could do that will earn you an income at a thousand times faster in a thousand times easier.
Jesper (40m 52s): So if you really want to be a writer and you have to be a bit naughty, you really want to go through with this. So, you know, as she says, she just hope that they realized what they're in for For and I think that is such a good message. You know, that tried to go in and if your listening to podcast like this one, you are going in, open-minded all ready. So that is great. You are already enlightened. As you enter on this journey, by listening to podcasts are reading block post or whatever, or you may be doing a learning about WRITING.
Jesper (41m 24s): But I like the core message of that, that you can tell people that this should be right. As you know, if they wanna be writers, they want to be right as, and then hopefully they just know
Autumn (41m 34s): What's gonna hit them. It was a very good message. And I agree, you know, any bunch of people who, it doesn't mind having characters, talking in their head and the spouses and significant others of all of those people who talked to the partners about the people who are talking in their heads and don't end up in the lunatic asylum. It's good. It's all right. So next Monday and if all goes well, Autumn will take a break and I will have a great interview line up for you about self editing.
Narrator (42m 9s): If you like, what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST please tell a fellow Author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn in Yesper on patrion.com/am Writing Fantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast going to stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Every story needs a villain. Someone to oppose the protagonist.
However, there are some traits that will make the antagonist memorable and feel like a real person, with true motives.
In episode 77 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, Autumn and Jesper explore how to create the best villain for a novel.
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy.
For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast in today's publishing landscape. You can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello? I am Jesper and I'm Autumn. This is episode 77 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. And today's episode is sort of a continuation of last week's episode where we shared 10 Traits that makes a protagonist great. So, today we will do the same thing, but this time it's the antagonists, or the villains turn And I was so,
Autumn (55s): So looking forward to this one and it ended up being so hard or it's so much harder than the heroes. Yeah, it was a actually.
Jesper (1m 4s): But yeah, I hope it's got to be just as much fun as last week, but at least in coming up with the 10 items and that wasn't even a bit harder. And I, as I said before, we started recording, I felt like the first six or seven of them, those were quite easy. But then number eight, nine, 10 at the bottom end of the list, those where a bit harder. Yeah. I had to think a while, but those,
Autumn (1m 27s): Yeah, I would've had been happy if we're coming up with the top five things for our top. Traits for Villain, but I'm in, it's two. I told you this, I a sat down the sporting and stared at my computer until I came up with my final two. I really had a forced myself to think this went through and I might the heroes, I try to do the hero's like in positive traits, but this one that ended up being more, the things Villain shouldn't be so will have to see how much we overlap this time. It's interesting.
Jesper (1m 57s): Interesting. But anyway, will get there first. How were things on your side of the Atlantic? It's good. It's good. We, we have guests over the weekend, so yeah, that was quite good. Yeah.
Autumn (2m 11s): Koshi and a nice to see some friends and a quick visiting, but of course we couldn't hug each other due to the COVID-19 situations. So that was a bit weird, but at the same time, at least having friends in the house For me, after a long while in isolation, that felt a bit like returning to normal, at least. So that was quite nice. Oh, that's excellent. Yeah. It it's good to be able to see people again. And we haven't, we seen a few extra people, but it is difficult because I know even my parents had said, do you know someone?
Autumn (2m 42s): They haven't seen happen to me driving by? And so my dad in the guard and instantly when you go hug and it's like, he's immuno-compromised, you can't do that. You gotta think before you tackle somebody and is yeah, but it was also when we, you know, we had to remind ourselves when they, when, when they entered that we couldn't hockey to it because it feels natural.
Jesper (3m 4s): That's what you do. So that was a bit weird, but, but I think other than that, it was, it was very nice. A guy with a bit of normal T in the light again. And, but I think otherwise it, she has also been quite a busy week. I got all my modules, it was completed. I'm so impressed. It only took like two years. I'm so swamped with formatting and creating pictures for the books were going to be releasing here over this summer that I still behind on my modules, but I'll get there.
Jesper (3m 38s): I'll get there. Yeah. But in the meantime, I also got started on the self publishing success course that this week course. So I started on that earlier today and I actually upload it the first module fully recorded and uploaded to our hosting platform as well. That is fantastic. Oh yeah, that's good. So nine more modules to go and I would really love it if it would be possible for me to have all of them done before summer holiday. But I don't know if that's going to be go on holiday in, you'd be like, could you build a website while I'm gone?
Jesper (4m 14s): So I seen her, this was going, I was planning on doing my world building modules. Well, you were on vacation. So just keep that in mind. Right. All right. Yeah. Well, it's not me. It's more the model or listeners who we'll be on your back because the sooner you get done, then as soon as they will have their free cost delivered two to, I need to clear, I've heard several people say I need to clone myself, or you can think that I just need to clone myself. Yeah. It can be that hot. Right. Of course, there's got to be a magic fairy or something around here who can figure it out for me or a mad scientist.
Jesper (4m 50s): Somebody's put in a way to put in an add in the newspaper that your looking for a math scientist, because we need to get more worked. Yeah, I'll do that. Just kind of, not that cracks starts responding to that app should actually be kind of funny. Yeah. Well, at least we we'll have some stuff to read out loud on the, on the Podcast afterwards. I'll do a Facebook ad. That will be even more entertaining. Yeah.
Autumn (5m 21s): Yeah. Okay. But how about you then? You seen any people have done anything interesting over the last week? Oh, the person who owns the land, the cabin is on its head. Her daughter is up for 'em of ones from Georgia and the other's from Boston. And so I've seen them and actually got to give everyone a little bit of a tour of the cabin and the work we did. And then, you know what? My, my big project has been three years in the making. I finally put together the trailer two, my Epic Fantasy series.
Autumn (5m 52s): So both trilogies combined into one trailer, because if you've got to do it, you might as well just do it for everything. And so I'm so excited to have that three year task off my back burner list. So that feels really good. Yeah. I can understand the why. Yeah. That's good. We got the internet WRITING Fantasy Podcast Oh, well, first of all, a huge and very warm welcome to Jeffrey Crosby who joined us on Petro on there.
Autumn (6m 29s): That's right. I saw he joined this last week. So welcome. I hope you're enjoying their, all the tips that are up there on Patrion and the fun in the exclusive benefit's as well. Yeah. That was a, of, there was a ton of posts. I think Petron has started list. I don't know if they've already done or always I'm interested on this and not quite sure, but I have noticed how, if you go to the site, when, if you're not locked in, like, like we normally are, then it we'll list how many posts are in there.
Jesper (6m 60s): What kind of categories in just like modern a hundred in writing. And I don't know what it was like 40 world building, or I can't remember how many, but it was a lot. So it had been that busy. Yeah. So there was a lot of posts in there that ah, that one can dive into. So, but that was great. Thank you so much, Jeffery for it, for joining us. And we also need to give a heartfelt thank you to say it, who increased his pledge and totally made me smile with his recent comments.
Autumn (7m 32s): I actually have to save this. One's ate because I do. There's a few comments that every once in a while, just to make you feel like Yeah and he, I, we were talking about some of his world building because we have a little task world building extravaganza going on on my Monday post. And he replied too, one of them as such an amazing answer. Or you rock it with those smiley face. I'm like, Ohh, that's going on in my little Pinboard for when I need to smile. So yeah. That, and then sometimes it's this short sweet, enthusiastic in heartfelt one's that just make it kind of like, Oh yeah, I'm saving it.
Jesper (8m 6s): Its awesome. Yeah. So I'll have to say that the way it is, those of you who choose to help us on Petro on that are the backbone of this show. It truly is, you know, it's you who keep this show going. So it means a lot to us that you are supporting us if you're listening and you haven't yet checked out Petra, there is a link in the show notes. So please go and check it out. You know, as a patron supporter, you are getting access to a ton of perks on top of all those a story's and, and, and post out there we just talk about, but there was a lot of other purchase.
Autumn (8m 41s): Well, and you get in for just a dollar a month, so it doesn't get much more affordable than that. So check it out. It really makes us happy. Yes anything from a THE worldwide web world web. And they're saying, well, yeah, I know. And to see now it was a tongue twister am not going to be able to figure it out. No, I mean, I Am Writing Fantasy group, it's been a ton of fun again. This week there's been some really good posts and they've been continuing with a, some of their breaking down trope.
Autumn (9m 15s): So it's just, ah, again, I've only been into a couple of times as a week. It's been, it was such a crazy week, but I do love seeing how everyone is interacting and it's a great resource too. If your looking for some tips, some feedback, just everyone is so nice and response to all the questions and you are usually answering things before I ever even get in there. So it's wonderful platform. So it comes to search for us on Facebook, under Am Writing Fantasy and come check us out and join the group.
Jesper (9m 52s): Yes. Yes. So as we talked about at the top of the show here, we, we did have a lot of fun last week, actually automated through our list of 10 Traits and we try to see how much a will that we have it yet. So we can do the same this week, but I wonder how much overlap there's going to be a one sheet. I said that last week as well, but I am actually agreeing with you this week. I know because especially, cause you sounded surprised at my mine are more of what Villain shouldn't be. So I'm thinking maybe we won't have quite as much overlap this time.
Autumn (10m 25s): Yeah. I've been, I don't know. I, off the last weeks experienced, I feel like so much less confident about my ability to, to have this run, right. Because Oh, you know, a boy I was wrong as well. So I don't know why should I predict how many overlapping Traits we have this time? Alright, well I'm going to say, I'm going to go with under 50% at this time. So do you want to go with it over? You want to switch places from last week or, or, you know, what does that mean?
Autumn (10m 55s): And there are four, I think will have about 40 to 50% overlapping out of the 20 or 20 Traits each week or a 10 Traits each to the 20 total. I'm saying maybe eight to 10 will overlap.
Jesper (11m 10s): Yes.
Autumn (11m 12s): Eight to 10. What do you mean? Yeah, I think eight we'll have eight or so. Yeah. Eight. So about four or five of our as well, at least five over there. And last week we have seven. Was it a yeah. Well I think it was a 13 cause I added up, you know, a 13. Yeah. I was 13 out of 20 overlaps, so right. Yeah. So, Hm. Okay. I'll I'll be bold at this time. We'll say Oh 11.
Autumn (11m 42s): All right. You see a 11 sounds good. So that means like six out of 10. It should be overlapping. Yeah. And I'm saying four to songs sang right around. I'm saying it a little less than a week to 10. Yeah. You somewhere in there. So we're a little, we're really close and are guesstimate of how it much overlap will be. We'll probably ended up with like 20 or something. Oh, well, okay. If that happens again, I don't know. I I'll be lost for words.
Jesper (12m 13s): Are we good? Oh, we'll have to give it a go. Alright. I started last time. So I think you should kick us off with your number 10. Okay. Yeah. I can do that after. So you don't need to have a notepad there so that you can keep track of our overlapping them. I will. So again, reader a listener's if you happen to hear some typing, I'm just trying to keep track of, of what we are. And if you, if you keep track and find out we're wrong, please let us know if I miscount.
Jesper (12m 44s): OK. So I will start with number 10 and I think as well as last time around, let's try to see if we can just share a bit of thoughts about why we picked each one is I think that's yeah. Okay. This sounds good. OK. So I will start out and again, as I said in the beginning, the last three ones, that means numbers, not a spot number is eight, nine, and 10. Those were really hot. I have trouble finding one. So I think it gets better than further down to watch.
Jesper (13m 15s): Number one, we get like a So number 10 was a guy being jealous. Oh, how interesting. And yeah, because when I have, so that's no overlap. Okay. But it's just like being jealous as an emotion. We all can relate to M and a technician who is perhaps feeling jealous of what the protagonists have, or maybe it could be jealous about some of the protectionist personality traits, you know, that the Villain wishes that I could be like this and that, or do like whatever, you know, it, I think it makes the Villain instantly relatable because as I said, jealousy is something we all understand.
Autumn (14m 1s): So I think that's good trait. What is a good day? I don't disagree, but it's not what I thought of, but yes. So it's definitely makes them a very relatable person. So yes, I agree. My number 10 is not like a huge one, but it's one is definitely a per more personal than in a more generic Hey this is a good Villain. So for me, one thing that I do live in a really good Villain that really kind of makes me like it is sarcasm. I know it sounds silly, but I love good sarcastic Villain and Someone with like a dry wit and maybe a well earned arrogant air, sort of like they not only think that there better than everyone else, they've pretty much proven it.
Autumn (14m 41s): And they have the, the wit, the sarcasm to remain others with some veil threats or amused patience. You know, I know it's maybe my little cynical side, but yes, sometimes you get those characters who had that half smile, a Glint in their eye while there are also a stabbing you and I'm like, I'd love those guys. So that's when I liked. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I agree. And I, especially like, you know, if, especially in movies, you know, if, if, if you have this really bad, Villain there, Andy.
Jesper (15m 16s): And it was just like, he just care at all day. You know, we could just see like, he is completely unimpressed by, by the, by the Hero or the army that his before him or whatever, it was just like, Oh, whatever. . Yeah, exactly. Just like, okay. I Yeah, if I'm ever, like, if I was ever a super villain, that is totally they'll persona. I want to go for it. Yeah, yeah, indeed. Yeah. It was just, Oh, I don't know. I shouldn't have thought a set up because now I lost a penny dreadful.
Jesper (15m 46s): We just talked about over this weekend that there was a new season of penny dreadful. I haven't watched it, but, but my, our friends who visited have watched it in the end, they set the, actually that there was two gods' in that new season. He was just, it was a good and a bad or a good and evil God. And they are sort of competing, you know? Oh, well the evil God has just being really evil in manipulating or a human or mankind. So I have to watch that after he set that up, it's like, okay, no, I have to watch it.
Autumn (16m 16s): Yeah. And that's funny cause we're just looking for a news show and we've been watching, we just started on upload, which is quite interesting. But I am gonna add that one to our cue because I did see it night for God and it would come out. So I thank you. Yeah you can watch it right after what's the tiger King. What you're really trying to avoid. I actually have watched that episode four, but that's when Adam was a way and he does a lot. It was better than I thought I will actually fish it out. Yes. I will finish it at some point when I'm not torturing my husband.
Autumn (16m 47s): Cause he refuses to have anything to do with it. So I've got to spend some quiet time. So for sarcasm, it's not one you have, so there is no overlap. No, no, I don't think that that so far, no is zero for zero. All right. This is unusual. I just kind of know, but this was going to end up with just like last week, last week I was way off in my prediction and not going to be way off again. It will be interesting. Okay. So you want to have my number nine, so lets go for it.
Jesper (17m 20s): Okay. Vengeful fit. Ooh. That's an interesting lion. I think this is a good one. You know, somebody who has an Axe to grind, it's a, it's a believable person, but also interesting because one day a vengeful about something. We also want to understand why and we want to learn what happened to the person. So I think that's a good trait for a Villain that it's a very good training and I had something maybe similar, but it's not really close enough. So I'm going to say no overlap, but I knew it was just so weird.
Autumn (17m 52s): We, again, I think it's because we struggled so much with this one. After we out of sync, freezing through something wrong, you know what it is? It's a Monday, but it's always a Monday so Hey, all right. Yeah so nine, my number nine is smart and I don't just being clever, but I mean like truly intelligent to the point of DVS and our thinking the Author because goodness knows I had a Villain one of my favorite villain's and I could see he was always out at maneuvering MI. I thought he was gonna win the entire trilogy.
Autumn (18m 22s): So I really did not trust him except two trust in that he had figured out what he was doing and tell me eventually. So if this is, especially, if you think about it logically though, this is if you're a Villain your antagonist is a figure who is like risen Farr from the ranks, like maybe started as a peasant and Roosen up through the government or something like that. That is someone who is going to be able to outfox just about anyone to have come so far. So I really like a master chess player of whose doing the long game and can handle the short game.
Autumn (18m 55s): That's just so impressed with me when I'm just like,
Jesper (18m 58s): Wow. Fully agree. Fully agree. Yeah. I think we'll have some overlap there. Some of us, we got one I think. Yeah. I don't think we, I think I haven't worded it exactly like that, but I think it's closest to some of my other ones. So all right. But number eight is a persuasive. Ooh, because I mean, they're, there's a few of the Traits on my list. You had to come here and that will compliment this one. So I hope it's not too much of a cheat because if there's too much overlap with one, some of my other ones, but, but I just think that, you know, a Villain who is able to give a logical argument as to why it is necessarily to do what he or she's doing.
Jesper (19m 45s): It just works wonders in showing the reader that this is a, you know, this is a real person that doesn't mean that the Rita has to agree with a logical argument, but it just like as long as you can follow the logic behind it, if you see what do I really liked that? Mmm. Because it, it shows the real person behind this scheming and what not. Right. So I like that. I like
Autumn (20m 10s): That too. I'm trying to decide if it's similar to what I have are not, will have to decide to when we get there. But yeah. And I kind of did the same thing. Some of mine kind of built off of each other and I wasn't trying to treat cheat as well, but I thought there was kind of different, different veins or flavors. Yeah. That's a different one. So that's all fine. I don't have good solid words like persuasive for some of mine. Maybe I just wasn't trying hard enough, but my number line or phrases to my number eight is committed to what they are seeking.
Autumn (20m 43s): I mean, they are so committed. They would give up their mother, their best friends or lovers achieve whatever their goal is. And they would do without any hesitation are coughing. There will be like, sacrifices must be made your It so forth. But I like that level of commitment. They don't sit there and go, Oh God, what's the right thing to do. They're just do it. Yeah score another one at another point from me. I think I have that. Great. Excellent. That's so encouraging. You have some overlap, you know, we were getting close to two.
Jesper (21m 14s): I need to get to 11. I don't want to be off one book now after I've come miscalculate it last week, I want to have this one right here. We need to get to 11. All right. What I'm at now? You're at one to two to that's all I'm counting us as a long way. Two were only on seven. There is hope. Okay. So number seven is likeable qualities. Oh and this is short of a flipping at the whole thing on his head, I guess.
Jesper (21m 46s): But I think that's a good one because the bad guy who isn't bad all the time, it's a much more complex character. And I really like it when the bad guy, all of a sudden does something that is quite likable. And then the next moment he is putting it back to being a bad guy. I really think that that works well because nobody's bat all the time for, just for the sake of being bad. So I liked that. Yes. And definitely overlap, but I have a word. It is slightly different, but Hey, we've got that one comm, so that's a good, I'm getting close to home.
Autumn (22m 20s): So my number is seven is again a phrase, but a character who is not just evil because the Author needs an evil character to pit the heroes against. And then they just go in, they give 'em like every bad trait that could think of like, Oh, you should just eat baby. He is or kicks puppies or a starves dragons or, or whatever. But I don't like just a list of evil for the sheer sake of making someone hoard that you'll just hate. They should have an actual personality, an arc reasons for doing what they do and all of those things.
Autumn (22m 52s): So I just, I still think even about the star Wars in the evil empire. And I mean, I think it took until maybe the clone Wars and stuff are making, you know, you do assume that dark Jetta in a dark forest is the reason is, is evil. But obviously I still feel like I missing something like why are there so evil people in the evil empire who seemed pretty decent? So I don't know which Cypress was to be rooting for it. It seemed to be heroes. Is that, aren't that decent? So what's the deal.
Jesper (23m 23s): Yeah. Yeah. I think we have some overlap there as well, but let's see. Alright. You can't make that up just because you want to win and I can just start saying, Oh, which one was the second one you had before? And then yeah. Yeah. That's my next, you keep asking what's account. No. OK. I need two more. Yeah, I know. I'm gonna, you know, I might not give you the Real so you watch out, He has some typing. That's just me correcting my notes. You have to do something else.
Jesper (23m 54s): All right. Number six unethical. And so I think we actually have some overlap here is just, just the words that we've chosen to it for it basically, but you know, Great villains. So they tend to do terrible deeds, but what makes it work is when the Villain firmly believes, like sincerely believes that the end goal just justifies the means so that the antagonist we'll, you know, well basically put aside normal moral conduct are moral considerations.
Jesper (24m 32s): And just to feel like this doesn't apply to him or her, that that really becomes a pretty frightening character when they do stuff like that.
Autumn (24m 40s): And what do you know what's really interesting about your number six is it's pretty much my number, so I, I didn't, I could get a bonus point. So if we end up a 10, then it comes to 11 because there is a bonus. It kind of goes both ways. But I guess, yeah. It's because I, I phrase it, this just fully believes what he or she is doing is right. And again, I don't mean is that the necessarily that they don't think that there are evil, but that what they are doing is the right thing to do.
Autumn (25m 11s): And it's really the hero. That's upsetting the balance of how things must be in their eyes. But yeah, just that total commitment of what I'm doing is the right thing to do. So I think it was almost exactly a phrase you used in there. So I think we're pretty much on par for that way. Nice. Okay. I'm getting close. So you might still where you might get this one. I hope so. Otherwise it'll be embarrassing and I can't sleep tonight will probably end up like, well, we can't rent a, it ended up at 18, but will probably end up with 12 or 15 just to spite us both.
Jesper (25m 48s): Ah, okay. At least I'm closer this week, last week I was so bad. Okay. Number five is past wounds. So what I mean by that is an antagonist who have suffered something in the past. You know, it's probably some emotional wound and then how that informs the way he, as she behave in the precedent. I think that also makes for a compelling Villain. It also gives the reader a plausible explanation as to why this person behaves the way he or she does.
Jesper (26m 25s): And, but I have to say, you're also have to be careful and come up with something good here, you know, something a bit original because yeah, yeah. The, the, the kid who lived in the street and was an orphan, whatever, you know, that's just, I know I've grown pretty tired of those. So I don't think that's a good past wounds. So you have to, to find something that hasn't been seen a million times before, but, but if you can do that, I think it gives a good origin story for the Villain, but it also gives a good explanation as to why they might think a bit differently than the rest of us.
Autumn (26m 59s): Now, see, I'm wondering if, is it possible to have an anti overlap that might be erase a point
Jesper (27m 7s): Only if we, our 12th than it will count because we get to pick on it then it absolutely. But its only something I can answer in hindsight. I don't know if it's been
Autumn (27m 17s): So it, it should be a double and tie overlap because my number five is not just eval because of a past trauma. So I prefer a failed character arc. Even if its a character arc we, or we haven't seen in the current book, something that happened before the story started, but sort of like where the character made a, they had a choice of like the good internal motivation, but they chose to go with like power or fame or control instead of doing the good thing protecting the week or something like that.
Autumn (27m 49s): So, so for me like someone abusing the character as a child is not a good, an excuse to be evil as an adult. I just, I want to see a series of bad choices and bad decisions that went wrong that led them to do increasingly evil or misguided things. I like that set of series and not just, Oh, this event happened in the past and therefore I'm bad. I'm kind of, to me, it's almost like a victim mentality and I want to see someone who's just taken the wrong turn even in despite themselves.
Autumn (28m 23s): I guess I like a more nuanced growth. So almost the opposite of yours if I'm reading it correctly.
Jesper (28m 32s): Yeah, no, I actually agree with what you're saying. I don't know if it's completely opposite because it's more like, OK, so yeah. I want to go with the orphan kid who lived in the street. Right. But, but okay. So something terrible happened and so it may have becomes like your coping mechanisms for how you survived, you know, so okay. Something bad happened and I try to do with the nice thing and I tried to talk to the people or whatever. Right. Nothing happened. It didn't help me. Then I beat them up and that actually helps, you know, something like this and that.
Jesper (29m 6s): And then it builds on, on top of each other because then, then I started incorporating into my mindset. Okay. If I, if I need to, if I need to get my way, I need to beat people up and then you do that as a child. And then, you know, when you get older and you get adult, then it sort of accumulates into nastier and nastier things that you or the Villain is doing. Yeah.
Autumn (29m 27s): Yes. So maybe it is an overlap because we're basically both saying that maybe there was something that started the tendency towards the evils site, you need some sort of trigger trigger. And then after that though, that's not the only excuse, they also continue on a path that makes that develops. That makes it more nuanced and keeps reinforcing it into this evil character. So I guess it is the same and again, on the exact same number, which is kind of funny.
Jesper (29m 58s): Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, we'll see where we end up and then we'll decide if it was to say more if it needs to add or subtract. OK. Depends on where we asked if we had a 10 or 12 or Indian, then we'll see. Alright, alright. Now before this is intelligent and I find this one important it's very much along those same lines. Just what you've said already, because I don't think there's anything scary about Villain who just keep doing stupid mistakes.
Jesper (30m 31s): You know, the Chip's keeps falling into the hero's favor. That's really annoying a I don't like that. A Serita and its incredibly frustrating, but as a villain who is an extremely intelligent and our maneuvers, every body at every turn that is just, I love that is definitely. And yeah, so that's why it, it was my number and nine, but its to me a very, it's just an important feature to have in the villain. And that's why I could probably be the two, your number for Yeah. And what's funny is my number for was pretty much your number seven.
Autumn (31m 3s): So mine is, has good Traits so that relates to be, that relates to what I said before about believing what they're doing is right. But they earnestly believed they have the answer too, an important question or their, the only one who was powerful in or can get this done. Right. You know, or like you said, maybe they love someone or their kind of children or misfits, but there's truly something deeply decent somewhere in them. I think that's so important because no one, no one is so 100% truly evil.
Autumn (31m 35s): Maybe if your writing Christian literary, a religious lit and you have to have a devil that is truly, truly, truly all encompassing evil. But heck I mean, even if you watch supernatural, most of the devil characters on their are actually kind of likable. So it's just kinda the world right now. We've seen things gray. I think that is important, but it also balances it also balances outright because it, it makes for a more three dimensional character. If you're also have some good traits of a loosely and it, again, I think it's interesting to have a character or an evil character that's a more nuanced and that they feel more real because again, not everyone is that bad.
Jesper (32m 18s): Okay. We enter Top I am not going to count how many we know are serious. We've had quite a few overlaps recently, so will have to see how this ends. Yeah. Yes. So let's see if we can agree in the Top. So my number three is formidable. That's an interesting one and yeah. And yeah, But the word formidable doesn't have to be understood as raw strength, you know, it can be, but it doesn't have to be, it can also relate to, well, some of the stuff we already talked about, so being like exceptionally cunning, but it could also be a person who has a great wealth in a lot of resources at their disposal.
Jesper (33m 0s): Something that just makes them miserable. Well, that Villain but more of a position to the Hero as such so that it adds tension. And the more attention we get, the better to story we have formidable is a very good
Autumn (33m 16s): And that's what kind of be another one where I might have to ask the question of, do we have an anti overlap, but it's not my number of three will come back to it. Tune obviously it, we only have three left. So my number three is again, this is where I'm starting to get into the negatives. My number three is me. They may not be an evil at all. My favorite villains are not necessarily evil. I mean, I truly love a good antagonist that has almost like a competitor to the protagonists.
Autumn (33m 47s): So they could just be taking a different approach on what needs to be done. And it's more like a race to see who can get the upper hand and solve the issue first because to me and not every story has to be good versus evil two, make it full of tension. Not every hero has to be a hundred percent justifiably. Correct. And right. And good. So it sort of THE Hey, Hey, you know what, you're a hero. You're a Villain does not need to be a necessarily evil. They could just be a very nuanced character and a different position was a different take on things.
Autumn (34m 19s): And it's just not working for your here or whatever. They believe maybe works for their set of people, but it doesn't work for the set of people that the Hero is from. And so that's where the clashes, the Rite in their own each of their own way, but buy being right there are hurting each other or somehow those are much more nuanced novels, but I do find them engaging. Oh a very interesting, I think that overlaps and so, okay. Interesting. All right.
Autumn (34m 49s): So I'll put an overlap in, I'll leave my question to Mark with who are formidable to see if it is like one of my final to we'll have to answer that soon. Okay. Yes. Yes.
Jesper (34m 59s): Okay. My number two is one that you have more or less already set up word by word that I think I just probably labeled the different the, I called it determination, but this is basically just the Villain who is unyielding. You know, somebody who is pursue a goal until the very end, no matter what it takes. Yeah. And that is pretty scary. That's what you already said it as well. Definitely. It's just someone who has committed. I think it is what I put it. Yes, definitely an overlap there.
Jesper (35m 32s): So my number two, and this is my anti to your formidable is not all powerful. So I think I've seen it more that the opponent is the villains to formidable, but I like once who are not all powerful there, you know, either whether you call him magic power, wealth, there's they are also working in a system of constraints.
Autumn (35m 54s): Plus they have to be able to be defeated. So they have some weakness, blind spot or arrogance, that's going to leave them exposed. So that's my number two is that they're not all powerful so that they're not a 100% formidable. So I dunno, is that an overlap? Where is it a, not an overlap. Yeah,
Jesper (36m 11s): But this is formidable and necessarily mean that you're all powerful. Yeah.
Autumn (36m 14s): No, not necessarily. That's why I'm thinking it's not quite the same thing. So we might not have an overlap there it's similar, but yes.
Jesper (36m 21s): Different. Yeah, no, I think you're saying something slightly different, to be honest, I didn't mean mine to sound like you have to be unbeatable or something like that. That was not the point of it. But I think still you might be saying something slightly different,
Autumn (36m 39s): So we are going to call those no overlaps, but they're pretty, they're almost along the same veins were, you know, there is this, they are incredibly challenging in, on one hand, but on the other, they have weaknesses as well. So there kind of like two sides at the same coin. Yeah,
Jesper (36m 56s): Yeah, yeah. I agree difficult, but okay.
Autumn (37m 2s): Is there a number one number one, right. This will be interesting. What is your number one answer?
Jesper (37m 9s): Yeah. So this was the one that I found most important out of all of the Traits to give to a year. And I called this one Modi. And what he meant by that was, you know, an antagonist who clearly knows what he or she wants. That's just a lot more interesting. And again, it is overlapping some of the stuff you said earlier as, or one is never an evil for the sake of being evil. So a good antagonist who believes in what he or she is doing is very important.
Jesper (37m 45s): And also the fact that at the antagonist will see him or herself as a hero while thinking that the protagonist is the real Villa. So it's one of those I have to be holder kind of things that you have already mentioned. Yeah. But I
Autumn (38m 0s): Really, when they have, when the Villain truly believes what their doing is right in justifiable and it's the Hero, who's the evil one eye just, and you get sucked into their mindset almost. That is a fantastic character. That's the way she is. I kind of cheated because my number one is very similar to my Hero number one. And that it is again that you can take these lists in all of these ideas. But what I want is a, well-developed a fully developed character and with an antagonistic, because I actually really like to a point of view of character, because like I just said, I wanted to be sucked into their mind.
Autumn (38m 37s): I want to see the world through their lens and see it makes me question what, you know, the Hero is seeing it, is it right? I like that kind of internal tension of getting to decide who is the right viewpoint. So I don't want them to have all the Traits we listed at which some of them kind of do contradict each other. So they shouldn't just be the list of these as well. Not quite 20 But 20 different traits that they should be something unique. And again, I mean, one of my favorite villains actually ends up joining the hero's in the second trilogy because it was such a cool character.
Autumn (39m 12s): He's still not good, but he's still not evil. He's just very complex. And I guess if I could have chosen one word for a character for a Villain complex, maybe should have been my number one choice. Not that. Yeah. That's also a good one. All right. Well, do I, is it time to add a note? So what's the score that overlap my number one. Does that count as an overlap or not? I'll decide one day, if I have put a question Mark.
Autumn (39m 44s): So one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, or 13, 13, 13 out of the 20th, which is the exact same was last week. We had 13 out of 20 last week. I had an expected that, no, I didn't either. I thought we'd be further apart. So, and as usual, we tended to agree too, with each other about the ones we chose, including complex.
Autumn (40m 14s): The one that my 11th one I've thrown out there. It's two, you were consistent. I feel good. All right. This will be a lot better than the last time I guessed a little higher. I have wouldn't have guessed there team. And that is hilarious. We were totally consistent. Apparently is. So even though, even though we're creating these lists felled a lot harder than if it really did it last week, I sent you Bonnie Tyler's I need a Hero I couldn't no pop songs came in my head.
Autumn (40m 47s): Maybe if anyone listening has a good Villain theme song, just go ahead and put in the notes. We obviously need some Villain. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We did some Villain inspired music. Yeah. What would be a good Villain song? You know, hit us up on in the Facebook group on Twitter or in the common sections here on the podcast or whatever, you know, I would like to know what what's a good Villain saw would be good, but I think that's what we were lacking, but I think of all, you know, take from this and this list have 20 different things were 13 of them would be really close to what, the way it's just, I just have to put that in their, just in case anybody who was very close to be my social Jesper won this week, I one last week.
Autumn (41m 39s): I can remember that, but I think that nevertheless, you take what you can come from this 20 items on, use it as inspiration. I think all the antagonist is a critical part of any story. And he, or she is the one who forces the Hero to find smart and clever ways to solve his or her problems and can also at times service to the catalyst for the character arc.
Jesper (42m 5s): So all of what we talked about here is actually really important. Absolutely. And Hey sometimes by seeing the antagonist lens, maybe the character of the hero will grow and see a bigger version of the world than they would have otherwise. Absolutely true. So take what you can from this and next Monday or Tuesday, and I will discuss whether or not marketing counts as working on your author business or not.
Autumn (42m 36s): Yeah.
Narrator (42m 37s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/am Writing Fantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast going to stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
What traits make a great hero? One that will linger in your reader's minds and hearts far after they close the book? Well, get ready for a raucous discussion that breaks down into a bit of a competition between Autumn and Jesper as they debate and compare what characteristics they think goes into the making of a memorable hero!
The 5 Day Writing Challenge Supercharge Your Scene hosted by the awesome J. Thorn that is mentioned in the episode is available for free sign-up at https://theauthorsuccessmastermind.com?aff=Am_Writing_Fantasy (this is an affiliate link and if you do signup for the paid mastermind group, we will receive a small percentage.)
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (1s): You're listening to The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast in today's publishing landscape. You can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need an literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from Writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts. Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I am Jesper
Autumn (31s): and I'm Autumn.
Jesper (33s): This is episode 76 of The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast and S authors. We want the reader to root for the protagonist because when the last page is turned, the reader needs to wish that it wasn't over. However, it can be mighty hard to understand how one should create a character who is likable competent, realistic. And well-rounded so Autumn, and I will try to share our thoughts on this topic today.
Autumn (1m 3s): Yes. I've been looking forward to this topic all week. I emailed you earlier that every time I was thinking about it, I had Bonnie Tyler's. I need to Hero go in my head. Uh, so it's been quite a fun and I can't wait to get to it. It, it became almost like, um, felt like I was filling out a dating list form of the, my ideal mate's. I think we had an, I think we've came up with some interesting tips that I hope will help out other readers, but until we get there, how are things on your side of the great ocean Atlantic?
Jesper (1m 39s): Well, it's pretty good. Um, they've slowly started starting to open things up now. So my youngest son is actually very happy because he's done it. He, he gets to go to soccer practice, uh, two days from now. Yes, he's quite a soccer player. Oh, he loves it. I think to be honest, I think that boy probably loves soccer. Modern, modern is that Oh wow. And your a referee. So that's amazing. Yeah, he likes it a lot. So, but it's funny. We will see how much she's going to enjoy the soccer practice, to be honest, because there's so many restrictions on it, uh, that they have to follow.
Jesper (2m 16s): You know, they're only allowed to train in fixed groups and they can only do like specific set pieces and there's no matches and Oh, you cannot had the ball. You cannot like, you know, use your chest to, to stop the ball or any, I mean, there's just so many rules that they have to follow in order to be allowed to play. So, um, we'll see if he actually enjoys it or not. I don't know once he gets frustrated, I don't know. But, uh, but they did, they did write out all these, he an email with all these rules and then they basically asked all the parents, uh, you know, can you please let us know if you're even interested in this way of practicing on that?
Jesper (2m 57s): And then I went to my youngest son and I said, so
Autumn (3m 0s): This is how it's gonna work. And I sort of laid that out to him and a say, so do you want to, do you want to go to practice? If this is the way it's going to be? And he looked at me for a second, like, I could see like the cock Wilson. He said, Tony, like, what is he asking if he didn't it for a while? And he didn't comprehend what, why I was asking if you want it to go to practice. He was this. And he looks at me like for a while. And then he said, yes, by what do you mean the answer to any part of this involved in it boils down too.
Autumn (3m 32s): I'm going to practice right now. Yeah. That was also almost like he was expecting me to say something else or something like, you know, what do you want about, what do you mean? What is the question here? Well, I hope he enjoys it. That's great that things are returning to some semblance of a new normal for you guys. Yeah. Well, we'll see. Right? Because now we've been in lockdown mode for what? For a long while now. And, um, once we start opening up again, obviously we don't know what the effect is going to be.
Autumn (4m 4s): Right. In which case you could go back to lockdown, but I will see, we'll see how it goes. Well, fingers crossed. It will go. Well, your ahead of us. So your experimental country to see how you do, you're the Guinea pig, I guess, but how, how is things on your side? Oh, pretty good. I actually planted by a garden, which is a little, a little will be releasing this later. But for now it's, um, sort of earlier, before the official, last frost date of may, but I figured between climate change and the 10 day forecast, I'm good.
Autumn (4m 39s): And plus, I mean, I live in this tiny cabin and I actually brought my tomato seedlings in some sweet pepper seedlings out to my cabin just to make room, you know, where they're growing. And I'm sorry, when your screw is sharing, like a 200 square feet with seedlings, a dog and a husband, something has got to go outside. So it was the seedlings. And what was fun is I was getting so impatient is waiting for someone to lend as a teller, but it wasn't coming. It was broken. I finally just Whit and actually hand Doug like a 10 by this baby.
Autumn (5m 12s): It's an eight by 12 garden spot. Um, and well, I am not 20 anymore. I do not recommend hand digging in a garden, but a lot of energy out over a course of two days. And then the next day I planted my little garden and they're outside. They're doing well, they're surviving, nothing's eaten yet. And I actually harvested some lettuce from STEM stuff I had in cold frame. So I, as much as I did, 16 years, a sustainable agriculture, I, I actually joined CSA as I never really had time to garden.
Autumn (5m 43s): And my mother has this huge green thumb. So this is my dad by both. My parents are master gardeners. I was, you know, like buying seedlings or buying vegetables from a farm. So now I'm like, I have a garden. It's kind of fun.
Jesper (5m 58s): It's a lot of work, but it's fun. Yeah. It's people have very different views on God. I mean, I hate it. I like going out into the garden and I like to sit there in the summer, but I do not like to do any gardening work. And the problem is you can't have a garden without doing gardening work so that you need a lot more money to hire other gardeners on that. Remember, I did share with you, I had a dream where we lent someone $20 million for a startup costs for their business.
Jesper (6m 29s): So yeah, it was like a, I don't know, maybe two years ago was something I did hire a gardener because I just felt like I am not going to do this. I don't, I don't like it. Um, and then, but I couldn't afford like gardening company to do it because then it's very expensive. Right. You have to pay them a monthly fee and all this. So I found this, uh, basically like it probably a retired guy, I think he's retired at least, but he sort of just had his own little company doing some gardening work and all that.
Jesper (7m 4s): So I hired him and he was doing God and Wagner is like, so half the time he was doing a pretty good job half the time, it was not that good. And then I also had to constantly, uh, you know, okay, so we went like this. So at the beginning, when I hired him, I said, okay, so you can spend, I don't, I don't remember the actual money anymore. And now at the value of it, but it was something like six hours, six hours a month or something. I can't remember something like that. So I said, if there's something to do for six hours, you can just do it.
Jesper (7m 37s): Uh, if there is less to do to, and of course you just do less and then I'll pay you, pay you every month, uh, up to a maximum of this amount of hours per month. And then I said, and I don't really want to go around my garden and figuring out what needs to be done and give you task lists and stuff. I rather, you just figured out just, you can see what needs to be done. Right. And you just do it. You don't need to check with me, you know, how many hours you can Spencer just do it. Right. And he was like, yeah, that's fine. And it ended up, like I had to go and check everything all the time and say, Well have you done this.
Jesper (8m 10s): Could you do this? Can you do that? And it just annoyed me so much in the end that I just stopped it because it's like, this is not what I wanted. Right. I just want to pay somebody and they take care of it. And I don't even have to think about it. And that's not what he did that annoyed me at the end. Hopefully we'll get to a better gardener eventually. Who knows? Oh, we got on the internet with the Am Writing Fantasy Podcast so we have something pretty exciting to mention here.
Jesper (8m 42s): Oh yeah. J Thorn a friend of our show, a fellow author, a certified story grid editor, and the host of several different podcasts. Actually he's offering some free help to anyone who feels they're, Scene just, isn't good enough. And maybe if you are struggling to understand what's wrong with your scenes, then he is going to help you out. Because as we've talked about so many times here on The Am Writing, Fantasy, Podcast Writing is a skill, so it can be learned.
Jesper (9m 16s): And I am happy to vouch for J thorns a and say that he's a really good teacher. And he has worked with hundreds of authors on thousands of scenes. So he knows his stuff. And what he is offering is something he calls Supercharge Your Scene and it runs from the 15th of June to the 19th of June. So that's a week after you are listening to this. If you're listening to this, Episode when we release it. And what we'll do is that we will help you decide with Scene.
Jesper (9m 48s): You want to write and also how to frame it with a clear purpose and adding in character motivation. And then each stay throughout that week, he will post you a free lesson. Two, walk you through the process of writing and revising compelling scenes, right? This is like, it's a five day challenge. Isn't it? It is. Yes. So if basically he gives you a four, a five day Challenge and everybody who completes those five days will be automatically entered into a price pool drawing.
Jesper (10m 20s): And there's going to be some really cool prices in there, including one of them being a free 30 minute, one on one consulting with J. I think that's pretty cool that as a really cool, also a mastermind tacked on the end of this free Challenge that's a pay paid mastermind, but there's no requirement for you to go and join the mastermind. Two, you can easily participate in the free challenge if that's all you want to do and just leave it at that. That's no problem at all.
Autumn (10m 49s): Yes. I mean, I just did. I'm a AMS ads. Challenge a five day challenge with Brian Cohain and there is so much fun now. I mean, I'm totally addicted and we are going to have to do one. I actually forgot to tell you I've been working on a little outline for one for us, but there it's so much fun. You learn things. There's a community there's SUPPORT. So, I mean, I've not that worried about my scenes, but I'm tempted to go Join J to Join this one just because they are so much fun and there's always something to learn and it's so much fun to interact with other authors. So I hope you guys go check it out as well, because it'll be great.
Autumn (11m 23s): And I'd love to see you there.
Jesper (11m 25s): Yup. I add on, I will add a link in the show notes here so that you can just go straight from there and check it out. But of course, in full transparency, please know that it's an affiliate link just in case you do decide to join the mastermind afterwards. Then we will get very small kickback here on our side too. The Am Writing Fantasy Podcast, which is quite nice. And it helps us a little too. So anyway, this things live in a week
Autumn (11m 54s): From the release of this Episode so hurry up and go and join us soon as you listen, if this is something that interests you. Yes. And I've been actually being a good girl and hanging out a little bit more of the Facebook group, which has been so much fun. There is so many post going on. So when shared a world map that reminded me of a West wing episode, which is totally dating me because it was, so that was a show that was on age as I go, but they had won that they changed the projection of a map and flipped it upside down.
Autumn (12m 30s): And I just remember the one character going, I'm just trying to figure out where Francis'. So if you're we had a little map nerd fast and going on their, so that was a ton of fun. And recently a few people have been breaking down tropes. Like the most recent is, is what does an elf? I think the first one was What is a dragon. A Jason's been posting those. So shout out to some amazing folks who are on their, and the great conversations. And I'm sorry, I took a break, but it's so much fun to dive back into the Am Writing Fantasy Facebook group.
Autumn (13m 5s): So you can just go to Facebook and Google Am Writing Fantasy and come join us because it is so much fun and everyone is so nice
Narrator (13m 14s): And onto today's topic.
Autumn (13m 18s): So there's lots and lots of well-intended tools and techniques out there to help the writer avoid generating a flat character. But we decided to come up with 10 Traits that makes for a Great protectionist. And we all know, yes, we did. It was like I said, I had so much fun thinking about it. Um, I didn't actually get to sit down to write it down to like think a day or so ago. But at that point, I think it took me all a five minutes because I'd been thinking about it. I always think of, ah, there's a story about Frank Lloyd Wright when he designed Fallingwater and the story goes that, you know, he would keep telling the clients who bought falling water that, Oh, I'm working on it, I'm working on it.
Autumn (13m 57s): And he actually didn't draw all the design until they were on their way to his studio to pick it up. I totally get that. That is me. I totally think about these things over and over and over and over again, and then just write it down. It's perfect. Right. But I can't wait to share these because we both have 10 things. And like I said, it was hard. I wanted to come up with, I mean, I analyzed some of my favorite heroes from the books. I read the ones I've written and I really thought about this for a long time. Nice. Yeah. And I think the interesting part is as well that we on purpose decided not to share things with each other in advance.
Autumn (14m 35s): So I'm going to be quite curious here to see how much overlap we have if we don't have any overlap on which Traits we find important and I'm not worried. I think at least 50% of the time we will have overlapped. They just might not be on the exact same order. We did order these as well. So it'll be really fun, but we do, we agree on so much and we're writing books together and plotting things. I think we kind of have some overlap on what we think are it makes up a good Hero yes, I think so too.
Autumn (15m 7s): A I think, I think definitely we will agree on a different things here. I'm not sure that's going to be a 50% overlap, but let's see. Let's see how it goes. I think it's quite interesting, but I don't think there's going to be much that we disagree on the way. That's true. It's true. But let's see. Um, and I guess we should alternate to keep things interesting. You won at a time and a, and then maybe also at a bit of what it's about why we picked eats of the traits. That is probably a good idea. And maybe explain what we mean by it too.
Autumn (15m 38s): So, alright. I am ready. And we're going to start at number 10 and work our way for the most important, um, yes, let's do that. Let's do that. Excellent. Alright. Do you want to go ahead or you want me to, no, go ahead. Alright. So number 10 on my list of important traits for a great Hero is empathetic. I think it's important for the Hero to feel for others. And this isn't just self absorbed. I cannot stay on reading stories where it's all about the character, his needs, and once, and he never thinks about anyone else who was with him or her know.
Autumn (16m 18s): I think that that's a, that's a good one. It probably goes well with one of mine as well, but keep it on how much they will that we have here then, because I don't know. All right, well, we'll have to tell, okay. Go for it. Alright. So I will start out with, uh, with One that many, many authors just believed to be universal truth. And when that must be adhered too, at all costs, and that is being likable.
Autumn (16m 50s): Oh yeah. But to be honest, I'm cheating a bit. It's all the way. I don't think there's going to be 50 if it's, I don't, because after all this is more like one that I'm almost saying that you try to avoid rather than it being a trade to use. Right. Um, and this requires a bit of explanation, doesn't it? Possibly, but I think, uh, I think I know what you're saying, but go for it. Alright.
Autumn (17m 20s): So I just don't want people to be too concerned with K creating a likable character. Um, it's much more about making sure that the protagonist fits the role of being a protagonist because that there's, there's plenty of characters out there who aren't exactly likeable, but we still route for them. Um, I don't know. Have you seen the TV series black sails? Oh, I've started watching it until we lost our free subscription because of the coronavirus, but yes, like after the first series or the first season.
Autumn (17m 56s): Very good. Yes.
Jesper (17m 57s): I really liked black sails, but captain Flint, he's not exactly likable, you know, or you could say, and a can Skywalker Michael Corleone from the godfather. I mean these characters, they're not really, I mean, they do things that at times you would say that's not likable is still a very interesting and compelling characters. Right. So I guess my number 10 is sort of an anti number 10 and
Autumn (18m 26s): I agree cause I have something very similar. I thought about a way of phrasing this, but I couldn't think I wasn't just trying to stay away from negative. So I have it worded slightly differently, but yes, I think we have overlap on this one too. Oh, okay. Okay. Well, yeah, it's just more like don't be too overly concerned with about, I have to create a likable character because as long as you give the character or the protagonist, a good reason to act the way he or she does, then it's going to be a good character. Yes. I agree.
Autumn (18m 57s): And I actually have my version quite high on the list. So I'm not going to tell you what number though. Oh, okay. Alright. So it's very important to me. Very important to me. All right. So number nine on my list is I like a Hero who's protective. So it's sort of this person that's always got your back. Even if you are in the middle of a fight or a disagreement with each other there still going to be there to support you. So I kinda like that element that, you know, you, you trust this person, you can rely on them.
Autumn (19m 28s): I like, Oh, Hero, The, who's reliable, I guess will be a good way to put it.
Jesper (19m 34s): Yeah, I can see that, but that's a good one. All right. So my number nine, um, well we, we often find a beginning of a novel where the protagonist is showing, going through some kind of hardship. And I feel like a situation like that does elicit sympathy in the reader and sympathy is important too, to make sure that the read the field's sympathy for the character. But my number two is therefore kindness.
Jesper (20m 6s): Oh, that's so funny. Yeah. Because of a character who for some reason are trying to help out others or out help an animal that always works wonders, but you know, kindness, even though you're going through hardship of your own that's that just works really, really well.
Autumn (20m 24s): Yes. And I actually have the word kindness on my list. So we will see this one again. What do we get down lower or higher? Should we, yeah, we have probably about 50% already think we are. I think it's only, yeah, we were pretty much there. It's one out of one out of four, so that we'll see if you're going to be right there. It wasn't me, I'm keeping track of, so if you hear any typing, it's just making little notes to on which is which, which are yes, for sure. And if there's any overlap between us. So yeah.
Autumn (20m 54s): Alright. Okay. So my number eight, I like a sense of humor of one of my characters. He is a total smartass, a captain, Jared RI is from my post-apocalyptic series. He cracks me up, he in the middle of an emergency situation that comes up with a smart ass response, but I also don't mind, you know, like a gentle, joking, just a kind hearted joking. And I have of course, a couple of heroes like that. So just those moments that make you laugh, even if you want to cry, even if you want to run screaming, I just like a character who has that kind of can laugh at themselves, can laugh at a situation that warms me up so much as a reader.
Autumn (21m 35s): I'm just in love with the character instantly with that. Yeah. I like that. But I just find it really hard to write. I think that you have said that before.
Jesper (21m 44s): Yeah. Writing humorous characters. I find that really difficult. I always feel like my own jokes are so lame, but a yeah. Okay. So what is it on number eight, number eight. Yours. Alright, so being honorable, that's an easy way to put a character in a positive light. Um, I'm not saying that you ha uh, the character has to be honorable all the time.
Jesper (22m 15s): Uh, you know, I think throughout all my 10 Traits here is just, it's not that you have to do it for any of these four, all of your characters at all times, but they're going to pick from, um, so being honorable. Yeah. I liked that one.
Autumn (22m 31s): I have something very similar. So I'm, I think there's a slight overlap. It's a different way of phrasing it on that one. So it'll be interesting. You'll you'll hear my take on it. Alright. So we're up to number seven, uh, intelligence. So this is a, I don't mean a CURO who's a genius, uh, but they have, should be able to be clever or they look at things differently and they can figure things out. So, and especially if you, like I said, so we can see things in a way that others don't.
Autumn (23m 1s): So they just have a unique perspective, but they're definitely clever. I can't, you know, someone who's just dumb luck in that as dumb as a, an ORC or a something. I just, I don't know. I can't respect a character who makes me, if I'm shouting at a book every other page, what, why don't you see that? I rather be all going, Oh my God, I didn't even see that. So that's mine. Okay. All right. So some overlap. Yeah. I guess we'll see.
Jesper (23m 30s): Um, okay. So my next one is being proactive.
Autumn (23m 35s): Oh, nice.
Jesper (23m 38s): This one is so, so, so important. And I, yeah, actually I know I just said a minute ago that these are more like things to pick from. And not
Autumn (23m 46s): Every character always have to have it, but this one, I would say EVERY protectionist always, always, always have to be proactive. Every single one in every single story, you do not want to protect in the us to just react to what's happening in and somebody, you know, if somebody is coming they're and telling the person the age, well, you probably need to do this, this now. Then they go off and do it know you want them to be the ones taking action. The protagonist is the one taking initiative and you always want to do that.
Autumn (24m 17s): So proactive. Yes. That was a good way. That's a good way of phrasing it. I have something very similar. So I would say there's some overlap on that one, but I didn't phrase that the same way. So I must be able to find one on my list that you don't have. I'm going to keep trying here. Let's see. Let me think. Um, yeah, we'll find something so far. It's maybe I'm stretching my thoughts on it, but will say, alright, so number is six in my list is kind, I don't mean The not the rescue puppies type of kind, but you know, that's fine too, if you want to do that with very Hero, but I mean, thoughtful someone who is we'll do something nice, just because it is a nice thing to do so.
Autumn (24m 56s): Not every page or every chapter, but once or twice in a book doing an act at a sheer kindness, like leafing, a loaf of bread for a beggar girl, who's been shadowing her since she entered the city, uh, that will totally win my heart. And of course, then you have the bigger girl who wins the bigger girl's heart. And she goes on to save the Hero and later as well. So though, you know, it all works out in the end, but I do like, like that, it's sorta like you're likable. I actually think I was just about to say it's like it, I actually have something a little more similar to likable later, but, um, uh, but definitely kind and not, like I said, it doesn't have to be this overwhelming, you know, saintly kindness, but just every once in a while, just something that shows I've a very good heart.
Autumn (25m 40s): It's a very nice, okay. All right. Are you ready for my next one? Maybe this one, you don't have one I'm waiting. Alright. So a sense of justice. Oh, we haven't done that yet. I'm not answering then that saying, Oh, okay. Well I think that this is a good trait to use, uh, when you want to show the reader, the protectionist sense of morale. So because it's not that we have to agree with the character and, and the character sense of justice, but it tells a lot about one's personality when you learn what a person perceives as right and wrong.
Autumn (26m 20s): So that's why I think it's a good one. It was a very excellent one. You wouldn't know how excellent that one is so excellent that you have. That's the next one of my number five is sense of fairness, justice. Oh my God. It's so easy. And I wrote this, One think we have coordinated this stuff. We really, we did not share this at all. It's so funny that they're back to back. So this came from my husband once asked me the question.
Autumn (26m 50s): If you were a God, what type of God would you be? I love that question. And I chose just, I would be adjust God. I really, I really like a sense of fairness. Um, I love cause and effect. If you do bad things, bad shite should happen to you. Even if you're Hero is the instrument to make the bad people stop doing bad things. So a character that can just let injustices slide just makes me want to shake them or a toss, the book or something. So yes, I totally am in agreement with you.
Autumn (27m 22s): We have total overlap, but that is a question I'm going to have to ask you at sometime if you were a God, what type of God would you be knowing my chesting a bit about what I do like your answer though. And you're a selection. They about it as well. God of justice. I do like that one, but I would have to think a bit about it. I think I would need to see a list of a domain that think a bit about it. Yes. Because there's probably some choices that I can't think off on top of my head that, that I would like as well. Yeah. That's my husband's ass answer actually made me worry then like, Oh, I don't know if I can like you anymore.
Autumn (27m 59s): The death wrathful I'm like shit of your personality. I don't want to know. Right. So you all are a number five. All right. So this is actually building off the one I had before, but also its an overlap with Monday the one's that you already said. So this one I have named resourcefulness. So this is more like if the character has a strong sense of justice, then he, or she will feel responsible and also have something that he or she wants to achieve.
Autumn (28m 38s): And I think resourcefulness is a great trait because if there is something that many readers like, you know, we like when characters can find an ingenious way of solving a problem and that's very few different words, but basically the same thing you said earlier. Yes. That's very true. So that I framed it more as intelligent, but to see a way, way of solving things, we had the exact same kind of meeting underneath of it. That's funny. All right. So Well, you know, I don't think people are going to walk away with a list of 20 what they have different perspectives on some of the same words, I guess though.
Autumn (29m 15s): That's fair enough. Alright. And this one is sort of similar to one of the one's that you mentioned. Uh, my number four I phrased is, um, you called it proactive, but I kind of called it when the going gets tough. They don't hesitate to dive in. So I like badass hero's that walk around withdrawn swords. And I like the ones that prefer never to fight as well. As long as when the going gets, he gets to that point where something must be done, they haul ass in and they go in and do it.
Autumn (29m 46s): I like decisive character's that will, Oh, you know, stick to and go for their guns when the need is there. So they don't have to go around swashbuckling all the time. But again, when something needs to be taken care of their are the ones to go and do it and they do it and they don't let them, you know, they don't just sit around, twiddling their thumbs, waiting for someone else to fix their problems. Hmm. Yes. I can hear the way I set that, that day. I have something coming up. Probably almost exactly the same thing. Now, if you doesn't overlap this, why is this hilarious?
Autumn (30m 21s): If you are a number For alright, so that this one is patients. Um, and to be honest, I do quite like impatient characters who just doesn't know how to behave themselves in a social context. I really do like that. But when I thought about it and when I was creating this list, I always also had to settle on the fact that I think as a protagonist, I think it gets tiring, right? What's quite well with an impatient character. If it's a side character, the main character, I feel like patients is a good thing.
Autumn (30m 55s): Um, and of course patients can be expressed in many different ways. You know, we could be like, the person is just friendly to avoid a conflict or they use humor to diffuse an escalating situation or something like that. So it can mean different things. But, but I do think patients, that's a, that's a good thing. That is a good one. And I have to say you what now you finally have one. I don't think I have patients. I didn't even think about it. There you go. How do you have like totally that's different. So that's yes.
Autumn (31m 25s): Awesome. All right. Stop making up the last three, just to find something we haven't, you know, just throw out something you don't even care about. Just really, I think they should be evil on the screen. That's not fair to our listeners. No. Okay. Fair enough. That they're probably laughing right now. This is not a competition. Right? My number is three. I wonder if you have anything similar. We're getting down to the nitty gritty now. So I like it when my Hero, it feels like a bit of an outsider.
Autumn (31m 58s): They never fit in quite with a general populace. So I'm never rooting for, if you have a Hero that's the jock that everyone in this school envies and the girls are throwing themselves at his feet and we will also happens to be a superhero in disguise. I think I described it as barf wants to somebody. I like the nerd in the corner who has a few friends and also they have to happen to have the key to a multidimensional portal and they are always nice.
Autumn (32m 29s): Yeah. They have the gumption to use it. And I also think, I think it just acknowledges the feeling that so many of the reader, so many of us have that were not a hundred percent because who is a hundred percent normal, what is normal? And so heroes like that kind of take that secret thing that everyone harbors inside of them and brings it out into the light and shows that this person is amazing and valued and unique and awesome. And so I liked that in my heroes when they also have that sense of, I just don't quite belong here and I'm going to find people who accept me for what I AM.
Autumn (33m 6s): I like that one. But I think that that might be one more. That is not overlapping. Excellent. I think so. Alright.
Jesper (33m 15s): Alright. But this one, okay, so this is going to sound very familiar. So I call this One resolve, but it's basically characters who are determined to fight to the end. And those are the one's that we love. Yes. So you just said it basically more or less a a moment ago. Right. But I mean, what if Frodo had given up halfway to Mount doom? Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't blame him to be honest, make for a good story.
Autumn (33m 46s): No, no. The one where someone else has to, he gives it to his side. So this is on you. Yeah. I'm done with this. No, that's very true. So yes they follow through.
Jesper (33m 58s): Yeah. I think that's a good one, but, but also I think it's fair enough. Sometimes if, if they're resolved also comes as a result of their side characters or the way they help her. Because I mean, if Sam had not been there, I'm not sure Frodo would have made it two month. That's true. That is very true. And that's killer as a shield. A great point for a why you have some of these side characters. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So final children,
Autumn (34m 22s): A final two. We are almost there. So my number two is going to sound a little familiar. I like a Hero who is not perfect. I think flaws are important. Seriously. Sirius. They have to be not good at something, whether it's romance they're in denial about some, hang up a they're a loss for their place in the world. So I like surface flaws. Um, they're like, I don't know. I like food analogies.
Autumn (34m 54s): If anyone read my Patriot on post, that was out recently. I like food analogy. So there, um, these falls are the seasoning and a good recipe and that just needs that little extra kick. So thats and I think I also, I, I have a kind of a toss up between, I also wanted to say that they were skilled, but not in everything. So that's sort of the same thing. They're just not perfect. They have talent, but it requires focus and work. They just not magically gifted with the kingdom. And there are God in their Demi God in a perfect, so that was my number two.
Autumn (35m 25s): And I think from yours minor exclamations that we should probably believe out is that you have something similar and I was great. No,
Jesper (35m 34s): I'm not going to comment on that. I refuse to comment. Nope, no further
Autumn (35m 38s): Fine, fine Well but I thought that was a very similar to your number 10 where they don't have to be likable because that is sort of, sort of the same idea. They don't have to be a hundred percent perfect or like no comments. Okay. Well what's your number two then.
Jesper (35m 53s): Alright, so, and I did not make this up just to be, try to find something that you don't have to assess this in my notes. So I don't know if you don't, I don't think you'll have this one because this is totally, you know, we had a strange, okay, this is like a joker I'm throwing in a joke. So this one, I just said, pick something the reader did not expect. And I don't know what that is, but, but the point here is just that once you have developed quite some Traits for your protagonist, you already have a good idea of what the character is already.
Jesper (36m 34s): And then it's very easy to lead yourself down the path of tropes and just, yeah. And then I'll add this and all that, that, uh, because that goes with the, with the white Knight on the white horse or whatever. Right. Um, and I think throwing in one trait into the mix that people just didn't expect, I think that works really well. So I doubt you have that on your list.
Autumn (36m 59s): and I love that one though, because your right that is often the little twist that is just so much fun. I there's a comic I've saved from years ago. That is a group of friends playing D and D. And I liked everything about it because it showed the characters. I created all had some weird, unique thing. And the character is the people who were playing the characters were their own unique entities. And it's exactly the same thing. It kind of, I saved it because it was like, this is not what I expected.
Autumn (37m 31s): And it was hilarious. And yes, it, if anyone has ever read it, it was the one where they're trying to an ogre and I'm sort of swashbuckling Hero. We were trying to fight and all of their roles to fight, roll poorly. So he ends up making a pass. They end up almost like kissing until he makes a pass, enrolls a 10 and they end up getting engaged. And that's how the war ends. And I just crack up whenever I read it. So definitely throw in, throw in the fun ones, but yeah, you in that one too. So that's to that.
Autumn (38m 2s): I didn't, I didn't think about that one, but it's very true. And I totally agree because that's sort of what goes to my number one, but I don't have it phrased that way. And it wasn't what I was thinking when I said it. So you want to know my number one One is yeah. In a way I feel like it's cheating, but its because we just did this whole list and we just we've got over what 18 different things I want to see, not a list of 18 different things and tropes sorta what you just said.
Autumn (38m 33s): I don't want to see this list of things that a character should be. I want someone who feels Real a fully developed character who has personality wants desires. Uh, it, it feels like someone who is not created just to fill a role in this story or to hit all the right buttons so that they know rescue puppies and also have a flaw and have to go learn something. And I want something that really feels like an authentic character in person, someone who's going to have has already been through it a thousand stories and it has another thousand to go through assuming they survived the one you're Writing yeah.
Autumn (39m 10s): Yeah. I think that's a good one. Alright. And then I have to add up how many we had overlap. Yeah. This is probably the most important one of them all I already, yes. It almost pains me. I don't want to say it eventually. I know, but eventually we have to let other, you know, the listeners go back to their lives so they can go create an awesome Hero yeah.
Jesper (39m 39s): A good protagonist needs floss. Exactly. What's it? Like I put it on number one and you had it on number two. It's just like it's again, Well a two way too close. Yeah. So of course, like you said, it's not a positive trait. A and I know that, but we just couldn't build a list like this without including floss, like you said as well. Yeah. I think that's impossible. A, we need to balance out the positive attributes and also yes, they also have the character arc and the growth, you know, the floss, his what makes the character arch and a growth seems impossible.
Jesper (40m 20s): That's what we want. So it will make the read a question. Can this type of person even managed to succeed in whatever they're trying to do. And I think that's how legends are made.
Autumn (40m 32s): Right. I agree. I definitely agree. It's what I like about characters and I think what makes them resinate with us. So it is so funny you that we had them, uh, we til we had two sets, so were back to back. I think we, I think that's why we did not have much, um, of a difficulty creating our Hero for the book we're working on together. Yeah. So you said 50% overlap and I said less than 50 and what did we have? Like 80 make them counting him up. So we had 20 total, um, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13 at a sweater.
Jesper (41m 15s): So I think we got over 50%. Yes we did. You win. Okay. Well, well I think what can be concluded from these list is how character's they must be balanced. Yes. They need to be interesting enough.
Autumn (41m 34s): So that readers find the characters compelling yet. I think also they need to be ordinary enough that they are relatable. You know, that's why Superman is not a good character. No, I don't really like Superman at all. Yeah, no, I think this was a lot of fun. Autumn a lot of fun. They really got me thinking about heroes even in my own writing and what I've liked about the characters. Just, you know, they could be so different, but there are some SS essences that foil down, they make a great Hero.
Autumn (42m 7s): Yeah. So now that we have discussed the good Hero goes off your story. What about the villain? So next Monday will be back with two new lists, but this time concerning the antagonist,
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You've heard mention of author brands, but what is it and how do you create one?
In episode 75 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, Autumn and Jesper explain how important an author brand is.
They also cover how, if you don't create one yourself, others will end up branding you anyway.
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
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Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need an literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them. Now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I am Jesper and I am Autumn. This is episode 75 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. And now you might be thinking that your books are the product and how this is what will make readers familiar with who you are and what you're writing. But the truth is that it's getting increasingly difficult to get noticed in today's internet landscape and a here, the creation of a brand could be helpful. So that's the topic for today, how to develop your author brand and we will also share some more words on that a bit later here.
Autumn (1m 9s): Yes, I'm looking forward to it. I, I think Author branding, it surprised me the first time I heard about it and thought about it and like I'm not a brand, but it's actually really fun and it kind of creates some consistency and actually kind of helped focus my writing. So I'm looking forward to this one. Yeah, you were saying that because you do all the graphic designs. That's why you like it. That's true. I'm one of those strange people. If you asked what color is Monday, I would probably come up with a color for you.
Autumn (1m 42s): So I like, I like colors, individual colors. Friday, Friday is an electric blue. Definitely electric. Yes. The last one was the reason for that. It was, it just something random You came up with it. It has an electric blue feel. To me it is, it's like an energizing, exciting kind of color. I like, you know, and that's a good, good energy. They are black or what?
Autumn (2m 11s): Um, I dunno. I think it depends on the Monday, but you know, Mondays, now that I work full time from a home, they're probably bright yellow and it makes no difference. It's not a bright yellow. I'm happy that I do feel, I still feel like that, you know, get your nose back to the grindstone. It's Monday get work done. It doesn't matter. Right. Okay. So how are things on your side of the ocean? No, it's, it's good. Uh, I was thinking that maybe I could give a a new status update on the whole selling a house.
Jesper (2m 46s): Yes. Soccer. Yeah. It's like a novel for us. It's a very, very long and very boring nonfiction, but it's a very boring reality show or something. Yeah. Well I talked about last week How we've had a, a couple who was out looking at the house twice now and worse, you're in quite some interest. And then last week I mentioned how the a, what does it cost?
Jesper (3m 21s): Like the advisor or what the guy who, who is like advising them for the purchase. He was supposed to call it our real estate agent and um, he did that as well. So I talked to our real estate agent the other day and uh, it was a bit a bit weird because, and I think this, I don't know if this, I haven't talked to this advisor guy, so of course I am going off of hearsay and, and feelings here that I don't know if they are true or not, but it feels like he might be a bit of a smart kid, a smart guy, you know, a bit like, yeah, yeah, I'll do some quick deals here and whatnot.
Jesper (3m 59s): I don't know. Because he was like, he told a, a a real estate agent at a w well we can, we can put in a price and then it was like 150,000 Danish crowns below the price that we have set at four. And keep in mind, we already reduced the price of a hundred K right? This is a 150 below 100 Kay. We already dropped it. A little insulting actually. Yes. So a real estate agent basically told him right away before he even talked to us, he said on the phone, you know what?
Jesper (4m 32s): I can't, I can't give them this offer. This is ridiculous. Um, it's not a good deal. Right. I mean, and he basically just said, you know, as a, as a professional light, I can't even stand behind that alpha. I'm pretty intense. Yeah. And then the other guy, well he was talking like, well it'll be, it was just like covert 19 situation going on and our real estate and asked him what color would 19 see what do you mean?
Jesper (5m 2s): Well, do you know the effect on house prices? And when he was saying, well, there is no effect on hush prices, not in this area, or at least I don't know about your area but not here. So, and then he started saying, well Am, well we have to start somewhere, right? Uh, well not 150. K. So he then, yeah, so there is a state and then called me and, and uh, we had a chat and he said, ah, so what do we want to do? And so I instructed him to, uh, after, after talking to my wife as well, I, I instructed him to go back and say, you know, come back with something serious and then we can talk.
Jesper (5m 44s): I don't even want to come up with the counter off on this. This is just ridiculous. So, but I honestly think, I think they're quite interested. I think this is just playing games to see if we can get something because its been on the for a little while so maybe they were just trying to test the water. Yeah. But don't forget as well that she is six months pregnant. Right. And so either either you basically do something now write and write and our house was the only one that they've been looking at or you say, okay then we don't do anything now.
Jesper (6m 17s): And then they have, they give birth first and then, but then you know before they get into a house it will, the kid will be a year old write. Do you really want to do that? Yeah. So I think they're quite hungry to be honest. Um, I don't know if you say hungry in, in English in a situation like this, but that was me translating from the concept comes across. I think they're very keen. They're very keen and it sounds that way. Yeah. So, um, so let, let's see what's going to happen. We haven't heard back since, uh, the other day was Sunday, uh, when I talked to him.
Jesper (6m 50s): Uh, so I, I don't know what's going to happen. Oh, well, a good luck. I would love to hear this story. You don't have a happy ending and she'll be picking her nursery colors and everything else, but I do. Yes, they have to. That's it. Yeah. I would have been a little bit like, really? That's all. Yeah, it wasn't a bit annoying because when they were here looking at the houses there, there was never any talk about pricing or they never mentioned anything. When they will either in the first, the second visit they have about, uh, it didn't say two.
Jesper (7m 24s): The real estate agent in something like, which would be normal, right. You say, you know, what, are they willing to negotiate or just asked a question. Nobody ever said anything. And then this guy comes in and then he starts doing this playing a game. And I almost have a feeling that maybe it's just him trying to play games. Maybe he just told them like, Hey, I'll get you a good price and blah, blah, blah. Some stupid sales talk. Right. Because this has also the guy who's got to sell their apartment. Right. So he probably liked, I'll get you a good price and then I can tell you the apartment as well.
Jesper (7m 56s): But yeah, let's get those types are not just in the United States, I guess. No, no, no. I'm sure every nation have those types of people. But uh, and again, he might not be like that. It is, is just, I haven't talked to the guy, but it was just a feeling that I get from it. But I could be wrong. Of course. I needed to be careful what to say on a public Podcast if that's true. But at this time this was an air. It hopefully you have the offerings. Maybe. Let's see, let's see if what is happening.
Jesper (8m 28s): Um, I also actually just wanted to mention because I posted it on Twitter, I didn't, have you noticed a movie, the platform on a Netflix? No, I have not seen that one. No, because it's quite, it's quite interesting. It was like a, it's a, I think a Spanish scifi kind of movie. Oh, that sounds good. But I want to, I want it to mention it because the premise of that movie is, it's just amazing. I mean I, I don't remember at least ever seeing it before. So it's basically like it's a prison that is in a tower.
Jesper (8m 60s): So it was like extremely high tower. You learn those hundreds of floss in it. And then the prisoners, they are on a whatever floor number between one and the last one, which is the several hundreds. Um, and then everyday at the top from the top there is a platform lowered which is full with fruit. So it, it's not like, it's like almost like Michilan kind of it, you know, they have cooks preparing it so it's like excellent food and it gets lowered down to level one and they eat for a bit.
Jesper (9m 36s): And then there's is, it feels like there was a timer on the platform or something, but then after it a little while, it goes down to level two and it goes, it keeps going down. So, and of course the people on the top floor, they just eat everything they can. Now of course, and every time it goes down there is less food on the platform. Oh, that sucks to be on the bottom. Exactly. And then the thing is that every, I don't remember now if it was every, I think it was every month or every week, one of the two, I don't remember anymore.
Jesper (10m 7s): But they get basically moved around on the different floors. So you will be put to sleep after a week or month, one of the two. And then when you wake up again, you will be on a different floor. Gosh. So if you wake up on a low floor twice in a row, you're basically going to die from starvation. But if you come up to a high level, then you can eat a lot and then hopefully you can survive your next turn on lower level. If you end up down there, but it's just that that whole premise is so interesting.
Jesper (10m 38s): And if of course it plays off all the, uh, like society will thinks about it, you know, if everybody just only ate what they could and is what it would be, there is enough food on the entire platform for everybody, but it is there. It depends on every one, only taking a plate and then letting it go. And if everyone does that, then there isn't enough for everybody. But of course nobody does that. So they're like, I'm on top now. I'm going to eat whatever I want. So I just, it's, it's so interesting that premise there is the end of the ending quite a lot.
Jesper (11m 11s): And that was a very interesting, keep that in mind if I go and look it up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They speak Spanish of course, but we actually launched a lot of Spanish. I'm learning my Spanish through a Spanish Netflix shows, so that's all right. Right, right. Okay. Yeah. Well here in the air in Denmark, which I also learned from a Twitter, well, he's in Europe in most, not in France, not in Germany, but otherwise it's quite common that we just a watch things with subtitles on us, what we do all the time. So we used to that.
Jesper (11m 41s): Whereas I learned, I learned often from Twitter that people find it weird and I never understand why because that's since I was a child. That's how we do things. Because when you start tapping things, it's just at the same, no, it's not the same. It isn't.
Autumn (11m 54s): I think we watched one episode of the rain In dubbed and it was a very different than watching it in Danish, the Danish in having it subtitled, that was fine. You just can't used to reading. I take in things better if I read them anyway. So, yeah. So to me it's fine. It's just bad if you're, if you're really, really tired and your eyes are tired, the last thing you want to do is read. So you watch something else. I, you know,
Jesper (12m 19s): We do it on, on, on this show. So like the reign for example, I have a top titles on the issues as well because I've just, I'm so used to it, uh, that I just, I absorbed, I absorbed the information better when the subtitle's on. I understand. So how about you?
Autumn (12m 36s): Oh, things are good. I've continued with my weekly planning and getting my life organized and I'm making progress in all fronts. So I have really nothing to report other than I've been a very good girl and I've gotten a ton of stuff done and I still have a ton more to do it. But yeah, I started to catch up. You watch out.
Jesper (12m 56s): Well, I started to get emails now this is done. This is done. That's a nice,
Autumn (13m 1s): So let's see. Hopefully going to continue. I have my week planned out in all my weekly goals and onward and upward is an old coworker used to say. So we are you doing good?
Jesper (13m 13s): Oh, a week on the internet. Writing Fantasy Podcast we've received a request actually for a future podcast podcast topic from one of our patron supporters. Yes, we did. Yeah, that was pretty good. She wanted us to talk about when the ideal time would be to start working on sequels when your writing in a series. So I did ask her a bit of more details. Um, but that's something we'll put onto the list of future episodes there. Yeah, I was gonna say, I, I hopefully, especially since you've got some extra information, you can copy and paste it into our, our idea list that we keep.
Jesper (13m 51s): So when we're deciding what to do, we're going to talk about in the future and picking things out. We can look at that one. That was a good one. Yeah. Yeah. I think that was good. So, and of course, uh, you know, by supporting on Patrion, you can also suggest possible topics for future episodes. Uh, but there is a lot more on patron that we do for a, there is, for example, a free access to one of our premium courses. There is a monthly Q and a where you can ask anything you want from Writing to marketing and publishing. And we also offer support as a free workbook, as a Christmas gift.
Jesper (14m 24s): And also at the top level, there's even the possibility for mentoring sessions. So we try to offer a lot of value in return for your support. In truth recording the podcast episodes every week, quite a lot of the work. So any support we can get, even if it's just a single dollar a month, is really helpful and it keeps us committed to to keep going here. So if you haven't checked out patron or Please,
Autumn (14m 52s): Follow the link in the show notes and check it out and we would really, really appreciate it. And so yes, especially since one of our goals on there is to have someone go through our new transcripts that come out with each podcast. Oh my goodness. Some of the errors come out of it wasn't what it is. Yes, bro. And I am awesome instead of on the wall. I'm like, wow, I'm just going to go buy. Awesome from now on. Yeah. Well we do do a light edit out of the, of those types of errors on the script that comes out.
Autumn (15m 26s): So a, I think we talked about last week that we've started adding the entire transcript of the podcast on every episode. So we do a light edit on it, but I can not tell you how funny it is. The what turns out in that light edit of, of what the AI comes up with that it thinks you were saying sometimes. It's just so funny. It's fantastic. Yeah, it at least cracks us up, but it would be so nice to have. So it didn't do it a little bit more in depth at it because you know it just looking at it and it, it was totally skipping one of us talking and other stuff.
Autumn (15m 59s): I was just very frustrated with it. But anyway, we won't go there and good news. We actually, just before wrapping this up and starting this podcast, we just finished a Q and a session with our new character development students and that was awesome. That was awesome. That was legitimately Oh, lot of fun. And I was a nice way before the, the Q and a session. James' one of the students actually emailed us and just says, you know, he's looking forward to meeting us face to face and thanks for these opportunities. Uh, your work with to help authors of all over the world is appreciated, at least by myself.
Autumn (16m 34s): And I'm quite certain that with Benny who mirror my sentiments and that's just like, I mean, we don't need to hear back from people, but darn it. That's awesome. It really is why we do it as to those little tidbits to knowing we're making a difference for other authors and eventually other readers. Yeah, it did. It really makes a, it makes a difference obviously. Um, so thank you so much for the kind a note. Thank you James Author brands. I'm still excited about the restaurant.
Jesper (17m 7s): Yeah. What is now Author Brand uh, I found actually a on the internet of things, I found a, I found a quote earlier today from Jeff Bezos, which I think actually sums it up quite nice. Oh, that's good. So it goes like this quote a brand is what other people say about you when your not in the room and quote. I like that Jeff Bezos with will come up with that one. That is a pretty good definition of what you or your personal brand is otherwise known as gossip right now.
Jesper (17m 47s): But, I think that the takeaway there that Even if you're not creating your own brand, you still going to have one because people will have an opinion about you. So the alternative as a much better meaning that creating your own brand, well that's preferable over them making the Brand for you.
Autumn (18m 7s): True. Ahh, that's a good way of putting it. Yeah. But it definitely, yeah, you definitely want to be in charge of what people are saying about you and not just reacting to what you know, you know, what are people are saying, you definitely need to consider these things when you're doing, I mean this is why we talk about quality, making sure you have edits and things like that because technically, you know, making sure your writing is clean and quality in a full error, free as part of your brand, but that's not the only a part of your brand.
Autumn (18m 40s): You want to be a little more in charge of it than that.
Jesper (18m 44s): Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, whether we like it or not, uh, as authors, we are selling ourselves. Right. So that also means that uh, you need a brand.
Autumn (18m 55s): Yes. And I think, I mean, we're dovetailing this right after an episode, we're talking about pen names with a Kiersten Ollifont and that is, yeah, I mean that's another thing. Your, each of your pen names is also a brand and that would be a reason to change her name is because there is a shift to your brand. You know, you want to be known as something else, whether it's, you know, you're one brand is erotica and your other brand is a children's Christian fiction. You wanna keep those two brands separated.
Autumn (19m 25s): That's an extreme example. But I would not be surprised actually if there's someone out there doing both.
Jesper (19m 32s): No. So what do we need when we try to create an author brand? What, what, what things do we need for it? Um, I try to list out a few things that I was thinking about. So basically when you start to think about your brand, um, I think you need to look at your show that you are writing in and you need to think about your target reader and then you need to think about what it is that you making that is making you unique.
Jesper (20m 4s): So why is it, for example, in our case you were writing Fantasy. So why is it that your target readers should read your Fantasy book instead of another Fantasy book?
Autumn (20m 16s): Right. I mean, to me it helps if you haven't developed your author brand yet, but you have written a few books. One of the first places to look for ideas on what your author brand might be is actually in your reviews. And if you start saying a common theme of like exciting or a really detailed characters or a fast paced, when you start seeing things like that, that's probably a, a, a good clear cut of maybe what your author brand is.
Autumn (20m 47s): But you know, you can also think about that from the get go and a control it as your writing and releasing your book's. But there's definitely a, to me, I love mining through my reviews and seeing what people have picked up because sometimes they have an insight that you didn't realize that they were talking about.
Jesper (21m 9s): Yeah. So I w w actually when preparing for this a session, I try to list out a few different things that Am that I think is important when it comes to your brand and what you could be developing in relation to that. So I don't have a particular audit, uh, audit, Lisa, and I think we can sort of just jump around as a, as we want. Excellent. But, um, I dunno, do you, do you have a place where you would like to start now you go first and Am I will add to it as I usually do.
Jesper (21m 42s): Okay. So I think as an umbrella thing across all of the things that I'm gonna mention here, we could say like the three inputs that I just mentioned. So the genre, your target reader and what makes you unique. You used your answers to those questions to influence the, your decision on what kind of colors you're gonna use, what fonts you're gonna use, what images you're going to use, and then you use those consistently across the different things that we are going to talk about here.
Jesper (22m 14s): That's sort of the underlying mentality around this. It is
Autumn (22m 18s): It really going to inform your marketing because is going to create a consistency in those colors and those fonts. And just the message at this is the type of Fantasy or fiction or whatever your Writing that you stand for it. And if you open up any of your books, it's going to be right there, you know, is going to be for a friend's centered. So it's a, it gives you a whole focus of the theme, which is kind of,
Jesper (22m 46s): Yes. So the first thing on the list here that I created was a logo. Uh, and well actually we've started developing or talking at least about a logo for our joint fiction as well, haven't we? Yes we have. And yeah, it's on my to do list cause we haven't, well we haven't even started writing there, but I want to have that logo before we get the website get Writing. Yeah. So of course the logo can be used for different things. I mean you could, uh, you could put them on the book cover, uh, like our plan is to do that, to make, to make the Brand and clear to readers that these are the same books because a, you know, as time goes by and there'll be more and more books in this world, then the logo will be the one that joins them all together to show that this is the same.
Jesper (23m 34s): Um, while at the same world and the same, not the same story. I guess that's wrong to say, but at least to set in the same setting a of course if you are just writing a single trilogy, then you could just make sure that each of the covers are looking similarly enough that people can see that these belongs together. But if you write a lot of different books in the same setting like we plan to do, then a logo could be the one that ties them together.
Jesper (24m 4s): But otherwise the use of a logo is good for, you know, of course your social media profile
Autumn (24m 10s): And uh, and on your website, and I mean, cause there's a few different layers there of logos. You can have your series logo, your book logo. And then I have a personal logo for my website, which is under Autumn Writing. So I actually tweaked it over the years cause I realized the original one I had to kind of a book in some kind of like triaged thing. Hey Autumn writer, hello. But I realized I write Fantasy when you look at it, it doesn't say exciting Phil Fantasy and that's what I write.
Autumn (24m 41s): I mean most of my readers know that, you know, there is the characters, another things, but I write fast paced Fantasy it's pretty much a page Turner. It's more like the thriller version of Fantasy. So I recently like you to think, I mean to me recently, like with in the last two years I tweaked and changed my logo, my personal logo. So that's another place where you use it though. I mean I use it Am it's a logo for who I am. It's an all my books that I published. There is a little circle logo that links to my website and it creates consistency. You land on that website, you know in your honor, one of my books and then each of the series also has individual logos that are also exciting.
Autumn (25m 20s): But it's a good way of tying your series together.
Jesper (25m 23s): Yeah, absolutely. In and of course if there is, just as you said that there's some thinking behind what kind of images and fonts and all that, but do you use a Writing Fantasy well that in a medieval setting that will, that that's different imagery and and fonts and colors. Then if you were writing, I don't know, a modern thriller, right. What do those things are different so and that should inform and influence you are a logo design
Autumn (25m 53s): Definitely.
Jesper (25m 55s): Okay. And we talked a bit about website down. I feel like that that's sort of your area Autumn too. Maybe you can say a bit about websites.
Autumn (26m 1s): Absolutely. So you know, having just talked to Kirsten, she feels, she feels that the websites are kind of going by the wayside or at least the, the big ones with blogposts and everything else. But I do think there's still a landing page. Most authors, maybe they're not looking you up, maybe they're looking you up more on Amazon than they are for your own website. But since we do sell books off of our website and if you're going to sell like signed copies, paperbacks or hardbacks off of your website, you want to have a website and so their you create, you take those same colors, you have a color scheme, there is some, usually five colors is what you want for our website.
Autumn (26m 40s): And there is some great tips and techniques if you do website on how to land on those colors, which is a whole science of itself. But then you use your fonts. Do you use your logo? You keep that. Like I said, my logo, who I am and what kind of books I write is more front and centered. Then the individual books I have because I want it to be under my name because I do write in different genres. As you noticed from the previous podcast, talking to Kiersten, I write in different genres, but I did not choose a pen name.
Autumn (27m 12s): So I chose that. I chose to stay under myself on a bird because I felt it still fell underneath my Brand. And so that's one of those important questions to ask yourself. And that's why I have just one website that lists all my books.
Jesper (27m 31s): Yeah. Ideally, uh, because I also previously before Autumn and I started working together, I wrote nonfiction. So ideally I should have had two different, almost, I probably almost two different, um, you know, pen name for it because it's just a real weird mixture. So you have Fantasy fiction and then you have some Author related nonfiction books for example. But that doesn't tie into it at all. Uh, but at that point in time I just felt like a second pen name and, and then a whole second brand and a second um, online presence and all that.
Jesper (28m 5s): It was too much to manage. So I did it all on my own name a that's what I've done. But it's not ideal for sure.
Autumn (28m 12s): No, we could have been like Joanna Penn and she has her fiction under JF Penn. I mean it is a tongue in the cheek, just a little indicator saying Hey this is a different version of me and that's sort of what the pen name, you know, some of them you want to keep completely separate like Kiersten has her as you know, its written in her profile. She is honest, these are different ones but she has way different names under her different pen names. So you know, it each happens but each time you choose a pen name you're doing it for a reason.
Autumn (28m 44s): Whether it's just a nod to the other part of who you are and what you're selling or a totally, you know, making it fit. She has one that really fits the urban fantasy that she is writing. And so you know what it is kinda the fun thing about a pen name. If you don't think your name really fits, it's John Smith and you're trying to write cozy mysteries. Am I want to go do something a little more cozy.
Jesper (29m 9s): Yeah. And that's it. But it's funny because that she, that you said that she said that about websites because we talked slider, we touched slightly upon it in a past episode as well where we had slight different views. You and I are on websites and a need for them if of course, if we disregard, uh, the need to sell directly because if you need to do that and it's a given that you need a website. But I remember in a past episode that I said that in principle you could just create a landing page if you're, for example, if you use convert kit or something like that, they give you the possibility to, to create a landing page and, and they will host it for you and you could in principle just create that so that you can have a way to collect email addresses.
Jesper (29m 54s): Yeah, and that's it. Then of course it is. It is a very light approach. I understand it, but I do agree with her thinking that I don't think the websites is a necessity than it used to be. I,
Autumn (30m 10s): I can, especially if you're running multiple genres and multiple pen names, I think for like her newer one, she literally has a, she bought the URL with the name, the brand name, her Author name, her pen name, and she has a redirect to a landing page and two sign up and see her books. That's it. And so yet you, you really can't do that. But again, she does still have a presence and she did go through the effort of buying the URL to no one could buy it out from under. So there's still some tech savvy, but that is one of those big things.
Autumn (30m 42s): I mean, and speaking of a website, so your brand, whatever that name is, Am whether it is Author so and so, or just the name that is part of your brand and you should own that. So go buy that URL. It's one of the things she checked before she was creating these pen names as she would Google it and see if the URL is free. You see you. If anyone else was using it, she wanted to make sure it was very, because she was specifically choosing a brand. And those are the things you want to check on as you're settling on a brand.
Autumn (31m 13s): If you're creating something and not just you know, going with what you were born with.
Jesper (31m 18s): That's why I'm so happy that we snatched up and writing and reading fantasy.com before we even knew what we were gonna use it for it. It is. It's a very good one. Yeah. And we have a use for it now in the future. So it was good that we snapped up that one.
Autumn (31m 33s): Yeah. So heck, I still remember, I was so amazed that it was free. I'm still amazed. Am Writing Fantasy was free when I thought of it because I was literally on a three or four day hike on the Appalachian trail and I think I thought of it on day one. I'm like, Oh, there's no way that that one's still available. And four days later it was first thing I did when I got off the trail was Google and going, Oh, that's it. It was
Jesper (31m 56s): Mine. He bought it. And then we bought Am Writing Fantasy when we were at it as well. So that was good. Very good. Okay. But that's slightly off topic, bringing it back. Uh, the next element to the Author brand is the picture of yourself. Um, and again, here, I would say make sure that a picture of yourself is on Brand, meaning that, uh, there is a difference between, you know, you're looking serious versus someone who writes humor.
Jesper (32m 26s): Because if you are writing more humoristic novels, perhaps a bit more of a funny picture. I sat that in quotation marks there, but it's a bit more of a funny picture. It might be a better smiling and laughing. And
Autumn (32m 40s): This is another one where I get in, I remember very clearly from Joanna Penn when she wrote a, um, it was something on her pen name or just she was going to contracting her to different brands and she showed her one image and now I can't remember if it was the fiction or the nonfiction, but one of them is black and white. It's almost the exact same picture. But she actually had one black and white because it just fits the genre and resonated better with readers. And I thought, well that's just interesting to go all the way down to the color of the picture.
Autumn (33m 10s): But I mean, I totally agree. And this is one where I see a lot of people say, you know, you need a professional Author image. And so I have this picture. You often see the one's that, you know, the clean background in the standing there. And maybe the half smile or as a holding one of your books and it has a post to it. And to me those come off as so standoffish and snotty. I can't help it. And occasionally you need to get some more, you know, the warmth in the eyes and more happy ones. But if you ever look at my Author image, I am holding a four leaf Clover and I'm actually a little out of focus.
Autumn (33m 42s): It's a four leaf Clover that's InFocus and there's an amazing Alaskan mountain background behind me cause I was traveling when we took it. And by the way, yes, I'm just really good at finding four leaf clovers. That's just me. But um, I, I think some people, I understand the idea of this is professional and we should take it seriously. But I also think if it's part of your brand that you are very open and out there and energetic or whatever that is, there's no problem with that coming through. I mean, you probably don't want one of your like mother kissing you on the cheek or something, but you can choose, you can choose an Author image that's a little more fun than They, you know, went to a studio and took a set PO's.
Autumn (34m 29s): But that's my opinion. I know some people totally disagree with me.
Jesper (34m 32s): No, but I think it's important that the picture comes off naturally. Uh, you know what? It looks very natural so that you can build that connection with the reader because pictures are doing that very well. There's a reason why you use pictures is because it builds a connection with people. So it has to look natural. But I would still say, unless you are a very good at it, don't take a selfie. No, that's not true. That's not good. Um, I am a professional photographer should also be able to help you in taking a picture that does not look like you're posting, that they can make it look so to you.
Jesper (35m 9s): Bring you a natural or whatever it's called. You're on your natural self authentic self to do it. Yeah. Yeah.
Autumn (35m 17s): Marin did it with a professional photographer. So I have some, you know.
Jesper (35m 21s): Oh you are lucky. I know you got some luck there. So yeah, here's my personal paparazzi, so I'm good. Yeah, that's good. But I do some very quick internet search before this episode. Uh, so it's not very specific here but or scientific at all. But I think you can get a picture taking price for some where between a hundred and $200 wouldn't you agree?
Autumn (35m 44s): I would agree. I would think if you're going to get a whole series, it might be up to 350 but in general for just a few photos or something. If you go head shots from a local photographer, and especially like I said, some of them are willing to go outside versus being in a studio or something like that. You should be able to find someone who can give you a nice library photo or something. Or maybe even on your own house if you have a nice bookcase or something, it gets a little bit of an author image.
Jesper (36m 13s): OK. So the next set piece or building block I have here for your author brand is then something that we actually talk about in the self publishing success course, that we're, there's a free course that we are planning to release later this year. But in that course we talk about creating your why. So this is basically a one sentence statement demonstrating why you write what you do. And uh, in autumn in my case, we write Fantasy because we believe that human beings evolve and heal themselves through stories.
Jesper (36m 52s): So in short, our why we summed it up with the following sentence, quote stories makes the world a better place. Very long quote. No, but that's the point, right? It is to be simple and easy, very short. Uh, and I'm pretty happy with what we came up with there. What am I think that's good.
Autumn (37m 13s): No, I agree. And I think it really sums up the many layers. There's many, many layers to it. And so that's kind of the fun of it. You can, obviously we're not stuck with one type of image or one type of, you know, reaching reader. We can play with the different ways of why we think it's important. And that's part of the brand though. I mean, it's a multi-tiered approach, but that's always the fun.
Jesper (37m 38s): Yeah. And it's an easy thing to communicate with a single sentence like that, uh, on, you know, Twitter profile on social media or on also on our website of course. But it's, it's something that you can just glance over a word with your eyes and you already understand what it is. Right? You don't have to read like full paragraphs explaining why I think Fantasy is a great young round, blah, blah, blah. It was just stories makes the world a better place.
Autumn (38m 4s): Yeah. And it's at the beginning to, in many ways it's the end of your elevator speech. It's wonderful to have that so that when someone asks you, you know, a, why do you write a, what do you write? You could say, this is why I do this and you have confidence in is wonderful.
Jesper (38m 21s): Yeah. And the other thing is that this ties back to what we talked about in the beginning about what makes you unique. So your Y is unique to you. Umm, so it sets you apart instantly there on why it is that your and
Autumn (38m 36s): Why, why is Fantasy just younger dead, you're writing for example, right? I mean, you answered to those kinds of questions. Well, nobody else can answer the questions like you can, let's right. And that's why it is sort of the core of your brand. And it's a great tip and a great way to start exploring, you know, why this is going to be your brand and why your writing in this and being in control of it instead of, you know, going in and waiting and seeing what other people say about you. Yeah.
Autumn (39m 6s): So I have a question here at the end of my list. Uh, but before I asked that question, is there anything else that ties in with Author Author branding that we have missed or I have missed your Autumn in my list. I don't think so. I just want to tell you, let people know that just because you have a brand and maybe have a color scheme, that doesn't mean like all your book covers are going to look alike or things like that. You can obviously use a logo or a series logo, that's all fine, but you're still going to have a unique covers.
Autumn (39m 40s): You're not pigeonholing yourself. You kind of, you know, creating a theme. You're, you are a certain set and you're going to stay within those bounds, but your books themselves or going to speak for themselves and so the covers should speak for themselves. You're still free to be creative and concepts there. It's just that there is a theme underlying neat all you're writing in why you write and sort of who you are and some people I was talking about authentic self earlier in authenticity has been a huge movement even on Instagram that people want to connect to an authentic person and I get a lot of questions on, well, if you're portraying this Brand, that's not really who you are, but it should be a sliver of who you are.
Autumn (40m 25s): I've always looked at it like when you're with your mom, your a slightly different person than when we used to do your boss. If you don't play with their siblings versus you know your aunt or uncle there is different. Yeah, it's different versions of you, but you're a brand is still a part of you. It should feel comfortable. You shouldn't be making up something and you should not hate this other brands that you are creating. It should be true to you, but it's just a small, it's just a different aspect. Is the pieces that you put forward and you say, this is who I am as a writer and this is what I stand for.
Autumn (40m 59s): Not this is this fake person that I'm pretending to be when I'm writing. No, of course not. Okay, so you ready for a question? Autumn well, we just do the character development Q and a for over an hour or so. I can do it. One more question. Okay. How important is an Author Brand really? Oh, that's a good question. How important is it? I would say if you are going to be a professional author that you are going to do this because you want to make it a that you want to maybe make a living off of it and you're really going to go all in.
Autumn (41m 40s): It is integral. If you are just playing around with Writing, it's a hobby and you, you know, you're not really in love with it. It's just something you're trying out. Yeah, it still took it. I would still ask people to take it seriously. I have recently met someone, I was doing some cover work and I was trying to investigate this author and she had no pen names, but almost every single book she had uploaded was linked to a different Amazon author profile.
Autumn (42m 10s): Like she created multiple ones and that's just confusing. I I, yeah, it was really, really surprised and it was all just different variations, like a neat her name with a period, her name without a period, her full name or initial knows it was seriously. So I don't do that to take your brand seriously enough that you're like on the same Amazon, Oh, I can't even imagine what her KDP dashboard bustle looked like. Make sure you're on the same dashboard. You've got the same author name a be at least that serious no matter how much of a hobby that you're just doing one book and it's just so you can give it to your nieces and nephews before you die.
Autumn (42m 49s): You know it still a legacy. It's still a brand. Take it seriously. Yeah. I think the most common objection that I bumped into when I, when we talk about Author brands is like, well Author or brands are things For last corporation's and we were just authors. We don't, we don't need a brand. And I can sort of understand the thinking behind that argument, but you are still selling products as a, as an author, you know in, in this case we're selling books, but it's a product that we're selling and
Jesper (43m 27s): If we then talking about how important is North of Brand really, I mean it's not like it's going to revolutionize your book sales. All of a sudden that you can earn millions because you created this awesome brand as an immediate is great. If you can create an excellent brand but it's not going to earn you're a ton of money that that's not the point. I think that the main point here is that if you buy your branding can get across to somebody when they first come across you on the internet where there is a million of different books available available to them and they come across you and if they almost at a glance can get an impression of, okay, this has a certain, let's say Fantasy feel to it.
Jesper (44m 12s): I like the image. Um, maybe there is a dragon crawling between letters or something, I don't know. But you know, it does something that it just leaves a positive impression on the reader's as they just come across you at the first time. I didn't. Of course the idea is that over time it should accumulate so that it brings more and more people in who had an interested in your writing and they'll give you a book, a chance because they lied, lied, like the branding that you have created around it. And they'll give it a chance and then to read your book and some of them will love it and they'll go on to read other books and so forth.
Jesper (44m 46s): So it's more like, I probably wouldn't even call it a cornerstone. In your publishing a part of, of your business,
Autumn (44m 59s): What is the foundation stone? Yeah. Maybe for this
Jesper (45m 5s): It's something like, I would say like you could live without it, but it just makes a difference too. Give a good impression. And when you're running a business like we are when we are
Autumn (45m 13s): Authors, why wouldn't you want to leave a good impression? I guess that's, that's the best way I could phrase it. So I think, and I think that it works and to me it's if you as an author, R R taking it serious are maybe you are trying to get into marketing and you just feel a little lost. Creating a brand really helps give you a focus in a theme and a message and suddenly all of those things that you're struggling with and trying to put together and what kind of images and what kind of quotes and what am I talking about.
Autumn (45m 44s): You suddenly go, Oh my theme is fast paced Fantasy so I'm going to find action scenes or my theme is really nuanced characters or a romance or emotions. Some of the, you know what scenes and quotes to go get a, you know, what's important to you know, what your next book you are going to make sure it has those, it kinda makes a lot of stuff that are nebulous and you're kind of don't even realize you're struggling with click into place and you're like, ah, this works. This is what I'm going to do. And if so for that reason I would say, you know, you start a brand.
Autumn (46m 18s): Just so you can kind of concentrate and figure out some of these little parts of yourself in your marketing, in your, you know, how you, you're reaching the readers you're trying to reach. For
Jesper (46m 31s): Yeah. So I think Author branding helps you communicate about yourself and make that personal connection with the readers. And a brand will emerge whether you want it or not. You might as well put yourself in the driving seat there and, uh, decide what your branding will be about. So next Monday we will share 10 things that makes for great hero. So what that should prove.
Jesper (47m 2s): Very interesting.
Narrator (47m 5s): If you liked what you just heard, there is a few things you can do to support the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow Author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/am Writing Fantasy for as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Have you thought about writing in a different genre and weighed the option of using a pen name or no? Get the tips to decide if your current author platform will encompass something new or if, and how, you should start a new author platform under a pen name with guest host author Kirsten Oliphant!
Check out Kirsten's other great tips and wonderful podcast at Create if Writing: https://createifwriting.com/
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (0s): You're listening to the Am Writing Fantasy podcast and today's publishing landscape. You can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need an literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from Writing Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them. Now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Autumn (29s): Hello, I'm Autumn. And we are on episode 74 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. And today we have a special guest as a yes for hinted last week, the women have come to take over the Am Writing Fantasy podcasts again, and we've booted Yesper off and given him a pit of a break for today. And I have with me Kirsten, Kirsten Oliphant, who is the author of over 15 books in different genres and the host of the creative Writing podcast, which she started in 2015 way back before podcasting became the cool thing to do.
Autumn (1m 8s): So her goal is to help authors learn to sell more books without being smarmy. Hi. Kirsten Kiersten as well.
Kirsten (1m 17s): Yeah, you don't have to. It's totally one of those Names and Hey, we're talking about Names today, which is, I mean it's just a perfect yes, absolutely. Thanks for having me on. I'm glad to be here.
Autumn (1m 29s): Oh, I'm so happy. And yes, it is amazing. So you have 15 books. I already looked at your profile on Amazon and of course you were going to talk about Pen Names but I love the fact that you, you're not even subtle about it. You can list it right in your bio. Oh, I'm also with this person in Brighton under this name as well. And you have all these wonderful books. So tell us a little bit about your books and how you started writing. It's always fun to hear.
Kirsten (1m 52s): Sure. Well I've been Writing I mean since forever, you know, I know some people pick up Writing later in some earlier, but I was writing, I mean I wrote my first novel in like third grade. Yes, it was terrible. But like, you know, it had dialogue and stuff like it, you know, it was like a solid, you know, D effort, right.
Autumn (2m 11s): Dialogue in third grade when you read it.
Kirsten (2m 14s): Yes. If you read a lot, you just pick things up and I think, you know, it was really instinctive for me. And so, uh, you know I kept writing throughout. I wasn't sure that I was necessarily going to be a writer but I did keep writing throughout. I wrote a bunch of half novel's in junior high or you know, never really finished anything but just did a lot of writing. I went to school Am college, English major, uh, you know, lots of papers. I took creative writing but you know its kind of hard to get into those kinds of classes and they only really have like two, you know, so I took part one in part to have that and loved it and my um, professor really encouraged me to look into MFA programs, which I hadn't thought about.
Kirsten (2m 50s): And so, um, I didn't, I went and worked at a church doing youth ministry and then um, a couple of years later when I got married I started again about writing and just really how I stopped and I missed it. And so I did apply and got into an MFA program and you know, win. And we moved to across the country were in Texas. Now I grew up in Virginia, Texas. Now we went to North Carolina, uh, for two years, which is amazing. A really small program at UNC Greensboro. Um, and it was, yeah, it was, it was just so much fun and really got, uh, you know, it's a very literary program, which is so funny that I'm, I feel like I'm out.
Kirsten (3m 28s): I'm on like the total opposite end now. Like the bastard child of my MFA program now writing genre fiction. But, um, it's really given me, I feel like I've had a really broad variety of experiences with writing and can really understand, you know, kinda the traditional perspective, indie perspective. And I just love writing. I love story. And so, you know, I'll probably go back to the literary stuff that's well more literary. I mean, it's not like, I don't know, genre fiction is not this, not literary. It's not that it's not good writing, it's just a totally different kind of craft.
Kirsten (3m 60s): Um, I think, but anyway, I appreciate both. And so that's kind of, uh, you know, how I got here. I graduated and then started having kids. So for like 10 years, I could not process novel stuff. So I got this degree and then was like, Oh nevermind, let's have a bunch of babies. And I did blogging for a while, um, and professional, you know, like made bunny of blogging. And so I figured out, um, social media and, and uh, was really active in all those kinds of things. And so, uh, when it came to a time to feel like I really wanted to write books again, I had this advantage of sort of knowing the landscape and author platform came pretty easily to me because it was something I was already doing with blogging.
Kirsten (4m 41s): It was just kinda putting a different hat on. So that's kind of the roundabout way of how I got here and started the podcast teaching other people, cause I think I enjoy the platform and it was something I knew how to do. But I think a lot of authors and creative people don't like it. It feels like icky. And so my goal is to kind of reframe that conversation and make it feel less icky. Like we should Real like writing more, but it's okay to also like Twitter or Facebook or email lists.
Autumn (5m 6s): Well, I get that because I absolutely, I was gone through your website and I'm one of those folks who I still don't, I still, I mean I understand the voice part and everything else, but I just prefer to read it. I learn better by reading it, not by hearing it. And so I absolutely love your creative writing platform because you have blog posts on everything. And I'm like, Oh, I could freeze this. And it's not that I don't like video or voice or sound, but I just like to read things even. Yeah. So absolutely.
Kirsten (5m 37s): And I'm going to for podcasts is to have, yeah, all of my podcasts have a full show notes, like a blog post. Um, because I know there are people out there who still want the content, but we all consume content differently. And you know, that actually helps me. Like I kind of, before I sit down to record, I read out the blog post and then I speak sort of conversation. I don't read it or anything, but I kind of have the blogpost in front of me. So it's like helpful to speak conversationally on the podcast and I already know what I'm going to say. But for those people who want to read and also for SEO purposes to get actual traffic on my blog, those meaty blog posts really help.
Autumn (6m 11s): No, no, no that's great. And you know you have some stuff in there. I noticed that was even like a marketing for authors who don't like marketing. It's a very helpful, friendly things. So those are great tips. And I know you recently, I think it was episode one 69 so very fairly recently. And you talked about Pen Names so it's already kind of covered it a bit. So we're going to go over it a little bit again, but you have, so you are ready in three different names. You have your real name and then to Pen Names and why did you do that?
Kirsten (6m 41s): Well really it kinda came down to the marketing and, and not being, um, muddy and unclear about what I was writing. So I started out, um, the first books I published were nonfiction. I had a couple of devotional books and then, um, was writing marketing books. I have an email book, which is actually down cause I'm updating it. I'm about to rerelease it, um, on email marketing for authors. And then I have one on collaborating with other people and creative ways. And I had run on a blogging, but I took it down because blogging has changed so much.
Kirsten (7m 11s): I just was like, I don't want to update this every six months. We'd like something dyes, you know, and the takeaway, a social media platform. Umm, as I just get her to update next, I'll have people email me like this isn't true in the more I'm like, yeah, your right and I don't have time to update those three 99 book over here that sells a couple of copies. Um, but when I started thinking about writing fiction again, it really, um, you know, I hadn't ever really thought about Pen Names but I started, uh, just seeing how for different genres and I really love reading a lot of Genres.
Kirsten (7m 44s): I'm one of those people that's all over the place. How it might be a really confusing, if you're going to look at an author and you may, you know, that you may of had this experience for anyone listening where you go and check out an author and you see all these different kinds of book covers and you just kind of, it's a, it's like a disquieting feeling because you're not sure what exactly a signaling, like what can I expect? And that's the thing that Pen Names really helped do. Um, when you're separating out the different Genres, it's setting that reader expectations. So it's incredibly clear. And you know, there are people like, you know, a Stephen King, he can do whatever he wants because it's Stephen King, but we're mostly not there yet.
Kirsten (8m 20s): And there are some people I know who write different genres all under the same name and it works to varying degrees, but especially when you're starting out, which I was putting out fiction, um, you know, it really, it, it really is muddy and it really makes things unclear for readers. And so I didn't necessarily want people to go look and be like, Oh, I love this book. Let's see what I'll show you. Oh, a book on email lists. I don't even know what that is. You know? And so that's just kinda how it started. I know some people do this for, um, you know, like maybe you're writing something, you know, like erotica and your husband's a youth pastor.
Kirsten (8m 55s): Mine was, which that's not what I write. You know, that would be a reason where you don't want your name attached to it. So for some people it is really about that privacy issue. But for me it was much more about marketing and you know, whichever way you're doing it, it's fine. Um, but yeah, there's a couple different reasons why you might choose a Pen. Names.
Autumn (9m 13s): Yeah, I've always, I looked at it cause I write in, I was going to say two different genres, but you're right when you throw in the nonfiction, so I write in three Genres as well and mostly I've always put it all my fictional writing under just the name I go by autumn Bert. So that is sort of my brand and I always figured if my brand was true, which is very fast paced kind of action oriented stories, whether it's Fantasy and I also do some post-apocalyptic kind of dystopian. So whether I Writing and one of those, I just figured my audience is technically the age bracket is the same.
Autumn (9m 48s): It is, I'm still the same kind of really well developed characters in action. So I figured it was all of the same. But you're right. I mean in some ways the covers are very different and my readers I have, it's probably split into thirds. I have a third are like hardcore Fantasy Please I never want to see anything with a gun. I have the other third are like Please if nothing is exploding BI, you know something with tea and tea. I do not ever want to read it. There is no such thing as magic. And then I have a third who just like the way I write and they're there.
Autumn (10m 18s): But there's definitely some people who are not into the crossover and it's, it's not as clear cut as I was hoping when I did it. And again, but you're right, I have my nonfiction of writing, I do with my husband that's under my married name of autumn, Raven. And I just wanted that clear cut. Like this is something that is totally different. There's the magic is all in your heart and not in, um, you know, blowing things up.
Kirsten (10m 44s): Yeah. And you'd hope like, I mean, my dream, I think all of us would love for our audience to love our words enough and love our style and our voice enough that they would go anywhere we go. And that's the goal. But at the end, I think you build that over time, that group of super fans, but it's a, it's a smaller subset of the people who read your books, right? People read your books and they may read all of them, but they may not all be super fans and I do have, you know, especially like on day one of launch, you know, if my also bots kind of pop up and I haven't had a long preorder, I might see one of my nonfiction books in the office of the boss or you know, I write clean romance in urban fantasy, young adult.
Kirsten (11m 19s): I read Fantasy and so sometimes those first couple days in either of those I'll see those pop up and I really don't want that. That's the other thing that kind of can make it Monday as I want. My also bots to show, I mean if Amazon is at that point, they're showing those, which right now for me it's like a mixed bag. Like sometimes you'll go on the Amazon page and you'll see Am customers have also read or also bought. Right now I'm seeing books you may like, which is super annoying because it's showing me all my own books because I'm like checking ranks all of the time. And so I'm like, I know I liked them, I wrote them, but I don't want to buy them, you know?
Kirsten (11m 52s): Um, but I do want that to be clear for readers as well when they are going up because if they're going and they buy one of my urban fantasy books and then they look and see a clean romance cover, that's, you know, maybe there's some crossover, but those two, especially the two genres I'm running under, there is not a ton of crossover because the clean romance crowd is, there is a variety of their two. But some of them our, there's a heavy influence of like Christian readers and some of them don't want magic at all. And so when you go to the urban Fantasy and I'm like, there's witches and the fan Pires and, and for me, the steam levels kind of the same.
Kirsten (12m 25s): Like my goal is not, I don't really have sex on the page in any of my books. I tell them I don't really have, um, language in any of my books and which is actually a real struggle in that the young adult orbit. Fantasy because in my head I get that that's here. I'm like, this is what they'd say, but I don't want to put that. And that's just my own personal, there's nothing wrong. I mean, again, I read all over the board write, but for what I want to put out, that's just kinda the line I've drawn into. It makes me happy to work harder. But if you know of my clean room and people come over, I think they'll be pleasantly surprised. And some of them have, and some of them have written me and said like, I never thought I would like a book about this.
Kirsten (12m 59s): Um, but you know, there's also some romance elements in my urban fantasy as well, which I know is like a, you know, debate, hot debate over in fantasy land. So I will always have, I think, some kind of romance in them, but it's not gonna it's not gonna be the main, a part of the story necessarily.
Autumn (13m 16s): Yeah. And I think that's definitely, I mean it's your writing style, what you're interested in writing and again, your brand and your platform. So those are things that are going to cross genres no matter what you do. I mean how you develop characters, it's, they're all going to be solid. There's going to be some, I think I read somewhere that someone did it in a review and said the familiar hand of this author. I don't think that's a good, yeah, that's such a good way to say that. Yes. No matter where we stick ourselves, we're probably going to have some kind of resonance and pacing that is very familiar and that's what we're trying to sell our readers on and hopefully bring them across genres.
Autumn (13m 52s): But that is, it is fun. So when you, you did this very purposely, you knew you were going to start writing it in a different genre and you set up a whole different platform. I mean, do you, you go as far as the websites, if someone was going to do this and they said, I, I write specifically in this, but I'm going to go ahead and write in a different genre, what are the, the things that you would warn them about or tell them at least to think about before they, they jump into something?
Kirsten (14m 17s): Well, for me, you know, given that none of us have a lot of time, right? And I've got five kids at home, things are going crazy. It's, I didn't have a lot of time to build a lot of platform. But what I found is that, um, you know, I kind of pared it down to the bare basics. Like what for me, what does the cornerstone of an author platform, and for me that's an email list because that is where you're going to sell the most of your books. That's where you're going to the most personally connect with your fans in a way that is more permanent, right? Like, so some authors may be more active on Facebook, whether that's an a group or a page or they might be more active on Instagram or some of their platform, but you don't own those connections, right?
Kirsten (14m 54s): Instagram and Facebook, do they control how you interact with an email? You actually have their email, you can print it out unless CSV like you know, the spreadsheet thing and hold it in your hand. It's yours. So email is so important. So that's always kind of where I start. Um, and then I do have URLs. Like I do have websites and, but I don't put a lot into it because really they, I think in this day and age, like I, I just don't see a ton of readers caring about your author website. I just don't, and um, you know, I'm not trying for like a traditional platform deal.
Kirsten (15m 28s): I'm not trying to like impress some publisher somewhere with, with how many page views I get a month in. And really, because I came from the blogging world, a new how I know how to grow a blog and know how to do SCO, all of that. But I also knew how much work it takes. And for me the return is not huge. I would rather just send people to Amazon and have them buy my books. I don't need a middleman. Now, if you were, um, you know, trying to do a lot of affiliate sales with Amazon, you know, you might want to send it to your website or if you're selling direct or you might be selling like literally from your website. But if you're just doing the bare bones basics, you don't need that.
Kirsten (15m 60s): So I did buy the URL, but I actually, for the first Pen Names I was thinking I might do more blogging, but then I, I really didn't, um, cause who has time for that? Like I don't have the time to do blogging and also write a bunch of books. Um, so when I came and I started the second Pen name under Sullivan gray for the urban Fantasy, I got the URL, um, which, you know, I, I think it's good to look those things up. Write, you don't want to have another author with that name. Um, there is a series I think actually with that name but not an author, but I did get the URL and then have it.
Kirsten (16m 31s): I had to redirect to a landing page from a mailer light, which was the email that I use. And so if people go to my author website, it's really just a landing page and I think I will build it out a bit, but I've sold a bunch of books without it. So I don't, you know, it's not a priority. The priority to me was growing an email list. I do have a Facebook page, a so I can run ads and uh, I like Facebook groups, although, you know, it is hard to put a lot into the groups, especially to get them off the ground. It takes a lot of you being involved and starting conversations.
Kirsten (17m 3s): I do believe in Facebook groups. It's a really great way to be close to your audience. And so I have one of those for each, but you know, I'm not, um, I'm not able to really be all of that active cause I also have a, a very active group for my podcasts. So you really have to think about your bandwidth and, and your ultimate, I'm all about the ROI, like your return on investment of time and money. What is going to sell books, what is going to help you connect longterm with readers who are going to stick with you. And for me that's email. And then having books sold on Amazon.
Kirsten (17m 35s): And again, I do use Facebook ads and so the pages were important but I did not. Um, you know, there's a lot of different schools on how to do Facebook ads, but I've had success with ads, with pages that are tiny so you don't necessarily even have to a big page because you can target other people. I am almost never targeting the people who like my page. I'm targeting other people's pages. So if you have a Facebook page of a couple of hundred people, that's fine. You know, you can still make money with Facebook ads. You can still sell books.
Kirsten (18m 5s): Um, is Facebook really does make it a lot harder now to grow a page and it's a lot more work. And again, what, what is the least amount of work? I can do on things that don't, you know, bring in a big return. Right. So that's my goal cause I've got too many balls in the air to spend a lot of time blogging if no one's reading it or if it's not selling books. So I think you can absolutely do the bare bones minimum something to run ads on. Um, some kind of like main hub where people can reach you and then your email list is really where I'd put most of the time.
Autumn (18m 40s): Yeah. And do you, so you have for each of your Genres in each of your Pen Names uh, different mailing lists. So you never find them across them. Okay.
Kirsten (18m 47s): Yeah I don't and I do, um, you know, because my, my um, there is some crossover again like I do every so often mentioned to my, you know, to frictionless like, Oh by the way, you know I have this idea if you like reading about vampires I get out of here. Or if you really like romance, you know, you might enjoy these books or you know, Hey if you're an author just in case you're out there, cause there are a lot of re uh, you know, authors and readers and you know, I've got this podcast thing going on and so I do mention it every so often. Um, but I even have the, um, I have the two fiction, uh, lists over on mailer light and then I also use convert kit, which I used for my nonfiction cause I'm doing a lot more complicated things with my nonfiction.
Kirsten (19m 29s): You know, I sell, I used to do a lot more like workshops and webinars and courses and so it matters a lot more if you can use some of the advanced features when you're really trying to separate out and mainly like does a good job with those things for the price. But convert kit is so much smoother and easier for all of that. And so yeah, my nonfiction list hangs out over there and then I've got the two fiction lists and mailer light. Yeah,
Autumn (19m 50s): We do the exact same thing. I have mailed a Lite for my frictionless and convert kit for the AmWritingFantasy. And I agree it's just, I absolutely adore mailer lights. Um, way of being able to put together a newsletter actually. And I, I keep looking at ConvertKit going Please come to the 21st century. Please
Kirsten (20m 10s): Oh see I'm the opposite. I don't like the fancy email's and so even in low light I'm doing like the very bare bones cause I don't like when I, when something hits my inbox, I don't care. I don't care what it looks like. It's really about the content, but everybody's really different. And so, you know, I don't think ConvertKit will ever go there. I think that's their whole platform but, but I'm there for the features and you know, not necessarily having a pretty background or whatever.
Autumn (20m 35s): Yeah. I think I like to do, in my newsletter there's a lot of interactions and questions and polls and convert kit does not, that I've found has, does not make that easy when you're talking to your fiction list and learning to do little poll on, you know, which characters are a favorite. So a light definitely makes that easy. But anyway, we're not talking about how you can easily get a bit lost into the email list because those two, there's so many great platforms though. But those are definitely to me to have the stable ones at the moment.
Autumn (21m 6s): Who knows what the future holds.
Kirsten (21m 8s): Yeah, you never know.
Autumn (21m 10s): That's great. So I love, I do love the Nate like Sullivan grey as an awesome Pen. Names said you did Sue some research, like you said before you went and chose something, you took something that fit the urban fantasy genre and you wanted to make sure no one else was already using it.
Kirsten (21m 25s): So if you're coming to think about a Pen Names I mean there's personal reasons and then there's like practical reasons and I think it's totally fine to mix them. So when I started with clean romance, I chose a name. My name is Emma st Claire and I feel like Emma is one of those Names. It's like friendly and happy. Like you can't not like Emma. Right. It's just sounds like a little touch of old fashioned. Yes. You've got to Jane Austin. And then st Claire was my maiden name. And really that was a risk because it's one of those names that always gets miscategorized because it has a period in it and it's like STD periods space Clare.
Kirsten (22m 0s): And so like my whole life I grew up getting like having everything lost cause it would be like some people put it like final in her S a for sale, like spelling it out even though it's not, or they put it under STC or they put it under C for clear anyway. It hasn't caused a problem. But the laughter as I was like, what was I thinking? But it was more sentimental. Like let's put something out with my maiden name, you know, bring the family name on. Um, and then with the, uh, but yeah, I absolutely looked at like, okay, is there someone like on Amazon with this name or one really similar or you know, it is the website available.
Kirsten (22m 34s): And then with Sullivan gray, um, I did go in and kind of look and I think sometimes with, um, you know, a lot of the white, depending on what John you're writing in sort of a more androgynous name, like whether it, you don't know whether it's a guy or girl. And we actually loved the name of Sullivan. Um, we're going to use it for a girl and we ended up not using it and we're done having kids. We're going to call her Sally. And I just thought that was adorable. So I love, I love strong girl names, I love last names as first names. It's all been great. Just had that ring to it that felt, it felt like kinda cool and powerful and just like a good fit for that.
Kirsten (23m 7s): But it also was like a name that I totally loved. And the website you are always taken but not by anyone who's actually using it. So I just have authors, all of it in gray.com but everything else is there. And I will say like, you definitely want to search that because this is hilarious. Last night I was on, I'm in some one of those Am, I'm in a ton of Facebook groups, right, for research and promotion and whatever else. But there was one and it was like a um, Christian Kindle reads or something and one popped up and it was about like prophecy and coven 19.
Kirsten (23m 41s): And I was like, I don't, I'm not really into that at all, just FYI. So, but I clicked on it cause I was like, who is this? Cause the person posting, like I didn't, it was posted under a different name. It's, I think it's the person. And I was like, is this a Pen Names this is a kind of stuff I nerd out about. So do I click through and um, I couldn't really tell this looks like that author's first book. So again, I think it's a pen name from somebody. So I clicked on the pen name itself and that name is really close to two different erotica authors. And so when you click on their name, you see that book prophecy and biblical or whatever.
Kirsten (24m 14s): And then it's like this giant list of like really raunchy covers that I was like, Oh you really, you really should have done a quick search on Amazon beforehand. Yeah, because it wasn't like it was the same name, but it was to Names close enough that the whole first page, if you go look for the author is all erotica. And I was like, I don't think this is where you want to buy your book to show up. So anyway, a quick search to save you a lot of time. Yeah.
Autumn (24m 42s): Yeah. I mean I've definitely thought of it like, Oh well if you're going to write like children's literature and erotica, you definitely need a pen name. But that's sort of of the other guy. So if you're writing a children's literature and your choosing a pen name, make sure it isn't close to something that you used to stumble
Kirsten (24m 58s): And you might not think that, but like you know, you definitely, you don't always know until you search things and then then you know. So it's definitely better to search first
Autumn (25m 7s): And then the search first or you know, someone else can obviously come along and choose something and totally jumble up the whole thing later. But at least maybe, hopefully you'll be established by then.
Kirsten (25m 17s): Yeah, hopefully. I mean, yes, people can totally, yes, come along a mess. All of those things up. So
Autumn (25m 23s): No, they always do. That was the other thing though. I mean thinking of Pen Names when I was choosing you, no, I'm going to write this dystopian post-apocalyptic series and I have this Fantasy platform and I was thinking of my readers and the way I honestly, I think it was the same thing. You know, you're busy, you have a life in a job. I didn't have kids, but I have a husband and hobbies and a dog that is my kid. Cause my fuzzy child and I, we were traveling and doing a whole bunch of things and I thought, Oh my goodness, I do not want to start at square one again.
Autumn (25m 55s): I don't want to start all over. But do you think it's not so bad because you can tell your other platform, Hey, if you're interested on starting this or did you feel like you really, it took that slow churn and burn to finally build up an audience under a pen name?
Kirsten (26m 11s): Yeah, it took time and it, and I'm still building like you know, the urban Fantasy doesn't make as much money right now as the clean romance does. Those are the clean romance readers are just voracious. So, you know, and I'd really already been established. That was the advice I kept hearing cause I was ready. I had a book ready to launch, you know, like six to nine months after I started the clean romance Pen Names was at um, the 20 books to 50 K conference. And I think in like four different sessions, I heard people say like, make sure your established before you switch.
Kirsten (26m 43s): And I'm into a new genre. And I was like, okay, I've got the book done but there's no rush even though I love the book. So we'll just wait. And that was a great choice because even when, I think it was like 18 months later, even when I launched, you know, I took a big income hit because I took a break Writing the clean romance, which was making money and also bad timing took a break on ads cause I was like, I don't know if these are fully working, they were turning off your ads, let's you know, really quick whether they're working or not true. But it does take some time to establish and you know, I think you absolutely can't, you don't have to do a Pen Names absolutely.
Kirsten (27m 18s): If you know how to do marketing, if you know how to write and you can totally get away, especially if you're, um, you know, if the, the Genres are similar enough in might have some crossover. But if you're doing really different ones, and again, mine really felt pretty different because there are some people who feel really strongly and the clean romance against the whole like paranormal, supernatural stuff. Like they're not just like, I don't like it. They're like, I abhor it, you know, I will not, you know, there was just a pretty strong reaction there. Um, and a lot of my readers who read my a young adult stuff, even though my young adult stuff's clean, I me and my goal is to, I'm not marketing it necessarily as clean.
Kirsten (27m 56s): That's just my goal in my own, you know, kinda the line that I've dropped. But I want my books to be good enough that they stand up with books that aren't holding back on anything. So that PE and, and what I found is those readers over there are reading all kinds of stuff. They're reading reverse hair on the reading steamy stuff. They're reading all kinds of, and they still like my books, but they're probably not going to cross over either. So I think that's really the thing to consider is do you have the time? I'm, how different are your Genres? Um, but it is, it is pretty hard to start, but if you, again, if you have the background and no, if you've already done at once, you absolutely can do it again.
Kirsten (28m 31s): Right? If was you just do it for maybe a little bit better. Secondly, and you know, kind of we're not to waste time. Um, you know, so for me, I found some author groups and connected and we were writing, um, you know, started out, I launched with doing like a Am an Academy series. And so that was really hot last year. Um, I was kind of on the tail end, but it still did really well. And there's, there were Facebook groups for Academy readers and so, um, you know, I got in to some like promotions with like book funnel with other authors who are also doing Academy reads and, and things like that.
Kirsten (29m 2s): And so, um, you know, you already know how to do it. I, uh, took a couple of days in row, like a 12,000 word, a short story that was a prequel to the Academy series. And I use that to build my list. And so, you know, within a couple months I built up a couple thousand people just because there are people out there who want to read things for free. And yes, there's freebie seekers, right? We all with emails, we hate that. But if you grab someone enough with you're writing, if they get it and actually read it, you, you might be hooking reader for a long time. And so I've had good results from, from using that freebie.
Kirsten (29m 36s): Um, and also it pulls people right into my pain works. And so, um, it is a pain. I was, I was kind of excited to see like, okay, how well could I do this again? Um, cause for me a lot of it's a test because then I go in and share that on the podcast to talk to other authors about it. In some ways, even if I fail, it's like, okay, well now I have something to share like don't do this. And uh, you know, I never shy away from sharing that. You know, I share my big income months and I share with like I totally screwed things on both of them.
Kirsten (30m 8s): But yeah, you don't have to do it. I just think your struggle is going to be a little harder if your not using a pin name and your Writing into Genres that don't have a ton of crossover or um, or you know, again, like if you haven't written a lot of books, if you were only written three books and two of them are in clean romance and one of them is urban fantasy. So when people go to your author page and they just see those three books, it's a little more money. Whereas if they see like 20 books and there's some differences in their, it's a little bit more, um, of a solid feeling that people can get because they know you're established, you're not just jumping around and they can find a couple of different of this kind and a couple of different of this kind.
Kirsten (30m 45s): So, um, yeah, you don't have to do a pin name it just for marketing it could be a lot easier to be clear and with those reader expectations.
Autumn (30m 53s): Yeah, I think that's a, actually a really good tip is, you know, being established in one. So, you know, finish your first series, are a trilogy, have that under your belt, have that platform established before you launch another book. Cause I do see that. I've, I know when I was doing it, I wrote an entire trilogy and then I wrote this dystopian series and then I did another trilogy back in Epic Fantasy. So I felt like I really knew what I was doing, but I have met so many authors who it's like they've started five different series and they have just the first books out. And maybe they were just attempting to a novella to see if it was going to sell.
Autumn (31m 26s): But if you don't have anything complete yet, it just, it does, it looks confusing and you kind of like, where are you? Are you finishing this? Is it going to continue? It's, it's definitely a little, um, it makes you question what's going on and it takes longer to search through things and see if you can find the next book that your interested in. It's so much prettier to see the whole series.
Kirsten (31m 46s): Oh, totally. And it's a thing about building trust, right? Like, we want readers who don't just read one book, they read all of our books and I found that it's really easy to break that trust. And so if your, you know, coz I'm a huge reader too, I read probably a book a day. Oh my goodness. It's my escape right now scape. You know when an author like leaves a series forever if or his writing for different at once, like its hard. And then you have a lot of readers who will say things like, well I won't read until the series complete.
Kirsten (32m 17s): And then on the author side of this author is like, well this series isn't making money, I'm going to drop it. And so it's like working against each other. So I totally understand why some authors write in multiple cause sometimes also just creatively, some people need a break or a palate cleanser or something else. But as a reader like you just want them to finish that series and um, clean romance, it's a little bit easier because often if your having a series, it's a standalone series, right? Because each book has to have a happy ever after. I'm in romance and a, yeah so you have a related series.
Kirsten (32m 49s): I'll have characters from one book, you know in there and the main then the next year, which people love and, and sometimes I'll make the decision based on like I'll get a bunch of reviews where everybody's asking for this one character and I was like all right great. So we'll, we'll do that. But um, yeah when you're coming into and, and I do have a series like that in, in the young adult where I'm, it's been way too long since I've gone back to the second book but it didn't sell as well and its kind of more of a um, a love series to have people asking about it but they, it didn't sell as well and not as many people are asking.
Kirsten (33m 23s): So I'm just doing what I can. Right. You have to balance out what are you doing your own life, what are you well you can actually do and, and also um, what the readers want cause you do want to build that trust and establish, you know, a relationship where they know what to expect from you. Cause again, I keep saying expectations and expecting, but like that is, that's kind of the currency for trust. His is the readers have expectations and you give them expectations. Um, whether you mean to or not, whether you outright say, I'm going to publish a book a month.
Kirsten (33m 54s): If you start publishing a book a month, they start to expect that. And so, you know, we need to kind of communicate that really well. And unfortunately not everybody joins your email list. They may be fans. You know, I had a book that, um, in the clean room and said, I ended up moving from one series to another and renaming it. And when I first put it back up, the note about that was in the book, but I had forgotten to put it on the Amazon sales page and immediately got a one star review from someone who had read it before and then bought it again.
Kirsten (34m 24s): And you know, I, I was like, they were like, you didn't say it anywhere. And like I had it, but, but Amazon also chooses where the book starts. Right? So it started after the note. And so, um, and, and there were massive changes, but whatever I understand I would be tic to, especially if they're not reading through K you and they actually paid full price for to have these books. So, you know, that was a feeler on my part. We've got to really, you know, meet those expectations and, and try to keep that currency of trust with the readers, uh, to keep them knowing that they could trust us and knowing they're not always gonna be on our email list. They might, and I have a lot of authors I read, but I'm not going to set up for the email list because my inbox is jammed, but I'll read all their books.
Kirsten (35m 2s): So
Autumn (35m 3s): Yeah, I remember when I first published and first started email lists back in 2013 and it was back when it was new and you figured the readers were like, kind of like, Oh, I can actually like talk to an author. And now I just, I can't imagine it's like another
Kirsten (35m 16s): Email list.
Autumn (35m 18s): No, you just, I know I go through my every month or so. I'm just deleting and unsubscribing from everyone. So I can imagine what poor readers are going through, but it is a great way to get into books and learn more about stories. So you know, I think of that whenever I sit down to write my newsletter is what can I do to make this not to take up too much of their time and show how much I appreciate that they didn't like opt out already.
Kirsten (35m 44s): Yes, absolutely. You don't want to, yeah, email. I mean yeah, that's the whole bunch of episodes on the South end, you know yet you don't want to like bother them, but you also like that's another way of, of trust. It's another way of building that relationship. And I think in a lot of ways it's, it is more intimate because for some people, like for me, I like you have been doing this forever. So it's obvious like when you hit reply, like you expect that it's going to the author and it's like a weird thing. If you get one of those, if you've ever got the form of emails, so on and so has read your risk and you're like, Oh my gosh, like just turn that autoresponder off cause that makes it feel super impersonal.
Kirsten (36m 18s): But you know, I'll have people hit reply and then when I replied back, they're like, Oh my gosh, emailing me. And they get so excited. And so it really does have this personal feel to it and um, yeah. But, but yeah, you'll for sure how people who aren't on your list, and that's fine too if they read everything, but you just gotta make sure like, okay, like I, I screwed up. I didn't put that note really clearly on the page. We're
Autumn (36m 42s): Only human. There's a pandemic. Yeah, totally. As soon as I,
Kirsten (36m 49s): Oh yeah. As soon as I saw the review I was like, I knew I forgot something and when added it and you know, but too late, that's fine. But hopefully the reader comes back. But hopefully we just do our best. Right. Provide a lot of books, provide information to keep the trust. But,
Autumn (37m 5s): And I do, I, I am totally a home. Please learn from my failure. I think life as an experiment and I'm happily to be my own Guinea pig so I do the exact same thing. I think we'd get along that way if I was closer to the Texas that it's just kind of like, you know, you do it, you try, you tell people about it, you move on. It is
Kirsten (37m 27s): As someone else your learning the hard way for somebody else.
Autumn (37m 30s): Yes. I am fine being the person who jumps into the fire of so far. I'm a Phoenix so we're good.
Kirsten (37m 38s): We're still going right. We're still Writing so no mistake that was permanent just once we moved on from
Autumn (37m 43s): That's right. I still, I do love that advice though. Just if you're thinking about writing a new genre, um, to go to like your book page or you know, one of your books and think about what's gonna show up on your also bots and does it fit and if it's not, the cover is not going to look right. If the reader is, would not go pick up a book, that's probably a really good time to think about doing a pen name and starting those steps. Yeah, absolutely. So is there any other takeaways, tips you want to throw out there before we wrap up?
Kirsten (38m 15s): Well, I would just say, you know, for the people, if we haven't really touched on the privacy issue, if there is anybody out there, if you're trying to do this for privacy and not have your pin name associated, I think that's where it gets a little bit a trickier. But you know, you can, um, I just had somebody asking me about this this morning in my Facebook group. Um, but you know, you can buy a domain and you can add or you definitely wanna add the privacy on because otherwise you're going to be getting, it's a little bit more per year, but I'm going to be getting emails and your email can be publicly associated with it. Um, Facebook, I find a lot of authors doing this, but Facebook Am you really are not allowed to have more than one personal profile.
Kirsten (38m 52s): And the personal profile is where you add friends, right? The page is where you get likes. So you can have multiple pages but you can only have one profile. So I see a lot of authors trying to add a second profile Am under their Pen Names in it. You know, you might get away with it but if Facebook finds out they can take away your whole account and if your, you know matters, right? Like your advertising and things like that on Facebook like that matters to lose that whole platform. And so, um, but you can have a page and have that be anonymous. You can most groups now if you're using groups' to promote Mmm.
Kirsten (39m 24s): Most of them allowed to join us at page and say you can do that. But there are ways to do it if you want privacy. But you're, you're going to have to make sure your not like secretly telling a few family and friends because then yeah, your also bots might get jacked up and connect to your other Pen Names so it is, it could be a little bit harder to keep that separate but it's totally possible as well if you're doing it for that reason, not just a marketing reason.
Autumn (39m 48s): Yeah. I've always considered it's sort of a nightmare there. You should know a little bit about IP and IP security if your doing it because there really is a privacy concern because it's hard. It's amazing how well people can link things if they really want to trace where something is coming from. So you have to be very cautious. Well thank you so much, Kiersten. This was really fantastic and tell I will put links in the show notes, but if you want to tell folks where to find you, that will be fantastic.
Kirsten (40m 21s): Yeah. Well if you're interested in learning more author stuff and getting another perspective, not just on Fantasy but other things, you can just go to Create if writing.com and you can find links to the podcast and my Facebook community there and yep, I do talk about the Pen Names there as well as you can find those. But yeah, thanks so much for having me. It was great to be on.
Autumn (40m 40s): Yes, it was so wonderful. I love that. I got a chance to talk to you and so next week, yes, we will be back and will be having a lovely discussion on developing your author brand and what it is. So please stay tuned and we look forward to seeing you stay safe out there.
Narrator (40m 59s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also Join Ottoman Yesper on patrion.com/am Writing Fantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going, stay safe out there And see you next Monday.
The beginning of a novel - especially the first chapter - is what will decide if the reader goes on to read more or ditches the story right then and there.
The ability to write a first chapter that hooks the reader is massively important.
But how do you accomplish such a feat?
In episode 73 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, Autumn and Jesper share the elements that every successful first chapter needs - along with some of the mistakes they have made in their earlier writing career.
Links to materials mentioned in this episode:
The Character Development - Essential Skills - course: https://ultimatefantasywritersguide.com/character-development-sales-page/
The video on how to write awesome prologues: https://youtu.be/CRTiTRWfUeU
The booklet designed to help you with crafting an amazing first chapter: https://www.amwritingfantasy.com/product/novel-beginnings-help-booklet/
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy.
For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need and literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from Writing Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them. Now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Bert and Jasper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I am Jesper and I'm Autumn. This is episode 73 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. And the topic of today's episode is opening books. So I guess we need to, I don't know if we need to have something clever to say here as well as out of like an opening book for this episode.
Autumn (50s): Oh shoot. I'm there for a big good or just coming up with great opener on the fly. I'm not a stage show a actor, actress.
Jesper (1m 0s): No, no. And I get distracted because, uh, when a hour intro narrator, there is a saying the intro, I was a, I got distracted because I was thinking about recently we got a transcription service to do a transcripts of every single podcast episode. Yeah. Well, yeah, but a bit, I got distracted because every time he sees he is now says my name and that intro, I can't help thinking about how the AI is going to get it wrong because I edited an upload it all the past transcripts of all of the past episodes over the last like week or something, or at least half of the actual to get my half.
Jesper (1m 46s): But I did have a baby. Yeah. Yeah. But every single time the AI comes up with a new variation of how to do my name. That's what's amazing is, is different every time. It's the closest I've seen it. He does a Yesper with a Y, which I thought, okay, that's a pretty close.
Autumn (2m 5s): But once I was, Hey dude, I was like, that's exactly so weird, so I got distracted about that. You weren't paying attention because you were like, what are you good at saying that about my name now? And it always spells mine incorrectly in lowercase and I was just like, yeah. And then also a Burt with an E every time it's a bit of an eye. Yes. Always a, you know, or at least I guess or at least it comes out a little bit closer than yours. But do you think, I wish we could train it to at least get our names right.
Autumn (2m 38s): That'd be fantastic. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, how are things? Things are going good. I'm, I'm slowly starting to enjoy, um, the cabin now that the major constructions done. I won't say we're not doing anything, but it's, we're an unfinished work. So like today I painted the door is a very exciting, you were building, you know, the whole rooms and I had to paint a door so it was so easy and it was a gorgeous day. We've had beautiful weather in the sixties if your on the Fahrenheit, so you have in the twenties and Celsius.
Autumn (3m 13s): So it's quite lovely, nice weather. And I'm getting myself, I'm finally organised. A long time ago I took a leadership course and it's funny how many times I actually refer back to this course. It was an 18 month course. Um, I've even written blog posts because I learned so quickly that if you put 13 would be leaders in a room together, you on a quest group or you got 13 people who want to go on a quest together.
Autumn (3m 43s): It does not work out well. You can't have 13 different heads and one body. But one of the things I learned was time management. And I finally know that I have this mental and physical space to do something other than built an entire building that I'm living in it in a core team, a pandemic. Um, I've, I've started doing some time management and I got out my book and one of my favorite things was writing down your to do list, not just like a massive to do list, but based on your roles.
Autumn (4m 19s): So I have, I broke up all my to do's into like Am, Writing, Fantasy or Writing or graphic design. And then I have little things under each of them. So that way you keep everything going because you're not just this massive list. You'll want to make sure that you get at least something done on everything. I even have stretch goals. They aren't, the only thing I didn't put in was Am like relaxed goals. I think maybe I want to work on a relaxed skull or a me time. I should add a meal goal tonight. And how much rewards for yourself when you get things done?
Autumn (4m 52s): That's to me checking it off. I am such a Ferguson that isn't that horrible. Um, no, I, I'm, I'm very similar. I just love it when I can click done on something, then it's just like, yes, we're post to a sad, that way we can have a lot. So you have my, my reward is crossing things off and usually the stretch goal is something fun. Like right now, uh, you and I, we're talking about doing trailers for the last week. Um, and I put on my, my stretch goal is to finally get working on the trailer for my series.
Autumn (5m 24s): So that's my, that's my, I really want to work on this fine time to work on this project or maybe one after you. It's like, yeah and you got to just push everything aside and say like I'm doing this because I want to do this. So how are things, I know you had a house showing in, you wouldn't tell me before the podcast. How so I'm dying of curiosity. Well yeah so we have the, you know as we talked about before I mentioned before, we are in the process of trying to to shell out easy, that's for sure.
Autumn (5m 57s): Pandemic does not
Jesper (5m 58s): help. And well actually that was the funny thing because I talked to the real estate agent and he said and get this, he said it is insanely busy now. You said we're working like 70 hours a week. He said wow, that's crazy. So I think it's because people just have more time on their hands now that they have with the pandemic. So they, they've, they're doing their house shopping now and looking on the internet and say Oh lets go and look at that house in this house. Or maybe this is sitting at their own house going, I hate this place, let's sell it.
Jesper (6m 33s): No, or maybe it's just been, you know, they've been talking about moving for quite a while and then they think, okay, let's do it now. But um, but yeah, so and so they are pretty basic. So we have the one showing a, what is it, a one and a half or two weeks back. Yeah. We had a, it was like Am slightly, well, younger couple of other sounds. I sound so old when I say that. They don't say that I have a lot of, then you buy a couple of years.
Jesper (7m 4s): So it's so funny. Yeah. Okay. Let's maybe like 10 years younger than us or something that you could say that's quite yet. Um, they, uh, pregnant with our first child so I can sort of recognize ourself. Um, and uh, they, they have been out How shopping I think for a while because it sounded like they came back. Ah, as I mentioned in the past, I have to show, we dropped the price a hundred thousand Danish crowns recently, so that helped.
Jesper (7m 34s): Apparently. So they come back and they had a viewing and a half a week back and then a couple of days later the real estate agent called and said, uh, can we get a second viewing? Because they would like to come back and see it again. So of course, yes, of course you can. That's a, that's a good sign. Um, and then at the same time they wanted to see another house on this street that, that real estate In also have an Asian also has for sale.
Jesper (8m 5s): So they wanted to see both of them because they wanted something to compare with. And a, they went and saw, the other one is like 200,000 things crunch more expensive than ours. It's also slightly bigger. I think it has one more room or something. Then hours, if I remember correctly. And I might be wrong on that, but nevertheless, they went there to get a bit of comparison, uh, or perspective. And uh, they were supposed to come here something like half past two that day or something and he'd called 20 minutes early and say, how can we come over now?
Jesper (8m 38s): And that was like, what? Well, yeah, will be out of the house in 10 minutes, so then you can come and But. And I said to him, well, that was quick. Once you're suppose to be a bit, spend the least a half an hour over a day or something. Yeah. And they say, yeah, yeah, but they're not that interested in this house or you just want to to see it. So, okay. So they came over to hours and then of course a, we were of course not here. So when I talked to a real estate agent afterwards, he said that the first thing that the lady there said when they entered the house or our house was just like, yeah, let's see what I mean.
Jesper (9m 14s): You know, you're getting a much, much more, how's for your money here? The other one, this is one of the first things you said. So that was good. Yeah. Uh, and a, they had, they had their mother with them. I don't know if it's the man or woman's mother, I don't know. But one of the two, um, and she was also praising the house and saying, yeah, this is a really good price. You're getting a lot of, a lot for your money here. Of course we did also just drop the prices I mentioned.
Jesper (9m 44s): So I'm sure that helps. Um, and uh, they were basically just this is the real estate on set. He said that the basic, they were just talking only about the things that they liked. I mean there was no critical questions. There was nothing. There was just saying all the things that they like. Um, so, so that, that was good. Yeah. They have an apartment inside Copenhagen, a two room apartment that do you need to sell? So first, um, so he, and then Mike, who do you, you can buy a house on condition that you sell your own first.
Jesper (10m 18s): Uh, so basically you do all the papers and all the, you basically sell the house but no money is transferred until they have sold their apartment. And then there was a time limit time limit on a contract. Like that a, so that they will expire at some point if they haven't sold within, normally it's like six months. So if they have them sold their place in six months, then the contract is either you can extend it or you can basically rip it apart then and say, okay, that's it. Um, that's interesting. Yeah. And then the only way around that is still that.
Jesper (10m 51s): So if somebody comes while you sign the conditional contract, if somebody then comes and say, well we would like to buy the house and if they don't have any condition, they can actually buy it even though the other contract exists. So they basically overwrite that contract and then they just buy it. And then the ones who were supposed to buy it on there, that signed a conditional contract. Well that's just bad luck. Yeah. So that's kind of how it works here. So he was, the real estate didn't was a, he was supposed to talk to them over the weekend, but I haven't heard back from him today.
Jesper (11m 27s): So now I don't know.
Autumn (11m 30s): They don't know what they're thinking. Oh no. Okay. Well, you know, you can't make me wait until next Monday to find out if you want to do, if you find out this is what you have to let me know.
Jesper (11m 41s): Yeah, yeah I will. But we'll see. I mean all in all it sounds like they're very positive and then their parents live down here on, on in the same city here so, and they live in Copenhagen, which is like 50 kilometers away so, and now she's six months pregnant, the lady. So I'm sure that they want to get down here close to the parents. Right. So I bet. Yeah. And then according to what they have told the real estate agent, they are not looking at any other houses or anything in this area is only our house that their looking at it that it should really happen.
Jesper (12m 19s): I hope. But let's, let's see. Let's get on the internet with the Am Writing Fantasy podcast.
Autumn (12m 29s): It's all right. So Autumn we doubled down over these past few weeks and we actually put a shot cost together, didn't we? We did. It was amazing that we've gone from, it seems like we have all these projects that we've been working on for ages and we just decided to throw another project in there and get it done in like two weeks was crazy. I don't know what we're doing sometimes other than making tasks that we can cross off. Well actually now do you say to me that was like such a conscious leader, let's do something where we can tick off because all of the other projects we're having, we have a huge like world-building course that we were moving forward on that.
Autumn (13m 10s): But it's a big, we have a free course that quite a lot of effort. We have a course on email list building, which is also a lot of effort. So there are so many things. Maybe it's this like subconscious place. You are saying let's do something where we can get it done. Exactly. I think there might have been just like, we've went on a win, so we did a win and it was awesome. So it was good. Yeah. Yeah. So it turned out, uh, I counted the minutes. So there was 86 minutes of guidance on the key methods to create fantastic characters in that course.
Autumn (13m 45s): It is six modules long until you decided to add a bonus module Autumn in the seven months long that it needed just a little bit more, but it wasn't enough for a whole nother module. So it's just a little short bonus. Yeah. Yeah. So basically it covers eight Character archetypes that every writer need to know. We talk about understanding Character motivation. We also discussed what comes first plodding or character development.
Autumn (14m 16s): There is guidelines on point of view characters. We go into character arcs and explain how those works. And then you have a bonus module Autumn it's about breathing life into characters. So really bringing out their personality and making, it's a, you know, given that little spice of life that sometimes all of the Character lists and interviews and sheets and bubble charts just seem to lack. Yeah. So that there's a lot of good stuff like their, so as you said, 86 minutes a week.
Autumn (14m 50s): It's, it's rather quick and easy to go through. So it's not like it won't demand hours and hours and hours from YouTube to, to uh, to, you know, get those key methods, get those key learnings. Its quite, quite easy in undemanding. It is. Yeah. Compact. Yeah, that's a good word. And it's also fairly cheap. Yes we do because it is a short course what we decided to make this one, I mean that came out or something out of the pandemic and quarantine to help writers, uh, you know, R group voted on it and this is what they want to do.
Autumn (15m 24s): We have a special preregistration at a discount but even at full price we are selling it for only $47 because it is a short course and because it is there, you know, as part of something you can do now to keep your writing and advance your skills while you're sitting at home and waiting for the world to restart at some point soon it sounds like. Yeah. So the course is available right now and I will put a link in the show notes from where you can get access to it.
Jesper (15m 58s): Um, and there is also a, as we always do Autumn we have a 30 day money back guarantee and a well it's very rare that anybody takes up on, up us up on those guarantees there. But uh, but it has happened once in a while and when it does, we don't ask any questions, we just give you your refund and that's it. Quite easy. Very much.
Autumn (16m 31s): All right. Opening hooks. Prerecording we will, we actually started debating a bit. What do we mean about opening? There is a, it's what you're saying, there's opening hooks to the book, opening hooks to chapters. There's the opening hook to your blurb. Which hook are we hooking? Yes. Yeah. But I think that is actually a good place to stop just to finding a bit. What are we talking about when we're saying opening hook?
Autumn (17m 2s): Absolutely. So we decided after a brief, Oh shoot, what are we talking about today on the podcast? Um, that we're so professional podcasts, this is amazing. We can handle the stress as well as our students. We just did a student Q and a before this as well. And we are good at answering questions on the fly so you can not push us off our purchase of what we know, what we're talking about. We said what we decided, we're talking about the opening of books. So this hook is literally hooking readers so that when you have someone to open up se like the sample, read a sample on Amazon to see what's inside that basically you grab them.
Autumn (17m 42s): So they're like, yeah, I'm buying this. I want to see what happens next. So that's the opening hook we're talking about for today. Yeah. So it's things like when you have a story should take you, it's beginning. It is how to capture a reader's attention. And a, I guess maybe we could also touch a bit on how much detail you should include in the beginning. Uh, absolutely. How it goes. Yeah. And if not right now, as we were talking before, we actually have a booklet on novel beginnings and what should be in there.
Autumn (18m 15s): So if you don't quite cover everything, they can always go to the AmWritingFantasy website and will have that in the show notes as well. And purchase the booklet is only a few dollars and get anything that we might miss today because you know, Podcast we're not going to try to do what we did last week, which was over an hour because that was the book launch a podcast and it was huge because book launches are a huge, yeah. If it was more than I actually thought initially it was just like there was so much to say, then we could have split into two.
Autumn (18m 49s): But I sometimes think it's good not to make people wait, get it all over with at once and yeah, all the steps. So whether we start with this, do you think, what were, what is the best place to start? Autumn well, I think, um, I always, I always go with the cliches are the things that you hear thrown about and I like to dissect them. And one of the things you hear when you're writing is start with action. And so that is true. That is a good hook because you kind of grabbed the reader and takes them with you as you're about to do something the way the character should be doing something.
Autumn (19m 26s): But what does that actually mean to say start with action and also what does it not mean? And that's one of my favorites because I do, especially teaching students, Oh my goodness. I think over 50% of students start their first sentence with something about the weather. And it's that whole, it was a dark and stormy night. So starting with action is not starting with what the weather. Nobody is tricky because starting with action is also not starting to see because there's also the other way where you're starting with, lets say some somebody is chasing somebody's right and when you start reading, if you have no clue who's chasing who is it?
Autumn (20m 10s): The Character. Yeah. You don't need to get to know which one are you supposed to care about and yeah, where are you in so many questions right there. It reminds me of that awesome scene in the movie memento where, where, where he a, he keeps forgetting. So he's running and then he's like, he looks, I can't remember if he's looking behind. I think he's looking behind himself. Yes. And then there's somebody's running as well. And he was the one he's starting to, to speculate weight.
Jesper (20m 42s): Am I chasing him on me? And it's just so, it's such an awesome scene. And then he turns and the guy's pulls a gun and shoots at him and he's okay. This isn't me. But it is true. I mean, as a reader you are basic. If it's not, if you were talking about book one, have a series or a standalone book. So we're just going to talk about the opening hooks for something that is brand new to the reader, doesn't know anything except if they took the time to write, read the blurb, which they probably did before picking either purchasing the book or opening it up to see what happens in that first page to see if it's an interesting.
Autumn (21m 15s): And so yeah, if you're throwing a reader into a situation, and so yes. What kind of action do you want to start with the action where someone is a gunshot or since we're talking about Fantasy you know magic the Dragon's about to eat them wear. Do you want to start with action so that the reader is not overwhelmed going I am so a loss. I do not know what's happening. And I think one of the best ways of keeping things clear is maybe starting with action but not having it to the chase scene.
Autumn (21m 49s): Having it as a one Character action and I always liked to keep it as something small. It could be as small as being purposeful, you know a drive to go somewhere too. I know in mine is the character has looking for someone my first book and born of water. So the action is she is sneaking out of a place so that she can go find something is very simple one Character something is going on. It's kind of building the curiosity and I think that's really going to be the key that we talk about today is all you want to do with the goal of every sentence is to keep, make the case, the reader want to read the next sentence to see what happens.
Autumn (22m 31s): And you keep doing that long enough there going to want to read the whole book. Yeah. And I think this will, uh, on a slightly personal note, because there is also, especially when we're dealing with Fantasy here, there is also the Am the thing about sharing a lot about the setting, uh, you, you mentioned the whether before, but in Fantasy especially you can be like, OK, so they entering this Elvyn Citi and then there was like half a page on, you know, why the city looks like this or why people are behaving like this.
Autumn (23m 12s): And then the history of that building over a year there was demolished and they have left it demolished as a reminder how evil the enemies AR or whatever, you know, all that kind of thing. And it is so easy to do when Writing Fantasy and because if I had to write my first book today or at the beginning of my first book, I think overall it's a good book, but at the beginning of the book does suffer from this. There's to much of setting description in the beginning of it.
Autumn (23m 43s): And of course again that was my first book. So you live and you, but
Jesper (23m 46s): uh, but there was too much setting description and they have had some people or readers pointing it out and pointing out How also there was too many names in the beginning. Uh, so yeah, so they are, they should have lost a bit of track on who is important and what, what am I supposed to, who am I supposed to route for? Basically that that's what they need to know in the beginning. They need to clearly understand, okay, this is the character that I'm supposed to root for.
Jesper (24m 17s): This is a par apparently the hero or the Heron. So and they, they are doing something, you know, and they're not, I think we need to define action in a bit of a broader context. So action just means that they are proactively doing something. It doesn't mean action in terms of their short fights or being shot or anything like that. If you do it right away or if you do it carefully, it could be something like that.
Jesper (24m 47s): It's, I'm not saying that you cannot never open a book where some sort of fight or what is going on or whatever or you could do that, but it's a bit more difficult. But I think actually it needs to be defined more broadly as it's just a proactive action taking by the protector.
Autumn (25m 5s): Right. And so it's almost like a purpose. You have something going on and then if it was your day to day life, it is, you're searching for your keys. Something is happening. But yeah, it doesn't have to be a chase scene or fleeing from a dragon. It doesn't have to be huge. And I definitely agree description from the world. I mean in the world, especially in Fantasy is almost like another character. It is so important. It's as important as the magic. It's, it's just these are our two pillars of what Fantasy really is.
Autumn (25m 38s): That it has magic and it has this amazing setting with amazing creatures, but when it comes to just those, especially that first page, you want to pair it down to just almost like Writing a flash fiction short story. Just the details to make it interesting. Just the details to layer in curiosity that there is more. You get the flavors, the hints that there's a whole world. There's a whole importance of why these things are there. You might mention that there's, I can't mention the tower that have been ruined so that you might mention there's a ruin tower, but not explain why or where it is.
Autumn (26m 14s): Chickens explain that later. You have a hundred thousand words to explain what you're setting up and these first few paragraphs, but if you can get the reader passes for the first few paragraphs so you won't get the chance to explain it all. So those first ones to me is I had a poetry writing class and this is really almost the essence of poetry writing is you pair it down to just the essence. You need to convey what you're trying to get across and what should be getting across as who is the main Character a little flavor of the world.
Autumn (26m 48s): Something happening, something curious, intriguing, something that is going to make reader go, what is going on with that? Go with going like, Oh my God, there's so much stuff going on. I don't know what's going on but go, Oh there is something. Why are they doing this? What's going on? Why? As you know, what is the story of this? They want to be curious why their doing things without explaining anything about what they're doing. Anything cause you can explain later. Yeah, about the world building as well. It's, it's, it's such a big part of, of the Shanghai of course.
Autumn (27m 22s): But I think for a lot of us, a lot of us Fantasy writers, we write Fantasy because we also love the world building. And hence it becomes very easy to say in a way to want in the beginning of the book to share some of that because we feel this need to, well the reader won't really understand why, you know, this elf hae that dwarf over there and less. I also explain that to a hundred years ago they, there was a war between the two racism and, well that might be some truth to that.
Autumn (27m 55s): But the thing is also as you should, you set that you have an entire book to share those things so you can go quite easily in the beginning and then over time seed In preferably of course in, in, in action or in dialog about what happened. That would be best. But I picked out as an example as well because I think it sort of cements the point that I'm making here in the, uh, I can't remember exactly if the book is the same thing, but this is a, at least from the movie where Gandel first enters the Shire and the Frodo accuses him of being late.
Autumn (28m 35s): Do you remember what Gandalf replies? Oh shoot, I don't, uh, I need to, I should almost try to have a really good voice, but if I can do a good, that doesn't sound like an assumption. Like an evil wizard. No, but he says a wizard is never late, nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means too. And I think that is so excellent because within that one line of dialogue, we now know, aha, okay, this guy's a visit a, a wizard.
Autumn (29m 14s): And um, he is, he's come to visit for whatever reason, we don't even know why yet. And that's the curiosity part that Autumn was just talking about. Right? Right. Uh, about why is he coming here? What, what's gonna happen. Oh, OK. With it. Oh, that's pretty cool. As a defense as you read it, but you don't need to do more with. The other part could have been to start saying, well Frodo was a Hobbit and there was a wizard called Gandalf and he was really looking forward for Gandalf to arrive later today, blah,
Jesper (29m 42s): blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. You got to wait to see you now I'm all already into info dumping and then my next impulse could be try to explain how long ago Ghana last there and how he usually brings some fireworks and you know you started and it doesn't matter.
Autumn (29m 60s): No, no and you're, you're not, you're telling and not showing and I think that's one of the important things. And also I think not only that that line gives a sense of what kind of wizard Gandalf is and you get attitude with that and you want that as well. That is a huge opening hook. If you have a character that is sparks on page one where you get this attitude where you, you get a sense of who they are, that can be so interesting.
Autumn (30m 31s): You suddenly want to know more about this character or this person and so that's another great hook and by paring things down to really good dialogue, good action. You just in skipping all the description in like you were saying, explaining about the habits in what they are and fireworks and wizards by just not worrying all of that, not to go with them to do it in chapter five, don't do it now or or better yet. Don't say he wizards always bring fireworks, have them show him off.
Autumn (31m 4s): You know you want to definitely keep to the show, make the character's do things. Don't just sit there and tell the reader about the things that the character's could be doing. Let's just know. Don't do that here. Especially in the first pages key and keep your passive sentences to a minimum. They should be very good, tight verbs and things that are solid and happening.
Jesper (31m 30s): Yeah, that's true and a lot of this stuff that we're talking about here is of course also about meeting reader expectations and by delivering those young or old tropes that that read is expecting to, to be there. I mean in the, in the plotting book, uh, the, we jokingly set a, so I just picked it up, this quote from in there. So it goes like this quote, imagine a restaurant where the large red sign over the interest reading Chinese restaurant, you go inside and find the menu listing spare ribs and hamburgers with no traditional Chinese dishes on offer.
Jesper (32m 6s): Such a restaurant would have a hard time satisfying its customers in quote. Right? Very true. That's the same thing here for us. When, when Writing a Fantasy we need to deliver those Fantasy tropes because they opened a fantasy book just like we entered the Chinese restaurant in the hopes that we will find something with magic or fantastical creatures and all those kinds of things that we love from the shore. So we need to deliver some of that, but it doesn't mean that we have to start explaining.
Jesper (32m 40s): The dragons
Autumn (32m 40s): came from and How the dragon that actually assists exists in these lands are 1,454 years old and Am it's actually a rather young for her age. I have a dragon and so on. Uh, you know it. No. And then opening Koch, no thanks. No, no. It's a way to much. And even, I mean I look at that, we've had a discussion about prologues because of the book we're writing together and I definitely, I, I, we've pared it down to that we think a sentence or two is okay, but if as soon as you get two a paragraph or two or a prologue as too long, it's should be a good, a little spice.
Autumn (33m 21s): I love cooking and I've been cooking today. Sorry. So you're getting all the food analogies. Just a hint, a spice, something to get a little bit of seasoning, but you know, you need to keep it going towards the story. You shouldn't be explaining things. I know in the novel beginnings, this is sort of a, a good thing. If you had an opening line as the David possessing zip Brooks as a door, Caitlin grabbed a handful of bless at Mer. It's not explaining why Zeke is now possessed by a demon, which demon as possessing him, why he will more actually do anything or who blessed it.
Autumn (33m 57s): It's just things are happening. And that's fine. The rest will be revealed later. Those are the questions that the readers should have is like Y is Z possessed. Who is, what's the relationship there? Their just little curiosity things that you kind of want to find out what's going to happen next without getting buried under all the details of well, we got in trouble and what school are was doing an incantation and then think of that actually work and blah, blah blah.
Autumn (34m 28s): If you don't need to know what needs did you just to make that up. That's actually very from the a novel, um, the big novel beginnings booklet. Oh, right, right, right. Okay. That's my quote. Right, right. Cool. Yeah. There was, somebody is talking on in the Am Writing Fantasy Facebook group as well around a favorite opening lines on, of course, now I can't remember the exact date, but it was something like somebody said that the, what they like the most was some or something along these lines and I'm, I'm going to butcher it a bit, so sorry about that.
Autumn (35m 0s): But it was something like it's the 1st of June and somebody has to die today. Oh yes. Yes. And I can't, I can't think of the book that that one's from. But yes, God can be very good one. But that's a good start. Do you know, you'll be like, okay, this is interesting. Yes. And that was, and to me, I think we can talk about a good opening and a good hook, but I think if you're writing in your, in your manuscript, do not sit there and go over your chapter one again and again and again trying to get it down to your first perfect hook, write your manuscript and then come back and then start looking for the gem.
Autumn (35m 43s): I know when I wrote my debut novel, I actually cut three chapters. It took me, I had to write the whole thing out, do some editing, realized, tweak things and a whole bunch of other stuff. And then I started looking at the beginning saying where's this supposed to begin? And I realized I had three chapters of just drivel that I had a right to get out of my head and just cut it and it didn't lose a damn thing. And it actually improves a ton to suddenly just cut out the first bit, the explanation and start there.
Autumn (36m 15s): And I've read, you know, I've helped other authors, I've read some other things and I know what I think that was like the third paragraph in and it had a great opening line of, Oh I can't even find it now. But it was something like, you know, today Katelyn was going to join the, you know, or something of, Oh shoot, it was something bad too, you know, is she, you know, trader's or something and she was going to become a trader or something and that was just like, Oh, today Caitlin is going to become a trader.
Autumn (36m 48s): Oh that is, that's interesting. But it was buried like three or four paragraphs down. It's like we'll get rid of the other stuff. Start with that. That is, that's exciting. That is like wow, what's going on? And if you can find that, that's great. And most likely you have it. If you've written your book and you have your manuscript, it's in there. You just have to go and do, you know, sort through the hay. She defined the needle, you'll find it in there. But don't worry about starting your first draft, your manuscript with the perfect talk right first and then come back.
Autumn (37m 22s): And that's part of the editing is to find out where, where or you put it cause it's in there somewhere. Right.
Jesper (37m 28s): Yeah. That's a good point. I just want to pick up and do that in a second. But before I forget, I just wanted to mention as well that a, regarding the prologue AM we actually, or I or actually in the past record as a full video where I talk about how to write a killer prologue. So I will also add a link to that video in the show notes. And if anybody is curious about that than you can, it's on YouTube so you can go and check it out. Um, so it's, it's an older one, but a, the points in there is still good so that you can go on.
Jesper (38m 2s): What's that one if you want. But yeah, just coming back to what you were saying there, I think that there is a really, really important point around the tendency and I think most authors actually have a tendency to set the first chapter or the beginning of the book to early rather than too late. I agree. Um, we often start with all of the buildup. Uh, if I do my own example again, a win with my first book, the, the one, the first one I wrote there that I mentioned earlier and as well,
Autumn (38m 36s): I could actually have made it worse, but they, the beginning, because initially my plan was to start the book. And so the Character, uh, the, the, the protagonist, she is pregnant and they, uh, she and her husband to be, are going to the city a that they live quite far outside. They, they like this, it kind of ELs in a way, but then not elves, but kind of But. So they live in their own cabin probably like, I can't remember, I think it's like half a day's walk from the city.
Autumn (39m 11s): OK. In the forest. And they don't quite get along that well with, uh, with the people in the city or the protect. This doesn't, so that why they live out their, but they have to go and visit his parents to tell her to tell them about the fact that she's pregnant. And my initial thinking was because you always hear this, um, advice out there about you should show the Character in their everyday life in the beginning. And when I first started out I thought, Oh, okay. So I'll put them in this cabin out there in the woods.
Autumn (39m 42s): They can just be cooking some food or breakfast or something before they have to leave to go to the city. And luckily enough, I caught myself there and I thought, but how is that interesting? You know, so, so, okay. So I've got to have an opening chapter with people eating food and saying, okay, how are you ready to go? Yeah, I'll get my things. And it's just so important. Yes, there's definitely a tendency, I agree that um, we want to start, sometimes we need it to get ourselves into the story as authors, but I definitely think it's something that you can go back and cut because it's got to be, it's got to be at least enough of a Mo.
Autumn (40m 21s): It was going to be an everyday life thing, but its also got to be a movement and something happening is something that's going to tie two like the inciting incident and the plot that's already got to be kind of bubbling up. And like we said, the Character has got to be fully fleshed out. Maybe you don't know your character that well. And so you know, in our Character course we talk about making sure your Character is really solid and vivid and then fully formed so that when you start even that first sentence, that attitude that something comes through that is gripping and really engaging for the reader to say, Oh you know, you're, there is no fuzzy greatness in this character.
Autumn (40m 57s): This character is pretty much a solid 3d and colored. If it weren't good to go. Yeah. Because that's the other part of it, you and, and that's what you were alluding at them as well you see, you can also start the story or two late. So this stuff is really not that easy. You know, you can start to earlier, you could start too late because if you're starting too late, the problem is that you might be confusing the intro with the inciting incident. Right? And that's not the point either. So you can not start so late that you all may already into the inciting incident because that's sort of skews the entire plot structure of the novel.
Autumn (41m 33s): So that's not going to work
Jesper (41m 34s): either. So I think that the way we describe it in our applauding book is basically thing as the introduction, as thought of a mini story on his own. So it's like a bridge that reaches from the first page and towards the inciting incident. So it's this little mini story where something will happen that will then take you towards that inciting incident in an interesting way that peaks the reader's curiosity along the way.
Jesper (42m 9s): And that's, that's really the trick of it is to make sure that one, you keep the curiosity going, but also that you have a clear goal in mind and with the ministry that gives you that goal. So there, there is something specific happening there. I'm in in just to use that one book again or my first book, this is an example again because now I already started it so I'm just working but a are for example, I actually have a sort of a little mini story in there in that once they get into the city that I mentioned before, I'm there in the city, they all live a day, they have platforms.
Jesper (42m 49s): I'm in the tree like quite far above the forest bet and they, they are there. Are they having this festival? Well on this point in time they get there and the kids running around up there and whatnot and at some point as a kid actually falls off the platform and the protagonist then jumps off the platform as well and safe the kit. But she's of course pregnant. So that's not a good thing to do. And they fall all the way down to the ground. And ah, there you see there was a little mini story.
Jesper (43m 21s): They were right,
Autumn (43m 21s): right? Yeah. I always like to say the, the mini story, the conclusion of the mini story, whatever a plot that is, is basically the inciting incident, whatever the characters trying to do in, in your example, you know, save the kid, it turns out wrong. And that is what basically sparks the inciting incident. So it's all related. It, it builds into the plot. And mine is like I mentioned, the main character is sneaking out to see a girl with magic that she had For, you know, didn't get a chance to grab earlier because that's her job as a priestess.
Autumn (43m 57s): She's supposed to collect other potentials to be taken in to the elemental church. And so she just didn't do it early. She froze, she's young, she froze, she didn't do it. So she's trying to rectify her mistake and that's all the whole mini story is basically trying to rectify a mistake. But of course when she gets the girl, it all goes to crap. And that sparks the entire 105,000 word novel because her Vinny story goes wrong.
Autumn (44m 27s): And that's basically, that's a great way of showing the world, showing a full Character, showing a little bit of action without hitting your reader over the head with this plot in this world and all of this big stuff that they should care about it, but you haven't made them care about it yet. You, you shouldn't tell them to care about it. You should show them these are characters are really gonna like it. Show that in that little mini story and by the time their curiosity is hooked, the inciting incident happens and then they just have to know how the Character is going to survive this.
Autumn (44m 60s): Yeah. So writing the opening hook is a, well, it's much harder than it is. This is really what it is very often. What determines if the reader will dump the book or not? Unfortunately, they will make up their mind within a few pages and that's it. So we will cover this topic in much more detail on how exactly to build this ministry and what to think about, how to introduce the characters and all of that stuff in much more details in our guide book on how to plot a novel when that comes out in probably a few months time, I would say.
Autumn (45m 40s): Yeah, well we keep saying that will say, but a for now, or at least I hope you got a lot out of today's episode and the next Monday, if all goes according to plan, uh, the women, again, taking over the podcasts as, as autumn has a very awesome guests lined up for you.
Narrator (45m 59s): If you liked what you just heard, there is a few things you can do to support the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn in Jesper on patreon.com/amwritingfantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. Going to stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Maybe we should have made this two episodes because it is a doozy!
Jesper and Autumn cover a ton of tips and steps to launch your book, starting from 12 weeks out from your book release until 5 weeks after. After? Yes! Discover why there are actually steps to your book launch strategy that take place AFTER the actual release!
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Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
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Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from Writing Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them. Now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I am Jesper.
Autumn (31s): And I'm Autumn.
Jesper (31s): This is episode 72 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast and the topic of today's episode is book launches, and Autumn and I am going to share how we handle the launches of our books. And uh, you can basically feel free to copy as many of the steps that you want so when we go through it.
Autumn (54s): And definitely some tips on things I think we've tried in the past that you don't know if they're quite worth the effort anymore, but we'll get to those.
Jesper (1m 3s): Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, I mean, and, and I guess we could also say that there was a ton of ways you can do a book launches. We've put our list together based on all kinds of things that we've done throughout the years and that this is, this is a part of the, the master list that we arrived at. But uh, yeah, I will cover that step by step, uh, you know, in a, in a bit here.
Autumn (1m 28s): Absolutely. So how are things over on your side of the Atlantic?
Jesper (1m 36s): Well, well, to be honest, uh, it feels a bit tired today cause this morning was the first morning in quite a while where I had to get up early to take the kids to school.
Autumn (1m 50s): Oh that's right.
Jesper (1m 52s): Because why would there have been like everybody else in shelf quarantine for a long while now. Uh, but uh, he, in Denmark, things are slowly starting to return to normal, well, I guess normal in quotation marks, but the, the Corvette 19 pandemic a lot to everything down as we all know by now. But we are, we've started lifting. It's like we hear. So it happens to the stages here in, in, in Denmark. Um, and a, one of the first stages is to get kids back to school so that parents can start working again.
Jesper (2m 25s): Um, and, well actually our kids were supposed to go back to school a week ago, uh, but we kept them at home last week because we were, first of all, we as parents felt that it was a bit soon that they began opening things up again. And uh, we also had a conversation with the kid's at the lunch table, um, last week and asked them how they felt about, and they both said that they did not quite feel safe, so we decided together with them that they will stay at home another week.
Jesper (3m 0s): So, so that's what we did. So they started today. While there are friends started a week ago.
Autumn (3m 7s): That's some peer pressure, so they knew their friends were back in as everything waited a week and that they, you know, life, nothing blew up. I guess it's a good that they decided that they felt safe enough to go back to school.
Jesper (3m 20s): Well, yeah, we asked them all over the weekend how they felt about it in that they both said it well, the youngest said, yeah, I'm fine, I want to go back. But the oldest, it was more like, yeah, I'm still not quite feel comfortable with it, but on the other hand and you know, we'd talk to him and it's a sort of, I had a conversation around how you probably never feel entirely comfortable because you don't know what's what it is. Right. Right. You don't know what's going to happen when you get there and, and all those things. So, uh, but they went to school today and when I picked them up, they were both really happy, uh, that they went and so everything went well.
Jesper (3m 56s): But a, but actually also I wanted to misspeaking of Corona virus. Right. Uh, these days I would really, really, really prefer to stay far, far away from hospitals. Uh, but unfortunately actually have to take my youngest son there the other day. Oh, no. Yeah, he was driving his scooter outside. Um, and, uh, well he basically just, he fell, landed with his, uh, entire body with, on, on his elbow.
Jesper (4m 28s): So we were quite worried at his arm was broken. So we have to go to the hospital in the middle of these Corona virus days, which I really would like not answer to. Yeah. And I guess they were really busy. They're, because we spent the entire evening there, something like three, four hours to get to his shoulder or elbow. I meant, uh, x-rayed and looked over. But luckily enough, it was not broken up this morning. A couple of days later, he, he, you know, as I said, he went to school, he had no pains.
Jesper (5m 2s): Okay. So everything seems okay now. But yeah, this has been a bit of an interesting week. That's crazy. Well, I'm glad he's fine. That's not there. They keep saying now this is not the time to do something stupid and get yourself hurt. So well, I mean is it really don't want to go to the hospital, but, but what can you do a very true, yeah. And how is a everything on your side?
Jesper (5m 33s): We are fine. I finished my built in storage benches. We have cushions on order and so the major goals and major building projects of my little cabin are done and you know, I wanted to like finish it up over the weekend and then it was going to be, um, obviously we are working on a character development course is going to do some computers stuff, but it was going to be like I wanted to have that moment where you just stop and the sun shines in the window. Do you have a thought? Oh you know, it looks like it has done two and a half months of building and getting settled and I can finally put stuff away and get rid of the sawdust on the floor where I'm also living in such a filtering in place.
Jesper (6m 17s): And instead it was probably the more realistic version of two and a half months of building and living and sheltering and pandemic and want to adapt.
Autumn (6m 29s): So you can see why I think it finally hit me a nice still. I mean I feel very content and kind of calm, which is still lovely. I don't feel like there's this huge pressure to go, I got to do something, the show results. But I definitely still have that kind of like, yeah, I'm not in slow mode but I'm not in like let's get stuffed on it. I'm not, I'm not under a total drive. I'm going to sitting back on my heels going, yeah, I could have a beer. That's where I'm at.
Autumn (6m 59s): But I think, um, I think as I recover and you know, speaking every time I'd used, you know, we have skill cells and compound miters and all these things we've been using in jigsaw calls and every time I go to cut something, I always had that moment of be careful. Don't do something stupid. You don't want to go to the hospital. Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. We'll have those moments. But I've seen, I have, um, my right knuckle has been a little bit sore and I actually have a brace on my left arm cause I've a little bit of a, like a tennis elbow going on from something in my right shoulder hurts.
Autumn (7m 33s): It's like a joke. I can't open the door with my right arm and I can't pick up my teacup with the left arm and I'm like, that heals because I've been in, I did go through my upper birthday. I'm a year older officially, so I'm not a known for a spring chicken. I'm once my body catches up so she loves me a year younger, once a week once everything catches up and I'm feel a little bit better and I can just enjoy being very physically fit, I will probably just be a little bit happier and then I'll be so excited. I'll have my moment in the sun of Yes.
Autumn (8m 5s): I'll sit on a picnic table by the stream and the waterfall and I'll be like, this is good, this is good. But right now having a blankie, it's a good that you're going to hold it all the building stuff that, I mean you don't want me in chats of billing anything unless it's like a building, but I can build a world, but I can not build a cabin. We go on the internet with the Am Writing Fantasy Podcast.
Autumn (8m 36s): So that was quite a few good post in the Facebook group over the past few days. I don't know if you noticed that to know. I, my husband recently pointed out, he's like, I do this every day. He has been doing a climate log and actually weather forecasting everyday and observations about the woods. He's like, and you don't even go look at it. I'm like, no, because it's on Facebook. I have been on a Facebook diet, not on purpose, just I had to cut something out for a little bit and I've got that out. Right, right. I appreciate you and taking care of the group because I know it would, it would be a dead plant if I was in my household right now a little bit.
Jesper (9m 15s): Um, Luke is good at taking care of things as well for you, but there was a quite a few good, but I just picked a few here at just to mention because I thought they were really good. Um, so Linda posted in the Facebook group, uh, a picture of the For heart horseman of procrastination. I thought that was it.
Autumn (9m 37s): That's great. Uh, and, uh,
Jesper (9m 41s): there was also Jason, he finished his first draft of it for nearly a 150,000 words.
Autumn (9m 47s): Oh gosh, yes. We rolled on progress forever. I missed that. I have to go find his post now and say congratulations.
Jesper (9m 55s): Yeah, it's a so, so, so, so well done. So a, yeah, we just wanted to call you out Jason thing and congratulating you on, on that. Um, and we also have a Tony Join quite recently, I think it was only like two or three days, uh, ago, uh, since I let her in. Uh, well, of course when you listen to this, we were pre recording it at an event. So you have been a part of the group for a while by the time we listen to this town you, but uh, but she, um, she showed some interesting creating a shared world.
Jesper (10m 28s): Uh, so she was asking if somebody was interested in that, so that, that was pretty cool. That's really cool. Yeah. And at the quite similar as well. Alexandra's uh, he was looking for a coach, author, so that was also quite nice. And I don't know, maybe he should check out Episode 58 of the podcasts because we actually talked about how to find a co author or a writing partner in that Episode. So that was 58 but a lot of good, interesting conversations happening in the Facebook group.
Jesper (10m 60s): So a Yeti your list know if you haven't checked it are already and how we should show you can so just search for Am Writing Fantasy in the group section of Facebook and uh, you will find us.
Autumn (11m 10s): Yeah, I'm excited. I'm excited to get back into it because it's always so dynamic and interesting. It's just crazy to hear what's been going on. And like I haven't been on for a few days, I swear it's not in a full week, so that's just fantastic. Yeah, absolutely. I did like the fact though that we are, you know, at least people do track us down. Um, occasionally if there outside of Facebook. But I know Audrey sent us an email, she just recently joined the Writing list to Writing Tim list. And she had said that her biggest hurdle was in finishing a novella.
Autumn (11m 44s): And she was writing by inspiration where he got into a good conversation emailing back and forth about that, about, you know, how Writing basically I just read this great metaphor. We're writing is a muscle. It's sort of like, you know, it's something that you need to work on every day, not just because it's somebody who should work on everyday and then you build your schedule. It's like muscle memory. It's you build your stamina. So I just thought, yeah, that's my new metaphor and my new kick and the butt to my re my, my physical construction is done.
Autumn (12m 15s): So now I've got to get back to a word construction. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, it's, it's important to a, to keep doing it. Um, especially that the part about when you don't really feel like Writing that, but you still put the pot and the chair and go get it done.
Jesper (12m 32s): Right. Because, uh, you can always edit it later, but, but do the thing about all, because there are some habits stuff and this as well, you know, if you can train yourself into the habit of this is what I do, even if it's just like a 20 minutes or 15 minutes early in the morning before you have to go off to the day job or whatever. But getting into a habit of doing it, that really helps in the long run. Definitely.
Jesper (13m 3s): So a book launches, Oh this is something that a, a lot of people talk about quite often.
Autumn (13m 12s): Well, there are important, I know, and it's, I think a lot of people take two views of book launches and the one is that it is a life or death of a Book. You need to launch big and launched loud and get a ton of sales. And that's how you do it. And then I think there's other people who think it's a marathon and you launch the book and it should be celebrated because that was a big deal.
Jesper (13m 34s): But that is not the,
Autumn (13m 36s): and by far a finishing a book, you need to do a lot of marketing plans after that. But the book launches kind of like the first big marketing.
Jesper (13m 47s): Yeah, I agree. Of course its always nice to see if you can get a good book launch going so that you get an influx of cast. So when you release a new book that's so of course nice. But uh, I I I as well will you often hear is all the stories about the amazing book launches have a, I don't know what 50 a hundred K on whatever it is. People, I mean yeah fine. But I really don't think that that's a good way of looking at it. It's, it's, it's good to Launch wants the book well and of course you should put thought into it and do the best that you can but its, it is really not, it's not the end all.
Jesper (14m 27s): If, if the Launch is in the best one, it could be.
Autumn (14m 30s): No. But it is exciting if it does well enough and you get on the hot new release list on Amazon or even on the other one's bestseller. Those are exciting goals. But absolutely just because you don't get one, does it mean your book is not going to do well or sell a ton over its life?
Jesper (14m 47s): No. So basically as I said up at the top of episode, we've put together a Launch process that we basically are more or less use, uh, for launching all of our books. And that's what we want it to share here with the listeners today. Um, we sometimes we tweak a few of the steps here and they are a bit of course a, I think that should be the method of this episode as well so that basically people listening take from it what you can and what you want and ignore it.
Jesper (15m 18s): A rest. Right. And maybe maybe we are going to mention a few things she ended, it inspires you to do something that you hadn't thought about. And if we do that then I think that's a success enough for this episode. Sounds good to me. And I have a good, good caveat or this is what, how we were sharing. Yeah. So basically the way we do it is that we have an hour process divided into the big book launch starting 12 weeks ahead of launch and stopping five weeks after the launch.
Jesper (15m 51s): So you got to be the one to explain time Yes it'll be a a, I think this probably a few people are scratching their head saying but its a book launch. What do you have something that you are doing something about your Book lunch five weeks later. So this will be absolutely, but I think it will make sense once we go through all these different faces. Probably the easiest way to do this to also keep some structure in the conversation would be to take them by weeks. So basically saying okay a block first block being 12 weeks ahead of Launch do this and do that 10 weeks ahead of Launch do this and do that and so forth.
Jesper (16m 28s): And then we moved down the list until we get all the way down to five weeks after the launch. So I think that's the way that will keep some structured in place in a framework around in the conversation today. Sounds good. So Yes all right, 12 weeks prior to Launch you wanna start us off Yes so when we are 12 weeks before the launch, the you still have quite some good, you know, time your, you're willing to advance here.
Jesper (16m 58s): So this is a good time to reach out to some relevant influences. So this could be maybe bloggers or YouTube burgers or podcasters, but the main thing is that their audience needs to match your readers. So for example, it would make no sense to reach out to us asking to be interviewed on the Am Writing Fantasy podcasts about a thrill, a book that you have coming up, for example. It makes no sense. No, this is not the audience.
Jesper (17m 29s): Also, the focus of this podcast is to talk about writing and marketing for authors. It's not for readers. So you need to keep that in mind and try to find some sort of blogger or YouTube or a podcast or whatever it may be, who's a normal content is aligned with what your readers are watching or listening to or whatever it may be. Um, but at the same time, it's also not worth trying to get on to a hundred different podcasts Your or something like that.
Jesper (18m 3s): It was just Yes that stopped by fucking making a list of like 15 mid range influences because the top, the top influencers, it's impossible to get on their podcast without invitations and the very low level once you might be very easy to get on the podcast, but the other hand you're not going to get out of it because the, they are low range, 50 in mid range influence. That's a pretty good to start with. And um, and then you, you go from there.
Jesper (18m 35s): Um, yeah.
Autumn (18m 37s): No I think that's pretty good. Yeah, I think so too. I think it's important to remember that even though your reaching out to influencers by 12 weeks prior, you should be, I mean hopefully by now you've got your book cover. I like it in the book cover as well. I'm still writing a lot of authors due now because one is inspirational but you can start sharing social posts, trying to build your audience and keeping it up to date. So you 12 weeks out you should have your book cover and even if you're not sharing it, even you have for doing teasers, you should be doing some posts on social media.
Autumn (19m 9s): So generating, you know, getting people interested, letting people know about your book, what's coming out. Some of the world building your character is a, if you have a blog, these are the things that you should be doing right now to make sure that they are kind of getting on the vibe. I mean I remember, I know I've recently said this to someone that book launches used to be, you know, publishers would need a year to year and a half to generate all this stuff and the excitement about launching a book. But I think just like reader's are kind of expecting book's to be like coming out every month, which is probably not possible.
Autumn (19m 42s): But there's also, it's everything's more of a flash in the pan. And I think the lunch strategy, I think that's why we started at 12 weeks out is because if you do it too soon, six months before you publish, people are maybe a little less enthusiastic. It's kind of good to start building up that energy, you know, three months before you launched because that's more the timeframe for us to get enough people in your resources together and get people excited.
Jesper (20m 10s): Yeah, absolutely. And this is also then at the time where you upload your book to two different, uh, online retailers. So like Amazon and, and wherever else you want to tell you a book. Um, and at this point you are not, uh, which will make sense in, in, in a moment, but at this point you are not uploading the final version of the book. So this is like the, probably the, the edited version, I think at this point. That sort of leads to what we do. And so from our view of it is done but its not gonna be the final version.
Jesper (20m 44s): We'll get back to that. So you have uploaded there and then there was a whole debate that one can have around should you do pre-orders or should you not do preorders and there are long debates and views about is it better or worse for you, your Amazon author rankings if you do pre-orders or not and all of that. And basically we sort of circled when that whole conversation by saying because we have a 12 week slow burning building anticipation process in place yet we are doing preorders.
Jesper (21m 17s): Yes. And basically what are we saying is I don't care if it hurts the author ranking doing preorders who cares? Uh, I don't, so we are just building as a low anticipation over 12 weeks and hopefully uh, once we get down to the list, you, you will see how the stepping stones leads to some excitement.
Autumn (21m 37s): Yes. And a big tip that I never thought about until, I don't know it was probably, it's been a year or so now, but I never thought of it. When you upload this draft version or nearly finished version, you don't have to upload your final cover. So if you are planning something like a cover reveal or something later, you can do a placeholder image of just about, you know it, it should be something I like. I have a couple of, yeah, it should be a, I have a little scrap one that looks like an old antique book cover and so you can just do that with your title and upload that so that if you do have a big cover reveal something later, you can upload your fake version, your holding version on good reads on Amazon and your distributors is drafted digital Smashwords so you know, keep that in mind.
Autumn (22m 25s): If you want to be clever and do a big reveal later. You don't have to have the final version revealed to the public quite yet. That's such a good point of view just before but also 12 weeks ahead of launch. I wanted
Jesper (22m 40s): to say a few words about email, newsletter squash, but just before I get there, before I forget, Please if you are reaching out two podcasts as a speaking as a podcaster, could you please listen to a bit to those people's, uh, episodes before you reach out to them to understand what is this kind of show and at least do a bit of your own research to find out why am I a good match for their audience and what they normally do. Because, for example, on our podcast yet, we do not take pictures for people to come onto the podcast.
Jesper (23m 14s): We only invite people to come on AM. So once in a while, as you know, about once a month we'll have a guest on, but those are the only people that we have contacted because we want it to have a conversation with them. So sending pictures to people like us in a, I'm just using us an example here, but it's not gonna work. If you're trying to find 15 mid range influencers and you want to get on a podcast and you will never listen to it, even a single one of the episodes and you don't understand that this is not how they, they, they maybe they don't even do interviews at all.
Jesper (23m 48s): Right? So you just wasting your time. Right. So please do that. A bit of research before you start reaching out to people is so annoying and getting emails from people who clearly don't know what they are, what the podcast is about, and then they're making pictures for something that makes absolutely no sense. It's so unhealthy
Autumn (24m 5s): that I totally agree. Even with audience, somebody might look at ours and like, Oh, Fantasy I'm going to talk about a Fantasy book, but we're targeting Fantasy authors, not readers. So we do make sure you're not wasting your time and effort, um,
Jesper (24m 19s): bothering someone who you're not even the right target audience. Yeah. Okay. So let me move on to newsletter swaps. This is basically where your reaching out to another author saying, okay, can you feed your, my book in your newsletter? And then I will feature in your book, in my newsletter we talked about that on past Episode as well. Um, here I have to say that for Autumn and myself we don't really use email newsletter swaps. And the reason for that is when we are publishing out our books, you hear that I don't like featuring another author's book in our email unless I've read it and I just don't feel comfortable with doing that.
Jesper (25m 4s): Um, but if you do do newsletter swaps and if you do like to do that then uh, basically this, uh, 12 weeks prior to Launch is the, its a good time to get that organized. Find out who you want to do newsletter swaps with and a yeah and get yourself organized. Know why you still have a quite a while yet. And there are a lot of good places as a, in my private, my, my Writing individually last, I have done them in the past. So
Autumn (25m 32s): yeah, there are good Facebook groups. There's a story origins, which has a fantastic newsletter swap area and BookFunnel. It's more for group giveaways but sometimes you can find some swaps through there. So those are the two of them are good places to look. Right.
Jesper (25m 45s): And keep it John or a specific same as looking at influencers. Right. Good. So I think we can move on to the next Am bracket here. Which system 10 weeks ahead of launch. Absolutely. So,
Autumn (26m 1s): and I was going to say, so we've already talked about reaching out to people and what are the steps to reaching out and I think we might've might have mentioned, should have mentioned this sooner, but you could mention it here. It's, you should develop a media kit for your book. So it sounds so professional, but this is a great way of AM sending people. So if you are reaching out to influencers, especially instead of sending them a bulk load of material, especially if you happened to have a website, put up media kit and have everything, some blurbs, some excerpts, some images, uh, you know, all of the information, the way that it's going to be released.
Autumn (26m 37s): Is it going to be on sale? Are you going to have some reviews? Do you have some earlier reviews? Put it, all of that on some websites or a download or something and be able to direct people to it. It will save you so much time and money. Just just do that and have it ready to go by the time you either start contacting people are definitely by 10 weeks out.
Jesper (26m 58s): Oh yeah. And then this is also a good time once you are updating your website anyway, so put you a book on to your website and make links to those preorders everywhere that you have the book for sale. And of course use affiliate links when you are on your own website. You are well within the terms of service from, for example, Amazon that you allow us to take an Amazon affiliate link and put on your own website to your own Book so that if people buy your book through your own website, you are not only get the royalties For from the book, but you are also getting affiliate income royalties.
Jesper (27m 37s): So there's no reason not to do that. So make sure that that's what you do on your website.
Autumn (27m 41s): Yes. And a little tip there. A, Amazon's not the only one with affiliate links. Even Google has affiliate links now. So if you have books on Google play Yes, it will make sure that you get them from each of your places and it really make a difference. And so as you're setting up all of this information, a do a preorder alert for a BookBub anyway, this is a good time. You know, make sure your book is up there in places where people are going to start seeing it in that they know that it's going to be alert. You know, I'm on Smashwords and I can also do alerts.
Autumn (28m 11s): They're saying, Hey, new book's coming. You could preorder it,
Jesper (28m 15s): let people know. Yeah. And there's a few more things to set up as well here. 10 weeks ahead of launch. So you should also get it on to, well, I'm saying book funnel now. I guess you could use other things, but honestly BookFunnel is just as a such a cheap, an amazing service that there was no reason not to use it. So you get, you get, the book's set up on AM on BookFunnel. So this is basically going to be your ad copy or the act also means advanced readers copy.
Jesper (28m 46s): So this is basically the, the, the copy that you are going to ask you, a bunch of readers to read ahead of the actual launch that we're going to come back to that in a minute. But you upload that here, uh, to book funnel. And then you also add the Book on good reads if you have a profile there. Yes. Oh yeah. Yeah. And I would also, at this point in time, I will also start booking promotional sluts on different promotional sites, ah, for the launch week.
Jesper (29m 16s): Now that you are still ahead of time, so are, you should be able to snatch up those, uh, those times slots.
Autumn (29m 24s): And to me this is a good reason to do the preorder is because by having a preorder, you have a link and you can go ahead and book those promotions. If you're not doing a preorder, you can't do that until the book is live. Uh, it is just, yeah, you know that you're scrambling to try to get any last minute slots. And there's
Jesper (29m 42s): only like, there's only so many advertisers who will do something for a book launch. Where do you have no reviews and they're basically standing on other books you have out in your overall review as an author. So you want to show, you want to make sure that you got in with them as soon as you can. So 10 weeks. That was a good time for that. Yeah, indeed. So do we have more on this or should we move on to nine weeks ahead? I think that's a good, that's good.
Jesper (30m 12s): At 10 weeks, if you, if you said you were in building your media kit, still you've got plenty to do. Yeah. Well that was a, nobody set that book. Launches should be easy. You know, your running a publishing business and you're stinking a home, you're and a half a book launch into three to three months. You're gonna be on your toes. You thought you're a busy writing, wait till you trying to launch something while there is more work. Anything that you might think, at least if in my view if you want to do it right, but that's what we are.
Jesper (30m 42s): That's what we were going through here. Yes so nine weeks ahead of Launch. So now, um, and this one, this first one that I'm going to mention that this is not vital at all. It's completely optional basically. But if you want, you can create a book trailer at this point or a, some sort of video promoting the book. If it's not directly a book trailer, then it could be something else. It could be a video with some of the world building in it or a something related to the Book. Um, this is optional, but why I have it on here, it's not because book trailers or videos like this is not going to move a lot of book sales at all.
Jesper (31m 20s): But why I'm mentioning it is because it's quite nice to work with on Facebook ads because you can then retarget a, when you can set for Facebook to say, okay, everybody who watches at least a 50% of this video, I want to retalk it. And then you can use that as an audience once you get down to the day where the book goes live and retarget all of those people with, okay, the book is now out there. That's good to know that that's, that's quite a nice thing to do.
Jesper (31m 52s): Um, and that, that's more the benefit of the book trailer than anything else. It's not the portrayal itself, but it goes without saying. Obviously if you want to do this, it has to look professional. If it's like a subpar, a video that you upload, nobody's gonna think it's interesting. Okay. So there was that and it's, it's not easy to do. So it's something to consider. It is I still once a book trailer for my own books and have it done it yet because I really want something high end.
Jesper (32m 24s): No. Ken burns pictures panning to the left or right. I can't do it. So, um, I actually, I actually did one. Yeah, I did it. It's actually, it's on the Am Writing Fantasy YouTube channel. So if anybody's interested, interesting. You can go on there. But this is, so, this is like the do it yourself. The book trailer. Uh, I think it's okay. It's not the best top quality professional stuff, but I think it's okay. But I'll leave it for the listeners two jobs so you, you can let me know, just tweet me or something.
Jesper (32m 56s): Once you watch it, you know what you think. But, but there was one day that people can look at it, see what it looks like if they want.
Autumn (33m 2s): Yeah. But okay, so it still it nine weeks prior to the Launch I'm going to go and look at this now cause I don't think I have seen it there. So you have it. I don't think so. I've got to go look anyway, since we were off of that, it was a time if you are going to do cover reveals or a book title review or anything big, it's time to make sure that you're getting those scheduled at nine weeks out. One of the things I will say that you might, you know, book cover reveals are there used to be a big Facebook parties and things like that. And there, there, okay you gather a whole bunch of authors together and you'd maybe all give away free books or you do something and there's still events like that, but they become, instead of like hundreds of people, they've become a lot more cozy.
Autumn (33m 47s): Often you'll see almost like it's like an author's you invited and just a few readers, even the big ones. So you know, if you can narrow your sites down, you get maybe 20 or 30 readers. That's exciting. It's good enough. But you'll have to decide if it's worth it. And I'd almost say the same thing. Booking blog Torres, this is something that you would do about it now. And as sort of the same thing, blogs are kind of fading. It's video as much more important. So if you had to choose between like a cover reveal party, Book tours or approaching influencers, go for the influencers.
Autumn (34m 21s): Go for the video of the podcast format over going on Facebook and having something going on there.
Jesper (34m 29s): Yeah, I would agree with that. Um, and I think as well for the cover reveal indeed, I mean if you go back and read some old blogpost on the internet and whatnot, you will see that it's being hyped a lot and I think it worked quite well as a strategy a while back. But I don't think you can get you get nuts getting much mileage from cover reveals to today. But the reason that we still do the cover reveal and uh, at this point in time, nine weeks out is basically only because it gives you another excuse to email your readers about the book coming out there.
Jesper (35m 7s): There's a limit to how many times you can email them to say, Hey, the book is coming out now it's nine weeks and now its eight weeks and now it makes, it gets boring after awhile. And so this just gives you an excuse to email them again and remind them that the book is coming out and then you give them the cover as a cover reveal in that email. That's basically all I will. I mean, you can post it on social media as well. Why not? While you were at it, it's another reason to do a good book or a post on social media and Instagram. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, so do that. But, but it's not that the cover reveal will assault all of sudden turn it into a load of the pre-orders or something, but not at all.
Jesper (35m 43s): But, but it's, it's just a small building blood in the building. Anticipation castle that remit creating here. Yes. And don't forget though, if you do the cover reveal and you put up a temporary holding spot for your book on Amazon to go and AM put up your Real cover before it's too long, but it might be a good idea. Yeah. Yeah. But this is also then nine weeks out is also at a time where I will then set up this arch team. So basically you our advanced readers team, and this is pretty simple in the sense that you send out an email to your email list and you explain to them that you are looking for our team members and make sure that they understand what that means in the sense of what is it that you are expecting from them.
Jesper (36m 29s): So you are going to give them a free book, a of this upcoming novel, um, and you are going to give them the opportunity to read it for free. And it's a, it's, it's been through your editor already. So it's the, from your point of view is the final version or we all know how typos getting past everybody. So they are a job in return for getting to read this book for free. The job is to learn to let you know every time they see a typo or out or if something or as well is unclear in the explanations or in the text or whatever, then they should also let you know.
Jesper (37m 6s): But make sure that they understand that this is what they need to do. And also let them know by what date you need the feedback. And that is not even their most important role. That's an important role. But really the key wonderful thing about having this arc team comes on lunch day. But that is part of the agreement Yes uh, we can have come back to you exactly. Well save that for the lunch day. Yeah. Okay. So that was nine weeks.
Jesper (37m 37s): 10 so we move into seven weeks ahead of launch. So you can see sometimes we're skipping two weeks. They're, it is not an error, it's on purpose. It's just because then you have enough time to go through all these steps. Right. So it's not because we can't a, we do math while we probably can't do that either. But that's not the reason because we figured you need a break for a week eight and you probably had a bit of homework to catch up on to get ready for week seven. Yeah, exactly. So seven to seven weeks ahead of launch.
Jesper (38m 7s): There's not too much here. Be honest. It's really going to get in touch with your arch team, making sure that you know everyone is up to speed, that they have gotten the book. If you've sent it out by now, it's always a toss up. It depends on how long your book is. You want it to be pretty close to your Launch day that they are finishing. It is, but you don't want it. You know, if you don't want to have to have finished it a month before and then by a long time launch day comes, they're like, Oh right, I'm supposed to do something else. You want them to be engaged and excited.
Jesper (38m 39s): So I know when I do mine, AM sent out my Launch team Book it's within the last month or so. It might be a little early to send it out now, but it depends on your book and who you have recruited and also how many people you have recruited. It's good to good to have enough people. You know, there is nothing wrong with having a hundred people who want to read your book and will help you out on lunch day. But you also have to figure is that too many of you have to decide what you need for your group.
Jesper (39m 10s): Yeah, I think that that part depends a lot on what it is that you are asking for. If your asking for content feedback, then hundreds of people is too much. It's gotta take you forever to go through all of that content. But I mean, I don't mind when we send it out because we're, the only thing we asking for is typos for them to tell us the type of it. So I don't mind giving out 200 fee out copies. I don't mind at all. If 200 people can look through four and try to hunt for typos, they're going to catch probably 90% 99% of of the hours that are still there.
Jesper (39m 44s): And then you should be pretty clean after that. So, but the other thing as well as I wanted to mention by reaching out to you as a team here is again you were hunting for a bit of content that you can use in emails to read us again so you could, the arc team members probably haven't read the entire book by now, but at least they've been part partly through it at this point. There should at least, and so you can ask them to share some of their favorite quotes from so far with you because those quotes then again gives you an excuse to email your readers.
Jesper (40m 17s): Again, reminding them that they book is coming and giving them some of the quotes and you can basically tell them that these are the favorite quotes from the advanced reader team that they picked out for you. Just to tell them where it came from, that it's not something that you pulled out and because it also makes it more, well, it humanizes the process, right? It's not like, Oh, I picked the 10 quotes so I could send them to you, but it's rather like, no, I had a conversation with the art team. They liked these. So I just wanted to pass them onto you guys as well.
Jesper (40m 47s): Right. So that makes sense. And of course made sure to provide the link to the preorder in that email as well. So those who haven't pick up the book yet and do so. And you couldn't repeat the whole process on social media as well. Of course. Absolutely. And also a good tip too is if this is a book on a series a, it doesn't hurt to make sure that you have any of the previous books. You can have those on sale right now as well. So you might probably have one to two already get those scheduled. Maybe do some promotional advertising with those.
Jesper (41m 19s): But it's also good to, you know, get some funnels, some new readers into your series. If this is going to be another book in the same series. So if you want to get that stuff and make sure that you have that all going okay, so that wasn't much. So now you're not going to get two weeks' break. How are you going to get a one week? Break it down. Yeah, six weeks ahead of Launch. So here, this is the time to do something a bit different as well is that it's not unique in the sense that is not something that you never heard about before, but it's basically like an exclusive bonus.
Jesper (41m 54s): So you set it up as a release, a contest. Um, there was a million ways you could do this. Um, but basically the, the, the main idea of this is of course that you are going to create a deadline, meaning that people need to take action now because if they don't, they're going to miss out. That's what you were playing on here basically to get people to preorder the Book because if you don't, you are going to miss out on this very awesome bonus that you can't get and you can only get this bonus here and now.
Jesper (42m 25s): So once the bonus goes away, it's gone forever. So this has to be something that you are creating specifically for this book launch and that you are not going to offer anywhere else afterwards. So you create something and you create an opt in form for it, meaning that people, we'll have to deliver that email address to you so that you can communicate with them. And then of course the idea is that on one hand they should be more than willing to give you their email address because they are showing interest in the a bonus here that you are offering.
Jesper (42m 56s): But on the other hand, it then gives you the possibility to email them and not only tell them about the bonus and who you want it if it's like a contest or if everybody gets it. Then of course later on your you have to be able to email them with the actual bonus itself. Uh, but it also gives you the possibility to email these people wants to book launches and tell them, okay, it's now available, which is quite nice. Yes, definitely a very good, definitely a good way to have that on your mailing list as well as get some more excitement going.
Jesper (43m 31s): Yes, and I should also mention in terms of ideas for what can you do as an exclusive bonus later this year, later in 2020 a Autumn and I should be releasing in a free course for you. And in that course that will actually be some ideas about this particular point about how you can run contests, but also what kind of ideas could you tell? What kind of things could you offer as a price? But the main point here for right now that I want you to take away is please, please, please help yourself by making sure it's something that you can deliver electronically.
Jesper (44m 10s): You don't want to be shipping something now, it's, I mean, maybe if you run one free book somewhere as a grand prize, but you don't want to do that for a whole bunch of people. You, you know, and it's much more exciting if everyone at least skits one thing, even if there was a grand grand prize, and I do, you want to make sure that you make it very clear in your rules that it has nothing to do with reviews. I, Amazon has very strict rules that you cannot buy. Give away is nothing can be done. You can never give a reviewer a prize or a payment.
Jesper (44m 43s): So make sure it's clear that it is literally for buying the book and supporting you, uh, but never give anyone anything for, I'm actually leaving a review other than the thank you because everything else, if Amazon finds out you were in touch, Oh you're a, you're at the Crick without a paddle. But it does say, yeah, that's correct that, but it even goes further than that because actually you cannot also run an exclusive bonus where your demanding people to buy the book either. That's not a lot.
Jesper (45m 13s): That's very true. So the only thing you can do is you can, this is what we're going to talk about this free course later in the year. Once we release it, then we're going to talk you through exactly how to do this. But the main idea is that you can say your chances of winning is significantly higher if you buy the book, which means that you can tell them, for example, so two, win this price. You need to tell me the first word in chapter 28 those are the things you can guess, you can say.
Jesper (45m 44s): I think it's a fine Maybe. Maybe you are wrong, maybe a REIT, but if you buy the book you probably have a better chance of winning. So that's how you can do it. But you cannot force them to buy the book, but it cannot be like you can only enter this contest if you're by the book. That's not allowed right there. Good. So we should be clear about that. But we got to explain that more in the course of that. Yes, yes. Let's move on. Okay. Oh, where, where are we? Where are we still in six weeks? Yes. If you have more for that bracket. Otherwise we can move on to five.
Jesper (46m 15s): I think we're on five. I think we're good. Cool. All right, so you already added the book to your own website previously. Uh, and what I really like, and this one is not something necessarily that everybody can do, but I can, because I have Autumn. So if you have your own version of Autumn out there that you can do this too but, but it's really a nice, if you could put at this point in time on your own website so the people can purchase directly from you here on the website.
Jesper (46m 50s): Oh this is such a cool tip because it gets to be so excited. Cause I guess in a computer geek group gurus runs in my family, um, you get to sell the book directly to readers, get a hundred percent of the profit and for the people buying from you, they get to get it early and it's just like win-win. Everyone's winning. I think my only warning is do check with your state laws. You might need a business license if your selling on your own website. So a big tip there. Otherwise you, I just think it's so exciting.
Jesper (47m 20s): You get, you're your own little book store and readers are getting in early and yes you might lose sales off of Amazon but readers are getting your Book early. So this was a good thing. But yes it is. And, and I think of course, unless you are enrolled in Kindle unlimited and Your on pre-order, then this is a no-go because then you are breaking the terms of service. But if you're not in Kindle unlimited or any exclusive exclusivity programs. So that was hard to say. But if you're not in any way, any such programs, then this is where I will then schedule an email already now to go out 10 days before the release date and here in that email tell you the email subscribers that you can get the Book already.
Jesper (48m 3s): Now if you buy it directly from this link so then you can point out to them how it actually supports you as Autumn was just explaining because you don't have to give, it gave a cut of the royalties to sites like Amazon. So basically you're telling them, Hey, as a surprise, surprise so you can get the book already now 10 days before everybody else and you are going to help me out by making sure that I get all the royalties, which you're a reader should be interested in. Absolutely. So that's a win win. Yeah.
Autumn (48m 33s): And it's, like I said, it's fun and it's not too much coating, but you definitely have to check it out. So that's all you have to do it. It can, especially in the first time through, it's a little bit to set up. So that's enough for you. You were five weeks out. Unless you have some spare time and you know you're you, you are closer, you get to Launch you, the more things are going to take your time and the more you want it you're going to get tired. So the more spare time, if you want to make some images, you know, start gathering stuff for a social media posts because you were one of the day you release the day before you release, your going to be willing to put up a whole bunch of different images, different quotes, different reviews as they come in.
Autumn (49m 15s): You want to make sure you have all of that stuff together. So start, make, you know, make yourself an electronic file and just dump images and ideas and stuff into it so that when you go to grab it, you have a whole bunch of stuff already there and you're not searching the web and getting frustrated because you just want to get it done now.
Jesper (49m 32s): Yeah. Yes. Yeah. So let's move on. Four weeks ahead of launch soon, a month out now. And uh, well this is basically where you can fall once you do your future self a favor. Cause normally it happens so that your past self is an asshole is not right. It's true. Yeah because isn't it a soda? Your past self is always the one who's thinking, yeah, yeah I can do that later. Then your future self is like, Oh why the hell did not take care of this?
Jesper (50m 6s): That's how it always worked. Right? So now you can flip that around and make you make your future self happy about the past self. And that's right. So schedule in an email again. Now two, go out to your email list. Seven days before the release date. And here you are going to tell them about that exclusive bonus that we just created. And your also going to tell them that this amazing book is available for preorder. Excellent. That's always useful.
Jesper (50m 36s): And again this is, you still want to make sure you're posting about your book out on social media. And again you don't get things organized to get things together, get quotes together as well. Just make sure you have a whole bunch of stuff to share so that you have it all ready at your fingertips so that you are your future self is so happy with you having it was a good way to put it, your organized because it's so much easier than trying to look for passages. Um, during release week you want to sit there and celebrate really a sweet Necco.
Jesper (51m 11s): I need to come up with 20 posts today in India. And to clarify, so you, you created the bonus itself six weeks ahead of launch and now we are at four weeks ahead of launch and I'm telling you to schedule an email only seven days before on. So basically why was it that we didn't just email people six weeks ahead of launch as soon as we create the exclusive post, and this is basically the reason for the that we don't email them is that we want to narrow the time window where they actually have the ability to get their hands on this bonus because the way people work and the way this goes and it is every single time without a fault, it is everybody only do what they need to do in the last second before the deadline expires.
Jesper (51m 58s): And that's just the way it is. It is. If you don't believe me, fine. But that's the way it is. If you don't leave us alone, go on to our Facebook groups and find the four horseman of procrastination. Yes. And so that's why you are only giving them a seven day window and you are saying by the end of this week this is going to go away and a puff of smoke, it's going to be gone forever so they have to take action. Now. It's not like if you email them and say, well sometimes within the next six weeks you need to look at this, they will forget about and not do it.
Jesper (52m 29s): So that's why that's very, okay. All right, so we're on two to three weeks. Three weeks now? Yes. All right, so that was a good time. You should be getting back, uh, messages from your arc team. Uh, if there were looking, hopefully again, and hopefully they were not doing content edits because that should have been beta reader is probably six months ago. So hopefully there's just some typos. There's going to be, typo is, trust me, there's always typos. You want to make sure that you have gathered those, you fix them and you don't upload every time someone gives you a type out, don't upload at the final version, save the, fix them all and a draft so that as you get closer, I think, what does that, Amazon's, what, three days?
Jesper (53m 9s): You can't upload anything prior to Launch. So when you were in that window right now, you still have three weeks. Keep gathering. Um, but make sure that you're fixing them on a master a manuscript so that you will be ready to upload it once you have all of them back. Yeah. Amen. That's it. Yeah. So once you have all the information back, are you up to update your files and upload the final version once you are ready? All right, so we can move to two weeks ahead of Launch. So this is where I really like to start collecting keywords for the future Amazon ads that are going to run towards this book.
Jesper (53m 44s): So basically start building up the list of keywords. Sounds good. And I will prefer tool For this is Publisher Rocket Yes that's an amazing piece of software and a way back when in episode 11 and matching that, that's a long time ago. But back then I talked about Publisher Rocket in that episode and then again in episode 32 we have Dave Chesson, he's the creator of Publisher Rocket. We had him on to talk about what you can do with Publisher Rocket and is one of my favorite tools.
Jesper (54m 16s): So we will include a link to Publisher Rocket in the show notes so you can check it out. And if you want, we don't, you know, affiliate, we don't, we're not even an affiliate with him but we don't push to me as well. Oh I forgot about that. All right, so we asked, we are, you know these things more than you keep it organized, but as we don't feel to share too many tools. This is a really great one, but Publisher rocket is a really great one. And I will also say a huge shutout shout out. It's not that I think he listens to our show, but Brian Cohen, I just took his five day AMS edge challenge and it was a ton of fun and I learned stuff and he made some great tips for finding keywords and categories and stuff as well.
Jesper (54m 56s): And he also mentioned publishers Rocket so those are a fun things. If you a join up with one of his challenges, you'll learn some great tips for getting more keywords as well. Yeah. Okay. One week ahead of Launch. Oh, are we getting to know? Yeah. So this is where I'll send another email to our list. And again, the purpose of this email is to build anticipation. Umm, so this could be the time where you and are using it as an extract of the actual book.
Jesper (55m 28s): Perhaps you could also email the entire first chapter to people with a to be continued at the end of it. Um, and once again, yes, you guessed it, don't forget to include links to the preorder. Absolutely. I always, I do this for my readers. I especially cause a, you know, I'm Writing at least 40 chapter books. I will give away the first three chapters with links at the end of even the three chapters of where to go get a preorder and I get that to all my reader's on my mailing list. Yes. And now that you were inside, you are emailing software and doing email's anyway.
Jesper (56m 2s): Then schedule and email as well to go out to your list at 6:00 AM am on launch day with the details about the book and all of the purchase links as well. Excellent. That's getting close. And so definitely at this point it's probably looking at where at one week Launch so you, you should have your final manuscript up
Autumn (56m 24s): and ready to upload your final version two, the channel's because if you wait to close to launch it again, that three day window for Amazon. After that you can't touch her Book file. If you have it uploaded your for a final version, guess what? They are going to get the not final version. So get yourself a few days at a deep breath and get your final book up there. Yeah, hopefully you're already done it by now, but at least at this point it's just the latest yet. This is what you need. The original definition have a deadline is a lion.
Autumn (56m 55s): You deduct CROs on pain of death. Am this is your deadline and get your book up there.
Jesper (57m 0s): Yeah. Okay. So we are heading into the final stretch here at a three days ahead of Launch. Uh, there is only a few things that I do here. So basically logging into Amazon author central to basically claim your book there. So there is a co, a tab in author central called Book top and you click on add more books there, find your niche, search for your name, find a book that you're publishing and click at it and then it will be visible on your author page on, on Amazon. So I'll do that. And, and the same thing if you have a book or a profile or a profile on a BookBub, then you go there and claim the book there as well.
Jesper (57m 36s): Yeah. And if you don't have it by now, make sure that you have good reads. Yes, yes, yes. And with BookBub AM do update all the Stallings on on your profile because that will automatically trick a book bub to send out and a new release alerts to your BookBub followers, which is, there is no reason not to do that.
Autumn (57m 56s): That's very true. All right, we're really close to Launch. So right before she out, don't forget, this is where you're going to check for reviews. You're going to make sure, make sure that you just create a reminder. So you go in and you're going to check for some reviews coming up so that you can look for them. Oh, you're going to actually use the good ones, the five star Wars and stuff. You wanna use those for two year tips. But I know you have some tips, don't you? For if you get any bad reviews, right?
Jesper (58m 29s): Well yeah well that the TEP is basically to make sure that you check that the bad reviews is within terms of service. So if somebody starts complaining about things that are not with in terms of service, which to be honest, we are going to cover a much more in the free cost. So maybe that's too much detailed to go in to hear. But make a long story short just to say that there are ways in which you can get Amazon to remove a bad review. Um, but I think there are all the details of that is not really related to launching.
Jesper (59m 0s): So maybe we can come back to that and in the free course I am going to explain it in detail there. Sounds good. Yeah. So all I will do here one day ahead of launch is just to send out an email to your list to say, Hey, it's coming tomorrow. Uh, and remind them as well that this is now the last chance to get that exclusive preorder a bonus. Excellent. It's Scott, that's a good tip. And this is probably the place where you are going to get most people.
Autumn (59m 27s): This is pretty and there always wait for the last bit. Yes. Um, but then so that's Launch exciting. All right. First are you going to wake up and you're going to toast yourself with a mimosa to celebrate? Don't forget to celebrate. This is a big, big day. No matter how many books you launch, it's always exciting to lunch a book. So, but also hopefully you already had a schedule, but you know, email your launch team because this is your arc team. This was the reason you gave away all those free copies.
Autumn (59m 59s): It was helpful to get the typos. Admittedly, they have saved my butt on more than one occasion, including the very careful reader who's did you mean this guy and not that one can. I can I tell you that
Jesper (1h 0m 10s): by the way, that it was once as well as the one of the arc team members came back to me and said, so why is half of this chapter in this book twice? Oh no. And I went and apparently once I got the edited version back from the editor, for some reason I, I can't remember what I have been doing, but I have been copying, pasting stuff for some reason and I forgot to delete my old original first draft version. So it had my first draft version of half of the chapter in there together with the editors.
Jesper (1h 0m 42s): Correct it. Luckily this person capture recorded and told me about it so I could delete it. But it was like Jesus. I mean if I hadn't, if the act team hadn't told me, I wouldn't have noticed.
Autumn (1h 0m 55s): Yeah. Uh, you know how your arch team members, they are lifesavers but the whole of the reason that they're really there and the reason you recruit them in the reason you vet them as well, which is important, you shouldn't just let everyone in it, especially if you've written a few books, is because on today the day you Book Launch you tell them, Hey, it's time for you to do your job and say thank you and leave a review. That's that sort of what the whole deal was.
Autumn (1h 1m 26s): They get to leave an honest review. That's the important key. You're not asking them for a good review or a bad review. It's
Jesper (1h 1m 33s): an honest, right. There is even more important key here because you need, this is where you need to be really careful and you also have to be careful how you are a word in your email because according to Amazon's, again in terms of service, you cannot give out an ad copy and demand a review in return. So the only thing you can do when you are wearing your email here is that you can appreciate it. Tell them how much you would appreciate it. If they would want to leave an honest review on a book, then it would really mean a lot to you and then you can of course explain how reviews means a lot to the success of a book and explain why it is important because most people actually even know we are authors.
Jesper (1h 2m 14s): We know why it's important, but a lot of readers don't. So you explain that to them and you can kindly ask them that. It would be really nice if they would want to do it, but you cannot say, I gave you an art copy. Now you need to give me a review. Because you knew that when you were breaking the terms of service. Absolutely. A very good tip because you don't wanna piss off of Amazon. No, no. It's weird. Most of the book sales come from so be nice to Amazon, follow their rules and Yes.
Jesper (1h 2m 44s): The reason you got an arc team together was hopefully to get, you know, if you had a hundred member team, if you get over 50 as you can get like 75 reviews, that's been stick a while. That's a little bit, but again, most the time, you know a year not going to get a hundred percent of people leaving reviews. Some people are going to be busy and they're not all gonna happen on the first day. I've most of the time, if they come within the first week, that's, that's great. Yeah. We again, we are going to talk more about this in the, in the free course. So now that's basically all you need to do on launch day.
Jesper (1h 3m 16s): So thankfully, thankfully, because we've been doing so much work ahead of monsters, so much to do now it's everything has been set up and everything is running. So that's nice. And then one day after launch I would just go in and start activating Amazon ads and if you want to do Facebook ads then this is also at the time where I would get those going. But that's basically it. And if you did do a preorder sale price, you know, you have to think about how many days you want to leave that going. But you might have some people change it after one day.
Jesper (1h 3m 47s): Some people leave it up for a week. But if you had a preorder, um, a special discount. Yeah. The book's live now that you might wanna think about changing that. Yeah. And of course that exclusive launch bonus thing that you did it, this is also a course of time now where you need to disable all of the signup forms for that and then start giving away the actual price. Absolutely. And now you will be really happy that it was something electronic. Yes. You can just hit send Yes.
Jesper (1h 4m 16s): Okay. Uh, so one week after launch, I would then send out a thank you email to the art team and you're not asking for anything in this email at all. You're basically just thanking them for us, for their involvement and what they've done for you. Because honestly, as we just said, these people are amazing. It helps so much. So we sent them a sincere thank you message. That's, I think that's a nice touch. Absolutely. I mean the arc team is often a made up of Your super fans are the ones that stick with you. I've been, I've had ones through like six book launches and you can't pay these people enough to know to be there and supportive and often a lot of them are happy to be a part of the team, so thank them.
Jesper (1h 4m 59s): That's all you can do. Okay. Two weeks after launce a I was just at this point go and check out. You're a good reach account if you have one and just see if the book has accumulated enough reviews on it. And if it has, then you can consider running a good wheat to give it away if you want. And if there's not enough reviews then maybe come back and check again later. Um, the one thing I do like about these good reviews, good reads, giveaways, even though they did crank up the prices for these are a while back to yeah.
Jesper (1h 5m 32s): But, but what I do like though is that it's, it has this sort of social amplification method in or trigger in it that, so once somebody enter the giveaway, it automatically, it has to Book add a two. They're want to read shells, but it also creates a story in the newsfeed for all their friends and followers to see Yes. So I do think that's quite nice, but of course for you to evaluate if you think it's worth the money and not, but um, it might be,
Autumn (1h 6m 2s): absolutely. I think there are exciting and fantastic. I was very disappointed when they raised the prices high as that you did, but yeah,
Jesper (1h 6m 8s): yeah, yeah. We won't go there. No. Okay. Three weeks off the Lance AM it's now too time too for another email to your list and this time it is also a thank you email and I think it's quite good to talk a bit about how the Launch has gone so far. And you could possibly include a screenshot of the Amazon reviews stats or something like that. Maybe the sales ranking, I don't know. Something because it could also be, you know, you could also do a screenshot or a short of a quote from good reviews or something.
Jesper (1h 6m 43s): But the point is just to give them some sort of social proof because they're will be some people on your list. And I'm also going to talk more about this in the free costs, but for whatever reason, or a third of your list never buys anything. I don't know why, but I don't know why they're on the list, but, but this is just the case. And uh, so by giving some of these people some social proof that other people actually liking the books that sometimes push some of them over the S and then they'll buy the book, uh, so it's good to, to collect those extra sales there.
Autumn (1h 7m 14s): Yes, very true. And I will say it's amazing how many people who are on your list and they, maybe they just don't read every episode, have read every thing, you know, email that you send them. But there's times that there'll be like six months, almost a year later. Oh, you published a book. So it definitely does not hurt even though you've sent all these emails off, pre-ordering and everything else. Say one more time, but you know, by the way it's live. Thank you for going and buying it. And if you haven't, you know, these are some of the early reviews.
Autumn (1h 7m 45s): Is it some of the reasons what the things people have said and you can go still pick up a copy.
Jesper (1h 7m 50s): Yes. Okay. Should we move on here? Four weeks after lunch. So we are almost there now. This is just after lunch. Steps yes. This is just the small little trick that I want to share. Um, so if you sent you our team another short email and you can just thank them once again for all the help that that's never in any harm to thank people a lot. But then while your doing that, also ask them if they read any of your other books and maybe they forgot to leave a review.
Jesper (1h 8m 23s): That's a good to know that this is the yes, just like a short little smart trick there to maybe collect some more reviews for some of your other books is exciting. Very excellent because yeah, reviews are a wonderful, I've noticed that, you know as my serious goes on as you would think that the reviews should go up, but they seemed to go down at the numbers of them are so good tip. Okay. Five weeks after lunch. This is the final one and this is basically similar to the week before, but this time you are emailing the rest of your list or not the art team, but the rest of the list and basically ask them what they thought about the book and then this gives you an excuse to mentioned the importance of reviews.
Jesper (1h 9m 4s): Yes. And then see if you can check, you have some additional reviews or this way,
Autumn (1h 9m 8s): which is excellent. A good tip, and I will say we haven't kind of mentioned it, but throwing all of this lunchtime, you should hopefully have still been using some of those information and images and reviews that you've gathered and you've been posting on social media as well. So make sure that you've done that and also make sure if you happen to have to set your book up with some Book specific hashtags, which has definitely a trick I like doing and I even have a Book hashtag section now in the back of my Book, uh, make sure that you're searching for people to see if they, have you been at all sharing your book hashtags and read picture your re tweeting, reposting, whatever platform you are on the re in front of it and you know, thanking people for sharing some of this stuff about your book.
Jesper (1h 9m 54s): Yeah, so that was a ton of stuff around book launches and basically this is the process that Autumn and I more or less go through when we launch the book sometimes should we tweak a few Steps here and there, change things around a bit of maybe sometimes, but, but overall this is the framework and uh, I know that that was quite a lot of a, maybe we gave you a few ideas here in there that you took note of, but also it was sort of an overload of information. Then in the free course again that we were going to do later this year for you.
Jesper (1h 10m 27s): We will also have some information downloads in there where you can basically get the entire process laid out for you and explain so you can look forward to that if, if, but at least in the meantime we just talk you through the entire thing. Yeah,
Autumn (1h 10m 42s): and so if you're launching books could luck to you this summer. It is an exciting time to start reading and will look forward to seeing what new books are coming out.
Jesper (1h 10m 53s): All right, so next Monday we are talking about something that could be mistaken for a show about fishing or even boxing, but the, that's the hook.
Narrator (1h 11m 4s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also Join Autumn and Jasper on patrion.com/am Writing Fantasy for as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Killing characters in a novel is fine, but there is a right way to go about it.
In Episode 71 of The Am Writing Fantasy podcast, Autumn and Jesper draw their swords and magical wands to discuss how to handle the killing of a fictional character.
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy.
For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (1s): You're listening to the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need an literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from Writing Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them. Now on to the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I am Jesper and I'm Autumn. This is episode 71 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast and today we are going to discuss
Narrator (40s): if there's anything to consider when
Jesper (43s): killing off characters in your story or can you just sort of get rid of them like AM if Tom Bombadil appears into your story, can you get just get rid of it, but I know it wasn't the, you know, but my fingers would be itching to get rid of that guy. I really don't like that character.
Autumn (1m 4s): Yeah. And I think we can talk about too, I know in our first series AM you know how we chose how I chose my first time when I had a kill off a character has changed immensely since that time. So I'm going to be fun to revisit what happened the first time I realized I have to kill off a character. What am I beloved characters?
Jesper (1m 27s): Yeah. That's one of the things, you know, sometimes we can get a bit of a text to who to characterize, but uh,
Autumn (1m 33s): Oh yeah. Horrible that way. But Hey, yeah, we will for now. I mean, how are things going on your side of the ocean?
Jesper (1m 44s): Well, a, it's, it's quite good I guess, uh, as good as things can be in the middle of this covert 19 pandemic that is still terrorizing the world. Uh, I mean at the point of us recording this, uh, we're just at the end of Easter right now. Uh, so yeah, as you can imagine, it's been pretty quiet Easter holiday where like everybody else, we've just been staying at home and not much happening too, be honest. But on the other hand, that's a, that's a good thing.
Um, and also in the middle of this crisis, we, we, we've been trying to sell our house. Right.
Autumn (2m 19s): Well I'm going to ask you how that was going to buy a house showings or on hold? No, no, actually they're not.
Jesper (2m 29s): I mean, as long as you don't touch anything and to house us, nothing is going to happen. Right. I mean, as long as you, you keep your distance from the real estate agent, that's also fine. Um, so there's those showing houses. Um, but yeah, we've been trying to sell out of how, well, honestly we've been trying for more than a year now. Um, because the kids aren't going to school in another city like 15 kilometers from here. So we want to a move. They're just to get rid of the daily commute back and forth.
And also because the kids are getting older, so they want to have their own playmate play, the play time, so, or a play date or whatever you call it, with, with the, with their friends. And they actually, at least the older one is, he's old enough to go and see people on his own as long as you can get there. But the problem is that he can, from where we live now as we always have to drive him, which is quite annoying for him and because then we don't have time. So he kept not just go and visit friends as much as he likes.
So that's a big part and why we want to move. So, but we've been trying for more than a year now and uh, we've just agreed here over Easter that a, with a real estate agent that we are going to lower the price with a a hundred thousand Danish grounds. So that's about 15,000 us dollars a year. Yeah. And I think we've reached the limit now to be honest. I mean, if this is the second time, we're reducing the price with that amount.
So if it doesn't sell it now, I think we might end up pulling out of the market at least for a while and then go back to it later. I mean it's not, is not what we want to do because of the reasons I just mentioned. But there is also a limit on how cheap you're going to sell this house. Absolutely. I mean it's gotta be worth it or it's not worth it. Yeah. I mean we like 30,000 us dollars down from where we started right now. So I think, yeah, I don't wanna we don't want to go much, much further than that.
No, that's always hard. So we'll see what happens from a, it has still not a way that the price reduction has still not kicked in on the websites and stuff like that. So we'll see what happens if, if it brings any interest or not. Because again, the covert 19 pandemic is also making while it very difficult to sell a house right now or not. Yeah, I'm not a, not as much, I'm not thinking so much about people viewing houses, but more like there is so much insecurity about finances right now.
So it's a bit like people are holding back a bit. So, and I can't imagine like I know you said your, you would have to go look for a house and you might get an apartment for a while and I can't imagine doing that in a pandemic world. So I yeah, yeah, yeah. Good luck with that on all fronts. It just, it's gone from selling a house. It was already complicated enough to wow, you've got a Rubik's cube worse or a Ruby grew up, Goldstein type machine going just to do one step.
This is crazy. Yeah. But on the other hand to do remember the, you know, once we sell the house, it's probably going to be like six months before we need to leave the house. Right. So it's so it's not like we, it's going to be quite a while before we move out after it's been so good. I usually in the us S it's a very quick, it's a month or two and your,
Autumn (5m 58s): you're out. So six months
Jesper (6m 2s): you can agree anything basically is quite normal for selling a house he in in Denmark at least a one is quite normal that you will agree. Something like a five, six month checkup over time. That's quite normal.
Autumn (6m 15s): That's what that's, that's so much calmer than over here is, that's a good good. That's good. Yeah.
Jesper (6m 20s): Yeah. But you need to usually have time to find something else to live in. You need to pack all of your stuff. I mean, we don't want
Autumn (6m 26s): stress like, you know that it gets done. We're all stressed in America. Are you kidding?
Jesper (6m 34s): Yeah. It will take a nice and slow. So, but how things have been on your side as well?
Autumn (6m 39s): Well, good. As long as you ignore the outside news. I mean the U S just just crossed the threshold to the most deaths in the world. So I try not to, I stopped reading the news and AM just been working on the cabin. We go out and very rarely, but Hey, I actually finished the inside of the room that we'd been building. So I have my little kitchen area. It's all very cute and cozy and getting things, you know, really wrapped up. And now I'm just working on the outside, um, trim and some the clapboard siding and my husband built a picnic table over Easter weekend, which was very exciting.
And we cooked something outside because it was a gorgeous weather. So, and our little R little sphere of the stream and the woods and now you hear Al was at night in the spring. Peepers are out. So it's quite lovely that way. And actually if you hear any weird drumming, it's a rainy day again. And we were having a rainy Monday. So every time we go to the record, I've got this little drum being in the background. Um, but it's, it's, it's quite lovely in its own way. If it was AM not such a terrifying year, it would be just a little blissful heaven.
But I guess the outside world feels like it's burning and, but my little sphere of the woods is quite lovely. So we'll just stay here.
Jesper (7m 53s): No, that's good. That's good. Yeah. Yeah. And actually speaking of the outside world burning there, there was actually a very quick little tip I thought I could share here upfront because because of the, the whole chaos and the world, all of the big companies has basically scaled back on the advertising. So I'm hearing on almost everywhere that a running Facebook ads at the moment, it's a lot cheaper than normally.
Excellent. Some of our listeners I'm well at depending on when your listening to this of course, and what the status is of the pandemic at that point in time. We could all hope that is better of course, but if it's not, then you might want to dip your toes into some Facebook advertising right now if you have a new book to maybe publish or maybe at the time or maybe running some ads for this building or something like that, it, it's a lot cheaper for right now to the normal.
So that's it. That's a good little tips in a small ship of light in all of the darkness here a week on the internet with the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, so as disgust, a few episodes to go. We were thinking, two, put a short pause together and the Facebook groups voted for it and that it should be about character development. But we also said that we were only going to create the course if we've got at least 20 sign-ups
Autumn (9m 28s): and we ended up with more than 20, so it was so excited that we're actually going to be making this course that kind of came out of nowhere and we never expected to do so we just went to the task and the task list. So we just added more tasks to our individual task lists, which of course we've never ever, ever even gotten close to the bottom of. It'll be good to do the sweating check in with a, you know, we added it and hopefully in a week or two we'll be crossing it right off hand
Jesper (10m 2s): just to get it done. Yeah, well we have the rest of our lives to get to the bottom of that task list for me. They be very long and, and successful and busy. Very, very busy. Yeah, that's true. But yeah. So we'll, we'll stop recording this, uh, this course and AM well, actually this episode will go out on the 4th of May, so we'll be done. Well actually, if everything has gone well and according to plan, those who signed up for the course should already have it in their inbox by the time and listen to this, but we see how that goes.
So it was it
Autumn (10m 41s): time traveling, sending this off into the future where we're done with the course already.
Jesper (10m 49s): Yeah, that's true. But at least we'll do everything we can to make sure that people have it be before the end of April, like we promised. Yes. Um, but maybe just us a quick recap. So in the course we will cover five different topics. Um, the first one being on cast of characters, so understanding what type of archetype characters are available and which ones your story needs. Uh, then we will talk about why you need to start with character creation rather than plot and also understanding character motivation, choosing point of view characters and then character arcs and how to tie them into the story structure.
Excellent. I can't wait a little bit of a great little course. Yeah, I think so. I think so. Anything else we need to share?
Autumn (11m 37s): Oh no, I think that's, well I had a little tip that got me excited about the email marketing course that you're a working on and I'm editing for you before we get around a recording. But I actually had a fellow author who I didn't even know was on my email recently. Am emailed me and said, ah, so I am sitting here in all of your email prowess. As I realized I need to put a little more effort in mind to make them even half as impressive. And I was like, wow, that's me.
Is that it often hear, you know, from readers, I think every author has that where they don't often always hear it from your readers every single time you said on the email. But it's always nice to hear from a compatriot and contemporary who tells you you are doing a good job in, which made me think high working on that email course script, um, for us to get that going.
Jesper (12m 26s): So that's another course on our to do list that we're making progress on and obviously we have some things to teach. So that's exciting. Yeah, that's all excellent. So all it all in due time, I think 2020 will be a good year in some way. And yeah, well at least in terms of putting out a lot of the content for teaching of the authors and helping the author authors out.
Autumn (12m 51s): So all in due time we, we'll make sure to mention it on future episodes as things gets ready. But uh, yeah, uh, Killing characters so hard. It's for it. I have to admit, I've met a few authors who, it was like second nature for them to kill off characters. But I know for me, when I was writing my first trilogy and I had that dawning realization, as the stakes got higher and higher and bad things were happening, that someone's going to die.
Someone who has to die. You can't have this Epic Fantasy quest that all these life threatening situation and no one dies. It, it feels so false. The stakes don't feel real. So someone has to die in who is terrible. I think I wrote a blog post on it that was basically the was titled that someone has to die. It was quite agonizing because I do, I loved all my characters and I went through many gyrations as I was plotting out that final book.
I mean people had died earlier, but not one of the big, big characters. Um, and trying to figure out how to do it and who was going to be that person. Yeah. It was a very tough as a new author and my first Epic Fantasy trilogy to us to figure that one out and to get to a point where I felt comfortable with it. Hmm. Well that's quite interesting because I don't have that problem. You can kill them left and right.
Yeah buddy. But it's still, there is finally a difference we found between us. I mean, I had a horrible time. I, I went through a random number generator. I was pulling names out of hat just to try to figure out which one it had to be. I love for them. It was horrible. So why did you have to kill one of them? It just didn't feel real. I always have complained that, you know, you read about these amazing question and somehow everyone makes it out alive and a third of these horrible life threatening situations.
And that's just to me, unrealistic unfeasible. I just logically somebody has a die silly character. One of the big characters, cause again I, my trilogy really has probably five or six, you know, really top tier the point of view characters and they're kind of all my little heroes and heroines. So I had to choose one of them. And it was, like I said, it was quite how I ended up getting there is funny in its own way, but I knew someone to make the stakes Real somebody's had to die.
It has to be a gut punch at some point. Those final chapters. So you, you roll the dice Indian or what? I did and I settled on a character, but honestly when I was writing the story out, I got to a scene, I'm like, this is it. This is the character that dyes. It came as I was writing it with someone I didn't even expect AM was going to die and it fit the story. And that's sort of even with that old blog post when I was writing, um, about what it was going through it, even when I was going through it, that's sorta what it ended up being is that it has to fit the story.
You, you can't, you can you random if you really need something to tell you, you can random number generated in work it in. But I know since then I've talked to other authors who you just writing and there's a point where you're like, this character dies here. You just know it. And I know, I remember talking to one author and he said, and the funny thing is I had it all plotted out and this character was going to show up in like three or four more chapters. It, it was like a point of view character. And so it was like I have to rework my entire plot to make the death happen when it felt right for it to happen because I, everything else I plotted was good.
And obviously they couldn't come back from the dead to be for their new scenes, so they had to figure that one out. But I do think, um, if your a slight pantser in your writing, there becomes a point where it's, you know, you just get to that life or death moment and usually you have your hero is make it out and just every once in a while and you're like, no, this is, this is the, this is the time that this character doesn't make it.
Jesper (17m 10s): And then you have to do it. The fallout. Yeah, for sure. But, but I agree. I mean, I don't have any problem Killing characters. I'm probably not the kindness to my characters. They would probably don't like me. I won't say my character is like me, how life is hell and my world. So, but, uh, but I do think there's a lot of truth in the fact that Killing characters should not be taken lightly. Um, there needs to be a reason on a purpose for Killing a character.
Uh, and I'm just thinking of an example and I, and I might be mistaken to be honest, because I'm not a hundred percent sure if it's true, but I did hear once that, um, Stephen King had written himself into a corner and at that, in the fact that he had way too many characters and he didn't quite know how to get all the different story arcs merged together. So he decided to blow up the town and a bunch of characters with it. And then while up, you know, you've got wind of a bunch of the storylines, but then everything could work again.
Uh, I don't know if that was him doing that or if it's just like a story about it, but at least I would say, you know, it serves us a good example to me how to not do it, but just because you did you feel like I have to many characters and I don't know what to do. Killing them for that reason is just not good enough.
Autumn (18m 32s): No, no. And I have to say, I mean really if your writing something, I'm a very deep and impactful and you want your readers to love your character as sometimes it's gotta be the one that is, no one wants to see di. And that's the way it always is tough. I think as an author you don't do as a reader to your reading and you don't want that character did I? It's always such a tragedy. I mean that's why I had um, game of Thrones. I know some people love game of Thrones because characters were dying left and right.
Just when you get attached to someone there gone. And I, it was too many for me. I have too many of my favorite characters die. I can easily just put down a book and be like, I just really for game of Thrones, I could go back and read it now because I know which characters I can stay attached to. Uh, reading it through for the first time. I still remember I picked up the first book and the series is back probably when it came out, which is what, a decade and a half ago or something. It was ages ago when I got to the end when Ned died, it was like, and I just put the book away and it took probably eight years for me to be like, I wonder what happened with that princess.
You got married to the, you know, nomadic guy. I couldn't remember names or anything and I finally went back and picked up the book again because I was curious. And then low and behold like six months later it becomes this huge thing. So, but I still never made it actually reading wise, I think past book three because I've just got so sick of it, I got to the red wedding and I was like, I'm done. I'm just done. Yeah,
Jesper (20m 8s): a bit. But this is, I mean, you do run that risk of annoying the reader way. You know it if you kill off a character, especially if it's one of their favorites, unless I mean if there is a really good reason for it, I think it's okay. Um, you, you still going to annoy some people about or some maybe they feel sad about it, but if it's like there was a really good point to this and it serves the story really well, then I think it's okay.
Um, but killing off characters are never easy in that way, but you need to be careful not to do it the wrong way.
Autumn (20m 45s): Exactly. I have received a text message from my niece who reads my books and she was said she was mad at me when she read that final book and let the one character died. So I know I chose the right character. Would I can spark hire from my niece say, how could you, but again, it's, it was important to the story, I think because it did make it more impactful. I made those final scenes and I think that's part of Killing a character. You can't just kill off somebody and the next day everyone jumps up and maybe they're angry.
It's just if they don't process it, if you don't have that, especially when you're doing the wrap up after the climax, if you don't have that tearful time, the one characters mourning that loss or you know what the worlds going to be like without those character, it helps. It helps with the grieving process, with even the reader to actually be able to say, Hey, this is important. It was important to everyone and, and we're so sorry and life's going to be forever different.
Jesper (21m 45s): Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean there's, there's purpose behind this topic, right? Because on one hand you could say, uh, if the writer, for example, realized, is that a, well, okay, I don't think that as much of a purpose for this character anyway, so let me kill that character. Right? I mean, what if the character, it didn't have a purpose at the first place, what is he, what is he or she even doing there? But you shouldn't be in the story at all. But on the flip side, I would say, and I'm curious what you think about this, but I would say you can add a story or a character to the story with the purpose that you want to kill them.
Autumn (22m 28s): I think it makes sense. It does. It does. It now that I plot out more, I kind of, no, you know, if the character is not going to make it from the beginning and it's not as much of a surprise anymore because I'm no longer whipped behind the ears. I as an author and I kind of, I've kinda, you know, learned to it was like becoming a manager or you can't be best friends with your employees is doesn't matter how much you like them because you might have to fire them someday. So you always need that little arms distance. Um, no matter how much you want to hug them sometimes.
But it's the same with your characters. Sometimes, you know, they're gonna die, but that's also a problem. I mean, I've talked to a lot of other writers and they've said that if they know that character is going to die ahead of time, there kind of colder and almost crueler to them. And I've said, I've just the opposite. If I know a character is going to die, I actually spend more time like developing them and loving them and you know, there were like the glowing wonderful thing and then I kill him off. So I give them the best life possible before ending it.
But again, that can be actually a challenge for writers if they know the characters is going to die, maybe they don't want to get to attach to them. And so they don't write it quite as well as maybe they need to go.
Jesper (23m 43s): Well that's true. Yeah, I guess so that, that could be a thing actually. Uh, but I just feel like if you add a character to the story, knowing that this person is going to die, you know, if they're destined to die at some point, then it also means that the actual dying part has a role to play in the story. I mean it will tie into the main storyline somehow. Um, and it becomes very meaningful because of that. And I think some of those way it might sound, uh, you know, at face value it might sound a bit a bit weirdly.
Okay. So you add a character just to kill them, but it actually usually ends up with a very, very meaningful death that that actually plays heavy Lee on the emotions as well. So if it might be a lot better than you think to do something like that.
Autumn (24m 37s): Oh, I agree. And I think again, that almost becomes as a writer, uh, you know, we, whether or not you want to read that we create hidden subtext or a symbolic symbolism in stuff in our characters are in our themes of our novels. You know, are we creating just a simple story or is there some underlying message? It's so hard to say, but death has a big, and um, I know even though I am writing for adults and adults often read my books, I have readers as young as 13. So you are giving them tools psychology wise of how to process this.
You know, to me it shouldn't be a a shoot 'em up game type of world where we're doing, Oh what does the one with the car chases? And you know, people jump out and shoot everyone in gangster his and I don't want that type of world. I want the deaths to be um, of a sense of loss too. The other characters, I want the reader to feel that sense of loss and how to grieve, but also that, you know, they died hopefully for a cause because they believed in something not because you know, the bridge collapsed on their head.
You know, life is already crazy enough and we're always looking for a meaning of our own lives. That books where we have a beginning and an end and there is a meaning and a purpose in a storyline that we sometimes can't create a lot of our own lives. We can create that in our novels. And so the life and the depth of a character could have a purpose and that's kind of soothing in this crazy chaotic pentatonic world we live in.
Jesper (26m 10s): Yeah, I think you're right. Absolutely. But I think part of the point your making as well, at least I think it is, is also that the, the death scene itself should be an Epic one is something to me and the, OK. Then, you know, as you said, you know, the Brits fall on their head and, and they die. You know, it's like what?
Autumn (26m 31s): Yeah, the, the giants, you know, trips and squish and it's just no fun that way. No, it's going to be in the sense of loss. I can't imagine you have this incredible character is it just dies because
Jesper (26m 44s): of the giant trips will just be de, you know, so senseless, but no one wants to a senseless, it does sound quite fun for me for a tertiary character. How does that, we'll see that in some way. Yeah. I, did you ever see the a tooth 2004 movie called Troy with Brad Pitt where he played at the kidneys? I think I did. Yes. It was just like, I really, really liked that movie. I mean a Brad Pitt is bad-ass Achilles a especially a remember like there is one, this one seen in the um, in the movie where the two armies, uh, you know, they, they, they need to fight each other, but then the Kings sort of discuss between them and say, well it's a bit of stupid thing that we, all of these people are going to die so why don't we just take our two best fighters and let them fight and then uh, whoever wins wins and, and everybody else have to die.
So there are the two Kings, it greeters and AM there was this huge, like huge guy, the guy, you know who, who is the champion of the one arm and he steps out in front of the army there on his ready to fight. Like he looks like a freaking bad ass, right? So your thinking Oh shit. And then a the, I think it's Agamemnon, the other King and turn it around to the army and he calls it Kellys and then nothing happens. And he's at the way he called slate.
I, it's a bit of quite a while to know what's the movie, but I think he calls it a few times and not nothing happens. And then he tells her, I said, where, where's the Achilles? Uh, well he's probably sleeping. So somebody runs down to the beach and into a right and quite right Achilles, just sleeping in his tent. So they get him and say you need to come and fight. So he just sort of gets up and um, you know, he has, he is a warning here and everything is going in there. So he walked up and a stand in front of their army.
They're in facing this a group guy there. They'll probably like, I don't know, a hundred feet between them or something at that point. So AM this guy, he has a spirit, you're the guy and Achilles has his short sword. So this other guy, Achilles just starts running towards him, like full sprint street for him. And the other guy then takes the spear up and throws it. And just like the most cool attitude bread pit could ever make.
He, you know, he his head slightly to the side and pass us right through, right past him, like an inch past him or something. And he doesn't stop running at all. And you just do it this while in full sprint. And then when he gets to the guy, he, he jumps up and the steps, he's a short sought into the guy down the neck and then, and then he falls off that, you know, it was just like done and, and the guy's done. So yeah. And he has several of these kinds of insane scenes in this movement.
And Achilles is so freaking badass. But then I'm getting to my point now, so I love that movie and I know why Achilles has to die the way he does and all that. But getting an Aero in the heel, it just feels like this is so fricking lame, you know? And this is not an Epic death. So it was a hero that is just like more bad ass than anybody else. And it annoys me so bad.
Autumn (30m 14s): I'm going to go back and rewrite Grecian history and Achilles should die a little bit better.
Jesper (30m 20s): Yeah, I mean if he has to die, it should be in Epic death. Right. I mean this is like the whole time hero. Nobody is more bad as this guy and then he has to die by an arrow in the heel, I mean I know, I understand all of the law and all of the history in why it is so and all that good stuff. But ah,
Autumn (30m 37s): come on. This is annoying. And again, it's one that um, all these actors, all of these directors and actors have struggled with when they get to play this awesome bad-ass character and they know they have, its a written, they have to die this way. And I know there's been one scene where I think you shot a couple times in the chest and they break off. So the only one that's visible is the one who in his heel and to everyone, you know, that starts the legend that he dies because of this. And so they tried so many times. But yeah, it's, it is one of those things.
I mean I can see that with AM. I know I've watched lots of shows and my husband and I will be like, Oh, how could it end that way? And sometimes the only way for me to deal with that is to, it's like the wrap up is too sudden. So in my head I'm, I'm Writing the next scene so that I can then process the death better when it seems so meaningless. And you know, I don't want to do that with you. You go to my readers. And I think that's one reason. I mean, so many writers often fail at the wrap up very well or fail with those emotions afterwards, which are so nuanced.
You meet a lot of readers these days, they don't want the hero like AM Hercules or you know, He-Man. You know, we used to have all these shows where it was like, you know, these brute Conan the barbarian, you know, they'd go and squash people and kill people at a time and there's never any reflection. And that's not the type of Fantasy we're reading and writing right now is people want to have the reflection. They want to feel that sense of loss. And so I think that's important to give that to readers, at least in the Fantasy I write and you know, not everyone's writing that or reading that, but there's definitely a trend to have more side effects of even PTSD and these things that a people are struggling with to make sense in this world.
Jesper (32m 27s): Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's just, it is just important to keep everything aligned with the story that you're telling. Um, at the end of the day, that's, that's the best thing can do.
Autumn (32m 41s): So a random number generator is probably best way for, to have to choose between your favorite character as if you're like me and your way to attach to everyone and a U. So you have to find some way of killing them off. And I do tell people, if you are like me and you just absolutely adore all your characters and you don't want to see any of them die, just to remember, you control the universe and you can control where they go in there dead. And this is magic and Fantasy.
So I do AM am I my one characters? Death actually is what spawned the basis of a second trilogy that goes into the realm of the spirit realm actually in which is ends up being where all magic is from. And it creates a whole nother storyline that might not have happened if I hadn't killed off a character, especially the character I chose. So I do tell him, that's a whole another thing. And I know when we talk about character development and magic and in a lot of our courses we talk about, you know, you should answer that question of what happens when characters die?
Where do they go? It's part of the world's mythos. It's the tired of the part of the world building. So if you have the answers to that question, hopefully as a writer, it, it doesn't hurt so much to kill them off. Unless they go to the ether and just dissolve into a universe, then I guess they're going to,
Jesper (34m 7s): no, not yet. But that's true. Uh, in, in, in my own trilogy as well. Um, there was a, uh, a world For the debt as well, and went to one of the characters die. Um, he goes there, uh, and then another character actually gets to meet her love again, uh, in the realm of the debt. So, um, so, so for sure. Yeah. That's one of the advantages we have in friends to see sometime there is a realm of the debt, right. A little just like in Greek mythology with the underworld and all that stuff.
So there is not a lot,
Autumn (34m 40s): Oh yeah, there is always that other side of the coin where at least when you get to go visit them.
Jesper (34m 44s): Yeah. Yeah. But I think at the end of the day, you know, trying to let the story dictate when some, when a character dies rather than you just feeling like, yeah, I need a bit of a tension or drama in this scene, so let me kill somebody. Because that usually don't give a very good result in, at least, at least in my view. That's a bit of a lazy storytelling that stuff. But yeah. Yeah.
Narrator (35m 10s): Okay. So the next Monday we are going to share our thoughts and also a part of our process for how to handle book launches. If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn in Jesper on patreon.com/am Writing Fantasy.
For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast. Going to stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
How do productive authors stay on track, even during a crisis (like, um, a global pandemic)? Goals are one tool you can use and in this episode, Autumn talks to author H. B. Lyne about how to set writing goals that are SMART (and what that actually means).
Plus, expect discussions on why you might want to re-cover your books, the importance of mental and physical health for your writing, and a bit about Holly's work as an UnstoppableAuthor with writing partner Angeline Trevena.
Learn more about H. B. Lyne at
Website: www.hblyne.com Social Media: www.facebook.com/authorhblyne www.instagram.com/hblyne Podcast: www.unstoppableauthors.com www.instagram.com/unstoppableauthors Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy.
For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s):
You're listening to the amwritingfantasy podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need in literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing join to best selling authors who have self-published more than 20 books between them. Now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Autumn (30s):
Hi, this is Autumn and today Jesper is taking a break and instead I am here with British author HB Lyne and we will be talking about her books and some great tips about writing and goal setting and maybe why you might want to recover. So, hi Holly, how are you?
Holly (51s):
I, I'm great. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me on the show.
Autumn (56s):
Yes, it's so great to, uh, touch base with someone across the ocean again and I love the accent. I do miss it. I, I've mentioned just before we started recording that I'd spent a year in England. I spent a year in Manchester and I just, I did love it over there and I kind of do miss the accident. I have to admit. So welcome. And yeah, please introduce yourself and tell us about a bit about your books. I think I counted was at five or six out. I can't remember.
Holly (1m 25s):
It depends on your definition. So I'm Holly Lyne I write dark hub and fantasy I have a series of the
Autumn (1m 36s):
well nonetheless
Holly (1m 37s):
and then another series of one, but I'm also appearing in some anthologies. So, um, yeah. And I have a couple of novellas and a collection of short stories. So yeah. Um,
Autumn (1m 53s):
I saw that you are a fan, I believe a Stephen King and your, you have hopes to be very prolific. It sounds like you're on.
Holly (1m 59s):
Yeah, I love Stephen King. I love horror. That's where my roots and uh, that would be amazing to be as successful as him.
Autumn (2m 12s):
Well if you ever happen to be covering overseas, because I used to live in Maine, I used to joke that, you know, I was just down the road from Stephen King, so I can definitely give you a tour and host you and take your over to Maine and, and I don't know, we can at least hang out by his gait. So appeal maybe I for ease. Very friendly. Sometimes he does sign books so we can try to stalk him. Oh great. Thank you so much for joining me. And I know you're also part of a team, just like Yesper an eye on stoppable authors.
So you have a partner Angeline and so you guys have been been writing together or at least you've been working together. I know for a few years. So I've known you from Instagram for quite awhile and Angeline from Instagram and I know you used to have the, was the Western building Western foyers building. Yes. So, but that was such a mouthful.
Holly (3m 14s):
We think branded at the start of this year and we're not. We are now unstoppableauthor
Autumn (3m 22s):
I love that. If it's a good, it's a good title. So I really like that. But yeah, you guys have done so much. I know I joined what in your world-building month where every day you, you know, post something on Instagram and that was so much fun. So it was fantastic that you guys organize things like that to get authors, you know, posting more and sharing more about our books and things we wouldn't normally think of maybe to post. So I've definitely been a fan and joining that. So it's so fun. Fun to have you online.
And I know you said you're actually writing a book on goals and goal setting, so you've switched to Lyne
Holly (3m 59s):
my first fiction book. Um, and it's just been a sort of natural evolution of what I've been doing, like with Angeline on the podcast and with my social media. Um, I've been apart of the writing community now for six years and it just feels like the time to start sharing some of the things that I've learned and helping other people. So they'll setting is kind of been my, um, area of expertise, I guess for a little while.
And it just, yeah, it seemed to be a natural fit. So I thought, yeah, I'm going to share some of my tips in a book.
Autumn (4m 41s):
Oh, that's fantastic. I asked, I, I do, I love, that's one thing I do love about the author community. I think we tend to give back so much, uh, compared to a lot of other side things, like in, my husband's into photography and he's done a few other things and they're pretty ruthless online where I think authors tend to be so much more helpful in kind. So it's brilliant to work with other officers, the best communities, but definitely some goals.
Oh no, that's all right. Hands down. It's definitely one of the best communities. I just, I, it's rare to find someone who you want to avoid, so that's a good thing. Well, I think goal setting is a great topic. So of course here we are. This is, we're recording a little bit early, but this will be released at the end of April. And I'm assuming, even though that's a couple of weeks away, that we're still going to be in a pandemic and just undergoing, Oh, I don't know what's going to happen between now and then.
And I sometimes don't want to imagine, but goal setting is a good topic for right now because it's so easy to, if you're not used to being home and you know, maybe having the chance to write all the time, or especially if you're home kids, which I know you have to. So it can be a challenge to suddenly your entire schedule. It has been up ended. You're, our entire world has been upended and we're trying, you know, there's lots of good memes, memes out there saying, you know, keep it up, you know, stay focused now as a chance to, you know, if you ever wanted to be a full time writer, now is your chance to give it a try, assuming you're not remote working, but how yeah.
So what are some good tips? I mean that'd be great to get into some good tips for goals I read at, I do know that. Yeah, I do. I agree. I totally, uh, I'm off the horse, the cart right now and I need to get back on it because I used to be so good at setting goals. I do weekly goals. So yeah, I can add in my tips too, but I've kind of fallen off of that and I need to get back on it because it makes such a huge difference when you have some sort of goals that's how you write. I'm up to book, I think I'm on 16 or 17 and I used to have people say, I am sure you have to.
It's like how do you have find time to write books. And especially when I had a full time job and a husband and you know, joke around and say, I'm a vampire, you don't sleep. I don't need food. Uh, it's not the truth. So what are your best tips? They give us any nuggets that you're putting into,
Holly (7m 16s):
you climbed up this book and kind of the topics I wanted to cover and roughly what was going to happen in each chapter. Uh, a little while. It goes off well before it's pandemic really took off. And I was planning to write it in this gap between fiction projects that I have. And it just, um, I delayed initially I delayed starting it because it felt no, hang on the world just went crazy. Now's not the time for this.
Um, and I was feeling really daunted because one of my early chapters was on, uh, living in crisis mode and it felt, I don't know insensitive maybe to be writing about that while so many of us are living in crisis mode. So, um, I put off, right, I put off starting it for, for a good few weeks, but then something clicked inside and I was like, no, hang on. Now is the perfect time to write about this. Um, and yeah, like you said, there are all these names and stuff and I know that that's negatively affecting some people because they feel this pressure to be their most creative, productive selves and they just can't right now.
Um, so I just want to say if that's how you feel, if you feel like you just can't right now, that's fine. I certainly had days where I'm just like, Nope, I know. I just have to get through the day. Am
Autumn (8m 50s):
yeah, this is incredibly, even if you're a normally a good, like I'm a normal, but this is really hard. And like I, there are times where I am out of breath, worried about, you know, my parents, they're both have immune issues. So it's just, you feel it. And even if you're, like I said, I'm normally a very chipper, dedicated task oriented person, but there's days that I just need to stop and just stare at the stream for a few minutes because it's just hard. This is really hard.
So yeah, if this is okay, if you're having, um, an office,
Holly (9m 26s):
absolutely it will just completely upside down and I, I wouldn't want anyone to feel any kind of pressure to set goals if they can barely shower and feed themselves, you know. Um, so definitely health first and there's going to be quite a lot in your book about looking after your health and, um, setting goals that are realistic so that take your whole life into account. Um, and figuring out what's realistic based on your actual circumstances.
So rather than looking at what other people are doing and what goals they're setting, make sure that what you're setting for yourself is appropriate to your life and your situation.
Autumn (10m 14s):
Oh, that's fantastic. That's a great idea. And a great reality check that. Yeah. Sometimes I know even myself with my productivity, I had a, a friend who lived in London and Oh my goodness, the amount of books he could turn out made me just made my head spin and I didn't know how he did it. And you just can't put that kind of pressure on yourself because it kind of free to me, it almost brings up writer's block or it freezes you from just that looseness, the creativity and the where the where the things sink and click.
And that's a, that's a much looser place than when you start feeling that pressure and the gears are grinding and you're done
Holly (10m 51s):
definitely going to fall apart. Very, what I call comparison itis, uh, where we, we'd look forever, outwards and especially on social media. I know, I said our community is wonderful and it really is, but when there's a little bit of a dangerous zone where you are looking always at what other people are doing and comparing yourself to them. And I don't think that's helpful in, you know, nine out of 10 cases.
So any, no, exactly.
Autumn (11m 27s):
And you also never know what's going on under the hood.
Holly (11m 30s):
Yeah. So you know, always, I think it's good to look up to other people and have aspirations and see, Oh, that really works for them. Maybe it's worth trying, but if it doesn't work for you, don't keep trying to, you know, make it happen. Yeah,
Autumn (11m 54s):
exactly. Yeah. It's always good to be open to learning another technique or another skill or sing us something will work for you. But yeah, when it's word counts and number of books released and everything else that, you know, if people seem to, some people rise to challenges that other people just feel like everything's falling apart. So it's it, it doesn't help to, to imagine yourself in someone else's shoes and someone else's life. You need to be the best you can be in yours. Excellent. I'll do love the fact too that you talk about like whole health because yeah, if you're struggling and just keeping things together that doesn't help if you want.
Holly (12m 31s):
Yeah, that really helps me. Um, you know, I think having other creative outlets can maybe free up your writing as well and give you, you know, creative well to draw from safe. Yeah. Yeah. Nice.
Autumn (12m 56s):
Great. So I know when I was doing goal setting, uh, you know, some people would go for word counts or everything else, but I would make, and some people have daily goals, monthly goals. I went for a weekly goal progress and I would adjust it based on my work calendar. Like if I had a really busy week that I knew I had a, I had a, you know, spot check coming up or something and it was just going to be a totally stressful week at work, I would reduce my, for me it was a chapter goals so sometimes it was like one chapter a week and then there was times where I knew it was going to be an easy breezy work or are those going to be some half days or something strange like that that I could, uh, I had have a chapter goal of two and a half chapters a week.
So that really, I mean I did really well under that.
Holly (13m 41s):
Yeah. So, and I go really extra and um, I set annual goals, quarterly goals, monthly goals and weekly goals. Yeah. So I have a longterm plan, so I never am going, Oh, I'm going to say I set yearly goals. I actually even have five-year plaques, but that's very, thank you. It's um, it's a loose plan. It's a kind of right now, this is where I think I want to be in five years, but I will regularly, we assess it and see if that's still white 1:00 AM yeah, rightly so.
And I him do that with my yearly and quarterly goals because things can change. Like this pandemic who'd have known this is completely changed my entire year. I was just gonna say that. Yeah. Check in regularly and secure goals is still relevant and if they need to be adapted.
Okay,
Autumn (14m 50s):
fantastic. Oh, that's a great,
Holly (14m 54s):
sorry.
Autumn (14m 54s):
Yeah, but I mean goals should definitely not be a written in stone because if you're not, you know, like we said the pandemic could happen, but just what you want out of life could change.
Holly (15m 5s):
Yeah. Okay. You might have an idea and it doesn't do so well and maybe the, you know, popularity of the genre has waned a little bit and so you need to change direction. So you always need to be flexible in what you're, what you're doing and what you're putting out there and keeping an eye on, you know, other factors outside of your control and responding to them. So having a versatile goal setting system that allows you the chance to do that I think is quite important.
Autumn (15m 46s):
And how do you check in with your goals? So I always saw that it's like, it's easy, I need, and I saw that at work, I would have to do a business plan and there'd be times you wouldn't even look at it until you're like, Oh, I'm going to have my annual or mid year review and I better look at my business plan. So you're looking at it maybe once or twice a year. But the idea with goals, I mean especially in his personal ones, are supposed to be keeping you on track and hopefully inspiring you to meet them, which means putting in some work. So what's your best tip for reminding yourself? What do you actually look at them and you say, yeah,
Holly (16m 18s):
because I have a a day to day bullet journal. It is includes all of my personal and work stuff and then I have a business planner, which is where I do my, my big goal setting I have for the year and the quarter and all of that. And in my day to day bullet journal, I literally keep task lists and I will regularly write down my goals. I'll put them, I do like a monthly spread, which has like a calendar with all of my appointments and everything on looking at an empty the sons and alongside that I always have some goals for the month and I'll write them down in multiple places where I'm going to see them that she every day.
And that helps just to keep them in the forefront of my mind on a regular basis. Okay.
Autumn (17m 11s):
Oh that's excellent. That's a good way. Yeah, definitely keeping them visible is I think important. I know some people put them like right into their calendar and other places. I've, I, I used to have something called ABC notes that was on my iPad that would actually show like unfinished tasks and like the little corner. So I would know to go in and check it and see like what I hadn't done. Of course, if you're good at ignoring things, I don't know what it would work otherwise. But it's definitely helpful to have something. I've gone almost all electronic and I don't, I mean, I wish Scribner actually had like, um, an alarm system or saying like, Hey, you haven't touched me today.
I wonder if there's an app out there for that or I should talk to the company that made it and see like put on like reminders. So it's like eight hours. That would be horrible. But I think I love it. Yes, definitely. Definitely be able to set your reminder time, but that'd be kind of fun. So what are some things that you would put on, like your weekly, your monthly or annual,
Holly (18m 19s):
uh, tasks on working out at the moment? I do, I have a word count goal this month, but most months I wouldn't do a word count go. It would be, I mean, I use smart goals, um, which, uh, do you know what they are? It's okay. So it's a planning system where, um, you have to get really granular with the Prince is, and the research shows that people who set smart goals are more likely to achieve their goals.
So every goal should be specific. So like a word count, that's, that's a really solid, smart goal. Measurable. Again, word count. You can check that every day and see what progress you're making. Um, yeah. Um, uh, yeah, a, a a is for, um, like appropriate to your situation that they actually fit with your, your big goals and what you're striving for.
Um, uh, is for relevant so they have to be yet appropriate to your situation right now. Um, T is time-bound, so put a deadline on them. So, you know, so I, if I don't say a word count goal, it will be something like finish this by the end of the month or, um, you know, I'm giving it to a big relaunch project. So over the coming months I've got goals like get the cover designed for book to get the formatting done for book three and so on and so forth.
So they, they're specific and, um, they're very, you know, concrete things that I know what to do. Um, and for bigger things that are more of a project, I'll break it down and figure out every task that I need to do in order to accomplish everything to do with that project and get it out the door in time. And so again, that's where I use my planner. I'll have like a, a page that I have, you know, for that project and I have everything written down that I need to do for that project and they can cross them off as I do them.
Okay. Oh, that sounds really useful. I like that smart goal. So that's the acronym that's very helpful. And yeah, I can definitely see the difference. I mean, if you do something very loose or if, especially if you said something way too big that you're gonna not be able to check off or you know who you end up with a busy week or you know, you end up in quarantine or something, you're just not going to get it done. I know the one time I forgot my am computer charger in Canada. And so it took them two weeks to ship it to me. I didn't get much writing done during that two weeks because it was paranoid I'd run out of my laptop charger and yeah, I don't know why I didn't just order another one off of Amazon, but you know, you just don't go back and question yourself, but Oh, I'd love to talk a little bit more that you're, so you're doing this relaunch to, not to switch up on goal setting, but I'd love to talk a little bit about your prelaunch and what led you to that market.
Changes the landscape changes, cover conventions change and my beautiful, beautiful colors that I had done in late 2013 2014 there are no longer current, um, you know, yeah, I did. I published in 2012 and yeah, I think I've gone through two or three covers on, yeah, it's changed so much and they've improved what the quality level has come up so much.
But also I gave an early publisher flowery titles that were like clues, you know, to the big story arc. And you know, I thought were very clever, but actually they don't really give the reader the right cues as well as the book is going to be. So I, I had some feedback that my titles and my covers made my books look like they were romance and they're really not.
Um, yeah. So, so I decided that I needed, Oh, new titles, new covers the works. It's something that I've been sitting on for maybe 18 months and was like, one day, you know, one day I'll do this am and then I, I decided to make it a goal and prioritize it. And so now it's actually happening. Um, uh huh. Yeah. Mean it's, it's scary and it's intimidating and it's exciting and all of the things.
Um, but yeah, I've just had the first book back from a cover designer and it's so pretty. I'm so excited. It's gonna be awesome. Oh,
Autumn (23m 47s):
Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. I partially, my other hat is a graphic designer and I love covers and I love arts. And I love the psychology of covers all the little clues that even fonts, I'm giving you these subconscious clues, the colors give you subconscious clues too. You know, what kind of genre can a book this is going to be. And so yeah, I agree. Oh, I can't wait to see your covers. I'll be watching on Instagram for you to release them that
Holly (24m 13s):
everything. I'm also happy, exciting. We've done even done the most beautiful job on the first one. It's absolutely stunning. And um, yeah, it's the first time I've worked with a for matter before and I've always just done my own and you know, that's fine and absolutely, you know, need writers shouldn't be afraid to boot strap that. And it's a good skill to learn, you know, to know how to format your books.
But I can't make them look really pretty or I don't have the time to invest in learning the skills to make them look really good. So say, yeah, I'm outsourcing that one. And that's, that's been a good experience as well. So,
Autumn (25m 5s):
Oh, that's great. Oh, that's fantastic. Well, that's always a good thing to hear too. And I mean, I just, to me it's a level of professionalism too, is when you are looking even at the formatting, whether you're learning it to do yourself, whether well or buying the software to do it yourself or hiring it out to someone else, it's just am. It shows that you're taking your own level of quality and professionalism and that this is something you, you know, you're going to be serious about this and you're no longer an immature.
So, you know, that's fantastic. I do, I do remember when, you know, the old old days, I think I uploaded my first book in 2012 using word and I was, I think actually I wanted to join a promo and the organizers like, look, your book looks good. You have lots of, you know, reviews. But I opened it up and it's like the font change because it just, Amazon's compression, everything had just kind of broken. The word file, original doc doc I had uploaded and I was like, I was so, um, so that, yeah, that's, I pull it down.
I'm like, I'm formatting. And I happened to have, my family's also very heavy into computer science. So I, I've looked at it, I found a software program and I actually, I use Golan and I ran with that and love it to death. Uh, and it was, I think I got that right. We do. It first came out, it was super cheap. So I feel very fortunate. Um, but yeah, it's, it was definitely kind of like a, you gotta ideal. Say you, you know, you need to go back and look at your previous books every year cause we have a tendency to publish and move on, but you to update your links, you need to make sure everything's working.
You need to make sure that the internet has not broken whatever format you created because it might, and it can and readers will not pick up a book if suddenly you have three spaces between every paragraph and things are offset in the font changes. Oh my gosh, no, you've got to fix that. You, it makes a huge difference.
Holly (27m 6s):
Yeah. So when is your hope to relaunch it? Fine. Are you going to roll them out one by one or you're going to die? Um, and so start a new, any actually like in the same world but set later on and um, the plan and the goal is to just that new book in December this year and rapid release, the full proceeding runs September, October, November, and then December and then into the new ones.
So, yeah, I'm just kind of getting everything lined up now so that I'm ready. Yeah.
Autumn (27m 55s):
Yeah. Well you sound like you'd be, and I know you're just on book ones and you have three more to do and get everything done, but we are only in April, so we have quarantine and pandemics aside. I think you've given yourself lots of space and time to hopefully have everything ready for a,
Holly (28m 12s):
not necessarily easy because there's always last minute schedule. Make sure you give yourself plenty of time because there's nothing, nothing worse, I don't think. Then realizing you've tried to fit too much in, um, you know, that can just really quickly if you feel too stressed to actually accomplish anything. So yeah.
Yes.
Autumn (28m 48s):
Yeah. I, I've definitely always been in my art and in my writing that a high stress does not bring out my productivity. I really, I'd rather do a quick meditation and calm myself down. I, I'm a comfort. I forget am I have looked at the anagrams, um, I forget which one I am, but whichever one is the one that like likes comfort for creativity and stuff, that's me. So I need my cup of hot tea. I might need a cookie and I needed the fireplace and then I'm usually ready to write it.
It's not usually that bad. I have traveled quite a lot and I've been writing, I finished a novel literally in the passenger seat of a land cruiser while driving a highway in Montana. Um, because I was just so desperate to get it done. But that's the, you know, showing up to work. Not the preferred method of work, but definitely especially I'm spent, I was starting am two new series myself and I've kind of did the test like I did two novellas to see which one readers would like and I was going to write whatever series they preferred and it almost ended up being like a 45 55 split, so that always didn't help.
So I'm going with the one I like, uh, but I'm still, it's new, it's a newish storyline, newish world and I, I think I need a couple of rainy comfort days to maybe get into it a little bit more. Maybe it'll start flowing better, but do some goal setting and just get going already and stuffing a wuss about this. I know how to write already put, it goes to show everyone everyone needs at any point in their career. They need to
Holly (30m 26s):
just written this series of short stories. I have stories of very kind of supernatural urban fantasy but very, very dark and they were written in the winter and I really want to give my main character, his own novel series because I just completely fell in love with him. But I'm like, I can't, I can't write that when it's bright blue sky and go to sunshine outside. I need the rain. I need the autumn dark evenings.
Cause that's the atmosphere as those books. Yeah. So he's going to have to wait.
Autumn (31m 10s):
Yeah, I do get, well he'll be waiting for you in the fall of it. Hopefully. Hopefully in other ways the world will be a happier, better place. But yeah, that's, I do get that. I, I definitely had a series that every time the fall, the first book started in the fall. So every time it came around it'd be like, yeah, I could keep going in that. And I will say this, the pandemic was inspiring some dark dystopian ideas, but I've actually kind of reverse course.
I tend to be contrary and I now just have this huge desire to go back to my original Epic fantasy, which is noble, bright and all like the heroes will eventually conquer. They'll go through crap, but they will succeed. I could just totally go for that. How um, however, you know, my book is sort of a dark urban fantasy as well, that my current series and I need to embrace.
Oh yeah.
Holly (32m 24s):
Yes. So is that the one, I mean, create new work? Are you coding in the world? Creates another aspect of the world, and then we're each gonna write our own novellas set in that world. Um, so it says future Britain where the sea levels have risen catastrophic CLI, and so there's, yeah. Yeah. So there's not a lot of funds left, not a lot of resources.
And people live under these domes to protect them from a radioactive atmosphere. I remember those posts stay inside. I'm like propaganda inside the domes. Yeah. Oh yeah, definitely. This is perfect for the characters who have to stay inside.
Autumn (33m 27s):
Oh, shoot. Well, if we can't laugh about this, we'll just go and say it. So, Oh you do? I think, well especially British, I think you're very good at the dark humor, the gallows humor. Am there's some people I think in the U S we're not quite as good at it. Uh, we're more sarcastic and so I do appreciate that about the dry British sense of humor. I think you guys can handle this very well. I've always said I was on the wrong continent, but, Oh well where are you go.
I'll come back and visit when I can, when you know, at this point we have to get a sailboat so I can come back. Oh well that's excellent. I love that. Cause I've heard like Gasper and I have been world-building and we're going to write a series together. Um, and so that's, you know, that's more the traditional, but I love the fact that you've kind of created a world together, but you're each gonna write your own novellas. That also sounds like fun. And who knows, maybe I will have to hell, we'll have to see how things go. I might end up branching off one or two short stories on my own then in the world that Yesper and I built that sounds kind of,
Holly (34m 34s):
yeah, I mean part of this world. So it will be very clear that they are a shared universe and you know, even going to sort of look at maybe crossover characters and just, you know, we'll say yeah, exciting times. Yeah.
Excellent. Hold on.
Autumn (35m 8s):
Oh, that's cool. That's really cool. Yeah, it's like I said, very different. So I know like probably a lot of the authors listening are, you know, familiar with like, well there's a lot of collaboration and co, you know, teaming up as writers going on, which I think is fantastic, but this is kind of a different twist on it and I think it's fascinating. So it kind of gives you a little bit of independence, but also a writing partner collaborator at the same time.
Holly (35m 35s):
Yeah, absolutely. Other people who maybe are challenged for control, like the idea of collaborative want to just test the waters, that kind of halfway house where we each have control over our own stories. So yeah, it's a good first. First step two was co-writing something.
Yeah.
Autumn (36m 6s):
Oh, fantastic. Well, I cannot wait to see how this goes and uh, hear updates and Watson, see the releases eventually on Instagram's. It'll be so much fun.
Holly (36m 17s):
Yeah.
Autumn (36m 19s):
Oh, great. Do you have any final
Holly (36m 21s):
yeah. Or announcements. I know what the unstoppableauthor is. You guys have put stuff together, but so many things are on I right now in the world, but I know you guys have some great clients. I can see how that grows as well maybe on hold, but all of our guest office had been fantastically supportive and they're all keen to, you know, still attend when it goes ahead in November. So yeah, it's kind of, we had to just kind of stopped planning because there's nothing else we can do on it right now. But, um, yeah, it'll be good to get back to planning and promoting that in a few months.
Definitely.
Autumn (37m 6s):
Yeah. I've seen so many of the events, the writing events Angeline has attended and um, you know, gone to as an author and signed up for and doesn't signings and things. And I've always admired it and was always joking like, Oh, I want to come across the ocean and do one with you guys. Who knows. Maybe one of these days we can all make that happen because it would be so awesome. I will definitely be paying attention and any excuse to come back at once. The world is slightly in our new normal, whatever that normal ends up being.
It'll be fantastic and hopefully I'll meet some of the other, like I said, I seem to know a lot of Britain, British authors, so that'd be fantastic to meet up with everyone. We're going to have a huge party maybe. Well great. Thank you so much for coming on and for the tips on goal setting and you know why you might want to be looking at your covers and you know, just testing out your books and looking and making sure everything is still up to snuff after a few years. Right now everyone's pretty much at home so it was a good time to recheck your old files.
Holly (38m 14s):
Great.
Autumn (38m 17s):
Yes. Excellent. Well, we'll have to have an update, maybe have out the other half on at one point and uh, see how things are going. Great.
Holly (38m 25s):
Yeah,
Autumn (38m 27s):
and so coming up next we have, we'll be back to Yesper and I will have some writing tips in our next podcast. So please come back
Holly (38m 36s):
and stay tuned.
Narrator (38m 42s):
If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the amwritingfantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join autumn and Yesper on patrion.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the amwritingfantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next time.
Becoming an indie author is an amazing opportunity, full of highs and more than a few lows. Jesper and Autumn share their self-publishing journey with a few answers that might surprise you!
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SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s):
You're listening to the amwritingfantasy podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing join to best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them. Now onto the show with your hosts. Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s):
Hello. I am, Jesper. And I'm Autumn,
Narrator (35s):
this is
Speaker 2 (35s):
episode 69 of the amwritingfantasy podcast. And we thought we would do something a little, I don't know, funny maybe today and share our journey as writers, you know,
Jesper (47s):
good. And the bad stuff. And hopefully that'll be useful to you, your listeners. And, uh, I dunno, maybe, maybe a few laughs along the way. At least say it's a little personal getting to know us in a different way. And you know, the real listic story of two authors and what have been the highs and the lows of her journey. Uh, let's focus on the highest, but yeah, no, there's some lows too. Yeah, there is.
Speaker 2 (1m 18s):
It's so, it's so nice. Nicer and Koshi that I can sort of hear the woods crackling in the background. It sounds so cool.
Jesper (1m 25s):
It is. Well, it's a nice rainy day here in Vermont and I'm in my cabin. I've got the woodstove going. I actually have am of course you don't eat me, but I've got a little brisket of corn beef on the woodstove simmering away and I can look out at the rain and it's falling on the pond and the stream, which has a little trickily waterfalls through stone. So yeah, this is pretty much my quarantine Haven and heaven over here. It doesn't sound too bad. No, it's a tiny, tiny house in a tiny, tiny cabin.
Um, I think ideally if it wasn't a, if we didn't have the support of the main house, which you know, it's about a thousand, 1500 feet through the woods is a main house where we get access to, you know, we can use some, we're doing some storage in the basement, especially now with like, we have extra food supplies and I'm using her freezer. They have a spare freezer, so we've got some space over there. But if it wasn't for that, this is a little bit too small, I'd want another 20 or 50 a hundred square feet to be my minimum ideal size.
But you know what, in many ways it is just quiet and pleasant and especially being almost done. I've done some buildings, shelves and stuff. I'm so close to finishing the insight. I can, I can taste it. So I'm very excited,
Speaker 2 (2m 46s):
but I can't remember. Did you have to go to the house to use the toilet and the showers and stuff you have?
Jesper (2m 51s):
Well, we officially, we only have to go there now for the shower. We have the composting toilet and everything hooked up in the cabin. So we're pretty self-sufficient for showers. Um, unless you want to really call bath, you can jump in the stream wise for going to the sauna and how it was with the shower.
Speaker 2 (3m 11s):
Yeah, of course. Of course. Yeah. Well at least then because then you don't have to get up in the middle of the night to go to the house to, you know, use the toilet or something. That's horrible. We did that a few times when we am when we rented a summer cabins in Finland, you know, because they fit on this also like huge country. So a lot of the summer cabins state, they don't have like toilets and stuff like that, like running water and stuff. So a lot of the time it's like this outhouse where there's a toilet out there full of mosquitoes and shit.
And then you have to go out there in the middle of the night if you have to go to the toilet is, I hated it. Hate it.
Jesper (3m 49s):
Well it is sad with the modern things like the composting toilets, um, that are available. And this one is one that you could use on a ship. It's like, seriously, this is not that hard to fix things up to am have it all inside and pretty, pretty Steve-O clean and hygienic and usable. It's so nice. Yeah, indeed. So all sorts of things on your side of the ocean.
Speaker 2 (4m 15s):
Well, uh, it's, it's, it's just a bit kind of quiet. I mean, well, it depends. It depends, I guess you could say. If you're looking in the media, everything is going crazy. It's not quiet at all. Right. But a self quarantined at home and you don't see any people, you just sort of sitting in the office most of the day doing writing and work. Um, and then, um, yeah, in the afternoon, sitting and watching Netflix and stuff like that took like, it's when you're out and about like you normally are.
It's amazing how, you know, little actually happens. It's just, it just said home. That's it.
Jesper (4m 58s):
I, to me, it's amazingly, I've always been good even at, well, you know, while we're traveling and as a full time author I've always been good about pretty much knowing the days of the week, but there's been a few times the last week that I've been like, is it Thursday? Oh no, it's Monday or Sunday. It's just like, I usually know, but for some reason, not that he entire world is off the normal work week. I don't have a clue what day it is.
Speaker 2 (5m 23s):
No. Yeah. That's, that's what happens. Right. But that's also why yesterday evening, um, I watched the movie on Netflix called wind river. I dunno. How, do you know what, no, it's probably not. I dunno. It's probably not that, uh, main, not mainstream, but it's probably not that well known. I guess I should call it instead. But it's like, it's a, it's a murder mystery from 2017. Um, so it's like a us fish and wildlife service tracker and then an FBI agent who teams up to solve the murder on the wind river Indian reservation in Wyoming.
Interesting. Yeah, it's a, it's actually, it's, it's like, it's a cool setting. Uh, I like it because it, you know, it has all the wintery themed stuff, so it's not easy to get around. They, they can easily get help from the outside and all this. I, I quite like that when you pin the characters into a setting where they can just easily get help. So, so that's pretty cool. Uh, and I also think that the character motivations are pretty good in it. You know, the folks out of there, the murder that, that they're trying to solve is, is of a young Indian woman who was, who was murdered there.
But it then turns out that the fish and wildlife service tracker there, he's, he also lost his own daughter. So there was a good, good character motivation for why he wants to help with it. Um, so he's trying to help the FBI agent salted so it's, it's pretty good. Um, but I would say as well that there is a lesson in there about trying to understand the tropes of the shoulder. Oh no, really?
Because it's like, I mean, I'm not going to spoil anything for anybody who wants to watch it, but to what's the end of the movie, it turns into like a shoot everything up kind of thing where, you know, when you're getting into the last 20 minutes of a, like a murder mystery movie, I'm sort of expecting that there's going to be a big revelation or plot twist or something like that. That's sort of what you normally would expect, uh, in the, in this genre.
But, so it was not a bad movie or anything, but, but the ending just annoyed me somewhat because it was like, all of a sudden it just goes crazy and everybody starts shooting. It's like w what I mean, if you want to do like a or a measurable thing, I think that's absolutely fine, but then you need to start doing it from the beginning. So you sort of understand all the way through the movie that Oak or if if in our case we write in books like, so you make the reader understand from beginning what type of books book this is or what kind of movie it is.
Right. You shouldn't wait until the end and then all of a sudden it turns into something completely different. Yeah. Mashup usually means you know, mixed up from the beginning, not a front end and a backend. That's completely different. Yeah, it was like a one hour, 45 minutes movie and everything along the way was, you know, standard MIS, you know, mystery murder solving stuff. There was nothing weird at all. And then the last 20 minutes it just goes completely crazy. Williams probably shoot him up sort of thing.
Sounds like. Yeah. Everybody starts shooting at each other. And it's not really like any revelation to figure out who the killer is because it just comes out with all the shooting stuff and it's like, okay, yeah, I mean, it's not a bad movie. I make it sound really bad. I mean, it was not bad. It was, it was OK, but, but the, I was just not a fan of the ending there and I, I dunno, I think that was a lesson for us riders to be careful with the expectations after strong run. Uh, if you want to break it, fine, but at least set that expectation from the get go then, Oh, week on the internet with the amwritingfantasy podcast so autumn you created a Pall on the Facebook group, uh, about a possible short cost that we could create for people now that they could with 19 self quarantine is ongoing.
Uh, and I was thinking we could talk a bit about it.
Jesper (9m 36s):
That sounds great. And that was, yes, we, there's so many people stuck at home and I mean, you can either read the news and just feel more and more paranoid, panicked and depressed or you can do something with all this suddenly available time. And you and I are definitely the more of the do something with it crowds. So we thought we'd help help some other people
Speaker 2 (9m 57s):
adding more tasks to are endless to do lists. That's, I don't know how smart,
Jesper (10m 1s):
I know, I feel the weight it's teetering at add some more supports I think.
Speaker 2 (10m 7s):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I was in checking on the result earlier today, um, on that pole that you've created because basically what, what we did was that we made a poll and said, okay, if we're going to write, or no, sorry, not right, but if we're going to teach a very like quick, short course, what would people's favorite topic B and you put in some different, uh, options for people to vote on, but also allowed them to am to add their own topics if they want it. Which I don't think I came in like two days later though.
Yeah. There was somebody who was a parenting, so cheated and said, I want all the above. Yeah. But, uh, I think I came in like two days later and then I added my fantasy map making option. But I think so many boats had already been cast at that point. So we was too late. Yeah.
Jesper (10m 59s):
I thought I had that in there from the beginning of that. It has something about map making, but maybe I was wrong or you have to Wilco shoot. Oh, it's probably, well, you know, you think one thing that adds the other.
Speaker 2 (11m 9s):
Yeah. Well, so we had the character development, we had the plot and story development we'll building and then I added mapmaking and periodic everything. So a chief air, uh, but I, but I was in checking the results today as I said. And there was actually twice as many votes on a course about character development versus number two, which was unplugged and store development.
Jesper (11m 33s):
Interesting. To me, that is very interesting. I don't know if I would've guessed on character development. I just kinda throw that one, I wouldn't have, I don't know. But obviously co authors are interested in that. So that sounds like it's might be one way you have to look into yeah, the people have spoken,
Speaker 2 (11m 51s):
that's a quite decisive result. So, uh, we are of course recording this episode that you're listening to now ahead of time. So this also means that we are going to set up a page from where people can sign up for this course that we're then going to create maybe on character development and why I'm saying maybe it's because we are only going to create it if we get enough sign off. Otherwise we will not spend our time on it.
Um, so by the time you're listening to this episode, all of this has already happened. Most likely let's fold means that the, yeah, which means that you will, you will have seen a short, very short, like a few minutes long bonus episode pop up on the podcast feed where I explained all the details, um, about how to sign up and all that stuff. So you're probably already listened to that and hopefully if you already signed up as well. Uh, so I don't know if we're going to be that fast on up, but that's my assumption for now.
So we'll see. Uh, if we get enough sign ups, we discussed autumn and I that we least, we needed these 20 sign-ups, otherwise we're not going to go ahead. Uh, so, but I guess, you know, these times of self pointing, it's just a good time to, to learn. You know, people have the time at home nowadays. I think it's a great, great thing. I mean, goodness sakes, I have, uh, so many little mini courses I've started, I want to get back to and I just keep building things. So eventually I'm gonna finish this cabinet. I'm just going to enjoy writing and creating on amwritingfantasy and maybe taking a few courses of my own.
Speaker 3 (13m 27s):
Oh yeah. Why not? Why not?
Speaker 2 (13m 31s):
All right. Anything else we need to share before we move on though other than, you know, stay safe out there and you know, let's go learn something about, uh, how we became author as the highs and the lows.
Speaker 3 (13m 43s):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (13m 48s):
Alright. So yeah. Hi alone. I actually tried to prepare like three good items and three bad items, organized truth to final one that became golf. Both a good antibiotic. So it's like a blessing and a curse wrapped in one. Okay, that sounds very fair. I will, since you're organized, I will come up with the same thing, but I will do my usual of winging it, but I'll let you go first. But because I can definitely think of two good things that definitely have inspired me, but maybe one of yours will inspire my third.
Okay. So do you want to alternate? Alternate.
Speaker 3 (14m 26s):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (14m 28s):
Um, so my first, should we start with the good ones? Are we going to go one good one bad one. Good one. Bad we should alternate the whole way through. So good, bad, good, bad. And also between the two of us. Okay. Okay. So just be mindful then. I have two good ones. I have two bad ones. And then the last one is, uh, is a mixture of the two towns fair. That's fair. Well that, that was the only way I, that'd be an interesting, I'm trying to think what will be a mixture so it'll be fun. Um, I guess there is more that you can guess.
You can think about it now and then, and then before I reveal it, I'll ask you, what do you think it is? It'll be tough one. Oh, that's mean it's going to be impossible probably. Thanks. Uh, so, okay. My first good one. Um, I actually talked a bit about this in a, in a past episode, but I think the really good thing I did was that I decided to only listen to one single critique partner when I started out, because I talked about it a bit in the past as well.
I just don't know. I mean maybe everything would have worked out fine anyway, but, but I, I just not sure how things would have ended up if I've done the either the like full critique group kind of a thing where you're getting a ton of other types of people, but maybe five, six people giving you feedback on your manuscript and all the contradictory information that you will be getting from people and trying to take into that into account when they don't even know myself starting out what is right or what is wrong or I think, I think it would have been a bit of a mess and might have ended up making things take a lot longer to get completed because of it.
Uh, and then I guess there's some luck in this one as well because I was lucky that the critique partner actually was, he was good at it. He's good at explaining what it was that was wrong with my writing, what I could do it differently. He gave me some examples once in a while, so not that he wrote anything for me, but sometimes he just wrote a line just saying, what, you know, what if you did like this? And I still distinctly remember some point, especially with the beginning of the novel, I was trying to ride him and he keeps, he kept telling me, well this is telling, not showing.
And he kept saying that we wrote and he said, he sent me back a note and say, is you are still telling. I was like, really? Okay. I wrote again and I think this happened 10 times. I've got the same response every time. And I was like, okay, I'm lost. I don't know what you mean. Um, and then he said, okay, um, what if it went something like this? And he, I think he just wrote a single paragraph or something and then I still remember as soon as I read it, it just sort of clicked in place in my mind.
Oh, that's fantastic. That's like, ah, I got it now. I see. And it was so weird because when I take clicked in, in place for me it always felt a bit stupid as well at the same time because you know, I read tons of books. I mean there, there was nothing in what you sent me that you don't read in any book anyway, but, but there was just something because I was in the middle of the process and he was telling me in, in a reflection directly linked to the story that I was telling that just made it click. Whereas when I was just reading other people's books, it just wasn't as, I don't know, it was just, I, I just couldn't get, I just didn't understand how, how to tell the story without it just being like, here's an infrared dump of text where I'll tell you about the world and whatnot.
Right. The famous fantasy problems. Yes. Um, well I think that's so, yeah,
Jesper (18m 14s):
that's a typical one I think for a lot of new authors too. We could do a whole episode on what the difference of showed up, what that really means. So we won't go there. But that is a, that is a huge step to learn.
Speaker 2 (18m 27s):
Yeah. We actually have a knot on the podcast feed here, but on the amwritingfantasy YouTube channel, there is actually a full interview with Chet. I forgot his last name, but he's a line editor full episode with him where he's talking about show versus a tail. So you can find it on the YouTube channel if you're interested. But, but it's, it's a really good conversation and he explains it in detail, uh, how to avoid it and what to think about and what not. So. So that's pretty good.
That sounds good.
Jesper (18m 59s):
I think for me, when I'm on, the first things that I did that I think made a big difference is, I mean I had spent a few years I think querying agents and actually getting some responses, but never really getting an actual agent, never getting a publishing deal. And it was really my husband who actually found an article on self-publishing. And again, this was 2014 so you know, really eBooks became popular in 2012 so it's only two years in.
It was still pretty much an unknown thing. And it was interesting because the article was actually about someone else who is also a federal employee, just like I was at the time and that she was trying self-publishing and her experience and it was just sort of like what you said, it was so similar to what I'd been doing and what I wanted to do that I think, I think he had even mentioned it in other people had mentioned maybe self-publishing and I have taken to adult ed writing courses, but neither of them had even mentioned self-publishing at the time.
It was completely unheard of. They were completely unhelpful. And so it was the fact that he, you know, he recommended it and I read it and it was so similar to what I was doing. I'm like, yeah, yeah, I'm doing that. And it was, I think that was December. I remember it being right before Christmas. So that was December at the time. And I said, yeah, I'm going to give this a go. And it took until February to get everything ready and to figure out how to get everything ready. But it was because, um, uh, my husband and him sharing that article that I actually became a self published author in early twenties actually.
So don't really 2012. I'm sorry. That's when I first published born of water. So right at the beginning of the eBooks. Um, yeah, I think that was phenomenal and I think I would have totally waited a couple more years and kept querying agents if he hadn't ever pointed that out to me and got me going.
Speaker 2 (20m 57s):
Yeah. But that's good. Uh, and I guess that was also back when, wow. Yeah. Maybe some people could argue that it's still a bit the case today, but there was a lot more stigma around self puppers.
Jesper (21m 9s):
Oh yes. And we can get into, if we want to switch to the bad side of self-publishing in 2012, um, I will say that as my first bad response. So you go ahead with yours.
Speaker 2 (21m 23s):
Okay. Well, I think my bad one is, it's about expectations because it's again, one of those things where, you know what, but you don't know it because I think I came into the writing journey with not completely unrealistic but slightly unrealistic expectations on how fast I could grow an income from am. I was thinking like, yeah, but you know, two years maybe then everything should be fine.
It's like, yeah, right. You know, you get, you get wiser. Um, and I think this line of thinking actually to just a slight detour here, but, but I think this line of thinking about having realistic expectations actually has heavily influenced the materials that we created for the free course called so popular soup success that we're going to release later this year. I'm going to talk quite a lot about that in the first modules of that course because it's so important in it.
I don't know why for me, I mean, I'm pretty stubborn minded. You know, when I, when I want to do something I'm going to do it. So it's not like it the motivated me, but it could feel times like frustrating when I was looking at the monthly revenue and it was like, what the F this is, I mean if you, if I looked at the per sentence then it was a nice number, right? Yeah. We had a 200% growth in revenue this month compared to last month. But it's like $1. It's like yes, that is the tough one. I could have caused the proceeds to kid myself.
Yeah. But it's, it never demoted, demoted. We my but I think for other people
Jesper (23m 8s):
it could. Um, I think, yeah, I think if you don't fight just other motivations. Um, cause I think that's common for everyone. They're hoping they'll make more money, but hopefully something else lights a fire and makes it worthwhile for you.
Speaker 2 (23m 24s):
Well, yeah, I mean of course there is also the fact around, uh, it's not, I mean, we're not writing books just for money. Right. I mean, as I said in a YouTube video, once, you know, if you're in for this, if you're in this for the money, there is a ton of better and much easier way to earn money then writing books. So if that was the only motivation than I would almost say go and something else and stay. So of course we're writing the books because we want to tell the story, but we also want to earn some money from it. Right. Um, and it was one of those things where I have heard many, many times that you need to think about your writing Korea something long term and you're not gonna own a lot of money very quickly and all that stuff.
And I've heard it a lot of time, but still, I didn't take it to heart until I sort of experienced it. So it was one of those things where logically I knew it, but I didn't quite believe it in my heart. Right.
Jesper (24m 18s):
I understand that totally. And yeah, I guess until you get there, you just don't know. So that is, uh, expectations is a good, um, good example of the lows. I think for mine, definitely coming back to it being 2012, late 2011 and most, like I said, no one was even recommending self-publishing at the time I was up in Maine. So I'm doing this tiny little corner of the United States that I've actually been to other States and people have asked me, Oh, isn't that Canada?
So my it is not a well known state even in the United States, surprisingly. And uh, so no one was really supportive. There was no one in the community who he could ask questions of. And so I did make some of those very typical newbie mistakes. Even though I had my book, I just taking these courses, I knew a bit about editing, I edited, I had someone else look it over. It, published it with still too many errors. It wasn't a good editor, it wasn't a good edit. It was am. Even though I would say a self-made cover, but I keep thinking, I still have self-made covers, but Hey, I'm a graphic artist, but my first cover, I hadn't gotten into Photoshop.
I did kind of put up something, it wasn't the best cover cause again, what were you comparing things to in 2012? Uh, you know the other, there were so few books on books on Amazon at the time, despite all that, you know, you could run a promo and you'd get 10,000 downloads on a drop of a hat. It was so fascinating and so much fun. It was,
Speaker 2 (25m 47s):
yeah. T.H.E. I think back then, actually it didn't matter as much what the cover looks.
Jesper (25m 52s):
No, it really didn't. I, I refer to those days now is the wild West of the indie publishing world because it was anything goes and you could shoot to the top, you could shoot to the bottom. Oh, it was tons of fun and just absolutely crazy, crazy times. But yeah, those were definitely some of my mistakes because I just didn't have the advice. And I, you know, again, that's what's led to some of our classes and courses and everything else or is because the stuff just wasn't available. There was no advice on the web. There was no help at all.
And even some of the publishing companies I talked to, I ended up using a publishing company in Maine. And uh, they helped people, you know, do print books but didn't help people at the time do eBooks. And when I explained what I was doing, they're like, really, you can do that. I mean, when you look, Stephen King in Maine basically started the ebook revelation in 2008 when he published a something that you could only get online. He is the start of this. And yet I had main publishers who are going,
Speaker 2 (26m 53s):
you want to do what? And
Jesper (26m 56s):
I, Oh, I guess I could help you edit it. Who was so unhelpful? So that was definitely my low side is I started so early and in such a little weird corner of the world that even though it was very literary Stephen King, I mean seriously, he was a town away. Um,
Speaker 2 (27m 12s):
just that helps support and writers groups. Uh, we're just not there. And that was really difficult. Yeah. But there there is actually believe it or not, but there are still people today that doesn't know that you can self publish on sites like Amazon and stuff like that though it still exists. There's still some people who just poo poo it and say, no, it doesn't matter unless I end up being published by a big brick and mortar and I'm like, well okay. Yeah. To me that's fine.
I mean each to his own. I don't mind how people publish if to self publish or they think that it's much better to be traditional published Ida. I don't care what whatsoever they can do what they want, but at least they should just be mindful of the decisions that they're making or what it means. To me, I think it's the attitude that it is the only in true and tried way. You know what? No, it's just one way. They're all equally, I don't like people looking down on other people. That's just not right. No, no, I agree with that. I agree with that. And I think the other thing about it is also that it's night, it's not like a, it's a onetime forever decision.
The decision to self-publish or traditional publish. It's also a book by book decision. That's true. It doesn't have to be. So that now I decide that I want to be traditional puppet show from now on, all my books are going to be that or vice versa. Everything is going to be self-published. I mean, you can decide what you want to do per book. So yeah. And I still think hybrid is probably one of the best ways to go. I mean, you get the both the best of both worlds. I think so. But I think so. It's not easy. Of course. No. You've got to find the right platform.
It'd be in the right spot and so many other things must align and the stars. Yeah. And you need an agent that's well to be able to do that. So, but well that's something that, not the story. Oh, something else though. What did you, what was another good experience? Another high of being, uh, your writing journey yeah. So my number two of the good ones is, uh, by far the best one.
Then this one was so easy because, uh, there is nothing coming even close to this. Yeah. Yeah. So that is actually teaming up.
Jesper (29m 35s):
Oh wow. I didn't know I made the list. That's so I have butterflies. That's fantastic.
Speaker 2 (29m 44s):
Well, but, but it's, it's true because I feel like it's, it's just so great working together, uh, on both all the nonfiction stuff and all the author related courses. And I also, you know, the community that we're building on the Facebook group, but also from listeners to this podcast and what all of that is, is really great. But I think above all of that is, it's just the fact that having somebody to work closely together with and sort of share all the ups and downs, but also figuring out how, you know, how we want to do things, coming up with plans for the future and, and all those different things.
I, it's just, it's so much different than if going on, if I was going out of their loan, I, I, I understand that everybody would want to, you know, be coauthor, altering things and doing things together and that's fine. But at least
Jesper (30m 36s):
for me and, and the way that I like to work, I think it's awesome. Oh, it is. I w I definitely concur considering that am one, it's by fault. I reached out to you first, but that, uh, that you're patient with me considering I am truly a high motivated worker, but it seems like since we, uh, started working together, I've been traveling full time building a cabin, um, had a job full time job for a while. I'd be disbanding in just a crazy journey. I've really used to be the steady person in the world, but it seems like it to be fair to yourself.
It's only been the last six months. Yeah, I think so. But it's been a little, little crazy, but we'll catch up and it's going to be very exciting. But no, considering one of my, one of my biggest complaints was that I had been going it alone just to learn indie publishing. I think having a partner and having someone else who, especially you like spreadsheets, I like graphic design. It, it all works out. I do websites. You do advertising. It'd mean we fill in each other's gaps. So, well, I don't know how this worked out.
Yeah, that was, yeah, that was not even planned. That's just us being lucky. I said, I can still say, I think, uh, the hike and Pooka Wasco national park in Canada, it was a 10 mile hike out 10 miles back and your name popped up. And I'm like, that's, I'm kinda sent him an email and see if he wants to work together. Yeah, that was amazing. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32m 7s):
Just to mention as well, for the listener, uh, back in episode 58, we talked about how to find a writing partner. So if that's something you're interested in,
Jesper (32m 16s):
go and listen to that episode a little bit more of our story as well. Well since you already claimed a working together, which I definitely think has been a highlight. I will say as a personal author journey I think one of the moments that made me, there's, I guess I'll combine it into two, there's two moments, moments that really made me one fall in love with being an author and how credibly awesome and cool it is. And one that made me take it even more seriously than I thought I already was. And the first one was I was doing something on good reads of all places and I saw my name listed under somebody who's favorite authors and I just kind of made me realize I am a published author.
I mean I remember like being a teenager and you know who Tracy, you, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, you know who my favorite authors are. I would list and suddenly my name is listed like in that same spot. And I mean it still gives me tingles. I mean it made me tear up. I, I know I did a screen capture of it and I'm just like, that's, that was it. That was just the moment for me of I'm an author and it's serious and someone actually loves my writing so much. They're saying my I'm their favorite.
So that was so exciting. And yeah, the other was when I got a critical review from Fantasia reviews and they wrote something incredibly glowing about, uh, one of my books, spark of defiance. And I think it was one that said, maybe kind of say, okay, I, I, you know, I've written a lot of books at that point and they were doing okay, but sort of like what you'd said, my expectations had been like, yeah, this is, this is making some money, but it's not going to pay for a lavish lifestyle among the stars or anything. This is not, you know, this is not going to foot everything I want to do with my life.
It's just going to be a part of it. And it kind of made me say, you know, but this is serious and I'm not putting people saying I'm good. People have said, uh, other, you know, other people have written to me and emailed me and said I was good. But to have someone who's a read thousands of books at a critical reviewer say you are good just made me kind of dust off my shoulders, dust off the covers. I ended up redoing all my covers. I redid my blurbs, I got a little bit more professional looking. You know, I did a little revamp cause you know, starting in 2012 in the wild West, you got to kind of take off the desert dust.
So yeah. Um, and so that, I think that really kind of made me take it all a little bit more seriously and say this is, this has gotta be a certain standard to everything I do and I really appreciate that. So understanding that. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34m 51s):
Okay. I have another battery one before the last, uh, mixed. Okay.
Jesper (34m 58s):
Oh, and this one is just like, I could bang my head.
Speaker 2 (35m 5s):
Oh. But it's like, because even when I started, I already knew it and then I did it anyway. Oh no. This was when, uh, I wrote a full book on how to Margaret Margaret books on Twitter. And it's so freaking annoying because I, even when I started writing it, I just knew that writing a book about some sort of social media platform is like the worst plan in the world because the social media platforms change all the time and what you write, we'll be out of date tomorrow.
Um, and uh, I did it anyway. I took all the time that it took to write the books. I, I even created like am there was a lot of like how to set different things up. So I even recorded a screen share videos about click here, click there kind of thing, which was linked to each video inside. It was like a very comprehensive book. I mean it would teach you everything you needed to know step-by-step, showing you videos along the way. It was in that sense, it was great.
Um, and people loved it. I think it was like a month after I published it. Then Twitter changed the terms of service. So the bedrock of the entire strategy that the book was built on disappeared because the service that I was using to make everything work had to close shop. Because Twitter changed the terms of condition there. So that went out the window and then was like, Oh, okay, great. So everything that this, uh, you know, paid for the, for the, uh, editing of the book and all that stuff, all the time that went into is just like out the window in five minutes.
And I was like, this is so fucking stupid because I knew it was going to happen sooner or later. Right. Uh, and that it should just, so yeah. I, I feel at least I did the right thing in the end because I actually unpublished it. Um, I do see a lot of books on Amazon that is out of date for sure, that it's still up there and people are still selling them. And I don't know, I just feel like that's cheating the reader leg. It is, it's not fair selling people that book, even if it's just $5 or something. But it's not fair selling a book where USD author already know that the content inside is, is not, it's not possible to follow the strategy anymore.
Right. So I've just felt like that that's not fair. That's certainly not what I want to do. So I actually unpublished it. Um, but it was just so annoying because all the time that went into writing it, recording all those videos, paying for editing and all that stuff.
Jesper (37m 44s):
Cool. I remember you, we were talking at that point we were, I don't know if we were to start working together, but we're at least communicating enough. I remember the struggles you went through with that one and little tweaks cause I was, I w but it's so easy. I mean it seemed like Twitter was stable for, at the time it seemed like tweet Twitter had been stable the way you were using it for a year.
Speaker 2 (38m 10s):
Oh yeah. In time. It worked really well. Yeah. So that's definitely, yeah, it's an easy trap to get yourself sucked into, I guess. Yeah. So for everybody listening, if you have an idea about writing a book about how to do some social media stuff, just save yourself the effort and don't do it. It's, it's so annoying when you end up figuring out that everything you just made, which is out of thing.
Jesper (38m 36s):
Oh, I think for me, and this is actually one, I thought you were going to choose this when your worst, so I don't know if it's your am the next thing you'll say or not, but I was gonna say piracy and
Speaker 2 (38m 48s):
Oh, okay. No, because I don't, I know, well just to give a quick reflection on that before you elaborate on why you picked that one. But because in general, I don't see it as a big problem. Uh, I mean I understand that peop people do pirate books and, and that happens all the time. I do understand that. But my line of thinking for the most part, it's like the people who are powering pirating books and downloading pirated books and are going to buy my books anyway. So honestly, I don't care.
I mean, I will say, I will send a take down notice when I, when I notice it, but I'm not losing any sleep or I'm sorry for that interruption.
Jesper (39m 29s):
My line of thinking. See, I think we've definitely, especially having matured, I think it's become, um, something we both share that view because I mean my biggest joke now, you've got to have a sense of humor about this is that you're pirating a book that sells for like one I'm giving away am and other ones that are like two 99, three 99. You really, if you're forgot to go steal something and try to resell it, there's all, I think my jigsaw is worth more than the book. Of course, the book you can kind of keep reselling and the true costs of piracy I think is a lot of people are doing the, Hey, sign up to get this.
So they're actually stealing the email addresses or possibly trying to get you to log into the site and create an email and then they're getting this password and they're going to try that password and your email address and all these other places. It's going to be on the dark web. So that's why you're supposed to always change your password because once they get ahold of one of your passwords, they're going to try your email. And password combination everywhere. So you gotta be careful and I hate knowing my books are used that way, but I definitely have had a few people who have come to me and said, Oh by the way, did you know your book's available here?
And it's like, you know, you'd go to Google and you say this is not authorize, this is not a real website. Please take it down. And it gets tiring cause I do try to at least stamp it out because it bothers me to no end result of what they're trying to do for sure. But it is crazy and it is funny though. I will say it's not really a piracy but I do actually know that since I published my book, someone else came up with the exact same title and she's a great author and she's doing really well and it's a different book, a different cover. But there is something just kind of like you had a name that I was there first but you don't, we don't have titles.
You've got to get over that one pretty quick.
Speaker 2 (41m 17s):
Yeah, indeed. I was just about to say, even even when we write our fiction, I'm, I don't intend to sit and chill all the books on Amazon to check if somebody has the same time. I mean, it, it can easily happen quintessential, right? So yes,
Jesper (41m 29s):
especially when you're doing elemental magic. I mean eventually someone's going to come up the same title
Speaker 2 (41m 34s):
you are, but Oh well, but definitely a piracy still bothers me. I just wish the world was a different place. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. It's a nice to know, but at least, uh, from those pirated sites, uh, as you, as you said, a lot of the time they actually trick you to show you download malware and stuff like that. So I hope those people who, uh, than stealing by downloading pirate of the stuff are going to learn the lesson one day a computer get corrupted.
So maybe you shouldn't do that again. Support the author please then $2 and support the orthopedics. So that's how to, that's how you should be behaving. But of course that doesn't apply, apply to any of our listeners because they are all author so they get this. All right, so your plus and minus combined. I have one as well. So what is yours? And don't make me be gas it cause I don't have a clue. No. Okay. I won't let you guess it will be here.
The rest of them. This is a blessing and a curse in work. So this is basically when I started out, uh, apart from writing I also spent quite a lot of time focusing on learning how to market books. Uh, so I was listening to podcasts, I was reading nonfiction books. I remember actually I recorded a YouTube video about it years back is still on the YouTube channel somewhere. And I think in that video I listed out like 20 or 30 books or something and that I read on marketing.
Um, I also took Mark Dawson's ads for authors course and I watched you two videos with Brandon Sanderson classes, uh, in it. So just like everything that I could absorb. I did. And on one hand I think it was good because it did help me in the longterm. You know, I, I sort of probably avoided some of the early pitfalls because I, for instance, I learned that I had to set up an email list from the beginning, which I did, which was good.
Um, but at the same time, I also have to say that all the time that I put into learning how to market books when I was still writing my first book was not a quiz. I should, you know, if I spent the same time just writing instead, I probably have probably had had more than one trilogy out now. Uh, but, uh, yeah, I don't know. It's sort of, it's good and bad. It's not like I want to say I want to, I would not do it if I had to do it again.
But I do understand that I spend a lot of time on it that could have been spent on writing and at least when we were starting out, it's better just to write some books and then learn marketing later when you have like at least three or four books. Yeah, that's probably very true and definitely good advice. And I still have to say even as a author with as many books as I have, that there is still
Jesper (44m 32s):
times I'm like, gosh, I'm wasting my time. I'm building a cabinet. Could be writing or I could be if I was more serious on graphic design, I could've learned this, this and this and the snout by now. But there are only so many things in the day and you know what? Life is not all about just my nose to the grindstone. Occasionally I had to go for a walk with my husband and the dog or they might not be there than the morning life keeps getting in the way of what's going on. It's kind of reminds me every once in a while that it's not all about fantasy worlds and characters in my head.
So my plus and minus is going to sound like a total minus, but it actually had a plus even though I would never do it again on purpose was that I was writing I used to write all the time on my iPad and I was writing one time and uh, we went to backup my iPad and I had actually, it was a new software update was went through on my iPad and I had backed up my story before we started it and I lost 10 chapters, 10, 10, 10, 10 and it was my second book.
So I had one post Oh, easily. I mean it was, I think that book, it's rule of fire and it was I think 110,000 words. I don't know how many chapters, but it's at least a third of the book. About a third of the book I lost in one go. And it was, again, I remember it was December. I remember the dates pretty good that way. And it was just gut wrenching because it was book number two. So I was only had published one. I kind of knew I really wanted to do a trilogy.
I'm still all new and wet behind the ears and you lose a third of your book. And that was it. Only, you know, I was about halfway through it. So I lost the major chunk of my book and I, um, it was that moment of am I going to be serious about this? Am I going to be a writer? Am I going to sit down and, and fix this and rewrite it or am I going to just give up and say, well, I tried and it didn't work out in life. Life threw me a curve ball and I just ducked and ran. So no, obviously 16 books later I sucked it up.
Said, you know what, just give me a week. Don't bother me. I am going to take Christmas break and I'm going to rewrite those 10 chapters. And I did ask him to the to him stop, right. Sat down, wrote up and I actually think they came out better, which is really kind of funny. Oh yeah. But I would never do, I would never delete 10 chapters on purpose again. No. Please especially one of our books. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (47m 2s):
Okay. Well I think that was some, uh, good and bad things about our author journey. So hopefully the listeners will get something out of that. Hopefully. At least I can see that there are
Jesper (47m 12s):
goods and bads in every journey and hopefully, Hey Sherry, you know, some of yours in the comments, it'd be really great to hear them.
Speaker 2 (47m 19s):
That would be cool. Or in the, in the amwritingfantasy phase. Well, no, that would be nice. So, uh, all of them I'm thinking if I get some music playing then maybe you can
Jesper (47m 30s):
talk us out here from this episode. Absolutely. So next up we are going to have a secret surprise interview on our next episodes of please. Come back and stay tuned. Oh, maybe it'll be the two of us.
Narrator (47m 45s):
If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the amwritingfantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join autumn and Yesper on patrion.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the amwritingfantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Writing a novel is difficult enough, but where do you even begin?
Autumn and Jesper share thoughts on this very topic in episode 68 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, together with some personal horror stories of what went wrong when they first started out writing.
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy.
For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion)."
Narrator (2s):
You're listening to the amwritingfantasy podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing join to best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them. Now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s):
Hello. I am Jesper and I'm Autumn, this is episode 68 of the amwritingfantasy podcast and we decided to talk about how each of us prepare to write our next book. So this is more about uh, I guess sort of sharing our personal experiences and thoughts, processes rather than a how to episode.
Autumn (53s):
Yeah. Not to mention the times we did it wrong and why we don't do it that way. You more I guess where we need to think about that too or, yeah, absolutely. There's a reason, especially after so many books and stuff, there's a reason we do things the way we do them now and not that they won't continue to change and grow, but we got here is for a reason and I think that's sort of the conversation itself.
Jesper (1m 19s):
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So hopefully people will get a lot out of, uh, just hearing our experiences here and am how we screw things up too. Once in a while
Autumn (1m 30s):
I thought there would be, it should be a few laughs in this one, hopefully. I hope so. Yeah. So how have you been autumn Oh good. I'm still still working on my little cabin and building and practicing safe distancing and a little bit of self isolation, but mostly be just because I'm a recluse and I really, I could have lived my life as a hermit. I think as long as I have a laptop and a good view and a nice place to go for a walk and probably a construction or a building project.
Um, even if it was rock cards, I think I could probably entertain myself forever. I've always said if you know, they need a volunteer to like go to Mars or something, I probably would be fine with minimal social contact and never just occasional internet, you know, talks home and I'm good. I am fine. So I'm just rolling with the punches and trying to take this weird world that we've found ourselves in and hoping that everyone else is doing well in staying mentally healthy Israel as well as physically healthy.
How are things over in Denmark?
Jesper (2m 37s):
No, it's uh, well it's fine. As fine as things can get, I guess, you know, all the podcasts I listened to are talking about the Corona virus who really don't want to talk about it anymore. To be honest,
Autumn (2m 51s):
that's what I use for the first week or two, I think I read like every BBC am news story that I could find it and I was obsessing about it. But now I go and I read any story that doesn't mention the Corona virus. I just read one about, uh, us multimillionaire who bought the first Bordeaux winery. The first, you know, non-French owner of a Bordeaux winery. That's what I went and read because yeah, I'd rather be reading about French.
Why that feels normal there.
Jesper (3m 27s):
Indeed. But it does come with some, some good things. I mean am because I don't have to drive the kids to school everyday. Uh, you start to get more extra time on your hands, which is quite nice. So I've, I've spent some time thinking about how we could, uh, use artwork for a world of Elysium going forward. Um, so yeah, we, we, uh, well, of course you know that autumn we are in the process of trying to find a graphic artist who can do some am some workforce.
And I think it's, it's quite an interesting process, wouldn't you say?
Autumn (4m 3s):
Yes, it is. It, it's, it's so much fun too. I mean, Whoa, we have to go and like scroll through dozens of artists and look at some amazing pictures and paintings that they've done. It's, it's horrible. So I had spent a lot of fun looking at others' ideas and worlds. It's, it's, you know, it's, again, this is why book covers are so important is it's distilling these all these ideas and putting it into one image and it's just fascinating and so inspiring to go and look at some of these really top notch artists.
Jesper (4m 35s):
Yeah. And then there is of course differences in quality between a, and some of them are extremely good and some are like, okay. But yeah, but I think it's, it's also impressive all the different kind of styles that the artists are using because the more we look into this, the more you can sort of see, okay, this is, this looks really good, but it's not quite the style that we're looking for. So, so I think that makes it an interesting process that is not only about, you know, you can find a pretty good looking picture, but it's not quite in the style that you want it, even though there's nothing wrong aesthetically with the picture itself.
But it's just like, yeah, it's just in jail with, with the feeling that we want to get. Um, so I think that's quite interesting. Of course we were trying to find somebody who can do professional grade work. Um, um, we have, uh, quite a lot to that. We've gone through, I put out a few posts on Twitter, uh, asking for, you know, artists to send links to us, uh, with their portfolios if they were interesting, uh, interested in, in becoming one of our artists.
So I just want to mention now here in this episode. So we sold it, we don't add getting up a new slew of a portfolio sent to us that, that we've already received all the submissions that we need. So please don't stop sending us more. Uh, and we are basically going through each of these artists and we're shortlisting them now. So when you listen to this, uh, this is not a call for you to start sending us stuff, so please don't,
Autumn (6m 12s):
we will let you know if something changes. But yes, right now we have plenty on our plates and we're going through quite a long different rounds of interviewing processes and finding out costs. And it'll take us a little bit of time to get to finally selecting the final one. But I can't wait. It's so much fun.
Jesper (6m 32s):
Yeah. And the, and the, and because, yeah, as I've said, you know, we're with a bit more time on their hands. Uh, we started thinking about how can we put this to use, of course images we can use in the books. We can also use it on the website, which we haven't created yet. For fiction. But that'll come. That'll come. Um, and then also, you know, we could also be thinking about creating some sort of collector's edition books of our world, you know, filled with amazing colored artwork.
Um, that would be pretty cool.
Autumn (7m 4s):
That would be, and I love, I mean, we, we just had that episode where we talked about publishing on Ingram sparks and hardcover. But I mean, there's a lot of people doing some launch packages that have like note cards and some swag and sometimes even like a whole fancy box. So there's a lot we can do with this artwork. Oh yeah. Yeah.
Jesper (7m 25s):
So we could basically create sort of like a law book with images in it for the world of Alicia would be pretty cool. I've, honestly, I have no idea if anybody would be pretty cool to make.
Autumn (7m 37s):
It would be really cool to make it if you really cool. Like I said that especially like once we have a trilogy or there actually we were planning six bucks once we have the whole kit caboodle or having like a really fancy package that you could buy that has some of the artwork and some of this and some of that. And then it just be a lot of fun. It'd be be the map. It'll be really exciting.
Jesper (7m 57s):
Absolutely. And the like in episode 66, so that's a two episodes back. Uh, when I talked to Joanna Penn, uh, we also discussed like multiple streams of income for authors. So, so this is kind of the thing to think about, right? How can you put, for example, artwork into creating other streams of income, which, which prompted me to start thinking about something else as well. And uh, because uh, you know, well back in the day when, when I was still a young person or story time, uh, I love the am, I love to do miniature war gaming.
Back then, uh, and I also did some, I had some sort of a shorter revisit back to miniature war gaming, like I don't know, five, 10 years ago, maybe something like that. And then I haven't tested for a long while, but it's always been something my brother and I, we like to do that together. So it's something we wanted to go back to. But then with more time on my hand again here at these days, I started thinking about, yeah, but this kind of artwork that could come into play if we, if we actually created some, some sort of fantasy war gaming books relating to that and we can use the, you again, reuse some artwork there.
Yeah. So I'm thinking to get back into that happy again and try to create some sort of system agnostic rule books that everybody can use no matter what kind of war game that they play, but then they can set it in the world of Elysium. I think that would be so freaking cool. That does
Autumn (9m 31s):
sounded really cool. So, yeah, there's a lot of, it's always anytime you can find a multiple use for one thing, it's probably a good thing to go. For
Jesper (9m 41s):
yeah, absolutely. And it would, it would be another stream of income. And I'm really excited about this to be honest. Oh, week on the internet with the amwritingfantasy podcast so it was, it was quite funny actually. A, and probably most definitely completely by coincidence, but to keep it on topic about the artists, uh, Joe, Joe Malik posted in a picture in the amwritingfantasy Facebook group, uh, about, uh, an image of a woman shooting a boat.
Did you see that?
Autumn (10m 13s):
I did. I was going to say, I just happened to still stumbled upon that earlier and I was like, Oh, you know, we're talking about art and that's the one of course a just popped into my head and it's one of the, one, it's awesome that, you know, people share, not just writing tips on the amwritingfantasy group, but that they're sharing this artwork. And he especially said am, you know, three guests as to what's wrong with the picture. So I like that cause he, his quote was like, do your homework. People don't accept sloppy research from your artists. So yeah, I agree. It didn't take me long to like notice what was there some really horrible stuff with this woman with the bow.
I don't know what happened there. I don't know either. You know, the image itself, at first glance you're like, Oh she looks rad and kick ass and it looks cool. It looks cool until you look at some of the details and you're like, is she just about to whack herself in the face if she actually pulls the quiver? And how was she holding? Is it through her arm anyway? So
Jesper (11m 15s):
yeah, there was like a five different things. Um, so for the listener here, so, so the image is pretty cool. Uh, you know, this woman with a bow, she's sort of shooting out of the picture to what you as the viewer vented and it looks really cool. Yeah. But of course the various authors in the fantasy amwritingfantasy Facebook group work quite quickly to point out the errors. So just for the listener here. So first of all the quiver is in the front of the woman.
So basically it's obstructing her draw area which makes no um, and then the woman is also drawing the boat horizontal, which is not a good way of doing it. Yeah,
Autumn (12m 1s):
no, your aim is so far off that way.
Jesper (12m 4s):
Yeah. And then the arrow is actually resting on the bow a few inches above her hand and usually you would use your hand to help guide the arrow. So that's another slight mistake there. And then the bolstering is strong in such a way that it rests against the inner arm and behind the arm God. So basically if she was going to release that bolstering its just going to catch on the harm God. Yep. And then um, it also looks like the bolstering is actually behind the quiver.
So I guess it's be kind of get caught both in the armed guard and the quiver. That's like quite a lot of issues there.
Autumn (12m 44s):
It is. I mean to be, especially the bow string and the quiver being in front of her entire, the string. I'm just like, really the quiver and the, it's, this is gonna be a total, she looks angry because man, she is in a bad position. That's how it should be. That's why. Yeah. Please can you shoot that? Yeah. But that's what's fun with the group. I mean they ask questions from, you know, pulling apart, you know, fantasy pictures to which, and making it a really good point that Hey, if you're going to go pay for a picture, make sure you're getting something that, you know, some reader is not going to sit there and laugh and laugh and laugh at.
But there's some great suggestions in there about, I noticed somebody was looking for a cross between a gr a dragon and a vampire and trying to come up with a name. Uh, yeah. So there's so much fun stuff going on in there.
Jesper (13m 35s):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I liked, I liked that one as well. And I also thank you, Joe for sharing that, uh, imaging in the Facebook group because I asked you just said to autumn I think there is a good point to be made there about the fact that you might be hiring an artist to do some work and like we just talked about, we have quite a lot of work that we're going to hire an artist to do, but at the end of the day, it is still, as the authors, it is still our responsibility to make sure that the outcome is what we needed to be.
So if the artist is making mistakes, it is at the end of this day is still your responsibility to check it and make sure that it's okay and there's no mistakes in it. Even though I fully get the argument about saying, well, the artists should do their homework and they shouldn't be. They should know what they're doing it for sure they should, but you're the one putting out the picture afterwards. So you need to quality check stuff.
Autumn (14m 29s):
Definitely. Yeah. You know? Yeah. I think you should both be aware. I mean, even if you're writing the scene, hopefully you know, you should know how to actually hold a sword or hold a bow and arrow. And it's awesome if you get a chance. Of course right now with self isolation, you probably can't go take lessons on sword fighting or archery, but you know, you can watch YouTube and see how it gets to, how it's really done and uh, it'll help make your fighting and everything else that much more authentic, which is fantastic for your writing as well as your artwork
Jesper (15m 5s):
So where do you want to start? Autumn how are we preparing to write our next book?
Autumn (15m 12s):
I was gonna say, is that a pun? How are you going? Gonna start your, start your writing well, and it's funny cause I mean we can definitely, we're starting together, um, our own book, which is slightly different from, you know, even how, it's Laura, I think how you plot than how I would normally start off on a book. But I definitely am adapting some of the things we're doing. And I mean, let's say I, let's talk really quickly about how you started your first book and then we're going to see how we got to where we are.
I think that'd be really fun. And so, yeah.
Jesper (15m 46s):
Yeah. And then afterwards we can also just touch slightly on fiction versus nonfiction because of how I prepare for those two things. Also slightly different.
Autumn (15m 54s):
Yeah. You're much better at the nonfiction I being to write nonfiction, but without your help, I don't think I'd ever get there without my husband's help. He's also, we've, I've written nonfiction but only with someone else prodding me on. It's not nearly as much fun for me is fiction.
Jesper (16m 11s):
No. Well, as long as you edit all my my mistakes, then I can write the content. Yeah, no. Yeah. But uh, yeah, starting out. So I think, I think I might have talked a bit about this on past episodes as well. Um, but when I first started out, I, I probably did what I think most people do in preparing to write the next book. So I just, I came up with something, I thought, well, this sounds like a cool story.
Let me write that. And then I just started writing and that was it. Uh, and I think that's probably what a lot of people do. I don't think so. Nothing necessarily wrong with that, but, but it's just, at least I feel like when you're starting out, that's how you end up in the ditch pretty fast. And that's where I ended up as well.
Autumn (17m 0s):
Yeah, I think am I do the same thing. I had a short story idea in my head about, um, a woman who had elemental magic and I didn't have anywhere I wanted to go with it. It just wasn't, I daydream a lot. And so it wasn't going anywhere in my day in my head. And then I happened upon a painting that was sort of Mediterranean and I thought, wow, I wonder what if she was in that world and an idea took off and yeah, I just started writing it and I think I was in chapter three when I realized I was totally lost and didn't know what it was.
Who was, it just had some gut instinct of they go here, here, and here. I had a world map because I love maps and I love drawling things, but I didn't know what they're gonna do and what was gonna happen. And even then, once I finished the book, I had to rewrite it. I to go back and develop characters. I had to go back and develop the world a lot more. I tore it apart, rewrote it three times. And even once it was published and I realized despite all of that, I really enjoyed it and I wanted to write a sequel and I hadn't even considered where this trilogy ended up going.
So I do things a lot different now.
Jesper (18m 10s):
Yeah. Yeah. I haven't been of the same problem because first of all, I didn't quite understand how important the characters were. So, you know, I have the overall story. I have some, you know, some godson mind and I want this and that to happen. Uh, you know, they're very like big picture, like fantasy kind of thing. So I have that in mind, but I didn't quite understand how important the characters were. Um, so that, that was definitely missing. Uh, and then also, like you said, I didn't quite know where I wanted to end up with it.
So it was like I have this concept in mind and I just started writing rod really understanding where I was going. Uh, I especially remember the very first raft. I probably wrote like 15 different drafts, but uh, but the very first one I started writing, I thought this is really cool, so, and I will probably also like maybe three, four chapters in or something. Then the main character got hurt and then I was like, ah, how do I then deal with that? Then I came up with, but then they can just go over here and then there will be some healing over there.
And then I started going over there and then I thought, but something needs to happen. So then when they were there, I came up with these kind of a weird like that almost like spirits or something like tree elves or something else like in talking helps. But more like spirit kind of things. Then I thought, what do they then then they can come and do something and then I started writing chapter five with that. Now it's like, where is this going? You know, I've come completely lost her.
Then all of a sudden I have two spirits and what are they are they have no connection to the main story. I wanted to tell that all so it's just like, Oh my gosh. So I did that and then I started over again and I think, I think I did that trick like four or five times before I figured out that maybe I should do a bit of flooding.
Autumn (20m 8s):
Florida you helps definitely. Yeah, it's a week. Yeah. We've both become plotters. I'm more of a hybrid than you are. I mean now that we're working on a book together, it is. It is not plotted. I've seen people who literally have plotted down to, I think you just need to add some paragraph breaks in some dialogue and it's pretty much done. So it's not quite that bad. It's at a different document and it's probably, I don't know. Some of them. I actually, I know because I copied out of Excel too cause I use a Mac.
So I was copping out of Excel because the shell cells were not working properly on my Mac and I would be putting into pages making edits and adding things and then posting it back into Excel before sending it back to you. So I know like the longest, um, area might've been 2000 words. So that's, that's almost as a for chapter that is almost a full chapter. But you know, on average they were maybe 800 words. So there are still a lot to hash out. But we definitely, we both do that and we have both been using the seven steps of story structure.
And I do know because we built this already together, that one of the things that I did without even intending to before I wrote my first book is I created a map and we both still create maps before we start writing. And I think to me, I just, the visualization of the world, I can't world build, and if I can't world build, I don't know the culture that these characters are from. So there's, I'm like missing half of what makes these characters unique and related only to this world in this story.
So to me, literally when I started novel especially a new world, the first thing I do is I draw a map.
Jesper (21m 56s):
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I have a few steps before I get that far, to be honest.
Autumn (22m 1s):
There's a lot of thinking before you get that far and for sure I don't just sit down with a piece of paper and go, Oh, I'm making a world.
Jesper (22m 8s):
Yeah. Well, it does come quite a, I saw some, I don't remember if it was on Twitter or if it was on Facebook, but I did see, eh, it's been within the last week. I saw some people debating, even if it was in our own Facebook group. I'm not sure, I can't remember where I saw it, but there was some people debating whether or not you were world-building before after you wrote the story. And, uh, and some people were saying, well, I don't understand why you would be well building before because you don't know what story you want to tell. Uh, and, and I think I, in some way I could say it, I, I land somewhere in the middle because the way that, uh, that I prepare for a new story is basically, I mean, of course step number one is basically brainstorming sort of the topics of the book.
What, what is it going to be about women? It's more like high, high level concepts. Like, okay, is it, is it going to be witches is a Dragon's isn't vampires? I don't, I'm just giving you some random things here. Right? But what is sort of the high level concept of it is, is it, is there like a global war going on? Are there guards mingling in the world or whatever it is, trying to come up with that first.
Autumn (23m 16s):
Yeah. Sort of theme slash you know, they'll concept you're developing the concept and I think that's part of, yeah. Yeah, definitely.
Jesper (23m 26s):
When I have that, then I usually try to think about, okay, how can we do that concept slightly different from what has been seen a million times before because of course a book about witches or book about dragons or vampires. It's just like, yeah, it's, it's been done over and over and over again. I don't, I don't want to do the same thing that has been a million times before, but at the same time I don't want to write something so strange and unique that readers have never seen it before because then it won't take either, so, so we need to sort of find just a new way of doing something that they are familiar with that.
That's that. At least that's what I'm aiming for.
Autumn (24m 4s):
Yes. Oh yeah. I learned that one from my first one that you know, having a few elements that a reader can just accept you don't have to explain is really kind of nice. Starting off. I'm imagining that you're a Brandon Sanderson and it doesn't matter what you write and people are going to pick it up and read it. It's not as easy when you're not known. If people don't know how it is, it helps to know at least the flavor of the genre and, and know that, you know, you don't have to eat. It's easier to have dragons then to create some kind of really weird monster and never even mentioned a dragon.
Just just go with at least have at least one drag and everyone likes dragons.
Jesper (24m 41s):
Yeah. Yeah. But, but I think also that, that's probably also where I sort of made a slight mistake with w with my first book, uh, or, or my first trilogy youth. It has, um, it has dragons in it, but those are probably some of the only true peace kind of things. Whereas a lot of the other creatures that are in that trilogy is some that I admitted myself. Um, which of course on one hand you could say that that makes it interesting, which of course I think it does, but at the same time it also makes it makes it a slightly harder sale.
Um, because that's something that most readers I used to write. Uh, if, if, if it was more like, OK, here's, here's Ellis and he, he had dwarfs and um, and then there was one creature here that you've never heard about before that that would be different. But this one is like, almost all the species are something I invented myself with, with their own name for the species that you've never heard about before and stuff like that. So, so some love that and some, some don't, but it, it just makes it a slightly harder sell.
Autumn (25m 53s):
Yeah, I know. I, that's the mistake we both have in common. And I mean, I did the same thing. I have one dragon and besides, I have no nights, no castles, no effected. Most transportation is through sailboats. So I don't even think I mentioned horses. It was, yeah, every race there's no elves, no ogres, no doors, nothing. All the races are endemic to the world. I haven't made up my own fantasy language for the book. And you know, this was my debut novel.
I talk about biting off a lot and it does, you know, people do love that and it's done well, but it's also a lot harder to sell. I usually have to S you know, tell people, Hey, are you sick of the traditional fantasy tropes because this doesn't have anything in it like that. You're just, it's so different. That is, I think in the entire six books, there is one important sword that comes into play and what I added a few more dragons. So that's about it. Yeah, it is. It does make it difficult because there's nothing there for readers to relate to your entering a whole new world.
And that's definitely part of the world building stage that you've got to decide if you want to. We, we both have decided to maybe aim a little, I won't say lower, but a little closer to center.
Jesper (27m 11s):
Yeah. And I, I can fully accept the fact that there will be those listening who would say, well, it's better to create something unique and interesting like that. And fair enough. Uh, I'm not gonna sit here and argue for against am. I'm just going to say that most readers are not looking for in my view. And you can disagree and that's okay. Um, but in my view, I don't think most readers are looking for a completely new experience that they've never seen before. They like to see stories that are unique in their own right, meaning that it's not like a story that you have read a million times before.
They do love that. They also love fancy readers. Also love work building. They love to see how you can create new like cultures and settings and all that stuff, but they don't necessarily want to recover from cover about all kinds of new things that you have to explain all the time. What the creature, what is this creature and how does it work? And it's great. But if it's just on and on and on about all kinds of new things, I think you're going to get be better off writing just put in your drops in UAL or something, you know, something that you don't have to explain.
And then in between you can sprinkle some new stuff. I mean we created some new stuff for, for our next series. You know, we have underwater dragons for example. I think pretty damn cool, but it's not something new in the sense that we have to start explaining a ton about what is the dragon. People know what a dragon is. These are just living on the water and stuff. So it's, it's, it's a different way of it. Our vampire is actually a dwarf, which is also new. Um, and he doesn't suck blood Ida. So those new elements in there, but, but it's, it's built upon building blocks that you are familiar with us.
So Rita and I think that is probably the better route to take. Again, you can disagree dear listener if you want. That's okay. But that's how I view it.
Autumn (29m 5s):
Yeah. And those are the building blocks that, I mean these are the decisions that we're going to use these more typical things are built off of these more well known ideas and concepts. That's something we did before we started writing obviously because we haven't started writing the book yet. But even before we started really drafting out the plot. So that's why we're delving into why we chose this. And that's, is this something you do before you start writing? Even my most recent book, solo book, uh, that's something I was looking at beforehand as I was making those decisions.
Am I going to have elves or Fe or what concepts are there I want to use and how do I make them sort of knew with without going so far that they are brand spanking new you. I only have a couple of brand brand, brand new elements in each. Otherwise, you know what on my end is I'm using seven fantasy races and I'm using ones that people would recognize. Elves, gin, dwarves, giants, they're all their centers. Even. I've never done centaurs before. That was kind of fun to like get to throw those in.
But it was something that was had been there before, but there's reasons that they're different and unique to this world and whether it's the magic or other adaptations, you know, I am already, that's at this stage when I'm choosing what I want to use. What kind of characters, what kind of races? I'm already starting to think about the world that they're from and why they would be the way they are. And also thinking about the magic. To me, magic is one of those things where you want to do something new with magic.
But how magic is one of the most complicated things? I started to develop the rules, like at this point, how are, how is magic going to work so that I can start developing the tension and the hurdles are going to happen, the story and how am I going to solve them? Because it's, to me, it's not a fantasy story. If there's not any magic or dragons, the dragons before.
Jesper (31m 2s):
Well, we don't actually have any dragons at this point in time in omic series. So that might be some, well, we have one note what targets? We're fine. Yeah. So maybe that counts. Um, yeah, so, but, but I, I agree in the sense for me as well, I think that the world building at this stage, you know, so, okay. I've brainstormed some sort of thematic or concepts for the book. We, at this point, we have also created a synopsis, uh, for our book. Um, we actually, we actually have an upcoming book on story ideas that we can release within the next couple of months, which will explain how at least we go about creating a synopsis, but that is extremely high level.
It might be five line of lines of text. That's yes. So, but at least then we know what it is. Um, and then we move into wealth building at that point in time. And to me, I think this is so incredibly important because again, people will have different opinions and that's okay. People have different processes. That's also OK. um, but the doing the world building at this point before we do any sort of plotting or outlining of, of what the story's gonna be about is so beneficial in my mind because as well as, as you've seen a autumn as you've gone through the outline says, I've been sending it to you, to you.
I mean, if we had not done the world building first, Oh, that would be so much, I would not have been able to. Now it's all of it is weaved into all of the chapters and I was only able to do that because we did all the well building upfront. No, I agree. I would have so many inputs, so many inputs that we would be missing there.
Autumn (32m 37s):
Yeah, it's so much in depth and involved and unique because we did the world building first and I mean I saw that when I wrote my first one without having world build built very well is that that's half the reason I had to rewrite it because it was so boring and there was so much missed opportunities because I didn't know the world until I wrote the book the first time and that's why I had to rewrite the entire 105,000 words again because then I finally knew the world even though I had my map, but it made me realize how much more detail it has to be a living document that you create as you go.
And so that's why, you know, we've world built, we did do a map before we really got into some of the world building. And I think that's partially because having a map and suddenly looking at some of the things like where the deserts are and where the forest are and where there's oceans and where the landscape, then you can kind of, it helps you trigger some things that you might not think about otherwise because you're looking at the real mechanics and physical nature of a world and you know, well the creatures that within evolve there and the customs that would happen after a hundred years of living with a desert that kills you and things like that.
Jesper (33m 50s):
Yeah. Yeah. That, that's pretty cool as well. I like that. I like our desert quite deadly.
Autumn (33m 56s):
We were having a little bit too much fun. We're world building. Oh, I got a new one for you. Never go to our desert. If you could be transplant ported anywhere. Never go to our desert.
Jesper (34m 11s):
Yeah. I don't care how much money you want. Yeah. But I actually, it's funny you said that, uh, around, around not doing world building for your first week because I actually had the opposite problem. Uh, yeah. Because, well, I love the world building stuff, right? And I love it too much. So when I, when I was doing my first book, I went all in on world building and I did at, um, and I thought, you know, S a reflection here later on. I think that helped in the sense that when we put our words building cost together, that was what was able to influence that we'll put in cost because it's like, okay, I think we need to understand what do you need to build and what don't you need to build?
Because when I did the first time around for my first two series, I built everything, everything I could think of was built and the, I have an insane amount of notes for the world. Uh, and I used like 10%.
Autumn (35m 3s):
Oh, that's painful. But it's typical though. It is very typical. I think. I must've, I was so, I love writing. I think I was just so anxious to get to writing that you know, I, and I wrote it first, so I did minimal world-building and then I realized what you needed to do to world built at least quickly so I could fix it and put it back in my story. So I was, yeah, we're there. We're about the only thing I think we've ever found that we were opposite ends of the spectrum on.
Jesper (35m 32s):
I think, honestly, I think I spent eight or nine month just world building that it was insane. I mean, and there was so much material. I mean, of course I knew every, every inch of that world in detailed when I started writing at the end of it. But it's like, but it wasn't, but again, when you're first starting out, know I, I w I don't know, but I wasn't thinking in the sense that, well, I'm probably not gonna use most of this. I didn't think about that. I just thought that the more I know the better because then I can explain it and I can sort of make it part of the story, which is true enough.
But what do you then figure out once you start writing is like you only need the tip of the iceberg, all of this stuff. Uh, it's, it's good to understand the other, some of the other elements I should correct myself by saying, you know, it's good to understand a bit more in depth because that actually bleeds through into the story even though you don't have to explain it, but you don't need to understand all the way down to the bottom of the sea too much.
Autumn (36m 33s):
I always figure you need to know something pretty detailed about where each of your main characters are from. And you should know some pretty pretty good details, you know, a little bit below surface level. Scratch the surface on any place your characters go. And other than that, you need about three general knowledges about anything else in the world that exists that you're not actually going to go physically see. And then you're pretty much good. You can go right. So that was always my kind of quick world-building. If you really want to get to writing, at least do that much.
Jesper (37m 6s):
Yeah. Well, of course. Uh, the world building costs, which again, it will be really a later this year. Hopefully it'll be out. I know we talked about for a long time, but uh, but, but that will actually lay out step by step exactly what you need to do and what you don't need to do. Analysts will talk you through how to do each of the steps is always, I think it's going to be insanely beneficial. And that was actually, we followed the exact steps that we put into that course ourselves for when we build the, well the volition and, but I guess I cannot quite say how long it actually took to go through the building of the world of Elysium because we were creating the cost at the same time.
So obviously it took a lot more time because we had to explain everything and how we did and why we did it as well. So I don't, if you're just going in, you just following the teachings of the modules and you're doing the world building, I do have a sort of gut feeling about how long would it take autumn do too. I, I'm not quite sure to be honest.
Autumn (38m 5s):
I think you, if you are determined and you want to get through it, you could do it within a month. But I think if you know, you have a, if you're not self, if you're doing, if you're self quarantine anything at the moment, Oh, you know, you can get this done in like three weeks. But I think, uh, otherwise, you know, two months might be reasonable and maybe a little bit. Yeah.
Jesper (38m 24s):
I, I don't, I, I think it probably depends on how much time you're putting. I mean, if you're doing full time, you could probably do the world building in a week or something, but you're doing like one hour here, one hour there, then yeah, maybe a month or something to go through the modules. Uh, but yeah, concentrated focus. Yeah. A week. And you probably have the world, all those stuff you need for your world and compared to the nine month.
Autumn (38m 49s):
But I think that's pretty good. That pretty good, I have to say. And I think I even did longer the first time. But again, the you the first time, you're really just figuring this stuff out. I have to say that you spent all this time building the world. I am so surprised you've only written one trilogy. I figured, I wrote, I created this world. I know it. And I know the character so well that I ended up with six bucks. So there's still sometimes play around with another three. So yeah. You know, we want to develop a world that to me is the benefit is you can just write some books in that world.
And so it's worth putting in the time and developing some stuff. But anyway. Okay, so we've done some building. I agree. But just one more point on that because you just triggered a thought. Oh no,
Jesper (39m 33s):
no, no. But, but no, it was not, nothing bad, but it was more to say, actually I did not go back and write more books in that world because I was, I felt like I can do something better. I think that's what I felt when you're first starting out. You know, sometimes it's like, eh, I just, once I was done with the trilogy, I liked that trilogy. It was sort of the story I wanted to tell. But at the end of it I felt like I don't want to tell more in this world, even though I know I'm way I wasted a ton of effort and time.
But at the same time I think I took a lot away from it. Um, and of course with the world of volition that we built, now we have, have on purpose build it quite large and expanding so that we can write a ton of things in it. We can also write very different stories in that world. Just taking place in different parts of the worlds. Even have like a interconnected different worlds through a center, which I'm not going to go into all the details here. I guess we can save that for Rita's, but, but there is a lot of different worlds connected inside the world of volition, so to speak.
So it gives us lots of playgrounds and, and um, that's on purpose because the idea for us going forward is that all our books will be set in Elysium. Um, so, so we did the world building once now and we can write a ton of books. We can write 30 books in this world if we want. Oh, no problem. Yeah. Um, so, so there is like an ongoing benefit of it, but at the same time, of course, if you are starting out, I don't know, you might end up in a place where I did, where it feels like, eh, I don't want to go any further with this.
So, so unless you sort of know what you want to do, it might not be a bad thing to just create a smaller world and just write a trilogy and just feel it out.
Autumn (41m 21s):
Yeah, I do for first start, that's not a bad concept is just start with something small, compact. You can have edges to your map and not worry well what's on the other side and just develop that so you can get to writing. Yeah, yeah. But anyway, so yeah, I interrupted you before. Oh, that's all right. I was just thinking before we, I mean, I can't believe how we were worried we wouldn't make it to a normal time with this one. And we're already like pushing the end and we are only, we haven't even gotten to writing. So after world-building, uh, that's when I think we really developed, you know, our characters more and start doing some character arcs and getting those nuances and after that, the seven steps of story structure.
So we, we really know where our hurdles in laws and what's going to happen and then we can hopefully, yeah,
Jesper (42m 9s):
yeah. Then it's a full outline. And then after that, uh, I put some new batteries in my dictation recorder and then we're good to go. Excellent.
Autumn (42m 16s):
So yeah, I just wanted to make sure that we got through all of the steps, but we actually world bill before we do our characters because without knowing, you know, what kind of races and stuff that they're from, we don't know. Some other nuances you could, you could be setting your character up for something totally the wrong type of character for that culture or missing half of what's important about that culture and a lot of tension and really excited things that you only know once you actually develop your world.
Jesper (42m 45s):
Yeah, I fully understand the respect, respected those counter arguments to that, but at least that's how we see it. I mean I could not create either characters or already outlined without doing the world building for us. I just don't see how you do it later. Uh, not, not if you want a very immersive world. I mean I understand if you're writing urban fantasy or something and there was only a few sort of world building elements that you need to put into a real w real world, you know, modern setting, then I guess I can see how you could do it on the fly a bit here, a bit there and sort of, okay.
There was, there's this one part that is fantastical so I'll just develop that as I get to it. I guess I can understand that, but I still feel like doing the wealth building up front makes a massive difference in the output afterwards. But, but that's, that's how we view it. And it's okay that some people will disagree. Yeah.
Autumn (43m 38s):
Yeah. So long as we agree with each other since we're writing a book together, that's a good point. But yeah, I mean, since I've written in urban fantasy, um, you know, something that's set in basically modern times, not this modern, I'm not sure if I'm going to add a pandemic to my story yet, but you know, it's just about now, a few years before hopefully. And um, yeah, I didn't have to do much world building, but I had to think about some concepts, some faith things and some historical stuff and throw those kinds of things in. But for that one, I kind of already knew a lot about the characters, but I had to think again how to make it unique.
You still do those concepts in those twists of, okay, I want to write this type of story, but how can I make it mine? Even though it says in this world and it's in the urban fantasy genre, I want to make it, I call it a Fe post-apocalyptic novels, so it's, it's related but it's also uniquely mine. You pick it up and gotta have to learn a few things like how magic works, works and what's happening in the world. Those are important things to make sure you know before you delve into the writing and before I delved into the really developing the characters and figuring out the rest of the plot, which evil when I'm on my own, it might not be as in depth as when we're together, but I still run through the seven steps of story structure.
I have outlined the entire trilogy. They'll actually, for this one, it's a series. I know exactly where all the books are, at least going for at least, you know, a paragraph to two to a full page about each of the seven steps so that I know really what's going to happen before I really sit down and start writing and going for it
Jesper (45m 14s):
and all this stuff. About seven steps of story structure. Dear listener, I mean w we're going to release a book, uh, in a, in the next month, year, hopefully before supper. And where we, we explain our step by step guide on how we go about outlining. So you can pick that up once we get that far. But there is also a video on the amwritingfantasy YouTube channel about seven steps, so you can go and look that up in the meantime and maybe like in a, in a quick summary,
Autumn (45m 42s):
sorry. Yeah, maybe we'll eventually do a more in depth podcast on it, but for now
Jesper (45m 47s):
there's a YouTube video. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Uh, I promise to just touch upon nonfiction as well. So it's write I'll just do that before we close out. Um, really quickly here. So when I'm going about preparing to write a new nonfiction book, one of the first things I do is actually to read a lot of books on the topic that I want to cover. Um, and why I do that is, is basically because a lot of the time I have my thoughts on what I want to say.
Uh, and it's not that, that those thoughts at all is going to change and that's not why I'm reading the books, but it's more like those are the authors who wrote books on the same topic often cover the same topic from different angles. So basically what I'm getting out of reading them is my like, ah, okay. Yeah, I haven't thought about this from this point of view or, um, and that just allows me to, when I then sit down to two write, um, I, I sort of know, okay, these are the things that I should probably think about tackling this book, right?
Because otherwise it might be very one dimensional because it's just the way I view it. Whereas if I read a lot of books on the topic, also often end up watching a lot of YouTube videos that tackles that the subject matter that I'm going just to get other perspectives about what are other people's angles onto subject matter. It's not so much about their opinions, but it's more like what are the angles that they're going to tackle this subject? You know where they're coming from so that I can build in those nuances.
Autumn (47m 25s):
Yeah. And not only just reading those other books, but I'm reading the comments and the reviews about those other books and YouTube channels, because then you see what character, what readers, like what they got out of it, and also where baby they like, Hey, you never said about this, this, and you're like, Oh, I should mention that then because it held, it gives you ideas of topics to put into your nonfiction. Yeah.
Jesper (47m 47s):
So basically that's what I do first. All right. So I collect all my inputs there and I write up my notes and uh, I put, I usually put the notes into chapters and sub-chapters then where they belong. And once I have that, then it's a pretty messy document, but it's divided into, uh, it's divided into the areas where I want things, so I know where they belong. And then I'll, I'll basically just start writing and that, that's it for nonfiction. So it sounds simple, but it's a lot of work. I can promise you.
Autumn (48m 17s):
And that's probably why I have yet to do one solo. Maybe one of these days.
Jesper (48m 22s):
Yeah, maybe. Who knows? You don't have to. Yeah, so I think there is a lot of ways people can prepare for the next writing project, but I guess I w I would actually be quite curious to hear other people how they go about this. So if, if you know, if, if you dear listener could leave a comment on this episode or on YouTube if you're listening to the podcast from there or even in the amwritingfantasy Facebook group, I think that would be, I would love to hear other people's comments on how do they prepare for the next to write the next book.
That sounds good.
Jesper (49m 2s):
So next Monday, Autumn and I will share some personal details as we discussed each of our journeys as writers, good and bad.
Narrator (49m 13s):
if you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the amwritingfantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join autumn and Yesper on patrion.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the amwritingfantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next time.
Hardbacks, personalized paperbacks, and distribution to bookstores, why wouldn't you want to publish with IngramSpark?
Jesper and Autumn cover what IngramSpark is, the many, many options it offers, and, of course, the cons of why this platform might not be for you.
Plus, a discussion on if IngramSpark is an alternative to KDP - can you choose one or the other, or should you be using both?
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy.
For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to the amwritingfantasy podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing join to best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them. Now onto the show with your hosts. Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello. I am, Jesper. This is episode 67 of the amwritingfantasy podcast. And, uh, well autumn you brought up this very interesting topic to talk about today, asking whether or not it's worth it to publish through IngramSpark so I'm looking very much forward to your thoughts on this.
Autumn (52s): I had to reread it. It, it's a fun logic puzzle that I got so excited about and then kind of had a reality shock. But we'll get to that in a bit for now. Yeah, we'll get back to that. But, so how are things over in Denmark? It's am. I know we're recording this a few weeks before it gets published. And you know, the world's going a little crazy right now, so I hear you guys have, school's canceled so your kids are home and it's just crazy, it sounds like.
Yeah, it's a, it's like a Corona virus in everything right now. So, uh, yeah, yeah. As you say, we are recording a bit in advance here, so who knows once this episode goes out, if, if things has calmed down on that.
Jesper (1m 41s): But honestly, I, I have a feeling that we're on the start of things rather than at the end of things, but let's see. But yeah, indeed, schools are close, so the kids are home, they'd dare being taught remotely. Um, so this, the teachers are uploading assignments for them every day. So they do that and then they call the teachers and stuff like that.
Autumn (2m 2s): So, yeah. And I don't have any matches to referee either because everything has been canceled. So yeah, it's, it's, uh, it's pretty much locked down mode. I would say it's probably safer for, you know, everyone, especially those who are truly high risk. It's best to slow the spread of this thing. But yeah, absolutely. And yeah, I was feeling really bad for the beer company. Creates the Corona. It's so weird.
I mean, people don't want to buy Corona piece. I don't understand. I understand that one either. ASCO has nothing to do with the beer. I'm not crazy about Corona beer, but it makes me want to go buy one just because it has nothing to do with the fear.
Jesper (2m 47s): That was so weird. But uh, yeah, that was a slightly to whatever. But guess what? I guess what I could say though is because of all this Corona stuff, then I don't have to, you know, bring the kids to school. We don't have to go to soccer practice and all those things. So I've had a bit more time on my hand. So that's resulted in a few things actually.
Autumn (3m 8s): Uh, we got the first of all, the plotting of our next series of the first book done. Yes, we do. It's, so, that's pretty cool. That is really cool. We've made some good use of our extra time for sure. Yeah, indeed. And the also, I'm pretty much a ready to start recording the self publishing publishing success course in, in the next few weeks. That's fantastic. You're ahead of me.
I've got to catch up and finish my, get my world-building modules recorded and everything else. But yeah, I don't think either of us will have run out of anything to do, whether we're quarantined for a week or a year. I think we could volunteer for a Mars mission and we would still be working by the time we got there and back.
Jesper (3m 59s): Yeah. The, the problem with us is that every time we finish something, we think of three more things to add to the end of the list. So it's like a never ending grind.
Autumn (4m 7s): We were always fighting a Hydra and finishing off ahead and getting three more in response.
Jesper (4m 13s): Yeah. But it's okay. It's okay. Yeah. And then by the way, it's, will I, I'm halfway through the script for the cost on using email lists as wetland goodness. So I hope. Yeah, I'm trying to get that one finished. And then once I'm done with the script for that, uh, then I can send you
Autumn (4m 30s): that to you and then I can start recording the self publishing success course instead. That is amazing. You're blazing ahead. I try to hear tastic well, I had some drive time and am some take care of some business times, so I've definitely not, and plus I was building the cabin so I always feel like I'm so far behind. But uh, the cabin building goes on quarantine or no, because, well, it's the house I'm living in, so like I did. But yeah, we snuck off to Maine to pick up our rooftop tents and a few other odds and ends that we had left behind up here for the winter.
And now the, our land cruiser is outfitted that if we wanted to escape to the far North and hide out in the Tundra, we'd be all set. But we just plan on going back to Vermont and hopefully, uh, riding out the rest of the coronavirus there and hoping that the world doesn't get too crazy or reminds me daily of what I was researching my post-apocalyptic story. I'm friends with my enemies that series. And it had a two major pandemics, uh, that led up to the first book.
And so I did a lot of pandemic research and a lot of virus research and, um, yeah, it's watching this play out is like, Holy crap, this is a, this is too real. It's very strange. Yeah. It's, uh, well it's, we, we don't know how to deal with this stuff.
Jesper (5m 60s): Right. I mean, that's, I think that's, that's part of the lipid hope. Hopefully. Hopefully it won't be too bad. I hope. Let's see. Um, but wasn't there something when you're supposed to go to some convention or something as well? Yes. Well, actually I was supposed to be going this weekend that we just went through. I was supposed to go to a paddlers rendezvous. My husband and I are both am, canoers and kayakers.
Autumn (6m 22s): We've done a lot of, uh, paddling on our journeys and traveling and actually he just picked up 105 year old canvas and wooden frame canoe. It's a classic. It's gorgeous. It needs to be fixed up. Of course everything we pick up needs to be fixed. That's just our life. Everything we own is a project that, uh, it's, uh, what's supposed to have this rendezvous and that was canceled and actually that's why we've come up to get the rooftop tent. We were going to camp there, but we decided to come up anyway and get our supplies.
But yeah, as Vermont am they're supposed to be a scifi and fantasy expo at the end of April, which is really close to when this will be released. And at the moment it's still scheduled to go, but I don't know, the CDC just recommended, you know, no gatherings larger than 50 people and they're supposed to be 3000 and 5,000. Yeah, I think they're going to end up having to cancel it. And honestly, at this point, if I could, uh, get a refund, I'd probably just cancel it myself. But you know, here's the hope of the world is much happier and healthier on April 25th otherwise, yeah, there was the one where I sent you some paper back books.
For wasn't it? It was. I think we're going to have to hold onto them until it's rescheduled. There will be another fantasy expo to take them to. Yeah, I guess so. Oh, we week on the internet with the amwritingfantasy podcast. So I actually wanted to highlight a post that you shared on petrol on a autumn. Oh really? Hopefully it's not the same one I was going to talk about. I don't know. They shouldn't let you go first. We are professional podcasters.
Here's a, we are very well coordinated and we know what the other one is going to say once we approved. Oh, was it two episodes ago when I actually mentally figured out the next bullet on your lists. So I think that was more coincidental than anything else. No, it was the one about foreshadowing. Oh no, that isn't the one I was going to mention. So what were you going to say about foreshadowing? No, it w it was more like, you know, you went through in detail how to use foreshadowing correctly in that post.
And uh, I just thought it was, uh, it was very valuable to, to share detailed posts like that we try on for people on the email list.
Jesper (8m 44s): We also try to send them some, some detailed advice on this and that sometimes it's marketing, sometimes it's, it's writing. But I really liked these posted you do on, on, on the writing style stuff, on petrol on it. I think they're really good.
Autumn (8m 59s): Q I should have so much fun and sometimes I really have to cut myself off because they get a little long. So, um, I do like to know that they're appreciated by the students and by my part writing partners, so that's awesome. Yeah, I think they're great. Well, which one were you going to mention? Done? Oh, I loved am. Zaid had mentioned it's am I'm on this, this tips, it's a long story about how I have this sheet of 10 to plotting tips that I'm going over and I'm, one of the ones that, that you mentioned was foreshadowing.
And the other one that I just did a little while ago was plots of individual characters. And so Zaden I got into a conversation and I just love that he came back with am. He gave me an update. He said just wanted to update and say that I've now written a really cool sequence that starts with the character telling the main character. He can clean up his own mess and walk away from the quest. Uh, it's created some really cool character moments for several of the questers and given an opportunity to really show the extent of the main character's flaws. Huge. Thanks for posting this.
And it's like, damn, that's awesome. So I'm so happy to know I helped to add to someone else's book and create this like pivotal scene that's gonna shred the main character. And I just excited and I'm glad I got to help someone. So it's been a fun sequence of a tips to post, even if it came out of a long ago class that was completely useless. I have finally resurrected. I'll point to this class. Yeah,
Jesper (10m 30s): it's funny sometimes. Uh, you find some, I also found some, some older notes in, in, in my cabinet. The, uh, I think it was yesterday something I thrown into it and I never thought I was going to use again. But then it was like, Hey, I think I have a use for this now. It's quite fun, but the hoarding is not a good thing though. I guess after I'm done with these 10 tips, I will burn them down. So, so that's, uh, you know, I know that every content creator always keeps saying that they rely on the support from places like Patrion.
Uh, but that, that's actually because it's true. Yeah. Podcast is a free medium and that's cool. You know, I like it that way. I love listening to podcasts myself and because they have free, that makes it really, really accessible. Um, yet at the same time, especially, I guess we know that modern than the listeners because we spent the time creating these episodes every weekend. It does, it does take up a lot of time. Um, and that is also cool because, you know, we, we choose to do that.
So that's okay. And we like helping people and we enjoy sharing so, so that's all good. But, um, I do want to say for those who already are supporting us on Petra on a, you know, huge thank you for it really does make a difference. Um, and for those who are not yet supporting us and listening, if you want to support with just as little as a dollar a month and please do understand that it actually is something that we really appreciate. Uh, so check that link in the show notes, uh, and at least take a look at the reward that we're offering to support us that, you know, it makes us so happy.
Autumn (12m 18s): It does. And it really does make a difference. I mean, we pay for the hosting, we pay for websites if it goes really far to making this actually stay up and running. So publishing with IngramSpark, I tried to pull some notes together as well.
Jesper (12m 40s): A autumn of stuff, but, but I, but I think it's, well probably you know, in full transparency we are not currently publishing our stuff with IngramSpark so I think this is more like a conversation about maybe the pros and cons or what to think about. So I guess the listener can more use it as inspiration for, I dunno, their own decision making process I guess.
Autumn (13m 3s): Yes, absolutely. We're on the outside looking in and that's sort of how the question came up. And author I was working with that helped format their book and do some cover work for them. Said they actually got a rejection to have, uh, a book signing event at a local bookstore because they weren't published with Ingram sparks. And that led to this huge research of why, why is an Amazon good enough? What's the big deal about Ingram sparks? And I got so excited about Ingram sparks.
I'm in love with what you can do there. However, I'm still not published on IngramSpark and we'll get to why before we get to the end of this episode.
Jesper (13m 43s): Yeah. In India we have already discussed, uh, at some point in the past at a four hour joint fiction books that we want to go to IngramSpark. So, uh, uh, but I think it's going to be interesting to just have a conversation about it and what does it mean then because it's not S yeah. Also the research side. It's not as easy as it may seem, but maybe we should stop by what is IngramSpark that's just what I was thinking.
Autumn (14m 8s): So some people are not going to even have heard of this because it's not as well known as like Amazon, but Ingram sparks would you say it's like, it's definitely a distributor, but basically it's sorta like a distributor. Yeah, it's, it's like a, an online self publishing company. Basically. It is, it is, is, um, it's just different. It's, it is a direct competitor to Amazon, which creates some conflict of course. But it has a few things about it that are the reason that, you know, bookstore is like it better as a distributor then, you know, getting paperbacks through Amazon and it offers, you know, it does offer very similar things to publishing on Amazon.
You can eBooks, you can get paperback books, but what's really cool is you can get hard back books. So this is the only platform out there right now. Whereas an indie author, you can get a print on demand hardback. So if that doesn't make you tingle because you want to see your books hardbacks that might be enough to make you want to go and check this out.
Jesper (15m 13s): So yeah, that's so cool. Yeah, and they, they distribute globally of course. Uh, and uh, I, I co during my research here earlier today, I saw that the, their global distribution network is actually one of the largest in the world. Um, it serves more than 29,000 book retailers worldwide. And, uh, that includes physical bookstores I should set, but also libraries. Um, so using IngramSpark is actually what can get your book into physical bookstores and libraries.
Where are the self publishing platforms actually has no access. Correct. Um, so that, that's pretty cool. It am and of course a IngramSpark and also publish to all the regular online places. Like I think even the distribute to Amazon as well. Uh, and you can get into all the other regular stores as, as, as you might want to. Um, but honestly I would not go through IngramSpark for that. Uh, I usually personally at least I usually go direct to Kobo, direct to Amazon, direct to Google.
And then I just use draft two digital to reach all the other online stores. That's pretty easy that way. So, but at least IngramSpark to basically help you reach the bookstores, uh, and also get that hot copy available on Amazon because it syncs up on Amazon as well. So if people are browsing for your books on Amazon and they click on the title once, you know, once they get into the, basically where the book description as well, that that's usually where Amazon didn't shows you the different formats. And if you have an IngramSpark hot copy, it will appear there.
Just like if you have an audio book appears in a paper back appears and so it's just, it just becomes one of the formats on the uh, on the Amazon platform. And I think that that is, that is the key thing there because if it didn't then I would say it's probably pointless but because it syncs up like that then it's, that's pretty damn cool.
Autumn (17m 15s): It is really cool. And I mean there are some tips, I mean you could go Ingram sparks and not do Amazon and have it pushed to Amazon through Ingram, but they do say that Amazon will, not purposefully supposedly, but they will see that it's coming from an Alto side distributor and they could have a really long ship date. They could list your book is out of stock for your paper. So they do say that if you're going to do Ingram, you should also sort of like what you're saying, do Amazon as well.
It should be a hybrid system of both because otherwise the way it's listed in Amazon is not, it doesn't look quite as true, but that's because of they say Amazon. It's like saying, well, you know, they don't know the distribution. Occasionally Ingram sparks gets overwhelmed and they have slow shipments and you know, they say some things like that. Yeah, well I don't think it's like,
Jesper (18m 13s): I don't think it's like a, let's say a conscious decision because it's a competitor that Amazon does like that. But honestly I think it's just because Amazon cares a lot about the user experience and the customer experience. And I think that they just take on purpose a pessimistic view on delivery times because they don't want to disappoint people. Like, uh, okay. It says I should be getting in two days. And then they order it and then once basically, so, okay, let me start a bit different. So let's say, let's say you go on and you want to buy the hard copy.
So normally the way I researched it at at least says that what can happen then is that when you click on the hot pack, it'll say out-of-stock like just said autumn. And that's because it comes from IngramSpark. So Amazon has no idea how long it's gonna take. But then as I researched the least, as soon as you then buy it and in hard copy, then you get the confirmation email and then it syncs up with IngramSpark and then you usually getting a pretty, you know, pretty good delivery date on it.
But it's just the initial overview that Amazon gives you the extra, they're trying to be pessimistic on purpose to set your expectations. Well and then over-perform right. So I, I honestly don't think it's because Amazon wants to make you.
Autumn (19m 32s): No, I don't think so. I think that's the case. But it does. It's something authors should know. And that's why a lot of people do. If they're going to go IngramSpark cause they also go as a hybrid. But I do, unless you have something else, I want to get his share. Like why I got so excited about IngramSpark and why it's useful. The biggest things. So this question had come in from someone who wanted to do a book signing and the bookstore was said, yes, we would love to, you know, it was someone from the state. The book was doing well, so they were the local author. They were like, this is great, but you need to put your book at Ingram sparks.
We don't order from Amazon. And so I had to do some investigative research on why it was an interesting, you know, why this dynamic. And so what I found out is that for an individual buyer paying full price for something on Amazon, the paperbacks are returnable for 30 days. But something like Barnes and Nobles, uh, this was a Barnes and Nobles, I was willing to do the signing. They're looking for a wholesale cost that is also returnable. Yeah. And so just like, you know what we've been discussing publishing with income SPARTS but so that's why they want to do it.
They can go and get a wholesale cost order, a whole bunch of books, and if they're not sold during your event, they can send them back. So you know, that sounds on the surface really a good deal. But there's some really interesting side effects of this that you have to be careful of because it turns out there's all of these returned fees that if you don't have your profile set up, you can see this big chunk, like one month you get a spic chunk where people, you know your book, wherever you're gonna go do your book signing by as a whole bunch of your books and then the next month or returning them and suddenly your account's going into the negative that comes back on you and your royalties.
And that's something you gotta be careful of if you do sign up with Ingram sparks, is that you check, you know, the return policy you set up. And depending on what return policy is set up is whether or not bookstores are going to go and wholesale your book.
Jesper (21m 42s): Yeah. But do you decide or you decide that yourself, the return policy, don't you?
Autumn (21m 46s): You do. You there's like, you know, there's standard ones you choose from and yeah, so there's like a choice of three or four, but you do have to make sure it's not something you should just push through. There's actually a very good reason about why you should choose one versus the other. And to really think about the cost because there is some restocking fees and other fees that can come out. So keep that in mind if you do sign up for it.
Jesper (22m 13s): I think it's just part of the game when you're dealing with bookstores, you know that that's how they operate. Uh, so yeah, it's just, it's something you have to accept in this case. Right. But, but on the other hand, I think you could also argue that for the average indie author isn't that much of a problem. I mean, if they, if they sent back five copies, yeah, okay, fine. I mean, if you're really an indie author who's selling like $4 million of books a year and then, okay, you can properly handle it anyway.
Right? But for for the rest of us human beings, you know, if, if we get five books returned about a month, I mean, okay, fine, or even 50 or whatever. But then it's also because you have to sales. So you should be able to cover, I mean, unless you run out and spent all the money, all the royalties right away, you can just transfer it back. Some of the royalties.
Autumn (23m 6s): I would hope so. And I would hope if you have another book signing, you know, it'll all come out in the wash, the people ordering them for the next event and the other ones, you know, returning them and that could work out. And I did truly coached the one author I was working with and I'm like, just check instead of going through the expense and we'll get to that about what Ingram sparks costs instead of going through the expense and you know, getting everything published over there. Why don't you see if you could, you can be your own wholesaler. You order them from Amazon, you let them buy them from you or buy only the ones that people sell and you know, promise to take back all the ones that they don't sell.
You know, ask. It doesn't hurt. So if you have a local bookstore, there's no reason you couldn't at least approach them saying, Hey look, I know Amazon doesn't do this, but what if I do it for you? Because obviously as an author you're probably going to go to another event and you're going to want some paperbacks of your own. You know, if you can work out to be your own distributor as you go to some of these events, you might be able to get into a few places that only would let you get in otherwise if you didn't grow up in sparks. Okay.
Jesper (24m 12s): Yeah, there was one thing that I'm curious about to be honest and because since this is a print on demand service, which means that the, they only print the books when they are ordered and then then they shipped them out. So, but because of the return policy, I'm quite curious what happens then. So when somebody returns the books is, since it's print on demand, they don't really have any stock
Autumn (24m 35s): or something like that. But that's one of the choices. There's one of the choices. The cheapest is basically to have them destroy it. And I think that it only costs you a $3 fee. Um, wasting the rainforest for nothing. Yes. There's other ones where you do say, no, no, you, you must keep that in the next time I am. Someone wants to buy it, you pull it. But that costs you a lot more money as a return. I think it's like $10 a book versus a $3 for destroy it now book.
So those are the, yeah, if you're agreeing conscience, this is a tough
Jesper (25m 10s): am. So that's what I, I've, I take the environmental stuff quite serious.
Autumn (25m 18s): We all should. Yeah, that's, that's one of the tough ones. And I will say though, there are some neat things that you can do with their print services. They actually have a personalization that they do with their print on demand. And I think this is so kind of cool. So if you had someone like when a giveaway and you wanted to actually print something in the book, you know, you'll be a print of your signature or a print of like, Oh, thank you so much for your support.
Jesper (25m 46s): If you're doing a, a truly personalized maybe to someone who was your mentor, you can actually have that printed in your book for only a dollar and just that one copy. Isn't that kinda cool though? That is, that is cool to be honest. So it's not quite as cool as hand touching it and maybe writing it. But if with this, you know, sending around the world and everything else, it's kind of cool to print it in there.
Autumn (26m 10s): A big personal thank you to someone. She was getting a book.
Jesper (26m 16s): Yeah, that, that is pretty cool and that's a dollar is pretty, that's just cheap so that's fantastic. Yeah, because on Amazon, when you're sending somebody a gift to somebody, you can also add like a gift, a notice or you know, I, I don't know if it's a small card or whatever it is that they put with it or if it's just a a pizza, but it's not in the book. It's sort of an Iowa in the packets. Just a, there's like a slippage slippage in India or something with the text
Autumn (26m 44s): you wrote on it. That it, that is pretty neat as well. But it for sure, I mean printing it in the book, so like a hardback copy of your book bound with some thank you message to someone that's amazing for a dollar. It's only costing you an extra dollar on top of the regular printing fee. I just think that just, I want to do that so badly just to say thank you to someone. But yeah, so that is one of the really cool services they offer. And like you said, IngramSpark is also a whole book publishing thing.
So if you wanted to go whole hog Ingram sparks, they have editing, formatting book covers, they truly can do it all for you if you want to pay the fees of course. But it is all in one stop shop. So that's kind of, you know, if you're really feeling it out and wanting to do a very professional level, they do offer it all right there in one website and it's one that's been vetted, tried and true. So you know, you're getting a quality product at the end. So that's kind of a nice thing to know too. Yeah, absolutely.
And I also read somewhere that the, if you're dealing with colored printed books, um, like for example, my map making focus incredibly expensive to um, to, to print with Amazon.
Jesper (27m 59s): That's also why to pay for the paper bag colored book is so high. It's because the printed cost I insane. Yes. I, I read somewhere at, at the colored print books are actually cheaper in the actual, on the cost side if you do it with IngramSpark compared to Amazon that I hadn't seen, but I would believe it because I think they're better set up for it where there's less color books being printed through Amazon.
Autumn (28m 23s): And I also have heard the paper quality through Ingram sparks is much better. So you're going to get a thicker paper and that might be why they can handle the color. So I know a lot of people who are doing am like coffee table books, like paperbacks, you know the books you would see like hardback photo books. They're going through Ingram sparks. If they're not doing something that is specifically designed for photograph heavy jobs because it just doesn't work well with Amazon because you know, if people remember KTP in the coloring book phase, for craze that was going on, I remember some people were getting am KDP or CreateSpace coloring books and they would have something printed on both sides.
But you'd go to use your colored pencils or your marker and it would bleed through to the other side because those pages we're just not set up for such a media being used on. Um, no, I can see that, but, but at least for you know, the quality of the color in the KDP paperback books are absolutely fine. Oh, they have nothing to say about that.
Jesper (29m 21s): Absolutely fine. Um, but it's just more, the cost of the printing is so high. Did you have to set your sales price pretty high as well? Um, so if it's cheaper with the IngramSpark then I can certainly see some great uses for that as well. If you are having books with lots of pictures, our color images in them then that, that's amazing.
Autumn (29m 42s): Yeah, that would be, I never did double check that, but I do think I could see it being cheaper. So that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, there were some costs as well that I think we need to touch upon. Yes. And that's, that's sort of the issue I guess because it comes down to setting up your book where you know KTP, you go and you upload your ebook and it's free. You can do your paper bag if you know what you're doing, you basically uploaded and it's free what the cost comes out in your royalties.
With Ingram sparks, there's not only the royalties, but there is also a fee for setup, which is a bit weird. I don't quite understand why. Well they also say some of the fee is for hosting the file on their servers, which I guess there's a part of me who's like that is a cost. I mean server space. Think of Google with how big their servers are all over the world. Amazon infant, they don't chaps for it. No, don't give him any ideas.
You're listening to this. They are adult. Just busy. Yeah, don't listen to them. You know when I first saw the fee, um, I wasn't that a appalled. So it's $49 for ebook and paperback or if you just want to do one or the other, it's $49 for a paperback and $25 for just the ebook so you can, you know, $49 that is not a big deal. And when I saw that, I'm like darn it. That is it. I am doing Ingram sparks because I just think I want to be able to distribute my books.
I read everything I read said there's no, no reason not to do this. But then I found that cat just reading for the kicker, I've found the catch and the reason I am still sitting here and haven't touched Ingram sparks to publish with Ingram sparks, you need an ISBM. You need to come in holding an ISP again and you need a unique one for every format. So if you're doing you book paperback and hardback, that's free ISBNs.
That's, Oh it is. Yeah, but, but I guess you could just publish the ebook and a paperback with Amazon KDP and then just do the hotbed for IngramSpark and then use one ISP and couldn't you? You could. But then, I mean to me the really the beauty of IngramSpark is using it for the paperback distribution because then bookstores might pick it up. That's the only reason they're going to get it is through IngramSpark. So that's probably a hardback and a paperback. So you'd probably be doing too, right?
Yeah, that's true. So I mean, and I was looking at it so you can buy 10 ISBNs for tune $295 so that makes it 29 50 each, which is not that bad. So plus that, plus the $49 it's, you know, if you're doing all three formats, it's $137 50 cents each. Or if you're not going to do, if you're only gonna do two of them, it's $110 each. So you know, $110 a book, plus you lose, you know plus then you get your royalties bag.
But they're obviously taking a cut there every time something sold because they have the printing fees and Oh, I don't know what EBAC, I still wonder the electron fees with eBooks, but we won't go there. So 110 for yeah, it's not too bad. So if you were going to do use all 10 10 ISBNs, let's just say you're just going to do paperback. So 10 books with 10 ISBNs, that's $785 for 10 bucks. And that's what's getting me because you know me, I'm prolific and I haven't done this yet.
So if I were going to get my 14 fiction books and my two nonfiction books set up to do this, I would be paying about $1,760 if I was going to do two formats. Yeah, for sure. It does her until I was trying to rationalize, you know, like okay, what if I just did paper backs and that's like 70 want to do the hard copy. That's the whole point. Oh it is. You can just keep doing Katie for paper back at the end of the day.
The true and so, yeah, I mean to get it set up for, you know, a trilogy for two formats, it's $330 or I have am six books written in the same world. That would be 660 bucks. And if you don't want to do just one at a time, you just want to go and do it. So I just still waiting for everyone who in quarantine to go buy my books so I can go to afford to do this. But it does add up quite a lot.
And that's what I think is the kicker. I was so excited at that $49 I mean that's a lot, but it's not a lot. But then when you start picking up too bad ISBNs, I mean, yeah, I've always had a problem with the eye. You go back to, I believe it's episode 41 where we talked about ISBNs and yeah, it was episode 41. So go back there and check that one out. And you can have the whole conversation on ISP if you should be using free ones.
Um, we won't recover it here, but you and I are both like, eh, I'm ESPNs we use the free ones and now suddenly it's like, Oh, I have to go buy them for this. Oh, I don't, yeah, I'm just, I mean of, of course you have the problem if you're looking to am to publish with IngramSpark when you have a big back catalog, then you have a problem there, right?
Jesper (35m 20s): Yes. If you do it as you go one book at a time, then it's manageable for sure. I mean, if you buy the 10 ISBNs for two 95 to 195, I should say. Um, then of course 295 that might hurt for something, but it's not, it's not that bad, if you know what I mean.
Autumn (35m 41s): It's doable. Yeah. It's just be about less than your editing costs. I mean it's not outrageous. We just covered in editing costs. So a couple episodes ago. So yeah, this is, that is a reasonable price that you're going to spend on your books. Yeah. So it's certainly doable. Um, I also read somewhere that the actual uploading process is supposed to be a pain.
Jesper (36m 4s): I don't know if that's still the case or if that's like old information that it used to be a pain and it's not any more, but at least there's a few different places on the internet where people are explaining how it's, it's an, it's, it's a bit annoying because you know, when, when we come from KDP on Amazon normally it's so incredibly easy. Oh, it is. Um, it's a ticking few box, uploading your file, uploading a cover and setting a price and then you're pretty much good to go. You wait like less than 24 hours and then it's online.
It's amazing. But I don't know, at least I've not tried it in myself. I've said in the beginning, but at least what I got from the research, it sounds like it's, it's a bit cumbersome to go through the uploading and publishing process with the IngramSpark, but I'm not sure.
Autumn (36m 54s): Yeah, it wouldn't surprise me. I haven't done it myself, but it is an older website, so it's an older platform where Amazon's constantly renewing and tweaking and correcting their code. They don't think have the quite the same level of money going into, you know, updating their area and updating how they do things. So I think it's a little bit older and I honestly, I didn't research it because I mean I use vellum for all of my formatting and I don't know if they're binding standards of all of that is the same as KDP.
I know I've done a few covers that have been used on Ingram sparks and the requirements are similar, but they're not the same. So I wouldn't be surprised if something in the, in even just the uploading what's required. Obviously you'd need a PDF, a for if you're doing, I think it's an epoch for the ebook, but you need a PDF for the print version. And so if the binding sizes in the margins are a little different and it's not something I can tweak on vellum, that's going to be another hurdle for me to get through because I'm, I love vellum and that's how I'm doing it.
Because I can format my ebook and my paper back and everything all at once with just one shot. And that saves so much time.
Jesper (38m 5s): Yeah. And if there's anybody from IngramSpark listening to this podcast and uh, you guys, we are paying as you are the only distributor who takes money from us for the upload. So fix your upload plus if that is indeed a problem anymore, which I don't know this, fix it, that's your, you're chatting us for the upload.
Autumn (38m 26s): So it should be simple and easy. Hey, I'll even take it one step further. If there's anyone from Ingram sparks listening, uh, get in touch with us and we'll do an interview and we can talk about, you know, how this process works. And that would be really actually kind of fun. I'll host it before it comes with a warning that I will ask questions about why you haven't fixed it yet. I'm prepared to answer that question. All right. But to be fair, we'll have to upload a book and make sure it's as bad as they say. Just, you know, we'll have this, we're just going on here and say, now we're just going on a rent like a everybody else.
That's all right. But you have to say what they do. The fact that they do distribute that bookstore is, you know that they offer this return policy even though they shred books and please, please do so in an environmentally friendly, compostable manner.
Jesper (39m 15s): Um, yeah, I don't know what, I don't know what's worse, worse to the environment, to be honest, if it's stretched us reading the book or having big warehouses, I'm not quite sure what it is, to be honest. Honestly I don't know either. But if they're composting it, it's okay. That's returning it to the earth and that's fine. But if they're not okay, Oh, I got all the ink. I still know of it's biodegradable.
Autumn (39m 37s): There are good inks. I'm just hoping that we moved to, I'm thinking the binding, the chemicals, the printing comp. I don't, now that I'm thinking about this, I don't want to know how unhealthy it is to print a book. I might have to go back to on the eBooks just for which should never have started talking about wondering what my footprint is in the world and I'm thinking, okay.
Jesper (39m 59s): Yeah, it's horrible. There was, there was what, one other kink that I came across. I think this might be applicable, but uh, I'm curious what you think, but what if, if you have an ebook, let, let's say you have an ebook of it. You have it published via KDP and you have it enrolled in Kindle unlimited. Oh, I think that the hot back copy from IngramSpark would be breaking the exclusivity agreement with Amazon, wouldn't you think so?
Autumn (40m 31s): No, I do not. I think the KTP is only on the KDP select is only attributed to the electronic, the ebook because you're allowed like, but when creates space was its own company. You could still do a create safe space paperback, but be in KDP select with your ebook. I think the KDP select is only eBooks.
Jesper (40m 54s): Hmm. Okay. That was my understanding of this. I went from Amazon listening. Please let us know, but I'm pretty sure that this is worth checking. Yeah, for sure. Uh, I, I'm a bit, you might be right, but I'm, I'm just doubting a bit whether or not this is OK. Uh, but, uh, but maybe I'm wrong, but it at least something to think about. I would say. Yeah, I'm pretty sure, again, for an author question, somebody who was going to upload and format, we got into a discussion about paper backs and I'm pretty sure I looked it up and the paper, okay.
Autumn (41m 27s): There's still distributed Amazon distributes to your extended network, even if you're on KDP select am. And that was fine even when it was created space. So I'm pretty sure that that's they're separate entities still that the KDP select only applies to your ebook, but right. We can try to look it up and maybe am put it in the garbage. Some of the, some of the, maybe I listen to no. So actually, so they can, they can reply with a common and that'd be fantastic. Straight here. Yes. Someone else who is on top of these things and loves research, that'd be fantastic.
Yeah. Or if you have a horror story, please let us know.
Jesper (42m 4s): Yes. So I don't know ma. Maybe at least from my point of view, in conclusion, um, I think it is IngramSpark is absolutely great for hard cap hard-copy books and to get into bookstores and libraries. And what I would also say is that when you get to your book page on Amazon, for example, if you can be available in all the formats, so you have an ebook, you have a paper back, you have a hard copy and you have an audio book, if that's possible for you. I mean, of course I do know all of that comes with costs, but if it's possible and you have a professional creative cover and of course you have your book fully edited and all that, basically your book will be indistinguishable from something random house has published or something.
Right. It looks like a hundred percent professional publishing house has published to your book. To me as an indie author, that's what I want. Right? I don't want the reader to be able to tell any difference whatsoever.
Autumn (43m 2s): No, I think that's true and I think it does give you that really that high level of professional shine though for some reason when you were talking about, you know, making it professional and having it looks so perfect. Reminded me of one other thing that did kind of irritate me with Ingram sparks where you know with Amazon, Oh you find out there's a typo or you want to fix something, um, you need to update like some kind of book links because you've, you know, you have more versions on Amazon it's free, but for every time you do a new upload of a new version, there's a fee on IngramSpark.
So, Oh my God, I forgot about that one.
Jesper (43m 39s): Yeah. But yeah, I dunno. Again, the logic evades me here because, okay, if you're telling me that we are paying for the upload because it takes up some sort of virtual storage space and, and, okay, fine, let's say that then, but because I create, I update a typo and upload the same file it, that's not going to create more, I mean it's basically, there's no human involvement from IngramSpark is not going to take up more space in cyber space. You know? It's just like, Oh my God, that's just like, no, it's just a fee to have a the.
It's just, I don't like that.
Autumn (44m 14s): No. Okay. I agree. But there's still something about a level of professionalism, but maybe that's sort of the key is that if you're publishing through Ingram sparks, you're probably got a good platform. You're making enough money, you don't jump into these waters unless you know you can afford it and tackle it and handle it. And
Jesper (44m 32s): that's why you'd be doing it. Yup. So I think, uh, I think that's it though. This list, there was a lot of good stuff to think about here for four people. For I mean for certainly for those who never heard about IngramSpark, now you know what it is. Uh, but also for the more experienced people, uh, yeah. We've, we've done some research on your behalf here, so at least you can use what we've talked about here to figure out for yourself if, if IngramSpark is something you want to pursue or not.
Of course, if you have a big, big back catalog, yeah, maybe they just want to do it going forward. I don't know. But, uh, to think about that one.
Autumn (45m 12s): And Hey, if you're on IngramSpark, do you have any comments about why you love it or think you regret it? You know, put that in the comments too. We'd love to hear, right. So next Monday we are going to share how to prepare to write a new book. So that'll be a lot of fun.
Narrator (45m 33s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the amwritingfantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join autumn and Yesper on patrion.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the amwritingfantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next time.
During these times of self-quarantine, many of us are stuck at home (probably watching way too much Netflix, or something like that 😊). So, we thought that this would be an excellent time to learn new things.
We were thinking to put a short course together for you. Asking in the Facebook group which topic would be the most interesting, it turned out that Character Development came out with twice as many votes as the runner up. So, creating memorable characters it is 😊.
Putting our heads together, we figure that we’ll create about one hour of video training for you, covering:
- Cast of Characters – understand what archetypes of characters are available and which ones your story needs
- Why you need to start with character creation and not plot
- Understanding character motivation and how to develop it
- Choosing POV characters
- Character arcs and how to tie them to the story structure
If that’s something you find interesting, we’re offering a special discount.
Enroll here: https://ultimatefantasywritersguide.com/register/character-development/ before the 12th of April 2020 and you’ll get the course for only $14,99, instead of $47.
On top of the discount, we’re going to run an exclusive 60 minute live Q&A session (date to be determined) where you can ask any question you want.
Now… we’re only going to create this course is we get at least twenty sign-ups. Less than that, we’ll of course refund your money.
Enroll right away, and don’t forget to spread the word so we get above the threshold of twenty participants.
We promise to get recording as soon as possible with the aim to have this course in your inbox before the end of April 2020.
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
In episode 66 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, Jesper is joined by one of the most influential voices within the indie-author space.
That's Joanna Penn.
Joanna and Jesper discuss whether you should be publishing your books wide or choose exclusivity with Amazon (Kindle Unlimited).
They also cover multiple streams of income. Hosting author events. How to manage a busy work schedule and whether or not authors should be paying attention to future tech, such as virtual reality and augmented reality.
You can find out about Joanna Penn here:
https://www.thecreativepenn.com/podcasts/
https://www.booksandtravel.page/listen/
https://twitter.com/thecreativepenn
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to the amwritingfantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing join to best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them. Now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I am Jesper and this is episode 66 of the amwritingfantasy podcast. So while autumn is taken care of some other stuff today, I'm extremely pleased to be joined by probably one of the most influential voices in the indie author space. So I'm going to have a very interesting chat with Joanna Penn and a while we start out by talking about extra activity versus going wide. I'll also try to ask Joanna some questions that I at least hope she hasn't heard a million times before, but we'll see how it goes.
Um, chances are that you've heard you Anna, on other podcasts before. So I, so I want to see if I can take the conversation in a slightly different direction. That than normal, but we'll see how that goes. For those of you who might not know Joanna I can let you know that she's an award nominated New York times and us a two day bestselling author and Joanna writes thrillers under JF Penn and have written more than 30 books and sold over half a million bucks in 84 countries. And I think there's probably more than that by now and five languages.
So she is a very big advocate of selling your books wide rather than being exclusive to Amazon. And she regularly advises authors on topics within self-publishing through her very successful podcast, the creative Penn podcast. So I honestly tried to reduce that introduction as much as I could do. I know, but the, but there's so much to say, so I didn't know where to stop, but welcome to the amwritingfantasy podcast.
Joanna (2m 2s): Hello. Thanks for having me. Yes. For and yeah, I realized I've been going for more than a decade now in this, in these phase, so it can be difficult to encapsulate, but I'm really happy to be on the show today and answer any questions you have.
Jesper (2m 15s): Yeah, that's very good. I don't know, maybe just to start off softly here, is there anything maybe you could share about yourself or what you're doing at the moment that I didn't quite touch upon there in the intro?
Joanna (2m 26s): Uh, yeah. Well I think what's interesting, well, might might be interesting to the listeners. I mean, you have the amwritingfantasy podcast and in fact, I got up this morning and went to my writing cafe and wrote 2000 words on my neck fantasy novel. So I am a fantasy writer. I do like fantasy maps as, as you do. And so I might in the third in my Matt Walker trilogy, which is a kind of dark fantasy split world am portal fantasy I think sometimes they're called. Uh, and then my other self, uh, as Joanna Penn, and I'm this week I have a launch for audio for, which is about podcasting and audio books and voice technologies and the AI and voice and that kind of thing.
So one of the important parts of me is the own quite a split personality, you know, faced a similar to you. I mean you do the same thing. You write fiction, nonfiction. Um, and I write in lots of other genres. So I think that's what I'm working on them. Well, what I'm always working on is I'm always trying to balance my affection and my nonfiction, which is a challenge for many writers.
Jesper (3m 28s): Oh yes. I think I'm going to ask you a bit more about that today as well. That balance part that's a, that is difficult. But, uh, yeah, I once again at least thank you for, for joining today and because one of the things that I initially thought about when, when we wanted to invite you onto the podcast, am wants the whole topic about being wide versus being exclusive to Amazon, meaning publishing within Kindle unlimited. Uh, and I do personally know why you think it's better to be white.
And I agree with your points of view on that, but, uh, but I think it's, it's sort of a topic that bears repeating. Uh, and it's quite important too to think about those things when people, I publishing whether or not you want to publish wide or you want to be exclusive to Amazon, but, but maybe you could just talk us through your line of thinking when it comes to being white versus being exclusive.
Joanna (4m 24s): Yeah, sure. Well, there's a few things. First of all, there is a choice on every book and every format. So you just mentioned Kindle unlimited so that's eBooks specifically within the markets that have Kindle unlimited, which is a very small part of the world and a very small part of the publishing EK system. Um, so even if you want to be on K you for your eBooks, you can still go wide with print and audio, which we'll talk about in a minute. Or you could go exclusive with a series and then go wide with other books. Um, all in one John HRA or an author name.
So there are so many different variations of what white and exclusive means. I want to be clear up front. The second thing is that because I've been publishing independently since before there was even a Kindle. Uh, so you know, I've been, when did I start writing 2006 and I published in 2008. It wasn't till 2010, the international Kindle came along. So I basically started public self publishing when eBooks were just kind of starting out, moving from downloadable PDFs from websites to the reader.
And uh, there was no Kindle unlimited till, I think it was 2014. Am was when it started out. KDP select started out. So I might be wrong on the dates, but it was certainly a number of years after I started publishing or I was, uh, I'm obviously English and um, I was living in Australia at the time. So even when Americans could publish within the K you ecosystem, the Kindle ecosystem, those of us who were international could not, and it's still not open to everyone. So this is the first thing. I mean there are listening to this show potentially all over the world and my podcast has been downloaded in over 220 country, which I think is pretty much everywhere.
See what we've got to remember is when you're on the internet, whether it's podcasting or books or whatever, you have to think that there are people who would like to buy your books all over the world. And as you mentioned, um, I haven't fact now sold books in 134 countries, which is kind of crazy. So this is my perspective as an international author. What I feel is so often the self publishing community is dominated by American voices. And American America is the biggest market for sure on its own.
But if you put everything else together, everything else is much, much bigger. And we barely even begun the digital transformation in most countries. So I have this longterm view. I have this international view. I also have a multifaceted view, I guess because I have so many books. I know you, you and autumn have a lot of books as well. So I do actually have a couple of books in Kindle unlimited, for German. So I have three German books they are in K because I have no ability really to market in German.
Um, and in fact, I just put an audio book live today in German because I have no other way of marketing those. I've decided to use Kindle unlimited and ACX for audible. Um, specifically in order to use the marketing that I need for a market, I have no other way of reaching. Whereas for English language, I have a podcast. I have a website or use social media, I can reach a market globally through other means. So there is so many things to think about when it comes to exclusivity versus white.
And look if, if, if someone listening, if you're just starting out, if you only have one book and you're putting it out in e-book, then sure, go in. K you not a problem because there's a lot of things to consider when you're first starting out and then, cause it's only a 90 day, you know, turnover, you could change your mind later on and go wide later on. Um, but what I would say is for print, print is very interesting because KDP print is brilliant. You can sell your book on Amazon stores, but you won't get into libraries.
You won't get into bookstores, you won't get into universities. You you know, there's a lot of things you can't do if you publish print on Amazon only. So I recommend Ingram spark for print and then for with KDP print plus Ingram spark. Um, and then for audio, um, I use ACX for they, um, you know, the audible market and then I use find a way voices again for library EK systems and for um, you know, Google play for Scribd for all these places where people are getting their audio now.
So I hope that gives you some sort of facets of the different, uh, parts of, of wide versus exclusive.
Jesper (8m 51s): Yeah, absolutely. And I think there is a good point buried there as well in the sense that it's not an, it's not a forevermore decision when you decide, for example, if you put a book into Kindle unlimited it can be a per book decision as well. You know, it's, it's not like you can just pull it up three months later. So maybe there is also a point around not overthinking it in that sense that, uh, if you want to test it out the waters for a while there, you could do but do so, but at the same time, wouldn't you also say that those people who read books in a subscription systems like Kindle unlimited are not necessarily kind of the same people who buy books?
So if you're building an audience purely for example, in co co Kindle unlimited and then you pull them wide afterwards, you're starting a bit over in building an audience wide, wouldn't you say? So?
Joanna (9m 41s): Yes. But then I think as we, as our author career develops, I think we're always building new audiences. So, um, you know, I know plenty of authors who go into K you for, you know, a first year and then take the whole series wide, for example. And, and this is, you know, someone like Lindsey broker. He's one of the biggest in the fantasy authors. Uh, you know, but she writes a book a month, whereas I'm kind of, I write a couple of books a year. In fact, I only white one fantasy book a year. So that's hard to do when you're not someone who puts a lot of books out.
But the biggest difference for those of us who would do this for a career and a new author is that a new author literally, genuinely has one book. Um, or maybe they have a couple of books if they've held onto some things. So I do recommend that people start with getting to grips with one EK system and then moving into other things later for eBooks. But again, I really want to reiterate, especially with nonfiction, you and I both write nonfiction as well. Um, nonfiction is a very print heavy and very audio heavy market.
Um, and in fact fantasy books if especially if they're long fantasy books or if you do a fantasy audio book box that you can get really good sales in audio as well. So I do, what I really want to emphasize is the idea of having multiple formats as well as multiple stores, multiple countries. So if you think about a business plan that is the kind of scaling that you want to do over time and as for different kinds of readers. I agree with you. I'm someone who buys books on the Kindle, but what we're seeing with digital, with audio as well as eBooks is a move to more and more subscription services.
So I mentioned script for example, which is growing fast in am audio books. Obviously it's not just audible at storytell, it's all these different types of subscription services. So I don't think we're stopping the subscription service anytime scene. I think what I want is to say I'd rather be on every subscription service, so I would go, I have nothing, no issues with K you I have an issue with exclusivity.
Jesper (11m 43s): Yeah, yeah. I was actually just about to say the same thing. For example, Kobo plus where I don't have any problem with their subscription model there because they don't demand you to be exclusive with that. That's the part that I also personally don't like. Um, and also Amazon making well as authors, our income is the books that were selling unless we're doing other things as well. But, but at least from a starting point that that's the income we building and being a hundred percent dependent on Amazon deciding something else tomorrow than they did today.
I don't know. I just does not feel good to me.
Joanna (12m 16s): No, exactly. I'm, I'm the same as you as you know.
Jesper (12m 20s): Yeah. But maybe, uh, that moves us quite nicely into, into another part of the same conversation because as authors of course we are, as we just said, we are building an income based on book sales. Um, but one thing is that a book can be several different things like, like you just talked about am audio books is, it's another format. Maybe there is, um, foreign rights or whatnot. But there's also other things you can do as, as, as an author.
I mean, of course am both you and myself and autumn also run some ortho courses and that sort of thing. So what I'm getting into is sort of multiple streams of income that you can make a living from rather than being dependent on a single sole income. S for example, eBooks or whatever we want to say. But I was wondering if we are thinking about somebody who wants to build a full time income, is it, or maybe if there is no difference here, but that's my question. Right? Would you recommend that people focus on like a few well earning streams of income and then put all the, you know, marketing focus and all their money in, in those baskets or is it better to have just a lot of smaller streams of incomes that together builds up a lots of streams and maybe, you know, what are the pros and cons of each if there are any?
That was a long question.
Joanna (13m 47s): Well, there's a couple of, a couple of questions to kind of fire at people less than, um, you know, one is what is a full time income. So this differs from in so many ways. You know, if you are, it's that, say you're listening and you're single and you're renting and you don't have kids, you don't, you know, you don't have a lot of debt. That is a very different situation to someone. You know, he might be in there my age, you know, mid forties maybe has a mortgage, has some kids in school, you know the definition and there's obviously if you live in New York city versus the middle of, you know, Sheffield here or places that might be cheaper to live.
So that would be one thing that you have to decide what is a full time income that needs to be the number one thing. The second thing needs to be what do you want to do full time? So, uh, for example, I mentioned Lindsey broker. Say Lindsey Lindsey is a friend of mine and um, she has obviously the six figure author podcast, which I highly recommend, but Lindsey, right all the time, you know, she has said that she does sometimes 10 hour days writing now there is a different personality and a different type of author. No one is the same type of author.
But when I compare myself to Lindsey, she writes every day for that many hours, say sh maybe she puts in a 40, 50 hour week on the actual writing I write. But I generally write maybe two hours a day. So maybe I put in a 10 hour a week in terms of writing fiction. Um, so if you look at how we make a living that is going to be reflected in the work that we do and that we want to do. So when I, you know, as I said, I've been doing this full time for almost 10 years now since I left my job in, in 2011 and I have never wanted to make a full time income from fiction.
I wanted to be an author, entrepreneur. So this is the thing. Who are you as a personality? I cannot help myself. I don't think you can either. I mean if you, you know, if you, you end up going, Oh, I really want to write this nonfiction book. I really want to do this course because they want to help other people. I really want to podcast because I want to talk about the things I care about. And I think you come from a business background. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So we just can't help ourselves. So there are other people listening who might be like Lindsay, he literally, all they want to do is write those white fantasy books all day.
So what you end up with is the desire to do different things also feeds into the multiple stream of income idea. Um, and that's really important because we don't want you to be miserable. You know, you don't want to give up your job and then find you hate it. I th I would go nuts if I tried to write fiction as a full time job. That's just not how our brains work. I am very happy writing a couple of novels a year, couple of nonfiction, do a course, etc. So that's that. That covers the first say two questions.
How much do you want to make? What is a fulltime living to what kind of person are you and what type of work is going to make you happy? Because at the end of the day, we all have to work. You just have to choose what you want to work out. Okay, so let's get onto the multiple streams. So I have, I have so many, like many hundreds at this point of streams of income, and they're, as you say, there were two kind of basics, active ones and passive ones, and then what kind of half passive, nothing. Nothing is truly passive, unfortunately.
But if we take am, I know you've done a podcast on Scrivener, for example. So I have a tutorial on Scrivener. I have a tutorial on vellum. Do you, do you use vellum vellum yet? Okay, so velum for anyone listening is am formatting software. I love it. So I have a tutorial on vellum, um, on my, on my website, the creative penn.com and I have an affiliate link. So an affiliate link is commission. So if somebody uses my link and buys vallum or by Scrivener, then I get some money.
Now, I recorded that video several years ago. It just sits on my website. People come to the website and I get money every month from they software platforms. Now it's a useful video. You don't have to by using my link. And it's kind of evergreen as about as passive as you can get in terms of an income stream. So what's, what is the problem in doing that? You just have to spend a couple of hours making a tutorial video that will help your audience. Um, so that's, uh, an idea of passive. I don't believe book sales are passive income because you really have to market these days.
You can get some residual sales. So I always say to my husband, if I died, it will probably take two years before the sales wizard to nothing unless you do some marketing. So am books or certainly not passive income, uh, doing a course. So I know you do courses. I do courses and I don't launch my courses. They're all evergreen, which means again, they sit on my website and you can buy them anytime. So again, in a way they're kind of passive. Um, and then just some ideas about active income streams.
So one, obviously both of us do a podcast and I have a pantry on I think. Do you have a pantry on? Yeah, yeah we do. Yeah, I thought you did. Um, so pantry on is an active income stream because if you don't produce a podcast you will not get any money from your patrons. Thank you patrons. By the way, everyone listening you are wonderful. We love you. Um, um, in fact I dedicated my latest book audio for authors. It's dedicated to the lessons of my podcast and especially my patrons because, Oh, perfect.
Yeah, because I they really make, not make me but drive me back to the microphone every week. Okay. So pay Patrion and also just for those of you who write Lindsay again bringing Lindsay up cause she's a fantasy or the. I figure, have you had Lindsey on your show? Yes, we actually did. Yes. Oh, there we go. Okay. So Lindsay also has a pantry on for her books. So T she does something smart. She releases her books to her patrons first and then puts them in Kau. So she actually gets around the exclusivity by, you know, giving, basically selling them to her patrons on a pre-release, then putting them in Kau.
And then when the series is done, she eventually, she puts it wide. So she's got a really good model. Then, um, the other, the other person, um, is, uh, she likes his mirror grant as well. Anyway, there's a lot of writers who put short stories on am pantry on NK Jemisin has a Patriot. I me, she's won all the Hugo awards and everything. Uh, so you patch you on consent and be used for writing, but again, it's an active income stream. And then another one would be speaking. So if you are a successful author, at some point you will be asked to speak, uh, whether that's at a literary festival, which will not pay you, uh, or they'll just pay expenses.
Or you could, um, you know, speaking and get paid. You could do your own events, uh, that type of thing. So, and again, that is an active income stream. You have to get people to come along and then you actually have to teach it. So those are a couple of examples of uh, active and slightly passive, more passive income streams. Yeah. I want to circle
Jesper (20m 48s): back to the events in, in just a few minutes. But before going there, I th the one thing that I'm quite sure many things many people would be thinking is that, okay, so if we have, if we're doing all of these things, because I agree with what you said before, that it all depends also on what do you want to do. And thus if you want to do it, hopefully it doesn't feel like slave slave work or something like that, then you're happy to do it. Right. But at the same time, if we aren't juggling multiple things here, um, and I know you do a lot, so my question to you was how do you structure your Workday to make sure that you apply enough focus on the different things?
Because, um, as you, as you brought up the example with Lindsey, right? If you just writing and your writing eight hours a day and then you do one hour marketing or whatever, then that's pretty simple. But in cases like both us and you were you, your building may be courses, you are tending all kinds of different stuff, but also you're writing some nonfiction and fiction and whatnot. How do you decide where to focus and put enough energy in each one every day?
Joanna (21m 54s): Right. Well, I've always done the same that I had a day job to show. Everyone knows I did have a day job for, for the first five years of doing this. So 2006 to 2011 I had a day job and my shed you'll then is the same as now. So I w I do creative work in the mornings and ID marketing and business in the afternoons. So, uh, you know, when I had a day job I would get up at five and I would write, try and do an hour before then going to my day job. And in the evening I would come home and work on the podcast work on my business website. And then at the weekends I was teaching courses and building out the business.
So basically I did that for five years. So when I left my job, I already had streams of income. Uh, now I do pretty much the same thing. It's just I go in the morning to a cafe and I write and I work on first draft material and I have to get out of the house because I'm talking to you at my home office and I cannot write first draft material in this office because I'm surrounded by distraction. As you say, I have a lot of other things to do. There's always more email, there's always more stuff to do. But I leave the office and I go and I write.
So I know today I did my 2000 words and that's done. And then I go and do some exercise and then I come back here and then the afternoon slash, evening, I do interviews, I do podcasting, I do business accounting, all the things you have to do to run a business. Um, I'll also do course creation and anything kind of more technical in the, in the afternoons. So that is literally it. Um, you, if you're listening in, you're not a morning person, then you're going to have to do it at night. Maybe it's the other way round.
Or you could do alternate days. If you literally only have one hour, maybe you can alternate the days or if, if you are just starting out again finish a book. Like don't get distracted by marketing and all these other things until you have a book. I hear, I get way too. Any questions from authors who were like, well, should I do about marketing? And I'm like, you say, how many books do you have that like, Oh, I haven't even finished a first draft. So yeah, finish the book first. But that is how I manage my time. Um, also another tip is I use Google calendar, um, to really manage my time in block in hour blocks, sometimes half hour blocks and everything is highly shed yield.
Um, so you know, and when I'm in that time slot, like you and I, right now we have a time slot, we're doing our interview and then the time slot is done and I have another time slot after this. I have a whole load of interviews this afternoon, so I batch tasks and um, basically just focus within the period of time I've allowed, whether or not that's, you know, half an hour or an hour like I did back in the day or now my full time life.
Jesper (24m 32s): Yeah. I'm, I'm wondered, uh, not versus autumn for example, autumn is not maintaining a day job, but I'm still maintaining at a day up because I'm kind of in the, in this place where you talked about earlier, right. How much income do you need to replace? And unfortunately, I have too much I need to replace. I'm still doing the day job, so at least on my end as well. Uh, I, I tried, I kind of adopt the same thing as you were saying there in the means that, uh, I can only do my creative stuff, but I, of course I have to do it very early in the morning before I, uh, I do my day job activities, but I can only do creative stuff in the morning because I always feel like afternoon, evening, I'd just too tired.
So, but I can easily do marketing stuff and all that stuff in the evening because yeah, with a business background that comes easy to me. So I don't need to use too much brain power doing better.
Joanna (25m 21s): Yeah. I think, and that's exactly the same as me. I, I it is much easier to do this kind of stuff than it is to write fiction and actually they I would say to people, and there's some romantic myth that being a full time writer is the goal. That's not necessarily the goal. You know, the goal is to have a great life and to write your books as well. Um, if you look at some of the figures that have come out from the various author organizations, most writers, including most indie writers, do not make very much money at all.
So you have to either have multiple streams of income, uh, or you, you keep your job. And in fact, I would also say having a job is great. You know, if you enjoy your job, then keep your job. And I hated my job, so I really wanted to leave my job. And this is the thing, but I, I definitely want to encourage people, look, if you can keep your creative life alongside your day job, then you won't have to do a lot of other things to bring in multi, multi streams of income. You can just focus on your creative work.
And in fact, the book big magic by Elizabeth Gilbert, um, she actually says you should support your art. Don't ask your art to support you. And I find that very challenging because of course I do have my art, but I also have my business. Um, so yeah, these are things everyone has to weigh up for themselves. Um, but as somebody told me a long time ago, don't be romantic about you pay your bills and money doesn't money.
Jesper (26m 47s): That's a good point. But I wanted to, uh, circled back to the events, uh, that you mentioned a few moments ago. Um, and I guess this is a bit of a sort of a self-serving question because I feel like, uh, you know, where we're going to get you on the podcast, I'm entitled to at least have one self-serving question as well because one of the things that am autumn and I have been discussing, uh, was to whether or not we should look at in the future doing some events on our own, you know, putting something together and maybe either with larger audiences or maybe with smaller intimate audiences, I don't know, but I have all the time been wondering if it is really, if you're looking at it from an income perspective, if it is really a viable way to get an income because it feels to me like if you go with the lots audience, of course you're also going to, uh, you know, we have a lot of work on your hands to organize everything.
Um, and of course you need to be able to attract enough of a crowd to actually fund the, the venue that you decide to take out. Um, but if you go with a small crowd then I feel like I think you have to have such a high ticket price that people are not really gonna want to do it or you can only just cover your costs. So I'm just curious a bit about what you experienced when it comes to speaking gigs and events and stuff like that. If it's, is it something that is viable to look at as something you can add money from or is it more like a building your brand name kind of thing?
Joanna (28m 20s): Well, again it depends on what type of speaking you're going to do and uh, cause there were all kinds, you know, I have a friend who was a keynote speaker, uh, for places like Google and Facebook and you know, he can get 20 grand for a lunch meeting, right? So if you choose to speak to a corporate audience and you have a topic that is appropriate for corporate events, then you can earn tons. Um, but if you are, let's say your going to do a workshop on fantasy mapmaking, then you are not gonna make much money from that.
Um, because the audience won't pay for that for, you know, they're not gonna pay that much for that workshop. So this is where you have to decide your own goal. And whereas for example, you could decide to speak as an author convention, you could do a panel on a work on an author convention and that would help build your brand. As you say, we'll probably sell some of your fantasy map making books. Am may get you some more readers, but you don't do author events for the money because it's, it's just not there.
Uh, as, as you say, um, I have, so in terms of actual income, and I may be running as we speak, the Corona virus thing is, uh, having fun with the worlds. Uh, so I was about to actually book a hotel for a am PR in-person event. Um, and I was going to have people, I may still do this, so by the time anyone listens to this, it may well be happening or might be in the future or whatever. But this is the types of things I've done where I have made money. And when I say made money, I mean a couple of thousand pounds in a weekend, which you know, too many people is good money.
Um, and also it's a, you know, can be an interesting weekend. So that would be 30 people in an, you know, a decent hotel and the price would be aimed at people who are serious about their writing career. So it's not a one Oh one how to vote a book type of situation. So, so you've got a number of factors there. It's, you know, what are you comfortable doing? And I've been doing professional speaking again for decades, so I know how to run a small event like that. I would never ever run a big event. I think the risk is too high and also it's not fun for me. I'm, I'm an introvert, you know, I don't enjoy big event.
Um, uh, so yeah, you have to decide like, who are you, who are the audience, who's going to pay? And so, for example, I, I've had an idea on the back burner for a few years now that I'll write and probably pitched you a traditional publisher in order to aim for that corporate speaking market. I may well still do that as well, but that's where I see if you want to be a speaker, then you can earn money with the right audience. If you want to be a teacher and run small events and, or speaker, author things than it is a much smaller thing.
And, you know, speaking at fantasy conventions, that is a brand building so that there's just such a range of, of things.
Jesper (31m 8s): Yeah. Yeah, I see what you're saying. But, and I think also, I mean, of course for the corporate speaking market, um, I fully agree with that. Uh, of course from our point of view, we were more looking at the am at like the author community, right? Because we also across the us are aimed at authors and all that sorts of stuff that would, that would be our audience, right? Or other authors, uh, wanting to, uh, go to an event, uh, whatever that may be.
Joanna (31m 35s): Yeah. And they and then you have to look at the author market in general and say, yeah, there are some authors with some money. Um, but if you look at the ticket price or most author events, they are not very high. So yes, there are ways you can do it, but you, you have to know your audience and know your value to the audience and what you can deliver that is worth a higher ticket price for example.
Jesper (31m 57s): Yeah, that's a, that's a good point. Uh, something we will continue discussing internally, myself and autumn about what we want to do there. But I for for one, I think it could be fun. I mean, uh, of course running podcast running courses, we also do all of that stuff because we like helping other people we like to use.
Joanna (32m 14s): Exactly. And that's another reason to do it. But you know, you asked about the money.
Jesper (32m 19s): Yeah, yeah. And DB because basically I guess what we're, we're trying to see if there was like an overlap in the Venn diagram here, right. Where it's not going to, it's not because we need to get rich from it, but we do want to earn a bit of money because at the end of the day, eh, going, preparing both, preparing an event but also going to an event, it is taking away time from other things that we could be doing that would earn us money. So it needs to sort of be justified in that sentence as well. So that's something we will think about. But, uh,
Joanna (32m 48s): I think you should probably start the pair of you or one of you, whoever, you know, you should pitch for panels at existing events or pitch to do workshops at existing events and then see if you enjoy it basically.
Jesper (33m 1s): Yeah. What am has already participated in a couple of different panels in the U S where she's based, a socio read sort of dipped our toes into the pond there. So, uh, okay. But that's good. But that was a bit about the future thinking here. So maybe I could, uh, shift us into another future future Christian media. Do you wanna uh, because I know that you probably like most, uh, unlike most others I guess really like to look into the futuristic stuff.
Um, so when I had you on here, I couldn't think of anyone better to ask about where you see stuff like VR and augmented reality come into fiction books. And if this is something we should have authors actually pay some attention to, um, and if we want to pay attention to it, where, where do we look, where do we get those? Like, um, you know, if we want to get in early on some of this stuff, where do we get the inputs and the insights as to how to do stuff like that?
Joanna (34m 3s): Well, it's interesting because of course, augmented reality and virtual reality are really starting to take off. And in fact, again, circling back to the, the Corona virus, what we're seeing is share prices in companies that do remote working and remote, you know, experiences are going up. So I think we may even see an acceleration in things like AR and VR because of this am virus, uh, issue. Um, because people will want to do more in VR.
So for example, I meant to be speaking, uh, when this goes out, it will have happened or not happened. But I don't know right now where the London book fair is going ahead and I meant to be speaking at an event and, um, you know, I see. If I could speak in virtual reality, then I probably would. So one of w in talking about teaching courses for example, I do think that we're going to see the rise in, you know, there's a lot of digital tickets to events at the moment. You can get to conventions and stuff that in the future, maybe we just deliver those in VR or in terms of marketing.
Maybe you and I meet in a, some kind of virtual space and people can attend the virtual space. So I think there'll be a lot of teaching. A lot of events will happen in in via, um, of course, one of the biggest areas it's already ahead of the curve, um, is gaming. Uh, so a good example in the fantasy space of course, is the Witcher. Uh, have you read the books or seeing there?
Jesper (35m 28s): I've seen the movie or a series I should say.
Joanna (35m 31s): Yeah, well of course, you know, the books have become massive because of the gaming. Um, so what I think is, is the licensing of fantasy universes for gaming and that is a challenge for independence. I do not think AR and VR are things we can do alone. So whereas we can very easily write a book alone, formatted with vellum and you know, pay a cover designer and an editor please but we can basically get books out on our own. Um, I have my own audio booth, I can do audio books on my own, but when it comes to AR, VR, gaming, am adaptation in fantasy worlds into this multimedia space, this is where licensing is going to come into it saying so I really think this is a fascinating area and there's going to be lots more stuff going on.
And I know quite a lot of writers who write for gaming worlds, uh, at the moment. That's definitely something that fantasy authors can consider if they want to look at that. That's obviously worked for hire, which we didn't talk about, but that is, you know, like that's the sort of contract jobs. Um, but yeah, um, books to gaming to adaptation to fantasy worlds that are turned into these entertainment experiences that is, that is only going to get bigger. Um, as we get more and more of these streaming services, uh, you know, Disney and Amazon and Netflix and everybody else.
So I think that's very exciting. But as I said, the education side, that's probably where I'll be looking, uh, over the next, certainly in the next decade, you know, by the time we get to 20, 30, I think we'll be doing things quite differently. Uh, in terms of podcasting, in terms of marketing, there'll be a lot more that is online in real life if you get what I mean, sort of in, in, in that, in that way.
Jesper (37m 11s): Do you think fiction books, uh, you know, for example, Kindle or eBooks, do you think that they will become more interactive in one way or another?
Joanna (37m 19s): No, I think it is. The interactivity of an ebook to me is, uh, has to be another product. I think we might, you know, w the formats. So audio books for example, I'm thinking of adapting some of my audio books and audio book is a straight read of a text. Right? But I can rewrite my books as am audio dramas. So I've written quite a lot of screenplays for my books, um, but audio dramas as cheaper to produce. So I'm definitely thinking of that. But they in terms of the interactivity, people get that from gaming.
People get that from other formats of, uh, work. So I do think that the ebook, uh, is not something that will become interactive. Uh, I think it'll just be something different. So it might be an augmented reality experience, whatever you call that. So they for example, I've written some books, some crime books that are set along the South bank of London. And I've thought about, well, maybe I could do an augmented reality tour of that area of London. So if you walk around there, I'll be there next to you talking about the place.
Um, I have thought about that, but again, I think we have to consider these things as different formats. And also going beyond being independent to licensing. So we haven't really talked about licensing, it's all but, um, we have copyright in our creative work and we can license it to different people to do different things. So I think Indies have mastered doing things ourselves, the basic stuff, but we're going to have to get a lot more comfortable with licensing if we want to move into these more extended worlds.
Jesper (38m 54s): Right. And do you think all this VR, augmented reality and stuff, do you think that this is something that would be good to get, you know, get going early or getting as an early adopter of that? Or is it better to wait until it becomes a bit more mainstream and maybe the cost goes down to produce it and stuff like that?
Joanna (39m 13s): Uh, I don't think you can get into this early as an independent. Uh, I can't see how you can, it's not like you can buy a piece of software like vellum and then make something unless you're a programmer. Um, getting involved with that, to me as a creative, I can't see a way to get involved in it early.
Jesper (39m 30s): No, no, I agree. Let me, let me clarify what I meant. What I meant was more to really pay a lot of focus on what is happening in the market and sort of have your finger on the pulse and then if, if a company comes out with some sort of solution that can be used from a, from an author perspective, then that you jump in really early on and start moving on it. Or is it better to sort of wait, because I, I, what I'm thinking is that if you jump in early, the cost will also be significantly higher. Uh, whereas if you wait until it's like a proven product that, that people know that this stuff is working, then probably the cost will go down.
But of course then everybody is doing it and you're not getting the early mover advantage there. So that was more my question. I think I didn't explain it well enough.
Joanna (40m 13s): Well, I think everyone has to decide what they're interested in. Uh, so you know, I've been podcasting since 2009 so I was clearly into podcasting before it went mainstream. Thus, I was able to take advantage of being an early mover in the space. Um, but I am not, I don't have, I'm not a gamer so I don't have any gaming headset. If you are a gamer listening, you probably have, uh, you know, you might already have an AR headset. There are lots of different they they've been going, you know, the virtual reality headsets have been going for years now.
So I think people will cheat. You have to choose what you're interested in and follow that and it will likely be the stuff you already do for fun. So for me it's always been audio. For other people it might be gaming.
Jesper (40m 58s): Okay, fair enough. All right, well time flies when you're having fun here. So maybe a to F to finish off am is there anywhere a place where you want to direct our listeners to if, if they want to know more about you and what you're doing? Joanna
Joanna (41m 15s): yes. If you'd like podcasting, which presumably you do say, come on over to the creative Penn podcast family, the Dublin, uh, that is my podcast for authors. I have a nother podcast called books and travel, which is obviously about books and travel and am that is the booksandtravel and yeah, basically I think, um, if people have questions, probably the best places Twitter at the creative Penn but it's definitely a really interesting time to be a writer. And being a fancy writer in particular is definitely a great time to write fantasy so I appreciate what you you and awesome are doing with this show.
Jesper (41m 54s): Oh, thank you. And thank you very much for coming on today. Do you wanna
Joanna (41m 57s): no worries. Thanks so much. Yes. For
Jesper (42m 1s): all right, so, uh, I hope you've got a lot out of that conversation with the Joanna Penn and the next week autumn we'll be back and we will be back into our old groove again.
Narrator (42m 13s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the amwritingfantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join autumn and Yesper on patrion.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the amwritingfantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Should you edit while writing?
The advice is just to write, but is that the best thing for novice authors?
How about after finishing your first trilogy or once you've hit your professional stride?
Autumn and Jesper delve into what they've been told — and the advice they've given! — to tease out the realities, when editing while you write might be a big help, and the realities of what they both do in this episode of self-reflection with some writing group horror stories thrown in!
Check out the free Ultimate Fantasy Writer's Starter Kit that Autumn mentions in the show at ultimatefantasywritersguide.com/starter-kit/.
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy.
For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (1s): You're listening to the amwritingfantasy podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need in literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing join to best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them. Now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt. Hello.
I am Jesper and I'm Autumn. This is episode 65 of the amwritingfantasy podcast and I think editing has sort of been a focus
Jesper (42s): because over the last few episodes with, with a, with a small detour into mapmaking last week. But uh, yeah, but for from next week onwards we're going to, uh, move the topic away from editing. But today though, we have one more episode for you, which centers on a question often asked and that is how much should I edit while I write?
Autumn (1m 9s): So it's still, it's still sort of a theme cause we've been talking about, you know, how much to read while writing. So we're still on the am writing part, but that's kind of what we're about, isn't it? Yeah,
Jesper (1m 22s): I think so. It might be, it might be in the name of the podcast.
Autumn (1m 27s): I think it might, but this will be a fun one. I, it'll be interesting to hear your take. And I, I put a lot of thought into this one and it's making me question what I usually give as advice. So I'll just leave that there. Right?
Jesper (1m 42s): Yeah. That can be good or bad. I'm not quite sure what to make of it. It was some self reflection time, so that's always a good thing. Yeah, that's pretty good. So how are things on your side of the ocean? Uh, well it's, it's been pretty quiet to be honest. Um, you know, I was supposed to do some business travel last week, uh, but I've got canceled because of a Corona virus concerns.
Um, and I was also supposed to go to Cairo in three weeks from now. That also would cancel Corona virus. So, yeah, just sort of been maintaining a, you know, business hours from home. And then, uh, early in the morning hours I've been very focused on trying to get the plumbing done for our next novel.
Autumn (2m 37s): Oh, I'm so excited. I love where this plotting is going. So, um, I can't wait till we get to write it.
Jesper (2m 44s): Yeah. Only, only missing to plot out three more chapters and then the plotting is almost done after that, so it shouldn't be too long, I would say. But, uh, but I cannot, uh, who forget that we have like three courses too,
Autumn (3m 1s): this building website. Am I not happening quite as fast as we want it to? But yeah, it's always worse when you're a writer. You're always waiting to get to the writing, but there's a lot of business side of being a writer that we've got to take care of two at the moment.
Jesper (3m 19s): Yeah. Especially with all the nonfiction like author stuff that we're doing is that that takes up a lot of time, which is okay and it's fine. I like doing it as well. But uh, but I must admit, you know, once, once you've sat down and you plotted the whole thing, it feels like now I really would like to write it now. It has to wait. It has to wait.
Autumn (3m 38s): Yes. I, I felt that way when I read the first three, the outline to the first three chapters we call, I want to, okay. No we're good. Don't touch bad. So how about you then? I feel so successful because my little cabin room I've been building has walls and insulation, um, and it actually has doors and windows and we're just actually on the inside paneling and then at some built-in bookshelves and eventually, uh, as the weather warms up doing, finishing out the outside trim.
So it's almost there. I have been good and I've gone down to only a half day of building so that I can do, Oh, you know, like the amwritingfantasy work we were just talking about. I'm so far behind so I've got to catch up. But it's been good and it's exciting and it is oddly warm. I'm in Vermont, which is troubling, but it is hard to ignore one of those days where you open up the door, the window, and it's am above 20 Celsius in the high sixties Fahrenheit and it feels warm.
It feels the birds are singing and you just want to go plant a garden and you don't even need a coat. And it's just like, this is, I'm just going to go sit outside for a few minutes and yeah, life's good. That's sitting outside a little bit with my dog next to the stream that's in front of the cabin thinking this is pretty darn awesome.
Jesper (5m 5s): I'm a bit envious. You know what? It was like a, a couple of hours ago I was at the soccer practice with my son and it's, it's not, it's not warm here. It's like, what is it, like eight degrees Celsius or something like that. It's not been warm at all, but uh, but that's OK. you know, we used to that here in Denmark, but it was more like it has not, it's been clouded all day long and then like five minutes before we need to exit to go to the soccer field to go to soccer practice, it just starts pouring down.
Jesus could, I mean, right when we had to go out and started, it was just like, Oh my God. So hearing about 20 degrees Celsius, warm, nice weather. It's a bit, I can get a bit in to be honest.
Autumn (5m 53s): I'll send you a picture. Yeah. Just to make me feel real
Jesper (5m 58s): bad. Right. I live vicariously through with you, with your kids. You can live vicariously. Nice weather with threw me. All right. That's fair enough. Oh, we go on the internet with the amwritingfantasy podcast. So we have like a constant influx of riders joining the amwritingfantasy Facebook group. Yes, we do. It's amazing. It is. And I actually checked earlier today, we've had 6,200 posts and comments over the last 28 days.
What do you think about that? Three kidding. That's what it says in Facebook. Analytical. Facebook's never wrong force. Well, no, but I like that stat. I'm going to say we'd go with it. That is absolutely astounding. I mean, I know it's like I go in there and it looks like, you know, Luke are, you has just let someone in and there's already like three people lined up. I'm like, Oh my gosh, we can't keep up. This is amazing. It's wonderful. But it is such a fantastic group. Like I said, I don't even like Facebook, but I like Facebook just for the amwritingfantasy group.
It's worth it. Yeah. There, there's, there's a lot of help and advice to get in the Facebook group. For for you, a listener for and fellow authors. Uh, we do do our best to be quite strict so that we keep it clean for any like promotional stuff. And as soon as we see something we deleted and we do want people and we also kick some people out if they can. Um, so, but, but what it means is that that the Facebook group is a very healthy, helpful community of fellow fantasy authors.
So, um, I just picked out a few, like a selfie for example, asks what editing software people use and why. Mike wanted to know the titles of people's favorite fantasy books from the past. And Arthur asked for some writing advice with regards to the need of, uh, showing the reader, the protecting his family, or if you could leave that out. I just picked a random few pieces there, but as you can hear it, there was all kinds of questions in the group and they all get answers.
So if you have not joined yet to, you know, feel free to do so. Just search for amwritingfantasy in the group section of Facebook and we will let you in as soon as we see. You see those wait list of things to, yeah, well, we definitely tried to approve the people, you know, every day. But uh, it often happens that both myself and autumn and Luke ends up letting people in on the same day in like morning, noon and night, I think.
Yeah. Well, yeah. Well that is quite the breadth of topics. That's what's so neat about it is, I mean, it literally, you go in there and it covers everything. So I kind of liked that. I've seen life life questions to editing, to publishing,
Autumn (8m 56s): to formatting to cover is, uh, it's, it's kinda fun.
Jesper (9m 1s): Yeah, I think it is to be honest. Uh, it's, it's good. It's really good.
Autumn (9m 6s): Yeah, it is. And I know, I think it's a little, we've had a little bump, um, with people joining us on our ultimate fantasy writer starter kit and I think it's from the publisher, the women in publishing summit that I was just a part of. They, uh, the number one watched session was actually the writing tips panel that I was a part of. So that was kind of really, I know, total success and helping so many other authors and through that I linked people to the starter kit.
So we just had a whole bunch of people join there and one of them recently, Mary van, she left a comment of a phenomenal amount of information. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and expertise. I look forward to taking your course in the near future. So that's so nice of her to have stopped by and left a message and yeah, I'll make sure I put a link in the show notes if anyone else is interested in joining us on the starter kit, which is our, our little free video course. So if you're looking for some ideas on how to start writing so you can am start writing strong and develop your ideas, how to avoid some of those novice pitfalls that can totally keep you from ever finishing your novel and then pick up the top 10 tools to make sure you do succeed in writing.
Those are, that'll be waiting for you in the show notes.
Jesper (10m 24s): Yeah, absolutely. And uh, I think it's three videos that you're going to get there, uh, by signing up. So we're gonna email you three different videos. I think they're spaced out a bit, if I remember correctly. Autumn
Autumn (10m 35s): the way you can, that way you don't feel like you have to watch it right now. You can, you know, you've got a couple of days.
Jesper (10m 40s): Yeah. So we will email you one video at a time, uh, once you sign up and then you can watch it at, at, at your own time. Uh, so that's nice. Oh, so how much should I edit while I write? I mean, this is a bit of a tough one to be honest with. You already alluded to the fact that you had to do some thinking well when preparing you.
Autumn (11m 8s): Yeah. As I did some major self-reflection because my advice has always been, do not ever, ever edit while you write. Just don't do it just right forward until you finish that first draft. And I've said that for I don't know, I've been giving advice since 2012 so for almost eight years I guess. No. Hmm. And I realized that when it comes to living that advice, what I do is entirely different, but it's not editing full out.
But there's definitely some editing while writing. And there's a couple, to me, I have a couple of really good reasons of why I go back and edit. But what do you try to do? Um,
Jesper (11m 54s): well, I also have to say when preparing this a go, you know, when I prepared this episode on the am thought of thought about what my point of view was on this topic, uh, I also came into the preparation of this podcast episode thinking that, well, I know exactly what I think about death. Then the wire sat in there and I sort of thought a bit about it. Then I started doubting a bit, uh, to feel about no, exactly because, okay. But, but I think if we sort of, maybe it would be a good thing to, just to start off, if I've just listed out here the sort of the two opposing viewpoints.
Yeah. In reality, I don't think of this, this black and white at all. The more you think about it is, it is not. But if we just for one second, you look at it black and white. So you have two opposing viewpoints, right? So, um, so on one hand we would find the writer who believes that it's best to write your first draft as fast as possible, not passing to do any editing at all. As you write, you know, ignore all misspelled words and all that, just leave it and just, right.
Uh, and then on the other end of the spectrum, we would then find the author who believes it. It's better to take a bit more time with your first draft and you know, fixing any obvious errors or even like if you, if you come across any problems, then you can fix those as you go as well. And that's, I guess that's the two opposing positions. But the more I think about it, there really not, there's not a right or wrong way of doing this.
Uh, but I think that's what we're going to get into discussing here a bit because this is something that is often debated, you know, if you showed on the internet and what not. There was a lot of viewpoints on this kind of stuff. And, uh, I think the only thing we can do here is we can sort of look at the topic and give you some things to think about because I think this is something you have to decide for yourself what works best for you and what might work well for you is not necessarily what worked for me.
Um, I mean there was also those who are a bit like perfectionist and the, you know, you get too bogged down in editing when you're writing and you know, instead of finishing that draft, uh, you just keep perfectionism things and that's not good. Um, but on the other hand, there is also those who, you know, if you know that there's an error in the manuscript, it just drives you crazy not to fix it. So
Autumn (14m 29s): that's also a problem, right? This is a problem. It can become a total roadblock. But I think we should look at the pros and cons maybe of both approaches and then sort of the hybrid, which is probably where I am because I'm a hybrid pantser and plotters. So why wouldn't I be a hybrid editor while writing as well? I think that's just, I'm a hybrid in my life. I don't know what I'm a hybrid of, but I'm a hybrid.
Jesper (14m 53s): Uh, I think sometimes you have like a spyware on my computer or something because literally the next bullet on my list,
Autumn (14m 60s): pros and cons, we are that in tune. It doesn't matter that there's the Atlantic between us. It's, we just know it's going on. That's so weird. You're not used to this yet. It's been like three years. I guess I can still surprise me. I mean, how can you pick exactly what my next bullet point says? He's really pretty good. Oh, but yes. All right, so we're going to do pros and cons. So what's the next bullet? Are we jumping ahead or is that, are we good for this now?
Jesper (15m 32s): Yeah, let, let's just start with the pros and cons and then S C a bit. I mean, it's not that I have a lot about pros and cons. I've, I've kind of kept it a bit simple. Um, but I think maybe to start out with, I could say like the one of the pros of editing as you go is that your first draft draft is obviously more cleaner. And I would guess that it's probably also more cohesive once you're done then it would have been if you didn't edit anything.
Right.
Autumn (16m 3s): And for this one, sorry, sound fair. That sounds fair. And I was thinking what really comes to mind to me when someone edits especially extensively with every single, like say let's say chapter that's just easier instead of scenes. Um, I know a few authors who are very new and very inexperienced and they actually either find a coach or a mentor and, or just good beta readers and they're sending almost every chapter and they're really going over it and really fine tuning it and really working on character development and scenes.
And to me it seems amazingly time-consuming, but I also know that's, that might be what some people really want and need, especially for like your first novel, you're really learning. So there's something to be said about making it work that way. If that's what works for you and you really, you find someone, especially someone to bounce it off of, you're not just running around in your own head, which is, I think we're going to get to in the cons. But in the pros, if you find that mentor or a coach or whether you're paying for them or whether they're there just as a kindness of their heart, they're passing it onto you.
It's, that's not a bad way to develop a story if you're getting that help from an outside source. I think that could be really bad.
Jesper (17m 17s): Yeah. I mean, because there's, there's something to be said as well about it. All of this also depends on where you are in your writing journey. Uh, I don't remember if I shared this story before, um, on, on a, on a past podcast episode. But when I started out writing first, I actually, I found a critique partner. Um, it was, you know, somebody who was experienced in writing himself.
Um, but I only find found one person and I did that on purpose because I felt like when I was first starting out, I feel like if I'm going to start sending this stuff out to beta readers and you know, and I'm going to get whatever, 2030, 40 however many of them, but, but whatever, you know, or let's just say five then five banner readers maybe. Right. And then I would get five different types of feedback and I felt like when, when I was first starting out, I feel like I was so inserts of vulnerable place where I would be very effected if I get five different types of feedback because I w I was not experienced enough to actually say, okay, this is, this is, I ignore this stuff just doesn't matter.
This is a good point here. I'll take that point, that's good. And then delete those points. You know, I was not in a place where I was able to do that. So instead I just found, okay, I'm going to find one person that I trust. And then what I did was I actually sent him one chapter at a time, so I just wrote one chapter and send it to him. And then I got feedback and I rewrote it and I send it back to him again. And he came back, rewrote it again. And I think I did it a million times. I don't, I don't recall them, but I do that a lot of times, especially in the first three chapters I wrote, I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote.
And every time he came back and said, well, this doesn't quite work and do this, and look at that. And then I rewrote it again and again and again until like, I think it took three months or something, but then at some point he said, okay, I think you're ready to start to start writing the first half of the book now. So, and then I started and I wrote half the book and then I sent that to him and he gave me some feedback. But at that point, I didn't know then that it was not a lot of rewriting there. Um, and then, uh, all of this, by the way, I should say all of this happened after I tried on my own first and I had to ditch, eh, like 50,000 words that are written.
I just did the whole thing and then I thought, okay, this is not going to work. I need help. And that was when I found that guy. Um, so, and then once I've written the first half of the book, I got a bit of feedback and I edited a bit on that and then I wrote last the last half and sent that to him. And then I was part of sort of good to go after that, but it helped a lot. Um, but that was a lot of editing as I went. But that's also because it, I think this topic does depend on where you are in your writing journey and how experienced you are.
Um, I don't think we can ignore that fact.
Autumn (20m 12s): No, and I agree. I mean, I, I think I had my manuscript pretty much done, but I did join a writer's group of writing class and that a writer's group, a creative writing class, and we kept going even after the class ended and we went chapter by chapter, everyone actually it was one of those rare groups where instead of getting like only five minutes, you, I think we went for 15 to 20. I mean you, if you're a fast enough reader or had short enough chapters, you could finish an entire chapter and we're all kind of were like, Oh, it's only one more page. Keep going.
Um, and so that really helped give feedback, especially even just hearing it. Um, it's such a difference when you're speaking in versus editing, you know, reading it so often you'd find your own edits there. So that helped me quite a lot with my first novel. And so I think that was really an invaluable experience. So I think I did have the first draft pretty much done at that point. But the course was designed that basically you wrote the next chapter for the next class and then you went over it and then you, you know, read the next chapter.
And that's what a lot of the other students that we kept going after the writer's group, you know, with the writer's group after the course ended, that's what we did. We all tried to make sure we had the next full chapter ready to go. And so that was the sort of the same thing. And that's another really great way of getting feedback. And if you do need that kick in the pants to keep writing, you had a deadline because you had to make sure you had some willing to read the next week. Yeah, that's true. I've never had any experience with writer groups myself.
Uh, but, uh, uh, I have heard some horror stories about it, especially, you know, I've heard some people who get those kinds of characters in the writing group that is really their there to critique other people's work to make themselves feel better. You know? Yeah. I've been in two different ones and the one was so bad that it's actually what inspired me to create the course of the ultimatefantasywritersguide because it was so unhelpful that I got angry and started questioning everything and looked it all up and said, okay, this is the really the way you're supposed to do it.
And the other one was really helpful and I miss them quite a lot and it was a fantastic experience. So yeah. Have on both sides of that horse. Oh, okay. But yeah. Okay. But I think all of that also touched upon the one of the cons of editing as you go. And that is of course that is going to take you longer to complete the first draft. That's just how it is. It is. It'll take you longer. And I still worry that if you don't get that outside help, if you're just rambling around in your own head, is this right? Is this wrong? Is this right?
And you find yourself especially the biggest clue. If you find yourself changing something and then changing it back and then changing it, and that's when you need help. You just gotta stop. Just stop full out, stop and look for help. If you find yourself doubting or doubting that you're good enough, writer get out of your head, get some help. Don't just keep circling your own wagons because you're just driving yourself crazy and it's not worth it. Trust me, it's not get help. But that is definitely a con while editing, if you're editing on your own while you're writing, you will just be circling your own little crazy thoughts and you'll not be writing anything productive.
You'll just be driving yourself insane. And if, if that issued and you could go and check that Stata kit that we have in the show notes, at least that'll, that'll get you started the bid and give you some, some inputs and feedback. Yes. Or, and come join us on Facebook and uh, yeah, you'll am at least have someone else to be like, how you're drowning, you know, raise your white flag and say you need help and we'll be there.
Jesper (23m 54s): Absolutely. Um, but I, I think, I mean did, this is slightly off topic, but it just popped up in my mind now that we were talking about it. But I do think it's worth pointing out as well, that when you are on your first book and you need some help, you know, if you're trying to join a writer's group or you're trying to find a critique partner or only one person like late, I did. It is your own responsibility to try to vet who you're listening to because it doesn't matter. And honestly, especially there in the beginning, if I think most writers are quite insecure in the beginning, at least I know I was as well.
Um, in terms of is my writing well in that, is this good enough that doesn't do anybody care about this stuff? Is this is nonsense. You know, all those kinds of questions, they haunt you, especially in the beginning. And if you get input from the wrong person, that could completely derail everything you're doing. So, so do, do, be quite careful about trying to understand who is this person who wants to give you input. So why I'm saying that is also because while the am writing Facebook fantasy group is great and you can join and you can ask your questions, just be careful if you're just starting out that you don't join the Facebook group and post a question and then you're going to get 15 different responses in the common fields.
So just be careful, you know that that that's, it might not be the type of help that you need when you're first starting out. So, so just think a bit about that.
Autumn (25m 25s): Yes. And that's very true cause I have to say if I wasn't stubborn, my am, I don't know what would've happened because my first writing group was the bad experience. And I think to me it really came down. I remember someone ripping me apart for using an adverb and then five minutes later they were praising someone for using the exact frickin same word. And you can hear it in my voice, I can hear it still. I still get angry, angry. But again, that is why I went home and I said, okay, they were not even the right genre.
I started saying, what do I have to do to write fantasy, how do I do this correctly for what I want to write? Because it was a multi-genre a writer's group. And yeah, if I hadn't been who I am and just got angry and I figured it out and I went and asked questions. But if I hadn't done that, if I had been a lot more sensitive and I'd been just hurt and confused and lost and overwhelmed, I don't know where I would've ended up. So yeah, be careful and be kind to yourself.
And if someone's not being kind to you kick them in the butt. But I mean that metaphorically, not physically or not okay. But yes. So definitely be kind and look for, you know, look for Donnelley kind advice, but good advice. And someone who, if you have a question like why do you say that? Why do you mean that? And they don't give you an answer, just blow him off. You know, you deserve to have a reason that you're being told this and that is very important. Yeah.
Okay. So let's move into a pro of editing. Only afterward. Oh, right. Well afterwards you got the book done. There you go. There's your pro. You actually have an entire manuscript.
Jesper (27m 10s): Yeah, that's true. Um, I mean, and you will be finished with that manuscript it quicker. Like you said before, you're like, like it's, it's the opposite of before of course. Um, but the con is then of course that it might be quite messy and you might need some time to clean it all up. And uh, yeah, so it's just like the opposite of the situation off before. So, and I know it's pretty frustrating isn't it? Because you see the more we go into this, the more clear it becomes that there is no clear answer.
Autumn (27m 42s): There is no clear answer God. Cause I mean if you have some really big plot holes in, you need to go back and fill them or what if, Oh my God, you missed something huge and really the whole thing got off track and you have to delete some stuff because you didn't stop and really think about this while you're writing. And especially if you're a pantser, this could be a huge issue. If you wait till the very end to finally start questioning is everything correct and going all right. Yeah. Sometimes waiting until the end isn't the best thing to do either. Unless you have a good outline and you really know you, you hit all the right spots so you fall it.
Yeah. Then at least maybe you have a hope that the book is in good shape. Mmm. Yeah. But what about those people who were then writing their first novel? You know, so just giving them pros and cons here, but you're giving any answers. So, but do we have any answers? What do you, what do you think? Do we have any answer about what, what would you recommend? You said, you said in the beginning that you had a clear point of view at first and now you're not sure. Sure. So yeah. Well, I arrive at maybe, I think for my advice for a first time writer, if you've never tackled a novel before, would be to join either writer's group, one that is preferably in your genre or to join.
You'll find a coach, find a mentor, someone who can help you through. And maybe do it in chunks, you know, maybe not every chapter, but give them, you know, you know, I love the seven steps of story structure given their whole intro, give him your whole inciting incident, give them some stuffs, then they can help guide you. I think, uh, for me, I took, you know, I have an English degree, but I went back and did two adult writing courses when I decided to take writing seriously. And that really I think helped lay some groundwork. Part of it, because I got so angry that I went and found different advice.
But the other one ended up being very helpful and a wonderful experience. So, you know, even me with an English degree, I went back and took a few more courses to get myself back in the flow. So I think for your first novel, if you're going to be serious about publishing, just you're going to need help, you're going to need you there chorus, you're going to need a mentor, a coach, someone to help guide you through that first book. It really helps. It will build your confidence and it'll definitely give you a better product. Hmm.
No. Okay, good. Whew. Don't, we're in agreement. Oh, that is so weird. A surprise. But now you know, as a, you know how many books? 1617 I've got done. No, I do tend to edit a least a little bit as I write, but it's not like grammatical, I don't worry about punctuation, but there are times, um, the books doesn't feel like it's flowing. It just, it feels like I've hit a wall, basically a writer's block and I, again, I'm a hybrid pants or plot or I have an outline.
I know where the story's going, but there's some looseness in the each chapter. And often when I hit that, it's because I hit a plot hole and there's just something in my mind that saying, Hey, Hey, you miss something and I've got to change perspective. I've got to think about it a little bit, do some brainstorming. And usually I figure it out and then it goes boom. And I'm writing really fast again. So I do go back and there have been times when I have like, Holy crap, I missed that and I've got to go back and add a chapter and I keep telling myself I can do it later. I know what's going to happen and it's no, I got to go fix it now.
I've got to go fix that character. I've got to go throw in sometimes a foreshadowing way, you know, go put that back in there now just so I don't forget, just so I can get it out of my mind and on the paper. So nowadays I do sometimes edit while I'm going because if it's a big element, if it's a plot element, if it's a character issue, I need to fix it before I go forward. Otherwise I can't go forward as well as I'd like to. Hmm.
Jesper (31m 35s): That's fair enough. Uh, I think that there's, you know, these different tiers in it, right? So you just explained, you know, the, if you only just first starting out and I agree with what you said there and then of course there is this, the stuff about when, when you have written a lot of books in light like, like you and then there was the, I think there was also a point for those people who just write, maybe wrote written like two or three novels or something because I think at that point, um, it is good to just keep in mind to get into the habit of finishing things because you need that habit going forward that, that once you start something, you also finish it.
It's not like, you know, the first novel might take you quite a long time. I mean for some people it takes years. You might be working with this critique partner or whatever you do where you take a writing course or something, but it'll take a while because you need to redo a lot of things many times too to find the right stride there. But once you do, well, let's say you get into book three union, you get into book two or three, I should say, then you probably have a lot better grasp about how do I construct a story and how do I make the story work.
Um, and there I think it becomes important that you get out of the habit you had with the first book where it took you forever because you kept redoing and re questioning and updating or whatever you want to call editing. Um, and then start learning yourself that, okay, it's, you know, it's okay if I need to fix some of the Pluff holes here and there, I guess, but I also need to get to the finish line and it cannot take me forever with book two and book three because if you want, I mean, if you're just writing for fun, that's fine.
But if you, if you want to earn money from it, you also have to put up some products. You know, you can spend three years writing every novel. No, I think your readers, especially in today's day and age where there, you know, I remember when I first started out, one book a year was okay, but there's a lot of readers looking for more than that now. And yeah, you can't take, you know, if he can get one done in six months, it's much better than waiting two years. Yeah. And I really, I struggled a lot with this am because when I got into book two and book three, um, I had a lot of problems, not editing as I went.
Uh, you know, I, I often found myself editing something like, well, not like structural or plot edits because I outline in quite detailed as, you know, autumn the details. I do Paul first book here, this is very detailed. It's like almost once I'm done with the outline, you can just fill in the blanks and the novel novel or most definitely. It's impressive. It's like, I know what's going to happen and it's very exciting. But yeah, it's, it's not much more to get that actually done as a book.
Yeah. You just need to describe the scenery and a bit, not even emotions because all the emotional stuff. So usually in the outline as well. So I know I'm an, I'm an outlier on this stuff as well. I know, so I'm not trying to advocate to the listener that you should outline in this level of detail, but why I'm saying it is just because once I have my outline and if you have a less detailed outline is perfectly fine as well. But what I'm just saying is that I don't have any plot holes because I outline and if you do the outline correctly, you shouldn't have any really glaring plot holes either.
So what I was more referring to was that when I, when I was on like book two and three, I was just doing a lot of the copy editing stuff. You know, I spend too much time making the sentences sounds just a little bit better or just correcting this and that, a even typo sometimes and stuff like that. And it was just like, it, it annoyed me. It annoyed me a lot that I spent so much time on it. Um, because I wanted to, I wanted everything to go quicker, but at the same time I felt like I, I just can't scroll past this stuff because it sucks.
You know, I too, I did to correct it. So I kept correcting it, but it wasn't until I got into dictation that that problem was fixed because as soon as I started dictating, now, you know, nowadays I just dictate a chapter 10 transcribe it into the computer and then I do a quick search and replace for all the fantasy words. So, you know, we talked about how I use dictation back in episode 59, so go back and listen to that one if you're curious. But I just do that very quick steps in replace of the fantasy words and then I just move on to dictate the next chapter.
So, because I'm not typing the words on the screen and I see the, you know, the errors there on the screen while I write, I just, I'm able to ignore the fact that, do you know these kind of, uh, well, it's just sentences as I speak when it comes out. So it needs to very much tidying up in the editing, but it doesn't bother me when I can't see it as I type it. So yeah, dictation just fixed that hit entire problem.
Autumn (36m 40s): That's really good. That's, and that is an interesting one that we didn't come up with and we were talking about dictation cause we weren't thinking about editing at the time, but that does make a lot of sense. And that's why I was actually having problems with dictation is because I, I couldn't get what you have having a Mac. I couldn't get the dragon software to then upload it and all those other fancy things. So that I, I was seeing as I'm doing something else, I was seeing what I was saying and it was horrifying because it wasn't as as smart and as well adapted to my speech pattern and punctuation and everything else.
So for me it was like, yeah, I just need to, you need to not see what it's doing because if you do you want to go fix it. And I was like, that's it. I'm going to type because I at least can put in the period where I want the period and it doesn't think I said period and Oh it's just horrible. So, but that is, it is a true, I mean I think that is definitely one of the types of editing you shouldn't do until you're done. And even then, I mean always do your content edit before you start even getting into the grammatical and the better language and all those other things you need.
There's us of other edits that happen before you get to worrying about if that commas in the right place. So those are the ones you have to be able to let go on unless you, unless you plot in much less detail as I do it. And there's nothing called a content edit. Your content edit is actually before you write this book. It's in the plot. Yeah, it's in the plot. We've been content editing before we even get to uh, writings. So it's kind of a reverse way of doing it.
Jesper (38m 19s): Yeah, I guess you could say, but it is sort of just depends on in which face you invest. The time, right? Because you can rush through a first draft and get it done really quickly and then spend two months content editing and fixing and going back and forth and fixing chapter 10 Oh wait, then chapter seven is incorrect and I need to update that. Or you can like me, I'm, I take like not full time of course, but I probably, it probably takes me like a month to plot a novel. I think I spent like a month on this book. One thing I found out incorrect. I think that's about right.
Yeah.
Autumn (38m 49s): And of course you've been waiting for me a couple of times to come back and read through and make some changes so it slows you down a little bit, but not much. He usually gives me a pretty tight deadline, so we've kept it moving pretty good. You don't make me sound horrible. It's not. It's been very exciting. So it's been fun, but definitely a different way of doing it. And I have to admit there's times am it was the story I'm working on right now that there's like, I, I should probably have done a little bit more plotting. I love knowing what happens next.
So that's kind of exciting. But I have not gone off my hybrid ways too deeply yet. No,
Jesper (39m 26s): but it, but it is a, as we just said, right? It depends on where you invest your time and uh, that's basically up to you and that's why you need to find your own way through this. But one thing I did find that it was quite interesting when I was preparing for today's episode, uh, I found some psychologists who were talking about multitasking. So, because basically when we're talking about editing while you're writing, you know, it is two different parts of the brain you're using because one part is for creation, you're being the creative writer.
And the other thing is about editing where, where basically you're being critical. So you're, you're applying your analytic mindset and being critical about what's written. And when you're switching back and forth like that, then you're basically multitasking. And these psychologists were saying that true multitasking is in fact impossible. So the best thing you can do as a human being is that you are able to be as good as switching back and forth between the tasks as quickly as possible, that that's what you could, you could sort of be good at that.
That's, I guess that's when, I mean all of this might be semantics, but I think that's basically what people mean when they say multitasking. But what the psychologist said, and this is the point of all this rambling here, what they said was that when you're multitasking, you're not being effective. So you're basically slower at what you're doing. Then if you were just focusing on one thing. So again, I'm not saying one thing is better than the other, but I do think it's valuable to just think a bit about the fact that the more you edit it while you go, the less effective you are with your time.
Okay,
Autumn (41m 9s): that makes sense. And I mean, I know there's, at my height I was writing a book while editing another book and you're right, you even then, Hey, I'm insane. I highly admit that. But it worked really well because of my, like I think I would edit usually first, which cause I was sitting down and getting into my writing routine. I was kind of in an analytical, you know, was coming off of work, which I've a very scientific job at the time. So I would have that kind of mindset and you do that for half an hour and then I would kind of get into the creative like, you know, you start getting excited about words and language and where the story is going and the next thing you know, then I'd write for an hour and again, they were separate and it was kind of gearing one up for the other.
If my brain was awake enough to be analytical, it was good at editing. If I was, you know, and more creative mindset, you, you kind of have the juices flowing. You got to have that drive and inspiration. And if it wasn't there, you had to try to manufacturer it basically. But they are definitely two different types of mindsets. And I would know they didn't mesh. You had to do one than the other nuts. You couldn't do both at the same time.
Jesper (42m 22s): No, and I mean it's, it's not about editing Sur writing but, but in general, at least I, I also feel like I, there's a limit to how much creative stuff I can do in a day. And I usually I have to start out doing the creative stuff early in the day because late in the day my mind is just like, I can force myself to do creative work, but it's not as good as when I'm more awake for a lot of bag of bed in the morning, you know, are they in the morning? I am good at the creative stuff. I can, but I can only do a couple of hours then I'm sort of out of my creative juices and then I need to default to some marketing or publishing work that I can Maul do without thinking much about it.
I mean, I've been doing that kind of, you know, the business stuff I've been doing for so many years that I can do, that's kind of thing without having to spend too much energy on it. So I can do that if I'm tired. But creative stuff like plotting for example, that's also why it takes a month. Because if I could plot eight hours a day, that would be a different matter. But even if I have the time to do that eight hours a day, which I don't, but if I have, then I don't think I would be able to because I would run out of steam.
Autumn (43m 32s): My, well, that makes sense. And I mean I took a leadership course and we plotted our, not just energy level, but what we were good at doing during the course of a day and creative in the morning and analytical in the afternoon is actually a very typical type of situation. So that makes sense.
Jesper (43m 48s): Yeah, indeed. So I guess all we can say share that. Uh, we shared some inputs and things to think about and uh, you need to make up your own mind.
Autumn (44m 1s): Yeah. And I think though, there's some pretty good take-home advice that if you're a new writer, probably try to find some outside help and maybe get some editing, you know, go by chapters or chunks of your book and get feedback. But once you get past two book, two or three, try to just get it done without worrying about editing. Get, get yourself used to finishing a novel, finish that first trilogy. That's a good thing. That should be your goal. And once you get beyond that, you know, might start, you know, making sure you get the plotting.
You might go back and edit a little bit as you go because, well, let's just, you know, you'll finish. You just know you have to get it right and it'll be a little bit better when you get to the end. That's my take home message.
Narrator (44m 44s): All right, so next Monday I have one of, if not the biggest name in the indie author community on for an interview because I'm going to talk to Joanna Penn next week. If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the amwritingfantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join autumn and Jesper on patrion.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month.
You'll get awesome rewards and keep the amwritingfantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Have you ever wondering how much it actually costs to produce a novel when taking into account editing, cover design, book formatting and everything else?
Or are you an experienced author, looking for a benchmark to evaluate if you're paying too much?
In episode 64 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, Autumn and Jesper, gives you the complete overview. All the expenses shared on a per task basis.
Links from this episode:
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Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
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Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to the amwritingfantasy podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing join to best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them. Now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt. Hello, I'm Jesper and I'm autumn.
This is episode 64 of the amwritingfantasy podcast. And uh, well money is always an important topic
Jesper (43s): and especially when you're starting out as a new author, you might be wondering how much does it actually cost to produce a novel? Well that's what we're going to look into today. And for the more experienced authors out there, you can use this episode maybe like as a benchmark to see how your cost compare.
Autumn (1m 2s): Yes, I, you know, this is kind of a scary episode for me cause I don't know, I think I would have been fly it as a new author getting into this, but as a port, yeah, it's good. I don't know. Have a base to have. This is not a free, but as I say, this is one of the best businesses to get into because your upfront cost is fairly low.
Jesper (1m 26s): Yeah, yeah, exactly. I was just about to mention that that's what we said on what was it, the previous owner, maybe two episodes back or something like that. When we, when we talked about compared to other businesses where you had to shell out like 50 K just to get started. Like we're nowhere near that. So in terms of context towards other businesses and types of businesses, the money amounts we're going to talk about here is fairly low. But of course I do understand if, if you're, if you're short on cash in general or you are, you have a limited budget, then it might, yeah.
Yeah. The point is not to scare you.
Autumn (2m 0s): That's, I'm trying to say that's a void that, that, how was your week? Let's get into something much more fun.
Jesper (2m 8s): Yeah. Well speaking of fun, actually, uh, over the weekend I listened to episode 61 where you had the interview with Alexa am. So that was really, I was really good conversation. I was really entertained.
Autumn (2m 21s): Oh good. I'm glad you enjoy it. I love talking to her and actually the publishing summit is happening, um, as we're recording this, so when it's released it'll have been over. But it's been so much fun. I love her summit and it was, uh, I'm glad the podcast was turned out as well as it did. Yeah. The, the woman women taking over the podcast worser. It'd be one to happen.
Jesper (2m 46s): Yeah. Apparently. So I see her, I'm lucky that I got to come back here, this recording now. Absolutely.
Autumn (2m 52s): We have a good partnership. We never argue. This is kind of funny. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. But actually something else I wanted to mention, a funny thing that also took place over the weekend was am. It was a movie that I watched, but not like a normal movie. This was only two minutes long. And, uh, the title of this movie was Pam spy vs six pack boy.
Yeah. This was, uh, this is my two sons. So they spent like five, four or five hours yesterday and recording this movie that they made. They spent four or five hours recording and editing it into a two minute movie. So the spend almost all day doing it. Uh, and uh, so it was my youngest son, he played the role of pants by, which was the super hero. And then he also played the role a six pack boy, which was the super villain. Although I know that this usually, it's not very charming to hear about other people's kids and what they're doing.
But, but it was quite funny because like a minute into the movie, well that's half the movie, but then we saw the reason why he was called camp S boy because his pants fell off right when he was fighting the villain. Yeah, I was, I dunno. It was just so funny. Adorable. And yeah, I don't even have kids. So I definitely lived through yours. But it's adorable in it. And from a practical point of view, it kept them busy all day. This is like win-win.
Yeah. That they spend all day. And at some point my wife went down to to the rooms and asked her, Hey, do you guys want to play a board game with, with me and dad? And they were like, well, we don't have time right now. We're just doing this movie. I was like, okay. But it seems like, yeah. Well, but I think it was a tragedy that movie because it actually ended with pants boy being taking away in handcuffs while while they're willing was sitting there eating popcorn that was out of movie.
Well, I think they're gonna have to work on a sequel. That's all there is to it. Yeah. Maybe. Maybe. Oh, I think it might win like a YouTube reward. You might have to show that one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I usually try not to share videos live with my kids and whatnot, but uh, but it was, it was quite funny. But, and again, usually parents feel that their own kids are much more funny than other people find their kids. So maybe it's just me finding it funny as it sounds.
Adorable. That's great. How about you? Oh well, nothing quite as much fun. But uh, Kevin progress has been made that we actually have windows and door and for the first time ever we are heating the room that we've added on to this cabin. So you can like work in there with like without major coats and gloves and stuff on. And actually I just did the flooring today, so it's starting to look like a real room. Nice.
Yeah. How much work do I have left to do there? Um, well installation will be exciting. That's hopefully coming tomorrow and the next day. And then it's really doing the interior walls and my husband happens to be an electrical, he did am technical high school, so he's an electrician, electrical apprentice. So he's been doing the wiring. Um, I do all the woodworking. He does the wiring, so it's kind of fun that way. So he's put the new panel in and all the electrical outlets. So you know, it, it doesn't sound to me, it's like we're past the big, you know, no more heavy lifting.
It's like some interior paneling. And then of course the outside am vinyl. Actually, we're not doing vital, we're doing Cedar shakes, am, all of that. It's still a little bit of work, but I'm also at the point where I'm like, it is March. And I made a promise to myself that come March 1st, the cabin could not be my entire life building this thing. So it's only half days now, only in the morning. And then the afternoon I have like, you know, this whole writing job thing that we do together. Yeah.
So, uh, now doing half days, so it's still gonna take a little bit of time, but it's going really, really well and I can't wait til we're putting in the shelves for the kitchen area and it's, it's coming soon. Right. Do you need to do painting and stuff like that as well? Um, it's mostly a wood interior, but I do want to do something other than wood on wood, on wood Brown. So I think I'm going to maybe do a little bit of color in the kitchen area because I like kitchens. They're like one of my favorite rooms in the house, so it'll have to be kind of fun. Don't you just, uh, check, decorate the walls with printouts, offenses, you maps.
That's actually a pretty good idea. Do a de Copan. Yeah. Mm. Yeah. That's something to think about. That advice is completely free. Oh, thank you. It could be, yeah. Could be done. If you could do that. Then you have to send me pictures. I, I have to get permission since it's not technically my cabin, but I think they could go for it. Right. Oh, week on the internet with the amwritingfantasy.
Podcast so before I have something else to share from internet this week, then, uh, I just want to get the most important thing out of the way first.
Jesper (8m 21s): And that is of course to thank all of our new patron supporters. Yes. I have a long list of names here. Oh, excellent. And, uh, maybe before I do this, uh, I'm sorry if I put your, any of your names. It's really not, it's not on purpose if I do, but uh, but here it goes. So thank you to E M the Ross Bernie virus. I think Hannah's Hannah's horribly sooner.
Andrew Davis arrest moose Garrett. They key the DKI or something like that. I think it's German. Yeah. Matthew Philips, Roger Walker, Colleen Baldwin, Brandon harden, Craig Sanders, Eric and Linda lecture. Thank you so much everybody for joining us.
Autumn (9m 16s): Patron. Thank yes. Loved seeing all of our new patrons and uh, can't wait to meet them and talk about what they're writing and just, you know, see what their questions and stuff are when they interact on the mini Petri on post. We put up every single week. So welcome. Welcome to the podcast and welcome to patriarchy. Yeah.
Jesper (9m 36s): And for the rest of you, check the link in the show notes. We are keeping the podcast ad free because we feel that that makes for a much better listen. So, uh, but do keep in mind that we do rely on the patron supporters to justify the time we spent recording this or so please consider becoming one of our backers. It really makes such a
Autumn (9m 56s): difference to us. Yeah. And even if it just starts at a dollar a month, I that's not that bad and we really do appreciate it.
Jesper (10m 4s): Yeah. So link in the show notes. But the other thing I wanted to mention as well, uh, was that in the amwritingfantasy Facebook group, uh, Nina posted something that I really wanted to share my reflections on. Oh, OK. and, uh, what you can of course pits in here too. Autumn Oh, absolutely. Very welcome to do so well is because Nina is a dangerous Arthur
Autumn (10m 29s): like me. And, uh,
Jesper (10m 32s): she posted a question that I think is really relevant because she was wondering if she should write in Danish or in English.
Autumn (10m 40s): And, uh,
Jesper (10m 41s): I thought I would bring this up here because many of our of our listeners aren't native English speakers. So in this case it's about Danish versus English of course, but you can just substitute Danish with any other language that might be your native language. For for the listener here. Right. So, um, in the post Nina points out herself that the Danish market is small. Um, but she's also speculating that there is less competition. So of course you could have a point there. Yeah, you can get that pretty quick.
Yeah. And she also says that, um, she does not want to find a publisher. She wants to become an indie author. Uh, so here in lies the question, should she write the book in Danish and then get it translated afterwards or should she write in English from
Autumn (11m 30s): they get go. Right. So I don't know if you want to share your thoughts on why I should I do mine first. I was gonna say, I think my thoughts are going to be tainted because I know you write in English and I kind of think I know why. So I'm gonna let you go ahead and go first and I'll see if I have something to add. Since I am a native English speaker. So I kinda had an easy yeah, I, I mean when
Jesper (11m 55s): there was a few things here, right? So if you, if she was, if Nina had said in her post that I'm looking to be traditionally published, then she could easily write in Danish. I think if she was looking to find a Danish publisher who will get her book into all the national bookstores here in Denmark and they will take care if it sells enough, they'll take care of translation and putting it into other countries and all of that stuff. Then I think if, if she wants to write in Danish and issue feels like this is uh, this is what I prefer, then go for it.
Um, but once you saying in her post that she wants to be a self published author, she wants to use the online platforms like Amazon and so forth. Then I think, and again here you can substitute Danish for any other language, but I think you need to do to do the bit of market research and, and see how big is the market really when you're looking at, for example, from Amazon's perspective, uh, if you put a Danish things, uh, titled and, and written book up on Amazon, how many people are actually buying that as an ebook from Amazon?
And I think you will find that the Danish market is, is very, very tiny. You know, even even ebook reading is not that spread out here in the Nordics or penetrated in the Nordic market as you might think. Uh, many people do not buy from Amazon. Uh, if you're looking at like average Joe, you know, in, in Denmark. Um, so in that case I would say then you a thousand times better off writing in English, uh, because the translation is expensive as well.
So if even if you write it in a Danish and then wants to translate it, it, that's going to be quite expensive to do afterwards. So yeah, I would think right in English, uh, that's, that's why I did it because I agree the Danish market is small and yes, there is less competition and yes, if you write in English and upload and non-Amazon, there's a lot of competition that is also true. But at this point of time, at least the, the amount of Danish readers going to Amazon to find a Danish book is extremist man.
Try to just do a search for Danish books on Amazon. You find almost nothing. And I was gonna say,
Autumn (14m 12s): when you niche down to a Danish book written a fantasy Danish book written in Danish, um, yeah, your, your topology talking a very small percentage of readers you're going to look out for. And so writing an English, um, you might be, have more competition, but you're also gonna have a lot more opportunity to find readers because it is one of the most widely used languages on the planet, whether it should be or shouldn't be. It, it just simply is.
Jesper (14m 41s): Yeah. Yeah. So, so at least I thought I would want her to share a bit of reflection on that because, uh, I found it, uh, well, first of all, she was staying, he sorta treated of course attention.
Autumn (14m 52s): Yeah. But, but I, I think it's relevant for other, other people who also, uh, not native English speakers like myself. Absolutely. And though speaking of questions and writing, I wanted to give a shout out to Susan Laken and also take up, let people know that she has ever really collaborative. Do you that I wish I could go and do, but I'm unfortunately tied up, but she right. Does a writing for life workshop, um, that she hosts. And Susan was, if you don't want to remembers, which hopefully you should.
She was a wonderful guest on our podcast that you interviewed Yesper a few months back, so she's probably don't remember the episode bumper, looked it up beforehand, so sorry. But she is actually running a fantasy and world-building retreat for writers in South Lake Tahoe, which is dropped it gorgeous area is a week long retreat or the mornings they talk about tips on how to write well and world build and characters and then the afternoon you go in, right.
And if you hit a problem like you know, everyone does, you can like raise your hand or go over and ask one of these three bestselling authors that are one of the hosts of the workshops. So that's going on for the whole week and we're going to have a link to that in our show notes so you can go check it out. She says that fills up very quickly. But she, we wanted to give a shout out because she was such a wonderful guests, did some great tips for us. And, uh, I think she's an awesome teacher and she's got some other great woman, Catherine brand camp and Rachel star Thompson are the other two authors who are going to be hosting it and teaching at the retreat.
So if anyone's looking yeah, looking to get away from the family or I guess you could possibly S as you can get a double room. So if you want to take the family boy you want to get away and just write for a week and do some fantasy writing this might be the place for you run Forrest run for us. Um, remind me, this is the one where it's an affiliate link, is that right? I believe it is, but uh, it might not be, I'll have to check. We do have an affiliate link with her, but I'm not sure if it goes to this one or not.
So there's a chance this might get us some money, but there's a chance it doesn't, so it might not, but anyway, Joe's just a full transparency here that it might be an affiliate link. So we might earn a few, a few dollars if you buy a on, um, uh, by our link here. But of course we are mentioning it because we have talked to Susanna, we know her and we know she's doing good things. So check it out if that's something for you
Narrator (17m 38s): and onto today's stuff,
Autumn (17m 41s): how much does it cost to produce a novel ton of time of course. And a willpower. Yes. It was to say, I think this is am possibly less frightening than figuring out how much you get paid per hour for writing a novel. That's something you should never ever calculate. Just do um, not because you're going to be rich unless you happen to be Neil Gaiman, J K Rowling's or George RR Martin.
Yeah, I actually,
Jesper (18m 14s): do you remember when I was first starting out? This was actually one of the questions I was asking myself and I, I remember looking up different YouTube videos from different authors talking about this stuff. And the more I search, the more varied answers I got to them. I think that's it's, yeah, it's just like with all the content that is out there in this day and age on the internet, that's unfortunately something you just have to navigate. So I guess we can just say the same thing applies here, right? I mean we can only, we can share how we view things here and, and from our personal experience how much we are paying to produce novels, but I'm sure you can find, contradicted her into brumation out there if you start searching for it.
So, uh, yeah, you'll just have to make up your own mind who you're listening to I guess.
Autumn (19m 1s): Yes. I suppose I, I thought we were going to say this is the end all be all. This is the answer you're looking for, but no, it is very true that I do. There are lots of ways of looking at this and some of these things, um, you know, everyone's different. How you're right is different. Uh, the resources you might have at your disposal. Maybe being a mom is a bestselling editor, and in that case, you know you're, what you're going to end up charging or for editing might be a lot different than what we're going to list out here. So you don't know. Yeah,
Jesper (19m 29s): I think we, we're trying to here at least to shoot for, for some sort of middle ground averages on what things costs. You can always find something cheaper and maybe the quality is also not to, yeah, maybe I was gonna say a nasty word there, but, uh, maybe the quality is not very good then. But you can also sometimes find something that is much more expensive that we're going to share here. And usually at least if it comes to editing, usually price and quality goes hand in hand, but not always.
You can also sometimes pay quite a lot of money for somebody who is not really that good. So, but that's a different topic. We actually talked about editing in episode 60. Am so you can go back and listen to that one. In if you want all the details. I think we're just gonna stick to cost with this episode.
Autumn (20m 20s): Yes. And I think going on with the expense too, I think there's always a point of diminishing returns where you can pay more, but you're, what you're getting for that little bit of more better quality is probably less than the lower area where you pay $100 more and you get a huge improvement over something that was half the cost. So yeah, we'll keep that in mind. So there's always a point where you're paying lots and lots and lots for only a little bit better than something that's slightly cheaper.
So I think we're going to be a good point. Yes, we're gonna we're going to go for that middle of the road where it's a solid, this was something you're going to help you and, and this is about what you should reasonably expect to spend if you are looking for quality service. Yeah.
Jesper (21m 7s): Okay. So do we want to start out with the editing? We already sort of touched upon that.
Autumn (21m 11s): I guess. So I was going to say, how far in do you want to go? I mean, technically you could say everything from what you're writing on is an expense to the program you're writing in as an expense. But are we going to get that particular, we're going to assume people already have a, some kind of device to write on or a piece of paper and a pencil.
Jesper (21m 32s): Yes. I think my assumption was at least people already have a computer and they at least, I mean, if they want to invest in, in Scribner like we talked about in the past episode, I mean Scribner cost almost nothing. What is it like 30 $40 or something,
Autumn (21m 48s): five. And it gets up to now it's very little and totally worth it.
Jesper (21m 53s): But yeah, so, so that all or you can always just use the Microsoft word or paint pages if you on the Mac or whatever, you know. So I'm assuming that people have a computer that they can write on, right? So this is more like producing a not a novel. What does that cost, uh, providing you have a computer to write on?
Autumn (22m 12s): Yes, I remember. I, I might not do as much research before we get on the podcast, but I'm very detailed oriented. So I had a, I had to find out what the ground level was. Yes.
Jesper (22m 24s): All right. So, well and so at least. Okay, so ground level, the topics I have here is editing, cover design, formatting, blip, writing, copyright. That's sort of the topics that I have. And maybe you have some other ones as well. That sounds good
Autumn (22m 40s): about what I was thinking as well. So those are, those are truly no matter what the expenses. So basically we're going to say that you were skipping like writing courses am help coaching. We're going to say basically that you have written at least a manuscript and how do you take that and produce a novel and how much does that cost? Does that sound about right?
Jesper (23m 2s): Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm not, yeah, we're not talking about the cost of acquiring a computer or taking a course about how to write and all that, but so it is more like, okay, you have your, you're, you're S, you want to write a novel and you want to know how much is this gonna cost me? So of course that means that as well, that we are factoring editing costs, which is before you've done with the novel. Right. So, so how much, how much this guy just going to cost me to produce the thing? Yes. I'm providing, I either I have a computer and either I have not, uh, Oh, I have already attended any maybe writing courses or whatever I wanna do.
But that's sort of beside the point. Yeah.
Autumn (23m 43s): You've listened to all of our podcasts and you're already expert,
Jesper (23m 46s): but, well, let's say we're going to have we got,
Autumn (23m 53s): yeah. Yeah. All right, so we're gonna, we're going to start, the education part is really important, really is, it really is, but we're going to assume, okay, you made it through that and we're going to assume you made it through. You know, you've got, you're getting some worth novel. So what it's going to really take to take that rough draft, turn it into something worthy of being read by a widely published audience and you know, yeah. How old is get out there on the world polished and perfect. Well as perfect as it can be, let's go for it. So editing is a good place to start. I agree. Let's start with that because if you can get through editing you, you're never going to get to the next step anyway.
So let's go there.
Jesper (24m 30s): No, no, that's actually true. But uh, yeah, so maybe just to summarize what, what we said in terms of cost from episode 60 so if we are looking at an edit that includes a developmental edit, we talked about that in episode 60 so go back there and listen if, if you want the details. But if we including that into the cost, then as we sat on that episode, you can probably expect to pay something like five to $7,000 for the editing stages and that, that means developmental edit, copy editing, proofreading the whole lot.
You know, all of it. Maybe five to seven grand. Um, yeah, that feels about right. If anyone hears something typing, we
Autumn (25m 15s): going to try live math. We already joked about this being an impossibility. I am keeping notes about how much we save for everything. So excuse any typing.
Jesper (25m 24s): So let's say five to seven grand for that. Uh, and then we also have a different variation where we could say maybe you don't need a developmental edit. So if you written some novels already or you've taken some courses or something that that means that you have a grasp of bout how to structure the novel already. So if we exclude the developmental edit, which is by far the most expensive one, and you can probably bring the cost down to somewhere between 1500 to 3,500, somewhere in between there.
Autumn (25m 56s): All right, that sounds very reasonable. And about, yeah, the going rate for a really good professional proof edit and making sure the grammar, all those are correct. Definitely in that ballpark too. Okay. So no disagreements so fun though. No, I've, well do those are good, I think. I do think there's sometimes if you are in with an editor for a long time, you might be able to get away with cheaper. But again, maybe you'd have to have a deal and maybe got in at someone's early rates or something, but we're going to say, yeah, 1500 that's a good rate for what it costs to get a good edit these days, especially on something as long as a fantasy novel a thousand words, 100,000 words to 150,000 and making sure they've gone over it a couple times, they're not just using Grammarly.
Yeah. This is not cheap.
Jesper (26m 48s): No indeed. Um, but of course you ask as we just, as you can see that the difference between five to seven K two 1500 to 3,500, that it's a huge, I mean, the developmental edit is so expensive. It's, it's insane. It is insane.
Autumn (27m 3s): And I do think a lot of people do, a little novelists, authors look at the cost of edits and go, Oh my goodness. And it is probably one of the biggest upfront costs before you ever publish. Yeah, for sure. But it's what you need. You do not want those early reviews. All saying, Oh my gosh, I couldn't get through it. There was an edit, you know, errors on every single page. There's going to be an error somewhere in your novel. No matter how much you pay, I can guarantee it. I've seen it in published novels put out by, you know, the really big publishers. I've still found errors on paperbacks and hardbacks.
It happens. It does happen,
Jesper (27m 39s): but I can't, can I just say something a bit self-serving here as well? Because if you're comparing those two numbers we just talked about, let, let's go with the cheaper numbers. Even. So let's say five K versus 1500 K. so what if you just took a writing cost like the one we have, for example, for $600 and then you just saved yourself, what is it like three and a half thousand dollars between 1500 and 50,000 right? So you can save $3,500 versus spending 600 so, but I don't know.
For me that's no bueno.
Autumn (28m 16s): $600 and you'll never hopefully has to pay for development at, uh, again. So you're saving thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars. If you take a course and learn how to do this,
Jesper (28m 28s): it's huge. I mean, at the end of the day, you don't have to take our cross, but my point is just that if you, if you spend some money on learning things by taking some good courses, you connected to save yourself a ton of money and it's well worth the money to take a course and instead of shelling out lunch lesson of money on developmental edits. But that's just my point of view. But make up your mind for that. Again, you're putting in his time. It's worth it. Yeah. Okay. So, so by far the biggest expense that's editing the next big expense and probably the only other big expense you ha you're going to have is to cover.
Um, but as you are our covid designer or and you also the expert on this or what would you say in terms of costs and prices?
Autumn (29m 15s): Well it will be depending on if you need a paper bag wrap or if you're just getting an ebook cover. I do recommend if you think you're going to do a paper back, just go ahead and get the whole paper back one done because then you can use the, the full image for advertising, which is fantastic. So for a paper paperback wrap, you can go to, there's a ton of Facebook groups and cover art groups that are going on that are doing pre maids. Even with a little bit of commissioner work, some tweaks that can get you a cover for as little, uh, individual cover, not a paper rap can be as cheap as 50 bucks to up to 150 for just the ebook cover and paperback wraps can go from three to probably 800 depending on what you want to put in there and how individualistic and how much hand painting you need to do.
But it's, to me, it's a lot, but it's not that much because you're getting something that is literally the first impression of your urban novel and also represents your novel all. All your months of work, all the expense that you've put into your blood, sweat and tears is going to be condensed into one image and you better love it and you better make it marketable. So you're going to want to pay for this one.
Jesper (30m 31s): Yeah, the, the covid is insanely important. Um, and and so with the cover designer that you're choosing, uh, that they know what they're doing because one, it's not really about being a graphic designer because that's not even good enough. It has to be somebody who, uh, used to doing book covers and thumbnail covers for Amazon and stuff like that so they know what is working, what do you need to put on that cover to make it convert into book sales. So it is insanely important. And even just doing the market research for your niche, John rhe it's either whether someone does fantasy or is doing paranormal romance, the covers change hugely and you want to fit in.
But you also want to say stand
Autumn (31m 14s): out in a wonderful way. It's, it's tough but it's part of why I love it. It's a challenge. I like challenges, but it is definitely, you don't want to just go in there. Um, if you don't know what to look for in a cover, don't just go into a group and randomly choose a cover that looks okay. I see some horrible font issues where I could do a whole podcast on fonts alone. So we're not going there. I'm a total fund addict. I admit it. I'm not seeking help. I refuse to get help.
I drink tea and I'm a fantastic and I am proud of both. So that's the word goes. Oh. So yeah, my, I'm going to say paperback rep. go with a paperback rap. If you most you want to do a paper back, they're not that hard to format. Um, and we'll be talking about formatting in a few minutes, but go with a price for a formatting for a paperback wrap or book cover for paperback wrap. And I'd say three to $800 of 500 as a solid middle of the way that you will get a probably a very, very nice cover by someone who knows what they're doing.
And honestly, that price has come down a lot, uh, over the years because there's a lot more people out there doing it. And again though now you have to sit just like with edits, you have to sift through a lot of people who put out their shingle and say they know what they're doing and might not know what they're doing. So keep that in mind.
Jesper (32m 35s): Uh, it's, it's, it's a bit tough one. Uh, I would also have said 500 is probably where I would aim. Um, but especially with covers as difficult as well because you can also swing the other into the other direction with the pendulum here because there are some cover designers who chats like $1,500 for a cover and, or even more sometimes, but, and no doubt that by far most of these artists who are able to, um, to chat this message because they are really, really good at what they're doing.
But I still have this am point of view that spending $1,000 extra on the cover, I mean you, you can find really good artists that will do a cover for $500 and I'm not sure that, I dunno, I'm just not convinced that the return of investment is worth to shell out three times as much. So, but yeah, I don't know. Mileage may vary but, but I'm just a bit more on the cautious side when it comes to cost on cover design is it is insanely important like we said, but is it worth paying three times as much as you have to pay to get that just a bit better cover designer to do it?
Fi I, I don't think so. But that's up to you do that. No, I don't think so. And there's some, let's settle on $500 for this one, right? 500 sounds good. And I was going to say one of my favorite cover artists and he does a lot more grim dark. So I don't ever, I probably will never buy one of his covers, but I'm like a fan total fan girl. I've talked with them and gotten tips from a J Calloway. He is amazing. Facebook group. He does a pre meet every week and to buy his premiums are usually 150, and to commission him as like 600 bucks.
And there you go. Yeah, that's a really solid price. I keep telling him he's way too cheap for what he does, but he's happy with it. So there you go. Hmm. Hmm. Yeah. Okay. So book formatting. So of course, uh, once you are done with all this stuff and you're ready to get into the publishing stuff, you also need to format the book. So it looks really good on, uh, as an ebook. And, uh, we've talked about this before to be honest. I mean, you can get vellum, I think that's $200.
Is that right? If you're going to only for Mac users, yeah, it's a, yeah. If you're gonna get the one that also does paperbacks, it's 200 bucks. Okay. Yeah. So that's an obvious a choice. You know, it's a one time off, $200 and then you're good to go forever. Um, you can also use Scribner. We talked about that in episode 54, but it is not a very good formatting tool like rolls. So seven in episode 54. So, uh, actually when I first started out, I used a professional formatting service, uh, and I just looked it up earlier today because I couldn't remember how much I paid for it.
But back then I paid $164 for formatting of both ebook and paperback. Um, and that included some customized, the chapter headings and stuff that, uh, but this was back in 2015, 2016 so I'm not quite sure what they would chat today, but I think chances are that is probably not cheaper.
Autumn (35m 50s): Um, and I've done some formatting for folks and they were pretty, they were a really image heavy ones. And so I was formatting images and so they ended up being, you know, three to 500. But those were, you know, again, they were not a fantasy typical fantasy novel where it's put together and it's fine. But somewhere in, yeah, probably 400 if you're gonna pay for someone else to do it, you might expect up to 400 is probably not unreasonable. No. Yeah. So in that case, velum is probably a better choice if you're on a Mac.
Yes. Yeah. And so yeah, that friendly. Yeah, indeed. So what do we want to go with as a hard price here? Say vellum for 200 do you want to go for 300 assuming that? Yeah, let's, let's go for the cheap one. I'd say $200 for a villain. We keep it on the cheap side. Right? Which assuming Gil get a used Mac computer because they're wicked expensive, but otherwise this is a really cheap, a cheap option. If you can format all your own books, look at us. I mean we've done 20 over 20 between us.
Am yeah, that's a lot of money saved by only spending $200 once. Yeah.
Jesper (36m 58s): And of course then the Ninja trick here is to do Mac in the cloud. So if you're on a PC, you, you create a Mac in the cloud and then you actually have a Mac computer in the cloud. So you and you load vellum onto that one and then you can use vellum even though you're on a PC. So that's the Ninja trick.
Autumn (37m 14s): That is so amazing. Yeah.
Jesper (37m 17s): Uh, okay. So the next two ones, a is optional ones that I just included in case people want to do that. Um, so the first one is blurp writing so this is of course something you could do yourself. And uh, I have a guide book on how to write fantasy blurbs, but, but otherwise it's something you can do for yourself. But if you want some to pay some body to do it, I think you should expect to pay around $300 for a blurb
Autumn (37m 48s): if you don't want to do it done professionally. I don't think that that sounds about right. Yeah. In I mean, yeah, this is something if you can, you know, get your guidebook and that'll give you some great tips. You can get feedback and Facebook groups like our amwritingfantasy Facebook group, those are all great places to get some help. And you know, no matter what, I honestly I think sometimes tastes change and it always helps to go back and revisit earlier books to then see if you can tweak them and improve them because yeah, you pick up, you get better as you get, as you can do this more.
Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah. So I'll, I'll add a link to that guide book, uh, in the, in the description or show note she, I should say. Um, of course that's, that's less than 10 bucks. So that's, that's going to be cheap. 10 bucks versus 300 that is a pretty, in this, again, this will solve all your future book. Blurbing uh, that'll definitely is a life, a savings right there by date.
Jesper (38m 50s): So, and then the final one, that's also an optional one, but if you do want to do a copyright registration, the last time I checked, I think it costs $35. I'm not mistaken.
Autumn (39m 1s): Say it was either 25 or 35. It wasn't that expensive, surprisingly. But again, a lot of times that only protects you in certain countries, possibly not worldwide. And some places, you know, if, if you can prove that you were the first originator, you probably covered technically anyway, or at least in the countries where it wouldn't be covered, they don't care. So there's not much you can do about it anyway. Yeah.
Jesper (39m 30s): Yeah. I mean, I think for the most part why you would consider a copyright registration is, is not to go to court with somebody and fight about it would be this and that. Because at the end of the day, it's going to be difficult. International used to fight your copyright registration anyway, but the main reason why I would want to do it am would be too, I, I'm Danish, I should know, but I would get a U S copyright registration because the main thing that I wasn't concerned about is, for example, if, if, if Amazon, they run their butts once in a while across the am, across their website.
Right? So let's say they catch you on, all of a sudden you get an email from Amazon saying somebody else's claiming that this book is their book. So am unless you can prove that the it is your book, we're going to shut down your account. And as an author, that's a pretty damn scary thing. It is. So that was why I would have one just so that I could just email it off to Amazon and say, here's the copyright registration. It is my book and a story. Right. So just for that, I, that's why I would do it. Um, but yeah, otherwise I'm not intending to go to court to fight people about, uh, yeah, you're going to spend a lot of time, money and effort doing that for probably no, no real benefit of gain afterwards.
But yeah, and it's funny, it's just to make sure your Amazon account is not shutdown. That's pretty important.
Autumn (40m 53s): Funny story though. I do remember once I was re-publishing, um, I think my debut, my novel born of water and they did because it is Permafree and widely available in so many places and I'm sure it's been pirated pirated. I've pulled it off of a few websites, I've gotten them shut down where it was pirated. So I, they did, Amazon actually did ask me to prove it. It was my book and I, I don't think I really, I was just more surprised and I'm like, well, of course it's mine. I've wrote it here and I did this and I added this and I just kind of did a little snippy reply and they're like, okay.
So, um, yeah, it wasn't quite as scary as you mentioned, but looking back at, and I'm like, I can't believe I was like, what are you talking about? Of course it's my book. So I think it's not that easy today to be, it was a while ago and it is a thing that can happen if you do have a book that, you know, mine's been out since 2012, it's been Permafree for a very long time. So yeah, sometimes there. I want to know what's the story with that and is it really yours?
If 30 bucks can save you that day, it might be worth it. It might be. All right. So is that every, I mean calculate all them? I did. I was going to say the only thing we didn't really throw in there is like advertising, which I think that's fair because I can change every month depending on AMS ads, but do consider that this does not include advertising and you're going to probably want to budget at least a hundred bucks, maybe a month to, you know, two three 500 whatever you can put into it. You're going to probably have advertising costs. So consider that as an author as well.
But I ended up everything we have. So without editing because that's our big variable. It is 1020 $5 so if you count an editing on the cheaper end, if you don't need a development edit, you could be paying 2,525 to 4,525 or if you do need that developmental edit and you don't want to just, you know, go buy a course and learn to do it yourself would be $6,000 and 25 cents or $26,025 or up to $8,025 so those are, you know, your ranges.
So maybe around 8,000 for everything versus what do we say? Starting a new business at 50 K this is a lot cheaper. It's not that bad. It's not that bad. And again, even the lower end, the 2,500 that is a lot, but it's also really not that bad. If you can figure out, you know, the development edit and again, you can figure out some of the student if you don't need to do the blurb because you learn how to do it or you go buy the book or you go by vellum and new format once and then you don't have to pay for any of your other formatting.
That's, you know, it's really not that bad. Oh, okay.
Jesper (43m 46s): And I, I think in most cases, if we just do like a blanket value as such, I think most people would say that the cost about three to 4,000 to produce a novel. So, um, as we, as we've laid out here, you can do it a bit cheaper
Autumn (44m 1s): and you could also do it a lot more expensive, but I mean,
Jesper (44m 5s): it is going to cost you money to produce a novel. So, so that's how it is. But, uh, yeah, I, I hope, uh, both the new writers out there got something out of this, uh, in terms of at least you get some visibility on how much it cost, but also for experienced or existing writers who already published books. Uh, maybe it gave you a bit of benchmarking and maybe you've got a bit of ideas about whether you, you will have some really good deals already or if you're paying much for some
Autumn (44m 32s): of the services that you are buying. Uh, but uh, yeah, the step was the aim, uh, to, to give a bit of perspective. Yeah. I feel like am between our partnership and having a longterm editor and the fact that I'm a graphic designer, I'm doing really well. So can I count this in my taxes now though, on what I should have spent? Yeah. I hope I'm not going to start receiving invoices from new. Fair enough. You help with advertising?
We're good? Yeah. Okay, good. Alright, so next Monday we're going to discuss a bit more about editing and this time how much you should be editing while you are writing.
Narrator (45m 19s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the amwritingfantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join autumn and Yesper on patrion.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the amwritingfantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
The advice goes "To be a writer, you need to read."
That's great, but how much should you be reading while writing and exactly what sorts of things?
Autumn and Jesper break down this sage advice with some practical tips, a bit of insight, and even a dose of statistics!
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy.
For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (1s): You're listening to the amwritingfantasy podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing join to best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them. Now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello. I am Jesper and I'm Autumn. This is episode 63 of the amwritingfantasy podcast and we are going to discuss how
Narrator (41s): much authors should read when
Jesper (43s): writing and I think to should become quite interesting. It is. It's a, it'll be a fun one to debate because I know what they say, I know what I do and I know what I want to do. So this will be fun to try to figure out which is the proper thing to be doing. Yeah. If there is such a thing as a proper thing, because I think that's part of the conversation here as well. You know? Very true. Yeah. That's something we can, uh, we can discuss a bit here today. Absolutely.
But first, how is your week here? You had a very busy weekend, you hinted out. Yeah. It, it almost feels like every weekend is busy at this eye, but, uh, but at least, uh, yeah, this, this past weekend was, uh, was quite a, quite busy in a alter, quite tiresome because am I went to take my certificate so that I could also function as a linesman in soccer games. Oh, that's exciting. So that's like an additional, yeah, it's like an additional referee cost that you need to take, uh, and you need to pass it.
Um, so it took like, it took all day, so you meet at nine o'clock, uh, and the, and you're done in five, so it's like a normal work day. But um, but during that time you also have, you know, you sit for a couple of hours and do, doing, you know, repetition of the theory of, because of course, because I'm already a referee, I know the theory already. So you do like repetition of it with the linesman specific parts and, and go through all that once again.
Um, and then we went to an actual game where we then were linesman, you know, so each of us had like 10, 10 minutes in each half, uh, where we were linesman in a proper game to practice, which was quite nice. But the thing was that it was like a, was the wind was howling and it was raining and it was nasty. So it was, yeah. And it was really cold, really raining and, and, and, and, and you only have 10 minutes, you know, and then the other guys who also took the certificate have their 10 minutes so far for like half an hour out of the 40 minutes and eat hot.
Autumn (3m 1s): It needs half. You were just standing there in the freezing cold, raining, you know, it was not very pleasant, but that doesn't I, I mean I'm in Vermont, but you're in Denmark, so I'm thinking, I think your latitude is further North, Southern thing. Ah, that just rain in February. And so, yeah.
Jesper (3m 22s): How are you feeling? Do you have a cold or he sounds like he doesn't use cell. Okay. No, no, I am no, no, I, I F I feel okay. I mean am okay. We did. God, we did get really wet and soaked because otherwise also afterwards, uh, you have to do, that's part of the certification that you have to, you had to pass a modified Cooper test. I don't know if you're familiar with those. And that was basically like, no, it's, it's Cooper test.
It's like a run test that was, I don't remember if it's like from the sixties or seventies, but it was developed for the U S military. Um, so I think normally in a Cooper test, if I remember correctly, you're running 12 minutes and you, it's basically like a max test. So you just run as fast as you can in 12 minutes. And then it's used to, normally it's, it's then being used to that. You built your training schedule off of that, um, so that you can build up your stamina and become more fit and whatnot.
That's how to use it in the military. But, but here we are doing in like a modified one. So instead we have to run a two kilometers in 10 minutes. So that means that you have to, you have to run fairly fast, otherwise you're not gonna make it. Um, and, and we did this of course we'd like in with the wind, you know, right in our faces. Like it was really strong headwind. Um, so it was a why I was, I was done for afterwards.
Oh man. So, uh, yeah, so yeah, they, it was a, it was good. I passed everything so I also have that certificate, so that was nice. Uh, but uh, but other than that, then I must say when I got home Friday evening, I was very, very tight. So I was pleased to be honest at the, this morning or this week, the kids are off school for the winter holidays. So I was actually quite pleased about that because that meant that I could sleep in this morning, which was quite nice instead of doing an early school run.
So that's good. That's good. Then hopefully they slept in and didn't like, decided to get up at the crack of Dawn and get into things. Now, you know, the kids a bit older now, sorts of data, they don't get, they don't get up late, but they don't get up early items. So it's like this eight o'clock, something like that at half past seven, something like that. So it's okay. It's enough that I can slip in as well, so, so that's good. So, but we're planning to, uh, to take them to the swim this Friday,
Autumn (5m 59s): so, uh, yeah. And, and on Sunday as well, my youngest has, he ha he's attending a soccer tournament that it has to have to go with him for on this coming weekend. So it's like, yeah. You know, next weekend is specious. Well, yeah, sounds, uh, you definitely hear running around, but Hey, you're, you know, parents and plus you have other things you're working on with the soccer and so yes, that will keep you busy. Yeah. Yeah. But I think you, last time you, when we recorded, you were talking about doing the renovation and whatnot, so you probably been pretty busy too.
Oh yeah. Just trying to, I think if, um, uh, if I ever have to pick up a pick ax again, I hope it's not to be lobbing at frozen ground and some big boulders. And we also had some concrete, uh, posts that were supporting the posts that were supporting the roof for the overhang where we're building a, a little room below it. And yeah, I just as a writer, as has anyone who likes to work with her and I actually anyone, no one wants to be sore but my elbows and my wrists and my hands, I just, I feel this, I feel this a lot so I'm, I'm tired but Hey, we're up to the point.
I have the floor joists in its level. I think I'm done with the frozen ground on the pick axing and I have just one more sheet of a floorboard plywood to put down and then literally the subfloor is done and I can just worry about the walls and after frozen floor, um, February again, February outside yet frozen groundwork. I am, I'm ready for just would, but we have a storm coming tomorrow and then it's going to be nice for a little while.
So we just have to cover up our, our lumber and stuff cause we don't need it coated in ice and then hopefully we'll get the upset the walls done and the sheeting done. So next week it's supposed to be really crappy and AC and rainy and you know like February, winter kind of stuff. But if we can at least have the outside sheeting on and the walls up then who cares? You know, we can worry about citing it when the weather's have decent. Well you can just work inside at that point.
So it's very close. Very excited. It almost sounds actually like that you have it colder than we do here. To be honest. I don't know. We'll have snow and ice because we don't have that. Oh yeah, no, we have snow and ice. We had am the temperature the other day was zero degrees when we woke up and that's Fahrenheit here. Yeah. So that's, that was fair night. It's am just about freezing every day. Usually like in the afternoons it'll go above freezing, but most of the all night and most mornings and evenings are below freezing.
So it's kind of cold. Yeah, it sounds like it. Well, once we get into talking the temperature
Jesper (8m 56s): and the weather, maybe it's am
Autumn (8m 59s): tend to move on.
Jesper (9m 3s): Well, we go on the internet with the amwritingfantasy podcast, so we have a lot of new join us on Patrion. Uh, so I just wanted to give, each of the machines are out here. Uh, so we have a
Autumn (9m 16s): Rena handwork, hand, Beck, something like that. Nina Jimson, Brian Jacob pits, and a fellow Dane. Do you want to try to pronounce her name? Autumn no, I'm not even, I don't want you to feel insulted. I've already seen you writing notes to each other in, in Danish. If so, I just, yeah, no, that's your side. You're good. I trust your pronunciation. So that was a Kasina fuck here. Oh, very nice.
That's, that's what I'm going to have to work on. That's really good. So how do you say hello in Danish though? I want to know that one. Well, you, you just say hi. Hi. You don't have another word, like Hey, uh, almost like English, but you just say hi. Hi. Okay. Yeah, this is, it's not like French with bones or anything. All right. So I can say hi. Oh, no, no. Yeah. Excellent. Well, good. I quite easy. We should do a word every single week. I'll eventually catch on. Oh, maybe.
Jesper (10m 15s): But, uh, but at least I wanted to on behalf of, of both myself and autumn of course to say, uh, thank you so much for the support that you're offering to the amwritingfantasy. Podcast you know, it's, it's this kind of support that helps us keep the lights on, uh, when it comes to this podcast. So please know that your pledge really makes a difference and it means a lot to us.
Autumn (10m 36s): It does. It's, it's wonderful to be able to help and meet other people a lot more personally than we would. And just like the Facebook group and, and the support. Yeah. It keeps us going here. So, which is a really important, yup.
Jesper (10m 51s): We offer a lot of rewards to those who join us. So I could also mention that, uh, just last week, uh, at the point of, uh, of this episode going out, we had the monthly Q and a session for for all those who support us at the adult dragon Tia, because you've got a name your tea or something.
Autumn (11m 10s): Absolutely. All of ours are dragon tears and yeah, of course for fantasy authors, of course we have dragons in there.
Jesper (11m 20s): Exactly. Yeah. So if you want to see what we watch, we are offering, you know, check the link in the show notes and a head on over to Patrion and consider to join the club and become one of our backers over.
Autumn (11m 31s): Yeah. And I mean, it's really interesting. I mean, not only do you get into the podcast early, but to me sometimes it's the weekly, I mean, we're doing like weekly writing tips and blogs and answering questions over there. So there's quite a, it would be dirty now. I think there's over a year's worth of a backlog of blog post just to access that have tons of tips. So yeah, it's getting every day. It's getting more and more.
Jesper (11m 59s): Yeah. Yeah. And we also try to post a bit, uh, kind of like publishing, marketing industry information slash tip show once a week as well. Uh, so only the patron supporters are getting those as well. So this is actually stuff with a winner posting elsewhere. So, uh, so it might be, might be good to get into that if you're interested.
Autumn (12m 23s): Absolutely. Though I don't want to forget. I still absolutely love how the amwritingfantasy Facebook group is growing so fast by leaps and bounds. And how much conversation is going on? I just looked at like what are the top ones just from, Oh, yesterday someone asked like, how do you choose weapons for characters? Guess how many comments are on that one already? 20. Oh, you're so low. Oh really?
41 comments on that one. And it just still typing, um, people talking about how they choose their character weapons and it's just, it's a lot of fun. So it's really actually seeing all the different ways, especially the different types. So we have fantasy from medieval to someone mentioning their space opera and they had mentioned something about a dinosaur. So it's, they're just wondering. So that's another one that if you don't want to join if you can't join us on Patreon right now, come over at least to the amwritingfantasy Facebook group because it's just fine.
Jesper (13m 31s): Yeah, it is. And, and I, I think, I don't, I don't remember if we talked about this on a past podcast episodes, if had just been conversations between you and me autumn but, but we have talked about in the past at least am that it feels like with Facebook groups that you sort of need to read some sort of critical mass and once you get that far, then then the interaction starts to flow more because they are just enough people that you will always get responses. And we've certainly passed that actually quite a while back, I think.
But, but it, it's amazing. We, I mean every day I'm either myself or Luke and sometimes you autumn are letting in more people. It's like everyday there's join requests and everyday there is new posts from people who asking for help or advice and people pitching in. So I think that's absolutely excellent and it's a really nice, a free resource. Uh, so whether, whether you're sort of viewing Facebook the same way that I do and you don't quite like Facebook, this one is just enough that I'm going to go on Facebook anyway.
Yeah,
Autumn (14m 34s): I agree. It's definitely become that kind of group, which is awesome.
Jesper (14m 43s): Ah, so how much should you read when writing this is something that is, yeah, but because there are so many opinions on this, I saw many people, I don't know, maybe for a start, maybe four-star on them before we even get started on this. Maybe we should just point out that whatever we say from this point onwards is just our opinions. Nothing right or wrong in this episode. It is. We just sharing what we think and you can feel absolutely free to disagree with us.
That's fine. We have no problems with that. So we can only just say what we feel like, and I think this has gotta to be, that's kind of episode.
Autumn (15m 25s): Yes, I think so. And you can happily comment, debate, criticized. They'll be kind in the comments. That's what they're there for. So this will be a fun one to maybe be a conversation with of, you know, do you, how much do you think are we right, are we wrong? Um, what do you think of the advice that's out there? And I think that might be also a really good place to start is what you've heard. What do they tell writers? Um, how much you should read while writing is always a good place to start.
Jesper (15m 57s): Yeah, it is for sure. Uh, I also find, I actually found a 2014, 14 time magazine article about how much American treats, so we can just come cycled back to that as well. And I can tell you what peoples, well this is a, you know, self assessments stuff. So it's just what people believe themselves. So it's not like a, like a scientific study but, but it's still a bit interesting, but we can just cycle back to that. And I think the elephant in the room, maybe, maybe I can start with that.
At least the, I see knowledge that, yeah, because there was a Stephen King quote out there, and I think this one influences quite a lot about how people believe, think, view the point about how much you should be reading when you're writing. And the quote goes like this. So quote, if you want to be a writer, you must do two things. Read a lot and write a lot unquote. All right, so that's what Stephen King set, right?
So it doesn't tell you have to, it's not like write every day. It doesn't say read every day, just as a read a lot, read a lot and write a lot, which of course I'm not going to disagree with him yet, but I mean that, that, I think that is true. Uh, but, uh, I mean the man has sold more than 350 million copies of his work. Right? And the, I also looked up, according to Forbes, he yearns approximately $40 million per year. Right. So I'm not gonna argue with that guy.
Autumn (17m 29s): That'd be like argue about if Neil Gaiman told me I had to read every day, I probably just go and do it so
Jesper (17m 35s): well yeah, but this is exactly what I wanted to debate a bit here. Right. Because I think does this, this is part of the problem because the guy Stephen King and because he has the name me as him because he's like the, you know multi award winning highly author that everybody wants to be when he says something it is taking S gospel. Yes. And that is fair enough and I understand why. So I'm not sort of putting people down for, for doing that at all. I fully understand the logic behind but I do have some issues when what he said there about read a lot comes off as if now this is a requirement, you know, if you want to be something like a successful, not even like Stephen King because I think that's, that's the lightning in the bottle conversation again.
But if you want to be successful at least then if you aren't reading a lot you will never become a good writer. And I think, I think to be honest at this is how that statement is often understood or that that that I mentioned before. Yeah, that definitely makes sense. And I don't like that.
Autumn (18m 44s): I like to question everything. So I guess it probably wouldn't hit me that way where there definitely would have been a time where in my life where I would have tried to juggle more balls than I really should possibly be responsible for just because everyone said this, you need to do this, you need to do that, you need to do this. Um, it's probably why I say why at this point, but I do see, I think that might be a key component is why should you read when you're a writer and that is important and maybe what you should read when you're a writer because there's also a difference there.
And so there's a lot of, there's a lot of wiggle room on the this question. There's a lot of things to unpack and try to figure out when they say you should read, if you want to be a writer. So what should you be reading? Should you be reading your genre? Should you be reading books on how to write? Should you just be reading the news? It doesn't say, well I read a lot of news stories every day. BBC is like, you know, my go-to if I have a five second break to see what's going on in the world.
Jesper (19m 51s): Right. But that's not fiction though. It is not. But I guess this is part of the conversation does, it does, it's just, okay, what
Autumn (19m 59s): are you supposed to be reading? Should it only be about writing or should it be in your genre?
Jesper (20m 6s): Yeah. Uh, I mean for sure. I do think that a reading is important. Um, uh, and I, I've, I try to think before we went to record this, I was trying to think of things that, you know, what are the benefits of reading from a writer's perspective? And I tried to, to think of some stuff and I came up with four things to be honest. And one of them is also answering the question you just raised about what it is did you should be reading. So maybe I can go over them here and then you can see if you have some more to pitch in or maybe you disagree with some of them and then you can, uh, you can share your thoughts.
We never disagree. So this will be fun and we'll see if we can get with something.
Autumn (20m 49s): I'll, maybe I shouldn't call it problem, but it always ends up stone and we, we agree on your thing. So it doesn't become very, very like heated debates is podcast all to play devil's advocate just for the sake of it. Alright, so number one, uh, I put down that the more you read, the more words and sentence structures that you will gain exposure to. So this will inform and help you in your own writing. And I think that is true.
That's very true. Because when you, when you see other, other, other authors writing and now we're talking fiction here of course, because then you're getting a sense of how do they, how do they use the words but also the sentence structures and how are they, especially with fantasy for example, how are they doing the world building elements, how are they sharing things about the world inside the narrative without info dumps like we talked about in past episodes and all that good stuff, you know, that's, that's something you do get a feeling for from reading.
So, so, and it, it sort of broadens your understanding of how to write. So I think that's important. Yes, I agree, of course. But I think it's also important the quality of what you're reading because you're talking about, you know, learning and I've seen, um, you know, sometimes if you're not reading something that is well-written, you might be learning the wrong things. And I have definitely seen that at a few, few times that people are not reading, you know, maybe there it's more lightweight.
It's not, you know, the high end, the, you know, the J K Rowling's or the George RR Martin. You're really seeing some really fantastic writing. I did read a really nice article from someone once who said, you know, when you're reading something and it really just moves you or takes you by surprise or you just does, it has an impact on you. That's when you should stop and really analyze it and look at it and see why. How did the author do this? That's a really great way of looking at writing.
And again, if I've read stories where the dialogue was literally and other things like that, and that's probably not the inspiration and that I want to be unpacking. So you gotta watch the quality of what you're reading. But isn't that highly sort of subjective? I mean, what if I like to read something that where the, where the dialogue is we, that's what I like and I want to write like that.
That's fine, right? That is fine. That is fine. If that's also what you want to write, I guess read something that is from an author who will inspire you. So if you go for someone who's writing that style you love and that you think is really an excellent writer and his writing things that you like and that'll help inspire you, teach you a lot about the genre and how to write whatever it is about their writing that you like, whether it's the characters of the world or just the sentence structure like you said.
Jesper (23m 56s): Yeah. And it also, on the flip side, I would say for example, am it's probably probably a year ago, but I read the Brandon Sanderson's way of King of Kings. I think story, I think it's way of Kings, not King, but nevermind. But I read that I think about a year ago and, and well I think most of us are on, most of our listeners here know Brendan Sanders. Sanderson is a pretty big name within fantasy authors within the community of Francis you authors.
But honestly, I, I didn't like those books. I think that's when somebody will kill me now. But, but honestly I didn't, but because you did not like a Brandon Sanderson story, probably. Probably, yes. Uh, I mean, but nevertheless, I still got something out of it. You know, I, I was certainly inspired with, I mean, the world building stuff, I mean, hands down, he is, he does an excellent job at we're building. Um, and so you can still pick up things about, for example, how he's am well, again, sharing the world details without doing info dumps and not because he does not do when for Dom's, it's all part of the story, which is really nice.
Um, so you could still pick up information like that. Even though that the story itself, I didn't really care much for that. I didn't care much for the character either. Uh, but, but there are still things you can pick up from reading other people's books. I like, okay, I like this one element, but the rest I don't like. So you just ignore the rest and you pick up the elements that you do like. Right. I think that's fine.
Autumn (25m 32s): I mean, I've, I've still never actually finished game of Thrones because I just, they're, the pacing sometimes was too slow and there's, I really could not get used to the fact that all the characters I cared about died. But at least now that I've watched the show, maybe I'll know which ones. Yeah. At least now that I've watched the show, I can only see which ones I know which ones will make it to the end. So I'll try to focus on those. But his writing it's the language and the, what it evokes and how he uses a different senses.
Just, I mean, there's a couple paragraphs and pages of his writing that I keep as inspiration when I need, when I'm feeling stuck and like my writing's flat, I go read those and I'm like, right, this is what I'm trying to do. And so yeah, even though I've never finished the whole series, I've finished enough of it to know this is stellar. If I could do this, I'd be so thrilled. Right.
Jesper (26m 27s): Okay. So that was only number one. Let's go for to. Yeah. So I'll do two and three here in quick succession because they're just short points. And then number four, I will then I'll get into answering the question you asked before about what you should be reading. Uh, so number is, uh, well when you're reading your PFOS to block all out all kinds of other stuff out and you're foster focus, uh, and so it helps to improve your concentration, which I think is a good skill to have as a writer.
So that's just a quick one there. Uh, and eh, number three is in prolonged nation of, of the learning about words and sentence structures, but that's more like the fundamentals of story structure. Uh, you also, you also get a better understanding about how different authors are structuring their stories by reading a lot of books. Um, so again, you will, there will be some stuff you like and some, some stuff you don't like and that's fine and you pick and choose what you want to sort of bring forward into to inform your own writing and what you want to ignore.
That's absolutely fine. But, but reading a lot of different stories does give you different perspective on how a story can be structured and what at least from your point of view works and what doesn't work.
Autumn (27m 47s): Yes, both are very good points. I like the idea, I hadn't been considering it, but with focus, I think that's a really important that there's so much going on in the world that it's probably a good thing to learn to just get lost in something and then hopefully you can do the same thing in your book. And I have to admit, as a writer it's, we never, we never experience our own stories with that first level of discovery, not the complete thing. It's always, you know, we're discovering lots of bout our story as we write, but we're never going to experience as a reader.
So it's also really fun to read just to remember what it's like to be led along. And so we can think about how we're doing that for the people reading our stories. Yeah, that's true. Okay. Should I get into my perspective on the question you asked that cause I think I'm saving up one of the reasons that, well I think it's going to be related to something I'm thinking of so let's go for it.
Jesper (28m 47s): Okay, cool. Yeah. So in terms of what should you be reading, in my opinion it, well it's one of the typical answers where it depends a bit, but if you are not well versed within or well-read within this younger that you're writing already, then you have to write within the genre. Yes. Because the thing is that, Oh I did I say right. I meant I have to read within this younger. Yeah. Because the thing is that each Shaundra has its own kind of tropes within them.
And I'm not trying to start saying here now that you need two copies tropes and you need to follow them, but, but if you don't have a sense of what they are and also how they do inform, read expectations of the stories, then you, your, your book are not going to resonate with that audience. So it's not about tropes, but it is about touching upon the troops. So do you at least delivering what readers of that particular show is expecting?
And then of course the way that you deliver it, you have to be creative and try to find new ways, but still touching upon that those particular truck try to sugar. So, so that's the reason why I think you have to read within your, within the same genre as your writing. Um, if you are really well West within your shower already and you understand all of it already, I don't know, maybe for example, if you would like to write a fantasy story that has some thriller elements in it, maybe it could be worth reading a bit of thriller stories just to see how those stories are working and how the authors are going about that too.
You know, give you a bit of an outside perspective almost if you can call it that. But for the majority I will probably say that you have to read within the genre and stays for the most part it's just in,
Autumn (30m 45s): yeah. And I think, um, there's another one. Good thing. Yeah. Well I think there's a few reasons to why I guess it doesn't. Um, I like variety. So I think it's sometimes fun to just read, like read in your genre or read what you're writing in the genre you're writing, but sometimes it is fun to just go pick up a murder mystery and see how they do some layering in of clues and you can learn so much about that. And so it's really fun to kind of go for really good stories. But I do think it's really important to do that because you learn not only what we've been talking about, but the current trends.
I think if, um, if I went, I just recently read an Anne McCaffrey when th the first book I ever picked up that was a fantasy story and is the reason I fell in love with fantasy and I read it again and I haven't actually finished my review for it on good reads because this is like, this is the most pivotal story of my entire life. And reading it now as an adult in 2020 versus, you know, a kid in 1980 where the sexism, it's more omniscient, just all the writing trends that have changed.
Um, how this woman am her boyfriend slash lover treats her. Oh my gosh, if that happened today, but at the time it was fine, but reading it now like, Oh my gosh, I'd never let my kid read this if she thought, if I would not want another young child to think it's okay to be shaken and be almost afraid of the person who is supposed to be our partner. Holy crap. So I was, I think it's important to go read, but you know, try to read what's contemporary because you'll be surprised at the change in nuances, uh, characters.
I remember the 80s there was a lot about you are born Dustin, you know, low, the big glowy signs and you shall go and be this. And nowadays it's like, I'm sorry, you're like the poor farm boy. You're going to have to earn this through some horrible trials and if you're lucky you will come out alive and be something better. It's a lot different. So if you're going to pick up something, it's to pick up those sorts of things. You what are the trends? How our characters being development, read the comments to see what readers like about the story, what they hated about the story and it's fascinating.
It's all, every book I read now is become like a scientific study of what do I like? What did other readers like, what do people say about it? Because it's good to find the trends and you're always allowed to have your own views and opinions. But again, if you're writing for a mass audience, it's also interesting to see if you agree or disagree with what other people found. It's really fun and even little things like I realized I liked to write dystopian, but almost all dystopian is written in first person and I just, I don't know why it's like nails on a chalkboard to me.
I don't really like reading, writing first person, so it's one reason I stay away. I have a little bit in the genre if that's also partially why I stay away from it because a third person is not that common and readers are not expect they're okay with it that some of them mentioned, you know, it's okay but it's not, it's not what they're looking for and those are important things. You only know by being curious and going in there and reading or picking up at least a whole bunch of am, the free downloads and the lease going through them a little bit to get to trends.
Hmm.
Jesper (34m 21s): Yeah. What your set just reminded me because uh, uh, quite recently I finished reading the first book in the dragon lands series with my sons and I was so afraid of going back to read that because of exactly what you will mention in here. Right. I was so afraid that this wonderful memory of dragon Lars was the one that put me on the, on the track of fantasy back back when I was a child and I, and I have so fun. Fond memories of that series is just like the best thing I ever read.
And then I was like, Oh my God, I mean, I'm so afraid now I'm going to pick this up and I'm going to start reading and am I going to be like, what? What is this? You know, imagine, yeah, we got, and I was so concerned about having my fond memory completely spoiled. But, um, but to be honest, it was okay. It was, it was not as a, um, it was not as good as I remember it, but it would say it's okay. I mean, racially in the skill is still cool, so that's good.
Those deaf. But I mentioned that I'm going to send that 2014 time magazine article before. Maybe I should just circle back to that for us. Let's, yeah, let's circle back
Autumn (35m 35s): what it said. Yeah. Again,
Jesper (35m 38s): it was, uh, you know, people's own estimation on how much they read. So there's no science in mold here, but, uh, but it's so excepted Americans read 19 minutes a day on average. So this is 2014. So mind you at 66 years old, right? But yeah, American sign minutes, younger Americans aged between 25 and 35 34 reads just four minutes a day.
Wow. And those over 75 reach upwards of one hour each day. So, uh, yeah. And I, I'm pretty sure that the, in terms of the younger demographics there, it could even be less than four minutes nowadays, but I don't know. How much do you read on average a day? Autumn
Autumn (36m 30s): I would say cause I would get in most of my reading right now is probably new stories and things like that. But I would say maybe I get an hour, but maybe I'm overestimating half an hour to an hour. And I would like that to be a fiction. And I do like, my problem is I try not to read while I'm writing because I'm task oriented and once I get involved in a novel I just want to read. I'm like addicted to reading. It's my biggest addiction. So I do not usually read while I'm writing because otherwise I'll just read.
But I do do other am other types of, you know, readings, little short stories and yeah, some stuff.
Jesper (37m 11s): So what do you think you read? Well, certainly less than I would like to. Um, I, uh, I don't have time during days and what not to read. So the time when I read this, when I go to bed in the evening before I need to sleep, so then I like to take my Kindle and read a bit, uh, before going to sleep. But it happens too often compared to what I would like that am I'm too tired when I get to bed, so I almost cannot read, so I just fall asleep and step.
So I don't know, on average maybe like, mm. I probably pretty much aligned with that article there. Maybe 15, 20 minutes, something like that, which is far less than I want to. I would like really light to read more, but I feel it really difficult to find the necessary time to do so. But also because when you've been really busy all day, you know, when I get to bed on tired. Yeah. Uh, and I think that maybe, go ahead.
Sorry, go ahead now. Well, I was just about to say, but maybe this is also why the Stephen King quote there re-ups me a bit the wrong way because it's, it's, I mean, not, not the quote itself, but more like the way that I think some people understand the quote because I don't know what exactly he meant by it when he said read a lot. Uh, I, I don't know if, if maybe maybe somebody can take out an article where he elaborated on it and I did read Stephen King's on writing that book he wrote.
I did read that, but that's like a couple of years ago. So I can't quite remember if he elaborated on it in there, but maybe he means that you have to read a lot every day. Uh, or maybe he just means that you read, you read as much as you can. I, I'm not sure, but at least I, I just feel like it's important to be mindful that you don't end up dedicating so much time to reading that it basically ends up taking time away from writing. Exactly. We're not going to be authors unless we, right, exactly.
That's why I tried it
Autumn (39m 18s): to write a book and then read a book and then write a book and read a book. Cause if I do it any other way, it screws up everything and I would just be reading. But I do think it's important and I mean I also think it comes from, like I mentioned, the trends and all those things. You can only get by reading current stories, things that are out now. But before I became a writer, I thousand, I mean how many fantasy books did I think I used to fall off a book in two or three days.
And so if I, if I estimated from the time I really started reading fantasy in seventh grade to when I started writing and slowed down on my reading activities, that's a lot of books. I mean it does like it has to count somewhere. I got all of that knowledge stored inside of me somewhere, even though sometimes it's, you know, not how I'd want to be writing now, but at least I, I can analyze that and they still get something from it because it's part of why I love the genre and why I became a writer.
Jesper (40m 23s): Yeah, but don't you think that sometimes reading can end up for some people to be like a procrastination tool? Oh, absolutely. It's like the excuse that, Oh, I need to read some stuff so I don't have time to write today or something. I dunno.
Autumn (40m 38s): The writing should definitely come first and it's one of the hard parts of being an author. I see some authors on good reads and they have like 20 some books they want to read. I'm like, damn, no, it's, it's been a long time since I read 20 books in a year or set myself that kind of coal.
Jesper (40m 55s): I've never read 20 books in. He's three 20 bucks on a month. Are you kidding? Wow. That's amazing. I mean my wife always makes fun of me because whenever I start reading a new book it takes me like four or five months before I'm done with it. And in the meantime, so you'd read like 10 books. I get more done with one that does wake it up
Autumn (41m 15s): or would your a slower reader. But it's still, again, it becomes an addiction for me so I have to stay away from it. I want to be writing I want to be creating my own stories. I yeah and it's funny cause I think to if you are reading and writing at the same time, there's definitely a trend where you kind of take on some of the aspects of what you've been reading and you might change your tone, which is also like if you're in the middle of the trilogy, the last thing you want to do is totally change up your tone just because you're influenced by someone.
So those are all kind of the caveats. You know, you have to be careful about what you're reading because if you screw things up, you can screw up some big things.
Jesper (42m 0s): Yeah. But don't you think that that's more like if you're in your really early stages of writing, I mean, once you've written enough, you're not going to change your style just because you are reading something. I would say maybe maybe differently
Autumn (42m 16s): a subconscious change cause I've found myself using words that I would not normally or just the pacing's a little different. I can see things being influenced occasionally by what I'm reading. So I do watch that. If it's not, I don't want to read reading something post-apocalyptic on horror when I'm also writing Epic fantasy that's all. No Woolbright because I think, you know, you end up with darker terms and your characters are a little more melodramatic and you're like, no, that's not what I'm aiming for. Let's, it's like changing your entire mood.
I'm very much effected by what I'm reading. Again, that's why I live myself. It's like being on a diet. I just want to pick up a book, but I can't,
Jesper (42m 58s): no, that's the quite interesting actually because I think my mind sort of just come compartmentalizing everything so it doesn't matter what I read or watch. Uh, I mean, of course you're always going to get a somewhat of an influence for whatever you're reading or watching on Netflix or what, I mean, that's unavoidable, but I don't think that, I don't think that it really influences the way that I'm telling the story no matter what I'm watching. So I don't really think about that much. I just want so read whatever. I wasn't,
Autumn (43m 27s): Hey, you're a much, uh, you're much more of a plotter. And I don't know if that has something to do with it where I'm more about the answer. So I'm more of a hybrid. I'm definitely, I straddled the line between the two, so, yeah. Yeah, it could be that. So I have a lot more wiggle room where things get influenced more than maybe sometimes I'm meaning for it to happen.
Jesper (43m 46s): Oh, right. Yeah. But I don't know, may maybe if we are to if it's possible even to derive some sort of conclusion out of all this, uh, talking around, but I don't know. I, I'm sort of thinking that, I think we are both saying that if you should not like spend years reading other people's fiction, if it prevents you from doing any writing on your own, you know, at least I think that, you know, writing skills doesn't magically appear just because you are reading, you know, you'll have to be writing and that should be your priority.
So at least in my view, if you are so busy in your day to day life, then prioritize your writing and then if you can get in like maybe 10 minutes of reading
Autumn (44m 32s): before you fall asleep like me, then that's it. I think that sounds good as I'm tooting my own horn here. I know. Oh, that's all right. I think, I mean I tried to do it depending on how long a chapter was, just just one chapter is good. And then you know, then I never met the brakes come off when I start getting close to the climax. But reading is important, but yes. So you don't even know the questions of what to look for and the things to break down to see why you like this writing or why you don't like that writing until you've been writing.
So reading should definitely come secondary. Hopefully you've read books that inspired you to become a writer. So you have that backlog, you have that, that you know you from foundation right first and then read. And it's amazing. It's just like, you know, going to the movies with an author, you want to strangle people because they are constantly pointing out the clues and the plots were horrible. But it's true. We all do it. Yeah. That's my wife next to me in the couch when we were watching something.
She, she hates stuff. I think it just comes to us net. Once you start doing it, you just can't turn it off. It's so hard to sit there in silence. Yeah.
Jesper (45m 46s): We see the force yet and we see the potholes miles away.
Autumn (45m 50s): Oh yeah. Yeah. So, but you don't know that until you're writing and you're doing it yourself and then you and you struggle with something and then you read it, someone else do it and you're like, Oh, that's perfect. And you remember it from then on. So I agree. I think that's our take home message, right? First, you're already a reader, but you know, just just a little bit, there's a little bit of spice.
Jesper (46m 14s): Perfect. So in episode 60 we share of the cost of editing, but how much does it cost to produce a novel when taking cover, design and everything else into account? That's the topic for next month.
Narrator (46m 27s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the amwritingfantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join autumn and Yesper on patrion.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the amwritingfantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Fantasy map making is one of Autumn and Jesper's favorite topics.
In episode 62 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, they discuss where to start when creating maps, how important realism and immersion is and how maps benefit your writing.
Map making tools are also on the agenda, as well as, discussing why some authors might avoid map creation and how to overcome the reluctance.
Links mentioned in the show:
The Ultimate Fantasy Writers Guide course: https://ultimatefantasywritersguide.com/main/
Fantasy Map Making book: https://www.amwritingfantasy.com/product/fantasy-map-making/ (paperback available from Amazon)
Map Making 101 blog post: https://www.amwritingfantasy.com/map-making-101/
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy.
For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (1s): . You're listening to the amwritingfantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing join to best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them. Now onto the show with your hosts. Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello. I am, Jesper. And I'm Autumn. This is episode 62 of the amwritingfantasy podcast and today we are covering one of my favorite topics and it's a fantasy map making I honestly don't know how, how did we wait 62 episodes to cover this? Autumn this is completely wrong. I don't know, cause it's
Autumn (53s): definitely, it's both of us. I mean, I, I'm at currently ranking a fantasy map for another author. So yeah, I love fantasy maps. I don't know how we waited so long. Maybe we just thought just talking about a map would be two less fun than getting the visuals, but Oh well we'll figure it out.
Jesper (1m 11s): No, it cannot be not fun to talk about maps. It's a, that's a credible, yeah. I mean we amateurs, we should, we should have done this as episode one or something. That's true. It was just, this is,
Autumn (1m 24s): well, it's because we're not just world-building, but this is definitely something we both love and so many authors do. I mean, what does a fantasy book without a map in it? It's just, you feel lost for from the get go.
Jesper (1m 38s): Yeah. I keep every single week I find some maps on Twitter and then I comment on them just because I liked them so much. So when I was more active on Twitter, I would do the same
Autumn (1m 47s): thing. And you're right. I actually kind of, I kind of missing the maps and what people are working on it. I need to add world-building hashtags to my Instagram searches.
Jesper (1m 57s): Yeah, yeah, indeed. I mean, I don't care if they, if those Twitter images are like, yeah, somebody made it out of crayon or whatever. I don't care. Just the fact that it's a map I love him. Map I don't care what it looks like.
Autumn (2m 8s): Yeah. I mean, I went for my, uh, last book where I was creating a map by newest world that I was making. I actually only did it in black and white, which, I mean, I almost always call her my map, so I was very surprised myself. But there's nothing, you know, it's sometimes fun just to have the shading and keep it simple and it does look better in the book. It's very crisp.
Jesper (2m 30s): Cool.
Autumn (2m 31s): Yeah. Yeah. The color does make it better to be honest. But black and white can be quite cool. Yeah. I it was, uh, yeah, it needed to get done when it was still, it was fun. I mean, I just recently found discovered cartography brushes for Photoshop and yeah. Oh, nice. Oh no, it's so bad. It's so much fun to have so much ease of creating maps. So yeah, it's, it's what we do, but that's not where we're going
Jesper (2m 60s): to start. We're have so much other stuff been going on the last week. Have it. I know, even in your life you've got some stuff going on. Yeah. Well, well, I think in general things have been going quite well. Um, on the, on the work side of things, I'm about halfway through the plotting book, one for our new series. So I'm very pleased with that. So it's, it's going, uh, it's going to be so much fun to write that novel.
I'm really looking forward to it. Um, but other than that is also been a pretty well pretty busy weekend last weekend, but also the last couple of weekends because, uh, well this weekend we just, uh, came out of, uh, one of my son's classmates had a birthday parties, so he was at that and my oldest son was at the cinema a cinema together with my wife. And, uh, and we also had somebody who came to look at the house. As I've mentioned before, I think on the podcast that we, we've been trying to sell the house for a long while now.
So, uh, it's things or maybe that there's been a bit of an uptake in people looking now, at least we've had three different couples, uh, looking over the last couple, well, two weeks probably, uh, last weekend. This weekend, maybe the weekend even before that, I don't remember. But the last couple of weeks I've been a bit of an uptake. Um, one of them was like, uh, this younger couple and when they were here looking at the house, I, I worry, I already said to my wife, because they really liked the house and then they had to go and have a meeting with the bank of obviously, and I said to my wife, you know, these guys is, they don't have the money to buy this.
It's, our house is only like a am, what is it from 2005. Okay. Some of you know, it's a pretty new house, so it's not cheap. So if you're really young as you can afford it, so yeah, lo and behold, they came back on the, uh, okay. It's about 800,000 Danish crowns, too expensive. So that's like a hundred K U S dollars. It says like, you're, you're just will weigh off, you know.
Um, and then there was another couple looking. Uh, they looked at three different houses here in, in our area. They actually ended up bidding on one of the other ones, but they bit like what's probably equivalent to 40, 50 K dollars below the price that it was offered. For so yeah, the real estate agent agent just told me, you know, I just told that then, then I'm not even going to tell the, uh, the, you know, the house owner you're bit, because this is ridiculous. Oh wow.
You can't beat 50 K below that. I mean, come on. It's that serious. Right? Yeah. That's, that's really it for a bargain. Yeah. I mean, come on. It's ridiculous. So, so that never happened. So they went away. And then this weekend, uh, just a couple of days ago, there was another couple in their mid thirties who came to look at our house and they looked at one more house as well, uh, just down the street that is also for sale. Uh, so they really liked the house. Um, so they, they needed and they have a good, uh, you know, financial, financial, they are, they are doing well enough.
So, uh, we'll see what happens. It's, it's only been like one work day since they were here. Right. So I don't know yet. We'll see what happens. But, but I don't know. I mean, why is it that people go out and do like how shopping without checking with the bank first? Well how much they can afford. I just don't understand.
Autumn (6m 45s): No, I mean the times I've bought houses, we have always gone and gotten a preapproval and had like a limit and just kind of knowing what we're looking for. But I don't know, maybe that one young couple isn't really, you know, maybe those are first time and they hadn't really figured that out yet.
Jesper (7m 1s): No, but isn't it like common sense that, you know, if you want to buy a house, maybe you need to check with the bank how much you can afford. I mean, it's just you, you know, they're wasting their own time driving around. Also probably getting a site excited about somehow we want to buy that house and whatnot. Right. But they're also wasting our time that we have to leave the house and they have to see it and all that. And then it's just all for nothing. Right. I dunno.
Autumn (7m 27s): Oh, it's just weird to me. I don't know what's common sense for some people might be a learning experience for someone else. Yeah, maybe.
Jesper (7m 39s): Okay. I guess I shouldn't be complaining. At least somebody is, uh, interesting in seeing the houses so that that's of course good. But maybe someday, someday maybe it'll lead into an actual sale, but uh, it's, it's tough.
Autumn (7m 52s): Yeah, it is tough. It's still early in the spring, so you'll, uh, you know, to be spring is always win. The house sales and stuff really start moving. So it's, to me it's a good sign that you have people interested early Springs, so that's a good thing. That's a good sign. Yeah. I'm trying not to be too pessimistic, but, but keep in mind that we've had the house for sale for more than a year now. Right. So we've been through a spring already. Oh, that was a bad sprain. This will be, this is the one 20 20th century maybe. Maybe 20. 20 is to write spring. That's right. I like that. I hope so.
That'd be a good side. Yeah. How about you? Oh, well, you know, I've moved into our little cabin in the woods that were fixing up, um, as part of our rental agreement. So that's really exciting. Except it is Vermont and it is winter, uh, not quite spring. And part of what we're doing is a little addition on the back and that is am it's really fun to have to do some earth moving and ground work. A small group, small spot, but it's cause it's under an overhang so it's like you couldn't fit in heavy equipment if we had some, but it's a lot of um, handpicking he, uh, I didn't realize, I've learned that the tool I'm using is actually called a pneumatic.
It's a pickaxe on one side and it looks kinda like a hoe on the other, right about the right. Writing you know, writers hands. They don't like manual labor like that. Do they know my, um, yeah, my right wrist is a little sore and tired and so, uh, yeah, it's not exactly, I've enough writing right now, but I have to say, I, I the keyboard, it's much easier to type it. So far.
I have to say, considering my hands usually get really sore, like if I do woodworking and things, so I'm, I'm not displeased that it's going well. And I learned that some of those common phrases like pick away at things, I think that came from pickaxes and you just kind of take little chunks, big chunks, but it's going, it's all the groundworks almost. It's like 92% done. So this week. Oh, that's funny. Yeah. Well this week will hopefully be actually putting in the floor, uh, and then building the walls and you know, once you got that pretty much framed it and put the insulation, it's starting to feel like, you know, you're, it's amazing how fast a building, especially just a one room can go up.
So am right. Yeah. I, I'm really hopeful that it'll be a, you know, a week two next week you'll have to check in and see how far we've come in our little cabin project. If you follow me on Instagram, I have been posting some pictures even on Facebook, on my personal feed. So if someone is interested in actually, yeah, tiny house construction. Am if you're kind of curious, do you know, come look me up and you can see how my homes coming along in between the podcast updates.
Cool. Oh, week on the internet with the amwritingfantasy podcast so we have, uh, something quite amazing to mention today. I'm sorry, I can't believe we've held off on mentioning this as well. No, I guess to be honest, like we talked about before we started recording, we should probably have mentioned it a bit earlier as well because it's just a bit down to the wire here. But if you are listening to this podcast episode on the data that it airs, then it will be the 2nd of March.
And that means that we have for the first time in six months now we have our premium writing costs open for enrollment. Yay. This is a big course. So it's, and we only do this twice a year. So it's so exciting when we open it up to new students and it's exciting to see the new students too. Yeah, absolutely. But th th th the thing is here that, so it'll be the 2nd of March if you, if you're listening on the day that this episode launches, but the cost active closest on the 5th of March.
So you only have a few days, uh, there, uh, there is a link in the show notes, so you can go and check it out if you're interested in that. But maybe autumn maybe you could just say a bit about what's in this a cost that we have named the ultimate fantasy writers guide right. I would love to, because this course is very near and dear to my heart. I actually created this one before we got together and became amwritingfantasy. So this is this course. I created it because, well, one, because I had a horrible time, um, with some in-person courses I took ages ago and I remember English class or so boring and so many of these things, they tell you these adages and they don't really get into the in depth.
Or the one course I took was all on mem, you know, it was open to all these other genres, memoirs and blah, blah, blah. And it really didn't help me with fantasy writing and that's what I wanted to learn. So as I got better and got awards and learned what I was doing, I've started putting all those notes together and created this course that it's to me I wanted, I'm sick of always having to go cobbled together and get your information from a hundred different sources or six different courses. I wanted a one stop shop.
I wanted to be able to take, um, an idea. It's to, you have an idea for a novel, how to develop that, how to build characters, how to world build, all the important things with fantasy writing and then breaking down the writing from how to write the beginning of a novel, how to write a really riveting middle and not get yourself or your reader lost or board and how, what you need to put in the climax and the ending. And more than that though, I wanted to teach other authors how to go and find, uh, you know, readers, especially as you're writing so that they're there and they're excited for your launch day and you end up launching to reviews and how to edit.
Cause I know that was one of what we just talked about editing on the podcast, but editing, that was something when I first got to it I was like, Oh, how do you tackle this? So I have a whole module on editing in there and there's editing on what is indie publishing and talking about wide versus just on Amazon or KDP select and what do you need to do for formatting, what do you need to do per book covers? What are all these steps and pieces? Cause I know the first time I've helped so many authors since then, the first time you upload the Amazon it's so nerve wracking.
It is exciting and you have questions. So it actually goes step by step on how to do that. And then the last module is how to go and build an author platform and, and brand. I mean literally I wanted this to be everything from your first novel idea to building your author career business all in one class. So it's a PR. I I know when I first told people this is what I wanted to do, they're like, wow, Whoa, how are you going to do that and hate 12 modules.
I did it. Got, you know, the who have gone through it or I love it and I think it's helped quite a few people. And actually I know you yes, we're actually went through it. So I think that's exciting. So yeah, it's quite some years ago now. It's been out for a few years now. So it is really funny. So it is kind of you were helped what helped me beta tested almost so it was fantastic back then and yeah, I am so excited to be seeing it, you know, coming again in new students and it's always a very exciting thing.
And I know you said, I think you pulled together some of the testimonials from other students. I did, yes.
Jesper (15m 30s): Put together a short, a some clip here that I was thinking to play. Just so people shouldn't take our word for it. Right, so I can just like just play a short clip here if you're okay with,
Autumn (15m 42s): yes. Excellent. Okay, let's go.
Catherine (15m 50s): Hi everyone. I'm Catherine. I'm currently working my way through the ultimate fantasy writers guide and I've been finding it very helpful. One of my main problems has been plotting. I had a very hard time getting my plot to go through and have continuity after going through the workshops for the plotting section. I have now got a full plot and have begun writing. It has been very helpful for me and I'm sure you will find it very helpful too.
Thanks.
Jim (16m 22s): Hi, I'm Jim D read fantasy author and I just watched autumn Brits a launch day module. It was a really informative, had a lot of great information. She had ideas I had never thought of before. Really excited to implement her ideas and launching my own book. Thank you. Autumn.
Speaker 6 (16m 47s): I highly recommend the ultimate fantasy writers guide because it's one of the best programs I've ever seen. It not only covers pretty much everything about writing from start to finish, including fan bases and stay in confident and everything. It also has things like languages and naming your character's based on that and it has map making it is just so excellent.
Jesper (17m 14s): All right. That, that was it. I hope that was loud enough. Uh, I can, uh, some of it was ma ma might be a bit low on the volume, but hopefully everybody could hear it. It came through fine on my end, so hopefully no one's like driving and they're Lily leaning towards their speaker trying to hear those. But hopefully, hopefully the soundtracks will,
Autumn (17m 37s): you know, be boosted when we do our post-production. So we'll, we'll keep an eye on that.
Jesper (17m 42s): Yeah, well we'll see what we can to make sure it goes through. OK. But, uh, but at least that gives, uh, you dear listener. Um, a bit of a, you know, other people's reflection on the course. Uh, and as I said, a closes on the 5th of March and we only open it twice a year. So if you want to have a look at it, you need to hurry up and click through the links in the show notes and check it out. And uh, if you do come in later and listening to this after the fifth, then you can still follow that link in the show notes.
Uh, and that it'll actually there. They will then be the possibility to get your name on a wait list for next time around. So, uh, you can do that. And the additional benefit I would say from doing that is also that you get onto our email list and in between now and next time we're going to email you a lot of good stuff about writing and wealth building tips and all kinds of stuff. So it never stops. We always have tips. We have the podcast, you know, tips we send by emails. So we want to make sure that, you know, we're helping authors and writers from everything, from marketing to how to write well.
So it's worth looking us up in at least joining the email list. And then you'll hear about the next course if you miss this one, which will be usually sometime in August. So, gosh, isn't that an age way? Probably. Yeah. Well, time flies. Yes. Uh, and of, and of course if you on the email list and you will get the information timely as well and not last second like this answer and the next time maybe we will do better at about announcing it ahead of time and we'll try at least, I don't want to promise two hours.
We'll try. You never know when someone's going to listen to an episode. So you can be listening to this in June. Yeah. Who knows? Yeah, maybe. Yeah, that's true. All right. Um, I think we'll move on. Let's go. So fantasy I was thinking like where do we want to start with the, I mean the, I, I think I would like to talk a bit about where you start with the map and also how a map map can help you with writing.
Maybe we could talk a bit about tools that you can use for map creation but I don't know what you think. That sounds perfect. I was gonna say you've only written a book on fantasy map making and you don't know where to start. I mean, come on Yesper you should have this out. Oh, and I'm disappointed. Yeah. Well the, the thing is that with the book writer, you can show the illustration. So everything that I'm talking about and uh, but, but here with audio only, we need to be a bit mindful about how to, how to make this episode approachable.
Uh, so it doesn't become too technical about geographics or whatever because that might also be a bit boring to listen to. But when you have a big a book with pictures in it, then it becomes a bit more interesting. It's much easier to show the pictures. But that's OK. I, I, cause I've written tons of blog posts. I mean map making is sort of, I think I had been doing a post on map making and you were, had the book coming out on something with maps and lo and behold, it's sort of how we met
Autumn (20m 49s): our first, first, first introduction, way back when on Twitter. So, yeah, this was, I can't believe this is blessing think. So remind them. Oh I think so. I'd have to go back into Twitter and double check. Oh goodness knows. I'm sure it's back there somewhere. It's been years and years and years. But I do remember, I think I had done a map making one Oh one blog post. So if I can do a blog post on that making one-on-one, we can, we can do this with no visuals. Well w we're going to be fine. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I do think we've always, I think we both had the theory, um, that you start with coastlines.
That's always where I like to start with my map is actually figuring out which is land of which is water. Yeah.
Jesper (21m 33s): Uh, I have one step that I like to do before I even get that far to be honest. Um,
Autumn (21m 40s): because I think
Jesper (21m 42s): when you're looking at the map uh, I mean of course we are talking about maps that accompanies novels. So what I would like to do before I even do anything, um, and after that I agreed that then its coastlines. But before I get to the coastlines, uh, I like to think a bit about the story that you go into territorial very good point. And then think about, okay, what kind of things do I need on this map to convey the story so that it, it helps the story, right?
So it could be like, you know, you need the, you need the mountain where the, uh, well now I'm thinking about the vampire of course from our mix, but something, you know, yeah, you need the grave site for the vampire on amount. Okay, so I need a mountain or I need a magical tower or uh, you know, I need a Capitol city from where the main character comes from or whatever it might be. But, but so I like to write down like a, like a list of, okay, here are the things that I definitely need on that.
No, it's very tune just so that I can reference.
Autumn (22m 47s): Yes. I think even like, even when you don't realize that you are already creating your world and a map in your mind, you really are, as you start thinking of your story, you think about where the main character, you know, where does the story start. Uh, that's uh, obviously a really good place to maybe start thinking about where your map is. You know, and then you think about where does the character go on the big events? And you start, you're right, you start saying, well, uh, I know with my first book they started in a seaside town and then we needed a big city and then we're going to go across the, uh, big dangerous water and so they're going to go to a desert.
So you start making that list of these are the kinds of areas that I want my store things I want to happen in my story, in places I want my characters to go to. And very quickly you start coming up with a map and to scale it back because of the map I have to create this week for another author is only one city. But it's still an entire story. So you still do the same thing in this city. What are the places they're going to go to? The
Jesper (23m 46s): taverns, the castle, the pal is the docs, the slums. You're going to start mapping out those areas of that you're going to need to create the story or writing. Hmm. Yeah. And, and that's exactly why I wanted to go when it comes to how does maps actually help with writing? Because one thing is that once you start mapping out things, you start thinking of other things that you didn't have and you can sort of use that as inspiration, which is quite nice.
But the other thing is also, I feel like I often, like right now for example, I'm plotting out a book one in our next series. Yeah. And I very often when I sit and I plot a chapter, I ha, I pull up the draft map that we put together. We're not done with the map yet, but, but at least a draft, I put it out just to, because it both gives me a feel of sizes of things, but also distances, which is very, very helpful. Um, so to know, okay, so if, if I'm going to have them go from this city, should that city, how far is it actually on?
How, how long will that take them? Right, right. But with, with the map right there, it's so easy to, uh, quickly calculate, Oh, okay, that triple take a week. Okay. Yeah. Then I know that, uh, instead of, uh, just making it up out of the blue, uh, I think it just helps tremendously. Yes. And to add to that, and I mean, once your map has done, and even as you're, you know, writing next novel or a series, but once it's done and you're saying they're going from here to here and you realize suddenly, you know, they're crossing a high mountain or they're crossing a Marsh and suddenly you have hurdles and other things you can throw in there, or at least descriptions.
And that's that to me. I mean, that added so much to my first series when I suddenly saw all these places, they would go and develop the cultures that would live in these places and made it all different. And I think it really, the book is so much better because I made the map first. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And, and the other thing is that, uh, well maybe it's a quote, the, uh, best fantasy ride a Brandon Sanderson, right? But he said at some point that the whole Lake of Epic fantasy is immersion.
And that I fully agree with, uh, the immersion is what makes a difference. And if you want emotion, I mean, you mentioned it before, what I'm right. I mean, having a map at the front of the book in the first couple of pages that already draws people in. Because also because it's a picture, we like looking at pictures. It, it's much, much easier than reading about, okay, so this city is over there. 500 miles from that city would sits in between. And then there is a Marsh and blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? But pictures right there, you can see it.
You don't even have to explain it. Um, so it, it adds that a emotion, but it also adds realism yet, because I really feel like, and this is something I talk quite a lot about in the, in the guidebook, is maps has to be realistic. I mean, unless of course if you are creating a truly fantastical world where like, like the cities are hanging upside down in the hour or whatever, then it's fine. You can do whatever you want, right? But, but otherwise, if you're creating, you're like more traditional medieval Epic fantasy, which is the case for most of us most of the time.
Uh, or it could also be an urban fantasy in a, in a, in a bit more modern setting. But even if you have a map there, it has to be realistic. By realistic, I'm talking about stuff like, um, well let's take rivers for example. Right? Uh, so rivers, they leave mountains. Um, but then sometimes in some maps you'll see the illustrator then sort of turns the river around and then it passes through and data or like a second mountain range because before it goes to the sea, right.
And rivers won't do that. It would be a very extreme innovation. Yes, it's, it doesn't happen. So it's like an unrealistic floor water. Um, and I could also mention w when a river heads down stream, when it's heading towards the ocean, it won't divide by splitting up S you know, as in one river suddenly becoming two rivers instead, rivers will combine as in two rivers joining to become once. And then on many maps you also see a ton of river deltas.
But actually they are much rarer than one thing. Uh, they are usually found near the coastline, so you can add them there if you want. But these are the kinds of things that you really need to think about and, and you know, infuse your map with this kind of level of realism because the reader might not actually be able to put their fingers on what is wrong, but intuitively they will am. They will just feel like there's something that is a bit off here. Something just doesn't compute here. And that breaks the emotion and, and it's just, yeah, it's sad.
Autumn (28m 51s): It is. I mean it really, if you haven't studied geology or cartography to spend some time with some real maps, real-world maps, uh, where you live or coastlines are islands and really get a feel for what shapes the land and rivers. And you know, what is theoretically possible. I mean there's always exceptions. Like I can think of, you know, if you had a glacial dam burst and it created a Canyon, you could technically have a river go through a mountain range.
It does happen in the Rockies, but this is an incredibly, a rare event and you have to have a geological past and you have to know something about tectonic plates in geology. And so if you don't have that level of knowledge, probably best to stick to rivers, do not cut through the mountains. They, they form little streams go into a bigger, that goes into a river and that goes to the coast and dumps into a Lake or an ocean. That's a pretty safe bet. And you should stick with it.
Jesper (29m 50s): That, yeah, I mean it's, it's honestly not because any of this is very complicated. You just sort of need to get the basic stare and uh, uh, but, but the other thing about the geographical things of it is also it, especially when it comes to why, I don't know why we're talking so much about water, but, but they would go, but especially when it comes to water, what has a very, very big impact on maps, but it also have a very big impact on the cultures or the political borders and so forth.
Because rivers not only provide fresh water to the people living around the rivers, but they are also this kind of land feature that gives you a border basically. Right. So in, in the old days when, uh, I was just about to say, when you can't build a wall to the country, I guess we shouldn't get into all that tobacco. We said we promise takes out of this. Yes, yes. So, but what I would just met this, that it gives you a natural border, right? You could have one nation living on one side of the river if it's like a big river and another nation on the other side.
And it's not necessarily that easy to cross either. So, and it becomes easier to defend as well. So it gives you sort of the lay of the lands with the different nations are kingdoms and so forth and where it makes sense that they would have their borders. The same thing with the mum, right? They also give you natural borders. So yes,
Autumn (31m 20s): just about to say, yes, mountains are these natural features where the river is Marsha's, um, places you can't cross mountains. They're wonderful boarders to help develop your nations. And I was going to mention rivers too, but going back to water, uh, they're not just good borders, but they tend to be where towns and cities developed because water is a means for transporting trade goods. It is something we need to live on. And you often protect your clean water source.
So that's usually where a lot of the cities of the first earliest cultures are you going to develop near fresh water, drinking water. So that's also important aspect of why we focus on water and rivers.
Jesper (32m 3s): Yeah. And it also becomes a sort of the highway of your medieval world, meaning that, you know, traveling on boat downstream and stuff like that, that's by far the fastest way to travel. Or if you're doing like am trading or something, that will also be a way to do that. Uh, the, the fastest and easiest would be to sale. So if the river's like a big river that flows into the ocean or something, uh, then, um, that that's, that's sort of an artery of your trading business in in your world then.
So I think that the point about mentioning all of this is, is really to say that there was a lot of things with creating the map that can influence your work
Autumn (32m 46s): writing directly or the store directly and then things will start falling into place and making sense once you have a map. And to me, I think the biggest thing is, like I mentioned, I usually develop the map and then I see these areas. And I know the part of map making is also, you know, the, whether you knew mountain rages and volcanoes and the, you get down to the nitty gritty of what it would be like to live in this area. I mean I, food is huge for me who were not talking about water. You know, what people would grow to eat there.
And you know, if there's enough resources for the city to grow or a towns and as you start thinking about the food types in the water and the land in the rain, I start developing an actual race in a culture that would live there. And so, you know, my first a story, my first series, there wasn't any traditional fantasy culture is because I made them all up to fit the world I had drawn. That all came from first building the map and then thinking about who are these people that would have lived and grown and adapted to be in this climate.
And, uh, that's one of my favorite parts is just, it's the map creates the seed, the kernel that grows into something truly unique and that fits your world in your story and only your world in your story. And it's exciting.
Jesper (34m 8s): Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I really feel like when I open a fantasy book, I know I've said this many times on Twitter as well, but when I opened a fence as you book, if I don't find a map within the first few pages, I'm already a bit disappointed. And it's like, I know not every reader is like me of course, but it's like readers really like fence, see the light, the maps, most of them, yes. And it's a bit like, why do you want to disappoint them right off the bat? No. Yeah, it's very true. I just, I mean, the map is going to help you and the reader will love it.
So why not?
Autumn (34m 42s): Oh, I trust me. I had a, I had a reader who actually really liked the map for my world and obviously they really liked my series. They actually asked if there's a way to buy the map. I mean, talk about getting tingles. That was still, every once in a while he posts a picture of my books underneath the map and I'm like, I don't even have that at my house. I'm so jealous. I want to go there and sit next to his books.
Jesper (35m 4s): Yeah, I actually got the, I actually got the map of, uh, of the world that I used for my previous series. I actually got it made in am poster size, so I can actually hang it on the wall when we move at some point. This is how much we love our maps. Yes. Yes. I love it too much, but, but I don't know. It's, it's like I can clearly recall like I probably been like 10 years old or something. Uh, uh, together with my younger brother, we had like this one, you know, these 83 sized pieces paper, it was some, you know, this Brown recycled paper stuff.
And we rolled it out across the dinner table, my parents dinner table in the living room, and we had multiple of these and we'd take them all together so they feel like the entire a table. And then we just started, I, I clearly remember like there was no real plan to it, but we just started throwing, okay, so here's some mountains and here's the city. And, and Oh, and then from there it just evolved into some sort of game that we started playing. Right. But, but I still remember that like that's the first memory I have of creating a map and I just loved, and I think my parents hated it because we occupied the table for like four days, but they're on a campaign going, yeah, exactly.
Yeah. But, but I, I don't know, I still have that recollection. I, I always, always loved,
Autumn (36m 29s): I think it would be a rare fantasy author who doesn't have some kind of map and world-building drive that or appreciation because that's sort of what's, it's a pillar of what makes a fantasy novel, a fantasy novel. And it hasn't been, I mean I've written and I do write occasionally in this world, but you still, you still need to get, Oh go look at the map of, of you know, how far is it from this distance and what are the unique features of this area. Cause I started in Wales and I found a place where there's actually this bridge that crosses an entire Lake in Wales.
It's like a mile and a half long. And I'm like that gotta use that somewhere. So it's still an exploration. It's still looking at maps. I think it's just appreciate appreciation for the realism that's there. So I know before we wrap up, do we want to give any like specific steps if you're making a map, you know, we said, okay, list out the areas you need, then you're going to do your coastlines after coastlines. I usually would do rivers. And from rivers cities, but I know also, I mean, do we have to worry about if you're really going to be realistic, you're looking at tectonic plates, which is what would create the mountains, uh, weather patterns.
These are all parts of actually making a map and it's, it's complicated, but yeah. You know, sometimes it doesn't have to be if it's a very small map
Jesper (37m 54s): yeah, I I, yeah. As you started out by saying in the beginning, I have a full step by step guide on fantasy map making. Uh, and it's both available in an ebook and paperback. Maybe I'll just add the link in the show notes if anybody's interesting. But basically that talks you through step by step what order I would do things in because it does matter a bit. But maybe that's a bit too technical. But actually I was thinking autumn maybe. So if we're going by the assumption here that at least most of all us fantasy writers we like maps.
If we're using that SDS assumption, then I think that the reason that sometimes maps are not included in books is because it is
Autumn (38m 36s): too daunting to create the map maybe. But if we're now saying, okay fine, there is, you know, you can get the step by step guide on the order of it. So if we sort of put, take that out of the equation and say okay, the problem is then not the fact that you don't know what order to do things in and what to do, but maybe the, the the, if we didn't focus on the remaining problem that might be here and that is actually how do you, how do you make the map you know, why your hand drawing or using software, how do you do it?
Maybe that's a good place to sort of wrap up because I think that that, that's probably the only remaining hurdle that I can come up with right here. Well that's fair enough. And I will also, I will try to find the blog post that, um, my little fantasy met making one Oh one that we can add to the show notes as well. But if you're really, I think even when I start with maps, I still do hand drawing. And to me the, one of the biggest things is start with the biggest piece of paper you can get your hands because I, I the, I totally scrunched up my world and it still doesn't look right to me and I keep wanting to redo my original map because I started with like copy paper, you know, something, a letter size and eight and a half by 11 if he raped, drove really small.
But you know, go to the art store and buy yourself a poster side sheet of paper and, and start with that. Even if it's going, even if you're not an artist, um, it's just grab a pencil. I'd recommend pencil. I, I like being able to erase, but start with that and start with drawing. You know that for he'll put a. Dot. This is where your book starts. This is that first city. And then work out there from your coastlines. But after that, you know, if you are good with computers, if you, you can take that original map after you get it all sketched out in a raised and everything fit in where you want it to and you can do that online or you can take that and hire an artist to do it and they, they're still gonna say, Hey, you know, you can describe it to me just like you can describe it to your readers.
But a visual is so important no matter how rough and how horrible you think it looks. It really helps to have something scribbled out on paper to outline what it is you're hoping to see in your finished product. And there's some great programs out there. There's a photography programs, there's some, uh, people who do roleplaying games. There's some great things that you can make, some half decent maps that are out there. And of course, you know, I like to put all mine in Photoshop because I'm just, I just love Photoshops so much cause you're the person I have definitely grown to be very fond of the program, but it's not the only one out there.
There's some other great programs too, so you should learn to, yeah, I can just mention a fractional map one. There's skimp. There is a dope illustrator
Jesper (41m 34s): there was incarnate, which has actually become better and better and better with the latest releases that they've made. And then there's also cam campaign cap tracker for three, which is the software that I used before sort of a autumn state and took over the map to sign. But uh, yeah, there's, there's quite a lot of options out there. Some of them are easier to use. Some of them are more complicated. I mean Kemp campaign can talk earth chakra for three. Jesus, that's how to stay. Um, that, that one is a bit complicated to you, that it has a steep learning curve.
Uh, but again, I mean go to our YouTube channel and there was actually, again, a step-by-step, I like those step by step things, but there is a step by step video series actually take you from scratch to, uh, using campaign could track over three up and exactly where to click and what to do. So there is that on the YouTube channel if you want. But otherwise there are, there are these different tools incarnate as far as I see, I've not tried it myself, but as far as I've seen all the tutorial videos, it's looks like it's pretty easy to use.
Um, and I think what I would say is that if you want to put your map into a book that you're going to publish, then I agree with what autumn said in the sense that it's great to use these different tools or even if you do it the hand drawing, that's fine as well. But it's great to use something to get to an illustration of how, what you want the map to look like, right? So that you can easily see here all the cities here, the mountains and, and blah, blah, blah, blah.
Everything is there. And so did you can give it to somebody who knows what they're doing. Uh, and then they will do the final touches on it and shine it up so that it becomes something that you can put into a novel. Uh, because you don't want to put in like let's say a campaign campaign tracker for three on incarnate or whatever, gimp or whatever you're using. You don't want to put ex tracked of that into a novel because it doesn't look professionally enough. So there is that caveat.
Yes. But of course, if you can give the artist, here it is, it's exactly like this, you know, in terms of the placement of everything. And then just give them a bit of freedom and say, you know, play with it at the design of it, you know, make it, make it look professional and good. But I just want the different cities and the names and whatnot and the mountains and the rivers and all the other stuff. I wanted to look like this, but the actual finish touch of it or the layout, uh, I don't know if you can use that word, but you can, you know, feel free to, to be an artist and, and make that look really good.
Uh, as long as you don't move things around on the map. Right. And being from the artist's point of view where I've done this for other authors, yes. That, that map the sketch, knowing where if someone wants to coastlines is just huge. You, you're going blind if you don't have that. So no matter how you feel about your drawing skills,
Autumn (44m 32s): sketch it out and even it helps almost to finish writing the book before you try to get the map completed. Cause you'll be surprised at how many times you add something new through your first book and even through your subsequent books. I mean, I had, I had some features created by my characters that I had to add in later for later additions. But that's sort of the fun of creating a map and actually having the world grow with your stories.
Narrator (45m 0s): Perfect. I think that's a wrap. Next Monday we'll cover something that is heavily debated and that is how much should you read when you're writing. If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the amwritingfantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join autumn and Yesper on patrion.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month.
You'll get awesome rewards and keep the amwritingfantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Do women authors face unique challenges?
Autumn and special guest, Alexa Bigwarfe, delve into this topic as well as ways to support women authors.
Alexa is a USA Today bestselling author, runs Write, Publish, Sell and is the organizer of the Women in Publishing Summit.
This episode has tips not just for women, but for anyone who is busy or feels too overwhelmed to tackle dreams such as writing.
Check out the Women in Publishing Summit which runs from March 2 - 8. Registration starts at FREE! Check it out at https://womeninpublishingsummit.com/.
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy.
For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (0s): You're listening to the amwritingfantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need in literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing join to best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them. Now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Autumn (29s): Hello, I'm autumn and this is episode 61 of the amwritingfantasy podcast and the women have taken over today. Yes, for is a way, and so today we instead have author and organizer Alexa Bigwarfe and she is joining me for a discussion on the hurdles facing women authors. So hello Alexa welcome to the podcast.
Alexa (51s): Hi, thank you so much for having me. I'm so happy you could join us today. And actually right now I'm over in Vermont and it's a beautiful sunny day, so thank you for being inside and, uh, hanging out with me. Absolutely. Well, I'm in South Carolina where it's normally beautiful and sunny, but today it's overcast and gross, so
Autumn (1m 13s): that worked out for you then. It's great. Fantastic. And so I have a little introduction so that people can listening can get and feel of for who you are. And so we'll just get that out of the way till we can free up the discussion. So Alexa you are a wife, a mother of three, a dog owner, which I'm going to have to ask what kind of dog and an advocate for those without a voice. You are passionate about advocating for women's and children's rights and discusses these topics on your podcast, which is the same name as a series you've written lose the Cape.
So you're also a USA today bestselling author and you're an editor and publisher of lose the Cape anthology series sunshine after the storm, a survival guide for the grieving mother. Ditch the fear and just write it and many other books. And if all of that isn't enough, you also run and organize the women in publishing summit every year, which I took part last year and loved it and I can't wait to it for it to be this year. And you also run the write publish sell website, which is dedicated to helping authors.
So I don't know how you fit all of that. And really
Alexa (2m 22s): I don't sleep much is my standard answer on that one.
Autumn (2m 26s): I understand. I know when I first started writing and people asked how I found time to do it, I would look at them straight with a dead pan face and say, I'm a vampire, I'm gonna start using that one. That's a much better answer. Oh, you know, it throws them off. Like they were kind of like, are you serious?
Alexa (2m 44s): I love it. Well, you know, now that my three children are all in school for seven hours a day like it or six, seven hours, however long they're gone, um, it makes a big difference and I'm able to cram a lot more in. My husband swears that multi multitasking is impossible and that is just one of the many differences between men and women because I think women can run circles around men and doing multiple things at the same time.
Autumn (3m 10s): I highly agree, which is so like I said, it'd be so much fun for taking over the podcast today, we'll probably, you know, solve all the problems of the world. While all smell disgusting, you know. Right. That's right. That's right. Excellent. Well, I'm so happy to have you here and I have to say, so I'm a dog lover too. Um, my, I have a current terrier who is like a giant golden version of Toto. So what kind of dog do you have?
Alexa (3m 33s): Dog Mia is a, she's definitely a mix of a yellow lab and something else that could be picked could be bulldog, could be all kinds of combinations. She's a mutt. She was a rescue, so we don't know what she is fully, but she is truly the sweetest dog we've ever come across. And she's a gentle giant. We love her.
Autumn (3m 54s): Yeah, that's just, I absolutely adore dogs. And that was actually sort of how I ended up with my husband. He had the cutest dog. Oh my God. So I fell in love with a dog, kept the boys. It's worked out
Alexa (4m 6s): well. There you go. So there is some truth to be told to men getting puppies and taking them for walks in the park if they're looking to pick up chicks. Huh?
Autumn (4m 13s): Yeah. So we're already giving dating tips to anyone out there listening. Yes. If you are trying to get together with someone, a really cute dog or a wonder,
Alexa (4m 22s): well you know, being a writer can be such a life of solitude that maybe maybe we do need to throw out some tips for social interaction from time to time.
Autumn (4m 33s): That's like she probably, we could get away with a podcast of like writing or dating tips for writers because we're all introverts, so we're like, I know sometimes if my husband didn't be like, are we eating today? Are you doing anything other than taking your laptop somewhere of like, Oh you are here. I didn't know you were in the house.
Alexa (4m 50s): Exactly. I did the same thing though with my three children. It's generally not a good thing. So we have a rule that when I'm working they're only allowed to come bother me if one of them is bleeding or, or really like truly needs my help. It can't be an argument over which television Joe they can watch. So
Autumn (5m 9s): yeah, I saw a reverse am blog article once, which I wish I could find it again. If anyone is listening and knows of this one, it was a family's interpretation of a mother's writing, a writer, mother's hand signals, and you know, she would hold up the one finger which to her about one minute and the family is like, okay, give her five. If she holds up two fingers, it's like give her 10 not two minutes. And if she gives you a full stop, it means do not fricking bothering me right now. She is on a roll. Go leave the house and come back into.
That is so true. It's just like there's what we think we got going on and then there's what the rest of the world realizes. We really mean when we say no, not now. Oh my gosh. So yes, if anyone knows of it, please send it to me. I've lost the link and it just cracked me up whenever I read it. It was fantastic. But anyway, so I'm so excited to have you here and I love that you're a USA today bestselling author. You have so much information and so many things that you're doing, but how did you start out?
When were you, when were you a newbie and how did you start writing
Alexa (6m 16s): well, it's kind of a sad story, so I'm sorry to bring anybody down here. Um, I actually, I wanted this, so the first part, it's not so sad. I've wanted to write since I was a little girl. I mean I started writing my name all over my grandparents couches and walls as soon as I could hold a pen, right. Which, uh, they were not very happy. But um, um, so I I self, I self illustrated and wrote my first book at the age of six called my unicorn. My mother threw it away at some point in time, so tears, no, but I always wanted to write and I'm one of those kids who if you go back and look through my stuff from like middle school and high school, like I have stories upon stories that I started but never quite finished.
I have like index cards of, of I, I one of those title people. So I would just daydream titles for day is, you know, cause I had like 700 titles of books and stories, you know. But um, somewhere along the line, uh, my dad was the mill in the military. We moved overseas. I totally fell in love with am overseas stuff and I wound up majoring in international studies and then eventually I went into the air force. Um, so I was doing, I was in air force intelligence officer and I did for for a decade.
I did technical writing and briefs and really, uh, really honed my writing, my writing and speaking skills through that career. And then writing um, some counter terrorism, uh, briefings and things like that for the state of South Carolina after I left the military. It's a very interesting career. Very, very interesting. I loved what I did. Um, like I said, 10 years total time working for the air force and for the state of South Carolina and doing really, really cool things and writing a lot of emergency plans and all this kind of stuff, grant writing, all of that dry boring stuff.
But it trained me very well in technical writing and am I decided to, it was, it was hard working in counter terrorism and by that point in time we had two small children. So I decided to stay at home and um, be a stay at home mom because I thought that would be easier. Um, it was not, we decided to have our third child cause my husband and I are both the third of four children and we were like, we can't stop before we get to number three obviously.
Um, and when we, I went in for my first ultrasound and they found out that there were two. So we had number three and 4:00 AM together. But a long, long story short, um, the babies were identical twins. They had, they suffered from a syndrome called twin to twin transfusion syndrome, which is very, very deadly if not treated. It was very scary and we thought both babies were going to die. We went through a lot of, lot of stuff, a lot of hospitalizations and they were born 10 weeks early.
And, um, Caris, my surviving twin was one pound 10 ounces and she spent, yeah, she was a little bitty. She lo fighter, she spent three months in the NICU and her sister, Catherine, um, just had entirely too many, uh, issues. And she only stayed with us for two days before she was, it was very sad. So in that time frame, there's obviously a lot of stuff going on. And I started blogging as a way to deal with grief and anger and just shock and awareness to tell other people about this syndrome that I felt my doctors were so poorly educated on.
And, you know, all these things. So I took the blogging and, um, really found a space and place for not only helping other grieving mothers, but for helping people who didn't know how to deal with grieving mothers. Like what might be the most common search term is still to this day, eight years later, uh, what do I say to someone who's just lost a baby? So I started writing on those topics and um, and I decided that I wanted to do more. By that point in time, I had am really gotten into a big community of other bloggers and writers on grief.
And so I reached out to a bunch of people that I knew who, who were, who were doing things, either they were setting up organizations to support grieving families where they were blogging about it or they were doing all these different things. And I invited, um, I think it's 34 of us total. So I reached out to all these people and ask them to be a part of this project that I wanted to do, which was a book called sunshine after the storm, a survival guide for the grieving mother. And it's basically like, Oh yeah, it was. So, it was a really healing project for me.
So part of my mission across the years has been using writing as a tool to heal and how no matter what genre, whether it's a children's book or a nonfiction book or even a fiction book, like there's so many ways that you can use your writing to work through things in your own life to heal to all of those things. So, yeah. So I became an accidental publisher basically because, you know, I just, I fell in love with the process and wanted to learn everything I could possibly learn about publishing.
And then we started the lose the Cape series, which is our guide for am for moms. Cause I was still raising children. So we did that and like, so now I've got more books coming out and people are coming to me, what are you doing? How are you doing this? I want to write a book. How do I do it? Yeah. So right. Publish sell was born.
Autumn (11m 44s): That is amazing. So yes, I mean basically from almost before you started putting the words that became your published novel on paper, you've been helping other on their journey from the get go. Right?
Alexa (11m 55s): Yeah. So, so yeah, through the, through the blogging and then through am basically kind of, so some people who were also writing on grief came to me first. And this is when I realized that that there was an opportunity for me to really help a lot of other people is because they came to me and they were like, Hey, I don't know how to get my book a formatted and I don't know how to do this and I don't know how to do that. So it started off with me just kind of helping out my friends in the green area who wanted to write and publish books too. And then, you know, word caught on. I started realizing that I, well, first of all being a stay at home mom, but just never quite worked out for me.
I, I wanted to be doing more like constantly. So I knew I didn't want to leave my kids though I still wanted that flexibility of being able to be home with them. And so I was looking for opportunities and at this time, like this is when like digital, the digital world was just blowing up. I mean, so all this stuff is happening, eBooks coming out, you know, all these, all these big transitions. So I was able to start looking at maybe I could be a blogger and make money through blogging. Maybe I could do this, maybe I could do that.
And so I just built my business from the ground up, doing a lot of different things. And, and um, eventually as I was working with these different writers, I realized that I didn't want to just help them prepare their book for publication. Like I wanted to be a publisher. So I took on that role and we have am, Kat, biggie press and purple butterfly press and Chrysalis press, which are nonfiction, basically hybrid press, a children's book, hybrid press. And then Chrysalis is our traditional publishing house.
But we have, we had a slow down, we took on way too much, way too fast. So we have stopped submissions for all of those for a while because now I'm focusing on the women and publishing summit
Autumn (13m 43s): I know, I can't wait til we talk about that, but before we do, I want to, so what do you think I get into, what do you think are the differences between a woman author and our account? Our male counterparts because I know I've definitely seen some differences and it's interesting. It's so it's kinda fun to open up that conversation and maybe some guys will get some perspective into, you know, helping their struggling female partners who want to be writers too. There's so many different
Alexa (14m 9s): is across the board from the way that we tackle our projects to our mindset issues. Like when guys in general, this is all generalizations of course, but generally speaking, when a dude decides he's going to do something, he sits down and he does it. If a guy decides I'm gonna write a vampire paranormal, romance, Blab, blah, blah, shape shifter, you know, whatever. Throughout all your, I'm not a fantasy writer, so I do
Autumn (14m 37s): you're doing really good. This might make these next book.
Alexa (14m 42s): I decided I'm going to sit down and write it. Generally speaking, I'm not saying that they don't have fears and challenges in that, but they sit down and they do it. Whereas a woman were like, well, do I know enough? I don't have an MFA. I've never taken a writing class. Can I do this or are people gonna laugh at me? What are they going to do? Like who am I? Like all these things just start going through our minds as women. So we have issues from there, you know, just in terms of can I do this, will I do this? But then I mean there's like a thousand other things women whether you're a mother or not, women tend to be the ones who take on the roles of caretakers, caregivers, planners, organizers.
So we're doing all the things in our lives. We're the ones who generally speaking, again, nobody threw rotten tomatoes at me. And you know what, there is a shift going on like my husband now is a stay at home dad, so I can't, you know, stay at home dads slash he works part time in my business now. But um, but, but you know, so, so I know that men are doing all these things as well. But generally speaking, like we just, we approach things differently. We have different things that hold us back. We have different things that hold us back in the world.
Like the, if you, every once in a while I see the article come up about how many women had to um, use mail pen names because that's the only way they could sell sell books, you know, so, so there are not only internal things that stop us from moving forward. There are still very definite external things happening in our world that, that keep women from having the same level of success. And I'm not one of those, you know, door bang feminists, like men need to die, all that kind of stuff that you see that you see some people on the far extreme side.
But I what I do, but I do see, I do see some challenges that women have to face and especially marginalized voices, women of color, women in any type of super minority type thing. You know, there, there's a lot of challenges still out there. So you know, it
Autumn (16m 45s): no. Yeah, I totally agree. Cause I know like I think my F the first question I often hear when female authors asking themselves is when can I find the time? Because I agree. It seems like every woman author I know is even myself, I don't have kids. We decided not to a long time ago before we even got together, so it worked out. But it's still, I'm the primary cook, you know, I tend to do the primary organizational things that he does the primary and be like maintenance things and he's putting them in. But you're right, it's like, I'm going to go and I'm going to go do this now and then it'll be done and then I'm going to go and do this now.
And for me it's like, well, I've got to juggle this. I gotta deal with this. I've got to get this done today at blah, blah, blah. You know, it's like I have 16 balls in the air and I'm like, can I throw out the 17th if it's a pedo of size? But it means, I'm sorry. No, go ahead. Yeah. Do it's exhau. It's, I really think we struggle with trying to hold it all together and carve out that time for ourselves. It's
Alexa (17m 41s): very unusual, um, from the men that I see in my life again. So I'm just using my little am snapshot of the world here. It's very to see a guy when I see them want to do something to stop and think, now, wait a minute, what am I going to get the laundry done and when am I going to get food and do I have a menu plan and do I have, you know, no. They're like, okay, I'm going to join the hockey team and I'm going to go play hockey or I'm going to write a book or I'm gonna, you know, learn how to play the guitar or go hang out with friends or go, you know, that's they, they just, they do.
And some women just do two and it's a L it's a thing that I'm having to teach myself actually, is that it's, if I have to focus on whatever it is, that is my priority and if it is my priority, then I have to be willing to let other things slide. It's okay if we eat leftovers for two days in a row. My kids don't think so, but I'm okay feeding them. It's okay to order from time to time. It's okay to let them watch movies as well. I write on a Saturday afternoon, you know, so,
Autumn (18m 45s): Oh, I love that. No, I, I totally agree and I think that's we. I love your lose. Lose the Cape series. I hadn't seen it until I was looking up stuff, but it's so true. We all think we have to do it all. We have to do it and I've learned even in my life to be much more advocating too. I think that's one thing. Guys are really good at saying, I am doing this and they stayed at, they go and do it and if they don't get something done or if someone else has to pick up the Slack wherever the chips fall, they just go and do it and women. We tend to be like, how can I fit that in where if it's something we're passionate about, sometimes you just have to say, I am doing this and you're either going to have to help or it is not going to happen because I am doing this and it's so scary.
Sometimes we'd switch with you in a relationship where you're the one who tends to pick up the other half of everything. But yeah, sometimes you just have to do it. And even am I've hit 45 now and I'm still learning.
Alexa (19m 39s): Okay. That's really funny. If you've been in a relationship with somebody for a long time when you're like, Nope, I'm not doing that anymore. Sorry. You've got to do the grocery shopping. You've got, you know, it's funny, as we shift roles a little bit now, this is a recent change for us. So we are still very much in the figuring it all out phase of him being the primary house person and you know, it's still in my nature to like stop work. It's like look at the clock and be like, Oh my gosh, it's six o'clock we have to eat dinner and I somebody, somebody's got to cook it.
So it must be me. So you know, I've had to stop and say, you know what, he knows where the food is, you know, and tell him like, Hey, it's six o'clock I'm not ready to stop yet. I have deadlines, I need you to make dinner. And you know, we're getting better at it. But it is, yeah, it's a, it's a challenge.
Autumn (20m 28s): It is. I mean, I've been with my husband, we've known each other 20 years this year and we've been married 18 and so agreed. We've, I mean for any relationship to last that long, it goes through a lot of changes. There's a saying that may you have, um, I think it's one merit, one spouse in many marriages, in other words, stay with the same person, but your marriage shifts and changes and it's a, it's a wonderful terminology saying, you know what? Nothing is ever the same. Everything keeps changing. You're both going to change. And yes, I've seen that.
Definitely as we've grown from our twenties to our thirties and now we're the hitting our forties. And it is just interesting to see the dynamics change in me learning to be much more of an advocate and him learning to he's, I still think guys, sometimes they cannot, if you do not tell them by the way this needs to be done, they don't really figure it out. But maybe that's just all the guys I go with my life. He's like, okay, the thing sitting in the front in the middle of the room. Yes, there's some general truth to that, but I do feel, so I started reading with fantasy.
Um, it was definitely, you know, it is my genre, it's what I'm passionate about. But I always felt very fortunate because the first author I picked up was ed McCaffrey. So a woman. My next favorite was Mercedes Lackey. My favorite book was written by Terry Wendling and I've always loved Margaret Weis. This is like from the day I started reading fantasy and fell in love with it. I've had these Paragon women's, I didn't start with, um, Tolkin or you know, all the guys I started with the women and I've always, I didn't realize it at the time as a young girl, I always joked that my mother never believed in women's lib and I think she just didn't know what to do with me.
When I started getting my boys, she's kinda like, I don't know where you came from. She wanted a, a daughter would have kids and stay near home and a son who would go off and conquer the world. And she got a son that stayed home and had kids and a daughter who wanted to go off and conquer the world. So she got what she wanted just in the wrong genders. And I'm fine with that. And she's learning. But it's always, I've always seen all these very wonderful Ursula Kayla Gwyn. I mean all these wonderful, I can ramble off all these women named, but you're right.
So many genres women authors have either hidden, their names are using, sit at pseudonyms or initials. And I do still see that with the young authors I work with. Uh, it's becoming more rare, which is really exciting. But even like, I think two years ago I had someone say, you know, I don't want, I don't want my first name, you know, Joanna or something. I want to use my initials cause I don't want them to know I'm a woman. I was like, wow, that's still out there.
Alexa (23m 11s): And, um, the, I I pretty sure, no, I'm just pulling this out of nowhere like most people do with statistics, but, um, I'm fairly certain it was still as late as 2018, maybe even the 2019 report that showed that book sales by either, um, male names or books by men. We're outperforming books by women authors like tremendously. So
Autumn (23m 36s): it would not surprise me any of that. But I know I've seen it with
Alexa (23m 43s): Apple years. I don't know if that has shifted, um, since since the me too movement really. I mean a lot of things have really, really taken a different turn since then. And that was a very, very well-timed, uh, movement to happen actually because it happened right as I was getting ready to launch my first womeninpublishingsummit three years ago. So that's amazing. I was like, sweet. The rest of the world is on the same page as me.
Autumn (24m 13s): That's right. We were ready for something specific, a space for women to be able to help each other. And I think for so if we're as long as week, stay away from undermining each other when you, but authors are so good at not looking at other authors as competition. And I think women authors can be so helpful and supportive of each other even more so than you know, many other areas in places I've been in, other things I've done and seen super true.
Alexa (24m 39s): And the fiction side, like I have seen fiction authors really band together really well. I love to see the authors cross-promote each other. I mean, I think everybody's smart enough to know that you ha that it works with people in your own genre. Like it's hard to cross promote someone who's writing something that your audience doesn't want to read. But, um, I think I, I've seen some really great partnerships on the fiction side. I think the w the nonfiction side is still a little bit different and I think it's because I want to say something that's probably, I'm, I'm glad you have a fiction audience, so hopefully there's not a lot of nonfiction.
Autumn (25m 14s): So there'll be kind, everyone be kind NonFiction's
Alexa (25m 17s): aren't like that. Okay. The word I will choose to use is a day in and day out authors like fiction writers. This is what you want to do every day, all day, all the time. You write your books, you read your books and all this kind of stuff. But a lot of nonfiction authors, unless they're in a series like unless they do autobiographies of all the presidents or something like that, where it is truly their thing, like a nonfiction author often has a, a particular subject that they focus on and they write books as part of a bigger thing, right?
Like I was writing my lose the Cape books as part of a bigger community for mothers. Um, I was writing my S my grief books as part of a bigger thing. Like I didn't come on thinking I'm going to write a 25 part series on, you know, grieving weathers. So, so I think what I see sometimes is that not, not, uh, not that they don't want to help each other, but they don't, they haven't been raised to realize that they're not competition raised in their genre, if you know what I mean.
So, um, it's not the case at all in the grieving mothers community. Like everybody is 100% supportive of each other. We share all each other's stuff. We do everything that we can. But in some other industries I think you see people get very nervous about competition and that's um, kind of another one of the things that we take on is letting people know that, um, the, you know, the expression with, with a rising tide, we all ships rise, you know, so it's, it's w if you're helping other women, if you're helping other people in your genre, if you're helping promote other, and the reason I came to form this opinion just to let you know, is that because I saw it in action, I reached out to my network and I said, I have an author that's publishing a book on X, Y, Z.
um, we would love for you to be part of her launch team and advanced reader team. And the, and the answer that we got back was, I can't do that. I have a book that's coming out. It's on a similar topic. The books were not similar at all. Like, I mean they were in the similar genre, but like in terms of the key takeaways of the book. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Yeah. So the key takeaways and everything were different enough that, and the audiences would have been different enough but yet enough the same to support each other, you know?
And it really, it really made me think that there's still a lot of people who don't maybe don't realize like how much better we do when we're helping each other. Um, so anyway, sorry, that was a long tangent. That really is, I just, I just want to put that out there to say that like they're really, it really, you made the comment that there is not a lot of competition in books and I really truly agree that there is not competition in books. And the reason I say that is because I'm a voracious reader and I know my reading habits and I right now am on a huge world war two bad-ass females kit.
Right? Right. Any stories of women who just did incredible crap in world war II is on my, I will read everything out there. I don't care if the storylines are similar, I don't care. Like I want to read it all. And I think that's how many readers are, would they, they want everything. Right. So by being able to share about other writers who write in similar, similar types of things, you're able to say, Hey, I don't have anything new for you, but if you like my stuff, you're going to love these books and keep them entertained until your next one comes out.
Right.
Autumn (28m 56s): All right. Uh, yeah. Especially, yeah, when books take you over a year sometimes to write if not longer, especially nonfiction, if you're researching can take you so long and yeah, it's better to support each other than, you know, pretend like no one else exists in everyone's waiting with baited breath just for your book. And even like no
Alexa (29m 19s): could be considered a very competitive, a cookbook for example. Like, if you've got two people rating vegan cookbooks, well I can tell you that I like a variety of recipes and I like a variety. Like I just, cause I buy one vegan cookbook doesn't mean I'll never buy another one again. You should see my cook.
Autumn (29m 37s): Exactly. It's ridiculous. Yeah. I, I think, uh, the internet and being able to Google recipes is become one of my favorite things about the writers. Your day may have come. No, but there's still something really nice about that big book with the big pictures that you can put on your counter and look at why you're, but anyway, we digress and you don't have to worry about them battery dying or getting like flour.
Alexa (30m 4s): Exactly. But, but back to the idea of like this, this community, um, the real reason behind the women and publishing summit was, um, I was like I told you once I decided I was doing this thing, I wanted to learn everything in the world that I could about publishing. So my writing summit is one of many summits that are out there that happen all the time for writers, publishers, authors, you know, marketing, book, marketing, all these things are happening all the time. So I'm, I'm attending as many of them as I can and learning from as many people, but I was noticing like on the panels and the presentations, one, there was very little female representation.
So for like, yeah, for like every five guys there was like one girl and then um, the number of minorities was almost nonexistent in some of the ones that I was looking at. So,
Autumn (30m 55s): and your pro, your, you know, I didn't really think about it, but yeah, you're right. I most of the ones I'm very, very, very white and very, um, at least the people, maybe the attendees are a lot of women out there, but you're right, a lot of the panels and stuff don't seem to always include. So I reached out
Alexa (31m 12s): do the one that I was attending at that particular time and I was like, Hey, where are the ladies? Was like, I follow a lot of women in the publishing world. And I know that there's some women doing some fantastic things with writing and publishing and book marketing and editing and I'm like, I don't see them in your thing. And he was just like, oops, we'll work on that for the future. It's been three years since then and I haven't really seen an increase, but that's okay because I filled the gap with my own annual all summit but women and people that identify as women.
Autumn (31m 48s): That is so wonderful. And so you started, this will be your third year coming up. Correct. And it's coming up just around the corner. So this, we're recording this early, but this'll be released at the end of February and the next summit is March. Then you can register for free,
Alexa (32m 4s): free at women and publishing, summit.com am
Autumn (32m 9s): and I'll have that in the show notes so people can follow the little things. A lot of fun.
Alexa (32m 13s): What I decided to do with it was I was like, okay, so this is cool. We started out our conversation with talking about how women are different. So one of the things that's going to make this and that does make this thing different is that we talk about the things that make women different. Like we don't specifically say in an interview. So what makes you different as a woman writer,
Autumn (32m 32s): but we do, we talk about my process that
Alexa (32m 37s): are applicable to women and men. If you have men in your audience, they're still gonna learn a ton of information because the knowledge base is incredible, but we're not afraid to talk about things like, well how did you schedule it around having three children and this and that, or what was it like when you're, you know, if you're doing this and that or you know, what are the challenges, the mindset challenges that you deal with? Because we do have different mindset challenges and well, you know, marketing strategies that work better for, for women because we are afraid to just say I'm doing this and go for it or not all of us.
Again, you know, these are just common things that pop up are we talk about topics that are like really, really, really unique to women in most cases. Like trauma, sexual trauma, and, um, the, the need for our stories to be heard. And, um, and what it's like to be a minority minority or what is like to be a transgender am women yeah, I guess he is. He is now a man that are transgender, um, participant from the first year.
So, you know, we, we did deep, it all relates to publishing or relates to writing or do the things related to the production and publishing of a book. But from this, from the viewpoint of being, you know, the, the woman's viewpoint on things.
Autumn (34m 1s): It sounds, I know. And I know it's a wonderful summit and I, like I said, I was, uh, took part as a participant last year. This year I get to be on a panel and so excited. But yes, I love it. Writing tips. So that'll be fantastic. But it's just a, it's a wonderful dynamic and I agree. I love the fact that guys can attend. So like if there's a single father out there who's struggling to make everything juggle and also wants to write or has had past trauma because goodness knows between PTSD and there's so many things the me too movement is letting guys know that they can show this side of themselves as well.
So it is a very inclusive and welcoming summit where if you have questions that just everyone seems to gloss over and a lot of, Oh we just do it, you know, go get it done. So the next step just go to the next step. And they don't deal with the emotional hurdles that are underneath or between those steps. This is a great place to get those like answered it without being embarrassed. And I figured out how to juggle it all and keep going and still get up the next day and keep them away
Alexa (35m 3s): real. It's a very professional conference, but we get really real and um, you know, and some of them, some of them are just straight up teaching and knowledge and information and you're now going to find that touchy feely side to it because we want people to know, you know, this is how you market a book. This is how you build your email list. This is how you find an editor. This is how you make sure you're not getting screwed over by an editor. This is the important things. And so the way we've organized it is the five days we have day one is like the big picture stuff.
Why, if you're just thinking about writing a book am why you might want to do it. It's, it's more like inspiration and that the types of things that we were just talking about, those would, we definitely hit on a day one marginalized voices and how we feel and you know, all those types of things. We dig right into it. And then, um, or over the course of the next four days, we hit things like all the tools that you need. Not all of them obviously cause there's a bit Jillian Brazilian. But the main things like editing tips, editing, production tips, getting your book formatted, am how you distribute your book, all of these types of things.
We talk about marketing a lot, lots and lots and lots of great marketing stuff. Um, and then, uh, the day five this year, we've changed it up a little bit in day five is all about the business of being an author. So if you're struggling, yeah, if you're struggling with things like I don't think we have anybody talking about taxes this year. I may put my, uh, I may put the one from last year and as a replay just cause it was great information. But you know, just knowing these things, like now you're writing books with the hope to sell like you're a business owner.
Own it.
Autumn (36m 43s): Oh wait, stop wondering if you're truly an author and own your business and do it. That's a, that's a very good tip to anyone listening who has a book out there.
Alexa (36m 55s): Stinks. And, and, uh, you know, we want to write we have our passion, we're doing these things. And it stinks to have to sit and say, okay, now I have to go through all my receipts and log my expenses and you know, gather up my data and all this stuff. But there's some really, really, really important things that authors don't know that they need to know. Like if you are selling your book directly from your website, you better check in with your, your local state to find out if you have to have a retail license so that you don't get, cause yeah.
Cause I mean that they might cost 25 to $50 to get registered as a retail license, but if you get, they're cracking down harder and harder on digital stuff. So if you get fined for not doing things properly, it's going to be worse for you. You know? Um, and just as a side note, if anybody's panicking about it, if you just put links through to like Amazon or iBooks or anything like that, you're not the retailer. They are. So you don't have to worry about that kind of stuff. They collect taxes, they do all of that stuff. But if you actually have a Shopify store or a PayPal button and you are actually selling books directly from your website that you then, you know, distribute and all that kind of stuff, you do do need to check in and see what, what kind of protections you need to have, what kind of paperwork you need to have, all of that kind of stuff.
So that's just one little tip there that's totally off the topic. But it's important. And this is something that I learned along the way and I was like that's really scary cause I'm telling people all the time to sell their books on their website to make more money and not have to worry about, you know, Amazon or whatever. And um, I might be getting them in trouble if they don't know the rest of the story.
Autumn (38m 35s): Do
Alexa (38m 36s): that's, I mean that's a huge nugget that I don't think anyone else has really ever been mentioning cause you're right, I've even heard like, you know, sell signed copies, do this on your website. But that's perfect because that's a little lovely little teaser tips. So if people want to go enjoy this summit that's the type of information you're going to find there. And that's why it's really fantastic to join this one because it is information that there might be other ones out there, but I think yours has a different feel and a different vibe and different topics that you might not hear in many other channels.
So it's really exciting. I'm looking out for each other, we're looking out for each other and we're making sure that we don't make mistakes that are costly.
Autumn (39m 16s): Yes. And I, again, I think that's what women are amazingly good at. We help each other out and make sure that, you know, we keep each other safe and supported and you know, we're also very welcoming. So for anyone else who's looking for support, we like to open our arms and you know, make sure they're doing okay too. Well, is there any other tips? Anything else you want to tell us about the conference? Like I said, I will put it in the show notes and it's coming up on March 2nd and you said registration is free on the website.
Alexa (39m 45s): We have am three tiers so you can register for free and you can come each day. You have to, you do have to register to receive the links, you'll get the links each day. Um, and we dropped like between five and eight videos every day that are available for 24 hours. And then they go away at 10:00 AM the next morning. And, um, if you, if you're like, I cannot sit in front of my computer all day long, every day, you could buy just those videos for $47 and watch them whenever you want. Or you can upgrade to am or we're calling the full conference pass.
And that includes all the videos. We have some workshops that are only available to the conference pass holders. We have a, um, a private community where we do additional workshops and training, not only the week of the summit, but throughout the entire year. Um, we've got bonuses from all the speakers and sponsors. So it's, it's really, if you, if you get that prior to the summit starting, so if you hear this at the end of February and register, it's on only $67, it's going to increase in price as time goes. But um, and it's just, it's another opportunity for us to take, um, what we have going on and to continue it between at the conference so that we're not just dishing out stuff that first week of March, but all the way through.
And by the way, the reason we chose the first week in March, March is women's history month. And the last day of the week of the first week of, of March is always international woman's day. So on the eighth we'll have Brooke Warner who is the CEO of, she writes press and she is the author of am right on sisters. And she does a lot of talking about this particular topic, like the, the challenges that females face in the publishing industry and why it's so important to share our stories and why it's so important to band together.
So she's going to be our closing keynote and I am pumped up about that.
Autumn (41m 33s): Great. Yeah. Awesome. I can't wait. So, yeah. Well fantastic. I am so happy that you joined me on here and we've got to talk about those. And I mean I could still think of topics that I think women face just, you know, I don't think we're so good at making sure we toot our own horn and tell people that, you know, like you're a USA today bestselling author. I don't think that was even first in your biography or so. It was kind of buried in there and I think that's typical of us. So, Hey, we all have things to we need to remember about ourselves, but thank you so much for joining us and I really appreciate the time and I count to see you're here.
Some of my listeners, uh, over at the conference and like I said, I will be participating in a panel for tips. So I'm looking forward to seeing something, make sure you use the link that, um, the item's going to send out cause that's a better link. For that's a better link. Alright. Sounds good. Yes, I will have that am posted up there on the show notes. Yes, I think that's right. You did send me one and yes. Disclaimer, we're always honest. I think that is an affiliate link. I want to be able to reward you for sending your community, so make sure you go through her affiliate link.
Well, thank you and I had even forgotten that we got those as speakers, but Hey, that's so cool. Thank you. Alright, well again, I can't wait to see everyone at the conference. I can't wait to see quote unquote see you at the conference. Alexa and thank you again. It's been a blast. Yes. Thank you for tuning in next week. Yes. For we'll be back and we'll have another exciting new episode and hope you will join us. Then
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Did you know there are three different types of edits and editors?
It's true!
And in today's episode, we go into different types of edits, how and WHEN to use each yourself or when hiring an editor.
Plus, a brief foray into costs of editors and a discussion on if you really have to pay that much.
Watch the video on how to find an editor that we mention in the podcast at https://youtu.be/SshSW7jUDlk.
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Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to the amwritingfantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need in literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing join to best selling authors who have self-published more than 20 books between them. Now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I am Jesper and I'm Autumn. This is episode 60 of the amwritingfantasy podcast so I think this one should be a very informative episode for the listeners who are new to writing. We are going to talk about different types of editing available to you and what you should expect to pay for it. I have a few notes on that and for the more experienced writers, we will share our views on which type of editing you need when you are a bit further along in your writing career.
Autumn (1m 7s): And it's so sad. I know a lot of authors are not excited about editing, but I absolutely love editing. So hopefully we get that enthusiasm leak through and not have people go running away going, Oh my God, I hated it. It gets, it's so exciting. I love it. A
Jesper (1m 25s): yeah, but that's good. I don't know quite how I feel about it, so, but they're one of us. Love it.
Autumn (1m 30s): Yeah. I can say wholeheartedly that it's one of my favorite parts of writing cause to really take something that might be rough, might not be rough, and to turn it into something whole and get it ready to be released is just, it's such an exciting time. Yeah.
Jesper (1m 46s): Yeah. So we're gonna get into all of that, but Hey, autumn, I got to tell you at our house to the voice of, I have a been home alone for about six days now. So I think that it's not good.
Autumn (1m 58s): No, I didn't know your wife was away. That's, yeah. So three bachelor is in the house.
Jesper (2m 5s): It's no good. I mean it without my wife in the house, things just gets really unhealthy really fast.
Autumn (2m 13s): Well. So she's the linchpin that keeps everything too.
Jesper (2m 16s): Yeah. Yeah. To the boys. They, they sort of, you know, they do, they're begging eyes and stuff and about unhealthy food and they can we have this and that and then it's like, yeah. Okay. So we've been cooking unhealthy food and a my youngest was a at one of his classmates birthdays parties yesterday. And then uh, when we got back home we turn on the PlayStation and we played FIFA for something like five hours together while we were eating candy and pop. So it's just like, this is no good.
Autumn (2m 45s): This is a side of you I had known existed. I was so shocked. But it sounds like a wonderful bonding experience and it's an amazing segue into what's going to be our next episode. But I'm going to save that for the ending. So it's very fitting
Jesper (3m 0s): for the next topic now that, well that's good. But I, I am happy to say that my wife returned from Finland this evening, so I am really looking for
Autumn (3m 11s): fantastic. Well, I hope you've made her a welcome home banner and tidy the house and everyone is filled on their junk food now.
Jesper (3m 20s): Yeah, well the tie, the house has been tidy than cleaned and I did all the laundry this morning as well, so that's pretty good. And uh, no, I mean the boys and I have been enjoying ourselves, but, uh, I must say I do prefer when she's around it just a. And the funny thing is, I don't know if you, if you feel this as well, but it's really weird. But when she's not in the house, it's not that she has to, you know, lie in the bed next to me, but I just sleep better when she's in the house. I don't know why it's so weird. Maybe it's like 20 years living together that does that to you.
I don't know, but it's just like when she's not in the house, I don't feel, I don't sleep as well.
Autumn (3m 56s): No, I totally agree. And especially it's for me, like if I know Adam's away, I can like tell myself, you know, I'm alone and I get myself to sleep. But if he's having, like if he's sick or he's having a bad night and so he goes and sleeps in another room to not disturb me, it actually disturbs me worse because I wake up and I just, I just feel that absence and I'm like, where are you? Are you okay? What can I do this just like, Oh this is just, it's totally counterintuitive. He leaves so that I don't, you know, he doesn't wake me up and I'm like, no, you left.
You woke me up.
Jesper (4m 28s): Yeah. But it's weird. And and usually I, you know, my, my wife works night shifts so she, she's not sleeping at the same hours as me anyway, but it's just like the fact that I know she's in another room into Houseton just I just sleep better. I don't know.
Autumn (4m 43s): Well it's very, very sweet, which is good cause you and I, we are both very a. We both had very long term commitments to our spouses, so I totally get that. And yeah, it's someone who's been in your life, like you said, 20 years, so of course you're going to be like so fine tuned to like, where are you? You're not here. Yeah. It's weird.
Jesper (5m 3s): Uh, yeah. And I know I've got confirmed that everything goes to shit when she's not around. So we're six days. Yeah, it's way. I mean, one or two days maybe, but this is way too much. Popcorn. Just felt good.
Autumn (5m 16s): I, I never thought it was true, but I know a few other people who have said that they're, they, they see their spouse leaving and they're like, Oh, I've got time. I'm going to finish this. I'm not going to be interrupted. I'm going to get all this stuff done. And for some reason you feel a little bit less directed. I don't know. I ended up really having a harder time focusing, even though I know I actually have more time to work on something. And so again, counterintuitive, I think, Oh, the other person's not here. I'm going to eat oatmeal and I'm going to get all this stuff done. I'm not going to make a big dinner. And I'm like, I'm lonely, I'm going to watch Netflix or it gives a little L.
Oh darn it.
Jesper (5m 56s): What about what you then
Autumn (5m 60s): good? Well you know that we've uh, we actually move this week. So that was kind of the exciting thing. We left are very adorable apartment that I'm thoroughly enjoy it except for the noise and being right on the main street in Brattleboro and we're moving just, I think it's only three or four miles South to a little cabin in the woods. But in between we came running up to Maine to pick up a few things. It's kind of sad when you're like, Oh we just drove 300 miles just to go pick up some stuff. But that is America and the distances here and that's what we needed to do.
So we'll be back down to the cabin and just a couple of days and I cannot wait to get it settled. We have some work to do there cause there's am it's part of the agreement for us renting it as that we are actually fixing it up and adding to it a little bit because we've done that before. We've lived in a year, we've built cabins, we've done all this craziness. So I'm looking forward to getting that done. So hopefully I see the end of February and like it'll be done and will be moved in and the spring, hopefully it'll snow once. We'll have the snow falling through the Pines and the hemlocks and there's a little stream out front by the wood stove and it'll just be heaven.
Until then I foresee a lot of hard work and ah, I'm getting, I don't know if it's older. My joints, I love you still love woodworking but now I do too much construction and uh, my hands flare up a little bit so I'm not looking forward to that. But
Jesper (7m 26s): no, we will get through. Yeah, I kind of a got enough of all of that some years back when when we were moving out of imp apartment that we had to fix it up before we sold it. And I already back then I told my wife, I'm never going to do this again. If we have to wait like two more years before we buy or sell anything in the future, we have to save up to get some builders to do this stuff for us because I'm not going to do it anymore. And if I hate it, Oh, we go on the internet with the amwritingfantasy podcast.
So I want to give people a reminder of what we mentioned on last week's episode because this episode that you're listening to right now is airing on the 17th and that's special offer that we announced last week, ends on the 23rd of February, 2020 that is. So basically this is your last chance. So as a reminder, what we're offering is an ebook of the plotting guide that we are releasing later this year. And not to forget, we're going to draw one lucky winner at random who will win a free seat in our premium braiding costs.
The ultimate fantasy writer's guide.
Autumn (8m 40s): Yes. I am looking forward to seeing who the winner is. And checking all that out and see who joined us on Patreon to the links are in the show notes and yeah, come on over while you can, while we have this special offer, we don't do this this often, so uh, now's a great time to join. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It's very rare actually that we doing this sort of thing. So keep in mind that the deadline is on the 23rd and a. yeah, you just need to join us on as, as a or I'm sat there and I want to mention as well what I said last week though, the, the plumbing guide is actually going to be for sale on for nine 99 and you can get in for a $1 here.
So yeah, you do the math on that one. It's kind of worth joining. I do it if I wasn't already like hosting it. So I don't need to, I guess I've been working on the plotting book and so I know what's in it and I, uh, it's, it's a good, good book. It's going to be really great and I think help a lot of authors, which is exciting. Yeah, absolutely. And then I had you, you forwarded something to me that I had to share because ah, yeah, it's just so it's wonderful to get comments. So everyone who ever comments, even on the podcast, whatever you do, even if you're reading this, you know, someone's book comments and reviews are just so wonderful to get.
But we had a comment on one of our earlier videos is before we switched to being podcast based. So this is something that's very, I know it's so old, which is really exciting that someone only just found this YouTube video and they got really exciting and it was one that is am plotting a series before you, right. So this is something that came out summer of 2019 maybe late spring. And so I had nine months ago, but I wanted people to remember.
We do have these YouTube videos that are back there that are before the podcast, so if you're really enjoying these, go check them out. They're a little shorter. We've put a lot of effort into making these and uh, people have commented on them. Things like this, like this video had me florid. I'm used to watching several minutes of mindless chitchat followed by anywhere from zero to two useful pieces of information which I may or may not have already heard. Then here comes miss autumn telling me that all of this really helpful information I've never heard anywhere nor figured out on my own.
She's casually throwing it down so thick and fast that I had to keep replaying segments in the lecture. I have it all written down. You guys are a amazing with a couple of G's, which is awesome. I'm so sorry to see that. Your good faith attempt at creating a YouTube resource for writers didn't take off, which is why we're on the podcast now. You are both very accomplished and have so much value to share. I am so glad you are staying. Even if I met changing focus, focus to the podcast format and I would've been lost without this video and look forward to watching, listening to many more of your offerings as I work on my author dream.
So how is that for making you feel like warm and fuzzy? Yeah, that's so kind. This is so kind and a great reminder that we have some amazing videos that are there. More visual base because that is the format we were working on. So they only stayed as videos. We never transform them into a podcast. I guess we could always revisit them as a podcast there. And there's a wonderful YouTube channel. So if you guys have, you know, 20 minutes you want to spend and you've caught up on all of our 60 episodes Nella podcast go and check out the YouTube channel.
Jesper (12m 18s): Yeah, it actually, to be honest, it happens moderate or it has happened more than once. Um, that, uh, people have posted questions in the amwritingfantasy Facebook group and all I had to do was actually go to the YouTube channel and the link with a video. And post that as a response to the question race because quite often there is a good chance that there will be a video on the channel that actually answers the question that you are having because there's a lot of videos on, there was like three years worth of videos or something.
So at least once a week I think you were over a hundred. Yes. Over a hundred videos. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, so, uh, there's a good chance you can find something, but uh, of course you don't have to just key it is, I don't mind at all that you keep posting the questions in the Facebook group for you. Just notice sometimes I just reply with the video link and that's it. Fair enough.
Narrator (13m 13s): And on to today's topic.
Jesper (13m 16s): Okay. So editing, editing, editing, editing. And I guess those can be a bit confusing about the confusion about this stuff because there's different types of editing. But yeah, and when you're first starting out, you will, you hear different words being used or for or terms in terms of what editing is. But sometimes tear referring to the same thing can be a bit confusing.
Autumn (13m 43s): And I, I mean I do remember when I was first naive Lee working like I'd done a book and I before I'd become published, you know those early manuscripts that you pretend like you never wrote in are buried somewhere on a hard disk that you don't want to lose what you don't ever really want to find kin either. Um, and I really, I thought editing was maybe just punctuation or I really didn't understand that there were different types of editing in that to do it logically I had to figure out a sequence that worked for me. That is probably why I love editing now because I figured out a sequence that I really think is efficient and shows great results and works.
And I know that editing is not just, you finish writing draft one and then send it to an editor. There's like this whole, I have 10 versions usually between the finished draft one in the sense of the editor. There's a lot in there, right?
Jesper (14m 38s): Yeah. But th but I think there's like a, I don't know how you prefer to do this, but I was sort of thinking that we have, at least in my view here, we have light, we have like three different levels of editing, editing. So we have developmental, we have copy
Autumn (14m 52s): editing and we have proofreading. That's sort of the way I think about it. But I don't know if that aligns with you is I actually wrote down 5:00 AM versions. I don't know. Each one's is slightly different, but some of them sort of overlap. But yeah, so I, you have, you listed three and I actually considered almost five steps to do with an edit before, which is probably why I end up with 10 drafts because I probably do each of them as waves I guess. But I agree. You call yours, you start with the developmental at a I called mine, I call it content edit, but I think we're getting at the same thing, which is looking at your overall story structure.
Yeah. A developmental editing. Um, structural editing. You can also call it that. And so what did you just use? Their content continent is all the same thing. It is all of a sudden. I agree. And I want, I think is interesting is right off the get go there is contention on when you do that developmental edit for me there is a lot of people say you have to let your manuscript sit for at least a month, six months, a year.
And yeah, that's why there's this huge, I again, I've researched editing. This is like we found one of my weird hobbies I guess. I don't literally usually lead into people know how much I like editing probably cause I, I don't have time to edit other people's work. I barely have time on the podcast. That's not really, well they know, I love getting tips on editing because I do think it's fun. Um, but yeah, so most people say, you know, you need to let your manuscript even need to finish it and let it sit so you can come back with a fresh pair of eyes.
And while I don't disagree to me, you finish your last page and you know now how your book ends, which is an incredibly important piece of information when you haven't looked at your beginning for a few months, six months, a year, depending on how fast you write. And to me, to me, I like to whip out a sheet of paper and I have a um, a methodology I do when I do a content edit the first time and I do the fastest read through in the world and take notes on point of view characters, the major themes that happen, all of these notes that I then put down.
And I even little ones that say, Ooh, rough needs work, needs refinement. I write down the subplots, I write all of this information down on my content. Edits so that, um, after this first read through and by knowing how it ends, I get to compare it to the beginning and see if it makes sense. Or if I look at it going, it ain't the same book something happened in there. If there's some weird kink that I've got a smooth out or it's not gonna work out. I think that's just an incredibly important thing to do.
So I tell people you don't have to wait on your content edit, just go for it. Yeah, that's, that's interesting because
Jesper (17m 51s): and I think that's actually a good thing that we are coming at it from slightly two different angles because you edit as well. So in that sense you are an editor and are therefore you're looking at what do I do when I do this type of editing, where I'm coming from it from the angle of I'm hiring an editor to do this stuff, so what am I going to get when I hire somebody to do developmental editing for me. Exactly. Which is interesting because it's, it's, it's the same thing but it's two different perspective on it.
It is. And as again, some people, especially if you're new, you might not be able to figure this out until you've had someone you know, shepherd you through it a couple times. Or maybe you have the time and the resources that you can say, I am not learning how to do this. And you send it to a content editor, you trust all the time, which yeah, more power to you if you do. But I, I love being hands on and doing it myself. Yeah, absolutely. A but sometimes, I mean, especially when you're starting out, you need help from other people to other professionals who knows what they're doing and at least the developmental editing stage that's, so this has nothing at all to do with grammar and word choice or anything like that.
That's not what you're going to get here. Uh, if you're purchasing some, uh, developmental editing from an editor, they only focus on story level here. So this is like the big picture. So you should expect to get feedback on everything from how the story is structured. Uh, continuity issues, maybe problems with your pacing. They could give you advice on the characters that you're using. Yeah. And the arcs and so on, so on. So yes.
Basically the point is just to ensure at this stage that your novel will become a, let's call it good read, for lack of a better word, a before you actually spend a lot of time on fixing grammar and all that other stuff. So that, that'll be totally time waste if the editor ends up telling you, you know, chapter four to six is, is sort of derailing the entire thing. You need to rewrite those or do something differently or whatever. Right. And you will be glad you didn't spend a lot of time doing grammar stuff on chapter four to six.
That's just going to waste a lot of your time. Um, yes. Yeah, go ahead. Okay. Yeah. Is this a I think I like to put it that am you don't know if the words that you would be proofreading to fix the punctuation and the word choice or the spelling or even the words that are gonna make it to the final novel. So this is why you don't start with that. This is a content edit. So even just work out the, okay, so I'm building a am working on a building a cabin. So this is making sure that the foundation, the structure, the, you know, the roof is going to be supported at all is laid out, the bones of it are truly solid.
You need to figure that out before you worry about what color you're gonna paint the interior. Yeah. So we can call, we can talk about the cost towards the MTA, uh, for each of the types of editing. But I, I guess the quite unfortunate part here is that this developmental editing, if you are, if, if you're looking at it from the angle of hiring an editor, like I am not talking about doing it yourself, then a the unfortunate part about this is that this is usually something that the beginning writer needs and it is also the most time consuming and therefore also the most expensive type of editing.
So that's a bit, it's a bit sad that that's the way it is. So when you're first starting out and you have no money for it, then that's, that's where you have to buy the most expensive type of editing. But uh, yeah, I don't know, but that's just what it is.
Autumn (21m 31s): It is. And I mean, I know some people would get, try to get by with beta readers or alpha readers or a really good author friend who's more of a mentor. So there are other avenues, but definitely almost every first time writer new writers really need to do a content and it helps someone, you have someone help them through a content edit. It would be it really unusual for you to have right of first novel with all on your own and it's perfect and doesn't have any problems are structural plot, plot problems or characters, Oh, sorry, just being truthful.
But it's possible. You might be that 1000000th percentile. I can do it, but I definitely think this one's worth getting done. But it is huge and time consuming. And you can work with someone for months, if not years to make your novel perfect or at least it's perfect. It's going to get. So yeah, it's as you know, as best as it's going to get. And don't spend years on your novel. Please probably not unless, unless you're really young and you have a lot of learning to do and you're really a perfectionist, but hopefully it won't take that long.
But this is definitely one of the most expensive edits you can hire someone to do.
Jesper (22m 48s): Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So if we climb up the editing ladder than my next entry is copy editing, I don't know what yours are. You have five. So yeah, I
Autumn (22m 57s): do after my con, my read through. So I kind of continued or an initial read through where you do all of this outlining and get all this stuff together and then it's going back through in the chapters you like needs to be fixed or subplot loss, fixing all those problems. So that's still part of the content edit. I have like a read through and then content edit. So those are two parts of this whole. So my next one is, uh, the grammar and punctuation, punctuation. So yes, a copy edit. So I agree. This is after you got to the point where you feel like all the chapters, all the pacing's, right.
The characters are right. The words of you know, been smoothed out. Now you need to work on word choice as well as some grammar and punctuation. You getting that smoothness, that starting to look like English. Yeah.
Jesper (23m 47s): Starting to get that nice sheen to it. Yeah. Some also call this stuff line editing and again, in my book is the same thing. Um, but uh, I dunno, some might argue otherwise, but I, I in my view a copy editing and line editing is the same thing. Um, so the editor will review your manuscript and the am Oh yeah. First draft, whatever you want to call it. A but you know, once you're done with the novel and you feel like this is the best that I can make it on my own, you probably have done several self-editing passes on it already.
Um, then they will stop fixing spelling, grammar, punctuation errors, uh, and, and those sorts of thing. Um, and why I'm saying the copy editing and line editing isn't the same thing. If you want to separate these two, then I would say copy editing. We'll only focusing, focusing on grammar while line editing becomes a more like deep dive into meaning the meaning of each sentence and your word choices and stuff like that.
But so, so those who argue that it's two different things, that's what they will tell you, that that's the difference between copy editing and line editing. But to me they're, the dude does this in one one pass. So, and usually when we get editing done on our books as well, our editors will both fix grammar and punctuation errors, but they will also tell or make suggestions to us with comments about, Hey, you know, maybe you reuse this word or you used this word three times on this page, or would it make more sense? You use this word instead?
Because I think it clarifies better what your meaning and that, that sort of thing. Right. So that's to me, you get that in one go, but a some will argue differently, but yeah, so be it. Yeah. And I think most good, uh, editors, at least the ones I use, we'll actually try to do two passes. So they'll do what? They'll do a second one and sometimes they'll do it a computer aided one, which is obviously an option. And then they tried to do a, you know, a red one, a personal one so that they can get it in.
A good editor will, if they see a sentence that does not make sense, they will flag it. They'll say, I'm not sure what you mean here. This doesn't sound clear. A good editor will also say, are you sure you met this character? Cause I know I've done that. Sometimes you have a character in your head and you type the wrong name or your pronoun choice was incorrect. So that's, that's always something that hopefully you have enough to just say that he, his eyes was blue in the previous chapter and now the ground, Oh if you have an editor who's that good, keep them forever, send them candy, whatever it is, they need to keep them happy.
And I would say this one, I call this, I have a two to three level on this one. So I mean I had to fix the problems from the content edit and then I have going through each of the chapters so that the ones I say sounds rough, you know, smoothing them out so that the words sound a little bit better. Then I go through, I do what I think
Autumn (26m 44s): is a good grammar punctuation, like a good line edit, everything should kind of fill up and I often find myself going, Oh wait, did this happen? And you know, checking things. But then my final, final pass when I'm doing my line editing is I actually started at the end of the novel and work to the front. And I do that by paragraph, not by sentence because I'm not that cruel to myself, but I do know some people who do it by sentence. And literally starting with the last page, looking at the last paragraph, I read it and I started going backwards because this is a fantastic way of seeing your punctuation really clearer, seeing your word choice and Oh yes.
By the way. I'm also keeping a list of times when I like see that I have favorite words. I've used way too many times in the novel or things I've consistently misspelled. I'm keeping a side list so that when I'm done I can also do a search find and go and look for any of those other ones I've messed up. Like I said, I am anal with my head. I admit it. That's what an edits I need to be. You have to be very, very focused on the details and and very perfectionist kind of way, you know? Because otherwise they edit this. No good.
Yes, and that's, I mean, and I still pay for an editor on top of doing all this on my own, so this is just, my past doesn't always feel devastated. How many errors they still find in my own rating after I've done all these 10 drafts of passes, but it goes to show, I've done 10 drafts of passes and I'm anal to the core and I'm running Grammarly and I'm running such search and find and replace and I'm still missing things. It's amazing what you miss. You always need to have someone else look over your stuff.
Yeah, that's the thing, right? I mean especially like if we're talking fantasy novels, so we have like a 100,000 words that's like 400 pages and you just get, you get blind to it because once you've been over 10 times, you start to seeing the what your mind wants you to see and not what it actually says on the page. And I think why shifting to another person helping you to take a look that they'll catch the stuff but and when they do you a and you get it back with track changes you will like how could I miss that? And that's to be the beauty of reading it backwards.
As you cannot get caught up in your own storytelling, you have to look at just those words. And some people reading it out loud works well, changing the font or the font size works well. But for me, I just like reading it backwards. It works pretty seamlessly. And my husband, husband and I are both a sound sensitive. So a even we don't watch many videos because we don't like noise and we still are. We have it on mute. A so am not gonna sit there and read 105,000 words out loud, especially backwards kill me.
It's going to take two months. I read much faster. But yeah, so that's the idea is you don't want to be caught up in your own writing because Oh it happens. You start falling in love with the romance scene. Are you the climax getting exciting and you don't pay attention to your word choice again. So it's very important to find a way of breaking that. And I have to say it's really helpful that when you send it to your editor and you correct the changes that they come back with two then if you have time and you're not really so anxious to publish it, letting it sit for two weeks and then reading through the whole thing one last time is, is also amazing.
What you'll find that you want to tweak and what maybe they didn't see to recommend on word choice and how many times do you use the same word? So yeah, there's, Oh, you can keep going on edits at some point you just have to say it's done. It's what I've, I try not to read. I try not to critically read something else I've written and have edited because I know I'll start tweaking things. It can. Yeah,
Jesper (30m 30s): absolutely. So the final States on my ladder is than the proofreading. Yup. Uh, so this is the lightest form of editing and also the least expensive of the mall. Uh, and this is exactly what it sounds like. So this is just the editor will go over the manuscript and fix any spelling, grammar and punctuation errors. And then you might say, but wait a minute, wasn't this what you just explained as being the copy edit and Hey, thank you for paying attention.
That's what that was exactly what I was saying. But where the, where the differences though is that with the copy edit, we also just talked about how the editor that will give you suggestions on the words that you use or the meaning of the sentences and, and do give you some sort of feedback on that sort of thing and where they might suggest you do some changes. Whereas the proofreader will typically not do that. They will just go through the manuscript, they will just fix errors and that's it. A so you're not gonna get any copy, edit type of feedback as well.
So that's the difference between copy editing and proofreading.
Autumn (31m 37s): Yes. It's a much lighter one. You might not get the noticing the pronoun choices or the questions of like, are you sure you meant this character here? Uh, those more personal touches and kind of like, Oh, you've been paying attention to what I've been writing or not. There it is literally like someone going use misspelled this. You missed an in, you should have a period or a semi-colon here. And
Jesper (32m 0s): that's about it. Yeah, exactly. So do you have more on your editing?
Autumn (32m 6s): No, but that's like, like I said, I've, I've pretty much after I've done mine, I've sent it to the editor and when I get it back, I'll do the accept and reject changes, which sometimes I do reject changes and if I can, I try to set it aside and then I do probably something that comes up more as the light proofread, looking for any last changes in last mistakes that maybe the editor or I have missed. And sometimes I have to say if you have some good beta readers or some really trusted friends, it's after done, send it to the editor, maybe I'll send it to them, which will give me maybe another month, uh, before I see what they have to say except, and reject their changes in, have my final run through as well.
So yeah, you're probably a 10 to 15 versions in my camp at this point.
Jesper (32m 57s): Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, but that's how it is, right? I mean I think there is a good point in what you just said around approving and declining changes because just because the edits assessed that they want you to change something doesn't necessarily mean that you have to do it. Um, you can reject changes and just say no. What I wrote was what I meant and that's what I wanted to say and that's okay. But I would just say as well that you're paying a professional person to do this work and they do this work all the time.
So try to, you know, if you are rejecting some changes, I would say be damn sure that this is really what you want to do. I mean, I would say you should probably like, except like 95% of the changes they want to do because they're probably right. Yeah. So it's only like on of the few ones where you 100% certain like, Nope, this is exactly what I want it to say and then stick with it. If that's the case. But a don't be too much like double, you know, or questioning, I should rather say questioning what the editors sending back to you because they know what they're doing.
At least if you've got a good editor. Right. So
Autumn (34m 7s): yes, and I would say yeah and definitely. And there are, if you've done a good job and selected the correct editor, you should have a good trust and he should really at least look at their, what they've suggested. And if you don't understand or you disagree, you should be able to open a dialogue and say, by the way, I was just, I don't agree with this. Or could you explain this a little bit more? But I definitely know like when I was starting out, maybe I had some editors that I thought had come recommended and I know I had one that changed all my goddesses to God, singular plural capital.
And that was a nightmare when I realized that. And I have to say that I never sent her a fantasy one again because it just was like, wow, okay. So from now on, I'm going to check religions and let people know up fronts, um, about the content so that I do not have such weird things happening. And I've had another editor who gave me a fence Hastick of few pages of an example. Edits I loved it, went with him and he ended up the manuscript he gave me back, I think it had, I can't remember how many changes it was, outrageous number of changes and he had gone through and changed all of my action tags and dialogue to dialogue tags.
So it would be like growled, grumbled said instead of picking up a glass or something and I was trying to fix it and I finally just kind of broke down in tears and my husband's like, just tell him you want your money back. There's no way you will ever feel that he didn't, that you didn't miss something that he changed and I had an agree with them. I was devastated. So there are some issues with editors and make sure you do your, like I said, I thought I did due diligence on that one.
I still secretly think he subleased out his editing to someone, a third party because it was such a big change. So I don't want to get people scared, but editing is expensive and there are definitely steps to find a good editor. And one of the best ones is to talk to author friends and say, who do you use and do you like them? Who do you recommend?
Jesper (36m 13s): Yeah, that actually reminds me of what actually what we just said before as well. Because if you go onto the amwritingfantasy YouTube channel, there is actually a video there where I'm talking you through like how do you find an editor? And I'm basically because in my, uh, in in G D day job land, I have hired a lot of contractors over the years and basically you need it. It's sort of the same thing here you are hiring a contractor, so you're buying a service and the editor is selling you a service.
So you need to approach this in the same way as you would if you're hiring a contractor to do something else and you need to vet out who are the good ones. And who are the bad ones. And obviously you want to end up with a good one. So if you will put a link to that video in the show notes so you can go straight from there and check it out if you're interested. But actually we'll talk you through the steps that you need to go through to find a good editor. And I can promise you if you do what I'd say in that video, there is a very, very high likelihood, it's not a guarantee, but there's a very high likelihood that a that you will end up with a good editor.
And editing is not like a protected title. You know, everybody can open a website and call themselves an editor and sell their services. Yes. Yeah. And that's the problem we are facing here. So they can charge you quite a lot of money to do something and then what you're getting back, especially if you're new to writing, you won't be able to sort of see or tell that something is off. So you might take their word for gospel and then they had you down a completely wrong path. So that's the danger. But uh, yeah, check that video out, the link in the show notes if you are interested in that.
Sounds good. Okay. So we were gonna talk about pricing before we wrap up. Yes. I think that's a good point. Let's get to that.
Autumn (37m 59s): Just so people have an idea of expectations because I think some of the problems are a maybe going for a low end one, not going in wanting to save money, which I totally understand. And maybe getting someone who doesn't quite know what they're doing and then you end up paying for something that you end up having to maybe pay again or you lose sales or you get bad reviews. And that's a really high cost of itself. So you should go into this knowing that there is a cost. You're paying for a professional and you want to be paying a professional to do this.
Not am your aunts, cousins, best friend. Absolutely not. No, no. I'm going to be a good professional editor,
Jesper (38m 36s): but no, but these are professional people, right? So, so of course you are put paying for a professional piece of work. Uh, it's this, this is not where you want to skimp on, on money, right? I mean the and the same, we're going to say this again over and over again in the self publishing success costs for later this year. But when I'm talking about covers and that course, I, I keep saying the same thing. You know, this is not where you're going to save your money. No. So I was trying to find some, I, I searched quite a lot on the internet earlier today to see if I can find some industry standard rates for reference points, but I wasn't quite able to.
So what I can do here is at least from my end, I can sort of give you what I believe should be around the rate that you should be paying for the different types of editing a but of course, this is based on my own sort of point of view and experience. So you can also correct me or challenge me autumn if you think that I'm off on some of this, but, uh, but at least this is how I see it. Um, at least it gives you people a bit of a pointer on what they can expect. Absolutely nothing else. And I've definitely, like you said, I've done this in the past for other people.
I've been an editor so
Autumn (39m 48s): I can tell you if I think it's falling in the rates I find or remember as being about the going rate. Um, but yeah, it's been a couple of years now.
Jesper (39m 57s): Okay. So I have three stages here. Like we talked about developmental editing, copy editing and proofreading and a. I've tried to put some pricing together for each of those three stages to see what you can expect and we can, we can just circle back afterwards a bit to the more experienced author and on what, what you need because you might skip some of this stuff, but at least if we assume for now that you're going to go through all three stages of editing here, then you start with the developmental editor we talked about before.
And I would say you can probably expect to pay something like $6 per page. And normally you would say that, uh, there is 250 words on a page, so that if we calculate that, that means that if you have 100,000 word fantasy novel, which is quite common, that gives you 400 pages to edit. So at $6 per page, that's $2,400 for their development.
Autumn (40m 55s): Yeah. And I honestly think that is a pretty good average price, but also possibly on the low end, a really in depth, someone who might work with you to really talk about the character development, character arts. You could be paying for a fantasy novel up to five to 6,000.
Jesper (41m 14s): Yeah, I mean, OK. So, so these are like a great. Yeah, I think we can expect around, but you can go on all of these. I would say you can go out a lot more expensive. I mean the best, the best editors out there, they have so many clients that they can charge a premium, but they also extremely good at what they do. So you get what you pay for here.
Autumn (41m 35s): Definitely. But I would say 24 to me, that's actually not even that the middle, it's kind of a low end average. Three to three to four is probably average to me for something as long as a fantasy. And if you're talking series now, let's just start with book one. Yeah.
Jesper (41m 54s): So as you're going to hear that this is the most expensive type of editing, and unfortunately as we said before, this is what you need when you're first starting out. So that's a bit of a shame. But yeah, that that's it. A it,
Autumn (42m 7s): the improvements you'll see are amazing. So once I can pull all your friends and family and have them for one year, this is your birthday present. Go for it.
Jesper (42m 20s): Yeah. So the next day it's then copy editing and here I would say, then we go down from the $6 per page to probably land $4 per paid at 400 pages. That gives you $1,600 for a copy edit.
Autumn (42m 33s): No, I think that's a very, very fair, very honest average. It could be I think as low as 1200 as high as 24 but that's, yeah, that's a good average. Yeah,
Jesper (42m 45s): and proofreading is after that, then it gets even cheaper. You can probably get that for $3 prepaid. So that's a total of $1,200 for 100,000 fans. A word fantasy she novel, but I would also say it, it depends on what you can find because we are with our proofreaders for example, that we use for our novels, we are paying like $300 for a proofread. So it certainly does not have to cost 1200 at all. But I think if, if we just go like on random checks with Reedsy, for example, if you go on Richie with just like a website that has a lot of editors that you can hire, I think you should expect probably like $1,200 for a a proofread.
But it can be a lot cheaper than that as well. But again, you need to be careful here because especially with proofreading, some people charge a very minimal fee for it, but what you get is also a pretty bad, so you need to be careful.
Autumn (43m 44s): I agree. And yeah, I mean, I've seen very, very cheap and sometimes they're amazing. I, I, I have a few beta readers who refuse to get paid and they're wonderful editors and I love him to death, find them, keep them, love them always. But yeah, then even still going through an editor, I mean, you can get away with three, 600 a 900 somewhere in there. It's definitely the lesser end, but it's also not someone who's going to really, they're going to fix some stuff, but they're not going to make it shine that if you don't know how to make it shine on your own, you might still feel like you're missing something if you just do a proofread.
Yeah.
Jesper (44m 23s): Okay. So you can see that that at least gives you something like to go through all the stages and you are up to like five, $7,000 maybe. Something like that. Yeah. It's not cheap. No. Well, but it's, it's the cost of, of, uh, of putting out a professional piece of work, which, which you have to do. Uh, but on the other hand, I would say don't get like disheartened by the cost of editing because in the grand scheme of things, if you're, if you're looking at all authorship as a business, you know, this is your biggest expense.
And compared to other types of businesses, I mean together with the cover of course, that that will be slightly expensive as well. But compared to other types of business, this is not a lot of money to run a company on, you know, four or five, $6,000. If you tell them what other industries that this is your cost base, they will happily take that, you know, 50 grand just to get started, right? Where we can do it for five. So it's, it's not too bad. But I do expect an understand of course, that for some people it is a lot of money and then you just have to save for it.
But what I don't want to give us the advisers that a have you ever heard the, the, the, the term saying minimal viable product. Have you heard that before? I have heard that before in terms of marketing. So basically the idea is that you, you, you do it as well as you can and then you publish it and then of course you're going to get complaints and then you read the complaints and then you start updating based on that. So, and then once you've sold enough and you have money for it and edit it and you hire an editor and you make them do a proofread for example.
But honestly this is just hurting your brand badly. So I don't do that.
Autumn (46m 11s): Oh yeah. I don't want to say unless you're like doing it under a pen name and you plan on killing off that author pen names so that you don't care about the repetition. That's, yeah. I wouldn't recommend it as the best way of building an author career. You go into it and like we mentioned circling back around as you get better hope maybe you can get out the co, you know, drop the content edit or maybe you can find a beta reader who's going to be your proofreader. And really all you're doing is that middle level, about 1600 or maybe you'll find someone who'll do it for 12 I mean I've been with my current editor for like five or six books and at that point we're pretty much like, Hey, you're going to do this for me.
Hey, yeah, I'll do it for that. Oh Hey, thanks. Cause I'm a repeat customer at this point. You know, he's making money off of me because he knows I'll be back again and again and again. So you know, I'm at a rate that I'm sure he's up to his rates for other people, but I'm still at the low rate from five years ago.
Jesper (47m 8s): Yeah. Well, but I, and I think maybe maybe to finish off, you know, for the more experienced, right. A it probably goes without saying. I mean, if we can use ourselves as an example, right? We do not do developmental editing, we don't pay anybody from it, uh, for, for developmental editing. But of course we do ping pong, ping pong back and forth between ourselves in terms of making sure that there is consistency in the manuscript and and and all the steps of the story makes sense. And the character arcs and all that we do, we do that between us.
So once you've written enough novels, you don't need the development that edit any way, you will know where the problems are and you will know how you probably even to fix them yourself. So, so that part you can skip once you get a bit further ahead. And then what we do, at least on our end is that we, once autumn have done all her editing, which of course we have the benefit of autumn knows what she's doing and that's a bit of it. Um, but once she's done with all her editing, then we send it off to a copy edit.
So the first editor that gets it, we'll then do both the proof reading, but also give us feedback on words and sentences and all the stuff we talked about and does episode. Um, and then we get it back from there. Then autumn will accept and decline that changes. But then we actually send it to a second editor. But this is only a proofread then in the last stage, uh, so that we make sure that we use two different editors on all our books because as we talked about before, you get blind after even editors get blind on the words.
So giving it to another editor at the last States and, and th this last days is not expensive. We probably pay like $300 for that last step. So it's not too bad. No. Um, so by then, autumn have been through a manuscript like 15 times and we've had to edit those going through it. And I have to tell you that there are still errors in it. It's just impossible to avoid it. And we just, I mean, I, I keep a side list.
Autumn (49m 7s): If I hear back from someone who's like, points it out and I don't immediately change everything. As soon as someone tells me about it, I keep a list and I tried to once or twice a year do an update and fix everything at once because otherwise you're, you're getting, you know, you're fixing something twice, one month and once the next month it'll drive you crazy. But yeah, I usually go through these books enough that I have them memorize. People ask me like years later, Oh, I can't believe you remember that seat. It's like, are you kidding? I can recite this in my sleep.
Yes, absolutely. And a and then we move on to the next book and zoom. We forgotten all about it. So that's how life works. And maybe the lights off. Oh no, I still remember it. Well, I think if I had to go back and redo like book one or something, I think I would have to read up on it.
Jesper (49m 54s): I don't remember most of it, but I don't remember the details. Yeah, you're probably right. Yeah. So autumn. If I get some outro music going here, you will have about 10 seconds to tell the listener about next Monday's episode. So up I'm up. Let's race. All right, so next week on episode 61 I have a special guest, Alexa, big Wharf, organizer of the women had publishing summit, and we're going to talk about some issues facing women writers.
Narrator (50m 25s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the amwritingfantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the amwritingfantasy podcast going. Stay safe, safe out there and see you next Monday.
Dictation and how to use it for writing is a topic that has come up on multiple past episodes, so Autumn and Jesper decided to make it into a full length episode.
In episode 59 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, you'll learn what benefits there are in using dictation.
What equipment you need. And how to go about the actual dictation; especially how to handle all the fantasy names.
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SPECIAL GIVEAWAY
And here's the link to the special giveaway: www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy.
Everyone who signs up to support the Am Writing Fantasy podcast before the 23rd of February 2020, will get the chance to win a free writing course.
The Ultimate Fantasy Writers guide will teach you everything you need to know about writing a fantasy novel.
Here are links to what Jesper use for dictation:
Handheld recorder: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Olympus-WS-852-Digital-Voice-Recorder-Silver-Large-LCD-Screen-and-Speaker/333224752740?epid=2255359847&hash=item4d95be3664:g:9b4AAOSwNmxZuB3z
Headset: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Andrea-NC-185VM-Black-Headband-Headset/183446856673?epid=129519208&hash=item2ab648e3e1:g:lIMAAOSwI~Bbn-wv
Mini fur to block out wind noise: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00NMUUIRK/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_ep_dp_jik-ybTJQM13A
Dragon Natural Speaking software: https://www.nuance.com/dragon/business-solutions/dragon-professional-individual.html
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy.
For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to the amwritingfantasy podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need in literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self-published more than 20 books between them. Now onto the show with your hosts. Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello. I am Jesper and I'm Autumn. This is episode 59 of the amwritingfantasy podcast and we have a topic that came up over and over and over again in past episodes. That is dictation. Um, I think it has come up as side comments more often than, well, I dunno just about anything else on past episodes. So we thought we better turn it into a full episode and that is how to use dictation for your.
Writing was there a knee better medium than a podcast to talk about dictating your novel? I think this is perfect. Yeah, it's, it ties in pretty well, doesn't it? I think so. It's like we planned this or something.
Autumn (1m 17s): Uh, I, I, I feel like it's fate that plan itself because I mean, I, I honestly, I was trying to think earlier today how many times the dictation has been both these sort of side comments in the past and it's just, I don't know. But it's been a lot of times. Yeah. I mean, I think I could name three or four off the top of my head, so that's, that is quite a lot actually. It's at least on our minds. I'm not sure about our listeners, but we'll see. Yeah. Yeah. But, but I think this will, this is going to end up being quite an interesting conversation because a well, I use, Oh, I do dictation myself.
And and I know autumn you've sort of tried it a bit, but I also feel like you might not be the biggest fan of it. Yeah. I think we'll have a nice wide perspective of our thoughts on dictation. Yeah, yeah. That's good. That's good. I liked a, but first of all a I wanted to, so I want to hear just how, how, how have you weeping autumn Oh, it's been good. Good. My parents came up to Vermont, which is always am. So that's where I'm staying right now.
And it's a seven and a half hour drive. So of course I'm like so nervous parents on the road that long. They're getting a little older, which always when you see them in person, you see that, you see the truth of that no matter how many times did you face time someone did I do that in one stretch. They are hardcore travelers. When I was a teenager and we drove from the East coast to the West coast and back on a two week trip. Um, so you know, so that's where you get to 7,000 miles.
Yeah, my wandering ways are very legit. It was great to have them come up and it was, it's been a long, long, long time since am. I've hosted them actually in a place I was living, um, probably almost a decade. So it's been a long time. I've stayed with them, but actually have them here and be, the host was very different and it's, it's not a huge apartment. It's a two bedroom with one bath. So it was a lot of thank goodness her family all right.
Put up and stuff. But it was great having the up and showing him around the Brattleboro in the town. So I thought it was great having some family time. How was it?
Jesper (3m 31s): That's good. Um, it's been good in general, but I think as well that we've had a bit of a, what seems like a streak of bad luck when it comes to injuries. And yeah. On the, on the previous podcast episode, I shared how I hurt my wrist above that amount is better. Yeah. It's, it's, it's still not 100%. Okay. But it's pretty good now it's minus stuff. But then last Monday, uh, we came back home from soccer practice and, uh, my youngest son started complaining that he's a his knee was hurting.
Oh, no. Yeah. And then I was like, okay, that's, that's not good, you know, try and, you know, sit on the couch and relax for a bit and stuff like that. Right. Whatever else you think to do. And then a couple of hours went by and um, and it was still sort of just hurting. So he went to bed in the evening and then the next day when he, uh, got up in the morning, he just couldn't walk. Oh no. Yeah. So it was, it was really bad. So we start off okay. We a so he of course did not go to school because you could not walk anywhere.
So a we took him to the doctor and a so I'm going to try this out. So he said it was a sprained cruciate ligament.
Autumn (4m 55s): I hope that's how you pronounce it. Pretty close. I actually, we had a dog who sprained his crew. She, uh, you didn't see, I'm not gonna pronounce it either, but ligament as well. So that's not a, that's a long injury to heal from.
Jesper (5m 8s): Yeah, I Googled that translation by the way, cause I have no idea what it was called in English, but uh, but yeah, I mean the, so the doctor said that he should just rest, um, would see then did last week and it probably took like, I dunno, five days or something. Then the pain was gone. So he does not have any pain anymore and he can walk around completely normal. Um, but the doctor told us last week, so this week meeting the week after the pain has gone, he still needs to take it easy because otherwise it can come back.
So he's not allowed to play soccer practice this weekend. I can tell you that somebody is not very happy about that. Uh, but in general, you know, just trying to get him to take it easy to do. It's just imagine how easy that is to tell the young boy that you can't run around
Autumn (5m 58s): too much and peace, you know, settled out. It's just, it's not easy. At least he understands English tricep telling that to a small current terrier. Who? Liz. Very feisty. So, Oh yeah. You might be able to reason with your kid. Especially I know how passionate he is about soccer, so yeah, he loves it. Yeah. Maybe I know it's going to great him, but it's like never play again or just don't play this week now. Maybe never again. It's a bit too far, but, but I did tell him today, you know that well, the reason that you can't go to soccer it is because if you go to soccer then it might get worse and then it's going to end up taking even longer before I can get back to playing a so you, you're sacrificing one week so that you can pick it back quickly.
Uh, he seemed to accept that though. Excellent. I can't be reasoned with at least try to sit there and pop them, pop some balls off of his head or something. Maybe just he's not a dark, you know, that's my experience. I only know dogs. Yeah, that's what I meant. Oh, we go on the internet with the amwritingfantasy.
Podcast okay. So today we have something really special to announce. So if you are listening to this episode on the day that it releases and that will be the 10th of February, 2020, then yesterday on the 9th of February, we opened a very special reward. Don't do you want to tell what it is? Autumn what do you want me to, Oh, do you go ahead. I just can't drink of tea anyway.
So, okay. So basically what we're going to do is that we are going to offer one free seat in our premium writing cost, the ultimate fantasy writers guide. I'm so excited about this because I love new students and I know how much someone loves getting a spot in this course, especially for free. So I think this is a really big giveaway. Yeah. So this is a, uh, wow. Remind me again autumn what is it, six $700 normally for the seat and the cost, right?
Oh, $600 yes. Five 97 yeah. 97. Yeah. So you give away, you get five, five 97 for free. Um, by basically what we, what you need to do is that you need to sign up to become a patron supporter. So everybody who signs up to become a patron supporter between the 9th of February, 2020 and the 23rd of February, 2020 day, we'll get their name in the pot and we will draw one random winner at am, uh, to
Jesper (8m 56s): win this receipt of the ultimate fantasy writers guide course. Yes. And good.
Autumn (9m 3s): This is not just writing. I think we should tell it. Let people know about that. It's not just like how to write, but it's just about to ask you if you could explain what this entails. Let's see. I was just somehow reading your mind from how many thousands. So we should look up, we should Google. We are from each other. That'd be hilarious. But yes, so it's six modules on how to write, how to develop an idea to write the beginning, the middle, the end to make sure you, you really develop and create a good story as well as character and world-building cause it is geared towards fantasy writers and then there are modules on how to grow your fans, how to do marketing and outreach, how to do editing and then even one on formatting and covers and all those things you need to know for publishing.
And then I'm going to final one module on how to grow your author platform and you know, become more professional and not just, you know, if you really want to become a full time author or even just make this more of a business model, it's you know, how to grow your platform that way as well. So it's 12 modules and like I said, it covers everything from, I have this idea too, I have several books under my belt and this is my brand, so it's really cool. I love it's a one stop shop on how to write.
Jesper (10m 21s): Yup, absolutely. So everybody who becomes a patron within between this eight 9th of February, sorry, and the 23rd of February, I will get their name in the pot as I said. And you might end up the lack of winter, but there's actually more than that because every single one who signs up during this timeframe, we'll also get a copy of the ebook copy of our upcoming guidebook on how to plot a novel. So whether you win the seat in the guy costs or not, you will, no matter what, get that ebook of the plotting book as soon as it comes out is scheduled to come out a bit later this year.
But you will get it as soon as it comes out. So you are guaranteed to win something.
Autumn (11m 6s): Yeah. Which we like I everyone should get something to take home with them. Yeah.
Jesper (11m 12s): And of course all the normal rewards that we are offering over on Patrion is applicable as well too. Of course going to get all of those as well. Once you sign up, you can see those on the patron pays itself. Those are link in the show notes. Um, and I, I guess I should also point out that once we do release this a guide on how to plot a novel, we're going to charge nine 99 for it so you can get into Patrion and this special reward for $1. So it's sort of a no brainer really.
Autumn (11m 43s): It's worth it for to sign up and yeah, you'll get some great stuff. Not to mention, I mean we've been doing posts and stuff on there for what a year now and it's, there's a lot of information just to read through. If you went back to the beginning and started there.
Jesper (12m 2s): Oh yeah, there was a lot of information in there and a also at the $5 tier you get access to the monthly a Q and a sessions. Uh, so those are also in there, those recordings for you of all the past Q and A's that you can listen to as well. That's true. That, that's some good stuff. Yeah. Um, and I guess also very important too to note is that a by joining on Patrion, you're also helping to ensure that uh, autumn and I will keep the amwritingfantasy podcast going. So there is that as well,
Autumn (12m 34s): which is very important to knowing you, I hope. But to us it lets us know how much you appreciate what we're doing.
Jesper (12m 42s): Yeah, absolutely. So as I said, there's a link in the show notes, so just go and check that one out and see if you want to support us there. Uh, and to remember the offer disappears on the 23rd of February. So we're going to talk about dictation. Autumn.
Autumn (13m 4s): Yes, we are. We're going to talk about dictation. That's really actually cut. My dad would appreciate that. Thank you. What about talking, talk about talking about, yeah, long talking, writing talking. So I don't know, before we get into all of this stuff around dictate should we just start out maybe by what is our own experience with dictation
Jesper (13m 24s): then what have we used it for and why before we talk about any, well, all the advice stuff I guess,
Autumn (13m 31s): I guess, I mean some of mine will come up with am the pros and cons is I saw it, but I can try to keep, save those for the end. And I will just say the, the cold facts of what I've done with dictation and maybe why I tried to do it. But it's up to you do, you've been doing this longer than I have and I don't know if you want to start with why you picked up dictation and what your, what you think of it so far.
Jesper (13m 59s): Yeah. Uh, so at, well there's a bit of story attached to that actually because, um, I don't quite remember when it was exactly. It's pro, it's probably a year ago, maybe more to be honest. A I'm not quite sure, but I had one day where, uh, well I woke up in the morning and then my index finger was completely stiff, so, and it took like, you know, like I went to the showers and all that, brush my teeth and so forth.
Then I started to move it a BA being able to move it again and uh, and it, it happened for a while. Like that, you know, every morning I woke up, I would have a stiff finger and I was thinking like, Oh, this is not good. Right. I mean, if you want to earn a living as a writer, then it's not good that you are, you're not able to, right. No time for you. Yeah. So, so I was a bit concerned, uh, not, not that all of a sudden like that out of the blue, that a I would have issues with my fingers just like that all. But I was more like thinking longterm, right?
That I was concerned if I'm feeling stiff fingers already now at this age, you know, how, how is it going to be in 10 years if I keep writing all this stuff. Uh, and, and if, if you lose your ability to write and, you know, I was pretty concerned where would, where would that lead to? And that was actually how I started thinking about and why I started doing the dictation was just because, well, I guess you could call it a health reason like that because I just, yeah, I just wanted to wealth be a bit more gentle on my fingers.
That was one thing. But the other thing is that usually when, for example, if I have conference calls or phone calls and stuff like that, I like to walk around because I feel like when I'm walking I'm thinking better. There's probably, it's just probably just me telling myself that that's true, but, but I, I just feels like I'm thinking better when I'm walking, so, and, and moving about as well, instead of sitting in front of the computer all the time in front of a keyboard. I also felt that that would probably be better for me in the longterm.
So that was the other reason that I picked it up. So, yeah.
Autumn (16m 14s): Oh, that's still a good story. I, I, I didn't actually know that. Why you started it because I think am for me it was one, I knew you were doing dictation but you're not the only person I know. And there's been so many authors. Um, Joanna Penn has done a podcast on a blog post on why she does dictation and why she moved to it. And so many people have said that they write so much faster. They use time that they might not have been using otherwise. So you can kind of fit it in maybe in different ways.
If you have a hard time sitting down at your keyboard, you know, technically you could go dictate while you're making dinner, as long as you're, you know, you've got the microphone and something cook hooked up, or if you're taking a walk or, I was thinking about it on my commute. I have currently an hour drive each way. And I was thinking, well, I could try dictation I mean, my brain's ruling about it usually about my stories are what I'm working on anyway. So why don't I give that a try? And all these other people are doing it and they're saying it is so much faster and they're like getting a book out in a month, you know, or you're, you know, you're doing so many more, maybe 5,000 words in a session or it's just going so much faster.
Even if he did a whole chapter, uh, you know, sometimes just sit down and write, type out a chapter. A talking if you're organized is so much faster than typing so that you could actually have this much more work done if you dictate. And so that's, I was like, darn, that's it. I'm giving this a try. So that's what brought me to dictation.
Jesper (17m 46s): Alright, OK. yeah. Uh, I mean, so basically,
Autumn (17m 53s): well I really like it. I guess that's, that's what I can, I mean I, it's a lot more productive. Um, and I don't, one of the things, and I don't know, some people, I think some writers she had his challenge with me, but the others probably don't. But when I'm typing stuff, I often find myself, you know, my, my thinking is way ahead of my fingers. So, and then sometimes I struggled to remember what, what was it that I just started, I wanted to write here and then I sort of pause because I have to think again because I'm usually like three, four sentences ahead of how fast I can type.
And that's really annoying because it disrupts my flow all the time. Whereas when I'm speaking or dictating, I can just keep up with my trail of thought. So it's, it's a lot easier. I could see that. And I think so you've definitely found a use for it and I've got a I can give some pros and cons too. When I think it works, and when I think it doesn't work in my why, it might not be the best fit for the way my mind works, which will admit, might be the only mine like mine on the planet, but probably not probably there somewhere out there whose as kooky as me.
But I know part of what I came up against when I first started looking at this was people talk about dictation, so what are you dictate into? And I ended up sending you this email saying, okay, how do you do this? When I started doing some research thing, how do I even get started with this? So you can, can you tell people how you're doing your dictation in terms of equipment? Yes. Yeah. Okay. So by the way, I can, I'll, I'll put links in the show notes to all of this a equipment stuff as well, so people can go on and find it.
Um, but so what I use is that I use a handheld recorder, uh, in my case, I use Olympus a w S eight, five two a. So it's just like a pretty small and simple handheld recorder um, and then I used to stand at headset because then as I said before, then I can move around a and I have equipped that headset with a mini for show that the blocks out any wind noise because a I have actually been walking outside dictating books as a, I mean, people might look a bit weird when you're walking by and talking about somebody slaying dragons from what bad, but that's life should be that interesting.
Yes. But a so I equipped the a headset with that mini for a to block out the wind noise. Um, and then of course a the main thing here is that you need a dictation software, meaning like a speech to text software a and here I use dragon natural speaking a because that is by far the best software onto market. There's nothing that does a dictation as well as a dragon naturally speaking.
Um, and that's basically what I use. So in total, this is going to set you back something like a little bit less than $400, I think. Um, and of course the main expense here is the software, the dragon naturally speaking. Um, but of course if you don't have money for that, you might be able to find some secondhand version on eBay or something like that. Yeah. And that's what it to just give it a try. I wanted to start cheaper and so I looked at am Google drive actually has a pretty, you know, it's still Google and so it has a half decent, um, text to speech.
Yes. And then I ran into the problem where even if I wanted to do the dragon am dictation software, I can't because I'm on a Mac and they killed their Mac platform about two or three years ago. So you can only buy it for a PC and that just, this is me off, but we won't go there. They have something new called dragon anywhere, which is am text to type. So it actually, you don't have to record it where the, what you're doing, it's actually kind of neat.
You literally, you're just talking into a microphone. It is recording it and it's not turning itself off or anything else. And it's, you don't see what it's doing, where the dragon anywhere your live talk to type, so as you speak it is translating onto a page and if you're looking at it, you will then look at it and be a little bit distracted or you'll see the spelling errors. And so I really think if you're going to do dictation, you want something where you're literally just talking into something and you're not going to see the visual, otherwise you get incredibly distracted.
And I would save with the Google drive option, which I did try out first because, Hey, I already had it. It's already set up on my phone. It has the problem where once you pause, if you're, if you're a pauser and you need to think about the next sentence or just something, it'll just turn itself off. So then you have to press the button again and get it going again. And then you see what you've been talking and it's just, yeah, that's, I think you really, if you're going to do this, you need to find a way of being able to talk to something and then upload that sound file am to something else that's going to translate it because otherwise you're going to get way too frustrated and too caught up in looking and reading at what you just did and see that it shouldn't translate something.
Right. And especially when you get like my current work in progress has a lot of Gaelic and native American names and I'm sorry, will you ask a at a, Hey, Google drive does not know what to do with that. Where the dragon software, you can teach it to recognize those words and it's a lot of time investment, but you, if you're really going to write 80,000 words or a whole series, you can get it up to speed on what you're talking in will actually spit it out perfectly. But it dragon anywhere and that was the other problem.
Dragon anywhere requires an internet connection. And where my life takes me, I don't have that all the time, so I could not actually use it at times. And I think that's what dragon anyways, a subscription service. It is a monthly fee. I don't like that personally. I like to just buy the software and then I own it. And I was very disappointed that it didn't have the capabilities as the dragon your. I'm using the natural speaking I w you know, if it had a subscription where I could then use like the upload the file and have it translate, I would've been, we would've been worth a month, month for me just to give it a good earnest trout.
Yeah. Yeah. But it doesn't have that capability. It is literally just the talk to type and it doesn't have the upload. And so it was very frustrating when you're stuck in this world of so many different platform users. My parents are online X and or left in Lennox and so yeah, there's a lot of people not using PCs. Hello? Dragon are you listening? Yeah. Yeah, I, I, there was, there used to be an Apple version of it though. They killed it.
They killed it because they couldn't get it to work properly. I mean, I was making too many mistakes and all that, so, so they, they killed it, put it online. Maybe there's a market for it, I'm sure that they will or something, but just want to play around for a bit, uh, testing it, you know, you can use the Google docs. A iOS software also has the building dictation software that is powered by CV. Yeah. So you can play around with it like that or even use dragon anywhere if that's, you know, just four months or something.
So just dragon anywhere has, it does have a 14 day free trial. So I did give that a go. I love it when people do do that, uh, to the, you know, they give you a chance to drive it. So I did use the dragon anywhere and just consciously made sure I was somewhere with internet connection when I gave it a go. But it was very, like I said, it's, it would be so much better to be able to do it. Like you're doing it. And I think Joanna Penn, it literally talking into a recorder and then uploading that file. Yeah. Because basically the way it works on my end is that I have my handheld recorder and I just talk into that one and then once I'm done a I just stopped the recording and I plug it into the USB port of my computer and then it just transcribes the whole thing into a, into a document.
Right. So it's, it's perfect. Um, but unfortunately I would say that at this point in time, or at least when we're recording this, maybe it'll change. So probably will change in the future, I'm pretty sure. But right now dragon natural speaking is the only proper software, I think if you want to dictate an entire novel that is usable, otherwise you can use other things like we talked about. But you know, I don't think you're going to get an optimal result without dragon naturally speaking.
Yeah. And I can say, having just done the research, I think in December that, or maybe it was even November, but it was still very recently that there were a couple other ones that talk about being novel, but for reviews and comments, uh, dragon is, is the way to go. And it really has a good solid platform where if you're going to do something that's 80 to a hundred and some thousand words, it's, it's designed to handle that where so many of the other ones are more for spreadsheets and business reports.
So there are like 5,000 to 10,000 words and that's, that's really what they were designed to handle. But there's a few who are trying really hard to compete. But I think for what people were saying, just being able to transcribe the words into sentences, the way you're saying it a dragon is definitely still the best. I think Google was coming up second because they do use their AI am deep thought that, you know, they're really, they're getting very, very good. Google is an understanding what you're saying, but they're not actually quite as good as dragon for a for this text to type or talked to tight.
No, indeed on me. And the last thing you want to be annoyed about when you're trying to dictate an entire novel is to software. So if you're getting annoyed with it would be like having a faulty keyboard and trying to write a novel. Right. I mean you don't want to deal with that, so yeah. Yeah. And I know they'd go ahead. Yeah, no, I was just saying maybe I could just talk a bit about training your dragon software because I'll have to assume for the rest of this episode that we're talking about trying to drive himself where because of not much else makes sense to me.
Yeah. That was going to ask, cause I saw even when I was doing the research that there were really two minds about how you do the dictation. And there was some, actually I think Joanna Penn, um, and a few other authors just literally talk the way we're talking right now. And they don't worry about saying period, a space, new paragraph, but I think you do something differently. So maybe this is where you're heading. Yeah. Well, yeah, we can get into all that, but, but what I wanted to say first was essentially, so when you get your dragon software, you basically have to train it a bit because there are, well like me, of course I'm not even native English speaker, but so, so, but, but even if you are native English speaking, there was a lot of different, um, uh, well what do you call it?
Like not slang but a dialects, dialects and accents. Everyone's a little different. Yeah. So, so the software need to learn how you are pronouncing words. Um, and if you take a bit of time to actually train the software a, then you can get a very, very accurate result. So I think my dictation is about 99%
Jesper (29m 42s): accurate when I dictate. It's very, very rare that software makes any mistake. Um, the few times it happens, then it's usually because either I'm speaking way too fast, which I have a tendency to do. Uh, if I don't sort of remind myself to at least pronounce the words properly a then sometimes it is the software might misunderstand me or if I'm out walking in, the wind is blowing straight into the microphone. And of course if it goes wrong, right? But, uh, but it's like 1% of the time.
So usually it works wonders. Um, and then I would say what you do is that you take a few chapters of your writing and you use that as a training of four, the software basically. So when, once you're, once you're starting the, the, the software will actually ask you to just start dictating some stuff so that they can learn a your way of pronouncing words.
And they are, I'm, I'm saying, take your own book you wrote yourself and then start dictating that because then the software will learn your way of writing because what you wrote is also when you start dictating your novel, it's going to be sort of in the same way of, you know, it's the same word to using. It's the same way you are speaking. Um, so you might as well train it from the get go on your work rather than some other author's work.
So don't, don't pull down a random book from the bookshelf and start dictating the wasted opportunity. Yeah. If you don't have a novel, then just write 3000 words of random stuff, know it ran at random story or whatever, and then use that as you are method. That sounds good. A yeah. And then once you're done with that, then you need the software to transcribe, uh, then it actually does allow you to basically connect straight into Scribner.
We talked Scrivener and episode 54, if anybody needs some input on that, but it does allow you to do that. But I actually don't, I always pull up a clean note pad and then I asked the software to, to describe into the notepad rather than into Scribner. And then I copy paste from the notepad into Scribner. And the reason I do that is because I don't want to have any conflicting functionality between Scribner and dragon. So when dragon transcoders transcribes it, there is no like software on the other side, so to speak, that it might have any conflicts with.
So an note pap, there's no software, so it's just transcribing and and that works best. So that's how I do it, at least it sounds pretty good. And so when you were saying with dictation you then you do put in your periods and you tell open quotes and quotes.
Autumn (32m 41s): And so how do you, how long did it take you to get used to talking your punctuation? Well, actually not as long as you think. Ah, yeah. Uh, yeah, I, I don't remember exactly how long I spent getting used to it, but it came pretty quickly. Uh, but I think Myles will vary on this. You know, every person will be a slightly different. So some people will find it very difficult where others may be like me, I found it quite easy. Um, but the thing is that if you want to start using dictation then it's not a thing that you try one time and then you give up thinking that, wow, okay I tried it.
That doesn't work. You know, give it at least a week or two if you're dictating every day and then go for it for a week or two and see. And then you can decide afterwards that if it doesn't work for you that that's fine. But it's PR dictation is not for everyone for sure. But I also believe that a lot of people, they just give up too fast because it is different and you need to train your brain to do it. Yes. That would be my biggest comment too is even if you decided to go with, uh, Joanna Penn who doesn't do the punctuation and you just talk, cause that was what I was willing to just start with that and just narrate a story.
So you're basically telling a story to you know, the wind and just go ahead and tell, speak your book. And I still kind of am in love with that idea, but I did find like my tips, if you're going to give this a try, you should have some pretty, I think it'd be harder to be a pantser unless you're really good pants are, but you should have an idea of where your story is going because you can get off track or get lost very quickly. And like I said in the worst thing you can do is actually have it doing the talk to text where you're seeing it put out what you're doing.
So you don't want to do that. You want to be able to talk right into a microphone and you want to be able to sit down and focus. I, you cannot do this while you're driving. Trust me, that's very dangerous. So do this while you're walking or sitting outside or sitting at home or you know, you, you really, especially until you get this going and used to it, you need to consider it your writing time. And it's not just a shortcut. You need to really work on this and focus, but you, it's, to me it's worse. It's so much easier to get lost in off track.
But that's also because from my own learning abilities, I learned better. And why when I see it in front of me, I need to actually read a when I, when people speak to me, I actually do not comprehend it as well until I write it down and then it clicks in my brain. Somehow it becomes cemented. And so the dictation ended up being almost difficult that way because I'm usually, I'm the memory, uh, you will have to Yesper ask me like, did, how did, why don't remember what we talked about. And I'm the one who remembers, I'm the, with my husband, I am the memory, but when I only hear it spoken, I don't remember it as well.
So I was thinking I was getting lost in my own story. I thought it would be easy cause usually when I'm writing, I have the whole scene playing in my head like a movie and I'm just getting it out. I'm just trying to keep up with the characters and saying what I'm seeing. And so I'm like, obviously it'll be so much faster to just say what I'm seeing, but I would get lost. Like, did I say that? Did I? I was, I would get so complicated, like not remembering what I was trying to get to that I actually like typing.
I actually do like typing. I hate to say it and I'm a fairly fast typists. I mean I can go over 60 words a minute if I'm typing fast. I've done up to 90 words a minute. So I'm a really fast typist, so I usually do keep up with my thoughts and I, if I get a thought that's ahead of time, I just write it down that I jump in. I fill in backspacing so my writing is not always front to back. It's sometimes front to middle to front, to end, to middle, to front end. Um, I'm very, I hate to admit how chaotic I am.
It sounds horrible, but I am not as linear as I thought I was. And trying to dictate a chapter from front to back. I realized how much I'm not linear and again, I think I could train my brain to do it, but definitely not having access to the software that would have made it easy or was kind of made it a huge challenge I think for me. But I would definitely say if you're going to do this B serious work on a scene at a time and have an idea of where you want to go, if you, if you're good at winging things, I'm pretty good at winging things.
I, I always show up at the podcast with half-baked ideas and somehow we get to the end of it every time. But for the book where I am kind of a hybrid and I liked the plot and I kind of know where it's going, it dictation was a real huge challenge that I have put aside for Monday for now. It sounds great and I'd like to give it a try again, even though I don't have a PC in my life at the moment. So I, I again, I'm just going to put a baby though too. Hey, dragon cop base. Um, maybe if they do the cloud based software system where I can use what you're using, I think it would definitely be worth trying again.
But for the moment, I kind of like my, especially right now where my writing time is very limited and I can just come back, see where I left off and go am and I don't need anything else but my laptop, I'm really good with that. So that's where I met with my dictation. It's, I think it's sounds so good. I'd love to, I have this visualization of going out into the woods and just talking to the tree is telling my story to the world and having it flow. And that has not happened yet.
I don't know. But, uh, and, and I, I think everybody, you know, everybody
Jesper (38m 37s): is finding their own way through it in the end. That's fine. I mean for me at least I asked you said before, I think it's important to to dictate the comers, the full stops and all of that stuff, because when you get into the editing afterwards, if you don't have all the customers and the stops in the paragraph changes in there and all that, it's just, it becomes one big mess for me. It does. It's just like, Whoa, what is going on here? And the stream of consciousness.
Yeah. And then, yeah, I just don't like that. I like it though. At least there was some structure in there. Some of the comments will definitely be wrong and all that, but, but at least there was, it reads like sentences and it reads like a story. Right? A it's, it does not read like a complete mess. Um, because that, that's the other part about it. You know, that the dictation for me is a tool for first drafting it. I've tried to use it actually also for editing and Oh my God, what an eye matches that.
Really, you should the look on my face when you said that. Yeah, that was a complete nightmare. So I remember going to do that again, but it is for first drafting and and because it is for first drafting. Then I also feel that it's important to just keep the flow going. And that ties in with what you just said before because you are absolutely right that at least for me, it helps a ton to know exactly where I'm going. So when I start dictating a chapter, I know where it starts, I know exactly what's going to happen in the chapter and I know where it ends.
So basically all I do is I need to fill in the blanks, which does mean for me. Uh, my, the plotting takes quite a long time because it's very detailed. But I would almost say that if you took a novel and you'd pulled out all the descriptions and all the, you know, the, all the am dialogues and all the description of, of how the characters are feeling, then you have my plot are plotting because it's so Dita.
It's explaining everything that happens. A and all I need to do when I'm dictating is basically putting in what the characters are seeing. And what they're hearing and what they're feeling and their thoughts, and then the dialogue of course. But other than that, everything is in my outline already. And here of course, I fully understand that we are all very different than we find out way, and that's perfectly fine, but at least if you know where you're headed, that makes a difference as well. With the dragon software, the dragon software does not close down because you're stopping.
So it doesn't matter actually, if you stop and you think for 60 seconds about what you want to say, and then you continued the software, we'll just, you know, not trust or 60 seconds so it doesn't matter. So it's not like your foster it going all the time. What do you just stop and you think that's, that's absolutely fine. But if we're talking about that we want to dictate with a high word count per session, then of course if you're stopping too much to think about things, then that slows down your production.
Right? So yeah, my MA's will, it'll vary how you go about it, but a set up. But also to come back to the unique fences you were, we talked that you mentioned earlier, because I have a trick that I use there, um, because especially with fantasy, uh, we have a lot of, we had words, no, really? Yeah. Well I'm like character names, place names and all the weird stuff that we come up with. Um, and it's, it's a bit of a nightmare to train the software to understand what it means because at well then you would need to pronounce it exactly the same way every time.
And you probably, you don't even do it at a SDR the yourself. No, probably not. No. So what I do is that I take a, uh, a small index card and then I make translations on it. So for example, if our wealth flower coming series, um, our main character is real. So I would just write on my index card rail and then I would write equal hero because he's the main character, right? So whenever I come to, I need to dictate his name.
I would just say open brackets, hero, close brackets, and then continue. And then once I've transcribed the whole thing, then I'll just do a search and replace in word and say, please, you know, replace this with a rail. And then that's it. And you and I do the same for all the different places. A so I could just write, for example, one of the city I could translate into just being capital or you know, a small city, big city, whatever.
I mean I have them on my index card so I know what it means, what it is. So while I'm dictating, I'm, I'm carrying my next card and whenever I need to save the words, I just take a quick peek at the annex cotton, then I'll say the, uh, the, the, the replacement word instead. Right. And so that just keeps the flow going and it makes sure that you don't end up with a, some sort of weird transcription when you're going back to a to edit that you don't even know what is the city person I'm talking about here. I have no idea. Right.
And I have to write that in the past is it's really annoying when you're trying to, you know, edit a chapter that you, you dictated like a three weeks ago. What is this? Yeah. That, that's actually really, I bet that helps speed it up. And that's a really good tip. Yeah. And the other thing I do also to just keep the flow, which I'm sure autumn is going to get so annoyed when she gets no, but what I do just to keep
Autumn (44m 33s): the flow going is that a I don't really, unless it comes to me straight out, then I don't really stop much for to describe setting. So if they, for example, approaching a castle or something, I won't usually stop too much in my dictation flow to think about what the castle looks like. A instead, I'll just say like open brackets, insert description of castle here close brackets. I can't wait for this. I know you're gonna love it.
It's rough draft and it's like, Oh fuck off this description. I have that. I know exactly where I need to be. I guess who or what I'll be adding. Yeah. But, but it's basically, I mean the, the intent of it is, is just to keep the flow going and, and what exactly what the cast looks like, doesn't matter for the story to be told. You know, you can handle that in the editing and there you can, you can think more about, okay, what would it look like? And because also when you, you're dictating, you often say what just comes to you and what comes to you is to cliches as well.
And that's why I prefer not just do it while dictation because it's, it becomes very filled with cliches. So let's go for the moment of truth considering you have plotting and then you have all this description and stuff. You have to put it on the back end. Do you really think dictation is faster than typing? I think if you are dictating, no, sorry. If you're applauding, I should say like I do then I think it might be a slightly faster, but probably not a lot because it takes me a long time to product level because I explained that before.
Right? So you're very detail. If you're one of the writers who you can get by with a plotting each of your chapters with like 10 bullet points and you just know where it stops and you know a bit about what happens in the middle and you know where it ends. If, if you, if you feel comfortable with your plotting at at that level, then I think it will be a lot faster to dictate uh, because you, you, you know, essentially you could plot your entire novel in probably a week if you're okay with just bullet points. Um, and then you just start dictating and you can, it's not difficult at all.
If you spent like two to three hours dictating, it's not difficult to do four or 5,000 words. That's, that's pretty easy. And you have to write pretty fast. If you're going to write 5,000 words in two hours, then you print them fast if you can do that. Um, so it's not, yeah. In terms of speeding up, it really helps a lot in, in, in that way. Well, that's fair enough. Well. So I think it's probably if, if it's something you want to try, I think it might be worthwhile. And like I said, I, I struggled with it and I gave it a a, gave it a good college try, but it's not going to work for me at the moment, but I'm willing to go back to it at some point to give it another try.
Cause I still have this, this idea in my head, but definitely am I want to do the dragon naturally speaking and until I can do that, I guess I'm just kind of waiting. Hello. It's definitely still intriguing, but I have to vent. I still kind of like typing.
Jesper (47m 50s): Nope, that's perfectly fair. So I think in conclusion, you know, am the main thing is here that you, you sort of need to know where you're going in advance, whether you plot in detail like I do or a bit more high level that's up to you, but, but know where you're going in advance. Otherwise I don't think dictation will help you much. Um, and then I would advise you to use some placeholder words instead of your. Wonderful fats. And then of course a above all, you need the right equipment because otherwise it's not gonna work, especially when it comes to dictation software.
And unfortunately Mac users, I, I'm not sure it's going to be well for you for the time being, but a we're waiting to pick up the show notes then a I will have link all the equipment that I personally use there. Uh, there will be some things to eBay's and stuff too, but it's basically just to show you the products though. There was no Fillion there is no affiliate links there. You see, if I had take been dictating the evidence, dragon would not understand what I said. That's right. But there was no affiliate links.
That's what I was about to say. A it is just to show you the product names. And if you don't show up on eBay, that doesn't matter. Just write down the product name and find it wherever else you shop instead. It's pretty commonplace products DS that I use, so there's nothing special in it. So I think that's am that's the word. And dictation sounds good. Talk to you next week. Absolutely. So we'll be back next week and the next one day, we're going to take a closer look at editing and which different types of editing is available to you.
Narrator (49m 29s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the amwritingfantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and YJesper on patreon.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the amwritingfantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Have you ever thought about sharing the writing on a book or short story with a collaboration partner?
Autumn and Jesper discuss not only tips on why authors team up but also layout steps on how to find someone to write with, including how they ended up as writing and business partners (which is quite a story!).
There are definitely some hurdles to navigate when and if you decide to write with someone, including just if a writing partner will fit your style and expectations.
Check out the FREE Ultimate Fantasy Writer's Starter Kit that Autumn mentioned in the episode at http://ultimatefantasywritersguide.com/starter-kit/.
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy.
For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to the amwritingfantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing join to best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them. Now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I am Jesper and I'm Autumn. This is episode 58 of the amwritingfantasy podcast and we're going to talk about collaboration with other authors today just like a autumn and I write books together and we're probably not going to touch much upon the actual ins and outs of how we write together, but the listener, if you want to know more about that, then just let us know and we can make that a future topic for another episode.
But today we keeping it, we sort of taking a step back and William steps investigate why you might want to consider collaborating with another author, but then also unpack the crucial question of how do you actually find someone to collaborate with. If that's what you want to do. So it's a, it's a pretty packed episode today, so hopefully that explanation sets things up correctly. But uh, yeah, I think that's it. Autumn isn't it?
Autumn (1m 29s): I think so. It's sort of the broad picture of you and if someone wants to know the ins and outs of what it's really like to collaborate closely with another author, especially one who's on the other side of an ocean, uh, we can touch on that one in the future. Yeah, indeed. So how have you been? Oh, you know, my life, it's always a bit of an adventure. I think that's just going to have to be like my slogan. Maybe they'll have it, put it on my toe. Tombstone, I always joke that I wanted am my obituary to say, um, where my tombstone to say to be continued.
I always seem to have something else going, but it looks like I love my apartment that way. I've been staying in since, uh, November, but I think the time here is coming to an end. It's a little expensive and it's in town, it's noisy. And we just got this lead on this little tiny cabin in the woods. So I'm kind of really hopeful that this ends up working for us. And then we'll have a chance to move into this great cabin.
Jesper (2m 31s): Yeah, you're used to not having too much space, so I guess it's not too bad.
Autumn (2m 36s): Yeah, it's am. It's tiny. It's like it's kind of a tiny house, tiny cabin. But I'm so looking forward to not hearing traffic and just as a stream running in front of it and there'll be birds and you can just hear the wind in the leaves and yeah, I'm keeping my fingers crossed. This all works out.
Jesper (2m 54s): Yeah. The, those parts that you mentioned there about not, not hearing traffic and birds and whatnot don't pop sounds quite good to be, but I think this, the size of the place would drive me bonkers. I have to admit, I've never, I've never had hopes of living in a tiny house or a tiny cabin. I even, the one Adam and I had built was, you know, it was like 450 square feet downstairs, 500 square feet. So two floors of that. That's a thousand square feet. That's a lot of room for two people. But this is more on the 100 to 150 square feet sits scale and it'll be, we keep talking, we can always write a book about our experience.
That is true. But on the other hand, of course you don't have to kids like we do it, I'll place you. So that helps a bit. Yeah. It's just a very small packable dog. We should be also been, how was your week? Um, I, I've, I've, I've been good or I'm, I'm starting to feel good again. So it's an injury. Yeah, it's about, about three weeks back. Uh, I was taking the tress out in the morning and the surface was slippery out there and of course I didn't notice, so I actually fail.
And then I landed right on top of my wrist. So am it's like three weeks back and it's only just now that it, it starts to feel normal again. So it, it, I, I guess as we get older it takes longer to heal. It is. And I know, is there anything more tragic to a writer than injuring your wrist, even though you do do dictation. So I guess, but yeah, a lot of typing that you do. I do a lot of typing as well. Yeah. And, and it was really annoying because the same day when I failed, we were going to host, uh, our youngest kid's birthday party at the swimming pool and I, well we, so we had a lot of kids coming in and what, I was not going to swim myself anyway, so, so that didn't matter.
But you know, we were small, like keeping an eye on them or whatnot. But when I fail, of course it did hurt, but it wasn't that bad, you know, it was just like, ow that hurts. And then you sort of keep going. So we went to the swimming pool and it was already hurting in the locker room a bit. But then after a while, wow. After we've been there, so I think probably a couple of hours had passed since I fail. I just couldn't move my, either my hand or my fingers anymore at that point.
So it was just like, yeah, it just hurt like crazy. So that was no good. Well, I'm glad it's getting better. That sounds horrible. And I'm trying to visualize trying not to visualize the idea of wrangling a whole bunch of young children who are old enough to be running around, but not old enough to be really responsible at a swimming party. Yeah. But it works. And you usually people listening to what I say, I know I'm, I'm a referee as well, so I'm used to, I'm used to telling people what I want them to do and usually they listen to the voice of am, you know,
Autumn (5m 58s): you better listen to me or else that could be useful.
Jesper (6m 1s): Yeah, of course. Yeah. I dunno. But also maybe on a different note, I wanted to mention that last night I finished the last episode of the witches.
Autumn (6m 13s): Oh, we just finished washing that too. What did you think the entire season, just this first season one? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I'm curious too. What do you think then? Um, it's funny, I read a review recently and they had only watched the first half and I highly agree with that review of the first half that I was not getting into Gerald's am character at all. I didn't like his deep voice where he was like always in a monitored, in the Husky distant character, especially compared to what I've learned since then about the story in the books.
But uh, Yetta for when she got involved and they finally linked up those two storylines. Oh, it was a blast. It was really fun and I enjoyed it. So I was, I didn't realize we were on the last episode and I went to play another one. I'm like, no. So it was good enough that I was like, wait, I'm not done with it yet. I was ready to continue. So I won't say it's my favorite episode or show ever, but I at least started getting engaged.
What did you think? Compounded.
Jesper (7m 22s): Okay. Now I'd say it's a bit funny because I feel like it was almost like a roller coaster ride in in the sense that the first three episode really did not help me at all. It almost had this kind of feeling of, okay, now we're going to a hundred new monster kind of thing. You know that, and I was a bit afraid, is this just going to be an entire season where each episode is just a new kind of monster that we are hunting because I don't feel like that's not what I want to. I like when there was a story arc that goes across every single episode, but not like each episode is just like a single entity almost like I, I don't, I don't like that.
So I was a bit concerned about that, but then when we got to episode for it became a lot better. And then I started like, okay, this is, this is really good. But then again, towards the end of it, I felt like maybe it was the last two episodes, but they started doing all these time jumps between the past and depressing. Yeah. And because you couldn't see any difference on the characters, whether we were in the past or in the present. It happened quite often that I got confused about where are we now in the story is just a pass or is a depressant.
And it took away some of the enjoyment for me to be on it.
Autumn (8m 32s): Yeah, I agree. When I think I sat up when they finally, when you finally realized that, Oh, all this other, there was this one actually two timelines, whether they're all past being put against this third character who is, I guess it's present or their future. And suddenly you realize that and you're like, Whoa, wait, you, they could have done a lot more, they could have something
Jesper (8m 56s): filmed it differently, different color, different lighting, I don't know, but just something. Yeah, just just make it clear that now we're on a different timeline. Right. There was something there and I think the books are a little bit different that they're based on am and then there's a huge role playing game that is spun off of it. And so I don't know if any of that carries through, but I am that was, I did get a little bit annoyed at that. I'm like, that was kind of, yeah. Not the best plotting that, not the best way of demonstrating that there's a different timeline going on.
Yeah. Yeah, indeed. And I, I think I would say I definitely recommend people giving it a try. And I don't know. I hope I'm not going to get an angry mob after me now, but I, but I, I picked up that the, uh, the Witcher was the most watched show on Netflix in all of 2019. And keep in mind, it was only released right before the end of the year. So it's been watched so much that you won't believe it. And, uh, I don't know, in my view, that speaks more about the, which your brand than it does about the quality of this TV show, to be honest.
So I hope not. So nobody's going to keep yourself. We're saying that, but, but that's, that's how I feel weak on the internet with the amwritingfantasy podcast. So there was a post on the amwritingfantasy Facebook group that really caught my attention. Yeah. I'm, I'm not going to share the name of the person posting it here because I haven't asked the person if they were okay with that. So I'm not gonna do that. But, uh, but I think that the post touched upon a concern that I believe that many Sharon, it, uh, that's why I wanted to bring it up here as well.
So it goes like this, the post that quote, is anyone disheartened by the over-saturation of the market? I find I get a little depressed when I see all those authors dropping book after book series after series and doing well too. No hate on their business. It's just makes me feel like when I finally finished one of my little projects, it's not going to have a chance in hell. So I shortened that post a bit, to be honest.
There was a bit more, but uh, but uh, I don't know. What are your thoughts about that? Autumn I think that's, that's something a lot of people feel probably or think, Oh, I think so. I can't imagine being a new author right now cause I'm uh, you know as a, I've been doing this since 2012 and so I've gotten a sh don't tell anyone. I actually just released a book 16, which was one with my husband that, and he and I had been working on for a year and a half. We finally just kind of snuck that one out the tour. But I make this as excited as I am about that.
It is a challenge to, to publish. When I first started, you know, there was, I don't think there's even 2 million eBooks on Amazon and I don't even know. You
Autumn (11m 54s): can't, it's hard to find out how many books are there now. And it's, it's just, it's beyond competitive. I keep saying eventually something will have to be done that Amazon's going to not be able to keep. I mean, can you imagine the servers to store all these books if nothing's ever pulled off? I don't know what's going to happen in the future and it's so tough and tight out there. So yeah, I feel, I feel that is a longstanding author is one with lots of books and with one that's still hard to be visible.
Jesper (12m 27s): Yeah. There was a, another person who posted a response, which I think sort of hit the nail on the head. It, it was a quote from Craig Martel am and Craig Martel said, eh, it's a rising tide lift. A rising tide lifts all boats. Readers read a book far faster than we can write them. If those books are successful than your books can be successful. So long as you have equal quality of cover blurb, story and marketing, you can't expect to compete unless you make the same effort as the successful authors.
It's a real job. That's what Craig, Marcelo said. Yeah, I think it is true. You know that there are far more far more readers out there, then we can write books for our sales. So, so that is certainly true. But on the other hand, it is also true what you just said in the days where you could just upload a book on Amazon and is expected to sell that. That's, that's, that's gone. It's not gonna happen. So I perfectly understand the concern raised by that initial question there. Um, but yeah, I don't know.
I do think it's, it is a matter of putting out professional work. Absolutely. And also you need to view your author Korea as a longterm plate. Yeah, yeah. I fully get the fact that one you, once you put out that what you're one, one little project as it was mentioned, that that's not going to move the needle much for you at all. Um, and yeah, as autumn just said, putting up 16 books that didn't happen in six months, Ida. Right. It takes years, lot of years and sometimes a lot of help.
You and I write together, I read my husband, Hey this, this sounds like a little bit about this episode maybe, but yes. Oh yeah, that's true. But just, no, and it's just building the audience. It takes time. Um, and it takes years and, and if, if you look at it long term, then I think maybe you will get less disheartened because if you look at it like, okay, I'm going to release this book and I wanted to compete and I want to earn, let's just say a lot of money for lack of better term of, of, of mentioning it, but I want to and a lot of money, uh, and I'm going read this one book and I'm going to compete against all these authors who have like six different series with three books into the meats and whatnot.
Then of course you're going to get this heart and, and, and, but I, I think it's important not to think about it like that, but more look at like, this is a longterm thing. And at some point I will also have six series with three books in them. Um, but while I'm working to get there, I'll make sure to put up professional work with professional covers. Uh, the best blurbs they can be. And I'll learn how to market the books and then I'll sort of do it one brick at a time. I think that's, that's how you need to look at it.
And we are going to talk a lot more about that in the self publishing success course that we have on our to do list for 2020.
Autumn (15m 23s): And I'm going to jump in with, cause you just did a fantastic segue into a comment I just received. It might've been late in December, but it was sort of about professional writing and uh, someone who from the amwritingfantasy fantasy Facebook group actually texted me, emailed me through Facebook messenger that said I wanted to thank you for the ultimatefantasywritersguide starter kit I've looked up hundreds of people who help new writers, but yours by far is the best. I'm going to have my daughter watch them. Thank you for an honest explanation on how to get started.
And so obviously they've just met snuck much because I love knowing that, you know, we've helped, this is going to give it to his daughter, but Hey, you know, you just mentioned, you know, write quality books and we actually have a starter kit that is 100% free. So edit it helps you get started on the right footing. So if anyone is out there, we can get you a link and you can go work on the starter kit and hopefully get you going on that first brick in your, your wonderful castle you're building.
Jesper (16m 30s): Yeah. Maybe you can make a note autumn to uh, to put the link in the show notes so people can just click through there. Um, and maybe, maybe I should mention as well that the self public success costs that we're going to put out, that's going to be free to, we're just too nice and we inserted, I think that's the right word. It's probably true too. But if you, if you don't want to miss that one, then I recommend going to a amwritingfantasy.com or use that link in the am in the show notes that uh, hopefully autumn we'll put in there because then you'll get onto our email list and then you will not miss it when we release this free course as well later this year.
And uh, that way also in the meantime we'll send you some writing and marketing tips on the emails. So that's nice and easy and uh, yeah, just uh, get on that list. There collaborations. So autumn I have a lot of notes on collaboration.
Autumn (17m 34s): That's fantastic. You are the note taker. I am the a pantser and so that's sort of why we're good at collaborating I think cause we put up, we accent each other, but let's, we'll start with yours and I will add in and continue to grow on your ideas.
Jesper (17m 53s): All right. Yeah. So I was actually thinking that maybe we could sort of take, take the conversation in three different steps. So step number one could be just to talk a bit about why you would even want to collaborate with somebody else. I think that's a, that's probably a good starting point is, um, and I have a few notes here and then of course you can add to it, uh, as well. Uh, but my first point about collaborating was basically, well, you're splitting your workload and you're also splitting the cost involved in publishing.
Obviously the downside is that you also have to split the rent years, but, but, but, but at least it eases off the workload. And especially like we, we know that a lot of authors are working day jobs as well. Um, so that, that's very common. Um, and in that case it is nice to have somebody else to share the workload with. Um, especially, and maybe, you know, if you're not as crazy as we are where we are both writing fiction books and doing nonfiction Ray to stuff like this podcast for the authors, then you can write books twice as fast.
In our case, we can't because we also have all this other stuff to do, but at least that's how it works. Yeah. Um, and also rather than actually writing together, when we were talking collaboration, we should also mention that it could also be that you just want an accountability partner or like a critique partner. Um, and we're not talking about using ghost writers yet, but, but more somebody like you work very closely with one person.
You might eat SPI writing your own books, but, but you just am hold each other accountable or help each other writing better books or whatever it may be that that is of course another option I did. I don't know, that's a bit of a, a side note, but I wanted to mention it anyway.
Autumn (19m 47s): Makes sense. I think unless you have more to add. But I think one of my big things for collaboration is one writing does tend to be very lonely, very isolating. It's something you spend a lot of time in your head. And by having someone to share that with, one gets you like, Oh there's more to life than you know, sitting there and thinking about stuff. But it gets you through the writer's blocks better. I think the inspiration and sometimes the ideas generated by talking to someone else, it gets your excitement going, your enthusiasm going you, you go over the levels, the little hurdles and stuff in your own writing career, um, cause someone's encouraging you or you're just getting both so excited about doing stuff that you know, someone else is there to make sure that you don't fall flat on your face.
So that's one of my things that, you know, collaboration, especially if you have a lot of self writer doubts, it's fantastic to join with someone else who can kind of talk you off the ledge and make sure you keep going and don't doubt yourself a corner where you're not writing as well as maybe like inspire. Like I said, sometimes bouncing ideas off of someone else, even if you end up in a completely different direction, they might've given you at least the idea of a completely different direction and your ideas can really grow and blossom.
Jesper (21m 5s): Yeah, I agree. And I, and I think also at least what we've seen is that am you are our ideas or be it world building our plot ideas or whatever it may be. It, I feel like it becomes better because compared to what I could just do on my own, because you have somebody to bounce ideas off and especially if you, if you compliment each other's weak spots, then it just becomes a lot better. Um, and I think that that is
Autumn (21m 36s): real big wind that you're going to get from, from collaboration. As you know, especially authors who use beta readers, this is sort of what they're using them for. For looking for those plot holes. This is doing it even sooner and in a different way. And the result, especially except you're working with like another professional, someone else who really knows the jargon, knows the plots, knows how to really build a story. Uh, what you end up with is it's not one plus one equals two. It's more like one plus one is equaling three to five. You getting a better game.
Jesper (22m 8s): Hmm. Yeah. And it's actually more common than, than, than you might think that too. Collaboration between authors. So I just looked up before recording just to give you some, some more, let's say famous famous examples. Uh, so I had a few I could mention here. So Neil Gaiman and Terry practice row together. Um, so did Steven King and Peter Straub. And in fantasy we have Anne McCaffrey wrote with the Mercedes Lackey and Marion Zimmer, Bradley and then the where we will known, uh, James Patterson, probably one of the world's best known authors.
He also collaborates, uh, he does all the plotting himself and then he delivers a very detailed outline at the maybe 60 to 80 pages as far as I could gather from the, uh, the research I did on the internet. But it looks like an outline of 60 to 80 pages is what he delivers to the people who, who write with him. And then he has a very intense back and forth conversations with the authors, uh, for writing the book. So if you look up James Patterson on, um, uh, on, on Amazon, you'll also see that a lot of his books says James Patterson on it.
And then it says with, and then there was another author named that's because he collaborates and has other people, um, writing his books as well. So it's not just some crazy stuff that we're talking about. A lot of the famous people do this as well. So before we get into how do we actually find someone to collaborate with, I was that maybe you could just share a bit about, uh, how, how does it feel to collaborate with somebody else, you know, uh, uh, either than what we just talked about, why you will want to do it.
But what are the upsides and downsides? Maybe we could, we have a few, few other things we could add here and what, what it's more like what should people be mindful about, I guess.
Autumn (24m 10s): Well that makes sense. Yeah, that's very true. So I, yeah, I guess you have to be well to play well with others. I mean am I think everyone has that experience. Maybe in high school where you had to collaborate with somebody on a am term paper or something or project partners on, maybe it didn't go well. So I think there's that interfere that you're gonna end up collaborating and it's going to be a huge issue. And um, I don't know.
I found, I guess if you find the right person, it's, that's not necessary at all. I always have introduced to you, yes. Part of people when I talk about, um, what we do together, that it's like, you know, ending up with am the perfect, uh, term partner pilot project partner because you always like do a 120%. So it's very, very useful. It's fantastic when someone's always making you feel like you're not doing enough and you were usually the person who was doing it all.
So those are the good things to the benefits that you can, you know, you're not going it alone, that you're going to actually be able to share a workload and share inspiration and yeah, it leads to maybe sharing the profits, but hopefully it's going to be a better situation than when you're struggling and doing it alone because, Hey, even if the book doesn't sell, you can talk to each other and maybe share the tasks of getting it to sell better. So it's not, it's a much friendlier and welcoming kind of feeling instead of always feeling like crap, now what do I do?
Yeah,
Jesper (25m 44s): yeah. I would also, I feel it intensely gratifying to, to, to work with us. We're a lot autumn because it's, it's, it's just a lot different than when you're doing all everything or all by yourself. You know you have also just the fact that, I mean if we go to the real bedrock of it, you know, you know you have somebody who understand the ins and outs of, of life as a writer, right. And and you have somebody who she has your calls and you can, you can work together to achieve them and that that's, I don't know, it's just, it's different than doing everything by yourself.
And of course you can go on to am what, what may be Facebook groups or whatever to build a network with other authors and that's all great. But, but it's still different compared to having somebody who she asked your specific goal and you're both working towards achieving those that that's, that's very different than, than talking to a more general author community, so to speak. No, that makes sense. That's very true. Yeah. I think the only downside I can think of it, it just plays off a bit of what you said as well, that you have to collaborate well with others.
But it's more like, to me there was a, there's a big thing to consider in terms of if, if you have trouble compromising and taking other people's input to hot and maybe, except that what you find is an excellent idea. Somebody else might think, uh, that all your collaboration partner might think that, that that's not quite what I like and if some people are prefers to have a day away, let's put it like that.
And, uh, if you're one of the persons who prefer to have it your way, then it just becomes really difficult to collaborate with somebody else because you have to reach some compromises. That's, that's just, uh, the name of, of the collaboration game man, because we could, uh, we could call it that. So, um, let's move on to the next section here. And, uh, that was more about how do you find somebody to collaborate with and yeah, that I sort of have a whole list of things here in terms of, uh, how to find somebody.
I actually, I, I put it into 10 steps, so I thought that was the easiest way to do it.
Autumn (28m 10s): Okay. Well, I like 10 steps. Seems very fair to let's go ahead and see. I'll see what I can add to your steps.
Jesper (28m 20s): Yeah. But I was almost thinking be before I get into this, uh, into these 10 steps, because these 10 steps are sort of very, I don't, I don't think mechanical is the right way to put it, but it is very much like, okay, I want to find somebody to collaborate with, give me a checklist and then I start, I start building to watch that. Right? That's sort of the, that's how the 10 steps are built. So, but why I want to start at different places because there is a lot of ways organically to find somebody to collaborate with like am very true.
And maybe maybe you could share a bit autumn about how you and I started to collaborating because that was certainly not intentional and, and I just want to, I just want the listeners to understand first that, uh, before I go into these very mechanical steps that there are other ways than what I'm talking about here in a second.
Autumn (29m 14s): Yeah. You can be the crazy pantser. That's me. Um, but it's true. I think, well, I think the first thing is understanding the feeling that no matter what you do, if you're going to collaborate with someone, unless there's someone you've known for a very long time, it's always going to feel like a risk and almost like asking somebody out in the date. So that's okay. Just embraced that. But, uh, for us, I mean I have, I had known for a little while on Twitter and we had collaborated am on your fantasy map.
I book I believe, cause I'd done some world building. And so we kind of started talking about world building, but it was peripheral and I was also on your email list. So we emailed a bit once in a while. Yes, that's right. So we kind of knew what each other was doing. Um, and I had just released the ultimatefantasywritersguide as a course and I had the amwritingfantasy platform and it was starting to grow and I was honestly hiking and on this 10 mile hike, um, I was thinking, I need help.
I felt like this was growing and I couldn't do as much as I needed to. I couldn't be everywhere. And I was thinking about people I knew who seemed to have their stuff together. And I knew you had a YouTube channel and you were, you had books and you were promoting things. And I'm like, yeah, I'm going to reach out to you and see, um, if you wanted to help out on, basically it was just the website. It was with my idea was like, Hey, you want to co-run this website with me?
And so out of the blue I sent you an email and know what you're going to get. You kind of said, ah, can you clarify this a bit? I have some ideas. And I'm like, Oh, send me your ideas and you sent me like a business plan. They're like, well crap, that is, so here we are two years later running a podcast. Yeah, yeah. I think it's uh, yeah, I was just about to say three years, but actually I lost count.
I think that, yeah, it does it better. I think we're into our third year if you want to count those two plus years. Yeah, nevermind. So there is that way of creating collaborative collaboration where you can cold call somebody that you think is, you know, doing a good job and say, Hey, you want to try this out and see how it goes. And that's what we did. We started small, we started with little things and we've each year, each month and at this rate it seems like it's a tweet. Can we keep building on what we're doing?
Yes. Yeah. Now we, we sort of have a fully fledged company running here almost again. Yeah, it's really exciting. It's, it's 2020 is going to be groundbreaking or friendly, maybe finally getting above the ground. So it's really exciting. Yeah.
Jesper (32m 8s): Okay, good. So, so I just wanted to am that story to be out there as well because, so that people can hear that there are lots of ways to do this stuff. But I really tried in preparation of this episode to think hard about how would I go about it if I, let's say you listen to this podcast and I, I, and I am assuming here that your goal is to make a living from writing in my Tim steps. But let's just assume that that's your goal. And from listening to this podcast, you're thinking, actually, I think I would like to try that out, but how do I it?
So I thought I sat down and I really thought about how would I do it if I knew that that was what I wanted, but I didn't have any context to anybody. I didn't know how to get started. So, so that's what I laid out in, in 10 steps here. Okay. And, uh, I think, feel free to interrupt me on along the way he autumn because otherwise it's going to be a long monologue. I'll keep you paced. Alright, so step number one, uh, first step is, of course, you need to start building a list of, uh, author names that writes in the same shop as you.
And that's not too hot. Uh, you know, you can, you can go to Amazon. They, these authors will probably appear in your also bots or you can just find them by going to the category section on Amazon. You know, if you're writing Epic fantasy go to Epic fantasy and start writing down names of authors who are releasing books. Um, that will give you a long list of course. So you need to stop somewhere, try, try to try to uh, build quite a good list there.
Uh, then I would go and I would check if they have a decent social media following and if they are active, actively posting anything on their social media platforms. Uh, so this doesn't mean that you have to go in after any big names at all because often it's actually better to find somebody who's slightly smaller because then both of you will be equally motivated to building a career. Right? So if somebody is too big, then it's not, but try to find somebody who has, this has a decent following.
So did you know that they are actively doing stuff and they are, they active in the market and so that, that gives you a pretty good list of authors. Hopefully you will be able to delete some of the names off the list just based off that. But so you still have a pretty long list here at step number two. So the next thing to check is whether or not these candidates are able to finish any levels. So you want to find someone who's am yeah.
You know, productive. Yes. Because the worst thing is that a lot of people like to want, I want to write books, but they never finished anything. And that's not the partner you want to work with, especially in that, again, as I am assuming that you want to build a career from it. So you want somebody who can finish novels. So I'm not saying that you have to find somebody who have published 20 novels, uh, to be a good candidate. Not at all. But if they at least have a few books to their name, maybe you can find the let's say three at a minimum on, on Amazon to their name, right.
Then you know, okay, they know how to finish a book. Uh, and you also know by then that they have some experience writing, which is also a good thing. Yes, definitely. Um, yeah, and they also, of course, having published books, they will also know what's involved in publishing and uh, you're not also not accidentally ending up with a mentor instead of a collaboration partner because that's what you're looking for here. So, um, that I think that's important.
Uh, and then also here in step number two, I would also check if there is a decent number of reviews on those books. So again, I'm not saying that there has to be a ton. Let's just say, did you want these 10 reviews on those books? And the average rating should be fairly good as well. So let's say about for that gives you some starting evidence, at least at this author candidate on your list here. The person knows how to finish book. They know how to, they know how to market themselves at least a bit because they have a social media following, somewhat of a social media following, I should say.
Um, and uh, they, they are able to produce novelty that readers enjoy because of the, uh, uh, about for average on the reviews. Right too. So that's a pretty good starting point, isn't it? That's a good way of, you know, you're looking for someone who's productive, knows what they're doing, um, can get the job done, understands the marketing and is also writing, you know, something quality so that, you know, if kind of, you know, hit your horse, hit your car to a horse, you want to get one that's, you know, got to run the whole race.
Yeah. So next one is number three. So now you have, uh, still still probably a pretty long candidate list. Uh, that shouldn't be hundreds of people on this list, but, but let's say the, you've, let's say you, you're down at like 20 or something just to make up a number. So let's say you have 20 author names on the list now where all the step one and two criteria has been met. So you go to these 20 people's websites and then I would make sure that I find the websites looking professional.
Uh, and that's something that was just slapped together. Very good. Uh, because, um, if this author is looking to build a career, there should be a sign up form on their website indicating that the person is building an email list. So if you either find somebody whose website looks and amateurish or there is no signups to any email list and you delete those names off the list. No, I agree. That's a very good point. So they kind of have that am yeah. Professional level that hopefully if you're trying to do this professionally, you're looking for as well.
Yeah. So whatever you have left on the list, you now join these people's email lists and then you look down, well, yeah, kind of, but, but what you're looking for is one that you want to see if they are actually sending out emails. Uh, so do they have an autoresponder going that sends out emails, soda, so that they actually contacting people who sign up. And also the other part is of course you want to start getting impression of this person who, who are they? What are they writing about?
And you know, just like a general impression. So that's step number four. So number five is then building on, on that. So you need to start corresponding by replying to these emails. And just like we said early on, you and I did this a bit in the beginning as well. I did. Now I'm starting to wonder if, if you had this plan the whole time. I remember you were the one reaching out to me. And I can't even say that even if you hated me, it, it, it just popped in my head.
But I would, uh, I would start replying to the emails now, uh, at this stage, um, because this should allow you to reduce your list of candidates further because there will be some of them where you just feel like you connect better with this person. Then what? Then versus somebody else. Don't reply back, you know, they just ha, or an empty vaults over them. Yeah. So that's a very good indication. So see what kind of messages you can reply. And this is, it's really not meant as you're trying to manipulate them into doing anything.
You're just trying to have genuine conversation with them to get a feel about this person and that sort of understand this person. I sort of have a good chemistry with that, that that's what you're doing. And then you should look to reduce your, your list to like a shortlist. Now let's say you want to get down to five candidates at this point. So cross out all the names where you feel like this doesn't really work for me or eh, yeah. Yes. Autumn said if they're not replying at all.
So at this stage you have five left and uh, you can now just email them and say, uh, you know, Hey, I've replied to a few. Uh, you should not say email them. That's what I'm trying to stay. Just say, Hey, I apply, apply to fewer of your emails, so now let, let's collaborate. But that's not what you're not going to do, right, because that's not gonna work. Um, B, besides also at this stage, you don't even know if you like the story telling style or their writing style. So what I would do now, um, since now you have a more manageable list of only five people on it, step number six would be the that you go and read a novel that they've written.
So you download a one of their novels from Amazon, the first industries probably, uh, or whatever. If it's standalone, that's fine to download that and you am you read the novels and that will probably allow you to remove one or two more names off the list where it just feels like, I, I don't like this way of telling stories or this is not how I like to do. Right. So get rid of those. I would always get me, I'd probably end up with somebody who writes in first person and I just can't do that. So it's a really good indicator.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. So step number seven is then asking, so a lot depends on how much are and also how well your email correspondence has been going already. So, but in general, I wouldn't simply ask if they want to collaborate. That's not gonna work. And uh, I don't know who, who knows? Just because you like one of their books, that doesn't mean that you will be a good match to work together. Right.
So furthermore, I would say that this other author might not even have considered that they should be working with somebody else. So at direct ask, like that will probably either end in a decline or they will, they aren't they, let's say they accept and then you end up with a collaboration partner where you might like their light a writing style, but, but then when you get into it, you find out that their work mentality is just not matching yours.
So then you have an issue. So how do we get around? So I think, yeah, so, so how'd you get around that? Is that I think it's best to start small. So when you reach out to them, so mentioned which of their books it was that you just read and especially important mentioned why you like their book and also make sure that you left a review of the book on Amazon or any other platforms where it might be published on so that you can basically tell them, so I read you a book title, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I really liked it, uh, because of blah, blah, blah, blah. And I have left a review on all the different platforms for you. And then you can proceed from there in that email to basically the next section of the email. You can proceed to offer the person something valuable. Um, so it has to be something that is easy for them to say yes to. So it could be that you offer them to share their book to your email list because you really liked it.
So, even if you have a small list that that might work, or maybe you have a blog or something and you can offer the Dem an author interview, you know, anything that gets their author name, eh, some exposure that they wouldn't have gotten otherwise, that that's sort of the asset you're aiming for. So you can be creative about it. Uh, but, but that's what you're looking for. So that's the ask here in step number seven. So if we then move on to step number eight, now you basically got a foot in the door.
So where you might have shared that book with your own email list or maybe you did the author interview when you posted that on your blog or whatever it may be. So you have some sort of connection with this person by now, or these persons I should say, because you're probably doing it with several different people. So where you go from here becomes a question of how to build the relationship. So it all will depend on the email conversations you've had so far and perhaps you need to email back and forth a bit more before you go any further.
But where you want to get to is to slowly familiarize yourself, um, with this author's work, with the aim to work on something smaller, collaborating, something smaller together. I like that. Uh, so step number eight is basically just about trying to sort of expand upon the relationship a bit so that you feel comfortable that you could, uh, work together on something small. I like that. So sort of like a short story or just something small.
Yeah. So that, that's basically step number nine. So we're getting towards the end now. So step number nine is basically, um, to figure out if this person's Workman tality fits well with us. And the only way to do that is to work on something together. So as you said, a short story collection, for example, could be a good idea. But again, make sure that you make it really easy to say yes. So if you offer for example, to say, if you say, okay, I will handle all the publishing, I will handle all the splitting of the revenue and all that.
Eh, let's say troublesome stuff that you are the author might be thinking of, Oh my God, I don't have time to do all that. If you offer to do all of that, then it becomes an easy sale. And if it's only like a short story collection, I mean there's not much at at, at risk for the other author here anyway. So. So they probably won't mind trusting you with doing the revenue splitting even if it, because it's going to be minor anyway. Yeah. So you'll then, let's say you, you go with this, you couldn't be creative and think of other ways as well, but, but I think the short stories is a good way because it doesn't take too much time either.
Um, so you then work together on this and stuff and you will figure out whether or not you are actually working well together. Um, and if you do, then hopefully by this stage you will have narrowed down your list of candidates down to basically only one, right? So at this point you need to find out, okay, we are working well together and all the different steps be before this step was successful as well. So he is basically the point where you can then start saying a maybe would it be Ida for us to collaborate together on a for level or even a series if you want to pitch that, really want to take a bite out.
Yeah. If you're gonna play a dangerous like, like autumn does, then that's what he can do. Jumping into the fire from the frying pan and not knowing where I'm going. Yeah. But that then my step number 10 is basically, so of course, uh, at number nine there will be a yes or no. And then of course if you get a no, and that was one of the other people on the list that you also did a short story with that you really liked and you can move on to that person. Um, I know that sounds a bit horrible. It sounds like you're shopping for people, but uh, but if you really want to collaborate with somebody, did somebody, and it doesn't happen organically for you to find somebody, then this is a way to do it.
Um, but we are missing step 10. Yes. So what does top 10 yeah, so step 10, now you've already found somebody you want to collaborate with am but before you stopped any like large scale collaboration on full series or something like that, I would say at this step 10 if you have low got into the agreement to say, yeah, I could be interested in collaborating on a full novel, uh, oil, even that series, then I would make sure to have a meeting with that person.
Um, and there I would say it doesn't have to be a face to face meeting, but it should be a video quality so that you can see each other. You could be Skype or zoom or something like, uh, I think, uh, no, actually I think back in the day a autumn I think,
Autumn (48m 27s): yeah. Say we still have not been on the same continent. So am I was close, I was in London and you're over in Copenhagen but we didn't quite made up that time. So yeah, we still haven't met. So then we've been together doing this for two plus years.
Jesper (48m 44s): Yeah, exactly. But yeah, you use Skype or zoom or whatever, but the key is that you get to talk with each other while you can see each other and then the purpose of that meeting will be that you need to align what it is that you want to achieve and basically sort of you lay out, okay these are my goals and the other person lays out the, these are my goals and you want to see that there was a match. I'd sorta the one person doesn't say, well I would actually like to collaborate on a series and uh, I don't really mind if it takes us 10 years because I have a lot of other stuff that I actually do.
But you are wanting to build a career. So you are saying, well I was hoping we could do it in one DMX album. Right. Then you have an issue. So it's much better to get that out of the way before you get started. And, uh, and I think that's 10 steps
Autumn (49m 31s): I like that. That's definitely very true. And I definitely thought the, where you're mentioning, you know, not just coming at blurting out, well you collaborate with me because I hadn't really thought of it too. You said that. But I've actually had two people prior to starting to collaborate with you who kind of came out of the blue and like, Hey, I like what you do when you do this with me. And I was like, uh, no. I think it gets a gut reaction. It's like, I don't know who you are and I don't know if I really want to share what I'm working on, but
Jesper (49m 59s): we've built this up gradually to where we're writing novels together. It's not, it wasn't our first step. No, no, indeed. It was not. Uh, we, we started out with the amwritingfantasy stuff. For we had a lot of plans from the get go with that. But like the, but the fiction collaboration was something that came later on in the process. But I, I, and I think I understand why the gut reaction is to say no if somebody just reaches out coat like that because honestly, I mean I, I would, I would do same thing because there are trainings in hopes that there is there some private, but yeah, but that's the one thing.
But I think the other thing that I was thinking about was more like it's a big, big time investment. Right? And you don't want to go in and say okay to something or yes to something that is a huge time investment. Unless you know that this is a person. That one I liked the person, no, I know that they are professional and three, I know that they, they, they have a good work, work ethic, that master's mind and we have the same kind of goals. I mean if you kind of tick all of those boxes, you're going to shoot, you have a huge time investment on your hand that you'll just end up figuring out later on that, okay, we don't have a medicine and you wasted that
Autumn (51m 14s): ton of time. Right. Yeah. Tell me, you could have been writing but I mean yeah, to give perspective, you and I meet every week for two hours plus we send each other a ton of emails through the week. Uh, we've gotten to the point where we can, you know, build stuff via email. But we also, we still have our time talking to each other every week. And of course we're doing that with a podcast, but that's if we added up those hours, the amount of time we spend talking to each other. Yeah, it's a very, this is a very serious relationship.
You've got to get along with your partner and also want to clarify like when we talk about, you know, work well together, sometimes that's everything from, you know, plotting character building. You have. Yeah, I'm a bit more of a pantser, but you know, to work together, you've got to be able to mold that into something that you collaborate with and build something together and figuring out how you're going to write, you know, it was one person writing first and the other one's adding things. Are you both, you know, swapping manuscripts back and forth so that you're building it as you go or one person has a character and one has the other character.
You've got to figure all that out for yourself. And if you can't, that's a pretty good indication that this might not work out.
Jesper (52m 27s): Yeah, I think that's true. And actually, I just thought of one more thing. Uh, I know we were running a bit long or does episode here, but uh, uh, but one thing not to forget, uh, maybe to finish off with here, but if you do want to collaborate with somebody else, you are going to have money between you. So you need to make sure that you create a contract that sets the terms and conditions for your cooperation. Because basically what you're doing is that you're running a company together and, and uh, a company cannot be run on the basis of trust.
Well it can, as long as you're good friends and everything is nice and dandy, but, uh, in a minute it's not nice and dandy. Yeah. But it just happens, you know, companies breaks up and people go into disagreements about this and that. And I just have to say that, you know, agreeing on the details about, for example, how to exit the contract, how to split money or whatever it be. It's a million times easier to agree on those details while you're good friends. Because once you're not anymore, it's going to be a nightmare to try to sort it out.
It is. Or even if it's not a friendship dissolving, but a health issue or a family issue or something,
Autumn (53m 39s): someone's got to step back cause they're not going to have the mental capacity, the mental time and energy to be able to say, you're right, let's figure this out for next three hours. So it gonna be like, no, I'm busy. This is why I'm leaving. So yes, figure that out beforehand. That way you know, who's, you know, holding the cart and hopefully whatever happens, you know, life does go on. You can't ever say it's going to be the same. And especially with, you know me is to your crazy partner so that's why we have a contract. But it's good because then we're always on the same page and we can just refer back to it and we know where we're going.
Jesper (54m 15s): Yeah. And the, and that, there was no reason to debate or discuss something because you did that upfront. So everything all is clear for both parties. There was no reason to end up in a misunderstandings and stuff like that. So it just keeps things nice and clean. And I know a bar, a contract sounds really boring, but you have to put it in place. I agree. So next Monday we have a topic which has come up over and over and over again. And that is about, uh, how to, to
Narrator (54m 44s): use dictation. If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the amwritingfantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the amwritingfantasy podcast going.
Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
In episode 57 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, Jesper is joined by the awesome and energetic Sacha Black.
Sacha is a fantasy author. She is an editor and the host of The Rebel Author Podcast.
Sacha has also written several guides and workbooks on how to write compelling heroes and villains.
So, we’re going to learn from her great insights on creating memorable characters.
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy.
For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to the amwritingfantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing join to best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them. Now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (31s): Hello, I'm Jesper. This is episode 57 of the amwritingfantasy podcast and today autumn is not here, so I'm joined by an awesome guest and that is Sasha black. So Sacha is a fantasy author. She's an editor and the host of the rebel author podcast so Sacha has written several guides on and workbooks on how to write compelling, heroes and villains. So we're going to learn from her great insight on this topic here today.
But first, welcome to the amwritingfantasy she podcast Sacha
Sacha (1m 6s): thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
Jesper (1m 9s): Yeah, it was very nice too. Very nice to talk to you. And the SF just sat there. I know that you also the host of the rebel author podcast, but what's that podcast about?
Sacha (1m 19s): I am. So the rebel author podcast is a motivational show at four creatives who like to break the rules or rebel against, you know, um, uh, conventions or just people who have the dry, sarcastic, wet who like, you know, the occasional naughty word. Uh, but it is am essentially about writing, publishing, marketing, um, or you know, all of those industry type topics.
And I tend to do interviews as well. Occasionally I do have a solo show, but yeah.
Jesper (1m 53s): Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So, so it's all, it's a specifically focused on just any creative outlet. Like, like I mean any Sean rough or writers or are you, are you focused on like certain elements within it or
Sacha (2m 6s): no, so it is for um, any writer of any genre. So I write obviously as you've met said I write nonfiction and young adult fantasy, kind of moving into adult fantasy soon. So I try to keep the topics wide. So you know about the craft as a whole rather than something very niche too. I don't know, historical fiction. And also occasionally, or I will be having anyway it topics that, uh, interviews that are more general to creative.
So it might be a better mindset or business, which could be any creative business. So yeah, I, I do try to keep it quite broad for all creatives.
Jesper (2m 47s): Okay. That's cool. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting because we sort of went the other way where by write I mean of course we, the topics that we are handling or talking about on this podcast, some of it is generic marketing and publishing and stuff like that, but at least from the writing perspective, we, we've sort of niche down and focused on fantasy writing so. So it was quite nice to hear that you also write fantasy.
Sacha (3m 12s): Yeah, well I actually think it's already important to be niche because I think you serve your audience much better when you do that. Um, and I suppose the thing that's overarching on my podcast rather than it being necessarily the niche topic, it's more the niche ethos and theme. So I always ask all of my guests to tell us about a time that they've been a rebel and you know, and yeah. So every week I will read out a listener who's a rebel, you know, in a little story that they sent in.
You know, I, I am sarcastic and witty, witty listeners to decide, but I hope I'm funny anyway. Um, and you know, but I will intersperse some naughty made up. So what are words or whatever. So yeah, it's kind of the feeling of the podcast that, um, is niche. I will not appeal to everybody because I have a potty mouth. I'm opinionated. Um, yeah, probably okay with that because I think that helps you find your audience essentially.
Jesper (4m 11s): No, I, yeah, I, I fully agree. I think it's, it's better to, to be a bit am, let's say unique and then some people will like it and people are, some people won't. And that's absolutely fine. Uh, I think that that's better than trying to appeal to everyone.
Sacha (4m 25s): Definitely. That's how you find your tribe.
Jesper (4m 28s): Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. So how did you get into writing fantasy did, did you always know that you want it to write fantasy
Sacha (4m 34s): Oh, that is such a good question. Um, I, I don't think I am like the least self-aware person ever. I didn't really know that I wanted to write until I was in my mid twenties. I think if I had been more self-aware, I would have realized because all the signs were there, you know, I was that kid who'd prefer to read in the library at lunch rather than come and play with other people, you know, things like this. But, um, in terms of fantasy specifically I as a teenager, I read a lot of fantasy.
I also interested in, you read a lot of crime and a lot of Raymond's. So I don't think I necessarily knew that that's what I wanted to write until I really got into writing. And I, and a lot of my fears around writing came from not knowing what, you know, if I was going to make some kind of accuracy era. So if you ride fun to see, you can make a lot of it up. So I did that, you know, um, ended up, uh, creating our fantasy world and it's actually just the first character that came to me.
So my first book has been with me since I was like nine years old. Um, I always, yeah, I always knew this character, so I'm not going to stick with fantasy forever. Um, I definitely have a contemporary young adult book that I'm about to work on this year that has, I guess, hints of magical realism in it, but it is predominantly set in the real world. So no, I don't, I read a lot of friends, see now, but I also read a lot of contemporary, I read a lot of nonfiction, so I don't know, I just like it. So there is no rhyme or reason behind it particularly?
Jesper (6m 19s): No. All right. Now that you'd call the self aware and, and I didn't know that I was that unselfaware but apparently I am because it wasn't until I was like, uh, what, like 38 or something that I figured out that I wanted to write so apparently I'm less overwhelmed.
Sacha (6m 35s): Well, you know, lots of us are to hold when we grow up to get a proper job. And you know, uh, I thought a proper job meant going to university and being on one of these really super dull, uh, management, fast track graduate, um, things, you know, so it, yeah, it took me a while to realize that I really hated the corporate world.
Jesper (6m 57s): Right. But one thing I did to find out by, uh, you know, snooping around on the internet was that you quite like conspiracy theories. So I thought that was quite fun. So I wanted to ask you if you have like a favorite conspiracy
Sacha (7m 10s): am Oh, it's so, that's so hard. So mean of you to ask me that. Um, I do, I do like them because for two reasons. One, um, I derive a lot of inspiration from them. You know, they are quite dystopian when you look at them. Um, and I love dystopian stories. I definitely will be writing a dystopian series at some point, but you can also take elements of fantasy from them. So, you know, like flatter the for example, is a great, um, great example of a conspiracy that's wildly popular at the moment.
And there are so many elements to that, you know, things like giants and whether the gods were actually aliens, you know, the, all of these things actually played really well into fiction, particularly science fiction and fantasy. So that is why I love them. And so I, I, you know, a hollow earth is another one. Hollow moon. Um, the, yeah, the firmament and having a dome over the F there are just millions that I will read about and we'll, um, take elements of, uh, to put into my stories.
The other reason I like them, uh, it relates to villains. Um, and I always think one of the good markers of a villain is when they're crazy or they're, um, you know, there, uh, what's the word? Like whatever they're trying to so like president snow once the hunger games in the hunger games, he wants the reality TV show when we are so convincing that they can get you to believe in their crazy for just a second. I always think that's a really good Mark of a villain. And I think that some of these conspiracy theories, when you look at some of the, you know, really, um, ardent supporters and some of their arguments, you can for a split second or two actually really invest in them and believe in them.
And I think that when, when it's that convincing, you can learn things from that for your fiction.
Jesper (9m 1s): Yeah. That is funny because that's exactly why I like conspiracy theories as well because there's so much inspiration in some of it. It's like, well, some of it is like really out there, you know, but, but it's still that there's a lot of good ideas that you can use for storytelling in there. And, uh, I quite like the one where they are talking about that, you know, that the matrix that we actually living in a matrix like thing. So the whole thing in the entire world is just simulation though.
Sacha (9m 27s): Yeah. But there are, do you know, they're all scientific books on the universe as a hologram that, you know, there are like genuinely traditionally published books. Um, I had one a few years ago and I can't remember the exact name, but it was something like the universe is a hologram anyway. Fascinating. And that is also what I lost. That some of these things really do venture into the science of it and that's when it becomes extremely hard to ignore. And you know, you do find yourself questioning, well, have I been lied to? What is the government really, you know, all of these things.
But yeah, I think that having an open mind, um, and investigating these things, be it conspiracy theories, all science or you know, some detailed, um, Avenue as a writer is really important because we do filter all those are things that we put into our brain back out into our fiction. And I just think it gives us more depth to our stories.
Jesper (10m 22s): Yeah, that's true. Yeah. And, and now I can't remember which one it was, which of course then makes it a bad example to bring up. But, but I did listen to a podcast like a couple of months ago where they were talking about numbers and how if you add this to this all, and there was something about the moon as well, the actual size of the moon and am something like that. And everything just keeps adding up to the same numbers or something. It was insane listening too. But, uh, but anyway, that's, that's a rabbit hole that we can get down another into another day. But, uh, we wanted to talk a bit about compelling, heroes and villains today.
So I don't know, maybe, maybe I could just start out by asking you what did this, did you think makes for a compelling hero and villain some overhaul maybe.
Sacha (11m 7s): Yeah. So, um, I, so a villain, interestingly, a lot of the same things cross saver and, uh, between what makes a good hero and what makes a good villain. But what often happens is that writers at focus all their attention on their hero because obviously the hero is the person who the story is being told via and therefore they have the most page time.
But the mistake that you're making there is that all stories are about change. Be it the emotional arc that a hero goes on, the emotional change, the obstacles that a hero must feet in order to win or get to the end of the book. And what drives change is conflict because all of us are creatures of habit will, will not change unless we're forced to too.
So yeah. And, and that is how you get the change is through conflict and what's what drives the conflict and novel that's your villain. So I always say that a villain is actually more important than the hero because they are at the source of, um, changing the heroes, which is what the story is about essentially. So the first thing I always think that's important is to get that straight in your head and to value your villain as much as you value your hero.
Um, in terms of what makes a good villain, I think there's a probably four or five things. So the first one is values. It's really, really important. Just like your hero will have values, they might value strength or loyalty or doing good or whatever. It's also important that your villain has a value and you can enact those in a couple of different ways. So you could have a positive value, like loyalty that your villain INAX in a bad way.
So for example, uh, Lord Voldemort from Harry Potter is an excellent example of this. Anybody who portrays his loyalty, they're gonna die. So that is an example of and acting a positive trait in a bad way. And then of course, you could have a negative value, like revenge, for example. Um, and just moving on from that, another really important factor in your villains is to have a positive trait. So for example, if you have a villain who is just a homicidal maniac who just wants to end the world, um, it's not very believable because apart from people who, you know, might have genuine, um, Mike, well anyway, having a complete psychopath as a villain in a crime book might be realistic, but that's usually because they're not really on the page very much.
Excuse me. They tend to, uh, appear at the end. Or if there's some, obviously might have a jewel point of view, but for the most part then on the page, and we'll get back to the point. So having a positive trait creates a second layer of depth to the character. Most of us aren't inherently evil and that goes for villains as well. They might have a warped sense of justice or a warped sense of equality or a warp sense of, you know what's right and wrong is, but they don't believe they are bad.
They believe they are doing the right thing. It's just that society or your hero doesn't. So having a positive trait is really important to make them believable. It gives them a sense of humanity and you can enact that in a million different ways. Be it showing kindness to somebody or even if it's a henchman, having a pet is quite often when that happens. Um, it could also be that, that you turn one of their negative traits into a positive temporarily.
So that is a trick that I quite like to use. Um, another last, I'll try and whip through these. Appreciate I'm going on. But, um, so, so the other one would be to have a really solid motive and a reason why. So this is often lacking. I find in manuscripts that I am do developmental edits on the, they don't think through the why a villain is doing something. People like, when we look at our psychology, we all do things for a reason.
Our childhood, our teenage years, you know, our most influential years shape our brain chemistry, like quite literally shapes our brain chemistry. And if you've had a wound in your past, often we talk about heroes and wounds and the thing that gives them their flow while your villain also has a wound in their past. And whilst you don't necessarily need to put it on the page because your villains isn't your protagonist, you do need to think about that because it will drive their behavior.
You know, let's say they lost family in a boating accident. I'm just talking about this on the hoof now. But perhaps they then have that would give them a wound and they might then want to seek revenge on, on, on the boating company. But a hero might choose instead to enact that wound in a positive way. So they might start up a charity for people of drowning victims or whatever, you know. So it's, it's looking at how you can incorporate that wound and give your villain a reason for why he's behaving and in that particular way.
And um, you know, doing the bad things that he's doing lost to make them unbeatable. Um, too often we give our heroes and easy ride and we don't, um, make things difficult enough. So one way to stop that is to make a really unbeatable villain for like 85% of your novel. Make them an expert in something, make them better than the hero at something. Um, because the harder it is for your hero to the win, the more invested your readers will be.
And last, but by no means least give them a really strong sense of integrity, which is actually a really positive trait to have. But I will tell you the reason why it's so important for a Villa. When you have integrity, you do what you're, say, what you say you're going to do, even if it means doing something bad. And that makes a villain, particularly when they do do bad things because they said they're going to do them, it makes them frightening. You know, if they are like, you know, I'm gonna, if you don't do X, I will kidnap your child.
And then they came back. The child that is terrifying and also makes them very believable. So yeah, those would be my top.
Jesper (18m 1s): Yeah. No, but, but I think that there are some really, really, really good points in down and especially about the reason for being evil because that's also something I always keep saying. Uh, automotive and I actually writing a book about creating characters and also plotting at the moment and in the character section part of it, we are also saying in data, everybody is a hero of their own story, right? So, so they're, they're, the villain will also believe that what he's doing is for the greater good.
Uh, so, so I fully agree with what you're saying that you need a good reason for, for them be doing what they're doing. And unfortunate lab also seemed like in mainstream, uh, what does he call pain or what does he call the, you know, the adversary and one of the superhero things where it was something to do with a doll or some stupid stuff like that, you know, when, when do you almost felt like they were making up a reason just to have one and for him being evil. Right. And that that doesn't work. Yeah. I think maybe too many writers also too concerned about the villain becoming, let's say, too likable.
Uh, and therefore they make him like just, just like super evil without any reason for being evil. But I would almost go the other way and say the more likable or at least understandable, you can make the villain the better. The villains.
Sacha (19m 23s): Absolutely. And you only have to look at the rise in popularity of anti heroes to see how true that is. Um, you know, uh, villains excuse me. Villains often, none of us would want to admit this, but sometimes they do the, they do the hard thing and they do the controversial thing. And sometimes we might, there might be parts of us that agree with them and that's particularly what auntie heroes do. They do the naughty things that we all wish we could do, but wait, call your boss in the eye with a fork is technically illegal.
Jesper (19m 56s): Yeah. But that, that's absolutely through. Uh, but, but also, you know, sometimes the villains side just, I don't know, maybe it's just me, but, uh, in, in star Wars for example, I like Veda the most. You know, he's just so cool. Uh, but of course he's not the good guy, but, uh, but it is, so sometimes it's just the am, the villains who are, who are really, really strong characters. And I think it's important to have strong villains because without it, as you say as well, then you have no real conflict and no driver behind.
And then the story.
Sacha (20m 29s): Exactly, exactly. I think the Mark of a good story, well there are many marks of good stories, but one of my most favored marks of a good story is a villain who will suck me in. Um, and you know, they'll make me like him and then just as I'm about to tip over into, Oh, I love this, they'll go and do some things so unbelievably, terribly horrible that I'm like, ah, later you kill me. Because now I just call it like the villain or whatever. You know, it's that roller coaster of innovations that I think comes from a good villain.
Jesper (21m 2s): Yeah, absolutely. But do you think it's also important to show chains in the villain or do you just go with like, well, the willingness to same.
Sacha (21m 13s): So you know, there are lots of different types of villain arcs as well. I think what we really interesting villains go on their own, um, that their own journey. So you can have a character who starts out nice, for example, that this often happens in like high school, um, uh, stories. You'll have two friends and one will become, um, you know, uh, I was going to say no to that, but one will become the cause. She gets jealous, but she starts out nice and then she declines on her own journey into becoming the Antonio.
I mean, to be honest, in that kind of story, it's more of an antagonist than a, than a villain. But they will descend. Um, and it's only as they descend that if you look at a graph, they are descending downwards, the heroes starts to rise upwards and it's at that point of crossing that the hero overcomes their floor in order to defeat the villain. And the villain falls into that point of insanity where there's no, no return for them. But you also have other types of villains.
So a redemption arc is, I just love a redemption arc. So a typical thing, and obviously as I've said, we'll go downwards. They'll start, you know, maybe bad, but they'll decline rapidly into the dark pits, off, you know, um, uh, push the red button of nuclear explosion. Um, but a redemption arc is when they might start bad, but actually they end up doing the right thing or they, they redeem themselves for whatever it is they've done. A good example of that, excuse me, in relatively recent TV series was once upon a time, I think it was am and the evil queen in a snow white and the seven drawers, so she's called Regina in this TV show.
She has a fantastic redemption arc, even the seven series. So, um, I would highly recommend that TV series if you want to see a recent example of a redemption arc that I loved. Um, yeah,
Jesper (23m 20s): yeah, yeah. But I think it is important to, to think about the villains as a character rather than just a mechanism to, to throw some stuff in the face of the hero all the time. Right. Because that needs to be some depth to, to the, to the villainous. Well of course, I, I do think sometimes when we're dealing with fantasy, if you're, if you're a villain is like, uh, uh, the dark Lord or something, you know, like, uh, like in a lot of the rings or whatever, right? Then it can be a bit difficult to try to, to think about how do I show a real change in Salona something, right?
I mean, but, but, but I mean, I think it applies both ways. Dis about a S before we talked about the not shoe Horning in the reason for the villain to be evil, but at the same time, I think it applies the other way around us. Well, sometimes don't shoe horn in a change because you think that's a good idea. It's, it all depends on, yeah,
Sacha (24m 15s): absolutely. And we all know I'm a rebel so you can, you can break any writing rule that you want as long as you're creating believable characters and you have readers that like your stories. Um, you know, but I, I, one of the things that I think is important, um, although again, lots of writers will break this and still create good stories, but allowing your villain, so your hero represents the theme in your book. Okay. So you'll fill in, should resent the, I'll put my teeth back in, should represent the anti theme.
So a good example of this, again, I will go back to the hunger games. Hopefully everybody has seen or read the hunger games, but Katniss represents sacrifice even on the, in the first chapter. She um, her sister gets cool to go into this really dangerous life threatening TV reality show and she sacrifices herself in order to protect her sister. Everything she does in the novel is about sacrifice and sacrificing herself for the greater good of others and in order to get what you want, but president snow sacrifices of the people for his benefit.
So he is a direct reversal of the the of the book's theme. And he will am. Yes. Okay. One of his values, his heel, any kill people for a purpose, but you can be damn sure that he will kill somebody if he, if it's going to benefit him. Um, so yeah, I really think that's another important aspect to make sure you, you look at in preparing your villain and Damon.
Jesper (25m 59s): Yeah, exactly. So, so speaking of that, uh, of what, what you just said there, how much and how, and how much detail do you advise to, to go into character planning before you start writing? How much of this do you set up in advance and how much do you sort of figured out along the way? I think
Sacha (26m 16s): that, Hm, I think that is individual to each writer. Um, I, I love, I love talking about process and talking to other writers about what they do. Um, their planner Ponsot writing into the dark, etc. Um, but I don't think that is one right answer. At the end of the day, if you are finishing books, then the process works for you. If you're not finishing books, then try something else and experiment. Um, some people like to let their characters play out on the page and then they're happy to do revisions.
That's fine. Some people like to go into a lot of depth planning, um, before they start. I think, um, even if you don't write it down and you don't plan it, knowing your villains am floor and positive traits and their wound in the past is helpful before you start because it can help you shape your scenes and the conversations and it will enable you to know both what you're hearing needs to be bad and good at and how eventually they'll defeat them.
But ultimately, I, you know, I hate dictating to people how they should and shouldn't do their planning. Um, cause I just think there are as many different processes as there are writers out there and you have to find an experiment to see what works for you.
Jesper (27m 35s): Yup. Yeah, that's absolutely true. And I think also the dose pros and cons to all of it. Uh, you know, the, the modern, you can plan out in advance the more time you're going to save in editing. But if you feel like planning out in advance is, is killing your creativity, then maybe it's better to just spend more time editing. So it's to his own.
Sacha (27m 55s): Yeah, absolutely. And also don't be afraid to change your mind. So like I always sometimes forget that I have permission to change my mind on things. So if anybody's listening, you have permission to experiment. Um, but yeah, so I have written books that are heavily planned and also not planned at all. And sometimes different books and different projects require different methods. So that's okay. If you need to change up your method, you have permission.
Jesper (28m 22s): Okay. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Uh, but, but, uh, in terms of heroes versus villains here, are there like any fundamental things that you think is really important for writers to be aware of in terms of differences between the two where we spent quite, uh, quite some time here at the moment talking about villains and how to make them great. You did also touch upon upon the heroes a bit in the beginning, but is there any like fundamental things that are really important or do you think the same sort of characteristics
Sacha (28m 51s): kind off but in opposite way. So when we talked about a villain, we said that, um, they need a positive trait in amongst their negative ones, but for a heroes they need a negative trait in amongst their positive ones. So nobody likes the perfect person and nobody really likes the geek at school who always has their hand up and always get things right. You know, it makes us feel bad, you know?
Um, yeah, nobody likes a perfect Terry because actually it's boring. There's no trials and tribulations and it's unrelatable. One of the things that we read is love the most is to be able to relate to the heroes and in particular their emotional journey because that really is at the heart of stories is, is the emotion. And, um, we're perfect as humans and therefore your heroes should not be passive. They should make mistakes. They should see the wrong thing. They should upset people.
Ultimately though they obviously need to be overwhelmingly good, um, in order to, to be the hair or not. If you have an antihero, um, obviously they are, you know, a good 50, 50 balance of good and evil. Um, the other thing that I think is really important to concentrate with, um, the hero is something that I talk about in my book. 10 steps to heroes how to craft a kickass protagonist. Um, and that's the hero lens so often.
Well, and it will depend slightly on the point of view that you're writing in but broadly speaking, even if you're in an omniscient, um, you know, looking over the heads of all of the characters type and point of view, your story will be told through the eyes of either a character, your protagonists, or another character or through a series of different characters. And the important thing to remember is that that is all your reader has.
Okay. So you, for example, I might see turquoise as more greeny blue than bluey green, but other people might see it more as bluey green. So each of us has this unique way of looking at the world. And the hero lens is essentially a funnel through which you'll read a sees the story and it is through the eyes of your heroes. And the way that you can Croft that lens is through actions, thoughts, and feelings and dialogue.
Now, if you're an exact, so to put this into practice as and as an example, if you have a really stuffy, formal, pompous sort of academic as a character, you need to think how that personality would be reflected across dialogue, across thoughts, feelings, and action. Because the way that academic would behave is very different to a gang member, for example. So instead of using, and you can get really granular with this, but this is how you create really good characterization and how you create the sensation of individuality and uniqueness for your heroes that your reader will fall in.
Love it. So let's go nitty gritty and talk. Look at sort of a sentence level thing a academic might say. Instead of saying, I thought either your offer, they could say, I've been contemplating your author. So instead of using a basic word like think or thinking, they might say contemplating or pondering and they might say, I've come to the conclusion that it must be a node. Rather than saying, I've been thinking about your offer and it's a no, you know, you have to look at how you can take those personality traits and filter them down through thoughts, through dialogue.
I mean that was a dialogue example, but even in the description, you know, somebody who is a angry character, we'll use shorter, sharper sentences and shorter words. Often things like automatic PSA, they might talk about the banging footsteps of a soldier, for example, where somebody who is much more um, thoughtful might use, my brain's gone completely blank now, but you see where I'm going with this.
Jesper (33m 14s): Yeah, absolutely. And, and I think also what, what a character notices is also different depending on personality. So one type of person who will notice something else in a room that then another type of personality will, right? I mean, some personalities will enter a room and the first thing they'll look for, okay, that this is me. So when I enter a room, I look for kitchen, where's the toilets, where, where are the exits? So I need to know where everything is. Right? But somebody else might enter a room and think, Oh, those look like interesting people over there.
I better go over there and talk to them. Right. And that's not me.
Sacha (33m 48s): Definitely I of those details that that characterization comes from. Um, and you know, the reflection on how those things make them feel. So I think in the book there's an example about, um, two different characters are more depressed character and an angry character looking at a parade and the differences, um, it's the same event, but they're looking at it through very different eyes. So they are noticing different details and yeah. So it's one of my most favorite things to do in in when I'm writing is to think about the details that one character we'll see over another.
Jesper (34m 23s): Yeah, absolutely. One thing I was thinking about while you were saying that, and I don't know what, what your thoughts about this, but the sentence level for me that that sounds like something that you should probably spend most of your time on, eh, let's say correcting or updating when you're doing your editing, because I think if you get bucked down and all of that during your first drafty, yeah, you might spend quite a lot of time thinking about the right words that this character will use and at the end of the day you're going to edit the, some of it out anyway or whatnot. So I don't know what you think about that.
Do you go about it right away or do you sort of save some of that, those details for the editing?
Sacha (35m 0s): I think it depends. Like I said earlier, some people will write an extremely clean first draft and that's, that's because they cycle through. So they might read it, they might write your chapter, read a chapter, read an editor chapter, write the next chapter, read it. At the end of the day, if you are finishing books, it doesn't matter how you're doing it. Um, I tend to use a mixture. I'm a bit of a burst writer so I will, but I'm changing that. I am trying to write consistently instead of, you know, writing 20 K in a week and then not writing for me personally, I do a bit of a mixture.
Sometimes I will take forever to, you know, write a single sentence and then other times I will just form it an entire scene out and I'll revise it later. And I think it just depends on how I'm feeling and what the moment calls for. But I definitely, um, I, I wouldn't say I write flowery, but I definitely love description and I love, um, obsessing about the sentence level stuff. So I probably spend a reasonable amount of time doing that in revisions or, or if I'm doing it at this at the time.
But it depends on the project. It depends on the characters. Some characters are so fully formed when they appear on the page that you don't need to revise them because their voice is so crystal clear. Um, the characters take longer to, um, to, to develop. So for example, one of my characters in my, um, uh, young adult fantasy novel, um, was, has been there since, but one, I'm now on book three, but, um, they were much blander I think in book one and by book three, they now this like total diva, snarky genius diva.
And, um, so they've really come into their room and perhaps I could have done more planning beforehand to ensure that this character was the same from the start. But I, I like it because it feel like this character has come into their road. So are you finishing books? That's the, that's the real important question. If your face you booked, it doesn't matter how you get there.
Jesper (37m 9s): Yeah, absolutely. That's so true. Um, but I was also thinking to ask you, um, maybe, maybe sort of as, as a rounding off, I don't know, but, uh, but because we have so many streaming services nowadays, you have so many movies that is easily available to everybody. What, what do you think about taking inspiration from characters in in? It could also be another books, but, but maybe from movies or TV shows or whatever, and using that as inspiration for your own characters. Do you think that's a good idea or it doesn't it matter or,
Sacha (37m 41s): yeah, absolutely. I get, get any inspiration you can from anywhere, be it, you know, going and visiting museums, you know, climbing into abandoned buildings. Not that I've done that any, any which way you can. And I think it's, I think we'd be naive to say that the stories that we read or the TV shows that we watch don't influence the us. I don't think we can avoid that. You know, arguably you could say that every romance story that has ever been written is a rip off of Romeo and Juliet.
Um, as long as you're not doing a carbon copy of a character, which frankly, I don't believe that you could because exactly. Each writer's voice is different. But if you are taking elements of a story, um, or elements of a world-building or elements of whatever, then, you know, so what every vampire story ever or has vampires in it, does that mean every race of vampires is saying, does that mean they all become a vampire in the same way?
You know? Yeah. I don't think that all unique stories really, I think, you know, with 8 million books or whatever it is on Amazon, I think it's very hard to have something that is truly original. So yeah, don't be afraid, just, just don't write carbon copies of because obviously then that is plagiarism and illegal.
Jesper (39m 4s): Yeah. But, but yeah, uh, I mean, I fully agree. I mean, unless you actually sitting there and copying exactly the same thing, then I fully agree that it's not possible to, to copy and not even a story. I mean, sometimes I call him, uh, come across, uh, writers who email me or some of them. I've also received some tweets once in a while where people asking or that, you know, what about when I share my story ideas and people would steal it. And I always keep saying the same thing. Like nobody can steal your idea. I mean, it doesn't matter that you're telling people if, if talking told somebody, this is what I'm, I'm thinking about, I want to write for a lot of the rings.
And you sat down and wrote the Lord of the rings while he was doing it in parallel, the two stories would be completely different even though you started out from the same idea. Yeah,
Sacha (39m 47s): absolutely. And the other thing is like, and I, I mean this with no disrespect to any creative, but nobody else cares. You know, we all, as creatives, we all have our own ideas that we are deeply passionate about and they are ours. And yes, there might be similarities and other stories, but nobody wants to write somebody else's story. They want to write their own story. So it is usually highly unlikely that somebody will steal your idea or whatever.
Yes, they might take elements or parts of your story, but nobody can write like you. Nobody has your voice because nobody grew up under the same circumstances. Nobody has the same lens, see what I did, their hair, you have and therefore they cannot possibly write to the same story as you.
Jesper (40m 40s): No, absolutely true. That's it's a ton of good advice. You're Sacha is there anything that you have not mentioned that you feel is important for the listener to know?
Sacha (40m 48s): Am just keep writing and keep practicing. And one thing that I really like to do is write flash, flash fiction. Um, I think it's a really good, uh, so flash fiction for anybody that doesn't know is a very, very micro short story could be anything from two lines of dialogue up to sort of thousand word character sketches. But if you're ever unsure about how a character would act or behave, I always like to put them in strange situations or you know, give them an emotion to feel or to react to you and just write a very short piece.
And I think that helps and stops people from making mistakes in their manuscripts. And it is also then free that you can then give to your readers or whatever. So yeah, just, just experiment.
Jesper (41m 39s): Mm, cool. So where can people find more, uh, more about you and what you do? Sacha if they want to check stuff out,
Sacha (41m 47s): but so, um, my name is, uh, obviously Sasha black, but it's Sacha with a C so, S a C H, a M and my website is Sacha black.co dot. UK. You can find out more about my books. I have a blog that you can find out more about like podcast there. The podcast is on all podcasting app category jobbies and it's called the rebel author podcast am if you would like to view my books, I'm on, I'm white, so I am anywhere that you can, you can buy a book.
You can find my books and, and last, but by no means least I am on Twitter and Facebook and all of those things. Um, but I most frequently on Instagram, which is at Sacha, black author and one last thing. Um, I do have a Facebook group where we do weekly accountability posts. We do fast friction writing Wednesday challenges, and it's just generally a really nice support group. And that is called 13 steps to Eagle. Doesn't sound nice, does it? But it is.
Sorry man.
Jesper (42m 49s): That's excellent. And uh, I, if you sent me some link Sasha, then I'll add it to the show notes so people can find it straight through there as well. All right. Thanks a lot for joining us today. So next Monday autumn, we'll be back and we're gonna dive deep into the topic of how to find other authors to collaborate with.
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Narrator (2s): You're listening to the amwritingfantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing join to best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them. Now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt. Hello, I'm Jesper and I'm Autumn.
This is episode 56 of the amwritingfantasy podcast and quite often the advice to authors is that you should be
Jesper (44s): diversifying your revenue streams and that might sound like good businesses wise, but what does it actually mean and what other revenue streams is available to you. So that's what we're going to cover today. I think this is going to be quite interesting. Autumn yeah, I think we're going to get into the nitty gritty, which I love. I love questioning these, these overarching rules that you're here and you're like, that sounds great.
Autumn (1m 8s): I want to do that. How do I do that? I then we're going to get into the what you could possibly do. Yay. Yeah. Uh, we have a few options. Should we call it prepared each of us. So we'll get into that a bit later here. That's right. So I had this thing where I came home today and I had to share with you that, um, I know you don't eat meat and so this is not going to be attractive to you, but I walked into the apartment and it smelled like maple glazed bacon as like woo.
And so other people who do eat meat are going to be like, Oh my God, this is not the way to come home to record a podcast and you're hit in the face with this warm aroma of bacon. It's just wrong. But, um, Adam likes to, my husband likes to am where are we? We're foodies, so we like to make food and he recently got into am finding out that you can make your own bacon. So, um, is, is WIC with made with local locally grown meat locally growing hogs?
Am so it was all the local produced with a maple espresso glaze. Um, yeah, that was, let me try that. Yeah, he's done it like once or twice before, but it's always been out. You know, he'll do it over a fire or a roast or a smoker or something to finish it off. But since we're an apartment now and it's now December and it snowed, we had 30 inches of snow and it's a little cold. I think the high on Thursday this week is 18 degrees Fahrenheit.
So that's really, it's below freezing. Um, you know, he decided to try it in our, our apartment, which happens to have a range. So it's, yeah, it's not quite the same, but at least it is fire. It's not electric stove. Um, and yeah, I came home to the luscious aroma of bacon and I've told you before, one of my favorite podcasts is gastropod, which is all about food. And so I was like, wow, this is my focus today is going to be on bacon.
Sorry. Nice. Well,
Jesper (3m 23s): I mean if he's, he's used to cooking outside, so I guess you can't blame him too much. He doesn't
Autumn (3m 28s): stand what, what inside inside kitchen look works, how it works. I guess I should just be happy. He didn't decide to roast coffee cause he has done that. He wrote his own coffee beans and that is one of the smokiest processes I have ever stumbled across. And that is not something you want to do in an apartment unless you want the fire alarm to go off. So just anyone else at home do that outside. So how, how's your week going?
Jesper (3m 59s): Quite good. Um, early in the week we, uh, uh, we went with my oldest son because he was gonna graduate to a yellow belt in karate, uh, this past week. Okay.
Autumn (4m 11s): So how, yeah, so we went there to, to see it and um,
Jesper (4m 17s): I'm not quite sure why, but we actually weren't allowed to. What's the actual year? I don't know if you call a test, but you know, the actual graduation or you know, they did test that. They notice stuff that they need to know and we went actually not allowed to watch that. So we just have to sit outside in the common room waiting while they are doing, I don't know why we were not allowed to watch it, but there was a bit weird, you know, we were looking forward to go down and see it and we brought his younger brothers, well we sat out there for an hour or something and the younger brother was starting to get really bored.
Autumn (4m 48s): Hi Beth.
Jesper (4m 51s): But uh, but it all went, it went well in the end. Uh, so, uh, apparently during his testing, um, they figured out that he was too skilled for the yellow billed, so they actually allowed him to skip the yellow and go straight to orange. So
Autumn (5m 7s): that was pretty much, that's actually really cool. So it went well even if it's a secret right, that you couldn't witness. Exactly.
Jesper (5m 16s): Yeah. And he was very proud of course. And uh, it was, it was really nice to see him see him that happy. So, so that was, I think that was awesome.
Autumn (5m 25s): Oh, it sounded like I said, I live vicariously through you as a parent. So I think that is just, that would be, it makes me feel warm and fuzzy. Just imagining like, Oh my gosh, this is something I produced that is doing so well. I don't know how that happened, so that's fantastic. You need to allow your doctor to start karate training or something. Um, as I'd like to joke, I have got to record him sometime to share with everyone the sound my dog makes because as the breeder had said, when had her first litter of carne terrier puppies, are they supposed to sound this way?
They sound sort of like, I call him a vampire dog and they don't grow. They don't bark. They, it's, it's just kind of seeding. I'm going to possibly eat. You in suck your blood, so I've got to get that for you someday.
Jesper (6m 13s): Oh yeah, that would be pretty cool. We can put it into an audio book one day about with a vampire Kip that in every time. Great. Oh, we go on the internet with the amwritingfantasy podcast so I was thinking it worth mentioning that the sum of our patrons are probably coming up on getting access to the what's in a name cost for free.
That's right. Yeah. Because after six months of support on Patrion, you actually get free access to this course, which is a in part about creating languages and names for your fantasy characters. So I think that will probably be some patron supporters who are getting close to, to get that access for free. So, you know, don't, don't forget the patron supporters to keep an eye on that and email us when your time is up so that we can, uh, get you into that course for free.
And it's a useful Yana. But I was just about to say that I would also think that some of them might not be too far off for getting a free amwritingfantasy t-shirt as well.
Autumn (7m 26s): I think so I've been, yeah, that's, yeah, that's the one year, isn't it? And there's a few people who have been there, so yeah, yeah, yeah, that'd be, yeah. It's, we have so many different, you know, people subscribe to different tiers and coming at different times that that's why we ask them to keep track. But they are there. So yeah, this is a great reminder to go in and check and see what day you joined and check your tier level and let us know if we owe you something because that's why that's there. We're excited to give it to you and if you happen to send a picture, if you get a tee shirt, we'd be thrilled.
That's fun to see people wearing am. Yeah, I love seeing people
Jesper (8m 4s): right before when we were recording a YouTube videos, I usually a tee shirt as well. But uh, nowadays on a podcast, I don't think quite it matters. I'm in pajamas. Really makes no difference.
Autumn (8m 21s): No. Considering how late it is for you. I mean it's only a mid-afternoon for me on the East coast of the States, but for you all the way over there in Denmark. Yeah, it's am evening. So you could be wearing our pajamas and slippers and I wouldn't know.
Jesper (8m 34s): No. Yeah, it's nine in the evening right now for me. So, uh, yeah. Um, yeah, but I also wanted to mention just that for everyone else who are not yet supporting us on Patrion, I would encourage, encourage you to at least click the link in the show notes and check out all the rewards that we are offering for supporters because you know, as for as little as a dollar a month you can get in there. And I have to say that the money we can collect from patron is what will keep this podcast going long term.
And we are certainly not there yet at this point in time actually justifies the time that we're spending on these episodes. So if you add just $1 a month to the pot will then we won't end up in a situation where at some point in the future autumn and I have to start asking ourselves if our time is better spent on writing. So I'll get off my soapbox there, but it's just that, you know, $1 might not sound like much, but it actually does make a difference if enough, if, if enough people, so yeah, that's, that's worth mentioning.
Autumn (9m 42s): Absolutely. And it's funny that you mentioned it because one of the comments I had really liked that had just come in is because I still sharing on Patrion, um, going really in depth into the seven stages of story structure and really pulling out like which one each one means and how to make it all link up to you can create a better plot. And am I know Zaid was like, you know, this is gold. Thank you. And the entire first act of my book is going to need a rewrite even though I'm like, no, wait until you're done writing before you, you do that.
But, um, you know, we got into the cause and effect and the idea of this mini story that should help serve as an introduction. So it's just, it's great to be able to help someone else out and then also to get the feedback and be able to, you know, answer questions specifically to make sure things are going for well for how he's writing and what he needs. So again, that's all on, on. So it was really, it's so great to be able to connect with, um, you know, other members and other writers that way and help each other and guide them.
So I know their stories are growing well too.
Jesper (10m 57s): All right. I feel like we raced through that. Uh, so, uh, we already have to, today's a topic now, um, with multiple streams of income. And, uh, I guess the best place to start is just defining a bit about what does it mean when we're talking about multiple streams of income and on, why are we talking about that? But do you want to kick us off with that? I'll just throw it on me. I thought that was the easiest.
Autumn (11m 29s): I don't never knew you to Slack on anything. I'm shocked. So, but I will take up the challenge. It's a multiple streams of income. I mean this is not having multiple books. Technically. Maybe if you have different genres you might want to consider it. But this is like, it's almost like having different jobs. So you have books and you also maybe have your day job and then you have maybe spouse's job, you have different areas, like big spheres of areas that provides some sort of income, some money.
So that way if suddenly all ebook sales dried up, you still have your own income or you know, you still, you're selling cross stitching or something, something totally related or unrelated, you know, you could be doing literary cross-stitch. So those are ways of providing income to your family, into your business, whatever that may be. So that's all we're going to look at today. When we say multiple streams of income, you have different pots that you're going to be getting money into. And so there are different, they might overlap in some areas, but it's not as easy as saying, you know, I writing nonfiction and fantasy it's, you know, there's still books, so we want to look at side maybe the realm, the pot of books.
Yeah. And, uh,
Jesper (12m 45s): basically the idea is sort of, um, well one thing that is not very pleasant to think about is that basically like having a day job, right? So you have one company paying you income or your salary in the case if a day job and something happens and they have light, they lay off hundreds of people and you're one of them and all of a sudden you have no income. I mean, as some author you're selling books. And of course I re very, very much doubt that Amazon is ever going to go bust.
But uh, but they could decide on, in Amazon that way, why are we paying authors a am this much royalty. Let's just say that from now on, we pay authors 50% royalty. And if you are earning all of your money from Amazon or doesn't matter, it could also be Cobra or whatever, one of the other, what is it called? Like online retailers. Um, then you're going to take it very serious hit, you know, and if you're not prepared for that, then that will hurt just as much as it hurts getting laid off from a day job.
But usually when you get laid off for a day job, and I do realize that probably here in or wind Denmark, we have a bit a bit better protection systems in place in the U S but at least over here, if you get laid off, you will, you'll get several months of pay, uh, to make sure that you have some time to find a new job. But if Amazon tomorrow and they could decide to cut your royalties in half, they will just do so when there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. So the idea would, multiple streams of income is not two, it's really not to find out, okay, so how can I earn as much as from selling books on something else?
But it's more an idea of creating a lot of small streams that together gives you a, you know, a lot of revenue flowing in from different places that in total, uh, earns you enough money. Um, but it's not that you have to come up with one thing. So that's not what we're talking about here. Trying to find one stream of income that will earn you as much money as selling books. That's not the point, but it's more like trying to what are some smaller avenues here and dad, you could potentially think about adding to your, to the things that you are doing two and a bit more money from different places.
So about the in in total between all of the things that you're doing, you get a healthy income and you are less dependent on one source. So, so that's the idea behind all of the stuff that we're going to talk about here. I hope that wasn't absolutely,
Autumn (15m 17s): no, no, that was perfect and it was a good, yeah, good intro to why you want to do this. Because you know, you, we don't control Amazon. We don't control these big sellers. You could, they could cut revenue they could kick you off if they consider that you violated something. So there are many reasons that you know, it's why you and I are both. Um, we're not just on KDP select but not just selling on Amazon. We are both wide because again, it's spreading out how you can find us and what happens if suddenly Kobo folded, you know, Barnes and Nobles has become so close to closing its doors.
It could happen. And with that happens, how's that going to affect where you sell your books if you were just selling them there? It's something to keep in mind. And this will hopefully, if you are considering becoming a career author or you're working towards that, this is something you want to do, you want to establish different income streams so that if something happens in one area, you know, hopefully the other one will be doing well enough. You also have some savings. You ha you have a safety net and you're not going to lose everything overnight. If suddenly, you know, Barnes and Nobles holds its doors, Amazon's decides to cut everybody to 50% or 30% of keeps it really small and something you're like making a third or a half of what you did the day before or
Jesper (16m 37s): it could happen. Yeah. Yeah. And I would say, I mean, we're not making up these scenarios here just to scare people because honestly it has happened several times. And I think if I look at the sort of the bus within the author community, it's starting to happen more and more because, uh, especially Amazon have put more and more like say automation and algorithms and bots in, in place to actually trigger for fraud basically. Right? So they're trying to determine automatically if certain accounts are basically cheating the customers, meaning and so decide samples, uh, people uploading am crappy book files just to earn some money or whatever, you know, all those sorts of things to, but I've heard more and more that, uh, should we call them quote unquote real authors have, are getting hit by these spots and, and basically having the account and spend it on Amazon and stuff like that.
Uh, and they have done nothing wrong in farther motor races. Of course. Uh, once a human starts in intervening and they get somebody from Amazon support to look at it, their accounts are, but again, Justin would take months. Yeah, yeah. Well usually it goes quite quickly to be honest. But but just imagine that the human being on the other end decides that. No, actually I think the is correct. And you are, I mean, you're, you're done. And if this is you and Ty income, what are you going to do then?
Yeah, I don't want to see people, but I just want to put it in perspective that we're just, we're not making up, you know, scary examples for the fun of it here. It actually does happen. No, it does. And that's what that is why it is scary. And that's why as a business you have to consider all the different income streams. So yeah, we'll stop trying to shake people into a terror. So before we make them forget to even listen to the rest of the episode, let's give them examples and you want to do what we did last time that we had some good feedback that we alternate.
Um, yeah, that's a good habit. Let's keep doing that. Okay. Do you want to start with the biggest one or shall we start with the smallest and work our way up? Uh, I don't have mine in a particular order, speak and small. I just have three different options. So for me it does not matter. Okay. Let's go ahead and just pick one. You go ahead. Okay. Um, so I think if some authors might be thinking about doing things like a, you know, professional speaking, coaching programs, stuff like that.
And that is a very good way to supplement your income because, uh, well at least after a while you might get a thought after as a am or asked for as a professional speaker. And if that's the case, then you cannot earn quite a healthy income from doing that. Um, but if that is something that you would like to do, it might very well be worth your time to write a nonfiction book on the topic that you want to teach. So basically using, using a nonfiction book as your starting point to get actually get into professional speaking or teaching or whatever it may be that you want to do because a nonfiction book cement your expertise, uh, and it goes a long way to earn you some credits about what you're talking about.
Because it's a bit funny because a while back, and now this is quite a while back, I wrote a book on how to use Twitter. And, uh, it was quite a lot of people who pick up that book really liked it and it has some really good strategies in it. And it was in part what I use to build quite a big Twitter following that, that I still have today of course. But, uh, uh, and at that point in time, I actually did a, this was many years back by the way, but I did reach out to some local, you know, local but in Denmark.
Everything is very relative. But I did reach out to some dangerous, uh, publishers and basically use the book as a starting point and then basically asked them, so if you, if you want to have some costs or do you authors that you're working with on how to use Twitter to, to build an audience, then you know, I can do a cost for you or come up to speak for you and, or whatnot. So I tried to do that, uh, as a kicking off, a bit of a additional revenue stream back then.
Uh, it was, I think it was even before autumn and I started working together. But, uh, as lo and behold, and this is probably lessons learned, don't, don't, don't do stuff on, on the basis of online because they change all the time. And I think I didn't, it didn't even take six month after I published the book before Twitter changed their terms of service, which meant that the entire strategy that was like the bedrock of that entire book went out the window.
So it was just so annoying. But, uh, yeah, I learned my lesson there and not to, don't write things about other people's platform that, that might change any day. Um, so, but anyway, that was a good lesson. And uh, the idea still holds true if, if, but try to pick something that you have maybe an expertise in already that's probably best, but also something that, um, that you can teach regardless of, uh, yeah, somebody changing the terms of service.
Autumn (22m 11s): Exactly. So more like if you're an awesome crime writer, of course, I don't know why you're listening to our podcast on fantasy writing if you're a crime writer, but say you're an awesome crime fiction writer and you're just really good at creating really fantastic dubious villains that no one would ever guess. And you wrote a book about how you do that. That would be, and then you could go, maybe there's a lot of great crime writers conventions and workshops and there's a lot you could do there that you would be invited to go speak to, or you could sign up to go and speak at and give talks on.
So that's sort of, you know, it doesn't have to be just because like how to use a platform, but if you're really good, if you created some innovative way of doing something, that's also a good starting point. It doesn't just have to be the writing style, but yeah. So it could be anything from how to write something to how to do something on a platform. Just be careful. It's a platform that doesn't completely change everything. Yeah. Every few months. Yeah,
Jesper (23m 10s): I heard on another podcast, there was this guy who, uh, he, I don't remember, I think he was actively writing thrillers or something, but, but that's beside the point. But, but he used to be a police officer, so he actually wrote some nonfiction books about how police procedures works. Uh, and then he was teaching other writers about, um, uh, how to, you know, make the whole police procedures in books. Uh, come, come across as, as realistic and not do all the mistakes, but it doesn't have to be about books either.
You know, the, the nonfiction maybe, maybe you write fantasy in your spare time and an end, the daytime time you are real estate 18 or something and maybe you can write a nonfiction book about something related to real estate. She has something and then that's what you want to teach and earn some, some extra income, uh, as a, as an extra stream of income on other site. For for doing that. I mean it does not have to be referred to writing at all. It's, but you could look at what, what are you good at and consider if that's something you could maybe make a bit of a side income on in one way or another.
Autumn (24m 16s): That's, yeah, that's very true. I like that one. And definitely something to think about it and thinking of some of the things I do and I'm like, yeah, I have some nonfiction books on, Hey, I'm coming out with one on our traveling across the United States. So that's typically a secondary stream there. You do cover the science as well, which is also like a another stream of income, right? So yeah. Yeah, absolutely right. It's so much fun. All right, so my number one is sort of funny because it's sort of takes away the problem on if Amazon decided to cut your revenue and that's doing direct ebook and signed paperback sales from your website.
So this is something that you either need to have a little bit of expertise to set up to be able to create the website. It'd be able to take money like through PayPal or Stripe and get all that interaction set up. But I will say that if you use WordPress and even Squarespace have some really easy, uh, plugins and platforms to be able to do online sales, you have to have your own domain. You can't be using wordpress.org the one that's free if you're using that, they will not allow you to sell and do stuff like that on your website.
But if you're, if you own your own domain and when you get it set up this way, it is 100% possible to go ahead and sell directly to your readers signed paperbacks, which obviously you're going to charge a little bit more than you'd buy it off of Amazon for and you can do ebook sales and the brilliant, brilliant, brilliant thing. This sounds so complicated. But book funnel, I hate to give the secret away. Book funnel has made an interaction integration with a couple of funding sources where if you happen to be already a member of book funnel to send out your art copy or to get people to join your mailing list, they're already set up to be the source file for when people buy your ebook.
And you just need to do these integrations that the first time you do it you go like, Oh my gosh, I do not know what I'm doing. But once you figure it out or you hire someone to figure it out for you, you can sell books. And that's just, not only is it exciting because you get 100% of the proceeds, a hundred percent royalties, which is just awesome. And then you can send that to your newsletter and explain why they're doing this. And most readers are savvy enough to say, Oh my gosh, this is wonderful. I will go there and buy the file and give you, you know, 100% of the, so when you're talking about a three 99 or four 99 book, that's fantastic.
That's, that's wonderful that you're getting 100% of the royalties and then you can do some really cool things. Like the last time I released a book, I released it early on my website to kind of entice people to go there and buy it off of from me. Or, you know, I can offer a sale that I'm still getting better percentage than Amazon, but it's still a slight discount. So there's lots of really cool things when you suddenly own the platform where you're selling your books from. So you might be able to tell, I'm kind of excited about this one because I've had a ton of fun and it's been very successful and it's still growing.
So it's a fantastic way of managing where you're selling your book so that you don't have to worry about what Amazon does. Obviously most people are still finding my books on Amazon or through other sources like that, but once they find me and join my mailing list, my newsletter, and some of them spontaneously see that you can buy the books right off my website. It's a fantastic way of getting a secondary income that I control a hundred percent of.
And it's not as painful as some people might imagine to start off with.
Jesper (27m 58s): No. But I think there was a key word in there that is really, really important among what you said. And that is the email list. Because selling your books direct, I would, I would say, at least from my point of view, it's more or less pointless and useless unless you have a good email is because just, just because you put your books up on your website with a purchase link on nobody's gonna, nobody's gonna find it. Especially because, no, they can Amazon.
Yeah. Because at least on Amazon, they might be searching for search terms like a, I don't know, whatever fantasy book or whatever, you know, and, and, and if you have the right keywords in your metadata or if you are buying a keyword ads on Amazon or something, you might pop up and they might find you like that, but on your own website, they will never, ever find you. I mean, did, the only way it's, it's, it's working. If you have an audience already and you have them on an email list and you can tell them, Hey, go here and buy the book.
Uh, if, if you want to support me because then, uh, I'm the, uh, you know, I don't, uh, I don't have to give a cut to Amazon. So in that way, and I think most, most readers would love to support you in that way. So they will love to do that. But it requires that you have an audience already. Otherwise it's pointless. I would say.
Autumn (29m 21s): Yeah, it's not going to be a huge seller unless you already have people finding you and signing up and people you can tell about and however that, however you've managed that, whether you have a massive Wattpad following and they'll, they're hungrily waiting for your book and they will happily buy it from you directly or you know, the mailing list and newsletter is definitely the easiest way of letting people know you can go straight to your website. But definitely you have to have some things set up. Like I said, you need a domain, you need to know how to do this. Book funnel is really one of the best ways of, of handling the ebook file.
And so yeah, there's, if you've got questions, you don't put them in the comments, but I found it really an exciting way of interacting and talking to readers and getting their support, which is fantastic.
Jesper (30m 7s): Yep. Okay. So my next one is, uh, well it's essentially like another product that you can put on the market without actually having to do any work. So that's a good starting point, isn't it? Great starting point. I want to do the one. Yeah. Uh, and it's basically putting your, the books in your series together in one file and then released a massive box set. So of course you could then say, well that's not really another stream of income. You're just putting together existing products and creating a new product out of it.
And that is correct. But actually quite often it's a different audience who reads box sets versus those who reach individual eBooks? I don't know. Do you re box sets? Autumn
Autumn (30m 51s): I tend to read individual eBooks, but I agree with you all the statistics and the research has said that this is a completely different audience than people who goes and buys the individual books. So I think that's kind of interesting. And yeah, bundles are a fantastic way of dealing with books.
Jesper (31m 10s): Yeah. Because I, and I think I'm one of these people myself because I hate reading boxes. It's, I don't, I just don't like them, you know, because, uh, there are so many pages in that file. And then when my, I look at, you know, at the bottom of the Kindle screen, you have this percentage of how much you've completed as it just like we read for two hours and removed 1%. It's like, Oh my God, I'm never going to get through it. You know? I like it when it's like a normal level and you read now and it moved two or 3%. It's like, okay, I'm making progress.
I don't know, it just, it bugs me. But then of course there are other people who will love the box sets and they buy box it. So it's just makes the point, right? It's two different audiences. Um, and, uh, and this is just another way where you can urge them, earn some extra income from products that you already created by just putting together, I'll put them together in a different way. Um, but I would say if you want to release a box set, please don't do it right after you release the final book in your series.
You know, because often, often box sets will have to be cheaper than buying the books individually. Uh, and it's, it's just not very cool if you like have people buy the last book of your series and then two weeks later you release a box set, which is 40% less than the entire series if you buy them one by one as much as the one a
Autumn (32m 32s): book. Yeah. I just, just one book or bundle of books. Yeah, no, I agree. You've got to watch your pricing there that I've, I've seen box sets for like 99 cents and yet the individual books or three 99 and that's just like really? Yeah. So normally I would say
Jesper (32m 49s): like six to 12 months before you release a box set after the final book in the series as has been gone out. And then you can then you can safely release a box, set a and not worry about the pricing because at that point your readers will have bought the books that they want to buy and enough time has passed that they won't be bucked about it. So, uh, maybe just place a reminder for yourself like six to 12 months later to, uh, to make sure to create a box set out out of your series. And then yeah, that's a good alternative income that requires
Autumn (33m 20s): absolutely nothing, almost almost method, just formatting and maybe a different covers so it stands apart. Slightly agree. Alright, well mine sort of along those lines. And another great source of income is actually turning your completed book into an audio book. So this is, the audio books are coming more and more popular, just like podcasts because you know, people have a lot more time to listen than they do to sit down and read and concentrate.
Of course, I still prefer written books because I just have a visual. I don't quite take an information the same one, I only hear it, but that doesn't mean audio books aren't fantastic for most other folks. So I think they're great. And I mean, I have most of my books in audio and it's, it can be so much. It's so exciting to actually hear your own books spoken by someone who actually knows what they're doing with their voice and create a very exciting, um, telling of what you've written.
So it's not something that isn't necessarily difficult. There are platforms, we've talked about them previously about how to do them. Um, but it can also, it's not necessarily free. That best way to do this is to have the money to invest so that you pay the narrator directly. But that can be quite a bit of money. I mean, a good narrator can be up words of $300 per finished hour. There can be other ones who are a lot cheaper, like 50% or $50.
But you know, you can be paying quite a lot to have your book narrated. And there's some good online conversions. I can tell you how many thousand words makes a finished hour of production. So you can kind of get out of budget and figure that out. And I won't say that this is going to net you, you know, a ton of money. I, from my experience and talking to a lot of other authors who are doing audio books, if your book is not selling fantastically as a written book, it's not necessarily going to pre a breakout hit and audio books.
So do consider that when you're figuring out, you know, how much to pay our narrator and there are some options where you can do royalty shares. So if you really just want to get your feet, um, that is a good way of doing it. And I would also say it really helps that if you have a series, you want to go ahead and line up like the whole series with the same narrator. Wait until you know you're getting your audio books when you have all the books in your series written. So you know they have an incentive to listen to all the books. I know I've had comments when I released my first audio book and they're like, Oh, it's great.
I love it. I just so disappointed to think that the, the other two books will never be done. Like it takes time to do this, you know, but there is that idea that a lot of authors are getting their feet wet, dabbling in it to see if they like audio books, um, and never are going to complete the series. So go and try to get it all. It's the same as producing and launching books, same idea, same technique. A series is better launching them back to back. All that stuff holds true, but it is definitely another means and it's a whole different, again, a whole just like bundles.
It's a whole different genre of people who are going to listen to your stories instead of read your stories. So yeah, consider that niche.
Jesper (36m 44s): Fully agree. It's, it's a, it's again one of those things where it's a different audience. Um, but I would also say that unless you have some sales on new eBooks already, especially if you're going for the role to share option, that part becomes a bit difficult because I think in the earlier days, it, at least from this is here, right? So I, I have not, I'm not talking from personal experience here in full transparency, but based on hearsay, I think in the earlier days, like years back, it was not that difficult to get oil narrators to do royalty shares on ACX.
But now they are getting really picky about what they want to narrate. If it's on a royalty share, most of them prefer to get paid upfront. Uh, so of course we'll have a lot of sales on your books already then they will probably agree on a royalty to share. But unless you can show to them that, Hey, this book is selling really well, uh, then most likely I think at least those who knows what they're doing, the good ones, they will turn you down. Our wanting. She, so I would honestly not spend too much time on trying to find one and hundred down.
Uh, unless you have good sales on, on the book already. Or if you can pay up front, then that's a good option and then you can go ahead and do that. But, uh, yeah, and, and even, even then, I would probably still say that unless you, unless the book is selling fairly well, you might never earn back the money you're spending on your book because it's, it's still relatively expensive. Uh, maybe in three, four, five years maybe there will be options where you can get robots to read it and in a voice where you actually cannot hear the difference from humans.
I mean, I would not be surprised if that happens in the next five years or something. But until the production cost comes down, you do need to really consider if, I mean the, the audio book market is growing like crazy, so that's a good thing. But just making the jump, just because the market grows like crazy might not be the best of ideas if you're never gonna earn, earn back the money. So maybe the next one I can pick up on that is about affiliate marketing.
Uh, and basically this means that you are taking some time out to sell someone else's product in exchange for money. So as an example, um, autumn and I only opened the doors for our premium writing course twice a year. And, uh, when we do, we are often offering an affiliate program. And I think if I remember correctly, last time we offered a affiliate marketers $100 for each seat that they sold in the course.
So there are also opportunities to sell products like this, so you know, other products from other vendors. Um, so you can get a special affiliate link from the company who created that product. So imagine that you are using am some sort of product yourself and then you, um, wanting to promote that product for whatever reason. Uh, you can then go and reach out to that company and say, Hey, I would like to promote your product.
Uh, and they will set up, if they do offer phileo phileo services, of course, they will set you up for the affiliate link that basically tracks everybody who then purchased a product through your personal affiliate link, eh, that Nick gets tracked and you get paid a commission. Just like I mentioned that am autumn and I did last time when we had our writing costs, uh, offered and we also paid affiliate commission to people who helped selling the, the cost. So affiliate marketing does take some time, I would say.
So you need to be mindful that you have to spend time promoting and get the, you know, getting the word out there about the product that you're trying to sell. But it can be a nice way to supplement your income if you want, especially as I said, if it's a product that you already using them, that that's a good option for you. So, uh, and one of my favorite uses of affiliate marketing is actually if you do have a website with your books, be an affiliate for your own books. And yeah.
Yeah. It seems so subtle, but, um, you know, if you're going to direct people to Amazon from your website, it's, you should be getting at least something back. It kind of adds up, you know, ups or royalty just a smidge. So it's definitely worth doing a signing up, even if it's just for that. Yeah. Yeah. So you can set up an affiliate account with Amazon. It's quite easy. It takes no time and then generate affiliate links for, for your own books. Uh, but the key is the, like what autumn just said that the key is that you need to place those affiliate on your own website.
So if you're a fresh sample are running Facebook ads or something. Technically, I've never, I've never heard Amazon cracking down on this, but technically you are not allowed to use an Amazon affiliate link in a Facebook ad because it has to come from your own website. So the same thing with newsletters. Um, you know, with your newsletter, it's technically not supposed to be an affiliate link though. I do know some author to do, do that. But it's supposed to only be from your own website. Not from even your newsletters.
Yeah, yeah, that's true. So yeah, so that's some, that's another option for you to earn some extra money. Uh, so it's essentially if you have products you already using a like those products, that's, that's a good option. Or if you have, you know, your, maybe you don't use the product but you know the company and you feel comfortable, you know, vouching for that company. So why not try to earn a bit of income from that? Um, you probably want to look at the, how much are they paying you to do the field sales?
Because as I said, it requires some time. So if you're earning like close to nothing, we'd sail then that's not my, that might not be where you want to spend your time. But but for example, like, like autumn and I offered $100 last time for everybody who saw this, even now cost that, you know, if you sell just 10 seats, that's, that's 1000 bucks right there. Right. So that's quite good. Of course, again, it takes a bit of effort and time to, to make those 10 sales, but it's, it's something that is possible. And uh, of course, if, if that is something you're interested in in terms of becoming an affiliate for our courses, then just join the amwritingfantasy Facebook group.
So if you search for amwritingfantasy in the group section on Facebook, you will find us and when, and if we decide to offer more affiliate bounties in the future, we'll post it in that group. So when it becomes relevant, certainly that's an option for you.
Autumn (43m 31s): That's a good one. And we love the help and we treat our affiliates well. And so I get the last one and it's sort of playing off what we've been talking about before, if what you're happened to be really, really, really good at is newsletters, getting people organized, getting a lot of readers active in your newsletter, and you start getting a newsletter that's getting into 2030, 50,000 readers. You can actually start selling spots instead of just like looking for newsletter swaps with other authors.
You can say, Hey, I have 50,000 readers that they love fantasy and for five or $10, you know, I will feature your book. It's almost like what BookBub is doing but just at a little bit of a lesser level. And there are some folks who are making some money off of their ability to organize readers and get the different genres together and be able to sell books. And if that happens to be something you're good at, you can sell that to other authors really easily. Cause we're all for that, aren't we?
Jesper (44m 34s): Yep. Absolutely. So I think in general we could say that, you know, S authors, you all as an author, you're running a business and it's just smart business move to diversify your income because it just makes you less vulnerable for any future instances where something might happen that you didn't account for. So, so that's the smart way of doing it. It is. And I mean we, there's things we didn't talk about. You and I had mentioned that, you know, we could mention, you know, selling your international rights, things like that.
I mean, there's a whole bunch of other avenues that are out there. So once you start looking around for ways of diversifying your income, you'll be surprised at maybe what you can come up with and what you had thought of and what other people are doing. Yup. So next Monday, if all goes well, at least I'll have a great guest on to talk about writing compelling heroes and villains.
Narrator (45m 31s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the amwritingfantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patreon.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the amwritingfantasy podcast going safe out there and see you next Monday.
On the verge of a new year, Autumn and Jesper decided to share some of the best practices authors should be aware of as they prepare for a another year of writing.
Goal setting - especially the need to set realistic goals - is also discussed in this episode 55 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast.
As mentioned, please provide some feedback on what you like and what you don't like so much about the podcast (if anything).
You can reach Autumn on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Weifarer
And Jesper: https://twitter.com/SchmidtJesper
Or send an email via the contact form on this page: https://www.amwritingfantasy.com/about/
We would love the feedback.
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy.
For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to the amwritingfantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing join to best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them. Now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I am Jesper and I'm autumn. This is episode 55 of the amwritingfantasy podcast and after we kicked off 2020 last Monday with a view on the awesome writing software scribbler, we are now going to continue setting you up for success with a conversation about, should we call it best practices for 2020 and some goals setting like that.
Autumn (55s): Yeah, I think that's a fair assessment or good to definitely look at some big picture stuff because Hey, it's the new year and now as a time to traditionally set back and set some goals and look ahead and make some changes. So I think that's a perfect way to begin even. You're a writing year in 2020. Yeah. We should probably have made that episode 54 and then talk about Scrivener today. But that go, there you go. I think it works out. We everyone needs to recover I think a little bit after new years.
Yeah, that's true. Maybe just, uh, having this weekend between might be a good thing. Yeah. That's speaking of ease into it. Yes. And now that we're past our week, um, even though we're technically time traveling, how has your week been going?
Jesper (1m 41s): That's been good. Uh, actually this morning I was doing some of the monthly checks on the stats for this podcast and actually I was thinking that maybe I could just share a bit about what I learnt there. That'd be exciting. Yeah. Yeah. Because since we started the podcast, uh, we've, we've seen consistent increase in the number of downloads per month, so, so that's of course very good. Uh, for some weird reason has still not, can wake up why September was just way better than all the other months.
Uh, but, uh, but even here in the November stats that I just did, so again, we try and traveling a bit here. So we're still in December technically, but in the end of November stats, uh, we also saw a positive trend in the number of downloads per month. So, so that's good. And uh, you know, basically we are releasing these episodes every Monday because we want to be helpful. And of course we are also trying to make it a, a slightly entertaining rather than a boring rundown of, of the topics that we pick.
So, so that's why basically that we're checking, I'm checking the download numbers every month because uh, you know, unless we see that people are actually finding the podcast useful and are listening, then it would be a waste of our time because at the end of the day, all the podcasting is time away from writing. So I think it's good that is trending in a positive direction. Right. Autumn
Autumn (3m 9s): plus it's like, again, I partially, we do this too cause we like to help other authors and it is nice. It's kind of one way of knowing unless people like go flood us with comments, which would be fine. Um, but I mean, how do we know we have to gauge that we're actually reaching people and hopefully helping them somehow. And that would be through comments or downloads and things like that. So it's kind of good to see a positive progression that way. Yeah.
Jesper (3m 34s): But I ha I have a small request that I would actually like to make to our listeners if you could with that. Yeah. All right. I want to hear it. This is, yeah, because we have a, we have a few reviews on the iTunes store at the moment that there was only four of them, so we need to be really careful about jumping to any conclusion based on those reviews. But, uh, since the volume of those reviewers are rather low, I want to be a bit careful here, but the review average is a 3.5. Uh, and I would like it to be meaningful enough.
For. So I think if you agree with me here autumn I would like to ask our listeners if they could please provide a bit of feedback because we've now been doing this, uh, in, in new wish format, you know, no, no longer YouTube videos converted to podcast, but actual podcast episodes we're doing, we've been doing that for what, like half a year or something.
Autumn (4m 29s): I think Maddie, I think you're right though. I was something like that. Yeah.
Jesper (4m 34s): Yeah. And so we, we've been doing sort of the same format here for six months. And of course when we started out, we, you know, as I've talked about before, I listened to a ton of podcasts myself, so I know at least what I like in podcast. And that was sort of how we decided to set up this podcast in, in the, you know, with the different sections that we go through on each episode, what we talk about, uh, and, and all of that. So, so there was a thinking behind why we set it up the way we did.
But at the same time, of course, we don't know if, if you're you dear listener, like that setup or not. Uh, so what I would really love is if we could, if I, for example, added the link in the show notes to both Autumns and my own Twitter profiles, but also a link to the contact form on the amwritingfantasy website so that you can send us an email then I would really love it if each of our listeners could just spend one minute to just give us a bit of feedback and just tell us what you like about the podcast in its current format and maybe what you would like to see different, if anything with the current format.
And then, yeah, because I, I really would like to get some feedback from listeners here. Uh, and of course, again, we need a bit of volume, so please don't think that, yeah, I'll let everybody else sent autumn and Jesper uh, feedback because then everybody will be thinking that and then we'll get only a few responses. And to be honest, I'm not willing to make changes on the basis of just a few responses. So we need a bit of volume. So please, uh, just spend that one minute if you don't mind. And then just tell us what you like and what you would like differently as well.
Then we will definitely consider if we see some reoccurring themes popping up in dose responses, then we'll definitely consider if we need to do any changes or modifications to the layout of how we run each episode.
Autumn (6m 33s): That sounds good. Always a good practice to hear from people and see what's going and take a survey. Yeah. So what has been going on in your life? Autumn well, I, I actually finished a book. Yeah, it's a, well I finished it in December, so hopefully by the time reading, well no, you're making me depressed, but it's a writing. I wa there's a book I want to read. I hope maybe by the time this airs I'll have that red.
But yeah. So hopefully by the time this is out am I'll have a do book out is oneness. Co-written with my husband about our adventures driving across the United States for the last four years with over a hundred thousand miles a day or our tires and sort of a how to do it and if you're going to do it, how to be safe kind of book. So, Oh, it's PRI. We've been working on it off and on for like a year. And so usually it's my husband who's dragging his feet and he got his part done so fast, so I got to give kudos to him for really pulling it together and then frauding me saying, what do I gotta do your part?
What are you going to edit it? What are you gonna so it's done and I'm so excited to get that out to the world because I know I have a couple folks we've talked to that I have promised it to for probably the last eight months. So yay. I've got a book out my 17th whew. It sounds good.
Jesper (8m 1s): You know, a very, like this book, is there other books like this on on the market already? Or is this like a, the first time
Autumn (8m 9s): one on Amazon? Believe it or not, it's not the first one there. Am overlanding adventure driving, uh, kind of nomadic travels is becoming very, very popular at least in the United States. But I mean for some countries like Australia and New Zealand, it is a walkabouts it's what you do. However, doing it on it as a vehicle, vehicle based travel. Um, yeah, it's something that people are getting more into and there's a certain very big niche on what kind of vehicle you need and the equipment to take and how to stay safe if you're going to some of the remote roads that we've traveled the last few years.
That's why Adam got a medical certificate and everything so he can take care of me and hopefully if I take, I had to take care of him. He wouldn't be unconscious cause I needed to know have him tell me what to do. We'd be free to think that one.
Jesper (8m 58s): Yeah. But you know, my marketing mindset is already speculating that you could probably get some cheap MSR ads, keywords for stuff like that. I, I guess there's not too much competition in that field. On on the keywords, maybe fingers crossed. Oh, we go on the internet with the amwritingfantasy podcast. So in the amwritingfantasy Facebook group, Dwayne said that he has several stories set in the same world and he wants to give one of them, eh, new our field to it.
And uh, he was concerned for how to achieve this without it seeming to take place on an alternate universe. So I just wanted to say that because I love how the group offers each other lot of help and advice. You know, Lawrence response was very helpful and insightful because she said, quote, I would make a list of some of the things we take for granted about life in our world and change those in your world based on what's been present since the past.
And then she said, I think a great example of this is the last Airbender the cartoon in the earth kingdom, they have trains, but they are powered by earth benders. They developed the technology to build trains but not the engines to power them. Similarly in the fire nation, they have tanks, but the ammunition is just fire benders, shooting fire.
Autumn (10m 23s): Oh, that's interesting.
Jesper (10m 26s): Yeah. But I, I thought, you know, the idea about, okay, so he had some concerns here and she says, you know, make a list and of the things that are coming in and change it to something else. Right. I think very useful and simple, but it's very useful.
Autumn (10m 39s): Yes. I see a lot of the comments on the group there. Everyone's so helpful. I mean we have, I can't think of any big problems we've had. They're just, it's a fantastic place to get feedback and ideas though. It's funny cause I mean, one of the things we don't really talk about here very often is that we actually have newsletter that we send out. I think it's like every three weeks and it has a writing tips and world-building tips and stuff too. So besides this podcast, we actually have a newsletter as well. Actually, we've got that going for a while and we had a good comment, um, that someone emailed back to us just the other day, or at least the other day from what we're recording.
And they were, had a question about when is it okay to use a word like our name that someone else has used. And they were like, give an example. I use the word Kith for one of my fantasy races and he wasn't sure if I knew it has been used for um, a very similar group, oddly enough, uh, in a different role playing game that I had never heard of. So no, that's not where I got it from, but it was a great discussion on, you know, when is it okay to, to use a word that someone else has, you know, also use and to me, it really comes down to it.
None of us are really making up 100%. I bet. No matter what words you make up right now in your mind, it is a real world word somewhere in a language in this world. So it's one of those things that, you know, if it's not, if you Google it and there's not 20 pages on someone else using it for a specific thing, it's as also as not trademarked or copyrighted. It's okay to use because everything's been used before. But I did give them the advice that, you know, if you do Google something and you wanna like name something Hogwarts or the Shire, you don't even want to go there, even if they're not trademark, because you're going to be at page 12,598 on the Google search and no one's ever gonna find your version.
But for something like a, the of my fantasy race or other strange words that you come up with and you look around and there's not that much else out there like it, that's okay to use even if someone else has used it somewhere because unless they're trademarking at our copyrighting it, it is legally free to be used. Yeah. Well, this has been the whole, well about
Jesper (13m 10s): to say scandal, but all this stupid stuff to be honest, in the indie author community over the last, uh, well not, not, not recently, but probably like four or five months back where, uh, or maybe it was less, but where some authors were trying to trademark certain titles and also words like there was somebody who wanted to treat my trademark, a cozy mystery so that the, I mean, all that stuff drove me insane to be honest.
But, but I, but I agree. I mean titles and names for raises and all that, it's, it's, it's a free fall. You know, you, you can have the same titles and you can have the same names of somebody else. But I do also support what autumn said that when we, uh, talk, uh, when we're talking about fantasy names, which actually we have a bit of information in, in the book on plotting that we're going to release in 2020 about how to create those names. But one of the advices that we give in there is actually also to try to search a bit on the internet to see if there's some well known stuff that is am already called whatever you want to use as a name because there's just no reason to, just because you didn't know that they w it was something that am somebody else has already used in a, in a setting or a book or in a game or whatever it may be.
There's just no reason to have readers starting to get those associations when they read it. Right. So it's just best to avoid if you can. And certainly if you go by the really, really, uh, famous examples like the Shire, like on set, you know, then you're probably gonna slap be in the, in the review. So if you do that, so just complete the stay clear of stuff like that. But in principle, there is nothing like called stealing in, in this particular situation. To be honest.
Autumn (15m 4s): No, not really. I think it's, um, it's, there's gonna be some overlap. It's bound to happen. There are so many people are writing and there are so many books and even if you go back through history of what you might not have read in, might not even know is out there, probably there's going to be some duplication. It's just a fact that's going to happen. So just try to keep it to a minimal and, and don't, don't do it because you did read something and you thought it was a cool world, a new swipe. It try to make it honestly having come up with it on your own.
Jesper (15m 41s): All right, so in terms of a best practices for 2020, that I think that that was what we ended up calling it, but it's basically like a list of some things that are good to do here at the beginning of the year to think about, to get yourself set up best for, for the year to come. Uh, and also some goal setting. And maybe that's a good place to start. I don't know. Autumn
Autumn (16m 3s): I think so. I think, um, it's a good, yeah, goals are a perfect way to start because 20, 20, I mean, like we said with new year's resolutions and everything else, it is a new year and historically this is a great time to look ahead and figure out what you want to do and accomplish in this new year. Because otherwise, unless you do that, the year can just run away with you and you'll maybe, yeah, it might never really achieve anything much less a big project or whatever you want to go.
So I know when I do some goal setting, I mean I tried to think about things from everything from like books I want to, how many books I want to write and publish or courses we want to put out. There's a whole bunch of stuff that we look at when we say it's almost always too ambitious. We are and life does get the better of us. But you know what? I'd rather be struggling to reach the mountain top then, you know, be standing on top of the tiny little Hill boy. I did it. I did it in like June. I'm going to work.
Jesper (17m 10s): Yeah. Uh, I tend to divide my goal setting in the West or at least think about, I mean it's a bit different now to be honest because we had to worry about it. So we usually talk about what we want to do and we we have all very long to do list and then we tried to figure out where are we going to start, what's on the top and then we'll work down the list. Right. And we never get to the bottom by the end of the year anyway. So it's a slightly different now. But if I'm thinking back to before we were doing everything together, then I would divide my goals into three different buckets.
Um, and uh, maybe I could just run over what those,
Autumn (17m 47s): yeah. I'm curious. I'm, I'm guessing writing
Jesper (17m 50s): marketing as something else. What are they pretty close? Yeah, I mean the bucket bucket number one would be what I want to achieve in D author business. So that could be a, for example, how many books I wouldn't want to put out or that I want to have X amount of revenue or whatever. Something like that. Right? But it's like if I'm thinking about my authorship as a business and then I'm basically setting up business goals for myself on what I want to achieve and I make them very concrete, like sub goals on how to get there.
So, so that I can track throughout the year and it's not like it's a yearly goal and then I don't know until 12 months later if I'm on track or not. Right. So I try to make it some, some concrete sub goals, uh, to, to get there. So if it is revenue, then I'll probably have some goals about how much I want to increase the revenue per quarter. If it's a writing books, then of course then I want to say something like, uh, in the first half I want to publish let's say two books and second half, two books, for example, something like that. So that's bucket number one.
Excellent. And then I also used to have a pocket number two, which was about how I was going to improve my writing craft. Oh, I like this one. Yeah. So that could be stuff like, uh, I need to read at least let's say 10 nonfiction books on writing craft fuck sample or it could be, I also really like, like the, um, uh, Brandon Sanderson has on YouTube, you can find, I think if you type in write about dragons on YouTube, you can find a full university level costs.
Brandon Sanderson has their for, he's done it for several years and I think all the years worth of classes are there for, you could just watch them for free. So I also used to watch all of those, a couple of, well many years back now, but I watched all of those as well. So if you want to check that out, just type in, write about pregnancy and YouTube and you will find them. So, so that's another way you can improve your craft. And it could also be of course, that you just want to ride, let's say 10 short stories and you have some mentor or something that you're working with and you want to get feedback on.
I don't know, but, but basically writing craft, but what's my pocket number two? And then bucket number three was about, uh, yeah, you basically cast it before them. So it's about promotion. How, how am I going to promote myself? So that could be, for example, if back then I was running a YouTube channel, so I would have some goals for my videos and both, both in terms of how many views I wanted or, uh, how many comments I wanted and stuff like that. Uh, or well, in the beginning of this episode as well as she had some podcast stats, right?
So it could also be that you are running a podcast and you're tracking how you're performing there. Um, or if you are not creating videos or podcast or blog posts, something like that. Perhaps you just want to learn how to be the master of Amazon ads or Facebook ads or something like that. So you knew you were going to invest either time or money or both in understanding and learning how to do that. Um, so we it could be anything, but the key is that you pick something that you want to improve and then you work at it until you master it.
So, so that that's, that's how I did it. Oh, I like that. I mean it definitely makes sense and I agree it's, you can't set goals and then put them in a, you know, save the file and stick it in a drawer and never, you know, get back to it. It's really important that it's somewhere visible. Like I like to put my goals on a sticky note. Um, well digital sticky note that's right on my laptop desktops so that whenever I'm, you know, closing up programs are going in between things. I see the sticky note that says, you know, this is a goal this is something you want it to work on.
Yeah. And it isn't, I think it really does help you reach further if you really say, Hey, I want to do this many books or I want to accomplish this. It really does keep it tight center that this is my goal and I've got to keep working towards it. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. As long as you keep working towards it. Exactly. Because I think a lot of the time what happens is that people who set themselves some goals and they'll get distracted about something, they'll start doing something else and they've sort of, yeah, I know do I have those goals into draw, but I'm not really working against them or to achieve them.
So it's sort of just fizzles outright that that's, I think that's one of the things from the other thing is also that a lot of the times people struggle to just make their goals concrete enough. So it's this sort of fluffy stuff that you know you need to be able to track whether you're on track on it. Because if you cannot track it, you have no idea where you're going. I mean, of course if you say, I'm going to release four books this year, published four books, that's pretty easy to track with an odd, you're doing that. But if you're, if you have other types of goals, like am for example, I want to, let's say master Facebook ads like we talked about just a second ago, right?
How do you attract that? Well then that's where you need to, you need to break it down in one way or another to say, okay, how do I know when I've mastered it? Right? So maybe it's something like I need to have 10 different Facebook ad campaigns, uh, that turns a profit, uh, or something, you know, I, I don't know, I'm just making something up here. Right. But, but do you need to make it concrete enough that you can actually track with them or not? You are achieving what you want to achieve. And then let's say by the end of the year you only got seven Facebook campaigns that is turning a profit.
Well, I think that's pretty damn good anyways. So you should be happy about that, right? Yeah. Say there's times where you might not even know. You might be such a novice to Facebook ads that you don't even know what is a, is achievable goal. So if you might start off by just by saying, by you know, creating one that, a campaign that's really getting a positive return on investment is like something to
Autumn (23m 46s): be proud of. It's, and then you might have to revise it and rash, you know, tweak it a little bit more as you suddenly realize, Oh this is what it's about as you start taking the training. But yeah, that's a fair point. Yeah. I think a lot of the time what I see people struggle with as they, maybe they can say like I want to write this many books but they don't, they have a hard time with breaking it down into the milestones. You know, the sub-goals that make it achievable, breaking down to steps that are bite size. It may be or a monthly or weekly to make it happen. Cause I know like one of my big goals a couple of years ago now was like I wrote down, I wanted to finally be a featured author and BookBub.
I just, I wanted to hit that target. I don't know why, but it was in my head and that's what I wanted to do. And so yeah, so I could write that down. But how do you do that? So I broke it down like I wanted to read you my covers. I didn't think there is a strong, I want to read you my descriptions. I needed more reviews. You know, you start doing all of these processes. I needed more followers on BookBub and by breaking it down and say doing the new covers, I hit my number of reviews I wanted, I redid my formats, made sure that the book itself looked spectacular and then I submit it off to BookBub because that's part of your goal is like once you think you have everything in place you you got to make sure you're actually putting it in.
And lo and behold, I actually did it. So it's totally achievable if you break down the steps that on the outside, that's just like you can't do, I want to be a New York times bestselling author. Well how do you do that? Look at the steps, see what other people are doing, break it down into actionable items and then actually do each one and check it off. And yeah, maybe you won't hit that big, big one, but at least you will be there. And I bet you will have learned so much along the way that you know, you might still hit it yet.
Jesper (25m 39s): Yeah, I agree. And I would also say, because we'd, what you said before, it sort of made me think a bit, because I would also say if you have some goals about how many books you on the right, I mean if you're working on your face first book, just make your goal that to finish that book, because honestly bef before you finished the first one, you have no idea how long it's gonna take. And it's, it's that first book is also going to take much, much, much longer than you think it will. So don't start out by saying, if you had never written a book before, I don't, don't start out by saying I'm going to write four books this year.
I mean forget it. Just say I'm going to finish one book and that's it. Yeah.
Autumn (26m 15s): And that first book will also take much, much longer than probably every other book you will. Right. I think everyone's first book is a huge learning curve.
Jesper (26m 24s): Yeah. My first one took one and a half year and uh, and I think nowadays we can properly, if we focus, not if we don't do all the cost building and all the other stuff we have going autumn but I think we can turn out a book in three, four months. That's what I was going to say. It's probably three, four months. Even even when I'm writing, I've written four and a half books in one year
Autumn (26m 44s): before while still having a full time job and it is totally, I was so focused and they good characters, they basically wrote themselves, I could barely keep up. And when you get into that kind of flow it's fantastic but you're not always going to be there. And you know four books in a year with a job and kids and family and life. That's a little tough. So don't be tough on yourself. You'd be do stuff that you know is going to make you stretch but not necessarily overwhelm you and make you have a breakdown I either.
Jesper (27m 20s): No, exactly. I think that's important. And I mean, once, you know what you're doing, four books a year is probably not unrealistic but, but you need to know what you're doing and you need to have the practice, uh, from publishing before you can set yourself goals like that. So that was just like a very quick, uh, like wanting the end up stressing yourself out because goal setting is good. But if you put really unrealistic goals and you work yourself into the ground because of it, then that's not worth it.
Autumn (27m 48s): No, not at all. You you should make this still fun and they should be, you know, some flexibility and stuff in there as well that, you know, you're, you have an achievement you want to get to, but you know, you still need to take family vacation and go to your sister's wedding and all those things too. I wouldn't honestly say as you're doing your goal setting that, you know, life goals should be up there and having fun. Um, that should also be one of your buckets. Your, you're filling as you're looking at your goals for the year, not just writing and marketing.
Uh, you got to make sure your balance, all of that with some family and fun and so going over. So we do goals but I think this is another time a year that is good to do some like once a year cleaning a house. That's what I like to do in January.
Jesper (28m 36s): Yeah, exactly that. And that was just about to say, because you told me before we started recording that you have a small list of things and and sober. Why. So I thinking maybe we could just jump back and forth through you pick one of your lists and I pick one of mine and so forth.
Autumn (28m 47s): Okay. Well I'll go ahead and start. So one of the things I like to do this time of year is going over my manuscripts and for me I like to look for missing links. Like did I publish a book and I forgot to add it to a previous book or did my website change at all? Or even just going through the manuscript and checking all those links are actually working. Cause you know sometimes you publish stuff and there's a kink and you didn't realize it. So I like to go over my manuscripts at least once a year. And even if any readers during the year sent me any updates saying Hey that wordsmith spelled and I didn't go fix it right away, now's the time to make sure I get all of those fixed and polished and cleaned.
Jesper (29m 27s): Yeah. That was also on my list to be honest. And I, because also I had the ones about, you know, you publish the book one and maybe in the back of that book you wrote like book two coming in 2019 like yeah, great. And now which went in 20 so yeah, need to up the dose.
Autumn (29m 43s): Definitely. That's a good point. It's, I even have seen, cause I like to do a sample chapters for something in the back of my books and sometimes those don't get updated to the actual polished versions or maybe I want to link to a different book and all those little things. It's a good time to think about, you know, even marketing. Like am I, I started putting the back of my books. I'm a little social media page, like sorta like hashtags and the ways of sharing and stuff. I need to go back and add that to all my other books now.
So I guess I'll be doing that this January.
Jesper (30m 17s): Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So should I pick one from that list? Go for it. Yeah. So I also put in email list here. And what I mean by that is that am so there's a few different things I want to go over here. I'm checking your, you know, total open rates, your click through rates and how many subscribers you're getting and from where they are signing up is pretty good to do here at the beginning of the year. Uh, and of course your email service provider, whether you're using convert kit like as or MailChimp or whatever, we'll tell you all these steps.
So when you log in, that as part will tell you. Um, but it's good to do because if one of the things that you're offering in exchange for email addresses is outperforming another thing that you're doing or offering, then maybe you should talk, uh, down on the one that actually performed really well in and do that more, promote that more here in 2020. Um, and also when it comes to the emails themselves, maybe you need to clean up your list.
Uh, and what I mean by that is that if you finding that you have very low open rates and very low click through rates, it's could easily be because you have a lot of death. Wait on and uh, what I mean by that is that when people are signing up to get something for free, probably as something you're offering, uh, it could be like a free chapter. Maybe. Maybe it's a full free novel or it could be like a character sheet that you're giving away, something you're giving away. Maybe in the back end of those books that we just talked about, that could be a link to say, Hey, you want to, you want to check out this character?
Or what he, what he's been up to after the novel ended or whatever it may be. Maybe you have a short story or something, uh, and then people sign up to get those free things. But some of those people who sign up and it's probably more people than you think, actually just sign up, get that freebie thing that they were looking for and then they will never open an email again. And if you have too many of those people on your list, it will hurt your open rates and if it helped or hurt your open rates, it will actually also hurt your deliverability of the emails.
So it's, it's no good basically. So you need to do a cleanup. Uh, I like to actually purchase the email list, uh, both my personal one, but also autumn on my list every quarter. Um, so what I will do is that I will use the convert kit, basically has a way that it keeps track of those who haven't opened an email. For I think it's 90 days. Uh, and then we sought those out and I'll send them a, an email just to those people.
And say that we can see that they haven't opened an email. And, uh, then I will tell them that, uh, if you want to stay on the list, this list, you need to click this link. And if you do not click this link, we will delete you within a week. Like cutthroat. There you go. Yeah. But at the end of the day, you know, as authors, we also have to treat this as a business and we're paying for the people on the list. And if they have no interest in reading the emails, why should we be paying for having them on the list? Right? So that's why we purchased them, because we only want people on a list, which actually interesting in reading, uh, the stuff that we emailed them.
So the ones that, because the way that it, eh, convert kit in this case, and I think most other email providers work the same way, the way that they track whether or not people opened the email is that they have a transparent one pixel size image in the email that they put in. And then they track if that image gets loaded. Uh, but in some email programs, uh, they will have a disabled image loading by default. So that means that it, those people might actually open and read the emails.
But the PIM, because the pixel did not get loaded, convert kit will think that these people are open the emails even though they are actually opening. So that's why I'm sending that email instead of just a leading people because then the ones who are actually interested in our emails can, they will click the link and say, Hey, you know, don't do not delete me. And then of course we won't. Uh, but this is a very good way I think to keep healthy email list. And then healthy email list is extremely important. I'll not go into all the details on deliverability, uh, why now, but actually in 2020 autumn and I also planning to release a completely free course for authors called self-publishing success.
And in that, uh, I'll have a full module on email lists and I'm going to explain why this is so important so you can stay tuned for that. But, uh, but that was a bit on email list. I hope that was not too boring. No. And while he's going to even add to it. You know, if you have automations, which a lot of us, uh, as authors do weed, not sending out every single email or just doing campaigns. So if you have any like onboarding automations normally see which ones are performing well. But again, check your links. I'm going to be like, this is just the hold up a sign. Check your links, go and go look at them really quick.
Make sure they're as evergreen as you think they are. Make sure that the, you know, double check your spelling. It's just a good time to look at it again with fresh eyes and see if there's anything you could improve at Tony. Want a change, new information you want to add. It really is important to keep these up to date.
Autumn (35m 38s): I know I've gotten one before and there was a reference to something that was like five years in the past and I was like, come on. You know, just go through these every once in a while people and make sure that they're still accurate and going to the correct websites and everything like that. That's very important. And actually speaking of websites, so that's going to be my next one because you know, I like to do websites, but this is a good time to run through your website. Especially go into Chrome in incognito mode.
Go in as a random browser and go and see what it looks like. Check your legs, you know, look at the information on mobile. Yeah, I check it on mobile. I'll go and look at your stuff as a new reader, not just with your lens of being the author and what you think it looks like from the back end, but what it really looks like for, you know, go to your spouses or your kids' computer and go see what it looks like as someone who is not logged into the site and make sure everything looks good. Am get those links shaped up.
And again, if you did book Sue published anything, if you're not running a blog or even if you're running a blog, go update it just now is the time of year to add that to your to do list. Even if it's a modest amount, go get it going again and make sure everything's clean. Your images are good that you, even if you're in your backend, you've updated your plugins and your WordPress theme or your wicks, whatever you're using because the older those things get the closer it is to crashing or being vulnerable to hackers. So make sure you get all your software up to date before someone swipes all your files.
Yeah.
Jesper (37m 15s): Next one of mine actually goes hand in hand with what you just said because other than website I would also say check your social media profiles and that includes your bio on Amazon or good reads or anywhere else where you might have written a bio, so just check if anything is outdated or maybe you just need to do a general update. Maybe you can write a better bio am or how about the banners that you're using on Facebook or on your Twitter profiles and so on. Do you need to change any of them or do you need to update some of it?
Autumn (37m 47s): It's just a good best practice to get done at the beginning of the year. Get a fresh face for the new year. That could be misunderstood, but no, that's a really good point. Those are things that people tend to forget. Just like when I think of like updating your website or updating your manuscripts, you have to also go update the places like book funnel and story origins, places where you have your book files uploaded too. So that's another thing is sometimes it's easy to make sure you uploaded something and updated something on Amazon.
But some of those places where your readers go like book funnel or you're being a reader is you know, they have access to some of your other stuff. Make sure that those are updated to, Hmm,
Jesper (38m 30s): I have one more thing on my list. Uh, how was your list looking at?
Autumn (38m 33s): No, I think I'm pretty well up actually.
Jesper (38m 37s): Okay. I have one more and it's about saving money. So this is probably pretty important. I want to hear this sounds super important. Yeah, that's on already. Yeah. So I would say review your last year's invoices that you received and paid and just check if you have any ongoing subscriptions for some services that you aren't actually using anymore. That was a good, because you might as well just go ahead and cancel them if you're not using them and save yourself some money.
But it actually happens more often than you think that you have something on automatic payment for some subscription for something and you're not even thinking about it. Maybe it's just like $10 a month so you don't really notice it, but they just subtract $10 a month and uh, it's just a waste of buddy. Right. So just go and check that and uh, yeah, that's good. Good idea.
Autumn (39m 31s): Very good idea. And sometimes it's really important to, uh, check at least a couple full months because I know my husband and I had, were both subscribed to something and we thought it was one subscription, but there was one slight difference of the email. We are getting double charged so places are sneaky. They gave us a refund, thank goodness. But okay. I was just about to ask, did they do that on purpose? No, no. They were very honest about, they were very nice about it. But yeah, you've got to watch some times, you know, you get a family and family accounts, little things like that can happen and creep up and costs you what seems like not much, but boy, $10 even a month adds up really quick by the end of the year.
120.
Jesper (40m 12s): Yeah. I had even worst layer while this was probably like a year ago or something. All of the, uh, I was, I was in my, uh, net banking, just checking my, my account status and and then I was thinking like, this just seems to be missing some money in these accounts. I don't understand why. And what, what is going on? And then I started going through all of it and then, um, I S I started that we were missing like three and a half thousand dollars on the counters. Like what's lies?
And it was less and it was, yeah. And then I clicked into the details of it and I could see there was some sort of, you know, building what, what is, what is it called? Like, you know, these big stores where you can buy building materials and in the U K so was, yeah. So I was like, how, what? So of course I called the bank and I said, well this is a mistake. I mean, first of all, I do not live in the UK and I do not buy building materials in the UK.
Yeah. So they said, yeah, yeah, just a, you know, there was like a function inside the net banking where you can click that this is not a, you know, this is not me spending this money and whatnot. So he said, yeah, just click that and send it in. We'll have a look at it. But I was quite nervous because it was a lot of money. So I asked him, but does it make a difference what I put in, you know, do I need to write something special to make sure you get the money back? But of course he didn't want to say that. He just said, no, no, you just write honestly and then we'll look at it. Cause of course he didn't want to tell me what to write.
So I submitted it and I was a bit nervous. But like two or three days later the bank returned the money. Oh. So, so that was good. But it was, it was a bit scary. It was all quite a lot of money. That is a lot of money and it's easy, easy to have happen to either stuff goes into the wrong account. Those numbers all means staff or someone swipes your card. So yeah, it must have been something like, I have no idea when it's happened. I mean I, I did travel to London on a frequent basis at the time, but I have no idea when, when somebody must have done something.
But, ah, but anyway, that's history now. But yeah, so I think as you can hear people, there's a lot of things you could do at the beginning of the year to set yourself up for success. And hopefully we mentioned some stuff in this episode that maybe you hadn't thought about yourself. At least that was the aim, wasn't it? Yes, it was. And have you haven't, you know, let us know on the in the comments if there's anything else that you hadn't heard of before or anything else you think would be a good tip for folks. All right, so next Monday we're going to give you six different streams of income for authors might serve well as yet more integration on how you can diverse your income.
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Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to the amwritingfantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need in literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing join to best selling authors who have self-published more than 20 books between them. Now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I'm Jesper and I'm Autumn. This is episode 54 of the amwritingfantasy and we are going to talk about Scrivener today and explore if it is the best book writing software out there. But first, this is the first episode of 2020 yes, I still cannot believe it.
Autumn (54s): We're time traveling. We're recording again 19 2019 but still it is really exciting to think that when our listeners are going to hear this, it's a whole new here. It is so happy to, yes, everybody. Yay. I wa I, I hope that you had a wonderful holiday and that the your getting ready to begin another year of writing now. Yes. And that's kinda like a hint of what our next episode's going to be at is making sure you do have a good year, but let's just hang out and have them talk about writing and Scrivener and kind of fun stuff this time.
Yeah. Yeah. So how have you, how has, how has your week been? Autumn good. It's actually, I was telling you earlier that they didn't get to elicit into our secret conversations before we start recording. But my husband and my dog are off on an adventure picking up some stuff in Maine. And I honestly cannot remember the last time. I didn't at least have, you know, my fuzzy little dog at my feet when I came home or need to walk him or feed him. It's like every time I go in like get a dirty dish or have a piece of cheese, you know, I always am one of those people who always have like a little piece I set aside for the dog and I'm like, Oh, he's not here.
So it's, it's freeing. I don't have to worry about it. So I'm going to spend the whole evening like totally 110% immersed in work. I'll probably totally don't even look at the time it, it'll be 11 o'clock I'm like, Oh crap, I have to get up tomorrow. But it's also just really weird because I mean having the dog, how you even mentioning, you know, exercise and stuff. When we were talking earlier that would be, you know, I have to get out, I have to do this, I have to make sure the dog is fed. It kind of sets a rhythm to your life and your evening. And once that gets off track because like, Oh, I don't have to go for a walk but I just want, I should go for a walk but I don't have to go for a walk.
Which is probably good because it is pouring down rain here on top of the 30 inches of snow. So I don't know if I really wanted to go for a walk, you know, I can see that. But do you think with the dog is also that it forces
Jesper (3m 0s): you to get off, you know, away from the computer and get go out walking a bit and whatnot and it's so easy to forget unless you have a reason to go out. Right, exactly. I think am yeah,
Autumn (3m 11s): it's, it pulls you away, reminds you that life is not about, you know, just producing stuff online or writing 24, seven. Uh, sometimes my husband is much more patient than he should be am in reminding me that I need to do things other than sit on the computer, but the dog has never a patient, he lets you know and he's got to go out. So I appreciate the distractions as much as sometimes you, you know, as adults, I'm sure P P of parents and stuff, they, they know they need to spend time with their kids, but there's always that like, Oh, just one more minute, one more.
Nope, Nope. The dog is going to go on the floor if I do not get my butt to the door. So, yeah, exactly. It's a good, that's very helpful. It really puts things in perspective.
Jesper (3m 54s): Yeah, absolutely. How has your week been? Uh, it's been good. You know. Um, I wanted to shout a lot. Started watching his document
Autumn (4m 4s): Cheerio's on HBO. Is it good? I want to start that. That's like one of the next ones on my list.
Jesper (4m 10s): Yeah. Well, Hmm. I've heard such things. Yeah. Well I decided to give it a try just because it is fantasy you know, so I thought, well I better, what's it like recent enough? Right, right. Um, and I understand that it's eight episodes long, the season one and I'm halfway through it, but honestly I cannot quite work out what I think about surprising. Yeah. But it's like, you know, on one hand that the star telling is good, the cinematics are really excellent, you know, it's where we very well made and the fantasy elements are also pretty solid too.
You know, there's something with a parallel universe going on and all that. That's pretty cool. Um, but on the other hand, eh, the main character is a child, so it has to sort of youth vibe to it. And I'm a quite, I'm actually quite not sure if if it is supposed to be for a younger audience or not, I cannot quite work that out. Um, and then I'll end it with this. This is just a small detail, but this is just me being picky. Right.
But then the one of the factions in there, they called the gypsy am.
Autumn (5m 25s): Oh, isn't that just a bit too light too? Like, well, I can't imagine what you might have faced. Those people are, yeah, exactly.
Jesper (5m 34s): Yeah, exactly. And they also like a traveling around, but that just use boats in this universe in instead of a, what is it, like a horses and whatnot. But yeah, I dunno. Oh, okay. Fair enough. That's just me being picky.
Autumn (5m 50s): That's just for like, that could be a bit more original. Right. All right, well I'll be interesting. I haven't watched that one. But you remember I had started the dark cause I was so excited. And I love those, you know, they're those puppets that were created by am, Brian Froud, you know, he's one of my favorite artists and I just could not get into the new version and I don't know, maybe I'll eventually I have you have a free night. My husband won't be like, what are we watching? So maybe I'll try another 1:00 AM and get back into it and see if I can, I can get beyond that first additional hurdle of this is just not jiving with me and I'd rather see an animated then as a puppets.
Jesper (6m 30s): Yeah, I don't, I dunno. I mean I actually, what's the, what's that one all the way through? Um, it's not like the best thing I ever watched, but, but it's quite okay. I think. Um, I'm also gonna watch his dark materials all the way through. I, uh, you know, I'm halfway through the season anyways, so I'm going to watch all of it. But I would say it's definitely worth of watch, you know, for people to make up their own mind. I just cannot work out if I, if I basically like it or not, but, but I would not say it's not like you shouldn't watch it for sure.
That's cool. I'll have to give it a try myself and let you know. Oh, we go on the internet with the amwritingfantasy podcast so I found a, a question that Larry posted in the amwritingfantasy Facebook. I just talked to mentioned that because maybe, maybe you and I could just give our reflection on it as well. Autumn yeah, I'm thinking. Oh, happily. Yeah. So he said, my main character seems human in appearance with the exception of his brimstone colored eyes, but he's actually half human, half demon created for one purpose to save his mother from captivity because of this, he does not have normal human emotions.
Basically. He has no interest in sex or companionship of any kind. And then he asks, can a cow to still be compelling without an element of sexual tension?
Autumn (7m 60s): Oh, I like this question. Yeah. And I was pretty good. I would say I have a definite answer there. And that's yes, because I had, I go through phases where I actually get annoyed that it seems like every subplot in every story is romance. I remember writing my first, uh, one of my novels and getting to some point where I could have made that choice and gone more towards a romance and stopping and thinking, you know, is this is fantasy is this, you know, romantic fantasy?
Is this like Epic? Fantasy? I mean, can they just be friends? And they ended up becoming the bestest of friends because that's the way I decided to go because not every male female pair up has to be a pair up. So I don't think you need to have that little play off of sexual attention. And actually you could probably do some amazing humor where character just doesn't get it. Someone's flirting with him and he's like, are you squinting? Did you get something in UI?
I think I would find that so hilarious and refreshing, but of course, I'm not everyone else.
Jesper (9m 11s): Do you think? No, no, I agree. I don't think you need it. It's not like you have to have, um, sexual tension or companionship or our romance and that sort of thing for a story to work off our character work for sure. Not, uh, that set of course there is a reason why it's used so much because as human beings we do relate to it. So, uh, but in terms of the question whether or not it has to be so for the couch to work, uh, certainly not, you know, there's a lot of things you could do to make the character compelling and just the fact that he's half demon and he, he has no normal human emotions that that alone can be pretty compelling.
You know, if you, yeah, I don't know, use something like autumn just suggested there. I mean there, there was, you can create some pretty funny and I dunno, maybe not intense but, but interesting situations at least. Uh, playing off of that. Um, and also I, you know, we have, uh, we are in the character creation process for our next am fantasy series. And, uh, our main character, well he has human emotions but, but we also sort of went down the route of saying that, um, he's, he's like logical and honest to a fault.
So basically he's like social skills are lacking and uh, he doesn't really understand that, uh, how other people's work, how other people work. And I think we, we actually speculated that maybe he, maybe he's uh, he's suffering from some sort of illness or something, didn't we?
Autumn (10m 52s): We did. And that's what I was actually going to say just because romance motivates a large portion of the society. There are still folks who are asexual or like how we're hinting at like autistic or Asperger's. There's, there are a lot of people out there and they like to read fantasy too. And almost everyone, you know, know someone like that if they just stop and think. And so just sort of like how the first am romances that were the same sex began to filter into fantasy.
I know some of the first stories I ever read made me question what was considered normal. Go ahead. Make people question what is considered normal. Go ahead and put a, I love reading books where a disability even, you know, missing limb or can't move a certain way. I like seeing that in writing because that is life and it is a rich tapestry. And so yeah, do something a little different. That is more than fine.
Jesper (11m 51s): Yeah. And of course, so for those, if you want to join the most awesome Facebook group for fantasy authors, then just search for amwritingfantasy in the group section of Facebook.
Autumn (12m 9s): So we're going to talk about Scrivener Scrivener say Scrivener shrimp now or Scrivener I say Scrivener Scrivener yes. Different pronunciation in England. But I think that is from what are bearing for Danish people like me, that can be a lot of different populations. And who's to say what's right or wrong, you know? Yes. But maybe we should start out by, so what is Scrivener that's true.
So this is a software program that was originally am back base, but I think it's on PC because you use it and you have a PC. So yeah. Why it's gone from Mac to PC. And I say I've been launched now that you can get it on iPads, which is, so it's a smaller, it's like Scrivener light, but it's a software program that is featured for authors but not just authors. They feature it for screenwriters, even really big reports and basically they're really talking about, it is a different way of writing and organizing because that is really, its strong suit is the way you can navigate, organize, split the screen, having note features.
There's nothing, there's a lot of things that do something similar, but there's nothing else quite like it on the market, especially not for the price that Scrivener still is, which blew me away the first time I looked up the price. I'm like, no. Okay. By the Ching. Um, it was an instant decision when I saw how expensive it was, which means hint, hint, it's not expensive at all. Please Scrivener if you're listening to those who own the software, don't raise the price because that is one of the most amazing things, um, about it.
And it just gets better from there. But I guess I don't want to wrap up the entire show in just 10 seconds there. No, we can, we can talk a bit about the, I checked the pricing as well, so we can share the actual numbers, but by the end of it, um, but I, I think I actually sort of listed, I
Jesper (14m 15s): listed out some of the features that you're going to get in Scrivener so maybe we could, we could sort of go through some features I'm sure. But I would also say that Scrivener it's, it's not really like a word processor processor as such because it's, it's more like a piece of software that helps you with writing. It's like S, you know, a tool that support the novel writing process because it does not really focused much on things like fonts and line spacing and all of that stuff that you normally get in a word processor process.
I mean, you could do all of those things. It's not that good at it and it's not what it's intended for. So, so I think that the unique features are much more interesting to talk about. Um, and maybe also just as a disclaimer here at the top, uh, uh, before we get into all of this, uh, we should probably mention that we are not affiliated with Scrivener in any way. So we are only sharing details about the software here in this episode because we want to be well, informative, informative, and help you out.
Uh, and nothing really else. I mean, we're not, we're not earning any money from,
Autumn (15m 24s): from talking about Scrivener in any way. So, uh, just know that yes, it's just because it is a good tool and it's changed my writing process. And actually that's what I wanted to mention first before we get into the tools. I don't know if you have a story of how you ended up with Scrivener, but for me, I was in book five of my series and up until that point I'd been writing and pages and mostly actually on my iPad, but occasionally I'd write in pages because it would sync with my Mac and I was stuck.
I was so lost book five out of a series. I had a lot of characters am we've talked about that before. We're not going to talk about how many characters, it's not game of Thrones big, but there's a lot of characters and a lot of POV in my story. And there was all these turning subplots and things I've had to work out. And there were threads from the first series are going into the second series and it was so big, I actually just couldn't wrap my mind around it. I could navigate through the pages document to figure out when the last time this person had talked in what was going on.
And then I had heard about Scrivener and I went and looked at it and they have this amazing setup that you see right on the left hand side where you can write by scenes or by chapters and you can split your screen and you can jump between things and see the last thing that happened. And I thought, okay, that's it. I'm buying it. So she was, like I said, when I saw the price tag and it completely saved my life and saved the book because I could organize all those subplots. I could color characters. Um, so when I looked at the overview display, I could see how often their point of view popped up, make sure threads weren't dropped and if I had re if I hadn't changed, I don't know if I'd ever make it through book five or at least not the way I managed to in book six.
The wrap up of the series was even bigger and it was not effortless, but it, it was perfect for Scrivener. So if you are a complicated writer, if you like subplots if you, if you need that extra help of organizing, that is really to me what this tool just shines for of creating a working environment where you can organize your thoughts, organize your plots. I know I'll do all my plotting, my world building, my character layout, everything is in one place, one document and I can get all to all of it very quickly with just fluidly without losing my spot and my writing, which is fantastic.
Jesper (17m 52s): Yeah. I'm trying to think back on when I got Scrivener software, but I think I actually got it very, very early on. Uh, I probably read something about it or seen somebody talking about it on YouTube or something. I'm not quite sure. But I do remember before, well what sort of pushed me over the edge to actually acquire a Scrivener was that I started writing, my first book was actually a nonfiction book on, on mapmaking.
And it's not even that long a book, but I was writing it in word and it did not take long before I got really annoyed with all the scrolling back and forth in this document trying to find things. And it was just so annoying. At some point, I just don't know. Let me look at the Scrivener stuff and yeah, as we said, we're going to come back to, but I just like this is a no brainer.
Autumn (18m 49s): Yeah, exactly. All right. So we put both came there because it really helps organize. So obviously that's one of the things why it does. So what are the other tools that you think people need to know or how it organizes for people?
Jesper (19m 6s): Yeah, maybe first auntie, how we'd organize this because well, as you just said, you know, you have the menu items if I don't know if we can call it menu items, but you, you're basically in the left hand side of the screen. You can sort of build up your own structure of all the, uh, all the chapters in the book. But I think what is really nice is also how you can basically use simple drag dragon drop techniques to reorganize things as much as you please. Um, and you can have the research notes, uh, and you can have them display it for easy reference when you're inside writing a chapter of it.
It's just that alone is amazing to me.
Autumn (19m 43s): Yes. And I do, do you use, so there's also, so that's the left screen is this menu in the middle. The biggest area is your writing screen, which can also be split, like we've hinted, so you can have your writing in one, one area and something you're referring to in the second area. And then on the right, there's usually, there's a few different like tabs that you can go through. But the primary display is usually a little note section and then there's like a little synopsis section and the synopsis one is neat because it tells you if you have it in there.
It also puts it in this overview display. So if you go and look at all your chapters, if you have plotted them out, you can actually see how the flow is going and where they are. You know, whatever notes you put their show up there. And then if I'm writing something I'm like, Oh, you know, fix this. Or you know, add in these notes or remember about this, there's this, I love having a little note feature that I can just be like, okay, plot these ideas that I don't want to forget that I need to keep my mind on. Or if like I spell some characters name, I'm like, I'm going to have to remember that.
It's like I put the spelling there so that I can look it up really quickly later. And I lost an ad. There's some dropdown menus too at the bottom and you can, you know, one of them's like first draft, second draft, third draft, which I do use that as I go through in my edits. And then there's another one that's like to do, if he doesn't, it feel weird things you can add to it, but you can actually change that one to my characters, my POV characters. And then I am label those as well so that when I go to that overview, I see my plotting, what characters voice it's in any, you can see if it's been, you know, edited or written or needs to be written.
It's like boom, I know where I am in my story.
Jesper (21m 24s): Yeah, that's wonderful. I think I went thought of kind of through an evolution, I guess with how I used it because initially, initially I started out by having that synopsis. So one the right hand side as well. So I would have liked some bullet points about what's supposed to happen in this chapter. Um, and then I would write like that. And then after a while, well, this was when I wrote my first fiction novel, so I wrote like half the novel in this way. And then I figured out off halfway through the novel, like, like I have no clue where I'm going.
So I ended up having to delete the whole thing and I said, this is not working. Uh, so I went back to the drawing board and then I did a detailed outline, uh, which then, well, that's what I've done ever since, to be honest, are still doing very detailed outline. So I know exactly what's going to happen and I know that I'm not gonna end up in a ditch somewhere 50, 25,000 words in or something. Um, so once I had done that, then I basically stopped using the right hand side, the synopsis field, because I had, well, the detailed am print out.
Basically you have the outline on a chapter by chapter basis. But then, then I found it started to become distracting to have all those other views on the screen when I was writing. So I actually used the feature where you can black out the entire screen in except the area where you're writing. And then I have the printout of the chapter outline on the table beside me and then I was just right. Um, and then again later on then I started dictating. So now I don't even do that anymore. So it's been a bit of an evolution.
Autumn (23m 8s): That's right. And we still have to talk. I've been trying my hand at dictating but I still have to say right now I prefer writing. It just makes more sense what I visually see it and yeah, I mean my outline, I usually go, I figured out how many chapters the book is going to be based on how my normal chapter word count and how long I want the story to be. And I then break it down and put my synopsis and all my notes right in Scrivener and it's all there with me, which is probably one reason I'm having such a hard time breaking away and I'm not using Scrivener but trying to do it through like dictation because everything is just right there and it makes me feel and fuzzy.
Jesper (23m 47s): Mmm. Yeah. Well it is a different process and of course you would need to get used to it but I don't know this, it's the second time we've talked about dictation so maybe we need to record an episode or something.
Autumn (23m 59s): And so part of Scrivener I mean we can talk about, there's some compilation things that are pretty nifty as well as can be a headache if you, you get too into the thick of them. But one of the things I like is that it actually has some really cool templates for like character sheets and it has a spot where if you're doing, if you go and find images for like your world-building. For me it's like I make maps and I have actually just dropped my maps right into the same file. And Scrivener and I keep all my novels. If I'm writing a series, which of course I'm always writing, I'm a fantasy writer of course I'm writing a series.
I do it by the series names. So like the one I have going now is the Kellett Ray. Um, I have it as a series and I have each of the folders as a different book. And so they're all together. They're all in one spot. I mean, seriously, I went from pages where we talked about, you know, scrolling and try to find where you bookmark something and going ahead to slipping to different documents to literally just being able to go into the same document. And it's all a navigation technique right there on the left. And I've originally didn't use the character sheet templates that came with Scrivener and then I accidentally opened, created one.
I'm like, Oh darn, these are actually really good. I've modified it a little bit to put in character arc as well. And you know, mention if their POV. But besides that it's really useful.
Jesper (25m 22s): Yeah, no, I, I love how you have this dedicated area in such Scrivener where you can dump in those images as you say on maps or even web pages you can dump in there as well. I think it's, it's really, really neat. You know, you have everything you need in one place and uh, you don't have to jump around a different documents or get too distracted and, and whatnot. You know, it's, it's, yeah, it doesn't get any easier than this basically.
Autumn (25m 50s): No, especially now. They've recently, within the last year, they created a special compilation. So that's when you take all your active files, your book files, all your chapters or scenes or however you write and you spit it out into a whole document instead of all these separate little individual folders where they existed. Scrivener and you know, before you could do a word doc, you could do all these times, it is set up that you can do it as a paperback if you know what you're doing. But they just created one that if you use vellum, it spits it out into a format that velum really takes two very, very well.
And so suddenly, yeah, it's just cause I do use vellum and I drop it in development. Boom. Everything again is like the chapters. Everything is there and looks neat and it's formatted perfectly and only step in between is I need to have the editor look at it first. So I tell him not to change the formatting at all. Right. When do you think that's only for the Mac version? I don't know. I didn't check since vellum is only on max, isn't it? I can't remember. Yeah, it is. Yeah.
I just, I dunno, I have not checked to be honest, but I don't think I have a compile feature in my windows version of Scrivener where I can output a vellum something. I don't think I have that. I think that's because a few, about a year ago when they created this version, you had an upgrade and I think that cost am another like $10 something ridiculously cheap. And so I went ahead and paid for this very new different software. They're going to keep both versions sort of alive, but this is there.
If you went and bought it today you would get this version with the compilation but I might think that was only the Mac version because I don't recall either that I've ever received an email from Scrivener about upgrading anything. So that's interesting. I mean I could be wrong but I think that might be the case. Well we'll have to have, if anyone who is listening has knows the answer it just drop it into the comments where you're listing and let us know if you see the compile for vellum in your version and what version that is so that way we can kind of get a tally going.
Yeah indeed. But I think it's worth mentioning as well that unless you are using something like vellum and unless you are outputting a disorder of special format or whatever, we want to call it two to then use vellum afterwards. Please know that Scrivener is not the strongest at formatting. So I would not advise you to output the work because you cannot put it in an ebook format from Scrivener direct you can, but I would not advise you to do that and then just proceed straight away to upload that onto the online retailers like Amazon, whatnot because it's just likely that it's not going to look very pretty.
Uh, and actually back in episode 46 so just a few episodes back, we talked about ebook formatic essentially. So I recommend and listen to that episode it for further details on formatting, but, but just be aware that Scrivener is not that good at this stuff. No, you're not going to be having your eBooks with drop caps and some other, the amazing things that you can do in some of the dedicated formatters for your books. But it does work. It has a nice output if you're doing screen writing and you're sending it on to someone to read as a cause.
Screenwriting for whatever reason is still the weirdest, most archaic, um, output format I've ever seen. And they have a few that are more standard that if you're going to be sending it to a publisher, they would probably recognize it, recognize it, but there's nothing really super pretty that you want to send out to your readers and expect them to be paying some, you know, high price money. For mm mm. Another feature I thought of that I want to mention because I quite like it and that does how you can track your progress progress to keep yourself motivated.
And I quite liked that, you know, uh,
Jesper (29m 43s): there was the two different ways at least maybe you have another one as well. I don't know autumn but at least I have seen or can remember, I shouldn't say two different ways of working. Uh, the first one is, uh, to add a different label to each section of your document. And you could, for instance, color code, the ones that are completed in green, and then you can add a column to displays to display that label in the Scrivener outline basically. So that gives you at a glance, you can see how far you've come and you can see all the chapters that is already complete.
Um, another way of tracking it, and probably I like this one better, is to set yourself a word count target and then script note scribbled over. Not only allow you to track the word count. So let's say you set it for 100,000 words for example, then Scrivener we'll track how you progress towards that goal. And I really liked that feature because it keeps you on track and it shows you in a visual layout how far you come. So I really liked that. And I think again, that might be a difference between the Mac version and the windows version here because I T.H.E.
I know in Mac you can set your yourself daily word count goals. Yes, you can. And if I'm not mistaking, I think that was enabled in the windows version and one of the later updates that came, but I don't remember anymore because again, I'm dictating nowadays so I don't use that feature anymore. But I really liked it when I was writing directly into Scrivener. Uh, and I think it is, it does allow your daily word count goals in, in windows, but I'm a bit fussy on that one. Yeah, I think,
Autumn (31m 21s): I think you're right that they did update it, but it's definitely in the Mac version where you can have an overall project goal. You can have a writing session goal and that you can also have a chapter goals. So that really breaks it down if you like, you know, you know, you're writing 2000 words or 3000 words is your what you want for this chapter. And you can have a little bit of a buffer, like as long as you hit, if you're writing 2000 but as long as you hit 1500 you're good. And if you go over 2300, you know, you wanted to tell you, Hey, this is getting a little long.
Are you sure you want to be dedicating this much, you know, space to this one chapter and it'll, you know, it gives you color coding, it tells you, it'll give you updates and notifications. So, yeah, it definitely does make you feel good though. I do laugh because I remember seeing someone figured out that copying and pasting can add and subtract to your word count goal for the day. So if you happen to paste in a whole bunch of stuff, it's like, Hey, you did it. You're like, Oh no.
It's words going on the page. But it does deduct. So if you delete you, you paste, you take something out, you cut it, it will take it off your word count goal for the day too. So you gotta watch that, right? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. You need to be a bit careful, dad. It's not a hundred percent perfect. Yeah. You could write a lot and then take it and paste it into another document and it's going to be like, nah, he didn't make it.
Jesper (32m 45s): Right. Right. Okay. Do we have more features we want to mention? Autumn
Autumn (32m 51s): I can't think of anything else specifically. I did just find out, found out last night when I was am compiling a book actually, that it does now have, it'll compile an outline, which I had noticed and that was very useful to be sending off to my editor to be able to add out the chapter outline and this is what it's gonna look like because I hadn't really worried about like a table of contents before, but it does do that as well. And there's a lot of other features that are in there that it's very, I never truly finished the tutorial.
I kind of got enough then then started poking around and started writing cause I was in the middle level book and I just wanted to get back to it and see if I could get it organized. So maybe one of these days I'll actually take the whole tutorial. Um, I hear that there's a lot of great things in there.
Jesper (33m 39s): Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean I will add a link to the show notes where you can actually see the tutorial videos for Scrivener. So if you want to a visual view of all the stuff we just, we've been talking about here, then yeah, check that link and go and have a look at you. Look at it yourself. But maybe I should get into some of the pricing stuff then do you think?
Autumn (33m 59s): I think so. I think we should let people know what they're in for if they go and look at this software. Um, and I think you'll be really surprised considering, I think we've done a pretty good job at explaining that this is a really powerful piece of organizing for something like a novel or screenplays. So it's, to me it's a really sophisticated piece of software. And I know when I went to look at it, I'm thinking, yeah, it's going to be a couple hundred bucks and I'm just going to be like, yeah, put that on my wishlist.
So I've checked it out. I was like healing.
Jesper (34m 36s): That's the thing, right? I mean, as we talked about, it's available for Mac windows and also iOS asthma, uh, autumn mentioned in the beginning. So if you have those, it will sink your work onto each of your devices. Uh, the Mac and the windows version costs $45. I believe that it's sorta, it's insane is I just, and I believe as well that if you're a student, you're getting a small discount even on those 45. Yeah, I think so. And there are times that they have coupons out, which I didn't wait for it because it's $45.
It's amazing just to get it. It's not like nothing. The iOS version, um, cost $20 or 1999, uh, and if you are planning to run Scrivener on both Mac and windows, then you need to purchase both versions. So you cannot use the same on both of those, uh, different OMS systems. But you do get a discount of $15 if that's what you're going to do. So, which is super sweet of, and I will tell you
Autumn (35m 38s): this to me, one of the most phenomenal things is the file it outputs is a dot Scrivener file that is a dot script file. It doesn't matter if you're a Mac or a PC. You deserve. You drop your dot Scrivener file to Dropbox and you share it with your editor or your beta reader who can download a dot script file. It doesn't matter if they're using a PC or a Mac. And that just blows my mind. I just why do another software. I'm so tired since I'm a Mac user, I'm spitting stuff out two pages and Excel all the time because my Mac can read them.
But you know when I send them to you, yes, for the your your PC cannot read. You know, my pages files in my numbers files, so I have to always transcribe them and translate them. But Scrivener no, we're good. We can share files. I think that is fantastic.
Jesper (36m 32s): Absolutely. And also remember that you're only paying one, so Scrivener is not doing some of the Microsoft tricks on you where they want you to pay monthly subscriptions and all that crap for to use the software. So you pay once and that's it. You have the Scrivener for life. And I would even say even further than that, what is really, really awesome, I really liked that is that their trial period is not a 30 days of the calendar days. Like, like what you normally see, but it's 30 days actual use.
So Scrivener tracks how many days you had opened it. And so if, for example, if you want to write today, you download the trial, you write one day, and then let's say you're busy for the next two weeks and then you open it again, you only used two days of your trial for that, then uh, so those two weeks where you were busy doing other things, it does not count against your trial period. So, so that's really awesome and it just gives you an excellent way that you can just play around with Scrivener and see if it fits your needs before you actually make any, any purchase.
But even that said, it's not expensive. Right. So,
Autumn (37m 38s): I mean, yeah, I think I just really think that the, this company, and I keep forgetting who is the actual owner of Scrivener and producer, but they've gotta be one of the most decent, not out to gouge you or anything. They really, you know, even that they give you a discount if you have to buy it for your PC and your Mac because you're a two type of computer household. That's just nice. I can't say that about some companies if they're just really nice.
Jesper (38m 7s): It's called literature and latte, the ones who make Scrivener. So, uh, that's, that's pretty cool. All right. But, uh, at least in my view, Scrivener is well worth it and am go and check it out if you want. So if this interest piqued your interest, uh, have fun with that. And now that we've got 20, 20 started autumn and I will be back next Monday with advice on some best practices for the next year. Just heard there's a few things you can do to support the amwritingfantasy podcast.
Narrator (38m 37s): Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating. And review. You can also join autumn and Yesper on patreon.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the amwritingfantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
In this last episode of 2019, Jesper talks to Adam Croft.
Adam is one of the most successful indie authors in the world.
Having sold more than two million books, he earns seven figures a year as an author.
The concept of read-through is explained.
We cover why it’s important? How to calculate it? And how it could revolutionize the sales of your book series?
As a special for the Am Writing Fantasy audience, Adam is offering a LIFE-TIME discount on 50% on ALL of his author courses.
The discount code is AMWRITINGFANTASY and the courses can be found at: https://courses.indieauthormindset.com.
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy.
For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to the amwritingfantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing join to best selling authors who have self-published more than 20 books between them. Now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I am Jesper and this is episode 53 of the amwritingfantasy podcast and today I've got something special for you while Adam is away because Adam Croft has agreed to join me today to discuss, read through. And while autumn and I have talked about the importance of writing in series before, we've never really covered, read through in more depth. So Adam and I are going to look into why it is important, how it could revolutionize your series sales and how to calculate it.
So Adam is a seven figure author and assault more than 2 million books. He is one of the most successful indie authors in the world and he has been featured on BBC television and radio together with many other media outlets. So as you can here, we've got some real expert advice from you to uh, for this final podcast episode of 2019. So I think we're going to close out with a bang here. So welcome to the amwritingfantasy podcast Adam thank you very much for having me.
Yeah, so I just said, you know, I said just set the, when people hear this, we actually at the 30th of December, but we are recording willing in advance and tie in advance of time and we only at the end of November at the moment. So I don't quite feel the Christmas spirit yet, but I don't know about you as well. Yeah. Happy new year to everybody. I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas.
Adam (1m 59s): Yeah. I hope no major events happen in the next month that we're obviously not going to be able to reference.
Jesper (2m 5s): No, exactly. Yeah, yeah. It's just here in in in Denmark or there was no snow yet, and it's just raining and it's, it's a bit like a, it's a bit like boring autumn weather, but, uh, yeah, not, not much of Christmas feeling yet, but hopefully it'll come over the next coming years.
Adam (2m 21s): England is very much the same. Um, but in terms of the Christmas feeling, we're getting there. My son will be three in February. So yesterday we went to visit Santa and am. Yeah, we came home, put some Christmas music on and things like that. So you have to try and get into the spirit. We have to have to do a little bit earlier than we might otherwise because he's only small and he, he enjoys getting into it. But, um, yeah, Christmas spirit is, is growing here, I would say.
Jesper (2m 47s): Yeah. Yeah. They've started decorating some of the shops here, but I have not seen any sensors around yet though. They've all been over here. That's why he's not made his way past that Mark. Yeah. Yeah. All right. But, uh, we're gonna talk some read through stuff here today, but I actually, I was thinking Adam am because I also saw the, the book, the nonfiction book you wrote, the indieauthormindset and I know that you always talk a lot about taking the longterm view on your author career rather than focusing on short term gains.
And I really liked that because that's always what I advocate as well. But I think maybe when we're talking about read through, maybe it's relevant to just touch a bit on that because I think it's important that we don't get to to, you know, tie it up in how do I earn a lot of money, short term or kind of thinking isn't it?
Adam (3m 47s): Yeah, definitely. I'm in route through is um, without a doubt a longterm thing to be considering. It's am but it is vice or for you know, a lot of reasons we will cover and it will give you some, some information, some statistics which will effectively um, inform your advertising and allow you to know straight away when you're looking at an ad, whether it's likely to be prophesying or not in the long term. Um, it is, yeah, it's very much tied into the kind of the analytical business side of things when you're looking at the longterm of publishing and it's about calculating really whether a dollar you spent a day is going to make you back, uh, you know, perhaps five, 10 times that over the course of months or even a couple of years.
Jesper (4m 33s): Yeah, exactly. And and I think as well when we're talking about read too is also about four people, four people to go from reading your book one and onto reading the written at rest of the series. You need to put in the professionalism and do a good job in terms of making sure that the, each of the book, and especially of course that that book one is professional. So that is professionally edited. It has been through all the editing stages in terms of making sure that the plot is there and that there was a good story, does good character arcs and all that good stuff.
But because out of without all of that, I mean if, uh, w I guess what I'm trying to say is that if people go into all the marketing and advertising space here with the mindset of, let me put out some quick books in a quick series here so that I can get some read through and I can earn some money, then I think they would be shooting yourself in the foot.
Adam (5m 29s): It would. And I, I know a fair bit about that. I've been there myself. Um, I mean, I will say to people, yes, you, you do really need at least probably three books out in a series before you're going to start doing any heavy advertising or before you, you know, want to get anywhere near making a profit from that advertising anyway. There's nothing, nothing wrong with getting the name out there and finding those readers, but giving them something to read onto is absolutely vital. Um, and yeah, it, it is the case that you want that book obviously as you do with all your books to be the best they possibly can be.
Um, I fell foul of that myself. I wrote my first book in my series, my main series him, well finished it in 2010 and that came out the first couple of days at 2011. Um, and I wrote the first book of my other series a few weeks later. So at that point I didn't really know how to write. I certainly didn't know how to publish. Um, this was in the early days of the Kindle over here, so it was very much hitting the hope.
The books weren't great. They're still not brilliant. I mean I have revised them since, but I can't, you know, while I would like to do is rewrite them all from, from head to toe. But that's obviously not practical for a number of reasons. So yarn battling that myself. In fact, having fairly low read through, um, on that series because the first couple of books are just so poor.
Jesper (6m 54s): Yeah. Autumn and I also discussed it at one point. I do not recall right now if it was on a podcast episode or if it was just in awe one of our personal conversations. But we did discuss at one point this dilemma of going back and rewriting a book one day. And also it's like, I guess you could say it also depends on how long the series is after that because is it really worth, because it will take quite a lot of effort and is that really worth it? I don't know. I guess,
Adam (7m 21s): well this is a thing. I mean if you've gotten a long ongoing series, then I would say just carry on writing a series. Um, the new books that you write, the more of those you have out, we'll will flood out the poor ones earlier on. I think people expect a series to get better as it goes on and the writer's career to get better as it goes on. Um, and as you say, the amount of time it takes and the benefit that you might get from that. Um, I think it's probably the case that it's not worth doing major revisions. I mean if you go back and there are loads of typos and things and stuff that just doesn't make sense and is, um, is objectively poor am then by all means make some small tweaks.
But I don't think major rewrites are good unless you've got, for example, a very tight trilogy or something like that where one really poor book is going to stand out quite clearly against the other two.
Jesper (8m 11s): So maybe, maybe we actually, we should actually start out by defining what we mean when we say through
Adam (8m 17s): yes, we can try. Um, I mean it is essentially the percentage of readers which will, um, read through your series or read through from one book to another. So, for example, if 100 people buy book one in my series and um, in a similar period of time, 25, we'll buy book two, then I can assume, and I underline and embolden that word, assume that, um, basically a quarter of people who've read book one or who at least who bought book one bread book too, you're not going to get figures that high for a number of reasons, which we'll go into later.
But that would give you a read through percentage of 25%. Um, you'll read through all likely drop the further you get through a series mainly because more people will come in and book one and will not get as far as book too, then won't go as far as book three and so on. Um, but there are a lot of things that can influence readthrough is not necessarily the case that if you've got to read through a 2% or 5%, that doesn't mean that 95 or 98% of people didn't enjoy the book.
Generally speaking, most people who buy the book won't even read it. I mean, I think we all can attest to the fact that the number of books we have on our Kindles or even on our bookcases is, um, infinitely more than the number we've ever read. So most people who buy the book won't read it. Um, people who do buy it, um, some of them won't enjoy it. Most of them probably will. And even those ones who do enjoy it won't necessarily automatically, and I kind of automaton robotic style, go and buy the second one, they might think, Oh yeah, I'll get the second one at some point and then forget about it.
Or they might pop it onto their wishlist and never actually buy it or the doorbell might go while they're in the middle of doing it. So, you know, all of these things will contribute to effectively lowering your read rate. Um, and it, it doesn't matter so much what the read through rate is. It's not really about influencing that number. It's more at calculating it, finding out what it is, and then utilizing that, um, in your advertising and your marketing as a piece of information, which can actually be very helpful to you.
Jesper (10m 43s): Yeah. And I was wondering while you were talking there, do you have any like guidelines or whatever we wanna call it on? So if people calculate their read through rate, I am, I don't know, we haven't really explained how to calculate it, but maybe we can come back to that in a second. But if they do calculate their read through rate, um, do we have any like, guidance or ideas about what, when can they consider like, okay, now I have a, a fairly good read through rate versus this is not good enough, for example. Or do you think it doesn't matter and you, you, you sort of benchmark against yourself more the most?
Or what do you think
Adam (11m 18s): exactly. I think you do benchmark against yourself. I think to a large extent it is what it is. It's not massively, um, influenceable to be honest with you, you can't really influence the readthrough rates too much other than writing a better book. And you know, as I said at the top of the show, we should be writing the best books we can anyway. So, you know, it, it, it's kind of kind of irrelevant really whether the read through rate is good or bad, there isn't anything that is good or is bad. Obviously the higher the better. But I wouldn't be alarmed if you calculate yours and find it coming out at sort of 2%, 5%.
Um, you know, it's not the case. That's, that is a huge failure. It's going to make life more difficult for you of course. Um, because effectively if you're selling, um, a copy of book one and it's costing you more to advertise that than it is the royalty you're making on book one. That's not necessarily the end of the road because the logic is that a percentage of those people will then go and buy book two, book three, so on. If you've got a series of 10 books and if you know who that X percent of people will buy all 10 books, then you know that a sale of book one isn't just worth a sale of book one is worth the sale of book one plus X percent of sales of 10 books, if that makes sense.
So it's about calculating the value of a reader rather than a sale and calculating a read through is about, um, getting that magical number of how likely that person who has bought that book is to become a reader of the series rather than just a purchaser of book one.
Jesper (12m 55s): Yeah. And, and I think, at least from my perspective, I would say, and maybe that was what I was trying to get at us. Well I guess I would say that people shouldn't be scared when they calculate a number because it's going to be much lower than you think. Oh yeah. It's not like a be like, well 70% of people who read my book, one is going to read book two. It's, it's probably not like that.
Adam (13m 15s): Yeah. I mean, 70% of people who bought it won't even read it. So mine like it and get to the end or their Kindle might crash or um, you know, we've all read books by authors that we've loved and we notice more they're in the series, but we still haven't gone out and bought them for whatever reasons. We've just forgotten or, you know, life gets in the way. And that's, that's generally, um, the biggest influence when it comes to books and buying books is that life gets in the way. Um, every time I put a new book up for pre-order for example, I, um, I'll put something in my, my readers group on Facebook's got a couple thousand people in that.
Now I think, and I always put a quick straw poll out and say, in case you've not already bought the book, um, can I just ask why out of interest, you know, is it, is it priced too high? Does the blurb not sounded enticing? Am have you just not got around to it yet? Have you not seen any ads for it or anything like this? As it's the first you've heard of it and overwhelmingly 70, 80, 85% of the am results are that people say they just haven't got round to it yet despite me emailing four or five times or you know, putting things up on Facebook all the time.
It, they just, people are busy, they put us in the back of their minds, they would do it at a later date. Um, and, and that's going to be a case when people have read your book and the only, I'm not just, they get to buy the next one, um, is a mention in the back of the book perhaps or your, your Kindle lawyer, Kobo or whatever it is popping up and saying, actually, do you know there's more books in this series? Would you like to grab them now? If they don't do it then, then they haven't got any more reminders. So you know that it's going to lower the read through rate anyway quite naturally.
Jesper (14m 51s): Yeah, absolutely. And
Adam (14m 52s): then as you say, they are of course, it's a very good idea to put that a link to the next book in the back of the first book so that they can go on straight to am to buy the next one if they like what they just read. And at least it's more likely at that point in time that they will do it right away because there they are right there on the page and the link is staring at them. So that's, of course that's a good trick. Um, but I would also say it, it's, it's, I think, I, I don't remember the exact number, but I read somewhere something like you had to have read, I don't know what, where it was like five, six, seven books, something like that of an author before you, before you actually start remembering the author's name.
Yeah. So, yeah. So that's also what you're battling against. Here's the people just don't remember and e-readers have made that really difficult. Um, well, one area has made that really difficult and that our beloved Kindle, which, um, doesn't give you on the lock screen when your, your Kindle is locks and most of them don't show you, um, the book that you're reading. And then when you unlock your can look, go straight back to the text. So you can't remember the title, you can't remember the author. Um, some of them like I books am we'll show you the covers.
Um, Kobo as well. When you lock your device, the, the front cover is the safe screen. Um, so some of them are better in that regard, but many of the Kindles, um, don't do that. And a lot of people, I, I'm forever getting emails from readers telling me that they loved my latest book X. And I think I've never heard of that book. Um, they're talking about characters of mind that their favorites and I'm thinking they're not mine and I'll, you know, I'll Google them or search on Amazon and find out who did write that and I'll go, Oh yeah, that was by so and so, wasn't it? Yeah. That they are, that was, that was a great series too.
And, you know, try not make them feel too daft about it cause they have taken the time to email me after rule. Um, but yeah, it is phenomenal that people don't know the books they've read. We quite often remember the stories, we remember the characters. Um, but it can take a while. So remember the name of the author or at least the, the title of the books. So, um, yeah, again, this goes back into why creating a strong brand is so important. Um, and why when we're calculating, read through or trying to gain, read through and get rid of us through our series am I think there really does need to be a kind of a fresh approach that I'm not sure what it is yet, but it does need to take these things into account and recognize the fact that the am the world is, it is the ecosystem as it is.
The technology as it is, um, kind of works against us in many ways.
Jesper (17m 24s): Hmm. Yeah, absolutely. So maybe could you say maybe some words about how do people actually calculate this stuff then maybe, maybe, maybe that's a good thing to get into.
Adam (17m 34s): Well, this is a difficult thing. Um, I mean I probably should give a few cautionary notes beforehand and it comes to calculating, read through. There are many things that can skew it and can cause some issues. And one of those is Permafree. Um, we mentioned how, you know, few people, sometimes we'll read through from one books to the other and if you've got one but which is permanently free, perhaps your first in series, um, that effect is going to be amplified massively because free books on the whole just don't get red.
Um, people fill their Kindles with them. Um, you know, I've got hundreds of free books on my Kindle. I'm never going to get, get through to reading them all. It's just not gonna happen. But you see one, then you think, well, it's not costing me anything. I might as well grab it and then read it. One, I've got some time in the future and as we all know, um, most of us writers and creators are also procrastinators. We know very well that when we say we'll do something in the future, it's not going to get done. Um, so those books, laundry, you don't get read. The ones that do get read, a huge percentage of those am will be read by people who only get free books.
They know they're on low incomes or don't believe you should pay for books or, or whatever the reason is. Um, they're just not going to go and buy book two because you know, for them, reading is a free thing and that's fine, I guess, but they're, they're not going become longterm readers of yours anyway. So this is why I'm, I'm, I'm kind of on the fence about free. Um, I think it can be helpful in some ways, in some big ways. And that's a, that's a, an episode for another time. Um, but things like that can really skew the data.
Jesper (19m 10s): Yeah. Sorry for interrupting you, but I was just about to inject there because we actually did release a podcast episode like, I don't know, three, four or five episodes back or something like that about PERMA freeze because we also surveyed, um, a lot of our readers and we were asking them different kinds of questions. But what really came out as a conclusion from that? Is that what you just said? Basically because the book is free, people downloaded it ends up on the Kindle, they never read it again.
So our conclusion out of that was actually that we don't think free books are any good anymore because it doesn't help. It's much better to get them to, because we also asked to read those questions about, so we, we ask them questions. If you have got a book for free, do you read it right away or at least right after the one you're currently reading or, or, or what most of them said no, they will get back to it at some point. Which means of course in translation they will never get back to it. No,
Adam (20m 8s): it's free. Does have some uses. I don't think it's a longterm vulnerability. Um, I think, um, it's could for sometimes a quick burst of am visibility, you know, free books will get downloaded more, they'll get seen more, they'll get found more. Um, and also, I don't wanna go too far off piste here, but you can, um, if you've got audio, for example, um, with whisper sync add on enabled, then for example, I'm having a book free for a short period of time to get a BookBub featured deal, um, can actually reach you in a fair bit of cash in audio add on through whisper sync because a lot of audio listeners, when they've run out of there, they're free books for the month or they're included books for the month in their plan.
Um, will download free or cheap Kindle books and then pay an extra couple of dollars for the audio add on. It's a much cheaper way of them doing that. So, um, yeah, there can be some cash we brought in there. But I digress. I like to read that derailing you. Sorry. Oh no, that's fine. It's am, it's a vital point of, of, of this Ray of vital part of calculating retreat, you know, accounting for all of these things. And you know, thinking in terms of being an indie publisher, nothing is a, is a satellite thing.
Everything kind of influences each other. Um, and that does make calculating read through more difficult butts. Um, I'll try and break it down into its most basic parts. Um, it is radically oversimplifying it, but effectively, um, you want to take a period of time, which ideally, and this is where it becomes difficult again, um, gives each book a fair crack of the whip. So for example, if you're taking the last year, um, you've got a five book series and you're taking the last year, um, but book five is only been out for a month, then you're not going to have a full compliment of data there.
Am you might just want to include the last month in, in that case. So you're essentially giving each book a similar amount of time on the market. Um, so you've got a fairly clean data. You also want to make sure that that period of time is as long as it can be to be fair so that you've got, um, the biggest amount of data you can then the data therefore should be truer. So effectively what you ought to do is look at, um, the number of downloads, um, a purchases that each book has had in that period of time and the amount of money at book has made in each period of time.
Um, you're then calculating am for example, I did this in, um, in one of mine, I took am a fairly short time period. Um, I looked at my series and in that period, um, one book of book one sold 518 copies, book two sold 390 book through your 312, but for two 75 and book for a book, five to 40. So yeah, these are just kind of fairly random numbers, but you can see the numbers reduce each time.
Of course, as readers drop off, they forget to buy the next book. They give up on the series, whatever it is. Um, and you're then calculating the percentage that read through, um, from one book to the next. So book two's download numbers are X percent of, but one's book threes are X percent of book twos or whatever. Then gets the end of the series your looking at the number who have got right through to the end compared to the number who have, uh, started the series and looking at what that percentage is, uh, of, of all readers, you know, what percentage got as far book five.
Um, that's the reader you're looking for in a calculation that you're, you're, you're aiming for there. So say for example, you calculate that am 20% of your readers, for example, make the full way through a five book series. Um, you then want to calculate the value of that series. So you've got book one where you might have a royalty of a dollar and say books two, three, four, and five. You've got a royalty of $2 each.
So somebody reading the whole way through the series would earn you $9, but 20% of people read their whole way through the series. So essentially somebody starting book one has a 20% chance of reading through the series and earning you $9. Um, and this time in the morning, I'm not going to try and work out what that is in my head. I think it's about $1 80, something like that. So, um, or is it, let's, let's work that one out. Um, so it's $1 80, so that's, um, Rita wouldn't actually be worth that $1 am to you.
It actually be worth almost twice that. So when you're sending a, uh, you know, advertising a book and you're spending, I don't know, whatever it is on, on advertising that and you're not quite making a profit, in fact, you are, you've probably doubling your money in, you know, just using those numbers that I've, I've plucked completely out of nowhere. Um, so if you know that, that am read through sort of, that reader would earn you that a $1 80 for reading through the whole series, which is is, is pretty low.
It's just a number that I F generated through inventing random ones. Let's face it. Um, then if you also know your conversion rate, um, which you can work out through some funky and manipulation of the Amazon ads, um, uh, dashboard for example, then you can work out what you can spend on an ad. So if you know that you make $1 80 for somebody who reads through the series, um, you know that 10% of people who hit your landing page will convert into a sale, your conversion rate is 10%, then you know that that scent, the scent of that $1 18 means that if you're spending less than 18 cents a click, you're likely to be making a profit across the series.
Um, so essentially it's, it gives you that final piece of data, that final piece of information, um, that will enable you to make a calculation as to looking at an ad and knowing fairly instantly whether it's likely to be profitable and knowing what your benchmarks are for advertising and knowing that you've, you've got that ceiling there and as long as you spend under that, you am you'll be making a long term profit. That's it. I was going to say in shorts when that wasn't very short
Jesper (26m 44s): at no, but I think the main point with with this read through and why it's important to do this in calculation here is because it increases the bar so to speak on how much you can spend on advertising your book. One because if you look at your book one in isolation and you tried to work out, okay, how much can I spend looking at my conversion rate to make sure that I get at least a, let's say a 1% return on investment or something like that.
Then that number will be incredibly much lower on how much you can actually bit on your ads on Amazon for example, on Facebook or wherever you're advertising compared to when you take into account all the revenue you're going to get from the rest of the series. Then you can increase your ad spend and your bidding and basically making sure that you have a fair chance in your ads actually being served. Because if, if you only look at like a two 99, three 99 book one or whatever, or even let's say four 99 when you take away two royalties from that and you take away the conversion rate will will drop you down to let's say it and 10%.
Then you are bidding so low to ensure a positive room at return on investment then that you add, I'll never going to get shown on Amazon anyway.
Adam (28m 3s): That's right. Yeah. I mean I, I looked at, for example, my am, I just found my fingers there while you were talking rather than inventing ones. I thought I'd find the actual figures that I did. A couple book, one in my series at the moment is am at 99 cents and that's a price point on testing there. So I will learn probably about 25 cents, something like that. Um, then you 30 cents for a download of that book for sale of that book, which makes you think, well, actually that's not even worth advertising, but that's theories based on my read through rates.
I've worked out what a, um, you know, a reader, a am that comes across is worth over the lifetime of their, their readership. So for example, I've worked out for each different vendor. Um, and I can see that, for example, a Kindle reader to me, um, in that series is worth six pounds 51. Um, a Kobo reader is worth seven pounds, 10 Apple reader is worth seven pounds 81. Um, so they're, they're actually, it's worth somewhere around the seven pound Mark.
I'm a reader. So whereas it looks as if there's a 20 or 30 P royalty to be made there, that's, that's not the case. Actually getting somebody to, to read that series, it could be worth about seven or eight pounds to me. Um, and that's a, that's a massive, massive difference, um, from, from what you believe that reader is worth. Um, you know, we're not talking about being pennies out here. This is no thousands of percent higher, um, and will make a massive difference to the way that you do your marketing, your advertising. Um, of course you're not gonna see that seven or eight pounds possibly for a couple of years.
Um, but that's a huge, huge, um, and with most businesses not making a profit in the first couple of years anyway. Um, I mean, I would happily talk away am a pound or two if I knew that it was gonna be making me back seven or eight a couple of years later.
Jesper (29m 55s): Yeah, absolutely. And this is where I guess we can tie back to the beginning where we talked about that this is a long term view on, on things, right? It's not, it's not about making a quick buck or something. Um, and it takes, I mean, I don't, I don't know. I mean, I know some people can read a book really quickly, but for me it takes months and months and months just to read one book. So if I'm your reader, it'll take forever.
Adam (30m 19s): Yes. And that's the thing. Now, everybody is different. Um, and there are so many different variables that go into this, which is why having the maximum amount of data we can is, is vital. Um, I mean, for example, if you're a new author, um, you might not have, um, the, the volume of sales and the amount of time behind you to be able to get clean data to calculate this, which is why I think calculating the read through is something that is best done. Um, the more, um, the more you go on, for example, it is something which is worth doing throughout your am author career.
It's worth doing, you know, every few months. And just, um, you know, seeing, um, seeing what your, uh, you'll read through rate is at that point in time because it will change, the data will get cleaner. So it's well worth repeating the exercise.
Jesper (31m 16s): Hmm. Yeah, for sure. I was just wondering as well, so when, or for those people who have their books in Kindle unlimited, I guess that will complicate matters a bit because you will have some people buying the book. You will have other people's pouring the book. Um, so we need to be a bit careful with calculating their, I guess, right?
Adam (31m 39s): Yeah. Uh, yeah, kinda limited does um, does complicate things as well. Um, you'll read through rates will probably be higher, but the competition is also higher and your roti rate will be lower. Um, also doesn't help that the amount you get paid for page reads changes and drops, let's face it every month as well. So that does complicate things. The calculations there are a bit different and an even more complicated. I mean, things like this aren't, aren't difficult to get across in the medium of audio anyway.
It, um, but um, yeah, there is am there is a little something I can do for your listeners to help out there, which we'll we'll cover at the end of the show I'm sure. Um, and yeah, even things like box sets can complicate things because you think, well, okay, somebody reading for example, if you've got a box set of books, one's a three. Is somebody reading book for coming from book three or are they coming from your box out of one to three? Um, also a lot of people read out of order. A very large number of people will read out of order. I'm for rather getting messages on Facebook and emails saying, Oh, I've read these three books of yours.
Which one should I read next? I'm thinking what you've read books two, five and seven out of water. Um, so you don't have, I'm glad you've enjoyed them because that's frankly miraculous. You'd recommend that order. Um, but yeah, people, people do. And it doesn't matter how much you say this is the next book in the series or you have things plastered all over your website, all of your emails. I love your Facebook with all the books in order. Um, you know, people are people, they would just do whatever they want this to be honest with you. So, um, yeah, read through is, um, probably the, the line of best fit.
I would say it's am is the best thing we have at the moment. Um, but when we're dealing with that amount of unpredictability and general human nature, we're never going to get something perfect butts. Um, you know, it, it's better than nothing. Um, which I know is not, um, the best sales message in the world.
Jesper (33m 40s): No, but it's, it's, I think it's more about looking at the big picture here because if, if, if, with the example you were talking about early on, you know, if you know that you are earning like I mean seven, eight, $9 for for, uh, those people from, from one person starting the beginning of the series and when you're taking into account all the drop off and whatnot, you know, but okay, Rita is worth seven, eight, $9. It's, it's not about the seven or the eight or ninth. It's more about understanding the reigns of, OK, so it's, it's, it's around this level that I'm gonna earn.
Uh, let's see. My, my Redis worth around this level of money. I mean, if it's 7.5 or 8.5, that's not going to rock the boat, but it at least it gives you indication on, okay, how much can I approximately bit and still end up profitable in the end? Maybe a couple of years later as you say, but, but I think that's the takeaway, right? That, that you need to, to think it longterm and ms an indicator rather than like an exact number.
Adam (34m 41s): Exactly. Yeah. It's, it's going to be closer then you have beforehand, that's for sure. It's, um, you know, it's not going to be exact. It's not going to be foolproof. Um, but yeah, you will, you will be closer than you, you were otherwise. So it's definitely worth doing. Um, it can really give you, um, some, some excellent insight into what a reader might be worth, which otherwise we're just, we're just guessing. And as you say, the only number we've really got is the royalty that you get from that, um, specific, um, up front sale rather than am from looking at, um, you know, the, the, the whole bigger picture.
Jesper (35m 26s): Yeah, exactly. So, I don't know. Adam is there any things we missed out? Oh, I forgot to ask you about when it comes to read through that as important to covid. I think so. Um, the only thing else I was to mention is the,
Adam (35m 38s): um, as I say, difficult to am to get this through in in audio format. Um, but if it's something that's am listeners or sort of podcast are interested in, I do have a short course, um, on calculating read through, which I'm, I'm, I'm very happy to give your listeners I'm half price access to, um, as an exclusive deal for them.
Jesper (36m 1s): That's great. Yeah. And I will put a link to am to that discount code or link a router in the show notes below. So, uh, for for you, dear listener, if you're interested in checking out Adam's costs on this, uh, you can get that very special amwritingfantasy podcast a discounter her by, by going from that link below. And I think Adam you said that it's not going to expire that link. Is that right? So people can just use it?
Adam (36m 30s): Yeah, that'll be there forever. I think it's, um, uh, courses.indieauthormindset.com I think we get 50% off of all of the courses, but if you go for the, um, the, the read through one, I think the, uh, the code is am am amwritingfantasy am and that will mean that the course actually costs less than $25. So, um, yeah, it makes it makes it a great deal.
Jesper (36m 53s): Oh yeah, absolutely. So I would say go and check that out and uh, we I know we just passed Christmas now, but maybe a late Christmas gift for yourself. Maybe that's an idea.
Adam (37m 2s): Navy, Navy, you can use your Christmas money on it.
Jesper (37m 7s): Yeah, yeah, for sure. All right. So I would say thanks a lot Adam for coming on to the amwritingfantasy podcast and share your views and thoughts and knowledge about read through to, to help our listeners to, to make their own series more profitable longterm. I thank you. It's been a pleasure. All right, thank you for listening throughout 2019 and have a very good new year's Eve tomorrow and we will see you in 20
Narrator (37m 39s): if you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the amwritingfantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Adam and Yesper on patrion.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the amwritingfantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
We are in the thick of the holiday season, so what better time to talk about adding holidays to your fantasy story?
Jesper and Autumn discuss the steps to make a holiday relevant to your world and story in this slightly more light-hearted episode.
Expect laughter as well as some useful tips to add holidays and lots of holiday-induced tension to your WIP!
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy.
For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to the amwritingfantasy podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing join to best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them. Now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and YeJJsper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I'm Jesper and I'm autumn. This is episode 52 of the amwritingfantasy podcast and since it's the 23rd of December as this episode releases, we decided to do something a little difference. It's sort of a Christmas special where we going to share how to create holidays for your fantasy setting. So I guess we could start out by saying Merry Christmas to everyone. But I have to say that feels a bit weird saying that now that we're recording this in the beginning of December, but I guess technically it is Christmas now, isn't it?
Autumn (1m 5s): It is for everyone who's listening or at least very quick close. And I mean heck it after you'll, um, so after the solstice and Kwanza and Hanukkah and all of those holidays. So we're just in the thick of it now. At least when you're listening to this for us it's like unstressful early December as we're recording. So that's kind of funny. Yeah. I'm not quite into the Christmas mood yet. I don't know about you. Well you have to remember I just had a two foot snow storm today so I that's pretty Christmas.
Yeah, I'd start beginning to at least look a lot like Christmas here. All the decorations are going up for everyone cause we're post post the Thanksgiving holiday in the U S and now here in the Northeast. We just got dumped with a huge store of that's lasted over 24 hours and it's still snowing and I think we're still expecting another foot tonight. So my poor dog is like, you see his ears and the tip of his tail of this? No, it's, it's really kind of sad cause he liked the snow was like he wants to avoid it.
He's a November puppy and where he was, where we got him from a, she was a very small breed or a local place in Maine, and, uh, she had something going on in their yard, so she never let the puppies out. So the first time when we brought him home in January is this, like this little ball of fur that was like, you know, he fit into a shoe. He was so small. Uh, the first thing he experienced was Maine snow winter. He loved it. He acted, he has this Arctic Fox thing going on where you actually rears up and pounces like you see foxes and polar bears do.
Yes. That is an instinct since he was a puppy. So he, he often, he'll hear something and there the snow, he's a current terrier, so he's sort of like these Toto and the wizard of Oz, except he's a little bit bigger and he's a redhead. He's gold. And so if you can imagine this little fuzzy mud like dog who, uh, they're bred, they're not toys, they're not, you know, or ornamental dogs. They're actually a working dog. One of the oldest breeds in existence where they're from Scotland older than Scotties and they were bred to get vermin, badgers and foxes out of Karnes, hence the cult carne terriers.
So yes, he has his amazing hunting instinct and you let him out and he hears things under the snow and he does his little Fox pounds and tries to grab it and kill it cause that's what they do. But he, so he, uh, he loves snow. He will go and roll in it, uh, during our travels as we've been traveling and we were trying so hard to find him snow every month of the year. And we did pretty good. I think August we managed to find some, cause we're up in Alaska and there was some stuff in the passes.
Uh, it's, it was kind of a challenge, but we tried to make sure he found snow and got a role in it and play in it and he was thrilled. Hmm. Nice. So how was your week? I mean, you're not getting two feet of snow, right?
Jesper (4m 12s): No, no. Notice there was no snow here. There was a bit of rain today way. It was like a slight, slight, slight snowy is snow flakes coming down today, but it was more like half rain. So it does count. And w well we are down to like two degrees Celsius, so it's uh, it's getting cold and it's getting wintery. So, uh, but speaking of a puppy's am, we spent this past weekend at my brother's and his fiance's place and they actually have a puppy as well.
So, uh, my, my boys, they, all our boys, they really, really liked it. I think it's the, the puppy is am is not used to people staying over. I think this was the first time that somebody stayed over for a weekend, uh, in his lifetime. So, uh, actually the Saturday morning, the puppy was kind of, it was so stressed out that it got sick. So we were growing up Saturday morning and stuff like that from all the attention.
And you know, the puppy doesn't have any filters to, to stop playing. Right. So if somebody wants to play, just keeps playing, but it's still quite small, so it needs to rest. But it can't figure out how to rest. So it just falls over and sleeps. Yeah, well no, they had to carry it upstairs and put it into, into a room up there so we could sleep because as long as it was downstairs with the rest of it, it just wanted to play all the time. So, uh, yeah, so we've got a bit sick, but then, uh, yeah, it slept for half, half well parts of of Saturday and then they felt better again and then the boys got to play some more with the puppy dare.
So they really enjoyed that. It was, it was a nice weekend. We, we enjoy going there and uh, my brother and his fiance that they're such hosts, you know, they go out of their way to make sure that you feel welcome every time you're there. So it's really nice. That sounds wonderful. That definitely sounds like a nice family visit. And hopefully your employees are satisfied with just visiting the puppy and not going to be bothering you for your own little canine companion. Yeah, they were already telling my wife when we were there. So I think maybe you should start considering getting a puppy or actually the oldest one of our dogs are boys actually started out differently.
He was, he was trying to be sneaky, so he was asking my wife's stuff like, uh, don't you think it's cute? Don't you really like, it wouldn't be nice if you could pet it every day. Yeah. Good owes to him. He is pretty good. Yeah. He was trying to get her to say that she really liked it because of course you did, but, uh, we're not going to get a dark, but, uh, he was trying to ease, ease her into a saying that you wanted the dog too, but he didn't succeed.
How are you guys am you know what he's coming from, huh? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, uh, but that's, I mean it was a very nice weekend. Um, but uh, Oh also, even though it's nice and relaxing and, and all that, you know, when you are out from your own house, and especially me, the older I get, if I don't sleep in my own bed at night, I get really tired. I F I have a trouble sleeping if I'm not in my own bed. So this morning, Monday morning here we are recording this Monday evening, but this morning I was very, very tired when I got up.
But uh, but I still managed to get all the final stages of the character creation process done for our next fantasy series. So I'm pretty, I'm pretty psyched about that. Yes, I saw that shelf in my inbox. I was like, darn it. You know, I've got to get to looking at that. I even haven't opened it up yet today, but I will. Oh well maybe tonight after I make dinner and put everything away I'll take a peek and see what you created and I can't wait to give you feedback and start working on this a bit more. Yeah. I also cannot wait to get into the fiction writing again, although I guess we have to say we have quite a lot of bits and pieces to finish up with causes and nonfiction books before we get that far.
But, but it's good to just make some progress in the background on, on the fiction stuff as well. Absolutely. I think sometimes the plotting is at least keeps it going, which is exciting and makes it still feel connected. Oh, we go on the internet with the amwritingfantasy podcast. Uh, so I posted a pretty interesting article on, on patron about writing in a noisy or a silent environment and, uh, I'm not gonna go into all the details so of that article there, but, uh, those on patron could of course read it, but among other things, um, except set that most people reach peak performance under moderate nice conditions like 70 dash a bills.
Um, and that just happens to be roughly the equivalent to the chatter in a typical coffee shop or restaurant on a relatively busy day. So that was a bit interesting. But Sates come and really made me laugh because he said, well, uh, he cannot write during silence or while listening to music instead, he said the sound of politicians is usually perfect as meaningless back proud chatter.
Autumn (9m 24s): That is really great. Yes. I guess, I don't know, streaming, um, you know, the U S government would really inspire me, but I guess it makes a good background babble.
Jesper (9m 36s): Yeah. Meaningless chatter. That was, what do you call it? I thought it was real great.
Autumn (9m 41s): Okay. And it's funny cause I enjoy the UK parliament compared to the U S they slam each other and shouting and all kinds of stuff. It's intense. It's, it's, I did not understand politics until actually I spent a year in England and it all made sense cause you know, it's the size of the a U S state, but it's a country and suddenly it's like, Oh this is how it all works. The U S is just too big and there don't get riled up or passionate, but Oh yeah, UK.
Awesome. So I think I'd get end up getting caught up in the accents and everything else going on. If I was listening to that as my, my background noise, unfortunately. Yeah, I think I'll pass on that one. But I told him very funny. I thought it's very funny. I was really excited actually in the Facebook group that Arthur had posted a question on wanting to find a font that looked like a computer speaking because you know me and fonts. Yeah. I was just about to say Fonz, that's your thing.
That is, I was like, Oh topographies. So I we there was some good suggestions but Oh, thank you Arthur for posting about fonts. It made my day. So I enjoyed that and I enjoyed the suggestions and that, you know, some people actually linked to a whole bunch of free fonts such, I'm
Jesper (10m 59s): not going to go look at right this second. But it's very tempting. Yeah. But I guess with font you have to be really careful right in, in making sure that they are actually free to use also. Because one thing I think, unless I'm mistaken, you're, you're, you're an expert. He has a, correct me autumn if I'm wrong, but I think sometimes you can actually find funds that are free, but they're not free for commercial use. Right. So I think you need to be careful here, right? That, that even though you find it for you, you need to check that is a commercial free font before you start using it for a book.
Autumn (11m 32s): Sometimes it's free for personal use or free for, you know, commercial use. You definitely, most of them come with a license and you just need to read that really quickly and make sure it is actually free to use like on a book cover and go with go with that. Or if it's free to use on, uh, on your book cover, but not free to use if you were making book covers to other people. Lots of layers and most people will answer them for you. And you know, you can always go to actually my favorite font resources called what the font. So there is a fabulous Sapporo to itch.
It is WTF. So, uh, there's a fabulous forum on what the font am and people are fun experts in the us. It'll answer questions and they'll help you track down fonts, which I won't admit how many times I have done that. Um, they will help you figure out all that stuff. So if anyone has a question am I highly recommend what the thought as a very good resource. And plus it's fun to get to say that to other people. Although I,
Jesper (12m 32s): I really don't know how they would police if you're using, uh, you know, a font that isn't allowed for commercial use. If you, let's say just you accidentally used it on your cover, I will don't know how they would police it. I, I don't, I don't imagine anybody sitting in going through all the covers on, on Amazon just to make sure. But, uh, of course anyway, we need to make sure we always complained with w with licenses and whatnot, but I'm just wondering how they would actually figure it out.
Autumn (13m 0s): I think it would be the random chance of someone finding it and questioning it and then asking to see your license. Um, and cause obviously you could possibly be using it legally because you paid for the license, which is usually what happens. So I can't imagine the challenge. I don't make fonts. Um, I'd love to make a couple of fonts, but I can see the challenge for licensing that I think I just do it for myself or I just let it free for use and yeah, I wouldn't want to go there.
Jesper (13m 29s): No. And I mean, how many times has it happened at anybody approached you to ask if you had the license for any of the funds are you currently using? Right. Never. Never. So, yeah, so I'm just wondering how that would all work. But yeah, who knows. Um, I should also mention that as we recording this episode, we just had the monthly Q and a, uh, we our patron supporters at the $5 here can get their questions answered, but there's a low, small rewards for those who support the amwritingfantasy podcast on patron.
So head on over and check that one out if you please. And uh, there is a link in the show notes. I was about to say, I guess that's right, this time. Last time I called it the description field, but the, yeah, so check that one out. Uh, there was lots of good stuff or one patron. Yeah. So we thought it was very much on point to talk about holidays now that we are just the day before Christmas.
That's right. So holiday is this, I don't know, may maybe, maybe some people find it a bit complicated or they make it a bit complicated. But to be honest, I think that the, the process we use autumn it's, it's simple.
Autumn (14m 52s): I think so too. I mean, obviously I think there's some people who just immediately assume you're going to have all the same holidays that we have in this world, in your fantasy world, if you're not writing on earth or about earth or earthlings, I think you're pretty much free to come up with something new. And that to me is so much more fun. But yes. We we've developed or we've each done it on our own and then we've adopted the process together. That I think makes sense. It makes it easy and it's always, to me, it's fun.
It's so much, it's a fun aspect of world building to be able to create a holiday. Okay.
Jesper (15m 30s): Yeah. And, uh, the, the process that we've, we've developed together here for, for how to do it, it's actually going to form part of the am, uh, oil pulling course. Yeah. That we're going to, I was hesitating there because I was trying to think when I could say that that's going to be done, but I don't want to do that. Maybe sometimes in 2020 goal we've talked about a goal and we would love to have it out this summer, so the summer of 2020. So fingers crossed and kick us in the butt and that's still my goal.
So we'll see if we can
Autumn (16m 4s): that happened. Yeah.
Jesper (16m 6s): Can't wait to get that course out. I truly think it's gonna help a lot of authors, uh, we with the, with the world building. Um, and it's, you're of course going to be a full step-by-step costs, but that it's going to take you through everything you need from, from basically building a fantasy world from scratch. But we are going to talk much more about that once we have something concrete. But for now, at least, we just sort of plucked out one topic from that course and that was, uh, about the holiday. So we could just talk you through how we do it and it is actually rather simple.
Um, and I think where we start is by looking at the history of your world. So just like in the real world, he has autumn said, you know, usually our holidays are linked to something that happened in the past. Um, whether you believe in that happening or not is not, not really the point, but, uh, but if you look at your, the history for your fantasy world and then try to find some past event that people would be celebrating, then, uh, that's, that's the starting point.
And you just have a bit of siren there. Yes. Maybe that was a, maybe that's inspiration for holiday or something. Oh, it could definitely be, it'd
Autumn (17m 23s): be a inspiration for a very dramatic event. I know I've read some really good holidays in short stories, especially science fiction that were actually from huge like not necessarily terrorism events cause I don't wanna think about September 11th but a big event. I think if we had celebrated the Hindenburg exploding in the aftermath of that and you know there's things that Mark, you know, big dramatic and tragic events. Then of course there's ones that Mark maybe the birth of a mythical character or of course I like astronomy.
So if you happen to have several moons and they come into conjunction with the sun and suddenly you have this amazing eclipse or you know like the changing of the times, like with the solstice that just happened on the 21st I definitely, I've always liked, I've always preferred the solstice and the Equinox is as big holidays because I am very scientific in, they're very visual and that works for me. I know when something happened and that we're at that point of the year where we just went through the longest day or the longest night, the shortest day, the darkest part of the year, and now every day is going to get lighter and brighter.
That's so exciting for me. I can celebrate that when wholeheartedly, uh, no religion necessary. So that's one of the fun things I think that we're trying to say here about holidays is they don't have to be religious. Obviously if you do have gods are gods and you want to have some mythical events around their life and death or birth or something like that, you can have that sort of holiday but it can just be the birth of a great hero. It can. And it can also be like a past military
Jesper (19m 3s): when you know, maybe it's celebrating the end of a war or at some point of famous battle happened and that's what people are celebrating. Or it could also be like purely scientific, like discovery items, you know? Or maybe maybe they found a new land on a at that date and that's what they're celebrating. Or somebody figured out how to muse use magic on that date. That's also pretty important, I guess, or discovery of an ancient race or artifact or something like that.
I think that you can make basically pick anything. But I think that the important thing when you're picking something is that it's some, it's somehow re relevant maybe as a backstory to the story that you're telling so that it's, it's, it's within the confines of or within the frame of the story or that you're telling that it's relevant in one way or another. I think that's, that's the trick to try to pick something like that rather than something completely out on left field that doesn't really have any difference whatsoever.
Autumn (20m 4s): So what do you mean? Like it fits the content of the story? Just about the people. Like do you mean it's because the character is an event, like the festivity and something happens or that the event itself, like the historic battle that actually ended in cause this event, um, is also related to something hidden in some kind of subplot that's bubbling up under the surface. And that people are actually discontent or this is actually taking place in the suppressed nation that lost and they want to, they're kind of celebrating with their teeth, gritted saying he, yay, we lost.
Yeah. I mean it doesn't have to, it can of course be showed at the, the, the event is
Jesper (20m 48s): actually something in the story is going to take place at that. And when they can of course be that. But what I actually meant by it was more like that it shows off parts of the world that is relevant for the story. So maybe as an example, um, so in our upcoming fantasy series, we have, the majors have actually trapped a, a doc God in like a prison cell. Uh, and the problem is that the cell needs to be charged because otherwise if it's a losing, it's am.
If it's losing his power, then the dark God can escape. So the batteries run out. Yeah, exactly. Batteries running out basically. Molly's, yeah. So, so what we then have is that we have once a year they need to recharge these batteries. Uh, and there is like an event around doing that. So it's, it's like a holiday event where there's some soldiers are doing different activities in order to reach out to those batteries. So, so it's not really directly related to what the protectionists is experienced in the story, but it adds to explaining that, okay, there was a doc got imprisoned here and the need to chat the cells and it apparently is dangerous if the dark art gets out and all that.
So it, it's sort of, it's, it's a nice way to build in frame or of world building elements without you having to go into actually, you know, explaining what this is about. And by the way, within that tower, there's a dock, God and blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, so by having an SSL vibration, you can make it pop off. What is it? It's part of action almost that you actually explaining parts of the background or, or for example also with the famous battles if that's what you want to do, you know, it could be in order to set up and explain to the reader that activities two nations where maybe the protectionists belongs to one of them.
These two nation hate easier each other and potentially there was some wire it's going to break out or something because there was worse in the past. You know, so it could be something like that where where you're sort of layering in world building that supports the story but it doesn't have to be because it's directly related to the plot, but more it's, it's more like background information that you get an excuse to deliver background information. In other words, it's like a fantastic way of showing the reader something about the world instead of telling the reader about some backstory and pass.
It's a fantastic way of, yeah, avoiding the info dump, which we've talked about in a different podcast. And instead dynamic right into showing an action in, you know, the reader or the is actually living through the event, which is much more exciting than hearing about some piece of archaic history. Exactly. Right. Yet. So I think, so once you've decided on an event, uh, then you need to ask yourself how important this holiday is. So, uh, we've, we've sort of specked it out on three different levels.
So either you can say that it's a, it's a major event that if basically affects everyone in society. And if that's the case, you need to ask yourself, how long does this, uh, holiday last? Is it like days or weeks of celebration? Or what is am? And also does it require any special form of preparation? Or you could say that it's a minor event that owned, that affects a considerable number of people in this society, but it does not require much preparation. And it isn't like a notable investment for people to, to basically celebrate.
Or thirdly, the holiday could merely be something trivial that maybe only last a few hours and most people don't even bother to participate. So, so that's sort of the next step to define how important is this, uh, to, to society.
Autumn (24m 40s): I'm currently going for the Viking Yule log that has to burn for 12 days. So you cut down an entire tree. That is why the holiday I'm going for right now, but I didn't know what to celebrate that 12 days off of work because it is my holiday. Yeah, go arguing a good excuse. I could take my laptop and sneak it in the corner. It will be good. But, and I agree. I mean the other options. Yeah, you're right. So you can have something that maybe you just need to cook a special meal and go to the temple and leave it in front of your ancestors or you know, is it something where you basically need to sit down for five minutes and say a prayer?
You mumble through it really quickly, know when you're done, Hey, let's get back to work.
Jesper (25m 19s): Yeah. And basically the level of significance of the holiday is important because it allows you to determine, of course, both how widespread and common the holiday is, but also how time consuming it is. Because if it is an important holiday that that requires a lot of am preparation. Well, well now it's the 23rd of December, right? So you probably just been through all of it is it can be quite stressful to prepare for holidays and uh, you can, uh, you can put your character through the same, right?
It's a good story trigger to maybe have some conflict between characters who was, and while they, they're arguing about some preparation work for the holiday or what to wear or what it may be. Right. So it, it's, it can be a good trigger for a bit of conflict.
Autumn (26m 4s): Yeah. For some reason I'm visualizing the conflict between the one character who hasn't started their preparation yet and I'm the one who is going, what are you going to get it done by now? That might be because I'm the slacker in my family. So hopefully by the 23rd and we're recording this, I'll be ready for the upcoming holidays. Yeah, you'll never know. Dear reader, dear listener, uh, please check in and ask how I did.
Jesper (26m 36s): Yeah. So, uh, so once you get that far, um, then you decide on one element that will
Autumn (26m 44s): make this holiday stand out. So this could of course be like the type of clothing people wear. Maybe, well we just talked about like a special contest that, that that's sort of what we did with, with our upcoming fantasy world here. Um, or it could be, I don't know, ritual sayings, prayers. Maybe they eat something. Special that's what I was about to say. Cause you know, I'm a foodie, so yes, especially initially you had to prepare or you know, is there a procession that's always an interesting one that could be even play into not just a one day, but a multiple day.
You have to go on a Trek to reach this temple and it takes three days and you have to do this as you pass this thing and this as you passed, you don't want to get too cumbersome and detailed, but you know, the more chance if this is really a huge aspect and an important part of your story, there's a lot of issues here that you can pull out and make some tension and drama. Especially if someone bumps over the, you know, one temple they're supposed to be, you know, worshiping at. That'd be me too. Yeah. I think that the key here is, and maybe this is the trip wire basically, because the key is to try to find something that isn't boring, right?
I mean, yeah, I eman I mentioned clothing people wear, but if, if that's what you do, you know, may get something very unique and awesome clothing. There's not like, yeah, then they put on a blue apron over. It needs to be something. What you're going for is something that both, um, fits within the context of the culture that the character belongs to. But also at the same time, something that is remarkable and baby may, we'll just make the reader go, wow, this is awesome.
Right. So you need to try harder bit here to, to come up with something that is special in one way or another. I mean a ritual saying a prayer. Yeah. That you could do that as well. But then try to figure out how can I make it something like where the, where the reader will say, okay, that's not a type of prayer I've seen before. You know, um, because otherwise it's just boring. Yeah. We'll sing around the Christmas tree. It's just boring. Yeah. You need something new, something more, much more exciting. And I mean, if you need inspiration, you Google some archaic, uh, you know, some different celebrations from around the world.
Mayan Inca, go look at some of the native Americans and Polynesian islands and see what some of the costumes or the foods or what's going on there. Because it's really inspiring to see how other native cultures have celebrated over the years. Because it's really a lot of fun. And it may give you some ideas because this, if you're going to spend the time to show this to readers, you really want to bring out something that kind of is stands out that makes you go, Oh, this is important. Even if it's just, I mean, if it's a tiny little, you know, five minute ceremony and you just mentioned it in passing, again, it should have an importance in the story, but make sure that there's something else going on there as well.
Jesper (29m 46s): Hmm. Yeah. So once you get to that stage, all those left to do is to give the holiday a really cool name. And uh, of course, if you create a name that for well, for example, it could be maybe a name of a person or place that the reader hasn't yet her off, that that could be a good way to add a bit of mystery to it and make the reader wonder what that might be about. But I think it's good to have a name that it's that some in some one way or another, I guess raises a question in the reader's mind that, that that's, that's a good name
Autumn (30m 21s): that makes sense. Or at least makes them think that this is such an interesting, you know, holiday I've always liked a, the candle. Most the holiday in Celtic is envelope and I hear that one. I'm like, why is that exactly? It's like, wow, I don't know what it is, but I want to go celebrate it. Or of course, one of my favorite actual holidays, and that's coming up tomorrow as you're listening to this is you'll book a flood, which is the Icelandic tradition of reading a story on Christmas Eve. So yeah, you can easily find some amazing holidays, but it's the ones that are fun to say and kind of go, what is that?
That that's kinda cool. You don't want to just make it something difficult to pronounce.
Jesper (31m 2s): No. Yeah, that was exactly what I was about to say. I mean, it's not fine with cool names and because the same thing applies for when you're naming characters. Absolutely fine with cool names, but it has to be something that you need. Try to read it out loud yourself. And if you're stumbling over the words, then there's no good. It has to sort of flow quite quite well.
Autumn (31m 22s): Yes. There's nothing wrong with naming something like the black candle miss or something. If it works in fits, whatever you're trying to evoke, that's fine. English isn't acceptable language and writing.
Jesper (31m 36s): Yeah, but, but, but, but the thing is just to sometimes worse looks cool written, but then they are very difficult to pronounce or you might, the reader might be endowed on how you're supposed to pronounce it and, and there's nothing worse than the Rita actually stopping reading to start wondering how am I going to pronounce this word right. I mean then they've just, you just pulled them out of the story so that you don't want that to happen.
Autumn (32m 1s): No, no. It should all flow pretty smoothly and you don't want them wondering, you want them maybe wondering a little bit of a peak history, you know, they wouldn't be curious about what's going on, not curious about how do you pronounce this and why the heck are you delving into this holiday and showing it to me at better half an important aspect to the story. So those are the key points.
Jesper (32m 24s): Yeah, I agree. And then then of course, would holidays also think a bit wider in the sense that holiday is, are often shared across borders. So for example, if you have, you know, maybe two nations, uh, who are at war with each other than maybe the holidays one time a year where they actually have a momentary peace between them for that week that the holiday takes place or something. But, but just be mindful, at least that neighboring countries and even maybe even further widespread within your world, they holiday is to cross borders.
So, um, so that's, that's important to think about, at least. Of course. That's what I've always loved. The stories of the Christmas Eve piece,
Autumn (33m 11s): treaties that were made between front lines in the world war one and world war II. I think that's always a spectacular example of something that crosses boundaries and actually pauses a war. But of course you can also have opposing holidays where if someone thinks another country that there's already a lot of friction, maybe they don't quite celebrate it on the same day or the same way. And so if you're trying to build some tension, you can actually create tension through the use of holidays in your story as well. So that you know, two people from opposing cultures are either arguing about the day or that no, you can't use that spice or no, that's not how you prepare that.
So you can always have some fun am if you need to add some arguments in there as well because goodness knows if anyone was celebrating Thanksgiving and you know his family traditions don't necessarily work all that well. When you're blending your family together,
Jesper (34m 4s): it's always troubled,
Autumn (34m 5s): right? In my world there always seems to be trouble. I don't know why that is. I should start focusing on peaceful times, but, uh, there's no one's gonna read that. Right?
Jesper (34m 16s): Yeah. But, but I, I guess, I mean that's more or less so. I, I hope and I guess that you can see that it does not have to be complicated or time consuming to create a holiday for your fantasy setting. I think that the main thing is that you, that you find that hook that makes sense for the story you're telling and, and, and that fits with the world and the culture of the character. Um, and that might take a bit to figure out what is best. But as I said, up at the top, your world's history is a good starting point.
So, uh, looking into that should probably give you inspiration of what to build. But, uh, but it does not have to be complicated and time consuming.
Autumn (34m 59s): No, and I will go back to that. If you don't want to do the history and you have God's and do have religions and obviously with those you will probably be coming up with some sort of holiday and that does give you a lot more leniency. Like I said, it could be a God's birth and other things like that, but don't forget, you can foreshadow, you could have a holiday that they think in some future date, something big is going to happen on this date. So everyone gathers together and kind of insulation of this big event. So there's so many ways that you can bring a richness to your world and your characters of events that are going to happen and kind of tease out the nuances.
Maybe it'll fit
Jesper (35m 38s): with your world and how you're building things. And definitely though should somehow fit with your plot and something, something big is going to happen there. Yeah. So this was a bit of a lighthearted like world building, a episode for you here just before Christmas. So hopefully you got a bit of a inputs for your world building and how to create holidays for your own setting here. Uh, and next Monday I will be interviewing one of the biggest and most successful indie authors in the world.
And that is Adam Croft. I'm so excited about this one. Yes, it's going to be awesome. And, uh, Adam will join the amwritingfantasy podcast and talk about read through and how it can revolt, revolutionize your book sales. So that's a holiday treat waiting for you next Monday.
Narrator (36m 29s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the amwritingfantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join autumn and Yesper on patrion.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the amwritingfantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
There are so many things to learn when you're first starting out as an author.
It's not only about the craft of writing, but also marketing, cover design, editing, and so much more.
Where should you start?
In this episode of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, Autumn and Jesper share the top advice they wished someone had told them when they first started out.
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy.
For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to the amwritingfantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need in literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing join to best selling authors who have self-published more than 20 books between them. Now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Bert and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I am Jesper and I am autumn. This is episode 51 of the amwritingfantasy podcast and we are going to share the three best pieces of advice about writing. I wish somebody had told us when we first started, so that's probably going to be quite good. I think it'd be quite good.
Autumn (50s): And I honestly had a hard time just coming up with three. I came up with five in the end, but we'll see. I will see if I could narrow it down. Wow. Five. Okay, cool. That's good. So how has your week been a, it's been good.
Jesper (1m 10s): I've been good. Uh, we were out am bowling, bowling, bowling last this past weekend. Uh, well, technically my, uh, my oldest son had his birthday like two months ago. I suppose you could say that's a bit late too in my doubt. His classmates better late than never, right?
Autumn (1m 30s): I guess. Well, I guess as long as he doesn't mind, got to celebrate it maybe twice. I
Jesper (1m 39s): but it went well. Uh, I'm, I'm not really very good at bowling to be honest. So yeah, I think all the kids played first for like one and a half hour. And then the last hour we adults joined it and I started throwing the two first. Paul's in the gutter. So I had to, I had to claim that the sun blinded me and the wind stirred me and of course all of this was inside and whatnot. So the kits look quite skeptically or be able to just shook their heads, like my lame excuses. But, uh, but it was fun, uh, although too, well, at the end the youngest got quite upset because he lost.
Uh, but yeah, but you know, he, he's the one who always also plays football and he's very, very competitive. So I had to explain to him, because when we first started, you can get these kid barriers on onto the goddess so that the ball doesn't go into the gutter. Right. And then when we started out, I asked him, I asked him if he wanted that to kids, Barry. And he said, no, no, no, no, no, no. He didn't absolutely not want a kid, Barry. And I said, okay, fine. So he played half of the first game or first frame or where, I'm not sure what it's called in bowling, but half of the first game basically he played without the kids.
Uh, barrier on which of course some of the balls ended up in the garden while the other ones were playing. It just hit the, and then they always got a bit of pins knocked over. Right. So, but he didn't get that. So, and then halfway through the first game, then we put on the barrier for him as well. And then the kids he was playing against was that they were three years older than him. And by the end of the game he came in two points after number four, something like 15 points after number one, which is pretty amazing in my shoe.
And I tried to explain to him that, you know, you played extremely well. These kids are much older than you and you more or less all those tight, you know, two pins. That's like, it's luck. It's just luck. Nothing else. You could have gotten fourth place against somebody who's three years older than you. That's amazing. But I would say it took quite a while before he felt just a little covid.
Autumn (3m 52s): He sounds like he's quite the competitor. You're going to have fun with him. Yes. Yes. He's very competitive. That is so sweet though. Yeah, and that's actually, so that teaches me something, I never thought about what countries have bowling or even where it originated, but, Oh, I dunno. I dunno either. But Hey, we have both have bowling in common. That's kind of cool. Yeah, I'm really bad at it. It was, there was a bowling alley really close to my high school and so that was literally one of our gym classes.
And it was never my favorite thing. But Hey, it got us out of school and we've got to walk down the road and um, played a love. Oh did you know at least twice a semester. Uh, it's never something, something that I've gone like you know, after school and hung out at the bowling alley, I'd actually rather play pool. I love pool. Yeah, me too. Always. We're, we're in the bowling alley. When I was younger I always convinced somebody to people with means that money we're going to have so much fun when we finally ended up on the same continent, it's going to be past that.
How, how was she a week autumn Oh it's been going well. You know we've been doing so talking and it's funny cause I am driving a bit more commuting and it was funny. I know you dictate your novels, that's how you do your writing and I've never done that before so I'm suddenly thinking I want to try this out. So I know you and I have been sharing some dictation tips and software and things we use. It almost makes me think that maybe this is like a potential podcast issue. I know other people have tackled it, but you know, give me some time to see if this is gonna work for me.
And I think we might have to am see if it changes how fast I can write or find, get my brain to wrap around. Not seeing the words in front of me. Cause I know recently, uh, some of the last novels I'd write, I would hit a snag and I would jump ahead and write that and then I'd come back and write the filler spaces in between. I'm like, that's not gonna work. It's DyKnow. So I've got to wrap my head around it and give it a try, but I'm kind of excited to give it I. Everyone who's does it says that they can get much more written if they did.
Yeah. It goes a lot faster than, than writing of, obviously you can, you can speak a lot faster than you can ever type. So if your mind is organized, yeah, you have to get your mind organized so that it's like, yeah, you know what you're going to say and where it's going and yeah,
Jesper (6m 14s): and funny enough, funny enough, it ties back to the plotting stuff like that. Cause I would not be able to do the dictation. Well okay. I could I guess, but I wouldn't be very efficient at it if I did not, if we did not do all the flooding upfront. So I knew exactly what's going to happen in the chapter before I even start. Um, and then it's, it's of course you need to dictate all the customers and, and all the new paragraph and open quote, close quote, all that you need to get used to saying all of that, which of course you are, you're not used to that when you're typing.
And so that's one thing. And then I think the other thing at least for me is, is to keep the flow going. So, for example, if you, if you, let's say the character comes to a castle or something and then you can't quite just on the fly to make up what the castle looked like, then I usually just like open brackets and then I say,
Autumn (7m 6s): great, cool description of castle, close brackets, and then they just move on because it's so cheating. No works. Right. Because I keep the flow going and, and the, the main point for me at that stage when you're dictating is just to get the story onto the page. And when you're doing the editing, you can always add in nice descriptor
Jesper (7m 24s): and all that, but you don't have to on the fly, dare try to figure out a cool description because even if you did, likelihood is that it's going to be cliche. It's going to be what comes to the top of your mind, which is not going to be the best description you can come up with. So some, yeah, I do. I do that quite a lot sometimes. So just add in that, yeah, sort of placeholder to add this or add that here.
Autumn (7m 47s): Oh, that's at least a good tip. So yeah, that's a good another tip you hadn't given me before. So I will keep that in mind as I get going that even if I have to just be like skip this area, they'd put this in and then put a note, Oh, put this in the area you skipped. Am that is what editing is for. So, but just be neat to see if I can get this rough draft out because it's in my head. I tend to be a little looser in my plotting when I'm on my own, but I have it outlined pretty well and I know what happens at each of the chapters and I think as long as I keep myself organized and it might be good am I organize my brain a little bit better, so I'm going to give it a whirl and see how it works.
And I'm just starting out with some really cheap actually free stuff. Software I already have. So we'll see how it was and it, that's a good place to start. Yeah, free is always a good place to start. If I like it, I'm going to get into what you have suggested. And like I said, maybe there's a podcast in this some point. Yeah, maybe, I mean, uh, for the listener, maybe, you know, dealers know, if, if, if a dictation is something that you're interested in us talking about on a, on a future episode, then let us know, you know, and uh, that we'll certainly consider it on the internet with the amwritingfantasy.
Podcast so I went in this morning autumn into the Facebook group because I thought I better start approving some people because I just over the last week, it's just been crazy. There's so many new people joining all the time, but there was new, uh, notifications popping up for people and it's awesome. But, so I went in there this morning and look at, already beat me to it. Everybody, he does that to me too. And I like, I'm going to go in there and no, well, I guess I'll go read through some comments and see what looks been doing because he's such an awesome moderator.
So I, I honestly, I don't know how we would cope without his assistance. It's amazing. I mean I, well I, well at least people would be waiting quite a long while to be admitted into the group if it wasn't for him. So again, I know we said it before, but huge thank you to very much appreciate his help keeping. It's nice because it's not so much keeping the group wrangled, it's just letting people in the door because happily the group is pretty good as far as not doing posts that they should. So for the most fun, yeah, there's a lot of activity in there.
It feels like it's really picked up. You know what people are posting a lot, which is very nice to see and they are commenting a lot on other people's questions and it's, it's amazing. I really, really like it. It is getting to a good place. I got lost in Jason's post about how many times a Milky male character can cry in a novel and if the gender should really matter. I know is, I figured you would see that one too. Yeah, that was the one I noticed as well. When I looked at it, I had over 27 comments already in us just looking through them and they're good.
They're really funny and they're insightful and I just like some of them, I don't know which ones were your favorites. Um, but I know there was one that, I mean the core that it's it. It's the reason that the person is crying, the main character is crying and not the gender. And I just love seeing that where it's such a good place in fantasy where you can have your male character cry. Yeah. A I was actually also a thinking about that one and I was thinking maybe we should just add our own short reflection here on, on that question.
Uh, autumn but, but may, may, maybe that was your reflection. You, you agree with that comment or did you have do something else to ponder about? No, I just think I'm definitely I. There was an example in there too about a female character who was trying to cook everyone dinner and her pot wasn't big enough and she just sat down and cried into her brother came and fixed it for her and how just that is not right. That is, that is a stereotype and I thought, you know, it had both arguments of this is a stereotype that you should do and these are examples of reasons you should do it.
But I agree it's, I don't want to see personally if I'm reading something, I don't want to see a weepy, weepy character, be it male or female, but I've had female characters cry. I've had male characters cry. And I do think the core is the reason, you know, if it is impactful enough, if it is painful enough or happy enough to stuff, forget there's happy tears, that crying is fine. And you know, we do it as people and emotionally it should be in your novel too.
Jesper (12m 17s): Yeah. Uh, I think so too. Well, if the question is how many times they care to can cry, I don't really think you can answer that question because it all depends on context and why he's crying as, as autumn have just been talking about. Uh, I would say even though if you have good reasons for the character to be crying, if it's like every second chapter, then it's gonna be really annoying, really fast.
Autumn (12m 44s): Male or female, I would be dropping a book probably. Yeah.
Jesper (12m 48s): I mean the Rita does have to like the character and root for them and nobody roots for somebody who cries all the time, even if there's a good reason for it. We do want to see characters take action. We want them to sort of own up to the problems and do something about it. Not sit there and cry about it. He, uh, I mean, so I would say there was a line somewhere and I cannot define that line for you, so you have to do it yourself. But, but there is a line somewhere whereby you could do it too much, but there is absolutely nothing wrong with a male character crying.
If there's a good reason for it, um, as long as it doesn't happen, happen too often, then at the same thing applies to a female character. There was no real difference between the two in this case.
Autumn (13m 31s): No, absolutely. And I agree. It's, it's, to me it's almost, should be not a crying out of frustration because they can't solve a problem but crying because of a loss of something heartfelt. Um, yeah, just crying because you're frustrated at throwing up your hands in the air and you can't handle it. Don't avoid that one.
Jesper (13m 50s): No. Exactly. Yeah. So questions like this one is what you can ask in the amwritingfantasy Facebook group and you will get all of these different, a competent reflections and responses and all that. So I think it is really a really, really awesome group of fellow fantasy authors. So if you have not yet joined the amwritingfantasy Facebook group, just go to Facebook and the search by amwritingfantasy and the group section, then you will find us.
Oh, so autumn you have five different things to share about the best pieces of advice. Uh, I have three, but I was thinking that maybe we should, uh, try to alternate a bit so that we are moving up through the ranks one by one rather than just giving five and three in a row. And I must admit that I'm very excited to hear yours because actually I I don't think we've really talked about this sort of stuff before, even between us. No, and I remember when
Autumn (14m 52s): we came up with the topic for this one, you kind of got excited like, Oh, that's a good idea. So I think so too. And I feel so organized. You know, I usually, you know, I come in with a little bit of background information but kind of wigglies things where you're the most organized one. But I have a list lower than yours this time. So do you want to start with, um, yeah, no, I think we should work from the bottom and okay. If you do your number five and you're number four, then I'll do three and then year number three and two.
Okay. So I will do my first two since I came up with five cheated. I did, I couldn't help it when I start. This is why I started writing courses. I just have so much advice and so much trial by fire that I want to share with other authors. So I just can't contain myself. So I ended up with five. But one of the things, I think one of the first things I saw when I was a new author, I was on Twitter and meeting other authors is everyone was complaining about marketing and marketing takes them away from writing and marketing blog, marketing hub, you know, hate, hate, hate, hate on marketing.
And I wish someone had just pulled me aside at some point and said, you know, marketing is often just sharing what you love about your book. What is it that gets you excited about your book? That is really the essence of marketing. So you should actually love it as well because you're sharing your most passionate parts of the earth story and your storytelling. It's just finding a way of doing that. And you know, whether it's social media and of course there's always buying advertising, but that's, you know, if you hate taking five minutes to buy advertising, I'm so sorry it's only five minutes, but the other marketing be it blog posts or social posts.
It's, it's really just sharing what you love about your story. So don't hate it. You should love it because it's part of what you love about your story and then number. Yeah. But no, but I think that's, it is a good point. Um, I'm just wondering how, how did you, how did you get to that stage? Because one thing is say is to say don't hate it, just love it because it, yeah, fine, but I still hate it, you know? If you're in that frame of mind, how did you transition into actually wrapping your mind around, actually this is something I do like, I think like pairing it down there was just a certain point where, you know, yes, it's not writing but it is 100% something.
Equally, if you're going to be doing this as a business, you're going to be marketing and you should probably never do any I. If you don't love something, people do know it. You, if you're just spamming it, throwing up close that you don't really care about and not crafting something. I'd rather see two really good posts in a week, then two every single day that are crap. And I think that when people start realizing that, you know what, it makes a difference to really put some time and effort and love into making these posts be they blog posts or you know, I love Instagram so we've already been there.
So hanging on an Instagram and seeing something that someone really did love rather than something they threw up really quickly cause I felt like I had to do something for marketing today and their books have to sell more and they just, you just feel that kind of desperate energy and it was standing back and saying, you know, this is, what do you do? How do you make this difference? And I think that's where I adjusted plus I. I wrote a booklet on am 50 blog posts, so topics to get your writing about your story and writing that I realized how many of the ideas I came up with where because I wanted to share something I loved about my story and it started when you start realizing that you love writing and you love these characters and you love everything you do and you know you get a writer talking, you can't get them to shut up.
You should love marketing. It's all about sharing what you love and try to do it in concise soundbites that you don't overwhelm the person you're trying to tell.
Jesper (18m 47s): But it also sounds like you're saying that it's a matter of not, could we call it like being too ambitious about it? You know, like, like you said that now that I have, I have to do some a new blog posts every day. No, but rather try to scale down the ambitions and then say, okay, let me do whatever I can feel that I have to time for I that I can cope, you know, rata one really, really good blog post once a week rather than a shitty one.
Autumn (19m 15s): Yes, I think so too. It definitely comes down to once you realized it, so it should be something you love and you shouldn't be driving yourself crazy trying to get all of them done, you know, make time to do one or two good ones a week rather than something every single day. It's, yeah, that's part of it. Definitely. All right. And so the other one, number four by other add on was uh, just a reminder to tell people to always, right, because you love it. I think as you take on your writing journey, you learned so much.
You learn about how to write, how to run a writing business, you know, tips on how to make sure you're writing a story that people, you know, readers are going to buy that you, so you end up writing stuff that maybe you think it's going to sell. And sometimes you lose the perspective that you actually enjoy writing. And she'd be writing characters you enjoy in a story you enjoy. It's so easy to kind of get lost and start just writing stuff that to do it, to make money. Um, and so it does a business and you have to look at that.
But if you're not loving it, you know, step back and think about it. If you're no longer enjoying it, because most of us come to this because we have a story you want to tell him. We love writing and I've seen writers as they progress and tr even, I've done it a little bit, you start doing it more as a business and you might lose a little bit of that soul. So don't forget to still love what you're writing.
Jesper (20m 40s): Especially nowadays, there is a, a lot of chalk in the author community about releasing more books and read them fast. And I, I, I don't remember actually to be honest, if we've talked about this in more detail in a past episode, maybe we have, but I, I feel that it's, it's, it's like a road to hell that we only, because people are going to get burned out because of it. That they're trying to keep up a pace that is absolutely crazy and you lose your passion and you've got to get stressed out.
And at some point, maybe you can keep up the pace for two years and you're going to release 15 novels in two years or something, but then you're going to burn out. And then what was the point? There was no passion in it either. I mean, I don't know. I would rather say I release, let's say, let's say we release two or three books a year and those books are passion projects. It's because we like it. Um, and it's at a pace where we can sustain it longterm. But of course as autumn set, I think as well that there is a point to be made about that it is a business.
So if what you love to write is something that nobody likes to read, then yeah, I mean, right. Those books once in a while, but you have to then sprinkle in some books that is more like what the market wants to read, right? So you could write like, let's say you write two books for the market and then you write one book for you. You could do it like that, but, but I don't know. I know it's a bit of a tangent here, but, but I just think that it's important to you.
You cannot just write passion if nobody wants to read your passion. Yeah. Unless you want to just doing it for a hobby, then of course it's fine. But, and I think that's the key is that, yeah, if you're going to do it as a business, you have to pay attention to trends and some of the, you know, we've both done research on the top selling books and what are the commonalities? And so you know that data, but hopefully you can weave that into a story you really want to tell. Because if you're just writing something that you know, five years ago, you would've totally cringed if you had read it.
Oh, you think about that? What a little bit before you write it maybe or give it a try but don't tie yourself to it. Yeah. All right, well what's your number three? Yeah, that was a tangent. Okay, so my number three is, I wish somebody had told me when I was done with the first book and I had to create a cover for it and I had to write a book description that creating a cover on writing a book description is just not something you'd just go Willy nilly about.
You know, I mean the book description we talked about last week, so I'll have to labor that point much here, but, but maybe with the cover because, and this is probably something that I'm not in a low alone in Oh, I was not alone in this boat of thinking that when I'm, I need a cover for my book now that it's done and I need something that just looks awesome. Yeah. So I'll get some somebody and then I'll say, I'll tell the, you know, somebody who knows covid the science because I did do that luckily enough to do it on my own, which you should never ever, ever, ever, ever do.
But, uh, I did get somebody who knew what they were doing to do it, but, but I, I dictated to them what sort of cover I wanted and I went for something that I want to look really pretty. And of course the coven D does need to look good. So that's not what I'm trying to say. But the job of the cover is to convey the sugar to the reader. And my cover does not conveyed a younger to the reader. So it's, it's a big mistake. And if, if I just, you know, researched it a bit or try to understand that well covered assign, I guess there must be some sort of logic or idea behind why covers looked at the way they look at me and I could have avoided that.
Um, that mistake I made and I had to, I have to regret Lee admit that I still haven't gone back and corrected it because I've been way, way too busy with all kinds of stuff and I know that's a lame excuse and I know I'm not doing what I preached the people shouldn't be doing. I should go back and correct it, but then I have to update it a million different places and I have so much to do. I still haven't gotten to that point on my to do list and I don't know why as since I made the book book Permafree it, it gets downloaded quite a lot anyway, so it I don't know.
I don't have a burning platform that it hurts me enough that I, I want to spend time on it above something else, but I really wish I had known that when I started out to be on,
Autumn (25m 31s): no, I think that's a good point. A lot of new authors, you know, I see some that come in so market savvy. I just want to be like, where did you learn this? Because even I didn't know that at first, but you know, I started back in 2012 where you could literally just scribble something on a as a cover and toss it up and people would go and buy it and download it because there was just, there were so many less books now on the competition. Whew. It's cutthroat in a good cover and a great description. But like you said, we just covered that the last episode, so that's fine.
But yeah, it's definitely very, very true. And yeah, you, you know, you don't want to get me going on covers and cover design. That's the other hat I wear. And there's a whole psychology and subconscious reading that goes into even the fonts. Um, yeah. And the colors and the mood. And I just had a discussion with someone. I'm doing a cover for, uh, angel wings. Do we want them lifted, which is more positive versus down, which is more dark and yeah, don't get me going on the symbolism that's hidden in covers that you read in just seconds.
Your mind picks it up, makes a judgment based on your, your entire novel in just, just a few seconds. So those covers, there's a reason they're complicated. Yeah, there is a reason why,
Jesper (26m 55s): eh, an Epic fantasy cover looks usually the way it looks. I mean if you for for the listener here, if you go to Amazon for example, there's a top 100 in Epic fantasy for example, and have a look at those covers in the top 100 and you will start to see some patterns there. And it's for a reason and dose out of sort of things that you want to emulate in your own cover now that copying any of it, but you want to pick out what are the common threats throughout these covers in my sub category on Amazon.
And then you want to use those things in your own cover rather than coming up with this amazing, beautiful picture that you think is look so good then nobody has ever seen it before. No, but that's true. But there's a reason why nobody ever saw it before. It's because it's not going to sell it.
Autumn (27m 43s): They're not going to do a genre it is or anything about your story, they'll be like, huh, yeah, exactly. So yeah, that was my number three. I like that. Number three. So my number three, now that I'm up to three, uh, is again sort of on marketing, but it's, I wish someone had pulled me aside and to, when you're trying to figure out how to market and how to sell books, especially as a newbie, I wish someone had just said, don't worry about all this other stuff. Focus on creating a strong interaction with your fans, which you know, mailing lists, good reads is also a fantastic way of like meeting fans and talking to them instead of, you know, do that over posting on social media or Facebook groups or just post that you send out to the world and you hope someone will find.
It's really, it's the comments, it's the interactions, it's your mailing list, building up relationships. They're getting your super fans that I think will end up benefiting you in the long run. So much more than having a great social media platform. So I wish someone had really talked about that. Cause I know there was a point where I had been working on I think book three and I hadn't really started book Fauria and I wasn't even sure I did actually a whole series of between three and four because they're technically two separate chill at is even though the same character, same world, but totally different story arcs.
So I took a break and I didn't even email my mailing lists for a well. I let it kind of languish and I saw a big hit in sales and especially between books four and five. It took me a while. I'd mentioned that the last episode, but five had the most complicated plot that I changed my entire plotting technique when to Scribner. And so it took longer than even my usual to get it out. And I let a lot of things drop and I really saw that hit between book four and five.
The sales weren't quite as there and I really blame that on me taking time as well as me not telling my readers lots going on and not being really communicative.
Jesper (29m 42s): So don't lose your fans, don't lose your super fans. Stay in touch with them somehow. Yeah. Communicating is is important. Um, and I guess especially, I mean, if a PR linking back, a looping back to what we just talked about, if you're one of those people who are putting out a new book every month, which by the way, some people do, um, then it's probably less important because you're going to communicate with them anyway. I sending them a new release every month, but, uh, but if you're like the rest of us human beings are not vampires and uh, or AI secretly.
Yeah. Then, uh, yeah, then I think it's a good point autumn to make sure that you communicate with your readers and keep the interaction going in, in the, in the low times, in between books. Absolutely. What's your number two? Well, I know this one is probably a bit cliche and say one way or another, but still my number two thing that I wish somebody had told me and, uh, it's also something that you and I have said over and over and over again on this podcast.
Autumn so I dunno if you can guess what it is. We've also talked about it on past YouTube videos and the in one of the, some of the older ones. Oh shoot. There's so much we've covered now. Yeah, I know. Just telling me I can hit you a bit that it's, you actually just said that a bit in what you said in your number three just before, uh, so that as long as you do with the series, uh, the email list, the email list. All right. Yeah, I mean, thank God I did create a mean email list as soon as I started out. So I did not make that mistake and I'm really glad about that because I had picked up that much that I needed to have, uh, have a, an email list.
So I did create that from the get go, which, which is good. So I was off to a good start there, but I just did not put very much effort into actually building the list. Uh, I mean I did a little, uh, but the majority of all my focus went to advertising for selling books and not really building the list. So when I, whenever I had some money to spend to reinvest into my business, I usually spent them on a sales ads rather than list-building ads. And, uh, I, I think I, I really wish somebody had told me back then that, uh, you should always prefer a new email subscriber over sale because the email subscriber that gives you a possibility to, to, you know, build a relationship with that person and then make them invested in what you're doing.
And that's a million times more valuable than a $5 sale. And I just did not have that focus back then. And uh, yeah, I really, really regret that. I think am I always appreciated the business model that basically a returning customer, it's so much more important and where are you going to make most of your money rather that one than
Autumn (32m 40s): a onetime sale. And so that's sort of what we're saying is if you have a mailing list and someone you can contact and is excited about what you're writing and is ready to buy the next book where you know, invested in the next series. That means so much more than, you know, the one, you know, doing a sale or a download and sending money to some of the advertisers for that. So I agree. That is actually a really good number two. Yeah. Yeah. We did talk a lot more about email list building back in episode six of this podcast.
So if, uh, if what I just said triggered you in any way than the, I recommend going back and listening to today's episode if you missed it. Yeah. And my number to actually kind of relates to a recent podcast episode as well. Okay. I don't know if you can guess which one, but actually I mentioned that when we were talking earlier. So my number two is that I wish when someone was talking about, you know, the show don't tell and all of those things, if they had just mentioned that, um, just just focus on one emotion or one description, poor paragraph or sentence.
I see a lot of new authors who are told, you know, show emotions, don't tell them and they throw in like facial expressions. Um, so they're like squinting or flailing, you know, they often have ends in there. Like the character brunches, their brows and frowns and you know, all these little suggestions. It's like, okay, you just just focus on one, bring out one emotion. I remember reading one where I was just like, I don't know what's going on here. There are so many emotions listed, so many actions.
And I could not fathom at the, I was at the point where I'm like, I just want the author to tell me what the character is supposed to be feeling cause I don't get it. So I think, yeah, I think when I was really learning and it was so easy to get overwhelmed with how to show emotions and even descriptions, you start layering in this and this and this and becomes an info dump before you realize it and you don't want to do that. So that interview you just had with CS last Lakin is um, fantastic if you yeah.
If you have questions on like how to really convey emotions, uh, well go back and listen to that cause it really helps look at emotional the art, the sources for writers because that is something I think is really being strong with that, especially as a new author is going to do you worlds of wonder. And like I said, I remember just reading someone else's work and just being so confused because they were talking about all these physical symptoms of emotions and I didn't have a clue what this character was supposed to be feeling or thinking or just what right over my head.
So yeah, I don't know. I don't recall the exact episode number, but it's probably something like 49 maybe or something like that around that in any way. So go back and find that episode if you want. But I think
Jesper (35m 39s): the gist of what you're saying in your, in your learning, number two, their guests, it's just writing is hard. It's difficult. And when you're starting out it's incredibly difficult because you don't know if you're doing it well or not. No, it's very true. And I think, I think most authors go through a phase where they learn a lot and it becomes a lot harder that eventually they just kind of have to put some of that aside and just right again and then use it on their rough draft. Because you can also learn so much that you prevent yourself from writing cause you know you should be doing it better.
So don't do that either. No. True. And work with an editor who knows what they're doing on. Feel free to post some writing in the amwritingfantasy Facebook group and ask other people for some comments and what not. But also be careful not to listen too much to what other people are saying when you, especially when you're first starting because it's so easy to get derailed about, Oh, this person told me to do like this and that, but then that person over there told me to do this and do what I really had a lot of benefit from when I first started out.
What I found like a, a what? It's not a writing partner because he did not do any writing, but he was like a sound board for me. So he's like for you really? Yeah, kind of it, you know, he was very experienced with writing. So what I would do is I would send him one chapter at a time and then he would come and on it and I would go back and I would rewrite the chapter and I think I wrote that chapter one like 15 times or something before he said, okay, you're ready to write chapter two now and so forth.
And I went like that for at least six months and made almost no progress. Um, but I, at least for me, I think it worked very well that I had one person I had to listen to because if I had to listen to 15 different writers giving me advice about this and that, I would be immensely confused because when you're first starting out, you don't know what's right or wrong. You don't know if a, if an advice is good or bad. And sometimes I think we've set this before as well. Writing is also an art form, so there is no right or wrong, it's not like math that you can say two plus two is four and if you get five then it's not right.
It's not like that. So there's also some, there's a lot of gray area in this and just because some Arthur tells you that you should be doing it like this, well that might be, he saw Hearst preference and that might be in his or her voice, but it might not align to how you actually doing your storytelling. So yeah. Yeah, it's difficult and you just have to write a lot to be honest. And then find, find a few people you trust and listen to Dan advice, uh, and, and just write and write and write and write and write.
Agreed. We've got to the top of the list. We're at the top of the list. So what is your number one? I know we're on my lumber one, huh? It's my turn. I think so.
Autumn (38m 37s): So my number one piece of advice I wish someone had told me when I first started out was right a series and release it close together. What I read my debut novel, born of water. I just wanted to write the story and I think I kind of had a dangling out there that it was going to be a serious, but I mean, I didn't even have a serious name. I didn't have a name for book two. I didn't really have the character arcs. I mean, it's amazing how much differently I plot now. Now I have not only the book names, I have the overall arcs.
I know what's in each book. I kind of have it all mapped out and I did not do that when I had book one and one. It's it's if you're going to do that, it helps. So that way you can tie your books together. It's a much more interesting series and when you write a series itself cells, I remember what I finally released the last book in the trilogy book. Three sales went through the roof because it was complete at that point and yeah, I wish someone had told me that. I think it's so much more exciting to go ahead and get everything written, get it released to get the whole series out.
People are much more excited. Your much more excited and I just, it didn't, yeah, it didn't realize it when I wrote book one and I had to do a lot of like scratching my head and change my cover cause I didn't have the series title in there anywhere because I just had it up out as a standalone more or less than it. It really isn't a standalone. So if you're going to write a series, if you're going to write a book, you really consider writing a series. It's better for sales, it'll get you excited. And if you're going to do it, just have all that stuff figured out from the get go.
It'll, it'll save you so much headache later.
Jesper (40m 15s): Yeah, we have am we have mentioned this last week as well, but, uh, between Christmas and new years, we have, uh, one of the biggest indie authors in the world coming onto the podcast called Adam Croft. And he's actually going to talk about just what autumn said and why it is so important to, uh, to write in series and what difference it makes. So you're gonna hear a lot more about that in the past. We also had Lindsay Perro onto the pet co asked you also talked about it. So yeah, there is a lot of advice out there and just take the word for it. Uh, you need to write it.
Autumn (40m 45s): Very good. Okay, so that was my top one. What is yours? Oh yeah. So my, it's funny because I think this one actually goes
Jesper (40m 54s): exactly the opposite of one of your past. Yeah. Because when I first started out, I, I, somebody had told me to spend more time writing and less time marketing because that's true. Yeah. My problem is that I I love the marketing part. I think opposite most of the authors, like you said in one of your past one you said that nobody wants to do with the marketing, but I'm one of those, I want to do them.
So it would make me inclined to spend a lot of time learning about the marketing platforms, how to do, make the ads as optimal as possible, split testing and all that stuff, uh, increasing conversion rates and so forth and so forth. So I ended up spending quite a lot of time doing that. Uh, also when I just had one book out, which is pointless, you know, let's wait till you have the series. Yeah, I, yeah, I would say probably when you have like three to five books out, then you can start playing around with advertising.
But until that point, it's really not that much worth of your time. You can do the list building apps and do that. As I said in my, in my number to a lesson, um, I wish I had spent more time list building so you can do that for sure as soon as you have, even before you have one book out. But, but sales ads, it's like it's a waste of time. And if I just focused more time on writing instead of doing ads all the time, I think I could probably have a lot of more books out by now.
Autumn (42m 22s): Yeah. Yeah. I think you are a little unusual as an author that way, but there are other authors who are good with the spreadsheets who are doing this, you know, from the beginning. Um, the sales, if it's not a business, in their minds, at least the sales are a validation. And so it's easy to focus on doing that when you know you're, you're still new and you people are going to discover you and right now it's really hard to get discovered. And so yeah, you could be spending a lot of time and money on something when it might help to get the whole book yet. I think for you know at least the two series one series done, but you know a little bit more under your belt because, Oh my goodness.
I will say one last piece of things to be aware of. I remember once talking to a Twitter, a very author had been doing it for 20 plus years. I can't remember how many books she had. Out and she said she was so happy that her debut novel was under a different pen name because now she doesn't have to even pretend she knows what any, you know what that book is about. And I won't say I feel that way quite that way about my debut novel, but when I see what book one versus my 16th book that I just really use looks like.
Yeah, my writing has changed a lot. So to keep just keep writing and do you remember you will improve and at some point you'll look back going, I was so hung up on advertising book one and marketing book one and just having written one book and now look at everything I have and how much I've changed. And now I want to hide book one a little bit,
Jesper (43m 50s): but that's okay. Yeah. So the next episode is coming out right before Christmas. And uh, we decided we wanted to do something a little different for you. Yeah. So we're gonna we want it to give it a bit of a Christmas feeling to it. So we are going to talk about how you are going to create a holiday for your fantasy worlds. So it's world building time and I'm already looking forward to it.
Yay.
Narrator (44m 23s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the amwritingfantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join autumn and Yesper on patrion.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the amwritingfantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Did you know that after your book cover, your book's description is the most important tool for selling your book?
It's true!
And in this episode of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, we break down not only how important a good book description is, but how to create one for your book!
For more info and tips on how to write a book description, check out Jesper's book at https://www.jesperschmidt.com/books/how-to-write-a-fantasy-book-description/
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy.
For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to the amwritingfantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need in literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing join to best selling authors who have self-published more than 20 books between them. Now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I'm Jesper and I'm autumn. This is episode 50 of the M writing fantasy podcast and we are going to discuss the book description and some also call it the blurb. It's basically what you write on the back of your book and S a sales description on sites like Amazon. So we're going to discuss what makes for a good book description how'd you write one con, which can convert to sales and that's all coming up on this episode. Excellent. I can't wait because this is so important to your book sales and interesting readers, but yeah, we'll get there.
Autumn (1m 7s): But first we have some news. So you had quite the week. I understand. Yes. For.
Jesper (1m 14s): Yeah. I don't think that our listeners want to hear any of the details because I've just been sick with the stomach flu for several days and then it was not a pleasant experience. And and the details I will spare you
Autumn (1m 27s): does not sound like fun. I mean, that definitely puts a dent in everything. I mean, it's like a full stop when you're truly, truly sick and in bed, so I'm glad you're feeling better. Yeah,
Jesper (1m 39s): much better now. Yeah, I was, I was in bed for three days with, with 40 degrees fever, so you can, you can imagine now that I'm feeling better and I got back to my work and whatnot. There's just a ton of things that I'm behind on now, but that's the name of the game.
Autumn (1m 53s): It is a it. Yeah. It's always seems like I know you and I know us and we always have our to do list that we'll never see the bottom of because we're always adding new things and so you not working on something for a few days and must have looked like a mountain grew.
Jesper (2m 8s): Yes, exactly. Yeah, I've been, I would say today, uh, uh, my time, we're recording this in the evening, so, so all day today I've been really busy trying to catch up on stuff, but I think I have some stuff I need to catch up on tomorrow as well. But for the most part I'm quite pleased with the progress I made today. So I got a lot done today, so that's good.
Autumn (2m 32s): That's very good. Now for me, I mean I was told you I was maybe struggling with a little bit of a cold. I had a small fever, nothing like you had, but I think my computer is like cursed right now. Honestly, I've never had one of those weeks where like you try to go do something simple and whatever you try to do either needs updated just isn't working right. You gotta reboot, you've got to reload. It just seems like everything I've tried to touch on my computer this week has been fighting me, so I'm, I'm about ready to toss it out the window even though of course I can't cause I kind of need it.
Oh, it has been. Maybe a computer has the stomach flu as well. I think I might be at least, I know it's not a virus, but it might have the stomach flu and even my Wacom tablet. So you know, they do a lot of graphic design. You know, I go and work on something a couple of days ago I go to go back to it and first Photoshop didn't work. Uh, the new update complete. I can't open a file that was nearly finished, this really big full paperback rep and Photoshop open it. So two hours later, my entire time to work on it, I finally managed, just said to heck with it and reverted to the former addition of Photoshop and it would open.
And then, so at least I got it as far as opening. But then I go to work on a new cover today and my Wacom tablet, my, that I use for drawling isn't working. Every time I go to touch it with the pen, it goes to the upper left corner of my screen and I'm like, I could touch it. But every time I use the pen it zooms off. Some lie. So after some research that I finally decided it was probably the drivers and updated those. So I am ready to work again, but I'll get back to that later tonight.
I see,
Jesper (4m 25s): Oh my God, this is what like one thing, you know that I cannot stand. It's like all also, you know, if my, if my computer is not working or something like that, it's like I feel like what should, what should I say? Like, like the carpenter who was trying to do some carpentry and then his tools are not working as well. It's just like, it just has to work. I don't want to fix tools. They just have to work. They're there to serve me and I hated when they don't work.
Autumn (4m 53s): Absolutely. And it seems like, like, you know, especially for something creative, you're in the mind or like thinking about it that you want to sit down to write and like, you know, you either don't have paper or your Scrivener isn't working or something silly like that. And it's just like, it kills the energy that you have going that you want to give to whatever you're working on. And so yeah, that's I think part of the frustration too. You're just who wants to spend two hours trying to figure out a Photoshop update when they could be drawing and making happy pictures.
So that was my week. Writing fantasy
Jesper (5m 34s): so this is a sort of a bit of old news by now I guess I'm not old, but it's like a month old I would say. Uh, but I, I post a some, some details about it last week on, on Patrion, uh, because we have now got the ability to place Amazon ads in the Amazon UK and the Amazon German stores. That's right. So that's pretty cool. I mean, technically you could do it before, but you needed an Amazon advantage account, which was pretty damn difficult to get.
I tried like three times applying for it myself and I never got one because you're not supposed to it w it was sort of like a work around of the system if you like. So I never got in there, but now they have officially opened soda. You can actually place Amazon ads in DC, in the Yukon German stall by at the KDP dashboard itself. So I started testing out that and playing around with it somewhat. So that's pretty good actually. Um, I've started to see uptakes sales in the UK where it was very difficult to sell something before because if you can't advertise, we all know how you, how you drown in the, in the sea of books.
So, uh, Oh easily. Yeah. So it has helped a lot. Um, but I will say for those who's going to test this stuff out, uh, be careful of the currency differences please because, uh, if you are betting like let's say 50 cents in the U S that don't put 50 cent into the UK store because then it's 50, you know, it takes pounds. Join no, not 50 pounds, but yeah, but it's, it's all, all of a sudden a pound's currency. Right? So zero dot five is a lot more than zero dot five in the U S store.
Yes. So at the same thing for the Germans sort of start as Euro. So that's a 50 cent Euro and not 50 cents USD. So be careful. Otherwise you will pay a lot of money to Amazon all of a sudden.
Autumn (7m 28s): That's a very good tip. I'll have to remember that. I haven't tried that out, but I do need to beef up my advertising. Again, I'm trying to revamp, thinking outside the box on marketing because like you said, so many people are doing the exact same thing. And I just, I'm always hitting that wall going, what is next? What is new? What is no one else doing? And well, when I figured it out and get it working, I'll certainly let you know for now, I later, everybody will be doing it too. Maybe I won't let anyone know. Maybe I'll just let you know or maybe just start listening.
I don't know. We'll figure that one out. But I am bound and determined. If we find something new and innovative because there's gotta be something else, it can work because, Oh my gosh, Amazon is so saturated.
Jesper (8m 13s): Yeah. But to be honest, I think finding something new, it is difficult. Um, I think it might be more about just being better at the ass and everybody else so that you just learn how to do it. Even better. I mean, Amazon ads, it might not be the best example because that's like uploading keywords and doing some bidding. So, but at least if you're doing something like Facebook apps, there is a lot of different, very insisted you can, you sort of apply to ads in terms of how you're targeting and how you're placing the ads and all that stuff.
So I think there you can learn how to do it really well and, and then make, basically make a difference in. And we have some, uh, wealthy, this is way too early, talk about that, but I can never help herself. But we have some stuff that we already have prepared and developed for three costs that we're going to do in 2020, but I can almost say with certainty that is not going to be ready until after someone next year. But in there, we actually gonna, um, give you the possibility to, uh, to get your hands on an ad tracker that we use or I use so far, but it's for also used for our books.
Um, and it's gonna it will, well, I already wrote it, so I know it's, it's, it's explaining all the best practices and how to do it, how to target, how to, where to place your ads, how to think about your ad copy and, and everything is India. So we're going to give you that your PO, the possibility for, for you to get a hand of that in the last half of 20, 20. Uh, and of course if anything changes, I will of course updated as well.
Um, but yeah, and then once we get that to you, then everybody will start doing that. Then I'll need to figure out.
Autumn (10m 6s): But that's all they new. But that's all right. It is really such a cool sheet. So I mean, I was excited when I saw that and I need to get into using it and get my, like I said, my marketing tamed, but it's really excellent. Yeah. Um, so basically, yeah, that was some stuff I posted about on, on Patrion, uh, last week. And, um, I think if, if you want the listener to get some exclusive posts like that one that I mentioned here together with writing tips that autumn post regularly as well.
We also have early access to the podcast episodes, dedicated Q and a sessions and much, much more than a checkout amwritingfantasy on patron.
Jesper (10m 48s): There was a link in the show notes down below. So I just have to say that there was a lot of work that goes into producing these podcasts episodes every week. So if you do find them valuable, you know, as little as a dollar a month, we'll really make sure too that we keep the lights on here. So, so consider that please.
Autumn (11m 7s): Yeah. And we appreciate it. And especially though not just the patronage and getting some, you know, that dollar a month. But I know like Jay Zaid had once again mentioned that he, uh, he really liked the one reason podcasts where I mentioned that even though I hear in my forties, I just discovered this awesome purple beauty Berry that I didn't know exist, that there's actually a plant that has purple berries and I love purple. So it really connected home with him that, you know, even the most experienced character in his story is not going to know everything about the world or everything that's going on.
And I thought that was really cool cause one I helped another writer and two, it's, it's so true. It's another perspective just because you have a knowledgeable character that they're not going to know everything and it's so much fun to get to talk writing and help each other out and you know, get new perspectives. And we do that all on Patreon so it's kind of fun. I hope you join us there.
Jesper (12m 10s): Oh, so book description actually one of my quiet, it's a topic I quite liked, but I used to hate, I guess I could put like that. That's true.
Autumn (12m 20s): It's one you have to grow to love. And I see so many authors, you know, complaining about writing them and I have to admit that I used to complain to like, how do you boil 105 hundred and 20,000 words down to, you know, ideally you something around 500 but I know for me, I really conquered these when I wrote the 11 short stories that would into the beginning of the prequel to my dystopian a series and I decided to reach release all 11 individually and I think I was really getting excited about this and so excited I had the covers and then I realized, Oh my goodness.
And it means I need 11 blurbs. I love it that the rest of the series to right. What was I doing? And so that's when I just changed my tune and got much more scientific and much more organized about how to write this and you, yeah, I know you like this. You have a whole book on book descriptions.
Jesper (13m 21s): Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. We're going to put that in description field. Austria. Sorry, that was my old YouTube eh habit coming up there in the show notes. I mean we can't put that on the show notes. Two years of YouTube thing. I guess we can forgive you. Yeah. Uh, but, but I don't know. Maybe it's because writing a book description it's a bit, maybe people think a bit about it. S S writing ad copy almost. You know, so we used to putting together this wonderfully beautiful constructed word words in, in a full fantasy novel and all of a sudden we have to do ad copy in 200 words.
It's like, well we don't want to do that. You know, may, maybe that's part of part of why people don't like it. I'm not, I'm not sure. I mean if I think back originally was not because I did not like it do to the ad copy aspect of it. I think it's more like I just didn't understand how to do it in a way that it would not read like at either a very boring ad copy or it would be like almost like a summary of what the book is about.
And that's not the point either. So, and I, I think I just didn't know how to do it.
Autumn (14m 33s): That's very true. And it's so often you can see the ones who, you know, didn't put in the time, we weren't really sure what they're doing. And even, I know for you and I both, we've updated ours and kept changing and evolving it as, you know, as we learn and sometimes the comments that people leave and we will get into that as we talk about how do book descriptions, they can change what you focus on because sometimes readers will find things in your book that you didn't know you put there and it's what they love and it's the best hook to put into your blurb.
Jesper (15m 3s): Hmm. Yeah. I think when it comes to book description should know, we just cannot ignore this, that there is a business aspect of being an author and a no, we've said it before, but it bears repeating, you know, you have to sell books and whether we like it or not though the, the, the book description it's just a crucial factor when a reader decides to buy your book or if they just decide to ignore it. Tha that's really where the book description needs to do its job.
Autumn (15m 33s): I agree. I mean usually it's really a stage thing. So the often see your book cover and it makes them curious enough that they're going to go read your description and if the description does not make them the blur, make them curious enough to go get a sample. If not outright buy it, then that's where you're going to lose them. So this is the second most serious part of, you know, trying to sell your book.
Jesper (15m 58s): Yeah, I mean because the cover will not sell the book alone. The cover will get people to click on it and say, okay, that looks interesting. And then I should just say it in the book. Description is the one that needs to close the deal. It's sort of like, like the catchy teaser or something like, like for a movie trailer or something like that. You know, it's, it's the movie trailer that gets us into the theater and buy the ticket. Right. But, but the movie poster is the one that makes us go and check out that movie trailer. Right. So it's sort of the same journey that we were going through here when, when we're selling books.
So I think that's, it's just, it's really important.
Autumn (16m 37s): Definitely. And so I know we both have am cause I, I happened to have edited and formatted, uh, your book description book so I'm very intimately familiar with it. But I've also, I think before we started working together, I had written a very small pamphlet, a little worksheet on how to do them. And we have very similar processes, which go figure that's how we teamed up in the first place. Yeah. So I know we both have a theory like how many paragraphs in which ones, you know, what each one is supposed to do.
And that really helps you focus on what needs to happen in your book. Description so for the opening, what is the first thing that readers see potential readers see? What do you like to have on top?
Jesper (17m 23s): Yeah, I mean at the top. So I have five steps to write a great blurb and am that at the top. You, you basically you, well maybe I should just say the five steps first. So you have what I call the tech line. The second one is character introduction, the third one is inciting incident and fourth is escalate tension. And number five if is dire straights and call to action. So we can go through, through them in a bit more detail here, but, but at the top is the tech line.
And um, I think probably one of the most, I don't know if I can call it famous, but one of the best examples of a killer tech line. It was one that, um, Adam Croft group. So Adam Croft is a seven figure othen, probably one of the biggest indie authors in the world. And and by the way, we are going to have him here on the amwritingfantasy podcast between Christmas and new year's, like a special treat. So that's going to be awesome.
Yeah, that's a little present to everyone. Yes. A bit of a Christmas present. Um, but with his book, uh, her last her last tomorrow, he wrote the tech line that went like this, could you murder your wife to save your daughter? You know, that's the kind of thing that entice readers to buy a book. That's like what, okay, I need to read what that is about. Right. That's, it's an incredibly effective way to catch people's attention. And um, and I, I, because I think the other part that you need to be mindful this about that not everybody will, will, you know, browse for you book on the laptop or something.
And so not or not, depending on what device you're using to actually browse the books you pop description might not really show up except for the tech line. So it's important that what is on top there is really, really eye-catching. Oh yeah. So that it doesn't get the clip and then people are allowed to just like, okay, I've got a half a sentence of something that doesn't make any sense to me.
Autumn (19m 25s): No. And I love your example had it was a co, it's a full sentence. It's a question, but a lot of them are often just phrases and those work too. Like some of the ones I've found that I just, when you read them, you could almost start thinking, Oh my gosh, I could write a book about this. Uh, Royal assassin, a fallen princess friends, enemies bound by prophecy. There's so much into these. Another one that I've always really liked is heirloom of forbidden magic. A corrupt sourcer who seeks to rule. You're starting to see some key components, but they kind of give you the tingles.
A really good tagline makes you go, it kind of perks you up and you're like, Ooh, what's that? And you kind of read the next line. And so that's what I think is so cool there. They're fantastic. Once you figured out your tagline, you're going to post this everywhere. It's going to be your tweets, it's going to be your Instagram, it's going to be what you put actually for now, if you go to my website, all of my books, I used to have the book description like next to the picture of the book and then he, then the bio links and stuff like that.
People don't like to see that many words. Now I literally have pared that down to just the tagline. No description so I have the tagline, the picture of my books, and then the links to go get it. That's, that's how important it is. It should sell the book basically on its own. That's what, like I said, you'd been marketing images this, you're kind of put the tagline. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I mean, I guess just to cement the point to how, how important it is, because I know that, uh, Mark Dawson, who was another seven figure in the author, he actually surveyed more than 10,000 readers and he asked them what triggered each person to read his book?
Jesper (21m 8s): Was it, he's covered, he's reviewed his book title and so forth and so forth. And what you learned out of that survey was that almost five times as many readers picked up, he spoke because of the book description as opposed to getting enticed by the cover. So you see that just, it just thrives home. The point that it is incredibly important, the book description is, and I, and I really don't, honestly, I don't think that most people understand that. You know, most, most authors thinks it's something like, yeah, I'll just, I'll put something together there and then slam up there.
Ghosts. I think that's how most authors approach it and it's a huge mistake. I agree. And it definitely takes some practice to get the right one and it, even when you think you have the right one, you don't. That's what your mailing lists other authors.
Autumn (21m 53s): Cool. Ask them, I mean post in our amwritingfantasy Facebook group, that is a fantastic way to get an idea of how your blurb is working and some, you know, feedback on what you might need to tweak. Yeah, yeah. I usually say right, 15 different variations of the tech line and it'd be, it has to be short, catchy and memorable.
Jesper (22m 14s): And then just as the autumn is saying, than my usual advice is that once you have nailed it down to your own three favorites, then start posting those and ask other people's opinions, ask them to vote for their favorites and then maybe the winner will not be the one that you expect. But uh, but if you get enough people voting on it and giving your opinion on it, then yeah, you should probably follow what people are saying. But I guess the one caveat to that is that make sure you are asking people who actually read fantasy yes, that's true.
Don't ask your mother and your uncle and whatnot what they think is best because unless they read fantasy already, then their opinion matters. Nothing. Exactly. And make sure you ask the people who are actually going to not only read fantasy but give you an opinion.
Autumn (23m 1s): Not like everything you do is wonderful at year. Oh yeah. That part as well. So, okay, so let's move on to step number two. After the tagline. You said it's what you have, the character introduction is how you put it. Yeah. So this is where we need to introduce the character.
Jesper (23m 21s): And uh, this is actually where the, where the book description begins because technically the tech line is just a teaser. So now here in step two, this is where the actual book description Texas beginning, and it's usually a short paragraph and it should appeal to general, like human emotions and desires. So it should be exciting and not like, you know, Frodo is a habit of 33 years old and he lives in a place called the Shire blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, we don't want to read that. So it should be something exciting, but, but we do need to introduce the character as the first thing because the character is what the readers need to identify with.
And that's why they should care about reading this book. Exactly. And I think it's one of the things I like to put in.
Autumn (24m 6s): So you're S E this is where you're trying to figure out, you know, you go with your main character, this is who you're going to feature and highlight and do something that's going to hook the reader, catch their emotions so that they kind of want to know what's going on without giving too much away. But you know, for me, when I was doing this the first time, I have am for main characters in my first novel and my debut because I'm just sadistic and I wrote this, I, I, we, I think I counted once.
How many, uh, how many characters I have by the end of book six. And I'm not nearly as good as game of Thrones, but I ha yeah, if you don't read fantasy and you try to get through mine and you don't like multiple characters are going to be like, what the heck is going on? So choosing the one main character is really hard. But I definitely learned as I grew and developed as an author that you need to pick one at the most two. And this is not the time to feature how clever you are at naming places, people, things, creatures.
Literally you don't want to throw too many new weird things that people don't understand unless they've read six of your books. So pick your main character, choose the name and everything else should be her best friend. Her enemy. Stick to keeping just one name because the more weird words you throw out there sticking points and the reader's going to be like, they don't know, they don't care. There's no, they're not going to be overwhelmed by how cool you can name things are going to be like, Oh my gosh, that's a whole book going to be like looking up a thesaurus to try to figure out what's going on.
So that's my biggest advice when you're doing the character thing is just, you know, awesome place names. I'm glad you can come up with them, but when you get to the description cut them out, you just want to focus on one thing and you want what the reader to focus on. Not the names, but that emotional pool of something really important.
Jesper (26m 5s): Yeah, I think that's serious that you just mentioned. I think that was the one where where you emailed, when would you got to bake book six and you said, what the hell am I doing? Why? Why did I include this many characters? Now I have to complete all these acts and we were really frustrated with yourself. It wasn't, that's actually why I switched to Scrivener. I was writing book number five out of the six and I realized the plots or so complicated the subplots you have that many characters do.
Autumn (26m 31s): How many subplots I was juggling. I said to heck with it and I went from pages to Scribner like that and my book plotting has never been better. Yeah, I, I don't think it's on on writing, but it was somewhere where I read one time that Stephen King also had a problem that he, all of a sudden you had way too many characters in the book and he had no idea what to do.
Jesper (26m 53s): So, so he just blew the whole thing up and killed most of them. And then that was salt. Yes. This is a total tangent, but I read a great, a great men today that said, yes, I have too many characters. I'm thinking of killing up, killing off a few of them that should really spice up my autobiography. Yeah. So okay, there's writers writing humorous.
Autumn (27m 15s): So I have a few examples of ways of, you know, things I think are pretty interesting. So on a planet far from earth, descendants of a maroon space, Tyler's fight a decades long war skies, shy scholar Victoria knows nothing of this conflict and felt pirates kidnapped her to sell her to the sadistic tyrant behind it. And so you know, those are getting on you. You were trying to find a way of giving some, a little bit of a setting, a little bit of an emotion, some kind of nuance of who the character is without throwing out, you know, they could have send it out the name with a plan that they could've sent out.
So many other things that name of the places woman was living, but you just want to have the only real name is your main character. And then trying to find some ways of, you know, you know, emotions she's been kidnapped. Do you kind of draw in the reader to keep going to the next part emptied and the next part is inciting incident. Um, so that's probably sounds familiar to most of you I would think.
Jesper (28m 22s): But, uh, so the, the inciting incident from a blip, blip perspective. So that should be a big revelation. Eh, I don't know. It could be like Frodo receiving the ring or somebody who's on the run or perhaps something happens that no one expected, you know, the, the trick is just to ensure that it relates to the character somehow. So it's not like in a far off land a BIC, a atomic bomb exploded. I don't know why that would happen in a fantasy novel, but just came to, but it has to, I mean, unless it's because, uh, like, uh, radiation will come to the character in 24 hours or what do I know?
You know, unless it's something that affects the character, then it doesn't qualify as an inciting incident. From a blog perspective. It has to be effecting the character. And again, you're probably looking at something like only a paragraph long or something like that. Nothing more. Yes. And I like to say about this. So I mean this is one where you can actually use your inciting incident from the novel.
Autumn (29m 24s): So if you've, if you use the plotting, if you use even just the seven stages in your crafting the blurb, you and I, we've talked about this, I tend to actually sort of develop a theme in almost a rough blurb before I start writing cause I kind of know what I'm writing. It's a good way of building out the whole novel outline. So this one, it helps to use your inside the incident. I know a lot of authors who they feel like they're writing this blurb and what they're trying to put in here is actually the climax. And that's too far along your, that's way too much information.
You just, your goal as you're writing your description is to get the reader to get through that first couple of chapters of your novels just until that's where they're going to sell that they're going to be so hooked on the character. And what's happening that they don't care. There'll be like, there'll be surprised by what's coming in the climax as well. So this really is when you're writing your description, you're kind of only focusing on that first third if he'd been that much of your novel. So really this might be the inciting incident that you know, the reader is going to get to in the first chapter, two, three chapters.
So they're going to get to this incident pretty quickly. But that's very satisfying for them because they kind of like go, Oh, this is what this, you know, this is why there, they read the description and they go by the novel. So they wanted to have that solution. But by the time they get to that resolution of what they read, the description for they're already so invested in the book. They read another a hundred thousand words, not a problem. Yeah. That's should be the aim. And then the next book in the next book. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, because the next one is escalate tension.
Jesper (31m 2s): So I think that that builds on what you just said as well because it's more about finding like that next beat that directly affects the protectionist after the inciting incident. So you're basically, I don't think it would be correct to say that you are building like a short like mini mini story in the, in the blurb because that's not quite what you're doing but, but it builds upon itself. So you have a tag line, which when people read it, it should prompt them to say, okay, that's interesting. Let me read a bit more than, than if they read the next paragraph would, was to coach introduction and say, okay, that sounds interesting.
I read a bit more. And then the inciting incident stopped to pull them in and then you get to escalate tension, which then just builds on what came before. So it's more like you, you keep them reading and you're sucking them into basically drive them down the funnel until they get to the next step. Step number five, um, where you are trying to make the sales basically. So that's, that's the underlying idea. And I know that sounds simple, but it's absolutely not, is not and for this one.
Autumn (32m 9s): This is the part that it's actually useful to ask questions and you want to show clear stakes. You know, this is where you can say will they survive, will you know or will they be defeated? These are the ones where you're asking those questions. And so if you are following like the seven steps of story structure, this is sort of those initial openings of the reaction phase where the character is reeling, they're questioning, you know, they want to go back to to what would their life life was like before or they don't. But you're of asking those questions.
That character is basically dealing with right after the inciting incident in the story. So this is where you want to look for those sorts of emotions to pull out. And these are, like I said, this is a great question, great place to actually ask questions. Don't answer them. Let them sit there so that the reader is like, well, will they survive? They want to. You want to capture that little like, Oh my gosh, what's going on? How will they, how will they get out of this little event that you've, you've already drank the reader on to this tiny little 500 word story that you're writing?
Yeah, I think for me, I, I need to be a am I view at least we need to be a bit careful here because escalate tension, that step, you need to be really careful that you're not jumping into step number five, which is dire straits because basically in step number five, you have the low point.
Jesper (33m 37s): And this is where, this is the part where you can stop asking, you know, the question is how, not necessarily that you write this question but at least get the reader to ask the question in their own mind. You know, how are they going to survive this stuff? And if you already put that too much in the escalate tension step, then your blurb is gonna run out of steam into last crucial part. So you need to be really careful on how to balance it. Um, so basically you could almost view escalate tension like the bridge between the inciting incident and then the low point, maybe towards the end of the novel.
So it's like what, what sits in between there that you can sort of build the tension with. So think of it like you are pushing the person reading the blurb from the inciting incident and towards like the disaster point of the novel that, that, that is going to prompt them to say, okay, nobody can survive this. And if you can get them to say that, then they will pick up the book. Because then I wanted to understand how in the world is this going to work?
Autumn (34m 39s): Absolutely. Until, yeah, that's a great lead into the final paragraph. Yeah. So, so obviously you're not trying to, with dire straits, you are not trying to reveal the ending of your novel in any way or give away any twist or surprises that stuff. The point, right. So as we already said, it's, it's a teaser.
Jesper (34m 60s): It's like the movie trailer. Uh, and if you think back on the movie trailers you hate the most, it's the ones that where you can sort of see what's going to happen that that's really bad. So you don't want to do that or where they take all the good scenes of the entire movie and put it in the movie trailer and like you can just watch that and skip the movie. So yeah, so the, yeah, exactly. So the idea is just to leave the reader wondering how in the world is to here, we're gonna make this, just leave them there. And then once you have left them down that fictional cliff there, you let them hang there and then you give them the cultural action.
And basically culture action could be something as simple as the LA last line, just reading buy the book today or something like that. And it sounds stupid because you would think that, well, if they are sitting there, they've clicked the cover, they are on the book page, maybe on Amazon and they're reading through the entire book, aren't they're there because they want to buy the book? Yes. And most of them will probably be, but studies have shown though that a direct cultural action, like by the book today, it does increase the conversion rate.
So there's no reason not to leverage that fact and just write that those few words at the end of it and, and, and just, you know, convert a few more sales. Join I mean, why not, right, exactly. I've always thought that was funny. It's was like, well wait, you there on Amazon reading the blurb and you have to tell them to go buy it. But it makes a big difference to get them emotionally hooked so that they go and press that, you know, by now or download a sample.
Autumn (36m 27s): Now it really does help. And I also say there's am sometimes I like to include something called the emotional cell, which comes right after dire straights. And that's where if you happen to have some really good reviews or awards or just something else that kind of builds up like what fans are calling the new great Epic fantasy, you know, pick it up today. It doesn't hurt to have, if you have something else to put in there that's kind of an emotional sell to get them to really get excited, kind of validate you as an author or your book from other people's perspectives.
They're saying, Oh yes, this is a very good book. So if you've got a a review quote or something else or an award, something you could put in there, it can really helps to ferment, Hey, this is a great book, and then tell them go get it and they will run off and go buy it.
Jesper (37m 15s): Yeah, it's, it's that social proof and, and I will also say if you, let's, let's say that you release the book like five years ago and in the meantime it have accumulated maybe, I dunno, whatever hundreds of years. Let's just say that. Then don't feel too shy to to go back and update your review and just add that stuff into the, to the cultural action section here. Last autumn is saying, you know, just say like hundreds of 5.4 4.5 star reviews on Amazon or whatever.
You know, just at that one line at the end there just to increase the conversion rates because at the end of the day, every single sale caps absolutely selling books. It's not like, uh, it's, it's not uploading and then the sales were just tick U U unique to convert everybody.
Autumn (38m 3s): You can get to land on that landing page. Absolutely. And I will say too that there is sometimes you'll see blurbs on Amazon that go past the call to action and keep going. And I know some people really wonder about those and that's partially because Amazon and other places give you over a thousand words to put into your review. And I think, I forget who it is, I'm almost thinking of this 5,000 words. That's a lot of words and you don't have to fill it, you don't have to use it all. But there are people who know the algorithms and they know the times that they can put in their keywords fantasy blah, blah, blah.
They're going to rank higher. So there is sometimes a, you know, you can have a question and answer session or an interview. I've seen those things after the call to action and I, I'm kind of ambivalent about that. I don't know how you feel about it. Jesper, I know why they're doing it. They're usually doing it to hit all the key words they need to rank higher on Amazon, but it can kind of dilute everything that came above it.
Jesper (39m 7s): Yeah. In my view, you need to be really careful. You're not diluting the blurb. The blurb needs to read well and it needs to be a good blurb and stand on its own. Uh, and the Amazon algorithms are getting so smart that they actually index and read the blurb anyway. So I think you were stuffing is one of the, well, it's the old days advice. It's still good to have keywords of course, but, but then if you write a really good blurb that talks about what the book is about and it's an Epic fantasy or whatever, you know, and you're going to have the keywords there anyway.
So just stuffing more and it's not going to help. Actually. I maybe from an algorithm perspective you might get a few more keywords in, but from a really friendly perspective you're going to lose. Right. So I don't know. I won't say that it cannot be done, but you really need to be careful with what you're doing if that's what you're trying to do. And I think it's just more safe not to try to be clever like that.
Autumn (40m 8s): Yeah, I agree. I think that's a good way of looking at it. How you said it. It's something that used to be done. Keyword stuffing. I think we've moved beyond that. And I think if readers don't realize what it is, I just think that yeah, it's diluting it. So it's probably not current best practice, but you still see it done. But, and maybe you've done it so you might need to go back and Hey, update your burp blurbs. It doesn't hurt to double check. You know, your blurbs after even a couple of years as your book ages and see, you know, make sure that it still sounds as good.
And like I said, sometimes if you read your readers' comments, you'll find some new new things to add. And that's always a good thing. So you might be able to update your blurb and make it more exciting. And maybe you pick up a few more readers. Yeah, that's the cool thing about being an indie author. It's so easy to do these updates. Uh, it, you know, you can always go in, you can upload a new blurb on, on your book and it, it takes like 10 minutes, you know, it's so incredibly easy. And in all the days that was, would have been impossible, but nowadays is so incredibly easy.
Jesper (41m 11s): So, you know, if your blurb is not working, if it's not converting Ville and all this stuff, you know, try to write a new one and to do something differently within. And of course, if, if you need help, uh, then, uh, as we set up on the top, uh, I actually wrote an entire step by step guide on how to write not only just a blurb, but actually a fantasy book description. So it's specifically focusing on fantasy book descriptions and uh, allow the link in the, in the show notes for that. And uh, it comes with a lot of examples.
It tells you exactly what to do step-by-step. It also has a, a bonus chapter on a nonfiction blurbs. So for those of you who might be looking at writing nonfiction like autumn and I do a then am, there is a bonus chapter on, on what to focus on for nonfiction perhaps as well. So next Monday we are going to share the three pieces of advice that we wish we had received when we first started out.
Yay.
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Narrator (2s): You're listening to the amwritingfantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need in literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing join to best selling authors who have self-published more than 20 books between them. Now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I am Jesper and I'm autumn. This is episode 49 of the amwritingfantasy podcast and we are going to discuss which social media networks or writers that we love the most. And this is pretty important because we all live in a digital world and especially as self published authors, social media place.
Autumn (54s): Well I guess for better or for worse, but it does play a role in expanding your reach. It does. I mean come on, you know, you and I actually have a confession to make. We've never gotten one person, so the digital core L it is incredibly powerful. Here we are partnering and teaming up across an entire ocean from each other and we're building a business and we're hope helping other writers that some of them will.
Jesper (1m 20s): Hopefully we do get to meet in person, but then we have to really on the line. Yeah, exactly. Um, and I, I mean, exposure something every author struggles with. I mean, okay, maybe unless you're like J K Rowling and George Lucas or some crazy stuff like that. But otherwise social media is pretty important. It is. By the way, mentioning George Lucas, did you see over the past month how he had been complaining about the direction district took with the star Wars movies?
No, I've actually stayed out of that because remember I was moving, so I really tried. You're not paying attention, so, no, it's been going on. Nobody's, I don't, I don't know how I really feel about this because I think I might be a bit off on the number here, but I think George Lucas was paid something like $4 billion or something for the rights to star Wars, like an insane amount of money. And I just, I dunno, I just feel like a bit, do you even have a right to complain and all the rights for that much money?
Autumn (2m 25s): I mean, shouldn't you just be off on your private Island and keep quiet? I mean, honestly, probably, but if you still feel in charge of the create, I mean, it's his baby shit. No, I agree with you. If you're going to be, yeah, if you're going to take something and you got to let it go and just let it go. Anyway, that was a bit of a tangent there, but, so how have you been autumn Oh, it's been good. I've been, like I said, so today makes it a week since am I moved into this new apartment in Brattleboro, Vermont, and it's been Yuto settling.
So it's been really fun to be stationary and not be moving every day. It's been a huge change. I won't say that. There's not times I miss it because I haven't lived in town. Um, when I lived in England, I lived in Manchester U K for nine months, once, and then I lived in Virginia and I lived in Blacksburg, Virginia, like right in town. My apartment. Um, it had a huge field out back and on the other side was literally the main street, um, with all the bars and everything else.
So it was like really right in the middle of everything. It's fantastic place. And so this is sort of, I don't even really have a big yard here, so I watch, you know, the one of the main roads is one of the quarters of the building. So I can see the main traffic going downtown. And it's hard because I miss the woods. I miss seeing water. I miss seeing the sunset over the lakes and in the woods. That's just, it is definitely where my heart is. But you have some water nearby that you can, I do, yes. I, that's one of the neat things I've discovered.
There's am Brattleboro is really kinda cool. There is within five minutes I can be walking in a forest and there's about 20 miles of trails including this huge ski jump that I cannot wait to see people going down this in winter. I've, you know, I do know how skiing, I'm not the world's best. I still snow plow a ton. Um, I'm not the best of paralleling, but I do ski and then to see this ski jump that's like, I mean I like roller coasters, but whole this day's going to be, I can't imagine going off this thing.
So, but behind it there's all these trails so I can be walking in the woods with the dog in five minutes or I can go the other way and I can be walking into town where there's cafes, I'm walking distance, the library and I'm so excited. I've already stuck my head in there trying to find out if there was any fiction writers groups and they're sort of is a creative writing workshop, but they're on break right now till maybe in the new year. And there is another one called right action and they're a little bit older and not that active, but talking to the director star, which I thought her name was so much fun.
Star and autumn were having a Tecton Tet and she thinks we should start one because there's a little bit of interest and there's other folks. So Hey, if anyone out there listening is in the Vermont Prato borough area, get in touch with Brooks library because I think you might be able to meet me in person. We might be doing a writer's group here. So it's exciting. This is am. I was talking to you before the show. There's something called your first hundred days. It's an old, it was actually a president of the U S came up with this idea I think.
And when I first started with my old job and was a new manager, I was given this by my supervisor at this idea that your first hundred days everything's in flux. You know, nothing has become a habit. Everything's still new and this is the time to reach out and network and find new things. And you know, those new habits started before everything becomes, you know, routine. So that's what I've been trying to do. I've gone to a meditation class, I found a pottery studio.
All this stuff is within walking distance. Are the co-op, which is this awesome food co-op is also within walking distance. I could probably drive faster to a grocery store, but there's something so cool about saying, Oh, I'm out a capers and being able to walk downtown and just go pick them up and walk back. Last night we did a beer run, um, because I just wanted to go get something and there's three breweries in town, so it's really kind of exciting. And I like your written settling in. I think so.
And it's only been seven days. Yeah. That's good. Yeah. So how's your week been besides you? I didn't have to go and move like I did.
Jesper (6m 46s): No, well, uh, yeah, I have my birthday over the weekend. That's right. So, uh, I hear it was a little quiet. Yeah. Well, yeah, no we didn't. No, we didn't do anything crazy at all actually. I went out, I went out refereeing a match and then, uh, when I came home I did a bit of chores and whatnot, but then, um, I, uh, uh, my wife cooked a nice dinner for us. We had a nice evening time. Uh, so, so that was, that was nice.
Um, but I also got stuff thrown at me on my birthday. That was a, yeah, because, because I was out, uh, I was up refereeing and I got both a captain's armband thrown at me and afterwards a soccer boot boot thrown at you. How did that, then there was this, uh, so the, the captain on the home team, he was a bit like a, he had a lot of temper. Um, so early on in the match she got a yellow card for being a bit aggressive.
Um, and then, right, right. Like one minute before the end of the match, F fourth was actually made against him. So, Oh, I awarded him a free kick, but then I, and I don't know what, I don't know if if somebody said something to him or if he was just angry because he was tackled so hard that he got the free kick or something, but he got up and he pushed the opponent really hard in the chest. Um, and they started shouting at each other and there was a lot of like stuff going on there.
So I ran over there and then because he shoved the other guy, I gave him a yellow card for that. Right. It means that when you get your second, it becomes red and which means that you're off. And then he, he just, I dunno, he went completely ballistic. So he's teammates has to hold him off because you wanted to go and attack me. But then he used his teammates, hell, hold, held him off. So instead he just pulled off his arm band and then he's spooked and threw them at me for this. Like, wow, it's
Autumn (8m 52s): not a good sign if he want it to attack you. I think he did need time out.
Jesper (8m 57s): Yeah. Maybe he went completely ballistic. Uh, but, and the, and the stupid thing was that he was the one who got the free kick. No, this is like, okay. Yeah. There's no explaining. I wouldn't put that one into a book because I think the cause and effect would be hard to figure out. Yeah. It's, it's, it's a real shame, but sometimes it's just like adults behaving like children, you know? And it's, uh, yeah. What can you do?
Right, exactly. I mean, there's sometimes in this, no, no reasoning with it. Adults, Oh, we go on the internet with the yam writing fantasy podcast. Um, so I actually was quite a, what should I call it? Please or whatever. I should come. I posted one of our teaser post in the am writing fantasy Facebook group. Uh, and, and it just got a lot of cool comments. So I thought I would read a few of them out loud here because I thought it was quite cool.
That'd be good. It's a which post, is it? You have to read the post too. Yeah. So the post was a habit character catch a cold or possibly in the next chapter. Oh, right. I remember that one. Yeah. And then after that I basically asked people if they could come up with something funnier that could happen to the character. And then I didn't really expect that many wonderful suggestions and funny replies. But uh, I think people really, they took it really seriously and just started typing away.
So that was really awesome. So I thought I could just read some of them up here. Uh, so Curt was the first one in there and he basically put like three different suggestions. And the first one was having have the character cats are called are, possibly a fish. That's all you, there's just like this really dry humor. I thought that was funny. Yeah. And of course we also have had Jason in there. I was always saying that he was going to pass on commenting on this one because he's next chapter is when the character is giving his quest by the emperor and to sneeze upon the Imperial person is death.
I mean that was a good idea not to give the character called, yeah, I might want to skip on that. Of course he could be. So trained to suppress a sneeze and Oh, the tension. Cool. Yeah, that's true. Uh, and David also said that, uh, my main character was posted by a salt made from gobbling touch steel and he is suffering from the effects. So his body is weeping. A deputy pasta turns the skin into a hard cross. The scap that spreads when it onto foreskin will transform into an Auckland creature unrecognizable from his original self.
You know, it's fantastic. Yeah. So that there was a lot more comments than the store. Thank you everybody for contributing. I really liked that.
Autumn (11m 54s): The uh, there's definitely been a few more. Like I said, I was moving and settling in so I haven't read all of those, but now I have to go in and check. So that's all in the uh, amwritingfantasy a group on Facebook. So I'm going to go look. It's funny cause I wasn't there earlier. Um, because now when we're recording this, it is still November and then no, right. Moe is in full swing and I've been just loving, you know, some of the updates like day seven, how you doing? And that's already got 22 comments on it and people chiming in about, you know, how their word count, someone who got their seven day streak badge, Christiana Christiann and so, you know, congratulations.
And I just love the support. Even Melanie who said she's not doing well, but she had to finish a whole bunch of other stuff. So I just, yeah, it makes me feel good to see everyone chiming in and contributing and supporting each other as we go through NaNoWriMo and you share the experience and that's always, you know, what sort of what we're talking about today. So I don't want to jump ahead to social media networks but definitely I love whenever I need some encouragement or just to see good people helping each other out.
I love going into the amwritingfantasy group and yeah, it always cheers me on that.
Jesper (13m 13s): Yeah, I was just about to say also, uh, I think there, there is a really good tone in there. You know, people, there was no, nobody is nasty to each other, nobody's any, you know, they're just helpful, nice people. So I really like to see that. And of course if anybody's listening and have not joined the amwritingfantasy group, you just go to the group session and search by amwritingfantasy and you will, you'll be let in.
Autumn (13m 36s): Yeah. And we'd love to have more, more great writers there. So it's, it's definitely just a wonderful place to be.
Jesper (13m 48s): So in covering social media networks for writers that we love the most I don't know, maybe we should alternate a bit here. Autumn so that it's just like not one, one of us doing a long monologue. And then the other one, maybe we just go back and forth a bit on, on one at a time.
Autumn (14m 5s): That sounds perfect. So do you want to go ahead and get started? I can pay rent.
Jesper (14m 11s): Yeah. And I think maybe, um, maybe as, as we go through each one, maybe we try to give a bit of reasoning why, why we have those on the list. Uh, so, but, but maybe before I give my first one, I just haven't honorable mentioned and I want to share because it's, it's not really a social media platform, but, so it cannot go onto this office, your list here. But, but since it's just an awesome place to pick up new knowledge about writing and marketing and all that I wanted to mentioning and that is of course podcasts. You know, I guess you am now I'm talking to you at the are listener already know that since you're listening to this podcast.
Well, but if you do search your podcast app, you might be surprised to find a lot of great podcasts about writing and publishing. I listened to a lot of them myself and Andrew is really a lot of good stuff out there that, that you can listen to. So I just wanted to mention that upfront here. Now before we get started. It's always a good suggestion. All right. So I can start out here. Um, and I have three platforms in the total. Okay.
But then I also have two bonus ones that I can keep afterwards. We'll just see how far we get. But definitely you, you pick your first, your top one. Yeah. Okay. Um, so the first one on my list here is one that I, I do have some issues with it. You know, privacy on the internet is a topic that I'm quite concerned with ms.
Autumn (15m 42s): So perhaps you can almost guess what social media platform I'm about to mention here. Autumn Oh, I'm trying to decide if it's Facebook or Twitter knowing you, but with this, with the privacy concerns, I'm going to say Facebook. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean it's, it's Facebook. So I guess you could say it's the, it's the one that I love to hate.
Jesper (16m 5s): I think honestly, if we were not running a, an author business here, I would not be on Facebook. I don't trust Facebook. Sorry. That's, that's the truth. What I know. But that said, you know, from a social media platform point of view, Facebook has the largest audience of any of them out there. And not to mention the ability that you get to run Facebook ads with quite good targeting tools. I mean, probably the best targeting tools in the world at the moment. So there's no way around it that it's just an absolutely awesome social media tool for authors.
Uh, so, and, and of course we just talked about the amwritingfantasy Facebook group. I do love that one. So it's not all bad. That's true in our kids, of course, that's a group of fellow authors, but there's no reason why you cannot have a group for Rita's if that's what you want.
Autumn (16m 55s): So absolutely. That's my first one. Yeah. I mean, you know, I have a love mostly hate feeling towards Facebook. I don't know if, if I wasn't an author, I don't know if I'd be on it. And in fact I joined just because I became an author. And so I've always, I've only only ever thought of it, I don't think of it as, um, a place I'd go on to hang out as a person to stay up to date with friends and family. To me, it's like I've go on because I'm doing writing stuff and it's just, just another tool as a writer.
But I will say that the interaction and the amwritingfantasy group that is, it makes me realize that it is an awesome tool. When you find a really good group and you get involved and you pay attention, there definitely are some bonuses, I'll admit it, but it's grudgingly because there's many other things. And again, I don't, I don't feed it, I don't put in a lot of love and soul and time into Facebook cause I just have some now just makes me feel icky. But I do try to stop into the amwritingfantasy group.
So I kind of agree with you there. But I think my top and favorite social media platform for personal and as an author and meeting other authors and meeting readers is actually Instagram.
Jesper (18m 11s): Yeah, I had a feeling that would be on your list. I like the picture. So yeah, I mean I've been, I'm incredibly visual. Uh, you have a graphic artist background, so I love seeing pretty pictures, but it's also, it's the hashtags. Am you're allowed 30 hashtags, which is a lot, but I love how it's sorta like Twitter where you can search by hashtags, super easy.
Autumn (18m 31s): You can follow hashtags. So, and the am books diagram, which is the, basically the biggest hashtag for readers, and there's a ton of one like am reading fantasy and fantasy reader fantasy book series. There's all of these other ones that you know, you can just target those, meet other people. Then there is a whole bunch of author ones like amwritingfantasy and fantasy author, fantasy writer, indie writer. So you start targeting those and you meet other writers and there's lots of follow loops, Friday follow loop where you can then meet a whole bunch of other writers, authors, bloggers.
They're not, they're not exclusive. They're very inclusive and they're like, you like books. You're, whether you're a writer, whether you're a blogger, a book blogger, it's just fantastic. And then you get to see really pretty pictures of other people's books and yeah, so definitely been one of my favorites. Yeah. Dude, do I have a feeling of, uh, I mean, because I think at least a while back at least I was talk about how Instagram might be a bit easier to get into them to get some traction on, I should say, rather than the other platforms.
Jesper (19m 39s): Because it is a bit newish. I don't even know if we can call it new anymore but, but do you have a feeling if that's true or is it easier to get engagement on on Instagram compared to many other places? I think so. If you reach out and talk to other people, they get back to you very quickly. Um, I mean I have over 2000 followers, which I think I grew my Twitter followers a lot faster than I'm going my Instagram ones.
Autumn (20m 3s): But they seem very interactive and very talkative. Um, you end up in conversations, they're very easily and it's also a younger crowd. I think the Facebook ones are 40 plus an older, more with some younger ones because we feel like we have to be on there because it's so big. Instagram is, you know, the J K Rowling's a 20 somethings a teenagers, the 30 somethings, they're on Instagram. And so I'm meeting a lot of very young voices and very just excited and dynamic.
And I think that's sort of maybe the difference. Do you think it can be used to generate sales, so to sell books and stuff? Possible, do you think? I think so. More like an engagement platform. No, I mean there's am obviously your Facebook ads can now be placed on Instagram and I do see those. I do see people, you know, mentioning the free book offers and people share them like hotcakes, you know, they'd help spread the word really. It reminds me of Twitter and I'm sure we'll get to Twitter. That reminds me of her away when I was younger.
But um, when I first joined Twitter, it has this kind of vibe that Instagram has now where it's super helpful, super nice people that are really, of course you still get your creeps in, your spammers, you've got to watch out for those are everywhere. But in general, my experience there has been super positive and yeah, I think it's a fantastic place. And I do think you can, you can definitely hit find readers and you can definitely find book bloggers who want to talk about your book and you can network with people really solidly.
And so yeah, I think you probably can sell books, but the very least you can find the networks to be able to sell more books. They're right, but can you post links with your pictures on Instagram? So can you direct people to somewhere else? It helps to have a short link so you, unless you're paying for an advertisement, it is not a clickable link. So what most people do is they have it in their bio, like a, there's something called dry tree. Yeah. Yeah. If you click on my bio link tree link, it actually then list four or five different buttons so I can direct people through that to wherever I want him to go.
Jesper (22m 11s): Okay, cool. Yeah, because basically when I, when I run our Facebook ads and whatnot, I, I can definitely see if I run them to Instagram, that performance is a lot worse than if I just run them on Facebook. So that was why I was wondering a bit about how efficient you, you view it as an advertising platform.
Autumn (22m 29s): I think as advertising and my PC, a waste of money, it is more being on there and being a member of the community that makes it different than organically kind of grow it and get other people to share it and spread the word all right. Right. Okay, cool. So what's your next one? What's number two? Yeah, so number two on my list is Twitter.
Jesper (22m 55s): One of those two would be your top two. So I guess this, this is too easy for you to get these five known you for a minute. Maybe you kind of guessed the next one. We'll see. Yeah, we'll say, yeah, I post a lot, a lot on Twitter. I mean really a lot and I gauge with a lot of people there as well. And I, I really like it as a platform. I think it's, it's, it's, it's an easy way to communicate with people. It doesn't take much. And also because of the, let's say RADA short messages or the tweets that cannot be too long.
I kind of like you, you kind of dipping in and out of conversations here and there. It's, it's like a, like a cocktail party thing. We're just going around. You're dipping in here and there where you want to and on, on Twitter ads. That's perfectly fine. You know, you can, as long as you keep on topping, you can, you can sort of bought into other people's talk conversations about and whatnot. And it's, it's very informal and I like that. Um, and I, I have sold some books from being on Twitter, but not a lot a I, and honestly, I don't think it's the best place to connect with readers if, if that's what you're looking to do.
But what I will say is that if you're trying to expand your network and meet fellow authors, then I think it's excellent. I mean, there was a lot of authors on Twitter and it's quite easy to stop some conversations. And then of course some of it will develop an and whatnot and you'll talk more and more to the same people over time. And I think on bet sort of one to one conversation basis, Twitter's probably one of the best platforms out there. Yeah, I think I used to be my favorite used to be my hub, just the way Instagram's become my hubs.
So from Instagram I like feed out to my other feeds because that's usually if you want to get me in person, that's where I am.
Autumn (24m 42s): But, and my Twitter feed is languishing because I don't even go in and check it as much as I used to. But I, that's where I started and I gained a lot of followers pretty quickly and I still, I mean I know you way out paced me cause you've put a lot of time in there still. Yeah. I think I have 52,000 or something like that. Like I'm somewhere in the 2020 fours or something like that cause I just really have not been paying attention. But I do. I remember someone once saying that you will always remember your first thousand followers and you know those were the definitely some of the deepest conversations I had.
But they do. I do remember that is when I first started publishing and the authors, there were the ones that it made me realize how amazing the author network is, how helpful they are. Um, very little pushback and lots of support. And I know that's probably still there, but I just don't connect. And I used to love the humor. Oh my gosh, authors are so snarky in 140 characters and now it's 280 characters. But back in the day when it was 140, they cracked me up.
The funny things that could come up within, so fuel characters. And so that was always my favorite. But I, yeah, the more recent politicizing and other things, it's been hard for me to sort through. So I've kind of neglected my Twitter feed. But that's nice to know that you say it's still there. No. Yeah. But I think a lot of it has to do with, with how you use Twitter. I mean, for example, I never scroll through my, my main feed because if I scroll through the main feat, there'll be a ton of different, uh, you know, the political stuff and all the stuff we don't even want to talk about on this podcast here.
Jesper (26m 26s): But there's going to be a lot of that in the main feed of Twitter. And I'll never scrolled through that. So what I do instead is that, um, uh, once a week I go in and I check, uh, so I use, uh, who tweet. And within Hootsuite I've set up different cues that for different words. So for example, I have one for fantasy maps. For example, I have one for world building, I have one for fantasy books or something like that. I don't remember them all, but I probably have like 20 of them.
And then I look through those and I see and that just find some interesting stuff that I liked there. And then I comment on that. And, and, and, you know, and today after somebody will reply and then the conversation goes for a bit there. And so it's, I really like actioning it. Like that and, and of course, and then I have, you know, a system set up so that I'm posting our podcast episodes on a regular basis goes out without me having to do it manually and so forth. So that automat automization of course helps.
And if course also helps that if you have well quite a lot of followers than you automatically get a lot more likes in which which and whatnot. But uh, but I would also say, I mean I don't think it matters too much. I mean, maybe I should start a different place, but a while back, I think a lot of people got really hooked up on how many followers you have on this platform and that platform. And honestly, I don't think it matters. Uh, I don't think it matters if you have 2000 followers or 52000 like myself.
I don't even remember the exact number, but around that, I don't think it matters. I think all that matters is how you're using it and, and what, how you engaging with people that that's, that's all that medicine. You can do that just as fine with a thousand followers that you, that you can with 52. I mean I really wouldn't get up hung up on the numbers. It also drives people crazy because then you're chasing the numbers and you're sort of missing the point that it's in the word, right. It's called social media social. It's right there in the world.
So you need to be social there. You're not chasing numbers. So I think that's true.
Autumn (28m 36s): The platforms were mentioning it's really about forming a network and putting the time and him being there. Because I know, I remember when I was on Twitter and people were complaining about it, just everyone on there seem to be bots. Um, but it's, you know, when you find a real person and you can actually really talk to them. And that is key I think with any platform that it isn't the numbers, it is actually putting in the time and finding friends. Basically it's, it's like Chino choosing your favorite cafe or your favorite bar. You're going there because of the atmosphere because it feels right because it's people you want to talk to.
And if you're just in there because you want to be looked at or you want other people to, you know, put you up on the stage and, and follow you, you're not going to get the same experience. No, I agree. Okay. Do you have one more? Yeah. Well, let's see. That's a tough one because I definitely, like I said, I start with Instagram. It's if I have time, because time is so huge. It's where I go. But there are a few other ones. Like I've recently joined a writers' groups on mighty network, so there's a couple on there. It's a more of a new network.
Um, it's what you got to watch for because you can join for free and join some groups and be able to interact, but then they can have certain areas that you have to pay for. It's one of those ones that has some hidden subscription areas. And so you do have to watch that. Those always, Kenny irritate me. It's, yeah. You know, if people want money, I'd rather than be on Patrion and say, Hey, support me here. Then you want access to this, you have to pay for it. It's, yeah, not everything I understand. I mean heck, we run a business, we know, you know, is there a cost to everything, but I like when people are up front about it.
But I will say that there some great interaction. It's sorta reminds me of Instagram where there's, um, you know, you can have the pictures and then you can have a lot more posts and links and those links are alive. So that's, and again, it's, I followed a group of authors over there that I already liked, so I already, I went with instant friends. It, since it's a smaller community, we can talk a little bit more direct. So that's kinda nice. And I, I've been enjoying that. But if anyone else sort of wants something that's in between Facebook and Instagram and once more talking, if there's look at some of the groups on mighty networks, there are some nice ones.
And like I said, and just try to find one where, you know, it has a vibrant community that doesn't always lurk behind the pay window.
Jesper (31m 2s): Yeah. And I think mighty network was also the one we were looking at at some point with an appreciative we should use that. But uh, I think how well their Facebook group is going, there is no chance that we're moving away from that. Facebook dies at this.
Autumn (31m 17s): But that's okay. You know, it's, it's grown organically and you can't argue with that.
Jesper (31m 23s): No, no indeed. Okay, that's cool. I've never tried a mighty networks. I looked into it a bit when we were considering but the eye, so my knowledge of it is fairly limited. But is it more like, is it more like what I said for Twitter that is good for connecting with other authors and, and building that whole or do you think so it's not like a place where you could sell books in
Autumn (31m 44s): no, it is totally just for networking. I haven't seen anything on there for advertising other than being able to say, Hey, but if you want more of this, you have to pay to get access to it. So I'm not sure how keen I am on that pop though. Let's see. That's where I'm at. It's like, I really like y'all, but I don't think I want to pay to be your friend.
Jesper (32m 7s): No, it's okay. No, I think I'm a, I'm at the same view as you. I mean, if then put people, direct people to Petra on if they, if they really enjoy what you're doing, then uh, and then you can really focus on it too. So I don't know. Yeah. Now on Petra, on you, you, you can give them, of course, you can give them extra content, like, like we try to do on our Petro and page, but you can also give them a special rewards and whatnot. Right. And it feels a bit like, I dunno, it feels a bit icky to me if you're supposed to pay to be on a, on a social media platform.
Okay. On the other hand, to be fair, you could to some degree say the same thing about Facebook, because if you post something, you have to pay Facebook to show it to your followers. Right? So in that way, I guess you can say that's not a true different, but
Autumn (32m 51s): no, and I was gonna say am if you're already, it kind of gets you already on that because you're there to talk to people and then you can, if you do go into the special access airy gives you just like an extension instead of a whole different website. But I haven't explored that territory because I just, I just haven't, I feel like that's not why I'm there on the social media. I'm just there to network, so I, I owe, everyone has something to learn, but I just don't feel like paying for it right now.
So do you want, what's your number three then? You said you had three?
Jesper (33m 26s): I have three and two bonus ones. So my number three is YouTube.
Autumn (33m 31s): Oh really? I should have guessed that. Because you have had a YouTube channel for we have had, yeah. Well you started before me for two years and then we teamed up for a year and we still keep it going even though it's now mostly this podcast. So that's interesting. So what do you like about you
Jesper (33m 50s): as a social networking now? Yeah, so, so I, I'm also a bit conflicted with this one, but I think I'm coming at this right now from the point of view as North of course. Um, and as you said, you know, we ran a YouTube channel for a while together as well, and then we converted into like a full on podcasts like we're doing now and I, I very much do not regret that decision one bit. I mean I think we did the right thing.
Yeah. You 100% agree. Yeah. So, so the YouTube channel is still alive in the sense that we upload a version of this podcast to the YouTube channel in case some people wants to listen on YouTube. So that's absolutely fine. It's not a lot of extra work for us to just to upload that there. So we do that. But that aside, you know, just because we and I and we were not able to make it work for us, does not mean that it's not a very viable platform for authors.
Because I have seen a lot of YouTube channels run by authors who have excellent success with it. It was built and huge audience on YouTube by uploading videos there. And I think why I have it on my list here is because I firmly believe in the power of video, and I know I've said this to you in our private chats many times as well beforehand, you know that, but when, when we just can see you on camera, it just builds another level of trust and connections.
So,
Autumn (35m 23s): and so do you see authors using this as a way of networking with other authors are a way of trawling in readers? What are they, what are the ones you see that are successful? What are they doing? I, I, I've seen
Jesper (35m 34s): both. Um, I, I the most of them that I see. So in that sense you can say that is a parallel to podcasting here as well. It's, it's, it's a lot easier to have a podcast or YouTube channel that talks about, you know, advice for authors. So like we do here we are authors talking to other authors about something specific, Ali on how to do am marketing and selling books and all that stuff. That's a lot easier because you have a lot of how to stuff that you can discuss.
Whereas as fiction it becomes a bit more difficult because, okay, what are you supposed to talk about? You know, if you just upload videos, uh, about, uh, you're talking about a different character or whatnot, you know, then for the random viewer who will just come across you in the search on YouTube, they probably wouldn't engage, not because they have no clue who you are. I said they wouldn't care. But I have seen a few am where they talk sort of about their writing process, but not in the way that they talk about advice for authors, but more a bit more angled to what a reader.
So they just talk about how they write and what they're thinking about and, and that sort of thing. Which and this is probably where the wheel fell off. For you have to be extremely good at creating very, very engaging content in on video because actually on YouTube, you know, if, if, if there's just like 30 seconds where people get bought the click away. Yeah. So it's, at least in my view, and maybe some other people will be, we'll find YouTube to be very easy to use, but at least in my view it's incredibly difficult.
Um, but, but if you can make it work, I mean it is one of the biggest search engines in the world. So it is, yeah. I don't think you can neglect it. Okay.
Autumn (37m 33s): Yeah, it makes me make me want to go back and like I used to do a lot of blogging and talk, you know, targeting readers and talking about my process and to be, it seems almost easier than I'm sitting there and typing it all out, but just doing a vlog and putting it on my website. But yeah, I know we've, I've been there with you and there's no way I'm going to be producing something with B roll and special effects. You gotta be a film major. I'm sorry you are a specialist.
Jesper (38m 2s): It is. It is a lot of work. And there was, of course, there was also a lot of competition on YouTube, so it's not easy.
Autumn (38m 10s): Yeah. That's why I thought should know if I linked it with my website and my existing blog, that might be an actually a pretty cool way of getting it going again because goodness knows I've been neglecting it and if people liked it so much this year, but 2020 is coming up, I will get better. 2019. I can't wait till it's over.
Jesper (38m 30s): There's one of the, uh, one of the authors on who's a email list I'm on, uh, he to actually in the emails that he sends out, he sends out a, uh, a video. So not in all of them, but in most of them, he, he had some video where he's talking about something and that actually, I mean, again, of course it's a lot more work, but it works pretty well because in the email you get a video of him talking about something that's pretty clever. But again, it's a lot of work so.
Or think about the, the F yeah. Ooh, go to back to that one. Anyway, we're on social networks, so I think I've got a runner up for my three like two different ones because to ones that I'm engaged with, what I used to be really engaged with. What Pat, it was great. I actually have my books and a lot of short stories and stuff posted there and I just haven't been keeping it up.
Autumn (39m 21s): But it was so much fun to network with readers. I mean a lot of the time you're literally targeting readers, some of them might be other authors, but what Pat is all about finding readers and that is just, it's perfect. And they're younger readers mostly, I mean 13 two twenties that's, if that's your target audience, you should be on what pad. And if you're an author that's just getting your feet wet and you want a lot of feedback from like beta readers, uh, what pad? It's free.
They have some levels now where you can pay for stuff, but it's just dynamic and amazing. And I really, every time I think about it like I've got to get back into Wattpad and it's just, yeah I need to be focused. I have this goal of getting back into like just diving into one or two serious social media networks. And the other one, the one that I've recently actually even took it online training that you targeted am and you sent to me was good reads a good ratio. Yeah. You sent me an email that there was this KTP cause some say animal Amazon owns it.
They were having a like basically hack good reads for authors and I sat in on that and it was, there was stuff I did not know. Some really cool ways of talking with readers. Um, sharing your favorite passages, why you wrote some things, what inspired you, how to make that more of a social media site. Not even going into the forums, which I, my husband and I have this argument all the time. I really hate forums. There's no pictures in forums. They're just there. At least it's like something they made in the 1980s when people are still typing dos and using all of the horrible there.
So aesthetically pleasing. Yeah, I don't do forums. So the good reads forum is like, you know, I go there and I'm like, Oh I just went into the swamp of despair and I don't want to stay here. But there's other parts of good reads that are much more interactive and ways of talking to readers and that I wasn't truly using. And so I've told myself I'd go into good reads every day and try to do something and I haven't been, but it's been a busy week. But we'll get, I do have that goal and maybe I should put what Pat on that once I have good reads and get back into it.
But definitely if Wattpad and good reads, if you are looking to target readers, those are my two that say learn to use those. If you've got questions am I'm getting good at one and I used to be pretty awesome at the other one. Awesome enough that people would actually be emailing me, asking how I got so many likes and comments on chapters as I released them. So apparently I was doing something right and what Pat and die, I left it for some reason. Yeah, well it happens. It does.
Well I think you still have your two runners up, so come on. We still have a few. I have the final two bonuses yet I put them on bonus list because a, I'm not using these myself so I didn't think it was fair to uh, to basically put them on the official list.
Jesper (42m 15s): But as bonuses I wanted to mention them because I think they are they important? Um, the first one is NaNoWriMo. I've never done a rhino myself, but I understand that there is a lot of support that you can get there. And I don't know if this is like the old school forum stuff that we just mentioned or not, but I think there's a lot of engagement between people there. So I think if you're looking for some encouragement and, and want to do join a lot, and I mean really a lot of other authors, 8,000 words in the month of November, then I think not over, I'm a might be a thing that is worth checking out and don't forget there is now is the June or July camp NaNoWriMo.
So if you do a summer one, and I think it's a little bit lower pressure.
Autumn (43m 1s): So if the 50,000 words scares you, try camp one in the summer. And yeah, I've never done it either because I know I could write a book. Um, and I know I do not want to put that much pressure on myself because I would take it way too seriously and freak out and be upset and yeah, my whole life would collapse because I have to write so many words a day. So I've never done it. But I, I love, I love the encouragement. I love everyone doing it together and I kind of feel left out and like, I want to do it one of these days.
So, uh, yeah. And the other bonus that I have, you actually already mentioned, Oh, it's good reads. Uh, because I think that is also when there's a lot of readers on good reads. So I think it's important. 9 billion readers on good reads or not, not 9 million. Sorry. It is just amazing the amount of readers. Um, yeah, it's, I'm trying to learn it because seriously it is an amazing platform if you can figure it out.
Jesper (44m 3s): Yeah, that's the thing again. And of course as we also talked about in uh, in a previous podcast a while back, I mean I still don't know what it is that Amazon wants to do with good reads, but maybe we'll figure that out one day. I still cannot quite work out if it's just a, if they'd just asked her the data and the reader list or what they offer, I'm not quite sure. But it is weird how they have not done any updates on, on good reads or changed anything and after they purchase is just to shame seems shitty, shitty looking
Autumn (44m 32s): website. It does need a refresh. But there are some cool trips, ticks and trips and talk tips and tricks you can do with it that maybe we should talk about one of these days. Yeah, maybe. Maybe. Did you have any more on your list or is that it? That's it for me. I think I, I'm happy with that. That's pretty much the key I think we covered.
Jesper (44m 56s): Excellent. So I think just in in rounding off here. Just wanted to add a few last words. I want just once just to tell you, dear listener, you know, don't, we mentioned a lot of different social media platforms here, but please don't go out and try to be everywhere. You know you're going to kill yourself and then just pick one or two social media sites that you already like and then learn how to master those and then expand later on as, as, as those become second nature and easy for you to do.
So it's really not worth killing yourself over with stress from trying to be everywhere on every social media platform out there. I mean, social media is important, but it's not so important that it's going to make or break your writing career as an author. No, not as much as actually not being on social media and writing her book.
Autumn (45m 49s): So talk, go crazy and spend all your time on social media. Yep. That's the final words. And next Monday, autumn and I will be back to discuss the all important book description, also known as the book.
Narrator (46m 5s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the amwritingfantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join autumn and Yesper on patrion.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the amwritingfantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
You've heard about them. You know they are bad.
But what, exactly, are info dumps, why are they such an issue, and how can you avoid them in your writing?
Autumn and Jesper discuss info dumps, why writers feel the pull to use them, and how to keep them away from your WIP in this week's episode!
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy.
For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to the amwritingfantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need in literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing join to best selling authors who have self-published more than 20 books between them. Now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (31s): Hello, I'm Jesper and I'm autumn. This is episode 48 of the amwritingfantasy podcast, and this episode is all about info dumps. So what is info dumps? Why do you need to avoid them and how do you avoid them? So yeah, that's, that's a lot of stuff to unpack. There it is. It's almost like, um, an info dumps so we'll have to watch that. I didn't even think about that. I don't know how else.
How else would I introduce a podcast episode if I cannot do an infant home? I don't know. I'll let you invent some sort of character and talk about it or something. Yeah, this'll be a fun one to a loop readers into.
Autumn (1m 11s): But Hey, I enjoy the irony of it. Yeah. So what's happening on your side? Autumn Oh, life is crazy. I have in the last month was crazy enough cause I started the month knowing I wanted a change and to get off the road at the beginning of October and not knowing where to go, what to do or where I'd be living or what I'd be doing when I lived there. And at the end of the month I have, I'm actually going to pick up a job again for a little while working in the environmental field, which is where my master's degree is.
So I'm super passionate about saving the planet and Gretta Thornburg is one of my heroines. So I'm really excited to be working again in conservation for a little while at least, and getting my feet wet. And I moved yesterday. Oh, at least as a listening of this, which is, um, you know, we're recording this earlier in November then compared to when we're releasing it. So at the beginning of November, I moved yesterday to Vermont, which as a state I've always wanted to live in.
And it's odd because our cars are registered in Vermont for when we are traveling, cause it's one of the few States where you don't have to live in the state and you can still register your vehicles there and you can do it online. And it's so easy. And I used to joke, people would walk up to us like, Oh, where are you from in Vermont? And I didn't feel explaining all of that to some stranger in a parking lot. I just say proud. Oh borough. And lo and behold, yesterday I moved to Prato bro. So that's sort of like foreshadowing isn't it? It's like karma.
That's what I thought. Okay. This is total foreshadowing. So I moved to this town and I'm really close to downtown and it's got a food co-op, it's got cafes, there is a brewery in walking distance to my house. And it is just fantastic. And also in the midst of all that craziness, um, we decided to sell our truck and camper. So that was a huge change. And by selling it, we had this great offer that we couldn't turn down. It meant I got rid of my reliable travel vehicle.
So I also had to find a car and buy it in two days. Happily. I actually fell in love with a car that was kind of hard to find and I Kevin up on it and went and test drove like a cross track and all these, you know, almost all the cars out right now look the same. They're like a hatchback on an SUV platform. They're identical. I don't care if it's a Nissan, Hyundai, Subaru, they all look the same to me. Ralph for, I test drove them all and they're kinda got lists.
If anyone doesn't know anything about me, I came from a Mustang family. I like sports cars. Okay. I admit it. I used to have a BMW 328 I and when you hit 70 the exhaust opened up to flow through and the suspension settled because of the air dynamics going over it. And you just felt this car's settle in just fly. Not that I ever did. I swear I was so, such a good driver. But yeah, so I do like my sports cars. I was trying to tell myself, I'm in my forties I don't need a sports car.
I just traveled slowly across the entire continent for a hundred thousand miles, you know, 150 200 miles a day. I don't need a sports car. Oh. But I found a WRX Subaru Impreza hatchback. So it's slightly practical. You can put stuff in it. And I'm in love with this car and this car is in love with me. And after finding it on the 31st of October, I bought it the next day. And it's not a new car, it's a 2012 but I love it.
I it's, it just feels like it was meant to be. Yeah. You know you have the excuse that because, because you just explained that, that you have always loved fast cars and stuff like that. So I'll give you that excuse. But you know what you say about men here in Denmark when you sort of get into your forties and you buy sports cars. Oh yeah. Midlife crisis. Yeah. I'll give you, I'll give you that excuse because you actually said that you loved it before that. And so I guess it doesn't apply to you. I think I had a purple mini Cooper, uh, S so sports Mini-Cooper and I think that was my midlife crisis car because it was a purple mini Cooper.
Come on. This is at least black and a little understated and it's a hatchback. I could have actually, my nephew is buying a brand new WRX and he has an a newer one than the one I just bought that it's a sedan. And I could have bought that from him from a really good price and it's in fantastic shape. But I would have forever thought of it as my nephew's WRX and I'd be like freaking out where this one, you know, it's got a few dings, scratches, and you know, it's, it'll be a perfect daily commuter and I'm really excited.
So, yeah, my life crazy. And
Jesper (5m 59s): it's got to settle down eventually, but it's been a crazy, crazy month in a very whirlwind of a week. So hopefully you've been a little bit more steady I think. Yeah. Well, yeah, I guess you could say more steady, but, uh, but of course we also on to, speaking of selling, uh, you know, we are also trying to sell our house, uh, because, uh, I don't remember if I talked about this on the podcast before, but our, our kids goes to school in another city. It's not that far off, but it's far enough that you can't bicycle or anything.
So you do need to drive there and the bus connections are poor in the sense that you need to take the bus to another city to then change to another bus to go to the city where the school is. So it, it takes like an hour commuting if you want to go and it's like 15 kilometers or something. So it's 50 kilometers. Yeah. It takes like 15 minutes in the car. Right. But you just spend an hour on the bus. So the buses out of the question and cycling is also too far for them. So we, now that the kids starting has started to get older, they also, you know, they want to play with their playmates and stuff.
And I understand, uh, but the, the problem is that every time they want to do that, we have to drive back and forth. So on those days, we ended up driving to deliver them to school in the morning, picking them up in the afternoon, or one of them may be, and then the other one will go and play with somebody then driving that guy home and then driving back to that city in the evening to pick up the other one that driving back again. So we've done in like four times in a day and it's, it's, it's really annoying. Yeah. You're at that age where they're more active, but they can't quite legally drives Yannick.
They can't get around themselves. Right. So I don't know, the, the, the older they've gotten, the more annoying it's getting. So we decided to sell the house and move to that city in step. Uh, but then somebody needs to buy this house and there's, at least, so far has not been much activity, but over the last seven days, the house was actually been shown twice to see that potential. Yeah. But it's so weird because then afterwards, of course the real estate agent always calls us and tell us how it went. And in both cases, the people who then came and saw a house then afterwards told the real estate and yeah, well this, this is a, the kids, one of them said that the kitchen was too small and the other one said that the living room was too small.
And I was like talking to my wife and I was like, I don't get it. You know, why are these people, you know, I'm not am, I don't for my Sega, you know, it's up to them if they want to buy a house on that. But I'm more thinking like you're spending your Sunday or Saturday or whatever, driving out to what's a ha or see a house that you might be interested in. But right there on the internet. When you decided to book the viewing, it says how big all the rooms are and there's pictures of everything.
So why are you spending your time going out looking at a house that y'all already know from the pictures? It's too small. I just don't get it. But ah, I dunno. And of course my wife have to do all the cleaning and we need to prepare everything every time before somebody comes. So, and you can see she gets pretty annoyed when they just show up and like, yeah, it's too small. Like yeah, you should have, no, you're not, not before you cave. Unlike me who I've rented this apartment sight unseen based on pictures and that the, the owners who have the lease are just super nice and informative and, and cut us some deals.
So yeah, there's me and then there's, you just need to find someone like me to buy your house. Super like, yeah, I guess so. I like the photo. Yeah, I'll be good. When can you come to Denmark? Done and you get by this house and then we'll buy another one. I will consider that. Okay. Yeah. And I guess apart from bed we could also mention that, um, we finished up the, you have finished up the content review of the plotting book. Oh yeah. It's going to be a great book. I cannot wait.
Yeah, exactly. So basically now we can get into creating the outline for the book, one of our new series, because that's going to be a download downloadable example within the plotting book. So once that is done well we basically write onto editing and publishing. Yes, of course. Driving ourselves crazy cause we have that outlined the book we want to write as well. Yeah. That's one thing at a time. We also have a few causes in the making and all that fun stuff. So one thing at a time.
Narrator (10m 28s): A week on the internet with the amwritingfantasy podcast.
Jesper (10m 35s): Yeah. So I don't know if you noticed this one, uh, but did you see MiFi posted a picture of herself in the amwritingfantasy Facebook group? Did you see that? I might've missed that with all of the moving and driving it. Yeah. Yeah, exactly what it was so cool because she was driving and listening to this podcast and then she posted a picture of herself and set that she was going to a weekend conference. And uh, I dunno, I just love pictures and messages from listeners. So at least I bus bar. Yeah. I think I actually did catch that one cause I remember commenting to my husband ad and that, that is just cool.
It is so neat to see people that, you know saying, Hey, I, I listened to you guys while I was going to a conference. So I did see that one. That was pretty nice. Yeah, I love that. And uh, so, so yeah, please send us more pictures or comments and stuff. We, we loved seeing that. It, it really, I mean if you try to look at it from the podcast producer's point of view here, I mean we were sitting back behind our microphones in isolation and recording some audio and then we also load in somewhere on the side of the world.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. We can't even see each other on the recording either. So it just, it's so awesome when we get a message. Some, you know, people lists from people listening and, and, and whether you like it or not, that's up to you. But you don't, it's not because a am number. I tried to say, you have to tell us that you like the podcast, but it's just cool to notice somebody listening. Right.
Autumn (11m 58s): That's my point. Very cool. Yeah, I mean, yeah, we see the download stats, but individuals are so much more fun to actually hear and talk to, so that's great. We'd love to hear from you. Yeah, I was laughing cause I, I remember, uh, again is eight, but I loved his comments on, um, the little Patrion post I had just done about killing off characters and this perspective. I never really thought about that. He said that, you know, he knew he was going to kill off one, so he had a hard time bonding with the character until he kind of put that aside and really started like, you know, feeling this character out.
I'm like, yeah, I guess that is the alternative as much. You're like really good at Georgia or Marten in just really going in depth of the character, knowing that you're going to ask them in the next chapters. I guess I'm not that hard court either, but it gave me something to think about, which I love. I love it when someone gives me a different perspective and I have to think, well that would be a drawback if I, if I know I'm going to kill someone off life changed my mind about how I develop them or make them just a little bit more annoying.
So maybe the readers don't feel quite as bad or am I going to make them even more awesome so that readers really feel bad, so bad.
Jesper (13m 15s): Yeah. Yeah. Actually I think, well not killing off characters as such, but we are talking a bit in the plotting book about, uh, you know, making sure that readers like the characters and have to do that. So that, that's quite interesting. But, uh, I also think, uh, based on what we just said, we, we basically just mentioned the two places where, where you can interact some more. So those, the amwritingfantasy Facebook group. So if you have not joined that one already, please do you, you know, just search for amwritingfantasy in the Facebook group section and uh, you will find us and uh, you can didn't just request to join and we will let you in or I guess maybe probably most likely our awesome moderator Luke will eat us to is because, um, he, he really helps a lot with managing the group.
So we are, we are very much appreciating that, uh, Lucas, so thanks for that. Uh, and the other place you can, uh, get a closer connection or I'll ask questions and all that stuff is on Patrion so there's a link in the show notes for that. And we actually just before recording this podcast episode, we just came off recording the monthly Q and a session. So if you're joining on the $5 tier level on Patrion, you can actually get access to a exclusive monthly Q and a session.
And you can also ask us questions and we will record some good answers for you
Narrator (14m 39s): and onto today's topic.
Autumn (14m 43s): Info dumping. Yeah, we have to not dump. Info we'll, I'll try to explain what it even is. Yeah, I
Jesper (14m 52s): know that a few different types of year. So for example, you could be talking about backstory and for dumping, uh, you could talk about wealth building, info dumping, and then there's also emotional infidelity thing
Autumn (15m 6s): and where do you put historic? There's often people who want that backstory set us the world building stuff for science. I guess it is, I was thinking about it a little bit differently, but I guess in a way it really is what came before. So that's part of world-building.
Jesper (15m 20s): Yeah, indeed. I mean, but maybe, maybe we should start out by defining what info dump in is and then also just say why is it an issue to do infidelity?
Autumn (15m 32s): Absolutely. I think that is important. I know for you know, I have to go ahead and Google like with the official definition is maybe you'll do that while I'm talking, but to me it's, it's when you're reading and you get to a part that it's not a plot of the novel, it's not action. It suddenly this, you know, it's not just a couple sentences, it's paragraph. Sometimes pages of information that really doesn't do anything to move the story forward. And that is my personal definition of info dumping.
And I'm not sure if it says something different online.
Jesper (16m 8s): Hmm. No, not really. There's just a lot of opinions. Uh, but, but I, I think, um, info dumping. So that's basically where you are. You're selling the reader some information. So this could be something, as I, as I just said, look, you know, character backstory, it could be something to do with the world as such, or some about how a certain kingdom works or a religion or magic system or whatever it may be. Am or it could be, ah, well my emotional stuff, like, uh, how the reader feels about something, but when it's done, as in not in the narrative of the story, but it's just you the writer telling to the reader that, okay, so this kingdom over here works like this and that, or it was actually the soda 200 years ago, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
You know, that sort of thing is info dumping. Where's there's nothing wrong with telling the reader that blah, blah, blah. Happened 200 years ago. If it's because one character is telling it to another character who doesn't know it, then it's absolutely fine and it's not an info dump but it's an infrared on if if it's just you getting it across to the reader because you need to maybe just tell it because you think it's important to the story and maybe it is important to just oil but then it is sort of the mechanism or the the way that you're delivering the information that defines if it's an info dump or not.
Cause that makes sense.
Autumn (17m 37s): That does. I think the telling is really the key thing. You are just giving the reader information without having it be an active part of the plot. The characters not going through it. It's not dialogue and even the dialogue, you have to be careful because if you have the characters saying and in dialogue, but again, it has really no impact on the story or it's just this tiny, you know, it's like almost reading a bedtime story where someone's relating information that you're just like, and they're saying it in a way that is not natural and they're just piling on like a monologue and a superhero's fill.
It doesn't work that way. You don't want a whole monologue of saying, well, you know, you have to remember you, even though you've known this since you were five years old, that this happened 200 years ago and that is why we're doing this now. No, that's still, that's still info dumping. I don't care if it's in dialogue, if the character should know it, they should come across as knowing it. Um, even if it's like, well, you remember or something. Yeah, it's very difficult. But definitely the telling, I think you hit the key aspect there that it's something that goes on for a long time, that it may or may not have something to do with the plot of the novel.
It had, could have some key part of it, but you're just telling it to the reader instead of showing it or having the characters somehow demonstrate it and show it. And that's a huge issue. And why, why, why do you think, why does it bother you? Yes, for sure.
Jesper (19m 2s): Uh, three things. I would say not one, but three things. Why am I not surprised you on the list already? I always have lists. I'm, I'm always, I love making lists and all that, you know, that especially to do lists. No. But okay. Three things. So one, um, info dumps simply stops the forward momentum of the story. So we, it sort of breaks the story and then you're getting this paragraph of 200 years ago in a kingdom far, far away.
And it's like, yeah, okay. But what happened to the fight that was just about to happen? So it just breaks the momentum and that's not good. The other thing is that it removes the Rida from sort of the story world, if we can call it that. So it pulls the reader out of the story and because as soon as you start reading info dumps on a page, you're not immersed in the story anymore. You sort of, as a reader, you're, you're pulling yourself out of it and then you're reading some, some facts stuff, yadda. Okay, I see. I see. Okay. And then you're getting back and trying to get back into the story in it.
And every time you pull the reader out of the story, that's not good. You want to keep them in merge so that they keep just flipping pages and one, see what's happening next. So that's why it's important not to deliver the information as an input on, but as part of the narrative of the story. And then thirdly,
Autumn (20m 22s): yeah, it's just boring. It's a good reason I had to fit. That's, I think that's one of my pet peeves is one that you lose the momentum and the T. V you know, that bond with the reader or the character cause I mean that's why I'm reading a stories. I like the character and usually it has nothing to do with the character or anything that's happening in all those emotions in grand things. It's just facts. And honestly, when I hit, um, if I, if I keep reading the story, you know, the first info John per two, I can probably get through it and I will honestly skipped pages.
I'll keep scanning through it and I don't read the crap anyway. But then if it starts happening too many times, that's it. I just, you know, that's when your to do list comes up and you're like, I really should be doing laundry. Why am I reading this right now? I'm not enjoying it anymore. Away he goes the book and off I end up doing other things, walking the dog because I remembered I didn't walk the dog today. So yeah, that's, it's a big issue. If you have too many of these things, readers will one skip it. So if they're not getting the information anyway and two, they might just be close in the novel and goodness knows of you, they closed the novel on something that wasn't exciting, they might not ever come back to it.
That's a big problem.
Jesper (21m 40s): Yeah, absolutely. And so the question is, okay, if we all agree that this is a problem, I think based on what we just talking about, probably most people can sort of recognize themselves as readers when they are subjected to info Thompson and recognize that it's not something we want to do. So I guess the question is why do we write info dumps if, if, if all of this is, is something that maybe we are more or less aware of. Uh, and, and personally I think it's because of movies because you know, if, uh, if for example, if we take the matrix, for example, yeah.
So in, in the matrix, the, when Morpheus is introducing new to the crew of the neighborhood, what is it called? Never can Nisa or something like that. The strip basically. So in that scene, in that scene there you have the camera panning over the crew and while the pan, the camera pans over the crew, more fuel system telling you about each of the crew neck crooner members, uh, and then basically also the viewer, meaning you watching it then. So you get to know each one.
But the thing is that it's not boring because we have the visual medium to support the introduction of each character. We can see what they look like, what they're doing and get the medium in. Movies are just different than books. But I think we are getting too much influenced by the movies and then we think that we're gonna we kind of have to replicate that in our books as well.
Autumn (23m 10s): I agree. And I also think often it's excitement on the part of the writer there just there's this cool world they developed or this, you know, interesting backstory. Like we were saying like 200 years ago in the time of the gods, blah blah blah. You've, it's almost like, you know, the setting up the prologue. But if it's not important in the story, if it's not inter woven into the whole fabric of the world, yeah, you don't need to show it.
It's, I, I like, I've often tell young writers, new writers that you have the space of the novel, 100,000 words to share your world. Don't try to fit it into the first chapter. You just want to kind of spread out those amazing things. Like today about this world, I just discovered those. There's a plant called purple, purple Berry. Um, there's a plant that actually produces these really cool purple berries. I didn't know that about this world. It took me until I was 45 to discover this ornamental plant.
That's amazing. That's what you want to do for your readers. You want to put the purple Berry, you know, way back there and hopefully just the middle of the novel that the discover this stuff as they go. So it's still new and exciting on page 345 as it was on page three. So that's to me what's important with info dumping is learning to spread out those descriptions and not being so excited to tell everyone about this really cool thing you, you created and wrote and developed in page two or three.
Because if you're that excited, you probably, you're too excited about your world. You need to back up and look at your characters and your novel and your story and make sure that those are really what's driving it forward and not just a showcase for the amazing world you developed, which it should be amazing, but that's not what you're telling the story. No, true, true.
Jesper (25m 3s): Um, actually, um, I have, um, I have an audio clip queued up here that we can listen to and you don't even know what it is. Autumn no, I dealt with this is kinda you, you hinted about this before we started recording and you're like, Oh, I'm not gonna tell you quite curious. I'll let you found and prepared for us. Yeah. Because I, I prepared a bit of an audio clip here, which I think serves as an excellent example of what I just said before on why I think it is that, uh, we authors sometimes get into wanting to do these input.
Dumps and, uh, this is an info dump. It's an info Don from a very, very famous fantasy story, but I promise you it's awesome and you're going to like it. Okay, let's go. Okay. So, um, I think autumn and myself will go on mute here so we don't accidentally cough. And then, uh, while, uh, while we do that, you dear listener, you just sort of sit back and relax and just enjoy these next few moments.
Lord of the Rings (26m 14s): The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feed it, I smell it.
It began with the forging of the great rings. Three were given to the Elves immortal, wisest and fairest of all beings. Seven to the dwarf Lords, great minors and craftsmen of the mountain halls and nine, nine rings were gifted to the race of men who above all else, desire power. For within these rings was bound the strength and will to govern each race, but they were all of them deceived for another ring was made in the land of model and the fires of Mt.
Dew, the dark Lord sold on forged in secret mastering to control all of this and into this ring he poured. His cruelty is malice and his will to dominate all life. One ring to rule them all, one by one, three lambs to the power of the ring. But there was some, who is this?
Did I lost Alliance of men marched against the armies of more doors and on the slopes of Mt. Dew they fought for the freedom of middle earth.
Victory wasn't here. The power of the ring could not be undone.
It was in this moment when all hope had faded at eco door, son of the King took up his father's saw song.
The enemy of the free peoples of middle earth was defeated.
Jesper (30m 11s): Oh, that stuff just gives me goosebumps is I would say for an info dump, it is spectacular. But that's because they're throwing in sound effects and if you're actually watching and visuals. So that makes it an exciting info dump and an important piece of history that goes with the Lord of the rings. Yeah, I mean it is so awesome and I, I think that this is exactly why, especially probably new writers want to do the same in the novel, that they want to replicate this stuff.
But as you just say, you know what, with this info dump here, you have of course the visuals when you're watching it. But even without the visual, just listening to it like this still gives me the goosebumps. But it has, you know, it has to great, great music. It has the awesome voice acting. So you know, all of that is, it's just not there on the page when, when, when you write it, I mean, you cannot replicate this stuff on the peso. As I said before, the medium of movies and the medium of books, it's just different and you cannot copy it.
No, I agree. Yeah, it's, you can't, it's totally different medium and yeah, it you, we cannot recreate, maybe if you're doing an audio book and you're throwing in the sound effects and you have it in amazing narrator, but it's probably just best to avoid it. And I have to admit, my mind started wandering towards the end because yeah, once I figured it out and then they get into the, all the girly stuff in there, it was like, okay come on, let's get to the point people. So you know, even, and then I actually found myself wondering, I'm like okay 3d the elves, seven till the dorms, nine to people, why people get nine and only helps only got three cause there's less ELLs.
So you know, my mind is already like just trying to unpack something with numbers instead of fully listening to the war effects. So that's the problem with info dumps that can happen, that can happen. But one of course I think we also need to be mindful when we are listening to it. We are listening to it as writers. So how mine works a bit different, we automatically start analyzing it. Worse. The reader won't do that. They will just enjoy it. That's true. That is true. I mean I've ever seen ever since I started writing watching movies has also been broken for me because I cannot watch a movie without starting analyzing at my, sometimes my wife gets so annoyed with it, she's like, okay, so who is the killer?
And I say, well it's this and that person and she's laughing, be screaming at the screen, you know, plotting
Autumn (32m 40s): this character and Stoli though was Oh yeah, you just don't get me started about really horrible script. Writing
Jesper (32m 49s): yeah, yeah. So of course I think in all honesty we need to be mindful that, that we don't use stories as, as as readers. I mean we of course read us ourselves but but you do get into the habit of analyzing stuff w which you won't do if you're just a normal sort of reader. If I could put it like that
Autumn (33m 7s): you trying to think about just, you know, we're creating this for a reader, not for a reader who's also a writer. Cause you can never determine if people, you, how many books they've read. This could be their first ever novel, probably not. But you want to at least kind of consider who your ideal reader is and there are a reader, not a writer. So hopefully the next sort of pulling apart everything on you.
Jesper (33m 29s): Yeah. So maybe in terms of getting into how we can avoid, avoid info dumping a, I also actually wanted to mention another movie. Have you watched the inception with Leonardo DiCaprio?
Autumn (33m 41s): I think I have, but I can't remember. So it's not coming straight to the top of my mind, but I know the title,
Jesper (33m 49s): right? Yeah, it's a really, really good movie. Um, but I think even though it's a movie, uh, and again, I, I just said it was not at the same medium as a perk. I think it's still a good example to, to share, uh, information with the reader. I mean, how it does it well, because the concept of inception is quite complex. It's, it's these characters who are moving around in not just one dream but like multiple layers of dreams and you so you could dream within the dream to get the print stuff.
It's pretty complex. Um, yet, you know, when the movie takes us beginning you, you could start out by explaining all that stuff and probably the view as well as, as a reader of a book, we'll sort of tune out in the Lego. Okay. But we don't get any long explanations in the beginning of this movie of how this shared dreaming actually works. Instead they just start out with tension. So there's one character is telling another one how it's important to train your mind to not be vulnerable to idea theft.
So it's just this very brief dialogue and, and then bam, we are right into the story and we know that somebody can steal your secret thoughts through. She had dreams somehow and that's it. And then we just take it from there. And I think that's a good example.
Autumn (35m 6s): I think that's a good one. And if, if people like, uh, shows sensate sorta does the same thing. It's these groups of people, seven to eight individuals that basically can share, um, sort of minds and memories and actually, you know, actual present. They can basically be there and talking to people. It's almost like having your, you know, your best friend with you. They can just literally be there and in the same room, but to go from a new washer who doesn't know that too, learning that it's sort of, the characters are sort of growing and learning this and how it all works.
And they do a beautiful job that by the time you get to the end where you know, they're basically fighting a battle and there's other sensei, it's, and it's amazing that they, you know, you've gone from not doing thinking it's a normal world and that you might be losing your mind because something weird, you're starting to hear voices in your head to having a powerful group who takes down the enemy because you're actually eight individuals. It's amazing. And they do a wonderful job. There was never an info dump in it at all.
So that's another good example. If someone wants to look at a series. Yeah. Uh, probably a rule of thumb might be that you know that you need much less inflammation in the beginning of a story than you actually think in order to keep the reader engaged because you might naturally start thinking, well, okay, I need to explain this and then I also need to explain that because otherwise it won't make much sense, but in all honesty, the Rita won't need need to half of what you think they need because they will also build the, they will build a lot of the context in their own mind as they start reading and then you can sort of see it in the bits that they need to know as the story runs along rather than giving them paragraph upon paragraph at the start because it's really not necessary.
Yeah, I think that's, those are really my two. I have two rules with really writing an information and one is that you should never have two sentences of description or it's something that's non-action. Even history, two sentences. Any more than that strung together, stop. Just stop. It should all be threaded in the description, the history. It should be mixed in with the dialogue. It should be mixed in with action. You know, they're in a Tavern, whatever it is, you described them pacing across the wooden floor or the other patrons. You have other things going on. You don't need to just simply tell the reader that it's a 200 year old Tavern and it has wooden floors, you know, make the character's experience it so that the reader feels it through the characters.
So it should all be about showing. And the other big one is that you just need to, Oh, you know what, it just popped totally out of my mind. That's so funny. Anyway, I, you know, that's what I call with all the moving and everything else going on. But I think the other one, curiosity, that is what I was going to say. The problem with info dumps is you're killing curiosity. In fact, you're really making people board and what you want, especially at the beginning of the novel is curiosity. You know, you have action happening and you're not really explaining why it's working.
You know, you have a demon busting through a door and someone throws something at it that makes it evaporate. They know what happened, but they don't know why, and maybe they're going to be curious as to why this object could do this too. This poltergeists thing. That's perfect. The last thing you want to do is explain why it worked and why it was blessed by so-and-so. And this happened 300 years ago and turn it into this and there's this piece of this st in barked. Oh my God, that's so boring. You just want it to work.
So those first chapters, especially the last thing you want to do as an info dump, what you want to do is actually really be careful with your information and just Dole it out. So slowly so that the reader is curious. They want to know what else they're going to learn, what else is going to happen, and why is this all happening in working that makes them excited. So that's why info dumps at the beginning especially, can just kill that curiosity. You explain it all in the first five pages and they're like, okay, story's done.
I don't need the next 95% of the novel. Oh, well,
Jesper (39m 23s): yup. So I think maybe to summarize where we could say, don't confuse the written media with movies. It is not the same thing. Do not try to replicate what they're doing this and uh, find ways to share information with the Rita that aren't telling them what they need to know, but it's instead shit through the plot moving forward and character speaking to one another. So next Monday, autumn and I will share with social media networks we love the most for hiders.
Narrator (39m 58s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the amwritingfantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join autumn and Yesper on patrion.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the amwritingfantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Editor and writing coach C.S. Lakin joins the Am Writing Fantasy podcast.
She shares great insights as to how an author can master the emotional craft of fiction.
Readers want to feel with the character.
Readers read to not only be entertained, but also to have the characters and the story affect them.
Episode 47 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast is full of advice and useful writing tips.
Here's the links mentioned in the episode:
https://www.livewritethrive.com/
https://cslakin.teachable.com/p/emotional-mastery-for-fiction-writers/
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
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Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to the amwritingfantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need in literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing join to best selling authors who have self-published more than 20 books between them. Now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello. I am Jesper. And this is episode 47 of the amwritingfantasy podcast. And today I'm joined by Susanne Lakin, who knows some of the secrets about showing emotion in characters in order to evoke emotions in the reader. And I know that you are a novelist, a copy editor, writing coats, and you also teach workshops on the writing craft. So welcome to the amwritingfantasy podcast.
Susanne (57s): Thank you for having me.
Jesper (60s): I did a bit of stalking on the internet and I saw that, I saw that you live in California near San Francisco, but maybe you can tell us just a bit more about yourself.
Susanne (1m 13s): Uh, sure. Yeah. I live South of San Francisco in California. Um, and I'm born and raised in California, but, uh, I've been writing pretty much my whole life. I was raised by a mother who was a top television screenwriter and then, um, my brother also went into that profession. So I am was around a lot of filming and reading scripts and movies and all that kind of stuff. So my early introduction, aside from reading books on my own was to read a lot of screenplays.
So I have a different type of attitude or approach toward fiction writing sometimes than others because I think very cinematically and I think in terms of camera shots and, um, just a very cinematic, uh, visualization of my scenes and I tried to teach that method through a lot of my books and my blog posts. Um, I think the emotion topic is one that's really important. It's not discussed much. There isn't much out there. When I started researching online about that, I wanted to put something together because I feel of all the things that are tied in with reading and writing is the idea that we have an emotional response to what we read.
And so all my life I've been reading and writing and loving books and wanting to figure out how I can move readers with my writing. So as far as, you know, that's kind of my whole upbringing in terms of my approach to writing and reading. Um, I also, I'm married, I have a couple of grown kids. Uh, I have a couple of grandkids actually and I have a dog who is old and needs a lot of attention, big that lab and I have a few cats. Um, I love to backpack and snowboard. I'm real outdoorsy kind of person.
Um, I also am the, uh, yeah, I was going to say I'm also the fiction coordinator for the prestigious San Francisco writer's conference, which is a top writers conference in America. So I put that whole thing together every year and that's super fun.
Jesper (3m 17s): Oh yeah. Cool. Yeah, it was funny you were talking about am at the out outdoorsy type of person and whatnot because autumn, my cohost TAC that she does a lot of, uh, of traveling around as well and seeing nature and all that. So, uh, that's something I'm sometimes quite envious when I see her pictures. You post on Facebook because I live in Denmark and he is just flat. We don't have any mountains. Only nice, nice nature like that. So yeah, it, there's some very beautiful areas around the, in the U S
Susanne (3m 47s): yeah, I would think that Denmark would have some beautiful places too. I haven't been there, but I would love to go. Uh, I don't get out of my cage very often. So, um, you know, maybe one day I'll get over there when, you know, one thing about writing fantasy too, since you know, this is what your podcast is about, I really think it's important for writers to get out in nature and to just sort of explore the world with wonder because all the fantasy writing fantasy and creating fantasy worlds requires so much imagination and an immersion of our senses that I think sometimes if we just locked up in an office space or bedroom or wherever we work all the time, it's really hard for us to get in touch with that wonder and the imagination, you know, that comes from exploring the world outside.
So that's just a thought that kind of popped into my head. But I know that for me, a lot of the inspiration for my fantasy books came from my time in nature, especially in the woods, like being alone in the woods, backpacking, um, grew up on fairy tales, which many of them were set in your part of the world in Europe. Uh, you know, where most of the fairy tales are about little cottages in the woods and there's like magic woods. And so because I'm a fairy tale writer, I really need to get into nature and feel that experience at the smells, the sounds, all of that.
Jesper (5m 7s): Yeah. Yeah. There's also something about just the fact that when you're out outside, you know, moving, moving around and of course some, some good scenery will help but, but just the, just uh, the fact that you're walking about and get some wind in your face and whatnot, that that actually helps them on creativity as well. In my, in my view, yes. Yeah, it does. Yeah. But, uh, so now I know that you run the live write thrive.com website where you also actually have a course on showing character emotions.
And that was really a topic that caught my eye and because basically we haven't really covered, you know, character emotions and how to show it and how to get evoke emotions in, in the readers well here on the podcast before. So I am really so glad that you agreed to come on for a conversation about this particular topic
Susanne (5m 58s): here. Yeah, I'm happy to talk about it. As I mentioned, um, a lot of times when I read a book, I have about 10 nonfiction books, writing craft books in my writer's Roger toolbox series on novel writing. Mostly I think all of them are about in all of novel writing except crank it out, which is just about writing in general. But usually I get the idea for a book or a course because I can't find enough information out there, you know, on the internet or out in the ether to, um, really be instructive and deep for writers emotion is as a really good example because if you search online for information on how to evoke emotions and characters had to show emotion how to get readers to feel emotion, there's almost nothing out there.
So it got me thinking about how I react to reading what, what moves me when I read a book and I spent, you know, quite a few weeks just exploring my own feelings in, in, um, thinking about the books that moved me, the scenes that move me, going back to chapters that I know would make me cry and try to analyze why I felt the way I felt or how the writer was able to accomplish that. It was like magic to me.
And I talk about that a lot of my course, which is called emotional mastery for fiction writers because the whole idea is we want to capture that technique, that skill. And Hemingway said it best when he said that when you read something that moves you emotionally steady how it was done, study how that writer did it, then you copy it and you do it yourself so that you can create the same effect in your readers. Now that sounds a lot easier said than done and it is. But in the same sense, it's really not that hard because if you can tap into what moves you emotionally, generally we all are affected in pretty much the same ways.
In other words, if something moves me in a big way, something I read, no doubt it's gonna move a lot of other people, it's not going to move everybody. Some people just aren't moved at all. They can read something that just everyone's sobbing away in a, in a room or we were even at a movie for instance, you know, you could go to a movie and there was like a really emotionally moving scene and everybody's, you know, teared up and there's always going to be a few people that go, eh, whatever. And there's just not moved at all. So you're not gonna please everybody. But the idea is that there are universal feelings, right?
There are universal emotions that we all share. There's universal responses that we share. Um, you know, growing up in the film industry, you know, there was always this unwritten rule, or maybe it was written, I don't know. I think people break it now, but in the good old days when there were morals and ethics to things, um, the role was you never hurt or killed a child or an animal in a movie or a TV show because people got really mad, right? You don't kill a child. You don't, you know, hurt a child. I mean, you might, you might imply that a child's being hurt and then the good guys go stop the guys from doing that.
But, um, you never, you know, show a child die or an animal die. Uh, and that rule is broken sometimes, but you get why, I mean, it's because it's so upsetting to people. And we all in general society in general, we react emotionally to certain things that we, um, you know, that we share those feelings. So that's part of the approach to become an emotional master in your fiction writing is if you mind your own feelings, you mind them, go deep into your own feelings and you analyze what moves you and how it moves you, then you can copy what the writer did.
A, in a basic sense, you know, not word for word, but see what the writer did and how it moved you and then you try to do that yourself. So in my core site, use about 40 different passages from different genres of different novels. And I go through these passages, we read them and analyze them, break them down. And one of the main teaching techniques that I always emphasize, regardless of what I'm teaching, is for writers to grab bestseller books and there's genre and tear them apart.
You know, get the highlighter pen out. If you don't want to use an ebook and highlight on your Kindle or whatever, I just say go to a used bookstore, find a whole bunch of old cheap paperbacks and get some highlighter pens out and Mark things up, Mark up the lines that move you, that move you emotionally like Mark up the lines that show emotion in the characters. So there's two types of elements we're talking about here. We're talking about showing, emotion and characters and then you know, evoking emotion and readers. So those are two completely different things.
And most of the time, the emotion that the character is showing is not the emotion. You want the reader to feel right. You might have a character that is showing, you know, despair because she's, you know, been thrown by the wayside. A child that's been left abandoned or something and that child is feeling despair. But you want your reader to be angry, or you might want your reader to be outraged or, uh, scared for that child. You know? And a lot of times emotions are very complex, so you don't want to just sit down and name an emotion go, Oh, I want my character to feel scared.
And so I'm going to say she's scared. Emotions are so complex that this is why it's so important to do what Hemingway said, which was to look at how the writer wrote a passage and then look at how you're feeling. A lot of times you can't name what you're feeling, you know? So our feelings are very difficult to pinpoint and to understand. And they're usually very layered. We might be angry on the surface, but underneath we're hurt or scared. Anger usually masks other emotions. So there's a lot to learn about the emotional landscape of ourselves and of our characters.
And, um, one other thing that I talk about at length extensively, um, in the course is that emotions can be shown lots of different ways and characters but there's effective ways and there's not so effective ways. So when we read passages where, where a character is doing all this body language, you know, their throat is clenched and tears are pouring out there gasping and they're moaning and their heart is pounding on their chest and their palms are sweaty. Yeah. I mean it goes on and on and on.
After while that stuff gets really tedious and it ends up being counter effective, you know, instead of making a reader feel emotion, they just, well, the emotion they feel is irritated but not the writer was hoping for. So the idea is that, um, you need to learn these tools and skills of how to show emotion and characters. There's, um, there's showing emotion by body language, right? Like I just mentioned, punching fish or whatever. And there's also am the emotion that your point of view character notices in other characters.
So there's a different emotional, um, pallet that's being put together here in a scene. So we don't just see the character, the point of view character emoting by their body language. But we also, they're also noticing what other characters are feeling and they're assuming what those emotions are too. So you have that kind of dynamic going on. Um, you can also tell emotions and it can be very effective. I have a module that's all about how you can effectively tell an emotion or name and emotion there's nothing wrong with a character saying I am scared, but it has to be in the right moment and it has to be fit the character.
Cause I'll tell you just honestly, you know, uh, there's a lot of people that aren't in touch with their emotions and you know, I don't mean to be sexist or anything, but you know, guys have like struggles a lot of times with naming their emotions. You know, they're not going to be, some guys I should say are not going to be quick to saying, gee, you know, I really am jealous and I'm not just jealous, but I'm kind of hurt right now. You know, they're not going to just come out and say that in a conversation. You know, maybe I have an example of a little passage I wrote with a friend that might come over to a guy saying, Hey, you're really jealous. I can tell, you know, and, and then he says, yeah, sure, I'm jealous.
You know, you'd be jealous too. You know? So I mean, that's more, that's feels more believable than having a typical person, male or female. Just sit there and go, gee, I am feeling really jealous right now. And I think I'm also feeling hurt, you know? I mean, for the most part, we don't sit and stop and psychoanalyze ourselves, especially in the middle of action. Right?
Jesper (14m 17s): Yeah, indeed. But, but there's also a huge difference between, I mean, w w what you just said that I, I fully agree with, but if the coater is seeing in as part of dialogue that I'm feeling hurt or I'm angry or whatever, that is perfectly fine. Um, but there was a huge difference between doing that as part of the dialogue versus you as the author telling the reader, now this guy's angry. You know, does that testing worked very well?
Susanne (14m 47s): Right. And, and the other thing that's important to tie in with what you just said is that when we're writing in deep point of view, writers don't realize that the entire scene is in that character's mind and voice. So when you're writing a scene and D point of view, all the narrative, every word, every line has to sound like the character. It's exactly the characters thoughts, whether you're in first person or third person. So you know, if a character is going, if you're going to say in the, in the, in the running text, um, Joan was angry.
That is really her thought at that moment. It has to feel like she's, you know, realizing that she's angry. Um, I don't know how better to put it, but there are exact, they are examples that I use to show how to do that well. Um, so in addition to showing, bodily emotion or physical tells to indicate emotion and the, and here's another thing that the character himself may not really be aware of the physical tells that he's displaying and what emotions that means. For instance, you can have a character in talking to somebody and he's, he, he's his clenched fists are clenched.
Okay. So we see that as the reader and he's aware of it because you're in his point of view. So you can't really show anything that he's doing in his body if he's not aware of it. Right? Like you can't say he didn't realize it, but as physical clench, you know, obviously he has to know his fists are clenched, but we don't, he might not know why his fists are clenched. You know, the, he might be clenching his fists, but the reader can get a sense of what's going on with him and make those assumptions of what kind of emotion is being shown. But if I just show my fist clenched, you don't have any idea what that impetus is.
You know what's behind that, right? Are you can kind of guess.
Jesper (16m 36s): Yeah, yeah, I agree. And there was also some, some part of denial and this you know, is especially the anchor element comes into mind. Again here you know that somebody, you know, maybe he has that clenched fist, uh, but, and then somebody will tell him that you are angry and then he will be like, I'm not angry. You know, that, that, that sort of denial element is, is also then I think that can work quite effectively as well.
Susanne (16m 59s): Yes. And so there's three basic ways that you can convey emotion in your characters and I mentioned two of them. One is the physical tells and then one is actually telling the emotion naming the emotion. But the best and most effective way to show emotion. And I reiterate this over and over and over with many, many passages. Samples is by using the characters spots, you can, you can write an entire scene that is so emotionally riveting and makes sure readers just anguished and you only show what their character is thinking.
And you never once show their heart pounding or tears coming to their eyes or sighing or moaning or groaning or anything else physical. The thoughts are the most powerful way that we can convey emotion. And they're the, they're the best way because they generate all those complex emotional feelings that we can't name. So when you have a character that's thinking about how they did something long ago and because of it, somebody was hurt, you know, maybe they forgot to pick up their kid from school or whatever, and then the child, you know, kidnapped, I mean, whatever.
Um, when you go through the thought process with the character, the reader starts feeling all these emotions because they're, they're visualizing what's being said. They're putting themselves in that character's shoes. And, um, it's the experience that creates the emotion. So if I'm reading about a character that's going through something and I'm hearing what they're thinking, I start going through that with them. And that's where the empathy, you know, connects where between reader and writer and character.
So, um, you can use all three and I give lots of examples of passages, you know, we highlight these different passages and you can see, and you can do this too, again, with those paperback books that you pick up from your friendly use bookstore just to, um, highlight in one color for instance, all the examples are tells of body language that are in the scene, you know, so anytime a character, you know, his throat gets tight or you know, they um, they sigh, you can highlight that and you can see how often that's being used by this particular writer.
Or maybe this is a bestselling writer in your Shaundra and you want to write the way they write. So this is how you can kind of get a feel for the distribution of these different lines and phrases and even words that can convey emotion. So you have that. Then you might have an instance where the character might name his emotion at the moment. Doesn't happen very often. It's very rare, but it is useful and it's good to know how to do it and win. But then when you look at the thoughts and you start highlighting in a different color, all the thoughts that evoke emotion in you as a reader, all the thoughts that imply the, an emotional feeling in the character, all of a sudden you start seeing this emotional landscape start coming to life.
And it's really fantastic. It's a great exercise to do. Just grab one of your favorite books and just start highlighting, especially the thoughts with the characters thinking that makes you feel something and makes and shows that they're feeling something. Um, even just a word or a phrase can do that. And um, I think a lot of times writers, especially beginning writers, don't understand the power of thoughts. They, they feel that they must, right? Uh, at least every other line has to be some sort of body language to imply emotion.
But you know, honestly, you don't need barely any of it. I like to throw in a few things here and there because I feel it's, it helps punch home an emotional feeling. But, um, you, you know, try as an exercise, just try writing a scene without using any of that, but using thoughts and seeing how much emotion you can convey from your character via that characters thoughts and also how much emotion you can, you know, affect into, in your reader or in yourself as you're writing. Um, it's a really eye opening exercise.
Jesper (20m 58s): Hmm. Do you have any thoughts around how much or how little you should try to, you know, use to three different ones or do you think it really does matter? It completely depends on how you want to write or, or am I hearing that you're saying you should be most focusing on conveying emotions with the thoughts and then maybe sprinkle in a bit of the other ones or how do you see that?
Susanne (21m 21s): Yeah. Yeah. I, I exactly, I think you should rely mostly on thoughts, but again, what you want to do is grab those best-selling novels that you love. I mean I have, my favorite fantasy writer is Patricia MacKillop and I just, she's just the most amazing writer in the world to me. And for years I've tried to copy how she writes, you know, my dream when I grow up is to be like her, right? So, um, I study her books, I tear them apart, I look at the language and the imagery and I think about how I feel emotionally as I react to her writing and her characters.
And so for me, when I was writing my seven but fantasy series, I would always go back to her books and just study them. And I would make lists and lists of like for phrases, not because I wanted to take her phrases and put them in my books, but I wanted to just study how she put those together so that I could copy the idea and get the same effect. It's just, it really is helpful to, you know, if you've got those writers that you love and you want to have your book stand up right next to their books to do this type of exercise.
Because maybe like for instance, if you're writing romance and maybe it's a fantasy romance, but romance will usually show a lot more body language for emotion and it will also be packed with a lot of thoughts that generate emotion, you know? And so, um, if you're writing a suspense thriller, you may go pages without any line at all that shows any emotion. You just might have a lot of action. Now the action also implies emotion. You know, if you know, if a person, you know, here's something behind a door, kicks in the door and runs over to somebody and grabs him by the throat and throttles them, you can guess that that person is feeling some sort of emotion.
You don't have to hear their thoughts. You don't have to know that their fists are clenched or that their anger is welling up in their gut or their heart is pounding heart in their chest. You can just watch the action and you can tell. So keep that in mind. That action is a great way to show emotion. And so a lot of times you can just show what's going on in a scene between characters and you don't have to even get into the thoughts. You don't have to get into the body. Physical tells, um, you know, that tell the character or the reader that there's a specific emotion that's being experienced.
So, you know, again, when you're reading through these books, when you're studying these bestsellers, look for those, look for those bits of action that some very specific emotion uh, you'll be amazed at what you find. Uh, it's at first, you know, sometimes readers say, well, I don't see anything. I'm not seeing any physical tells and I'm not really seeing an action. And then they start digging in deeper and they pull back and think, okay, what actually happened on this page? Um, if it's boring writing if you know, then you might not see anything that's really tapping into motion.
Because to me, if you don't, if you don't show characters feeling inner conflict, because it's really all about conflict, you know, when we feel emotion we're conflicted about something and if we can't get our readers to feel some sort of emotion, then obviously we're failing. There's something that's just not coming across that tends to happen when we have scenes that are very predictable, boring, ordinary on the nose type of scenes where the characters are sitting around eating. You might be in a fantasy book. Okay. So they're in the woods and they're sitting around by the campfire and they're talking about, you know, that they're going to cook tomatoes or whatever it was that, um, salmon, uh, and um, Mary they were doing, they were doing up on whether top or whatever.
Uh, yeah, I mean if that scene was just about, you know, here I have some cooked tomatoes and you know, it would be really boring. There wouldn't be any emotion. But instead we see Frodo freaking out. Like, Oh my goodness, what are you doing? You made a fire, don't do that. And all of a sudden the, the black writers come and there's a big, you know, attack and you know, that is packed full of emotion so that, you know, the, the action is, you know, it needs to be evoking that emotion or evoking that tension, creating tension between characters inner conflict, you know, inside a character, all of those different elements.
So, um, yeah, this is covering a lot of stuff, but yeah.
Jesper (25m 28s): Yeah. And dude, but I also think that there is an important point around that action part because it's not, it depends on depending on what happens in the particular scene, but if you are in the middle of some sort of action sequence, maybe the characters are fighting or whatever they are doing. I mean, I think there, it's also important as the writer, not to get too much into, uh, the, uh, OK. I should show emotions by thought because in the middle of the fight, the character will not start thinking about what, how they feel about it.
They will just do stuff. So, so, so there is also that element to be mindful about that. You don't start showing the character thinking about emotions in situations where that just is not natural to do,
Susanne (26m 14s): right? Yeah. There's usually like visceral, uh, brief thoughts that might pop in when somebody grabs you from behind or smacks you in the face. Like, ouch, that hurt. Yeah. I have a am I have a module on my course, which is, you can see it for free too. So if anybody's listening to this and they want to just go pop over to my online school and just watch a 38 minute free module, you can do that by just scrolling down and clicking on the preview. And I put this module up for free because it's one of the most important things that I teach that I never have heard anybody else teach about.
But it's, I find it really essential and it's very eyeopening for a lot of writers and it's basically what I call the action reaction cycle. Um, what that entails to me is that everything we do all day long is done in this cycle, right? Something happens or we do something and then there's a reaction. So you have an action than a reaction. But what follows the reaction is the processing of that reaction.
Okay. So, uh, I give the example of let's say there's, um, your character is in the kitchen and she hears a crash. Okay? So that's the action. Her immediate visceral reaction is, Oh no, what was that? Right. So there's always, there's two parts to reaction. When is the immediate visceral reaction, which, you know, you might get that in a high action scene with like fighting scene like we were just talking about where there's only time for the visceral, there's only time for that immediate quick action because quickly you have to make a decision and move on to another action.
So, um, so the character, here's the vase fall over, a crash goes, Oh no, what is that? That's the first initial reaction. And then she runs into the room and she sees the cat has knocked the vase over from the table onto her laptop and all the water is just pouring all over the laptop. Okay. So now there's an extended reaction, right? Characters like, Oh my gosh, my laptop. Oh, you stupid cat. You know, so maybe whatever they're thinking, but this reaction now is more extensive because she's taking in this situation and that's leading to emotion, right?
So she first she's shocked. Maybe you're a little bit startled by the sound. And then when she sees her, what really happened? Now she's feeling more emotions, uh, conflicted emotions. She's upset, she's angry, she's freaking out because her dissertation is on there and that she hasn't backed it up to the cloud. Right? So there's all these emotions going on. So you have action reaction. And then after the reaction you have the processing. So processing can take a second or it could take three weeks. It could take, you know, an hour.
It really depends on the situation. Um, for instance, like a detective can find a clue and then the whole next chapter can be processing. Okay, what does that clue mean? What, you know, now we understand that, you know, Joe is actually in the, in the bar and he wasn't at the hotel, you know, blah, blah, blah. And there's all this processing that goes with that. So after the processing comes a decision, what am I going to do now with what I just processed? In the case of our character who's laptop is wet, she's going to act really quickly after that reaction.
She's going to swoop down, grab her laptop, shake it out, grab a towel, wipe it off. All the while S swearing at her cat and her thoughts are going to be spinning like, Oh my gosh, my dissertation and if I have to write this again, I'm going to fail. Blah, blah, blah. So there's all these thoughts that are going on, which is part of the processing. Um, and then, um, of course then there's going to be a decision that comes after that. You know, part of the decision in response to the reaction was grabbing the laptop and wiping it off. Of course. So that's just a, again, a visceral decision, but there's usually going to be a more extended decision that happens.
Like, what do I do now? I've, you know, if I've lost my dissertation now what now I'm going to be processing this and having to make a decision. And that decision leads to new action. So it's sort of a five prong step. You have an action reaction process, decision, new action. And if you're writing a high action type scene, like a fight scene, you've got like, you know, some dwarves run into some elves in the forest and they start fighting each other. You and your main character is, you know, trying to, you know, push away all these, you know, horrible creatures and you know, kill a few in the runaway escape.
That action reaction decision thing is going to happen very, very quickly. Like in seconds after seconds after seconds, right? Your character isn't gonna like smash somebody with a sword and they'll sit down and think for five minutes, gee, I wonder what I should do next. Right? But there's other times when you have a low energy scene, right? Where your characters are sitting around talking or they're walking down the road and they are processing like, what are we going to do now? Where are we going to go? Well, if we go here, you know, it's gonna take five more days and we don't have time. This is going to happen. And you know, you need to have those low energy scenes where your characters are talking in their processing and their thinking, but that's going to lead to a decision.
Okay, so now what do we do? Let's go here. Okay, let's go do it. And you know, whatever happens will happen and then you're seeing it. So you can have scenes, um, uh, scene in itself could have this process many, many, many, many times or a scene could be all action and even end inaction. You know, you can have a fight scene and some guy just falls off the side of a cliff and that's how the CNNs or you can end with your character, your point of view, character reacting, uh, where the, his friend falls off the cliff and he goes, Oh man, dude, better you than me.
And just the scene ends right there. You know, um, we see this in a lot of suspense where the scene ends with a visceral reaction. You know, the character finds the dead body. Um, I mean, you might just end in action. Like the character just finds the dead body. And we don't see reaction. But for more emotional punch, you'll notice that really good writers will end a suspense scene with a tiny bit of reaction. You know, the character sees the dead body and gasps, you know, God.
Jesper (32m 29s): Yeah, exactly. Because you also playing on, I mean, as providers, we are thinking about this stuff. So, you know, as right as we thinking about how do humans actually react then, and you're breaking it down nicely in these different, uh, sort of thesis or whatever we want to call it. But, but for, for the reader who doesn't think about these things, they will just pick up on it maybe, you know, so subconsciously they'll know, okay, there's gonna be some sort of a further reaction to this because it leaves in a strange place.
So to beat the, the chapter cuts in a strange place, so, so they will be very inclined to read on just because they just know that there's going to be more, let's say, emotional impact for, from what just happened. Right. So, so that's sort of what you're, what you're playing at day, I think.
Susanne (33m 14s): Yeah. And also, as I mentioned, um, in that example that you know, like let's say there's an avalanche and this guy sees his friend, you know, go off the cliff and the avalanche is going on in the scene right there. If the next scene shows him barreling down the mountain in his car, we, the, the decision is implied, right? He made a decision, I'm going to get the heck out of here before I died next. Right? You don't have to have the characters sit there and go, gee, I better leave the mountain because maybe I'm in a fall in a hole too. You know, if the mountain is falling apart.
So, um, you might not show the processing and decision, but you'll show the effects or the results of the processing and the decision, right? So, um, that's, you know, what happens is if readers read a scene and one of those stages is missing, whether it's implicit or explicit, you are going to, they're gonna, they're gonna feel that something's off. And this is what happens with a lot of the manuscripts. I critique about 200 manuscripts a year.
So I see this a lot, especially with the beginning writers where they're gonna show a scene. You know, somebody runs in and says, George, your, your mother was just hit by a car outside. Um, and George goes, Oh no, what am I going to do? I mean, how am I gonna live? I don't have somebody to earn a living and buy me food. It's like, what? You know, it's like, that's not how you're gonna react. I mean, right. It's their Holy Hubble. So we want to have our characters to act believably. So you have to put yourself in your shoes, in their shoes.
If you had somebody run in and say, you know, Oh my gosh, your mom, your brother, or your mother or your best friend, or your kid was just hit by a car, what is your reaction going to be? Your immediate visceral reactions, just going to be this, this is what you're going to be like, slammed with the shock of it. And you might feel you're gonna feel some body emotion. You might like all of a sudden your, your breath might get caught in your chest or you might gasp, right? Um, you might get dizzy, whatever.
You might fall down. I mean, a lot if you just even say to somebody, it's a mean trick. But if you say to somebody, am, you better sit down, I have some bad news for you. They will physically feel ill, they will fall down or fall into a chair if you'd, if you're a good actor. Right? I mean, it would be, it would be mean to say that to somebody, but this is how we, this is how our bodies react in that fight or flight, adrenaline, releasing hormone reacting, you know, physiology that we have as bodies, as human bodies.
So, um, we have to remember that our characters need to have those types of bodies too. So if somebody is going to come running into the room and say, Hey, you know, your mom was just hit by a car, uh, and then they run back out. Your, your character has to, you know, immediately register some sort of shock, some visceral reaction. And then of course they're going to go run outside and, and their thoughts are going to start, you know, running through their head. What kind of thoughts will those be? You know, they're definitely not going to be planning like what I'm going to do next year if I don't have my mom earning a living and how am I going to get kicked out of my house?
I mean that might come three weeks later, but it's not going to come right now. So am
Jesper (36m 23s): yeah, I agree. And I think part of why that probably happens sometimes w in, in the writing is because the writer knows what story is supposed to be told here. So, so therefore you, you quickly jump to, okay, I need him to talk about how am I gonna live now? Because that's the sort of the next hurdle that he's going to be hit by an in this story here. So I need to start telling the reader that this is a huge issue, so therefore I'm jumping to that. But whereas I think that the main point is also to say that, you know, all those emotional faces that they have to go through.
And if you really put yourself into coach's shoes and they're like you just said, and then what would you feel like if it happened to you that that is also the story, you know, was that we need to be careful. We don't get to plot-driven here. And we remember to, to know that the emotions that the characters are feeling, that's what the readers will connect to and the character is to story.
Susanne (37m 22s): Yeah. I talk about too how to create beats because um, one of the main things that that happens with beginning writers is they can see the scene in their head, kind of like what you're talking about and they know what it's supposed to feel like and sound like. And so they'll do like rapid fire dialogue where they characters saying something in the next character saying something back and they're going back and forth and back and forth. But there's moments where certain things are being said that are unexpected or shocking or upsetting.
And if you don't stop and give a beat, like have the character pause and process again, this is part of that action reaction cycle. You know, I can just be talking casually with you, but if you say something to me right now that, uh, I, I didn't expect and that can affect me is important or can affect me emotionally. I'm in a need to take a beat. I'm going to have to stop and process that. And so the way that we do that in our writing is we, we have the character pause, we have the character stop and process and think, you know, a thought will come in, a reaction will come in a S.
there's lots of different techniques that you can use to slow down a scene. One of the techniques I like to use is to have a character notice little things and good writers do this very well. Little details. They might hear a clock ticking in the background or they might notice the bottom of their pants leg is frayed. Um, when we start noticing little things around us, it slows down time and it or stretches out time. However you want to think of it.
And it helps to create that beat, that moment to let the character react and respond to what was just said or done. But also you need to let the reader do that. And one of the, one of the basic ways we do that as writers is we do a scene break or we do it, we end a chapter, right? That's why I was saying that suspense authors often will end, uh, a scene of high action with a big action moment or a visceral reaction to that moment and end it really quickly.
And then there's an X, then there's a new chapter. And the purpose for that is that it gives the reader a chance to go, Oh, okay. Uh, and process that, I mean, oftentimes at the end of a chapter, if it's a great chapter, you know, we'll stop and not just start reading the next chapter. We'll kind of take a breath or get up and get a drink of water or something. Because we need, we need the moment to sink in. So as writers, we want to always write our scenes to build to a high moment. The high moments should come at the end, at the very last line or the last paragraph.
And that high moment should pack a punch, whether it's an emotional punch to reveal a clue or move the plot forward in some way. But you want to end with that emotional punch at the end of your chapter because then you're creating, you're creating a beat. You're creating a way for the reader to breathe, to process, to absorb what they just read, get them ready to move into the next scene. And again, you can do it with a scene break too. You don't always have to have a chapter in, but you can have multiple scenes in a chapter, but you want to aim for that with every senior, right?
You wanted to build to that high moment and then you want to stop it right there and give the reader a chance to react. And that's part of manipulating your readers so that they'll feel the emotions that you want them to feel. Okay.
Jesper (40m 43s): Yeah. That's why I think it's important. What you talked about a bit earlier as well with the, with the, uh, what should we call them, like campfire scene. So you know, that, uh, the Maslow scenes, those are important because if you're writing, let's say a 300 page fantasy novel and every single chapter is this height intense stuff all the time, I think most, most readers will get pretty tired before they at the end of those 300 pages. And they probably will not enjoy it that much. So you need some of the slow pacing in-between just to take, get also give the reader a bit of beading boom here and there.
I think that's important.
Susanne (41m 19s): Yeah, it's really good to alternate. And again, this is all part of that action reaction cycle because if you have a lot of action going on, at some point the characters need a process which just happened. And um, as I said in a mystery, you might have a whole chapter where they characters the detectives talking or whatever. And uh, but in a fantasy, you know, it might just be a page. It really just depends on your writing style. And it depends on your plot. Um, there's nothing wrong with having lots and lots and lots of great action in a fantasy novel or any novel, but they readers aren't going to get engaged with the characters unless you can really get into their thoughts and into their inner conflict, you know, just show what they're struggling with.
If our characters aren't struggling, you know, if they're not vulnerable, if they're not, you know, having, um, doubts if they're not, um, you know, finding the journey hard other than just, you know, I can't climb the mountain fast enough. Um, it's just not going to have enough meaning for the reader. You know, we want, we, we like to go on those heroes journeys and those heroes journeys are all about, uh, the internal journey, not so much the external journey.
Jesper (42m 26s): Yeah. Yeah. We, in previous episodes we've actually talked about the character arc as well and how it's incredibly important that, that both, there is like a, a meaning behind why the character is feeling the way that they are feeling. So it's not just because they were slapped in the face and now they're feeling angry or something, you know, that that needs to be some sort of underlying driver that that also links in with the character too, to how they're going to transform over the course of the story. And then you use all of these different elements, uh, to, to basically push them to watch that transformation.
Um, so, and I do think that that's important that, that you give with everything basically, that you have some sort of reason for why things are happening. Uh, and it's not just, uh, because you, I mean, of course you, in order to give all that suspense and that bad things needs to happen and it has to be difficult for the character, but it should not be random bad things just to show that the coaters struggling and they are feeling, you know, emotions so that you can, the reader can connect to that. But if the reader cannot see that there is some sort of purpose and we're going somewhere with all of this, then it becomes a bit like, yeah,
Susanne (43m 37s): right. I always call, I always liken it to a string of scenes. If you have a character that just has ups and downs and has a good day and a bad day and things just keep happening to them, but there's no overarching purpose, there's no plot goal that they're striving for, there's no passion toward a goal, then, um, it's just kind of meaningless. It just feels like the characters just wandering around. I write a lot about that in my other books too. Um, so yeah, it just, I just feel that I'm becoming an emotional or emotion master in your fiction. Writing is one of the most important skills that you can learn, but nobody teaches it and nobody really talks about it.
And so I hope that you know, by giving, and this course is six and a half hours of video, but I also have about 40 different assignments that I give out that you can download, which I think is really cool because what I'm hearing back from writers, I've got hundreds and hundreds of writers now that are taking this course or who have already taken it since I launched it September 1st I am I'm really excited to hear that they're enjoying doing these exercises. And part of these exercises as I mentioned, is getting these books and marking them up and studying passages and analyzing how good writers do this.
Cause honestly, the only way that you can become great at anything is to emulate great people in that field. But you know, if you're a painter, you know you people go to the lube and they set up their easels and they copy the masters. They try to paint exactly like them, not so they can copycat, but so they can learn the technique, they learn the skills, they can see what colors go well together and create what kind of effects. And we really need to do that with our writing. And I never heard anybody ever give me that advice for the decades that I was writing novels. Nobody ever said, go study these great novels and tear them apart.
See what kind of words they use. Sentence structure, paragraph structure. How long are the chapters, how much description do they use? What type of description? Um, when you study masterful writers, it's just amazing how incredible they write is that Toni Morrison said, easy reading is hard. Writing and that's so true. When we read a beautiful scene that just seems to just flow beautifully. Like everything is just perfect in it. That was not an easy scene to write.
And we all should know that if we've struggled writing great scenes, you know, I mean, there's there scenes that I've read that I wrote years ago and I'll go back to a book that I wrote and I'll read a scene out of my book and I'll just go, I can't believe I wrote that scene. It was like a fantastic scene. Where did that come from? You know, and, uh, and I'm just amazed that that somehow came out of me and I don't ever feel like I did it. I always feel like somebody else wrote that scene through me somehow. But I know it's because of all the studying that I did. And I think that's how painting works or playing music or whatever.
If you practice and practice and practice. My husband's a jazz sax player, so you know, every night like three hours hearing scales right in my bedroom because that's where are his studio is set up because we have a tiny house. So, uh, you know, we get that, but you have to, when you practice and practice year after year and you get really good at something and seeing with writing when you get really good at writing scenes and conveying characters and their emotions and describing them and bringing a scene to life, a lot of that can just start happening naturally. But at first it does take a lot of work.
It takes, um, it takes intention. Like you can't just, just write and just write a lot. It's just sort of like giving, you know, giving a kid a three year old kid, a big bag full of airplane parts and say, well, just keep putting them together and eventually you'll have a working airplane. You know, it doesn't work that way with writing writing practices. Great. It's great to write every day. It's great to journal, whatever. And I highly encourage that. But you also have to write very deliberately, and that involves the studying of great writing and doing like read Hemingway said, study how other writers did this.
And then you try to copy it so you can do it yourself and you can get the same results. Right? So just like anything else. And I, like I said, I rarely ever hear writing instructors tell writers to do this, but this is the number one thing I think writers should do. They should, as part of their discipline or their writing practice, they should beat, you know, reading widely and not just reading, but studying what they're reading. Um, I've heard people say, yeah, you should read a lot of books, great read books. It's fun to read books, but if you're not really paying attention, if you're just enjoying the book, which I like to do from time to time, just read a book for fun.
Um, that's a different thing. But for the most part, when I read a book, I just tear it apart. You know, what's working, what's not? Why is this boring? Why do I hate this scene? Um, it's good to know why you hate something. It's good to know why you don't like a scene. It's good to know why your board or why you don't care about a character. It's good to know why you halfway through the book, you just give up. What was the point? What was that tipping point for you that said, okay, forget it. I'm not going to waste any more time reading this book that teaches you a lot and you should learn from it so that you don't do those same mistakes in your writing.
Jesper (48m 33s): Yeah, I think that's, that's amazing. There. There's so much a GM Pactor good stuff in it. In this episode. He has a center, so thanks a lot for, for that. And, uh, I will also put a link in the show notes to the uh, live write thrive.com website where I think people can, there was like a one free session or something off the course. Is that right?
Susanne (48m 54s): Well that's my blog. Um, my online school is that CS lakin.teachable.com and that's my writing, that's my writing for life workshops online school. So I have my video courses on that. Um, so yeah, I'll send you the link and then if you put that down there that good. And um, yeah, so I have a, I have a handful of courses. I'm working on a new course right now on your cast of characters which are really excited about because I'm going to be interviewing a dozen or so bestselling authors starting this week. I'm doing video interviews with them to ask them how do they come up with their characters, how many characters, how did they decide which characters they want.
That's also another thing I've been trying to research online. I can't find any information on it. How do you know how to populate your story with how many characters and what are they, what are their roles? Uh, it's, so, it's a fascinating topic again when that I just feel writers should know and I'm, I'm excited to see what I'm going to learn in my exploration as I go through this. But yeah, so I hope, I hope people come check it out. And again, if you go to C us lakin.teachable.com and you click on the emotional mastery course, you can scroll down to the curriculum and you'll see the free preview.
So if you want to just watch the one module for free on the action reaction cycle, do that. You don't have to commit or enroll or anything like that. Uh, I feel like the course take it, uh, if you don't like the course after you pay for it, you get a full refund. So there's no commitment. It's like 30 day money back guarantee. So, um, but I, I do think that you'll learn a lot from it and, um, check out my other courses. I think I have free previews on all my other courses too. So if you see something else that you need to learn, like what your 10 key scenes are or your four foundational pillars are.
I have courses on those things too, um, based on my books. So, um, I hope you check them out. Yeah, thanks for having me here. I really appreciate being able to share all this information and I, I really love to help writers and I love to see writers improve in their writing so they write great books. That's what matters
Jesper (50m 50s): indeed. Yeah. And thank you so much for joining us. So I hope you got a lot out of this. Uh, DLS snow and there was a lot of good, good, good stuff in here. So I will see you next Monday. And then autumn, we'll be back a posting with me
Narrator (51m 5s): if you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the amwritingfantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join autumn and Yesper on patrion.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the amwritingfantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
How seriously do you take formatting your ebook?
Tune in to why you should care (a lot) and some tips to make sure your ebook shines no matter what platform readers find you on.
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Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to the amwritingfantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need in literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing join to best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them. Now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt. Hello. I am, Jesper.
Autumn (32s): And I'm Autumn.
Jesper (34s): This is episode 46 of the amwritingfantasy podcast. And today we'll be talking about formatting of ebook. So what do you need to consider about
Autumn (44s): formatting? Can you do it yourself? And what about the reading experience? So that's some of the stuff that we're going to talk about. But how's your week been autumn? Before we get into all of that, it's been kind of a crazy week here in Maine and new England where I'm at. We had a huge nor'easter sweep through which it's a big storm that am swept all the way up the coast from Pennsylvania up into where I'm at in Maine, right on the coast. And it left a swath of areas without power, which was surprising.
And we get these a lot in the winter, but this one was just rain in a 60 mile per hour winds. It tore up trees. And so where I'm at here in Maine, we, we lost power for probably a full day in intranet as well of course. So that kind of, you know, it was a perfect day for reading a book, but that's about what you get. Uh, but there are still places here on the peninsula that are without power and I mean huge old Oak trees and Pines with big white Pines that you couldn't even put your arms around that are still across power lines.
It's just amazing. And it's, it's interesting cause my inlaws actually where we're staying at the moment have a generator. So for us, and we have cell phones and we're, you know, we're used to traveling. We're used to like, okay, just get in the camper, we have battery backups to actually three solar panels. Am we use our cell phones as hotspots. The towers were fine. So we're like, Oh, it's a normal day. And it wasn't until we got out of the house and we see all these restaurants and cafes and everything is packed to the gills were like, Oh, people don't have power.
It's really funny cause I mean we've lived, um, Adam and I have lived just weave, our old house was 100% off grid, so you'd have that all the time. We'd go to, I'd go to work and people were like, Oh man, we lost power to do lose power. I'm like, Nope, there's solar panels are still working great and never had a problem. And even that, we had a old house whenever we've had a few houses in our life and marriage. And one of them was a 200 year old Chestnut timber framed Cape Cod style house.
So it was very old and historic and it was, it looked like a little Norman Rockwell painting. And it was beautiful. And even though there we didn't have solar panels or a generator, we, whenever we lost power, we had this candelabra that actually had real candles. And so we would go and light the candles and we would, you know, we'd sit there and play cards or something with each other and it, people would drive by thinking we were fine and D had power and it just never fazed us. So it's never been a big deal for us. But it was am.
It is interesting when you see how many people, especially in today's day and age and when the internet goes out and you can't charge your cell phone, how many people were kind of freaking out by day two?
Jesper (3m 39s): Yeah, I don't know. I think I would be freaking out, but I would certainly be annoyed, you know, uh, uh, w w w every summer, or not every summer, but almost every summer when, when we go to Finland, uh, for, for us to stay at summer cottages, we usually rent one. And uh, in the earlier years, like years back then, because in Finland is, it's all fenders, also a huge country. So a lot of the times the summer cottages are like out in nowhere and it's very difficult to get power lines and everything out there.
So many times you do have cottages where maybe there is no like a,
Autumn (4m 15s): yeah.
Jesper (4m 15s): You know, proper toilet. Uh, sometimes the house is powered by solar cells as well, which works fine. But, but the first couple of years when we went there and sometimes we rented those types of cottages and I always like, after like four or five days, I almost had enough. It's like I need my running water. I need my path, I need a proper toilet, I need the internet. This is driving me crazy. So, so it'd be the later years. We've only only rent like the Luxe luxury kind of days where they have everything available.
Otherwise I'm not going yet.
Autumn (4m 46s): You wouldn't have appreciated our old house. I remember when we were telling my parents that were building this, I mean we, we literally build it ourselves. We use my old Jeep Wrangler as the generator. It was so far off grid, so T.H.E. Run the souls. We were using, uh, a car engine because we had nothing else up there. And so, but when you walked in, you flipped on a switch, you use the sink. We had that thing so set up that you would not know what was under the hood was solar power and a different am. It was a special pump that was off of an RV, so it was a low drawl and wattage and I feel like we really, we could make this a, like we could sell this to people, like how to do it.
We had it so well set up and I'm still kind of proud of that. But yeah, we had a lot of people would be like, what's it like? You know, do you not have this and not have that? I'm like, I go home and we watch movies. The stove, you know, eh, did have a propane fridge and a propane stove. But that is totally like, there's actually stores here in Maine because so many people have camps and cabins where there's propane lights, propane stove. It's just like normal up here. It's so easy and it's kind of cool. Yeah, I think a lot of it is also about getting used to, but of course you'd have to, the willingness to get
Jesper (5m 58s): use to Ingrid's. I don't. So that's my problem. So how, what have you been up to this week? That's why you also far away. So you hopefully you got to see a movie. Yeah. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So like we, like we talked about in last week's episode, uh, the kids were away at my mother's place for most of the week because they were off school. So, uh, the wife and I went to the movies the other day and what's the new joker movie? And, uh, it is really, really critical.
Oh, that's awesome. The reviews are like mixed. So I wasn't sure if I wanted to go see it, but you say it's good. Yes, it is. It is so good. I'm not going to spoil anything here in case for those who have, haven't watched it, but I have to say a note because one of the things I was thinking about before going to move to the movies and watching this movie, what was some, was one of the topics that we as writers so often talk about and that's about how to, you know, give the villain justification for his or her actions. And I was really thinking about before watching this movie, how are they going to do that with the joker in the way that, because in my view, if they turn the joker into like a likable character all of a sudden, then I think that would be an issue because that's not what the joker is, right?
He is a bad, bad person. And, and I was really thinking, so how are they going to turn him into a likable or not turned in into likable, likable character rather. But at the same time, Megan, the enjoyable movie, because obviously like with books, if you read a book and the main characters like really annoying and you hate the person you usually don't like to read either. And that was, that was a bit my concern here. Um, but they, they did it so incredibly well and, and like, I mean, did joker, he is crazy, but they do a very, very, very good character arc from the start of the movie to the end of the movie where you just see him going more and more and more crazy and it makes sense in what happens.
And it's, it's like, it is nothing really to do with like, you know, the whole Batman universe or whatever. There's very, very little of that. D the whole point of the movie is, is the joker character and how he sort of becomes the joker in how he goes crazy and it is so well done. Well there you have to say what queen Phoenix, the, he deserves an Oscar for that performance. It is incredible acting. So convincing. So good. I mean he's a good actor anyway. One of my favorites. So yeah, I knew it very well.
Could pull it off. It would be him. So I guess from a writing perspective, if anyone's working on characters and wants to show a villainous growth, this is a good movie, I guess you're suggesting. Go see this one. Yeah, absolutely. And especially I like how they, how they build on his getting crazy. You know, how they build one brick at a time because it's not like some, you know, some, you know, well some movies where something happens and then all of a sudden, well then the character is completely different all of a sudden.
I mean, okay. Sometimes in a movie you can sort of accept that, okay, that thing happened and that was really traumatizing or whatever. And then the person changed me. Yeah, you can make that argument. But in this movie they just build it brick by brick and it is so cool.
Autumn (9m 10s): I really liked you. I was saying, I think you've convinced me I might have to try to find time in my schedule. I'm of a very busy week I think coming up that maybe I'll have to sneak out and see this one too.
Jesper (9m 22s): Yeah, you shoot, you shoot and then avoid all the crazy people that comes out as well. You know I have to say when when we watched this movie, right, so there is a, there is a twofer in the movement and am
Autumn (9m 35s): for some weird reason there was these people in the cinema that was laughing like hysterical when something happened to that dwarf and I'm not going to spoil anything but, but, but what happens is not a good thing. You know, it's a pretty crazy, insane scene. And they were like laughing hysterical because th there was destroy often to see. And I was like my wife and I was looking at each other like, what the fuck is, isn't this 2019? I mean, why is it funny to what's a twofer anymore? I mean maybe in the 90 eighties I understand, but Jesus, I'll keep that in mind.
Make it might need to take some like rotten fruit to throw at somebody if they act out of line. But people are just weird. I think we've already established that week on the internet with the amwritingfantasy podcast yeah, so I was actually the
Jesper (10m 28s): thinking am normally we try to pick out something that is being discussed in the Facebook group or on Patrion or something like that. But actually I was thinking today to maybe just do like a small cultural action to our listeners here. If that's cool. That sounds sure. Let's do it. Yeah, because I was thinking after watching digital movie here, um, I was thinking that maybe if people could go into to our Facebook group, uh, you know, if you, if, if you're not a member already, just search for amwritingfantasy among the groups on Facebook and then you'll find us.
But if you go in there and then let us know what you thought of the movie because I actually would like to hear other people's perspective on this and if they agree with me that it is really a beautiful way to construct the character arc or if you're having issues with it. And to be honest, I would really like to hear what people think about the last two minutes of the movies, but that might be a bit difficult to do without spoiling anything. But yeah, there is a bit there that I really would like to discuss with somebody. Maybe you will, I can discuss it once you watch the movie or
Autumn (11m 32s): that sounds good. Oh, I like that. So yes, that's a good call to action. So anyone who has seen it, I mean we, we should put like, you knows asterix at the top and say, spoiler alert in this conversation if you can see that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And uh, yeah, good idea. We'll start a thread and see what am who else has seen it and what they think because yeah, especially from the character arc point of view, how it progresses even though I haven't seen it. I like what you've said that you know, this is a good character art. Like to see what people have to say and yeah, if we warn them that there's some spoilers ahead, I think people will forgive us.
Jesper (12m 7s): Yeah, we could do that. So if you want to, you know, post something in the Facebook group to let me know what you think about the last two minutes. Just put that a spoiler ahead wanting at the top. They're like autumn suggesting and then let me know because I would really like to talk about those last two minutes there. And now for those who haven't watched it, I really curious to go in and watch the movie because they want to figure out what's what happens in those two minutes. So yeah, maybe I'll just set you up for that. Maybe that was on purpose.
And also by the way, where if while you were in the Facebook group, uh, at the point in time when you're listening to this, we are in the middle of November. Uh, of course, uh, autumn and I record these in advance, but so we instill in October right now, but we're talking to you in the future. So when you're listening it will be in the middle of November. And if you're doing NaNoWriMo, then maybe you could just go into the Facebook group as well and let us know how you're progressing in NaNoWriMo.
Autumn (13m 1s): Yeah, that's what I was actually saw that, uh, there's been so many posts recently, like, Hey, are you getting ready? Are you prepping? You know, when we're recording this, we're getting close to the end of October. And so everyone is coming together and talking about who's doing it, why are you in now? No ride Mo, you know, what do you get out of it, do you not? Do you know what was going on? So I love seeing all the people getting excited and prepping for it. And the other ones who were saying, no, this is why I can't do it, or this is why I don't, or this is what I do instead. So it's so exciting. But now you know, when you're listening to this, it'll be November and I'm sure everyone's going to be supporting everyone and doing world word count updates and celebrating as people reach their goals.
So yay, I can't wait to see that.
Jesper (13m 48s): So autumn, you should just get some weeks back that we should record an episode about formatting.
Autumn (13m 54s): So this is my legal soon here. I think formatting is so important, but I don't see many blog posts, many topics talking about formatting and why it's important. And I know, you know, it's just especially, I think when I first started out, you know, back then I was late, I like to call 2012 when I was first publishing. That was the wild West days of self-publishing because a lot of stuff could go. You could do get away with anything. In fact, Amazon's requirements, we're only a word doc doc file and they would do a crazy conversions and make it into an ebook for you.
And there were a lot of books out there that you'd be reading it and would have these weird like hanging line breaks. Something would just stop in the middle of a sentence and it'd be like two lines down. And I remember reading some of these and even if the story was good, you hit that and you're like, did I miss something? What's on why? Where is the rest of this sentence of this paragraph? Did I get deleted and throw you out of the story? And I think maybe because I came from that, that we, that it's just always been very important to have a very nice looking document.
Not just because it looks professional, but because as a reader and reading it, you don't want to get hung up going, what is this saying? Where's the rest of the story? Did they paste in somebody else's novel right here and I don't know about you. Yes. For have you had, have you read some books online and stuff that you're not just the formatting threw you off or even paperbacks? I mean, sometimes things get published and you're like, really? Did anyone check this page?
Jesper (15m 36s): Um, I might have to be honest, but, but I'm not sure I can, I cannot recall like a specific example. Uh, I think nowadays, usually most of the time the formatting is under control when you're buying eBooks and stuff. Like as though I might have come across something like that, but, but I do support your point of view in the way that am if you spend all that money on getting a good cover, you spent money on, on an editing and not ignore ignoring all the time you spend writing the novel in the first place. So it's like not taking care of formatting then you basically stumbling on the finish line.
Yeah.
Autumn (16m 13s): Right, exactly. It means so much. And there's, um, you know, while there's four matters that you can always hire a professional, but there's also a lot of do it yourself programs that make it pretty easy. I mean, Scribner will spit out a file, but to me, I don't actually like Scribner's file. I don't think it's that pretty or professional looking. But it is possible. And if you happen to be a Mac user pages actually will spit out an epoch file and Amazon now takes E pub files if you did not know that.
So you can upload directly to Amazon, a nice looking epoch file. So I think it's amazing what is available to make at least a clean looking ebook but it's also amazing how many people don't go and download it and check it before hitting publish. And I do think at least taking a few minutes of doing that as important.
Jesper (17m 5s): Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And I think it is also, I mean at this point in time we've gotten to a stage where it is so incredibly easy to get good formatting programs or I mean, uh, just like three, four years ago maybe, um, I was still using like a, a I P I put a file from Scrivener and then I was using this,
Autumn (17m 28s): should you sit? You'll do July. I've never used it, but I have seen it.
Jesper (17m 33s): Yeah, I was using CTO because then you could upload to Scribner file into CTO and CJ were allow you to like manipulate the hedos. Everything that's Scrivener did not do that well. And uh, and then I could go from there. But it was like there was like four steps to
Autumn (17m 51s): ebook whereas nowadays you just like click a button and vellum almost. Right. And then you're good to go. I guess that's what am. I mean I remember, I think my first one I did do, I was still on an Apple at the time, but everyone required a word doc and it was just like, well shoot. So I had to go pay for word or I think I was transferring it to my husband's Dell and the crazy manipulations I had to do to upload something. It's like no wonder it looks like crap. And sometimes it would change the formatting or the fonts and it was just a mess.
What to create anything. And nowadays I, when vellum first come at came out and I knew at that point I think I had published at least three or four books and I knew I was serious and I'm very much a do it yourself. For so I went ahead and bought vellum when it was brand new and fairly cheap. And so I've had it since the beginning and Oh my goodness. One of my favorite thing about it is that it creates a professional, really beautiful ebook end paperback now that's across platforms.
So I can take my vellum file and upload it to like drafted digital or Smashwords with the distributors or Kobo or anywhere. And I know it's going to look, it's going to have drop caps is going to have these cool centered chapters with little like ornaments or an image and it's going to look like that on every single re e-reader from a nook to an iPad. I love that. I love knowing that I'm producing something that's quality that the readers are going to be like, hopefully they're not even going to notice the formatting.
You spend all this time and effort on it and the real goal is that the readers don't even notice except for maybe saying, Oh, it's dry. It has a drop cap. It looks so beautiful. Or something like that. Yeah, I agree, but, but they will notice if it's not there. I think that's the difference. They will notice if it's crappy, but they will love notice when it looks good because then it just looks like everything else. But that's not a bad thing because you want to look like everything else. Right. Should that stand out in this way? No. I mean it's nice to have this little nuances like having, you know, you can have an image and now with vellum you can even have like the scene breaks that are within a chapter.
You can use am your own emblem or symbol, which is really cool. So like for my Celtic one, my one is a Fe novel. I have a little am Celtic knot work that I can use as my line break instead of like a, you know, regular slash and so it's nice having those little touches that can kind of, you know, keep the theme going in a story. But at the same time it doesn't have to be, it can just be, you know, a simple line and you know, it's there and it's clear. And again, the reader, hopefully it's, it reminds me of last week when we were talking about dialogue and using the word said, and Stephen King had said, you know, you said because it fades into the background.
Well, we both disagree. It's just too boring to only use said, but when it comes to formatting, you do want it to fade into the background. You want it to be. You know, the neat thing about these e-readers, uh, versus like a paperback is that you can set up your own colors and fonts, things that you kind of, or how you went to experience books. And I think that's fantastic. So there's this sort of methodology where you kind of want enough control for the reader to be like, I need a white screen or I want to cream screen, I'm using a Kindle Paperwhite and so it looks like a real page, you know, that's what I love about vellum and I'm not trying to sell vellum to anyone, but it has definitely been my favorite thing and it is, it's not as simple as a click, but it is a drag and drop and then make sure everything looks right.
So it's so, and actually Scrivener now we'll spit it out into vellum basically. So it is just, it's almost seamless and it is fantastic. Of course, you know, I always laugh at that idea that Scribner will spit out the fi file and develop. But the problem is unless your editor is using either Scribner or vellum am you still have to have the editor kind of sitting in there somewhere. So you've got to figure that one out.
Jesper (22m 1s): Yeah. And just to be clear, I mean we're not, we're not affiliates of Willem or anything, so we just mentioning it because it's a very good tool and I think I'll put a, I'll put a link to vellum in the show notes as well just in case anybody wants to check it out. But again, it's not an affiliate link or anything. So we just mentioning it because we really liked that tool and I especially liked the, because you helped me or them when I was a formatting my ebook on mapmaking because there was a lot of different images in that file of of different maps and I was really concerned initially about how is this going to scale on different e-readers because you know, my file of course has like a, a certain size of of the different maps I in in a set side size and my Scribner file.
So I was really concerned like how is this going to look across the different new readers. But then yeah, she just explained, well I'm just a auto fits it to the different, the ureter so that it's, it's amazing like that it looks
Autumn (22m 55s): good no matter where you put it. And you get these like you can do little different images or you know borders around it. It's just, it's easy. It looks pretty and there's times am it's almost, I used to format my paperbacks in word because I had control and I can have different fonts and different drop caps and I can make it look a little more fantasy where you know, the font options and vellum are not all, you know, there's like five or six different fonts and honestly they all look about a hundred percent the same to me. And I love fonts, which is kind of sad.
But it is true. There's not a huge unit. Can't really change things really badly. And I mean I probably went sometimes too far cause I would have my drop cap. So that big capital at the beginning of a chapter in a totally different font that maybe looked more fantasy or something. I thought the books were just gorgeous because if you're going to pay 1112 you know, plus dollars for a paperback, you should get a work of art. It should be beautiful and something you're going to cherish.
Because honestly, I mean, how many books do any of us have that are actually on our shelf? So if you're going to go that far, it should be just this wonderful, wonderful thing to celebrate books. And so I would go way out of town and once I switched to vellum paper back, I lost a few things that I used to do, but I have to admit, it is so easy. I know format once and I get an EPOP. I get my Moby Kindle file and I get my paper back. Boom, boom, boom.
That's why I did it. I had to give up some of my creative control. But yeah, no, they're also changing and growing and maybe eventually a little, let me add a few more fonts, but for now it's, it's not worth, um, being that creative because really at the end of the day I just want it to look good and carry across to all the readers wherever they pick it up that it is a beautiful file and plus it has to not be massive cause like we was talking about with yours and the photos, it's so easy if you're doing that in word to make that not knowing how things are going to size.
And there's some coding techniques where it's a flowable texts so it's not going to, you know, where the page break is going to be for the next chapter if you have one. But basically things don't get hung up on one page versus the next page. There's some really cool things that go into coding for e-readers if you, if you get into coding things. So you know, knowing all that's in there to create that in word is cumbersome. And if you have some hidden formatting things like a space or if you're using tabs.
Oh my goodness, don't I remember, I think the first time I wrote anything, I use tabs instead of an automatic indebt at a paragraph or that horrible, I can't even remember what Amazon might've done to it. It was just like, Nope, start over. Uh, those are things that it's really nice when you use a software program, it'll fix that for you. But I definitely, I learned very quickly to set up my typing document am correctly so that you hit enter and it gives you an indent and never, ever, ever touched tab while you're writing something.
Jesper (26m 23s): No. And I think at least at the point of disregarding, uh, Mac or vellum is only available for Mac.
Autumn (26m 30s): I think you're right, but
Jesper (26m 33s): there is, there should be a work around, uh, actually I'll try to find a link on how to do that work around and then put that into shore. Not as well, if anybody's interested. But what you could do is you can basically like a Mac
Autumn (26m 44s): in the cloud. So that means that you basically have a Mac machine, but it sits in the cloud. And then you can do use developed from there. And then even though you have a PC, you can, you can get the files out of vellum that way. But I'll see if I can find the link to how to get access to Mac in a cloud somewhere. I'm not, I'm not sure. I've never done it myself, but I'll try to find the link and put it in the show notes. But maybe we should also mention apart from vellum, um, if you go to draft two digital, I'll also put a link to that in the show notes, but if you go there, they actually offer free formatting for years.
So they're not going to charge you anything. And you do not have to publish with draft two digital either to use the formatting tool. Anybody can use it for absolutely free without any commitments or publishing anything with draft two digital. So those guys are just cool like that. Yeah. So that's another option. Yes. And it's a pretty powerful editor and formatted or format her as well. And it'll create something. I don't think it's quite as pretty as vellum but it probably all the breaks where you need it. Um, it talks, you know, they even step you through what you need for your front matter and your back matter.
So if you're just into publishing, maybe this is your first book and you suddenly you have to consider what do I put at the beginning, you know, where do I add Jeff to digital actually will step you through that and kind of give you some ideas of like, Hey, do you have this, do you have your links here? Do you have this about your bio? So they are really good guys that way and it is, you know, is a decent file and it'll carry across very well. And I also want to mention, I am not good with this one, but Calibri is a free formatting software that's available online.
And I do have that. Yeah, I use it to look at things and it actually converts file types very well. So for if you had for some reason something you wanted to convert an epoch back to a doc file, you can actually do that with Calibri. And that's why I have it because I can, I can change the format around. But yeah, you mess up in Calibri and you get, Oh, you get spaces. It's, yeah, I it blows up whenever I use it, but I do, I've, I know people who have used it and they create amazing books.
And I do think there's a way of using it for videos, which, um, is a nonfiction book. Like if you're doing like a web tutorial and you actually want the video embedded in your book, I'm not sure vellum does that yet, but I think you can do it with Calibri if you happen to be a coding wizard as much as I play with code and stuff like that, that is way beyond me. Yeah. But another nice trick that I could also mention is that if you get, I mean, of course you software, so we're talking about now like vellum or drafted digital that they'll like spit up the format files you need.
But, but just a very neat trick as well is if you have the Kindle previewer
Jesper (29m 43s): so that you can download that from Amazon. It's just like a free piece of software you can download. So not, not the Kindle for PC, but the Kindle previewer. If you download that and basically you can then use that preview or to open an IPAP file and then the preview will recognize that this is not my correct file format and then it'll automatically converted into a mobi. But that's pretty, uh, that's a pretty neat trick.
Autumn (30m 7s): That is a good one. And I do know, I think ebook funnel, if you have to be using ebook funnel, they will now do some conversions for you as well. I think they'll take an E pub and make it to a mobi. Um, it's a new announcement and I don't know if I read the whole thing, but I think that's something that they're doing. So if you're an author and you want to, I mean, why is this important? Because you can actually upload an epoch file to Amazon and they accepted and it's fine. And even I use Smashwords as my distributor and instead of doing a dot doc file like they require and having it go through the meat grinder and not feeling competent at all about what's going to come out the other end, I actually just upload my vellum E pub and they're fine with that as well now, which is exciting.
When they switched to that, I could have just hugged everyone at Smashwords because that was a dream come true for me that I never have to do the meat grinder again. It's fantastic, but the reason you might want these files if you are trying to send out to beta readers or arc readers and you need to get the file out before it's available for sale, you kind of need all of these files, so that's why we're like telling you how to go ahead and get them and create them for yourself. Not necessarily so that you uploading them, which is it's great to have them for uploading, but if you need to get them to readers so that they can read it for you and look at things and test out your formatting.
This is how you can do it.
Jesper (31m 31s): Yeah, I would say that, you know, even for uploading when you're publishing, I mean, I would really advise against uploading a word file. I mean, yes, it's possible, but it's going to be crap. And the formatting like we just talked about here, it's important that the reader gets a good experience. So in most cases nowadays, because of these, uh, both the free tools, uh, that we've been mentioning or vellum or whatever you want to do, um, it is not too complicated to do, but, but even if you do feel is too complicated paying somebody to do a conversion for you.
I mean, you can even ask autumn and we'll do it. I mean, it's, it's not, it's not that expensive to get somebody to do it because it's a such a fairly simple job nowadays that you can get somebody to do it fairly cheaply, I would say.
Autumn (32m 19s): I agree. I mean there's definitely, there's some higher end ones, but always be conscious to the fact that if you don't do it yourself or you hire someone, you know, make sure they keep the file or give you access to the file. Because if you, what are your readers finds a misspelling and you want it fixed, you don't want to have to pay for the formatting all over again. So that's why I think I like being in charge of it myself. I don't think it's just that I'm like a control freak, but whatever. I have to tell myself at the end of the day.
Right.
Jesper (32m 52s): That's true.
Autumn (32m 56s): But it is, I would say, yeah, just sort of final note formatting I think one of the things we really haven't talked about and was one of the first things with formatting that surprised me was so important and will actually decrease, um, Amazon's acceptance of your book is if you do not have that clickable table of contents in the beginning. So often if you're uploading a word file, unless you've gone through and done the bookmarks, even in pages, there's a whole bunch of processing and coding you have to do on yourself and it's not too difficult.
It just takes time and consistency and double-checking herself, but making that so you have an act of table of contents in the beginning that you click on chapter 11 and actually go to chapter 11 if you don't have that, Amazon will actually ping that against you. So make sure that is there. And if you're a new author and you don't know how to do that, it's part of your formatting get someone to do it for you or vellum or there's pages in word. There's a few ways of doing it and there's a wrong way of doing it as well, that it creates something that's not actually going to upload to Amazon.
So double check that. But that's one of the biggest things that you want to make sure you have because it's actually important to the places you're uploading. If they don't see that clickable table of contents, they're like, yeah, you don't know what you're doing and this is not going to work for us.
Jesper (34m 18s): Yup. Okay. So I hope you got a lot a lot out of that and learned a bit about formatting and some things to think about a, it's certainly one of the things you don't want to skimp on a at the end and, and stumble on that finish line that there was no reason to do so. And if you find all the techie stuff a bit complicated, you know, uh, yeah, you can, yeah. You can commission order to, to do it for work for you. For I'm am and for a very fair price. You, she will do that. But that's up to you. Whatever you want to do a, I'll put some, I'll put some links in the show notes as I've been mentioning here.
And uh, and then, uh, next Monday I'm aiming to have an interview lined up for you, but I'll see how that goes. And if for some reason that doesn't work out, autumn and I will be back.
Narrator (35m 7s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the amwritingfantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join autumn and Yesper on patrion.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the amwritingfantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Writing dialogue can be fun, but also challenging.
What do you need to be aware of?
How do you write strong and meaningful dialogue between characters in your novel?
In this episode 45 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, Autumn and Jesper will give you all the insights you need to become better at writing interesting dialogue.
Looking for more? Here are the links to the four blog posts mentioned in the podcast:
https://www.amwritingfantasy.com/who-said-that-dialogue-and-your-writing-post-1-dialogue-tags/
https://www.amwritingfantasy.com/dialogue-post-2-adverbs/
https://www.amwritingfantasy.com/dialogue-post-3-action-tags/
https://www.amwritingfantasy.com/dialogue-post-4-line-breaks/
And the Emotional Thesaurus.
It's an amazing companion book that any writer will enjoy: https://www.amazon.com/Emotion-Thesaurus-Writers-Character-Expression-ebook/dp/B07MTQ7W6Q/
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy.
For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to the amwritingfantasy podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need in literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing join to best selling authors who have self-published more than 20 books between them. Now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (31s): Hello. I am Jesper and I'm Autumn. This is episode 45 of the amwritingfantasy podcast and we are going to discuss ways in which you can write not only believable but also compelling and rich dialogue. Yay. Should be interesting. Yeah. Like, podcast is also a bit of a dialogue. So, guess that works. Yeah, we'll be talking about talking.
It almost sounds a bit weird. I'm sure we'll work it out. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But dialogue is important, so I'm looking forward to get into that. But, um, but before we get that far, I have to say, I mean we are, we actually recording off schedule right now because normally we record these podcasts on Mondays and today it's a Wednesday because I had to shift things around because this week here in Denmark, the kids are off school isn't a holiday for you guys or it's a school holiday this week.
So, uh, so day off school from school and then, uh, Monday we uh, we tried to do like a family day and just to do some stuff together. So we went to the cinema and watched a movie together with the kids, which was nice. And then yesterday, uh, I after work, um, after I was done with my work day, I done drove and Mike our kids off and delivered them to my mother's place. But that's a across the country.
So I think by us standards, it's not that far. You're in Denmark is a two and a half hour drive each way, which is quite a lot in this country. I drove them there in the afternoon, then I have some dinner and then drove back. So I was back here home at midnight yesterday and then I was up this morning and I think I've been working for 11 hours today, so I can feel it a bit now.
Autumn (2m 33s): It's, as I said, if you get a little loopy or low energy towards the end, we'll know why. But yeah, driving two and a half hours, I think that's sorta like driving across most States. But it's gonna say a Texas, I think it's eight hours across. So you're, you're a smaller state is what they had to be like. Here yeah, I'll, I'll country he is not that big, but that's actually nice when you have to get around.
Jesper (2m 58s): Right. And you don't have to drive that far.
Autumn (3m 0s): Yeah, exactly. No, I think it, I think good, cozy community and even cozy States because yeah, it feels more like, you know, it community. You get to know places really intimately. So I think that's actually a huge benefit. Um, I can't tell you how many as we are driving the last three years am across the entire country. How many times we've met people, you know, from the Midwest who had never seen the ocean or maybe they'd only seen Lake superior, just people who'd never seen the mountains are never seen the desert. And you know, we're actually, I'm really odd, my husband and I, we have seen as much as we have of cross of the United States.
So kind of changes your perspective a little bit.
Jesper (3m 41s): Yeah, and I, I mean for sure here in this country, if you don't travel then uh, you know, outside the country to other countries, then you will never see a mountain. That's just impossible. It's true. I have something, we have something we call a mountain in a, it's, it's base, it's in Jutland in the middle of Jutland and I, th I, I'm going off memory here and I could be wrong, but it's like 250 meters high or something like that. So that's all my own.
Autumn (4m 7s): It's like a hell yeah. That's why every time I sent pictures of the mountains in the Rockies, you're like, wow, that's amazing.
Jesper (4m 17s): Yeah. Well I love mountain. So we went to Greece two years ago. There was mountains outside the windows and also when we went to New Zealand two years ago. I mean, I love that the nature stuff that it's so different from my own country. Here
Autumn (4m 31s): well you make me think when we finally get to meet up in person, we'll have to like make it somewhere in like the Rockies just so you can see some mountains.
Jesper (4m 39s): Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's cool. All right. Well a huge forest and stuff like that as holds it.
Autumn (4m 44s): Yeah. Yeah. I S yeah, there's so many spectacular places like that glacier NEC national part for anyone who's in Montana. Um, I think it's one of the prettiest national parks of the United States. It is just all inspiring. Astounding. And I have to admit, the first time I saw it was just in the fall, right after a light snow and all the mountain tops were white in the trees, still had some color and it was just like, wow. It was amazing. Amazing. So I cannot wait to some day, get back there hopefully soon.
But it's funny. So you're talking about your week and you know, there's a lot of the readers or listeners will not, but I've been actually helping out at a cafe. It's actually a friends downtown and it's only been open for like five or six months. And here recording this, this is only like mid October. So what's released, you know, much later. But we're just getting into the height of Halloween here in Maine. And uh, we just had this huge festival called pumpkin Fest. And so there's these massive, I think that winner was 1800 pounds am that was the largest pumpkin grown.
So they have these massive pumpkins and they put them all downtown and they decorate them. And there was like lanterns, fish. There's like a dragon. There's Audrey from the little shop of horrors or is hedgehogs? It's just so much fun. But the fun thing is, is I've never, I, you know, I love tea. I'm not a coffee drinker though. My husband is. Um, and then two, I'm a Baker, so they've been huge use of my baking skills, but to be thrown into a cafe setting and trying to learn this espresso machine and what a macchiato is, I couldn't even pronounce machiatto like go of core Tado and actually kind of starting to pick up with some of these drinks are, is really fun and it's humbling.
I think anyone who thinks that they are top of their game and something in life needs to go do something entirely new, a brand new enterprise at least once a year so that you can be a little bit humbled and realize you are, you got, you're not top of everything. You may be an awesome whatever you are. Calligrapher cross Stitcher, cross country skier, I don't know, whatever, you're so obvious. I hopefully a writers if you're listening to this, you may be so, so very good. But it is so humbling to throw yourself back into something entirely new, especially in a sink or swim situation with the housing.
You know all these people coming in from the parade and Oh, it was just a madhouse, but it was kind of fun. I actually managed to keep up with the 20 somethings on work was working with, so that's another humbling experience when they're talking about what they want to major in. You're like, Oh, Oh, Oh, back in the day. Yeah, I don't drink coffee. I then I hopped from what you just mentioned, I don't understand why this was the biggest surprise for me is one of my coworkers said, you've got to try a dirty chai.
I'm like, what the heck is a dirty chai? Because they knew I like T. so a dirty chai is a sh hot chai with a shot of espresso in it. And as far as I'm concerned, tea and coffee should never meet. I have sent back with water. Yeah, that's what I was thinking too. Yeah. I've sent back water that had been run through the coffee pot going, I do you know what? Coffee water. I want real water. I am such a tea snob. Totally. Just, yeah, I know. I admit that, but Oh my gosh. Dirty chai there.
Especially I do decaf because I cannot do espressos. Um, but it tastes like kind of like a rich warm pumpkin pie. You don't taste the coffee. It's just makes it deeper and richer. So anyone else out there who is crazy like me and things, coffee and tea should never meet, try a dirty chai or maybe don't because I have to admit now I'm slightly addicted and that's going to kill with me for a long after the cafe. It'll stick a no, just waiting, you know, before you know when all of it, then you will stop drinking coffee as well.
And then you're addicted to that. No, I only drink coffee on, I like coffee on and only decaf again on rainy days because to me coffee tastes like mud and there's just something about money, cold days. And I'm like, Oh, I gotta go for a cup of coffee. It kind of feels like that's the weather, but I have to admit a nice Earl grey as much better in a rainy day.
Jesper (9m 12s): Right, right. Oh yeah. That's a lot of stuff. I mean, yeah, I think we've both have had quite busy, busy times going on. Uh, actually over the past week as well. Not only this week but also last week am I've been preparing notes for our completely free costs that we are going to release probably, I don't know in 2020. So yeah, it's been really busy. But I thought that maybe I should just give a very, very quick like short overview of the modules that I'm currently making the notes for do you think that would be good?
I think that'd be awesome. I know you showed them to me and they, I just cannot wait for this course. It's going to be so awesome. Yeah. Yeah. So maybe I could just do a quick rundown of course for the listener, it's going to take a while before this is done, but, but maybe just as a short teaser or something here. But uh, so module one, we entitle why 2% of authors succeed and 98% don't. And, uh, in that module we are going to share a bit of, of the myth that people believe about self publishing and what it really takes to make it.
And that's followed by module two, which is the mindset that most authors don't understand. Um, and I guess that title pretty much says it. So apart from making you understand how, uh, how you should understand your future career as an author, we also share our top five tips you need to know in order to make it. And that is followed by module three, which is the author platform. Um, and I think our, the platform is like a term that is often thrown around, but uh, but here in this module three, at least, we're going to lay out exactly what it is, how to build it, and how to make it work for you.
Yeah. Fantastic. And module four is, uh, how do online retailers like Amazon actually work? So we're going to talk about the online landscape of bookselling retailers and explain which factors will actually affect your sales. And I think that one module fois is pretty tightly knitted together with module five which is Amazon explains, uh, Amazon explained is what we call it because basically whether we like it or not, Amazon is an incredibly important to all indie author authors and it's therefore really important to understand how the algorithm actually works and how to make your books appear in searches and a lot more so.
And yeah. Also I'm going to share how you can become an Amazon bestselling authors and then maybe your favorite topic, a autumn module six is book covers AA, I love buck covers. Yeah. And they also amazingly important. So we're going to go deep into the topic of book covers in module six and explain everything you need to know about that. And the same can be said about module seven on book descriptions. That's also important. Absolutely altered covid ad and modulate.
I have a feeling that this is one of those where some love it, some hate it. It's about advertising because I mean in, in here in 2019, nobody can make it without advertising. So there's an entire module dedicated to that topic. And then once we have retina or written our books, then we need to launch them. So much in line is gone a share approval, some proven strategies on how to make you book launch is successful. And then module 10 is the cornerstone you can't live without.
Can you guess what that is? And probably remember, Oh shoot, I do remember but now I can't think of no, you say this is a question that wasn't fair of me. It's email marketing, email list that I remember that when now it was just only fitting cause I only just sent out my newsletter yesterday. So all right. Indeed. Yeah. So we're going to share some, some facts about email marketing in, in that module 10 and then of course, and if you have not done so already, you need to get going and get your email list started to today.
Yes. So all of that we're going to give for free and giving all this away for free. This is sad. I know we have been crazy for us. It'd be great. We in the city and I think, I think we are, but I've always said that. So that's all right. Yeah, indeed. I mean, I, I've looked around a bit, um, of, of course we have a, well this is the way we have decided to structure it and what we have decided to do. But if we compare to slightly similar courses, uh, I guess we could call it, uh, I've looked around and they usually charge for about $500 for this type of information.
So, uh, yeah, I dunno, we are stupid or they're going to be mad at us. So yeah. But it's the old still early days and the am but I have my notes completed for half the cost by now. So we are making good progress. Yay. Oh, we go on the internet with the amwritingfantasy podcast. So maybe just a in prolonged nation. Can you say that a lot? Like, I dunno, it works, whatever.
But adding onto, uh, the, the CRE cost that I was just talking about, uh, we also, I shared it, uh, the cost modules on patron as well to our patron supporters and we will got to a lot of nice messages back. That was nice. Yeah, there aren't really excited about this course and I've been, I'm excited about the course, but it's always good. I mean, good to get feedback and find out it's really going
Autumn (14m 52s): to be valuable and really appreciate hearing that. So it makes us more excited to get it done.
Jesper (14m 58s): Yeah, exactly. And then of course at the point in time where you're listening to this podcast episode, those who supports us on Patrion and have already known about this costs, these costs modules that are just yet for several weeks because we do try to maintain a close relationship to the pupil on Patrion and apart from the awesome rewards that we offer in there, we are also, we also share dedicated posts about writing every week. So there's a lot of additional tips and advice that you can pick up on Patrion and we even had our monthly Q and a session recently.
So yeah, go check out patron by the link in the show notes and uh, there's a lot of help you can get there for as little as a dollar a month.
Autumn (15m 41s): Yes. It was really awesome to see the comments on the chorus and actually, because when we're listening to this, while we were recording, it is going to be different from when we launched, but as we're recording this, we only just released episode 42, which was the one where I really gave some personal tips and feedback on how uh, overwhelmed at how my summer was going and the comments of course, Pat the Patriot number has got that early, which was so I got to get that before I hit the general public on Monday. So it was nice to get those like, yes, thank you.
You know, it's so important. But then even once it hit, uh, the general public was a general release. The comments I've gotten back from so many authors and people who are saying, this is not just, you know, authors, but so much of today's life is dealing with being overwhelmed and too many tasks and not knowing how to sort them out. So one, I appreciate all the positive messages, um, with people thanking me for sharing that, but also just wanted to give another shout out to everyone else.
If you're feeling overwhelmed and just struggling, you're not alone. I, I've heard from so many people that if it's not something you're going through now, it's something you've gone through. So, yeah, you know, always reach out, talk to someone, take a deep breath. I used to joke when I was am at my day job and was a manager that if it wasn't life, death or world peace, I was not going to get work worked up. So, uh, you know, reach out to people, keep that in mind and realize that, you know, if no one's going to die, um, if you know you're not going to save someone's life with this news or you know, you're not going to solve all the problems in the world and all Wars were a mill e-stop uh, go, just take a breath.
It's going to be okay to take a few minutes off, a half an hour off a day off and get your head on straight, or at least get back to feeling a little bit like yourself. Don't, don't keep pressing yourself to you. The point of collapse. There's no, there's nothing to be gained in that.
Jesper (17m 40s): No, no. Yeah. I'm not good at that either, to be honest. So I'm listening to you advice here as well. You
Autumn (17m 45s): better, well, I heard you're going to the movies maybe with wife while your kids are away. So that's a very good thing. Executive dialogue yes. This is the, I guess this, this conversation can go in all kinds of directions. Dialogue is so important from a great way to share character stuff. They'll wait. Can't wait to break up the pros in your novel, uh, giving out information and hinting at things.
I mean, it's so exciting and so important. It's an amazingly useful tool if you can get it right. Yeah. Well that's the trick with, with all of the writing stuff really, really is. Yeah. But I think as well when we're talking about dialogue we can get all into, into how to, to write the good dialogue and all that. But, but even before we get that far, I think there is a mechanical point around dialogue to make us well mean. And what I mean by that is that apart from dialogue keeping the story interesting and, and you know, moving, moving quickly for the reader, all those white spaces that appears when you start adding dialogue and the shorter lines that appears on the page.
It did just a mechanics part of that. I don't know if you can call it mechanics, but you know, once you reach pages in a book where, okay, here's a lot of white space there, shorter liner so you can see the dialogue is going on. It just makes for great greater Rita experience. So, so there is that added benefit for for the for dialogue which has nothing to do with writing the dialogue but, but, but I think that's an important point to make as well. I do too. I mean it definitely breaks up the page visually. Just like if anyone writes blog posts and stuff, there's a lot of techniques to making sure you have white space around what you're writing or breaking it up with quotes and things.
Dialogue does the exact same thing. You have pages and pages of prose and plus by following dialogue correctly and having lots of line breaks and the shorter sentences you actually add to your page count. So you know, I know a lot of first time authors and they're like, how many pages is this going to be when it comes a novel and you know, add more dialogue you'll actually get a little bit longer extended page count. Then you might have, if you even despite your word count. So it's kind of fun that way. Right? Yeah, true. Although I would say I don't really care how long it's going to be.
I mean it's, it's as long as it takes to tell the story. Right. That is actually a very good comment and one that they've been debating on the amwritingfantasy Facebook group. I just noticed. So that was kind of very funny. Okay, cool. So I have, I've sort of prepared some notes. So a list of different things that I probably have like 10 different chapters, she or something, but I don't know where do we want to stop street? I'd just to wrap one. And then you, you, you take some of your points as well or how do you want to do it?
Yes. Why don't you, since you are the list maker, why don't we start with that? And I mentioned before we started that is your job. You're good at making lists. Um, I've written I think a series of four or five blog posts that are on the amwritingfantasy website. So I have those and am yes, it's going to be almost like a, it is going to be a little bit like a quiz show. You start with your list and I will chime in with the tips. I've done an ad too. Even the ones I added on the blog post.
Jesper (21m 10s): Okay. Okay. Uh, yeah, so there was no particular order to this at all. This is just a, it's going to go a bit here and a bit there. These are just the points that I noted. The another one to make a and. I think the first one I could start with is that all dialogue needs to have some sort of purpose. You know all the, if you compare to real life, when we start talking to people a lot of the times that you know, at least if it's not like somebody you know really well, you will start talking about plus and trees like a talking about the weather or some ice breaking stuff and all that you need to kill when it comes to dialogue between characters.
Even if they don't know each other, we don't want to read about what they think about the weather and all that stuff. That's really boring. So you need to build towards something called Creek concrete within that scene. With your dialogue so that there is no pointless dialogue that that's really important.
Autumn (22m 3s): I agree. And one of my least favorite pieces of advice on writing doll dialogue is to listen to people talking around you. That is horrible. Have you listened to people talking around you? They usually don't make any sense. They're using like O M G and lots of ums and we're, you know, you can't follow often with writing dialogue you actually need to add in some explanation and it's like jumping to the heart of a personal to person conversation between people who either know each other really well that, but you still need to explain something.
It's totally different from listening to someone if you're sitting at a cafe because there's a lot of pointless dialogue that goes on at cafes. You have to have a purpose and there's a lot of different purposes you could have. It could be sharing information, it could be character building, it could be something humorous there. But there is a purpose and you've got to get to the heart of it very quickly. You can't sit there and kind of beat about the Bush and you know, talk about, like you said, the weather.
What are we having for dinner? Why is he late? Unless of course the why he's late is really important because he just got eaten by an ogre. Okay. So
Jesper (23m 17s): yeah, that's better. Oh, dragon. Oh, try again. That, that actually am well puts me right on the path to the next point that I was, because when you, you know, listening to others or listening to real speeches is indeed, or I was also gonna say that it's a bad idea. First of all, that might be a lot of slang words and you don't want to have a lot of slang words in your writing because Rita's don't understand what's going on. It seems, it seems confusing. So you don't want that. And you also want to kill filler words or at least reduce them to the absolute minimum.
So when we're talking here on the podcast, uh, we have our, you know, speech am, what is it called? Like limit, not limitations, but we have our habits in how we are speaking. Correct. And, uh, either some people say a lot of, um, some people say like all the time or whatever it may be, but we need to kill all that stuff when we are writing. Dialogue and uh, you, you're not supposed to write realistic speeds with a, with a lot of those filler words, but you're more supposed to write interesting.
Dialogue I would say or interesting things that the characters are saying that leads to some sort of purpose.
Autumn (24m 27s): Exactly. I read a book once where they literally had someone instead of writing exclaimed in glee, which would've been fine. They actually use the dialogue and I was like, Oh, this is terrible gig views. Exclaimed in glee, don't use actual descriptions of wheeze or ohms or legs. And I know a lot of people want to add in like some kind of charac characteristic phrase. Well that's fine, but you still don't put it every single sentence. And if you're from the 80s and you remember the Valley girl phase where it was like, um, like this, like that, that's so cool.
He don't need to add that to your dialogue either. A, unless you happen to be writing a really obnoxious teenager and even then please keep it to a minimum just, you know, twice in a chapter. Just show it and that's about it.
Jesper (25m 18s): Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean you can, you can write the am here and there in a, in a revocation if there's a, if you're trying to make a point that the characters really unsure in the situation or something, then here and there it can be okay, but, but you really need to keep it short and you need to let dialogue flow naturally and then get to the point instead of all that blah, blah, blah stuff. So yeah, that's just a, that's just it. Exactly. Okay. The next one, next one. Let me see here.
So next one is that, of course it will. This is a bit of a well almost formatting type of way, but it's also a good idea to make sure that you give each speaker their own paragraphs so that it's easy to distinguish who's actually saying something. Because I don't, dunno in sometimes in books it's not really clear who is saying what and you go back and you reread the section two times to understand who set that. And that is really annoying. So you don't want to do that.
Autumn (26m 15s): No. It can throw the reader totally out of the story cause they're trying to figure out who's talking and who actually has the information. And that's horrible. And I mean this one is so important. I actually wrote an entire blog post on formatting and yeah, if you, every speaker should get their own, you know, paragraph and then a space. And so yeah, you might end up having, you know, three words and maybe a dialogue tiger, an action tag or maybe not depending on how many people are speaking. So you might have three words and then you're hitting the, you know, the paragraph return again for the next person speaking.
That's okay. That's like what we were talking at the top when we first started. It creates white space. It's a visual break. You do not need to make dialogue look as packed as an info dump, which shouldn't be in your novel anyway. You don't want it to look like this heavy prose. It should be this little, you know, almost like poetry, lots of spaces and white and different varying sentence lengths. That's kind of what makes it fun.
Jesper (27m 12s): Mmm. Yeah. And that, that varying sentence length is, it's a good point as well. Um, and especially also don't, don't make the really, really long monologues. Nobody wants to read that either. No. There should definitely even annoying in real life.
Autumn (27m 29s): Here that one is, is, so that is a real life example you can follow, but it's definitely, definitely back and forth. You want to have some play on words and again, that's what makes dialogue fun because its purpose, like I said, it can actually have multiple purposes. So one of them should definitely be, you know, ramping up tension maybe and getting some sparring going and for that you're going to have really short sentences.
Jesper (27m 53s): True, true. And I don't know, this next one, it might sound a bit weird when we're talking about dialogue or the, but it's still applicable and that is don't forget to use silence as well. You know, it can work really well when a character character suddenly just falls silence instead of, uh, arguing that that works really well. I have a character from my dystopian post-apocalyptic
Autumn (28m 17s): Siri is that he is a master. I wish I could master this. Oh my gosh. I tried to channel him all the time, but uh, he just, Jared, he can, he knows that people will just start talking to fill that silence and eventually they're going to reveal what it is he's waiting for them to reveal. He's so darn good. But yes, that is perfect to have one character who is basically controlling the sentence or maybe just he's not, they're not ready to say something. That's fantastic. They can just fall silent.
And I think that is fantastic advice.
Jesper (28m 51s): Yeah. And I think if, if you look at the, maybe the reason why a lot of the time we don't think about writing or writing silence. That sounds really weird. Maybe a lot of the times we don't think about it is because in real life it feels extremely awkward. Now I have am, I've been negotiating contracts and stuff like that with, with clients in my, in my, um, uh, day job thing for many, many, many times.
And one of the things that it is incredibly difficult to do, but one of the things that works wonderfully well is if you're negotiating something and you've sort of, you've made your points and then of course the other party will argue that the, they want something else. A lot of the times it works amazing to just to keep quiet because they can't, people cannot take it that there was just a silence. So they'll stop talking about something and sooner or later they will start giving you something because, uh, well, okay, maybe we can do like this and that and then, yeah, okay, maybe we could, you know, uh, of course you try when negotiate and of course you are trying to make a win win situation rather than a win lose situation.
But, but if they're really not botching anywhere, sometimes it works wonderfully well too. Just keep silent and let them do the talking because they to come up with such suggestion all of a sudden that didn't you have something to work from.
Autumn (30m 12s): I have this visualization of someone going into their like annual review now and their boss is telling them all this stuff and they just kind of sit there like, Oh huh.
Jesper (30m 22s): Yeah.
Autumn (30m 24s): I'm not sure if we're giving that kind of advice right now, but consider a silence the next time you're in a tough negotiation.
Jesper (30m 30s): Yeah. I'm, I'm going to give you like a $20 pay raise and then you just sit there silent looking at the boss. You are you happy with that? Still silence. See how that works. I love it. I have a 25. Is that make you happy? Yeah. Still silence. If anyone uses this technique, please let us know. Yeah, yeah. I would love to hear a story about that. Alright, so the next, next tip, uh, next tip is remember that in many cases actually coaches won't actually say precisely what they're thinking.
And this is also what we do in real life all the time. Um, but if, if you are making dialogue where the characters just laying out exactly how they feel about something and exactly what their plan is, it's, it feels extremely unrealistic
Autumn (31m 21s): and people don't talk like that. No writing either. Exactly. And so many people are not really that self aware. So you're character shouldn't be that self-aware. Maybe they're just like, something's bothering me or I don't think we should go that way. And they're not really articulating why or what their overall plans or overall hopes are. Maybe it should just be, you know, those kind of loose terms. Like hopefully we can make it through the past. If we leave early in the morning, that's better than saying we will get up in the morning and we're going to go to the past and we're going to get through and no, it sounds better if you at least make some possibilities and kind of couch it in those little terms of not quite sure though.
I have to admit, I sometimes also say when you're writing, you know, get rid of those questionable things. You know, people don't do things halfway, but when it comes to dialogue, that's okay. You can have some quasi, I'm not really sure of statements, but when you're doing action, you either do it or you don't do it. Don't do these. Almost get rid of all the almost, unless it's in dialogue then it's okay. Yeah, no, and sometimes as well, people say one thing, but they mean something else.
Um, so that's also something to consider. Absolutely. And it's also, you know, it's great to, if you're on the point of view, point of view, if someone is a very powerful character and a great manipulator, so you can know, you can have them thinking one thing or you know, you could have them really manipulating through their dialogue and that's really fun for the reader to start figuring out that, wait, no, they weren't. They were thinking something else and now they're doing this. Why are they doing this? Curiosity. Oh, that drives readers nuts and keeps them reading.
Jesper (33m 6s): Yeah. Yeah, indeed. Uh, so I have one more. Um, and then you, you can fill in if you have more after that. Um, if you probably have, but um, this one is a, it's one that can really drive me nuts sometimes. The Asar her speech to text.
Autumn (33m 25s): Ah, that's actually what I was going to bring up too. So I know there's this huge advice out there that said, always use said, and I've gotten into a lot of debate about this with other authors. So what do you think? Should you always use said
Jesper (33m 41s): no? Absolutely. I think, uh, I think it's on writing the, if you know the book from Stephen King, I think, I think it's him saying in that book that if you're writing, he said or she said it's almost invisible to the reader because our, I sort of just skims over it. We register if it says he or she, but otherwise we don't really notice it then. And I think there is some truth to that, if that's all you're doing. There was not much variance in your speech, tach and attacks and this should be
Autumn (34m 13s): for. Fantasy. Um, we have a little bit more allowance to use the adverts, the adjectives had in those descriptors, uh, than say if you're a writing, you know, well, okay, scientific something. But it's definitely, I think we're allowed to be a little more flavorful for the our words. And that's kind of fun. I think it's a lot more fun. So yeah, I, I agree the CEDS, you know, maybe 50% if of the actual dialogue tags, which again, you don't need to just use dialogue tags, but definitely like, you know, you don't have to use set 100% of the time.
It's just boring.
Jesper (34m 57s): It is. Absolutely. And. And I think the, the other thing, and this, this is, this is the part that that drives me nuts sometimes is when speech tax I used incorrectly by that one. I mean, is that if you're using the L Y at works, so you're saying, like he said angrily are, she's said sadly or something like that. It drives me absolutely bonkers. There's, I think there's this tendency to use those lly at work because that's how we, we, we think that it shows emotion but in fact it doesn't, we're back to the show don't tell, which I think we've mentioned a hundred times already, but it is just much, much more engaging if you're using the actions and steps, you know, you can describe how the facial expressions that are showing that he's angry or anything like that or maybe a, maybe a tear rolls down the cheek because they're sad or are they slam the door or whatever they do.
But, but that's sort of dialogue tech is a million times better than writing she sets. Sadly. It's like what the, and I was just about to say B
Autumn (36m 11s): I'll do it for you. No, I agree. I think on the blog post on adverbs, I wrote that, uh, you know, the first time the character, the reader here is that the character is angry is because of using anger. You know, shouted angrily, which I hopefully never would've had ever used sheltered angrily. But if that's the first time the reader sees that the character's angry is because you just told them in a dialogue time was an adverb, Oh, you're not doing this right? No, it's not supposed to work that way. You're supposed to be showing the emotion yet you could use shouted instead of said, that's a great one.
But yes, I am the cup against the floor, hit the wall gestures, you know, moving so quickly that they knock something over to show, you know, some kind of emotion. And those are often called action tag. So if you said, I don't know what you mean. And then said as he slammed, you know the cup onto the table, that is an action tag and you immediately relate that whoever is speaking is also doing the action.
So of course this would all be in just one paragraph. And then when you switch to the next speaker, you go to the next paragraph. But those are action tags versus the dialogue tags like shouted, swore, whispered, those are dialogue tags and they're, you know, and you can intersperse, use one or the other. Some people prefer to use one. I think a mix is great and again, if there's only two people speaking and they're alternating pretty regularly, you can go a couple of lines without using any tags. As long as you, you know, either throwing an action tag, you need to make sure the reader doesn't get too confused.
You don't go like six lines with no nothing but definitely like three or four sometimes that is visually fun and makes it go really quick when two people are having a very intense exchange to just skip the dialogue or action tags. As long as it's only two people. Once you throw on the third, you're going to have to make sure everyone knows who's talking.
Jesper (38m 12s): Yeah, I mean a, and of course it can be difficult to come up with new stuff or new ways to express am emotions and all that. And and we can also end up repeating a lot of the same stuff because that's just how we work when we don't think about it. But, uh, I actually wanted to mention, and I can put the link in the show notes to this, but there are some really, really awesome books that you can buy that it's going to help you a lot. And am these are there, it's like a series a but it's written by Angela Ackerman and Becca put Felicia, I think that's how you say it, but it's basically a, you can get like a writers guy, two character flaws, a writers guy too.
Character attributes. Uh, so these are called the negative trot, a treat thesaurus and the positive trait thesaurus and what you can do with these books is that basically just has tons of different uh, uh, like a trait. So I can look up anything like a, I can see, okay, ignorant for example. And then this, uh, I'm just doing it now, of course you can see it, but it'll have, it'll have like a, a whole list of like 40 different associated behaviors to being ignorant.
And then there'll be like 40 different things that you can then use as inspiration on how to show it when it in you know, when writing and how the character might react and how, how they might, you know, what they might do and so forth and so forth. So it's, it's, it's really amazing and it works extremely well, especially when you're in the editing phase and you're trying to make your dialogue tax better. Then use these books as inspiration and am and try to, you know, very your dialogue tax it, it really helps a lot these books.
So I will, I'll put a link
Autumn (40m 2s): to them into the, in the show notes. So if you're interested. Yeah. And are they the ones who also wrote the emotional thesaurus cause I know I've seen that one. Yes. Yes. Those are, they're fantastic inspiration for really enhancing your writing and being able to show emotions other than the heart pump, you know, chest, the heart beating in the chest and the brows. Scrunching there's so much more to emotional. Yes, there's a lot of other ones in there and you can pick some of those tweaks.
And give one specifically to a character that helps with your character building. And I think that's, you know, yeah, it's fantastic. And they're great books. Absolutely. Uh, okay. That's what I ended up my list. Autumn do you have more about dialogue I think I go into a little bit more in the blog post. Maybe we should, you know, link to them or at least tell folks, you know, check out the amwritingfantasy website and look up the dialogue tips there. Cause there's four or five blog posts that we've covered and they actually, part of it is like just taking the same set of words.
It's slowly adding to them so that you can see a dialogue developing into something that's different and more concrete. And that might give you some tips to, to get going. And there if you want more questions on action tags and dialogue tags and when you should or shouldn't use adverbs, that is all posted in there. So that'll help make it a little bit more clear. If you're visual in listening in and want to look at something, they're there. Well, of course we always want to make things easy. So we'll
Jesper (41m 34s): put a link to those articles or blog posts in the show notes as well. So there's a lot of good stuff you can link or you can click in the show notes this time around and check out yourself. So that was all about, uh, dialogue. And the next week we are gonna. We're going to have another amazing episode, so see you there.
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Narrator (2s): You're listening to the amwritingfantasy podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing join to best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them. Now onto the show with your hosts. Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt. Hello. I am, Jesper.
Autumn (32s): and I'm autumn,
Jesper (34s): this is episode 44 of the amwritingfantasy podcast and we are going to talk about something as exciting as free books today.
Autumn (44s): Yeah,
Jesper (47s): yeah, yeah. A lot of people do. But, but actually we're going to look a bit into that. And, uh, just for reference here, these are also called Permafree books, uh, because it's about books that you are setting up so that they are permanently free on all platforms. So that's what we're talking about today. Um, and we actually also covered this topic slightly on a previous episode already. Uh, but since then we've actually gone out and ask for Rita opinions on this topic.
Yeah. And it's better than just being us, us authors here among ourselves, speculating on what we thinking about offering free books. So, uh, yeah, that's what we're going to look into today and also discover if it's actually worth it anymore nowadays, but, but more on that later. How have you been since our last recording? Autumn
Autumn (1m 41s): that was definitely a little bit of a personal one. If anyone hasn't listened to it. Talking about feeling overwhelmed and yes, life hip cups. So thank you. I've actually been doing, you know, well there's still ups and downs and days like that, but I will say, you know, I've been talking about that. I've been struggling with my writing and of all things. I'm very busy at the moment cause am I do my newsletter to my readers on the first and the 15th of the month. That's just when I do them. And so I have this to do and not to do, I've been doing some book cover commissions and so I really don't have, like right now the writing hasn't been doing well.
So I'm like, of course I'm not going to write, I'm not even gonna. Look at it. I'm stuck in this scene. I hate the scene and I figured it out. And so I, I wrote myself two minutes on my phone and I hate writing notes on my phone, but I did two minutes of writing notes and it really came down to a phrase that I had already written. I just was stuck at. And by turning it into a negative, changing things slightly, I think I can finish up the scene that has had me stuck and move on. So I know I'm very excited.
I mean I literally, I'm doing like 500 words a day at the moment. I just, it's kind of a, I actually am not even doing that right now. It's hopefully when I get back to it later this week, it'll, it takes like half an hour. This is not a big deal. It's just to make me feel better and feel like I started my day right. Um, to keep writing cause I'm, Hey, I'm an author, but life's a little chaotic right now and overwhelmed and other things. But it feels good to keep it going. And I'm so excited that I think I figured this one out. I'm going to move forward to the next season that could trip me up.
But that's, that was a good week to have that. That idea. I knew as soon as I got too busy to work on it, it would finally come unstuck. And it did. Yeah. Well that's good news. Yeah. I mean progress is always good. I mean, even the small small steps counts as well. Right. And I think, I think that's a lot of like authors. We love that, that moment of, Oh, that epiphany that when things click into place that especially ones that you've been struggling with for what, two months, uh, when that finally clicks and you suddenly have, you realize why things pulled together and why they mean something, that's what really gets authors so excited that we're stumbling over our words and we're just kidding.
You were jumping up and down in our partners in our lives are going, are you okay? You're excited because you had a night. It's all right. But I love it. I love it. It gives you a whole new energy. And so I am definitely feeling a little bit more positive and like maybe my life might be a little less stuck because my writing I think is going to be unstuck very soon. Huh. Excellent. That's good news. So how is your week going? Yeah, well good.
Um, I know, I was actually thinking that, uh, it's been a while since I shared one of my referees story. Maybe I could share one today.
Jesper (4m 37s): Okay. Because I was refereeing this weekend and uh, the rain was just pouring down, but that's actually not what I wanted to, to share. But w but we got really soaked but, but that's not the point. But something, something happened, you know, this weekend that I've never tried before, it's due. So, uh, yeah, so the, the away team, they manage to turn up without any clothes for the players.
You know, where they have their normal clothes on of course. But they did not have, they hadn't brought any of the plain clothes at all. So let just showed up. Yeah. Well, so they had like a, not the coach, but they have like a team manager and he supposed to, he has one task and that is to bring the clothes. And that's the only thing he didn't do. So they, well, so there was a few of the players who had their own shorts and t-shirts. Some of them do that. They, they buy their own and then with the club branding on and all that, so they have the right stuff.
But, but the rest of the team, which was like seven or eight players did not have anything but the clothes that they were standing in. So like chips and stuff like that, you know, regular clothing. So they were just standing there and uh, then they, uh, they sent back a guy to pick up the clothes. Um, and of course I'm sure in, in us standards, the distances are not very far here, but, but here in Denmark they had to drive like 50 kilometers. I'm not sure what that is in miles, but in our standards, that's not a lot.
But yeah, probably. Yeah, but, but of course, if you have to start a medicine like 15 minutes, then it's pretty far back and forth to drive 30 miles or 60 miles. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. So he, he, the coach then asked me, you know, can we start this match later because, you know, we don't have any clothes. So I said, yeah, you know, for me that's not a problem. But, but you have to ask the home team coach if he's okay with it.
Um, so he, he went and asked to tone gene coats on and I went with him. And then the home team coach set, I'm sorry, but we can't because several of our players actually have a double mat, so they have to play another match right after this one. So we cannot wait to start. We need to get started. And uh, so, so they, uh, some of the players were still hadn't come out to the pitch and a I and then told me, you need to, you know, you need to get your players out here now because we need to start.
And by this time we were already like 15, 20 minutes late, um, because they had forgot their gear. So, so that was really wonderful. So now he, uh, he then suggested that the awake coach then suggested but, okay, but could we then perhaps wait until our guy comes with the clothing and then we'll just shorten the, the match, uh, you know, playful, less time than normal. And, uh, the, the home team coach them said, no, I don't want to do that. I want to play full time.
Oh, he's just being, he didn't turn to me. Well, yeah, I dunno, but, but he is in his right. You know, it's not his fault that they forgot their clothing. So, so this a way team coach, he then turned to me, you know, as the referee, because I'm the one who needs to get the match started. And, and he said, well, so what do we do? And basically told him yet, well, you have two options. Either you can forfeit, which means that you're automatically going to lose the Mets three to nothing.
Or you borrow some green pullover shirt from the home team. And then basically you have your players play in jeans and regularly on the shirts. Oh, it is. And he was like, what? And I said, well yeah, that's your options. Either you play or your forfeit, what do you want to do that's very black. And I then he said that, okay, well we've, yeah, yeah, exactly. And then he said, okay, well we drove all the way here so we want to play and as if that's fine, then we're going to start in two minutes. So get on your green pullover shirts that you borrow here.
And then we kept going. And of course, you know, they hadn't had any time to warm up or do any pre-match preparation. So they were completely unprepared and they were standing there like half this, half the team and teams. It's ridiculous. And the home team was just laughing at them and yeah, it was horrible. And uh, but you know what the irony of this whole situation was? What's that?
So because they were arrived so late and I was so unprepared that da way team then ended up losing five nil. Oh. So actually if they had forfeited, they would have lost three needle so they wouldn't have gotten a better result by not playing at all. I was hoping for a better moral to this story.
Autumn (9m 33s): I hear that you know, either, you know, the other team like gave them extra clothing or the home team gave them extra clothing or that somehow they actually ended up winning. But this is like Lou's Lou.
Jesper (9m 48s): Well, yeah, maybe it's not a positive story, but I guess the moral is that you need to come prepared for stuff. You can't just show up out of the blue and think everything will work out. Right. Yeah. You'll just be able to wing it and it's fine. I guess maybe that's not the best way to do the same thing, but writing. Right. I mean you can't just, no, exactly. Yeah. And same thing with writing, right. You, you can't, you can't just show up to at your computer and think everything would magically work out. You know, you have to put some thought into it.
Autumn (10m 16s): Absolutely. That's, that's so true. But unfortunate. But yes, it is definitely always, I'm not a pantser, you're not a pantser. We're definitely always better when we am have a little bit of a plot going, which is why we're writing a plan plotting book together, which I think we keep mentioning every episode, so, okay. We'll move on from that one.
Jesper (10m 37s): Amen. Oh, week on the internet with the amwritingfantasy podcast. So we have these, uh, small like topic teasers, or maybe I should call them talking points that we post every week in the amwritingfantasy group. And, uh, and, and maybe I should also mention that actually that every month we we do give away some very cool prices to those who engage the most, don't we? Autumn yes, we do. I think it's really exciting, this stuff that you can get
Autumn (11m 9s): everything from blurb reviews to a 3d books images. So yeah, it's kinda fun.
Jesper (11m 16s): Um, yeah. And we also offered to review five pages of writing, and I dunno, maybe it's actually time that I should give away another audio book of, uh, of my book of how to write a fantasy book description. What do you think? Maybe I should do that next month? Maybe we should, uh, yeah, we'll have to decide because I have to make up the image for what the price is going to be, so let me know. Right? Yeah, yeah. Maybe that's a good, uh, but actually what I wanted to say about those topic teasers or, or, or small snippets there that we post actually that I posted one this last week with the following text.
It just said, listen to music that reminds you of your character or scene to inspire your writing. And I was, and that was all he said, but I was actually quite surprised to see how many engaged with it. There was a lot of comments and posts then I really did not expect that on something as simple as that. So that was, uh, that was very, I was very pleased with that. So thank you everyone for all the posting there. That was awesome.
Autumn (12m 14s): That is, I, it's all a little bit of it. And it's funny how many people like, right, like writing to music or don't like writing to music. And I know occasionally that sometimes when I have a am, when I have, you know, a character I have problems getting in touch with. It really helps to listen to music that reminds me of this character. So I can definitely see the point occasionally and listening to music that inspires you to get into your scene and your character. But yeah, there's other times where it can totally not help too.
Yeah.
Jesper (12m 47s): Yeah. It's funny because I, I, well, I, on the flip side, I need a completely quiet environment. Otherwise I simply cannot concentrate on writing. But, but I don't know. Did you notice what Jason said that, that he was listening to all writing that really made me laugh.
Autumn (13m 0s): No, I don't think I saw what his answer was. He wrote BBC news. I think if I was listening that would inspire me unless I was doing a political thriller at the moment.
Jesper (13m 17s): Yeah. I just don't see how, I mean, if it works, then that's great for him, but I just don't understand how you can listen to news and then, right. I mean, that would be so distracting for me. Yeah. If, of course.
Autumn (13m 28s): Yeah, exactly. I was gonna say for me, unless it's a specific song that reminds me of a character and like I said, especially for the a few difficult characters I've done, otherwise I just do a YouTube Epic fantasy mix and put it on the background a drowned out what other noise. But if it's a perfectly quiet house, I'm good with a perfectly quiet house because I tend to zone out and not hear anything anyway. Right. But it's funny, I was actually looking at a different conversation in the Facebook group that really got me going. Yeah.
We, uh, I like it when other people post topics and ideas too because obviously, you know, that's really close to them. And Richie recently posted something odd, um, a blog post he had done where you've had a guest author come in and talk about mistakes male authors make when writing female characters. And I thought that was such a good topics. I, yeah, I had to read through the blog post and read through all the comments on it to see, and you know, the, the blog post is very authentic in saying, yeah, sometimes fee, you know, women writers when they're writing male characters are also making assumptions about what it's like to be male because obviously no one is putting on someone else's skin and living someone else's life.
But I did think it was some great tips on how to write a female character and some things to avoid because yeah, there's still some horrible, people don't treat female characters like Oh you know, a real character. And so it was really interesting to read through the post and see what some of the issues we're all the way down to a good solution is if you really are, have any doubts, make sure you have a female beta reader that you're going to actually listen to who can give you some female perspective about what you're doing to your women characters.
But it definitely, you know, both ways. You know, I'm a woman and I do write male characters and I know you have a written, some major female characters, so it's always nice to like, you know, double check your perspective and make sure you're doing right by all your characters and all your gender's, including the ones that are somewhere in between.
Jesper (15m 32s): Yeah. I guess maybe I, maybe I should have read that, uh, that blog posts before. Uh, well, of course it wasn't released back then, but, but actually at some point there's a slight, I don't know, maybe half a year or more ago, but I was, uh, I was interviewed on another podcast and, and the, the interviewer, the host asked me, uh, about me writing female characters and, and, and what, how, you know, what did I think about when I wrote the female character and how do I make sure that they are am
Autumn (16m 4s): realistic, I guess. And
Jesper (16m 7s): I guess I did not have a very good answer was because I was like, I was like, well, I don't understand. What do you mean? I mean, I just, if it's a male or female, the character has to be strong. They have to be capable because otherwise we just don't like the character. So it doesn't really matter if it's a male or female. And of course they have to have reasonable motives as to what they're doing and why they're doing the things that they're doing and all that good stuff. But at the end of the day, it's not really that different that that, I think that was my response back then and it was like, uh, but it sounds like this blog post is a lot better than what I came up,
Autumn (16m 45s): which is why I think it's the subtle, subtle differences that people might not realize when they're writing characters were like a few heads, some good examples where they started with a really strong female character, but then she got married and had kids and was no longer a warrior and only cared about having kids and that people were like, how could you do this to her? She was a strong independent female or, or using a character like I, the token female, you know, you and I are blog, you know, developing things. I'm always going like, we can't just have one woman, you know, this 50 50 or even if it's, you know, it should be something, Hey, I think it's really fun to have like a 75% female troop, you know, do something different.
Don't worry, don't stress, but definitely treat them is deliberately as you would any character. Hmm, good point.
Jesper (17m 35s): Yeah. So as I said in the beginning of of this episode, we have been debating for a while now whether the strategy of giving free books away actually works as a marketing tactic anymore. And uh, to get wiser I guess on that topic, we started the survey and we ask readers for their opinions on the matter and the point of this recording that we're doing right now, we've got 379 responses. That's pretty good. That is definitely not bad.
Autumn (18m 4s): Well, I'm hoping for more, but you know, that's getting pretty statistical at this point.
Jesper (18m 11s): Yeah, exactly. But I would really like to get to a thousand responses in total because then is, as you just said, is statistically relevant at that point. So I would like to, I guess put out a call to all our listeners year since all of you are also writers and am maybe autumn maybe we could ask people to help us out a bit. You know if I put a link to the survey in the show notes and maybe then if we ask our author listeners here to share that link with their readers, maybe in the newsletter or wherever, in order to basically get
Autumn (18m 46s): more responses. Don't you think that they would be willing to do that for us? I would hope so. I know I've put it in my nose letter and you put it in yours, but that'd be fantastic to get some other other readers out there to answer it so we can get it up to a thousand because I know we are going to calculate the results and have the answers and you said you're going to post it in the group in our amwritingfantasy Facebook group, so that would be, you know, you'll get the results if you'll help us out. You can find out as this is topic that we're about to discuss with our current slightly, not quite statistical enough average, but you know, you'll get those results and make a decision about how you want to run your books and if you should be doing PERMA free.
So please help us out. The link is in the show notes and if you have questions of course just reach out and let us know.
Jesper (19m 36s): Yeah, absolutely. And of course you find the a amwritingfantasy Facebook group. I just searching for amwritingfantasy in the group session of Facebook. And what I should also let you know is that this a link that we have in the show notes, it does not require your readers to sign up for anything or leave their email address or anything like that. I, I left it completely open so that is as easy as possible. And you know, people could just go and leave their response and leave again and that's all we asking. We're not gonna put them on an email list or anything like that. So uh, yeah, you can tell you that lowers the barrier of entry.
That's exactly
Autumn (20m 9s): double is take it yourself. We're not trying to swipe your reader list. We just wanted to have this question answered.
Jesper (20m 18s): Yeah, exactly. That's what we want. And um, basically what I have to do here today is now that I will share the results that we have so far with the 379 responses. And uh, I, I would think that is fairly accurate to be honest. Uh, I would be surprised if the remaining am amount of responses up to a thousand will completely change the results. But uh, yeah, just be aware that might change.
Autumn (20m 48s): Yeah. I can't wait to hear it because even I've been kept in the dark, so I don't have the stats in front of me. I can't wait to find out what some of the answers are. So yes, let's get on with it. So what are people answering and you know, are you seeing then a big enough trend that you, you're feeling pretty confident that these answers are pretty solid? Oh, good. I can't wait to hear that. Yes, absolutely. Yes, absolutely. But maybe before we get into the actual results it, it might be worth explaining. How do you actually make your book permanently free when Amazon doesn't allow you to put in a price of Shiro Dallas when you uploaded to KBP.
So maybe you could just cover that first autumn absolutely. This is something I've keep doing an undoing and trying to decide if I want to do again. So to make a book permanently free, the first thing you have to do is be wide. You can't just be on Amazon and it not just why to like it's free on my website you have to also have your book published on the big sites like Kobo, Barnes and noble, uh, Apple. Sorry, my brain just blanked. Apple books you need to have on the big platforms you book also uploaded.
And then those platforms, you do have the option of choosing free or if you go through a distributor like books to draft to digital or Smashwords, you also have options of uploading to free. So you have to basically push your book out to free everywhere. Again, those big publishers are the ones that are important. It doesn't matter if you have it free on what what pad? Amazon doesn't care what about Wattpad unless you happen to be in KDP select and have your book on what path they will find it. Trust me, don't do it but if once you have your book free elsewhere, what you need to do is you can do it two ways.
The smartest, easiest and most professional way is to email the KTP KTP help desk and say, I have this book you give your ASI en number is free on platforms on Smashwords Smashwords. Yes. You knew here on Barnes and Nobles at this link you must give them the actual link so they can click on the book and go and see it's free on Kobo, Barnes, noble, you know, give them multiple if you can and then say would you please price match? They will normally email you back saying it is up to their discretion to decide if they want to price match, but if they decide to do so that you will see it marked as free in a few days.
I can tell you that as the script they send you every single time and I don't think I've ever seen them not follow through and then make your book free. Now the other way is if for some reason you get a no response or if you are just really nervous for some reason about talking to the KDP help desk who are usually incredibly helpful and very polite and nice. Um, all you have to do is get you and all your friends. Social media works great for this reason and say, Hey, go and go to my book page on Amazon and there's a little button you know on the page usually helps.
If you Mark it out to people and say, click this. Say you found the book at a different price elsewhere and give them the links to where it is also free and just have, Oh, I've heard as few as 10 friends, I've heard as many as a hundred. I think the real number is somewhere around 20 to 30 people have to go and say, Hey, I saw this book free somewhere else. And Amazon will usually price match it that way very quickly as well. So you can do it both ways, but really it's easy unless you're really good at rounding up a whole bunch of friends, just email the KTP help desk.
But if that does fall through social media and tell people to please report your book as free on other websites and that'll work as well. Yup. And of course the strategy or the line of thinking behind making a book free is of course that am you lower the barrier of entry for, for new readers and and basically makes it like a no brainer for them to, uh, to give you a book, a chance. And then of course the idea is then all the strategies here that you're writing in a series, so you're giving one away for free.
And then the idea is that once they've read that, then they are hooked and like your story and then they go on to buy the other books in the series and am iron man is sexually to get to number 66 in the overall Kindle store with this strategy. Um, but the attentive listener will also remember that in a previous episode I talked about something I called Kindle stuffing, which was basically when readers download books free just because they are free and then they store them on their Kindle device and then they actually never read them.
And that was am the premise or line of thinking behind this survey that we did because I can certainly see on my books that um, that looks, it seems like there's a lot of Kindle stuffing going on because the number of readers who go through from book one to the rest of the series has seriously dwindled compared to in the past. Yes, I agree. It's called the thing that is just stuck. Yeah. It's called the read through rate. And there was a time where you give, like you do a big promo, you have your book for free and you know a thousand people download it and if you have a 10% to 20% read through rate picking it, you know they're picking up the next books in the series.
That's, you know, pretty successful and it makes the advertising worthwhile. But I agree recently it seems like the raid through rate is dropping like a rock and I'm starting to wonder to what the results of your survey going to be as if is this is Kindle stuffing really just taking the for and people aren't picking up or they are picking up free books but they're never getting to them because there's so many of them. Yeah, that's, that's the thing. So do you want me to, she has some results out. Oh please I wouldn't know the answers at least with the answers as we have them right now.
Yep. Okay. So I'm going to cover each of the questions I ask people
Jesper (26m 44s): and then I will give you the responses and I will also give you my reflection on it. And then of course you can sort of pitch in and give your reflection if you agree or disagree with me. All right, sounds good. Okay. So the first question I asked was, are you more likely to take a chance on a new author if the book is free? And basically 64% says that they don't mind paying for a book written by an author that they have never heard of before.
Wow. Interests. So 36% chose the other options where I stated that they will only purchase books written by authors they already know. So that's, you know, people are willing to take a chance. 67% are willing to take a chance on a new or 64 64 that is really excellent. And that's surprised that that's a lot more than I thought. Yeah. I would have thought it was a lot less too. Yeah. And then I went on, so I basically spit out the questions here.
So the one, the people who are within the 36%, uh, pocket here, then the people who said that they only want to purchase books from authors that they already know. I asked them a sub question that I did not ask the other ones. Um, and this sub question was basically saying that if they would purchase a book from an author that they don't know if it, the book had good reviews and otherwise sounds interesting, uh, and for their taste and so forth.
Right. And do you know what happened? They still won't get it. 66% now confirmed that they would change their mind. Oh my gosh. Did you see a lot? That is a lie. You didn't put it at a threshold, like a minimum number of reviews. You just said like an excellent star rating. I just said great reviews. That's what the question says. And of course I did on purpose with all these questions. I made them very black and white because I want to force people to take either one side or the other.
I don't want all those in the middle answers. So that's on purpose that I've done it like this way, but 66% confirmed that they would change their mind. So if 64%, that was the number we had before, you know, out of the total pool, they said that they were already prepared to pay for the book and other those who then said that they wouldn't, you can still convert 66% of those people if you have good reviews on the book. So basically if I add those two together, then you're looking at more than 80% confirming that they are willing to pay for a novel.
That's exciting. That it really is to see that that many people are willing to buy a new book even if they never heard of the author. But obviously you've got to have some stuff there. Great reviews or, I mean, do you have questions on pricing? No, not as such, but we'll come to that. But, um, now I'm, any questions to go here? Let's go. Um, yeah. So, uh, so I thought that was very interesting. Of course it does.
As you just said to autumn. Uh, it just proved that if you have social proof on your book, meaning good reviews and stuff like that, then it does make a difference. But let, let's move on here. Uh, then things got really interesting as well. When I then asked if you bought a book, is it the next book you're start reading? And of course here I'm alluding to these Kindle stuffing topic, right? Right. So if they bought the book, 42% says yes, this just the next book, they'll start reading while 58% then says no, they will attitude there to be ruthless.
Autumn (30m 34s): Okay. Which we know how the big, the Tubi redless so, okay, so that's almost almost 50, 50 that, you know, most would go ahead and read it next and the rest are gonna just add it to the pile even though they know they bought it.
Jesper (30m 48s): Right. But listen to this then, because this is where it gets interesting because the next question I asked him is basically the exact same question. But now I sent us the question on those who get a, who got a free book instead of buying it. So basically the question went like this, if you download a free book, is it the next book you start reading and you know, what happened? What happened? So, so now only 32% confirmed that they were started reading it.
So we just lost 10% compared to the 42 from before. I think this, to me, this makes sense because if you spent money on something, you are far more likely to also take action on it. That's true. Right. Wow. That's so this leaves, yeah. So just leave 68% of the readers saying that they would simply add the book to the TUPE red list if they, um, God did for free. And that is the list that we don't not want to be on as authors.
You know, we want them to pick up the book and start reading.
Autumn (31m 53s): Yeah. It's, yeah. That to be redless. I mean, I know mine. Um, yeah, it's, it's a sad, sad thing that books on my to be read list because I just, you're right, if I see something that really interests me, I'm going to go buy it and read it. And I don't really care about what else is left that I picked up randomly across the net. So that's interesting. That's really see that coming out that readers are gonna look at the books that they purchased and bought money for we're the ones they picked up for a free might end up to the back eddies of the to be red.
Jesper (32m 29s): Yeah. And of course the, the, the critical listener could then say, well 10% that's not a laugh a lot. And yeah, I don't know, maybe it's not. But to me 10% I mean if you're out a lot of free books the fact that 10% of them are more likely to not read it because it just goes onto the, to be reckless to me that that is significant. I think it might be, I mean I definitely seeing a trend, but I'm sure you still have more questions to go. I do.
I do. Because the next question here then as onto the one that we just had here, and the next question is how many unread books do you have on your e-reader? Maybe the Kindle, the phone, the nook, whatever. Oh, this is going to be a scary one. Yeah. So if I tell you the bracket options autumn that I gave people, then maybe you can guess on where you think that 60% of all the responses fill in one of these brackets. Sure. You can guess.
I'll give you the brackets first. Okay. I'll give this a try. So yeah. So the first bracket I gave them was that they have none or no on read books on their e-reader because they always finish the current rate before they pick up a new book. That was the first option. Second option is that they have less than five mm. And third option is that they have between five and 10 unread books on the e-reader. And this last option is that they have more than 10 books on debt e-reader.
Which one do you think? 60% confirmed. I'm going to guess the last option. More than 10 yes. Isn't that scary? It is scary. 60% of Rita's has more than 10 on read books on their Kindle. I, it's just doesn't surprise me. You can put a whole library on there and it's worse. Am Adam has shared all of his unread books with me if I go into his account because you can do that with friends and family and wow, that's just a lot of books.
Awesome. It's a lot of, I mean, and of course it says more than 10 so we could be a lot more as well for some of the responses, right? Yeah. And then, and now we really deep inside the Kindle stuffing territory here, right? Because you saw the people who go around and find pre books and then, Oh, that's a free one. I'll just download it to my Kindle and then move on. And you know, five, 10 minutes later they probably forgot everything about that book because it's just there and then they think I'll get back to it one day. But we all know that they won't know. And I think that's the worst thing about when you're looking at your to read list on your Kindle, unless you're basically left with the cover, you don't have the blurb in front of you, you don't have the reviews, you're just looking basically at the cover saying, Oh, which one do I read next?
And so yeah, unless it's something that you thought, Oh, that looked good and I actually bought it, it's easy to just skip. Like I don't remember that one. Or this is where your cover has really got to stand out so that people go, Oh, that one's neat. Otherwise they might not ever open it again. Yeah, exactly. And this is then where at least for me, that those 10% that we talked before, those 10%, that 10% drop from people who just put it onto the to be read list, uh, from downloading it for free rather than buying it.
That that's where, for me, those 10% becomes relevant. Because if we are saying that these are 60% of readers, that it has more than 1,000 books on their Kindle. But these are also readers who have bought books of course. But if you can drop that number by 10% by saying if they purchased the book, then they will not, they will start reading it in 10% of the cases. They will start reading it right away rather than just putting it on that wait list there or read list. Right. So, so to me, that's where those 10% does make a difference.
To me
Autumn (36m 19s): it does. I really think it does make a difference of, you know, how many people are going to look at it and read it next. But yeah, that's a tough one because, you know, it'll be interesting as we get more, more answers in to see if that 10% ends up growing or shrinking. I'm getting gas. It might grow a little bit more, but we'll have to see.
Jesper (36m 41s): Yeah, yeah. We'll have to see. Um, so I thought that was very interesting, but I also have, I have one more final question. The last people in the same way. So yeah. And this was actually because I wanted to, I don't know if you could call it dispel a myth or maybe just at least get a confirmation if the myth was actually true. Okay. So the myth goes like this, that free books are perceived by readers as being of less quality and therefore you should not make you a books free Oh, that's an interesting thought.
That's a myth. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, did, this is a topic that I hear, well I wouldn't say often, but I've heard it many times, at least on on internet forums, on Facebook groups and from authors, you know, debating between themselves whether or not making the book free actually sends a signal to the reader that this is something I just slapped together. That's why it's free and I don't want to judge you for it. You know, a lot of authors has been debating this stuff and well, I don't want to debate it.
I will rattle. I will just ask the readers, what do they think? I like that answer. So what did they say? It was a crystal crystal clear response. There is absolutely no doubt. And even if we're getting more responses, it's not gonna change anything. 100% convinced that this is a, this is the final answer. So we've got 86% of readers responded that in their view there are not any difference in quality between free books and non free.
Autumn (38m 15s): Woo. That actually makes me excited. Yes, we'll add the boom for you. That is exciting because I know when I talk to authors and you know, I always, when I teach and stuff like that, I've always saying this should be your best work. Your gift is the widest distribution. It's going to touch the most people. You wanted to be like, Oh, this is wonderful. It's so good that that message, you know, readers are willing to believe that a free book is, well, at least 86% of them think it's just as good as buying a book.
Or could it be that some of the bot books aren't that good? I'm not sure.
Jesper (38m 51s): Well, I think it's, it's shows more about the fact because the, the readers don't know about this debate that authors has between themselves about, well, if I put the book for free, then I'm signaling it. It's poor, poor quality, but it's not because of course I did everything I could to make it a professional and blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, the readers don't know about that conversation. They just pick up the free books and they read them. Yeah. And of course if they pick up a ton of free books and every time they read it, they're like, what is this crap? You know, then well, it will show clearly in the responses. You then most people would say the opposite.
They would say, yeah, every time I pick up a free book, it's, it's horrible. So I think this is just a myth that exists between authors and it's not real.
Autumn (39m 31s): I think that's exciting though. It's good to know that, you know, the quality of books out there is good because it's reinforcing, reinforced by the reader's saying, no, I pick up free books and they are good and I've had good experiences, so I'm excited. I think that's a really awesome result. And the whole thing is interesting that really if you want your book to be read sooner, it's better if they're buying it by these results so far.
Jesper (40m 0s): Yeah. That that's uh, yeah. If, if you, if we're trying to conclude a bit that that's certainly a conclusion, right? Uh, there's a higher likelihood that readers will read the book if they bought it rather than download it for free. I think if I look at the result like helicopter view, it's also pretty clear that readers have way too many unread books on their Kindles and there is, it's just a problem. It honestly, it's a problem. I could see that and, and yeah, I'm what I was about to say is to me the only way to get around this stuff, and this is just my personal opinion and everybody can, you know, have make up their own mind about what they think and, and whatnot in my personal opinion is like, yes, you can still get people to download the first book in your series for free.
I in full transparency, I still have my first book in my trilogy for free and I really don't plan to change that now. Um, so that, that's just for full transparency here. But if you give it away for free, yes, you can still get people to download it that not as many people downloaded as they used to do. Uh, but if it can still happen. But the thing is that when we then talk, cha-ching read through, which is basically, so as we said before, people reading books one and then going on to read the rest of the series.
Yeah. It, uh, there's really, it's really bad because people just have way too many books on the Kindle and they never get to it. So at least if you want a slightly bigger chance of people reading
Autumn (41m 34s): your book and then reading the rest of your series, I would say if I had to put out a new one now, I would not make free I don't know what you think. Autumn well, like we said, I still have my book one, my debut book one as a PERMA free and I mean, I'm over 200 reviews and a 4.4 star rating on it. So I'm thinking part of me is wants to put a price tag back on it and do some AMS ads and, and see how it goes.
But I haven't, you know, life's a little crazy and overwhelmed right now. So I think I might wait on that in a couple months. But I'm seriously considering maybe changing things up. I've always thought maybe a Permafree doesn't need to be permanently free maybe it should be switched to a different one. Maybe I should make the first book and my second Epic fantasy series. Make that one free just shake things up a little bit because it is interesting. That's all marketing is about is shaking things up and trying new things.
So I'm always one to figure this out. So yeah, I'm not quite 100% away from Permafree. I think occasionally giving out a free sample of free something. But I do think you're right. The read through rate is definitely lower. And you know, I think you're my, no, I'm working on my next two series and both of those, I am not using PERMA free so you've got to buy the book to play, so we'll have to see how it goes.
Jesper (43m 5s): Yeah. And of course another strategy that that you could consider is, is to put it for free once in awhile and then flip it back to priced and then laid on, flip it back to free again and, and basically then you can promote the fact that it's free. Now if you want to get into the series, right? I mean, but you're still going to hit the Kindle stuff in problem. He has an a and I, I just don't see any way around this because for way, way too many years now or I mean three, four, five years ago or more. This was a very, very good strategy and you could really get a lot of readers this way and, and uh, that was read through, but nowadays I think, yeah, the train has left the station and it's too, it's too late to get on board now.
So you should have bought your ticket. For
Autumn (43m 51s): I agree. Woo.
Jesper (43m 56s): All right, so next Monday we are going to talk about how to write good dialogue.
Narrator (44m 7s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the amwritingfantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join autumn and Yesper on patrion.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the amwritingfantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
What do you do when your book isn't selling?
What changes can you make to make your book start selling?
International bestselling author, Stuart Thaman, who works with traditional publishing companies to revive dead books that aren't selling. joins the Am Writing Fantasy podcast to share his insights.
In this episode, the how-to guide book, "How to write a fantasy book description" is mentioned.
You can find it here: https://www.jesperschmidt.com/books/how-to-write-a-fantasy-book-description/
You can find Stuart's helpful guides and articles here: http://www.stuartthamanbooks.com/marketing-series
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy.
For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Jesper (1s): Hey there. Jesper just dropping in here up at the front of the episode. I have an excellent guest host on today, but I just wanted to drop in here quickly to let you know that we had a bit of audio quality issues, the internet on my guests and is not entirely stable and at one point about 18 and a half minute in it actually drops, which means that I cannot hear him and he keeps talking for a bit while I'm also talking on top of him to hoping, hoping that he's coming back online.
So you're going to get about one and a half minute where we accidentally talk over one another. So my apologies for that. And also when it comes to his internet connection, there is a bit static on his end and uh, unfortunately I've done everything I can to try to clean it out, but, but it's not possible to get it any better than it is now, but you can hear everything he says. So I've decided to release this episode anyway, so I hope you will get a lot out of it. And the much, much apologies for the audio quality here.
Thank you.
Narrator (1m 7s): You're listening to the amwritingfantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing join to best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them. Now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (1m 35s): Hello, I am Jesper and this is episode 43 of the amwritingfantasy podcast. And we are going to talk about reviving dead books. Meaning, how do you get books that doesn't sell to start selling again? And as you've noticed, the autumn is not with me today, but instead I actually have a guest host and that's Stuart Thaman whose books have reached international international bestseller status in the U S Australia and Canada. So welcome to the amwritingfantasy podcast, Stuart.
Stuart (2m 7s): Yeah, thanks for having me.
Jesper (2m 10s): And I, I actually understood, uh, from a bit of our email conversations that they just spent a bit of time in I was about to say my part of the world, well I think it was in Germany and I'm in Denmark, but it's close.
Stuart (2m 21s): Pretty close. Yeah. I was in central Germany, went to college and verts Berg, so been a decent amount of time in Europe. Oh, okay. What's bird what when Germany is, that is basically dead in the center of Germany. So it's a sort of a little bit to the East of Frankfurt. Probably the nearest a landmark, but not too far from you HC and yeah, honestly you can get anywhere from the center of the country, so it got to travel around a good amount as well. Oh, nice, nice, nice. So you were there for several years then. Yeah, for a good bit of time and really, really enjoyed it.
I love the food. I love the climate. Uh, it's just a wonderful place to live.
Jesper (2m 59s): Oh, cool. Very cool. But uh, but I think you're back in the U S now, right? Yup.
Stuart (3m 4s): So living in Kentucky, which is a in the Midwest of the United States. Yeah.
Jesper (3m 9s): Right. Okay. And actually before we get into the whole conversation about reviving dead books, which, ah, which I guess you've made a bit of a specialty out of, but before we get into that, I also noticed that you writing some lit RPG books and uh, I know that that's a, a Shaundra that has been a bit there. I don't know if we can call it hot, but, uh, I, I haven't understood that it's, it's something that, um, that is selling quite well in general, but, but it's also I think a bit of a special show to write.
So I was just wondering if you could, you know, just yeah, a bit of insights about what is lit RPG and how do you go about writing it because I think it's a bit different, isn't it?
Stuart (3m 50s): Yeah, it's a very niche, sort of a sub genre of fantasy and PSI Phi and, and really have any other genre you can sort of turn things into lit RPG. But, uh, it's been around for a while since ready. Player one came out quite some time ago, but really got big when the ready player one movie debuted a couple of years ago. And when that came out a lot of people started to get turned on the little RPG and a lot of people will call a game lit as well. And um, now the hardcore readers will, we'll put some designations between game lit and lit RPG, but typically, uh, the whole concept behind the sub genres, you have a fantasy, scifi horror world, whatever it might be, B.
But in that world there exists the sort of mechanics of an actual video games. So, um, in I've got three different lid RPG series now that have done pretty well. Uh, it's uh, definitely a hot selling Shondra at the moment. Am it's really, uh, a lot of fun to write. And being a lifelong gamer, it's sort of like writing the video game that I wish I could play. And that adds a whole new dimension to the entire writing process, which is a ton of fun, but really starting to get popular am in the past year or so, just sort of a genre that's blown up.
Jesper (5m 8s): Right? But am I right in understanding that you are actually writing out, that's for characters and stuff like that as well. Or
Stuart (5m 15s): so there'll be a stats for the characters. They'll have like strength, agility, uh, this sort of traditional stats that you would expect from a video game. They go on quests, they go on dungeon runs, they get magic gear every time they level up and you know, gain experience points they need to pick new talents and they're sort of building their, their build more or less than kind of gives you that feeling of reading someone playing a really fun video game.
Jesper (5m 41s): Right. So you're describing in the book itself what they're picking when delivering up and all that stuff. Yeah,
Stuart (5m 47s): exactly. In and why they're making that decision and, and uh, what they anticipate that decision might mean in the future. Like if I get this talent now, it should unlock these future talents. And, uh, you can really mentally envision the video game aspect of it quite well.
Jesper (6m 3s): Wow. That does different, yeah. And uh, and quite, it must also am I've never read a book like that, but it must be quite a different reading experience as well because I assume, I assume that's still a story in there, but, but a lot of it will then be broken up by these sort of well known story elements where you're just learning what skills they're picking for leveling up and stuff like that.
Stuart (6m 27s): Yeah, it's very interesting because this story in some other PGS can honestly be secondary to the progression of the game and the progression of the character through the game. Uh, just depends on which kind of lit RPG you're reading. But I got turned on to it just on a recommendation from someone they told me I should read dungeon Lord by a Hugo who ESKA and the read that and just really, really, really liked it and just thought like, this is the kind of fantasy like I could write this, this is a lot of fun. And, uh, wrote my first one and took a while to really get it good and, and to really perfect it.
But, uh, it's done really well. It's sold quite well and I'm really happy about that. So definitely a lot of fun to write. And uh, my, my first one only took me 20 days cover to cover to write it. So, um, very, very fast writing it because it was simply so much fun to do.
Jesper (7m 18s): But how, how long are, uh, is IPG novel in general? How many words is
Stuart (7m 23s): yeah, I mean typically the longer the better. So my very first one was right around 80,000 words. My, I've got two more that are coming out in November that are both over a hundred thousand words. So, um, the longer you can get them, the better. I'm just like normal, Epic fantasy people like to stay in that world as long as possible.
Jesper (7m 40s): All right. Okay. Very cool. I was just curious about that. I know it's a complete detour versus what we're going to talk about. What I was just curious. Yeah, very new
Stuart (7m 49s): stuff.
Jesper (7m 50s): Yeah. Okay. But maybe we should get on topic, uh, for the sake of the listener here as well. Um, so yeah, I previously in the past I talked to Dave Chesson who, who was, uh, who was also on this podcast a while back. Uh, he's the guy who does the publisher rocket software and uh, he mentioned Stuart that I should contact you because you have made a bit of a specialty to revive that books. Uh, and you're also doing it for traditional publishing companies as far as I understood.
But yeah, but where do we start this whole conversation about how to revive it? That book if the listener is in the situation where they have a book they published but it's just not selling.
Stuart (8m 32s): Yeah. The first thing to do is just identify the quality of the product itself, which could be pretty difficult. And it kind of requires you to step back with an unbiased eye and try not to look at the book as, Oh, this is, you know, my baby that I've worked on for so long and my projects that I've had, you know, sort of putting in my heart for so long that I really want to succeed. And the first step is just to look at the product as just a product that you're selling to consumers. Like anything else, if you ran a pizza shop or whatever, you would look at the quality of the product that you're selling and see where you can improve that.
So not every book is really, you know, ready to be revived or anything like that. I'm definitely not, there are a lot of books out there where the quality, you know, maybe it's something you wrote 10 years ago and it's just not that great. You know, if you can recognize that, it'll save you a lot of time and money and frustration. I've got books that I now call dead books where I've buried those books because the quality just wasn't that good and I'm not going to waste money trying to revive it myself. But then I've got other books that I wrote a long time ago released that did not do as well as I wanted that I have gone back and revive and then um, know working for different publishing companies.
I've done exactly that. But the first step is really, especially if you have a big catalog, identify a good candidate. So you need something with good writing, unless you really want to drop another, a couple of hundred dollars or $1,000 into the editing costs as well. But you want to make sure you have something that's got a good enough backbone essentially to where you can improve it enough and revive it and it'll actually be worth it. Um, but figuring out which book that is in your catalog, it should really be step one.
So really the thing that the strongest writing that didn't sell that, that the non-selling factor was a surprise. That's, that's probably step one for sure.
Jesper (10m 28s): Right? Yeah. And that of course makes sense. But, but the thing or the question that popped up into my mind here, when you set that is like, but it's not, I don't think necessarily that every author can recognize that themselves. So, so, you know, of course, if you're doing it for a traditional author publisher and they give you some debt books that they could, you know, Stuart can you please revive these for us? Then you can approach this SD outside opinion that that takes a look at the book and say, okay, this is not up for that, you know, this is not good enough or whatever.
Maybe that sounds a bit harsh but, but you know what I mean. Uh, but if it's the author who, who's supposed to do it on his or her own books, um, do you think that's possible to do or do you need somebody from outside to take a look?
Stuart (11m 14s): It's definitely difficult and I, I think is, I have worked a little bit as a professional editor and proofreader as well and, uh, worked in acquisitions for a publisher for quite some time, reading through manuscripts in the slush pile and that kind of thing. So I think that gives me a little advantage and a little better perspective where no, I'm not attached to even my own writing as much as someone else might be. Yeah. I, I think that's a skill that people can develop if you look at something, especially if it's been awhile since you've actually sat down to write it, uh, you'll find oftentimes, at least in my experience, that even if I love the book and the moment I was writing it and I was really, really into it, thought it going to be fantastic.
Going back and rereading it, I can look and say like, Oh, this just, you know, it's just not my best work. I've advanced as an author. I'm better than this now and this just doesn't really do it for me. Um, and I think that's a skill that people can develop. Okay. Honestly, I think there's a lot of editors out there that should be able to take a manuscript from someone if you send it and you know, maybe they charge you a hundred bucks or whatever, but just ask the editor, you know, for their outright opinions. Yeah. Do you think this is good enough for me to publish?
You know, from the stuff you've seen that you've edited, um, you know, editors, a lot of times we'll follow how well their books do that they added, you know, look at it and say, Hey, if I were to try to revive this, do you think it's worthwhile? And, and just trying to get an honest answer that way.
Jesper (12m 42s): Yeah. Yeah, I agree. Uh, and, and I think what I've often said before is that, uh, you need to be careful because what happens a lot of the time is that of course with every single book that we write, the better we become. So you see you, you need to be careful also that you, you don't step into this never ending spiral of, you know, because you can always go back and we write some older books and make them better, but you need to really ask yourself, is it worth it? Because the amount of time that you're spending rewriting is, is quite, uh, you know, it's, it's quite an investment of time to do that versus if it's just a cover that is off, you know, that's a much easier fix to, to see.
So I was just wondering, because I was thinking that if I was going to approach it, rewriting was, unless I for sure knew, of course that this is just not good enough. Then it's, it's a given obviously that you need to do that. But I was just thinking from a time investment perspective, I think that we're rewriting part would probably be the last thing I would do. I would probably try out all the other elements first or, or what
Stuart (13m 48s): yeah. If, if it's a book where you can simply pick flyer, like this is a book that needs rewritten, my recommendation would be just shelf it. And if you have that time later in the future, go for it from 90% of us. We're not gonna have that much time. So just, you know, pick a different book to try to revive. Or oftentimes I've found it's, it's even easier just to write the next one and just sort of forget about it and know leave that book as dead. But, um, really the, the best, you know, reviving the dead books is if you can go through that back catalog, maybe you've got four or five or six books that really aren't selling and just pick out, you know, find the one that has the strongest writing, the one that is the best that, you know, maybe it needs a proofread, something like that.
But it doesn't need a whole lot of work to the actual manuscript in order to get it ready to go.
Jesper (14m 39s): Right. And of course, well maybe they won't be many reviews on a day fee if it, if it is really a debt book and has always been a debt book, but, but if you do have some reviews, I think that's also a place where you could go to, to get some hints if, if it really needs another editing pass and you know, if there's complaints about too many typos and whatnot.
Stuart (14m 58s): Yeah, exactly. I definitely agree with that. Yeah. Um, but I, I was also thinking in terms of
Jesper (15m 9s): the look inside part, you know, from the Amazon, but how much attention are you, are you placing on making sure that those first, uh, I think, if I'm remember correctly, I might be a bit off on this, but I think it's 10% of the book
Stuart (15m 23s): somewhere around there at least. Yeah. So
Jesper (15m 27s): present, I think you, you can see from the look inside or the free sample on Amazon, but how much attention are you putting on making sure that those 10% are really engaging?
Stuart (15m 36s): Yeah, it's definitely a part you need to hook the reader. So not every reader of course, is even going to look in on that feature or even know that feature exists. It's definitely a part, um, and that, that some people do pay attention to. And I think a lot of other authors, we'll start there if, you know, if you've written before and you're looking for new materials to read yourself, then it's an area where we're going to look, it's gotta be, of course, you know, professional formatting. And a lot of times, like when I worked for different presses, I'll go into their material.
I'll see, okay, these books were made and you know, 2010 or 2014 and the formatting just back then wasn't as good. And they've gotten a professional format or now or whoever, there's, whoever is doing their formatting is simply gotten better. And so we just need to update this, run the manuscript through the formatting again as though it were brand new and get it updated, get it out there in the professional quality that the other more modern books are used to receiving. And, and that can be definitely a big thing, but I think just from a, okay, really from a story perspective, if you don't hook somebody in the first, you know, 10, 15 pages, if you don't get them absolutely invested, then there's so much other competition out there that readers will leave.
And especially if you're trying to sell and Kindle unlimited, you have to be even more am sort of action heavy and really, uh, punching it up well upfront or you don't really have a chance cause somebody's pinhole unlimited. I mean, they didn't pay to download your book at all. If you don't get them committed and invested in the first 10 pages, they're just going to move on to the next book on their Kindle and you've lost them. So, uh, definitely very important from a story perspective to have a really, really strong active opening that introduces, you know, one or two characters, keeps the cast small, sets up the overarching conflict well and really attaches the reader to those characters right out of the gate.
Yeah, fully agree. Um,
Jesper (17m 36s): let, let's assume for now that that people sort of, they, they have the, they have the product itself, meaning meaning the book or the writing itself is, is up to par. So, so that, that stuff is good. They have a good to hook in the beginning. Uh, if, if
Stuart (17m 50s): we assume that that is okay, then what about covers then? Yeah, so the cover of course is a huge aspect of writing and you know, we all know the old phrases of not judging books by their covers. And yet we all do it every single time we buy a book. It's the first step of marketing. It's the first thing you see when you approach a book, whether it be online on a bookshelf, and it doesn't matter. The first thing we see are first impression is always that book cover.
And a lot of times what I've seen in some of the books that I have revived is that the cover just doesn't match the genre expectation. And if you're trying to sell a, a a really, you know, intense suspense thriller and your cover just doesn't speak to me as a thriller, it could be a beautiful gorgeous cover. But if it just doesn't meat the jhana expectations of a thriller, then it's not going to sell well no matter how good the cover is.
So a lot of it is just looking at the top 100 covers in your genre or pick, you know, 10 or so competing authors that your book is most similar to, and you know, you write thrillers, look up Stephen King and Dean Koontz and look up those coppers and see what they look like. Because even if you don't like that style, that's what the reader expect. And that's what the reader wants to see because the reader is going to be coming from Dean Coons or Stephen King and they're going to be looking for more thrillers to read.
And if they see, you know, a thriller that matches what they like, they're going to buy it versus seeing a thriller that could have a gorgeous professional, extremely good cover. But if the cover to them says, Oh, this is historical or horror or fantasy, this isn't a thriller like I like, then they're never going even to reach or blurb and they're not going to get any farther than glancing at your cover and ignoring it and you lose that reader forever. And that's an area where I see a lot of authors don't make sense.
They spot on is that cover just doesn't really, really important and you have to have a cover that really explains what the show is about action and shows that it's not really about, uh, at the point in time when it comes to covers, it is not good. Me being original, which a lot of us authors can easily try to become a try to, to achieve. We tried to be so original and we try to, to make it so unique that nobody has seen this before and we believe it's, it's to be excellent, but in fact, that is not the case.
Uh, and that's not what we're looking for because readers are looking for something similar to what they used to. And by giving them a cover that that shows them that this is the younger you are getting and it's on par with or similar to two other
Jesper (20m 48s): best selling books in that younger, then that is how you are going to am to be successful from a, from a coverage perspective. Okay. So, so if that was all about covers then am I'm wondering the other element that also goes into whether another book will sell is uh, the uh, uh, book descriptions. So, so how do you or how do one yeah, consider or evaluate if once book description is good enough.
Stuart (21m 20s): Yeah, I think in book descriptions and blurbs or a synopsis, it's a lot more difficult than with covers cause converse, you can compare to some of the top selling covers in your genre and get a good idea. But blurbs are so unique to the book that it makes it a lot more difficult. But with blurbs that very easy to change, especially on the electronic format, it's extremely easy to change. You can try out a different blurb every week until you get something that you really liked. But a big mistake at least that I see with lots and lots of blurbs is authors try to just sort of tell you the plot.
Here's what my book is about. That seems logical, but it very, very rarely works. And really the goal of any sort of book blurb or synopsis is not to tell the reader what the book is going to be about, but it is to tell the reader instead why they should look at the book and what they're going to be excited about. And really what that comes down to is Shondra expectations, which is similar to the cover. And you want to just give them atmosphere and you want them to think like, Oh, this is going to be a really cool, you know, intense mystery thriller, not, Oh, this is a book about a guy who was framed for a crime and goes on the run and moves to Argentina.
It should be a book, a description that gives them just the atmosphere and sort of builds up that expectation in their head and then leaves them wanting more. Because if they, if they get the plot from the, the book description, they don't need to read the book anymore. If they just get the atmosphere and the genre expectation, then they need to read the book in order to figure out what it's about. And I think that can be a, a, a really powerful selling tool. But again, since it's so easy to just change the blurb, essentially whenever you need to pick five or six that you like and you know, test them on a, a writing group and you know, on a sub Reddit or something like that, um, test them out in a Facebook group for authors.
See what people like, pick the two or three that get the most votes, try one for a week with your marketing plan. If it works, great. If not, switch to a different one. And you can really am guess and check with them blurbs pretty easy.
Jesper (23m 41s): Yeah, absolutely. And, and, uh, it's, it's sort of like thinking about the movie trailer. I mean, of course not all movies trailers does a good job at being a trail either. But yeah, it needs to just tease to stuff. You don't have to. Yeah, exactly. You don't have to tell bots. You just, you just tease it. Uh, and, and then, yeah, as you say, I mean, fortunately enough, eh, changing the blurb is quite easy. So, uh, you can just upload a new one and see how it performs. And of course, for you, dear listener, if you're struggling with that, don't forget that, uh, I actually have a guide book called how to write a fences.
You put description so you can pick that one up and, uh, follow a step by step guide if you need some assistance on, on blurps. But, uh, but I do think blurbs are incredibly important because if people find, if, if you sort of have the writing on the control and you have the cover under control, meaning that it's sugar specific, like you talked about before, Stuart then people will then click, but then when they click and get to the book page on, for example, Amazon, then the blurb is the one that needs to close the deal, right? Yup.
Definitely. Yeah. And if you don't have that sort of them, well, you're still gonna lose out at the problem. He, I guess in, in revising these books, reviving these books as a, that was what I was trying to say is that you have, so you have quite a lot of moving parts here, right? I mean, yeah, there's a lot of different elements that could be wrong that you need to evaluate. Yeah, there are a ton of variables and it can sometimes, especially when you're looking at your own work, it can be hard to pinpoint exactly what's wrong, but Amy and I think, uh, if people really take a diligent look, it's not as hard as it seems to figure out exactly where there's room to improve.
Right? Yeah. And then, and sometimes it's probably also about of, uh, if, if you are really stuck, you know, maybe get some author friends to take a look for you or something like that. There's tons of groups out there full of authors that don't mind giving advice to everybody else. So there's, the resources exist. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. But, but I was just thinking when I said that, I also thought of a caveat right away. I guess that's, that's the problem if you're trying to give advice and been thinking about caveats right away.
But, but the, the problem is also that sometimes the authors themselves are not the right people to justice stuff because we think as authors and, and it's difficult sometimes to put yourself in the mind of the reader because just like you said with the covers, uh, the readers are looking for, uh, something that signals to them that this is, I know what I'm getting and this is what I'm used to. They're not looking for, this is the most amazing original fats as you cover I've ever, ever seen. You know, that's not what they're looking for.
And we can get, well, I think sometimes by asking other authors, you can get into the same trap that they will tell you their author opinion. Um, and, but of course, sometimes you're going to get good advice from people who know what they're talking about. It's just a word of caution, I guess.
Stuart (26m 50s): I would agree. A lot of authors will make the same mistake as an author trying to revive their own work and then they look through it from the wrong perspective.
Jesper (26m 59s): Right. But okay, so if we have the writing we have to cover, we have the book description than, than what. What else?
Stuart (27m 7s): It really, once you've got all that your, you're pretty much ready to go. So, uh, you've, you've got everything more or less. All right. Seated correctly. Sometimes. I've actually, we've, we've changed titles on books as well, so we've had titles on that comes to mind that as probably the most successful book revival I've ever done. Um, and it, it was a really cool portal fantasy about a Japanese fighter pilot going back in time during world war II and going back to feudal Japan times and sort of becoming a sword and sorcery fantasy and that book had a cover that said historical fiction to me.
It had a title that was in Japanese and I didn't even understand it even though the book was in English and the writing, we just needed a proofread. But, uh, we changed that title to one that was very in keeping with am with sort of expectations and whatnot. The book's called samurai wind by Nigel sellers. But, uh, we, we revive that and got the new title on it, got a new cover on it and everything. And then really from there, the bulk of your work is finished and all you need to do is just find that audience and figure out where those people live.
And with a samurai themed portal fantasy with a little historical bend to it, honestly, that appeals to most fantasy readers already. That's something that a lot of fantasy readers are going to really enjoy. So all you need to do is, is, uh, then dive into your sort of traditional marketing approach. And for me that would be Facebook and Amazon ads testing key words, figuring out which keywords are getting your sales, and then am pumping really as much of your budget as you can afford into those valuable keywords until they stop working.
And then re-evaluating once those keywords fall off a little bit. But, um, once you get to the point where you've got, you know, the title, the cover, the blurb and the writing that is pretty much everything. You're, you're more or less they're ready to market it again and really rebrand the novel and get people interested in it.
Jesper (29m 12s): Yeah. Yeah, I would agree. Uh, and of course then once you are at that stage, then you have the same problem that everybody else has and that is to drive enough traffic there and, and when those bits and all that. But do you have any, any good advice when it comes to, to running some ads and getting, getting the traffic to that book that you now know it's good and you know what you're sell but you just need to get eyeballs, eyeballs on it. Do you have any advice on, on how to best go about that? Uh, the advertising part of this equation?
Stuart (29m 41s): Yeah, it's definitely marketing books is tricky. And sort of the uh, pitfall I guess of almost every author out there that I talked to am on my website on stuartthamanbooks.com I've got a whole series of free articles about marketing that go into, in a lot more detail than a, just a quick podcast. But essentially the biggest advice is if you're using pay to click or right, yeah. Pay per click ads. That's it. So if you're using those paper click ads, which I recommend you just want to sort of start with the shotgun blast and hit as much as you possibly can right out of the gate and it's going to be expensive to test and it's going to be a pretty steep learning curve.
You'll need to know what you're doing. Yeah. If you set up, you know, maybe three or 4,000 different keywords on Amazon, which am I use the publisher rocket as well, but, um, set up 4,000 keywords and run those for fast and keywords, which will be four different ads, but run them on, you know, three different ad copies and adjust your ad copy. You know, three different times, figure out which keywords are hitting. And the combination might be something that's surprising. It might be something that you don't expect and he might have, uh, you know, a key word with an ad copy that doesn't strike you as something that you would, you know, would work for you.
But again, the author's not the customer. So it's hard to think like a customer and we don't always understand the customers. Um, but really just sort of testing as much as physically possible for as long as you can to get enough data to be meaningful. Then figuring out from that data, okay, what about this makes sense and where am I actually going to make money? Um, you know, kill those keywords that are just sucking down budget with no returns. Kill those off real quick. Figure it out. The ones that, the keywords that are giving you the best bang for your buck and then put more and more into those keywords.
Or maybe try five or six different ad copies with each key word to see what works the best. And eventually, you know, might take you a month, but you'll pair it down to where you've got ads running that are going to be very profitable on either Facebook or Amazon, whatever it might be. B, you'll get ads that are, are churning out a high rate of return.
Jesper (31m 57s): Yeah. Do you uh, tend to be it high to, to, to get those, uh, basically to revive the books so to speak, in order to get to get the Amazon algorithm to pay attention to you? Do, do you tend to bid high to make sure you're winning those bits or, or do you just bit sorta Jewish sure. That you're going to get a return on investment if you win the bid. So how do you, how do, how do you go about that?
Stuart (32m 20s): It's setting is definitely difficult. I'm not gonna say I'm a master of that just yet. Honestly, in the beginning I like to set the bids higher just cause I'm, I'm kind of impatient when it comes to getting that data and figuring it out. So I'll last a lot of ads in the beginning that are going to cost a good bit of money and have pretty high bids just so I can get all that data and you know, run through my budget every single day to make sure I'm hitting it. And uh, once I get all that data, all tone it down.
And most of the time, once I have an ad that's fairly refined, I'll just send it to the Amazon recommended bid and they do like the dynamic bidding where they'll adjust it for you up to like 50% of what you put in. So I'll put maybe 50 cents in and so that'll let it adjust up to 75 cents if it needs to. And that seems to work pretty well. So you're not getting, you know, prime time bids, you're not winning those, but you're still at least, you know, winning enough bids to get a decent amount of impressions, a few thousand impressions or whatever it might be on each ad and, and that's really what you need.
But once you pare it down, I think that the bid matters maybe less and less. And it might be the case I've had a few times where reviving an old book, I've found that it wasn't any keyword that was even expensive that ends up being the winner. And it'll be something, you know, for sent keyword that nobody else is bidding on that I would've never thought in a thousand years of irrelevant. But it was something that publisher rocket pulled up in their list and I kept it in there and there it went.
And so it'll be a really cheap, a keyword, which is fantastic.
Jesper (34m 4s): Yeah, I know, I know Dave Chesson likes to share the example of, uh, of, uh, what was it? Book book book. I think that was the key word, who was using just three times the word book in a row, which makes absolutely no sense at all.
Stuart (34m 18s): Who types that in on am I don't know what they're hoping to find when they search book book book but people do apparently, and that you weren't as typically cheap so you can grab it.
Jesper (34m 30s): Yeah, yeah, indeed. Indeed. Okay. Well, I think that that is good in terms of revitalizing the book so, so you certainly need to drive the traffic there and, and all the usual stuff that we usually talk about is, is of course also relevant in the sense that, uh, if you make sure to write in series, then of course you can afford to spend a bit more on, on this, uh, book one in the series that is debt, uh, because hopefully people will now start reading through that and, and like it because you just made sure that the product itself is good and then they'll buy the other books and, and that will bring you back some revenue, meaning that you will cover some of your ads.
Exactly.
Stuart (35m 10s): Yeah.
Jesper (35m 12s): Okay. Uh, Stuart uh, is there anything else that is important to know about reviving that books, uh,
Stuart (35m 19s): that we haven't talked about? Covered just about everything? Um, I guess as a last bit of advice, I would say, uh, one of the biggest mistakes I see authors making is, is always with the cover. And just the concept is actually a line that I read I think like two or three days ago, just came up. Another author mentioned that your when you look at a cover, you should not be looking for some flawless work of art. You should consider your cover to just be your first marketing tool. And even if it's a cover that you personally don't like, if it fits in your genre, the offense, what readers want, use it.
It doesn't matter if you like it or not because the paycheck is what, what the authors in it for. So, uh, it doesn't have to be some, you know, flawless work of art. You can always make a special edition later that's going to be your flawless work of art, but you need to sell books first before we can afford that special edition.
Jesper (36m 13s): Yeah, absolutely. And you mentioned early on that, that you had some articles or blog posts or whatever that, uh, goes into some of this. So if you send me the links to that, the Stuart, then I'll add those links into the show notes. Can go and read it.
Stuart (36m 29s): Yup. Yeah. Just Stuart Thaman books is where you can find it all and we'll get those links up there.
Jesper (36m 34s): All right, perfect. Okay. Thanks so much for, for joining Stuart. Yeah, thank you. So next Monday autumn is back and we are going to talk about whether or not free books are worth it as a marketing strategy.
Narrator (36m 53s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the amwritingfantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join autumn and Jesper on patrion.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the amwritingfantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Autumn have been feeling quite overwhelmed and stressed out lately.
Unfortunately, she is far from alone in dealing with these feelings, yet its a topic that each writer often deals with in isolation.
It's our hope, that by putting it out in the open - with this episode 42 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast - that others will feel more empowered to talk about their feelings.
Hopefully, Autumn also managed to be inspirational in sharing her personal story.
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy.
For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to the amwritingfantasy podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need in literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing join to best selling authors who have self-published more than 20 books between them. Now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Bert and Jesper Schmidt. Hello? I am, Jesper.
Autumn (32s): And I'm autumn,
Jesper (35s): this is episode 42 of the amwritingfantasy podcast and we are going to talk about feeling overwhelmed today. And, uh, in many ways, uh, today's topic is, it's a bit personal, so I, I guess he upfront, I want to thank you autumn for the fact that you agreed to share some about, uh, you know, those feelings for the benefit of our podcast listeners. So I hope we were going to create a episode here that will really help people.
Autumn (1m 2s): Yes, we're going to definitely keep this one real folks. And I promise I will not be breaking down in tears though.
Jesper (1m 11s): No, hopefully not. We'll see how and, and Hey, I also have to say, I apologize if my voice sounds a bit raw today. I'm still recovering from a cold and the actual had a bit of fever over the weekend, so that was really annoying. Uh, and I am feeling better now, but I, I'm not quite there yet. So, uh, sorry about the bit here in voice today. It's really not the how try not to cough in your ear as well.
Autumn (1m 36s): Sounds good. But yeah, that's the funny thing doing the podcast. So I can't see you if, so for all I know, you know, you've got like your pajamas and your robot and a wash cloth over your forehead, so hopefully you're not that ill anymore.
Jesper (1m 50s): No, no, no, it's not that bad. Uh, it wasn't, uh, in bed either, you know, a sleeping all weekend or anything. But, uh, I was still, I was still moving around but I really wasn't, especially Saturday. I was really feeling bad, but
Autumn (2m 7s): it's getting better. That's good. That's an important thing, you know. And it's funny cause I, I just picked up Adam from a a leave no trace master educator canoe trip. So we had this wonderful training where you went to go canoeing in the Adirondacks and the fall weather. And while he was gone, I had the camper to myself for five days and I picked him up and he absolutely had a bat. Great time. It was fantastic. He met some fantastic people. Uh, he passed obviously. So now he's a master educator. Can train other people on how to leave no trace. But what was interesting is that of all the things, he has a lingering bad back.
So he's am ever since. I think it runs in the family because his mom has the same issue, so, Oh my goodness, yes. Talking about things that are slowly recovering, he is limping around very much and it's always one of those, it's a perception. I should, we kind of talked about perceptions and stuff before, but I've always thought it was you. You look at someone and you feel people look at him and he's six foot, two broad shoulder and it's very, you know, he looks like he would be a police officer. His family, way back to his great, great grandmother was a warden at a women's prison.
So I mean he's got that physique and they're like, Oh, you're so strong you can do anything. It's like, dude, his bag is so fragile. It's like I feel so bad for him. I haven't seen him in this much pain since am Oh geez. When we probably first met 19 years ago and, but it's recovering and I think it was just the way he was sitting in the canoe and paddling. I'm like, next time you wear a brace, next time you do this and, but he's on the meds and yeah, at least he got to go out.
Some of the pictures he took during the chorus or just, I almost wish I had gone with them, but Hey, I got some time on my own and I got to explore some really cute towns including Lake Placid where the Olympics were held. Winter Olympics were held twice, so I had some fun on my own. Yeah. I went to a, uh, coppery that the chef had changed, trained with Julia child. So, you know, it was a really difficult five days. Yeah. I'm usually us introverts. W we really hate being alone.
Oh. It's just absolutely horrible to not have to worry about what to cook for someone else or what time to eat, have to share my beer. It was really,
Jesper (4m 31s): but didn't, I can't remember. But didn't you tell me at some point that Adam is also, your husband is also a bit of an introvert? Yeah,
Autumn (4m 37s): he is. He um, he definitely needed some downtime. He's trying to do better with is extroverting stuff. Like we were just in town today and I was walking in and talking to people at shops, uh, filling out some stuff around town is like, I don't know how you can just walk in and start talking to people. Like, all right, let's give you some lessons on breaking the ice with someone you're meeting for the first time. So, but it has a, I could probably use some of those as well. Some of those lessons. I definitely, uh, I learned by doing, because I was a waitress for a year and I have also, um, I worked for the government.
I was going to people's houses and farms and trying to give insulin to do conservation programs with the federal government in the United States. Let me tell you, that's not always the easiest thing. And so you learn to talk to people. Really. I can talk to any why that's not a worry, but at some point even I need to turn off and go curl up with a book.
Jesper (5m 35s): Yeah, I would say that there's probably fair to say I could, I can, I can talk to anybody as well, but it, it doesn't come natural in the way that I have to actively think. The thought that, Oh, I guess I need to go and talk to that person, then I can easily do it. But, but it just not, it doesn't come natural to me. You know, my natural reaction is just to, you know, go my own way and do whatever for myself rather than going and talking to somebody. Right. So I need to, I need to be mindful about it and actively thinking about it all the time.
Otherwise I just don't do it.
Autumn (6m 7s): Yeah, I can understand that. I mean it's, I, I just was having this conversation with that. I'm actually, I remember in college I would be so used to being alone and doing my own thing and working on my own projects and I, it would probably be sunset and at that point it'd be like, I really haven't gotten anywhere today and I haven't talked to anyone and I'm kind of lonely. And so I would go for a walk, you know, it's like dinner time and I'm like, I think I, there's 15 minutes left in the cafeteria. I can go find someone to talk to and go have dinner.
And yeah, I was always am it took until sunset. So I can go about, you know, until the end of the day and evening I think is one of my social time is so if I could live in a community where the rest of the day you can work and mornings especially, don't talk to me until I have my team and I watched the sun come up and maybe our ride for an hour, then you can talk to me. But evenings I want to pull out the wine and sit by the fire and talk to the next 20 people in the room would be fantastic.
Jesper (7m 8s): Yeah. All right. I think evenings, uh, I quite like to just, uh, sit back and, you know, watch some Netflix, which, Oh, by the way, that reminds me. Did you ever watch the U S version of the office?
Autumn (7m 21s): I have not watched. I've watched maybe two episodes of it, honestly.
Jesper (7m 27s): Alright. Because I originally I watched the UK version, which was made years before the U S version. So it's, uh, it's Ricky Jarvis, who's a, who's a English comedian who created the office originally as a British TV series and it was absolutely awesome. And then, uh, later on the U S version that came out, he's also like, eh, I think executive producer or something. At least he has, he has his hands in it. Am
Autumn (7m 55s): okay.
Jesper (7m 55s): And then for many, many years, I resisted watching the U S version because I just felt like it can, it, it's just some sort of rip off and it cannot be as good as the original UK version. I just never watched it. And then maybe, I dunno, maybe four or five months ago, I can't remember, something like that, but some months ago, anyway, uh, I started watching it and I was like, Oh my God, this is excellent. And it's just so freaking funny. You have no idea. And it's, it's, and it has a lot of the same feel to it that the original UK version does.
So a lot of the subtle humor and the characters are just absolutely awesome. So, and then I was started watching it. I got really hooked and then I told my wife about, and she was like, no, I don't wanna watch the U S version. It's, it's, it's probably not better than you. It's exactly the same accident I had. And now we are like a, I dunno if she started a month ago or something watching it and now we a month later and she's watched more than me, so she took me now.
Autumn (8m 58s): But it's just, I don't know if you get the chance. What's it? It's amazing. I've heard that. She just never clicked with me, but maybe I'll give it another try. Honestly, we just picked up and started watching disenchantment, which is the same creator of the Simpsons, Matt groaning. So, um, he has a kind of fairy tales sort of animation cartoon. It's insane. Season two. And so we just watched the first episode of season two last night and okay.
You know, this Simpsons meets, um, the princess beanie, uh, being is the main character and her am Lucifer. Lucy is her demon. And it's really kind of fun to watch that. So that maybe when we're finished with am our current season two of disenchantment. All right, that may be it. Writing fantasy podcast
Jesper (9m 58s): so I was just inside the, uh, amwritingfantasy Facebook group here earlier today and uh, I sorta Kel posted, um, that's used currently writing her first battle scene in her book. And then she asked people how many battles scenes other people have in their novels. And I thought that was actually a quite an interesting question. Don't, don't you think autumn
Autumn (10m 20s): I was, I was actually, I had saw that one too. What was going to mention it as well. So I thought the same thing because I hadn't, you know, everyone thinks about the climax, but you know, how many, what other battles scenes do you have? Do you throw them in as hurdle? So I've been looking at some of the comments to see, you know, what other people say, you know, it, it's kind of all over the place. Some people say quite a few because it's military fantasy. Uh, there's one, you know, a couple of like just one, so, yeah.
Jesper (10m 49s): Yeah. But that's also why I picked it out to mention it here because I just wanted to pitch in here and basically say to Carol that at least from my perspective, you know, your novel needs as many battles scenes as is demanded by your story and no more, no less. I mean, I, I don't think you can say that a story has too many battles scenes or it has too few. It completely depends on what type of story it is that she's telling. At least that, that would be my point of view. But I don't know what you think.
Autumn (11m 16s): No, I agree. I mean, it's, I don't want to see too many of them. Like if I'm a reader and I'm reading a book, you know, if, if there's swords and mercenaries in magic, even magic's a good battle scene. I expect, um, you know, some minors scenes, especially as characters are learning their powers or learning how to use a sword. There should be some scuffles and things that you're learning along the way before you get to the big climax. But you know, if, if your climax is something different, a totally different based type of story, then you know, maybe there really weren't.
Maybe there'll be a lot more running. Maybe there's a lot more questing and searching, but again, usually something that attacks you in the woods. So I'd be surprised if there's only one. But I definitely, I actually, I hate to admit this, this is probably so horrible, but when I read Lord of the rings, I actually skipped skim through the battle scenes because they were just too detailed and too many character names. And I just, at one point I had two or three paragraphs into it, I realized I didn't care. So I just looked for the characters.
I knew skim to the end of it and said, ah, this is who won. And kept going.
Jesper (12m 28s): Yeah. But that's actually where I think the, the Lord of the rings movies did a good job because in the movies you assume into the characters and see what they are doing on the battlefield. And then it becomes interesting, whereas these like huge scenes where it's described that 1000 soldiers road runs into another thousand soldiers and they slay half of them and it's like, well that's not really that interested because I'm not invested in those soldiers. But if if you sort of assume into the character running in the midst of all these people and on all the chaos around and whatnot, then it becomes interesting all of a sudden.
Autumn (13m 2s): Yeah, I know we've both talked about that before. I mean, I, when I wrote my first, especially the trilogy Epic fantasy climactic battle seed, so I mean, you know, three books building to this scene and you know, there were I think ended up being nine chapters for the entire battle because it's huge. But I kept it to each of the characters, basically what their experience was through the battle and that kind of made it so much easier to tear apart when I was approaching the first time ever. Writing something this big and massive and it does, it means more for the readers and it, it's really a great way to write it as just a focus on what's going on with this character.
And then I always say like having big telltale events that basically are become the time clock of the battle that this happened, that happened. So that way, you know, the reader can sync everything up. It works, it works great. But yeah, I definitely think keeping it, you know, keeping it relatable to the characters in your plot and how you're building it to make sure it's, it's fitting what's going on in the, uh, in your story. You don't need to throw in, you know, 16 different battles. There's no magic recipe. But I, like I said, I think it would make sense if someone's going to be learning to use their powers, that you should see some displays of it, even if it's just practice before they get to the big, big scene where they have to be at least a good enough master to hopefully win.
Jesper (14m 27s): Yeah, that makes sense. Uh, I also picked out from the Facebook group that, uh, uh, James had some trouble coming up with a title for his novel or maybe, Oh, I should rather say he had three different titles and then he wanted people's opinion on which one people thought the best. And he actually, he got a, a lot of votes on that pole there. Uh, and there was also a clear winner among his three different options. So I think that's great. And I really like how the authors in the amwritingfantasy Facebook group helping each other out with stuff like this.
And, uh, I did not vote myself for one of the options, but instead I actually pointed him to watch our episode 37 of this podcast since we actually covered that topic at great length there on how to pick titles for you on novels, if any of our listeners, yeah, go ahead. I say that's just what I was going to say. It's like, did he not listen to our, our podcast I don't know. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe he was too busy or something, but, uh, but he did the, he did reply back and say he wants, he would go back and listen to it.
So, uh, so that was good. I mean, not every people have, are subscribing like me, you know, the, the different podcasts I listened to, I listened to every single episode, but that's not everybody. So, and maybe it's going to tie into our topic of being overwhelmed as well, but, uh, but what I was gonna say before is that if any of our listeners are interesting in joining a group of fantasy authors, you can just head on over to Facebook and then search for M writing fantasy among the groups there and then you will find us.
Yeah. Getting into today's topic, I think first of all, I must share in full transparency that I've never really felt overwhelmed myself. So, uh, please note that I'm not saying that to, to make those who do feel overwhelmed feel worse or to sort of raise myself above them. I, I'm only saying it so that our listeners are aware that my advice on this topic might not be as good as yours. Autumn that's not a problem. I think I am surprised. I can't imagine not feeling overwhelmed at some point with that.
How did PAX writing but you are so organized. It doesn't surprise me, I think you. But then again, I also know being an organized person, usually myself, that when the cookie crumbles and you're an organized person, Oh my goodness, it's disaster. It's like going into a kid's play pen where they had a tantrum and everything falls down. So I hope you never feel overwhelmed because I think when are, if you're the point person and the foundation of a lot of things in your life and when you crumble, it's bad.
So you stay where you're at and be a lot of crunch. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, there could be a lot of contract I've had, I've had employees, uh, who have suffered from both. I mean, some overwhelmed, but I, I've also had a few who actually went into full burnout. So I've seen what it looks like close by at close hand, you know, and it's, it's not good. Uh, so, but, but as far as understanding how it feels on one's own own body then, well, I can't really say much but, but I'll, I'll try and um, give some reflections here.
But uh, but I think, well you've been through a bit of a journey here recently autumn so maybe you want to set us up for this content a bit about what, what, what sort of in
Autumn (17m 50s): going on. Sure. Well, yes, if most people don't realize I've been a full time author, graphic artists and traveler around sort of the world, but mostly in North America because we have a small dog and we just don't want to abandon our furry child. We love her. Oh, you know, we ha we took him on because we love him, so we don't want to just drop them off and then go travel the rest of the world though. It's in us to do so. But we've been doing that for three years. Ever since I quit my job, a very good job.
Um, on my 42nd birthday, literally it was my last day in the office was my birthday. And so I gave my two week notice so that I can have a big birthday bash that involved the staff. I say goodbye to all my employees and walked out the door to, uh, kind of scary big world. And it's been a blast. We have traveled over a hundred thousand miles in the last three years in a variety of vehicles from a Jeep Rubicon sleeping in a ground tent to a land cruiser 80.
He was sleeping on a rooftop tent to now this four wheel camper that we have. And, but it's, it's coming I think to an end, but I'm not sure we're in a transition period. And when you're in a transition period, it's, I equate it to like, you're walking in this really Misty veil. If you don't even really know where you are, you're just, you're in this thick, dense mist and you're walking sometimes in circles, sometimes you're just kind of feeling your way and nothing has come clear yet where my next chapter is going to be a what we're going to do.
I mean, I know there's things in me, the things I miss. I'm a huge foodie. I love cooking and I really miss, you know, having a kitchen and having, you know, making food and all those kitschy thing. You know, I wouldn't have a bookshelf with my own books. I don't even have a whole set of all my own books. I have to go to my mom's house to see my books. I kind of want that. So there's a lot of desire is am and Adam feels the same way. My husband, he's an outdoor person and outdoor guide and it's kind of, you know, we've enjoyed our travel, but it's kinda hard to, uh, be that to other people, to work maybe in a job where he's guiding like kayak tours or hiking tours.
Unless you're in a place that didn't, you know you can do that. So there's a lot of this stuff that we kind of were excited to put on hold and toss it to the wind and go to Alaska and see some amazing, see the Northern lights outside of Yellowknife. It was a fantastic journey. And there's places I want to go back to so badly, but at the same time we've also seen just about everything. So we don't want to just keep going in circles were kind of ready for something new and it's created a bit of an impact.
Jesper (20m 52s): Yeah, that, that was sort of what I was going to ask about here is it. So do you think it was all the, the feeling of we maybe want to do something differently? Was it, was that, do you think that was the trigger for starting to feeling overwhelmed or was it something else?
Autumn (21m 11s): I think it was the realization that we thought everything was smooth sailing and it was going fine. And you know, we'd just gotten this camper. So we were excited to travel in something that's a little more comfortable than a rooftop tent in a land cruiser where I was doing most of my writing in the passenger seat or at a picnic tables. It's always fun to design a fantasy map. Um, Jim Reed, this is, you design a fantasy map for another author while sitting at a picnic table.
So we were excited, but there's a lot of tasks that weren't getting done. Driving every day takes its own toll. Um, there was a lot of times where it's like, I wanted to go and do something, but I really needed to sit and write. I mean, I'm an author. This is a real business. And just, I felt a lot of internal pressure, pressure from the expectations I had for myself, the expectations of wanting to meet the needs of my clients when maybe I should have just said, you know what, it's going to be another week or so.
Yeah, sorry. Speaking of the small furred devil, Hey. Yeah. But yeah, so you know, the expectations of people I work with and even wanting to, you know, I write with you and spend time with you that I w you know, we have our own things we're working on. We're working on courses and books and all these things going on, plus my own personal writing and uh, you know, just willing to draw. And I think it all just became too many expectations.
Jesper (22m 48s): Yeah. So it sounds like it may be, it was more like, uh, uh, built up over time rather than something's suddenly happening or whatever.
Autumn (22m 56s): Yeah. I think, um, I think that's usually, cause I am the rock in my relationship. I'm usually the one who can go through anything and get things done. And so when I get off the rails, it's kind of a huge hip cup in our lives that, Oh geez, you know, the bedrock just had an earthquake and now what do we do when your not feeling as motivated and excited and creative and just passionate about what you're doing when you show up and you're like, Oh, I gotta work on this today, don't I?
Yay. Yeah. So I think it was, uh, for me it's always a slow summer when I have a little breakdown and I always joke that, you know, I have one or two funky days every year, but this is, this has been going on for a month or more and it's, you know, it's getting better now because I'm actively managing it, but it's still going on. I mean, I'm still stuck in my current work in progress. I like get chapped. I've been at chapters five, six, somewhere in there for a month and a half and I can usually pound out, you know, maybe not 5,000 words a day, but two, 3000.
Like I said, writing is my job and I just, I write, I have a minimum minimum goal that I write, even if it's like I've got a ton of other things I'm working on, I try to at least write 500 words just to keep the story going. I have it all plotted out. I want to, I've, you know, my, my writer, author newsletters, I have my readers that they kind of know what's going on and they want to see what's coming up next in the story. I want to have a publication date that I've promised and I did. I pushed forward and I kept writing and the other day I finally just looked at it and said, I'm just not going to pretend like I'm happy with this.
And I won't say a deleted it, but I took it and I moved it to an outtake folder and I'm back to where I was a month ago staring at the screen going, Oh, I just need to make this scene. If I can just get this scene to click together, I know I can move forward. But it just hasn't clicked yet. No. But how did you recognize the fact that you were feeling overwhelmed if it was sort of building up over time and almost sneaking up on you? How did you recognize that this is, this is what I'm feeling?
I think it's just a matter of at some point being honest, like maybe sitting down, I don't know if I was sitting down with Adam, we, he, we, he and I talk a lot, obviously, uh, almost 20 years of marriage. Um, we've built houses together and fixed houses and lived in a camper together, um, for a hundred thousand miles. So we talk a lot. He's my best friend and I think just saying, Hey, this is, you know, nothing's working. I'm feeling stuck.
And I think for me it was really like when I, my writing is stuck, my art was stuck. Um, getting anything done was stuck and I'm, and he started saying, well, you know, it sounds like you're overwhelmed. You sometimes you need that outside perspective. And then I know I wrote you an email saying, I just am not getting done the things I want to get done that I've said that, you know, these are the important tasks. We've got a head for us and I just don't know what to do. And you always, always, you're like the best writing partner and business partner ever.
Yesware, you'll always come back and be like, no, you know, you need to take care of yourself. So I mean everyone, everyone I've talked to you that I said I'd need more time to work on something. It has been fantastic. No one's like, Oh really? I needed that yesterday. I think. Um, yeah I think a lot of the times is expectations. When we think well the what we're holding ourselves to, what we think should be going on in our lives and it's just not happening. And it's that association, that mistake that really messes things up and messes up.
You know, what we're doing with our lives and how things are going. And that's what gets us off track. And it's sometimes just, you know, talking to the people in our lives so that they know that, you know, it's not that big of a deal. You know, it can give you breathing room. And that's one of my biggest advices as if you're feeling stuck and you're feeling overwhelmed, that you just need to go and talk to the people in your lives. Talk to at least one person. Cause you will immediately start feeling at least a little better cause it's not all bottled up inside of you.
You need to at least say Hey either if you, even if you can't say I need help, you can just say, I just need to, you know, take a break. I need to go take a nap. I know that's one of my biggest signs is I usually like to get up in the morning and right. And the day that I was like, I had to rather stay in bed and screw what I'm working on and sleep for another hour, then go tackle this scene that I can't get through. Am I'd rather do anything than that.
I when I start avoiding my laptop, which is my nephew am who's a computer engineer by the way, jokes that I'm more attached to my laptop then anything else in my life, he's, he'll come up and be like, what I see you don't have your laptop on right now. Um, you know, he would literally tease me that, Oh my God, I cannot believe I'm witnessing you without this other object that I thought was permanently attached to you. So, uh, when I'm like going, no, I done with that right now.
I need to walk away from that right now that that is a sign that there's something big going on in life.
Jesper (28m 45s): Yeah. And I, and I think, at least from what I have seen with, uh, with employees and stuff like that, you know, it's first of all, I think it is really important to, to spot the warning signs when they are there because some people just don't see the warning signs and, or they don't listen to their body and that don't feel, feel it before it's too late and that that's, that's how you end up in the complete burnout. And that's sort of the worst thing that can happen. So I fully agree with what you said there before about speaking to people about how you're feeling and, and realigned some of expectations with other people because often as you said, I, I believe that if you are honest with people around you and saying, I'm, I'm just feeling overwhelmed and I need a bit of breathing space, at least if most people would understand that.
And, and S, you know, say don't worry about it. Notice and as soon as you get those confirmations, then at least you can sort of take that pressure off of your shoulders and say, okay, well other people understand and they're not expecting me to do something tomorrow and I have that breathing space. Then you can also start to allow yourself that breathing space. And I think that that's important. Um, but I also see from, uh, from past experiences with employees. I've also seen a few factors and you mentioned some of them already there, but a few factors that I've seen happening is if people, uh, struggling with setting boundaries, meaning that they know when to say no to some, some task or project or whatever.
Because I still, I simply don't have enough time for this, for example. Uh, but then the day they ended up saying yes because they want to please everybody. Then usually those are the ones where you can easily hit down that route of starting to feel more overwhelmed. And if you then don't recognize the science, then you end up in a burnout because you S you have a to do list that are miles long and there's just no Intuit and you're maybe working yourself too hard as well. Because then that's the other part that you mentioned about sleeping. Because I think, well, exercise can help us well, but above all, you need to get your sleep.
Um, and to get your sleep on a regular schedule if you can, meaning if as much as you can, going to bet the same time getting up in the morning at the same time every day. I, I'm, I'm pretty religious about that myself. Um, but, but it, it makes a huge difference if you get your sleep, if you don't get your sleep, especially when you have those really long to do list. And then you start saying, okay, I just need to work more hours, then I'll get it done right. And then you start working 16 hours a day or 18 hours a day or whatever. Maybe I'm exaggerating a bit there, but, but you get the point, you know that then you're on the, you're on the wrong path or start as soon as you start doing all that.
Autumn (31m 25s): Absolutely. And that's, it's definitely so easy to do. I mean, I know what it's like to be someone who tackles all these, all the big projects. I mean, usually it's just, you know, my meat and gravy and what I want to be working on. But you can't always be the person bearing all the weight and getting it all done. Everyone deserves a break. Everyone deserves a vacation. And I think when you finally realize that, you know, you do need to set boundaries, even if it's like, okay, it's an hour or two a night and guess what, you like five o'clock or something, uh, you know, the computer's going off and I'm going to spend some time with my husband.
Or especially since I do this full time. I mean, like I said, my nephew jokes that I'm on the laptop all the time, 12 to 18 hours a day. Well that's not doable. I mean we've been traveling around the United States and there's been times Adam's like, just just put it away or just come, we'll go do a walk. Don't, don't keep doing this. I don't, you don't want your memory of where we've been to be. You look at your laptop screen and I do think that's very important and so I know just overall of like what I could have done the last three years.
I feel like some things have slipped because we were, we were traveling and I was enjoying it, but it was also a of suddenly going, I think some of our transition time right now is like, well, you know, we need more time to focus on our businesses and our what we're doing to make them grow because the bit of time they're getting right now is not enough. But it is. I would say my number one thing is it after talking to people is to be kind to yourself. Everyone's got to have bad days.
It's fine. You just need to be gentler. Like even my niece was just saying this, Kayla to me as well, that it's, you just need to be kind to yourself. Yes. The writing's not going well. Well you know, I'm not meeting my word count goals. I'm behind on my schedule is that, you know, giving myself pressure like that is not going to make me feel better, is going to make me feel worse and I'm going to backslide into being in a dark place, which is not where I want to be. So I need to be kind to myself and just recognize it.
And to me it's, it's basically embracing the fact that I know this time is difficult as it is as difficult. You know, I'm walking in a mist and I have no idea what next month we'll even bring much less where I will be in two or three months. I just know something has to change. We haven't found it yet, but this transition time is fleeting. It will end. This is not forever. And there's sort of an acceptance of that and an embracing and just saying, Hey, this is only right now.
Yeah, I'm not writing well right now, but it will get better. I just need to keep, if not keep working like a for the scenes I just deleted or didn't lead. Like I said, I never delete anything. I move it to an outtake folder so that I can, if I changed my mind, I can go back and there are some good nug nuggets in there that I've already pulled out of it. But I know this one scene is just like, I feel like I am doing, doing novice author stuff like the throwing up minor obstacles. I have nothing to do with the plot just to make it, just to have something to write.
And so instead of doing that, I got rid of all those little minor obstacles and I'm back to the main scene and I literally basically started journaling to myself in my chapter. Obviously it will be deleted later, but it's like why is this scene happening? What needs to happen here? How does this gonna relate to something later? How does it fit in the plot? I got out my diagrams of plot, the seven steps of story structure and how that integrates with character arcs and made sure everything was lining up. And you know, I'm starting to see the importance of where this scene is and why it has to happen.
And so it does fit in. It just has felt so pointless and I want to get beyond it. I haven't gotten there yet, but I also know so I'm not writing the actual story, but I'm sitting there at least trying to figure out where the problem it is I'm having with it. And I know some of the problem is I realized I'm just not in love with this character. Honestly I feel like doing something I've told everyone not to do and switch to a different story that I'm more passionate about, even though I said is the next series I'm going to write and I don't think I'm the, I don't think I'm going to do that yet.
Realizing that the character is not working for me, I can look at it a little bit more and say why? You know, what? What do I need to do to make this character more interesting to me? Because if it's not interesting to me and I'm writing a flat character, then it's not going to be interesting to my readers. So you know, you start pulling apart these little threads and when your whole life is bound up in a big ball of threads, it helps to am to pull it apart, pull apart your creativity because if you get something working on one front, it'll often, you know, start moving on other fronts and I've definitely seen that.
I mean I know by seeing taking a back seat and trying to take a few days off and just look over everything I've got going on, I can see some disconnects where it's like I've done this and I've done this over here and I never put the funnel, the little connector together to tell the people that this is done and Hey, I also have this group that I should probably tell him they should get together and they should probably know about this. So it's definitely you start seeing those connections that you're not making because you've been so busy that you're just getting the minimum done just because you then can say it's done and you can move on to the next task.
And also speaking to us, go ahead.
Jesper (36m 57s): No, I just wanted to say when, when you said that that was the, that was the other thing I was also thinking about was that, uh, efficiency plays a big party and, and I'm, I'm, I'm all for if you shouldn't see it, you know, uh, it's a like a religion almost for me, but um, but what I meant by that is that when you are training yourself and you're working way too hard and you're trying to force things, that's also where you often end up in those situations whereby actually use half the time you're spending on something is, is nonproductive time.
And what I mean by that is, is that you end up, for example, as you just said, you start writing stuff and then it's like, what is this? It doesn't make any sense are, and then you, maybe you put it in a different folder or delete it or whatever people do that doesn't really matter, but it's still wasted hours of work. Right. Whereas, and I, I do realize that this is way easier said than done, but, but if, if, if you were able or one we're able to cut themselves a bit of Slack and try to get their sleep and, and uh, and those things that we talked about before, then you would also find that your productive hours I actually producing stuff that you can use so you're not spending twice as much many man hours doing the same thing then then you have to, right.
I mean you have to sleep thing is a really important thing. And also trying to cut yourself a bit of flack, as we said a few times now to sort of put that demand on yourself. Right? Yes. Sometimes working more hours and harder is actually not the solution.
Autumn (38m 33s): No, I definitely eating and I did, I didn't realize it was, I believe a Japanese technique, but it's one I've sort of came upon on my own and obviously of course no one's ever, no one's ever the first inventor of the wheel. Someone else came up with it before you, but it's, you can only have three tasks on your to do list at a time. Cause I definitely, yeah, I've definitely, I'm one of those people who have a million projects and I have all these things I want to do, but you can't really do all of them well.
And when you have that many weighing on you, you do feel the stress. So basically, yeah, you might have a list of all those tasks that need to be done, but then you have an active task lists and there's only three things on that. Those are the, these are the three things you're going to work on today or your three big projects, whatever they are. And nothing gets moved out of the other list until it's on the active. And how you talk about making boundaries and stuff. There's your boundary. You just kind of say, I'm sorry, these are my three tasks.
Nothing else is going to be a move to the other list into one of those is done and you ain't it. So it's definitely taught me to be like, these are the three things I'm working on. These are my three priorities. I am working on those. When one of those is finished or one of those, one of those is at a stage where I can move it aside, I will choose what something else to go and that is all I'm doing right now. And if you don't like it, find someone else because that is just how I have to live my life right now.
Jesper (40m 6s): Yeah. The, the, the variation. I've heard of that one that you did you just mention, this is basically almost on a more granular level in the way that, the way I've heard of this, that you put three things on your to do list, but they can only be things that you will get done today and nothing else. So basically it could be like, okay, I'm gonna write chapter number eight for example. Uh, that, that could be a thing. Right? But he cannot say finish novel number
Autumn (40m 34s): unless you're like 500 words away from the ed.
Jesper (40m 38s): Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Because otherwise it's like a maybe a month or two or three or four or five months long to do listing however long people take to write a novel. Right. But eh, but so it has to be something that you will complete today and all three things has to be something that is achievable today. So, um, you have to be realistic in your own goal setting and then when you go to, to bet at or, or once you're done with your work day or whenever it suits you, then you can make your list of three new things for tomorrow. But then you're feeling good about it because you know that you're making progress.
But you're also noting noting or knowing that you're taking off stuff on the to do list because I managed by three things today. So it is a way where if you are prone to feeling overwhelmed at that, that might be helpful.
Autumn (41m 21s): Definitely. And that's why I think when I, that's why I use a word count goal, especially right now. I mean to used to be like write half a chapter, which is fantastic when you have the time. But when life's busy or you just, you know, there's going to be other things you need to focus on that just saying, you know, I'm going to write 500 words. And like with Scrivener, we both use Scrivener just watching that word count and say, okay, I hit my 500 you know, if I've had a little bit more time or you know, if I can put a little bit more in. Great. But that's it. And I've also definitely come to the realization that, you know, even time management, like saying, um, I working on this till 10:00 AM or till 11:00 AM and then no matter where I am in this project, I've got to move on to something else today.
And so it's just literally starting to manage that a lot more actively. Where before it seems like things recently just kinda got away with any things were taking longer than they should have. So I'm just simply, you know, if it's going to take longer than it's going to have to get worked on tomorrow and making sure it happens that way. You know, taking a couple of days off every once in a while, taking the weekends off sometimes now or I decided weekends are more my time. So you know, I'll probably right, but I have some courses I signed up for and maybe just some fun stuff, the graphic design or Hey, getting away from my computer or maybe doing something else.
It really, we're not designed to work seven days a week, even if we're passionate about it. I've, I've met and talked to so many people that, you know, I see that they've kind of burned out in their own business and they want to, you can just hear it in their voice. They need a break and I don't want to see that happening to me or to us. So I've definitely learned that, you know, if you don't start taking breaks now, if you don't mix it up a little bit, that it's going to be, you know, you're going to face that down the line because you do get burned out with things and you've got to find a way keeping it new and fresh and challenging.
And usually that's by letting it go a little bit. Yeah, indeed. So, uh, I don't know, is that, it's that sort of a wrap around the topic of feeling overwhelmed, a autumn on or did you have some more stuff to share about your experience? I think that'll do it. I just going to say to people though, I mean, you're not alone and remember that whatever you're going through right now, it's temporary and that no one else knows what you're going through unless you tell them.
I always joked that I wish that if you had a cold sort of like you have over the weekend, yes. For that you turned a different color. I mean, if someone looked at you and your purple or share truth, they would know you're sick. But you know, especially our internal, our mental landscape, no one knows what's going on unless you speak up. So, you know, that's what like our Facebook group for this is, uh, you know, topping. I've talked to a couple authors about not being able to figure out this chapter. I've talked to friends and nieces and other people and anyone who's willing to listen to me talk about writing and it's, it's important.
It's important to be able to reach out to fellow writers who will. Everyone's going to know what you're going through, and if they have an experience themselves, they will relate and it's part of the human condition to, you want to kind of clam up when you're feeling vulnerable, but the best thing you can do is reach out to somebody and say, yeah, I just in a rough spot and you'll be surprised at how really wonderful most people are.
Narrator (44m 57s): So next Monday I hope I have an excellent interview lined up for you, but I'll see how it goes. So I'll keep it as a surprise for now if you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the amwritingfantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join Autumn and Jesper on patrion.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month.
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Have you noticed those free ISBNs that come with distributors or with Amazon's paperbacks?
Is there a catch to using them and you should run like a maverick demon on a rampage to purchase "safe" ISBNs directly ... or are they really OK to use and might be saving you up to $125 a book?!
Join Jesper and Autumn as they lay out what an ISBN is and does as well as what the deal actually is with those free ones!
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
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Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to the amwritingfantasy podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing join to best selling authors who have self-published more than 20 books between them. Now onto the show with your hosts. Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello. I am Jesper and I'm Autumn, this is episode 41 of the amwritingfantasy podcast and we are going to talk about ISDM ISBM numbers. I almost stumbled the same bed ESPN numbers and uh, whether you should buy you own ISBNs numbers or if you should use free once. So yeah, we'll get into explaining all the details about what ISB and numbers are and all that. But, uh, I think, can I first say that I actually had a very busy weekend here because my oldest son had his birthday this weekend.
He turned 11 Oh, vial. That's fun. Always almost a teen. It's coming up. Yeah. So, so that, that's the bat. But we had, we had the house full of guests, so that, that was great. Uh, w w we had great fun and it was nice. And uh, my brother and his fiance came already on Friday and then they stayed all weekend and then the other guests came on Saturday. Uh, and then, uh, yeah, some, some, some of them of course from left in the middle of the night and a Sunday morning, uh, my brother and his fiance had to, to go to, because they are picking up a dog, so they have to drive to pick up a dog.
So I had to get up early to make breakfast for them and all that. So I was really, really tired. Or there's something about a group of kids, especially 11 years old with all that energy that can really make you feel tired, I think. Yeah, absolutely. And then of course when you have to wait on your guests for for like two full days, you know, I don't know for me that, I mean, I, I actually think some people enjoy doing that and I do enjoy the company and all that, but, but waiting on people is sort of not maybe my favorite activity, but uh, of course you'd do it anyway.
Autumn (2m 28s): So, but it was very, it was very nice. Oh, that sounds really good. I houseful of family is definitely fun, but I'm like you where I, you know, my parents, we were just visiting with them and sometimes it's like, Oh, you're having a party in the basement. I just, that's a lot of their friends. All their friends are, you know, they're super nice to us and they often have their kids, you know, are mostly my age to sometimes the kids tag along and it's great, but it can be so overwhelming and you know, so much time of it, I'm like, I need to go to the woods so little while
Jesper (3m 6s): w that was also why when it came to Sunday, you know, we just decided to, I'm going to relax on the couch and basically do nothing. So actually we decided to, uh, to watch the first episode of a dark crystal eight of resistance with the kids. And I believe you told me that you watched it too, didn't you?
Autumn (3m 25s): Yes. I've only watched the first one. I'm giving it a try out. I think I have to watch a second one, but it's, what did you think of it? It's okay.
Jesper (3m 34s): No, but yeah, but I think, well, first of all night, my wife noticed that it was, it's in fact a prequel to the 1982 Jim Henson film, the dark crystal. So that was quite interesting to me. Uh, but I think I would say that if I wasn't watching it with the kids, I probably wouldn't watch it to be honest. I mean, I think it was OK and, but there was, there was quite some info dumping going on. Like, like you can almost tell that that's because they want to make sure that the younger audience understands what's happening and all that.
Whereas as an adult, what's in that? That's a bit like OK. Uh, you could probably do that a bit better. Um, so, but, but it's OK it's, it's, it's fine, but I don't think I would be watching it on my own to be honest.
Autumn (4m 20s): Yeah. That's where I, that's how we both felt after watching. The first one is am I want to get beyond the info dumping, which again, they're building the world that existed before the original movie. So there's a lot of information to share, but the puppets just didn't work for me in the lack of facial expressions that how far like CGI as com and what they could have done instead of the puppets. Not that I don't want to diss traditional because I love Brian Froud. He's one of my favorite artists. And he created those, all of those puppets and the styles and the costumes, but it just, I would have actually preferred it as CGI if they digitized all the puppets and then created expressions and things.
The voices and actions alone just didn't do it for me. But I want to watch one more. So I get past all the info dolphin thing and see if I get swept up in the story. Cause I know a lot of other authors and a lot of people I've talked to really have but it's not there for me yet. So I might watch one more. And otherwise, you know, I'm back at Lucifer the first.
Jesper (5m 27s): I still hate it. It gets better, I swear. But, uh, but I actually, to be honest, I, I, I think it's quite cool that it's puppets, uh, because it's, it's different compared to what you're used to seeing in puppets nowadays is it's pretty where it is. So I thought that that's actually cool. I mean, I get, I get your point in Iowa. I can certainly agree that the fact that you can't see face mimics is it's a bit, let's say weird because we're not used to that. But I still think it's quite cool.
Autumn (5m 59s): Yeah. I'll have to, like I said, I want to give it another try or two and see if I can get into it. But the first one didn't catch my interest so we'll see. Yeah. So this week I've actually been doing a lot of reflecting because the 19th would have been my brothers, I can't believe its 51st birthday. So he was four and a half years older than me. He actually passed away in 2000 oddly enough, the day I met my husband, of course he was just a guy I met. Um, so that's, I've been thinking about that a lot.
Sometimes I don't think about his birthday until like afterwards, but this year I just was visiting my mom and it's been in my mind and I've just been reflecting about how much not only did he miss because he actually choose, chose to take his own life. But how much that event changed me besides the fact I obviously met my husband, um, that same day as well. But I believe it or not, cause you've only known me, you know the class, Oh gosh, I don't know what four or five, six years. Yesper but we am you've probably known me as you a risk taker.
You've known me. I quit my job, my full time job. What do the two week notice to go travel the world. And you know, I've done some crazy things, but I was always the steady rock who never took risks in high school is very quiet and antisocial. And I realize how much, when you realize that life is short. Like my brother was only 30 when he passed away. I was 25. And how much, um, just realizing that, you know, life changes, there's so much out there.
What are you afraid of? Trying something scary for, you know, switching, leaving my last job where I wasn't happy to go explore and travel across the United States. I mean, what's going to happen? I might fail. I might have a blast. I might do both. I just realized that it really did change me into a much more of a risk taker, which is oddly what my brother was. So I think we actually would have gotten along. We fought like cats and dogs as kids, as teenagers. So I honestly think we would've gotten along so much better.
But it also, you know, I've talked to before that, you know, August has been a really kind of crazy, it was a crazy month. It's still kind of this 2019 I've said it a hundred times. I cannot wait to this year ends. But I also think that every time that, you know, things get bad, I still can't imagine making that choice. And I think about all the things my brother missed. Uh, his youngest daughter is, you know, we're, or her associates degree. His oldest son has graduated college and has an awesome job as a computer engineer.
Um, is young middle son. The youngest son actually is, uh, in the air force and re-upping to another role. You know, another four or five, six years at with them is just an is. His other daughter, his oldest daughter, actually has a daughter and it's just like, wow, I live changes no matter what. When you have a bad day and you're frustrated and everything else that's going on, I just still can't imagine making that choice and not sticking out to see what's going to happen next.
So it's, yeah, it's been such a reflective week for me. I guess I'm sitting alone in the Adirondacks because my husband's away at a training and this is obviously I need his distraction because my mind is on very deep thoughts.
Jesper (9m 28s): Yeah, I can, I can hear that. Do you think it was because you were at your parents' place? Was that why you started thinking about it? Oh, what, what do you think you all of a sudden starting have started to have these reflections?
Autumn (9m 40s): Probably, I think it was there. We were talking about my mom seemed a little sad and with my nephew who lives with them and, uh, we were trying to figure out why and it just dawned on me, I'm like, it's September, it's my brother's birthday coming up. And she always gets sad this time of year and everyone's just kind of paused. And so I think, yeah, that's what was kind of, when I figured that out. Um, like I said, I usually think of it after the fact because life is so busy. But this year I've got some quiet time. And like I said, it's been a hard year, but, so it's just on my mind, I think.
Yeah.
Jesper (10m 14s): Yeah. It's, it's interesting. I mean, I know it doesn't work like this, but I wish I could tell people thinking about, you know, taking their own life to, um, to think ahead. You know, it, it's, especially if you're, I mean, if you're, if you're rather young and, and here I'm also talking about people maybe 50 or whatever, right? I mean, you have so many years to go and it's just, and who knows what's going to happen in 10 years. Maybe something awesome will happen and you will be so sad that you, you know, ended it before it happened or whatever.
You know, it's, it's hard to know, but I know it doesn't work like this because my wife works on a suicide hotline as well, so she talks to these people on the phone, so I know it's not like you can just tell them, yeah, yeah, yeah. You should be feeling better because later on it will be better. You know? It doesn't work like that, but I just wish it would.
Autumn (11m 7s): I agree. I, I fell at the time, I mean, I was 25 he was 30 that he thought everything was over at 30 and when I hit 30 it was really kind of like band. I feel like a kid and I don't know what's going on. I can't imagine how my brother felt like everything was over at 30 and now I'm 45 and you know, sometimes I feel it in my bones, but I still mentally am like 20 something and I know talking to my parents, like you telling me don't get old. And of course they're in their seventies and I know mentally they think they're in their thirties and twenties I don't think, you know, our minds stay at this act of healthy level and our bodies are the ones that let us down.
I just can't imagine feeling like mentally it's, I'm done. I just can't get there. I'll just work, create a new world and write another book and get lost in it. I think that's my answer to everything.
Jesper (11m 54s): Yeah, that's true. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know how we're going to get on from it. This was like, this is like a topic once you wouldn't start a podcast because now we can't get anywhere else. Well I, Oh my God. Well I understand why you might be thinking about those things. That's certainly not a, it's not easy. Oh week on the internet with the amwritingfantasy. Podcast okay, well autumn we have to try to move on to something else. Move on.
Actually
Autumn (12m 26s): I think I said I, it's actually in its own way empowering to me because I have a, I have a low bar that is so low that you know, I can't reach it so I know things are going to get better no matter what happens.
Jesper (12m 40s): Perfect. At least a on on a more happy note if we can go there. We had so many comments coming in on Patrion from both Sade and Irish and uh, guys please keep it going. It, it's awesome to read your notes and comments on, on some of, well you actually just, I think both of you actually started your own a threat and just to share some info, um, and you also basic commenting on podcast episodes and whatnot, so that's great. And uh, please keep that going and well for the rest of you, if you want to check, check out Patrion then there's a link in the show notes.
So we'd go over there and, and check it out. We do give you a ton of rewards if you, if you join us there.
Autumn (13m 23s): Absolutely. And yeah, it's been so much fun with all the commenting. So it's been it, it makes it really engaging and that's kind of fun. And I actually wanted to bring up um, another place that I find engaging you. You know this. Yes. For that. I'm not the biggest fan of Facebook. I might have said that to you before.
Jesper (13m 43s): Well it might have come up just like once or twice maybe. Okay.
Autumn (13m 48s): And I think it's like every email and we have to do something on Facebook. But you know, it's where so much connection is going well. It's so funny cause another author that I really admire admire Angela Ford. She's part of a group and she's probably a designer and really good with computers and she and her friend created a new app called indie author lifestyle. And it's a new forum, really, really fun for actually for authors. And so I've been on there.
And it's funny cause the intro question I thought was really funny that she, you know, you join and you get a question right away to get you to thinking it's what's your, what's your biggest struggle when it comes to self publishing? And it's been really fun reading all the comments about, you know, some of it's just working on getting editing done on a tight budget, marketing and sales motivation, motivating myself to edit and, you know, tuning out distractions. So actually I've been having a am way more fun. I know I really need to give back into our own Facebook group because the comments there are awesome, but if there happens to be anyone else out there like me who kind of feels your skin crawl just the little bit when you get on Facebook, Hey, check out indie author lifestyle because it's been, you know, in just a few days that I've been part of it, it's been a huge vibrant community and very chatty, very easy to get into.
Um, unlike Facebook and it's not stealing all my data. Yay. Yeah.
Jesper (15m 21s): Well, yeah, that, and it's a good question that they're asking there because you can get a myriad of different answers to that question because everybody will, well, of course a lot we'll share, but, but there's going to be a very, very many variations on what people struggling with. Oh yeah, that's a good starting question. But actually I have to say that am in the amwritingfantasy Facebook group just today alone, I approved 11 new joiners. So that's, so that's awesome. And the last few days, um, there's been a lot of people joining so that, that's really great.
And I can see a lot of comments going on, a lot of threats getting started and people asking questions and other people's replying. So it is, it is in fact quite a good community that that's going on there. Even for those who doesn't like it.
Autumn (16m 9s): I enjoy it whenever I get on there. And I love seeing am some of the comments I know recently even, I think it was Zane, somebody's Irish, one of them was mentioning even how great the amwritingfantasy Facebook group is. So I have to admit, it is also it's own vibrant community. So I, yeah, I need to get back in there too, especially when you're approving 11. And I haven't even been in there yet today. So, oops. Yeah.
Jesper (16m 32s): Yeah. Well we are several people doing this so that it works out. But it's good because it feels to me like, um, and, and maybe, maybe I'm going to regret saying this at some point, if it turns out that I'm not right, but, but maybe we've sorted past a critical mass of people now because it feels like there is a lot more activity than they used to be just like a year ago. Um, so, so there's quite a lot of people in there. I think we are getting close to 1000, 300 people in the group, so that's pretty good.
Um, and of course, if, if you listening, uh, interested in joining a group of fantasy authors, just sharing stuff about writing or marketing or whatever it may be, basically more or less, you can post everything in there and people will jump on it and reply and give you their thoughts. So you can just search for amwritingfantasy in the group section of Facebook and then you will find us and uh, just put in your request to join and we will approve you quite easily.
Autumn (17m 40s): ISB numbers. Oh, that's right. Sounds complicated. OK Oh, it is in so many ways. At least it feels like a little bit. It's am to me, almost a throwback to the real traditional publishing days. And so there's a lot of kind of misunderstandings in the indie publishing world about what an ISB and number is and do you need it and why are they so, gosh, darn expensive. I mean, talk about one of your biggest hurdles to self-publishing.
I'm surprised somebody hasn't actually written down having to buy ISBNs numbers.
Jesper (18m 17s): Oh yeah, yeah. True. But maybe if I just set us off a bit here with the STR has a short definition thing just so that everybody's on the same page and then I think you can lead us into it because I know that you have researched this a lot more than I have, but as usual, I have opinions about everything so I can still see opinions. But, uh, but maybe just so to put us, everybody on the same page here so everybody knows what we're talking about. So I S P N stands for international standard book number and basically the ISBM number is a way to identify books, I guess you could say.
And an I SBN is assigned to eat separate edition and variation of a publication. So this could for example, be a paper back and then if you have a hardcover edition of the same book, then for example, they will, those two will have the different ISP and numbers and getting ESPN numbers assigned, uh, that is handled by each country separately. So essentially what that means is that each country has their own ISP and eight inches that is responsible for assigning ISB and numbers for that country or territory.
So it's doesn't matter what you know, language your publication is in. So for example, if I want to get a ISPN number here in Denmark, even though I'm writing English, I still have to buy it from the Danish agency. So I think that's the definition is out of the way. And hopefully that puts us on the same page about what we're talking about here.
Autumn (19m 52s): Yes, that's a really good introduction. I mean, I remember the first time I heard about ISB and numbers. I mean I had volunteered and worked the library in my high school and really hung out at the library a lot in college. And I thought I knew everything like the Dewey decimal system and you know, but then I had picked up a book in England that a friend desperately wanted, but of course there's an English copy and blah blah blah. And finally we figured out we just needed a search by the ISBM number and then she could find it and order it. And of course, you know, that was the dark days of like 1996 so the internet was not quite as good as it is now.
And Amazon book search didn't exist back then. But that's when I realized that ISB numbers, those little numbers in the front of a book actually means something. And there's some really complicated parts. I mean they actually kind of tell you a lot of information about all written in like you know, about what it actually means. And I thought that was kind of interesting. So they're actually, they're at these day there. Is is an ISP and search though that makes it really easy to go and look for things.
So if you have an ISP and number, you can just go ahead and put it into a search and find your book. But some of those, uh, I know there's a lot of misinformation out there about what the ISBM number says and it's am. So, you know, some people say if you get a free one, because that's really the topic today, is do you actually need to go buy an ISP N number or can you use, um, Amazon? You know, when you do eBooks on Amazon, you can, you don't need one. You use an a S I N number, which is an Amazon number and it's just good for the Amazon what stores?
And then if you go through KTP to print a paper back or like I published, I do a lot of stuff on Smashwords but I know drafted digital as well. These other places will create, you know, give you a free is number. And so why wouldn't you use it the free one versus going and buying one. You know, why is there a difference? I know there's people on both sides of this fence. That's what I, that's what I'm wondering too. So I'm looking forward for you to tell me why I should buy one.
Oh, I'll see if I can change your mind. It will be hard because I'm actually playing the devil's advocate cause I've actually always used the free one too. But as you know, I've learned to am question everything. I used to just do what I was told and then big events happened in my life and now I don't believe a word anyone says into like, Oh and look it up myself. I must be that. That's a healthy attitude to be Isaac. So I mean, thank goodness I can do this. As a teenager, my parents would have gone gray so fast.
It's such a good kid. But so I'm gonna you know it's going to be interesting because there are some information in there and like I said there's some misinformation but I do use a free one too. And I know you do as well cause we've talked about this a lot. So there's a couple of neat things. So there's some stuff in there that tells you what language the book is published in and you can also find out what country it's for. There's some things that represent the title of the book. So that becomes a special unit of numbers as well.
There's a check digit, which is kinda like your credit card. There's always a check digit digit that they all kind of add up to or work to this one number or they know it's a fake and there's something in there that tells you who the publisher is. So that's sort of the only sticking point I can see between, or at least in this example are there are other sticking points. But the example of why you would or would not buy an ESPN. So if I use a free one from Amazon for my paperback book, it's going to say Amazon's the publisher.
If I'm a publisher or I wanted to say that I published my book, if I buy one, it will say that. So written there and almost like a meta tag for a website. It says who is the owner of the book or at least that copy of the book. So there is that. I don't know what you think about, you know, how important do you think it is to be able to say that you yes, Russ Schmidt created and made this book and all the way down to owning this little digital number or do you care that it says, you know, Amazon or Kobo or one of these other places is the digital publisher of your book?
No. Well I'll see if you can change my mind, but, but my point of view is basically that I could not care less and, and basically here's why. What I care about is selling books and I don't know of anybody being readers who goes on to, for example, Amazon and stopped typing in a puppet those names to figure out, I mean disregarded. This is self publishing, so just say you have published your book with random house for example.
I don't know of anybody who goes on to Amazon just says, I wonder which book I wanted to rent a random house book. I mean nobody does that so well, yeah, in this case then, because I always use the free a Amazon ISPN numbers. Then of course it will say that Amazon is the publisher, but I don't see that it makes any different whatsoever in terms of selling books or acquiring readers. I simply don't see it. I see. I don't disagree with you.
That's what's so hard about this conversation is I read the same thing and you know I double checked before I, I looked at the price tag of a single ISP in at $125. I mean, obviously if you're going to do this, there are ways of buying them in bulk of 10 or a hundred and considering you need one for every single different edition. So if you have an audio book, an ebook, and sometimes it's even by retailer, so you know you can have different numbers. So yeah, you, you, if you're going to publish, if you're going to need one, you're probably gonna need at least three or four for the exact same book, but in different formats.
So, and you have to realize sometimes that can be mobi file for Kindle versus an epoch bile. Some places are really specific. So that's the only other reason I've heard people complain about, you know, having these ISBNs, if you don't own it, if you own it, you can say when you submit your book to a place saying, this is the pub file, it goes with this ISBM or this is the ebook file. It goes with this ISP. And so you only have one for your ebook, one for your paperback, and one for your audio book where if you're doing sort of like what I'm doing, I'm going through a distributor.
So I have my Amazon one, the Amazon paper back one, and then I go through Smashwords and they give me an ISB and for all of those, but it's actually the exact same book, ebook file as the one that's an Amazon
Jesper (26m 44s): that has a different ISP, a number. So suddenly it's like I'm having, you know where like goodness, I didn't have to pay for these. I might have five, six, seven, eight different ISBNs numbers that point back to the exact same book. So some people say that looks so unprofessional. I think this might be the companies that are selling ISPN numbers, but I'm not sure. No, but that's also what I'm wondering because unprofessional in what way? I mean I can understand if you look, if you are a traditional publishing house and then you are using you, your is, well I'm going a bit of on assumptions here, but I am assuming that these, that they are using the ISB and numbers to track their global sales and all that stuff and they can probably split it out on territory depending on the country.
Um, indicator inside the ISPN numbers and whatnot. So they can use it to, to, to check their sales. And if I'm not mistaking as well, if you, for example, if you're talking about counting paperback sales or hopper, how cover sales towards something like the New York best times seller list or whatever it's called. What is it called out? Yeah, the USA today bestseller. That was for the New York times. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. If you, if you need to count your paperback and hardcover sales to, what's that?
I think you have to have a dedicated ISPN number. So everything that is just an Amazon ISPN number, I don't think that gets counted. So, so that's another thing. But I'm going a bit of memory here, but that's how I remember that it works. That does make sense. And I could see that being a key point. I would love to, I know a couple of people who put together some paperbacks are not paper bags, but bundles to make a run for the New York times bestseller list. And if I thought about it, I should send them an email and say, Hey gee, wouldn't you do this?
Do you just do the Amazon ASI en or do you actually go and buy an ISB N so that, you know, New York times can track it. That might be a good question to ask someone and come circle back or a little rounds of this one of these days. Yeah, to be honest, I, I don't like those bestseller lists because you can gain them. Uh, and, and then there was also, there's also some, you know, booksellers that gets counted or some bookstores that gets counted in terms of sales. And then there's others that don't.
So I have heard stories of authors figuring out which spoke, um, you know, bookstores actually have the sales counter to what the bestseller list and then get them to buy a ton of books with the agreement that you're going to buy them back afterwards. Oh my goodness. So they buy a ton of books. It gets counted. I think. Uh, I think that was how it worked. But anyway, somebody can prove me wrong here. You find this not understanding something, but how I remember it working was that, that you, you could sort of make some deals with those books.
Sale sales companies are bookstores and then basically got a lot of sales counted towards the best seller list. And yeah, there, there is articles on the internet, by the way, if you're interested, uh, the listener try to, uh, try to search for a gaming New York times bestseller list and then you'll find some stuff. But there it is possible to game the system. I don't really, that's why I like something like the am, the Amazon bestseller list I like a lot more because it is just based on sales.
It's just based on what people buy and there, there is nothing else to it. You cannot game it. You cannot get around it. If you don't sell any books, you're not on the list. It's that easy. Whereas for example, when we're talking about, um, ISPN numbers, for example, if you don't have the, uh, if the ISPN number yourself and it doesn't get counted, you could be selling like $1 million worth of books and never hit the list, right? So to me, then there's something wrong with the best seller list if, if, if it only counts a portion of the market
Autumn (30m 45s): and not to be jaded being in the United States of America, but everything's for sale here. So of course you can game the system to get to the New York times best seller list and the USA today, I mean, I've seen people, you know, usually the buy in for a bundle that's going to make a run at it as about a thousand dollars. So for $1,000 you can get together as one of these author groups that usually has about 20 authors. They put all that money into marketing and whatever else they have to do and boom, you get to put USA today or New York times bestseller after your name, once you hit the list.
And you know, that's great. But I have to say every single bit of research I've done and looked at, all of readers don't care. They care. If you have a good book, I mean, yeah, great. You can put USA today or you could put Amazon bestseller, that's all fantastic. You can put that after your name. But did you write a good book? That's usually what readers are looking at before they pick up your book. So I try not to take it, you know, it's whether or not you have a PhD after your name. It makes the author feel better.
Maybe it gives you that confidence boost that is worth $1,000 to go for but um, I haven't bought into one of those, so we'll see. I guess maybe I'm jaded that way. But another thing that I've heard about ISBNs, and this one's, I think I've already worked my way around to not believing it, but you have to tell me what you think of the sort of face value as a, supposedly libraries are becoming more important to the distribution of eBooks and overdrive is the largest supplier to schools and libraries in the world.
And they circulate more than 105 million eBooks in just 2014 but they also supply to retail stores and everything else. And what's required for overdrive is an ESPN. So, you know, you need to have an ISB and to be part of overdrive, but do you think having a free ISB is somehow holding
Jesper (32m 40s): you back from being recognized in libraries? Well, let's back a big, uh, I think we need to be really careful with, you know, 2014 numbers because 2019 markets, I'm massively different than 2014 ones. Um, and if we're looking at something like it, I mean, if you want your paperback or hardcover in, in the library, then I think it still holds true that you need the ISPN number.
Uh, you, for example, I'm and, and I know you do that too. Autumn I mean we have a print on demand via Amazon, right? Those folks just not get into the library. Um, but when you are distributing white and especially with eBooks, which is still growing in terms of from a library perspective, um, if you are publishing via draft two digital and use those as your distributor, they actually have several different am, I don't know if you call them funnels or whatever, but they have several different agreements, let's put it like that with libraries.
So it's quite easy to be honest. When you're, when you're done publish your ebook, draft two digital, you just sort of put a ticket in those boxes to say, yeah, I want to also distribute to these places and those ones, we'll put your book available at least to the library. But I have to say as well that this doesn't mean that you'll start seeing a ton of people boring your books because it's the same environment as us as it is on Amazon. There's a lot of books available and it's not like people in the library, all of a sudden your book, we'll just start a peeing in front of them and you will earn a ton of money from people.
Boring. It's not happening in way. At the end of the day, we're back to what we have said so many times before the money is in the email list and that's what you need to build. All this extra stuff is nice fluffy stuff to get your ebook into the library. But unless you are actively pushing for it, maybe telling people that, Oh by the way, do you know you can get my book at your library if you just go and search for the book or if you go and ask for it and whatnot, if you, if you don't actively drive it that way yourself, it's not gonna make any difference.
It's just going to be like selling books on Amazon. I mean, you can upload it to Amazon, but it doesn't sell on its own. That's very true. And you're right. Even smash for it. So that's why I kind of saw through that one one the date on the uh, facts for it. But also Smashwords does distribute to overdrive in, it has some deals with libraries. So I think am when I set up a lot of my distribution with Smashwords, I actually put on my books to libraries even cheaper, which I didn't realize. Most book publishers actually send out the libraries for like 60 or $70.
You know, the big publishing houses, that's how much they're making it. 60 or $70 for a certain period for book to be licensed
Autumn (35m 38s): to libraries. I'm like, man, I think I did 99 cents. So obviously, but again, it's also to get your name out there and there are, I've been reading about some tactics if you want to have your book distributed more than libraries, like you know how to send letters or you know, I travel around and I use a lot of libraries. Thank you for free internet. I love the library's United States and Canada. I'm like, Canton, no one's actually let you have drinks in them. Oh my gosh. I was like, he's in in the United States to actually carry a drink until a library. I love Canada.
But all you have to do is like you go up there and tell them, Hey, I'm an author in my books are available and they're really well rated. And Hey, if you go here, you can get a free, you know, it's only 90 cents or you can get a free one for the library. Just let me know and I'll happily give you a digital copy and you can, you know, work in or out. If you, if you're an author and you have a local library and you have not stopped in to tell them you're an author and you're a local author and give them an ebook please just go do it. You'll be so excited. It feels good to at least, you know, have something at the local library.
Jesper (36m 42s): Yeah. And uh, there is something to it that, uh, you should be pricing your library Burroughs higher than your sales on, on, for example. Amazon but, but again, once you, if you use something a distributor like draft two digital, and when you are setting your prices, it will actually give you some guy, you use some guidance in the module when you're setting prices and it'll tell you on average how much higher is the price for a book like this in the library and stuff like that. So you, you're not going in blind and you will get some support and help there in, in, in pricing it correctly.
But, but yeah, uh, library borrows does weren't higher pricing than, than sales on Amazon.
Autumn (37m 21s): Yes. It's, I know that now I'll have to look it back. What? I didn't smash words, but I'm not that worried that I'm somehow having the library's drain my, my sales, it's not a huge writing thing. And one of the things I have to admit that I really hadn't thought about with ISB and numbers, so they throw this around and they're, like I said, they're quite expensive. I mean, it's $125 for one. It's, I think around $200 for 10 and then is it 300 or something for more than a hundred it's something, it's probably a little more than that, but the price has changed a little bit.
But there's definitely some things, you know, you want to buy them in bulk if you did decide to buy them. But don't forget if you buy an ISBM number, you now need your own barcode because if you're doing a print book, you need to have your own ISBM number and it's all kind of labeled in there together. So that's another expense. So of course, if you go and buy a barcode plus an ISB, a number, there's bundles for that, or one bar code and 10 ISBM numbers, you know, now it's only $320 for 10 ISBNs and a whole barcode, which I don't know if that's gonna work for all 10 days be ends.
So you see where the system really becoming really, I mean, I thought editing was bad, but you throw in ISP in numbers and suddenly it's getting kind of expensive.
Jesper (38m 44s): Yeah. And then w I don't know, the more we talk about it, the more I just feel like I'm getting went. Maybe it's confirmation bias. I don't know. But I feel like I'm just getting more and more
Autumn (38m 55s): points in. What do you, how do you say that points into check board or whatever. I don't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you've taken off your boxes that yeah, you've made the right decision to go for a free one, huh? Yeah, because I, I just don't see the point of it.
Jesper (39m 9s): I, I, as I said, I understand it if you're a big publishing house, but none of us are, right? I mean
Autumn (39m 15s): we are like nimble and fast and flexible in the office, so we don't need that. All that stuff. I think so too. And I think after I finished like reading dozens of articles about ISB and numbers and why you should have a free one or why you should go and buy them. And it's funny, most of the articles I read were really pushing you to go and buy ISBNs numbers. Every argument kinda came down to like, well, it left me with this feeling. I'm like, yeah, I understand. Maybe that's some people still have this perception that you're less, less formal, less, you know really well put together less quality somehow if you are using a free ISBM number, but it's a lingering sense that is fading quickly.
Just like how everyone used to say, Oh, in books, they're not as good as traditionally published books. No one, I haven't heard anyone say that for years, so that's awesome. I think indie authors are finally shown and proven that we can write awesome book that publishers only wished they were smart enough to have gotten a chance to publish. But the same is true with ESPN numbers. This is something leftover from the brick and mortar days when publishing houses owned. Basically we're the gatekeepers to being able to publish.
Now they're being used differently. You use, I'm still to find books, but I mean now to have to have a different one for every single format. I mean, goodness, I couldn't have just added a different code at the end that a or a B or a numbered number that would say, Hey, this is the audio version, this is the ebook version, this is the paperback version of the same book. It's kind of just clunky and archaic and you know what? It's gonna change or basically be left behind because that's just the way things are going these days. And I agree with you, I just don't care.
Eventually they're going to have to catch up with how awesome indie publishing is
Jesper (41m 7s): I guess we just found our conclusion dare. So, uh, yeah, it's probably not worth buying any ISPN numbers. Next week we are gonna talk about feeling over whelmed. So, uh, just to you there,
Narrator (41m 19s): if you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the amwritingfantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join autumn and Yesper on patrion.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the amwritingfantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
The character arc represents the change the character will undergo as the story progress.
Stories are all about growth.
If the character doesn’t change then there is no story.
But how do you create a character arc and what different kinds are there?
Join Autumn and Jesper as they share how to create an authentic and believable character arc.
And here's the link to the really cool (funny) map, Autumn was talking about: https://www.instagram.com/p/B2MttwuA-kW/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy.
For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to the amwritingfantasy podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing join to best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them. Now onto the show with your hosts. Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (31s): Hello, I'm Jesper and I'm Autumn, this is episode 40 of the amwritingfantasy podcast and we are going to talk about character arcs today.
Autumn (44s): So yeah, I think that that's going to be an interesting conversation because character it's a pretty important they are. And well, you know, as we just were recently talking to each other and I said characters are easier to understand the most people. So I think we're going to nail this one pretty good.
Jesper (1m 2s): Yeah. And the thing would characters is that, uh, we have, we have control of what they say and what they do, right? So it's much easier than real life. People
Autumn (1m 10s): insert evil laugh here. So yes, I think this'll be really good. And it's, it's important to understand your character. So this'll be a lot of fun. I love adding depths and finding new ways to bring out different aspects of character. So we'll try not to get carried away with this one.
Jesper (1m 25s): Yeah. Who knows where we're going to end up actually, you know, speaking of, of real life people, uh, I was, uh, I was in Sweden this last week and, uh, I just, I don't understand people. I am, I think the longer I live, the more I figured out that I don't understand. So I was am, I was in the airport in Stockholm or queuing for to enter the plane to fly back home to, to Copenhagen. And then, uh, they, I don't know how they do it in the U S but at least here, you know, if you have priority seats then you're always, you're called on first.
Um, and then they, of course, they scan your boarding pass and whatnot to make sure that the UI actually a priority customer. And, uh, luckily enough, I am one of those all the time. Yeah. I fly so much that I'm a priority customer. So, so the thing is that, and this is what I don't get right, so we, I'm queuing at that airport and I need to uh, uh, bought the plane and they call priority customers. So we'd go up and we stand in the queue and of course scan the boarding costs.
Uh, and then you enter the plane, right. But there was, again, this, this is not because it's not just happened once, it happens all the time, but this time there was five people in that queue who were not priority customers who tried to skip in and get on board. And it's like, and every time it happens, I'm like, why do people do this? I don't understand. Please they can see that the boarding is getting scammed. They know that they're going to get caught and they're still standing there in the queue trying to get in.
And
Autumn (3m 5s): I just, I don't get it just to go and sit down. I always laugh because a, we take ferries quite a lot and the best sign ever saw was at the front of a ferry that said, do not turn on your car engine. So far. No car has reached the dock before the ferry. Like yes, they're not going to make the plane go in faster by boarding faster is not going to happen. You're not going to beat the actual airplane. No. But but it's just, I mean I did the,
Jesper (3m 32s): the thing about wanting to get on board and and I mean that's one of the things honestly I do like with B about being a priority customer because you sort of get on board and you get to sit down off of standing in the queue and there is space in the overhead compartments for your luggage because there's nobody else on the plane at that point. So that part I do like, so I, I, I saw them understand why people want to get on board, but since the boarding cards are scanned and you know you're going to get caught, that's where my logic sort of just didn't add up anymore.
I just don't understand. So you're trying to skip line on something. You know you're gonna get caught. So what the heck is the point?
Autumn (4m 9s): Maybe they just like to get yelled at. I don't have any better insight than that. I can't say understand people all the time. Sometimes I don't understand myself. I mean, heck, we haven't been on video chat here today and we're not on video right now, so you guys can't see. But I actually have some pretty radical, awesome purple streaks in my hair. So if you wanted to ask why I decided to add purple to my hair, I don't know. I felt like it. So I, people are a little strange.
However, there is one thing I do understand and we do this, you know, with our course, with our students and my niece and I just teamed up to be accountability partners. So she's working associate's degree. Yeah, my niece Kayla, if you're listening, big shout out. She's one of my, my fans, my biggest fan in my family. So I think that's so wicked cool. I love talking to her. How old is your niece? She is. Oh God, you're going to ask me this.
Actually I think she just turned 22 so sorry if I missed that. But yes, issues just you know, just in college she's having a good old time and she loves fantasy and fantasy books so we get to talk about writing and books and all these things that she gets into, which is fantastic. But she had some stuff she wanted to work on and I also said in the last couple episodes I was on a writing break and I'm getting back into it and it's kind of going slow. And so we got talking and she's like, well I'm trying to do some mindfulness and some yoga and I want to get back and she does some fantasy art. And I'm like, well I'm trying to get back into my fantasy art and I'm really getting bad at my writing.
She's like, that's it. We are mailing emailing each other. So she emails me on Wednesday and I email her on Saturday and we have to reply back obviously when the other one emails and say how we've been doing and it's working, it is working. That is the awesome thing. I've, I can't say I've written chapters, but I am getting through a scene that is very sticky, but that's a whole different conversation of what do you do when you plan something and plot something and then a scene decides to take over and take what you know is way too long. It should have ended a chapter ago, but the scene keeps the characters keep drawing out this one thing.
And logically I know when I get to editing I can just cut it down. And right now this is just the way the process is going and I just need to keep writing, but I'm just annoyed and I want to get past the scene. But anyway, my niece Kayla is helping me and making sure I am writing and I've done a new book cover or getting it, she's doing good on her yoga and meditation and we're doing good.
Jesper (6m 39s): Oh, that's perfect. So just unpacking that a bit. So what are you emailing to each other, what your goals are for the next week? I just giving each other a status update or what are you doing?
Autumn (6m 49s): Uh, mostly status updates cause we know we have our goals that we know we both want to either, you know, at least be working on it and writing um, or at least doing the yoga. So I just say, Hey, this is what I've been doing and check in. Have you been doing this? And she'll say, yeah, you know, yes or no. I haven't quite done that as much as I wanted to. So right now we don't have any specific like word count goals or anything, but uh, we're at least trying to make sure we're getting it in. And for me she knows I won't try and to write every day. So it's just like if I say I skipped the day, I'm still saying I skipped it.
I try to make sure at least get a sentence and then I can say I wrote. Right.
Jesper (7m 24s): Yeah, true. Yeah. I mean, I have heard it before about am accountability partners and of course that's also something that, that you and I tried to do autumn with the, with the courses to an audit, the students that we get for four hour online writing cost to, to serve a bit as accountability partners and try to answers people's questions every month, uh, if, if they have questions or if they want on the fly stuff, then be there in the mastermind Facebook group for, for the students.
So I do think it's important because, and we've probably talked about this many times before, but being an author is such a lonely profession, so it's good to have somebody who is sort of, yeah. Your wing man there.
Autumn (8m 8s): Absolutely. And I'm loving it and it's a good excuse to get to email my niece every twice a week. So that's kind of fun too. They see what's going on. I get to relive my, you know, college days through her. It's, it's, it's kind of, yeah. Kind of
Jesper (8m 20s): weird when, when the young ones, I was about to say gross up, but it's kind of weird, you know? Uh, it's, it's different conversations. You are, I also went for like a, a probably I think two weeks ago. Uh, my oldest son, he felt like he needed some time alone, him and me. So we, uh, we just went to a beach for a walk. And, uh, it's, it's funny when they get older because he really enjoys that, you know, just, just for a walk, just to go and talk for an hour and that's all he wanted to do and that, that was great.
I mean, you know, when they're younger that they're to, well, that's going to bore them to death. Right. But it's funny how things change. Yeah, it is. That's, that's always when, uh, I mean, I never had kids, but for like my nieces and nephews, it's when they get old enough to talk back and you can feed them ideas to give, to drive their parents nuts. What she, that was my favorite. I think we might be an ocean apart here. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I think on, on, on my side here, uh, it's, it's also been really busy lately.
Uh, I'm desperately trying to, uh, to get the am some modules recorded for our future costs on fantasy world building. Yeah, well, I'm making progress, but I have a goal to finish my recordings within the next two weeks. And quite honestly, I don't know if my accountability partner, if I had one, would think that that would be possible, but, uh, but let's see if I can make it. It's just been, it's been a bit too busy lately because, uh, we've also had our online writing costs open for the first time in six months.
And of course when you deal listener listening to this podcast episode for the cost will be closed again, but you could still go to a all submit fantasy riders, guide.com/main. If you want to sign up for the wait list, that's still possible. Uh, and then you will be the first one to know next time around. But, uh, it's just, yeah, it's just been one of these a couple of weeks where it's been incredibly busy. So, uh, yeah, that's it. With the yam writing. Fantasy podcast Oh, and I think first of all, I want to give a huge shout out to sate who joined us on Patrion.
So that was awesome and we really appreciate it. Yeah, it's great to have a new one join us. And he was already a, he'd found us through the podcast as well. So that is just, you know, it makes me feel good to give back a teller shout out to him. Yeah, absolutely. And then, you know, uh, all the support we can get from, uh, from, from people will, will basically keep, uh, or help keep the lights on. For 40. Amwritingfantasy podcast so, yeah, I mean, I, I think I speak for both autumn and myself when I say that we really enjoy making it, you know, this new podcast format compared to the older YouTube videos.
Uh, but that said, I also want to point out the obvious I guess, but it is still quite a lot of work to do this. So, you know, even a dollar in support does make a difference. So, uh, anyway, thanks again. Safe for, for, for these, uh, for, for your support. And we hope that you will enjoy the rewards that you are getting out of a patron. Actually, I can let you know by the way, a side when you're listening to this that I did post your amwritingfantasy bookmark already. Uh, and uh, yeah, I mean, I don't know, maybe by the time you hear this episode because we're always recording a bit in advance, you might already have received it.
Autumn (11m 55s): Yeah. So check out Patrion and uh, there was a link in the show notes and then you can learn about all those rewards that we are offering to those who support us. And I guess autumn that there was quite a lot of rewards actually. Even, even if you're only supporting with $1. Yeah. We like to give back because I think it's not even, yeah, the dollar helps keep the lights on, but it's sort of like getting comments and stuff. It's a, it makes you know that this is important to people and that is a huge motivator for us to keep going. As much as you know, getting a little bit of money to actually pay the licensing fees and you know, the website, not all those little things that kind of go along with running an online business.
So thank you for every all of our Patreon supporters. It's always fantastic to have them here. And you know, I just, we were talking about comments and you'd mentioned before about you know, other authors and it's a, you know, a network. And that was the biggest thing. I know I've been talking to a couple authors and I've seen a lot of posts. I hang out a lot on Instagram. I admit, and I have seen so many authors this last week commenting that they had such a rough August, that they've been taking a break even from social media or from writing or from something in their life.
Because for some reason it wasn't just me. It was a really rough August for a lot of people. So you know, a big shout out to a lot of authors that, Hey, just remember you're not alone. It's nice to know that I did wasn't the only person in the world having a rough OBGYN August. I'd rather, you know, I wish we all had a fantastic, I can't wait until we're all shouting about how wonderful of an October we're having. I just think that's an important to thing. And actually if you do happen to go to Instagram, if you're an Instagrammer and you go to my profile, which is just autumn Bert, it's really, really hard to find.
Uh, I actually just short shared this really cool mental map that had some really neat aspects. Yes. For I should share this with you because you will love it. It is a mental map that is drawn in the image of a fantasy map. It has things that I spend too much time online, falls the dormant volcano of blind ambition, the mountain range of impotent rage. So, Oh, I'm already loving it. I want to see that. I will have to send it to you. It is super awesome.
I told everyone that I am currently living in the Glade of hopeful aspirations while drinking from the river of pleasure in this of small things. So that is where I am currently living. Um, and I'm ignoring that outside thing that people call reality. It just sucks. Just I'm happy in my Glade about hopeful aspirations and just leave me here for the rest of the fall. Yeah. But you know, what do you think it would be possible to, to, to have a link to it, to some somewhere because then I could put it into shownotes and then the listeners could see it as well.
Yeah, I think I can share just the post with you and that way they can go straight to it. And if not, I'll do a screenshot. So I will give you need an Instagram account to be able to view it. That's the one thing I love about Instagram. It's not like Facebook, you don't get kicked out just because you don't have an out. Anyone can see it. So I will make sure I get that over to you because it is kind of awesome and it's a good reminder you're one not alone because so many other people feel, uh, you know, that they're living in the Crip, Crip, crippling insecurity.
Vil um, you know, it's a whole community. Come join us. Yeah, yeah, no, that sounds awesome. And I guess I just sort of, uh, out of myself on, on how little I know about instrument to ask about that. That's okay. You're much more, uh, I used to be so much more active on Twitter and that is definitely where you are. You've got your forte on Twitter and I've kind of backed up and sometimes I go there and I'm like, you can do what now.
So fair is fair. Yeah. Yeah. I do post a lot on Twitter for sure. That's, that's, that's a given. I like that. A community, they're quite honestly, Oh character arcs yeah, it's awesome. I really liked couches, Zach but but maybe before we get into all of this, maybe we need to define what we're talking about.
Right. So character arcs that is a very good point. Just because you know, I, I used to be one of my pet peeves. You'd hear something bad around like show, don't tell, what the hell does that mean? What does a character arc? So this is not just the plot of your novel, it's not your plot. It is the character's journey, the progression of character takes. And one of my favorite things is there's a huge misperception that character's always progress because there's actually, there's actually a whole bunch of different types of character arcs but as far as, I've kind of boiled it down to three.
So there's a fail arc where a character instead of succeeding actually becomes maybe a villain or dies or you know, Ned am in game of Thrones is through book one is a wonderful example of a fail Ark. He dies, he does not succeed. There's also an Epic fantasy, the heroic arc that is the one that we often write about. And the one we readers often expect isn't so sometimes assume that it's the only type of arc. And that's where the character starts out as, Oh, let's go with the, the favorite trope of the farm girl who grows up and becomes a great warrior, becomes a King.
You know, they succeed in saving the country, becoming a great sorceress am something fantastic and magical. It's a progressive arc because you know, they do succeed, but there's also one called a flat arch. And that one you don't see many of the best examples that you usually are like James Bond or Superman. You know, think of something where the character, there's a whole bunch of books that could be read in any order. Well, the character arc never changes. They always start the book self-assured that they can solve the, and everyone else around them's going, I don't know if you got this one.
And at the end they're proven right. They do succeed. They might have some self-doubts along the way, but they do manage to solve the problem. There is one huge book example that uses a flat art. Can you guess what that one is? Mm, no, that's probably because you haven't read it hunger games. So that writing the movies. But I have not read the book. Yes, Katniss Everdeen. She does not really change her character kind of stays the same from beginning to end.
Her initial thoughts and feelings about the government, about herself, about everyone except who is her current boyfriend. She doesn't really change over the entire course of three books. So that is a park. And that's a good example where the rare examples of writing a flat arch in something that is not just a serial series like you know, James Bond or Sherlock Holmes.
Jesper (18m 48s): Yeah, yeah, exactly. If we are defining, I mean the character arc is sort of the, the change that the character will undergo as the story progressed. Right. And so, so that's good. But now that you mentioned James Bond, uh, tha that's, that's like the perfect example of a story that doesn't have a character arc. So, and if, if you're saying the same is in hunger games, then I mean, at the end of the day as story does not have to have a character arc. But I do think at least in the case of James Bond and uh, and uh, I have to be fully transparent here that I'm not rented the James Bond books, but, uh, of course watching the movies I've done and am well I don't know, you'll have to forgive me here when I say this, but I really don't like dams.
Am I guess in my view it is just simply because there's no depth to that character because there are no, I mean essentially James Bond again going by the movies, but James Bond is the same in the end of the movie as he was in the beginning of the movie. There is no change and at least in my view, if there are no character art, then there is no story. That's how I view it. And of course people can feel absolutely free to disagree with me, but, but I think the character arc is what adds depth and and without it.
It, it just doesn't work. No, I can't. That's not to say that you know that the, well now you call it the, I can't remember which words you use for it. But basically it's the same thing that I'm mixing things up here because, uh, as I've been talking about before, we've been talking about before we have an upcoming book, uh, on flooding. And in that book there is a section around character arcs and in there we called them the positive arc, the negative art and the steadfast app. But it's exactly the same as what autumn was just saying is just some different words for it.
So now that I have you all confused, what I wanted to was that when you are talking about the flat flat arch or what we in our upcoming guidebook is calling the steadfast arc it, it doesn't mean that because if you're using that flat art there, it doesn't mean that there is no arc. I mean that, that's sort of the difference. I'm trying to get it because maybe the character doesn't truly change their beliefs or who they are. Uh, but that, you know, the character can still start with a certain belief.
And then the novel plot sort of confirms that that belief was correct in, in it at the end. So the resolution then reinforce us to coach us original belief. And if you see what I'm getting at, so if you're sort of uh, working at using the character arc, even if the coach doesn't change, but you're using it to show that the belief that the Carter had is actually true, that's a different one than if you're just saying, okay, here's the respondent, he's going to do some cool shit and then the stories over.
Right? I mean those two things are very different and that's what I'm trying to say. Yes. Does that make any sense at all? I'm just rambling. No, because there's a lot of things if just because a character with a flat arch or a steadfast art, they can start with this belief, the self belief in you know, that they can solve this problem or they are who they say they are and everyone else doubts. Just because the novel might prove that. Correct. There's a whole pathway and self doubt and well it's an arc and that's what we're going to talk about is how to actually create that art.
And then the only thing that really changes is that, you know, at the end of a steadfast arc, they're proven correct. Where the other arcs like the negative arc, the positive arc, the negative one, you know, they, instead of being proven correct, they fail. And the other one, the positive arc, they start off believing maybe they're not good enough and they managed to succeed. They become something greater. So they all kind of have the same starting point, which is useful because to create an arc, it's almost all the same steps. So that's kind of great.
And it's not, even though it creates such a nuance character and creates a whole pathway through the novel for this character, the actual steps to begin creating a novel arc are not that difficult. And so that's really where we need to go next I think, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I was just thinking while you were talking there, um, because I think especially with the, with the, what the positive arc, what did, what did you call it again? A progressive or they are heroic. This just shows how amateur should we are.
You know, we haven't even aligned to terms before we started recording. There were like so many arcs but it's just what's out there. Yeah. But, but what I wanted to say about the positive one is that we were really at the core of it, we are dealing with internal change. It doesn't matter what you call it to be honest. But if you imagine a positive arc where the character is going from B being one kind of person to being another one. So
Autumn (23m 46s): this could be like weakness turning into strength or fear turning into bravery and, and you, you get the idea, right? So it's an internal change we're talking about. And then as a result you have this positive arc where at the core of it, the couch is sort of still the same person. However he or she has become, maybe you could say like a better or more fulfilled version of themselves. So, so I think that's the, that's the root of the positive change. No, that makes complete sense.
And I think often in a positive arc like that, you see an outward change too. But that's more symbolic because they believe more in themselves because they have created this internal change. It creates an external change as well. And that's sort of the fun thing because part of a character arc is internal and external things going on at the same time. Because sometimes you need those external factors to create the internal change. I mean really even in our own lives, why do we change? I, okay, I changed my hair color to purple because I felt like we're all, you change because you, you know, something is going to happen.
And that is usually the inciting incident. So that's one step. So yeah, it starts with you start with a character who has a certain belief and you need to create an external event that's going to make them reflect on who they are and what they need to become to, you know, reach this other goal. Yeah. And, and I think from movies and whatnot, I mean, it's often easiest to reference movies because we are, everybody wants us a lot of movies, but we don't always read the same books.
But in movies, I'm not the kind of ref reference a specific one, but just in general, do you know these kind of movies were something external, you know, something terrible happens and then afterwards the next scene you are seeing the characters now changing because of that external thing happening. And I don't know if it's because you know we are writers and Oh I'm a, I'm a writer that I just see way through that. It's just like that is to me that feels too lazy and it's like, yeah, okay, I understand that something external and big happened and also understand that of course it would influence you in one way or another.
I I fully get that. But sort of using that as your trigger to say and yeah, now Whoa, here we go. And now the character transformed into somebody else because it just feels too easy to meet it. Do you know what I'm saying? I do. And to me, my favorite, worse movie trope is when you have the flood character who begins the beginning because of the incident that happened before. Like his brother died, a horrible death that he is somehow feels responsible for us. So he is this a lone Wolf character who is grieving and standoffish and no why or this is going right now so he can win the girl saved the day, blah blah blah, blah blah.
So I didn't see that one coming a mile long. So I think there are always nuances and there's always ways of handling it so that you know, it's fresh, it's new. So that the character I have, this is one of my favorite ones with illnesses. I, we often have this discussion, you think you're all in the men and then you get sick again and then you have to sleep a little bit or you do too much. You know, it's the same with characters and character arcs just because something happens, you do not have, you know, something happening does that, it's not a math formula does not equal automatic change.
There's gotta be steps, progressions, back, steps back, sliding. Other things can happen. That's when you get into the subplots. Then you have this other thing that's pulling in one way and maybe that's the wrong direction. You know the love interest, best friend dies, Oh my gosh, now things are really screwed up. So that's actually why I like the seven steps of story structure because it has, it's not just a three act for act. It has this kind of ups and downs and backsliding in a moment right there in the middle that can be this horrible, tragic event that makes you reevaluate everything again because you need to kind of have those pushes.
So I do know when we do, like when I do a character arc, I literally start with four different parts and those are usually, we talked about inner and outer things. So inner motivation, you know, there's gotta be some inner reason that a character wants to change. We talked about an outer motivation. That's usually an external factor that makes them also realize they need to change to adapt. There's usually inner obstacles. And that's what we're talking about now is the inner obstacles. And there's also outer obstacles. But let's start with the inner, the inner of the ones that are like, well, you know, yes, I want to be a writer.
That's a good inner obstacle or inner motivation. That's my motivation is I want to, yeah, but the outer off the inner obstacles are sorta like I have doubts or where do I find the writing time? You know, I don't have a dual thing to write on right now. So those are your other obstacles. Actually that last one, not have anything to write on. That's an outer obstacle. So you can see how they kind of work together where you know, it doesn't have to be the arch villain sending pension men to come and stop you.
That's an outer obstacle. But it can be something simple. Like I have no writing utensils. While that kind of sucks. So those four things though can start to make the basis of a character arc. So you just need to sit down and think about your character and look at like the inner motivation. You know, what is it the character really wants? What is their secret inner drive? And again, it could be secret. I mean you could have a character that goes around telling everyone I want to be the world's best champion and blah, blah blah.
And then you're going to have that one in the back corner who's like, I, you don't really came admitted to themselves that they secretly want to be a great source for it because everyone knows that magic isn't real, but that's what they really, really want. But then never tell anyone unless they're like totally drunk. That's the fun of having characters. This is where you start bringing out those nuances that I talked about and that's why I said I'll try not to get too off track because this is what I love about character building is that you take that little nugget, that inner motivation, the thing that they secretly want.
And you know, you decide if your characters out there boasting that this is what they want. Or if it's the one who's in the corner saying, uh, no, I just want to sit here at all. I want to do is sit here and I just want to watch the world go around. We're really, you know, there's a lot more going on back there.
Jesper (30m 17s): Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, and I, I think you're quite right in saying that, you know, everything sort of fits together. It's like one big puzzle. And that's also why in the, uh, in the, in the plotting book that we are finishing up there, there's a lot of diagrams and whatnot in it because everything sort of just, it slots in together like one big puzzle. But I do think that the key here is that you can use those external events like we just talked about too, to help facilitate the change. But the core of it, or the root of it should be the coach's own needs and motives.
So if you use that as your starting point to trigger the transformation, and then of course you can use these external event to support it as like a supporting structure. But if you use the inner motivations as, as your driver, then it will not come across like those movies that we were talking about before where, Oh, something happened and what B then now the person changed. You know then then, because if you can recognize that, well this character already had this motive inside of him or her and now they were trying to do something about it or they wanted to change maybe, and then something external happened and sort of pushed them over the line, then it works and then it comes across as very authentic and then you, you really feel like, okay, this makes sense.
You know, so, and that's why I said before that if you just push, push them over the line with the external event alone, that's where, to me it feels too flat and it feels like cheating because that's sort of the easiest solution, right? Whereas figuring out what are they inner motivations and how to actually build it up so that I both make it possible why they have this motivation, but I'm also showing it to the reader and then I'm using that as a weapon to drive the character arc. You know? That is not easy and that requires some serious thinking and some serious work and that's why it comes across as authentic because it actually makes sense.
Autumn (32m 15s): I think that's so, so true and so important. That's why I like books that even though they start with am action, but it's not necessarily the big action of the novel. It's like a little action and every day like, Oh, you know, one of the favorites is like showing that you know what's going to be your main character. Maybe they're picked on as a kid or they're struggling everyday. They don't quite fit in. They kind of already Harbor a desire for something different. Like you're, and then the big inciting incident comes and gives them an opportunity to become this new person. It's sort of, even if they sometimes miss it, but it's those books where everything is, you know, a field of flowers and it's sunny and breezy and then everything goes up in flames and they have to become the great heroic person.
It you're right. If they had started us, this peace loving person and now they have to go to war, it doesn't have the same resonance. It's a different type of story and it feels forced. Where if you see that character struggling a little bit in those first pages that they kind of want to be something different. They're trying to be do something different and they're just trying to get by and then your inciting incident happens. That outer motivation happens and then you see the character, you know, going, Hey, this sucks, but maybe I can get something out of this to become, it can become a stepping stone instead of the giant rock rolling down the mountain side and crushing you.
Jesper (33m 36s): Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, and I think there is another place whereby the character arc coincides or aligns itself where we will with the actual plot of the novel. So you were just talking about basically, well the, the trigger, the trigger, we could say, you know, in the beginning where maybe maybe the inciting incident helps in facilitating the change to start, but then if we move to the end of the novel or the end of the character arc, one of the things that we're trying to align with our future guidebook here on how to plot a novel is actually to make sure that the end of the character arc coincides with the climax of the story.
Absolutely. Cause if you can make that happen so that the character arc actually peaks at the same time that we reaching the climax, then that is really a good way to, you know, generate a very true reaction in the reader. And, uh, I think when that happens, then that is actually what w what will make them remember the story, right? That, that that's what makes them tell other people about how amazing this story really was. Because it wasn't just a climatic, you know, fantasy battle against the evil necromancer in the end of the story.
But it was also the time where the character actually came into his, his or her true being and because of that they succeeded. You know, then it's awesome.
Autumn (35m 3s): Absolutely. That's to me especially, I mean that's a whole different topic. Getting a tween character driven versus plot-driven because with fantasy you just about with all of the books we're talking about, people talk about them being character driven when really all of these books are plot-driven but when the character arc lines up in with the plot so that it's kind of driving the plot and forcing things to happen, that is when the novel becomes fantastic. That's when it feels like the character. It is a character driven novel when actually we have a plot and the plot is what's really driving whole story, but the character is making it feel like it's all happening because of this internal change, their struggles in the outers obstacles that are coming at them.
And I agree that's when, when you can combine those two in, there are definitely steps to do that. And diagrams and whole bunch of other ways is lined up with your character arc and the things are feeding into each other and then you hit the climax and it all has to happen. It's not just a climax of the plot and these big outside events, they're going to happen, but it's also the climax of the character arc. And are they going to succeed or fail or what's going to happen to the character? Oh my gosh, that's when you're like gripping the page and you, you know, that's when you're up at 3:00 AM your time.
Those are the books that are just so riveting. And yeah, that is where it's really part of the character arc in lining it up with the plot. So that all happens in seems to be interconnected, ran. It doesn't just happen randomly. It takes work and if you're a pantser and you do it afterwards, it's just a lot of editing. But you can do it too if you're a plotter or a hybrid more like me, you know, you gotta kind of remember that and work it out and make sure it's happening in the different events are triggering the different acts, but the events in the plot or triggering the character arc and the character art is triggering things in the plot and then it's like, bam, this is a huge novel.
This is so exciting. Yeah,
Jesper (37m 4s): it's funny you mentioned that stuff around the uh, plot-driven versus character-driven story because actually, um, uh, I'm actually making one of the a or an argument in, in the, in the plotting book in, in, in the, in the character section of the book. Um, because if, if you go through the exercises necessary to create a, both a proper character but also creating a proper character arc, then the argument I'm making in the book is that there is no such thing as a purely plucked driven book because the book is always about the characters.
It is always about the couch. A change that is what a story is about. A story is not about a country a is going to water with country B and then at the end of the novel, one of them wins. That's not a story. The story is interesting if there are characters in that setting who goes to war and the effect that that has on them as a person and maybe on their family or what do I know? But that's where the story is. So there is no thing, there was no such thing as a plot driven story.
If, if you at least follow the mythology that we are laying out in this future book here, that you're going to get your hands on it at some point. Um, because it is about the characters and it always has been.
Autumn (38m 25s): That's what I think is true. I mean, I, when people ask me if, uh, I have a hard time coming up with story ideas, if you can come up with a character, if you can look at something, you know, I have a bottle of conditioner on my desk, don't ask, has something to do with the purpling. You have something on your end. You just start adding character nuances, start adding motivation and personifying something. You can write an interesting flip piece of flash fiction tune entire novel because that's what resonates with people. That's what people want to know is the story of that individual, that personified object even.
That's all it takes sometimes to come up with a story is to simply look around your house and say, what do you think is the inner desires of my house plant? You end up going, cause trust me, you'll find a story and everything throwing a little bit of magic and a mad cat and you're going to be fun.
Jesper (39m 21s): Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I don't, you know, if autumn if we had been a bit smart about this stuff, you know, we would have had recorded this podcast episode like maybe in the week leading up to us actually releasing the book that we're talking about because this is a just us again but but we thought that we saw thought it an interesting topic. So we just wanted to share some ideas and give you, you know, the listeners some something to think about around the couch arcs and why they're so important.
But if we had been smart, as I said, we would have aligned it with the release of that book, but we didn't. But I don't know if we should say something. When do we actually expect to have this book done, do you think?
Autumn (40m 3s): Oh, let's see. I, there's a chance it could still be by the end of this year. Otherwise I think it'll be very early in 2020 but you know, I think maybe we're smarter than we realize. So there's, it's a huge book and there's so much in it and so much good stuff. So I bet we can find another topic and and you know, this'll just wet your whistle and we'll do another one I'm sure on something that is also a lot of books. I know we've mentioned it at least twice now, so it'll be important and will be able to tie it all in and then announced it's forthcoming release, but it's going well and I think we'll get there very soon.
You remember I had to do some, we did mention there's a lot of diagrams and I still putting those down as well, so it's coming.
Jesper (40m 49s): Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think the, the main or the biggest hurdle that is left apart from, of course some diagrams and whatnot. But other than that, I think that the biggest hurdles that we have left is that we want to include a free download with the book where you can basically download the plot for our first book in our new trilogy. And why we want to do that is basically because then you have the book as your guide and you can go through all the teachings in, in the that guide and basically then by downloading our, you know, that that free version or the platform Alburgh one, you can basically see all those, all that theory in practice.
So seeing how did we actually do what we're teaching in the book. So we thought that that would make like an excellent, uh, accompany or companion, whatever you want to call it, to, to, to the plotting book to make it the teachings even easier to understand and easier to follow. So, uh, so that's basically the biggest hurdle here from a time perspective is that we need to then complete the entire plot for the first book before we can do anything else. Um, but other than that, you know, the, the entire book has been written already and it just needs some editing and uh, and then it needs to download.
That will take quite some time and background. Yeah, so characters are sensitive to any story and without it, you have no story. Next week we're going to talk about ISB and numbers.
Narrator (42m 34s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the amwritingfantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join autumn and Yesper on patrion.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the amwritingfantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there
Speaker 3 (43m 1s): and see you next Monday.
There are so many ways to market your book from paid advertising to join promos and newsletter swaps. But does joining a free group promo really help you with sales or new readers?
Join Autumn and Jesper as they discuss the pros, cons, and possibilities out there with group promos in Episode 39 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast.
Check out some of the links mentioned in today's show at:
https://storyoriginapp.com/
https://bookfunnel.com/
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SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (3s): You're listening to the amwritingfantasy podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing join to best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them. Now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt
Jesper (31s): and hello there. I'm Jesper
Autumn (34s): and I'm autumn. This is episode number 39 amwritingfantasy podcast. Hey, we're going to talk about group promos and if they are worth it., but you know before we get there it's been a, even though we're batch recording things, we always have things going on. It's been always,
Jesper (55s): yeah, certainly. Certainly a lot of things. I mean this here in Denmark we just been hit by a complete like late Shama heat. It's a normally here by the end of August it's, well it's not cool but you know it's the summer sort of starting to come to an end, but now it's just like last couple of days. It's been 30 degrees here and a Celsius of course.
Autumn (1m 22s): Possibly 30 gosh, she's a sure there are no, Oh you mean,
Jesper (1m 29s): yeah, exactly. I mean it's really warm and it's am. It's incredible. I dunno what happened, but it's very wrong all of a sudden.
Autumn (1m 37s): That's funny cause that we've been in am, Adam and I, my husband and I don't like heat and that's half the reason we travel as we get to go up to the North, we like to be like for us to be 70 Fahrenheit. So you know that's pretty moderate. It's like a jacket might be necessary in the morning and usually when we're down in Pennsylvania and usually when we get here it's less stirring hot. But for end of August is actually perfect. Like 70s am. Beautiful, beautiful. It feels like fall, which I can't say it's really felt like fallen August in Pennsylvania since I was a little girl, so I'm not complaining.
Jesper (2m 14s): No. Wow, that's nice. I mean I actually don't mind it being hot outside, but I must admit right now in, you know, sitting inside in my little office here and recording this podcast, I'm like, it's feels like I'm sitting in a sauna or something. It's really, really well.
Autumn (2m 33s): I know the other on the other side of the Atlantic, I've got the window is open and I'm actually a little cool and capris.
Jesper (2m 40s): Yeah. Then that's the thing, right? Because if for me it's, it's late evening time now. So my problem is that if I opened the window or the insects comes in here, eh, if it was daytime it would be no problem. Right. But uh, during nighttime and you have the, you know, the lights turned on inside, then all the insects likes to come and I don't want that. So I have to sit in the sauna here and record. Oh, I will, I will. We're going to hold a few weeks. If you disappear, we know you possibly passed out. Oh shit.
Yeah. I mean, I was out the other day with my youngest son. He was playing in a, in a soccer tournament the other day and he was just as hard as this. It was 30 degrees and luckily none of the kids passed out, but it was, it was really, really, really warm. And they were playing this tournament so they will playing like eight matches or something. And it was, yeah, steaming from above and, but it was really cool. It was, uh, just as kids tournament, you know, and um, and uh, they didn't play very well for the first couple of matches.
They, they sort of draw off you and, and lost a few and maybe one one. So when once the group play was sort of done, then I was thinking, okay, we'll probably go home then because that was it. But then for some re reckless reason, they actually went to the semifinals as the last team that just made it above the cut. So, so then, okay, fine. Then there was one moment. So he played one more match and then they won the semifinal and all of a sudden they have to play the final playing really shitty for all the first like five matches was really shitty.
And then all of a sudden they were in the final. And, uh, it was actually really, really exciting because, you know, this, this tournament that they create, created here was, um, they, it, it's in the local club, so, so it's only the local club players who are there, but they're, they're from all kinds of different age groups. So what they do in this tournament is they mix and match the age groups. So did you have some of the young ones and some of the older ones and so they, they make like teams of five kids, but different ages in each team.
So, so they played together the young and the older ones, which is quite cool. And am my kid was one of the youngest there altogether. So they were playing this, a final match, the final against another team who had actually won every single match. So I thought, okay, they're going to get, you know, beaten really bad now. But they didn't, they really fought for it. And, uh, uh, the, the, the end of the game came and there was still no winners, so they had to play golden gold, you know?
So that means that the first one who scores will win the game and then went into that over time and they were playing and am and it was really, it was crazy. I mean at one point my, my young son here, so again, he's the youngest one on the pitch. So he came with the ball dribbling down, uh, towards the opponent's goal. And there was this defendant in front of him is like four years, four years older. And I was like, I was thinking like, Oh, pass the ball, pass the ball, pass the ball. You know, you're not going to get past that.
But he didn't, he actually dribbled past the guy. He was four years older than him and then all of a sudden he was alone in of the goalkeeper and the goalkeeper was like three years older than him as well. And he shot at the goal and it actually went past the goalkeeper, but it hit the post. It's just like, Whoa. And there was this like a, because it was the final, it was probably like a hundred people watching. So they went this like, Whoa, through the entire crowd, you know, this little boy pass pass through pass two kids who were just mud three and four years older than him.
And uh, but unfortunately they didn't win there. So they kept playing for a bit. And then a bit later on in the match, uh, my, my youngest Sunday, he got the ball again and this time he didn't pass it. But actually the guy he passed it to was the one who then, because of that past shut the winning goal and they actually want the final
Autumn (6m 42s): underdogs in the winters.
Jesper (6m 44s): Yeah. It was so amazing. And uh, I was really proud of him. He played so amazingly well and uh, he was almost in tears himself and am when they then, uh, handed over the trophies afterwards though there was only, there was only like one trophy for, for the team. So the team had to pick themselves and all the, all the young, all the boys than said, uh, where you played so amazingly, so what? We're going to give you the trophy. And uh, that was really, really awesome. And then there was the, they had to announce the best player of the tournament.
So the, in the, in the loudspeakers there, they called him up and said that he had played so well. So they, they made him the best, uh, play up the tournament. And I must admit, I tee it up a bit. That was really so proud. It was amazing.
Autumn (7m 29s): I teared up a little bit. I, I live, my kids are, um, this was my vicarious moment cause I don't have any children other than a small dog. So with that is just so, yeah,
Jesper (7m 39s): so awesome man. It was so well the surf and I think there was at least 20 people after afterwards who came over just to tell him how awesome he played and stuff. I mean, people, he doesn't normally talk to people who is not normally on his own team. So it was just amazing. And many parents also came over and said, Whoa, that was amazing. And you know, and he was, he's just a young kid, you know, he's really small compared to the other guys on the pitch. So, and it just, yeah, it was amazing. So that was my little story this week.
Autumn (8m 9s): What is a fantastic story? I don't think I have anything else to top that one.
Jesper (8m 16s): No, it was cool. I liked it. Oh, we on the internet with the amwritingfantasy podcast. So actually, um, I, I'm PO, I noticed something that made me laugh a bit in our Facebook group. Yeah. Because, uh, Dwayne poop out of the poll in the Facebook group and he asked for what a cliche or from a mine, and I don't know if it was just for fun that he made that poll or if he needed her for something but but I couldn't help laughing when my load and add an option called something mere models were never meant to witness that.
So it made me smile, but then it made it even better when I saw that the, you know, of course the top spot or the one with the most world are gold, but just below them there is this something Mia moderns were never meant to witness as a, as a cliche thing. I just thought that was so funny. Oh, I, that would be a cliche to mind, but it's just so cool.
Autumn (9m 19s): That is great. I didn't notice that. I've got to get back into the Facebook group. I was been offline a little bit too long, so I have to go check that one out.
Jesper (9m 30s): Yeah, it was, it was quite funny. And am and of course I should also say, by the way, that any of you listening, if you want to join the Facebook group, do you know just search for amwritingfantasy among the groups on Facebook and just apply to getting and we will approve you or, yeah, I don't know. Maybe I'll also moderate a loop will actually, because often look, he is must faster than both you and me are in approving people, but uh, but we'll let you infrastructure. So, uh, yeah, if that's something you would like to join them, just do that.
Autumn (9m 59s): Yeah. I've got to go in after we're done recording and maybe relieve loop a little bit. We had a whole slurry of people joining today, which is awesome. But, uh, we've been recording podcasts and I've been getting all these notifications of people who want to join. I'm thinking, Oh, poor Luke, we've left him hanging there because we're recording. Should probably go help out after this.
Jesper (10m 19s): Yeah, maybe we should, but, uh, he's doing a good job though.
Autumn (10m 24s): You're doing an awesome job. So yeah, shout out to Luke. Thank you. Are awesome. Amwritingfantasy Facebook group. Moderator, so I thought it was funny cause I saw a comment that Irish had left on our recent YouTube video slash podcast where she could, on the one we were talking about whether or not you should take a break from your writing. And she said she could see both sides. And I totally agree. I was thinking about this because one thing we didn't mention to that episode is I think you, yes. For when you go on your family vacation, you try not to.
Right. So that's like a week or two off as well. So need to take writing breaks that during the year.
Jesper (11m 1s): Yeah, absolutely. And, uh, and that's, I think I also, I hopefully I made it clear in the last episode as well. Um, you know, that I haven't written anything for probably a month now or something because I'm so busy and in recording costs us, uh, for for amwritingfantasy so, so yeah, I mean, absolutely I do. I do take breaks and as you said, especially when I go on the case, but you know, you always catch me anyway. Autumn because I tried to make those, like I make these announcements before I go on vacation that I'm not going to work, I'm not going to do anything.
I will check the email and just reply if autumn sends me something, but otherwise I'm not gonna do anything. And then of course I'm going to send you something and then I always, you, you, you call me out on it and then you say, well, I thought you was supposed to be on vacations, but I don't write anything. No, but I, I am really and not doing anything, you know, I always end up doing something.
Autumn (11m 57s): Your brain definitely does not turn off because we're a certain vacation. You came back and I think you had like three or four pages a world-building. Um, I just had to do it. So it's true though. Sometimes when you take a break, you didn't go and you're like, I'm not going to be writing. That's when everything, Oh, you wouldn't like I always joke the minute I stepped into the shower and there's no possibility of writing paper or the minute I start cooking a really involved dinner, those are when the idea finally goes click and you're like, Oh shoot.
Jesper (12m 34s): Yeah. But that's exactly it, right? I mean as soon as you wind down from your day to day, being busy and running are about and whatever else we're doing on a day to day basis. So one, once you start with Lexington, all those creative things pops up in your mind and then I accidentally end up writing it down and sending emails to you. Autumn so yeah.
Autumn (12m 57s): Well I respond and we get work done even when we're both supposed to be taking a break, but that's okay.
Jesper (13m 3s): Okay. That's a good point that I was made though. You know that it is important especially, and I think she was also pointing out about, uh, the, you know, the print outs situation and, and there especially, it is really important to sort of give yourself a break. So I fully agree with that.
Autumn (13m 19s): I've certainly enjoyed mine, but I've got to get back to it.
Jesper (13m 23s): Right. So group promos, could you hear the sigh? I don't even know where to start with this because knowing almost no experience with, I mean, the funny thing I guess is that in the future we're going to release fiction together, but at least up until this point we've done so separately. So it means that you have some experience with group promos where I have very little, so I'll have to give you the reins on this one. Autumn
Autumn (13m 51s): that's fair enough. But yes, I think I've probably joined with mailing lists. Uh, they'd call him newsletter swaps even though you're not actually swapping your a mailing list with another author, you're just promoting another author in your newsletter. And I think I've been doing that since maybe my first year as an author or they started up pretty quick and there's been, I've seen the rise and fall of so many different platforms where you can organize them, share them. I've seen everything from, and I've actually hosted some group promos on amwritingfantasy or not amwritingfantasy but on autumn writing my personal website and Yesper I know you joined that one and you could probably mention what you thought of it, but that was back in the days when you had to build it yourself.
Now book funnel and story origin and some of the other ones, it's a freebie. They allow you to basically they create a website for you and you just send people there and so they have your own website. So there's a lot of ways of using them and the are often that you have to send that out to your newsletter and so that's sort of why you don't do that. Is that correct?
Jesper (15m 0s): Yes, that is correct. I mean am my problem, I have done it at some point some years back. But my problem with it is that I treat and, OK, let, let me back up a bit because otherwise this is gonna sound like I'm saying that in everybody else's, not treating their subscribers with respect. Uh, and that's really not what I'm, what I'm trying to say. So I don't, I don't want to put my foot in the middle of the heinousness to you, but what I'm, what I'm getting at is that I find it really important to always treat subscribers with respect.
Maybe I should put it like that because, and, and by that I'm not saying that running, you know, newsletter swaps are not treating them with respect. But what I mean on the other hand is that I feel personally and miles may vary here, so make up your own mind as what, what do you listen to think and, and maybe you see this differently as well of them. So I'm looking forward to hear your, your sort of thoughts on it. But at least in my own personal view, I think that if I'm going to push, you know, push a book or, or recommend a book or whatever you wanna call it to my email list, I should have read it because otherwise I don't, I don't want to do like, okay, uh, can you put my book on your email list and then I'll put your book in my email list if I've never read it.
Because I feel, at least to me it doesn't feel fair to my subscribers and that's why I stopped doing it a long while ago because I just feel like I have no idea if this book is good or not. And uh, yeah, I don't know that that's just my sort of philosophy.
Autumn (16m 34s): I can understand that because I think when it comes to doing individual swaps with authors, which is more what you're talking about, it is so hard to tell the quality. I mean, it helps to look at the cover and see if it looks professional. Maybe read the first couple of sample paragraphs pages that are on Amazon to double check. Because I definitely learned that one very early on is that, you know, it's don't just accept something out of the blue without looking at it first. Because yeah, you don't want to send something that you're kinda cringing and you're hoping your readers will never read it or they'll not think crazy for recommending it.
Then it comes to the group promos, which are a little different because then you're just selling a reader, Hey, here's a whole suite of books that are either they're usually on sale or the freebies or to sign up to get the freebie. So you know, they know they're subscribing to a whole lot of other authors, which again, do you want your readers to be overwhelmed by signing up for another 50 books? But at the same time, there are also great opportunities for spreading the word. I know with my first book, my debut novel, Boardman of water, you know, that's been Permafree now for a few years and I've, I'm actually still toy with the idea is some point.
Does that Permafree status and does it need to end thinking about that? Because I think that'll be a question maybe for a another podcast coming up is, you know, should Permafree be permanent, but we'll come back to that later. But I know when I was my only book or you know, the first book, I only had one trilogy and I felt like I was pushing that out to way too many promos and I wasn't seeing much gain because it was like every promo I could join I was putting that in and I thought, okay, you know, you have to start limiting who where you're putting in.
And I think that's my advice even today. It doesn't hurt to try a sale's promo. I've done, I'm doing both now. Sales promos and group promos where you're doing a free book that people are signing up for. And sometimes I do a free promo where literally the book is free, just go get to soccer. It's fine. I'm giving it away. And I think, uh, by doing those, you do get to run into other authors. Everyone joins in to send it to their newsletter and you usually get a pretty slick graphic.
And so you're just sending them saying, Hey, you know, it's not like necessarily this is the book you should go look at but go see if there's anything here that suits your fancy. But again, it's easy. This summer I have never seen so many group promos and I don't know if it's because people are just getting their act together. They're realizing that these, for authors where they're usually free to join, there's a few that have maybe, you know, chip in to get an Amazon gift card. Do you know something that'll make more people come and look at that page? So there are a few that costs, but in general, these things are free.
Uh, what you're doing is actually supporting other authors. So that's awesome because seriously, that's one thing I love about authors is where we're so good. We're not competitive, we don't look at each other as competitors. We looked at each other as, Hey, I can only feed a reader, you know, one or two books a year that leaves, what, 364 days or you know, 300 something other days that they need to read books. And I can send them yours. That's not a problem. I want to make sure that they stay a reader and don't give up on books cause I can't find anything to read.
So these group promos, you know, they give readers a chance to go look at them, check them out. But again, I know this summer I have seen so many, I usually use book funnel and story origin. I used to use instaFreebie, but I've been off that for a little while now. And it's just, I literally, I, this morning I got a notice of for new promos I think every day. It's a weird day that goes by when I don't get a notice that I have at least one new group promo that is open to be joined.
That's a lot of promos. And I know when I first saw it I was like, Oh this is great. And I happen to have like for first in series books. I have four series out now. So Hey, I've got lots of books. I didn't, you know, go push out. I got two new releases that I can put a new release promos. And you get really excited until you go and sit down to do your newsletter and you realize that you know, you signed up for like six promos and you're supposed to be telling your readers about six different promos. You need to start, you need to come down and definitely take a look at, you know, what are you getting out at the start?
You know, tracking the link, seeing if people are using them. I know when I do a book funnel one, I don't just send them a generic one. I use a specifically create a special link for each promo so I can go back in and see how many people downloaded the book. I can get those, that feedback. So I know if it was really worth my while. A book funnel is really cool because it also tells you how many people look at the page versus downloaded. So if you're seeing age discrepancy there, you can be like, ah, I got to work on something because people are looking at it, the cover is off asleep good enough for people to go look at it.
But for some reason they get to and something on there is not, you know, they're not clicking through. So there's some great nuances, things you can kind of tweak, tease out by doing these promos. But only if you take the time to do the stats. And one of the important things is you have to join the right promo. Uh, there's a lot of multi-genre like new release promos, so that could be a multi-genre one. There are some 99 cent books, which is again a multi-genre one. You know, am I going to do good, do well there or should I just stick to the ones that are Epic fantasy or dark fantasy or the ones that are specific like magic worlds.
Uh, there's one that was recently heroines, that was great. And then there was another one I went to join that they made it sound like female magic users. And when the promo came out, the graphics, it was all about witches. I was like, okay, no, I'm pulling my phone out when I'm not writing. Which craft? I love witchcraft. I would love to write a book on it, but these are not in, this is about elemental magic on a fantasy world that's not going to fit anything else in is probably a waste of my time and maybe my readers won't like it, but I have no proof of that. So I'm probably gonna to waste their time by sending it to them.
Jesper (22m 48s): Yeah. Yeah. And uh, of course, I'm glad that you pointed out the difference between the newsletter swap and a group promo. Uh, I was also the one you ran, I can't remember a long while back. Uh, actually maybe it was,
Autumn (23m 3s): yeah, there's probably, I think at least it wasn't this year, so it might've been 2018
Jesper (23m 8s): probably then. Yeah. Uh, but I was part of that and, and uh, I think I got like, I don't know, three, 400 subscribers or something from that one, uh, onto the email list, which is, which was pretty good. Um, so I mean there is of course, well, okay, again, let me back up a bit here because there's so many nuances in this conversation because one thing you're saying, okay, a group promo, you get 400 suffers from it. And that's wonderful. Yeah. Okay, that's good.
But you can also look at it from the angle of saying, but okay, so these 400 subscribers just loaded Kindle with 50 different books and they're not gonna read any of them anyways. So what's the point? Right. And then on, and then of course I could then switch it back the other way around and then start arguing, well, okay. But then if you have them on your email list, it's stand up to you as the author to, to write even beta emails than the other ones so that they get invested in intrigued in U S North or, right. And of course that's, that's within your power to, to try to do something there.
But but there is some sort of argument hidden somewhere in here around the quality of the subscribers, you know, uh, I've heard many, many times for like Freebooksy and stuff like that. You know, that you can get a ton of subscribers but they are worthless. So, and since we are paying for subscribers on the email list, at some point we also have to start asking ourselves, you know, what kind of readers do we want on that list? Right, exactly. Yes.
So it's just, it's, it's, it's a bit complicated.
Autumn (24m 47s): That's where, I mean, cause I was going, you took the words out of my mouth. You get subscriber as it is up to you to make them believe that your book is worth reading. And of course you only get like maybe one or two emails to get them excited and maybe off of you, it's in your power, but you're not going to get every single one of them sticking with you. And of course, hopefully that's why there's the unsubscribe button. And hopefully if you're doing list cleaning, um, that might be when you start cleaning out some people who've never seem to be opening your emails or responding to you.
And there are, I think the group promos where people have to go down individually and pick a book that they think looks interesting, are far better than the group promos where they are basically signing up to win a prize. Like there's a few out there where everyone who goes into, it's going to get a free ebook to the winner or free paperback. Okay.
Jesper (25m 38s): Or the way you, even the worst, the ones where they give away like a am Amazon gift card or something. I think that's some of the worst thing that you can ever offer because those people are there because they want the gift card, not the books.
Autumn (25m 50s): Yes, exactly. And often a gift card, you're not even sure they're gonna use it for books. It'd be at least that's they're giving away a Kindle or something. You have an idea that they like books, but again, they can turn around and sell it. So. Exactly. So those are, those are the ones, I mean I joined those when I was first started and you can get, originally, I think the most I've ever gotten from one of those was almost 5,000 subscribers. That was early on, very early on. So it was one shot. You suddenly get 5,000 subscribers, you know, but again, as soon as you get that, you're probably sending out an email and those 5,000 people are getting emails from what, 25 30 different authors.
So later group promos have gotten more organized where the like, okay, I've seen one where it's like if your last name starts between a and D, you can send on this day just that readers don't get overwhelmed. But again, that's what those inboxes are gonna look like for that entire week. It's going to be from all these authors and all these introductions. And I know I'd be like, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete.
Jesper (26m 57s): Yeah. Or people just use like a fake a on another fake. But you know that you just use the Hotmail account that they just created for this stuff. And then as soon as they get the books onto the Kindle that, you know, they never log into that Hotmail account. They never read the emails, they just grabbed the book and then that's it. Right. So what's the again, what's the value there then?
Autumn (27m 16s): And exactly. And plus I know those group promos just like everything. I think this is even true with book sales, just everything it's, or even advertising, it's harder to get those numbers. I mean, my first promo that I ever did, I think I got 10,000 downloads now I don't even get 10,000 downloads. If I do a book funnel, it's just there are so many more books. So now you know, you're talking about a couple hundred a baby, a thousand subscribers are fantastic. But honestly that one month long promo that I organized, I was thrilled with the outcome because you know, most people are, we're seeing between two to 500 subscribers.
That is fantastic. In a month. Some of the ones I joined now, you know, I think I just had a group promo where I think I had 322 downloads and I'm like, Hey, that was pretty good actually. It is. I was actually really surprised. So there are still some ones, but again, it's coming. It's drilling down and telling yourself one, you can't join every single one there is because then you are going to get your book out there to maybe too many people. And again, if they're choosing it, that's great. But again, you're sending it to your readers too and you should do your part.
And so you don't want to drive your readers crazy with like four or five, six promos of every single email. It's kind of, you know, that's really taking advantage of them. Or are you doing a newsletter where you're just sending out emails about other books or are you doing a newsletter that's about your writing and you've got to make that choice and find that balance.
Jesper (28m 44s): Yeah, I agree. I agree. And I would say, you know, if it's sort of like a group promo for example, like the one you hosted the last year where there was a ton of free books and then you know each, each person within that promo code then email their own list and say, okay, here's a link from where you could download a ton of books and needs of the authors in there gave a book away for free. And I think something like that is fine because you're doing a service to your reader by, you know, here's a lot of fantasy books that you can get for free.
So most readers will like that. But that said, you have to be really mindful because if you do that all the time, if I was on my favorite authors email list and he was, he or she was emailing me, eh, let's say every second week with another 50 books that I could die, I would go and seem pretty quickly. It's like, what the, I mean, I cannot not read all these books anyway. And I mean once in a while doing it like once every six or something like that. To me, and again, this is personal preference, so take that with a grain of salt.
But in my personal preference, that would be okay. Uh, the, the newsletter swaps I hate, but I don't know. I mean, I, I do know that, uh, this might be a bit of a different sort of topic, but it's been something that I've really been turning over and over in my mind because I've been thinking that for like, I think it was two podcast episodes back, I was mentioning how I was thinking about creating like a free course for four authors, uh, to give away to, to our new led newsletter subscribers on, on amwritingfantasy.
And one of the things, our sessions or whatever you wanna call it for for that free costs has been around. I want to talk something about this Permafree stuff, which is linked into the newsletters or sorry, LinkedIn to promotions. And, um, and, and this topic that we're talking about here today, because obviously the value in group promos is because you're giving away a free book. But I still haven't really made up my mind and that's what I want. I want to make up my mind so that I can give sort of a here's my, here's my why as to why I'm thinking the way I am.
Because right now I'm not sure because on one hand, I mean I have my own and you also have your own, your one for free Permafree and I do see every day probably like, I dunno, maybe 10 downloads on Amazon without me doing anything. It's just because it's free. And that's certainly 10 downloads. I wouldn't have been there otherwise. And then of course, if, if some people liked the book, then they will go and buy book number two in the book number three and so forth. So there's a logic there at play.
But this is then the flip side. And this is where I haven't really made up my mind which camp I'm in and I need to figure that out. But I also understand the argument of saying yes, but since Rita's I able to just download so many free books as as it is possible today, there's a ton of free books out there. Basically the, the, that that was, I don't know who coined this term, but somebody, somebody called it Kindle stuffing, you know, that you're just filling your Kindle up with a ton of books just because there's also this collector's item, eh, sort of need that kicks in.
Like, Oh, it's awesome. Like I have 2000 books or whatever, you know, at the end, they're not gonna read any of it anyway. And they're not, if they are downloading this many books and signing up for this many promos, they're not going to read the emails either. So, so what I, when I was saying early on that it's the new job as an author to make sure that you write emails that that hooked them. But if they don't read any of them, it doesn't really matter. And you know, you're just playing into a game of, yeah, let's feel everybody's people, you know, every, every one's Kindles up with free books.
And then I don't know what the point is anymore because the goal is gone in this terminology he or, or this point of view, but, but as again, as I said, I don't know which camp I sort of believe in, if I believe that it is a good viable option to do the Permafree because years back it was a very viable strategy and it worked really well. But nowadays with so many free books and so many people downloading them, uh, I'm not sure if we've sort of moved past the point in the market where the free book is not that good anymore to have.
But yeah, I, I really don't know and I, I need to do more thinking because I cannot make up my mind. So I know that's not very helpful. That's my thinking.
Autumn (33m 18s): But I, I don't disagree and I do think that, um, I know even like I said, we both have PERMA freeze. But my two, my newest series, the one I've got two in the works that I'm, that I'm going to finish one first and then finish the other one. But I have put out two novellas and I did not make them free. And people, I'm sorry, leaders who are listening to this, I have no plans of making them free right now. If you happen to hunt around, you may find them in a free promo somewhere, but it will be exclusive.
It's usually only for a couple of weeks. It's only by my choice. Otherwise they're on Amazon and they are 99 cents and I'm not planning on making them Permafree I'm planning on doing that and maybe every once in awhile opening them up briefly on my website or through these group promos and that'll be the only way to get them for free. And it is a, it's a different technique and more people are using that where you know, your book is for sale online, a for sale on Amazon. But occasionally you can get it as something exclusive and that adds that little extra shine that hopefully people will read it.
And I also think that novellas are becoming more of the, the way of giving away a free book. You and I both have full length Epic fantasy novels. I know mine is 105,000 words and I do have people downloading it every day without even being advertising it. Uh, they do go on and read the incomplete six books series, which is fantastic. And I loved that. But so I don't know, maybe born of water will stay free because I don't have a novella at the beginning. But you know, if I ever came up with one, I may switch it over and create a novella and put that at the beginning and offer that as free.
I'm not sure. And that's the tough thing. Readers, if you're listening to this, writers are not trying to milk you for money. We're trying to make a living. I am a full time author and graphic artists. This is literally how I put food on my plate. So I don't think there's anything wrong with making a living where you can afford to eat and be creative and get paid to be a creative individual. I think it's fantastic. I hope. But it is important and it's not always, it's not easy every day cause trumps me.
But book sales fluctuate. Yeah. Yeah it does. But you start getting smart with this as a business and you have to start asking questions. I'm happily, I'm a prolific writer enough. I except for my two week recent break when I've got to get myself back in gear and get this book done. Uh, you know, I'm usually a prolific enough where I can release a couple books a year. I can hoping to do an entire series plus what we're writing next year. 2020 is going to be big and that is fantastic. And that's a good way of doing it.
And because I have 16 books out, I can play with different techniques and that's amazing. That's so much fun.
Jesper (36m 13s): Once you have, the easier it becomes, obviously
Autumn (36m 15s): it does, it's try different tactics with different books and not sweat it because when you only have one series to play with, it's a big change. Does decide to put something in Kindle unlimited to do, you know, make something free versus not free. Those are big changes and they have a very big impact when it's your only series.
Jesper (36m 34s): Yeah, indeed. And if I, if I can just share one more of, uh, my, uh, look it from this side and then look it from that side arguments here because you triggered something else in me and what you just said because yeah, I mean when you were talking about am that we also have to make a living from selling books and, and you know, that we shouldn't feel, I guess you didn't say this, but I guess it's, it's sort of embedded in there somewhere. We shouldn't feel ashamed about charting for our work. And I'm sort of of the opinion here.
So, so he, okay, so he comes to a side and afterwards I'll give you the B side, but, but the AA side is saying, I mean Kindle books or eBooks, it doesn't matter if it's Kindle or on COBOL, wherever you're selling books. But a book for five, six, seven, eight, I'll even say nine 99 it's damn cheap. I mean, come on, you're, you're getting like 100,000 word novel that is probably taking sometimes years, but at at least quite a while. And uh, if it's a very experienced writer than it'll be fast obviously.
But then you're also getting quality, but you're getting a quality novel for let's say, just go with a high price you and say 10 bucks, 10 bucks is not a lot for a book. And I feel like we have sort of put ourselves in a situation a bit as authors of where now there is an expectation that you can get it for, you know, almost nothing. And, and that's sort of the, the B side of this whole argument is, but what are, what are we, what is our goal here?
I mean, what are we trying to do? Because if, if on one hand you were saying, okay, a side here I'm charging nine 99 side is saying I'm going to go Permafree obviously the besides argument here is that well if I'm going after and Rita who has never heard me before and I'm going to say to him, okay, Hey read my book and you just have to give me $10 and then I'm saying, and by the way, that's not expensive at all. And then the reader, if I put the reading glasses on and he looks at the beside and the byside, well well you don't know me so you have never read any of my work.
So I think it's free ad and I'm going to give you this book for free. And then you can make up your mind yourself. And if you like it, you can read more and then of course you have to pay for it. But at least there was no barrier of entrance here that you need to pass it. You know, it's the barriers soloed at that. You can just give it a try. It's like a free sample thing, which is, which is sort of like they do in the supermarket as well. When they want you to buy some new chips or something, right? They give you a few future taste and then they want you to buy but so a and B side here, I mean they don't, but they both have valid points in my view.
And again, this is where I cannot make up my mind because if we have really taught the readers of in today's day and age that you should just expect authors to write books for free. I mean then we just shot ourselves in the foot and, and what is the point then? Right? But on the other hand, since everybody else in the market or not everybody else, no, I'm exaggerating now but right but but since there is a lot of people in the market who are giving their books away for free and the barrier of entrance is so low, as I said before, how are you going to compete at that?
Against that if you're saying, but I'm going to chow chow to nine nine to nine, right. I mean, if you're having a huge email list and you and the people love what you're doing, then well that's not a problem. You can just sell it for nine 99 and people will buy it. But I'm coming at this from the angle of what is the advice for a new author? She should you, should you make your poop Permafree and then say, and then I'm going to run some group promos and whatnot to, to get my name out there. Or are you just Kindle stuffing? You know, are you just playing into the, to the Kindle stuff in game and actually it's not gonna make any difference for your author career at all.
And I don't know. So again, I need to make up my mind so I can make it cost module on this stuff because I really, I don't know right now.
Autumn (40m 40s): Well, I think that that's gonna be a question that's, Hey, that's when we can ask our listeners as well.
Jesper (40m 45s): Oh yeah, that would be good. Yeah. I would love some perspectives on this.
Autumn (40m 49s): Yeah. Let us know if you think you know, free books are Kindle stuffing or if you think that's a really valid way, especially as a new author, if it's something that we should be looking at and doing so that you know, you get to be known as you were, you know, learning and growing as an author. And you know, once you get your email list to like something reasonable and 5,000 you can start charging like at least 99 cents for your new novella. And you know, let us know what you think because next week we talk about character arcs.
Narrator (41m 30s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can to support the amwritingfantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join autumn and Yesper on patrion.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the amwritingfantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Discoverability is a true challenge for authors in today's publishing landscape. The Internet is a crowded place and it’s getting increasingly difficult for authors to get their work seen.
Jim Kukral is an Internet Marketing veteran who has helped companies like Fedex and Ernst & Young to understand how to use the Internet to grow their businesses.
He is also a bestselling author of non-fiction books and an international professional speaker. On top of that, he is the co-host of the Sell More Book Show podcast.
In this episode, he visits the Am Writing Fantasy podcast to discuss how to conquer the “visibility issue”.
Jim's most recent book, “Your Journey to Becoming Unskippable" can be found here: www.beunskippable.com
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (2s): You're listening to the amwritingfantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing join to best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them. Now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (31s): Hello, I am Jesper and this is episode 38 of the amwritingfantasy podcast and we are going to talk about how to conquer the visibility issue in today's world. And the internet is a crowded place nowadays and it's getting increasingly difficult for authors to get their work seen. So today I actually brought on a guest who will help me understand how to navigate the issue of visibility. And that guest is Jim Kukral, who is also an internet marketing veteran who has helped companies like FedEx and Ernst and young to understand how to use the internet to grow their business.
He's also a bestselling author of nonfiction books and an international professional speaker. On top of that. He also hosts the sell more books show podcast. So that was quite a bio there. Jay, welcome to the amwritingfantasy podcast.
Jim (1m 24s): I am happy to be here. You have a wonderful podcast here and I've heard lots of great things about it and I know that's people who listened to it, so congratulations.
Jesper (1m 32s): Oh, thank you very much. We actually only recently shifted onto a 100% podcast focus because beforehand we had the Brown, I primary source was actually YouTube videos and then we just sort of uploaded a podcast version of it, but recently we shifted it around. So it is now a podcast where we only just uploading a YouTube podcast so to speak. So, so that's great. I'm, I'm glad you liked it.
Jim (2m 0s): I do.
Jesper (2m 2s): Anything else? Uh, you could tell us about yourself other than what I just mentioned in the intro? Jim
Jim (2m 8s): um, I'm uh, from Cleveland, Ohio and I have a family and I have been publishing content online for over 20 years before even blogs started. I started my first blog, uh, two months before nine 11. I am have written books before. They were called, you know, eBooks and just give you apps online. You know, so I've been doing this a long time. I am definitely not Seth Goden or Malcolm Gladwell, but I would like to be, uh, so, uh, I, I love, uh, producing content that helps people.
Jesper (2m 47s): Yeah. And, uh, I'm also a regular listener of the sell more books show myself and I really liked that. So, uh, since this is also a podcast, I might be listeners who are not familiar with your other shoulder. So perhaps before we dive into today's topic, maybe you could just share a bit about what you and Brian are doing over on the sell more books. Show
Jim (3m 6s): yeah, about five years ago, if you can believe it. I think it's five years. I'm bad at math. If you listen to the show, you'll see that we're bad at it.
Jesper (3m 13s): Yeah, I know.
Jim (3m 15s): We started a podcast called the sell more books show me and Brian Cohen and we did recorded the 282nd or 83rd episode yesterday. So we've done it once a week for all of these years. We're approaching our 300 episode and it's all about the news of what's happening in the world of publishing and self-publishing. It's really for indie authors of any genre who want to learn about the latest tools, tips, tactics, strategies involved in self publishing.
It's a fast paced format, 35, 45 minutes show of news and tips where we offer a little bit of commentary.
Jesper (3m 57s): Yeah, no, I, I re I really enjoyed also because you know, between you and the creative Penn podcast, you sort of get most of all the news you'd need. So you don't have to sit there and read tons of articles yourself. You can just sort of, you know, tune in once a week and listening to your podcast and then, uh, at least you sort of get the main picture of what's moving into publishing world. So that's, that's really good.
Jim (4m 19s): Yeah, that's the point. The point is to quickly give the indie author the information they may not have found on their own and then just offer a little commentary as well on how to help them sell more books. That's the whole why of the show.
Jesper (4m 36s): Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And the 300 or five years that, that's a ton of episodes that you have released. I was almost about to say $300. I don't know why that, that number popped up in my mind, but, uh, it's a lot of episodes you have guys have released every week. Uh, that must have been quite a journey.
Jim (4m 56s): Yeah. You know, it's the longest podcast I've ever done. I've been doing podcasts before Heath Dube and you know, all kinds of stuff and this is the longest one I've ever participated in. The key to having a long podcast and doing it is just doing it consistently and having a consistent format. Um, if you're starting a podcast, definitely just have it be consistent every single week, release it at the same time and also have a very consistent format so that your listeners can get accustomed to it and used to listening to it.
Jesper (5m 31s): Yeah, yeah, exactly. That, that's also something we've tried to be mindful of now that we shifted to a a hundred percent a podcast instead of YouTube videos too, to try to build in some consistency. And you know, regular sections so that indeed, as you say, people can get used to the format. So that's good. But, uh, we wanted to talk a bit because you just released a book, a Jim called your journey to become, and, uh, we wanted to, I guess, use status as a bit of a springboard into a conversation about visibility and perhaps how, I guess that's self published authors, worst enemy now nowadays.
So, uh, I hope we can yeah. Get, get a bit around and look at this from different angles and so forth during our conversation here.
Jim (6m 20s): Well, yeah, I mean it's, the book just came out this summer and I'm very proud of it. It's the best book I've ever written. And you know, I make the argument in the book that the world has become skippable. Um, VR is allow us to fast forward through the commercials. When you're watching a show on Netflix, the very first thing that pops up when the show is over is the little button in the bottom right corner. It says, skip to the next show. Uh, people can't wait five seconds to watch the next show, right?
Uh, we become a skippable society. We, we have the technology to fast forward through the content that we want to consume and the content that we don't want to consume. And that comes all the way down to your brand as well. Um, it's not that attention spans are decreasing. We can still pay attention that the thing is we've just become really good at focusing and deciding what content we want to pay attention to.
So in your brain, there's a thing called the reticular activating system and it's the little thing in your brain that decides what information you're going to pay attention to and what information you're going to skip. It's a a great example of if you were in a very crowded room with 300 people and your a brother or your spouse is at the other side of the room and they a yell your name, there's a reason you hear it, number one, you hear it because it's your name, your condition.
Your brain is conditioned to be open to that sound. And it's coming from a familiar tone of voice of person that you are used to hearing and that's what your reticular activating system does. So I guess my point is that in this very skippable world that we're living in as authors, we have to find ways beyond just creating great content to get people to want to pay attention to us.
Jesper (8m 26s): Yeah, and that's definitely the hotline. I also noticed, uh, I think the, you know, Netflix apps, uh, I think they are a bit different in different places of the world, but at least here in my part of the world, I noticed it, it's probably only like maybe two months ago. But, uh, whenever you start a show, normally they run this sort of, uh, what happened last time on blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, that sort of thing. And then, uh, about two months ago, this option appear every time on the screen. Now we can just click like a skip intro. So, so I think that goes very hand in hand with what you were just saying.
You know, that we are very much skipping over everything nowadays and just want to get to the, to the main gist of things
Jim (9m 6s): we do. And we, we, we want to skip things. We've become a society of people who literally are just so busy. Uh, and we just don't have, we have so many things being thrown at us more than ever. More adds more content, marketing, more books. Um, and our brains are looking for reasons to skip things. And as an author you have to find ways to become unskippable. Um, and that's what the book's about.
Jesper (9m 38s): Yeah. And, and I, I think since you've written this book, I think I'm not going out on a limb in saying that, um, you probably share my view that, you know, discoverability in today's busy world is one of the most difficult things for us authors to deal with. But I'm curious what your view is on, on this topic, or maybe I should put a different, you know, since there was so much content on the internet, as you just said, and I guess in that way, consumer behavior has also changed quite significantly.
Maybe over the last, I don't know, decade or so. But what is it that we need, we authors need to understand about the modern reader because I guess it's the readers that we are, we're sort of after here.
Jim (10m 21s): The first thing you need to understand is that, uh, everyone's using their phone, right? So all you have to do is get on a bus or go to a waiting room or a doctor's waiting line or, or anywhere. And I want you to be very conscious of what people are doing when they are not distracted by anything. There was a report I wrote about my book that Microsoft did that said, when people said, when they're not distracted by anything, 77% of them picked up their phone as their first reaction.
And they looked at, we spend an average of three hours a day looking at our phones, not talking on them, okay? They beans spend an average of nine hours a day looking at our phones. All right? So the first thing that an author needs to realize is that we are living in a mobile world and people are staring at their phones, uh, hours and hours and hours per day. So keep that in mind when you're thinking about how somebody might come across your book, they probably found it on a recommendation on Twitter or Facebook or they were browsing the Amazon app or Kobo app on their phone.
And that kind of leads into the line of thinking then, well, does your cover pop? Does your title, uh, make sense? Does, um, does your cover look like the other covers in the science fiction or fantasy categories? Right. Cause people buy what they're used to. You know, if, if I'm a big, I'm a big science fiction, I'm a reader, you know, I'm looking for, I made that consciously be doing it, but I'm subconsciously looking for books that look like the other books that I liked.
Does that make sense?
Jesper (12m 22s): Yup. Yup. Absolutely.
Jim (12m 23s): This is why the romance industry has what I call the shirtless Cowboys on it. Um, there's a reason there's a, you know, really six pack abs, a shirtless man on the front of 90% of all romance novels because that's what people are used to and that's what people want to buy. And that's what makes the books on skippable. So I cover to market strategy as long as uh, as well as a right to market strategy definitely helps make you unskippable.
Jesper (12m 59s): Yeah, and I think, I mean that there's 100% true in, in what you're saying around the, you really need to hit young our expectations and that's both entitling covers because otherwise you'd just in a came, especially today. And, and maybe just to use the Netflix example again here for a second, because I also noticed, you know, sometimes my wife and I have your we might be watching the same series but on on at different times. So she might have it in her watch list and I have it in my watch list. But it's quite interesting when you then go into your watch list.
The image that is displayed is different. So, so the same series, but the image that they show in the thumbnail for me is different than the one that show for her. It probably, because you know, they know why male and she's female. So they are showing us different things that they believe or they probably know through a statistical whatever that tha that that's something we like. More right. So, so, and I, I know I've heard you and a pen speak about this in the past as well, how she would love to be able to do different covers for different territories in the market.
So, so there's something about that too, you know, that, that our culture also dictates some of what we like and don't like.
Jim (14m 7s): Uh, yeah. I mean the companies like Netflix and Amazon especially are doing all kinds of, uh, testing. You know, Joanna is right. The AI part of this is becoming a big part of how it works behind the scenes. There are programs that are starting to be developed that will, uh, automatically right, uh, advertisements for you headlines. Interesting, right? So there's one coming out that I saw that will automatically do Facebook split ad testing for you and um, and it will write headlines.
It will write copy right and it will run a massive amounts of ads and determine which one is highest click. I mean we're eventually going to reach the point where a program like that you could just hit a button and it will put in a budget and it will run ads and create them all for you and just return the results later and say, well this one performed at the highest level, um, all written by AI. Um, now we're not completely there yet, but it's definitely coming.
Jesper (15m 18s): Hmm, that's interesting. And I wonder what they will charge for such a service, but that is certainly interesting.
Jim (15m 25s): Well, they will charge for it for sure. Um, but the beautiful part about it is, is that it is run by an, you know, a computer. It's an AI. So you know, the, there is no human labor involved so hopefully the service will be cheaper. Here's the problem though, when if you make it cheap enough, you've got a lot of authors using it and then all of a sudden the AI is, you know, producing all of these ads for all these different, you know, if you get, you know, 10,000 science fiction authors using it, you know, then I'll, the marketplace gets flooded.
You know, one of the reasons that, uh, if you find the time to learn how to do ads and learn how to market your book and put the time and effort and you could stand out, um, because you know, when you push that Boulder up over the Hill, you, you, you learn how to do it. You spent the time and effort and you spent the money and you could definitely a stand out above other authors. When the technology gets to the point where everyone can do it, uh, and the cost is low enough, then the playing field gets leveled a little bit.
Jesper (16m 37s): Yeah. And that's both good and bad. I mean, it's good that everybody can, can get to play, so to speak. But on the other hand, I mean we, we've seen it at least also with Facebook ads or especially with a Amazon ads that, you know, the, if you really want to hit those top keywords, you have to pay a lot per click nowadays. So it's, it's just been almost become impossible unless you're like selling box sets and whatnot, so you can afford to spend more. But, uh, on a single book it's almost impossible to at least for the good clicks, you know, the high profile words.
Very true. So that's, that's sort of the world we live in. Uh, and, and that all plays into why visibility is such a problem for us. But I think also, I quite liked how I picked up in the beginning of a your unskippable book where you are, you are sharing sort of your epiphany and you're, you're talking about how many defined success as being money. And basically we just talked about that too. You know, we, we, we just had the angle of how do we sell more books and, uh, I have also set before that, you know, getting rich might not be the best of success criteria is it's great if it happens, but it might not be the best to strive for.
But, but that's sort of what I picked up in the beginning of your book a bit capita. But perhaps you can elaborate on your line of thinking.
Jim (17m 57s): Yeah, I mean, uh, my book is a business inspirational book and I tell some personal stories in the book and one of the themes as you mentioned is, you know, why are we always shooting for as a human race, you know, how rich we can get and how successful we can get. Um, I personally personally believe that, you know, money being filthy rich and having a ton of money and losing my life because I spent so much time working to reach that goal is not the most appropriate thing for me.
There are some people who that's what they're into. They want to have a lot of money and that's fine. That's totally fine. If that's what you want to do. Um, I will say this, you know, it's a short life and the dream of, you know, being the next, you know, Andy Weir and the Martian is is a great dream to have, but you know, are you going to, uh, spend so much time and so much effort going after that dream that you miss everything else happening in your life? Um, and so there's a lot in the book about, you know, just mindset and trying to be in the moment.
You know, I think it comes from the fact that I'm in my late forties now, you know, I felt when I was younger and that's natural, but everybody goes through their own journey, especially authors, you know. However, I will say this, that you do need to have a business mindset when you are writing books. Uh, we talk about this on the summer book show all the time. Uh, the authors that are successful are the ones that, number one, right? A lot of books, a number to treat it as a business.
You know, the romantic dream of writing your first novel and the publisher comes and sends a limousine with champagne and writes you a huge check and you know, then you're on, you know, the tonight show after like that doesn't exist. Uh, it's, it's a, it's a dream and the reality is, uh, the people who are having success are writing a lot of books and who are, who are doing all the cover to market and cover two and write to market strategies and who are, you know, learning how to do ads and who are learning how to turn it into a business.
And that is the reality of the, uh, of the, uh, writing business today.
Jesper (20m 25s): Yeah, 100%. Uh, I mean the days where you could just write something and put it up on Amazon and then, you know, here we go. Those days are long gone. So yeah, I fully agree. You have to be really professional in, in getting good cover design and of course not forgetting professional editing of the books and, and those things that any like professional publishing company would do anyway. Even though you're just one author with your one-man company, you still need to do all those things, otherwise it's certainly not going to be successful and, and well, that's especially where you become skippable instead of unskippable.
Right. Because then it's just, ah, this was another pile of rubbish and people would just move on.
Jim (21m 4s): Well, you know, I'm, I write nonfiction books. However, I just started a project with a fiction author. We're going to co-write a science fiction adventure book together, which should, yeah. And I announced it on the show this week. So, you know, this is going to be my first attempt at writing a fiction book and I'm not a very good fiction writer, so that's why I teamed up with somebody else. Am right. One of the things I'm very cognizant about is right to market strategy.
Um, I read scifi books and I know what I like about scifi books and my, and I know what scifi book covers look like that sell well, I've done the research. Um, so one of the things I'm really worried about when writing the book is writing it to market writing putting the cover to market. So, um, I am, while writing it is going to be a fun thing to do. Uh, the reason I'm writing it is cause I want it to be successful. So I'm using it all of the knowledge and information I've learned over the years from fiction authors and doing the summer book show podcast to uh, make a really good attempt to try and write it like a business.
And does that take some of the fun out of it? Yeah, it does. Right. Um, I'll give you an example. Uh, my coauthor and I were doing some character development and some of our first meetings the other day and the antagonist. Uh, you know, we needed like a, a good name for the antagonist and you know, I wanted to pivot and kind of give the antagonist kind of like a funny, uh, you know, light light name, you know, something, you know, really kind of, you know, against the grain.
And my coauthor said our readers would hate us for that. Why that? Because they don't want, you know, you do a play on the name for the antagonist, they want it to sound evil. And so in my brain, I wanted, I wanted to do something that I thought would be fun, but then the marketplace would reject that. So I said, fine, let's keep it, you know, the trope that it currently is. And that's kind of a, that's kind of like a decision that I needed help to be made and I want the book to be successful more than I want to use some counter intuitive name.
Does that make sense?
Jesper (23m 33s): Yeah, completely. And, and, and I think it ties, we'll back to what we just talked about. You know, what, what the goal is. Because of course if, if one wants a book to be successful in terms monetary value, then obviously you need to play into to some degree at least to to the, to the market tropes and what we does I expecting and then you know, tweak it and twisted a bit so that it's not exactly what they've seen before. But at the same time they do recognize it. And I think when we're talking about, you know, a goal of monetary value then then I think a lot of this is also something that is something that we are just, uh, I don't want to use the word society, but we sort of brought up by thinking that you're only successful if you are a financial successful.
And I like to think that, you know, we need to take a bit deeper. And actually I, I also find a quote here, I could just drop them from your own book here where it says being unskippable, it's about mindset and the specific actions you take to achieve your goals and dreams. So there's a lot of accountability in that quote and, and it's talking about your goals, meaning that you need to decide for yourself what you find successful. And that could of course be, I want to earn a lot of money from this book, but I still think that if you have something underneath the need to sell more books, it could be, for example, I want to sell a lot of books because I want to be free of my day job.
I want to have more freedom or whatever. However you wanna phrase that, that is probably a better driver or what do you think?
Jim (25m 6s): Yeah, I agree. Um, there's, you know, I think, you know, in America there are definitely, uh, different ways that people think about these things. You know, one of the things I wrote about in the book was, you know, these America Americans consider the sign of a stagnant career if you're only working 40 hours a week. Yeah.
Jesper (25m 29s): Oh, Jesus.
Jim (25m 32s): Which is kind of really where the state of mind, you know, we have people here working, you know, and then there was another thing I just read about how um, you know, 30% of Americans are working a job but then also trying to figure out some kind of side hustle job like driving an Uber am. So we are very work focused here and that's a rental thing. And I, and frankly I don't think it's healthy, um, but it is where we are the rest of the world, you know, does it seem to have that mindset?
But nevertheless, that's where we are and everybody needs to make a decision of how they want to move forward with their life. Um, financial circumstances are a big driver of that. You know, people having to work multiple jobs to get by. I will say this, it's very important for you to set a goal and the goal should be, you can make it a financial goal because that's usually what sets people free from doing the things they want to do.
So write down how much money that you need to make per year to replace your current financial situation and then break it down into months. So if it's $100,000 a year divided by 12 months, that's how much you need to bring in every single month. So you can finally break free and quit your job if that's what you want to do and replace it with writing income. But know this, the way you're going to get there is going to be a ton of hard work.
It's going to be, instead of watching, uh, eight hours of a new show on Netflix, it's going to be, I'm going to write for eight hours instead. Uh, it's going to be, I'm not going to, uh, spend time on Facebook. I'm going to shut my phone off and I'm going to write for three hours instead. Um, it's, it's all about how high your pain level is and what you really want and uh, how bad you want it.
And that's what's going to make the difference of you having success. Cause again, go look at the top authors in your genre right now. There are V I guarantee you there's very few of them that have just written one or two books. Of course they're going to outliers. The people who are making big time money and who are being very successful are writing lots and lots and lots of books, you know, and look, use publisher rocket and look to see who these people are and see how they're doing it and how they're doing cover to market and how, you know, find ways to write more books.
If that means you have to come and find ways to collaborate with other authors, then you need to find a collaboration partner and start writing books. But that is the key right now.
Jesper (28m 26s): Yeah, I agree. And, and of course there is a, there was a challenge embedded here as well because I asked you just said, uh, some people work several jobs in the U S just to get by on a, on a daily day, day to day basis. Right. So, so there is, for them at least the question also becomes, well, how can I write if I also need some, some money to live? So, so yeah, I guess that, well, the point about how bad do you want it still applies, but, but, uh, it, I, I just want to acknowledge that it, it's probably difficult for some people even though they would really want it.
Jim (29m 1s): Is it really that difficult though? You know, I'll be the, I'll be the bad guy here. You know, I want you to examine how much time you spent on social media today. I want you to think about how much time you watched Netflix or Amazon prime or some show, right? So like, you gotta make a decision. How bad do you want to do this? How bad do you want this to happen? And examine the choices you're making in your life and decide and, and again, if you don't want it that bad, then that's fine.
That's totally fine. Some people don't want it that bad. I have a friend who is probably one of the most talented writers I've ever met, and he could be writing sitcoms and comedy specials. He's the one of the funniest people I've ever met in my life. But he had zero interest in moving to Hollywood. And having a career in it. He just likes to do it for fun. And that's frustrating as all you know what for me, because to see that kind of talent not apply itself, but guess what?
That's his decision. He has zero interest in, in using that to build a career and do that. And I had to learn how to deal with that. Uh, I have another friend who's one of the funniest people I've ever met in my life. He's Jim Carrey times 10. Am. Every time I meet him he makes me laugh so hard. I wanna pee my pants, but he is, he is so funny, but he has zero interest in starting a YouTube channel. He has zero interest in becoming a comedian. Um, it's just how some people are.
You have to decide what you want to do and if, if that's what you truly want, if you truly want to be the next Mark Dawson or Joanna Penn, um, then you're going to have to go ahead and put the effort in to get there. And that's the sad truth of it. There is work involved.
Jesper (30m 52s): Yeah. I mean, there is no shortcuts to success, no matter how you twist and turn it. You know, you'll have to put in the hours.
Jim (30m 57s): Nobody wants to hear that.
Jesper (31m 0s): No, no, maybe not. But at the end of the day, that's how it is. I mean, nobody got to the place where they are if they are successful by watching Netflix shows and the in the couch. Right. I mean, that's not how it works.
Jim (31m 11s): Yeah. I know. And I hate to bring that stuff up because like I said, nobody wants to hear that. But it is the truth.
Jesper (31m 19s): Yeah. Yeah, indeed. But I'm also wondering sort of if we're looking ahead Jim because, okay. Looking backwards for a second first maybe, you know, we came, I don't know what, maybe 10 years ago, you know more than this than I do because you were very much involved in the internet business like 10 15 years ago, but, but at least we came from a place where there wasn't as much content on the internet. Uh, of course you didn't have as many tools as you have today to, to help you to easily do things.
But it at least you didn't have the crowded space on the internet back then. And then nowadays we S we are in a place where it is pretty crowded. If you're smart about it, you can still become visible. And we talked about some of those things that you could do already here in this episode, but if you're looking ahead Jim like, like I dunno, 10 years ahead of something, where do you think that the future of marketing is going on the internet?
Jim (32m 16s): Well, I've seen all the shifts. I've been doing this for over 20 years. Um, technology plays a big part in it. Uh, you know, how, how people react. It always comes back down to one thing, which is authenticity, uh, and great content. Um, so, you know, there was a tie, we went through this shift where everything became automated. You know, everybody talking about chat bots and you know, automated sales funnels and those things are, those are good tactics and they still do work.
But I think the biggest thing I want to point as this, you know, there's never been a greater time in the history of the world to build a brand and to get your name known and to sell a product or a book right. In that then right now there never has been and just because there's more competition doesn't mean that it's harder. It's actually easier than ever if you and I wanted to, right now it's like we wanted to meet in a room for the next seven days and write a book together.
We could have a cover designs, we could write a book together, we can edit it, we can put it up on Amazon and you and I could then go on Facebook and Twitter and tick tock or wherever else, Instagram, and we put it out in front of millions of people with a click of a button and have the opportunity to sell that right away. Right. That is a game changer. Before the internet, before all these social media channels, it didn't have that you, you couldn't just instantly create a brand and a business overnight.
You can do that now. Um, and that is a huge opportunity. That's still a lot of people. I just don't think, I think everyone takes it for granted how simple it is. I could develop a course. I could get off this podcast with you and go, you know what? They gave me a great idea for a course on how to help authors. I could sit in my office for the next 24 hours, create the course, put a website up for it, and start selling it a day later and making money. That's an opportunity.
Um, it's just, again, how bad do you want to do it? But it all comes down to the core basic principles, which I write a lot. You know, there are two reasons people use the internet. Number one is to have a problem solved. And number two is to be entertained. Now, when you put that into the book conversation, uh, to be entertained as fiction and to have a problem solve this nonfiction. So when you start thinking about things in that term, all your, if you're writing fiction, you need to entertain people.
If you're writing nonfiction, you need to solve problems for people. And that's just the basic core of business and how you approach writing as a business, solve problems for people or entertain them at the highest level and then just go out and start putting it out there. You don't have to be salesy, but you do have to go out there and be authentic. You know, um, authors that are really working on social media to share parts of their, their lives are authors that are telling stories and bringing in people.
Uh, I would highly recommend that everybody do a Google search for something called 1000 true fans. Um, it is an amazing piece that was written years and years ago, probably 10 years ago now. And it basically makes the argument that any artist, whether it's a musician, a writer, uh, anyone who creates content or any type of business can survive and build a successful business off of 1000 true fans. Because if you have a thousand people who are true fans of you, you will sustain a career.
Um, because a true fan is somebody who, uh, will drive four hours in a snow storm to come to your next book signing because they love you so much. On top of that, they will advocate for you and evangelize about you and create bog blog posts and do videos about you without you asking. Um, that's a person who will buy the, you know, six box set of your book, even though they've already bought all of your six individual books are ready because they just needed to have the box set.
So if you can cultivate a true fan in today's world, then you can build an entire career off a thousand those thousand people. And that's the only way you're going to do that is build trust and be authentic with who you really are to your audience. And they will reward you for that. Um, if you are, uh, the days of being stand offish and known not answering your emails, I still get frustrated at this. Like there's some very big time authors who have come onto the scene in the last year and one of them I've been trying to reach for six months and I've tried Facebook, Twitter, email, uh, tried to go through networks to find phone numbers.
This author is a complete ghost. They, they, they cannot be contacted. And you know what? I'm annoyed. I'm completely annoyed by it. You can't, you can't respond to me on Facebook. You can't, you can't send me an email back. You can't, you know, just say hello, right? I, I'm not asking you for anything. I wanted you to be on my podcast, but at least tell me know, you know, that annoys the heck out of me. I'm not gonna say who it is and their content of their book is great, but you know what? I have a bad taste in my mouth from that author and I, it's not somebody that I respect because they just can't even talk.
I respond to every single email. I give people out. My cell phone numbers say texts me in my book, in the book I gave, here's my cell phone number, text me, tell me if you're enjoying the book. That's just how I operate.
Jesper (38m 4s): Yeah. And, and the, and I think that is important. I think it's important to be approachable. And I also just want to acknowledge that a 1000 true fan, uh, input you gave there. If, uh, if the listener is looking for it, you can also go onto YouTube and actually just search for 1000 true fans. And there isn't, there's an interview with the, with the guy who wrote that article and I think indeed it is like 10 years ago, but it still holds so much true today and it's, it's really good. And it's funny because it was just sort of a thought that he had and he, he didn't know if it was true or not, but at the point when he says in the interview, when he wrote that article, it was more like, I think that it might be like this.
And then he published that article and it just resonated so much with especially people in the creative community like authors and, and stuff like that. So, uh, so I, I really think that that is, uh, if you haven't seen that one yet, deal isn't it? And go and check that one out because it's really good. The other thing I was just thinking based on what you said Jim was, uh, I also think that we need to be careful not to always focus on the negative, right? I mean, probably like 10 years ago, people were complaining that, well, well there was also those people who thought that the internet would go away tomorrow affect them.
But, but I guess there was also complaints about how, you know, you needed to know a lot of coding and it was not easy to make content on the internet and so forth. And as time went by, now it is actually pretty easy to, uh, produce content. But now people are now complaining that, well, what we're talking about here today, that discoverability is an issue. And I got, I don't know, in five years from now it'll be something else people are complaining about, but I think sometimes we, we also need to take a step back and just acknowledge what you said before Jim in the sense that it is a, it's a very good time to actually be selling books now and because we have all these tools, yes, maybe there is a discoverability issue, but it's also a matter of trying to find the opportunities and how to, how to stand out of the crowd, which is definitely not easy, but I mean it's still better than what it used to be in today's market.
Jim (40m 12s): You like to go back? Let's go back in time. Okay. Let's go back in time to before Amazon, before the internet to be discovered, you had to go through a gatekeeper as a publisher or an agent and they had to determine if your content was worthy enough to be given to the masses. Okay. The select few who were chosen to have good content enough where then a distributed out to bookstores and popped about and New York times bestseller list and things like that.
So a couple people in the entire world, we're controlling all of the content distributed to the rest of the world. Would you like to go back to that? Cause I wouldn't, there was an absolutely terrible time to be a content creator, to be an artist, to be somebody you had to spend 20, 30 years building a brand, creating content or would you rather have it now where everybody has an equal opportunity and I don't buy the argument that discoverability is harder than ever.
You are just not using all of your best effort to get there. Um, there are, uh, there is the very easy ability to go out and learn how to use Amazon ads and create ads and start getting your book out and start selling immediately. There is a very ability to start using Facebook ads. There is a very easy ability to start your own podcast or create a video or create some type of content that will help people find your book.
You just maybe just don't want to do it and that's because you are still in that romantic dream of that. I'm just going to write a book and everybody's just going to come and read it. But the world has changed. You have to treat this like a business, right? A lot of books, right? Covered a Mark, right? Right, right to market, covered a market, have amazing book descriptions. Make sure you price it the right way and for and here's really what you're asking me here. There is a lot of people who still are in the artist's mentality.
Um, and the art mentality is I am doing this for the art of it and I just loved to do it and I'm upset that I have to treat this like a business. And unfortunately that's exactly what we're where we're at. If you do not want to treat writing books like a business, the odds that you are going to have success diminish by you know, 99% and again, people are like dang it Jim why are you telling me this? Well, it's just the truth and I think everyone listening to this knows that but sometimes they need to hear it again.
Jesper (42m 55s): Yeah. We were back to the fact that you have to put in the work right at the end of the day that that's what it is.
Jim (43m 1s): Very preachy thing by me. I wasn't my intention to do this at all.
Jesper (43m 9s): No, but, but uh, at the end of the day it is true. Right? I mean, and I, I certainly think that there is an, I'm also speaking to myself here. I mean making like visibility, your worst enemy is also something that you choose to do. I mean we can focus differently. We could try to focus on, okay, maybe my covers are actually not sugar specific enough. Maybe my titles is not selling what this younger is to do. Rita, maybe I didn't do enough editing or I skipped something along the process there.
And then, yeah, of course you do suffer discoverability consequences of those choices. But on the other hand, things are so easy today with, with, with online stuff. Did you, you can still go back and change it and it doesn't, it doesn't require too much. Like you don't have to go to your major publishing company and say, can you please take change my cover? And then they tell you no, and you can just do it first. So maybe we need to focus on the post attention
Jim (44m 5s): that came out almost 10 years ago was published through Wiley as my only traditionally published book. And, uh, I didn't like the cover that they did for me. Of course they wouldn't let me do my own cover. Um, I didn't like the title of the book. Um, that ultimately they decided, um, I didn't like any of it and I would like to go back now if I had the rights to it and redo the book with the cover and the title, but I can't do it because they own it. Right. So, you know, that's, you know, that's a problem for me and which is why I self published now because, uh, I just want to have that control.
I want to be able to change. Like if I, you know, book cover designs change, you know, there's two years from now we might be seeing a totally different trend of covers might be more illustrated covers in a specific genre. We don't know. You need to be.
Jesper (44m 56s): Hmm. Yup. Exactly. And uh, I can also see that we're coming up on time here. Am GM. So I want to make sure to thank you very much for that. You took the time out to come and talk to me here today and uh, maybe you can share, where do you prefer people to pick up your book from if they interested? Is that just Amazon or how do I do about that?
Jim (45m 19s): You get a copy of, I will say this, the um, people who were the arc readers of the book, we're all authors and I have gotten since 84 positive reviews of the book in about less than two months. So if you are an author and you're thinking, this book is not for you, you would be wrong because all of my arc readers were authors in fiction, authors and nonfiction authors and they really enjoyed the book. So if you go to be unskippable.com that just takes you to my website, it's much easier to spell than my name.
So be unskippable.com you can find my book there and check it out. I think you'll really enjoy it. I think it'll will inspire you.
Jesper (46m 3s): Excellent. I'll put the link in the show notes as well. So, uh, for you listeners out there, if you're interested, just check out the show notes and click through debt and you don't even have to make a note if you're out on the move at as you listening to this. So, uh, thanks you. Thank you very much. Jim for for talking to me today. And um, and thank you for your focus on motivating people on a daily basis. I know you guys do that over on the sell more books show as well. So I think we need more people like you.
Jim (46m 31s): Well, I think we need more people like you who will consistently produce content in a great format and continue to do shows like this. So thank you so much for doing the show and thank you so much for having me on.
Jesper (46m 44s): All right. Thank you very much. And uh, thank you for tuning in again this weekend, your listener, and uh, yeah, just come back next weekend. Make sure to subscribe if you haven't done so already.
Narrator (46m 58s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the amwritingfantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join autumn and Yesper on patrion.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the amwritingfantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
You've got the story, but what do you title it? Is choosing a title for your novel pivotal? Are there any steps to pick the right title?
Autumn and Jesper hash out why choosing a title is actually very important and how to go about doing it in episode 37 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast.
Check out the links we mention in the podcast:
https://www.adazing.com/book-title-generator/
https://www.pickfu.com/books
http://www.lulu.com/titlescorer/
https://publisherrocket.com/
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below.
(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (1s): You're listening to the amwritingfantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing join to best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them. Now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.
Jesper (30s): Hello, I'm Jesper. This is episode 37 of the amwritingfantasy and we're going to talk about how to choose a title for your novel.
Autumn (43s): It should be an interesting one because I know you and I have very different techniques. Yes. For on how we choose our titles, which would make it really fun for our code books, but we'll get to that in a minute. For now it's a kind of a fun week, so for me, I've just actually gotten off the road, you know, I live like in a camper and we travel all over North America and we are finally landed back in Pennsylvania. I'm visiting my parents, which is always fun and I'm adjusting to waking up in a real bed and are better having family around and not just birds and squirrels.
So that's my life right now that it's so far so good. It's always nice. I'm catching up on sleep for some reason even though we slept really well and I love sleeping in the camper. Am just been tired the last couple of days. So yeah. You said you fell asleep on the couch or something like that? Yeah, yeah. Which is not like me. I'm not a nap person. But yesterday I couldn't, especially just seeing my parents for the first time in months and months and months and, and you know, I'm supposed to be like talking and socializing and I just passed out on their couch.
Jesper (1m 54s): How do you wear, when you're traveling around, how do you actually do laundry and stuff like that? Do you find like laundry, laundry mats? Is that Colton? Is that what you do or do you have any sort of, uh, laundry or possibility in the car? How do we actually do both?
Autumn (2m 14s): So sometimes we'll actually, there's like three choices. Sometimes we go to a town with a laundromat and go there. We used to sometimes stay at a hotel and often they will have at least a washer and dryer and some campgrounds. Especially you're a Canadian, uh, campgrounds. So Canadian national parks, you guys, Canada, you guys are awesome. I don't, there can be, not say that, but uh, often the Canadian national parks, we'll actually have a washer and dryer, which American national parks often don't even have a shower. So I can't even tell you how awesome Canadian national parks are compared to the U S ones.
Sorry guys. It's true. Why is that? Do you know what, why is that different? I don't know. I don't know if we just have more of them and they're very much, the U S ones are very much under funded. They cannot even keep up with the road upkeep where the Canadian, I've been to some of our national parks and they literally have these granite countertop wash stations with under counter lighting is where you just can go and do your dishes and they have hot showers.
I mean there are nicer than someplace, some luxury resorts I've stayed in and this is just a little pavilion to do your dishes and hang out and talk. And they often have open fireplaces. I mean, they're just amazing, amazing places. And then the U S ones, they're often, you know, struggling to stay open, struggling to take care of their finances, don't even have enough interpreters and park Rangers. So mostly budget, uh, Canada seems to take their national parks really seriously. And they just had their anniversary.
I can't remember if it was the Centennial or 150 years on their national parks. And they put a ton of money and made all the national parks in Canada free in 2018 and that was, I just can't imagine that U S doing that. There's one day a year that they am they last weekend, I think it was, or maybe it was Sunday, they actually opened up all national parks in the U S for free one day versus an entire year. So it's just a lot different approach. And I think there are maybe not as big visited.
Um, the U S ones, there's a few that are really, I've never been to Yosemite. I'd love to see Yosemite. I don't know if I'll ever make it to Yosemite because there's a wait list to get in, but Oh yeah. So the last option I mentioned, I can do laundry in camp. We have something called a scrub, a bag, which I think might be out of Australia. I can't remember where the companies from, but it's this cute little plastic bag that looks like, um, you know, an airtight, watertight one and it has these little things in it. You put in, you know, a couple of shirts, waters and laundry detergent.
You scrub, scrub it for like need it like as a loaf of DOE, uh, for like three minutes. And I cannot believe how well this thing works. When I went out and first got it, I'm like, you want me to do what? Are you kidding, kidding. And now it's just like, it's completely reversed. I'm like, you want me to go to town and sit there and, and nasty, you know, laundromat for flowers when I could just be here in camp.
And go, you know, I'm done in 15 minutes and you hang up your laundry to dry and I'm still talking to the squirrels. So I actually really like it, but it doesn't help when United up with some really like a lot of laundry. It just doesn't work. You've gotta be on top of it pretty much weekly. Yeah, I can imagine. I mean, you don't want it to build up to a big pile of laundry to do. So, uh, we don't have much clothing with us. I mean, we are in our current camper. The area under the queen size bed is all closed storage and plus, you know, we have a few other notes and crannies where you can toss your jackets and things.
But yeah. You we don't have a ton of clothes, so, well, you know, when you're getting down to your skivvies you've probably waited too.
Jesper (6m 5s): Yeah, I can imagine. Um, and I also, um, well maybe it was while you were driving around. I don't know. But, uh, but at some point it was sort of leading up to summer, so it's a bit a while back, so to speak. But, um, so you told me to read a book, which I read over the summer holidays called StoryBrand, and it just, I just wanted to bring this up because it was quite funny in the, in the way when you, when you had read it then you S you said to me that, uh, I think actually maybe we should add like a attack line for the amwritingfantasy website, but we should probably also redesign it.
And I was like, uh, attack line. Why I don't see any point in that. And then over the summer I read the book and I was like, Oh, I'm so with you now. I fully, you're coming from. But it's funny. So I just wanted to, to bring it up because actually I think am for those listening, it is actually a worthwhile book to read. Also just in the sense that narrowing down, you know, as an author, why is it that you're writing and what are you trying to achieve and how could you, you know, communicated to, I don't know, maybe your family or it could also be to readers why it is really that you are, um, writing I, I think in that regard that that StoryBrand book actually works pretty well too.
So, um, yeah, so I just wanted to give that recommendation to listeners here.
Autumn (7m 38s): Yeah. And a big shout out to Gail Scrivener who, uh, was the Scribner cut podcast the guest for your podcast. She, um, she turned me on to, I think it's Don Miller sent Daniel, so I'm pretty sure it's a Dawn Miller, his book StoryBrand and yes, to have read that from, you know, as a graphic artists but also to, I've read that as an author as well as the, what we teach with the amwritingfantasy and are YouTube and everything we do, you suddenly realize how to break down your targeting and your audience and how to say what you're doing and how to kind of figure out what you're trying to do with this, what you're currently marketing, um, even your books.
And that was like, Oh, wow, yeah, I need to read. Is. I, and I ended up redesigning my personal website and now once I get some space and time on my hand and I recover more from the road, I want to, we went to tackle the amwritingfantasy website because yeah, it really, you suddenly realize how cluttered things are and how much more interesting it can be just to focus on some things. Sort of like, you know, no longer have to worry about all these crazy B-roll and stuff that you need to be to be doing the podcast.
Jesper (8m 48s): Yeah, yeah, me too. Me too. Absolutely. And, and I think yeah, as if I don't have enough things to record already, but uh, I actually thinking about maybe making sort of a, a free, not a freeze, what am I talking about? A free, a free, that's what I'm trying to say. Free a free video course that people could get once they sign up via amwritingfantasy to just make things a lot more simple. Uh, we do have a, some freebies on amwritingfantasy today.
Like for example, we have that am book price analysis. Um, but at the same time there are the resources out there that goes even into more depth. So, and I have some things on my list of things that I'm thinking that doesn't really fit into the other courses that we are going to create. They are still valuable. So I was actually thinking maybe once I'm done recording all the, all the stuff for the world building cost that I also have to do.
But once I'm done with all that, may, maybe I could do some recording of a, a shorter free cause that people could get their hands on
Autumn (9m 60s): you adding something else to your bottom of your never ending.
Jesper (10m 6s): I can't help myself. That's the problem with the amwritingfantasy. Podcast yeah. So actually we, we've sort of been batch recording a bit here because, um, yeah, we've, we just started this new format of the podcast and just in case any of us ever get sick or something should prevent us, we don't want to miss a Monday release. So we've been best recording a bit. And why I'm bringing this up is because in the one of the previous episodes here, we actually asked you guys out there listening if am if it's possible to leave comments on the Google podcast app or in the native Apple podcast app.
And of course, because we're batch recording, we don't know the answers yet. So I just wanted to reiterate that the, if you can please try to drop a comment and see if it's possible. And, uh, of course, and we have on our end, no idea if we actually gonna get notified if you do those comments. So if we don't respond to it, which I promise if I see a comment, I respond to it and then, you know as well that I saw it. But if we don't respond then I dunno, hit us up on Twitter or something and say that you left a comment because then at least we know that it's possible, but then we will also know that we can't see it or hear it.
But uh, yeah, you actually, the link to both our Twitter profiles, I in the show notes, so check that out. But I'm still curious to know if it's possible to comment on podcasts episodes.
Autumn (11m 36s): Absolutely. It, it'll be interesting and I, if we can't see the comments, if they don't come through automatically, I, there's gotta be a way that we can log in, you know, respond. It would just make a little note on our task list. Hey, you know, at least twice a week go over and see you comments.
Jesper (11m 52s): Yeah, yeah. Something, yeah, yeah, that would be good. But, but I, yeah, as I said, I don't even know if it's possible for people to leave a comment. So I guess that's hurdle number one, but probably somebody out there could, uh, could be so kind to test it out for us and then shoot us a message on Twitter or something to say either I have left a comment or saying I have tried, but it's impossible.
Autumn (12m 12s): And you said we know where we are with it and you definitely on Twitter, uh, me, I'm more on Instagram, but you know, I, I've been trying to be good now that I'm off the road that I've actually checking in on Twitter again. I used to be my main platform and was the last one I go to. I admit it, but ah, Instagram, if you're on Instagram you'll find me there. Yeah, absolutely. What, speaking of comments, so we actually had a really great one that just came through today that I thought was, it's so universally true because even with 16 books out actually happens to me too.
And that's what I responded to. But, uh, Sam went in on our starter kit, which speaking of freebies, that is our current free mini course that could teach you some really good tips, especially if you're a newbie, is just starting out writing to make sure that you make it into and through your first novel. And he said on the second one that this helps so much. I have a tendency to get bored towards the middle of my manuscript. With that boredom comes a bright new shiny idea that and latch onto and the process repeats without me going back to a previous story, too many Chinese in migraine.
So when I get bored again, I'm going to try to outline the next few chapters, interview or write a short story with some of my characters to get the boredom gap out. I really liked those ideas. Thanks. So that's cool. That is really cool. So want to thank you, Sam. I love the comment, but as I replied to him, it happens. I mean I'm currently in am. I was on a holding pattern. We talked about that before. I took a couple of weeks off from writing and now I'm getting back into it and I've just not what I want to go write something else because I got stuck in it.
I got stuck in my life. I get stuck, I took a break from writing and I'm like, Oh, I don't like the current setup. I want to do something else. And yeah, you know, this is going to be my 17th or 18th book depending on which one I release first. Cause I've got two things going at once and it still hits me. You still have to be, you know, sometimes I told him you sometimes you just have to be the stubborn person in the room and be like, no, I am not going to, you know, get out of this. I'm not going to turn around and not do this. So I make sure that I stick to what I'm working on because I've made a promise to my readers, but, and it's my business.
I'm, you know, professional. So I can't just go chasing rainbows and unicorns no matter how awesome and pretty and bright and shiny they are,
Jesper (14m 35s): right. Yeah, indeed. Yeah. And I also liked how, um, how you asked in the, uh, in, in the amwritingfantasy Facebook group, if anyone had am put some, some time aside for him, like a mid summer update of updating any of their back catalog of books with the links to their new books. Um, because that's, that's really something that is often overlooked isn't it, you know, to go back and update those, uh, those back matters of, of our previous books.
Autumn (15m 4s): Absolutely. And I really, uh, some of my first Epic fantasy series, I haven't, I need to go back and add mine to new releases from the summer. And I guess I'm just kind of putting it off because I've reformatted things a little bit and added a few new stuff, new pieces of back matter to my current novellas and I want to go back and put it in all the other ones. So it's not as simple as just adding a link. It's all gonna take a half an hour, then the upload time and yeah. Okay. This is my first day off the road.
Jesper (15m 33s): Yeah. So with that. And I also wanted to be loved.
Autumn (15m 38s): I know it's going to be so interesting. We have a interesting topic coming up, so let's
Jesper (15m 44s): go ahead.
Autumn (15m 47s): Okay. So how do you choose a title for your novel? That's always a tricky one for me. I, I've kind of go with a gut instinct feel, but I know there's other techniques and I know you do something completely different. Yes. For yes.
Jesper (16m 3s): Yeah. Well it's not because I originally was very scientific about it either. I think, you know, of course for I start, one could ask, you know, how, how, how much does the title and the subtitle really matter? And at least I think it matters a great deal because it conveys the sugar to the reader and above anything else it has to convey the Shaundra. Uh, and I think it's what you just mentioned there is more common than, than you think, you know, that authors tried to come up with something clever or unique or something like that and think, ah, that, that, that'll be good.
Right. But actually I would say no, it's, it's the opposite.
Autumn (16m 46s): I don't disagree with you. I think what I'm going with, my gut instinct is to fit the genre and the book and you know, Oh, it was like, you know, if something's going to have dragons in it, that's great for fantasy. But I also, I do know that there's people even I've seen on websites, that's my favorite thing when you're looking through the website menu and there's something so clever there and you have no idea what it means. So I do think there's a tendency for folks to have really unique, interesting names and words.
And sometimes that doesn't tell you anything about them.
Jesper (17m 19s): No, exactly. I mean, I, and I'm guilty of this too, so I'm, I'm sort of, uh, uh, you know, acknowledging that fact completely. Um, when I, when I had to name the three books in my Keystone boom, true religion, for example, I thought that I was really smart and, uh, I, I wanted all the, all eats of the book titles to start with the letter D because then I thought that'll be cool. Right? So I named them desolation degradation and damnation, those three books. And I thought that was awesome.
But if you weren't listening to the podcast and you knew that we are talking about fantasy from those titles, you will have no idea that it's a fantasy novel. And so yeah, it's, it's not a good, it's not good titles to be honest. And I think I actually, I should go back and change them and now should alter change the covers because I know a ton more today than I did back then. But yeah, you know, time, time is also an issue.
Autumn (18m 15s): I say if we always keep retweaking what we did but not, you know, at the same time there are some, um, some reasons too, but I know with my first trilogy, it was born of water, rule of fire and spirit of life. And of course it was elemental magic. So I made sure I had that in there. But I remember telling somebody a couple times, like born of water and they actually asked if it was religious. And I was like, um, maybe I'm just really out of tune with some religions cause I didn't even Dawn on me and it still doesn't quite.
Um, but again, that's just, it. That's the huge world. You're not going to be familiar with everything and you're not going to be able to control how other people will always interpret it. But I was thinking of the elemental magic, but again, I could have probably thrown something else in there. And I remember I was trying to be clever too, and also thinking, Oh gosh, I don't want to do this, is that there's five elements, uh, in my world and I should have five books and with a few other ones, like bones of earth and something else for the other are was missing as well.
And I'm like, uh, no, it's a trilogy. So I'm skipping those two. What I did, the next trilogy, I, you know, I had a few things on there. I have Gates of fire and earth. I have spark of defiance and a new goddess. So only one of them actually mentioned elements and the taglines, uh, w was pretty straightforward. Tag, realize am Epic fantasy adventure and elemental magic. Something like,
Jesper (19m 49s): yeah, that's good that that conveys this younger pretty clearly so people know what it is, right? When I think titles are more aligned with fantasy as well compared to mine. Um, but I, I think, you know, I, I went on to the top 100 bestseller lists in the fantasy category on Amazon, just to sort of check what people are saying there because that's always a a neat trick that you can apply is to go and say, look at the books that actually sells and what are they titling the books. And so I just pick three at random here just to give you and the listeners here in an example, you know of how you can use the book title to really show what that it is a fantasy book.
And of course in the bestseller lists lists, there are a hugely popular ones, like the Handmaid's tale, which is cutting the number one. Then of course followed by Harry Potter. So I left, left those out because that's, I say it felt like it. Well we all know those books anyway, so, and then I picked some of the other ones from the top one and you get tired. This like magic fury that King and then chosen you. See you see what I mean? Yes. If I just told you those titles and you have no idea where, you know, what's younger we are talking about, and I mean that you didn't know that this is offensive.
She podcast you would probably put it quickly guests that this is fantasy books. Right, right.
Autumn (21m 11s): And I used to say, I know some of the ones I've read like arcane you, you know, that's the magic and fantasy easily.
Jesper (21m 18s): Right, exactly. And that's exactly my point, right? I mean the title needs to clearly tell the reader that this is a book for you. And uh, if you being smart about it, like, like I was, then you're not telling them that. I mean, a book called desolation. What's that? It could be anything.
Autumn (21m 35s): Yeah, it sounds posted. Co park elliptic to me.
Jesper (21m 37s): Yeah. And then maybe a bit scifi could also be right. That's true. But yeah, so, so don't do that. The weird thing is I always end up repeating myself and do what I say don't do what I do because I, along the way, I always learn things too, to do them smarter. And then that's what I'm talking about. And of course I never did that myself. So, uh, yeah, learn from,
Autumn (22m 3s): well I think that's am that's part of the reason though, at least it's part of the reason I started with amwritingfantasy and doing it and my first blogs to other authors was because I am such a tendency to do things the hard way and learn by mistakes and I'm trying to keep other people from necessarily following in my footsteps and maybe just, you know, taking the easy path.
Jesper (22m 26s): Yeah. Hopefully that's at least the idea also also from, uh, from this podcast that we can, we can share our experience and then hopefully people can make a shortcut to not go through all the hurdles and hoops that we've gone through. Um, but I have quite a few tools that I wanted to share with people here as well that that can help with with all the titling. But I don't know if I should just jump into all that stuff. Autumn or, well, what do you think?
Autumn (22m 51s): I think so. I mean, I, like I said, the only thing I've done other than, um, going and randomly, you know, choosing something that feels like it fits my book and it sounds a little fantasy or running it by other authors obviously can also help. But, you know, I do know some people who go into, there's a few websites that will give you some good suggestions for like blog post titles, things that are clickable and that people will like. And I do know some people who do run titles through that, kind of like a title generator to see what comes up. And if something sounds even better and more exciting.
But those are the only three techniques I've thought of. So what do you have?
Jesper (23m 27s): Okay, so hang on because I have a long star, a long list of stuff of what of things you can do. So, uh, uh, of course we were going to put links to these different things in, in the show notes. So you know, you don't have to make notes of this stuff if anything piques your interest. Um, so just check out the show notes here. But first of all, I would say route, write down at least five different titles for your book. And of course each one have to clearly communicate that this is fantasy. And you can also use your subtitle to get specific.
For example, like if you want am autumn set gave an example before, but you could also just say like a tale of Epic fantasy or something like that, you know, just so that it's very clear. And if you are writing, for example a trilogy or a series, then the same logic applies to the series name. That's also needs to clearly communicate what this young race. So if you write down some different ideas, um, then that's a good start. But there was also some online tools that can actually help you out if you find it difficult to come up with something.
And there is, for example, one called adazing.com/book title generator. And again there will be a link in the show notes, but this one will actually suggest you some possible title names. And the cool thing about this tool is that you pick your stronger as well. So we will try to give you titles that are based on the genre. So that's pretty cool. And uh, as far as I know it's free, but I, I think you do have to create an account with your email address, but, uh, but I think it's, you don't have to pay for it other than that.
Oh, good. Um, and then there was also the possibility to use lulu.com/titlescorer which is pretty cool as well because it actually uses statistical research to give you a score for your title. So for example, as I said before, if you have five titles you came up with, you can type them into lulu.com uh, and then it will give you a score on how good it believes that the title is from a best seller perspective.
And that's pretty damn cool. And it because of you, because it's useless statistical research to back it up. So that, that's, that's, that's good. It's a good indication at least.
Autumn (25m 43s): Yeah. The scientist in me is like, Oh, I want to go try that.
Jesper (25m 46s): Yeah, exactly. So I think that that is cool. Uh, and of course one should never back away from anything called split testing. Split testing is always good. So again, if you have your, uh, your different titles, you can, for example, use pickfu.com/books. Uh, and that w that website will actually put your dif, different titles. You can put in like your two different titles and you could pitch them against each other and then PickFu we'll put it in front of an audience and let people vote on which one they liked the most.
So this one will cost you a bit of money to run that survey, but I think it will be well worth it. And um, and then basically you will get real people voting on which one they liked the most. And uh, yeah, that's always good.
Autumn (26m 33s): I kinda like that. That sounds like a lot of fun, which does also make me realize that Hey, I could always just ask the readers in my newsletters to do something very similar and not have to spend them.
Jesper (26m 44s): Yeah, exactly. That was where I was going next in that, that is absolutely right. So, of course, if you have an email list, you can just ask people or your email subscribers to vote. Uh, you know, you can even put it into like a, like a Google form or something and just ask them to vote and it will cost you nothing. Right. But, uh, I would say though that the, you need to have a certain amount of people voting down. I mean if you don't have at least a thousand responses, then it's not really statistically relevant. So you might end up, if you, for example, get let's say a hundred responses, you do run the risk that you might just have hit a very small subset of the market and they liked the particular title.
But actually the broader audience wouldn't. So be mindful of that, that you need enough people on your email list if you actually kind of go by their boats, I would say. Uh, but of course if you are losing you or using your email list, it has the nice added benefit of it that the, you know, you're getting people invested in your upcoming release because they are allowed to start voting on the title and imagine that you then pick one of the ones that the people like, right. I mean then they already pretty invested in the book before you even release it.
So, so that's an awesome benefit.
Autumn (27m 56s): Yes. I mean I just asked my newsletters, uh, my readers, which series, cause I started too serious with tune at different novellas and a mailer Lite has this really cool survey form that gives you a lot of results and it's just part of their, you know, newsletter building. And so yeah, I, I did something very similar and said, which one do I write next? And Oh my gosh, it was like 40% to 60. It was a 10% difference between which one I should write next. So it's kind of exciting.
The results come in and let readers know when the next email, which one they chose.
Jesper (28m 32s): Yeah. And sometimes you actually am I would almost say more often than not, you get surprised about the results that you see because the one you think is the best is not the one people vote for.
Autumn (28m 41s): That's true. But at least I like both of the ESL win-win.
Jesper (28m 45s): Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And of course you also have an a yet another option a and I mean please don't get overwhelmed by all the different uh, tools that I'm mentioning here. And that's my purpose is not to overwhelm you, it's just to give you different possibilities and you don't, you don't have to use all of them. You can sort of pick and choose what you feel most for. But you could also use publisherrocket, which is formerly known as KDP rocket because there is possibilities inside that software to give you an idea on how well your title title will be performing on our YouTube channel, there is a, one of the older videos that actually giving a review of KDP rocket as it was called back then.
So you can go and check that out if you're interested. But I think for the most part, I would say that this trick probably works the best for nonfiction titles more than fiction ones, but for nonfiction at least, if that's what you're writing and trying to make a title for then I would definitely say that you should try out publisherrocket because it's, it's really excellent at that. And actually we tweak it. We tweet one of our titles are on the future plotting book that we're going to release at some point later this year maybe.
Um, we actually changed the title of that based on what KDP rocket told us or publisherrocket as it's called now. So. So it's definitely useful.
Autumn (30m 8s): Definitely. And of course that one is a, you do have to buy it, but there's so many things you can do with it. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. I think it'll end up making your publishing life on a little bit better if you go for publisherrocket. Yeah.
Jesper (30m 23s): Well, a bit off topic here, but there are so many other benefits of publisherrocket, like a collecting all your, uh, Amazon add keywords and stuff like that. It makes it a million times easier. And I think the nice, what I like with the KPD KDP rocket or publisherrocket is basically that it's a one time fee. It's not one of these monthly things that you have to pay for. So you pay for it once and then it's yours. And I really liked that.
Autumn (30m 48s): Yes.
Jesper (30m 50s): And I, and it's not that expensive on top of my head. I think it's $99. But I could be mistaken. But it's not that expensive.
Autumn (30m 57s): No. I think, uh, if you're gonna publish multiple books, there's a few things out there and I love you publisherrocket I love it for the keyword feature, just helping me find which ones I want to use and which ones are going to really help. And undaunted,
Jesper (31m 14s): that feature alone is worth the money. You know, you can spend ages collecting Amazon keywords, uh, but publisherrocket doesn't, does it in half a second.
Autumn (31m 26s): Yeah. So it becomes more of a logic puzzle to me instead of a mind numbing tasks.
Jesper (31m 33s): Do you remember when we were first collecting the keywords and we were sitting there copying and pasting out of Amazon? Jesus Christ. That was painful.
Autumn (31m 41s): That was it. It was like, okay, I'm going to put side eight hours to spend on Amazon while I go through every single letter in the dictionary with are like 16 different keywords. Oh, it was horrible. It was so bad. It's incredible. We're totally off topic now.
Jesper (31m 55s): Yeah, completely off topic. But I guess it's also because, uh, that was sort of a, my inputs on how you can pick your titles for your books and I think at bottom line here is basically you need to really make sure that you are conveying the genre without eh, straight of a doubt to the reader answer. So don't get clever and a then split test, split test, split test and let the data speak instead of your own biased opinion. Because honestly we, we usually wrong.
We think that we know best I authors.
Autumn (32m 29s): That's true. But it was interesting. It's like we say where it's like that I'm always wanting to question everything. I think I get it from my dad. So when you say conveying the genre, we have to, we should say is that because I know in some people are like the Chronicles of Valdor on and to them that is the, you know, conveying there's genre conveying their world. But I like the word Chronicles, but is that really, you know, nitty gritty, getting it down to what is in the genre. So what words do you think are going to come up with a really good intro?
You know, things that really sound like they're going to be a good fantasy word. Like I would say dragons Chronicles magic. What other terms can you think of really quick that might help convey a good fantasy genre? And if you can think of anything, you know, let us know as you go through the listing to this, you know, we asked you for some comments. So if you happen to come up with some comments, that would be fantastic. Let us know what keywords you can go fantasy and women's view promo.
Narrator (33m 44s): If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the amwritingfantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join autumn and Yesper on patrion.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the amwritingfantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Not everyone will like your book, but they aren't supposed to either. You aim is to find the reader who likes the kind of fiction you write.
What happens when you do come across someone who doesn't appreciate your work and leave a bad review on Amazon? How do you tackle it?
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
If you spend any time on the Internet, you'll find advise stating that writers should write every day. Is that true?
What happens when things get in the way? Are you then a failure?
In episode 35 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, Autumn and Jesper shares their thoughts on a topic that troubles many.
Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.
SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST!
Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.
Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy For as little as a dollar a month, you’ll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Narrator (3s):
You're listening to the amwritingfantasy podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing join to best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them. Now onto the show with your hosts. Autumn Bert and Jasper Schmidt.
Jesper (32s):
Hello? I am, Jesper.
Autumn (34s):
And I'm autumn,
Jesper (39s):
this is episode 35 of the amwritingfantasy podcast. And, uh, today we're gonna talk a bit about how difficult it is to write every day. And sometimes things are just getting in the way and it can be difficult to continue to write every single day. And we're probably also gonna touch on what you can do to overcome it. I, I'm not sure we have all the answers, but I think we can probably give you some ideas on it. But, uh, yeah, I guess I guess we need to start to say sort of welcome to the new amwritingfantasy.
Uh, we're not supposed to say that. Maybe
Autumn (1m 18s):
I feel like it's new. This is our first real like dedicated podcast. So yay. Am we've got some learning to do about how we're doing this. It's a whole new set up, a whole new recording system. Um, I'm currently on the road, so I'm sitting outside next to a library in Canada, in Poult port Colborne. So if anyone is from the area listening, Hey, I love your town, it's really awesome. I love that your library. But I'm sitting outside because there's no, I don't want to disturb the other library listeners.
So if you hear a little bit of traffic and cicadas on this beautiful August day, that's because am Hey, we're just kind of winging this and learning. And they always say, never wait until the, the situation is optimal. They see this about writing all the time too. You can't wait for everything to be perfect because nothing will ever be perfect and then you'll just keep waiting. So we're doing this and I'm really excited about it actually.
Jesper (2m 16s):
Yeah. Eh, you know, we, we sort of have a, a game plan how we want to structure these podcast episode, but I sort of feel like, uh, until we get the hang of it, we run the risk of getting lost in our own new forms. We'll see how it goes today.
Autumn (2m 33s):
So everyone bear with us. This will only get better, but I hopefully you're as excited as we are to be really launching our podcast and moving away from YouTube is now our secondary channel, but we're still going to have something up there for the pupil or dedicated fans who are still on YouTube.
Jesper (2m 50s):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean everybody can listen to the amwritingfantasy stuff anywhere. It's almost a little, yeah, if you prefer podcast or if you prefer YouTube. That's all good. The only difference is that you can't see us anymore. So we can sort of sit in our pajamas here like we talked about last week and uh, yeah, you will have no idea.
Autumn (3m 18s):
No, but I says I'm sitting outside. I am not in pajamas today. Maybe next time.
Jesper (3m 24s):
Oh, thank God. I was just thinking if we hear like a police car, something that we know why,
Autumn (3m 29s):
yeah. If I disappear for Siri, suddenly am just don't ask, but post bail. No,
Jesper (3m 38s):
no, exactly. Yeah. And we, uh, we also talked in some, a, a bit of music. They in the beginning as you can hear. And, uh, throughout the podcast we have a few other sorts of music pieces that we're going to use. And by the end of the episode there's also some music. So I will be curious to know what the, what the listeners thinks of the branding music. Uh, I mean, we, you and I autumn have been debating a bit about the, the branding music when we got it recorded. Uh, we, as you can here, we paid somebody other than ourselves to, to do the, uh, the recording of that music.
And of course he's a, a ton better than we are at, at that stuff. But yeah, I mean, we sort of tried to find a way, what do, what did we want him to say and, and what music should they be in the background and whatnot. But I don't know. I mean, maybe we have just have to ask people.
Autumn (4m 30s):
Yeah. Let us know. That'd be really great. We love feedback. So that's, that's important to us. And, you know, we're all adapting, so, you know, take that with a grain of salt. But what do you think about our new intro and our new music? We'd love to hear.
Jesper (4m 46s):
Yeah. I mean, maybe at some point we could, uh, get something else recorded if we want it, but, uh, but at least for now, we'll stick with this stuff. Uh, but, but that doesn't mean that we don't want to hear what you think of it. And, uh, and maybe we'll change it at least. Uh, it's funny because when we were doing a YouTube, we were always told also by the YouTube consultant at, yeah. But you don't not take music more than 15 seconds because people hate it. But I think, uh, on a podcast, I think it's, it's different.
So here, hopefully we can, uh, we can have a bit more music. I like,
Autumn (5m 21s):
like I said, well we're a, you know, and I were debating switching from YouTube to podcast. I think podcast is going to fit us better. Um, I'm not very good at, you know, jumping up there and showing everything and being on video where I like to get in depth. And I think readers like to get in depth. We're, we're a little bit of a slower crowd and I think listening is something we're much more attuned to. Just like, that's why audio books are so popular. You know, it's, this is like the audio version instead of the movie adaptation.
And I don't want to do the movie adaptation. I've never wanted to be an actor or an actress. So this, I think this will fit us very well. And I hope if it's our re our listeners and I said, let us know what you think if this is something that's working for you.
Jesper (6m 12s):
yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and basically what we also wanted to do is, uh, start this podcast by sharing a bit of a, you know, a personal story. What's just happened, what is happening in our life. And so forth, rather than just, uh, you know, getting into the topic. And then that's it because I think, at least when I listened to podcast, I like to hear sort of what's going on in, in the personal life and, and whatnot. So, so we're gonna, we're going to do it out a bit in the beginning of each episode here. And then of course, if some of you listeners, if you, if you don't like to listen to, to that, then you just start off, skip 10 minutes into each episode and then you'll get into the topic or something like that.
Maybe 50 minutes. I don't know. We'll see how it goes. I've lost it. Yeah,
Autumn (6m 60s):
I think we're doing great. But yeah, so I think we still have a little bit of time and I'll share something I've already mentioned. I'm on the road to, my husband and I are set out on a little two month adventure through the United States. It's coming to an end and we've been actually traveling for four years on the road. We've done almost a hundred thousand miles across the U S and Canada. I know. And I've loved it. Oh my gosh. The things we've seen, it's been so inspiring. And I could tell stories for years and years and years, uh, about what we've done and seen and I'm hardly done.
But I also think we're coming to a new transition period and I'm excited because believe it or not, traveling every day was actually getting in some ways frustrating. So we are secretly looking at a small community in the summer. I'd never thought I'd want to move, but I'm super excited. So I'm hoping I'll have big news to share in maybe a few weeks, maybe a couple of months about a new location and some new things I'll be digging into and stable internet Oh my gosh.
I'd be so excited for this. I'm trying to imagine having a door I can close because you get the listeners can't see what my camper looks like. The what we traveled in, but it's, I'm not a solid vehicle. It's not a solid camper. It has a canvas top to it as well. So it's not soundproof either. But it is my home and you and I have recorded videos that we've done so much stuff and put up with some poor sound quality. But can you imagine both of us with having like doors that we can close and telling our significant others and spouses be quiet.
This is my toy, so we'll see how it goes.
Jesper (8m 49s):
Indeed. Yeah. And, and I have to say you, you've been really good at posting pictures. Autumn a I like when I see you, your traveling pictures are on Facebook. There's some truly amazing nature. I mean, of course, bear in mind that I'm, I'm from Denmark. You know, this country is just flat, nothing except fields and flatness here. So when you're posting all your mountain pictures or whatever, you know, that's just awesome for me.
Autumn (9m 14s):
I'll make sure I go back and share some more Iowa. I have enough pictures to last for years and uh, where we're thinking of going to doesn't have many mountain pictures, but the area is gorgeous and I can't wait to take those pictures too.
Jesper (9m 28s):
Alright, cool. And you know what, because I'm not traveling, so I'm usually at home and I have stable internet and uh, I then am able to watch stuff like Netflix and whatnot. Have you ever watched, uh, the Danish series called the rain? Yeah.
Autumn (9m 44s):
Yes. Actually I have, I've watched is what, two or three seasons now? I've watched all of them.
Jesper (9m 50s):
I think there's two seasons. Yeah, they read the second season recently. But that's pretty cool because at that you actually watched it because I wanted to, to talk a bit about that because I'm really, really like I cannot make up my mind what I'm thinking because the first season was okay. And then recently the upload of the second season and then I've been watching the second season as well. And it's like, so you have these moments in the story where actually it's, it's pretty good, you know, that they build tension really nicely and you don't know what's going to happen.
And it's like, okay, this, this is cool. And then they, they put the most amateurs, insane, bad dialogue in the middle of everything. All of it. All of a sudden, you know, the coaters are just saying stupid stuff and I get completely pulled out a story and it's like, what the hell? I mean, how can you simultaneously build a very, very good and interesting story and then have characters that are just saying the stupidest stuff. I mean, I don't know.
Autumn (10m 49s):
I agree. I especially, there was a few parts like the rain, obviously the name, it's very important and especially the first series. It's an amazingly frightening event when it rains. The second series, watch how many times it rains and no one freaks out. And I'm wondering just something changed, miss something huge. But there are times too that characters disappear and no one's looking for them. And these were supposed to be like a tough band of friends. And there were definitely times when I'm like, this is great.
And so many other times I'm like, Oh, can we just fast forward through this? Please
Jesper (11m 28s):
yeah, indeed. Yeah. I mean, the only thing I would say though, when it comes to, uh, to this am a second season here, the, the way that they build over, if you look at the story, if you'd see the season as a character arc for for for us machine or the guy who has this, uh, cursing him or this virus in him. If you look at the character arc, I really think that the one thing that do incredibly well with the second season is to build a Superbowl.
You know, if you're looking at it. Yeah. I mean you by the end of the season, the last episode, I know I'm not going to spoil anything, but basically giving that guy every single reason why he is going to take out prevents on everything and there is a solid reason for it. And I think that is extremely
Autumn (12m 17s):
yes. And I think the developing relationship of his sister and now I can't remember her sort of boyfriends sorta not boyfriend's name is also very good. And some other quirks with hospice too, with, uh, he gets a love interest and how that pans out is just, yeah, I definitely, when I write, I like to throw in a little bit of romance. I think it's important. It kind of gets everyone warm and fuzzy and talk about building tension. You just yanked the romance strings out from under somebody.
She collapses worlds over that. So I really do enjoy, uh, there are some, uh, major parts of it that they do a fantastic job developing and it's worth watching. I don't regret watching it. It's not the best one out there. I might share with you. Am there's one I'm watching. I can't wait to ask if you've seen, because it's one of those shows where I've given up trying to figure out what's going to happen and I'm just trusting the writers. They will do what I don't expect them to do and it'll be fantastic.
And it's amazing when you find a show or a book or anything that you just finally give up trying to figure out and say, yes, entertain me.
Jesper (13m 30s):
Indeed. Oh, week on the internet with the amwritingfantasy podcast all right. Uh, you know, one thing we talked about as well autumn and I am not sure if we ever sort of concluded on it, but maybe we can, uh, maybe we can outsource this to the audience or listeners. He actually, that's probably a good idea, but I, I'm not sure if we ever figured out if it was possible to leave comments on the Google podcast app or the native Apple podcast app. I know we figured out that if you go to the pot bean site, uh, on amwritingfantasy then people can leave comments.
But I'm assuming if we forgot the others
Autumn (14m 7s):
I have not managed to as of yet, so I'm not sure. So if any listeners know how we can get the comment section live on Apple and Google, how we can get access to those other than logging in, I guess, and checking them ourselves, that'd be great. We'd love some pointers. If some people are really like good at commenting and love giving feedback and just know how the whole thing works.
Jesper (14m 31s):
Yeah. The, the, the easiest thing is actually just to see if you're able to leave a comment on the, on the Google podcast app order audit or your Apple podcast app and, and, and see what happens. I have no idea if are going to receive an email notification that there was a comment, but, but try it out and uh, we'll see what happens actually because it would be cool for us to just hear, uh, what you think of a this first, um, this first episode in the new phone. Well, always, but I also wanted to mention that am it was really funny because we posted on Patrion about these changes that we were going to make a, obviously we, for the, for the Patrion members, we am we post or they have early access to, to the episode.
So we posted it a couple of days in advance and then, uh, on Patrion moose spirit went in and he actually wrote a whole story around how the, uh, amwritingfantasy podcasts that changed from YouTube to a, to a podcast. And he was sort of making a story around the, you know, the parenting from Lord of the rings, you know, that, that sort of severe that they look through and uh, and they can see far off lands and all that stuff. And he was lying. Oh no. You know, we kind of see into Palin team anymore and whatnot. It was really, it was really funny.
So I would just wanted to thank most be at for for that. Uh, that story he posted. That was so fun. Yeah,
Autumn (15m 57s):
it's always good to get a check while I love, I love, that's why I've always enjoyed, um, working with writers, even Twitter when it was 140 characters, the snippets, the snarky cleverness of writers just always makes me smile and it's fantastic. So, but I was going to mention that, you know, it's, we're still figuring out, we'd love comments. Uh, we get them from Petrie on, we're hoping to figure out how to get them through the podcast. We have had a few thank you Irish for going in and showing us that, Hey, comments do work on the pod bean site.
At the very least. But we do also have the amwritingfantasy group. And I was looking through the comments in there and I thought it was really interesting that what someone had recently posted, the character names should never start with the same letter. I don't know if you saw that one in the are private Facebook group. Yes, but, but I thought that was interesting because I've heard that, you know, try not to have the same name but the same first letter like, Oh yeah, I have broken that quite a lot. It was interesting seeing the, the followup comments of what other people thoughts on that one.
And I don't know about you. I mean, have you tried to avoid even this first letter, the same first letter or do you just try to make sure that they sound or look incredibly different?
Jesper (17m 15s):
It's so funny because at some point I was, uh, I was, I was talking, I think, I think it was in a YouTube video to be honest, but I cannot remember where it was. But at some point I w I was basically giving the same advice saying, you know, you shouldn't, or maybe it's in the flooding book. Actually I can't remember any more. But anyway, there was some place where I was giving the advice that am that you should really avoid that. And then the funny thing is that in my own Keystone bone trilogy, the two main characters have to say the first letter for their names. So it's so stupid.
So it's one of those things, you know, do as I say, don't, don't do as I,
Autumn (17m 49s):
yeah, I guess so. I guess I, like I said, I've always heard, you know, try to keep it away, tried to keep them looking different. I have read a book that was historical fiction and I think three characters had very, almost identical if you said them, they were identical names, but again, it was historical and that's true to the history at the time. And they tried to separate them by doing different spellings while I'm writing fantasy I think the worst I can say though, is that I didn't realize this a tool. I was doing the audio book that I had a character durag and I also had one to hall and I realized, Oh my gosh, that is like two letters different and I make sure I don't do that again.
But no one's ever commented on it. No one's ever gotten them confused. So I don't know. And I still, they will start with the, yeah, I mean look at George RR Martin. Can you imagine if he had no characters with the same first, he had 150 named characters, I believe in the first set of books. Yeah. So how could you, there's how many letters of the alphabet, so you've got to have to start repeating yourself at some point.
Jesper (18m 55s):
Yeah, indeed. Yeah. I guess so, uh, I think the other thing I should just mention here before we transition into the actual content of, of today's am episode was just that if you're listening to this episode, when it releases on the 26th of August, then actually the next live Q and a session is on the 2nd of September, which means that if you head on over to patron, uh, just, you can find the link in the episode show notes here, but if you have a head over or to Patrion and if you join on the adult pregnancy or that's the $5 one, we have actually just change the reward system so that you will be able to join us on the 2nd of September four live Q and a session.
So if you, interesting headache, head over to patron checkout, uh, how we set up all the rewards there. There's a ton of rewards for that. You're going to get your hands on for basically as, as little as a dollar a month. But if you want to access to the Q and a session, then that's the $5 year. But a head over over and uh, and checks.
Autumn (20m 7s):
So writing every day. I, I swear by that, I teach it and I've sort of changed my mind. Oh mine. Well I do think it's incredibly important, but I also think doing something every single day. Yes it's important to have the hub habit, but it's also important to build in time off. Why do we have vacations from work?
Why do we, you know, even do different things like date nights with our off spouses to kind of shake things up. And I think every once in a while we even have to give ourselves a break cause you know, usually you tell someone right everyday and if you don't, you know, you should feel bad. You're a bad writer. You did not write today. And I actually, you know this, I just reached a stress point earlier this month that really came out of nowhere, I think had been building for a while.
But it really hit me hard surprisingly. And I don't break. I'm, I'm the rock in my relationship in my life. I know nothing usually shakes me, but I had an earthquake. So it does happen. And I needed some time off and I stopped feeling guilty and said, I'm taking, I think it's been two weeks now. I've written maybe two days and if it comes, I'm like, that's fantastic, but I'm not pushing myself because I needed a break. I felt like the wellhead normally run dry, like the gas tank had run dry.
I was sucking up the sludge in the bottom and it was crap. And I knew it was crap and I wasn't loving any second of it. And that's not why I write. Yeah. I think I'm a writer. It is important to keep writing. Um, I, it is a business to me as much as a job. And you do show up every day, but that's not true. You get vacations at work, you get sick days, you do get time off and haven't, haven't taken a break. I'm excited about things. Again, I'm excited about the story again.
I think I really, I didn't realize how low I'd gone, but I needed it. And now I'm thinking, you know what, why don't we, you get weekends off from your job. Why do we tell writers to write every single day without even saying, take a break once a month. Give yourself a day off.
Jesper (22m 30s):
Yeah, yeah. I follow your line of thinking here, but, but I'm also, I'm going to challenge you a bit as well, the way I, I mean, okay, this is difficult because it's like a walking a very way we find balance because I fully agree that it's very easy for writing and Andy orthos business side of your life to basically take over. And that is certainly not healthy. So I am fully in agreement with you that, you know, you shouldn't like let everything take over and, and basically, you know, grind yourself too to the ground by stress and having to write.
And you probably, if you follow a bit, uh, along on the, on the internet, uh, the listener here, then you've probably seen all the Facebook groups and whatnot where it's sort of become well popular to say that you should be publishing books every month. And if you don't publish book every month, then the Amazon gods don't like you and it's going to be shit, you know? And I don't prescribe to that. I don't think that's true and I think that's only going to drive you to stress basically.
Right, so they should have some certainly not. And then set out saying all that. Then at the same time we are writers so we do need to write, but then if I'm looking at myself like example then because we also running this amwritingfantasy business and we are basically running like you know, courses and we are currently recording a course for wealth building as well as, I mean if I'm looking at myself, I have not written anything since I finished the first draft of our plotting book, which is probably like, I don't know, maybe four or five weeks ago, maybe more, I'm not sure, but it's a long time ago and I've not written any fiction words ever since or a nonfiction words in that case.
But I've not written anything other than I've been writing scripts for the course and recording costs, modules and whatnot. But if I had to do both, I would probably get pretty stressed out. So I just sort of said, okay, I'm going to be done with the courses first and then afterwards I'm going, you know, then autumn is reviewing or editing are plotting book and then at some point that's done and we'll get into our fiction writing again. But why am why I'm struggling with this basically autumn is because I cannot either advocate that you sort of come up with excuses for yourself to not right.
Meaning that, Oh okay I need to do the cost so now I can't do anything else or I need to do Facebook apps so now I can't do anything else. And you know, because that's, it also happens that people come up with excuses for themselves not to. Right. All right, so I don't know. I'm really struggling with,
Autumn (25m 21s):
I have to admit cause I was going to say that it kind of also depends on what you define as writing. Are we just going to talk about fiction? Because I have been writing, I've been writing on the Patreon posts, I've got other things that I've been working on. But I've, I think I've definitely talking about more like the book a story and you know, cause sometimes switch. Yeah, exactly. So that's, but again, I do think we often don't credit authors to consider that writing is writing. Sometimes that's journaling, sometimes you're writing sales copy, book blurbs, all those things do also count too.
Writing but there's something different. So another pressure with working on a story development and getting it going and developing and creating that. And so I have to admit, I, there isn't that part of me that says, is it, you know, are you making an excuse? Have you not written for a very long time? Or in general, are you writing every single day? You're usually really, really good at it. And some days you just need a day to go, maybe read a book or take a walk to the beach, just go do something else that doesn't involve, you know, picking up your, your story and developing it.
Or maybe just, you know, taking a day off and maybe just thinking about it and seeing what comes out of that instead of working in it. I mean, it's really tough. It is. I mean,
Jesper (26m 45s):
because it's also like, you know, if you're going to make a living from writing, you have to write. It's not like, you know, if I go into a J to a day job, it's not like I can go to the boss and say, you know, today I'm just not feeling it. I think I'm like, I have what coast block today so maybe I'm not going to do, I'm going to go to the beach. You know? It doesn't work like that. And if you're a writer, you know, I'm not saying that it can never happen that you take a day off and that is not what I'm saying.
That's, that's fine. But, but I think there's also a bit of a, not for everybody, but for some people there's a bit of too much coming up with excuses for why I don't feel, I don't feel the story today or, well, I'm a bit tired today. I will write tomorrow. But you know, if you want to make a living from writing, you'll have to do, you have to, right, right. I mean, am I wrong?
Autumn (27m 41s):
Very true. I do not disagree with you. And I mean, by slowing down, taking a break, I've had to readjust my timelines and tell my readers that, Hey, I know I said I wanted to finish the strap at the end of August and I just needed for some personal issues. I needed to push that back to the end of September because I just needed a break. But at the same time, I do think that, you know, it does come down to keeping things realistic, knowing if you do need a break. But again, I think, uh, you and I definitely will.
We're writing, we have a tendency to make sure we were writing every single day, literally seven days a week. I have, I always keep a minimum word count, which is easy. I mean, it's 500 words. Even when I'm stressed, busy, I tried to get up in the morning and write 500 words. So it's just like half an hour. If I can't put a half an hour aside to write to at least keep things going. That's really kind of sad. But you know, I do know a few authors who write 5,000 words a day. Um, she turns out a book literally I think every month or you know, a month and a half, two months max between the editing and everything else.
And I had went to admire her and also think 5,000 words. That's all. There's so much more I want to do in a day other than just write that story. I have, you know, a husband, I have a dog, I am a graphic artists. I like talking to other authors. I don't think I want to spend eight hours in a cafe writing 500 words, but I know
Jesper (29m 11s):
no that, that, that's why I love the dictation because I think I can turn out like three, probably three, 4,000 words and two 20 hours writing and then I'm done. But of course it's w first draft material, right? You still need to do all the editing and whatnot after when it's not, it's not pretty pros. But the story is it are and that's the main thing. You know the story and get that recorded, then you can make it sound nice.
Autumn (29m 35s):
That's true. Of course. I tried to do a fairly clean first draft, but I still, I everyone's got to do editing and it's gotta be decent. But I do think there's, like I said, I've seen a benefit for having taken a little bit of time off cause I really hit the bottom of the barrel. But is every author going to hit that? I mean I've been publishing since 2012 and this is my first break and I can send a true break because it's am. I have been doing other types of writing I just haven't, I've only plucked, like I said, I've plucked away at my story.
I think I've done a thousand words and two weeks out is so abysmal, but it feels, I feel ready to look at it again and I know I'm ready to look at it again. So I know myself, I know my habits. And so maybe, yeah, I'm going to say, if you've been writing for seven years and you want to take a two week break break, I'm going to say it's really took off. It's probably okay. But if you've only been writing seven days a, this is your first attempt ever in writing uh, maybe you should, you know, work at that a little bit more.
If you haven't ever finished a book, if you never finished, you know, if you're been working on a chapter for a month, it's time to finish that chapter and move on. So those are the important things you do need to keep going. I, you know, I've always said even just a sentence, at least keep it going, make the story feel alive. At least give yourself a little bonus saying, I sat down today, all that came out was one decent sentence, but you did it. That's important.
Jesper (31m 12s):
Yeah. And of course there was also a diff, I mean, well we were just talking, talking about thousands of words there, but, but I mean if you just, you know, write 250 words a day, uh, you know, a year from now you'll have an all,
Autumn (31m 23s):
you'll get there. And again, think about as why I teach, what, you know, how we teach what we do and having an outline, if you just have your end goal in sight, like I'm writing a novella, I know how many chapters that's going to be, I know what chapter I'm on, I know what's going to happen next. So I know exactly where I am. And I think that really helps to knowing where your finish line is. The author I know who writes that 5,000 words a day, they literally, they already have it all figured out, the exact word count. And they're basically checking boxes off every single day saying, I did this, I did this, I did this.
And it is, it is truly a business and a work schedule and a milestones and everything else that they've basically got a business plan with every single book they write. I'm impressed and terrified that at the same time, but it shows you how much you know you can put out and she's making a living from her writing and that's one reason it's so serious for her.
Jesper (32m 24s):
Yeah, and of course, I mean there, there is a few different things that you can do to make sure that at least it becomes easier to stick to, to the writing part. I mean we, human beings are creatures of, so if we, if you can link your writing and into a habit, make it become a habit. And what I mean by that is that, for example, I like to say either write first thing in the morning before there was any distractions that can derail you or write late in the evening when for example, everybody else in the house has gone to bed and you know that, that you can no longer be distracted by something because then at least you will, you will protect your writing time.
And I think it's important to protect that writing time and um, maybe it, it's also good to, well I don't know it probably that this is not so important for me, but maybe it'll help some other people and maybe, I don't know what you think about it autumn but if you could train your body to sort of recognize some signals, that would probably be good. You know, like if I put on some certain music than my body is trained to know, okay, this is because I'm going to write or maybe I make myself especially a cup of tea every evening before and then I know, okay, now it's time to ride.
I think, I don't know. Maybe that'll be helpful for someone.
Autumn (33m 48s):
I think it does. Those little writing rituals I think are actually really key. I think it can be, sometimes it could be a disadvantage because if you have, I had myself trained when I was working full time, I would come home, see my husband, I make a cup of tea, I'd sit down with my laptop and do not talk to me for like an hour and 45 minutes. This is my time. I'm writing a book and that it would be like social time, make dinner. But then if sometimes I'd have a Saturday and I suddenly had three hours and it wasn't the right time, my body and my mind, we're not like, Oh, you want it right now.
Oh, okay. And it will take longer to get into the story. But I, and I would almost do the exact, I could have three hours instead of like 45 minutes and I'd only get probably the same amount of work done. And it's like, well darn. So you have to, yeah, it helps when you maybe don't make it time dependent, but maybe routine dependent music. You know, put on music, put on, sit down at your writing desk to make sure you turn off all your apps that could possibly ping you and tell you that someone just left the new comment on Instagram and you have to go see it.
Don't just throw all that stuff off and start writing. And I do think that is very important, but it shouldn't be the only thing if you're spontaneous, don't just go for it.
Jesper (35m 7s):
Right? Yeah. The, I can't remember if I ever asked you before, but do you believe in writer's block? Autumn I
Autumn (35m 12s):
don't. I, for me, the only time I, I do believe in writer's block in some ways, I've never had it where the story was completely dead to me. But I've had, I've hit walls that I've learned to realize are usually my subconscious saying something is missing. And every time when I stepped back and looked everything, looked at the plot, try to figure out what was going on, I would be like, Oh my gosh, I cannot believe I just missed this thread, this, everything would have gone off the rails if I hadn't stopped here.
And that's usually what it is for me. It's usually assigned. My subconscious is seeing something that I consciously did not see, but I've never had a complete like, Oh my gosh, I can't, I'm sitting here staring at a blank page. I can't write a word. I don't know. You could give me a piece of lint and I'll put a character on it and I could probably write 5,000 words. It's not difficult. It's not that I can't write, but maybe I don't want to write what I'm supposed to be writing, but I can always, right.
Jesper (36m 20s):
Yeah. I don't believe in writer's block in the sense that you can sort of run out of creativity, which I think is also what you were mentioning there. I mean, I, I, for me, writer's blog is just a, it's a symptom that you don't know what's gonna happen next us. The problem, right? You, you've sort of gotten to a stage that the story where I'm a bit stuck here, I don't know what the characters are going to do next or what's going to happen next. And at least for me, I find that the outlining just to hit helps tremendously. It to keep the writing going because I always know what's going to happen next.
I, I never get stuck. I agree. Then of course some people can start saying, well, if you're outlaying of, and this is something I talked a bit about it or we talk a bit about in the, in the plotting book, which of course we have not released yet, but just trust us, it's there on a file. But, um, we talk, they're a bit about how some people feel like, well, if you know what's going to happen, then there was no excitement in writing it because you, but yeah, I mean I guess I in one way or another, I, I can sort of follow the logic on that, but on the other hand, the fact that I know what's going to happen and I know exactly where it's going just means that it saves me so much time in editing, plot holes and all that stuff, or rewriting whole sections afterwards because there is no potholes.
Autumn (37m 42s):
No, I agree. I, that's a, I mean, I still find
Jesper (37m 45s):
so, yeah, I don't know if that's how I view writer's block. I don't really an insane
Autumn (37m 52s):
and outline as you do, but I definitely, and I still find, Oh no, sorry. Hopefully you can hear me now. Okay. Yeah. Are you, yeah, there we go. God, I love technology. It's, or a staffing things around the world. So, but yeah, I think am was plotting. I plot Navy not as as thoroughly as you do, but I always know what's happening in the chapter and I've got to set up the scenes maybe a little bit and sometimes new threads develop.
And like I said, no matter how much you plot, sometimes something new can come up and you realize you missed it. And that's usually when I realized that the story is not clicking for some reason. And I pause and I figure it out. And usually, uh, sometimes adding chapters, figuring out what's missing to really develop it. But I would think even with outlining, I'm always excited to write what's coming next because I can't wait to take what's a brief idea, you know, outline in a couple of sentences and turn it into a full fledge scene with emotion and dialogue and characters like moving.
And there are always those lulls that you're like, okay, I want to get to the mix. Really big tension filled moment. So it takes, you know, sometimes there's some spots where you're like, okay, I just want to push through this. But usually I'm just excited if I'm not excited to write as a reader going to be excited to read it.
Jesper (39m 15s):
No does too. But, but, but you want to, I think there was an important point in what you just said there because this thing about getting excited, I think there's a flip side to this that we need to be mindful of and be careful with because I, I fully agree that of course you should be excited about what's happening in your own story and that stuff. But at the same time it's so easy to get blinded by a new idea. Or you know, this happens so often and this is probably why there's a million manuscripts in desk drawers around the world here.
But you know, people get the third way through their manuscript on a novel and then they feel like, well, I don't know, I don't quite feel the story anymore and I have this other idea that is excellent. So let me pause this, a novel and then I'll start writing that one instead. And then they get a third way through that one. And then the same thing happens again. And I think you have to stick to it. You know, if you're, if you're going to make any sort of a Monday from riding, you have to finish the novels. So you can't just jump every time you get excited by something newer because it happens to all of it.
It happens to me as well. Often, you know, when I'm halfway through or a third way through or whatever, uh, through a novel, then I start getting exciting by it, the next book and what's going to happen there. But I can't just jump around all the time. Right. I mean, it's never going to get done then.
Autumn (40m 38s):
No, it's very true. I mean, we both tend to write series. You can't even in the one thing with a book, but you know, you're on book one or two of a series. You can't just say, Oh no, I'm gonna go do this other one. Instead, you really, you make a choice of pro business choice, professional choice, a promise to your readers that you're going to finish what you start. So you're going to have to finish what you start, even when you maybe want to go check out something new. And I have to admit, that's one reason to wrap back to where we started. One reason I've taken a writer's break the last two weeks is that, you know, there's a few other ideas and crazy scenes that I'm kind of tempted to just go, just, just do something fun and get myself going on those.
And I'm kind of resisting that pool.
Jesper (41m 28s):
The wonderful thing happened here with technology that a, all of this water lost her connection there. But I can see she's coming back now slowly here when you want to move and get into to a stable place with staple into, in the near future. But, uh, yeah, it just dropped the connection, but it happens. So I don't know what good points she was about to make, but I guess what I could tell you is at least a, another little trick that some people talk about is that, uh, whether or not you should enter the chapters or you should stop in the middle of a chapter.
Um, and because I'm sort of a checklist kind of guy, I really liked to end chapters completely because then I feel good about myself that I know that that chapter's done it. Then I can move on to the next 10 day tomorrow. But they are also authors whereby actually doing stopping middle of a sentence in the middle of a chapter because then basically you, you jumped straight into the flow the day after. So, so that's another little trick that you can apply if you find that helpful.
So I guess the conclusion is that don't get derailed. And next Monday we'll cover how to handle bad reviews.
Narrator (42m 54s):
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Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion)
Jesper (1s):
Hey there. Jesper just dropping in here, uh, up at the front of the episode. I have an excellent guest host on today, but I just wanted to drop in here quickly to let you know that we had a bit of audio quality issues, the internet on my guests and is not entirely stable and at one point about 18 and a half minute in it actually drops, which means that I cannot hear him and he keeps talking for a bit while I'm also talking on top of him to hoping, hoping that he's coming back online.
So you're going to get about one and a half minute where we accidentally talk over one another. So my apologies for that. And also when it comes to his internet connection, there is a bit static on his end and uh, unfortunately I've done everything I can to try to clean it out, but, but it's not possible to get it any better than it is now, but you can hear everything he says. So I've decided to release this episode anyway, so I hope you will get a lot out of it. And the much, much apologies for the audio quality here.
Thank you.
Narrator (1m 7s):
You're listening to the amwritingfantasy podcast. In today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them. Now onto the show with your hosts, autumn Bert and Jasper Schmidt.
Jesper (1m 35s):
Hello, I am Yesper and this is episode 43 of the amwritingfantasy podcast. And we are going to talk about reviving dead books. Meaning, how do you get books that doesn't sell to start selling again? And as you've noticed that autumn is not with me today, but instead I actually have a guest host and that's Stuart Peyman, whose books have reached international international bestseller status in the U S Australia and Canada. So we'll come to the amwritingfantasy podcast do it.
Stuart (2m 7s):
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Jesper (2m 10s):
And I, I actually understood, uh, from a bit of our email conversations that they just spent a bit of time in. I was about to say my part of the world, well I think it was in Germany and I'm in Denmark, but it's close.
Stuart (2m 21s):
Pretty close. Yeah. I was in central Germany, went to college and verts Berg, so been a decent amount of time in Europe. Oh, okay. What's bird? Where's when Germany is, that is basically dead in the center of Germany. So it's a sort of a little bit to the East of Frankfurt. Probably the nearest a landmark, but not too far from you hick and yeah, honestly you can get anywhere from the center of the country, so it got to travel around a good amount as well. Oh, nice. Nice. Nice. So you were there for several years then. Yeah, for a good bit of time and really, really enjoyed it.
I love the food. I love the climate. Uh, it's just a wonderful place to live.
Jesper (2m 59s):
Oh, cool. Very cool. But uh, but I think you're back in the U S now, right? Yup.
Stuart (3m 4s):
So living in Kentucky, which is a in the Midwest of the United States. Yeah.
Jesper (3m 9s):
Right. Okay. And actually before we get into the whole conversation about reviving dead books, which, ah, which I guess you've made a bit of a specialty out of. But before we get into that, I also noticed that you writing some lit RPG books and uh, I know that that's a, a Shaundra that has been a bit there. I don't know if we can call it hot, but, uh, I, I haven't understood that it's, it's something that, um, that is selling quite well in general, but, but it's also I think a bit of a special show to write.
So I was just wondering if you could, you know, just yeah, a bit of insights about what is lit RPG and how do you go about writing it because I think it's a bit different isn't it?
Stuart (3m 50s):
Yeah, it's a very niche, sort of a sub genre of fantasy and PSI Phi and, and really have any other genre you can sort of turn things into lit RPG. But, uh, it's been around for a while since ready. Player one came out quite some time ago, but really got big when the ready player one movie debuted a couple of years ago. And when that came out a lot of people started to get turned on the little RPG and a lot of people will call a game lit as well. And um, now the hardcore readers will, we'll put some designations between game lit and lit RPG, but typically, uh, the whole concept behind the sub genres, you have a fantasy, scifi horror world, whatever it might be, B.
But in that world there exists the sort of mechanics of an actual video games. So, um, and I've got three different lid RPG series now that have done pretty well. Uh, it's uh, definitely a hot selling Shondra at the moment. Am it's really, uh, a lot of fun to write. And being a lifelong gamer, it's sort of like writing the video game that I wish I could play. And that adds a whole new dimension to the entire writing process, which is a ton of fun, but really starting to get popular am in the past year or so, just sort of a genre that's blown up.
Jesper (5m 8s):
Right? But am I right in understanding that you are actually writing out, that's for characters and stuff like that as well. Or
Stuart (5m 15s):
so there'll be a stats for the characters. They'll have like strength, agility, uh, this sort of traditional stats that you would expect from a video game. They go on quests, they go on dungeon runs, they get magic gear every time they level up and you know, gain experience points they need to pick new talents and they're sort of building their, their build more or less than kind of gives you that feeling of reading someone playing a really fun video game.
Jesper (5m 41s):
Right. So you're describing in the book itself what they're picking when delivering up and all that stuff. Yeah,
Stuart (5m 47s):
exactly. And, and why they're making that decision and, and uh, what they anticipate that decision might mean in the future. Like if I get this talent now, it should unlock these future talents. And, uh, you can really mentally envision the video game aspect of it quite well.
Jesper (6m 3s):
Wow. That does different, yeah. And uh, and quite, it must also am I've never read a book like that, but it must be quite a different reading experience as well because I assume, I assume that's still a story in there, but, but a lot of it will then be broken up by these sort of well known story elements where you're just learning what skills they're picking for leveling up and stuff like that.
Stuart (6m 27s):
Yeah, it's very interesting because this story in some other PGS can honestly be secondary to the progression of the game and the progression of the character through the game. Uh, just depends on which kind of lit RPG you're reading. But I got turned on to it just on a recommendation from someone they told me I should read dungeon Lord by a Hugo who ESKA and the read that and just really, really, really liked it and just thought like, this is the kind of fantasy like I could write this, this is a lot of fun. And, uh, wrote my first one and took a while to really get it good and, and to really perfect it.
But, uh, it's done really well. It's sold quite well and I'm really happy about that. So definitely a lot of fun to write. And, uh, my, my first one only took me 20 days cover to cover, to write it. So, um, very, very fast writing it because it was simply so much fun to do.
Jesper (7m 18s):
But how, how long are, uh, is a lit IPG novel in general? How many words is,
Stuart (7m 23s):
yeah, I mean typically the longer the better. So my very first one was right around 80,000 words. My, I've got two more that are coming out in November that are both over a hundred thousand words. So, um, the longer you can get them, the better. I'm just like normal, Epic fantasy people like to stay in that world as long as possible.
Jesper (7m 40s):
All right. Okay. Very cool. I was just curious about that. I know it's a complete detour versus what we're going to talk about. What I was just curious. Yeah, very new
Stuart (7m 49s):
stuff.
Jesper (7m 50s):
Yeah. Okay. But maybe we should get on topic, uh, for the sake of the listener here as well. Um, so yeah, I previously in the past I talked to Dave Chesson who, who was, uh, who was also on this podcast a while back. Uh, he's the guy who does the publisher rocket software and uh, he mentioned Stuart that I should contact you because you have made a bit of a specialty to revive that books. Uh, and you're also doing it for traditional publishing companies as far as I understood.
But yeah, but where do we start this whole conversation about how to revive it? That book, if the listener is in the situation where they have a book they published but it's just not selling.
Stuart (8m 32s):
Yeah. Thank the first thing to do is just identify the quality of the product itself, which could be pretty difficult and it kind of requires you to step back with an unbiased eye and try not to look at the book as, Oh, this is, you know, my baby that I've worked on for so long and my projects that I've had, you know, sort of putting in my heart for so long that I really want to succeed. And the first step is just to look at the product as just a product that you're selling to consumers. Like anything else, if you ran a pizza shop or whatever, you would look at the quality of the product that you're selling and see where you can improve that.
So not every book is really, you know, ready to be revived or anything like that. I'm definitely not, there are a lot of books out there where the quality, you know, maybe it's something you wrote 10 years ago and it's just not that great. You know, if you can recognize that it'll save you a lot of time and money and frustration. I've got books that I now call dead books where I've buried those books because the quality just wasn't that good and I'm not going to waste money trying to revive it myself. But then I've got other books that I wrote a long time ago released that did not do as well as I wanted that I have gone back and revive and then um, know working for different publishing companies.
I've done exactly that. But the first step is really, especially if you have a big catalog, identify a good candidate. So you need something with good writing, unless you really want to drop another, a couple of hundred dollars or $1,000 into the editing costs as well. But you want to make sure you have something that's got a good enough backbone essentially to where you can improve it enough and revive it and it'll actually be worth it. Um, but figuring out which book that is in your catalog, it should really be step one.
So really the thing that the strongest writing that didn't sell that, that the non-selling factor was a surprise. That's, that's probably step one for sure.
Jesper (10m 28s):
Right? Yeah. And that of course makes sense. But, but the thing or the question that popped up into my mind here, when you set that is like, but it's not, I don't think necessarily that every author can recognize that themselves. So, so, you know, of course, if you're doing it for a traditional author publisher and they give you some debt books that they could, you know, Stuart, can you please revive these for us? Then you can approach this SD outside opinion that that takes a look at the book and say, okay, this is not up for that, you know, this is not good enough or whatever.
Maybe that sounds a bit harsh but, but you know what I mean. Uh, but if it's the author who, who's supposed to do it on his or her own books, um, do you think that's possible to do or do you need somebody from outside to take a look?
Stuart (11m 14s):
It's definitely difficult and I, I think is, I have worked a little bit as a professional editor and proofreader as well and, uh, worked in acquisitions for a publisher for quite some time, reading through manuscripts in the slush pile and that kind of thing. So I think that gives me a little advantage and a little better perspective where no, I'm not attached to even my own writing as much as someone else might be. Yeah. I, I think that's a skill that people can develop if you look at something, especially if it's been awhile since you've actually sat down to write it, uh, you'll find oftentimes, at least in my experience, that even if I love the book and the moment I was writing it and I was really, really into it, thought it going to be fantastic.
Going back and rereading it, I can look and say like, Oh, this just, you know, it's just not my best work. I've advanced as an author. I'm better than this now and this just doesn't really do it for me. Um, and I think that's a skill that people can develop. Okay. Honestly, I think there's a lot of editors out there that should be able to take a manuscript from someone if you send it and you know, maybe they charge you a hundred bucks or whatever, but just ask the editor, you know, for their outright opinions. Yeah. Do you think this is good enough for me to publish?
You know, from the stuff you've seen that you've edited, um, you know, editors, a lot of times we'll follow how well their books do that they added, you know, look at it and say, Hey, if I were to try to revive this, do you think it's worthwhile? And, and just trying to get an honest answer that way.
Jesper (12m 42s):
Yeah. Yeah, I agree. Uh, and, and I think what I've often said before is that, uh, you need to be careful because what happens a lot of the time is that of course with every single book that we write, the better we become. So you see you, you need to be careful also that you, you don't step into this never ending spiral of, you know, because you can always go back and we write some older books and make them better, but you need to really ask yourself, is it worth it? Because the amount of time that you're spending rewriting is, is quite, uh, you know, it's, it's quite an investment of time to do that versus if it's just a cover that is off, you know, that's a much easier fix to, to see.
So I was just wondering, because I was thinking that if I was going to approach it, rewriting was, unless I for sure knew, of course that this is just not good enough. Then it's, it's a given obviously that you need to do that. But I was just thinking from a time investment perspective, I think that we're rewriting part would probably be the last thing I would do. I would probably try out all the other elements first or, or what,
Stuart (13m 48s):
yeah. If, if it's a book where you can simply pick flyer, like this is a book that needs rewritten, my recommendation would be just shelf it. And if you have that time later in the future, go for it from 90% of us. We're not gonna have that much time. So Jesper you know, pick a different book to try to revive. Or oftentimes I've found it's, it's even easier just to write the next one and just sort of forget about it and know leave that book as dead. But, um, really the, the best, you know, reviving the dead books is if you can go through that back catalog, maybe you've got four or five or six books that really aren't selling and just pick out, you know, find the one that has the strongest writing, the one that is the best that, you know, maybe it needs a proofread, something like that.
But it doesn't need a whole lot of work to the actual manuscript in order to get it ready to go.
Jesper (14m 39s):
Right. And of course, well maybe they won't be many reviews on a day fee if it, if it is really a debt book and has always been a debt book, but, but if you do have some reviews, I think that's also a place where you could go to, to get some hints if, if it really needs another editing pass and you know, if there's complaints about too many typos and whatnot.
Stuart (14m 58s):
Yeah, exactly. I definitely agree with that. Yeah. Um, but I, I was also thinking in terms of
Jesper (15m 9s):
the look inside part, you know, from the Amazon, but how much attention are you, are you placing on making sure that those first, uh, I think, if I'm remember correctly, I might be a bit off on this, but I think it's 10% of the book,
Stuart (15m 23s):
somewhere around there at least. Yeah. So
Jesper (15m 27s):
present, I think you, you can see from the look inside or the free sample on Amazon, but how much attention are you putting on making sure that those 10% are really engaging?
Stuart (15m 36s):
Yeah, it's definitely a part you need to hook the reader. So not every reader of course, is even going to look in on that feature or even know that feature exists. It's definitely a part, um, and that, that some people do pay attention to. And I think a lot of other authors, we'll start there if, you know, if you've written before and you're looking for new materials to read yourself, then it's an area where we're going to look, it's gotta be, of course, you know, professional formatting. And a lot of times, like when I worked for different presses, I'll go into their material.
I'll see, okay, these books were made and you know, 2010 or 2014 and the formatting just back then wasn't as good. And they've gotten a professional format or now or whoever, there's, whoever is doing their formatting is simply gotten better. And so we just need to update this, run the manuscript through the formatting again as though it were brand new and get it updated, get it out there in the professional quality that the other more modern books are used to receiving. And, and that can be definitely a big thing, but I think just from a, okay, really from a story perspective, if you don't hook somebody in the first, you know, 10, 15 pages, if you don't get them absolutely invested, then there's so much other competition out there that readers will leave.
And especially if you're trying to sell and Kindle unlimited, you have to be even more am sort of action heavy and really, uh, punching it up well upfront or you don't really have a chance cause somebody's pinhole unlimited. I mean, they didn't pay to download your book at all. If you don't get them committed and invested in the first 10 pages, they're just going to move on to the next book on their Kindle and you've lost them. So, uh, definitely very important from a story perspective to have a really, really strong active opening that introduces, you know, one or two characters, keeps the cast small, sets up the overarching conflict well and really attaches the reader to those characters right out of the gate.
Yeah, fully agree. Um,
Jesper (17m 36s):
let, let's assume for now that that people sort of, they, they have the, they have the product itself, meaning meaning the book or the writing itself is, is up to par. So, so that, that stuff is good. They have a good to hook in the beginning. Uh, if, if
Stuart (17m 50s):
we assume that that is okay, then what about covers then? Yeah, so the cover of course is a huge aspect of writing and you know, we all know the old phrases of not judging books by their covers. And yet we all do it every single time we buy a book. It's the first step of marketing. It's the first thing you see when you approach a book, whether it be online on a bookshelf, and it doesn't matter. The first thing we see are first impression is always that book cover.
And a lot of times what I've seen in some of the books that I have revived is that the cover just doesn't match the genre expectation. And if you're trying to sell a, a a really, you know, intense suspense thriller and your cover just doesn't speak to me as a thriller, it could be a beautiful gorgeous cover. But if it just doesn't meat the jhana expectations of a thriller, then it's not going to sell well no matter how good the cover is.
So a lot of it is just looking at the top 100 covers in your genre or pick, you know, 10 or so competing authors that your book is most similar to. And you know, you write thrillers, look up Stephen King and Dean Koontz and look up those coppers and see what they look like. Because even if you don't like that style, that's what the reader expect. And that's what the reader wants to see because the reader is going to be coming from Dean Coons or Stephen King and they're going to be looking for more thrillers to read.
And if they see, you know, a thriller that matches what they like, they're going to buy it versus seeing a thriller that could have a gorgeous professional, extremely good cover. But if the cover to them says, Oh, this is historical or horror or fantasy, this isn't a thriller like I like, then they're never going even to reach or blurb and they're not going to get any farther than glancing at your cover and ignoring it and you lose that reader forever. And that's an area where I see a lot of authors don't make sense.
They spot on is that cover just doesn't really, really important and you have to have a cover that really explains what the show is about action and shows that it's not really about, uh, at the point in time when it comes to covers, it is not good many being original, which a lot of us authors can easily try to become a try to, to achieve. We tried to be so original and we try to, to make it so unique that nobody has seen this before and we believe it's, it's to be excellent, but in fact, that is not the case.
Uh, and that's not what we're looking for because readers are looking for something similar to what they used to. And by giving them a cover that that shows them that this is the younger you are getting and it's on par with or similar to two other
Jesper (20m 48s):
best selling books in that younger, then that is how you are going to am to be successful from a, from a coverage perspective. Okay. So, so if that was all about covers then am I'm wondering the other element that also goes into whether another book will sell is the am book descriptions. So, so how do you or how do one yeah, consider or evaluate if once book description is good enough.
Stuart (21m 20s):
Yeah, I think in book descriptions and blurbs or a synopsis, it's a lot more difficult than with covers cause converse you can compare to some of the top selling covers in your genre and get a good idea. But blurbs are so unique to the book that it makes it a lot more difficult. But with blurbs that very easy to change, especially on the electronic format, it's extremely easy to change. You can try out a different blurb every week until you get something that you really liked. But a big mistake at least that I see with lots and lots of blurbs is authors try to just sort of tell you the plot.
Here's what my book is about. That seems logical, but it very, very rarely works. And really the goal of any sort of book blurb or synopsis is not to tell the reader what the book is going to be about, but it is to tell the reader instead why they should look at the book and what they're going to be excited about. And really what that comes down to is Shondra expectations, which is similar to the cover. And you want to just give them atmosphere and you want them to think like, Oh, this is going to be a really cool, you know, intense mystery thriller, not, Oh, this is a book about a guy who was framed for a crime and goes on the run and moves to Argentina.
It should be a book, a description that gives them just the atmosphere and sort of builds up that expectation in their head and then leaves them wanting more. Because if they, if they get the plot from the, the book description, they don't need to read the book anymore. If they just get the atmosphere and the genre expectation, then they need to read the book in order to figure out what it's about. And I think that can be a, a, a really powerful selling tool. But again, since it's so easy to just change the blurb, essentially whenever you need to pick five or six that you like and you know, test them on a, a writing group and you know, on a sub Reddit or something like that, um, test them out in a Facebook group for authors.
See what people like, pick the two or three that get the most votes. Try one for a week with your marketing plan. If it works, great. If not, switch to a different one. And you can really am guess and check with them blurbs pretty easy.
Jesper (23m 41s):
Yeah, absolutely. And, and, uh, it's, it's sort of like thinking about the movie trailer. I mean, of course not all movies trailers does a good job at being a trail either. But yeah, it needs to just tease to stuff. You don't have to. Yeah, exactly. You don't have to tell bots. You just, you just tease it. Uh, and, and then, yeah, as you say, I mean, fortunately enough, eh, changing the blurb is quite easy. So, uh, you can just upload a new one and see how it performs. And of course, for you, dear listener, if you're struggling with that, don't forget that, uh, I actually have a guide book called how to write a fences.
You put description so you can pick that one up and uh, follow a step by step guide if you need some assistance on, on blurps. But, uh, but I do think blurbs are incredibly important because if people find, if, if you sort of have the writing on the control and you have the cover under control, meaning that it's sugar specific, like you talked about before, stupid, then people will then click, but then when they click and get to the book page on, for example, Amazon, then the blurb is the one that needs to close the deal, right? Yup.
Definitely. Yeah. And if you don't have that sort of them, well, you're still gonna lose out at the problem. He, I guess in, in revising these books, reviving these books as a, that was what I was trying to say is that you have, so you have quite a lot of moving parts here, right? I mean, yeah, there's a lot of different elements that could be wrong that you need to evaluate. Yeah, there are a ton of variables and it can sometimes, especially when you're looking at your own work, it can be hard to pinpoint exactly what's wrong, but Amy and I think, uh, if people really take a diligent look, it's not as hard as it seems to figure out exactly where there's room to improve.
Right? Yeah. And then, and sometimes it's probably also about of, uh, if, if you are really stuck, you know, maybe get some author friends to take a look for you or something like that. There's tons of groups out there full of authors that don't mind giving advice to everybody else. So there's, the resources exist. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. But, but I was just thinking when I said that, I also thought of a caveat right away. I guess that's, that's the problem if you're trying to give advice and been thinking about caveats right away.
But, but the, the problem is also that sometimes the authors themselves are not the right people to justice stuff because we think as authors and, and it's difficult sometimes to put yourself in the mind of the reader because just like you said with the covers, uh, the readers are looking for, uh, something that signals to them that this is, I know what I'm getting and this is what I'm used to. They're not looking for, this is the most amazing original fats as you cover I've ever, ever seen. You know, that's not what they're looking for.
And we can get, well, I think sometimes by asking other authors, you can get into the same trap that they will tell you their author opinion. Um, and, but of course, sometimes you're going to get good advice from people who know what they're talking about. It's just a word of caution, I guess.
Stuart (26m 50s):
I would agree. A lot of authors will make the same mistake as an author trying to revive their own work and then they look through it from the wrong perspective.
Jesper (26m 59s):
Right. But okay, so if we have the writing we have to cover, we have the book description than, than what, what else?
Stuart (27m 7s):
It really, once you've got all that, you're, you're pretty much ready to go. So, uh, you've, you've got everything more or less. All right. Seated correctly. Sometimes. I've actually, we've, we've changed titles on books as well, so we've had titles on that comes to mind that as probably the most successful book revival I've ever done. Um, and it, it was a really cool portal fantasy about a Japanese fighter pilot going back in time during world war II and going back to feudal Japan times and sort of becoming a sword and sorcery.
Fantasy and that book had a cover that said historical fiction to me. It had a title that was in Japanese and I didn't even understand it even though the book was in English and the writing, we just needed a proofread. But, uh, we changed that title to one that was very in keeping with am with sort of expectations and whatnot. The book's called samurai wind by Nigel sellers, but we we revive that and got the new title on it, got a new cover on it and everything.
And then really from there, the bulk of your work is finished and all you need to do is just find that audience and figure out where those people live. And with a samurai themed portal fantasy with a little historical bend to it, honestly, that appeals to most fantasy readers already. That's something that a lot of fantasy readers are going to really enjoy. So all you need to do is, is, uh, then dive into your sort of traditional marketing approach. And for me that would be Facebook and Amazon ads testing key words, figuring out which keywords are getting your sales, and then am pumping really as much of your budget as you can afford into those valuable keywords until they stop working.
And then re-evaluating once those keywords fall off a little bit. But, um, once you get to the point where you've got, you know, the title, the cover, the blurb and the writing that is pretty much everything. You're, you're more or less they're ready to market it again and really rebrand the novel and get people interested in it.
Jesper (29m 12s):
Yeah. Yeah, I would agree. Uh, and of course then once you are at that stage, then you have the same problem that everybody else has and that is to drive enough traffic there and, and when those bits and all that. But do you have any, any good advice when it comes to, to running some ads and getting, getting the traffic to that book that you now know it's good and you know what you sell, but you just need to get eyeballs, eyeballs on it. Do you have any advice on, on how to best go about that? Uh, the advertising part of this equation?
Stuart (29m 41s):
Yeah, it's definitely, marketing books is tricky and sort of the, uh, pitfall I guess of almost every author out there that I talked to am on my website on Stewart Feynman books.com. I've got a whole series of free articles about marketing that go into in a lot more detail than a, just a quick podcast. But essentially the biggest advice is if you're using pay to click or right, yeah. Pay per click ads. That's it. So if you're using those paper click ads, which I recommend you just want to sort of start with the shotgun blast and hit as much as you possibly can right out of the gate.
And it's going to be expensive to test and it's going to be a pretty steep learning curve. You'll need to know what you're doing. Yeah. If you set up, you know, maybe three or 4,000 different keywords on Amazon, which am I use the publisher rocket as well, but, um, set up 4,000 keywords and run those for fast and keywords, which will be four different ads, but run them on, you know, three different ad copies and adjust your ad copy, you know, three different times. Figure out which keywords are hitting.
And the combination might be something that's surprising. It might be something that you don't expect and he might have, uh, you know, a key word with an ad copy that doesn't strike you as something that you would, you know, would work for you. But again, the author's not the customer. So it's hard to think like a customer and we don't always understand the customers. Um, but really just sort of testing as much as physically possible for as long as you can to get enough data to be meaningful. Then figuring out from that data, okay, what about this makes sense and where am I actually going to make money?
Um, you know, kill those keywords that are just sucking down budget with no returns. Kill those off real quick. Figure it out the ones that, the keywords that are giving you the best bang for your buck and then put more and more into those keywords. Or maybe try five or six different ad copies with each key word to see what works the best. And eventually, you know, might take you a month, but you'll pair it down to where you've got ads running that are going to be very profitable on either Facebook or Amazon, whatever it might be. B, you'll get ads that are, are churning out a high rate of return.
Jesper (31m 57s):
Yeah. Do you uh, tend to be it high to, to, to get those, uh, basically to revive the books so to speak, in order to get to get the Amazon algorithm to pay attention to you? Do, do you tend to bid high to make sure you're winning those bits or, or do you just bit sorta Jewish sure. That you're going to get a return on investment if you win the bid. So how do you, how do, how do you go about that?
Stuart (32m 20s):
It's setting is definitely difficult. I'm not gonna say I'm a master of that just yet. Honestly, in the beginning I like to set the bids higher just cause I'm, I'm kind of impatient when it comes to getting that data and figuring it out. So I'll last a lot of ads in the beginning that are going to cost a good bit of money and have pretty high bids just so I can get all that data and you know, run through my budget every single day to make sure I'm hitting it. And uh, once I get all that data, all tone it down.
And most of the time, once I have an ad that's fairly refined, I'll just send it to the Amazon recommended bid and they do like the dynamic bidding where they'll adjust it for you up to like 50% of what you put in. So I'll put maybe 50 cents in and so that'll let it adjust up to 75 cents if it needs to. And that seems to work pretty well. So you're not getting, you know, prime time bids, you're not winning those, but you're still at least, you know, winning enough bids to get a decent amount of impressions, a few thousand impressions or whatever it might be on each ad and, and that's really what you need.
But once you pare it down, I think that the bid matters many less and less. And it might be the case I've had a few times where reviving an old book, I found that it wasn't any keyword that was even expensive that ends up being the winner and it'll be something, you know, 4 cent keyword that nobody else is bidding on that I would've never thought in a thousand years of irrelevant. But it was something that publisher rocket pulled up in their list and I kept it in there and there it went.
And so it'll be a really cheap, a keyword, which is fantastic.
Jesper (34m 4s):
Yeah, I know, I know Dave Chesson likes to share the example of, uh, of, uh, what was it? Book book book. I think that was the key word, who was using just three times the workbook in a row, which makes absolutely no sense at all
Stuart (34m 18s):
who types that in on am. I don't know what they're hoping to find when they search book book book, but people do apparently, and that you weren't as typically cheap so you can grab it.
Jesper (34m 30s):
Yeah, yeah, indeed. Indeed. Okay. Well, I think that that is good in terms of revitalizing the book. So, so you certainly need to drive the traffic there and, and all the usual stuff that we usually talk about is, is of course also relevant in the sense that, uh, if you make sure to write in series, then of course you can afford to spend a bit more on, on this, uh, book one in the series that is debt, uh, because hopefully people will now start reading through that and, and like it because you just made sure that the product itself is good and then they'll buy the other books and, and that will bring you back some revenue, meaning that you will cover some of your ads.
Exactly.
Stuart (35m 10s):
Yeah.
Jesper (35m 12s):
Okay. Uh, Stewart, uh, is there anything else that is important to know about reviving that books, uh,
Stuart (35m 19s):
that we haven't talked about? Covered just about everything? Um, I guess as a last bit of advice, I would say, uh, one of the biggest mistakes I see authors making is, is always with the cover. And just the concept is actually a line that I read I think like two or three days ago, just came up. Another author mentioned that you're, when you look at a cover, you should not be looking for some flawless work of art. You should consider your cover to just be your first marketing tool. And even if it's a cover that you personally don't like, if it fits in your genre, the offense, what readers want, use it.
It doesn't matter if you like it or not because the paycheck is what, what the authors in it for. So, uh, it doesn't have to be some, you know, flawless work of art. You can always make a special edition later that's going to be your flawless work of art, but you need to sell books first before we can afford that special edition.
Jesper (36m 13s):
Yeah, absolutely. And you mentioned early on that, that you had some articles or blog posts or whatever that, uh, goes into some of this. So if you send me the links to that, the Stewart, then I'll add those links into the show notes. Can go and read it.
Stuart (36m 29s):
Yup. Yeah. Just Stuart Feynman books is where you can find it all and we'll get those links up there.
Jesper (36m 34s):
All right, perfect. Okay. Thanks so much for, for joining steward. Yeah, thank you. So next Monday, autumn is back and we are going to talk about whether or not free books are worth it as a marketing strategy.
Narrator (36m 53s):
If you like what you just heard, there's a few things you can do to support the amwritingfantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join autumn and Yesper on patrion.com/amwritingfantasy for as little as a dollar a month. You'll get awesome rewards and keep the amwritingfantasy podcast going. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
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Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Jesper (1s): Do you struggle with many of the same things that many other authors do. And that is, uh, how to feel more confident with writing.
Autumn (15s): If you're a fantasy author, then you've come to the right place. My name is Autumn Birt and gather with Jesper Schmidt. We've published more than 20 novels. Our aim is to help use our experience to help you with writing marketing and selling books to fans all over the world.
Jesper (31s): So we wanted to try to get in a bit of a quicker widow for you guys today. And the S you can probably see in here, autumn is on the move traveling around. So, so there, there was a bit of wind in the microphone and the audio quality is not the best, but uh, but we hope you can live with that. And we just wanted to, to talk a bit about how to feel more confident with your writing. But before we get into that, we also wanted to shout out a huge thank you to some both existing support us on Patrion who upped their pledge, but also to quite a few new patron supporters.
Jesper (1m 9s): Uh, so I think you have the names for us. A autumn.
Autumn (1m 13s): Yes. I want to give a shout out and a huge thank you for your support. It really means so much to us. But bill, moose, beard, Mark Jones, Perry Tomers, Irish, Carrie, Karen Jones, Amelia hay, and Angela Gibson. Uh, thank you so much for joining us. Those who just did recently and for those who author pledge and just for those who have been with us and supporting us on Patreon, we just went through our big first birthday anniversary blowout and it was a lot of fun.
Autumn (1m 44s): We got some new patrons and met some great people and I really thrilled with the interaction and everyone is really helping us out and lets us know that what we're doing is important to them and helping them to finish and follow their dreams and become better authors and writers and publish. And I love being a part of that.
Jesper (2m 6s): Yeah, absolutely. It is. We really, really appreciate it. And, uh, it makes a huge difference too to know that you, that you value what we try to put out in terms of advice for you. Uh, every week. So, uh, so thanks a lot. And I also hope you're going to get a bit out of the today's video, although we are going to pitch something for you, but they stay tuned for a second and then it'll make sense. But I think first of all, before we get into that, then we need to talk for a second around what are sort of the main problems that that writers, uh, even if you're a new rider or an experienced one, doesn't matter too much, but, um, what are the main problems that we face in, in terms of, of feeling confident about our writing and, uh, I dunno, I, I made a few notes here autumn but, uh, I don't know if you, if you have some place where you, where you would like to start with, what are of these problems are, how, how should we do this?
Autumn (3m 2s): Well, I think, um, I would say to me, the top one that always comes to mind, the one that I hear the most of is doubt just what your writing is good enough that anyone's gonna read it. And I think that is, to me, the number one problem next to impossibly consecutive with finding the time to actually write. Those are huge issues for I think every author out there.
Jesper (3m 26s): Yeah, indeed. Yeah. Yeah. And I had a, I had a few things on my notepad here, so I mean things like, it's sort of a dock tails on what you just said, but, but you know, struggling with how to, how do I know that what I'm writing is good enough, you know, that, that, that it duck tails on the whole feeling, not confident, whatnot. But, but, but I'm more thinking about the actual mechanics of writing here, you know, uh, how, how do I actually write so that I know that I'm doing it well correctly and I'm saying sort of, you know, correctly, it's, it's, it's that can be debated, but, but at least how am I doing it in a way that, uh, that, that works.
Jesper (4m 7s): Maybe we could put it like that as well. Um, and how do I make it interesting? How do I, how do I turn my story idea into things that I, I mean we've talked about before on how to structure chapters, but, but just in general, how do I turn a story idea into a complete exciting novel where it's actually gripping and it's filled with tension on all those things? Yeah. And then I think also one of the cute issues with, with being writer, being a writer and an author is also the fact that you're doing it on your own.
Jesper (4m 43s): So it goes on one hand with the fact around worrying on worrying about being confident enough. Because if you win a ordinary workplace, you have colleagues around you and you, you'll probably know whether or not you're doing a good job and your boss will tell you or not tell you, you know, that sort of thing that goes along with the nine to five job. But, but being an a writer, you're writing an entire novel and basically you have no clue if it's good or not.
Jesper (5m 13s): At some point you would release it and then the readers will tell you, uh, but that's a bit, uh, that's a bit, well, it's shame and a waste of time and whatnot to, to go through all that hassle to write a full novel. It might take you several years, uh, only to learn that people don't appreciate it, that, that's horrible to be honest. So, uh, so I think the accountability partner part is important as well. Meaning that if you had somebody who you could go to with your questions, uh, who you could maybe share in, in a more private forum, you could share some of your writing, you could get some feedback on it if this good or bad, that sort of thing.
Jesper (5m 52s): And also somebody who could help you along the way to to your finished novel. I think that's, that is a huge problem, that many phase because you're doing it by yourself and you don't have that sort of partner on the site, even if it's like a virtual partner.
Autumn (6m 10s): Absolutely. I mean, I think, um, having a person, a community, just someone you can go that you trust the you and say, Oh, you know, is this a good idea? Is this a good character? Or how do I develop this? Or I feel lost here. They, like they say the mushy middle. I so many authors just lose track. They want to skip to a new idea, right. Was about, they hit the halfway point and it's such a commonplace to back up and let go of. But to have someone to say, no, you know, you're, you just need to push through this as you hit the climax to have that partner, like you said, an accountability partner that will keep you going, not let you drop another novel that you give up and say, look, you know, that you're writing correctly, that you are doing all the necessary steps.
Autumn (6m 56s): That's really a huge part of making sure that you're going to get to the end and what you're doing. You're doing it right.
Jesper (7m 2s): Indeed. Yeah. Yeah. And then this is where the, the pitch part then comes in because it actually just happened. So by complete coincidence here that we actually have something that will solve these problems for you.
Autumn (7m 19s): We do. We have something that we've put together, I put together originally and then Yesper you've come in and help me work on it. That uh, I went through all this and I saw so many other authors struggling that we created the ultimatefantasywritersguide to really help someone learn how to write, write properly, not get sidetracked, nugget loss of ideas, make sure they're writing some riveting and interesting. Um, and then to know how to market it, how to find fans, how to edit it.
Autumn (7m 51s): So it's actually interesting I editing, I know the first time I looked at it was like, Oh, this is not, you know, just spellchecking there's so much more to editing and developing a novel after that first draft is done. And then you know, how to the step to actually publish. It's intimidating the first time you upload to Amazon. It's exciting. It's so exciting. But it's also the questions on there when you're like looking at Amazon and people are asking about ISB numbers and all of these questions, knowing what you need to DOH know the file types you need. It's all needs to be put together.
Autumn (8m 22s): And so we did, we put it all in one spot. We're insane. No, we did this all is one course, but we did. And because of that, um, it's a one stop shop chorus that'll teach you how to write and how to, you know, develop everything into a fantastic novel.
Jesper (8m 44s): Yeah. So basically when I, what I, what I've just explained was, uh, the details around what the ultimatefantasywritersguide costs has to offer. So on the back end of going through the, uh, obviously, uh, the aim is that you will feel less worried, um, and you will, you can sort of park the feelings about not feeling good enough and you have somebody who will be able to help you. Because as part of the course as well, you are going to get access to both a closed mastermind Facebook group that we run.
Jesper (9m 15s): Uh, but you're also going to get access to monthly Q and a sessions that we run for only for, for students and, and, and support us on Patreon. So that means that you can push your questions and we will cover them in, in a monthly Q and a or you can show up yourself to the month Q and a and we will have a conversation autumn and I with you to try to answer any questions you might have. If you cannot show up, you can just post them to us, to them in a video for you, which you can watch, watch on your own time.
Jesper (9m 45s): Um, and basically like that we're trying to help you so that you are not alone and you don't have to be alone in the writing process.
Autumn (9m 54s): So this course will make sure that you, not only you will have an accountability partner, you'll know what you need to know. So you're not going to have another unfinished manuscript. You're going to know your writing well, you're going to make sure we are going to make sure through the question and answers. We're going to be there to help you to talk to you. Plus the the, the private mastermind group. You're going to have access to other authors who either are going along with you on this journey or Ooh, or who are ahead of you. And like, yes, for an I who have done this, we've seen it.
Autumn (10m 25s): We know how to help you and make sure that you finish this, Oh no, leave it behind and you'll be successful this time. And that's what this course is all about. And even once you finished how to go on the next step of your career, the Arthur branding, marketing, all those questions, we're still gonna be here. You're going to have lifetime access to us, to those questions to make sure that as your books grow and your platform grows, that you will know what the next step is and you're not lost somewhere along the way and that you can be successful as well.
Jesper (10m 60s): Excellent. So if this is something you're a bit interested in, at least hearing a bit more about, uh, we have a page for you set up that, I'll put the link to the page in the, in the video description below, or if you're listening on the podcast and it'll be in the show notes. So click through there and have a look at the page. We've, we, there was a video there that goes into more detail about what the cost is about and, and I promise you it's not recorded on the outside and, and, and like this video. So it's good. It's a good quality video where you can probably hear what big things happen.
Jesper (11m 32s): So go and check it out if you interested. Uh, you should know that the am the costs for this time around, we'll open on the 30th of August, but we only opened the course twice a year. So if you listen to this or what's this before the 30th of August, you can go to that page, you can sign up for the wait list there and then it'll only be like a few weeks and then you will get an email that the courses open and you can sign up. Or if you're watching this way, way later, then that's linked is still applicable.
Jesper (12m 2s): Still go through to that link that the, that I'm mentioning there that we have a below in the show notes or in the video description because there again there will be a wait list. But of course then you'll have to wait until the next time, uh, that the course opens, which is only as I said, twice a year. So that's how it works. Uh, go and check it out. If you have any questions to any of what you read on that site, uh, that then just ping us, let us know and we will help you out. There's also a Q and a on the page itself that you can read, and you will also notice that there is a ton of very, very cool bonuses linked to the cost that, uh, but there is all listed on that page.
Jesper (12m 42s): So go have a look and, uh, and see what you think and hopefully, hopefully you heard everything we said here. Okay. Uh, and uh, it comes through. Okay. We do have some, uh, we do have some plans for the future here, but we'll share more about that the next week. But for now, go and check out the course and, uh, we hope that you will find it useful. Well, we hope to see you. Thanks for tuning in and watching us see you next Monday. All right. Stay safe out there and see your next Monday.
Now that KDP Rocket changed it's name to Publisher Rocket, we brought its founder and creator, Dave Chesson, on to Am Writing Fantasy.
We discuss the recent change to Publisher Rocket, but more importantly, how authors can get the most out of Publisher Rocket. The conversation covers everything from how to rank on Amazon, insights on the Amazon A9 algorithm, KDP keyword selection and onto Amazon ads.
There's a lot to take away. Enjoy.
https://publisherrocket.com/ https://kindlepreneur.com/
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LET'S CONNECT!
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Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Jesper (0s): So the awesome tool for authors called KDP rocket recently changed its name to publisherrocket and I could think of nothing better than to bring its founder and creator Dave Chesson on peer two amwritingfantasy to talk about why he changed it to publisherrocket and what is it that we people can learn from it. And maybe we can get some Ninja tips out of him. We'll see if you're a fantasy author, then you've come to the right place.
Jesper (32s): My name is Jesper and together with autumn I've popped this modern 20 books and it is our aim to help you in your writing and marketing endeavors. So Dave maybe you would like to just say a few words about yourself and thank you for coming onto amwritingfantasy.
Dave (50s): Well, it's really awesome to be here. Um, as, as you said, I'm Dave and a. I run a website called kindlepreneur.com a that teaches authors how to sell their books and get their books discovered on Amazon as well as the creator of publisherrocket. I started off as an author, but I actually have a bit of dyslexia. And so I've never thought of myself as a great writer. And that's why it was very important for me that if I was going to spend all that time, you know, uh, I'm a father, I'm a husband, and I was, I used to be military. If I was going to spend all that time writing on wanting to make sure that I had the right market.
Dave (1m 23s): And so it's from all that research and understand that helped me to get my books out there and to make enough money for my books to be able to quit my job and be here full time with my children. So
Jesper (1m 33s): yeah. Excellent. And uh, we use a tend to be rocket, uh, ourselves as well. Autumn and myself and the, actually I talked about it in a, in a previous video, so if any of you watching wants to sort of get a inside KDP rocket look, I did some screen-sharing stuff and whatnot. I'll put a link right here on the screen for you so you can just click that one and then it'll take you through that video. Would you want to see what the KDP rocket looks like inside? Because we're not going to do three SEO in here today. And for those of you listening on the podcast, you need to cycle through to episode 11 and that's when I talked about canopy rocket but maybe to start us off Dave maybe we can sort of why, why did you want to change the KDP rocket into publisherrocket?
Dave (2m 15s): Well, the first thing was, is that Katie P rocket uh, we used to have version 1.0 and it's solely focused on Kindle and that's why we chose the name KTP because the Kindle aspect, this is back in the day when create space existed and then there's KTP for ebook. So now that a publisherrocket is a version 2.0 it covers both books and eBooks. So we needed to make sure that nobody got confused about thinking it was just a Kindle tool anymore. But another crazy thing too though is that we've been in talks with Barnes and noble, Kobo and iTunes about including their markets data in rocket in the future.
Dave (2m 53s): It's kinda hard to have a conversation with those guys when your name is very Amazon centric. He has to say it stalls the the discussions. But now that we're publisherrocket though am most of the representative we've been working for a very pleased about that and had been really forthcoming in looking into how we can access the data that we do to be able to provide authors with the information that we give. So that was a really major factor about, you know, taking and changing the name. And at the same time, like I talked about, we did the name change, right as we transitioned to version 2.0 and version 2.0 is not only faster.
Dave (3m 30s): And I would, I would say sleeker, definitely a better look, but also the internal programmings allowing myself and my programmers to add even more. We have a whole bunch of new features and capabilities coming out. We'll be adding every international market here very soon. And this isn't just pulling information from those markets. We've actually been collecting years worth of data on all of the, from the German, that UK, the Japanese, you name it, to be able to give the right analysis that fits those markets perfectly.
Dave (4m 2s): So now that we have a more robust program, we can do things like that. We also have added every one of the 16,000 Amazon categories inside the program itself. So for the first time authors can go in there and be able to see every possible category, especially from their genre or their string. And then they can even see how many books that day they need to sell in order to be number one. And that that is updated daily. And as a matter of fact, we're actually adding new systems to make it update even more so.
Dave (4m 32s): So you can get real time data and find out which categories are best. And in the future we're going to be adding even more to that to include the average am abs, LR of the number one books. And here's the cool part. We're going to be adding something that lets you know how many shoppers actually go to that category to purchase books. So now authors can finally select categories that help them to be a bestselling author even more so and on top of that categories that will help you to sell more books.
Jesper (5m 2s): It's a, it's an amazing tool. I mean, I, I can't imagine the amount of data scraping you must be doing. I mean, actually last time when I recorded the previous video I was talking about every time, can it be rocket started pulling data. I did the screen sharing system recording sessions just like, Ooh, powered down or the most I could see it. You know what a but I'm glad that the a that you mentioned that the publisherrocket is, is, is let's say faster because also sometimes it didn't happen often, but a few times it didn't happen on me.
Jesper (5m 34s): That KDP rocket crest and I had to restart it. It was not a big deal. You know, we just do the research again, but, but of course, I guess publisherrocket tests that fixed mountain, is that right?
Dave (5m 44s): Seven times faster and it's able to hold more information. The thing about it was when I created KDP rocket 1.0 back about three years ago, I had no idea how popular it was going to be, nor did I understand how many extra things I wanted to add to it. So our original foundation of the program was, was meant for just keyword research and competition analysis, you know, helping you to choose the right keywords that get discovered and help you to see what your competitors are doing. And that's it. But over those three years we added the category feature.
Dave (6m 16s): Then we added Amazon book ads feature and you know, we have even more that we want to do a. And it was evident that our original programming wasn't able to support that. And so as we added more, it started to slow down just a bit. Or like you said, there was the crashes. So we completely overhauled the entire system with the plans in the future of adding even more. And we put that in the infrastructure. So, and we timed it seven times faster, which believe me, it's, if you're doing a lot of research or you're pulling, you want to pull hundreds if not thousands of keywords for your ads, every second counts.
Jesper (6m 51s): Yeah. You have some new cabinet. And it is, I mean, it is amazing how, how much computer power that needs to be to actually pull all that data out, uh, from, from what is, you know, from, from the use of perspective on my end, it just looks like a very sort of, that's a simple piece of software, but there's a lot to it underneath the hood if one were to look at it. Right?
Dave (7m 14s): Yeah. When I first designed the a the software, I did what I call the Mazy test. And, and Muzzy is actually the name I give my grandmother and she's super awesome. Um, she knows about that much about book marketing. But the key was, is that I, I wanted to see if she could figure out how to use it, you know, kind of on our own. And, um, that was kind of a test that we did to figure out, okay, how good is this? How is it going to work? But then on top of that, we continue to revise it and change things and move things around so that no matter what age you are, whether or not you're young or you're in retirement age, it's very intuitive and we'll help you to get through it.
Dave (7m 51s): And one thing that I want to add too is, is that, you know, we talk about all these additions and new features and even the upgrade to version 2.0 a I'm a strong believer of software companies never charging people again, you know, you make your software better. Don't, don't make me pay more money for it. Uh, so every one of those things we've talked about has been a free upgrade for every user on that. That's our policy. That's the way we're going to keep it.
Jesper (8m 13s): Yeah, that's excellent. But I w I was thinking maybe for, for those who doesn't jump on to that, the other video that I recorded them, but who just sort of want a very quick overview. Maybe you could just start off, talk us through that for different features that are inside the publisherrocket and I think it's four, if I remember correctly, four different areas that you, what you can do and maybe maybe your thoughts on what is, which one of these are, if any, are most useful in your view for, for authors if any of them better than the others or, or, or what, I'm just curious to have your thoughts on that.
Dave (8m 49s): Well, let me answer the first question and then we'll get to that last one. What I'd like to tell people is, is that that publisher rockets entire design is to help authors get their books discovered. Okay. To get found on Amazon and hopefully in the future the other markets as well. Uh, so that they can get their books in front of the right shoppers slash. Readers. Now, every one of those features was designed with this in purpose. Okay. But with different ways of doing it. The first feature is keyword feature and that is helping you to choose your seven Kindle keywords, okay?
Dave (9m 20s): Those are the words that people type into Amazon and then Amazon chooses to show books of for it. There are three very important questions when choosing your keywords that authors should definitely consider. The first is they want words that shoppers actually type into Amazon. The second is they want to make sure that that shoppers actually buy those books when they see them. Okay. A great example is you're in fantasy, right? What are the chances that I type in the word fantasy and Amazon shows me the perfect book, right?
Dave (9m 51s): Like the type, I mean, you know all the different types of genre out there. Right? On top of that though, what if I type in something like Velossa Raptor, Epic war? Okay. Maybe there's a book out there, I don't know, but you know, you can quickly see that no, there are no sales coming in for those books. Therefore, this is not actually the end game. This is not where shoppers end up and then purchase. So knowing how much those books are making that show up is a very important thing. And the third and final part is understanding the competition.
Dave (10m 23s): It's great to choose those words, but if your book doesn't show up on the first page of Amazon, your book will not benefit from that keyword. So we've designed it for authors to quickly answer those three things inside the keyword feature. They can see all the words that people are typing into Amazon that pertained to what they're thinking about. They know the average amount of money that books are making that show up for that keyword and they know how hard it would be to rank for it. And we give it a great score from one to a hundred. And our programming, uh, takes into account when it creates that competition score.
Dave (10m 57s): It takes into account the popularity, the author, the popularity of the book, the sales, how new is it, uh, the re review grades, uh, and more importantly recent review grades cause that has a major effect. I would say reviews that came in two years ago, I have little to no effect where as a review that came in yesterday as more of an effect. Um, we also take into account, um, some other factors as well, and we compile it into a number that makes you easy for you to say, Oh wow, that keyword would be a lot harder to rank for then that one.
Dave (11m 31s): So right there you have everything you need to select your seven Kindle keywords. But I'd also say too, that that feature's really important for new authors just about to start their book. Say for example, your thinking of writing a book on, we'll say, um, some type of magician fantasy I'm going to stick inside of your genre. Here is I give an answer, right? Okay. Now knowing what it is that people are typing into Amazon and whether or not there's a hungry market for it can be really important to helping you sort of not only choose the niche genre that you go into, but more importantly, it can help you in figuring out what should be the focal point of your book cover or your book description and help you to know that your book idea before you even start, whether it has a market on Amazon that's willing to pay or if it doesn't.
Dave (12m 25s): Okay. So you can collect all this information and validate your book idea before you start, as well as have important information on how you design and layout your book going forward. Because remember, keywords are the words that your market is using when they are shopping and looking for the next book. So if somebody, if there's a lot of people say typing in necromancer, uh, you know, Epic fantasy right, okay. You know, you were thinking about having a wizard that, you know, maybe, maybe it does raise the dead or are deals in the dark arts a bit, you know, um, and you know that that has a hungry market.
Dave (13m 3s): You may want to focus or ensure that your cover represents that more so that it truly needs the desire of those of those readers. You may find out that, well, there are other characters, you know, in, in my, in my group that are trekking through the woods, you know, but maybe that one should be front and center. Um, you may do research and start to find more and more about what people are typing. And so that information can really help you get your foot, you know, get you started on the right foot. The second feature is our competition analyzer.
Dave (13m 34s): And the purpose of this one is to understand what your potential competitors are doing, how well they're doing and what they're doing, right? So you start by typing in say a keyword phrase or whatever it is you might want to target for your keyword. And rocket will list out the books that Amazon would list out and it gives you important information about, you know, the book cover, the title, the, the age, how much money it's made. It made that day about how much money it's making on average in the month. Um, and so you can start to kind of see what's working.
Dave (14m 4s): You can even flip between book and ebook and see how, how well their ebook is doing compared to their book and understand which ones actually making more money for them. And so that can kind of help you with some of your marketing decisions moving forward, your price selection, um, you know, whether or not you want to target this an advertisement later on and so forth. The third feature is our category feature. And like we talked about earlier, you know, Amazon has 16,000 plus categories and we have the data to help you find the right category. Okay.
Dave (14m 33s): It's interesting, there's actually a lot of authors, especially for fantasy might think that a that the main category of science fiction and fantasy would be the only category that holds fantasy related categories. That's actually not true. There are four different main categories that have a whole subsection on just fantasy and especially in literature and fiction, um, young adult. And there's a couple of more that are just really weird and out of place. And our software actually helps people to find those very quickly. And I assure you, if you look at the science fiction and fantasy and then you find your fantasy selected category there, it's probably going to be a lot harder to rank for that than say a the fiction or literature and fiction version of that same exact category because nobody thinks to look there.
Dave (15m 18s): So the software helps you to find those opportunities so that you have a much better chance of actually being a bestseller. Why does bestseller help? Well, there's a couple of things that come from this. Number one is that you get the orange tag that says bestseller. And that's cool. I mean from a humorous perspective, but what's really good from a marketing perspective is that when Amazon shows your book and others, it shows the orange tag or yeah, it's the orange tag that says bestseller. So your book sticks out, which means my eyes are going to direct to yours, even if somebody else's is above you.
Dave (15m 50s): And on top of that to that tag is a bit of social proof. It tells me that other people like this book because they're buying it and I feel more comfortable purchasing it. Now that I know that others have bought it as well. What's funny is is that you might not be selling as much as the others, but you selected the right category. And so you have that advantage. Another thing that's coming from category sales to is that Amazon sends out emails to people who've bought inside that category. And if you're the new bestseller, you're actually gonna get promoted more often from their email campaigns.
Dave (16m 23s): And so that's a major help. And a third thing that's really coming from, from categories as well is that we're seeing an increase in shoppers' purchasing from categories themselves. And you can see this cause Amazon is now adding filters inside of the categories on amazon.com. So say for example, you go to your favorite category, you can now look on the left and it'll give you phrases that people have used to describe different types of fantasy. You'll see a top authors listed. So you can click those series names, um, genres to choose from.
Dave (16m 57s): And if there are fantasy specific awards, they even have little click boxes there for you to select. So you can see the award winners. So Amazon's really focusing on improving shopper experience through categories themselves. And that all starts with authors selecting the right one. And finally we have the Amazon ads. We call it the AMS keyword feature. Because say for example, you've got a great book and you just can't seem to either break into your, uh, your area. There were too many powerful, awesome, you know, books make more money and you just can't get up to the top.
Dave (17m 29s): Or maybe you know that you're creating something absolutely new, like some crazy new genre a or what have you. Then Amazon ads is probably a phenomenal way for you to take it to the next level. And I would also say to those who have written a book and it failed, maybe try given a little breathing it, you know, new life into it through ads and you may see it finally get that opportunity with Amazon ads, you can now say, Hey, look Amazon, I want to put this book at the top of the search result. Somebody types that in, I want to show up for that.
Dave (17m 60s): Or you could also say, Hey, Amazon, anytime somebody sees this book, I want to be next to them. Okay, I want to be right there so that you know, they've got to see my book first. This gives you ability to 100% now. You're getting eyes on your book and that can be incredible. But the problem that author's run into is you can't just select 10 or 15 terms, sit back and say, sweet. You know, and even raise up the cost per click to make it. Yeah, no obvious that you're going to make those. The you're going to get seen. Actually, it's taking hundreds if not thousands of keywords that you want to focus on for your ads before you can really start to see some progress.
Dave (18m 36s): And so we created a system that helps you to auto-generate those pertinent keywords and help you to make your ads more effective and efficient. So from those four features, we're helping you to get discovered naturally. We're helping you to understand what your competitors are doing as well as what you'd be facing. We're helping you just like those categories who you're seeing and found and connected to other books. And finally we're helping you with your ads, if that's what you choose, all of that to help get you discovered.
Jesper (19m 3s): It's amazing. I really liked that. The piece of software, it's very well developed. Um, and I think especially now in, in the, if we're, if we're looking at Amazon for a second year in the Amazon marketplace, if you are to let's say, get any sort of traction with your Amazon ass, we are getting to a stage now where short the top keywords, they are so expensive that when you're selling an ebook for $5, it's, it's, it's forget about bidding on it.
Jesper (19m 33s): It's way too expensive. And then the only other option then is to have tons of apps running on a little bit, but then you're going to pick up the fuse that nobody else saw bidding on or maybe a few people are bidding on. So and there I have found now publisher Rob, I was just about to say KDP rocket, but probably so rocket to am to be incredibly helpful because I think on, I, especially one of my books I have, I think I have my 20,000 plus keywords ads running on those a but, and then just out of KDP rocket, I mean it's so easy to just go in, generate lists, pump them into Amazon and other list into Amazon.
Jesper (20m 9s): I mean, it doesn't matter if some of the keywords are replicates of of one, you already have it there because who cares? I mean, you were going to win one of them and as long as you are bidding the same, it doesn't really matter. So you can just, you know, beef up your Amazon ads by pulling data out of K.D.P. Oh, sorry. Now I did it again. Publisherrocket I mean, uh, so I, I think it's, it's an amazing tool that saves, she was so incredibly much time.
Dave (20m 34s): Yeah. You know, a lot of people are afraid about, like you were talking about 20,000 keywords are, so what happens if I'm showing up for keywords ed, you know, nobody's ever going to buy. That's okay. Because the thing is you don't pay Amazon until somebody clicks on your ad and nobody will click on your ad unless after seeing your book cover in your title and your ad blurb, if you choose to have one that still interests them, then they click. So, you know, I found some interesting keywords that I still can't figure out exactly why that directed, but it somehow caught the attention of a larger number of people.
Dave (21m 9s): Those people clicked and those people bought. And again, I think the reason why I made those sales was because nobody was thinking to target that. And yet it was a good fit in some way. And again, I only pay if people's, after seeing my ad like it and choose to learn more.
Jesper (21m 26s): Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That's exactly my mentality with it as well. I mean, it doesn't matter what your load in there, because as you just said, you know, you only pay for the click. So who cares if you're 500 keywords for that you got from publisherrocket that nobody cares about, that doesn't really relate to fantasy, but for whatever reason, that's what you've got in your list. It doesn't matter. You know, you gotta kinda pay for them anyway. So yeah, it's just a base, you know, you can just go crazy and lots of lots of keywords and look them into Amazon with lope it and some of it will get clicked.
Dave (22m 0s): Yep, absolutely. And you know, and that's, that's an interesting thing. I just kind of break away for a bit on this is what I love most about Amazon ads is I can use the numbers to finally figure out where the problem is with my book. You see, when am here's an example. I, have you ever heard of the book a battlefield earth? It's a science fiction book. There's actually a really bad movie made about it, but it doesn't ring any bells red, but okay. Well anyways, uh, this book was written and uh, awhile ago the publishing company reached out to me and said, Hey, we'd like your help about figuring out how to improve our Amazon ads.
Dave (22m 39s): I said, okay. You know, I actually read the book as a child and it was probably the second ever science fiction book I read and I credit it for kind of turning me into a scifi fan. Uh, the first being Ender's game. Love that one. So I said, cool honor to, to kind of work on a book that I read as a kid. Sure. So we looked at it and we looked at their Amazon ads and it was crazy because I saw him now they had a large number impression, so great. They were, they were choosing the right keywords, you know, Amazon was choosing to show their book and they had a lot of great clicks and awesome.
Dave (23m 12s): The cover fit, it was perfect. Got it. And they've just done a new cover when they were doing this new launch. However though the percentage of people choosing to buy that clicked on it was pretty low. It was like 0.5% maybe it was 0.4% but it was like somewhere that low that we're actually going from clicks to buy. And while they were making money and they were helping to get their book out there more in, the problem was was that there was a significant number of people who were coming to their sales page and choosing not to buy. So they were like, well, maybe we need better keywords.
Dave (23m 43s): I was like, no, no, no. I know what your problem is. Your book description is horrible. So I told him that the problem was was that the book description was more like a book report. They were giving way too many details. They were listing out, you know, characters that didn't need to be in there. They were giving, you know, the specifics of the entire story and it dragged on. Now I said, so really we shouldn't be focusing on our keywords because obviously those are driving in the right people because they're clicking and they're interested, but they're not paying. So I said, look, I'm going to rewrite your book description, I'm going to use what I know about Amazon and everything and we're going to go ahead and construct something that makes shoppers now.
Dave (24m 21s): This is truly an a post-apocalyptic Saifai book that you know of, you know, Epic proportion and why they need to read this book. So I wrote one, they said, yeah, that sounds really cool, but we really think that our original one fits most with fans. I said, all right, hold on, let me, let me show you something. So I went to a website called petfood.com and it's where you can pay to like submit two different versions, whether it's like two different versions of a cover or two different versions of a book description. And they go out and they find people to survey and to choose which one they liked best.
Dave (24m 54s): But more importantly, those people have to give a reason for why they chose one of the other one. What's really cool is is that we had about 75% of the people choose mine over the other. One. More importantly, when reading the comments, most of the people that chose the other one said, I've read this book before and this one gives more detail. So obviously it wasn't the best one to choose a new person to purchase it. It was only the one that they felt most comfortable with because they knew the story and that was the thing about the publisher was they were so close to the story that they thought they needed more information.
Dave (25m 26s): So when I showed that to the publishing company, they mirror like, Whoa, okay, cool. So they changed out the book description and immediately they tripled their conversion rate of their ads. And even more so from tweaking it beyond then to get even more sales. Now that not only helps with their Amazon ads but also helps with every other effort they're making in marketing, whether it's Facebook ads, email campaigns or whatever, because now when people land on that book, more people are converting to purchase because the book description is that good.
Dave (25m 57s): So I love Amazon ads, not just from the ability to proactively and absolutely get my book in front of people, but also I can learn through the numbers where my bra, my book is having a problem and then I can fix it and give it the best success rate.
Jesper (26m 14s): Yeah, absolutely. I mean a I also wrote a whole guide, step by step guide book on how to read, write fantasy book descriptions because it doesn't matter. Your book description is part of the equation that makes people buy. So it's not only about finding good keywords and finding out what to be and so forth and of course have a good cover. But the book description is absolutely a part of the equation.
Dave (26m 38s): Yeah. I never realized how important a book description was until finally Amazon provided those AMS numbers mean I kind of used to think, eh, you know, it's, I mean the coverage is really important, but really that book description is what makes somebody who's interested turn into a buyer. So 100% and yeah, use that kind of resource and material, make sure that your book description is stellar arrests, all of your marketing efforts could be dying prematurely because you couldn't land that sale.
Jesper (27m 6s): So I wanted to cycle back to the seven keywords again, um, that you mentioned before, and I'm sort of spraying this question on you a bit. So if you don't know, that's fully fair. Uh, but I was just wondering, when you're looking at the data from, you know, under the hood, if you have any reflections or insights on how much those seven keywords actually matter. Because when I use publisherrocket, of course, I also figured out which with seven keywords performance better than the others and, and, and all that. And I could see the data from publisherrocket that there is a difference.
Jesper (27m 38s): So of course I researched out the seven best ones and I used those. But in terms of moving actual book sales, at least on my end, I did not really see that those setting the keywords mattered much. So I'm just wondering, based on your data perspective, if you know, if it's because there was seven keywords, actually it doesn't matter as much as we think they do. Or is it because maybe it's too saturated with those keywords and that's why you're not seeing the needle move? Or I don't know if you have any insights on this.
Dave (28m 10s): Well, there are three important parts to keywords to help push book sales. And the first one is identifying your target keywords, right? So knowing which keywords really will work to help move the needle. And that's exactly what publisherrocket does, is it finally gives you the ability to see what those keywords are. The second important part is making sure you get indexed for that keyword. Okay? And indexing is where Amazon acknowledges that your book should show up for that keyword. K, uh, ways to influence indexing are, you know, you've chosen that phrase is when you're seven Kindle keywords.
Dave (28m 43s): Another thing is, you know, the words are either in your title or subtitle and yes, Amazon does index the book description. I know a lot of people say that it doesn't cause they'll take like a full sentence from a book description or some made up word, put it into Amazon. It doesn't show anything but Amazon's own a nine a algorithm. That's actually the name of their search engine. If you go to a nine.com which has its own website a they flat out say we index book descriptions and descriptions of products. So the way that they do it though is they know what words should be appropriate to that genre and therefore those are very important to them.
Dave (29m 17s): Um, to go a step further on that, if you scroll down on the Amazon book sales page and you'll get down to where the reviews are and notice that there's a word cloud density above the reviews now. And these are like words that Amazon has figured out that people are using when reviewing the book. Guess what? A majority of those are genre or category specific words that it has identified. I believe it does the same thing like that with book descriptions. Um, that's why you don't see a lot of buzz. He is, you know, because it's, but you'll see like war made, you know, you'll see a necromancer, you'll see those words popping up.
Dave (29m 54s): So I'm going to throw in book description, um, for that purpose. So again, those things all help to show Amazon that. Okay. Yeah. And same thing with reviews. What people put in reviews. I definitely think his index, but I don't see a nine. Talk about that. The work high density makes me think so. So those things help to say to Amazon you should show up and yeah, to a certain extent that will help you to show up, um, higher in the rankings. Okay. But it depends on the competition. Maybe just choosing those words is enough to get you on the first page.
Dave (30m 25s): So long as the competition is low, that you know that competition score we talked about, right? You get an 80 competition and I'm sorry, but you choose the best seven Kindle keywords, you're not going to show up on that first page. Um, but you choose like a 20 and yeah, you can get there just by choosing one of them. So that brings us to the third one, which is ranking for that keyword. Now statistically speaking, if you ranked number one for a keyword, okay on Amazon, you can expect 27% of the people that typed in that phrase. We'll click on your book. You ranked number two though, and it quickly quickly drops to 13, then 11 then nine, eight, seven, six, six, six, six and then it bumps up to seven at the bottom because apparently people scroll down and then they see that last book the most.
Dave (31m 6s): Um, but that's a huge difference. You ranked five or you rank seven for that book, that title, excuse me, that keyword. And that's 6% compared to 27%. And if you rake on the second or third or fourth page for that keyword, it's, it's, it's like 2%, 1% less than 1% of the people will actually find you from that keyword. So making sure that you're in the top of that keyword is very important. Now, one of the best ways to increase your rankings for that keyword is by the sheer act of a shopper typing in your keyword, finding your book, selecting it, and purchasing it or downloading it, okay.
Dave (31m 46s): Because that is a pure signal to Amazon that somebody went, when they typed in this phrase, this product was the one that connected with them. And this is the product that actually made us money as well, right? So they'll want the best selling for that keyword to be at the top so that they make, um, you know, they make the sale. And I've actually got a quote from Jeff Bezos about this, the CEO of Amazon and he said, we don't make money when we sell things. We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions.
Dave (32m 20s): So they want to show the one that makes that, that sale. So how do we as authors influences were, remember when I talked about, uh, you know, validating your book idea and choosing covers that fit that term better. That's huge. Um, I was working with a romance author and she was writing a romance. We did our keyword research. Long story short, her perfect keyword phrase was am second or Victorian second chance romance family or with baby or these other words at the end that helped people to know more about the book.
Dave (32m 54s): Let's just those words, we understand what the story is. K Victorian error. So we're looking at the Victorian period of time. Second chance romance is a type of romance where somebody finds love again and then the whole family or with baby is that at the last moment people were adding in there some kind of phrase or term to help them know that no, this isn't hotter steamy or no, this isn't, I want this to be about family. She needs to have a kid and she's looking for love again. So she's looking for somebody who would be cool enough to, you know, to date her while she has somebody else's child.
Dave (33m 30s): And even more so if you put that on in the context of the Victorian error, right. I mean that sh that wife, no matter how it happened, she must be a charlatan or an end, a social pariah because she's without husband. So he's, you can see, we just know from those words exactly what it is the market is looking for. And the interesting part was that the, the cover originally was of like a castle that was kind of Victorian period. So cool. She nailed the, the time setting. However though there was nothing about it that helped to personify the other parts. So instead that cover was designed where it showed the, you know, like a ball basically happening and the mom holding the child with kind of the group of people looking down on her like, Oh, you know, she without a husband and the Charlotte and, but there's one guy standing in the back kind of looking very interested.
Dave (34m 16s): Notice that that cover symbolizes everything the shopper's typing in. So what do you think's going to actually get the click? Write the book that shows exactly what they're looking for. But another tactic for people who are like, look, I already got a cover and I'm cool with it. Another tactic that I recommend to people is that if you know that somebody is going to be buying your book, okay? Uh, so you have some people out there that yes, they are fans, they love what you do. I would recommend to tell some of them to go to Amazon, type in your keyword, phrase your target, and then find it that way.
Dave (34m 51s): Might want to give him a warning. They may have to go through a couple of pages, but it means the world to you. If you did that, what that will do is that we'll send the signal to Amazon that this book should definitely be ranking. You'd be surprised how little amount of sales, what happened, you'll shoot up to the top. Now I'm not, this is not a hack and I'm not ruining Amazon and I'm not going to help a bad books when, okay? Because what ultimately happens is this tactic will give you that ability to be at the top and to be found. However, though, if your book continuously is passed up from books under it in case so shoppers are normal, shoppers are typing it in and not choosing your book, but choosing this book or this book or this book, you will start to come back down in the rankings and you'll finally sit at where you belong.
Dave (35m 35s): So us doing researches, authors is not about hacking Amazon it's not about bad books. Winning Amazon smarter than that and its algorithm is great. What we've talked about here is helping authors know their market better, make better decisions as they develop their book, make better decisions on how they want to position it, and know that all of those efforts are actually going to existing markets where they will find the right readers.
Jesper (35m 58s): I couldn't have said it better myself then, but a that's the thing. Am you know the thing about all this machine learning, because I fully agree. I'm an Amazon the the algorithm behind or I guess there's actually many probably, but the algorithms then a behind the drives Amazon are very intelligent. The only thing that seems very old school to be still it, you know, in 2019 that we even have to write in those 70 words manually. It seems crazy to me. I mean Amazon should be able to learn by a machine learning, which are the works that associates to this book and you know, I don't know, maybe that'll stop at some point.
Dave (36m 37s): Well, and to an extent that really is what we were talking about in the indexing, right? It's taking the input you, the author gave, it's taking the input of the categories you choose. It's taking in the input of the title and the words you use in the book description and it's taking in the input of what your customers are writing and then it is figuring out where it should put you. Now what's really cool about keywords is that you may say you may choose seven particular phrases, right? You're going to show up for more than that. Okay. You don't just show up for those seven, you're actually going to be indexed on a whole bunch more like hundreds.
Dave (37m 12s): Okay. But the key is is that if you show that your book is making more sales, okay, it's succeeding Amazon then starts to spread you out even more. Okay? That's why like if you type in Harry Potter, you know, or any type of wizard kid, wizard, wizard school, whatever, you're going to find Harry Potter in that list. Harry Potter didn't have 50,000 keywords they can enter and they just had seven. But Amazon is going to test and show books more and more often because the whole point of the 89 algorithm, again that's there they have lots of algorithms.
Dave (37m 45s): Um, but the 89 is the search bar that shows up and it's the only one that's got its own name. The a nine algorithm is going to test and push and show products because the ultimate goal of the a nine algorithm is to make Amazon more many. And like we heard from Bezos, it's not about the sale, it's about providing the right product and that's when they get the sale. So
Jesper (38m 8s): we've, we've sort of talked them out a lot around the publisherrocket and how Amazon works and all that. So I think there was a lot of good stuff here for, for people to take home and consider the Dave. But is there anything you want to share who are at the end around a? Maybe what your future plans are with publisherrocket or anything like that?
Dave (38m 29s): Yeah, like I said earlier, we're going to be adding the international markets so that people in Germany can focus on the German or Indian or Japanese. And we've been collecting information for years now for that. We're also going to be adding more information about each individual category so that people can choose less volatile ones are more popular ones, you know, for purchasing power. Um, and help people see seasonal changes as well in categories. And again, you know, as an author myself, I'm always testing and Amazon's always changing so we're always staying on top of that as well.
Jesper (39m 3s): And if people would like to sort of get more insight into publisherrocket a where can they, where can they find publisherrocket and maybe you can share how much does it cost?
Dave (39m 15s): Sure. So publisher rocket you can find it@publisherrocket.com and it's a onetime payment of $97. So, and you get that for life a that includes all updates, upgrades, you name it. As we add more as we change, uh, you'll benefit from those as well. And I would also say too, if anybody out there wants to learn more about Amazon ads, I've got a full free course on Amazon ads. You can find that@amscourses.com and it's one of those that I give every detail for you to do Amazon ads without software or without paying for any other aspect.
Dave (39m 48s): It'll take you all the way through the process.
Jesper (39m 51s): That's excellent. And if you email me the link to those things, then I will put it into the description field below. If you're watching on YouTube, so just go below this video, or if you're listening on the podcast, you just go to the show notes and then you'll find the links there from, from Dave that he mentioned. So thank you so much for coming on amwritingfantasy Dave and at least from my end, I can say that the, I think the dose $97 I will spend, it's definitely worth it. So, uh, but I'll leave that up to you guys. Thank you so much for joining Dave.
Dave (40m 22s): Absolutely. And it's really good being here.
The general advise is that it's better to write in series instead of standalone novels if we want to earn a full-time income. What does a six figure author has to say on that topic?
Lindsay Buroker, a highly successful fantasy authors, join Am Writing Fantasy to share advice on how to earn a living as an author.
You can find out more about Lindsay here: http://lindsayburoker.com/
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Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Jesper (1s): You might have heard the advice that one should be writing in a series if one want to earn a living as an author. And there is actually something to that. And today I am joined by Lindsay Buroker who is a very successful fantasy author who earns a six figure income a year from writing. If you're a fantasy author, then you've come to the right place. My name is Jesper and between Autumn and myself we've published more than 20 books.
Jesper (34s): And it is our aim to use our experience to help you in your writing and marketing endeavors. So first of all, thank you for joining me here on a amwritingfantasy. Lindsay
Lindsay (47s): thank you for having me. I'm excited to talk about books and marketing and in series of course.
Jesper (52s): Yeah, it's, it's always a good topic to talk about and uh, but maybe, maybe you can say a bit about yourself, uh, your writing. And I also know that you're, well, I transitioning out of an old podcast and starting a new and so forth. So maybe we could just sort of give a bit of context for stuff.
Lindsay (1m 8s): Sure. I am mostly self-publish. I have an audio book publisher, but I started self-publishing at the end of 2010. Uh, when my first series was the emperor's edge, and I had only two books written at that time and they weren't in the same series. So I can talk to what it is to start out without, you know, there's a lot more you can do with marketing when you have more. Um, I was, uh, pretty excited about it from the beginning. I saw the potential, even though I didn't make a lot of money to start with. You know, I think I was really excited when I made more than a hundred dollars a month.
Lindsay (1m 40s): Uh, but as I got more books out in this series, I had people do fan art and, um, they started, you know, doing some fan fiction and things like that. So I saw that people enjoyed my writing, uh, at least certain numbers of people, the ones that you're, you're hoping to target. And so that was really reassuring and I felt confident that eventually I could get to the point where I could make it my day job. And by the time I'd finished that series, I ended up doing about eight books. Uh, I was, you know, making I think over 10,000 a month. And I thought to myself, well, if I could just keep doing that, that'd be awesome.
Lindsay (2m 13s): And, uh, I could, you know, you have expenses to edit paying editors and cover art and such. But, uh, that was before anybody was spending much money on advertising. So that was mostly take-home money. And, um, I've, since fruit and numerous more fantasy series, I've also done some science fiction. Uh, if you take a peek at me when this podcast comes out, you'll see that I'm doing my star kingdom scifi series, but, uh, I'm, I'm kind of alternating next year would probably be back to dragons. So, um, and you asked about the podcast. We, uh, myself, Joe Lolo and Jeff Poole did the science fiction and fantasy marketing podcast for over four years.
Lindsay (2m 49s): We are kind of been winding it down this year. I was starting to feel that we had a message that could be for more than just scifi and fantasy authors. So, uh, Joe and I are going to start a new one this summer called six-figure where we kind of help people that want to get to that level. And even beyond that, it is possible as a solo author, if you're a prolific and marketing and in a genre where it works that you know, you can make $1 million or more a year. So there's right now it's a great time to be self publishing or you know, just kind of managing your own future.
Lindsay (3m 20s): If, uh, if you have any entrepreneurial spirit at all and uh, uh, as I'll be the first to admit I liked the writing more, I kind of do as much, you know, I learned as much in marketing stuff is you have to, but uh, I think I'm kind of can demonstrate that you don't have to be a super pro at a Facebook ads or AMS have or anything like that. I'm still feeling my way. A lot of it, some of that stuff. Yeah.
Jesper (3m 45s): Yeah. And I'm, I'm glad that you said about the, that this is a good time to, to get into or to publish in general or to write books in general because I, I sometimes come across the line of thinking that, that people think like, well isn't it a bit too late now? And of course if we are comparing two, and I guess you'll have this from personal experience, but if we compare it to like 2010 2012 something like that, then for sure it is a different marketplace nowadays. But in the global view of things here with, with all the countries who doesn't even have eBooks or you eat, there's an old doing all of that yet.
Jesper (4m 21s): And we're still sort of in the, in the earliest stages of this stuff. Wouldn't you agree?
Lindsay (4m 27s): I do. And I often tell people, when I started, it was December, 2010 I thought I was too late as it cause Amanda Hawking had already made her like million dollars from a, you know, her paranormal romance books. And there were a few other people that got in really early and we're killing it. And, and keyboards was around back then, the writer's cafe forum. And people were saying like, Oh, it's getting a lot harder. So I was like, well, we'll, we'll, we'll try to figure it out. Um, in the early days you kind of had to go hunting on deviant art.com or somewhere, or no, an artist.
Lindsay (4m 59s): There wasn't really this whole industry to support indie authors yet. You kinda had to find an editor that maybe could do fiction. Uh, my F my editors started out in the technical editing field and so I was referred, I was her first person doing like SciFinder fantasy and to this day I think I'm one of her main people. She's still, it's like, what is this term you're talking about? But, um, so now at least it's, it's, there's a lot of great advice out there. There's a lot of sites for am promoting your book. If you've got a little money to spend at the social media stuffs a little more established.
Lindsay (5m 32s): So I do think, you know, you still see people that are just, and maybe they started a couple of years ago, but they kind of figured it out with a new series or something and that's taken off for them. So it's very possible still here and not 2019 to to make a splash. And, uh, I feel you do have to pay attention and learn some of the marketing stuff. It's, it's, you're probably not going to just throw a book up and get lucky by having it in the right category. Am you saw more of that early on, especially, you know, if a new category of popped up on Amazon that hadn't been served by traditional publishing, if you just threw something up there with a horrible cover, it didn't matter if people would give it a try and those days are probably gone.
Jesper (6m 11s): Yeah, true. Yeah. And in that way, it is a different marketplace now, but, but uh, but okay. But I guess at the end of the day, one should also say that, you know, if you want to get into writing because you want to earn money, then I think there is, there's a lot of different professions that will get your many way quicker than writing books. So that way it's, it's not the right motivation. There's not because you want it. And many I did the right word of business because you love writing and you love telling stories and that that should be the main driver.
Jesper (6m 44s): But then of course you need to couple it with, with some advertising. But I guess then, uh, coming back to sort of the main topic here, because now that we are talking about advertising and one of the often made arguments about it's better to write in a series rather than writing stand along books is because of course you can sort of put a bit more marketing budget against a, the first book in the series because then people would go on to read the other ones. But I know you've written quite a lot of series, so I'm curious too, to have your inputs or views on, on, well I guess on one hand, how do you decide when, when is it time to stop a series, but also what have you seen from when you're comparing your series to your standalones?
Jesper (7m 32s): Can, can you still make a standalone work well or is it sort of doing the interface? It's, if you do that,
Lindsay (7m 39s): it's a little tougher if you have a fan base built up and they'll just, you're lucky enough that they'll try anything new you put out. And I have a, a standalone I did last year PSI Phi, um, that did pretty well. Um, you know, it certainly more than covered its costs and the time I put into it. Uh, but knowing me, I always end up like wanting to write two or three more and the, the readers always want more to. So I have very few actual stand-alones that are still standalone am my dragon blood series, which has eight books, a spinoff book, uh, and a spinoff series of five books that started as a standalone.
Lindsay (8m 12s): I hadn't known intention of writing, I'm just like, I'm just getting this sweet little fantasy romance with magic and it'll just be a nice side thing. And uh, I really enjoyed the characters, which is what happens. I tend to fall in love with the characters and hopefully the readers do too. And I always end up doing more. And you're right on the advertising. If you're gonna spend money on a book one, you know, especially if you're thinking maybe I'll make it free or 99 cents as a way to kind of lower the barrier of entry then am it helps if you have seven more books at four 99 that people will hopefully get sucked into the series and continue on to purchase.
Lindsay (8m 51s): I'm not super calculating as far as like, Oh, well last year I actually had a of did quite well. That was a heritage of power. It was that spinoff series in that world where I already had a lot of readers and I wrote five of them and they were still selling really well. And I remember thinking, you know, I should just keep writing more of these, but I kind of planned a five book story arc. Actually I planned a three book story arc and it turned into five. So, and I'm not really someone that can just go, well let's just take these characters and keep writing more of them even though I've sort of solved that overarching story plot so I was already moving onto something else.
Lindsay (9m 28s): And um, then that's something people can decide for themselves. I do try to write, I like the am to do like three before I launch anything because it lets me really get into the story and I'm committed before, you know, cause sometimes if it doesn't sell well you can get discouraged or even if it sounds okay but not nearly as well as something else you've done. Uh, that can also be like you always comparing either against other authors or your own past successes. So it can be a challenge to stay in food if something doesn't do as well.
Lindsay (9m 58s): So I like kinda committing beforehand and like, you know, I think this is going to be at least five books and uh, w you know, we'll see how it goes from there. I feel lucky enough to have readers that I know I'm not going to lose money on a series or cause it, they'll try anything new. So that's a nice place to get to. I know that's not everybody yet, but I do think it's worth doing maybe committing to three books there. You know, especially if you're newer and don't, you're still kind of figuring out the marketing stuff. Maybe you can afford super cool.
Lindsay (10m 30s): You know, like custom illustrated cover art, which is always great in like Epic fantasy if you can have a illustration, but that can be $800 or more. So not everybody can start out with that. And so if you don't have a real cop killer covers to start with, that can be a little tough. If you're not really great at writing blurbs yet, you're still learning how to do that. Uh, you can kind of unknowingly sabotage or a series. So you want to give it a bit of a chance. And then I always say like, before you abandon it, you know, try to try getting new covers, ask for opinions, you know, cause a lot of people really struggle with blurbs.
Lindsay (11m 5s): Uh, I can't tell you how many I've looked at as just as a reader looking for something to read and like it's just kind of, it'll be a little choppy or it doesn't quite make sense and it's probably cause they edit it so much that it became less natural. So there are definitely challenges when you're starting out and uh, sometimes it's the second or third series that does well for you and takes off.
Jesper (11m 27s): It's often actually a bit difficult to figure it out.
Lindsay (11m 30s): What will
Jesper (11m 31s): sort of resonate with the readers are bare and
Lindsay (11m 36s): am.
Jesper (11m 37s): I, I don't, I mean I talked to Dave Chesson quite recently. Of course he has his publisher record a software that sort of can help you figure out if there's a market for certain book ideas. But I, I've always been more of the line of thinking that,
Lindsay (11m 53s): right. The story
Jesper (11m 54s): that I'm excited about writing and then maybe it'll take off, maybe it won't, but maybe then the next one will. But I don't know. But that's sort of my, my line of thinking on it. And I guess one could be smarter and the research, the market burst specifically figure out what people want and then write that. But I, I dunno, I've never really been a prescriber to that mythology.
Lindsay (12m 15s): I'm not any good at it. So I don't either. Like I, you know, I think if you see, I think you can write to market if you happen to be the market yourself. Like you love those vampire romance novels that sell like crazy. I, I'm kinda one that wants to subvert the tropes rather than doing what's super popular. So I've just found that even if sometimes I think before I write a series, you know, this one, I think it's got a few, you know, enough things that are popular and like Epic fantasy that maybe it'll take off. And then inevitably that one, it's just, you know, it does okay.
Lindsay (12m 47s): But, and then it will be a series where I wasn't expecting that much from it and that will end up doing better. And I'm kind of reassured because I think traditional publishing has the same experience there. There also seemed to not be very good at predicting which things will end up. They end up calling him a sleeper hit because they didn't expect that one to do well. You know? And then sometimes you push something really hard and it's just, it doesn't click with people. And you know, I think you can get better at predicting what will you know, what's going to do well. But usually I can tell in hindsight why something did well, but not necessarily as far as sitting down and planning like, Oh, I'm trying to write the next big hit.
Lindsay (13m 25s): Uh, I'm just happy to, I like you. I think it's important to write what you're really excited about and then you can figure out how to try to market it in the best way that, yeah. Has the best chance to do well. Like, you know, you can put a dragon on the front cover if there was a dragon in chapter eight, you know? But yeah, that seems to be the traditional fantasy symbol that, uh, people see and get excited about and they're like, Oh, that's my kind of book.
Jesper (13m 52s): Yeah, indeed. But if we're, if we're saying that committing to at least a trilogy, then is is sort of the advice, um, have you had any success in, for example, having, okay, you show your written a trilogy but it's not really taking off and then you're rebranding it with newcomers and new blurbs and stuff. Have you had success in actually making such a story sale whereas before it actually didn't? And what I'm hinting at here is that the actual story is actually okay, but it was just a wrapping around it meaning the covers and the blurbs and stuff that really didn't work.
Lindsay (14m 31s): I've seen it happen a lot for other people. Um, my first year is actually did not have very good covers that were, you know, I remember the emperor's edge was my first series and kind of a high fantasy steam era kind of thing. So not only did it not quite fit Epic fantasy or steam punk kids kind of in the middle, I had these covers that uh, I don't know, said is this historical Indian fiction because there are these yellow covers and apparently that's what it puts them in mind. And I agree looking back that they weren't super, you know, they didn't scream Epic fantasy.
Lindsay (15m 5s): Um, but I was always willing to make the first book free and run sales and I feel that the story pulled people in well enough that if they would just give it a try, they would, you know, enjoy it. And I didn't have like super hot success. Right. Like I said right from the start, but I was always willing to like run those, you know, make this free run a promo, just give away the first book to try to get people to try it. And I was lucky enough that you know enough people like the story and I think the word of mouth helped a little bit too.
Lindsay (15m 35s): Uh, that's still seems to be a fan favorite that are that first series. So if you're not super to market and you don't have the exact, you know, perfect cover, it's more of a challenge and I think you might have to be willing to do the free book one or you know, to try to lure people in and then hope this story is strong enough to, uh, to get them in there. But if you know better and can you just make it all awesome from the start? Your odds are of course better. And uh, I have seen other people where they recovered it in kind of relaunched the series a that suddenly they gained some traction and am with mine, I put new covers on it eventually.
Lindsay (16m 12s): Uh, it wasn't really a game changer, but it's, it made it easier to get BookBub ads on the box set. So that's always a plus if you can get some one of those a year. But they're getting, they're getting tougher to get. So even for established others,
Jesper (16m 27s): and I was thinking, because I know I've noticed that you have quite some some series starter. The first book in a series are free. Uh, and I've also noticed actually I think you have some thought trilogies that are free as well, but do you have a, like a conscious strategy about what you're making free and why and so forth or how do you, how do you decide what to charge for and what to make free?
Lindsay (16m 52s): I usually don't start out with book one free, but I'll often launch at 99 cents since. So it's uh, you know, people will check it out. And then am it's usually after the series is complete. Like most of the ones where I have a free book, one that's always free, it's like an eight book series. And so there's seven more. And usually you sit and spin off stuff. So if I suck them in with the first one, then they'll go give it a try. And then I will often box up the first three books in this series. I find that, um, if people read the first three books, they're even more committed to going on and finishing the series.
Lindsay (17m 25s): And if they just try the first one and I don't usually leave those free to sort of like if I got a BookBub a few months ago, I made it free for the BookBub and then I just kind of a pain to go back in. And I have one right now that I think is free on Amazon even though I put the price up on the other sites and it's like, Oh, okay. Um, and so I will usually do those for sales. Do you like the three books? And again, in a series where there's like eight, so there's still a lot of stuff for them to go on and pay for if they wish to.
Jesper (17m 56s): I'm also sort of tried to use the, uh, book one free or I have my first book in the service for free as well, just because as S I think you've said earlier, it just lowers the resistance and the barrier for new readers too, to actually give it a chance. Um, and in that way, it works. I still believe in here in 2019 that the freestyle is still works,
Lindsay (18m 20s): I think especially on the non-Amazon sites for those who are not exclusive and want to sell on Barnes and noble and Kobo and Apple, that am, those people don't have a subscription service yet. Like K you can own limited on Amazon. So there, there's still, I feel like a lot of people surfing looking for the free books on those sites. I even had somebody the other day say they grabbed my free book, went on Smashwords, which has like, wow, I didn't know if people are still shopping there, but I think the international crowd that maybe doesn't have a local Amazon, you know, in their country, uh, you might be able to, they might still use Smashwords.
Lindsay (18m 56s): And you know, some people just like that there's no DRM and all that stuff to deal with on the sites. But I forgot what I was talking about. Oh, free working. Yeah. So I feel like on Amazon, Kindle unlimited maybe replaced it a little bit, uh, because those people will kind of have their $10 a month subscription and they don't think about it. That just automatically comes out of their account and everything in Kindle unlimited at that point is essentially free for them so they can just shop from that store. But I still find that when I do a free run on Amazon that I can get some, some new readers checking them out.
Lindsay (19m 31s): Uh, I'm surprised at how many people have come in from the free promo sites. They'll say like, Oh I found your book first on Freebooksy or BookBub cause I feel like authors are saying others don't work anymore or they don't work as well as they used to. But I think there's still a lot of readers subscribe to it that you know, they, they read a lot. They want bargain books. And as indie authors, even if we price it for 99 we're still a bargain compared to nine 99 or 1499 from traditional publishing. So I am still a fan of free.
Lindsay (20m 1s): Like, I'm happy if I can get my stuff into libraries and you know, people can read them that way because people that buy, you know, even if they download your stuff for free, they may still tell a friend and share the story with somebody who's going to go pay for it. And so that's why I've never been bothered by, you know, at least sharing. Most of my book ones ended up being a complete a story. So it's not like they have to read on, but I do try to set up a bigger story arc to kind of draw them in and there's questions that aren't answered about the characters.
Lindsay (20m 32s): Is that, cause I think if you give him just a complete book that ends, then there's like more friction. They're not necessarily going to automatically just continue on with the next one. Hopefully if they love the characters they will.
Jesper (20m 46s): Yeah. Then then the cliffhanger, of course you can, you can use those as well just to S people into the next book in the series as well.
Lindsay (20m 54s): Yeah. I often, I sh I don't like to do those, but somehow it ends up being kind of a cliffhanger. Like I tried to do a complete story and the novel, but then it's obvious there's more things that the characters have to go and deal with. I, especially in fantasy, I think that we just tell these massive sprawling stories that at the end it's a whole different like government system, you know, that had to be put in place. It's not like this, it's not just a little romance. Usually it's this Epic spanning scope.
Lindsay (21m 25s): We'll pretend that made sense.
Jesper (21m 28s): Yeah. Um, but I was thinking as well, because we talked about the freestyler, but on the opposite end of the scale is, is uh, the, let's say more expensive pricing element. And I talked to Joseph Melik recently as well because he, uh, actually increased the prices of all these supposed to nine 99. And it was quite interesting conversation because he was telling me that in terms of actual unit sales, there was no difference from when he had the lower price point.
Jesper (22m 2s): Um, and so you basically use, just increased all his revenues. But he's not selling any less amount of books. And it also went, of course, enables him to, to spend a bit more money on the advertising because he can afford it. But uh, have you played around with the price ranges on your books to see if it makes a difference in that way?
Lindsay (22m 21s): I, at one point, I went up from doing a lot of them three 99 up to four 99. I am conscious that, uh, I published pretty often. So if somebody's gonna come in and read everything I published that year, it might be like 10 novels. So I would feel that it might be harder for them to buy everything if I made it something $10. And I've certainly heard from a lot of people, they're like, well, I'm kind of on a budget, you know, I'm retired, I have a set income. So I really appreciate that your books are affordable. And in my case, I make plenty. Uh, so I'm not like, you know, I am feel like I need to make more.
Lindsay (22m 55s): It just cause I have so many books out now that a and I managed to keep the back list selling reasonably well and I almost always have a new series, uh, each year. So, um, you know, if you want to try it and it works, there's nothing wrong with that. I think I, we had Joseph on the show. I think he kinda does like one book a year or something in that I think you might have diminishing returns if you've published really often at that price point. We're am it depends on how prolific you are too. I know he's a big fantasy. You can be doing these 200,000 word novels and you're not going to be publishing is often.
Lindsay (23m 28s): So, um, I am a big fan of looking at the overall income rather than worrying too much about what one book costs. That's why I'm happy to do 99 cents or free for a book line if it means I make more overall. And um, you know, I, I like I have less than traditional publishing. I feel like that's a real advantage for us. And when I still make 70% yeah, that's, that seems like a really, you know, making $3 three 50 per per ebook seems good if you're, as long as you're selling, you know, lots of copies.
Lindsay (23m 59s): If you're selling three copies a month, then a little more frustrating and you know, you might want to play around with all kinds of price points.
Jesper (24m 9s): Yeah. But maybe, I mean if you're selling three copies than three 99 or nine 99 doesn't really make much of difference except that one more cup of coffee you can buy that month. But otherwise it doesn't make much of a difference. I guess
Lindsay (24m 21s): it depends also if you're in Kindle unlimited and people can borrow them, I've noticed that the higher price points can actually be more appealing then because they feel like, Oh, I'm getting a really good deal because I can just borrow this six 99 book instead of having to pay for it. Whereas if it's 99 cents, they might just go, well I'll either buy that or maybe I won't get that one because it's not as a good of a deal for one of my 10 borrows that I can have at a time. So that's something to consider too.
Jesper (24m 51s): Okay. So I guess at least am what I get from, from all of this is that for sure it is still advisable that that people should be writing in series. I think we settled on that. Uh, give it a nice commitment to write three books before you were sort of abandoned it and find something else. And I guess also based on what you're doing here that sometimes I, I, it's almost sounds like sometimes you're just writing a book and then you, you just make sure that the ending is at least open enough that if, if people like it, you can write on, but it almost sounds like many of your series of sort of spat out of just one book then then happen to get extended into a full series.
Jesper (25m 32s): Is that, is that right?
Lindsay (25m 34s): I think the dragon blood series is the only one where I didn't at all, wasn't planning to do a series. And then I've got a little box set that's two books where am the first one was encrypted and I totally meant that to be a standalone. And then people liked it and I was curious what happened next with the character. So I turned that into a to book things. So it got a sequel and a short story. Generally now you know with experience on my side I will plan out something that can go to five or eight books and I will plan from the start for it to have like there's questions about the hero or maybe the villain that you're not going to get the answers to right away.
Lindsay (26m 11s): So that will make the reader curious and want to read on. And there's, there's some something going on that needs to be resolved. Like I did one scifi series where the heroin was trying to search for her daughter that was missing and that took it through all eight books. Poor kid. So like, even though there are individual stories, and you'll see that a lot on TV series too, where this sort of like there's one thing where they're trying to accomplish in the end, solve some crime or something. You know? And I think that if you design it that way from the beginning with a few little things like that, that people want to see resolved, it keeps them reading.
Lindsay (26m 47s): I know I'm reading something right now where I think I'm only reading cause I want to see the character become the thing. You know, she's trying to become a Knight. It's like these are okay. But you know, I'm not sure if I would keep reading if it had been a complete story in one book. So sometimes just that stuff can keep people going on, even if maybe there's some other stuff that wouldn't have made them a super fan and then by the end maybe there'd become more bigger fans of the series. So we also have a very, uh, been sort of watching reading, what's it called, mentality.
Lindsay (27m 23s): But the culture nowadays and being in Kindle unlimited, I guess that helps. But, uh, do you have all your books in most of your books you can limit or how do you do the split between widen and Kindle unlimited? All of my older stuff or older series are wide because I started publishing before Kindle unlimited and KDP select existed. So I really resisted for a long time. I didn't want to go into the Amazon exclusivity with anything and I finally saw that it was an advantage to be in there and kind of a disadvantage not to be in there since the borrow is also count as sales as far as calculating your sales rank and whether you're going to be in the top 100 of your John rhe thing.
Lindsay (28m 5s): So cause I know if you pop into like Epic fantasy, you'll kind of look through and unless it's a big traditionally published author, chances are the books are in Kindle unlimited. There very few people who are able to make it and kind of stay in that top 100 for a while if they're not in canola limited. So I started launching new series in there. And so they might stay there for a year or so. And then when I have something new, I'm going to start a move that series wide and kind of do a, like a second launch, I guess. Yeah. On free or 99 cents and run some promos.
Lindsay (28m 37s): Again, it's sort of an opportunity to say, Oh, Hey, I'm launching now on Kobo and Apple and all the other bookstores. So it's not the ideal thing, you know, I think right now people are making more money by being exclusive with Amazon, which is seems counterintuitive and we'll find it tough to jump. Um, I've heard from, uh, you know, like Kobo and stuff, like the worst thing you can do is kind of jump back and forth. Yeah. I, so I just, I started in NKU and then move it out and then it's going to stay out. I'm not gonna try like yank it and try to put something back in.
Lindsay (29m 10s): Kau so I'm, it's usually the most recent series is in there. And then, um, yeah, just put the other chef wide and I also do a Patrion for the sole purpose of putting my books out early before I enroll them in KDP select. So the fans that are not Amazon people can, if they're willing to download it from book funnel. Uh, and you know, I announced it on Patrion they can get the books early. I usually put him a week or two up, uh, before the, before they launch.
Lindsay (29m 40s): So that's sort of how working around right now because the problem was starting out wide as you have fans on the other site and say get grumpy when understandably so when they find out your new book is only on Amazon. So it's, there's a little bit, a bit of a challenge. I uh, I'm would certainly love it if Amazon removed the exclusivity requirement cause I, I don't have any problem with people getting it as a subscription thing. That doesn't bother me. I still make money on that. But they do make it tough by not allowing you to have it anywhere else or even sell it on your own site.
Jesper (30m 13s): I, I'm not, I have not unwilling to put any of my books are in Kindle unlimited, but uh, but, uh, yeah, that's a whole other story that I've talked about pre previously. So, uh, we'll leave that a little for now. Um, but I was wondering now that, um, now that I have you here and we've talked around the, the, the series and the importance of writing in series, but because, because you also were six-figure author, I'm wondering if sort of you have any advice for sort of the different stages that people go through to get to that level or, you know, is there any good advice for beginners versus a, once you maybe pass that 10 K Mark and, and so forth, is there any, any sort of, uh, the best of the best advice for, for, for those stages of writing?
Lindsay (30m 59s): I think if you kinda keep your expectations low and just, you know, cause I feel like people get so disappointed if they're, they're new and they see how much you can possibly make, but they're booked, doesn't do, or their book maybe even does. Okay. You know, they're like, Oh, I made $500 this month. That's, that's horrible because this other person's making $5,000 in my genre. So I always had the kind of low expectations. Like I thought maybe if I got enough books out, I could eventually do this for my day job. So, um, it's, I think it's kind of tough actually when you have success right out of the Gates because then you think it's always going to be that easy.
Lindsay (31m 33s): And I've seen now I've had the opportunity to see a lot of authors disappear. Like they had one series it took off and then their next two series flopped and then they're just gone now. So I think it's, uh, probably not bad if you just kind of gradually, you know, put more books out every time you put a new book out, it gives you an opportunity to, you know, have a sale on book one. And I just think of it in terms of, I'm trying to get a few, few more readers with each new book I launch and, uh, hopefully they'll become lifetime readers. I, I've, I dunno, I think I have maybe 60 novels now between my name and I did like 15 under a pen name.
Lindsay (32m 9s): And I have readers tell me regularly that they've read every single one. And I'm, uh, I'm just amazed. I'm like, I don't, I haven't even gone back and like read a lot of them as just as a reader. Um, so that's great. And then, you know, of course if you do start making some money, make sure, you know, I was going to be different in every country, how much you need to put aside for taxes. But, uh, the government will want their portion and it can be pretty high when you get up into six figures. They, they, you know, at least in the U S they do your tax bracket based on, you know, what your income was.
Lindsay (32m 42s): So make sure to put money aside for that. And um, you have to hear, you have to be able to pay for health care on your own. I know in some countries that's what you get as a citizen that pays taxes. So that's something to consider in the U S and some other countries where you need it by your own health insurance. So usually you need to make more as a self employed person than you did maybe as a salaried person in order to cover all your expenses. So it's ideal if you can probably do both for a while and just pay off any day you have before making the jump to full time.
Lindsay (33m 18s): And then you'll probably find that there will be jumps. Like I thought, you know, income would just kind of steadily rise. Uh, but you tend to like something takes off, you know, a little bit and then you get a big jump and then you're at that level hopefully, and you stay there and then maybe the next year is there'll be a bigger jump. I w even inevitably it won't continue to just always trend upward. So it's, it's good to put money in the bank and then not assume that you're just always gonna make the same level every year. I tend to pay for things with cash just so I don't am and have to worry about it.
Lindsay (33m 49s): You know, they don't, I don't want a big mortgage on a house or anything like that. So I, I feel like if you have gradually success, you're probably going to handle it better than if you just suddenly start making 100,000 from your, you know, some trilogy that took off like crazy. So, but you know who, who wouldn't hope for that to happen?
Jesper (34m 7s): Yeah, I guess I can't blame anybody from hoping that. Okay. So thanks a lot for all your advice here. Lindsay am where can people find out more about you if they want to, to learn about your writing or your podcast or whatever.
Lindsay (34m 28s): I'm on lindsayburoker.com if you come anywhere close, just filling my name, you'll probably find it. It's Google can help. This is not too common of our El. So, uh, that's my website. I'm on Twitter as goblin writer, which is a kind of handle you get if you have had it for 10 years before you started publishing in New York and thinking like, Oh, I need a professional author thing. And then under lindsayburoker on Facebook and also on Instagram. And uh, the, the new podcast is going to be a six figure author's dot com with the number six because that is the domain that was available.
Lindsay (35m 3s): So hopefully we'll, we're going to do kind of a higher level, you know, just sort of skip the basics cause there's a lot of podcasts that, you know, do some of the basic stuff and we'll try to get on some really successful guests and just drill down and ask them the good questions. So if you're a podcast listener or on YouTube, hope you check us out.
Jesper (35m 23s): That's great. And thank you so much for coming on to amwritingfantasy Lindsay and have a chat to you today.
Lindsay (35m 29s): Thank you for having me.
Jesper (35m 31s): And so you out there, thank you for watching and see you next Monday.
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Do you love tightly plotted novels where little clues become huge problems in the next book? I do! But how do you plot them as an author – without spending months outlining or writing everything first?
Well, I'm so glad you asked! Because I know a simple trick that will lay the foundation so you can write a series with confidence!
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Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Autumn (0s): Don't you love a tight series that is tied so well together that in a tiny problem in book one because the tension fuel plot a book three is what I crave as a reader, but as a writer, how the heck do you create that without writing all the books first and possibly driving yourself mad on the edits and rewrites? What did we need? If there is a simple trick so you could get writing and publishing with confidence, well there is an employee to share it with you.
Autumn (33s): If you're a fantasy author then you've come to the right place. My name is Autumn and together with Jesper we've published more than 20 novels. Our aim is to use our experience to help you with writing marketing and selling books to fans all over the world. A quick note to those listening in on the podcast. There are a couple of graphics that I'll link to in the show notes at the end of the podcast, but for the full effect I recommend watching the video. There are a couple of things. I look forward books as a reader and a big one is a tightly woven series where the tension keeps building and it's all tied together with not only an overall huge goal, one that you don't usually realize it's all at least book too, but that one where minor problems pushed aside for immediate threats bubble up to be huge plot changing moments.
Autumn (1m 25s): Those books will keep me up all night and make me forget to eat, but as an author, especially a new one, creating that can seem like a nightmare in plotting. Creating a single book is difficult enough, but a series that flows like it was planned that way far before a single word was written. It's tough, especially if you don't want to write all three, four, seven books before publishing even one or the novella or short story.
Autumn (1m 55s): Having this sort of big picture info is so important and to do it, we are talking a hundred pages of intricate back checking, right? Gosh, no, you should know me better than that. I like efficiency. Getting the biggest reward for the least amount of work is sort of my thing. I want to spend all of my effort on the actual writing, not the before I ever get to writing part. We are going to do this super easy, simple and build off a few of the previous things we've covered on these videos.
Autumn (2m 31s): Okay. First, let's take a look at the plot of a traditional story arc. Again, we first looked at this in the video creating a novel outline. Remember, this is where a fairly flat intro rises during the inciting incident to escalate through some hurdles and laws to the high point of the climax before dropping to a less tense resolution and the episode on creating a quick novel outline. I talked about using the seven of story structure and using it to match the graph was an inciting incident, hurdles and laws when the reaction phase, the dark Knight of the soul and planning phase in the middle and then the climax on wrap up knowing that you might think the plot of a trilogy, it looks something like this.
Autumn (3m 18s): This graph shows three books, one after the other with the exact same tension shape as a single book from a flood intro to a final wrap up and all of them equal if peak tension in the background of this trilogy, some sort of series arc ties everything together. It makes sense, right? But it is wrong.
Old McGrumpy (3m 40s): Why? It looks like three books with some overarching theme to tie them together. It is very orderly.
Autumn (3m 47s): You would think so old and grumpy as an AI. You probably like a very clean and organized graph that resembles one input after the other exact same inputs. But that doesn't make an exciting series
Old McGrumpy (4m 0s): but you just don't like logic. If this isn't an image of a series, what is it?
Autumn (4m 6s): Well, it represents a poorly planned series or one that is more like a TV show where something that happened in the previous episode doesn't really impact today's show but somehow plays into the overall season. It works, but in some tight plotting, I like type plotting. We are here to talk about tight plotting.
Old McGrumpy (4m 27s): Fine. What is a trilogy supposed to look like to a worthless human?
Autumn (4m 32s): Ha glad you asked what a trilogy you really should look like. Is this
Old McGrumpy (4m 39s): ag?
Autumn (4m 39s): Oh wait, it isn't that bad. Oh, well, good to know that a really tactical plotting can make AI runaway. To make sense of this, we just need to look at the parts here. Book one contains the beginning of a subplot that becomes the plot of book to which contains a subplot that becomes the plot of book three and behind it all as a series plot that weaves everything together. Plus book one is exciting, but the tension really increases with book to well.
Autumn (5m 10s): Book three is even bigger and a complete page Turner, not to mention the inciting incidents for the serious plot happens at the climax of book one. In fact, you might say the climax of book one kicks off that realization. There's a bigger problem. The climax of book two is actually a hurdle in the series plot and the climax of book three is also the climax of the series plot. It all makes so much sense when you craft it, but I promise you as soon as you sit down to plot out your series, it will all fall apart.
Autumn (5m 46s): Like I was speaking a foreign language that you are momentarily fluent in and now eludes you. Because that has happened to me. Writing is a mess. Nothing is ever as simply as I just outlined, but there are steps to make all this happen. I wouldn't tell you it was possible and then not get you to the end and the way to do this is with that two sentence synopsis, novel theme. These are super simple and follow the lines of just needing five elements like a one, a hero who finds himself stuck in to a situation from what you went to S to free himself by achieving a three goal.
Autumn (6m 25s): However, there is a four villain who wants to stop him from this and if he is successful will cause the hero to experience a five disaster. To take a deeper look at that and some explanation, I'll link to a blog post at the amwritingfantasy website. If you haven't been over there, you should check it out. There are a lot of great resources from workbooks to one over 150 posts on writing and marketing. For writing a trilogy, you need to create four of these two sentence synopsis.
Autumn (6m 57s): They would include one the synopsis of book one two the synopsis of book two three this analysis of book three and four the synopsis of the empire series, the plot of book, one will be mostly unrelated to the series. However, the climax of book one will reveal a larger problem which has been slowly building through the book as a subplot. This reveal is the series theme. The end of book one also sets up plot a book too, which is usually overcoming a big hurdle to six need it to succeed in solving the problem with the series plot book three is plot will be closely tied with the series.
Autumn (7m 39s): At that point, the characters are the thick of trying to solve the series plot what of the climax of book three at the same time by looking at the themes and the fellowshipping upping the seven steps of story structure for each book and the series, you could start to pull out the subplots that needed to grow to become the plot of the following. Book knowing the theme and the plot of the series helps you see how book three you should develop. This will tie everything together so the books feel tightly woven even before you write them.
Autumn (8m 11s): And that's because well they are. It does take some time and thought, well you have all the tools to do this and once you put it together, you know how all the books we'll weave together. I can start to see a bit of an overall tapestry. It is really exciting. And now you aren't writing in the dark either. You have solid direction for an entire series arc so get writing and let me know in the comments if you're applauding a series and a bit of what it is all about. I love to hear, don't forget to check out the episode on creating a quick outline for your novel.
Autumn (8m 47s): It will help with solidifying this one. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Should you create an audiobook version of your novel? Are audiobooks worth it?
If you do go ahead and get an audiobook created, despite the production costs involved, how do you then market the audiobook? And what about how to publish and distribute it?
All your questions will be answered in this episode.
The resources we mentioned were:
ACX (Amazon audio production available for US citizens only): https://www.acx.com/ FindAwayVoices (available Internationally): https://findawayvoices.com/ Draft2Digital: https://draft2digital.com/
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Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Jesper (0s): Have you ever wondered whether or not you should produce some audio books for your novels and is it even worth it? And how do you market audiobooks?
Intro (13s): And
Autumn (16s): if you're a fantasy author that you've come to the right place. My name is Autumn and together with Jesper we've published more than 20 novels. Our aim is to use our experience to help you with your writing marketing and selling books to fans all over the world.
Jesper (30s): So in about one and a one and a half month time, we are going to open our writing costs for fantasy authors for the first time in six months. And we've sort of been waiting for the right time to give away an awesome price and it just happens so that actually tomorrow we have one year anniversary on Patrion. And because of that we thought we wanted to celebrate that anniversary and give some stuff.
Autumn (1m 5s): I was so excited because Patrick has been a great place and great opportunities where we can provide even more personal touch and tips. I mean, we love doing these free videos and the podcasts. We love reaching authors and helping authors so they don't have quite the same stumbling blocks and experiences that, um, we ended up having some times that always for the best. So we can give you some of the tips and the things we've learned over time. We love doing that on YouTube and the podcast, but in Patreo and we can do even more, we can reach more people with the personal tips and more in depth focus tips.
Autumn (1m 45s): And it's been a great experience and I cannot believe it's been a whole year.
Jesper (1m 50s): It's amazing, isn't it? How time flies when you're having fun? No, we're just really, really busy. Yeah. But basically what we decided to do with, and here's how it's gonna work. So tomorrow, the 16th of July, and that's 2019 if you ever watched and listened to this, uh, but tomorrow the 16th of July until the end of July until the 31st of July, 2019 we have a two week window and during that two week window, we're going to give some stuff away, eh, unique to those who either subscribe as a new subscriber on Petro on.
Jesper (2m 30s): And you can do that as a little as a dollar a month or two, some existing patron subscribers who upped their pledge to the next year. So either one of the to we'll get some additional prices on top of the normal rewards that you do get anyway once you sign up for on patron. And one of them is uh, my audio book version on how to write offenses. You book description, which every fantasy author needs to write anyway, so you can get a free audio book version of that, uh, as soon as you have signed up or upgraded your tier.
Jesper (3m 10s): Uh, on top of that, because we are releasing the ultimate fantasy writer's guide, our premium writing costs for fantasy authors in the end of August, we are also going to put the name, your name in the pot for a draw. And we're going to draw one lucky winner between everybody who signs up in this two week window until the 31st of July. And also between all the people who operate the Tia who's already on patron and we're going to draw one name at random and that person will win the premium ultimate fetish of riders guide course for free.
Autumn (3m 45s): I'm so excited about that. Uh, we'd like to give away or how offer scholarships occasionally. So having a chance to have a new student and to do that for free and as a reward to our pantry Rollins, I think it's a fantastic opportunity. And what a fantastic way to celebrate our one year anniversary on Patreon.
Jesper (4m 5s): Yes, exactly. I'm also looking very much forward to it and uh, go check it out. There is a link in the, if you're on YouTube and just the description field below this video, you will find the link to patron. But if you are listening on podcast then just go into the show notes and also there you'll find a link to patron. So just go over there and check it out. But remember it's only this two week window and after that we are back to normal. So get on there. So it starts tomorrow
Autumn (4m 34s): on Tuesday and just goes to the end of the month and 2019 so check it out while you can and shine in.
Jesper (4m 43s): Great. Okay. That was a bit of anniversary speech there. So we hope to see you there. But uh, let's get into a bit of an audio book conversation autumn because I think all your books is a really, really good topic to discuss because the audio book market is absolutely booming. Uh, it's crazy the growth rates that we see in the audio book market, uh, yet at the same time, out of all the books that you can find online or the eBooks, it's probably like a few percentage of the total who actually has audio progressions available.
Jesper (5m 21s): It's very, very rare and that is of cost because right now and the time and age we're in both the production costs for an audiobook, but also the time that goes into it is working a bit against us. But we wanted to share our thoughts here today on, well, should you, should you create an audio book for your novels or not? And if you should then how do you market those audiobooks and also what are your distribution possibilities, you know, how do you release it or publish into the world?
Jesper (5m 58s): So, but maybe we should start about the uh, the part on should we actually create audiobooks.
Autumn (6m 5s): Sure. That's a good one. I, cause I've been in audio and doing audio books and I can't remember when I started if it was 2014, 2015, but it's been a few years now. So I've done that. I've had a pro file, I have all of my Epic fantasy trilogies, both of them. So six books in audio and I'm working on my dystopian one and I've been giving away advice to a lot of authors thinking of trying out audio books. So I think this is a great and important topic because you're right, as far as percentage wise, you know, I, I would, I started E publishing in 2012.
Autumn (6m 40s): There were like virtually, there was less than a million eBooks on Amazon. So this is like the reset for doing that again. But now it's audio books where it's a small market where you have a much better chance of having your books noticed, seen and heard. But again, this is more than just, you know, making sure you are editing, um, and controlling those aspects. You still have a whole new realm of things you need to be on top of and take care of so that you're producing a quality audio books so that what your knee known for your name gets known for is a wonderful story in a greatly produced audio book and not something that people are going hearing.
Autumn (7m 21s): This person's voice is like hearing fingernails on a chalkboard and I can't stand this author. That's not what you want to have happen. So this is a whole new realm and it taught me a very important lesson when creating fantasy and character's name is make sure you know how to pronounce them and that you can tell other people how to do that. It's totally changed my perspective on what I needed my characters now.
Jesper (7m 43s): Yeah. That, that is absolutely true. Uh, but, and I think probably most people can relate to this, but we live in a world nowadays where everybody is very, very busy and because of that, people are also in general, maybe not everybody, but a lot of people are trying to optimize how they spent their time. Meaning that if you could stop doing multiple things at once, like that's in part also why I personally love listening to podcast. I counted them last week and I'm currently listening to 51 different podcasts shows.
Jesper (8m 17s): So it's a lot. Um, but the nice thing is about, it doesn't really take up like extra time because I do it when I go grocery shopping or if I'm cooking dinner or something, they're not just having my earplugs in and I'm listening to it while I'm doing something else. And I think where we are today in here in 2019 with people being so vicious, they are, I think in part that's also why we received seeing audiobooks rooming because people can do it, they can basically listen to a book while they're doing something else.
Jesper (8m 48s): Um, and that is a market that you can tap into by creating audio books.
Autumn (8m 54s): Definitely. And now we was interesting
Jesper (8m 56s): as I, there's a few platforms out there, so you and I have actually used totally different ways of doing this. I've been on ACX since I started, but ACX is related to Amazon. It's owned by Amazon also. It's what it produces it you buy the books on audible as well as Amazon. So that's where I've been. But it's not um, open to anyone who doesn't look white. It States which has a huge limiting factor. But you found a place that you have been using that um, you don't have to be a U S citizen, which is kinda nice.
Jesper (9m 29s): Yeah, exactly. Uh, so I've used find a way voices, um, which is, I've been very happy with it. It's a very good service. You upload your, sort of upload some, some information about what it is, the book that you want them to Janae narrate and then they, and you also say something about what type of narration you would like to know. Should should the person sound professional or funny or serious or calm or whatever. Uh, so you, you, you sort of give them some hints and some guidelines and then they will go out and then are their library of narrator to stay.
Jesper (10m 5s): We'll find three of them that they think matches what you're looking for. And then those three we'll do a free sample for you, which you can listen to. And if you don't like any of them, you just say to find a way, voices, I don't like them. And then they'll give pre new once and they will continue doing so until you're happy with it. And once you're happy in your selected it, then the duration starts and then you go sort of go through the process and then Nereda uploads them to find a way, voices, platforms where you can communicate whenever he was saying you need to change this and that, and then he will, we recorded or she will rerecord it.
Jesper (10m 37s): And once you've approved each of the sections, just press approve. And in the end, then you have a final audiobook and then find a way voices takes care of it and they distribute it to all. There's like one in a hundred different distributors that they also audible that they distribute to. Uh, so it's, it's very, very easy and uh, it's, it's, it's a perfect opportunity in my view because also there is no exclusive activity with it. Like if you go to ACX with Amazon, they lock you in, um, as usual Amazon style.
Jesper (11m 11s): So find a way why system good at and you're free to do whatever you want and you set your own prices for the book as well, which is really nice. You can't do that on ACX as well. If I understand correctly, once you've sort of gone, gone through all that and uh, well you, you, you have your audio book released and uh, it's, it's pretty simple actually. If you go in through the draft to digital, if you use that drafted digital as your distributor and if you have your ebook on there and you us inside the drafted digital dashboard, if you click create audio book in from in there, then drafted digital has a agreement with findawayvoices that any customer who comes them find a way voices, we'll waive the $50 administration fee that they normally chance when you upload a new project.
Jesper (12m 1s): So you can upload a unit project and you're paid nothing. So it's awesome. So if you're also using breath to digital, just go through that platform rather than creating an account separately on findawayvoices and upload your book there because then they got a chat, your $50 to sort of handle your new project and find the samples and all of that. But you can save that money by just going through draft or did digital to that's, that's so cool.
Autumn (12m 28s): You pretty much convinced me. I wish I had tried it, but I don't think anyone existed when I started. I mean, ACX is also incredibly user-friendly. And if you're only on Amazon, it's definitely the way to go because you log in and you actually pull your book in from Amazon through your AEs IBN number. So you pull it in, it links automatically. So when the book is done, it's automatically distributed. The sound clip is right there. So unlike findawayvoices, you don't have anyone setting anyone for you.
Autumn (12m 59s): You post up a sample, you give them a script that you want people to read and you could just sit there and let it be and people will come and find you and read your script. But you can also go and look for narrators and say, Hey, I just have this open for auditions where you come and audition for it. So it's a very active, you have to go hunt for people. People come and find you, and it can be a lot of fun. So you can end up with 1520 I mean, you can keep it open as long as you want. And so you find the narrator you're looking for and then work out a contract. And there's a couple of different levels you can pay someone outright.
Autumn (13m 32s): If you have a book that is selling incredibly well on Amazon, they will actually pay a percentage of the fee to the narrator. So you can get that kind of a deal if you have a really good bestselling novel. And there's also something where it's royalty share what's 50 50 of all the process proceeds. And obviously the, that's more for newer narrators, but the high end ones, they usually want a fee that's can be upwards of $300 per finished hour, uh, which is not good. It takes 10 about 10 hours to make one per finished hour video.
Autumn (14m 3s): So you can kind of figure out how much they're actually getting per hour is not that much. So it's up to you to choose what UAA you've got. You want to go. It's awesome. If you have a book in a series and you have the money, you can hire someone for the entire series. That's what I'm having with my dystopian books. But at the same time on my Epic fantasy, I was a new author at the beginning and so I actually have a different narrator for every single one and it works, but it's also jarring. Not everyone pronounces the same names the same way. Some people prefer the one narrator over another.
Autumn (14m 34s): So there's a lot of discontinuation. Um, honestly the best way to go is to save the money and be able to pay the narrator upfront. Then you own 100% of the royalties and that is fantastic. But you know, it works both ways. If you want to get your feet wet, it's definitely for you to find a fantastic narrator by going with the 50, 50 royalty share deal and giving it a try and seeing how it goes because it is a fantastic market to jump into. However, saying that, um, if people think is it is the way to become the quick rich, you'll get rich quick book selling way.
Autumn (15m 11s): I can say after three, four years in this game, I'm working with a few other narrators and people who are doing audio books, other authors, you know, it's great. It's great to be finable, but I'm not seeing it as the most major boost in my sales I've ever done. I think it makes much more sense to focus on writing and making sure you have an entire series written than it does to get your first audio book out. So if I had to choose between writing and getting my audio book released, I would write first. But I definitely love it having it on that platform as well.
Jesper (15m 43s): Yeah. Yeah. I mean, of course, as you said a, it makes a lot of sense to make sure that you can get the same narrator to to do a whole series so that it doesn't, it's not a new voice reading next book in the series, so that certainly makes sense. Of course the downside would findawayvoices is that you don't have this ride split opportunity, at least not now. Maybe it comes later. I don't know what their plans are, but right now the only way to do it is that you have to pay, uh, their narrator for the recording. Um, they go for anything.
Jesper (16m 15s): I think the lowest, I've seen this $150 per hour, but then they go upwards and easily $500 power. I think the one when I got to narrate the, uh, how Taran right offenses, she put descriptive your book, I think I paid $250 an hour for him. Uh, and he does a very good job and so they, the pricing ranges, but at the end of the day, it's not cheap. And of course, if you have a full, 100,000 word long fantasy novel, it's going to cost you quite some money.
Jesper (16m 48s): Uh, and that, that is really the downside with the audio books is that where we are right now where you have to do it like this manual approps and buy them. I buy that. I mean, I'm pretty sure that in if in a couple of years, if we had to have this conversation in a couple of years, I'm pretty sure we're going to see AI being able to S to narrate books just as well as human beings as Kevin. I'm pretty sure that we'll see that in a couple of years' time. And when we get to that space, yay, I can probably never read that book in no time and the cost will be a lot lower, uh, to do so.
Jesper (17m 23s): But, but we're not there yet. So that just means that not right now the only way is to go with the human way, meaning that you have to pay a human being to sit there and read everything and record everything and be this extensive and it's not a, as autumn said, it's not a get rich quick dark sort of thing. But, and I will also agree, I think with what you said them that if if it's just your first books, I wouldn't rush into start getting an audio book. But I mean for, for my first trilogy am I don't have audiobooks for those either.
Jesper (17m 57s): And I have, I don't have any plans to do that either at the, at this point in time. But I would say that sort of, if you, if you have the money to spend on it, I think it is extremely good to get the audio books out there, both because the market is booming and one more people are listening to all your books. That's one thing. And we are far from it as stage where everybody in the world who will get access to audiobooks are there yet. So that will only be a lot more people coming on board in the coming years who will start getting access to all your book, uh, platforms that are not there today.
Jesper (18m 31s): So there's a lot of new customers out there, so to speak. You don't have a handle on today where the audio book will help you a lot in, in getting there. But that, that's, that's sort of the one side of it. And then the other side of it is that having the bootable different formats of a book. So you have a, um, an ebook, you'll have a paperback. Uh, maybe you have a hard copy if that's something, but, but at least you have an ebook. They have a paperback. Both of those of course you could get through Amazon, but then you also have an audio book that just the fact that you have at least those three formats also shows a certain level of seriousness and professionalism with your book that when somebody goes to your book page on, on Amazon, for example, in the, okay, there's all these different formats there, it kind of gives the impression S and also show that this is a serious author who actually means business when one is being created here and it's not just, uh, created a, a cheap ebook and there you go.
Jesper (19m 32s): You know, so, so I think that there is some certain level of branding and professionalism in this that you cannot neglect completely either.
Autumn (19m 41s): No, I agree. I think it definitely works as your plot form. If you're a serious author, you want a very strong platform. Audio books are the way to go. I will definitely say, uh, if you, when you hire a narrator, you're going to want to have a list of pronunciation guides of names, place names, characters. Sometimes it doesn't hurt to have a little bit of a feel. I remember one of my auditions and one of my very sensitive characters, I having to be an action scene. I always say, if you're going to pick a scene for an audition, pick one of the most challenging scenes in your novels.
Autumn (20m 14s): And that way, you know, if they pull that one off, they're going to pull off the rest of it. And so I had this scene that was very challenging and very, you know, action oriented and they narrated the one very sensitive male character. Like he was a hockey jock. And I like know we talked and he redid it so that I could really get a better feel for him and his voice. So it doesn't hurt to have a few tips like that. You're gonna want to hand that off to your narrator. It's very important to that they get the words right and really treat them like you would, you know, your graphic artists, anyone you work with, your editor.
Autumn (20m 46s): This is a very professional, I've become really good friends with the narrator for my dystopian series cause we've been together for years and I've watched his am career blossom as an actor. Actually. I'm hoping now at this point my book will be famous just because of who he's going to be. And um, the things you learn, you know, he has to not eat dairy the day he's going to narrate cause it makes mouth sounds. I mean he is, you have to have a soundproof studio. This is when they say the, you know, 300 to $500 per finished hour knowing that every per finished hour is 10 to 12 hours of audio and takes.
Autumn (21m 24s): And I don't think I could have the patients to do this. I appreciate the professionalism that a truly good narrator has. So you know, if you're going to go get into this, take the time to listen to a few audio books that are really well done and get a feel for it because you want to know, you know, the sound, the static noise, all that white noise, it all adds up and want a quality finished product. So make sure you're getting that, especially if you're going to be paying for it directly and have, you know, the a hundred percent royalties.
Autumn (21m 57s): But even if you're doing a 50, 50 split, you should have a standard that you expect and make sure you listen to it so that there's anything that's incorrect. They get pronouns wrong or names wrong. Um, I had someone try to change an entire scene by accident. Make sure that doesn't happen so you can get that fixed and corrected. Now the biggest aspects with audio books too is how you end up marketing. So just because you haven't, it not 100%, you know, it shows up on Amazon, which was fantastic.
Autumn (22m 27s): But you do have to let people know. And there's a few ways. There is a place called audio book. Boom that does do marketing with ACX. You get 25 free codes. But I know, yes were, you seem to be got, have a lot more than 25 and there's a few places out there where you can look for our reviewers. You can do swaps that they get a free code if they're going to guarantee you 100% that they will review your book for you. And those are all great ways of getting noticed and having people, you know, see that you have an audio book, which is fantastic.
Autumn (22m 57s): Plus it gets you into more abuse on Amazon, all your profiles, your paperback or audio book and your ebook all connects. So that all those reviews, uh, covid reference, which is good. It's also frustrating if someone doesn't like your narrator. It gives you a one star review and totally ripped a new one. And that shows up on your ebook, which has nothing to do with, cause I have had people say I hate this narrator of their voices, like chalk on a, you know, fingernails on a chalkboard. Uh, couldn't stand it, but the store is really good and you're like, Oh, so just warn you.
Autumn (23m 30s): Yes, your name is going to be forever linked with whoever you choose to narrate it. And if people don't like the voice of the narrator, you're going to hear about it. Yeah. I think when it comes to marketing of the audio book says it's a bit difficult.
Jesper (23m 47s): I mean you do get these giveaway coats that uh, that you also just mentioned autumn which is across nice. And then you can give away some audio books and hopefully make people interested in, for example, if it's, if you have a series of books and you can give some audio, a free coats away for the first one and then hopefully they will go on and buy the other ones. So that is of course good, but it is a bit more difficult in a way that you don't necessarily have quite the same tools available to you as you do with the eBooks for example, or the paperback back.
Jesper (24m 19s): Certainly on on the Amazon ads you cannot charge at the audio books specifically with the Amazon app, you could target the ebook and you're contacting people back, but not the audiobook. But of course their line of thinking is then if you run the ads to the eBooks and to the paperbacks and those who actually prefer audio books, they will just pick up the audio. But when they arrive on your book page. So that's sort of the the line of thinking behind but it, but it is a bit different to some extent. At least I view would maybe, maybe some, some has more experienced with this than me and and can correct me and maybe even autumn I don't know, but, but at least in my view, these audio books, sales are more something you're sort of pickup up in the wake of the other book selling.
Jesper (25m 0s): So you, you just sell some audio books. Because the other, because you're pushing traffic to the other books and this, that's how I view it. Of course. The other alternative is that we find a way washes. You're also distributing to libraries in the U S desists though. So you can try to let your readers know who, why the U S that, Oh by the way, do you know that you can actually get my audio book for free if you go to library and they, eh, they use these special apps that findawayvoices us as well with libraries has access to, but all those details are inside the findawayvoices dashboard.
Jesper (25m 36s): So you'll get all of that when, when you start working with, we'd find a way voices, but you can't tell Rita. So you know, go to your library, asked them if they use this and then you can basically, you don't even have to leave your home, you know the, the readers can download it via their portal to the library from home and you will get paid as soon as they do. So because the library then pays for a pro listen base. So basically the, the sort of lent the audio book to the, to the customer, in this case, the Rita, and then you get paid for that by uh, findawayvoices.
Jesper (26m 9s): So, so it works and you get paid. And that's of course nice that that's another way you can try to market the book and actually market the fact that they can listen to it for free, which most people will like. So, um, yeah. But other than that, I, I, I do view it as the marketing side of audiobooks is a bit difficult. So you just started to pick up the sales to cam from marketing the eBooks and the paperback books. But I don't know if you have any other thoughts on that order, but that's sort of how I see it.
Jesper (26m 40s): I think that's a primary way is definitely if your book is selling well
Autumn (26m 44s): in other ways that you're, you know, you have an ebook am so you do a, you know, a sale on it or you have a freebie, people will see that it's an audio book and you'll get some sales that way, which is fantastic. It is also, I always look at it, it's another way of doing posts. So if you do post to your social media account, you know, letting people know every once in a while having, Oh yeah. By the way, do you know this is on audio? I know for a while I was taking clips and putting them, sometimes I'd make them to YouTube clips or I would just do the audio clip or I do it as a blog post and so it's fantastic.
Autumn (27m 17s): Do you have this other medium? So I'm going to, you know, I'll post more on it and share off clips because I can access all of those files that are on my audio book and it clips and do am beams and do all these other posts. And so that has always, you know, kind of more interesting. I use it for videos. I use Adobe spark, which allows you to make some really cool high-end videos. I can put in some sound there. I have this plan in this script to make this trailer and actually paid my one narrator that do a few other quotes and stuff so that I can make a trailer.
Autumn (27m 50s): So I have all that that I'm pulling in from the audio book that'll really, it's maybe stunning if I ever sit down and sit still in one place long enough to actually pull all the files together that are just in random pieces at the moment. And of course there's giveaways. So you know, if you do paperback giveaway is ebook giveaways. You can do audio book giveaways, whether you're using a viral share platform like King Sumo or Rafflecopter. But it is again, another way that if you have free codes or if you, you know, once you finish your 25 free throws on ACX, you can ask them very politely to see if they'll give you a few more, which usually they'll at least give you five more.
Autumn (28m 26s): So it's always helpful to keep that in mind and you'll have more codes and you can, uh, give them out in. The nice thing is with those free codes, even with ACX, you actually get paid for them. It's a slightly lower rate and ACX also does distribute to libraries and a few other just, they call it expanded distribution. So all of that is available there. And like I said, there's really no reason to not give it a try. I have right now I have two novellas out that are a new series at the moment. I have no plans on making them into audio books, but I also liked that it's a novella.
Autumn (28m 59s): You know they're one 35,000 words. One's 45,000 words does is a great, get your feet wet with audio book life. So if you have even a short story, all of those, think outside the box. If you just want to try it out and it's for sale on Amazon, go for it. See what you can figure out and see how you like it and learn the ropes because still better way about learning how to work with audio books and then how to market audio books. Then to actually go get an audio book made and what to say if you're starting out, don't worry about rushing into creating all your books.
Autumn (29m 38s): It is cool to have on your books. I certainly think so, but, but it is expensive. So
Jesper (29m 42s): uh, maybe wait a bit and uh, if you could start seeing that you, your series a are sailing, if you start seeing that your eBooks and paperbacks it sailing and then it, it's definitely worth, worth considering. Stop getting some audiobook screener if you can afford it or if you want to spend the money on it. There is a, a lot of things we can spend money on, so maybe it's not at the top of your list. Like it like that. That is actually the case for me with, with my first trilogy that it's sort of not just not the top of the list of things I want to just spend money on.
Jesper (30m 16s): So I have not done it. Maybe I'll do it one day, I don't know. But, but for now I have a lot of other things I would rather spend time and money on. So, uh, that's up to you. But, uh, yeah, I think the main thing is to take away is that just because you spent the money in creating an audio book, if the book is not selling already, it's not going to stop selling just because you have an audio book. So you can save the money if that's the case and because it's quite expensive trip. So, so there's no need to, to think that this is the magic bullet.
Autumn (30m 47s): No, I concur. I mean, I know when I first saw the uh, idea that my trilogy at over a hundred thousand words each and you add that into your hours that it was going to be over $10,000 to $12,000 to produce, I can guarantee you am I'm not making that back in audio book sales anytime in the near future. It's fantastic to have them. But again, I agree with Yesware that this is not where you want to put all your coin. I would say start put that money into marketing your current folks and put the audio book cloth once you see them selling.
Autumn (31m 20s): Cause it's not really the other way around. I haven't seen an audio book becomes so huge that the ebook sales lift, it's usually the ebook sales come first and then the audio book. But it is definitely fun. It gives you a few more things. And you know, worst case scenario, you want to have some clips of someone reading your book. Um, you can read your book. So don't be shy. Get front of the camera and you can always use that for marketing purposes. To
Jesper (31m 47s): yeah, true. I would say though, a sort of a, a bit of a wanting to finish off with here, but the don't try to narrate your own audio books unless you're a bit good edit, you know, because it really does take skill and there's a reason why they charging several hundred dollars an hour because one is a lot of work, but it also requires skill to do it. So really it sounds properly and it sounds good. Um, and people have it, you, you know, they have them now right out in the box, right inside the or.
Jesper (32m 17s): So it has to sound, we will. Uh, so I would definitely never tried to,
Autumn (32m 25s): no, I concur. I only mean that for like a little posts on Instagram, but to do a full length book, get a professional it, once you hear a professional narrate a page of your book, you will fall in love. And you also probably realize how many times you seen Eustace didn't say a word on the same page and kick yourself, but it is. Um, I, I didn't even like audio books honestly until I heard my first book narrated and I thought, Oh my gosh, this is so cool.
Autumn (32m 56s): So it's definitely fun, but you don't have to race into it. The market will still be there in a few years, so concentrated on getting your ebook selling. Okay, cool. I guess we'll just say thank you for watching and listening. If you want to podcast and see you next Monday. Yes. See you next Monday. But don't forget tomorrow is Tuesday. Go to Patreon and possibly win a spot in the ultimate fantasy writer's guide course and get some other freebies for joining or upgrading. See you there.
Autumn (33m 27s): Bye. Bye. Bye.
Is it really worth it attending author conventions and events? And if it is, how can you ensure to get results from it?
What is you would like to organize your own convention or event? What do you need to consider and are there financial risks to take into account?
Zach Bohannon & J. Thorn from The Career Author podcast (http://thecareerauthor.com/) are sharing their experiences.
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Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Jesper (0s): Have you ever wondered if it's worth going to writing events and is it worth your money and is it really worth your time and what if you are sort of further along in your career and then you won't be speculating about is it worth creating some of my own events? That's what we're going to talk about here today. If you're fantasy author then you've come to the right place. My name is Jesper and together with Autumn we've published more than 20 books and it is our aim to help you in your writing and marketing endeavors.
Jesper (36s): So today I have been joined by somebody else. Then the, actually it's the guys from the Korea author podcast. I listened to their podcast every week and I will let her put the link in the description field below for our podcast so that you could go and listen to if you want. But the reason that I wanted them on here to cover this topic is because I know that they have talked about it before because, and they also have both of their perspectives on this thing, so they both joint conventions by themselves. As a participant, but they have also an art creating events for other authors themselves.
Jesper (1m 10s): So we want it to try to cover both angles here and they're welcome to, uh, the amwritingfantasy, uh, channel. Uh, Jameson.
J. Thorn (1m 19s): Yeah, thanks. That's for, we're really happy to be here. Thanks for having us.
Jesper (1m 23s): Thanks a lot. And, uh, well I guess we can sort of just jump right into it. I know you guys have participated, if we start with sort of the participation angle, and I know you guys have gone to different events just as participants where you have not been new organized so a bit, but I wonder if you could sort of share a bit about is. Is it worth the time and the money that it takes to go to these events? And if you do go to these events, how should, could you go about it to make sure that you actually get anything out of it? Because, uh, it, it is at least, I think quite a both expension of time, but, but also as S introvert authors, maybe it's not the coolest thing that we can think of.
Jesper (2m 1s): Is it worth it?
J. Thorn (2m 3s): Yeah, I think it's totally worth it. I can say that without hesitation. Uh, I'm thinking back on some of the live events I've done more recently. So I've done, I did the indie author lab that was put on by publishers weekly. Uh, last year I did podcast movement I think in 2016, 2017 which sort of like a big convention. Uh, I did a story grid certified training and a and a story grid weekend with Shawn Coyne last year and a couple of years ago.
J. Thorn (2m 34s): Uh, so yeah, participation I think is really important in those and. And I think what's most important is that it's not necessarily what you think you're going to get. It's going to be what happens when you're there that you can't plan for. You can't anticipate things like conversations with other authors over a cup of coffee that leads to a further discussion that leads to a possible project or you know, you meet someone who happens to know somebody else and it's a good connection way. And I, I hesitate to use the term networking cause especially for introverts that makes our skin crawl.
J. Thorn (3m 6s): It's got sort of this really dirty connotation, but, um, it really isn't, it's not networking in the, in the sleazy internet marketers sense. It's more about making connections with other people and, and really allowing yourself to be in the moment and to absorb what's happening. Certainly the speakers and the content is important and I think people will probably only sign up for events that they believe are going to help further their career. Um, but I don't think that's the main reason for going to a live event.
J. Thorn (3m 36s): I really believe it's the interaction with the other participants, possibly the people who are putting on the event and then all the potential that comes from that. And even if I don't meet someone and I don't have a very, uh, concrete outcome from that meeting, there's always a skill or a strategy or a new way of looking at things that, that comes out of those events that doesn't happen for me online.
Jesper (3m 59s): Yeah. No. And I know, especially from what you've shared in the past, us facilitated that you get quite exhausted from Merde, sir, you said in person events or things. So how do you go about it? You know, if you, uh, if you are like an author who are very introverted and don't really like seeing other people, do you sort of mentally pitch yourself up to, okay, I need to talk to a few people today are, how are you doing?
J. Thorn (4m 25s): Yeah, that's a great question. And uh, I mean it is, it's a very broad generalization that, that creatives are introverts. Not all creatives are introverts, but I anecdotally, in my experience, I've found most of the writers I deal with are introverted or towards the introversion scale of, of the Myers Briggs and and. There's really sort of two ways, uh, an introvert can approach a live event to make it more manageable. The first one is exactly yes for what you, what you mentioned, which is to kind of set a little game of buy it for yourself and just say, okay, today at this event I'm going to talk to at least two people.
J. Thorn (4m 59s): I don't know. I'm going to introduce myself to two people or one person. Like it doesn't matter the number, right? It's that you are your creating a little incentive for yourself that will put you in the right mindset and sort of open, um, you know, you're sort of opening your mind to, to meeting other people. But then on the flip side, it's really important to both at the event and after the event to have time to decompress. And I think this is where introverts really have to do this for themselves because it's not usually built into the events.
J. Thorn (5m 31s): You need time within the day of the event to go and sit by yourself for 30 minutes or go read a book or go journal or just go and not talk to anybody like you. That has to be built into the day. And then I think it's also good and I think this applies to for extroverts as well. Once you get home from the event, you need time to decompress as well. I think it's really hard to just kind of jump right back into your, into your daily grind. You need time to, you need time to recharge and get some of that energy back.
J. Thorn (6m 2s): Because for introverts, being in those crowded environments is not impossible. And it's not that we hate it and that's a misconception. It's just very draining on your energy and you need to, you need to be able to wait to do that and not sort of at a secondary level. I think it's really important both leading up to during and after the event that you are paying very close attention to your biological needs, making sure you're getting enough sleep, your eating properly, you're exercising if possible, because there's a tendency at these events to kind of go off the rails and eat and drink and, and, and you know, and do things that you wouldn't do at home.
J. Thorn (6m 37s): I call it living like a teenager. And so if you're not a teenager that, you know, that's gonna take its toll too. It's, I think all of that taking that sort of comprehensive approach can really make not only an experience great, but make the least amount of disruption in your day.
Zack (6m 52s): I'll also add real quick, like, I mean I'm definitely JL straight up, call me an extrovert. I don't know if I'd go that far. I mean I definitely have introvert tendencies, but um, I'm definitely more extroverted than he is in a lot of other authors and but to me, one thing I've noticed being at these events though too is that, you know, this, it's not the same thing as going to like a cocktail party or like a work Christmas party or something. I mean, there's a lot of other people in the room who are Waikiki and I think that knowing that comfort and that you're not the only introvert, most of the room is going to be introverted from what I've seen.
Zack (7m 25s): I think that really helps open up people talk. And I know with our bigger events, specifically our conferences, you know, we try to, uh, you know, we, we do like the round tables where people were kind of forced to sit together, but it's not like there's never really been any kind of uncomfortable thing for me. Then we have our genre at dinners where people put together by the genre. So like we're kind of encouraging people to kind of break out a little bit, but not in like a funky like, uh, you know, speed dating type of way or something like that. But it's like really uncomfortable, you know?
Zack (7m 56s): So that's just kinda my perspective from being a little less introverted, much less introverting I should say.
Jesper (8m 1s): Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think from my own experience when I've been to sort of conferences or events or stuff like that is it's not as hard to strike up the conversation as one might think in a way you just sitting at the table and as long as you're sort of smiling and are open to people, then usually you can start talking. But where I think it's a bit difficult and where I'm curious, what would you guys say about this? Because the aftermath of it, you know? Okay, so you've gone home, you talk to five people, but how and why should you get in contact with them again?
Jesper (8m 32s): That that part is a bit mysterious mystical to be, you know, how are you supposed to do that? I mean, okay, I can just find a, send an email to somebody. Hey, it was great seeing you at that event. But that's it's a bit, yeah, I dunno. I think that's
J. Thorn (8m 45s): a good first step. And a lot of times you don't really know how or when or if that's going to happen. Uh, I remember I went to podcast podcast movement when it was in Chicago. Brian Cohen up from somewhere book show and he's very outgoing and extroverted and he had no problem walking up and talking to a lot of people. And and I think that was good for me and I, and I think if you are, if you tend to be more introverted and you have a more of an extroverted buddy you can bring with you, I think you can play off each other's strengths in that way.
J. Thorn (9m 16s): And so I was able to kind of kind of tag along with Brian and then like I was really good at sort of looking at all of the offerings and saying, okay, well why don't we look at this one and sort of thinking about this one. And that was not something Brian was like really good at. So we kind of, we kind of balanced that out. And then what I did was when I came home, of all the people I met, I did exactly what you said. I sent an email and just say, Hey, it was really nice to meet you, a podcast movement. Um, if you, if there's anything I can ever help you with, just reach out.
J. Thorn (9m 48s): And I kind of gave myself permission to leave it at that and I thought, you know, I'm going to do that. It's sort of a, it's courteous, it's kind and um, if something's meant to come from that, I'll hear back from them. And some people, I didn't, some people I didn't and and you just never know. I think the big thing that we always preach is that if you start a relationship by giving as opposed to asking, it's always, it's always better that way. So even, even the following up with a thank you from a live event, I think if you're just saying, Hey, thanks a lot.
J. Thorn (10m 19s): If I, if there's any thing I can ever do for you, just let me know and then leave it at that. I think, um, that's, that's a good way to approach it. Not feeling that pressure to sort of work all those contacts that you just, you know, you just got all, all those business cards, you collect it. I don't, I don't think you necessarily have to have to force yourself to, you know, make connections with those people that aren't a natural.
Jesper (10m 41s): Is there any specific events that is spread? You mean, I'm going to hook you up on the spot here, so it's okay if you don't know, but, but I'm just thinking that some of the people who are watching this video and, or listening to this podcast might be people who are also pursuing my traditional publishing wrapped. So are there, in your view, certain places that are better than other, if anybody wants to walk over there?
J. Thorn (11m 5s): No, it's perfect timing because as we're recording this, I'm about three weeks away from heading to New York city for thriller Fest for the first time. Uh, so I, I think, uh, you know, if your listeners are not familiar, thriller Fest is the annual gathering for the thriller writers and that's where they have all their awards and there's Pitchfest and agents are there. In fact, I'm going to pitch fast, I'm going to be pitching a project to am to several agents. And I think every sort of a top level genre has that annual gathering.
J. Thorn (11m 36s): Like for the horror writers association, they have Stoker con, uh, waa, waa has a big gathering. Uh, the, uh, science fiction and fantasy writers of America have an annual gathering. So I think if you are looking for, you know, an agent or if you're more interested in sort of the traditional publishing world, those, those, those are the events that you want to attend. And those are the big ones. And, uh, and, and they're, they're somewhat affordable. Like they're not, they're not out of reach. I think for, you know, a few hundred dollars per ticket.
J. Thorn (12m 8s): Uh, you can, you can go to any one of those. And, uh, and I think that that would be a great way for people to get to know what, what that industry is like.
Jesper (12m 17s): So I guess we can conclude, conclude that it's definitely worth going to these events and you need to put a bit of your extrovert hat on and then go through wasn't and try to build a bit of relations but, but I'm wondering then if we sort of jump into the time machine he say then we fast forward a couple of years and now the people listening or watching the video, they have sort of grown a certain pattern to a certain level in their career and they're starting to thinking, okay, maybe it would be cool to actually organize some events on my own and thus maybe use it as something that supplementary income to my book selling or whatever it may be.
Jesper (12m 53s): Maybe it would be worth if you guys just spend like a minute of talking a bit about what you guys are doing and who you, so just to set the scene a bit for talking about what kind of events you are renting and how you're going about it and what you're thinking about and so forth.
Zack (13m 8s): Yeah, we, uh, the, the whole thing started kind of funny for us. I mean it really came out of, we ended up doing a authors on a train is kind of our like a event that responded and that came out of us going on a train trip with Lindsay broker and Joanna Penn and spending a week writing and a VALIC. We went, rode on a train plan to book out and it's been a week in new Orleans, Louisiana. I'm writing a whole novella together and you know, J and I were sitting outside one night, uh, having, having a burger before went to a concert while we were in new Orleans and we just kind were like, man, I'm like, why couldn't we do this with other people?
Zack (13m 48s): This is like a really cool niche event type of thing that really we didn't, we don't see anyone else doing stuff like this. Like you see people doing writer's retreats from, they'll go like rent a cabin every, want to work on their own stuff. And um, you know, you see the conferences and stuff, but you really don't see these like smaller, really unique things. Like who else was taking people on a train? And then my, you know, the really weird thing and that's really what started it. And it's spa, you know, it kind of snowballed into the smaller, like the world, the world building type advanced or we'll go and we'll pick a unique place and go build a world out together.
Zack (14m 24s): Um, and then of course we're stood in authors on a train and we have our bigger conferences as well, which is the career author summit, uh, formerly the somewhere bookshelves summit. Um, so yeah, that's, that's kinda the, the main stuff that we have going on and we can obviously as conversation goes down deeper in each one of those.
J. Thorn (14m 39s): Yeah, I would add to that there's sort of an intermediary step for someone who's, who's thinking about this. And, and I, I think it's very, uh, this was really good. I think it's really great to be thinking about diversifying your revenue streams as an author. I would ha, I would highly encourage people who feel like either organizing or putting on one of these events sounds like something that like to do. I think that you should definitely do it. Am don't listen to that. The, there's too many or there's too many people doing it. I don't buy into that. Um, I think there's always room for more voices, new voices, new experiences.
J. Thorn (15m 12s): But I think between being at an attendee and then, uh, running our hosting, there's this other space that I would recommend people explore, which is start, uh, talking or offering to speak at other events that you're not running. I think it's really important to not only refine your public speaking skills and your ability to present because as you know with a podcast, whether you're on a podcast or on a stage, you are performing, it's a performance. And it, and it takes a certain level of skill and practice.
J. Thorn (15m 43s): It's not the same as having a casual conversation with somebody. So I think you need to practice getting in front of people. And the way I did it is I started offering to do talks for fruit for my local library system. And I would go in and I would hold these little workshops and I would do these talks. And I did that for years. And uh, and I was a classroom teacher before that, so I had sort of the presentation mode refined. But doing those presentations sort of gave me the understanding of, okay, number one, what do people want? And number two, if that's what they want, how can I provide it?
J. Thorn (16m 13s): Or how can I find someone who can provide it? So I think there is this middle ground where you, you really have to kind of find tune your chops. And one of the ways you can do that, going back to our previous point is you could reach out to people who are organizing events and offer to speak for free and say, Hey, I'm, I'm getting, you know, experience and speaking. I love your event on, uh, you know, I've been following you. I would love to S I would love to present for free to your audience if that's okay with you. And you know, some people are going to ignore you and some people won't. But I think getting your feet wet and really getting experience presenting, especially on a stage live in front of people would be really important before you kind of go all the way to that point where you're going to be the organizer of the event.
Zack (16m 54s): I think another, I think another step you could even take is not think this is kinda gonna depend on where you live. Um, but I almost feel like running some kind of really small event locally could be really good. And even if you don't charge anything, you know, go rent a room at like a local coworking space or something. And obviously you know, you, if you're probably gonna want to be in a city where there's like gonna be a lot of writers that could come, but there's a whole other level of complexity of planning event and risk when you're talking about go like, you know, and for instance, in September we're going to Seattle and we live in Cleveland and Nashville and Seattle is a like fi five or six hour plane ride for each of us.
Zack (17m 34s): So like to plan an event in Seattle and not live there is like, there's a lot of complexity around that and you know, J and I both have a background playing music and I know me personally, I know he has some, like I used to plan like a festival on stuff. Like I'm a small music festival and so like I have some event planning background and um, and I mean there's a lot of little logistical things that you may not think about whenever you're playing an event. And you know, we're still learning as we go and learn along the way.
Zack (18m 4s): But I think that doing something locally small, maybe you get, try to get 10, 15 people or something to come show up and you do like a lecture type thing. Or maybe you guys do like a world building, I don't know like, but I think that can kind of help you start to see kind of the logistics of putting something together and getting people to show up as well, which is kind of a step ahead of like having a library organized, something you showed up in speaking, which I also think that's a great, great way to get started on that too.
Jesper (18m 30s): Yeah. And it is a great point around getting a bit of practice with people or speaking in front of people because even for an introvert is certainly doable, but, but you sort of need to to get used to it a bit and then you can, uh, you can make yourself do it, so to speak almost. But, but I want, I mean I, and I think it's a good point too, to sort of work your way up to it and, and do some of those smaller events for four. I started if that's what you want to go, but, but at the same time I also know that it's pretty important for you guys that the event doesn't grow too big.
Jesper (19m 2s): So I'm wondering how do you balance this side of, okay, you, you're of, you'll have some costs into it because you have to rent a place and probably get some food and drink and whatnot. And then at the same time, if you don't have enough people come in, then I guess either you can have a very, very high ticket price, which I don't think you guys are doing either, unless I'm mistaken. Or you can have a ton of people at a lower price, but what but how do you balance it out? Because if you're doing, I mean if you're just doing it for fun, then it's fine. But if you're doing as a sort of supplementary income, then you need to learn a bit from it.
Jesper (19m 35s): Right? So what are your thoughts on that?
J. Thorn (19m 38s): Yeah, I think it's really important to be completely transparent and honest and say that anytime you're organizing an event, you're taking a risk, uh, financially, mostly financially, but you're, you're risking your reputation as well. I mean, I, I don't think we're at this point anymore, but I remember we had conversations of like, what if we went, if we roll out an event and no one shows up or no one's interested like that, you know, there's a cost that's involved there. Um, and at a certain point, but, but more importantly, you know, the, the events, you know, for, for authors on the train, we're renting a mansion in San Francisco.
J. Thorn (20m 14s): Well, we had to put 50% down on that before we put up the landing page. And for the career author summit, we had to secure the, the, the conference center before we put the landing page up. And, you know, so part of that is you need some savings. You need to have some money set aside that you're willing to risk. I mean you can mitigate your risk, but at the end of the day, anytime you're putting money up before you're selling tickets, you are taking risks. So I think it's important to recognize that. And uh, and we've been, we've been willing to do that.
J. Thorn (20m 44s): And you know, we've been successful. We haven't lost a ton of money doing and we've made money in most cases, but you do need to have many willing to sort of put up and to secure those. As far as the event themselves are concerned. Our wheel house, our specialty is really these small sort of intimate gab world-building gathering since. So authors on a train and am PSI Phi Seattle and vampires in new Orleans, these are events, we're really taking a dozen people.
J. Thorn (21m 14s): So we know that we don't need to have, you know, $100 in Facebook ads. Are they running to drive traffic to that landing page? Cause cause we're, we're going to sell them out. It's only 12 people and we charge enough that we're going to make some money, but it's not so exorbitant that people can't afford it. So that's sort of the, the one style of event that we really like doing. The career author summit, we kind of kind of fell into our lap. Um, it wasn't something we had planned on doing. Uh, summer book show, Bryan Cohen decided he didn't want to do that summit any longer and we had such positive energy momentum for that event.
J. Thorn (21m 47s): We didn't just want to let it go and so Zach and I went to Jim Kukral and said, all right, well Brian doesn't want to want to do this anymore. And it was all good. In fact, Brian is going to be speaking at the career author summit, but we said, what if we continue it? We'll rebrand it as the career author but we made a very hard, definitive decision, very public decision and said, we're not growing it. It's at 120, 115 hundred 120 years about the match. Yeah, that's about the number of seats we're going to sell. And we're not growing it past that. I will not sell out those sell out. We could, we could buy, you know, we're, we're very close to having that sold out now and it's 11 months away, so it's not, and that's not a slight against events that grow larger become larger.
J. Thorn (22m 29s): But we find in our own experience that, uh, once you go above 115, 120 people, it's, it starts to feel more like a trade show and less like a conference or a workshop. And that's just not what we do. We, we'd like to be able to walk around and interact with everyone. We like people to have the opportunity to meet all the other people there. And once you go North of one 25, it's hard to do that,
Zack (22m 51s): I think. I think going back to kind of swing back to your original question too, is, you know, it's, it's very risky and J will tell you like what we kind of laugh because we joke that when we're coming up with these things, J always starts with yes. And I always start with no. So J comes to me with the super ambitious ideas and I'm always like, no, no, we've got to pare it down. And we ended up somewhere in the middle and it really works out. But I think that not getting too ambitious and trying to knock it out of the park so hard the first time when, if, when you're not really sure what all the costs are going to be in stuff, uh, it's, it's really important.
Zack (23m 26s): So don't, you know, you obviously want to put on a good event, but you know, that doesn't necessarily mean you have to take all your attendees to the fanciest restaurant and have the fanciest venue. And we've made that mistake. I mean, we, we had, uh, one of our events, you know, we, uh, we're going to try to make it a little bit bigger and we rented a bigger type of, who ran a whole theater, you know, and, uh, we, we did a lot of different things and that event, as awesome as it wasn't as fun as we ended up having on it, uh, ended up losing money for us. So, and it's because we kind of went, we got too ambitious and we learned a lot from that though and and realized, you know, we, we'd rather deliver these really cool experiences.
Zack (24m 5s): The problem was is that we were trying to get more people than we really should have and we really realized then like for our smaller well billing events like 15 people, max is kind of like that's really worse. Sweet spot is. And with that, you know, we can still make enough money to like be at the rock and roll hall of Famer at the Mo pop museum and see like we could still do really or rent a mansion. You know, we could still do this really cool stuff and still have room for us to make money as well.
Jesper (24m 33s): One element is around the venue that you are reserving are paying for, but the other part is also how what type of event you're running. And by that I mean if you're running something like, like you're talking about here, like a willpower thing event where it doesn't take much prep in the way that, okay, maybe have some initial idea for a world that people then come to the UN and and basically the work is done, they're in the oven. But if you have more like a presentation type of event, either you would need to run the same presentations every time so that you don't have to prep too much or you what because if you do want to create a new presentation every time at the end of the day that his time away from writing and unless you are really earning money on that event, if you're just covering your cost or earning $1,000, you know, my question would be is that really worth it?
J. Thorn (25m 26s): I I think that's a very legitimate question. I think the answer is going to be really dependent on on the individual situation Zach and I need to make enough money to make it worth our while. We sort of, we know between us what that is and that that's got to cover our own costs of, of getting there. The cost of not writing during that time, I think, I think that's an an another cost factors into it. And I think it depends on the event. So if you're talking about something like the career author summit, preparing to present at that, a lot of the work comes ahead of time and then you present and it's kind of over.
J. Thorn (25m 59s): But world-building is kind of the opposite of that. So there's not a ton that we do leading up to it. But then once it's over, we published an anthology and Zach's right now is going through all the stuff from, from rocket park in Cleveland and that's, that's a full on anthology publication, revision, editing. It's a lot of work. So you know, and like that's, that's work that we're not quote unquote getting paid for. That was part of the ticket for the event. So that's just stuff that we're obligated to do that we enjoy doing. So I think it really, it really comes down to the person as far as like what type of event do you want, do you want to put on, what do you hope to get out of it and, and what sort of resources do you have to spend on it?
J. Thorn (26m 40s): And that's both time and money.
Zack (26m 41s): And I think too, I think, I think it is important to mention too that there's two of us, which are best, not obvious, but for people who don't know, you know, we do these events together, but we also write fiction together. So even when our fiction production doesn't necessarily have to stop you because J might go do be working on a presentation, but I might be working on our fiction. So I do think that's important to bring up cause, but that's not to say that one person's still couldn't manage this stuff on their own and still run their fiction business and do events. There's nothing that says that by any means.
Zack (27m 12s): But, uh, I just think that's important to bring up for this conversation to those.
Jesper (27m 16s): Yeah, true. Yeah. And I certainly don't think that this is anything, you know, the, the starting out author should really worry about or try to do. But even if you're not collaborating with somebody else, you know, if you're a bit further down your career path, you might have a virtual assistant who can help booking stuff and whatnot. So, so
Zack (27m 34s): of course you're probably gonna need some help to do an event. There was no doubt. Yeah. Depending on the size and scope, what you're trying to do that you're probably gonna need some help. But like you said, you can definitely hire people out to help you or stuff. So
Jesper (27m 47s): is there anything else we should cover around organizing events to say anything that I should have asked you that I do?
J. Thorn (27m 56s): I mean, as far as organizing an event goes, I think it, you know, really the big takeaway, what Zach mentioned is is if you're, if you're really interested, do something very small and local for free. And that's the best way to get a feel for a lot of this. Everything from logistics to, uh, the type of people you want there to, the presentations or the workshops that you want to do. And maybe depending on where you live and who's near you, you can just invite a few of your friends and just say, Hey, come for free. You know, let's all do this together.
J. Thorn (28m 26s): I'll, I'll sort of run it and I'd love to just get your feedback on it. And I think starting small and starting locally is probably the best way to do it. Because the last thing you want to do is to, is to think planning something like the career author summit sounds awesome. And you'd love to do that. And then you start to do it and realize it's not something you enjoy or it's, or it's something that you don't want to spend time on and then you're kind of stuck. So I think if you start small, then you're going to have a much better, uh, you'll have much, uh, a much better idea for yourself as to what, whether you can do something more grandiose in the future.
Jesper (28m 60s): I think that's very good advices. And, uh, it's all, it's always good to get some advice to somebody who has actually done it, you know, rather than people speculate to be good on that. So I very much appreciate that. Sure, absolutely. I did mention the Korea author podcast in the beginning and I will put a link to that. So if you're watching on YouTube, it's going to be right below this video. And if you're on the podcast, just go to the show notes, but is there anything else, guys you want to mention where people can find your, or is this just the curiosity podcast you want to point people?
Zack (29m 31s): Yeah, I mean, everything's over@thecareerauthor.com you can get the podcast there. Uh, if all our events are there. So if you're interested in attending one of our events, um, you know, we're, right now, we are, uh, all our 2019 stuff. Well, the only thing we have left to by Seattle, it's sold out. Our 2020 stuff is almost sold out. So, um, we, we have the career author summit in Nashville, Tennessee. That's a in may of 2020. We've got some great speakers will be there. We've got Joanna Penn, Lindsay broker, Brian Cohen, Jim Kukral, Mark Leslie, the fade, a honorary quarter.
Zack (30m 7s): We've got some really good speakers lined up for that. Um, and we're getting really close to being sold out for that as of this recording. I don't know what it would be when you guys, when you air, but we're, I think we have like maybe 12, 15, 20 tickets, 15 tickets. Um, so we've got that going on. We have a authors on a train, California dream and is what we're calling that am. So we'll be taking a trip, we'll be taking a train from Los Angeles, California to San Francisco, uh, with a group of authors. And we will be doing, we'll be staying in a mansion for a few days and we're gonna build out an anthology together, write stories, collaborate.
Zack (30m 43s): That's a collaboration event. Um, that has like one or two tickets available as of right now. Um, and then we also have vampires of new Orleans, which, uh, will be taking place Halloween weekend, which if anyone who's never been in new Orleans, that's like a the best time to go to new Orleans. The weather's really good. Um, and, and there's so much cool stuff that happens there during Halloween and, uh, we're going to be doing, we got some really cool stuff lined up. We're gonna be doing more. We're there, but then we're going to be writing vampire stories, publishing anthology. Um, and that is, we don't have any treats left for that either.
Zack (31m 15s): I don't think so. And again, yeah, so this is all for 20, 20, so you can check all that stuff out. I mean, if you're someone, again who's interested in may rain events, you can, it's got all the stuff there. You can kind of see what we're doing and um, you know, maybe, maybe that will spark some ideas for you as well. So yeah, but everything's at the career author.com
Jesper (31m 33s): yeah, and I don't take just anybody within this, a fantasy author audience here who doesn't like vampires. The only thing you need is you. You're missing the dragons, so you need to put them out there. We'll get there eventually. One a 21 maybe we'll come closer where you live and I will get a castle somewhere and dragons. Yeah, exactly. All right. Thanks a lot for coming onto amwritingfantasy guys. I appreciate it. Yeah. Thank you for having us. We appreciate it. All right, and to your opt in, see you next Monday.
It isn't easy to sell books. That's especially true outside of the Amazon eco-system.
I sat down with the former Kobo Director Mark Leslie Lefebvre to pick his brain on how we authors can sell more books on Kobo.
There's some really strong book marketing tips and tricks being shared.
And, here's a link to Mark's podcast: https://starkreflections.ca/
New episodes EVERY single Monday.
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"Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Jesper (0s): So if you are debating whether or not you should be selling books, exclusives it exclusively on Amazon, or if you should be wide, then I have a special guest on here today to help me to talk about selling books on proper. If you're a fantasy author, then you've come to the right place. My name is Jesper and together with autumn we have together published more than 20 books. And our aim is to help you with your writing and marketing and selling books based on our experience.
Jesper (34s): So actually today as I was just saying before, I have a special guest on and I'm very, very piece too to have Mark on here to help me because Mark has a very, let's say good insight, especially insights in talking about selling books on Kobo even though he's doing something else today, which I'll let him himself explain in just a second. But uh, thank you very much for, for coming onto amwritingfantasy Mark it's a great pleasure.
Mark (1m 3s): It's an honor to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me.
Jesper (1m 7s): So maybe just to make people know a bit about you, maybe you can say a bit about both what you're doing today, but also specifically maybe your prior work in life because it's very relevant in the conversation we're having here.
Mark (1m 20s): Yeah, of course. So I mean I've been in the book industry since 1992 I started as a bookseller, um, specific to our conversation here. I worked for Kobo am between 2011 2017 and when I was there, uh, I was the director of self-publishing and author relations and I created Kobo writing life, the self publishing platform. So for those who aren't familiar with it, it would be very akin to what, what KDP or Kindle direct publishing is to Kendall and Amazon Kobo writing is to Kobo.
Mark (1m 51s): It's a published direct platform free. I think it's a lot sexier of course, and a lot more user. And because it was built by an author for other authors. Now I left Kobo at the end of 2017 because I wanted to write full time and do a consulting for publishers and writers. I couldn't keep my hands out of the business because at the end of 2018, I joined a part time role, uh, with draft two digital, which is an aggregator that distributes eBooks and converts them for free to Kobo, to Kindle, to Apple, to nook, to Google to to Lino, to a whole bunch of other platforms as well.
Mark (2m 29s): So I couldn't not want to build cool things for writers, so I kinda needed to keep my fingers in the, uh, in the, in the muck, so to speak. Uh, and, and, and sort of that's where I am today, doing a combination of writing and basically helping authors. And I really want to help authors sell broadly and sell globally rather than just selling really, really well in the U K and in the U S on Amazon, which is usually what you're getting from that platform.
Jesper (2m 54s): Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And yeah, and I actually, I use both draft to digital and Kobo. So, um, but, but I do go directly Kobo also is to get into the promotional opportunities that Kobo has for, which I'm sure we're gonna get into quite some more. But, uh, but it's funny because the whole conversation about being by Y versus being exclusive, uh, autumn and I just had a chat about that the other day for our, for our mastermind group. But, um, but for me it's, it's sort of a no brainer. I mean, uh, I don't want to put all my eggs in the Amazon basket for sure.
Jesper (3m 27s): Um, but the thing is also that then when you take the decision that you want to publish white, then it is harder to get traction on, uh, on why platforms like Kobo it at least that's my perception. The corporate just works a bit differently than Amazon. It's, it's not quite the same machine in that way that that Amazon is. So, yeah. I'm really curious to have some insights and thoughts to hear from you on, on, uh, how do an author get more
Mark (3m 54s): traction on Kobo? Well, actually, uh, I, I'm glad, I'm glad you mentioned that because I mean, Amazon is the world's biggest bookstore. There's no disputing that. So they have a lot more customers. They have a, you know, 20 years of experience of building their platform as a, as a book platform. So they've done that for a lot longer. And a Kobo is only about 10 years old, for example. And other platforms then be Kobo and Apple and nook, you know, all the other platforms that aren't Amazon. You have to pack a little bit of patience, uh, when it comes to that, because you know, for example, and but again, there are things are changing on Amazon all the time.
Mark (4m 30s): So, you know, it's pay to play now and you can't just publish a book on Amazon and it'll sell. You have to pay for it. So, uh, with Kobo you can get traction. And so you, you mentioned the am, the promotions tab, uh, which is available if you're publishing direct to Kobo, through Kobo writing life and and it's not automatically available. Once you have your Kobo writing life account, you have to email a writing life, a kobo.com and ask for it and they'll, uh, they'll add it to your account and then you could submit your titles to be considered for various promotional opportunities.
Mark (5m 5s): And, and they usually have about probably am 15 different promo opportunities on a regular basis. A lot of them are the free page. So if you have a, like a, a free lead generation title, whether it's the first book in series or maybe it's a short story in your universe that ties back to a novel, uh, that you have or a series of novels, you can use that, those are, those you actually have to pay for. Most of the other promos on, uh, Kobo are usually am usually something like the, a a monthly 30% off promo of on science fiction and fantasy titles, for example.
Mark (5m 41s): And instead of, uh, you're agreeing to allow Kobo to give a coupon code to its best customers who can get your book for 30% off, you do not have to change your price. And so what's critical about that is you don't have to change your price. Meaning Amazon's not going to price match. It's, it's an exclusive coupon for customers to use. So you leave your price normal and the customer gets the code and instead of actually paying for that, you only pay for the books you sell during the promo. So, uh, it's usually about 10%.
Mark (6m 13s): So let's say your book is just because I'm not good at math, let's just make it a $10 book. It's a 30% off discount so the consumer can get it for $7 and instead of getting the, uh, you know, the regular 70% on that, you would get a 60% am so you make a little bit less. But unlike Amazon ads and other, you know, BookBub's and things like that, you're not out of pocket initially. And, and the one thing I always have to remind authors have is it's cool to pay for ads and then get paid for it.
Mark (6m 44s): But you have to remember you're getting paid 45 or 90 days later, so your out of pocket with some many and then you get the many a few months later. So it's not like, you know, I made $100 this month and I spent $75. Yeah, I'm $25 a head. Well, no, no, you're $100 in the hole until 45 to 90 days later, depending, like depending on the platform, uh, you know, the year $25 ahead three months later. So, uh, it's important to remember the income and outcome, right, in terms of your expenditures, because sometimes you could be in the right a little bit early on if you haven't budgeted properly.
Jesper (7m 23s): Yeah. Yeah. But I think at least the promotions that, uh, that are listed on, on Kobo writing life, I mean many of them there they're not like expensive stuff. So, so it, it might be, I dunno, 20, 20, $30, something like that. Four to five, I think for the four, usually the most expensive ones. And they, unless you have a lot of books, I mean they're not gonna accept your putting one book in 15 different ones at the same time anyway. So I mean, and I think that, I mean that is a good thing, you know, that that is not expensive to advertise and Kobo
Mark (7m 54s): no, it's not and. And so what it sometimes takes on a platform like Kobo is just a little bit of extra lift or kicks with sometimes all it takes is a promo where you're going from selling nothing or maybe you're selling one book a month or one book a week, whatever it is, and then suddenly a doubles your sales or triples your sales. You know what I mean? Going from one book to three, which doesn't seem like a dramatic thing, but it often, it's a long slow build. And I've often told writers on a platform like Kobo, it can take upwards of six months to nine months and then that feeds the self fulfilling prophecy of the Kindle unlimited magic world and exclusive to to am Amazon because a lot of authors will start, you know, Amazon first and then maybe after 90 days they, they try publishing wide but you know, 30 days pass and they're not seeing anything.
Mark (8m 45s): And then at the end of that 90 day period they, they go back to Amazon exclusivity and and one of the things that I have to caution authors about is every single time you delist books from other platforms like Kobo, you're starting from scratch every single time. Even if you had sales in that period where you were published wide, the minute you delete your book or unless the book, you are immediately going back to zero and you're starting not from where you were before, but you're starting from the beginning because everyone seems to be familiar with the Amazon algorithms and the 30 day cliff and you have to publish lots of books really fast to, to keep that going.
Mark (9m 26s): Kobo and other retailers have algorithms like that too where you're ranking in your trending in your ratings and things like that are based on customer behavior with interacting with that book and related to all the other books. So Kobo unlike Amazon isn't mostly am algorithm driven. It's driven by a combination of algorithms and manual merchandisers. So not all that different than um, a book seller in a bookshop who would, would take in, you know, a whole bunch of books from different publishers and then decide, okay, what books am I going to put in my front window?
Mark (10m 2s): What books am I going to put on this display? Now the promotions tab, uh, helps the Kobo writing life team find and curate titles from Kobo writing life from self published authors to get their books onto the end caps and into those window displays along with the big publishers who are constantly trying to pitch their titles to the merchandising team for placement of new releases or special features, et cetera.
Jesper (10m 29s): At least from my experience, and it probably depends on the type of books and if you're hitting the right promotional option. But from my experience there is quite a difference. You know, some, some of the promotional promotions that I've run sort of almost nothing happened from them and then others of them are quite good at. But it seems it depends on luck on I think what type of books you are promoting and if you're sort of hitting the right promotional category now or whatever you want to call it.
Mark (10m 56s): Yeah. Yeah. And some of them work, some of them don't. The key is just like with BookBub, right? Anybody apply in you applying, you apply again, you just keep applying, you apply, you try it. I mean, what, what does it cost you? It didn't cost you anything in, in most cases unless it was one of those small, uh, pays for like the free books and you just keep trying because you never know what might hit. Here's the other thing and during election years for example, people don't read as much. So there could also be something going on. It was your book release, the, the, the week that the Avengers end game came out and you and your writing, you know, superhero fiction.
Mark (11m 30s): Well, not as many people are probably going to be buying books around that time period because they're all going to be excited about that. Or, or you know, game of Thrones, like during the, the, the, the, the, the end of the season people may be, are not buying as many fantasy novels, but after game of throne ends and everyone's feeling like they're missing something, maybe then they're going to be looking for fantasy. And also there's, there's all these other factors that have nothing to do with books and nothing to do with platform that affect the behavior of consumers. And that's why, I mean I often, I often say patience and persistence are two of the key elements that a writer needs in order to, um, have longterm success as, as, as a writer.
Jesper (12m 9s): The other sort of weapon we have in our hospital, his riders is also am using the feature deal, but the CPMs on where we can certainly talk Kobo readers, but I was just curious because I can, I can for sure, uh, analyze my way to, to the fact that the, the blog largest Kobo audiences probably in Canada. And I would assume that it's quite locked in the U S but, but how is it around, is there any like English speaking territories, other places in the world that are really good targeting options maybe for your Facebook ads and stuff like that?
Mark (12m 45s): Yeah, yeah. I'm glad you mentioned that. So before, before we am drop talking about BookBub ads specifically is I have, uh, worked with authors over the years who have been able to do BookBub ads for Kobo in both Canada and Australia for full-price books, not for 99 cent books are two 99 bucks, but for the full price, whether it's four 99, five 99, six 99, whatever the price is, and those convert really, really well because, uh, in, and BookBub published a stat, I think it was about six or nine months ago.
Mark (13m 16s): It was on there on the BookBub blog that showed that 70% of their best customers, because they know who's clicking and who their consumers are, 70% of their most avid readers and buyers buy books at full-price from BookBub ads. Uh, and, and I know from evidence that I've seen from authors, I've worked with that that works really, really well on both a Kobo and on a Apple as well, um, for Canada and Australia as an example. So that's good targeting. But so Canada and Australia are two of the, two of the larger am markets for Kobo.
Mark (13m 52s): Now, Amazon does dominate the U S so Kobo doesn't have as big a presence in the U S Kobo does things like they partner with the independent booksellers association or the ADA, the American bookseller association, where there's about 600 independent bookstores across the U S that if you go to their website, they're selling eBooks, but they're selling them through Kobo. And Kobo does that as a partnership so that a local consumer could, could purchase an ebook and the local bookstore actually gets a cut of every one of those sales, even though it's entirely powered by Kobo.
Mark (14m 23s): And I love that kind of collaboration because it allows the bookstore to do what they do best, which is move print books into the community. And a Kobo does what it does best, which is move digital books, audio books, and eBooks into the community without trying to put the bookstore out of business. So it's not the Amazon way of come in and bully their way through the market, like Walmart, Amazon, and just push all the other independent retailers out of the way. But we're collaboratively. And so in Canada where Kobo was born, it's, you know, chapters Indigo, which a chain kind of like Barnes and noble, only really, really successful.
Mark (14m 55s): And, um, and then in Australia there was a, of course I'm drawing a blank on the name of the, of the major retailer, but there's a major retailer and a couple of other retailers that Kobo has partnered with. So those were markets Kobo got in early and partnered with. Now in the UK, the Kobo is also partnered with, um, wh Smith and, uh, and other retailers in the market so that when you're buying eBooks, um, from wh Smith, you're actually buying them from Kobo there powered by Kobo. And when you go across different countries in Europe, Kobo is really strong even for English language titles.
Mark (15m 30s): In am markets like the Netherlands and Belgium because they've partnered with bowl and bowl is a major, significant Amazon sized a retailer. And that's a great opportunity for writers cause uh, folks in another lens love a rating as well. Uh, there's also an additional program I should mention that's only available in, uh, through Kobo and ball and the Netherlands, which is called Kobo plus. So think of it like Kindle unlimited, except you don't have to be exclusive to a Kobo. And when you're listing your books in a Kobo plus am, what happens is instead of your book being listed twice, like once on Kobo, on once on ball is listed four times, you're in the regular Allah cart Kobo channel, you're also in the couple of plus channel.
Mark (16m 16s): And then on ball you're in the Al a carte and then you're in a Kobo plus. So it's almost like doubling your SEO or your visibility of your titles to, to more readers because there are some readers who will buy and then there'll be other readers who say, well, for whatever price a month, I'm just going to read unlimited. And so, um, that's also been a really good market for, uh, for Kobo authors.
Jesper (16m 40s): Mm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I did try, I have tried, uh, before as well to run some, uh, some Facebook ads specifically to Watsonville and some buildings because, uh, because of the Kobo plus thing, but I didn't, I didn't, I will not able to really make much out of it. Um, but maybe I'm just thinking now that we were talking, maybe it would be worth running the apps and actually mentioning specifically Kobo plus in the, uh, in the ad text itself, which I did not.
Mark (17m 6s): Yeah. And I would, and I wouldn't even mention Kobo if you're doing it in the Netherlands because Kobo was probably not as well known a brand. A bowl is the brand am.
Jesper (17m 14s): It's a, B, a L M DOL,
Mark (17m 17s): DOL. So ball.com. Um, only because and and that's one of the reasons Kobo partners with folks in different territories. I'll give you a perfect example. So Talena is, is huge in Germany. And Toledo was a known and trusted brand that was built out of a whole bunch of a chain and independent books. Bookstores wanting to protect themselves from, from the on slot of a, of, of Amazon coming in and killing them. So to Leno was a brand that was established years ago and has built up trust and they, it's, it's a German born solution.
Mark (17m 49s): So even though Kobo bought Tulino years ago, Kobo did not infuse itself into the market. Kobo actually backed out of the market. And and even though Kobo was producing that Talena readers now instead of it having the rackets and Kobo brand on it, it has to cause Talena was the trusted brand. Nobody knows Kobo in Germany, but they know until they know on from the Kobo you mean or what? Well, Toledo actually has its own independent, uh, independent platform. Actually, ironically, you can't even get into Tulino directly through Kobo.
Mark (18m 21s): Um, and, and it's still operated as a separate company with a separate trusted brand. Even though Kobo owns the company and provides the hardware behind it, the actual cow catalog, believe it or not, um, the best way to get into to, I was actually through draft two digital. And again, that's because, uh, when that happened, when the takeover, uh, when Kobo purchased Tulino, there was an easy way for authors to get their works into Taino and it was working 100%. So there was no reason for when I was running the Kobo writing life team, there was no reason to go and rebuild something that would cost a lot of money if there was an easy way for authors to do it that was free.
Mark (19m 0s): And there was, you know, so that's the kind of collaboration that a company like Kobo is interested in is what's, how are we helping enable readers and writers to come together instead of making it more complicated? So am um, they may one day invest in, in trying to get stuff into Toledo, but right now there's an easy way to get stuff there. So, um, they don't have to, you know, reinvent something when they can build something new and something fresh that doesn't already exist for authors.
Jesper (19m 27s): But that's a good point about using the correct sort of works around their brands that the people know in the different countries because uh, yeah, well when I ran, ran the apps to watch the Netherlands and Belgium, I just wrote Kobo right. And yeah, maybe that's exactly the reason why it wasn't so successful at
Mark (19m 45s): you never know. You never know. Right. I think, I think bowl is a more well known brand a and that's been around a long, long time and, and, and you may, you may have better luck with that or at least doing a combination of Kobo and ball or something like that. And that's what the partnerships are, are all about. And I think that's a distinguishing factor that people don't think about when they think about, you know, Kobo is a single retailer, like, you know, like Amazon but Kobo has different fields and different looks in different countries and you can check this out.
Mark (20m 17s): Now again, this is just on Kobo. It's not on their, on their partner sites, but you can check it out if you're logged onto Kobo. So from Canada here, when I log on to kobo.com there's a little Canadian flag icon on the top right hand, um, uh, of the screen. If I click on that flag, it opens up a screen that allows me to see what the U S site looks like because it's merchandise differently. It's going to feature different titles with the UK site. Looks like what the, what the German site looks like, what the, what the, you know, the, the Netherlands or Spain or, or any of those other countries look like because they actually do have merchandisers, uh, around the world who are working with the local publishers looking to spotlight, uh, titles that are of interest to that specific market because you're not trying to Americanize the entire world.
Jesper (21m 11s): W when it comes to the ad stuff, it's, it's always about figuring out the right sort of wording and then, then the, the right targeting. I mean, at least you can target the, at least with the Facebook.
Mark (21m 22s): Yeah, of course. The director
Jesper (21m 25s): narrowing down your audience by selecting people who have Kobo readers and all that good stuff.
Mark (21m 30s): Yeah. Which is, which is fantastic. It's so great that we have these kinds of tools available to us, um, to make it easier to, to only show it to the right people.
Jesper (21m 40s): Apart from the paid apps that we then have the opportunities to run or used to promotional tap is, is there anything else, uh, one can do to increase their sales rank in a corporal you pro universe?
Mark (21m 53s): Yeah. I know this sounds basic and simple, but I have to say it because people just don't do it is uh, be inclusive. Don't just have links and share links to Amazon. I know it's the world's biggest bookstore, but they don't have every single customer in the world. They have a lot of customers. But there are people who read on different platforms. And again, I'm not saying this just for the benefit of Kobo, I'm saying it for the benefit of readers on a nook or Apple or Google or any of the other platforms because maybe they're a bowl customer. Maybe there are chapters, Indigo customer candidate or a w H Smith customer and and.
Mark (22m 26s): And this is where am before I started working with draft to digital, when books to read. And that's books, the numeral two, read.com when that was launched, I thought, what a brilliant idea because prior to that existing, I would publish my books directly to Kobo. I would publish them directly to Kindle. And then I was using, you know, either Smashwords or drafted digital publish wide, but I would create my I pub. And then in the back of my Amazon book, I would have my Amazon legs. And then in the back of my Kobo book, I'd have my Kobo links.
Mark (22m 57s): And in the back of my, uh, well I started to do a draft to digital, um, they automatically will insert links to whatever retailer they're sending it to, which is brilliant. So now when I create an I pub, I just use the, uh, universal book links because you know, for example, books to read.com/killing it on Kobo, which is one of my books. And if you, if you look go to that link, you will find a link to Amazon, Kobo w H Smith, Google am, nook, Apple, all the platforms.
Mark (23m 29s): But beyond just that, and this is valuable even if you are exclusive Amazon because when you go to Amazon, um, I would probably, um, be redirected to the site in Canada and then there's the.uk in the.com and the dot D et cetera, et cetera. And so the same thing with Kobo Kobo, uh, you know, is just kobo.com in, in most territories. But it also is going to, if you click, if you share a kobo.com link from the U S and somebody in the UK clicks it, they're going to see the U S page.
Mark (24m 1s): And I was going to say you can't buy it. You have to click on the UK page here. So it's an extra click and and and you don't want extra clicks. You want people to be able to click the buy button right away. So what the books to read, universal book links does is it allows the CA, it knows the geo-targeting and sends the consumer to the place where they can actually buy it at that same retailer. Um, and, and being inclusive is the first step because if you're doing advertising and sharing stuff about your book, unless you're specifically targeting Kobo customers or Amazon customers in a different territory, am because let's say you're part of a promo and you want to and you want to share that, um, share universal links be inclusive of all the retailers.
Mark (24m 42s): You never know, um, where they're, where they're hanging out. And then similarly, I would say when you get a Kobo promo, it's not enough to just get the promo and sit back and cross your fingers. If you get a Kobo promo, let people know about it. Do you have a newsletter? Say, Hey, I'm in a 40% off promo for June four for Kobo. Here's a link to my title's just use this coupon code and you're done. And, and, and again, if it's a specific territory, you can say, Hey, depending on your newsletter, just send it to your UK authors.
Mark (25m 14s): If it's a UK only promo or are you, I say UK readers, um, um, or, or at least let them know saying, Hey, I've got this book, uh, it's 40% off on Kobo. This is only applicable to the major English language territory's us, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand. Uh, it's still available everywhere else, but not at the discount. Oh. And if you happen to be an Amazon reader, you know, here's the universal book link. You can just get it on any, any retailer if you want to read it. Anyways, thanks for, thanks for being a reader. So I think being inclusive across the board is always your best option.
Mark (25m 47s): Um, because a consumer may read that, let's say you, your newsletter posts and say, Oh my God, he's got this book I didn't even know he had. And it's on sale at Kobo. Well, I don't read on Kobo. I read on Apple. Oh good. There's a link to Apple. It makes it easy for me to buy it anyways because if I'm interested, I'm going to buy it where I'm going to buy it anyways. I'm most likely not gonna switch retailers just to buy it there because it's only available there or it's on sale there. Um, you're more likely to just go with what you're comfortable with. So I think inclusivity, um, like publishing mind, it's a, it's a much bigger thing than just than, than just considering, um, adding Kobo to your, to your profile.
Mark (26m 30s): I would add as many retailers as possible because the, the broader you extend your, uh, publishing the, the broader the potential customer and reader base can be. And then and and that would include library systems too because through Kobo or through draft to digital or through other aggregators, you can also make your books available to the libraries. Um, and that's, and that's yet another discoverability platform that I think is really fantastic for writers. Very good bystanders, especially the thing about that, there is no reason to try to fight people's habits because you've got to lose every time.
Mark (27m 3s): You know, if they, if they Kobo they will continue buying books or Kobo no matter how your mom, what you pushing you Amazon links, you know. Yes. It's just a waste of time. Um, but, but I also think that the funny thing is also that we S office, we often get into this am mentality that we think that we does know everything that we do. Because in my, when I send out my, my new status for chapel I at the bottom of the email, I just have my books listed down there next to them exclusively like you're saying.
Mark (27m 34s): Of course. Yeah. Sorry. Interesting links. Uh, but um, but just having the list of there some people picks them up there and you should think, you know, after they've been on your list for like eight, 10, 12 months, you should think they'd know what, no, it's just as an easy trap to fall into that. You just assume that everybody knows it because they only list of it actually. That Oh, so just push the, push the link once in a while. Not every three weeks when you get a new promotion. But once in a while pushing it out, pushing out a linker, especially if there's some discount.
Mark (28m 7s): That's great. Um, but you will pick up new readers from your own email list. It's quite ironic to me, but I'm glad you mentioned that cause that that is extremely valuable. Um, it's true. They may have only attended to the top 20% of the, of the last three emails you've sent, but today they had more time and they actually read it all the way to the bottom and went, Oh look, he has other books. I didn't know that even though you might've told them about it three months ago and they opened and they even open the newsletter, but they just scanned it and they missed it. Right. We miss so much information. The other thing, and this is, this is really cruel, a critical I should say is a am, a good buddy of mine, Shaun Costello is a horror author.
Mark (28m 43s): And and through his newsletter, cause I help him with his publishing. Then there's marketing through his newsletter. We had a 30% off box set promo and it was only on Kobo. And so we sent out a note to the the newsletter subscribers in instead of just targeting Kobo people. We did send it to everyone just to let them know. But then we also included links to all the other retailers. Now we had am, we had like the main ones, so we had like Amazon and Apple and nook there and then we had the universal book link for all other retailers and it was amazing how many sales we got on all the other retailers for a Kobo specific promo.
Mark (29m 21s): So you know if, if, if you're, if you've got some promo on, on Amazon for example in the book's available other places too, but maybe it's not part of a promo feature, just be inclusive. Include those links. Like you said, they may go, Oh, I didn't know this book was on Apple or Kobo or whatever. Nick click on it. It never hurts right, to, to have that available. No,
Jesper (29m 42s): as long as you do it in with, with, you know, you're keeping your, your recipient of the email in mind that you don't spend them every three weeks to try to push more sales. But as long as you, you, you, you keep them in mind and you don't doing it. I mean, that's why I like adding it to the end of the email often because then it's not, it's not the topic of the email, it's just they had the bomb if in, in a bit of a smaller fund as well. So it's just there some of them like Florida. Um, and that, that works quite well, I think.
Jesper (30m 12s): Yeah. I like, I like that approach. Yeah,
Mark (30m 16s): I do like that approach. I think that that works a lot better. You're making sure they're aware of something, but you're not jamming it down their throats.
Jesper (30m 23s): Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Okay, cool. Mark I think we've covered a lot of useful ground here. Is there anything else we should mention before we round off?
Mark (30m 32s): I just think, uh, if, if you can stand the sound of my voice and you enjoy hearing my thoughts on publishing and writing, I do have a podcast of my own. It's a weekly podcast called starkreflections on writing and publishing and folks can check it out at starkreflections dot. CA. I, I kind of share my thoughts on, you know, 30 years in the industry and all the things I'm continuing to learn every single day.
Jesper (30m 56s): Excellent. Yeah, I, I have listened to it and myself as well, so I can recommend going and checking it out. So thanks a lot for, for what you're doing. Thank you for showing up on my amwritingfantasy Mark that's great. Thanks. Jesper it's been, it's been amazing.
MailChimp's recent pivot from an email marketing provider to a full-service marketing platform left many authors in the dust. Including us!
We jumped ship and we have some key tips to help you move on... and preferably move up to something that will make organizing your email list and newsletter life in ways you never dreamed were possible.
Check out David Gaughran's article on MailChimp's changes here.
You can check out Convertkit HERE and the migration form HERE.
Join us on Facebook!
New videos EVERY single Monday. Make sure to subscribe: http://bit.ly/1WIwIVC
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Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Autumn (1s): What the heck is going on with MailChimp. I've used it for years and it was slowly becoming more lost each time I logged in and it wasn't because I've crossed some invisible age threshold where software no longer made sense. I've never seen a company make a platform more difficult to navigate and use of every update so horribly. I treaded logging in this situation was unsustainable, not if I actually wanted to do you know, do business with a man and mailing list, but yes for and I had a plan.
Autumn (38s): If you're a fantasy author, then you've come to the right place. My name is Autumn and together with Jesper we've published more than 20 novels. Our aim is to use our experience to help you writing marketing and selling books to fans all over the world. It started with little things like when I clicked on a campaign in MailChimp, the default action directed it to the stats instead of edits like it used to. I can't tell you how many times I groaned as I needed to back up, hit the dropdown menu to say I wanted to edit an automation sequence.
Autumn (1m 12s): Instead of seeing, you know, the stats, years of doing things one way or so difficult to unlearn. Then my list disappeared and changed to audiences. It took two or three steps to burrow into the menu to find my formerly easily located lists and subscribers and the from there to go to items like subscription forms and emails. I was sorta like, what the fuck. But then I took a deep breath. I really don't rattle easily. I'm waking Lee adaptable. But then it got even worse.
Autumn (1m 43s): My campaign menu's changed. Instead of seeing all the automations or recently sent email blasts, I could only see the ones that related to the audience I was currently viewing. So if I was working with a list for books in one Shondra, uh, wanted to see if I had email, I'd sent to a list that came in through like a giveaway. The search turned up, nothing, not a notice. There was a campaign like that attached to a different list. But thing. It was full panic mode a couple of times as surge just came up empty, like my entire history of emails had been erased.
Old McGrumpy (2m 21s): Only worthless. Humans can mess up the beauty of code.
Autumn (2m 26s): Oh hi or would make grubby. I should have guessed that our AI Cohoes you would take that view. Do I need to remind you that worthless humans invented computer code and some of it is all that beautiful,
Old McGrumpy (2m 39s): but computers will perfect what you've begun
Autumn (2m 43s): perhaps, but the last time I checked, there's still a lot of work to do now. Why don't you go chase down some redundant, outdated code of your own before you call humans too complicated.
Old McGrumpy (2m 54s): I don't have time for this.
Autumn (2m 57s): Where were we? Oh, right. MailChimp is the mailing list platform I've used since I first created an account as a new author. I recommended it to the writing courses I teach. At least I did until I didn't. I already didn't use about half of the platform because it was more than I needed to send newsletters out and organize a book launch or launch teams as MailChimp pivoted towards a new business model of a full service marketing platform and it left me in the dust. I don't use over half the platform normally, but when they transitioned to something entirely new where I wouldn't use over 80% of it but needed to pay for, well 100% I can only be happy that we jumped ship when we did, which was a full month before the new changes in pricing tiers.
Autumn (3m 44s): I won't go into what MailChimp has been doing, but we'll billing to a very detailed article by David Koch ran in the show notes. That article is a great discussion in itself, which we've been doing in the amwritingfantasy closed Facebook group. We'd love to have you join us there and add your thoughts. The link is in the show notes. Yes. For night jumped out of MailChimp before getting out needed to happen ASAP and our account costs would have at least doubled if not tripled or more.
Autumn (4m 15s): Part of the reason why we loved was I was tired of being frustrated with figuring out the platform when I just wanted to create a newsletter or just simply check the wording of it. Automation, a two minute task became 15 minutes Odyssey of frustration. Honestly, about a year ago I moved my reader lists out of MailChimp's to Miller Lite. Then Yesper and I decided this winter to move our author list to convert kit where he hosts his reader account. Don't get me wrong, I like Miller Lite.
Autumn (4m 46s): It works fine for the reader newsletters, but convert kit is awesome. It is a whole level of organization and simplicity. I hadn't even known existed with mailing lists. If you have some pretty sophisticated automations, ConvertKit will not let you down. In fact, it will make your newsletter life upright so smooth that you'll be able to take the time to figure out any kinks in the flow and to get it all working better. One of my favorite things is we didn't have to do all the heavy lifting. If you have more than 5,000 subscribers, ConvertKit will migrate you to their platform for free.
Autumn (5m 20s): You get a personal team who will work with you to translate what you used to do and to how it works in covid kit and give you the tour. Before handing over the keys. Our team was fantastic and asked lots of clarifying questions, which always boosts my confidence that they care and are taking their task seriously. Part of the process is completing a month migration form, which at first I felt so daunting. They wanted me to organize the chaos. I'd created a MailChimp.
Autumn (5m 51s): Oh my gosh. I'll link to the migration forum too, but there are some key was of information you'll need. You'll of course near the main website you use the signup forms on, but if you are like us and have a few different sites, that isn't a problem. There is a spot for those too. You need your subscriber count, but approximate is fine, which is good because if you have duplicate emails you might not have as many subscribers as you think you do. You also need a list of all your subscriber forms in a very specific way.
Autumn (6m 21s): That is one the URL, the optin to any thank you attached. Page three any lead magnet or freebie attached and for which list groups opt. It needs to view attitude. For me, that could look a little bit like this one, a photo link at this plebiscite to know thank you. Page three, PDF download, pound up this website and four goes to a free booklet. Not that bad except you need to do it for all of your opt-ins. I think it was at this point I realized I needed to do this exercise at a document and then copy and paste to the migration forum.
Autumn (6m 55s): ConvertKit also leaves an entire section for you to type in anything odd or unique about your list or list management. For me, I listed the my website themes because I have one that wants stripped code in order to create a special pop-up signup form. They handle that. No problem. Next you need to know the name of your list tags and or groups that need to be moved. That makes sense. Especially for us, since I had some author lists and some Reno lettuce and well not everything was going to be in the same spot when it was all said and done.
Autumn (7m 27s): The next really big piece of info you need is your automations and know how they are connected with lists sort of the whole way the puzzle fits together. They get written down like this. The arc reader onboard automation connects to the ArcSight of form and the arc reader list. There's also a place to list any integrations you use Zapier or a membership plugin as well as your timeline and any extra info you need to share after that you need to actually give a ConvertKit access to everything from MailChimp to your website, plugins and such because they actually go in and do all the switching for you.
Autumn (8m 3s): I can't even begin to tell you how fantastic that was because I gave them some crazy long answers to all the above questions and they did it all and checked in to be sure they were moving it right and they do it in a very thoughtful way. The migration form has some fun examples and phrasing to take the, Oh my gosh, you need to meet to actually be organized and explain this to you. Pain out of the ordeal. Oh, and they give you a free tee shirt, which is kind of awesome too.
Autumn (8m 33s): What about that MailChimp account you'll be leaving behind? You may still have subscribers coming through the old legs. Do you want to have them find a blank page? I didn't. So I figured out a few alternatives. One thing you can do is scrub all your list once you have them safely downloaded and then request MailChimp revert your account to free as long as you haven't done that before and now have less than 2000 subscribers if you have all is not lost. Another option is to pause your account. This is an option that's under your settings.
Autumn (9m 4s): Hey, wait, wait, wait. Down at the bottom. Once your account is pause, you would not be billed and you cannot send whoever people could still sign up and so if they come in through an old link and then you can download that new site up and upload it to your new platform plow, you can view all of your account information like lists, campaigns and automations. It is actually a really great feature. Nothing's lost. You can still refer to it. I'd recommend that if you do pause the account though to change all of your subscription forms to say right there that the subscriber landed on an old link and a signup will not result in getting whatever it is they think they're signing up for, but not to worry and to follow the link provided to the correct sign-up spot.
Autumn (9m 47s): Yeah, might use it through a few people through the jumble of link clicking, but you will have a better success rate than if a potential subscriber hits a dead link. If your questions are to ConvertKit migration and what is going on at MailChimp or some steps you can take, let us know in the show notes in the comments below. And if you're running an author newsletter, check out this video on using your email list to sell books for some tips. Stay safe out there and see your next Monday.
Don't you hate it when you have a fabulous idea, the writing flows well, and then when you hit edits you release your favorite bit has NOTHING to do with the novel plot?
Keep your writing on track so you don't waste writing time OR inspiration with this very quick outlining method, which is nearly painless, even for pantsers!
And don't forget to check out the FREE Starter Kit writing course for more great tips on writing HERE!
The link to check out average word counts in your genre is at HERE.
And pick up a graph of a traditional story arc HERE or watch the video of today's episode HERE. The link to the video on the 7 Steps of Story Structure is HERE.
New videos EVERY single Monday. Make sure to subscribe: http://bit.ly/1WIwIVC
PATREON! Many bonus perks for those who become a patron of the channel. https://www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy
LET'S CONNECT! Closed Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/AmWritingFantasy/ Blog and Courses: https://www.amwritingfantasy.com/ Podcast: http://podcast.amwritingfantasy.com/ Jesper on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SchmidtJesper Autumn on Twitter: https://twitter.com/weifarer
"Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Autumn (0s): Have you ever been writing a fantastic scene full of tension and tripping with emotional nuances? The scene is the best thing you've written and spent hours, if not days on it, only to realize in a late moment of clarity that it has absolutely nothing to do with the plot of the novel. It hurts so much to hit the lead on all that work, but what if there was a way to ensure you're wasting your inspiration and writing time on stuff you'll cut later?
Autumn (34s): If you're a fantasy author, then you've come to the right place. My name is autumn and together with Yesper we've written and published more than 20 novels. Our aim is to use our experience to help you with writing marketing and selling books to fans all over the world. A quick note to those listening in on the podcast. There are a couple of graphics that I'll link to in the show notes at the bottom of the page, but for the full effect, I'd recommend watching the video.
Autumn (1m 4s): Most writing pitfalls aren't genre specific and effect all authors. These are the big ones, Lang like landmines at a field of wild flowers. You think everything is going along just beautifully until boom and one of the big ones is figuring out what should go where as you write or if what you are writing even belongs in the novel. You know what I'm hinting at that dirty P word plotting
Old McGrumpy (1m 30s): but readers like character driven stories.
Autumn (1m 34s): Oh, hello. Old bit grumpy. I knew I couldn't escape an entire video without you making an appearance as are mostly unwanted AI cohost. That is true. We just love character driven stories and that is one reason many writers shy away from spending time on plotting
Old McGrumpy (1m 52s): so you shouldn't plot.
Autumn (1m 54s): I wouldn't say that many writers prefer to pants rather than plot. I'm a hybrid that is probably is a bit more on the side of my pants or that applaud. Or always tended to jump into a fire before I assessed everything. Anything
Old McGrumpy (2m 8s): but this video is about plotting and you've said you are a pantser Fuman are confusing in like superior. I
Autumn (2m 16s): actually, the video is about creating an outline. I'd make one to keep myself out of trouble. Well, as much reading trouble as possible, at least.
Old McGrumpy (2m 25s): What is the difference? Plotting is plotting
Autumn (2m 28s): well because I don't want to plot much. I developed a method of creating an ultra quick outline that takes about half an hour and will guide my process as I write without feeling like I just wasted a week that I could have been writing the darn thing instead of a figuring out how to write the darn thing. That is why this is an applauding video. My a grumpy we'll see despite my grumpies disbelief up bed, a flooding is a lifesaver. The first writing course I taught was called right great faster and I use the slogan, it doesn't matter how fast you type, if you just end up deleting the page anyway, so much writing help is centered on typing fast or like you're only writing.
Autumn (3m 12s): Problem is time, but we all know ideas seem to disappear like vampires at sunrise. When you finally sit down to write or wasn't. That inspiration strikes. It can lead you astray as much as actually help you write. Writing is complicated. I don't care how fast you type, if you don't know what you're writing is actually important to the novel, you are just wasting writing time with 15 books out and a bout release number 16 while beginning my fourth and fifth series.
Autumn (3m 42s): I firmly believe in protecting and making the most of my writing time as well as keeping it on track. I'm serious about this which is why I teach writing tips and started with a course on how to write great novels faster because the world needs more fantastic fantasy and no writer. She'd get lost in the weeds. In fact, if you are looking for more key tips on how to rate especially start off writing and steps and make sure you succeed in actually finishing your work in progress, make sure to check out the free starter kit.
Autumn (4m 15s): The link is under the video. It will help you refine your idea, avoid novice pitfalls and give you some great tools. That is how serious I am about making sure writers don't fail right now we are talking about an outline though. One that is simple, doesn't take days, how you can finish it and under a half an hour does half an hour investment saw logo worth keeping your writing focused and moving? Good. So let's get started.
Autumn (4m 45s): Start by looking at your own writing. How many words do you typically type in a chapter? Hopefully you've done enough writing to be able to create an average word count. If not, check out a book you've read that you liked the flow of and give an estimate on the new words per chapter. Remembering that the average paperback has 250 to 300 words per page. Got that? Good. Now we need to find out what is the average word count is in your genre. There are lots of resources out there for this. I'll include a link to in the notes below this episode to a great blog post with some solid numbers by sub genre and it's a good reference, but it's getting old word counts for indie authors are actually coming down.
Autumn (5m 27s): The important thing is to decide what your writing, such as a short story, a novella, a novel, and how long you'd like it to be. Don't take your target word count and divided by your average chapter like Presto. You have your target number of chapters. Why is that useful? Glad you asked. Well, if you take the typical graph of a story like the traditional story arc, which looks like this, a traditional story arc starts out with a pretty flat tension until you hit the inciting incident, then there's explosive tension growth towards the climax, but it isn't linear.
Autumn (6m 6s): The tension goes up and down a bit as you toy with your reader and character as well. Um, but as the character goes through a few stages and some hurdles in laws, then there is a sweeping bell curve of the climax before it drops to a gentle wrap up. That's a nice little flat tail. What tension is lower than the climax, but higher than the intro? Pretty cool, huh? With the calculation you just did, you can add your chapters to the graph. Now you have an idea of where your inciting incident should fall, when you should be adding in hurdles, in laws and when the climax begins and you won't forget to do a wrap up.
Autumn (6m 45s): Now if you follow the seven steps of story structure, which was covered in this video, you can also add in the steps remembering that the inciting incident, an idea dark night of the soul is usually a chapter. Each intro and wrap up are usually one to three chapters. The climax should be at least as long as the longest phase and your novel, either the reaction of the planning phase, which those don't have to be the same length and again, Presto, you have a rough outline.
Autumn (7m 16s): I do this. Everything I write now even short stories. My next release at the end of June is a novella that I targeted for 35,000 words. I typically write 2,500 words in a chapter and that works out to 14 chapters. Guess what? Guess how many lungs by novella is 14 this really works better than that. I knew that chapter's wanted to would be my intro. As you can see from my quick outline, the inciting incident needed to happen by the end of chapter two chapter three to seven would be the reaction phase while new info would occur in chapter seven.
Autumn (7m 50s): This would lead to the reaction phase from chapters eight and 11 with a climax spanning 12 to 14 and it really quick wrap up at the end of 14 that is all I put together before writing. Yes, we're, I know we'll have a small a panic attack when he sees this, but it is all I need and honestly I have the entire serious planet out this way. Oh, but there is a bit more to a series including this video. Could that be a hit of something coming in the future? This outline leaves room for inspiration, but it keeps going in the right direction so I don't end up wasting a week's worth of writing, which means I'm writing a new book, my new book that much faster and I know I'm hitting all the key plot points and that is the goal, isn't it?
Autumn (8m 34s): Don't forget to watch the video on the seven steps of story structure to really develop your quick outline and create a solid guide that we'll get your writing. Well, prick novels faster. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Do you know the feeling of reading a book which really does have an engaging plot, yet each chapter just feels a bit... boring?
We share our 5 steps which every chapter should contain. Learn how to write your chapters in such a fashion that they keep the stakes high and the tension going. These 5 steps will get rid of boring chapters once and for all.
Grab our FREE writing course: https://www.amwritingfantasy.com/product/ultimate-fantasy-writers-starter-kit-short-course/
Here's a link to the book (now also available as audio book), "How to write a fantasy book description": https://www.jesperschmidt.com/books/how-to-write-a-fantasy-book-description/
New episodes EVERY single Monday.
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Closed Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/AmWritingFantasy/
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Jesper on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SchmidtJesper
Autumn on Twitter: https://twitter.com/weifarer
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Jesper (0s): All right. Welcome to a amwritingfantasy and today we are going to talk a bit about chapter structure or maybe you want to call it seem structure. In this case we are talking about the same thing, but how do you create any gating chatter?
Autumn (21s): If you're a fantasy author then you've come to the right place. My name is Autumn and together with Jesper we've published more than 20 novels. Our aim is to use our experience to help you writing marketing and selling books to fans all over the world. So we have of course a quick status update on how we're doing and we still have so many irons in the fire, but it is coming along well. First off is the world board building course and we're definitely making progress. I know. Yes, Paris would really busy recording and I'm still working on a few back end things.
Autumn (53s): He's beating me this time.
Jesper (57s): I'm pretty sure that was page because I have a like a humongous module coming up in the near future here, so I'm not going to be done very quickly with that. Let's see how it goes.
Autumn (1m 6s): Yeah. At least a, a black or does, we're competitive. We're not super competitive with each other. We just keep each other going. And that's important. But, um, I think I'm going to beat you eventually on this, but I'm not that worried. I'll catch up.
Jesper (1m 19s): Yeah, that's okay. I mean the, the, the, the, the model or you beat me, so just be very quick. It will be, we'll have it done, so that's good. Yeah. I don't think there's a reason to keep beating that one, but there's a lot of work like we've talked about before, so it was sort of still be enough work for at least to carry us into the fall and then we'll see you.
Autumn (1m 43s): Absolutely. And there's still the backend, um, to build a website. So we'll get there eventually. And of course we have our books that we're working on the plotting book. Um, we have, uh, audio, audio release coming up, so we've done a lot of stuff going on.
Jesper (1m 60s): Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And actually, uh, in, in that way am today's topic, you is sort of coming from the book. Uh, I guess I could say because we have the, well in a, in a planning book, you, you saw a need a chapter about how to plot a chapter as well. So we have an actually in the book we have a five steps that we believe and feel should make up the chapter to make it a good chapter. Uh, and basically what we thought to do here today was to give you those five steps and talk a bit about our thoughts on, on what those Facebook
Autumn (2m 39s): Jane and why, why is building the way that it has. Absolutely. It kind of has a sneak peek at what is coming in, what we've been working on and a much bigger way than us just telling you, Hey, bill, he on a book. So I think we should definitely dive in with our five steps.
Jesper (2m 56s): The first step is a, what we call a to go and buy character goal. We mean that in every chapter that character should have a goal on what it is that he or she wants to achieve. Because if there is no goal in the to, if there is also no momentum because we have no clue what the character's doing or why.
Autumn (3m 18s): The interesting thing about this is you might be thinking as another, well what if my character doesn't find out through like halfway through the book or halfway through the chapter I should say what they want to, what is going to be the purpose of it? So how do you set up, you know, chapter where the character gets the important phone call, say halfway through, you know, it's not the first sentence. I think it's always nice to start with action, but what if that just doesn't work for this chapter because that doesn't always happen. So there's got to be a way to have a lead in like you still need to start with action.
Autumn (3m 51s): You can have the character doing something else that's also important. This is like a sort of like a little mini story that happens before the really big reveal of what's going to happen to this chapter. So always make sure you start with some sort of purpose. Even if it's a smaller one. That way you get the action going and you don't leave a leader scratching their head going, please just let something happen right now. I'm so bored.
Jesper (4m 16s): Yeah. And I think one of the points that we're making in the book about the character goal is the chapter doesn't really start until point number two, which we're going to come to in a second. So, so the coach goal is small, like you as the author needs to know what it is that the character wanted to see him. Because if you don't know that, it is very hard to convey to the readers will that, that this coach is trying to do this or that I may, maybe he or she is trying to uh, looking for, uh, an object or they are trying to find some information about something.
Jesper (4m 49s): You know, it can be a ton of things. It could also be that they're trying to avoid getting physical or mentally harmed or, I dunno, it could be a ton of things. And it could also be, which we're going to go come back to it a bit later here, but could also be that the character starts out wanting one thing and then later in the chapter they want something else that could also be, but, but just the fact that you know what it is to care to once and what they are trying to achieve is what makes the difference. But the chapter itself in the way of thinking, what is actually happening doesn't really start until I'll point number two, which is the hook.
Autumn (5m 26s): That's right. The hook is very important. This is what's going to keep the reader reading the next paragraph. So you think the hook, obviously when you write the first sentence of your novel, the first page, it's got to be a hook. It's got to grab the reader. Well, the bad news is every chapter should have at least a small kind of hook, the same type that draws them. You're in. So the reading the next sentence, the next sentence, the next sentence. So the first part of your chapter is always the hook. And that is where we talk about action. Or if it's dialogue, you know, the character walks into a new, they should walk into the middle of a conversation.
Autumn (6m 0s): It's more engaging. If you're trying to figure out what's going on that you've already cut to the chase. And the important thing is you're not rehashing what just happened in the previous chapter. You know, hopefully the reader just read that they just flip to the page and the ones to start the next chapter. You don't want to start re sharing the same information unless there's a huge point of view, change, a huge time gap, something like that. Otherwise get right into it. The probably key words, she is his curiosity.
Autumn (6m 31s): Uh, and by that I mean that if you can sort of wake a curiosity in the reader about that, they want to know, okay, this, this seems interesting, what's going on and what's going to happen. So, so if you can achieve that with your hook, uh, then you're definitely on the right path. Definitely. I, that's am really the whole point of the novel. It's, it's so the reader is so invested in the character that they're going to read anything cause they love it, which might not happen. It might. Hopefully it does. Curiosity is what you want to use to draw them in.
Autumn (7m 2s): So that's really important in the earlier chapters of the novel. But with any chapter, if you want them to do, if you want to write a page Turner, if you want to write something that someone said, I stayed up till 5:00 AM even though I go to work at seven because I couldn't put it down. That's really the key, is keeping them curious to find out what happens next. And so that is how you develop your hook. And again, you should start it with action, with dialogue, with something going on, even if it's not the immediate point of the chapter, not the immediate goal of the character, but just so something is moving and happening and engaging.
Autumn (7m 37s): All right. And uh, then Arthur the the hook. Then we have conflict and dilemma, which is our step number three. And of course now we've sort of caught the reader's attention and they, they, uh, hooked on what's gonna happen. And, and I don't know, maybe, maybe it also depends on how you look at it, but at least for me, even though it's fantasy and sometimes at least from a classic fantasy of you manufacture, she books reach a bit slow and a bit like, ah, okay, OK, that then we need to hear about the forest.
Autumn (8m 15s): And then there was those types over there. It gets described in painful detail and so forth, which are for us, but, but the, the five punch structure that we have built here is more or less sort of almost like a thriller patient, you know, if we want this sort of twist or turn the pages and I want to see what's happened next, even though it's a fantasy novel, I see absolutely no reason why it shouldn't be a page Turner and that you really want to flip the wind and see what happens. So, so when we then get into conflict or dilemma, that's where we tried to build up the tension.
Autumn (8m 47s): Absolutely. And that could be of course action. And I agree. I mean fantasy I think there are fight scenes, but there's no reason this is not something that you're just like whipping through. I love it when I hear like a reader went through 500 pages overnight. I mean that's just maybe only torturing people, but so actually that's obviously the first thing when you think of with, uh, something that's conflicted dilemma. So, you know, there could be sword fighting, there could be chasing means. There could be any of that. The character might not be in a life and death situation situation, but something should be happening.
Autumn (9m 21s): So your hook has built to this much higher point where it's no longer curiosity but like, Oh my goodness, what's happening? But that's not the only type of conflict we're talking about here.
Jesper (9m 33s): No, well, the thing is with, with conflict is that, um, there was a bit of cheating going on that we need to be mindful about us. S S the writer, uh, that we, that we don't cheat. And what, I mean that sounded a bit cryptic, but what I meant, what I mean by that is basically so you could say, okay, how do I make tension? Okay, I'll have something blow up. Or a dragon just appeared and then put the timer on fire. We just talked about game of Thrones before recording. Yes. And that's why that template came up into my mind.
Jesper (10m 4s): But maybe attract, we just showed up and burnt the entire city down or something, you know? Well that's, that's all well and good. And of course that is tension. Uh, I mean something is happening, but the, the caveat here is that it's cheating because the tension and the co, the conflict and dilemma you need to build has to be built on basis of the character goal. So it has to be something that stands in the way of the character reaching their goal. Because only then is it a true conflict and dilemma for the character in the scene.
Jesper (10m 37s): It's fine to, somebody attacked the city over there and that's very exciting. And of course that's, well a bit worrying. But if this character is not even going there and you're supposed to do something completely different over there and stuff, uh, in the, in the opposite direction, that wealth, maybe if he's a good hearted person who will probably be a bit worried about those people over there, but it doesn't stop the character in achieving her goal. And if it doesn't, then it's not a conflict and it's not a dilemma.
Autumn (11m 7s): Exactly. That is really the point. So the driving does show up. It's got to stop the character from reaching the next step that is going to be moving the whole plot of the movie forward, or at least showing something really important to this novel. It can't just be something from left field that causes them to completely lose the goal unless of course the character, the chapter goal does change. Uh, that could be an interesting twist, but it has to be done on purpose, not just because you felt like draw writing in a dry again, which is really cool.
Autumn (11m 38s): I met, but it can't be the only reason the dragon showed up.
Jesper (11m 43s): We can always, always find a reason to put him in somewhere. Right? I mean, that's just, it has to be there. It's not the same without a dragon.
Autumn (11m 51s): Absolutely. You can see where this is.
Jesper (11m 56s): Yeah. All examples. I would recommend something to do with dragons that every, every single example I was gonna say. I think there's, yes, there's one in the am amwritingfantasy logo. So big surprise. Yeah, that's true. Okay. So I'm trying to, uh, put this a train wreck back on track here. So, so we have a character goal number one, the hook, number two, conflict and dilemma is number three. So there was that, the first three stepping stones to build a good chapter.
Jesper (12m 30s): And then after conflict and dilemma number four, then we're going to get instant reaction and decision. And when we are talking about reaction and decision, it is incredibly easy for us as writers to sort of default into thinking, okay, so I've just put a conflict on and create a dilemma that standing in the way of the character's goal. So I guess the most obvious thing to do is that when I'm dealing with reaction and decision is that just that the character will find some way to deal with this conflict and dilemma that is now window way of achieving that goal, which is true.
Jesper (13m 12s): And, and of course the character should be doing that in step number four, they should be thinking about how can I overcome this challenge that is now standing in my way? How can I find a new solution? But I think an element that is very often overlooked is that the character will also have an emotional reaction to what just happened. It's gonna frustrate them or make them sad or I don't know, but, but it's going to generate some sort of emotional reaction within the character and I, and it's so easy to sort of forget about that in, in, in writing about how, Oh, then he makes this new plan and he just going to do this and that, blah, blah, blah.
Jesper (13m 51s): It's that emotional impact is very, very, very important because it also shows characterization to the Rebbe and they understand where the character's coming from. And they get a deeper feeling for the character. But all that said, I also have to say, on the other hand, you need to be careful not to overdoing that emotional reaction because if you do to counter can sort of end up, let's say he's sad about what happened or something he can get, he can come across like that. He sort of feeling sorry for himself, which if you do that just like twice in the novel, I pretty sure the reader will think that.
Jesper (14m 28s): Well he said what's, I don't want to read about him, give them the emotional impact but, but sort of co pack it into all the other stuff that is happening and just sort of added a bit without going too much into detail about how sad he is about this and that. And then I wanted to remind him of how he lost his father when he was five years old and blah, blah, blah. You know? Yeah. That's not gonna work, but I think that's why
Autumn (14m 52s): I have all my female characters get angry. It was only gets in their way because they're all kind of fire recharged. Take on. So that was the other thing, just because you have, you want to include that emotional reaction, cause I agreed this is, this is what will make the reader start really relating and caring because maybe they've never had a dragon land in front of them that really pissed them off, but they had something that stopped them and got in their way and they wanted to get around it through it, over it. They understand that emotion and so this is how you get the reader to relate to the character.
Autumn (15m 24s): But again, don't go over the top. You don't want to have drama, drama Queens, you know, stubbing their toe in crying a river. This is not the type of emotional reaction, but anger something there that they also have to deal with as well as getting through the dilemma, making a decision and deciding how they're going to conquer and achieve their goal despite this big setback. So you can tell this has gone from, you know, a hook that gets them reading curiously to achieve this goal. Something that happens, a conflict, which is exciting.
Autumn (15m 56s): It's enchanting up. The tension we've gone to now reaction, which is more emotional as well as maybe mental, maybe physical, maybe they have to solve an actual problem, but it's kind of really getting inside the car. The reader is like starting to really just like get excited as well as feel this. These are all really good things that you want to see happening. Cause that all leads up to step five.
Jesper (16m 19s): Yeah. And now we have the disaster. So, so in, in um, in step four we put emphasis on showing that the coach is pro active because that then that sort of leads them into to the disaster, which is our step number five. Maybe coming back to the thriller, a example here, you know, that ending the chapters with cliffhangers is a really, really good thing. You know, something is that it does not mean that you have to end chapters with the, again, things growing up or dragging this a PSI of know where every, you know, all that stuff.
Jesper (16m 53s): It doesn't have to be that. It can also just be that a very interesting question is, or print, you know, something is now all of a sudden in doubt that, well, okay, I thought this guy was doing a, but maybe he is not doing a maybe yes, an ulterior motive or something. You know that there can be many subtle ways to do a cliffhanger where the reader, it's just ending up in a situation where they think what's going to happen now because that's where we want to leave them at the end of the chapter. So they uh, I bet like at 10 o'clock in the evening and actually they want to go to sleep, but you are going to rub them up.
Jesper (17m 30s): They're sleeping too because they're gonna say, ah, just one more chapter and that's where we want them.
Autumn (17m 34s): That is, we are going to just draw them until the end of the next chapter. They're going to keep going. But this is definitely, it doesn't always have to be a life and death peril, but that isn't awesome. Cliffhanger where you want to flip the patients. He has a character survives but they could come up with new information which is always interesting or find out something was betrayed or just something else that they weren't really expecting. And then you have the character reacting. You want to know how they're gonna deal with it. You can have that asking a big question or trying to find the results to something.
Autumn (18m 5s): And the answer again is the next chapter and you just of want to split it so that they have to find out what happens next to turn the page. So now just like every chapter is going to have a hook just like the beginning of the book, well every chapter is also going to have a little bit of an ending that makes you want to turn the page, makes the reader wants in the page. I always say and the chapter was as much enthusiasm that you want to keep writing the next chapter that's going to be what it's going to draw the reader into. Wanting to at least go to the next sentence, which is going to make them curious cause it's going to be a hook.
Autumn (18m 37s): You got to start the cycle all over again and the next thing they know it is five in the morning and they haven't slept away, but they finished your book and hopefully will really re hopefully leave a really good review.
Jesper (18m 49s): Yeah, yeah. But, but that's, that's the neat thing with these five steps is that one sort of leads to the other and once you get to number five, your disaster is automatically going to give you the next character go. So now this happened and now there's a new goal because the character then that wants to achieve something and you can sort of repeat the whole cycle again and you sort of repeat those cycles throughout. Right. And every time to build some on the one that came before it and you just am yeah, you go go like that. Uh, I would say though that these this was sort of the breakdown at the chapter level in the how to plot a level book that we're going to release later this year.
Jesper (19m 26s): There is like whole sections of that that sort of breaks down the entire novel into some pillows. There were different things needs to happen. These five steps might, might sound sort of like a very am organic pants away of writing, you know? Okay. So I'll just take those five step running through and the next after the next step, the next step for them. So forth. And then I have a level, but I'm just putting that caveat out there because there's actually a lot more planning behind the scenes here on in terms of building up the structure that these that these chapters sits inside.
Jesper (19m 58s): Uh, but that's the way too much detail to get into here now. But at least on a, on a chapter level, if you are finding it challenging to write chapters or scenes that feels engaging and feels exciting and then try out these five steps. So step number one, character goal. Step number two of the hook. Step number three, conflict or dilemma. Step number four, we action and decision. And step number five, the disaster. And I can almost guarantee you just putting these five steps into your mind and thinking about them.
Jesper (20m 29s): We'll generate a better chapter.
Autumn (20m 32s): It will. You will find that it'll help the pace of your novel, the reading and yes, there's a lot more to an entire novel than this, but this is a great way of setting up a chapter so that you create that engaging feeling that you draw the reader in and they keep reading and they don't put it down. This is a good
Jesper (20m 48s): stepping stone that'll get you started and it'll get you, even if it's a small chapter in more of an intro versus the climax, which obviously this is going to be easy to use, the climax, it'll get you going with every chapter. They keep just a little bit more engaging and that'll really help you along. Exactly. Maybe we should mention because at the point of recording this, the am that plotting book is not edited yet. It's not out yet. But uh, if you think that you might be interested in it, then I would go on to amwritingfantasy.com and just sign up for you.
Jesper (21m 25s): You can download one of our freebies that are on the page there. Or if you go to the blog section, there's also a am assign a place there where you, where you can put in your email address. But I mentioned that just because if you do give us your email address by one of those sign up forms, you will be on our list and you will automatically get notified at the appointed time when released the books on them. Then you can pick it up. So if you're worried about getting about it by the time that it comes out, because it will be several months from now, sign up for the email list by our amwritingfantasy outcome and we will let you know at least the good point is it's written where does editing it.
Jesper (22m 3s): So I'm pretty much all the way there. We'll get there very soon and I think if we wanted to, we could probably push it out in a month or so, but that, but the one thing just like the small thing that there is about it is that we want to include an example outline as well show from start to finish. What does it look like when you apply all the sort of the chief things that are in this step by step guide. We wanted them to apply that on our first book, one in our new series so that you can basically download the plot and see what it looks like with all data, sort of the mechanical S behind the scenes flooding structure in place, um, to use as inspiration, but also to sort of deepen the learning experience.
Jesper (22m 45s): Uh, but we're not gonna develop that plot until our work. The thing is done and as I've just said in the beginning of the video, that will be built on dumb until the fall, I think. So that also means that it's several months away before we, we'll start promoting the book, which means that we had finished the book and release it until that is done. So yeah, essentially the book is done, but it's not gonna be released anytime soon unless we figure out time travel. But yeah, probably it's going to be working on definitely pretty Bob.
Jesper (23m 17s): We'll get it. That's another conversation. All right. So anything else we need to share with them? No, I think we are all set. So good luck with your plotting. Leave comments to let us know how your chapters are going. We want to hear if this helped you. Excellent. See you next Monday. Bye bye.
The pricing of eBooks is an ongoing conversation among authors that might never reach a conclusion.
Some say that a low price devaluate the books, whereas others swear that a eBooks should be cheap because of the online distribution mechanism.
I had a talk with Joseph Malik, who didn't just succeed in making his first novel, Dragon's Trail, a Kindle Top 100 Bestseller in four countries, but also decided to increase his prices to $9,99.
Learn what effect this pricing strategy has on his book sales and associated revenue.
You can find Joseph here: http://www.josephmalik.com/
New episodes EVERY single Monday.
To subscribe on YouTube, go here: http://bit.ly/1WIwIVC
PATREON!
Many bonus perks for those who become a patrons. https://www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy
LET'S CONNECT!
Closed Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/AmWritingFantasy/
Blog and Courses: https://www.amwritingfantasy.com/
Jesper on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SchmidtJesper
Autumn on Twitter: https://twitter.com/weifarer
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Jesper (0s): If you were at a fantasy author, you've come to the right place. My name is Jesper and uh, together with autumn we published more than 20 books. And our aim here is to use our experience to help you in publishing, marketing and selling books have fans all over the world. So today we are going to talk a bit about one of these topics and that is especially around how you should price your ebook.
Jesper (31s): All right, man, for the first time, actually, I think we have a returning guest here on am amwritingfantasy and I'm talking to Joseph today to help me. So Joseph what have you been up to since last time we talked?
Joseph (43s): Hey, thanks. Jesper I don't think we've talked since I released my sequel, which would've been in September, late September of last year. I released my second book. Uh, the new magic.
Jesper (56s): Yeah, because I think last time we talked, you only have the first ebook I wasn't there, so that's right. Yeah, yeah.
Joseph (1m 2s): If I were talking about sales last time and um, yeah, so that we did, we did that. That's second books are hard I think in a trilogy. So it hasn't done as well as we had expected. But there are some, some very strange things happening with the numbers that we haven't got figured out yet. And we recently learned that it was very heavily pirated right at the beginning. Um, writing launch it launched into the top 50, uh, Evan fantasy new releases on Kindle and it got, uh, uh, mainstream backing and got mentioned in like Gizmodo, I think he would think of verge and some other pretty big websites.
Joseph (1m 45s): And was it, did, it started off really great. And the good reads reviews are pretty strong and there's a tremendous number of them. But the Amazon reviews, there haven't been that many and we're not seeing a lot of sales. What we're seeing a lot more reviews and a much higher percentage of good reads reviews, then sales. Um, and we're seeing a lot of social media traffic as well, but not the sales to back it up. And then we recently found out that it was, uh, it was featured on a, uh, on a, on a pretty major piracy site.
Joseph (2m 16s): That's since been taken down. So we're, we're kind of recovering from that. Ebook fairly sure. We are ripped off, so yeah, it happens.
Jesper (2m 26s): Yeah. Unfortunately, yes, I do. It's just part of the author life at the, yeah.
Joseph (2m 30s): It's just, it's, it's, it's fine. People are reading it and that's great. Yeah. Sorry. It is a second. Ebook and so it's been, you know, it's a lot darker. It's the second act. It's been getting very responses from people, but they chose a protagonist in a less than flattering light because in the second one, second ebook can be Dennis to. Uh, no second act things start to go wrong for him, so that's fine. That's fine.
Jesper (2m 57s): All right. Yeah. Well I hope it'll, it'll pick back up for you, but, but, uh, well I, I think one of the, what we wanted to get into here, it was a bit around the pricing because, and actually this is sort of a often debated topic and yet you don't want the community in general that are those who swear by that you should price your books cheap, uh, because it's an ebook and others are saying that you are insane if you do so because the books are much of a much higher value than maybe a dollar or $2 or whatever.
Jesper (3m 30s): So that's sort of where we want to get into a bit here today. And you have some thoughts on this. I know Joseph
Joseph (3m 37s): yeah, sounds great. So we'd first started off pricing my first book, dragons trail at two 99, I think when it first released back in 2016 and it did fairly well. And um, uh, two 99 and then it got like a couple of book clubs at 99 cents. Um, yeah, I've got an international and then, uh, and then a USB port ebook and after that, I think we raised the price to three 99 or four 99. And we found that there was, uh, no, there was no decrease in sales when we did that.
Joseph (4m 9s): And then about a year later it had kept selling me. We had moved the price to five 99, I think we sold it five 99, all through 2018 and it just continued to sell really well at five 99. And then when we released the second book, when we released the new magic, we did a, we had one more 99 cent promotion with the new magic. And I forget who we did it through, but it was, I don't remember who did it.
Joseph (4m 40s): Anyway. Um, and after that we decided to go for broke and we raised the prices of both ebook into nine 99. We understood that if it, you know, if it didn't work, we could move her back to five 99 and just call it, you know, and, and, and just calling it a marketing exploration. But the damnedest thing happened, which is that after that spike from the 99 cent promotion came down, the sales actually went up at nine 99 over five 99 not by much, couple more books a day.
Joseph (5m 17s): And overall the trend line has been higher at nine 99 then it wasn't five 99 and it's taken us all a lot. We've had to do a lot of market research to figure out how this is actually happening. But there were a lot of things going for these books the way that we did them that may not work for other indie authors, but it might work for some if they're following a particular business model. And I think we talked about this last time too. I'm a fan of fantasy that, um, that I'm not really doing this the way that everybody else is.
Joseph (5m 51s): You know, I, my, my release cycle is about two years. You know, I put top dollar into cover and editing and, uh, you know, type setting and proofreading and everything. Um, and I try to put out books that are comparable and competitive with the books that the big five publishers are putting out. In fact, I just, I just did a book signing at a Barnes and noble at a fantasy convention a couple of months ago. And the Barnes and noble staff, we're looking at my hardcovers and asking who my company oxblood books they were asking who walks board books was an immigrant.
Joseph (6m 30s): They thought that we were in front of a, of a big five publisher because they were turning the ebook over. They couldn't believe it. It wasn't something that was made cause they've got indie authors in there, you know, uh, doing signups from time to time I guess. And they would, I believe this is an independent Bookman Ross. Exactly the same. The only thing we don't have, we don't have like the metal stamped covering, you know, though that door, the embossed cover or what have you. Um, but it's, you know, were, so we're putting out really high quality product and we put a lot of money into the production value of it.
Joseph (7m 1s): That's kind of a this start point with all of this. I think that there's an expectation of a certain level of value in craft at that $10 Mark. And something that's really interesting about that is that when we started really getting into it, cause I'd belonged to a million to a number of readers, forums and readers groups like on Facebook and stuff, I participate in these groups as a reader. And in a lot of these groups, they don't even know that I'm an author.
Joseph (7m 32s): I never told him. I just, I mean they're just doing market research, you know, fantasy fans or what have you. And there is a, there's a readership out there that will not buy books under a certain price point. And they are absolutely adamant. They don't read Indi fantasy. They just don't, and I'm not saying that they're right for it, but it's, it's just really interesting. They, they, you know, we see this divide between indie authors and big five authors who missed it.
Joseph (8m 2s): Used to be is getting fuzzier now. But there's definitely a divide out there between readers are independent fantasy and readers of big five fantasy and the people who buy, you know, fantasy by household name authors, uh, generally are not going to read a 99 cent fantasy or two 99 fantasy what have you. They don't. And I think to them the money is not as big of a deal as the time that it takes out of their day, you know?
Jesper (8m 31s): No, yeah, yeah.
Joseph (8m 33s): 10 bucks. They care about how those four or five, six hours, you know, um, are going to be spent, are they going to enjoy that time? Because I think that there's a subset of people out there. In fact, I know there is because frankly I'm one of them and my, my time is worth more than 10 bucks an hour.
Jesper (8m 49s): Yeah, absolutely. Well, of course we have to sort of, uh, let's say pay respect to the people of world who don't have much money to go by. But, but, but, but that said what I meant, what we did was that I just want to repeat one to preempt too. When I'm about to say so nobody could comes out before, but my point is just that whether we are selling a book for $1, $2, $5, $10 in my mind at least it is still the am chief for ebook. It'll just like $10 it's, it's two cups of coffee or something, you know, nothing that I have to sort of preempt preempted that.
Jesper (9m 24s): I do understand that some people of the world don't have $10 to spend on the bookstore or respect for that. But, but just in general, at least I, I don't think that that price in itself should make much of a difference as to whether people wants to buy a program. But where I think it might make a difference is if you are first starting out and you are struggling with activity, getting your name out there, a price point of nine 99, I think we'll work counterproductive for you because it's going to be very, very hard to sell it. But if you already have a, a certain leadership, uh, following you, then yeah, then I can see it working because then you can push the ebook to current readers as well and it'll bump up the rankings on Amazon, et cetera.
Jesper (10m 4s): And then Amazon will start promoting it for you, uh, mighty algorithm and so forth. And, and then it might sort of work.
Joseph (10m 10s): Yes. And my first book sold spectacularly and we were very fortunate. It's got I think 120 I haven't looked in a while, 120 or something reviews on Amazon at this point. We've sold, I don't even know well over 10,000 copies. It's also got its received mainstream critical acclaim from, you know, publishers weekly and yeah, he said some big fantasy sites as well. And so it's got that kind of credit behind it. So we can, we can push it at nine 99 there's kind of, again, there's a sort of expectation behind it.
Jesper (10m 41s): Did you have any sort of the feedback from your current readers? So when you raised a plat price to nine 99, was there any feedback or anybody complaining about it or anything?
Joseph (10m 50s): No, I got one message on my, uh, on my website from somebody who had misunderstood something that I was saying about marketing earlier when I said I wasn't going to drop my prices again because he then saw it on an edit 99 cents sale. And I'm definitely going to keep doing that. I mean, if I get a BookBub for God's sake, I'm going to drop my price at nine 99. I propped up my price and 99 cents coming. This is kind of what you do. But, um, so another thing that has happened that's been really interesting about this is that we've seen our paperback orders go up since we pushed the price to nine 99.
Joseph (11m 27s): We're now selling more paperbacks and we're selling, we're also selling hardcovers as well. And we're seeing, uh, we're seeing orders from bookstores, from independent bookstores. And I think that part of that, I think part of what's going on is that, I mean, I know that when I go into a bookstore, if there's a, if there's a book that I haven't seen before, uh, I'll, I'll look it up real fast, you know, just punch in my phone and look it up and see, uh, you know, and yeah, well look at reviews and see what the author is about and what have you.
Joseph (11m 57s): And I think that when people do that, uh, and they see that the, when they see the bullying and then they see the reviews and then they see that it's, you know, it's nine 99 for an ebook, I mean, $7 more for the paperback. And it's not that big of a deal. But you spend 10 bucks for 10 bucks for a book, you're probably gonna spend, you know, 17. I mean, people, when people buy a book, you know, they're not, they're not just buying something to spend. When people buy an actual hardcover book, you're, look, you're buying a work of art that you can also interact with.
Joseph (12m 28s): You know, that's what it comes down to us interact with a piece of art. Um, it's not just, it's not just a book, it's not just a story, you know? And so when you give them, again, give them that really nice cover and he gave them that, the beautiful typesetting and have your paper and everything for this, you know, I, I think it's I the thing in front of them. You know, people like books I love, I love having a book in front of me. And so I don't know, again, that's, that's kinda where I'm at with it. And you're talking about people who don't have a lot of money for books. And you know, I was grabbing earlier about having, you know, and we'd gotten pirated and for God's sake, if you can't afford one of my books, seriously, if you can't afford one, all books deaminate just message me.
Joseph (13m 10s): I'll send you a book funnel link and I'll send you a copy of the book. I have no problem doing that. Just, you know, seriously. Just don't, don't pirate it. Just as let me know. Say, Hey man, I'm a student. Hey, I can't afford nine 99 for a ebook, you know, and yeah, more than happy to do that. I have no problem with that. Yeah, that's, that's, that's basically it. And there's no reason to steal anything for God's sake. And there's always gonna get pissed off then what books are, are, are, are expensive. I'm not trying to be exclusive, I'm not trying to cater to a specific crowd.
Joseph (13m 40s): I just happen to think that, you know, the amount of work that I've put into the books, again, if it takes you, like you were saying earlier, yeah. I mean, if it takes you a tissue four or five hours to read a book, you know, I can, I can read a paper back in two, three hours, but again, for 10 bucks it comes out to $5 an hour, $3 an hour. You know, that's not, that's, that's, that's fabulous entertainment right there, man. I mean, that's, that's, that's a lot of time that you get for spending that money. And I don't mind buying books because again, for me, that's, that's, that's money. Well spent as a good use of my time. And so, and I, I think same thing, it takes me two years to write a book and there's, there's a lot of time and a lot of effort involved in that and I kind of want to recoup that, you know?
Joseph (14m 21s): I mean,
Jesper (14m 21s): yeah. So, so when, when you were raised your pricing from nine 99 compared to to what you have had before, how long ago is that, you know, how, how much, how much data do you have sort of two to deem that it's actually been successful to erase the price?
Joseph (14m 37s): I've got about, I think it was about three months ago.
Jesper (14m 39s): Okay. So the last three months have been selling better than at the previous price point.
Joseph (14m 45s): It's fallen back to about almost exactly where it was at the previous price point. Am
Jesper (14m 51s): right. But wise it gives
Joseph (14m 52s): more than new wise. It's fantastic. Revenue wise, it's much better. Yeah. At nine 99 I mean, you're making, making $7 a ebook. Yeah. No, I mean if you're selling, you sell five books a day at that, you know, with two books out, you sell them, sell five books just on Amazon. Even all my numbers look like on the other ones you have to just do it there. There's some of them are net 60 so I haven't got, I haven't got a trend line for, for the uh, for the other retailers.
Jesper (15m 19s): No, no, no, no. Right. But it also gives you sort of, because you have that higher price point, it gives you a bigger margin that you can play with when it comes to a running apps and stuff because you wanted to spend a bit more and still make it profitable where those who sell it for two 99, you know, that's very tough. A marketing budget that you have to spend there.
Joseph (15m 41s): AMS ads were one of the reasons that we considered going to nine 99. I'll wear the Amazon ads but they call it now, but they were, they were killing us and uh, and we're now able to compete at a completely different level. Two, I'm able to get conversions now, which is really weird. I mean we'll get conversions now on some of the top tier keywords out there at nine 99 people won't buy at the exact same ad. All I did was raise the price and, and the, the, the click through rate and the conversion rate on the on premium keywords is, is much better at nine 99.
Joseph (16m 17s): Um, and again we're seeing this primarily for the first book in the series though, not for the second. And I think that's because it's got, you know, over a hundred reviews and it's gotten, you guys got that. It's got the blurbs from, from, from mainstream critics and what have you. So you're able to kind of able to play at that at that level. I think that that's the thing right there that if you want to be doing this, that's the thing, you need to be gunning for first. You know you need to be able to get that, to get that book out there that's going to, you should concentrate not on selling the book at 10 bucks put on on producing a book and getting it to the point where it can sustain itself at that.
Joseph (16m 56s): I think that's, I think that's, that's, that's more the key than anything else and took him use it took almost three years to get, get the ebook to the Puerto Rican stay afloat at, at, at at this price point.
Jesper (17m 6s): Yeah. That's what I would think as well. You know, if you could build a ebook episode that it has enough reviews on it, it's selling well, it sits well in the ranking and then you raise the price them, then I can see that it could work. Or as I said early on, if you already have a very established name and you have a big leadership or ready, then you can probably launch it that at that price as well. But, but yeah, unless you have those things in place, I think my advice to those of you watching and listening would be don't, don't start out by pricing your books and nine 99 thinking that that's the new one out in a lot of margin, which of course you will, but you will still love books.
Jesper (17m 43s): So you're going to be start at zero.
Joseph (17m 45s): Right. And, and again, you know, coming back to trying to say this, not getting in trouble with anybody, but coming back to what I see in, in these readers forums and looking at what, looking at what is expected from readers who buy books at 10 bucks a pop or more. Now you've got to really have your ducks in a row. And again, if you're somebody that they've never heard of, yeah. You really have to have, you've really got to have some kind of like some of the tips, I'm kind of like social proof behind it, right?
Joseph (18m 19s): You've got to have, so yeah, I don't know. This is what we've been doing lately and it seems to be working, you know, fairly well and you don't remember, rankings aren't great. I mean, I'm hovering probably around anywhere between 50 and a hundred thousand on the Amazon rankings. And sometimes, sometimes they'll go by and I'll only saw a couple of books a little fall down into the 150 toward a thousand range. And then the next day we'll sell five, six, 10 bucks and we'll pop, you know, built, built. They'll pop right back up again at nine 99.
Joseph (18m 51s): You know, like I was saying to me, even five books a day, uh, it's almost a thousand dollars a month. This, I mean, it, it, it has a really fast, your margins get a lot better at that, at that point. So I don't know. I guess it's a way to do it and I don't. Yeah, I have a lot of people asking me all the time for, uh, for advice on, on marketing, advice, on writing and advice on what have you and I on this. I'm going to tell you right now, I don't know what the hell I'm doing.
Joseph (19m 21s): I just, I know we gotta, you know, my wife and I spit all ideas we have thrown around and well maybe this'll work. Maybe that'll work, let's try this. Let's try that out. My God that worked. So, and this might tell 'em this, this might, this might run its course, this could be, you know, I, I keep expecting to wake up tomorrow and sell notebooks and then sell no books for two weeks and they have the thing just have exhausted as market I and I don't think that that's what happens, but I'm, I'm totally prepared for that.
Joseph (19m 53s): I just know I'm prepared for anything that happens good or bad in this, in this environment because it's just so dynamic and I'm prepared for anything that happens in this environment to be transitory or somehow provisional and pretty much many anything that happens can be a fluke. You know, the fact that we selling it all at nine 99 could be a fluke. It could be just some freak occurrence of, of, of, of, of market placement. And, and demographic interest at the moment, you know?
Jesper (20m 23s): Yeah. Well probably not, but, but I, but I think that the funny thing about marketing books, and I mean, of course you can, uh, you can watch the channels like this one or listen to our podcast and stuff like that. And we tried to share everything that we learn at least so that other people can replicate it by that. But I think apart from that, what is important to sort of understand is that when you're marketing things, you have to do what you're talking about here. You have to test different theories out and just see what works because as long as you are, I mean, of course you can, you can do one like everybody else does.
Jesper (20m 57s): You can, you can run the Amazon ads and, uh, and yeah, I think at this point in time, at least if you want to be competitive with Amazon apps, that bits are quite expensive and you have to pay quite a lot, uh, which makes it sort of pop type lists for any new authors at least because you don't have the budget to compete. Am
Joseph (21m 19s): that I'm going to, I'm going to argue with you on that one, my friend. Because there's, in marketing, there's a concept of a loss leader, right? Where are you? You're going to have to spend money at the outset in order to establish your brand in order to establish yourself. You're gonna lose money. Many and you know, it comes down to a to here in the States. Maybe we talked about this last time, you know, but, um, I've gotten some flack for how much money we spend producing the books and, uh, I mean our launch costs are probably four or $5,000 a book.
Joseph (21m 56s): Um, by the time everything is, is, is factor in including all of the, you know, including all of the ads and everything might be higher than that. And, and while that seems prohibitively high here in America anyway, the average startup cost for a small business in this country is $25,000 right now. So, you know, launching a book for $5,000, even with even, and even the cost of, you know, incorporating, starting a business, all these things, you know, hiring an accountant, um, hiring, you're, you're, you're your, your business development consultant.
Joseph (22m 32s): I don't have graphic artists, all these things, web designer, all that stuff that it takes to get the, get to actually get your company launched in to to launch these things, you know, perfect. We also have you classes, writing classes or mentorship or uh, going to writing conventions and getting, you know, some kind of, some kind of study in, in, in writing, whether it's up, whether it's formal education or whether you're self-educated, you know, and, and even the investment in yourself, the time that it takes to learn, you know, to actually learn the craft of writing those years that it takes me, you can still be, don't put that into monetary terms.
Joseph (23m 8s): If you break it down. I don't like to, cause it depresses me, um, like about logging pillow the time and put it in the butt. But even so, I mean it's, it's a pretty good deal. I mean, launching a book for that amount of money. And the other thing is that, you know, even with that $25,000 average startup cost here, here, here in the States, you know, your business is expected to lose money. It's usually, I mean, it's typical for two to three years to go by before you see a profit. I mean, you operate by taking out loans.
Joseph (23m 41s): I do not recommend that anybody do this. When you're launching a book for God's sake, don't do. Generally when you launch a small business, you take out, you take out loans and you use the loans to pay yourself and to pay for your business and keep it afloat until you get the revenue coming in a year or two or three years later. Also, most small businesses fail, but there's this expectation getting back to AMS ads and Amazon, there's this expectation that you're immediately going to start making money as soon as you put your book out there.
Joseph (24m 14s): And that's just not, that's just not how it happens. And I think that when you are building your business model, you need to look at it realistically and realize that, Hey, it's gonna cost me money to get my book out there. The advertising, the promotional and heavy, I'm going to lose money on this. And there's also another thing that Amazon had to do if you spend enough on them, and I, I've done this in the past and I don't do it anymore, but with, with AMS ads you can spend, you can spend a lot of money on AMS ads and get your ebook way up in the rankings so that people will see it and bio organically and then you're a cost.
Joseph (24m 56s): Your average cost to see how you're a cost is going to go through the ceiling, but you're going to be picking up more sales that are going to offset that in the long run. Um, because once you get into that top 100 of that top 50 of the top 20 in, in, in your genre and your subcategory, then you're going to improve your visibility and people are going to be just going through, they're not going to be clicking on. Your ads are going to just find it on their own. And so there's a model in there as well, but it takes, you're gonna you have to be willing to lose money to gamble on, on, on doing that.
Joseph (25m 27s): And we played around with that at cheaper price points, uh, and it worked really well. But again, yeah, when you're talking about, you know, talking about $10 a book, then the sale, when you don't get a sale can actually, you know, when you, okay. So when your sales start to go down, then it starts to actually make a dent. Yeah. And the other thing, last thing to realize that I'm not doing this, you know, I'm not doing this professionally right now. This is not, this is not my career. I'm not making enough on this right now to, you know, retire on or what have you.
Joseph (25m 59s): Um, and I think that if I was, I might be going about this little bit differently right now. You know, I've got a, uh, got a job right now that I really enjoy and I'm able to do this and you know, kind of as a, as, as a, as a dedicated hobbyist and they kind of play games with and see what works and what doesn't. So I have, uh, uh, uh, um, I'm extremely fortunate to be able to do that. So again, if you're, if you're trying to, you're trying to do this and be a full time author, I would not recommend trying anything that I'm doing right now.
Joseph (26m 32s): Um, sole means of income that just would not recommend doing this. So, um,
Jesper (26m 37s): uh, I mean, I, I think because I, I'm, I'm fully on board with the fact that your first book can can function as a loss leader and that sort of thing. But, but the way I view it is that if you struggle strugglers fullback time, maybe a year or two, you could place bets on Amazon ads that will actually get your sales directly that were perfectly reasonable bits. You know, maybe you could bid like 20, 30 cents per click and you would get to scale. Nowadays if you want that sale, you need to bid maybe close to a dollar.
Jesper (27m 8s): It's just in all honesty, unless you have a price high price pipe, like like nine 99 for a ebook, if you're selling it for two $99 99 cents I mean of course you could take a loss leader, but, but most people who's just starting out, they cannot sustain spending $3,000 a month on Amazon ads, $100 in return in sales. That's just not working.
Joseph (27m 28s): It's absolutely not. Absolutely not. You absolutely can't. And you're right there. Her premium keywords out there right now. I mean, I think game of Thrones is going for, I mean over $2 right now. Um, you know, and with the new bid structure as well, working plus up your bid by up to 100%, you know, you can be paying equally getting $3 on that, which is saying that is insane. I mean even at nine 99 if you're bidding three bucks, I mean, you're going to need game.
Joseph (27m 60s): You're a 50% conversion rate and your click throughs to make that. I don't know anybody, I just don't, I mean maybe somebody out there is doing it for God to give you our man contact me. I will hire you to ride my, uh, to, to write my copy. So,
Jesper (28m 17s): but yeah, I think everybody ebook.
Joseph (28m 22s): Yeah.
Jesper (28m 26s): All right. But, but I think for me the main, because autumn and I have also been debating sort of the price point for, for our future books and we all, we are also gonna sort of crank up the prices a bit compared to what our previous book sells for. But I think for me the key takeaway for, for those watching and listening is really that am that this might be a strategy worth considering once you have a bit of creaminess to your name and, and your, your, you're selling a certain amount of books already. Then sort of dumb sort of just fall into the trap of thinking, well, I've always sold sold at four 99 so I should probably just continue doing that because apparently I'm sailing, you know, tried testing out and do what Joseph had done here.
Jesper (29m 4s): Trying to crank up the price and see what happens. You can always lower it again, but if it keeps selling at a high price, you'll be still could but to do it right. So, uh, for me I think that's the, that's the takeaway here. All right, cool. Is there anything else we need to cover? Joseph
Joseph (29m 20s): yeah, actually I just remembered that one of the catalysts for pushing the price up was that good reads, give it a really high ranking on is Hugo recommendations list. And when that was happening, um, our sales, we're doing really well. And again, it gave it that, that kind of credibility again, when you, when you, when you went and clicked on, when you did a Google search for it popped up and I think it ended up at white number 25 on good reads. You go recommendations list, which was just phenomenal. So again, that kind of, that kind of, uh, that, that verification validation, you know, I was in there too.
Jesper (29m 56s): Yeah. So basically if something like that happens, then that could also be a trigger whereby you should think, maybe I'm just gonna raise the price for a while. He used to see you because, you know, if you're getting treatments like that, that, that, that's what I have. Right. So,
Joseph (30m 8s): yeah. Yeah. And that just suddenly you, sorry, I just remembered that that was, that was one of the, one of the things that we were like, you know, let's, let's see what happens.
Jesper (30m 17s): Yeah, yeah, exactly. Okay, cool.
Joseph (30m 20s): Jesper fantastic, man. Thank you. It's great talking
Jesper (30m 23s): and it was great talking to Joseph. So I wish you best of luck continuously would selling books at nine 99 and hopefully you're going to get a lot of revenue from that app. Your hope. Thanks a lot. Joseph cheers. Take care.
When you first starting out as an author it can be incredibly difficult to market yourself and build an audience.
You don’t have a large list of books to promote. You only have one. On top of that, you have no experience and probably no idea on where to begin. So, what can a new author do to build an audience?
Learn the one thing that is more important than anything else.
New episodes EVERY single Monday.
To subscribe on YouTube, go here: http://bit.ly/1WIwIVC
PATREON!
Many bonus perks for those who become a patrons. https://www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy
LET'S CONNECT!
Closed Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/AmWritingFantasy/
Blog and Courses: https://www.amwritingfantasy.com/
Jesper on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SchmidtJesper
Autumn on Twitter: https://twitter.com/weifarer
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Jesper (1s): When you first start out as an author, it can be incredibly difficult to market yourself and build an audience. You don't have a large list of books to promote. You only have one on top of that. You have no experience and probably no idea on where to begin. Let's put you on the right track today. If you're a fantasy author, then you've come to the right place.
Jesper (36s): My name is Jesper and together with Autumn we've published more than 20 novels. Our aim is to use our experience to help you with writing marketing and selling books to fans all over the world. First of all, allow me to just take a brief moment to thank most beard for joining us on Patrion. Your amwritingfantasy bookmark is already in the process and maybe already received it by now.
Jesper (1m 7s): Together with the handwritten message. We made a list of some extremely useful rewards for Patrick on supporters and we offered to review a patron supporters well building their Amazon pages discounted access to our premium courses and there's also a Christmas gift each year and we even offering to create a professional looking fantasy map for your novel or even writing your book description.
Jesper (1m 40s): As you can hear, it's important for us to really give back to those who support us. So check out our Patrion page for the detailed. There's a link right here below this video or if you're listening on podcast and just check out the show notes. All right, let's get going with today's topic. Every author, and that's not only the new ones, wants to build an audience who loves their writing and helps to sell books by telling their friends and family about the author's work.
Jesper (2m 13s): That's sort of a given and what we're all aiming for. However, when you only have one book and absolutely no fans, one of the first questions quickly becomes, what can you do here and now to start building an audience of readers? Many starts wondering if they should start something like a Facebook group for readers. Oh, and by the way, for those of you who hate Facebook, just think of what I'm about to say as an analogy.
Jesper (2m 48s): For any kind of group on any type of platform, I'm just talking about an online community where you are the owner of the group. It could also be something, a Slack channel or, yeah, I dunno, some other alternative than Facebook you just don't have a critical mass yet. So something like a Facebook group will be a waste of time, otherwise there won't be enough interaction and activity inside the group. And even if you do get some people in there, the excitement will quickly sort of sizzle out because in today's quick and fast moving online environments, no one feels excitement about a Facebook group with 20 people in it at at least not in the context we're talking about here.
Jesper (3m 37s): You know, sort of a a fan group context. Indeed, you might acquire a few hardcore fans and, and that's great. The new rider would say that's better than nothing and it is better than nothing. However, you are now also obligated as the Facebook group owner to at least pay attention to what's going on in the group. I'd almost bet you that there isn't much going on in that group at all, but this then generates the need for you to stop making something happen and you are now spending time coming up with things to post about and worry if these new few fans you do have, we'll leave the group.
Jesper (4m 21s): Awesome. Anything like that. You see how this is not going to help you very much.
Old McGrumpy (4m 28s): Can I offer some advice?
Jesper (4m 31s): Hi, all my grumpy as our resident AI cohost, you can indeed offer advice, but please do. Remember I, I won't tolerate any of your negative inputs. Are our audience here once useful tips.
Old McGrumpy (4m 45s): Of course you worthless humans, never understand what is best for you.
Jesper (4m 51s): Mmm, I, you're going to share anything useful you guys. All right. What is it then?
Old McGrumpy (4m 57s): Do not worry about building an audience. Spend time writing another book instead.
Jesper (5m 3s): While that is common advice and I actually agree with you all my grumpy writing. Another book is the best way in which you can get more opportunities for readers to discover you. However, I also know that our audience here would like something specific that they can take home here and do something about right now.
Old McGrumpy (5m 26s): Then be strategic with your time. Do not to jump on every interview or marketing opportunity that comes your way. There is no reason to burden yourself out. Testing every tactic out there.
Jesper (5m 39s): That's also true and I like it, but I feel like you're sort of missing the point a bit old. My grumpy.
Old McGrumpy (5m 47s): No, you are missing the point. Worthless. Fuman
Jesper (5m 51s): alright, okay. Get angry if you must, but there's nothing wrong with what you said. Oh, okay. Then he goes, all right. I would still say to keep those things that all my grumpy mentioned in mind, but I want to take it in a different direction. What I want you to focus on is your email list. I placed a link here on the screen. For those of you watching on YouTube and for those podcast listeners out there, you want to go back to episode eight where autumn and I talked about acquiring your first 1000 email subscribers.
Jesper (6m 29s): So I'm not going to cover any of that stuff again, but what I will say is that while your email list will be small at first, you should encourage those on it to talk to you in your emails. Ask them questions that will prompt replies. The thing is that we buy from those we trust and we only trust those with whom we are building a relationship. That's why you will want to have a conversation with your email subscribers on an ongoing basis just because you have only one book out.
Jesper (7m 6s): Heck, even if you have no books published yet, you should still start an email list. It's never too early. Honestly, one-on-one communication isn't excellent relationship builder and that's something specific and new author can start doing right here and right now. Another thing is that if you're ever going to go to any conferences, I mean just as a regular participant, you know, trying to see if you can host a meet up with not only your emails list subscribers, but also with those who follow you on social media.
Jesper (7m 43s): If just a few people are going to the same conference with you, why not take the opportunity to meet them face to face? What this does is that it allows for those people to connect over you, the author, and find that they all agree that your books are worth reading. I'm not saying that you in any way need to sort of force the agenda to be about you, but it will come naturally because they're all there in the meetup because of you and your work.
Jesper (8m 14s): What else should they use as an icebreaker when talking to each other? You see, while you're writing more books, builds up your catalog of products at the best you can do is to interact with your audience. As your fan base grows, you can then start to look into things like the Facebook groups or Slack groups or something of that nature. Having your fans talk to each other over shared interest and shared beliefs is what will strengthen the sense of a community and deliver you those super fans who will just buy everything you write and also promote your work without you even asking point and that's just awesome.
Jesper (8m 57s): That's what we really want as authors. That's sort of the the dream of every author, but do understand that I'm, I'm talking about building genuine relationships, even if it's only online. I'm not saying that you should engage with people only because they will then someday buy something from you. Right? That that's, that's the wrong path to go on because if that's how you come at all of this, you'll need to rethink your priorities. As I just said, people buy from those they trust and ask yourself this, would you trust someone who are only talking to you because there is a hidden agenda to lower you into buying a book at a later date?
Jesper (9m 41s): I know I wouldn't, and I'm sure you wouldn't either. Be genuine, be honest and be a real human being with your email subscribers, not a salesperson. I know this stuff is hard and it's, it's not the quick fix that you might have hoped for for this, uh, episode here. But the thing is that there is no quick fix. It's instead a grind that takes time and built slowly as time goes by. In fact, click the video here on the screen if you want to learn about what it takes to become a full time author.
Jesper (10m 16s): For, for those listening on the podcast, you want to go to episode number five and here you will learn some constructive truth that no one ever tells you. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
From social media shares to ads, authors need a LOT of marketing images. But how do you create them, especially if you aren't a graphic designer or have a tight budget?
Autumn checks out a new tool that might be the perfect solution for your marketing image dilemma. From a free option to a no fuss templates, is BookBrush all it looks to be on the surface? This is a walk through of the tool and while we tried to make it work for audio, we REALLY recommend checking out the video this week!
Check out BookBrush for yourself at http://bookbrush.com/!
New videos EVERY single Monday. Make sure to subscribe: http://bit.ly/1WIwIVC
PATREON! Many bonus perks for those who become a patron of the channel. https://www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy
LET'S CONNECT! Closed Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/AmWritingFantasy/ Blog and Courses: https://www.amwritingfantasy.com/ Jesper on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SchmidtJesper Autumn on Twitter: https://twitter.com/weifarer
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Autumn (1s): For those of you listening to on the podcast, I'll be doing some screen-sharing today. So to get the full value, you might want to watch the associated video. The link is in the show notes. Go check it out. You have a new release coming up and you want to know, you need images to share on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and your newsletter. And you want to be able to change them up a little bit so you're not spamming people with the exact same content over and over and over again. So what do you do?
Autumn (31s): Learn Photoshop in one night through YouTube tutorials or pay a graphic designer half your first months royalties for some really snazzy smart images. Wait, I just heard of this new company called book marketing images or something. Authors need all the time. They're really important and most authors are working on a budget and most of them aren't graphic designers.
Autumn (1m 3s): So it's kind of like a worst case scenario. This is something where you need really powerful images that bull attract readers that they will, you know, be willing to go and buy your book and at least take a look at it. And they say that someone needs to see your image at least seven times, at least seven times before they're going to go click on the link and buy it. So that means, you know, do you really want to send them seven when images not really. That's getting good old and tiring. They've to start like just not seeing them anymore.
Autumn (1m 35s): This is a problem because like I said, most authors are on a budget. So how do you figure out new ways, new ways of changing up your images new more powerful messages that you can evolve and work on. And that one don't take you forever to figure out how to create them or to, it don't cost you an arm and a leg. It's really a difficult choice. So you know, there's a lot of gray area here. So what do you do?
Autumnb (2m 2s): Pay a professional. Do it yourself. Fence of Lupron, honorable
Autumn (2m 6s): in most cases. I would agree with you a little bit grumpy for those of you joining in for the first time it grumpy is our resident AI cohost oil. We never actually gave him the job. He sorta took it, but I would agree with him most times. Yes, I seen book covers and some advertisements done by other authors who aren't professional graphic designers or to hurry and they've really aren't up there with the ones that are well designed by professionals.
Autumn (2m 37s): You can tell the difference and sometimes it's charming to see a do it yourself and other times you just know they're not converting. It's kind of a little painful when it comes from a design sense that you know, they just could do better.
Autumnb (2m 52s): All the other options are too complicated to learn.
Autumn (2m 56s): You're right. McRobbie there are some other options out, but yeah, some of them are complicated. There's Photoshop, Canva, there's a few other things that you know you can play with, but they aren't perfect from a design standpoint. I mean really, I'm a graphic designer, but if I'm looking for a tool, something that's going to be useful, that's number one. I want it to be useful. I don't want it to be complicated. I don't want to spend hours learning to use this, this new piece of software. And it helps if there's some guides, templates, a help desk.
Autumn (3m 28s): I mean that's asking for a lot because what, then I'm going to be paying an arm and a leg and everything I would've made that year on this one. Book that's not what I want either. It's gotta be a balance of all those things. So what could be the options out there? So I had this wishlist of things I wanted if I was going to be designing a whole bunch of images for my books and for my new releases and just ongoing media campaigns because you need to keep them fresh. And so leaders, like I said, we'll continue to see them start getting interest.
Autumn (4m 1s): You know, you have to foster that they're being, there's so many images out there. So you need something that will set yourself apart and begin to tell the story of what you're creating. And so that's what I found out about bookbrush and it just so happens about the same time I got an email from Kathleen who works at bookbrush and she invited me to give it a try. And I did think it was funny because here I was already looking at it and I'm a graphic designer. I mean I usually do all my design images right in Photoshop.
Autumn (4m 32s): It's just what I go to. It's what I know how to use. But I'm always looking for something that's maybe a little faster and easier because I love Photoshop, but let's face it, I do covers, I just really complicated things in there. And when I opened it up, it's like this black hole, it's sex me, it. And I get flying with things. I go to look up a thought, does the next thing I know I'm download at 15 fonts. I'm playing with a new cover that I think would look good with this one. I'm really inspired by this other image and Oh yeah, three hours later I was supposed to be working on, uh, you know, immediately needed, desperately do book marketing image.
Autumn (5m 10s): And that's not done. I haven't marketed anything and I am so far from where I started off. So focus. Okay. I like focus. So I wanted something that would help me with focus. So Hey, I tried bookbrush and I've got to try it out and give it a test run and I want to show you what I found with it and let you see if you like it because I'll let you know what I think at the end. So here we are with bookbrush. This is what it looks like to go ahead and open up the website and you don't.
Autumn (5m 41s): It is a fantastic deal on the surface. You look at what it promises to bring you and yeah, you know, it's mentioning some great people here, Mark Dawson's, your other images. BookBub is featured this, you know, it looks so easy and the images look beautiful. There's a great Washington action video testimonials. It sounds fantastic, but really is, it is anything that's easy as it's promising. That's why I get to take a test run with it.
Autumn (6m 12s): You know the graphic design or doing a test run on a graphic design program. This has got to be interesting. So the first thing you'll notice is that there's a couple of options, right? When you start up, once you log in, you have a custom creator and a video creator, which is in beta. We'll take a look at that in a minute. But let's start with the custom creator and it's okay. It opens up and it's like boom. It's steps you right through it. I mean this is not complicated. I mean, how can you complain about just something that is literally a step by step program?
Autumn (6m 43s): I mean I can't screw this up, so that's a good thing. So the first thing you want to do as an ad size and look at those, it okay, it's giving you a whole bunch of options. So if you don't know your ad sizes and you don't want to go Google, like do you need Facebook, do you need Twitter what they're actually used, different sizes. They do. The cool thing is bookbrush has it already set up for you? We even have Pinterest. So BookBub take a choice. You could even do your custom size if there's something you want to design for your newsletter and you just want something a certain way, you can do that here too.
Autumn (7m 17s): But let's say I have a new release that came out yesterday. Well when I was recording this, it came out on May 15th for you. So I want to go ahead and do an Instagram image and it gives you already an Instagram story. So I've got two choices here but I want to just do something I want to post and say, Hey, you know I released a new book, I want something fun. So I'm going to choose a typical square Instagram one. I've got my size. That's kind of templates and this is one of my favorite things I have to move on or about bookbrush is that it gives you custom templates.
Autumn (7m 52s): Now it has two different varieties. I have some saved templates cause I've been in here playing meant it, but it gives you community templates to now community templates. These are some tried and true ones that have actually worked for other authors. And that is fantastic. So if you wanted to like know, like are you doing a cover reveal? This one looks fantastic. There's some great images that should inspire you if you don't know where to go. So if you're not a professional graphic designer, but you need some images that have been proven to convert well or at least of where to start so that you have that professional look to your images, check out the community templates because you're going to be inspired.
Autumn (8m 38s): And even if no much of which one you choose, you're going to at least be a step above just throwing something together in a lesser program like paint or something else. So looking through these, I mean I have to love all of these, but I have a new release so I have a kind of a theme and I'm doing fantasy so it's actually dark fantasy and well you know what? It happens to be 99 cents. I kinda like this dark image so I'm going to go ahead and choose that. Now the nice thing is like it comes up and if you look, all of these things are clickable and movable.
Autumn (9m 12s): So if I want a little more space, I want to change things out a little bit, all doable. It works. So that is a fantastic little thing. I can move all this stuff around. And the cool thing is if I don't like the background that's coming up, I can upload my own. So you know this doesn't work for me. Maybe I want to go ahead and choose an image. Let's see, maybe I won't go with the actual book. Get rich, boom, it's in there and I can move it around too.
Autumn (9m 51s): So there you know you can move it around, you can take it out. You can also see if I want the background behind it Dar. And once you click on that edit background, I don't know if you saw that. So you have this little thing right here. It says edit background. I can have the dark, I can have an overlay and make it darker. I have transparencies so you can really choose some cool things.
Autumn (10m 21s): It gives you this option for overlays. I want to make it a little gritty. Barclay's through some really cool effects you can add right over top of the image. So you can play around with these and get, you know, that kind of darkness or removal you want with a background to make it kind of wealth, you know, fade into the background. Just sort of important. But I don't know if I want anything, maybe an alum black.
Autumn (10m 57s): And so you can change even the colors. I'm kinda liking the darkest blue, so let's give that a whirl. Of course it's not my book and I do want that other part to stand out. So maybe I should just stick with black. So that isn't my book obviously, but I want to use this image. So how do I change it out? Just double click on it and it's that easy.
Autumn (11m 28s): So I want to go back, change the cover again. It's easy enough to just go ahead and drag in your Europe new cover, drop and drag. You know, it's not that complicated. So I've got my book successfully uploaded and I click on it and hopefully it'll change into my book today. How has that, so I have, you know, this image that's already looking really great.
Autumn (11m 58s): However, um, well this isn't what I wanted to say cause it's not urban fantasy it's dark fantasy it's not on sale. It's a new release. So it's all there. So easy to go ahead and just get typing and click on it again. And you get lots of auctions like you notice it has this glow to it. I don't really want it to be yellow though. Oh it doesn't look too bad.
Autumn (12m 29s): But this is dark fantasy I kind of want to read to, to it. There we go. I can change the size, I can change the font. It comes with some great fonts already. But the nice thing is there are options for you to go ahead and upload your own. Look at all the thoughts that are in here. So it's pretty good. I haven't delight crush, so I'm going to go with this one. However you know it needs maybe to be moved down or maybe we just want it larger.
Autumn (13m 0s): What does that look like? So the neat thing here is like you'll see this other element, so it's 99 cents that's on top of something and that's on top of a stamp. So these are the options for understands. There's lots of different ones you can upload and create your own. And again, there's community stamps too, so that makes it really fun. And there's some great options. If you're a best selling author USA today, all of these different places where you can find your stuff.
Autumn (13m 34s): Right now I'm looking for this circle that's down there because I don't really want the purple one. Oh, but does he? I could do an audio book. That would be really cool. There's shelves. Oh here we go. I think I want to try the red one. So definitely a little bit more punch to it. Cool. So I just need to figure out where, which order these layers. I've got so many now. I don't really want this one.
Autumn (14m 4s): So you just click it, get rid of it. I want to use this one instead. And if you notice it has down arrows. So now it's behind the other one. So there you go. So that's it. Um, so what have I done? I've done this in like less than five minutes. I have an image that it looks pretty snazzy and would definitely be powerful when you're done. When you have the image you'd like, it's so easy.
Autumn (14m 35s): You can either say it as a template. If it's one that you think you're going to use time and time again or don't forget to download it and that's it saved. I haven't imaged. Alrighty, five minutes. I can go ahead and post this to, I didn't fall into the Photoshop Oubliette of Oh, what else can I get done? That rabbit hole. Great. I also said I was going to show you what the video looked like. So let's go look at those because how much fun is that?
Autumn (15m 6s): So this is the video creator that bookbrush is using and there's so many ways you can start with this is steps you again through one, two, three, three steps to create a video. And you could go ahead and use the images. You've got, look, this is the one I just created. I wanted to turn that into a video. I could work with that, but I want to go to my books and let's choose something that looks kind of, you know, dark fantasy ish that will really stand out and look at all these options.
Autumn (15m 40s): I mean, again, you can do cover reviews, lots of things. Now this is the paid version, the pro version. We'll look at the other one in a moment, or at least discuss it. Well, let's just go with a nice flat on it, bitch. Okay, so now I have the book for the video. You need a chicken. So in effect, and if you get to this point, you can feel a little bit like it's a blank screen. What's going on?
Autumn (16m 10s): So panic, you just need to know what you're searching for. So let's see. Mine's fantasy. So what is, what's out there? That's magic. Okay, now you're getting the Ikea haunted little images. And so there's all these video effects. It's just come up just by searching for them. That's a little too lighthearted for me.
Autumn (16m 40s): So let's see this one. What happens with sparks, why that one's kind of cool because it is a new release. So I kinda like that. And then you get to choose options so you can have transparencies. Length of the video works for me so I can really like play with my new release. Now there's still some work that needs to be done.
Autumn (17m 11s): You know, there's, I think a few things I would like to see in the video weather right now. It's not letting me add text or anything like that to it. So unless I'm pulling an image in that already has the text laid out and the book, I'm kind of at a loss for be able to say, Hey, new release. But it gives you a great starting point. Just if you want to do some quick stuff and I want to crop that down to uh, an Instagram size so I can upload it that way. Fantastic. But again, some of the size up and options that I'd like to see and aren't there.
Autumn (17m 46s): Some of the options are like adding a font or add in that little 99 cent sale. Those things would be really cool, but I don't have that quite yet on my video after. So there's still some work that needs to be done. But overall I think that was pretty quick. So I know I haven't been applying with video much and this might inspire me to give it a go. So that's it. That is bookbrush and his whole, I think it's okay to tastic tool and the best part, what are the best parts is that it is actually free to sign up. It gives you limited options.
Autumn (18m 17s): You don't have quite as many templates. I don't think he would act load the thoughts with it. You're limited to the number of downloads you get, so you're only allowed three per month, but you don't, if you don't have any books out, you're working on a really tight budget. This is a fantastic way to at least get three images every single month where you can talk about your book and upload it and really get to share some new experiences with your story and try to get new readers to take an interest. Bookbrush would give you a professional image, it'll give it to you quickly and if you really upgrade to the paid plan, you can get all those community templates and to me the price is really good because it's only, it rates out to less than $8 a month.
Autumn (18m 57s): It's like $96 a year. It's a lot, but at the same time for the number of images and the power and the need we'll have as authors to come up with those images and really the strength of some of these, especially with the templates that have been proven, they can really help you if you're struggling to create some beautiful marketing images for marketing is hard enough. It's painful enough to, you know, you need these images, you need good images. You need a lot of images. This is a way of doing that for yourself, not taking a ton of time, not this major, massive learning curve that is going to slow you down and just keep you from doing the 500 other things you have to do while you are an author and especially if you're in New York or, and you have to do all of this on your own.
Autumn (19m 45s): So I hope you like this. I hope you enjoyed my little bookbrush walkthrough and stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
What if there was a new way in which you could test our your story ideas before committing the time to write a full novel, or even trilogy, only to find out that readers aren't interested?
We've run some experiments over the past month and are here to discuss if this way of testing story ideas is a viable option for authors?
New episodes EVERY single Monday.
To subscribe on YouTube, go here: http://bit.ly/1WIwIVC
PATREON!
Many bonus perks for those who become a patrons. https://www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy
LET'S CONNECT!
Closed Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/AmWritingFantasy/
Blog and Courses: https://www.amwritingfantasy.com/
Jesper on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SchmidtJesper
Autumn on Twitter: https://twitter.com/weifarer
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Autumn (0s): So if you have a new idea for a complete new story, should you just go ahead and write it straight away or would it somehow be worth it to actually test if readers would be interested in the story idea or not? Well, that's what we are going to talk about in today's session and also if it is worth testing with readers, then how do you do that?
Autumn (39s): if you are a Fantasy author, then you've come to the right place. My name is Autumn and I are together, we've published more than 20 novels. All our aim is to use are experienced with to help you with writing, marketing and selling your books to fans all over the world.
Jesper (56s): Okay. Before we get into all of that, uh, let's just do a quick update on what we're working on as we've decided to do a show on these monthly joint sessions and a, as we talked about last month, where you been pretty busy on a few number, are a few different items, haven't we?
Autumn (1m 16s): Yes, we have some big projects coming up and one of the, we hit a new milestone. So we're both really excited to be at this point with our top secret not so secret world building course that we have been working on for months now.
Jesper (1m 31s): Yeah, yeah, yes. Yeah. Um, yeah, so well basically we, as we mentioned last time, we were sort of nailing down on our joint process, uh, for our product. So we have a book on our guidebook and how to play in a level and there was a workbook associated to net. And on top of that we have a book on story ideas, which has some of the well congruent with what we are talking about here today I guess.
Jesper (2m 4s): But we had those three books, um, in a sort of, in the way because we were focusing on getting those done before we could actually put full effort into the world, but the cost. But, uh, now I'm very happy to say that we actually have the first draft of all three of those books done.
Autumn (2m 22s): So we're really excited. We have some content editor and our editor and actually a couple of bucks covers, but we got one of them done. So we're really moving along with those and our focus is definitely going into the world building, which is perfect because it's really starting to come together and hopefully it will snowball to completion very quickly. Well, quickly as of this year 2019. Yeah. So
Jesper (2m 46s): I was also doing this or that you couldn't see that, you know, for those on the podcast, I'm doing air quotes quickly because a big, well there is a still a lot, quite a lot of work with the world of course. Um, but now because of those first drafts of those books are being done, uh, a sort of only focusing around the world building course now. So we got to pick up a lot of peace. Um, but there's still months away before, before it's done.
Jesper (3m 15s): Um, as we talked about before, we are building our own a future world in a, in conjunction with the development of the course. A a sort of example sessions are so that people could see how to apply what we are teaching, which makes a lot of sense. And on top of that that we also want to add a sample outline of our, the first book in our next series, which we have not done yet but the first applied for that we want to include as a download in the plotting books are the people also there and see how we are going about a the plotting and how are we applying what, what the book is teaching.
Jesper (3m 52s): So that alone also hauls that book back because we need to finish the work in the first and then we've got to put the book and only then can we, you know, make that download available inside the program of when they could be released the book. So its probably gonna I guess we are gonna sort of have a ketchup effect later in 2019 whether you released the three books at one time and also have the cost on all of a sudden everything sort of well contribute factor that point I guess I'm going to say it sounds like we'd made this giant ball of yarn that's all knotted together in tide or a piece of Celtic knot work and everything is interlaced independent on each other.
Autumn (4m 28s): So what is all released is going to be a big phenomenal and beautiful. But until that I feel like we're just pulling it individual strands that we don't see the whole pattern yet, but we're so close, we're getting there. I'm really excited. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Alright. And our books, that's actually a really good lead in to what we're talking about today of, you know, should you just go and write whatever book idea is in your head, is that the best way of writing books or is there a way of testing the market to see what readers are interested in?
Autumn (5m 2s): And so that's a fun question and one we have both kind of ponder it in one of our pondering as we look at our current or are you serious that we are going to be Writing. Yeah, it's very interesting actually because it was something that was something autumn brought up actually a while back I think because initially we talked about it quite a long way back about but I'm sort of testing the waters with story ideas and trying to figure out if its, you know if there was a way to yeah, to test out whether or not a story idea is getting in the interest from readers are also, if it's sort of worth investing the time to write a full trilogy for example with a story idea before we're getting into it.
Jesper (5m 44s): So we talked about it for quite a long way back and then it sort of went on ice for a while because we were doing other things I guess. But now it's, it's starting to become a bit relevant to have that conversation again then is, well especially me as well. I'm very interested because I know autumn have done a bit of testing with some way with this stuff a over the last, well in one sense I guess I'm, and when I started on writing my first a series, I did exactly what I guess like 90% of, of, of what those probably do is I write out what I wanted to write and then I just cross my fingers.
Jesper (6m 20s): Hopefully the market will like these sorts of books. Uh, but yeah, the question is, is, is that really the best way of doing it? So that's what we are. We sort of explained this topic here. One we've talking to you at the same time. So, uh, so hopefully you will get a lot of this. So, but, or maybe you want to sort of explain a bit what you
Autumn (6m 39s): sure. And I was gonna say this is, I'm in the middle still of doing this experiment because I did the same thing when I wrote my first trilogy. I had this idea, I just wrote it. And actually then I wrote a different series and I just wrote it and they've done well, but they could be doing better. I look at the market, I know that they could be doing better and my perspective has changed and I'm passionate about writing. This is definitely my passionate. What I want to do is adult, but I'm also much more interested in now as an entrepreneur. I understand the business of writing and I know when you're doing a business you test out products, do you know, do some market testing, make sure that people are actually going to like what your doing and of course there is a couple of ways of doing that and one is like you can see what it is really a popular right now like a game of Thrones and say, Hey, I'm going to write game of Thrones, my version, but by the time I got that done written and how many other people are writing game of Thrones type stories right now you're just going to get this tiny little sliver of the market.
Autumn (7m 35s): But the other thing to do is to say true to yourself and what you want to write, which is great, but don't go and just write an entire series, don't build an entire series. The best thing to do is to test the market. And that can be done through a couple of means. One is short story, which I've been writing short stories and they're great because they also help with a world building. If your, if you're kind of pantsing your world or your character's on some short story is really our great, phenomenal way of getting a better feel for the world as you actually write it. Instead of writing a list of, you know, or even drawing a map, it gives you more of a perspective, very similar to how the novel will be.
Autumn (8m 13s): But somewhere in between a short story and a novella. And that's what I am trying. I actually have two story ideas that I think are great, completely different ideas. Um, and I'm releasing two novellas in may and one in June and I'm going to see which one's readers per for before I go and write the entire series. On either of them because I'm at the point where I want to know I'm going to be writing something that not only I enjoy, I mean I just love Writing, but that reader's are really waiting for him going to be receptive to, because I do this for a living and I have to make money right now.
Autumn (8m 46s): You have to pay the bills and eat. I, I'm not a vampire yet or a tree. I'd actually like to be a tree, but the truth that could, right. So like an end of it has to be an a, that would be a fantastic way to live. So that's what I have written. I did a plot out this series. I have a solid idea of what books one, two, and three would be, but I have only written the first novella and I'm going to give them out. Um, well that goes out. I'm going to be 99 cents and I might do them as a signup, as a free a bank lead in, um, that reader magnet.
Autumn (9m 20s): But I'm going to give them, you know, a couple of months out there to see which one readers prefer on whichever is the one that I see the most interested in. That's the one I'm going to go ahead and write next and then I'm going to write all three books and release them. Boom, boom, boom. Like we've discussed before in these episodes. So that's a fantastic way of doing it. But I don't know. You can give your ideas. Yes. For us, I mean it, does that sound like a reasonable thing would? My biggest con that I have found, and you can still be a good one for you to think about is I have written two novellas to totally different worlds, two totally different characters.
Autumn (9m 57s): I've had to take the time to develop characters, developed a world to develop magic systems. Everything we've talked about, everything we talk about in our world building course and I'm writing so far, 45,000 words in one 35,000 words in the other and I might not go any further. And so there is definitely a time constraint there. I mean, I could test out other ideas using the same world but different characters. But it's also not as easy as saying darn it, I'm writing three books and that's what's going to happen.
Jesper (10m 29s): Yeah, that'd be good because I actually was uh, once a day to rewind it for a second that just to understand, so are you saying that you have like two completely different worlds have to compete your different stories and that, that, and then you write one story though in one of them and another show of throwing another? Is that what you're saying?
Autumn (10m 49s): I have written short stories in both of them, but um, to really do this market testing, I'm going to actually put them for a sale, not just for download and I'm putting them on Amazon. And so there are actually novellas, ah, the one that's 45,000 words or the other one is 35,000 words, but it's two different, there are two different stories. Totally. One is more urban Fantasy modern, this more set in this world. So that one was pretty easy to develop at the end of a lot of backstory to make it real. And the other one is dark Fantasy and totally different world.
Autumn (11m 19s): Right? So that went with all of the regular world building you'd have to do. Right.
Jesper (11m 24s): Because of my thinking would more be like, for example, let's, let's use our own future fiction. Here is an example for now. Uh, but we are building that entire world and Am we've got to write it in that world so it's not like, well then we'll just build a new world after that. But in a new world after that, until some things, you know that we are going to write it in that world. But so my thinking was more like, is that what you need to do with, in this case, I understand that you have two different worlds and all that, but I'm just trying to link it back to uh, to let's say a more efficient way.
Jesper (11m 57s): So if you have only one world, and then I was just speculating that maybe what you could do would be to right. Two a day or two or three or whatever, how many you want to do with a different story or stories that is all said in that world, but maybe just focus on on sort of some different stories or maybe some different characters or something to see. Then which one sticks the most awkward, which one gets downloaded on that point, the most of it and you know, I was thinking,
Autumn (12m 29s): I was thinking that would be my caveat is that if something does, if it's this whole world that I've developed doesn't work, that's something that I was thinking if I could try and just, you know, go to different parts of the history, try a different character and find thee, find the aspect that readers, they go, yes, this is what I want to know about and this is what I'm going to, and that once you see that spark, once you see readers really say, yes, I really want to read this. That's when you know you have something that you want to go ahead and write and obviously write as quickly as you can, but it's probably going to be a year from that novella to that trilogy being released.
Autumn (13m 4s): But that's understandable if they're excited, you're also going to be building readers who are waiting for the rest of the story and that's, that's still very powerful. So you have even that many more people waiting for that release. As I said
Jesper (13m 17s): in the beginning of this video, we're sort of figuring this one, I know that we've talked to basically you're just to get to a viewer seeing us sort of debating what to do ourselves here. So uh, so that, that sort of a bit behind the scenes as well because I was just thinking as well when you set that, if it's even possible to do, unless you have quite some audience already. I mean in our cases we have some email lists, we can email people, we can ask readers to which one do you prefer? And we can, you know, when we release a short story that we can email them where you can say okay now its ready and they we'll go in and buy it or download it but I'm just thinking gee to be actually be able to judge if one story is better than the other or a sort of entice is read on more than one of the other.
Jesper (14m 5s): You need enough statistical relevance to be able to actually judge it. You know if if your grandma and your mother downloaded won and your brother or sister download with the other, you know is that it doesn't help it. I mean you leave, you need at least a thousand people reading each of them and to be able to say anything is relevant about whether or not it's, it's, I mean a hundred people is not even enough, which I categorize myself as as pretty savvy and in the apps stuff. But the way I think I would even, I would have a hard time, I think driving enough traffic to just 99 cents.
Jesper (14m 40s): So a short story too actually to get people to convert to buy if they are just like they have no let's say knowledge of me or us or whatever already. I think it would be difficult.
Autumn (14m 54s): I think it would be, I agree actually and I thought it that cause you could sit there and turn out a whole bunch of stories and never see any Real just like you know of any real catch because you just don't have the marketing. But this might be a good reason to try KDP select for a 90 day period because I knew get the free offers, tried to do some giveaways with a book funnel, give giveaway something where people sign up for your reader list so that you can then get them, they can have it for free by signing up and then you could say, Hey, and this other one for free.
Autumn (15m 24s): You then tell me which one you like. Because I mean that's a great way to start building up new new readers as well. Because I've thought about this. My previous books are, I have one that's sort of post-apocalyptic, which kind of fits one of the stories, but the other one I went from Nobel bright Epic Fantasy to I think I'm just a dark phase in my life and everything is dark. It's dark. Fantasy is a very, uh, one of the questions I recently answered on Instagram is, would you survive in your world? I'm like, no, I would die in this world. My first world, the Epic fantasy world.
Autumn (15m 55s): Oh yeah, I'd be fine. So fun. This one down dead and five days easy. So it's a much darker world. And so will my old audience like it, I'm not sure. So I'm thinking I might need to do some new audience building anyway, so I have thought of that. Or it's like, Hey, sign up, get it for free. I go, Hey, here's the other one for free. Hey, which one do you like? And so there is going to be a lot more talking to people, chasing people, saying, Hey, you know, a little bit of a hustle, but I want to know what people like and hopefully I can get them to interact with me.
Autumn (16m 30s): I'm actually doing some interactive polls and some contests and stuff like that to get people kind of more excited and more involved in the story and knowing, learning about it very quickly, learning about the world very quickly. And then I can even just see what people, how people are, are they doing the direct poles or are they answering questions and finding out what are the eight Fantasy races they are on the swine are, if they're like Flay are dark Faye and the other one, see how often they're actually following through with some of the other things. And I can take all of that data to see where people are interested.
Autumn (17m 3s): Hopefully. Hopefully I'll look, you know, in a year would I have the books are written in C for selling.
Jesper (17m 9s): Yeah. Well, and at the end of the day that the question is fundamentally here is, uh, is it worth to do some market analysis beforehand before you stopped doing all of the, you know, writing a full trilogy, you are releasing it only to figure out that, well nobody's really interested in it in this particular world of the story, you know. But on the other hand, is that worth because well as I said before, I think if you have a good building audience already you can, you can probably get to the stage whereby you can make a conclusion without let's say too much hard work.
Jesper (17m 46s): But if you don't have that, I think you want for quite some hustling to get to the States where you actually have the input that you need to make a proper a concussion on whether or not people like one story versus the other. A. So for me, I think unless you have the built in audience, I we're, I would say is if you are willing to spend a lot of time and effort on it, then it's great. But it's is it gone the long run a long term situation, is it gonna save your time or just going to spend a lot of time figuring out which one you have to write any way.
Jesper (18m 22s): So you know, if you see what I mean, if if you write fairly quickly, you know, if you don't take one to two years to write another, sadly, let's say it takes you four months to write a novel. Yeah, you know, 12 months you're going to have the full trilogy done. If you don't have any building audience and you have to run out and you have to collect all the data to figure out which one to ride. And first year I need to write the short story is then you need to do all of the market research. I would think you're probably looking at seven, eight month right there.
Jesper (18m 53s): And then you could have done the full trilogy in for a month extra and then that started.
Autumn (18m 59s): Yeah. And that is definitely the catcher that I also think of it from a reader's perspective cause I've done this as I've met other authors and you go to their Amazon page and you see all these like maybe books one or two out of five that are out there. But then there's books one and two and three or a book one in this other trilogy in book two of the gist, all of these half-finished trilogies. And I know as a reader I'm like just finished something. And so you may see an author publish a book, a book one, and they, you know, I, you list out the names that the rest of the books, you know, is that really what you want to see as a reader?
Autumn (19m 34s): Go or have other readers come to you and say that you have all these book ones and no books to three and four. I don't think that's really what you want to see either. So it is, and I play with that and I have to admit, I probably, I like both of these stories enough. I can see me Writing the whole series in both of them. So it's worth it. So which one do I write next versus which one is going to go into a hopper and I was never going to see the light of day. I don't feel that way about it. But that is the true platform that you know is being billed as a, this is a Writing as a business and this is how you do your research and this is how you know what to write in next and you're going to have ideas that literally get canned and never written.
Autumn (20m 15s): And that's just so sad to me as a writer or you know, even though I'm kind of straddling the line of, well this is the way you're supposed to do it. And then there's me going, but I just want to write it. I just want to see which one to write next. And I have a feeling you already know which one I'm going to write next. So, why am I doing this other than, you know, I could be in a build up some readers while I'm just to have the novellas out and it will help me though. Give me maybe confidence on which one's going to do better. And I have to admit though, you and I are together have done some market research and that totally a little bit of what I was planning on Writing because by doing the market research I refined and tone down, um, some elements that I would have normally have kept.
Autumn (21m 0s): So I do think market research has a place and it you should be aware of like what is the top 50 bestselling books and fantasy are your genre right now and allow that to, you know, temper. The idea is that are going in your head because if you really wanna write a best seller, if you really are going to do this for the money, you do have to do some research somehow. If you are a fast writer and you could whip out, you know, if my mother my game and really concentrating, I could easily do an novella in a month that is nothing.
Autumn (21m 30s): So if I could write two or three novellas, get a feel for the audience, um, with, cause I do have a, you know, a pretty good audience already built up. Say, Hey, which one of these do you like? And then go for that series and get it done in a year and have a very solid platform all the while. I think that's a really good business idea
Jesper (21m 51s): in principle. I agree. I, for me, I think you need to have the built in the audience otherwise, to be honest, I would, if somebody came and asked me for advice and they did not have a built in audience, I would probably tell them, no, don't do it. Don't do that. Because you've got to spend so much time and effort on it. And honestly, I don't think, well, unless you're willing to release, put the phone. I mean I got to get to go to a proper conclusion. A chances are probably you, your jump to a conclusion the way before you should go and then you are going to end up in the same place.
Jesper (22m 23s): You wouldn't have ended up anyway. But what I think I would say though is because you mentioned how we've done some market research and whatnot, which was actually part of some of the modules in the world that are in cost. So I would say if you know what you're doing with your wealth building, meaning that that you're also building a world that you know has elements in it that that reader's generally like. Then that is the first step and then the second step, a mountain shamelessly plugging some of the stuff we're doing.
Jesper (22m 53s): But the second step step is to it. If you know what you're doing with your planning and you can develop the characters based on some, what should I call it, like like generic elements that is also known to invoke reader interests. If you don't have those things working together, I would almost go as far as to say that this story idea is as long as there's not meet on the bone, all of that story idea that they can carry it truly it in for example, but let's assume that that is the case then I would say it probably doesn't really matter if it's the one story of the other one you your writing because if there was a building is based on some market analysis and the plotting is based on what we know readers generally like with characters and plot lines and character arcs and those sorts of things.
Jesper (23m 45s): You should be safe to be honest. I think.
Autumn (23m 48s): I think so too though. I think. Let's ask anyone watching or listening that you know, do you want an update as I carry out my experiment that's coming up a, if you do put it in the comments and we will schedule one of our one on one sessions or at least a little update later on. It's like, you know, how my little experiment runs and if I do see some feedback and then if it carries out in a year when I launch the series, if I really do see that maybe my sales have increased and I feel it comes from what does it come from, does it come for the fact that I asked readers which ones they prefer and what with that or because you know, I've been advertising it for a year with a novella.
Autumn (24m 28s): I don't know. We'll find out. I'm taking notes. Right.
Jesper (24m 32s): Yeah. But I think that is an excellent idea actually to uh, you know, let us know who you are if you're interested in, in, in, in a later update on how this experiment is going to go. Because right now I would say I am probably on the, on the, let's say I'm just probably sitting with a concussion that is not worth it. Um, to be honest, based on what we talked about and, and, and before entering this, a conversation, actually I haven't made up my mind. So it just happened by, we were talking to you, but based on what we talked about, but I think I've sort of re recent my mind to have to watch that.
Jesper (25m 6s): I don't think it's worth, but maybe you see it differently or maybe maybe you just, you know, just curious to learn how this tested all of them is doing is growing. And of course maybe a one of them will surprise me and actually tell me that I wasn't idiot and actually we should be doing what she's doing because it makes so much sense. And then of course I will be happy to come on air again and see how it was an idiot. But until then I think it's not worth it.
Autumn (25m 34s): I will definitely a wrap up by saying it has been a lot of work and the stories have become both very near and dear to my heart, so I couldn't, I could not write one at this point. So I'm going to basically I have the next two years of serious plan. I'm just trying to decide which one to write first and being ironic sometimes as I am. And it'll probably be, the readers will tell me what it would be like that I want it to write this one next and I'll probably do it. I think if I here any flag from my re my readers, it will be because I didn't continue in my elemental fantasy world that was Noah Bright and went to this dark, dark place.
Autumn (26m 8s): And I'm probably gonna get an email saying, are you okay? I'm like, hang in there and trust me, he's a really good series. Probably bad shit happens but shouldn't have said that to really bad stuff happened but really is a good suit. Just trust me. It's amazing, amazing storyline on both sides. Both the dark. I don't know why I'm just, they're in my life. Everything was fine, I promise.
Jesper (26m 31s): Awesome. On that note, uh, let us know in the comments section or in the, in the show notes or if you're listening on to the podcast, if you would like an update later on on this one, a day on this topic and we will make sure to a, to come back to it later on. Uh, but, uh, on that note, I think, uh, all those left to say is a, see your next Monday night.
You’ve gone through all the trouble of creating an amazing character for your fantasy novel, only now you have to introduce him or her to the reader. Your fingers hover over the keyboard. You feel paralyzed. How do you best introduce the character?
Here's you'll get my best advice on how easily you can make character introductions interesting.
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Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Jesper (1s): You've created this amazing character and now you have to introduce him or her to the reader. Your fingers hover over the keyboard, you'll feel paralyzed. How do you best introduce the character? Well, maybe you searched for advice on the internet, but this remedy leaves you even more confused. One piece of advice contradicts another one today. I will give you my advice on the topic.
Jesper (32s): Will this go against some of the other advices out there on the internet? Possibly there is no one correct way of a protein writing in step. Take what you find useful from what I'm going to say and then just discard the rest. yeah. If you want a fantasy author, then you've come to the right place.
Jesper (1m 5s): My name is Jesper and together with autumn I run amwritingfantasy.com between us we've published more than 20 novels and our aim is to help you in your writing and marketing endeavors. Introducing a character can be difficult. It requires some experience and because the reader has to meet the protagonist within the first paragraph of the novel, it also has to be done right. There are many debates about plugged driven versus character-driven stories, but as we justify and explain in our upcoming guidebook on how to plot a novel, all plots are driven forward by the main protagonist.
Jesper (1m 51s): The hero is the story because it's this person's inner journey the reader has to become invested in, so we need to let the reader know what the story is going to be about. By revealing the character arc, we need to hook the reader. We need to make the reader care about the protagonist. That's a tall order, isn't it? No wonder it's so difficult. Let's focus on the introduction of the protectionist, also known as the hero because making the reader acquainted with this character is perhaps one of the most important parts of opening a novel.
Jesper (2m 32s): I'll give you four different elements to focus on. Each one is designed to make the reader care. Number one is to put the character arc front and center right away. Perhaps you have a character who believes that he will only be happy once he has become a night. Over the course of the novel. The character will come to learn that there is more to life than just being a night and this was just what he believed that he wanted.
Jesper (3m 4s): In reality though, he was craving love and respect, which he gets once he meets his future wife. Maybe he even abandons his quest for becoming a night during the novel. I don't know, but if you can show right away how becoming a Knight is incredibly important to our hero, then you are straight away giving the reader a solid understanding about who this person is and who their go and who they're going to follow over the course of the next 300 pages.
Jesper (3m 39s): There is one downside to this though and that is that once a counter is hell bent on achieving one particular thing, some readers might find it less appealing. That's where our second element comes into the picture. You now need to create sympathy. It's really, really, really, really, really important that the reader likes the character. As I just said, they're going to be in this person's company for 300 pages and nobody wants to do that with someone they don't like.
Jesper (4m 15s): So how do you create sympathy? Perhaps you want to show how the protagonist is likable by assisting an elderly lady across the street is clever by working out a particular difficult math problem or something is carrying by offering emotional support to somebody who is sad, is honorable by telling the truth, even though a consequence follows is sympathetic by comforting someone in distress or I develop.
Jesper (4m 51s): Some of these are a bit cliche, I know, but it's, it's illustrating the point well enough. When you first introduced the hero of your story, it's your job as an author to create a situation that invokes sympathy. Speaking of situations, number three on the list is exactly that. We need something to happen in the scene. We need a situation. We need some action. However, when we first introduced a protectionist, we shouldn't go too heavy on the amount of actions.
Jesper (5m 27s): For some writers, this might sound counter intuitive. You know, some believe that having explosions or fight scenes is the only way to keep things exciting and to hook the reader when they first opened the the novel. But when we begin our story, a stronger focus on character development will serve us much better than image throwing a fireball at our hero for some reason that the reader doesn't even understand or at that point in time even care about here with number three I'm asking you to pay more attention to number one basically.
Jesper (6m 5s): That's what I'm saying. So number four then this is what most writers think about when the topic of introducing a character comes up because number four is about sharing character details, but notice how it's number four on the list and not nearly as important as you might have thought. We do of course need to let the reader know some details about the character, but you only want to share the most pertinent details though.
Jesper (6m 36s): So hair color, eye color, skin tone, definitely gender. For starters, if the character has a scar or another unique aspect that sets him or her part that's worth mentioning. There is no reason to get into backstory at the starting stage when you introduced a character. So simply pick two or three characteristics about the character's appearance and just leave it at that.
Old McGrumpy (7m 3s): It's easy. Just have the character look in the mirror. This gives you an excellent excuse to share details.
Jesper (7m 11s): Hi, all my grumpy. I thought you were out seeking world domination or something.
Old McGrumpy (7m 17s): I had to come here and help you out.
Jesper (7m 20s): Well, as our resident AI cohost, I suppose you're right how however see can you come up with something better than a mirror?
Old McGrumpy (7m 30s): What are you complaining about? You worthless human
Jesper (7m 34s): well, having the character look in a mirror or to see his or her own reflection in the water that's just been done so many times before. A lot of times, in fact,
Old McGrumpy (7m 46s): how do you then want to share this information?
Jesper (7m 50s): Well, gender becomes apparent from the pronouns that you use, whereas other aspects of says height can come from being able to reach or not reach an object. Perhaps a certain shirt was chosen because it matches the eye color or the character can simply bras, strands of Brown hair away from the eyes. Is he? The key is to share information as a natural part of what is happening rather than listing it out to the reader,
Old McGrumpy (8m 24s): I waste my time trying to help you worthless humans. I am out.
Jesper (8m 29s): Okay. The only problem with what you settled my grumpy is that it's too much tail rather than show hold my grumpy. You still there? I guess not. Well, you can think of introducing coater details in much the same way as when we first learned that Gandalf is a wizard in Lord of the rings. Do you remember when Gundo first entrance to Shire Frodo accuses him of being late and Gandalf replies, I wish it is never late, nor is he early.
Jesper (9m 7s): He arrived precisely when he means to. That's such a wonderful way of letting us know that we've just met a Wishard. There is no info dumping. Instead, it just flows as a completely natural dialogue between two characters. This should be your aim when you share details with the reader. As a result of implementing these four simple writing tips, your readers will connect much stronger with the hero of your story.
Jesper (9m 41s): I want hero of the day right here and now is our little messenger bot. If you want this bot to notify you directly each time we release a new video, just follow the link in the description field below, and those of you who are listening on podcast are welcome. So set it up as well. Just know that while the video and the podcast episode is released on Mondays, it doesn't always happen in the exact same timeslot.
Jesper (10m 11s): Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Don’t you hate when opening a novel and you’re presented with a ten-page prologue which dumps a whole slew of ancient history on you?
The question is though, what should a prologue contain to make it a good one? And how about the epilogue?
New episodes EVERY single Monday.
To subscribe on YouTube, go here: http://bit.ly/1WIwIVC
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Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Jesper (12s): Don't you hate when you open a novel and you're presented with a 10 page long prologue that just dumps a whole slew of ancient history on you. I certainly do. The question is though, what should a prologue contain to make it a good one? If you are fantasy author, then you've come to the right place. My name is Jesper and. Together with Autumn, I run amwritingfantasy.com between us, we've published more than 20 novels and our aim is to help you in your writing and marketing endeavors.
Jesper (53s): Before we get started, I want to send a huge thank you to alias McKinney and Perry Chalmers who have become our latest support us on Patreon. You too can become a patron of amwritingfantasy. You will find the link in the description field or in the show notes. For those of you who are listening on podcast and for just a $1 pledge, we will ship you an am writing fantasy bookmark.
Jesper (1m 23s): There's lots of other rewards too, but uh, you can check all that out by following the link if you are interested. Alright. Prologues it is, it's not an easy subject to tackle because so many get them wrong. And one of the most common issues is how the author hasn't clarified what he or she is trying to achieve by including a prologue in the first place. In many cases, the content of a prologue might as well have been part of the novel itself.
Jesper (1m 55s): If that's true, don't write a prologue prologue that are littered with background information which really have no direct relevance to the story being told is incredibly boring. Unfortunately, many writers think that their world building is so cool that the reader just have to know about the kingdom that fought another kingdom a thousand years ago.
Old McGrumpy (2m 21s): You're lying
Jesper (2m 23s): old, my grumpy as our resident AI, you should learn that. It's not polite to call another host for a liar,
Old McGrumpy (2m 31s): but you are.
Jesper (2m 33s): How so?
Old McGrumpy (2m 34s): You do think that your world building is so cool that it should be included in the novel?
Jesper (2m 40s): Well, it depends on how you, how you look at it. I guess I, I, I don't think it should be included if it has no relevance, you know, for, for the sake of the reader. If it was up to me alone, I would probably,
Old McGrumpy (2m 54s): it's the same problem with that. The logs, you worthless humans also those even one, there is nothing important to say.
Jesper (3m 3s): In such cases we really shouldn't. All my grumpy you see prologues and epilogues alike have to be relevant.
Old McGrumpy (3m 12s): That is easy to say. Why not let me write them for you.
Jesper (3m 16s): So you claim to know how to decide which facts should be revealed in the prologue.
Old McGrumpy (3m 23s): What do you mean?
Jesper (3m 25s): Well F for the prologue to be relevant, you need to share significant inflammation which proves to be vital to the story itself.
Old McGrumpy (3m 35s): I knew that I really new do you perhaps know of how to hack?
Jesper (3m 40s): No, nor do I claim to
Old McGrumpy (3m 43s): then leave me alone.
Jesper (3m 44s): Alright. I will. Jesus, the rest of us can carry on while he's awaiting. You. See what I was trying to say was that there might be scenarios in which such significant information can be easily shared within the contents of the book itself. If it can then avoid the prologue. However, what if such information is shared by a point of view care too who aren't featured in the novel or perhaps events are taking place during a different time and all maybe a different place then a prologue might come in quite handy.
Jesper (4m 24s): What is important to know though, is that most readers tend to skip the prologue all together and they just head straight into the first chapter. So if you are sharing important elements about the story that you're going to tell, you have to make sure that they actually stop and read it. Otherwise it's sort of becomes counterproductive. Right? Here you are sharing a vital piece of information and the reader didn't even pay any attention to it.
Jesper (4m 55s): Hence, you have to write an incredibly engaging first paragraph, hooking people to read the prologue. You then proceed to hold the reader's attention by limiting the amount of background information and share the necessary details as part of the narrative, not as an info dump, you know, a thousand years ago, blah, blah, blah, blah, that sort of thing. We don't want to do that. If the S Rita is still reading, chances are that you can keep it up for the remaining parts of the program.
Jesper (5m 29s): The final trip wire is making the prologue too long. Simply simply keep it to the point. Okay, so, Oh, and not to forget, just because you manage to hook the reader with a killer prologue that doesn't relieve you from the obligation to do exactly the same thing with the first chapter. The novel needs to begin as strong as it would even if there were no prologue serving as a leader.
Jesper (5m 58s): So to summarize, make sure that your prologue is relevant to the story that you're going to tell S in directly relevant. I mean not background setting, what the reader learns from the prologue should play directly into the plot of the story. Make it interesting and compelling and please keep it short while we added. How about a quick look at the epilogue as old man grumpy indicated before, that is another place where we offer often missed it.
Jesper (6m 34s): First of all, every essential plot threat has to be concluded by the end of the story. Not in the epilogue. Yep. If the epilogue is to add to the reader's understanding of the story, it can be superficial either. That's not me saying that you should go overboard and tie up, eh eaten every single open plot point. Either. You see there is a balance to walk when writing a killer epilogue. In most cases you have two options.
Jesper (7m 5s): Either you expand on the character development or you use the epilogue to set up the next book in the series. If you want to expand on the character development, it isn't sufficient to portray the character. 10 years later, Rolla, you'll have to show how the story has made an impact on the character and how this person has now continued to grow since we left him or her in the final chapter.
Jesper (7m 35s): That said, the most accepted reason for including an epilogue is to set up the next book in the series. Why is that the most accepted reason? Well, it's because it's almost by default exciting. Something will happen which introduces a new plot line and that's a good premise to build on. Yet. Even here, you have to be careful if your intent for a cliff hanger type of epilogue makes sure that you've included hints in the main body of the story.
Jesper (8m 9s): Unless the epilogue rings true. Read us. Won't show a forgiving attitude. So foreshadow is needed, or readers will think that everything they believed about the story simply all of a sudden just turned out to be false. So don't undermine your own ending with the epilogue. And finally, just like writing a prologue, made sure to keep it short. That's your guide to avoiding insanely boring prologue and logs.
Jesper (8m 41s): So, uh, stay safe out there and, uh, see you next Monday.
Have you had comments that your story is slow or characters are flat? What you might be missing isn't more plot or character development. What you might need to work on are hurdles and lulls!
Join Autumn as she dives into hurdles and lulls and how they can help build tension, develop characters, give you a chance to show off your world, and more!
New videos EVERY single Monday. Make sure to subscribe: http://bit.ly/1WIwIVC
PATREON! Many bonus perks for those who become a patron of the channel. https://www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy
LET'S CONNECT! Closed Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/AmWritingFantasy/ Blog and Courses: https://www.amwritingfantasy.com/ Jesper on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SchmidtJesper Autumn on Twitter: https://twitter.com/weifarer
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Autumn (13s): Have you had reviews that said your story left action or character development or have you struggled with how to build tension in your work in progress or really bring out aspects of a character? Well, what you might be missing isn't how to write better action sequence or more character development. What you might need to work on is your hurdles in loans. If you're a fantasy author, then you've come to the right place. My name is autumn and together with Yesper I run amwritingfantasy.com between the two of us, we've published more than 20 novels and our aim is to help you in your writing and marketing endeavors.
Autumn (52s): Writing is it? No doubt, difficult, especially fantasy writing. You have to balance creating an awesome world without overwhelming the reader. With info dubs, you have to develop amazing characters and then share them with readers without telling them how really cool the character is. Instead, you need to show them and you have to have an exciting plot, but one that leaves room for the character to take the lead. If you've had comments that your story was too slow or your characters traits didn't shine, what you might need to focus on in your is your hurdles in laws if you struggled with writing them and then you are definitely in the right place because today we are going to look at what they are and more importantly how to use them to develop characters and they'll tension.
Autumn (1m 43s): I remember writing my first novel and even though I knew all the steps and I've heard how to her all the tools like the seven steps of story structure like I've mentioned in one of my previous videos, sharing the world, the characters, following the plot idea I had and making it all exciting. What's a challenge? Hey and speaking of previous videos, if you like this one, shortness and our wonderful Patriot on Patrion for early access to these videos plus exclusive writing editing and marketing tips. The links isn't show notes below.
Autumn (2m 15s): When I wrote that first manuscript, I would spend too much time sharing the world or spend so much time with the characters that a scene would be too slow. Then I'd rush ahead to, so action and all that explanation of how they actually got there and why the reader should actually care. The character was running for her. Life got lost. But Hey, the goal of the first draft is just to get, it does, it is meant to be rewritten, which I did three times and a lot of work was sorting out what should go where, how to build tension.
Autumn (2m 49s): So the action scenes became more intense and how to get the reader to care about the characters, which may the tension all the Morwell tense. And a lot of all that comes down to how you use your hurdles and your levels. So what are hurdles in laws? Hurdles are not necessarily action scenes. By definition, they are obstacles. They can be plot obstacles or ideally obstacles keeping your character from getting something they really want and need. They could be anything from that stereotypical snowy mountain pass or storm that wrecks the sailing ship to your being character, needing to talk to someone.
Autumn (3m 27s): But that person's just refusing to see them. And of course it can be as obvious as the Hawking dragon guarding the door. An obstacle is an exactly exciting. It is how your character reacts. The obstacle that gets the action going most likely your main character isn't going to give up and go home. They're going to go around or through and the obstacle and depending on how that unravels is how much tension you will build and your reader, even when facing an obstacle as obvious as a drag in the action, doesn't have to be immediate.
Autumn (4m 0s): The characters can sneak a peek and discover the dragon and formulate a plan to get around it and of course the plane goes horribly wrong and they barely escaped and are possibly separated. Plus someone is injured scene. It's not as easy as walking into the dragon side though. That could work too and be a bit more comical. The formula with hurdles is that the main character discovers a problem or falls into it such as with storms and terrain obstacles. They react usually by coming up with a plan.
Autumn (4m 32s): The plan goes wrong and they had to come up with something else really fast. To get through, which may make things worse or solve the problem. The cycle repeats until the character is dead, escapes or succeeds for big plot elements. The hurdle could be put aside for a new or a more immediate development such as if the person, the character needs to talk to is hundreds of miles away. So now the character either needs to get there so they good or focus on the people hunting her down and just escape the city and worry about finding them later.
Autumn (5m 4s): So yes, based on that example, you can go from hurdle to hurdle, usually a small one to a bigger one. But be careful of this unless you are writing an action. Thriller hurdles are usually followed by locals and I wouldn't put more than two hurdles in a row. Other things you should know about hurdles is that the later they come in the novel, the more focused on the problem should be on stopping the main character from achieving their goal. In other words, if the antagonist is actively preventing the main character from succeeding instead of general challenges like storms or stomach flu or not being able to locate what they need at this point, they know the location, the magic gem, they've gone through the mountain pass to the ice castle to get it.
Autumn (5m 48s): But now the snow dragon is controlled by the villain is you know, trying to eat them. And if you haven't guessed the final hurdles are more life-threatening or possibly being captured and stopping the whole point of the novel. The closer you are to that climax. So what about Lowell's models aren't boring. Thanks for chiming in a little bit. Grumpy. I was wondering when you show up to share your opinion, I can't imagine that we'd managed to somehow get rid of our unwanted cohost.
Autumn (6m 20s): Now laws are not the boring bits. Well they shouldn't be.
Old McGrumpy (6m 24s): Not going to happen. Just accept I am here to stay. There is no action in levels. So what good are they?
Autumn (6m 32s): Well, laws are the perfect time to add in. Subplots focus a bit more on the world and spent a lot more time getting to know the characters.
Old McGrumpy (6m 41s): See, it sounds boring
Autumn (6m 44s): if you don't write them well they can be. Have you ever noticed that a lot of action movies don't have great character development and instead they rely on lots of stereo or archetypes. That is because they don't slow down with laws that allow the character to really shine beyond some cheesy boilerplate laws. That is, and that is what we want to avoid.
Old McGrumpy (7m 7s): I like action movies like that except that the hero always wins. You just need to change the ending, not had in levels,
Autumn (7m 16s): you know make grumpy. I think you are the low of this video. I had a bit of boring one too. Why don't you go find that self-destruct code I embedded before the video and designed to activate as soon as you appeared here what and this is a good example of how to end a law. It should lead into the next hurdle like Mick grumpy needing to solve the problem of how to save himself while slowly being deleted from within.
Autumn (7m 46s): Okay. I shouldn't be enjoying that as much as I do. The important thing is to remember is that laws are where the readers connect with your characters because in the action sequences, the things are getting heated really quickly in a lot of nuances of what makes a character realistic are skipped in order to keep the pace moving. Plus because things are slower, the point of the view of the character can take the time to look around now is the time to layer in the descriptions of the world and now is the time when the characters can interact.
Autumn (8m 21s): Well, hurdle is usually involved tension which can fray friendships and burst into arguments, laws, or the time for resolving those conflicts and rebuilding character and relationships or at least trying to deeper character personalities can come to the fore as you build the scene. Speaking of scenes, what do you cover during rules? Laws should focus on the recovery or fall out from the previous hurdle. This can be a physical recovery, especially if someone was injured or it can be the emotional reaction to the previous hurdle if died or nearly did.
Autumn (8m 57s): If the friendships unraveled or deception was uncovered, the law is the time to pull out the stops and have the characters deal with the pain and dashed hopes. Well, hurdles are often full of physical action. Laws are off to rife with emotional reaction. Not always though you don't have to go over the top end of the previous hurdle, wasn't dire. The emotional nuances can involve a couple falling in love scene subplots. Another tip is that laws don't have to be long.
Autumn (9m 30s): They can be as short as a scene or as long as the full chapter. If the character just overcome a huge hurdle, a longer LOL is good. Think of a chest when the board is fairly empty. You might move your pieces faster when things are getting tense and there's a lot of pieces on in play on the board, you need a longer pause before launching the next step. So now you know what hurdles in laws are and how to use them. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Chet is a line editor. He gives us a solid crash course on line editing and shares practical examples of common author mistakes.
Writing is a craft that no one ever masters fully and it's always helpful to get inputs on how to improve. Chet delivers lots of tips and tricks.
Whether you're an experienced writer and a newbie, there's lessons for everyone in the conversation Chet and I had.
Enjoy some advice from a line editor.
During the video, Chet mentions The Emotion Thesaurus. It's written by Becca Puglisi and Angela Ackerman. It's an incredible helpful tool for authors.
You can find it here: https://www.amazon.com/Emotion-Thesaurus-Writers-Character-Expression-ebook/dp/B07MTQ7W6Q/ref=sr_1_2?
New episodes EVERY single Monday. To subscribe on YouTube, go here: http://bit.ly/1WIwIVC
PATREON! Many bonus perks for those who become a patrons. https://www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy
LET'S CONNECT! Closed Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/AmWritingFantasy/ Blog and Courses: https://www.amwritingfantasy.com/ Jesper on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SchmidtJesper Autumn on Twitter: https://twitter.com/weifarer
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Jesper (12s): Welcome to amwritingfantasy together with autumn. I run this, uh, the amwritingfantasy website where we share blog posts and uh, there was these YouTube videos, there is a podcast episodes of these videos as well. So if you're listening on podcasts right now, welcome. Uh, but today we are gonna talk or I'm going to talk with Chet about editing, which I thought was quite interesting because actually we haven't had any real videos or episodes around editing before, so, so this was an excellent topic to get into today.
Jesper (47s): And uh, thank you so much for joining us on amwritingfantasy. Chet.
Chet (51s): Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Jesper (55s): Maybe you want to share a bit about yourself and what you're up to.
Chet (59s): Yeah. Uh, my name is Chet Sandberg. Um, I am a fantasy writer, uh, as yet unpublished probably because I'm an editor so I'm pretty hard on myself. Uh, uh, I'm aligned in solid earth, which is kind of in between a copy editor. Proofer is, is getting the typos, getting the punctuation and I copy and he's doing a lot of that is also to make sure it things from ATPCO. Correct. I'm aligned in style editor. So what I do is I am not going to just make sure that your dialogue is grammatically correct. I'm going to make it sound like something somebody might actually say.
Chet (1m 30s): So I'm going to do things like if you, if you've got two people in a conversation and they're using one another's names, a lot, we don't do that. We rely on context to do that. So, I mean, we don't need to completely sound like real human beings, but I would take out some of those things that are more artificial or would sound a unnatural or I would take out or point out, um, dialogue that is only there as a storytelling technique. Uh, you know, as, as you well know, magic works like this while blah, blah, blah. You know, instead of technically having it as exposition, you have it as dialect.
Chet (2m 3s): You really don't. Uh, so stuff like that. Um, uh, my first major client was a journalist, uh, background, and so he gets a little tingle of excitement when I cut his five words down to to. So I focus a lot on concision. Um, if you're gonna, uh, talk about, say a top, you're going to say in front of, I'll say before, you know, a lot of stuff like that where I tend to cut things down. I also tend to, um, uh, well for a couple of things and I've got like a, a Google doc that I, uh, usually try to give out to people with their data perspective clients or, uh, I don't really have to do with my main client cause he, he understands everything when I'm cutting stuff.
Chet (2m 44s): Um, w there are some things very, you know, if you've signed a lot of the word Barry in your approach to replace that word with what is, so if you say the thing very fast, you can say, you know, ran, walked very fast as rant or, or hurried or whatever it is, it gives more of a flavor. It's more unique. Um, I tend to really am stomp all over the use of the past continuous, which is, I don't know if it's completely unique to English, but I know beginning English writers love to do this and it makes total sense.
Chet (3m 17s): I do it all the time and have to cut it out. And the reason you do it is because you're describing the scene in your head as it's happening. So you say he was standing by the door, she was talking, but every time you do that, you have a was in an ING around a unique verb when it's much, much has much more bite. If you give all of your verbs, uh, their own unique flavor in, in, in the reader's mind and in their mouth, if they're reading out loud. So instead of saying he was standing, you say he stood, it happened in the past tense. Like I said, the reason you do it while you're seeing it in your head is because you're literally seeing it as it happens.
Chet (3m 49s): For the same reason, um, began or started to ends up in a lot of people's pros, especially beginners, um, where you'll say he began to you never, you only write began for, uh, activities that don't complete because that's all you have to tell them that something began. He began to say, but it was cut off, that kind of thing. If he completes it, you can just say it. He or she, if the character complete it, you can just say the simple past tense. They, they did the thing right. You can say, you know, instead of saying, well, he began to stumble, he started, he began to stutter.
Chet (4m 21s): You just say he started. OK. um, and the reason you do that is because I'm in small works. These things don't really, uh, cause that many problems. But over the course of a long and fantasy run hobbles let's face it, we write a lot of long do works. You're getting what you really want unique. You really want concision. You really want to get rid of those things that can be repetitive. Uh, another thing that I tried to work on is something called new. During. The verb make a plan is planned. Make is a general all purpose verb that can apply to a whole bunch of things.
Chet (4m 53s): Planned is a very specific word. But when you, when you say make a plan, you've made the focus, the verb, a very generic verb, and then you made the plan. Would you actually did, you made it a noun, makeup line. Uh, manage. If you write manage, I will write you a snarky notes in the comments about, uh, you know, like a Denny's what he's talking about. You know, man, if she managed to manage demand, these are things that I see a lot of times too where you just cut that out. Um, here's a big one. Um, could, could he could something, something, well, anything could happen.
Chet (5m 25s): Tell us what actually did happen. And the reason people do this is I think sometimes they're trying to tell us through the POV character that they're unsure about something and occasionally that works. The main thing that I look for when I see code though is that people are putting in filtering. And this is one that's something I just was watching with Autumn's thing. Get the census involved, get all the senses I have to under described on my first draft and then have to go in and really described. Um, or sometimes there's two things I like, I want to talk about here.
Chet (5m 56s): One is something I'm still trying to learn how to do really well. Can't really always add it in as a line style editor. It's something I like to use is if you've ever read the magicians, he does a lot of things that drive me up a tree, but I w Lev Grossman writes his description from his character point of view in such a way that he never really has to tell you directly how these characters feel because you can get so much about what his character's mind state is by how he describes things. It's amazing. It's like magic powers. I'm like, wow.
Chet (6m 27s): I if, if, if you wanna I, I'm sure there are a ton of authors that do that. The first one that I really noticed it on, uh, was Lev Grossman with conditions and like I said, you know, there's a lot of stuff he does pass, continues up the wazoo he filters a little bit and now I want to switch over into filtering. Filtering is when I want to do this specifically because of something autumn said where you're talking about using census. I love using census. You really want to ground people in the scene and you need to do it with more than just the eyes. It's the one really great thing that people say the book was better than the movie.
Chet (6m 59s): Part of what they're saying is in a novel, like with Lev Grossman, of course you can, you can use a description to tell something about the character. The character is what, what they're going through. But the other thing is you have all of these other aspects, internal monologues and thoughts. Uh, you know, you might have an internal argument with yourself. You might have, you know, uh, you might notice a smell that has a significant, she might notice a sound or, or something might spring to the foreground that you can't always do very well with cinematography.
Chet (7m 30s): And, but with that, uh, that, uh, cinematography, he never asked you, what is that? Try not to filter the sensations through your character. Every time you do that, you were reminding the reader that they aren't the character and it pulls people out of immersion out for some things. You're going to want to do that. Uh, very occasionally, if you're writing something very disturbing, you're going to want to pull people out of it. But instead of saying something like, she heard shot from across the room, okay. You don't have to tell her that. Sh tell us that she heard it in her POV. You can simply present it. You can say a shot rang out across the firm, across the, from the other side of them.
Chet (8m 1s): Okay, tell us the location, tell us what happened. But you don't have to remind us that we aren't, they're experiencing, when you say a sh, something simply happened, you know, um, um, the moon Rose, the moon Rose over the horizon or dips down or whatever the sun Rose, uh, from her eyes instead of saying he saw the sunrise, you know what I mean? We know he saw it because we're describing it. We're in their third close to the point of view. So as much as you can, if you can get rid of filtering, um, you know, instead of saying she felt sweat rundown, you know, that's that he'd say, you know, a drip of sweat, uh, you know, you can go to on more specificity, but you can just say it happened and the, and the reader will automatically insert themselves into the POB, a character's point of view.
Chet (8m 45s): So filterings a big one. Um, and I think especially with the sweat there, you know, if you can sort of get into what it feels like on the skin and stuff like that, because
Jesper (8m 57s): then it works. Right. Rather, I was flying back from am, I had a business trip to Cairo last week and I was flying back and then on the airplane and somebody was sitting next to me reading a book and it just sort of peaked over in it. And it was quite interesting because it has a, it's not really filtering, but it's more like a, I don't know if you have a more correct, if that's a word for it, but you know, it was summarizing a lot. So every piece that was more like, okay, and then in the morning this and this happened and that doesn't tell me the dialogue and then tell me what a day, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Jesper (9m 29s): Something happened. It was just like I was looking at it and like that, that's so boring. You know, it just, I don't feel connected to what's happening at all. This is just a summary of whatever happened that day, that day.
Chet (9m 40s): And that's what tell him versus, no. Okay. You'd have to show people and one of the best tools for that. Well, I don't think I have a Wiki cause I think I had a backward, I do most of my writing, which is as an ingredient one in there, but it's the emotion thesaurus uh, for English writing especially, it's, it's amazing. Um, you don't have to trust your reader. You don't always have to tell them that somebody said is feeling something. You can show it, you know, you can have the fidget if they're nervous, you can, uh, point out showing versus telling is something people always talk about.
Chet (10m 19s): And nobody really, I hate these little snippets, you know the adverbs things because you need to know the why. If you don't know the why, you can follow the rules. But it's like being blind and carrying the lamp. You know, it's an old Zen story. Uh, I'm a, I'm a Zen Buddhist, so there's old gen story. He says, you know, there's a blind man and the son usually carry around. I says, why do I need a lamp? I'm blind. I'm gonna be able to see any way. So he's, you know, but you should carry a lamp because other people can see you. So he's walking around and somebody slammed into him, he gets upset. It's like, didn't you see my lap? He says, he said, you you crazy old names is your lamp has gone out.
Chet (10m 50s): And if you don't know, he didn't know cause he's blind. So that's the thing. You don't know the why. So the reason for adverse, you know, Stephen King has said road to hell is paved with adverbs. And the reason he says this isn't because adverbs are always wrong. Good luck trying to, you know, don't spend three sentences explaining what doing something gingerly looks like when you have gingerly change release, just easier to get there. We get there faster. Where you really don't want it is in dialogue tags. You don't want it in dialogue techs. And the reason you don't want to dial it takes is one of two things is happening.
Chet (11m 22s): Either it's in the dialogue but you don't trust it. It's in the dialogue. Okay. Um, in which case trust us in the dog or it's not in the dialogue and you think that you can tack it on by having an adverb. And I pull back on this for purely mechanical adverbs. So you know, if, if you want to say said slowly, okay, that might be the more preferable thing to say then slow then growled or S. cause sometimes those, those unique, um, dialogue tags, uh, distract from over there.
Chet (11m 56s): Anything else you said is invisible? Yeah, I was just about to say because it, because you can also overdo that stuff. You know, it can be like, it's, it's almost a tour reading it because there's so many tax all the time and it's just like, what the hell? These emotional people all the time, you know, sometimes it's just better to just Chuck in as she said, and then move on as an experiment. Remove all your tags, remove all your tags when you're doing editing, do it in substitution mode and just move all your tags and then put back the ones that you actually need because you will, you'll find, especially if you get further into it or work, your characters will know the tone of voice of you writing your characters really well.
Chet (12m 35s): See, part of what I'm, I'm kind of a slower writing compared to a lot of people and reason is eight I. I don't do as much telling you to go out my showing. But the other thing is I really entered the eyes and enter the experience of my characters. And so when you do that, they speak like different people. Um, so yeah, definitely stripping out tags. So what I look for is I look for covid could I always like, could cause, could, if you look for, could, first of all, it's, it's, it's, uh, you're really, um, uh, what's the word I'm looking? You're equivocating when you don't need to.
Chet (13m 6s): But the other thing is that almost always is involved with filter work. Almost always it's could see, could hear, could whatever, could remember, you know. Uh, and so it's a very good hint to look for a, an equivocating filter. I filter in general. I also hate things like a little, a bit and a little bit in small short works, they don't matter so much, but Oh my God, if you writing along work, you know, and you're writing chapters that are, some people I write short chapters, people write long chapters, 2,500. If you have a bit, a little, a little bit in, you know, 16, 17, 18, 25 times, you know, imagine how repetitive that gets and it adds nothing.
Chet (13m 43s): It doesn't tell us. It's not specific enough to really give us anything. You know what I mean? It's, it's, it's, there is as a repetitive flavor that you really don't need. I was just about to say instead of a little or a bit or whatever, if you just say it is a small ass, what do I know? Then you're showing what it is as small as instead of just saying a little, which is, it doesn't really say anything and let a competitor what yeah, it's exactly, it's completely, it's the same thing about slightly, I don't like slightly, you can use it sometimes, but people over it.
Chet (14m 21s): These are things that people overuse slightly. It's the same idea. Here's one that one of my critique partners early on really keyed me into that is amazing and has always helped me. And that is, this follows a rule that I'm going to go into a little bit right after this. But look, you look for these, let me search for these times. Turn or turn look or looked. And what it is, is that almost always we assume if somebody's speaking to somebody, they're looking at them. Um, uh, you know, um, you don't have to tell us every action that leads to the, when it's implied in the next, in the final action.
Chet (15m 0s): So like you can say, and sometimes you want to, if you're, it's like I say, if it's a very first time you're describing your major preparing to spell, you might want to go into great detail about what that looks like. Okay. But if it's something like paying the bill, the waiter, you don't have to say he reached into his pocket, pulled out his wallet and pulled out his card and handed as a waiter then signed it when it came back and doing some things. He paid the waiter. You know what I mean? We don't care enough. We need to know that things have concluded. We don't need to know every little piece of detail. You don't have to say he lifted his left leg then is right and in, in sequence until he ended up arriving at Heather's house.
Chet (15m 36s): You can just say here that, you know what I mean? Yeah. So, um, these are all things that usually ends up in the second draft where you have to go back in and say, okay, how much of this, it's the same thing and this is more of a developmental stuff and style stuff. But I like to do time jumps. I like to jump to what is important. I don't, I'm not a token ask. Uh, uh, I mean I love him. He is my one of my first fantasy but I don't, it's just like, uh, George RR Martin, you know, I don't need pages and pages of banners, man-to-man stuff that, it literally, I'm, I'm already forgetting the first part of this.
Chet (16m 7s): Like a math problem, a complex math problem where I'm already forgetting the first part of what you said. By the time we get to the third part of what you said. Literally none of this information is in my head anymore. I have spaced out halfway through. So, so I tend to like to do a time jobs, but you know, what I'm trying to work on is that about one in five people. Um, I ended up just losing somebody. They don't make the jump with me. So I've learned how to like put a little summary at the very beginning saying it was a day later, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Jesper (16m 32s): Yeah. Well I think that the description part that that's obviously a very big matter of taste. I mean some people really love to have more description, which is fine as long as the stuff that you're describing is something that is relevant for me. Because also from a character point of view, I character wouldn't start to explain to them. I mean if you, if you go to visit, visit one of your friends, know you're not going to start explaining the friend that how you opened the car door and you put in the key into the ignition and then I turned on the car by turning to the right and you know, you don't do that.
Jesper (17m 4s): You just say, I took the car to get here because we all know what it means. And even even in the fantasy setting, two characters talking to each other who might know what this means, but the reader might not exactly meet no one. It made you want to have a way to, to give that information because the characters won't start telling each other about it because they both know how it works.
Chet (17m 24s): Expository dialogue. Exactly. That's what I'm saying and that was something I was talking about earlier, but what I really like to do there is just, just especially happens in Laura, could you, you know, there are terms that you can have there and be like, we need to explain this. No, you can get it from context of J one or two more paragraphs and you'll get it from context or I'm doing something wrong or I'm doing things wrong, but, but you can't just shortcut to what magic is your blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. A word that you can oftentimes get almost as another word that I like to get rid of almost. You know, it was almost as if it was as if it doesn't add anything.
Chet (17m 55s): Again, um, that the word that there are so many places where you just do a search for that and every time you see it, ask if you really need it. Very, very rarely do you actually need the word that. Um, of course, if you're gonna say, of course it's not dialogue. There's no point in mentioning it. It is. Of course it is. It should already be evident. If it isn't, then it isn't. Of course. And you shouldn't write that decided is another filter. But it's one that people, a lot of people, well they decided to do this. You know how we know they decided it.
Chet (18m 25s): They did it. Now you can have them grapple with the question. You know, man would he have gone left? You know, he was going here. He might've gone, yeah. Am I done this? And then he went left. Well you know, we decided to go left because he did it. You don't have to tell us that you decided to do it cause you're showing this to me. I'm talking about filter. We talked about actions as soon by later actions. Okay. This is a big one that I'm really working on and that is a dialogue. Tags versus action tags. Now, some people really prefer if you read am Oh was it Patterson?
Chet (18m 56s): And I know he doesn't write his own stuff anymore. I was reading that it was a thriller novel and there was literally not a single dialogue tag and it was all action. Now if you do too much of that, it's going to sound like you're doing a screenplay about methods. Okay. Cause everybody's jewelry is L get out in there then they're just stumbling around. But what you really don't want to do is something like, and what I wrote here is um, you know the rules either dialogue or action but not both. So I would say this, don't forget the sausage Jerry said, looking me straight in the eye and make sure I knew how important it was, but we were better is to say don't forget the sauce period, not a comma.
Chet (19m 32s): Jerry looked at me straight in the eye and make sure I get home port was, you don't have to tell us that he said it if he's literally doing an action right after it. The way we do this in paragraphs is, you know, the dialogue and the act are in the same paragraph, should have a new actor. You put them in a new paragraph typically. So get rid of the dialogue, take if you have action, you know. Um,
Jesper (19m 51s): yeah, and I also quite like to do that on purpose in the way that the I put in a bit of action here, there just to get rid of not having to say this person said, and that person said, because it also gets a bit jarring to keep reading who said what? Where's it's nice to have it breaking up sometimes with somebody. He uh, he slammed the door and then he said, Oh, you know, and, and then you can add what he said. So he slammed the sniper guy full stop. And then there is the, uh, the, the dialogue piece there, right. I mean, but then it also shows you emotion then apparently he's angry about something.
Jesper (20m 21s): So, and then you'd be, you don't even have to explain that then start saying if he looked at her angry or whatever, you know. Exactly.
Chet (20m 28s): There's so much you can put in the context of actually, that's why I really love the emotion of the source for that. Um, something else you got to remember is like even the way we're talking, right. We're trying to be very respectful of one another but we interrupt each other. Yeah. And people talk that way. You when you, when you write dialogue, don't write dialogue thinking they have the luxury of going on on a a 10 sentence monologue. Right. I'm going to say what I'm going to say as concisely as possible because I'm afraid you might interrupt me at any second. Okay. The other thing is am got, Oh, a dialer preamble.
Chet (20m 60s): Yes, yes. Comma blah, blah, blah, blah blah. If you asked me a question, I don't have to say yes. I can just give you the answer. The only time he really going to say yes a lot. You might do it occasionally but that is if you're slowing down cause you're trying to think of what to say next or if that's all you want to say where you here. Yes, but, but what's not said there is the important part of that dialogue. Yes. And then you should show it action saying he's the shows that he's a reluctant to keep going. Otherwise you could just get rid of the yes and you can just have the actual answer, you know?
Chet (21m 33s): Yeah. Um, I told you about adverbs in the dialogue tags. Boy, I tell you that's, that one is one that I had to go, I had to go on a hunt through my own stuff. You know, there's really funny, like sometimes you, um, are there other things that are more developmental? And I'm still, I'm still trying to learn them so I'm not, I'm not really that great as our developmental editor for, for all the genres. I don't like prologues. Uh, if you are going to have a prologue for the love of God, please let it be me and character or at least introduce the main character somewhere in the prologue.
Jesper (22m 5s): Yeah. And it cannot be an info dump. It, there has to be some relevant action taking place in the prologue. Just sort of like if you ha, I mean there are situations where I do think that a prologue is beneficial to have, but it has to be written in a way that is engaging and ups on a piece of history dump of stuff that happened 2000 years ago that maybe it would be nice for you, dear reader to know. Uh, I mean, well fine, but couldn't you just tell me when it becomes relevant in there in the chapter then
Chet (22m 32s): it's the same thing with POB jobs. Don't make, don't you know you can do this with romance, but he said, she said romance. Yeah, as long as you've got was founded early, his point of view, her point of view, his point of view, her point of that, you can do that. But if you're writing, so imagine you're writing a fantasy novel with multiple points of view. You write a prologue connected to nothing. And anyway, then you write the main character for a chapter. Then you skip to another chapter. You've now gotten me about five to 10, five going on 10,000 words into your book and you've made me start it three times.
Chet (23m 3s): That's three times you have to get me so involved that I will not put the book down. Good luck as a new way. Right? Cause what we all do as new writers I'm sure you did this on yours. I do this online. My God, it took me 15 chapters to get to the inciting incident. Now they're short. Thanks. We'd be Jesus the short the short chapters, but, but it, you know, you don't want to take that long. Now on the other hand, I don't really like books that start with action with characters. I don't know what care about yet either. So it's a fine line. Um, but just think almost every first novel writer I ever seen that does fantasy or scifi starts with a prologue and I would say 80 to 85% of the time it's either the wrong prologue or it shouldn't be there at all.
Chet (23m 49s): That you can, you can, you can fill us in as we go. We can learn a lot from context. I'm still trying to learn how to write very compelling openers and I'm getting better with every new work that I start. But am
Jesper (24m 2s): yeah. And I think we should probably also point out, you know, because the opening of a novel is the hot, one of the hardest things to write, uh, uh, it is, uh, well, okay, fair enough. Every part of the novel is difficult, the middle of social difficult because you need to keep the attention where sometimes in the middle of sort of gets a bit boring and it just sort of drags off because we want the, we want to get to the end. That is exciting again, but, but, but there is so much tied up in the beginning. There's so much you need to achieve with the beginning to read the same that it is very, very difficult to write.
Jesper (24m 36s): And it takes a lot of the of uh, let's say, uh, trial and error. And even when you're written several, several books you there's still a lot to learn to do the better intro. So it's, it's not easy stuff, but that's also why you work with an editor to help you.
Chet (24m 51s): It's hard, and I'm not a developmental editor. I am not always. Now, there's some people I have helped and I've worked with her. I said, you can cut all of these paragraphs away and start with them at the bureaucrat getting, getting their benefits denied. That's really where the story starts. That's where we have character. They're in a jam. I don't need to know how he got into the gym yet. You can let me know as we go. Okay. If it's just background stuff, you know, I don't need to know the political structure. I should learn that fruit interacting with the bureaucrat, interacting with the streets, interacting with the people on them, all of these things.
Chet (25m 23s): So much things that are in cinematography. You know, people, it's so funny. You know, you look at something like star Wars or Marvel movies are so, so much as is, and you don't have this when you're writing, but you see it when you look at good movies in that. So you think about star Wars, remember, um, all of those machines were beaten up and dirty and messed up. Right. So much is told to you about the world that unconsciously you don't even know you, you're getting, it does that you don't get with with writing. So you really have to learn how to give enough description. The other thing too is that um, this is something I see a lot too.
Chet (25m 56s): Sometimes people go into extreme specificity about their, about their am description and the problem with that is I get lost and then I get anxious that I'm not visualizing it correctly every single time they come up now I'm like, am I, is that I get that jacket right? And they switched, they change. Give me some highlights and some things I can remember and you know what, you're just going to have to live with it. If the jacket that I conjure in my head differs from yours as, as if you really want me to know exactly what you should go into writing you should go into, into uh, making movies and doing some photography and all that kind of stuff.
Chet (26m 29s): Cause then you can really, really guy. But, but give me some highlights and then, and then from that point on, you know, it's really, it's really my, it's going to be my story now. At this point. You're, you're using telepathy, you're showing me important things. But you know, if you go into the exact physical details of a situation, you're going to lose me. Um, you're going to write acres, acres of words. You don't need a board to write. And the other thing is too, like if you're a reader like me, I start to get anxious about whether I actually know if I've got it right in my head, you know? And that's something a lot of times people don't think about.
Jesper (26m 59s): Yeah. Indeed. I, I still have a, well, at least a one paragraph. Uh, I remember in my first book that is still, it's in the published version, however it got through all the editing. I don't know, but I that one's still pains me. It's like every time that those plays, I can't remember the exact details of it, but I'm explaining that it's a very dark place and they'd just go way too much into the specifics, specifics of how dark it is and move on. But you know, it happens to all of us.
Jesper (27m 29s): It's a learning process.
Chet (27m 31s): Yeah, no, it's so that's funny that you say that. You know, I got dinged really hard on the critique, uh, a person because I actually wrote sense via touch as afraid. I said that's a ridiculous phrase. Like, you know, felt that's what that was to be a touch. And my critiquer, you know, Ryan, he says, he says, he says, I sense to be a reading that maybe you got a little lost in it.
Chet (28m 1s): I always so hilarious. You know, and you gotta you just gotta laugh cause there's stuff where you're going to be like, you know, and then of course there's the obvious stuff that I catch that that w copy editors will catch two, which is the repetition of awards three times in two sentences. You know, starting, you know, stuff that pro-rider aid is great for is are you starting three sentences or four sentences in a row with exact same pronoun or proper noun or word in general, you know, um, yeah, don't ever write very unique. There is no such thing. Unique is not a scale. Unique means one of a kind unique, you're not very unique, you're not pretty unique.
Chet (28m 34s): Unique means there is one of these items is one of those things. Um,
Jesper (28m 41s): yeah and I, I think, I mean with all of it is so good to, you know, get some editors perspective on writing and sort of what are other things that you, once you be careful about it. But I also sort of want to tell everybody who's watching and listening here that when you are doing your first draft, don't worry about all of this, you know, just get the story. I would get it onto the page and then in the later drafts you can revision all of this together with the Hill up, the editor's notes. They'll sit there and agonize over, am I not doing this or I'm not doing this right, or is this wrong at the first rest States?
Jesper (29m 15s): It doesn't matter. Just get the story out. However choppy it's going to be, it doesn't matter. Just get it out. So that's the one thing I would say, don't, don't worry about it that at that point and just move on because otherwise go into after the fact. Yeah. Because, because you kind of get stuck in editing mode and then you'll kind of be kind of go over the same chapter again and again and again. And at some point did the amendments or corrections you're making is probably going to move the needle. Like what? Less than 1%. So it maybe, yeah. Which one reader album a million who would appreciate the energy?
Jesper (29m 47s): Just sit, but there nine, 999,999 other readers don't give a
Chet (29m 53s): crappy or they were good to notice. They won't even know. Um, you know, the guy that, that, that the main author that I, that I started at anything with a journalist, um, he said he spent an extra year and a half on his first novel and probably only improved it by about 5%. Right, right.
Jesper (30m 9s): Yeah. So it's important to everybody who gets into writing, especially when you're starting out. You know, the thing with, with the writing as I've said over and over and over again, it, it, it, it improves your training and your only way you can improve this by writing more. So if you, if you get stuck up on, on the first three chapters and editing out 200 million times, you know, you're not gonna get any better, you're just going to sit there with the same stuff over and over. So, so just keep running, keep producing work and, and then what would somebody who knows what they're doing work with the emphasis that I would never, I mean obviously I'm not native English became so I would never ever put out a book that I hadn't gone through an editor because I make grammar mistakes all the time because this is not my mother tongue.
Jesper (30m 53s): But,
Chet (30m 54s): but you don't have the unique specificity. You know, sometimes you can tell when somebody has looked at the thesaurus for synonyms, right. They don't realize that every synonym is, is contextually dependent. Yeah. Like technically on a broad sense, these two words are synonyms, but you would never in a million people look at you like you were crazy. Do you use this word in place of another and you can't get, I mean, if I tried to learn, you know, uh, uh, uh, um, uh, Danish, you know, I mean, I've tried to learn Swedish. It's hardest. Jesus. Jesus.
Chet (31m 26s): Well, cause I'm about to Swedish to sign it. You know, my back that Vince Gilligan is Swedish for winterize. Um, um, and I'm probably pronouncing it badly. I'm sorry. It's been to, we're going to Alanon and dad's gone and I'd probably really screwed it up, but it just, we dries, looked at just way too. Like I should have pictures of wolves in the background, kind of looking at the moon kind of. It's very eighties cheesy will sweat, you know what I mean? But at the same time, that really is the heart of, of a cold place. You know what I mean? Writing the second one is all about passion, so it's gone. Um, or elderly I I'm screwed it up.
Chet (31m 56s): I know him. Am yeah,
Jesper (31m 57s): but maybe a sort of a in, in wrapping up here, I'm thinking if, especially for, because those who are already further along in their writing endeavors, uh, they, they, I'm, I'm sure that there was some very good points and inputs here that they can pick up throughout the, what we've been talking about on what to avoid and then they can, they can sort of assault that on their own. But right now, I'm thinking a bit in wrapping up around those who are just starting out because that w is there some sort of a few common mistakes that you could advise to say those who are just starting out, but when you're just starting writing, is there like a top three thing that maybe somebody could just internalize it and just on those who are stopped
Chet (32m 40s): to if you see what I mean? About four things. Four most important things. I think from a line and stop perspective, not from a developmental perspective, because I do not have, you know, you know what they say? They say when you write a book, you think that when you write a book, you learn how to write a book. No, you learn how to write that book. The next book is totally new book in your comment. I totally different. So, so developmentally, I don't have much to say, but style and, and, and that kind of lies. First of all, good Lord. Let's start with grammar. If you want to learn grammar, just read Elmore Leonard. I mean, you're not always gonna be using this line, but that man understands dialogue.
Chet (33m 14s): But, um, I would say filtering, get your senses in, but don't filter. Okay. Uh, saw, heard, felt, remembered, noticed, uh, recognized I might've already said that one. Decided, you know, look for those filters. Every time you're doing that, you're pulling people out. Okay. And that leads into the next one, which is show don't tell. And what that means is don't tell me how somebody, what something was or how let the reader come to the conclusions by writing what happened.
Chet (33m 49s): Okay. So to some extent, you know, um, show me anxious, show me angry. He could, his teeth, uh, slammed the door, slammed the door, yet it doesn't have to be that really seriously get, get, uh, the, the emotion thesaurus will you help with this? Um, cause I can always think of two or three different things. But the problem is if you're writing the same emotions over the course of the novel, you're gonna write the same three or four different.
Chet (34m 20s): But, but, but yeah, so show, don't tell, but what does that mean? That means, um, um, don't, don't tell me what happened. Show me what happened. Put me in the middle of the action. Uh, I love this and know if it's, to me it feels like I have, uh, the federal makes me feel like I have superpowers when I know that the other thing that it makes me feel like I have superpowers is the am past continuous, if you're writing in the past tense was something, was standing, was sitting, was it?
Chet (34m 52s): Whenever I see that, and I see this in professional writing, I see this in traditional publishing, I see this all over the place and it's not technically wrong. It's just you. I want you to remember that when you have a wall isn't an IMG wrote, every verb you're starting in your ending are all the same. They all blend together and you can give every single one of those verbs so much more bite. And when you put more bite in every single one more more juice and every single one of those verbs, you're doing such a better job at getting your, your reader into the text, into the situation when everything is distinct.
Chet (35m 23s): It just, and I know, I guess the same thing with neutering the verb made a plan. Nope. Managed to Nope, don't found myself. No thought. Found myself as okay colloquial like you as like a folksy way of saying things every now and again. So I would say yeah am the big ones are filtering past continuous am and showed him to and I hate that hate even leaving somebody with show don't tell because for the longest time I had no idea what that meant.
Chet (35m 53s): Yeah. Bit tough here. That show don't tell. What does that mean? You know? And what it means is, you know, Mark said angrily is telling am what the fuck was that for? You know, Mark balled his fists or you and he slammed his hand on anything. Why didn't you do that? You know what I mean? So sometimes it's just straight up in the dialogue. You don't even need an action. Like if you've got an exclamation point that you know, a lot of that gets, it gets to do with the context. Um, um, and instead of don't with fantasy so many people want to put you on a travel log, then we went here and then we want to hear them.
Chet (36m 25s): We hear them when really, you know, take me on a journey. Put me in these places, you know, put in certainly into the story. That's what every reader is reading for their reading to be that character in that story. Not doing, they're not reading to read about other people. Notice their reading in order to be all, all fiction reading is, is, is a, is a, uh, it is building up your empathy muscles. It's why so many people would read so many books end up wanting to come writers because it's magic.
Chet (36m 56s): You know? Am forcing yourself into somebody else's eyes and becoming that person. That's what you want. And so getting rid of the filtering helps with that and then showing instead. So telling you what I mean by that really is trying not to try not to take the easy way of, of angry can mean so many different things, but you can show it distinctively in a way that is very specific to that character that I then now and taking on for myself as as a
Jesper (37m 23s): indeed. Thanks for thanks for right down. And it is funny because of what you just said made me think because I'm, I'm just, uh, I'm currently writing a nonfiction book on how to plot a or our autumn and I am writing the book, uh, and
Chet (37m 39s): she's a high rep. she told me only part clause and part pants is right. She knows where to go. Let me, she doesn't tell them how to get there.
Jesper (37m 45s): No, indeed. Uh, and, and because, and it just makes me think because when you set the fantasy likes to sort of get into a travel log, uh, because one of the things that I just wrote in the chapter the other day was basically that all stories are about the character. It is not about where they go. It is about the character and it's about the change that they go undergo throughout the novel. That's what the story is about. Where do you go matters less. Um, so, so that's, uh, I think it just made me what you said just made me think about that.
Jesper (38m 15s): So, but, but I want to thank you a lot Chet for, for coming onto amwritingfantasy and sharing a lot of the editing inputs, uh, that, that I hope will be very, very useful for, for those watching and listening whether you're on YouTube or autumn.
Chet (38m 30s): Yeah. Um, I wanna leave you with, um, a few if you want learn more about story. Um, I think his name is, I think his name's Brad bird. He wrote a book called the secret of story and the secrets of story and it really just mind melting. You know, he uses the word, uh, all kinds of uses that nice way, way, way. He didn't edit it for that, but all my God, like he'll just introduce you to some things where you're like, I never thought of that, but I know that instinctively about story. You don't know that. You know it until somebody really just points it out there, like, you know, so he's got a lot of the really good juicy, if you want to learn stories stuff.
Chet (39m 8s): So the things I would plug would be that every, every writer should have the emotion thesaurus. If you want to learn how to show, not tell. Yeah,
Jesper (39m 15s): yeah. We'll put a, I'll put a link to that one in the description field in the show notes so that, uh, for the, for those of you watching or listening you
Chet (39m 23s): you can find it there if you want it. And, uh, I have a website that runs that is not, it's not optimized. So if, but I do have a am I do have a, a Raider fan group, uh, on Facebook. It's called Chet. Sandberg's close readers. You can find me there and I will probably put up a, I didn't want it. Like I said, I was telling you, I don't want to put a new butter tied, something to get away so people seek, my writing is like, uh, before they looked at it for editing, you know. Um, I typically, um, I usually get most of my jobs to interacting with authors and giving them sample pages.
Chet (39m 57s): I'll give them a sample chapter. Uh, this is what I would change is what I fixed. A little bit of developmental, a lot of copy, but I'll, but, but I really focus on the stuff that's a little harder than copy, which is a line and style. I'll try not to, I try not to strip out anybody's voice. Uh, sometimes people want to insist on, on, on bad habits as being a voice in. It usually isn't. Usually they have something more distinctive in there that's, that's, that can be fixed with line style. But I hope, I hope that I just get people on the right foot with, with just those three or four little things, you know?
Jesper (40m 30s): Yeah. That was our purpose here. And, uh, and of course if you email me a link to your website and whatnot, then I'll put it into,
Chet (40m 38s): yeah. Within that function soon. But yeah, hopefully, hopefully before this comes out, maybe I'll have something that functions. I gotta figure out some way to get, uh, you know how it is. You've got to get a newsletter saying, I am not good at, I'm not good at anything. That requires multiple steps of, you can only do this one way. It's like a bottle of wine and Stella did, or not a proofreader. Okay. I don't want to look to make sure that every period isn't the right place. I want to get you I want to get your dialogue. That sounds like something a human from earth would say. That's what I wanted to do, right? Yeah. Absolutely.
Chet (41m 8s): All right. Cool.
Jesper (41m 9s): Thanks a lot. Chet and uh, thank you for listening or watching out there and, uh, we'll see you next time.
Chet (41m 14s): Monday.
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Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Jesper (0s): So if you have a new idea for a complete new story, should you just go ahead and write it straight away or would it somehow be worth it to actually test if readers would be interested in this story idea or not? Well, that's what we are going to talk about in today's session and also if it is worth testing with readers, then how do you do that?
Autumn (38s): Yeah. If you're a fantasy author, then you've come to the right place. My name is Autumn and together with Jesper we've published more than 20 novels. Our aim is to use our experienced with to help you with writing marketing and selling your books to fans all over the world. Okay. Before we get into all of that, uh, let's just do a quick update on what we're working on as we've decided to do on these monthly joint sessions and a as we talked about last month, we U been pretty busy on a few number, a few different items, haven't we?
Autumn (1m 16s): Yes, we have some big projects coming up and one of them we hit a new milestone. So we're both really excited to be at this point with our top secret, not so secret all building course that we have been working on for months now. Yeah, yeah, yes. Yeah. Um, yeah, so well basically we, as we mentioned last time, we were sort of nailing down our joint process, uh, for plotting.
Jesper (1m 48s): So we have the book on our guidebook on how to flood a novel and there was a workbook associated to that. And on top of that we have a book on story ideas, which is sort of a well congruent with what we're talking about here today I guess. But we have those three books. Um, it sort of in the way, because we were focusing on getting those done before we could actually put some full effort into the world, but in cost. But, uh, now I'm very happy to say that we actually have the first draft of all three of those books done.
Autumn (2m 22s): So we're really excited. We have some content editing and our editor and actually a couple of bucks covers. But we got one of them done. So we're really moving along with those and our focus is definitely going into the world building, which is perfect because it's really starting to come together and hopefully it will snowball to completion very quickly. Well, quickly as it this year, 2019. Yeah, yeah. I was also doing this or you couldn't see that the, yeah, for those on the podcast, I'm doing air quotes quickly, uh, because uh, uh, well, uh, there is a still a lot of work with the welding course.
Jesper (2m 58s): Um, but now because of those first drafts of those books being done, uh, sort of only focusing on the world building costs now, so that's got to pick up a lot of peace. Um, but they still months away before it's done. Um, and as we've talked about before, we're building our own future world in, in conjunction with the development of the cost as sort of an example sessions so that people can see how, how to apply what you're teaching, which makes a lot of sense.
Jesper (3m 31s): Um, um, on top of that, we also want to add a example outgrowing of our, the first book in our next series, which we have not done yet, but a the first applied for that we want to include as a download in the planet books are, but people also there can see how we are going about the plotting and how are we applying what, what the book is teaching. So that alone also halls that book back because we need to finish the wealth building first and then we got a plot the book and only then can we, uh, you know, make that download available inside the program.
Jesper (4m 5s): They could, we release the book. So it's probably gonna I guess we're going to sort of have a kitchen perfect later in 2019 where we released the three books at one time and also have a cross on all of a sudden everything sort of well contribute factor, except I guess I'm gonna say it sounds like we made this giant ball of yarn that's all knotted together and tied or a giant piece of Celtic knot work and everything is interlaced independent on each other. So well it's all released. It's going to be big, phenomenal and beautiful. But until that, I feel like we're just pulling it individual strands that we don't see the whole pattern yet, but we're so close, we're getting there.
Autumn (4m 38s): I'm really excited. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Alright, well building and our books, that's actually a really good lead in to what we're talking about today. If, you know, should you just go and write whatever book idea is in your head, is that how the best way or writing books or is there a way of testing the market to see what readers are interested in? And so that's a fun question and one we both kind of ponder it and wonder. We're pondering as we look at our current, are you serious that we're going to be writing?
Jesper (5m 11s): Yeah, it's very interesting actually because it was something, it was something autumn brought up actually a while back I think because initially we talked about it quite a long while back about, but I'm sort of testing the waters with story ideas and trying to figure out if it's, you know, if there was a way to test out whether or not a story idea is gay, getting any interest from Rios a but also if it's sort of worth investing the time to write a full trilogy, for example with the story idea before we're getting into it.
Jesper (5m 44s): So we talked about it for quite a long while back and then it sort of went on ice for a while because we were doing other things I guess a but now it's, it's starting to become a bit relevant to have the conversation again and it's, well, especially me as well. I'm more interested because I know autumn have done a bit of testing with some with this stuff, uh, over the last well once I guess. Um, and when I started out writing my first a series, I did exactly what I guess like 90% of all authors probably do is I write what I wanted to write and then I just cross my fingers.
Jesper (6m 20s): Hopefully the market will like these sorts of books. Uh, but yeah, the question today is, is, is that really the best way of doing it? So that's where we, we sort of exploring this topic here. One good talking to you at the same time. So, uh, so hopefully you will get a lot of this, but maybe you want to sort of explain a bit what you mean. Sure. As can say this is, I'm in the middle still of doing this experiment because I did the same thing when I wrote my first trilogy. I had this idea, I just wrote it and actually then I wrote a different series and I just wrote it and they've done well, but they could be doing better.
Autumn (6m 53s): I look at the market, I know they could be doing better and my perspective has changed. I am, I'm passionate about writing. This is definitely my passionate what I want to do as an adult, but I'm also much more interested in now as an entrepreneur. I understand the business of writing and I know when you're doing a business you test out products, do you know, do some market testing, makes sure that people are actually going to like what you're doing. And of course there's a couple of ways of doing that and one is like you can see what is really popular now like game of Thrones and say, Hey, I've got to write game of Thrones, my version, but by the time I got that done written and how many other people are writing game of Thrones type stories right now you're just going to get this tiny little sliver of the market.
Autumn (7m 35s): But the other thing to do is to say true to yourself and what you want to write, which is great, but don't go and just write an entire series. Don't build an entire series. The best thing to do is to test the market and that can be done through a couple of means. One is short stories, which I've been writing short stories and they're great because they also help with the world-building. If you're, if you're kind of pants in your world or your characters on some short stories really are great, phenomenal way of getting a better feel for the world as you actually write it. Instead of writing a list of, you know, or even drawing a map, it gives you more of a perspective, very similar to how the novel will be, but somewhere between a short story and a novella.
Autumn (8m 16s): And that's what I am trying. I actually have two story ideas that I think are great, completely different ideas. Um, and I releasing two novellas in may and one in June and I'm going to see which one's readers perfor before I go and write the entire series on either of them. Because I'm at the point where I want to know I'm going to be writing something that only I enjoy. I mean I just love writing, but that readers are really waiting for and going to be receptive to because I do this for a living and I have to make money now you have to pay the bills and eat.
Autumn (8m 48s): I, I'm not a vampire yet or a tree. I'd actually like to be a tree, but a tree they could, right. So like an end, it has to be an a. It would be a fantastic way to live. So that's what I have written. I did plot out the series, I have a solid idea of what books one, two, and three would be, but I have only written the first novella and I'm going to hand give them out. Um, well that goes out there going to be 99 cents and I might do them as a sign up as a free a banged lead-in, um, reader magnet, but I'm going to give them, you know, a couple of months out there to see which one readers prefer in whichever is the one that I see the most interested in.
Autumn (9m 30s): That's the one I'm going to go ahead and write next. And then I avoid to write all three books and release them. Boom, boom, boom. Like we've discussed before in these episodes. So that's a fantastic way of doing it. But I don't know. You could give your ideas. Yes. As I mean does that sound like a reasonable thing would? My biggest con that I have found, and you can, this will be a good one for you to think about is I have written two novellas, two totally different worlds, two totally different characters. I've had to take the time to develop characters, develop a world, develop magic systems, everything.
Autumn (10m 3s): We've talked about, everything that we talked about in our world building course and I'm writing so far, 45,000 words in one 35,000 words on the other and I might not go any further. And so there's definitely a time constraint there. I mean, I could test out other ideas using the same world but different characters. But it's also not as easy as saying darn it, I writing three bucks and that's what's going to happen. Yeah, be good. Because I actually was, uh, wanted to rewind that for a second, but just to understand, so are you saying that you have like two completely different worlds and two completely different stories and that that's, and then you write one stop throwing one of them and another show of throwing another?
Autumn (10m 47s): Is that what you're saying? I have written short stories in both of them, but uh, to really do this market testing, I'm going to actually put them for sale, not just for download and I'm putting them on Amazon. And so they're actually novellas. Ah, the one is 45,000 words. The other one is 35,000 words, but it's two different, two different stories. Totally. One is more urban fantasy modern to more sun in this world. So that one was pretty easy to develop but at the end and a lot of backstory to make it real. And the other one is dark fantasy and totally different world.
Jesper (11m 19s): So that went with all the regular world-building you'd have to do. Right. Because my thinking would more be like, for example, let's, let's use our own future fiction. Here's an example for now. Uh, but we are building that entire world and am we've got to write in that world so it's not like, well then we'll just build a new world after that and the new world after that onto something, you know, we got to ride in that world. But so my thinking was more like that, that what you would need to do with in this case a I understand you have two different worlds and all that, but I'm just trying to link it back to to let's say a more efficient way.
Jesper (11m 57s): So we could have only one world. Uh, and then I was just speculating that maybe what you could do would be to write two or two or three or whatever, how many want to do different short stories that is all set in that world, but maybe just focus on on sort of some different stories or maybe some different characters or something just to see them. Which one sticks the most or which, which one gets downloaded the report the most mentally, you know, I wasn't thinking thinking that that would be my caveat is that if something doesn't, if it's this whole world that I've developed doesn't work, that's something I was thinking I could try just, you know, go different part of the history.
Autumn (12m 40s): Try different character to find the, find the aspect that readers certainly go, yes, this is what I want to know about and this is what I'm going to. And that once you see that spark, once you see readers really say, yes, I really want to read this. That's when you know, you have something that you want to go ahead and write and obviously write as quickly as you can, but it's probably going to be a year from that novella to that trilogy being released. But that's all understandable. They're excited. You're also going to be building readers, uh, who are waiting for the rest of the story.
Jesper (13m 11s): And that's, that's still a very powerful, so you have even that many more people waiting for that release. Yeah. As I said in the beginning of this video, we're sort of figuring this out. That's, we talked to basically you're just to view a seeing as sort of debating what to do ourselves here. So, uh, so that, that's sort of a bit of a look behind the scenes as well because I was just thinking as well when you set that, if it's even possible to do, unless you have quite some audience already. I mean in our cases we have some email lists, we can email people, we can ask her readers to which one do you prefer?
Jesper (13m 45s): And we can, you know, when release a short story, we can email them when we can say, okay, now it's ready and they will go on and buy it or download it. But I'm just thinking G to be actually be able to judge if one story is better ended the other or sort of entice us Rita more than one or the other, then you need enough statistical relevance to be able to actually judge it. You know, if if your grandma and your mother downloaded one and your brother and your sister download the other and you know, it doesn't help it.
Jesper (14m 18s): I mean you need, you need at least a thousand people reading each of them. And to be able to say anything relevant about whether or not it's, it's, I mean a hundred people is not even enough. Categorize myself as pretty savvy in, in the, in the apps and stuff. But uh, I think I would even, I would have a hard time, I think driving enough traffic to justice 99 cents short story to actually get people to convert to buy it. If they're just like they have no, let's say not it's of me or us or whatever already.
Jesper (14m 51s): I think it would be difficult. I think it would be, I agree actually and I thought of that cause you could sit there and churn out a whole bunch of stories and never see any real, just like S you know any real catch because you just don't have the marketing. But this might be a good reason to try KDP select for a 90 day period because then you get the free offers. Try to do some giveaways with BookFunnel, giveaway something where people sign up for your readers list so that you can then get them, they can have it for free by signing up and then you can say, Hey and read this other one for free.
Autumn (15m 24s): And then tell me which one you like. Because I mean that's a great way to start building up new new readers as well. Because I've thought about this. My previous books are, I have one that's sort of post-apocalyptic, which kind of fits one of the stories, but the other one I went from Nobel bright ethic fantasy too. I think I've been just a dark phase in my life and everything's dark. It's dark fantasies. I'm very a. One of the questions I recently answered on Instagram is would you survive in your world? I'm like, no, I would die in this world. My first world by Epic fantasy world.
Autumn (15m 55s): Oh yeah, I'd be fine. So fine. This one I'm dead and five days easy. So it's a much darker world. And so will my old audience light kit, I'm not sure. So I'm thinking I might need to do some new audience building anyway. So I have thought of that where it's like, Hey, sign up, get it for free. Oh Hey, here's the other one for free. Hey, which one do you like? And so there is going to be a lot more, you know, talking to people, chasing people, saying, Hey, you know, do a little bit of a hustle, but I want to know what people like and hopefully I can get them to interact with me.
Autumn (16m 30s): I'm actually doing some interact polls and some contests and stuff like that to get people kind of more excited and more involved in the story. And knowing, learning about it very quickly, learning about the world very quickly and then I can even just see what people, how people are they doing the direct polls, are they answering questions and finding out what are the eight fantasy races they are in the swine or if they're rightfully or dark Faye and the other one, see how often they're actually following through with some of the other things. And I can take all of that data to see where people are interested.
Autumn (17m 3s): Hopefully, hopefully I'll let you know in a year when I have the books written super herself. Yeah, well, well at the end of the day that the question fundamentally here is, is it worth to do some market analysis beforehand before you stopped doing all the, you know, writing a full trilogy releasing it only to figure out that, well, nobody's really interested in in this particular world that his story, you know. But on the other hand, is it worth because, well, as I said before, I think if you have a good building audience already, you can, you can probably get to the stage whereby you can make a conclusion without let's say too much hot work.
Jesper (17m 46s): But if you don't have that, I think you want for quite some hustling to get to the stage where you actually have the input that you need to to make a proper conclusion on whether or not people like one story versus the other. A so for me, I think unless you have the building audience, I were, I would say, well if you're willing to spend a lot of time and effort on it, then it's great. But is it going to long run monitors situated?
Jesper (18m 17s): Is it going to save your time? I've just got to spend a lot of time figuring out which one you're to. Right. Anyway. So you know, if you see what I mean, if, if you write fairly quickly, you know, if you don't take what two years to write a novel, sadly, let's say it takes you four months to write a novel, you know 12 months you're going to have Fultz religion done. If you don't have any building an audience and you have to run ads and you have to collect all the data to figure out which one to write the first year I need to write the short stories, then you need to do all the margarita.
Jesper (18m 48s): It's, I would think you're probably looking at seven, eight month right there. And then you could have done the full trilogy in four months extra and then that's done. Yeah. And that is definitely the catch. And I also think of it from a reader's perspective cause I've done this as I've met other authors and you go to their Amazon page and you see all these like maybe books one and two out of five that are up. But then there's books one and two and three or book one and this other trilogy and book two of just all of these half finished trilogies.
Autumn (19m 20s): And I know as a reader I'm like just finish something. And so when I see an author publish a book, a book one and they, you know, I, you list out the names of the rest of the books, you know, is that really what you want to see as a reader? Go era. Have other readers come to you and see you let you have all these book ones and no books two, three and four. I don't think that's really what you want to see either. So it is, I play with that and I have to admit I probably, I like both of these stories enough. I can see me writing the whole series and both of them.
Autumn (19m 51s): So it's more it. So which one do I write next versus which one is going to go into the hopper and I'm just never going to see the light of day. I don't feel that way about it. But that is the true platform that you know is being built as a, this is a writing as a business and this is how you do your research and this is how you know what to write index and you're going to have ideas that literally get canned and never written. And that's just so sad to be as a writer. You know, even I kind of straddling the line of well this is the way you're supposed to do it. And then there's me going, but I just want to write it.
Autumn (20m 24s): I just want to see which one to write decks and I have a feeling I already know which one I'm going to write next. So yeah, why am I doing this other than, you know, I can be enough build up some readers while I'm just have the novellas out and it will help me though. Give me maybe confidence a which one's going to do better? And I have to admit though, you and I together have done some market research and that totally a little bit of what I was planning on writing because by doing the market research I refined and tone down, um, some elements that I would have normally have kept.
Autumn (21m 0s): So I do think market research has a place and you should be aware of like what is the top 50 bestselling books and fantasy are your genre right now and allow that to, you know, temper the ideas that are going in your head. Because if you really want to write a bestseller, if you really are going to do this for money, you do have to do some research somehow. If you are a fast writer and you can whip out, you know, if my mother my game and really concentrating, I could easily do a novella and a month that is nothing.
Autumn (21m 30s): So if I could write two or three novellas, get a feel for the audience, um, with, cause I do have a, you know, a pretty good audience already built up. Say, Hey, which one of these do you like? And then go for that series and get it done in a year and have a very solid platform all the while. I think that's a really good business idea. Yeah, in principle, I agree. I, I, for me, I think you need to have the built in audience otherwise, to be honest, I would, if somebody came and asked me for advice and they did not have a built in audience, I would probably tell them, no, don't do it.
Jesper (22m 6s): Don't do that. Because you've got to spend so much time and effort on it. And honestly, I don't think unless you're willing to really spend a long time and I've got to get to to a proper conclusion, chances are probably your, you'll jump to a conclusion the way before you should and then you're going to end up in the same place. You wouldn't have ended up anyway. But what I think I would say though is, because you mentioned how we've done some market research and whatnot, which is actually part of some of the modules in the world than in cost. So I would say if you know what you're doing with your world building, meaning that that you're also building a world that you know has elements in it that that does generally like them.
Jesper (22m 47s): That is the first step and then the second step and now I'm shamelessly plugging some of the stuff that we're doing at the second step in step is a. If you know what you're doing with your plotting and you can develop the characters based on some, what should I call it, like like generic elements that is also known to invoke a reader interests. If you sort of have those things working together, I would almost go as far as to say that the story idea it as long as there's enough meat on the bone of that story idea that it can carry it.
Jesper (23m 23s): It's religion for example, but let's assume that that is the case. Then I would say it probably doesn't really matter if it's the one story of the other one. You're writing right? Because if the world buildings based on some market analysis and the plotting is based on what we know Rita's generally like with characters and plot lines and character arcs and those sorts of things should be safe to be honest. I think. I think so too though. I think let's am ask anyone watching or listening that, uh, you know, do you want an update as I carry out my experiment that's coming up?
Autumn (23m 58s): Uh, if you do put it in the comments and we will schedule one of our one on one sessions, or at least a little update later on to let you know how my little experiment runs and if I do see some feedback and then if it carries out in a year when I launched the series, if I really do see that maybe my sales have increased and I feel it comes from what it does it come from, does it come from the fact that I asked readers which ones they prefer and went with that or, because, you know, I've been advertising it for a year with a novella. I don't know.
Jesper (24m 29s): We'll find out. I'm taking notes. Yeah. But I think that is an excellent idea actually to uh, you know, let us know if you're interested in, in, in, in a later update on how this experiment is going bigger. Because right now I would say I'm probably on the, on the, let's say I'm just probably sitting with the conclusion that it's not worth it. Um, to be honest, based on what we've talked about and, and before entering this conversation, actually I haven't made up my mind, so it just happening by, we were talking here, but based on what we talked about, but I think I've sort of re recent my mind to, to watch that.
Jesper (25m 6s): I don't take it twice, but maybe you see it differently or maybe maybe you just, you're just curious too, to learn how this test that autumn is doing is going. And of course maybe autumn will surprise me and actually tell me that I, I was an idiot and actually we should be doing what she's doing because it makes so much sense. And then of course I will be happy to come on air again and say I was an idiot, but a until then I think it's not worth it. I will definitely wrap up by saying it has been a lot of work and the stories have become both very near and dear to my heart, so I couldn't, I could not write one at this point.
Autumn (25m 45s): So I'm gonna basically I have the next two years of serious plan. I'm just trying to decide which one to write first and being ironic sometimes as I am it, it'll probably be the readers will tell me one and I'd be like, but I wanted to write this one next and I'll probably do it. I think if I care any flack from my re my readers, it will be because I didn't continue in my elemental fantasy world that was nowhere bright and wit to this dark, dark place. And I'm probably gonna get an email saying, are you okay? Are you sure? I'd be like, hang in there. Trust me is a really good series.
Autumn (26m 15s): Probably bad shit happens, but shouldn't have said that really bad stuff happens. But really it's a good suit. Just trust me. It's an amazing, amazing storyline. Um, on both sides. Both are dark. I don't know why I'm just there in my life. Everything is fine, I promise. Awesome. On that note, uh, let us know in the common section or in the, uh, in the show notes a if you're listening on the podcast, if you would like an update later on on this one, a on this topic, and we will make sure to, uh, to come back to it later on.
Jesper (26m 48s): Uh, but, uh, on that note, I think a all those left to say is a see you next Monday. Bye.
Internationally bestselling author Angela Ford began publishing in 2015 and grew her platform quickly. Discover how she managed to rocket up the indie book list and the essential things you need to build your author platform. Plus, we may have a bit of fun on the way!
Check out Angela Ford's writing at https://angelajford.com/ and her amazing website design for authors at https://www.angelajfordmarketing.com.
New videos EVERY single Monday. Make sure to subscribe: http://bit.ly/1WIwIVC
PATREON! Many bonus perks for those who become a patron of the channel. https://www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy
LET'S CONNECT! Closed Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/AmWritingFantasy/ Blog and Courses: https://www.amwritingfantasy.com/ Jesper on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SchmidtJesper Autumn on Twitter: https://twitter.com/weifarer
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Intro (9s): Yeah.
Autumn (12s): If you're a fantasy author then you've come to the right place. I'm autumn and together with Jesper we've run amwritingfantasy.com between the two of us, we have more than 20 books and our aim is to help you with your writing and marketing in deafness. We are today with Angela Ford who is an international bestselling author and has an amazing author platform and she's going to give us some tips today to help us out. Welcome, Angela, if you could give us a brief introduction and tell us a little bit about your writing and how you got started.
Angela (43s): All right, well, thank you for having me on. I, wow. I started writing a long time ago and I guess I never really expected to be here, but one of the things that I've found so far with the writing journey is that it just takes the time that it takes. So I guess that would be my number one tip. Um, I think nowadays is really hard when we go online, especially on social media and people are talking in different writing groups about their income and how much they've made, um, from just this month.
Angela (1m 19s): And it's something like five figures or six figures and it's hard to like look at that and go like, well, I've been writing for a long time and how come I'm not making that amount yet? But as I found out from just from my writer's journey that it just takes some people, it just takes them, they get there instantly and some people, it just takes a long time. So I'm all about the journey and just making sure that everything is set up the way they look that up in order to help you reach your, your writing goals.
Angela (1m 50s): And so for that, um, I do a couple of different things and I'll share my story. I started writing when I was 12 years old and that was the first time I started writing fantasy yeah, it was really fun. Like I just loved writing and I was home until I had a lot of time on my hands because school didn't take up as much time as it did. Like if I went to public schools. So instead of being in school for like seven and a half hours a day, I did school work for four hours and I tried to be done by noon, so then I could have the rep for that afternoon until they do whatever I like to do, which ended up being writing other things, but mainly writing.
Angela (2m 31s): And I really was inspired by, um, token of course CS Lewis. Uh, when growing up my dad used to read the Hobbit out loud to me and my sister. And so it was just a lot of fun, like with the whole Blake, the doom and gloom and just like the different fantasy tropes. Like they have the drawers that show up on the doorstep and Bilbo was just resistant to this adventure in the ring that makes him invisible. Like all of those fun things. I just loved how fantasy takes things that you know, don't happen in the natural world.
Angela (3m 6s): And just all the, the mystery and the magic and makes it come alive. And that really inspired me to write. I was like, I want to write something that's, that's fun, that they take all the impossibilities and makes them into this ridiculous story that we're reading. And that's really where it started. And it was funny because I remember that I started writing the first draft of the four world series, which is more one of my more popular fantasy series is the first one that I publish.
Angela (3m 38s): And I remember I wrote the first draft of that. And then, um, I kind of switched and I decided to become a musician and then I decided to go off to college and get a real job as they say. That's something that would pay the bills. And I remember like writing just stuck with me. It just stayed with me. And I remember writing, even during my sophomore year of college, I spent a summer and I just wrote a book because I loved writing and it was a great outlet for me. And then, uh, I recall I just stopped writing.
Angela (4m 10s): Uh, and it was after my laptop was stolen and it had all my work on it and I saved all my work. Blog the actual hard drive with my laptop. So when it was stolen, like everything was gone. And so I just, I just gotta stop because it was at that moment was like, okay, I need to focus on having a real career and having a really good job and I'm going to do something else now. And it was my sisters that really kind of pulled me back or like, Hey, we really want to hear your stories like usual, right again. And so I actually joined a writers' group.
Angela (4m 44s): Um, it was something like write to a book and a hundred days and I had that daily motivation just encouraging me to write. And I finished the first draft and they very first novel, uh, the five warriors. I remember when I was getting ready to release, cause I knew I wanted to self publish because my main goal was getting my book into the hands of readers as fast as possible. And I didn't work through the process of querying and agent and stuff because I know that that takes time. Like it, it just takes time. And so I was like, I want to make sure I can get this book out quickly, you know, within a few months to these people instead of waiting like a year, year and a half, however long.
Angela (5m 23s): I remember when I started working on it and I was like, okay, like the first thing that I need to do is start building my platform. I need to create an email list and start growing that. I need a website where people can go and they can sign up to the email list. I need an attractive offer because I don't really have anything to give them. So I need to make sure I have something that's fun or interesting or just why people want to sign up. And then the other thing that I decided to do, I was like, I also need a reason for, um, Robert Walters to the, my work.
Angela (5m 56s): And so I'm to do newsletter swaps too. And so this was back in 2015 it was kind of before, like the whole like newsletter swap idea was super popular. Um, it was actually like I had just reached out to authors and I said, Hey, like I will feature your book in my knees letter, um, on this day, you know, just help me spread the word about my book. So it was just kind of an interesting little swap there. And for the actual growing my email list, I really didn't know what to do other than just do a $25 Amazon gift card giveaway.
Angela (6m 27s): So I did that and people signed up for my email list. I was part of the, the contest. I kind of found out afterwards, those might not be the best subscribers or people that want to win a contest. And so, you know, sign up for anything. That's the ideal. But it just all started there with, um, making sure that I had my, my platforms I'm going to give away and I can focus on growing my email list. So that's kind of the, the background. Let's kind of start career at again.
Autumn (6m 59s): I love the fact that you knew that you needed a plat for somebody. New authors don't like have that knowledge, that savvy attitude. So where did you, how did you know that this is what you needed to be successful? Because I know I actually started publishing in 2012 and um, I didn't do a website, but I, there was so much I didn't know. And at the time if you Googled it, they were like, no advice out there. I always joke it's the wild West days of publishing because I mean, you could literally do anything and probably be successful, but by the time you hit 2015 when you started, you actually really needed to kind of know what you're doing.
Autumn (7m 36s): You need to know that you needed a good, good cover, that you needed to edit. These things were so important or you would sink to the bottom. So how did you come into the writing game and actually know that and have that much experience and knowledge?
Angela (7m 50s): Well, it's, it's funny that you asked that. So, like I said, so back in the day I decided to give up writing because you know, lost my laptop, lost on my work, you know, it started whose practice really hard and so I broke focus. Yeah. I was just, I was just struggling with it and I was like, okay, I'll still write, but maybe I'll blog online and if my work is on blind, then you know, it's not going to be deleted. Or if I'm storing something in the cloud, then it's going to be much easier to do if I don't have my laptop or if I'm on any device is going to be easy to retrieve that work without losing it completely.
Angela (8m 25s): And so I decided to focus on my career and my career was actually in marketing and yeah, so I worked for a company that did development. They did websites and as I was learning, I started at the bottom when I was working my way up. And one of the things they really encouraged me to do is really learn about, really focused on my own personal growth in where I wanted to go. And the more I worked for them, the more I was like, marketing is really interesting. I'm really curious about content marketing and email marketing and all these different things.
Angela (8m 58s): Like it's fascinating and I really want to do more with that. And so as I was standing, uh, learning about it, I was like, I need to work with entrepreneurs who are publishing books because I want to know the behind the scenes. And so I worked with um, a couple of different authors, especially one entrepreneur, he had a book coming out and it was nonfiction. So I helped them with the research of it. I looked at what he did for his book lodge and he had like a whole beautiful landing page. He had a place for people to go to like see the book, he has a purchase links on there.
Angela (9m 29s): He had the reviews from other people, he had a way to sign up for email lists, all these sorts of different things. And I was like, Oh wow, we really has it together. And I noticed the one thing that made his review really stand out because he got like something around 25 to 50 reviews, like within the first week I realized was because he had a platform and he already had people on his side that were willing to like read his work. So, um, that was, that really put him ahead and I was like, I'm starting from scratch. I'm not going to have these people right away, so I need to do what he did.
Angela (10m 2s): I need to build my platform. That's the one I need to do because he already has a platform and he's way ahead of the game, uh, with his book's coming out. And so it was really from past experience and working in the marketing field that I really saw, like this makes a difference between um, breaking your, your launch. It's the whole marketing, making sure you have a thing set up correctly in from the get go. And the other thing when marketing is that it can be a quick process or it can be a slower one.
Angela (10m 34s): I realized that it would be a lot harder for me to get going if I didn't set those things up right away. And so that's what really helped. That's how I knew how to do it.
Autumn (10m 43s): That is fantastic. So you saw the power of having that before you even got started. So that is no wonder you were your on top of it. That's a fantastic way of starting out. And so that was when you published your first book. You already had your website, you had a freebie, you had a mailing list. So when you launched your first book, what happened?
Angela (11m 4s): Well, so lots of great things happen. So I was able to grow my email list, I think from zero to about, it was either 800 or a thousand and that happened in that two month period. Uh, I was able to the book release and it was actually a full-price launch. Um, I did not do any routes. I really want it to make some money from the books. So I believe I released it at four 99. Wow. Yeah. But the thing was, I have a lot of people that were excited about it.
Angela (11m 36s): I had a lot of friends and family and so they were the people that bought that book. And I know real market is really don't go after your friends or family because they're not your target audience. But that's what I have at the time. So. And so they bought the books. And then one of the other things that I do, which was really big, uh, was I had an actual book release party at my apartment. And so that, yes, and the reason I did that was because like I said earlier, my big goal with, um, doing the indie publishing route was because I wanted to have the physical book to put it in the hands of people when I wanted it fast.
Angela (12m 15s): Like I want this now when the, when the book came out, like the ebook released online and that was a good seller, was doing just fine. And then, um, I had the party and I ordered a bunch of books. I think I'll order it like only ordered like 30 books. Cause I was like, Oh, he'll be fine and stuff. And I had the party was great. Everyone came, everyone bought books. Like everybody bought books. It was crazy. I wasn't expecting it. They were like, I pay $15 for the book. It was wonderful. And they sold me out and then people were like, Oh we'll have like later that we could like Oh yeah I need to pick up a book and stuff.
Angela (12m 48s): And I was like this is working like for itself. This is wonderful. S I really find it cause I went really well and now like selling 30 paperbacks doesn't seem like a big deal. But back then when you're first starting out like every little bit helps. Like it's like success to be like selling. And so after that like book sales were fine. I wasn't making a ton of mining, but I was making around like I believe it's like 50 to a hundred dollars a month off of it because then again it was full price.
Angela (13m 20s): And so that actually ended up being something that it wasn't getting as many sales because it was full price and I really wasn't doing anything with am. I did not do advertising, uh, very much. I think I did it like the first like launch week I did some Facebook ads and I may have done some Amazon ads later, but I really didn't know what I was doing with ads and I felt like I really need to like sit down and take an ad. Scores are really learning what to do with ads before I could really utilize them.
Angela (13m 51s): Um, it just felt like throwing money away. Well not really throwing money away if felt more like I was using that money to give my book's visibility, which might or might not convert to a sale. And so I was okay with spending that money, um, for that week that I spent it because I was like, this is all about visibility. And I need visibility. I meet people to see the cover over and over again and hopefully one day they will actually buy it. That's also one of the things that I learned, um, when I was in the workforce was that the rule of marketing is it takes people about seven times, see something or hear about it before they actually make a purchase.
Angela (14m 26s): And so lasting your email about that one time about your knee release is great, but you also need to do it again, you know, like couple weeks later, tell tone, Hey, like make sure you got this. Yeah, it's crazy. Even now, uh, I will say that I have my best days for cells when I send a message to my email list and I always think, I'm like, Oh, my email is, they're great. They're my super fans. They have all my books is wonderful. But now every time I said, well, now all of a sudden all these smells are coming out of the blue.
Angela (14m 58s): And I'm like, Oh, you didn't have it really didn't have it. Oh my gosh, why are you here? Well, like this book has been out for forever. Why are you just now buying it? They started later in the series and that's just the way it was. That's probably it. Like you just never know. And so, uh, I know like there, there are different thoughts when it comes to having an email list. But, uh, for myself I found that it's a, it's a powerful thing and I wouldn't have had that if I hadn't thought to like set up my platform make sure I started building it from day one.
Angela (15m 33s): So it's a really smart way to go. I think that answer your question, I kind of gave some extra. No, no, but that's, to me it's all very good information because it's just amazing how much I think you've done so well and you've grown so quickly. Like I said, you're an international bestseller and you have how many books on now? You have quite a few. I just release number eight actually 2019 number eight is out. That is an amazing accomplishment.
Angela (16m 4s): And yeah, and you've sold around the world. You've done amazing with your platform. Your website is very top-notch. It looks beautiful and of course it helps to know that you were actually do how to build a newbie. But for those who are starting out, what's some of really good advice for a new author or even an author who is just their sales, aren't there, what could they do? What should they focus on? Number one, to create a platform? What's the first step that they should do? Yeah, so I think number one, it really helps, um, to focus on making sure you have something to give people when they join your email list.
Angela (16m 41s): So a lot of people call it a welcome gift or the lead magnet or just kind of whatever you want to call it. But when they, when they go through our website to sign up, am is good to have that sign up for my email list, front and center, maybe at the very top. That's like the number one thing, especially if you're brand new and then give them a preview of your work so they can understand, um, your writing and just kind of leave him hanging or just kind of hook them in with your story. And so for that I actually create it.
Angela (17m 12s): I used to give away, I think like the first, like one to two chapters. Then my first novel, like that was my, my giveaway for readers. And it worked just fine. It was great. Um, now I actually give away a full short story that's like 9,000 words. Uh, but one of the reasons I recommend doing that is because number one, you're growing your email list, so that's great. And then number two, you can give people a preview of your work, encouraged them to buy your actual book that's out on Amazon or just wherever. It's that you can now encourage people to apply it.
Angela (17m 44s): And then number three, now that you have people on your list, you can talk to them and you've been, you can build them up to the cell. And so what, what I used to do with my email list is once they joined, you know, I give him the preview a little bit later, I come back and say, Oh, we'll have a quiz on my website. If you want to take it, you can find out which character your mill slide and then read the book, you know, and you can kind of be like, Oh yeah, that, that result was right. Or wool, the characters straight. Um, and those two things really help because people do need those reminders.
Angela (18m 16s): Like they, they might get the book and download it and then for it to read it and then they get an email from you like, Oh, what'd you do think are with character you like? And they're like, Oh yeah, I need to read that is. So it just helps to really jump in memories. And so that's what I recommend starting out. Um, make sure that you're a jog in their memories and actually having that conversation. Uh, and then the other thing that I suggest doing is if you're really want to make more cells, you might want to think about pricing a little bit. Uh, maybe if you have a, a couple of books out already, maybe start the lower the first one off at a lower price point and then kind of raise the prices on the other ones.
Angela (18m 51s): Just to bring more people in and get that visibility online. And then the third thing that I recommend doing is just connecting with other authors that I just massive because I feel like I wouldn't be where I am today without having, without knowing what other authors are doing, without having their encouragement and support and accountability. And that's huge. And so just talking to someone else about their journey and what worked for them and just kind of the tips and the tricks that you can also apply to your platform will help tune.
Angela (19m 24s): And so what is your number one place that you like to network with other authors, if you don't mind sharing that tip of release where you think the best places are to go? Yeah, I actually love Facebook groups and I really don't use Facebook that much anymore. Like I was one of those people that signed up back in the day when Facebook was just for college kids and I was a college kid without the place to be obviously. But now with the groups, it's just great to have those communities just have conversations with.
Angela (19m 54s): And so a couple of the groups that I've been hanging out in and we're actually read the post and interact with them is am 20 bucks to 20 K that's a big one. And they have am the yearly, uh, seminars or conferences in different parts of the world. And so that's a great place to go to like catch up with other people and learn a lot and get encouraged to actually like publish your book, get it out there, start marketing it because the beginning of the journey you're going to learn so much once you're actually doing it. Uh, and then, um, SPF, I'm self publishing formula by Mark Dawson as another great place.
Angela (20m 29s): Um, I'm actually taking his ads course and must help me just to really become confident with what I'm doing with that. So now it's not just one visibility is about actually making, but yeah, they'll book me in these online and there, there are tons of good ones. So you just really have to find what works well for you. I've been in somewhere, you know, it was great, but I didn't love the advice and I was like, yeah, I'm just going to leave it because this, this isn't exactly for me, but it just, it just really helped to just hear what other people are doing to be able to ask questions and get advice and people are great.
Angela (21m 1s): They're willing to talk about it. You get all these free of biases. Wonderful.
Autumn (21m 6s): True. I mean, how often do you, it's, it's one of the things am I found that recently though. Someone else that, one of my favorite things about authors is compared to other professions in groups and even online, they tend to be so helpful. We know that a reader is going to read more than us. We can't produce enough books to fill a readers to be read list in our lifetimes, even if we wrote every single day. So authors are amazingly supportive. I every time I need to be uplifted, I just go and like talk to, you know, go jump on Twitter, jump on Facebook, say hi to somebody, and you end up networking and talking or just blowing off steam where, uh, my husband's a photographer and it's cut throat.
Autumn (21m 47s): Don't, don't go on photographer. Thor comes, they will kill you.
Angela (21m 51s): Yes.
Autumn (21m 52s): Lethal. If you want to be depressed, go on photographers, little rope and you will feel inadequate. But that is fantastic. Is there any last tips that you want to give to wrap up before we move on?
Angela (22m 5s): Oh, well my other tip would just be, don't be afraid to get started. What you have to get started because you need to learn. You need to make those mistakes and you need to improve so that the next book you bring out can be even better. And then the third one will be even better. And I just feel like it's a journey as kind of like walking up a staircase. Like every, every time you release a book, you get closer to the top. And that's kind of like a snare that you've accomplished, I guess. Uh, so you just keep going because eventually you're going to get to where you want to be. It just takes time and patience.
Angela (22m 36s): But you absolutely, you've got to get started and you know, there'll be afraid to reach out for help, but like it's, people are ready to cheer you on. And like you said, there really isn't any competition because, you know, I released my fantasy books. I'm really excited. I tell my advanced review team, you know, I worked so hard, I spent months working on this. They're like, great. I read in one sitting, wonderful, what's next? And I'm like, I don't have anything else. I don't like go here. People that I recommend you go read while you're waiting.
Autumn (23m 8s): And that is true because yes, I mean that's why we support each other because uh, it takes, even if you're a fast writer, you're talking maybe a month, want to be three months, you've got to do the editing and the artwork and you know, many you let it sit for a little bit. You got to do world-building, especially with fantasy and plotting and characters, especially if you switch. I just recently finished up, um, I'd been writing in one fantasy world. I switched to a new one and that first novella was so hard because it's a world Duke your it was so much to figure out and build um, I was so easy to write the same characters, the same world for six bucks.
Autumn (23m 44s): You're like, I'm dreaming it. I mean, it was like, you know, I, they're my best friends. It's not out the effort and suddenly it's all new again. And it was harder than I remember the first time around. That's okay. And I agree with you. I mean, if you don't start, so many people want to write and you know, they want perfection, they don't want to do anything until it is perfect. What, you don't even know what you need until you put it out there. And so yeah, it should be edited. It should have a good cover. You should do professional level, but you will learn so much more and you will look back five books from now.
Autumn (24m 16s): It'd be like, Oh, I just didn't know.
Angela (24m 20s): I still go, wow. I just didn't know. And now I know. So it's a learning process, but it's wonderful.
Autumn (24m 28s): It is definitely my passion and it took me awhile to figure that out, but I, there's, I will never stop riding. The internet could crash and we ended up at a post apocalyptic world and I'll still be writing somewhere. That's just who I am. It's how I defined myself.
Angela (24m 44s): That is wonderful because I feel like that's the spirit of writers. We don't, right? Because we know we're going to make X amount of money off our next book launch. We write because we love it. And I mean, what you said was absolutely perfect. I'm just going to say yes. Yes.
Autumn (25m 0s): Fantastic. Thank you so much for being here today. Angela and I will put links below the episode to your websites so everyone can check you out. And thank you for the tips. Have you writing
Angela (25m 12s): thank you.
Should you use Facebook ads to sell more books or are you just going to waste your time and money?
Bill and I discuss this very topic while we also give some good tips and tricks on things like ad images, audience selection and split testing.
Lots of good stuff that should be helpful for all authors who has either never run any Facebook ads or tried for awhile before giving up.
New episodes EVERY single Monday. To subscribe on YouTube, go here: http://bit.ly/1WIwIVC
PATREON! Many bonus perks for those who become a patrons. https://www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy
LET'S CONNECT! Closed Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/AmWritingFantasy/ Blog and Courses: https://www.amwritingfantasy.com/ Jesper on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SchmidtJesper Autumn on Twitter: https://twitter.com/weifarer
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Jesper (12s): Welcome to amwritingfantasy. I'm Jesper and to together with Autumn. I run this channel and we try to share writing, publishing and marketing tips every single Monday for you. But today I actually had one of our patron supporters on here too and we're going to talk some, some very important stuff about the Facebook marketing, which is a very, very relevant if you want to S to sell some books. Uh, and of course I should also mention that if you want to check out patron, then you can go there and check out the stuff that we offer.
Jesper (46s): There is a ton of rewards that you can get for just a $1. For example, you're going to get a bookmark, you're going to get early access to the videos. There is actually a cost that you're going to get access to for, for, for a reduced price. So all that is possible by a patriarch who would check out the link below if you're interested in that. But I want to say hello to build and thank you bill for joining at a very late hour on the other side of the Atlantic.
Jesper (1m 16s): But we want to say, uh, say hi to everybody
Bill (1m 19s): are there. So, um, yeah, uh, thanks for the introduction. Yes. Um, yeah, I've, uh, I just started fiction writing myself. Uh, but, uh, my experience has mostly my day job, if you want to call it that as a, mostly with the Facebook marketing and a few other types of marketing that go along with that. So, um, I figured that I could, uh, maybe help some people out to our new to Facebook marketing or perhaps don't have the, um, sort of the background that I do with it.
Bill (1m 55s): Um, I lost count somewhere, um, after 10,000 Facebook ads run for me and, uh, for clients as well. Uh, so there's, we've done a lot of ads over the last few years and we've seen the platform evolved. Um, uh, a long time ago. I don't think I was on it the maybe the first year. Um, but, uh, I've seen it evolve from something that's sort of barely function to, uh, uh, uh, uh, terrifying machine now.
Jesper (2m 29s): Yeah, yeah, yeah. And when you sort of talked about the idea of, of us discussing Facebook outside, I thought it was a good idea because especially with Facebook, it's if they are so incredibly good at taking your money, it's, it's crazy. You know, some marketing platforms like Amazon asks, for example, they, it's very hard to, to get them to take your many activity, but whatever you do with Facebook, they will take all of your budget, no problem. So, uh, knowing how to, what to think about in how to go it, they see important at Easter when you're autumn from a testing perspective so you don't end up spending all your money.
Jesper (3m 6s): So I was looking forward to this conversation here. Bill
Bill (3m 10s): okay. Uh, well I can give you a few tips based on that idea. First you mentioned testing and uh, that's something I think sometimes we're lucky. Sometimes we make assumptions about what the audience likes and get it right. Um, but in my experience, even knowing a lot about a particular market, that usually happens at best one in five, you're going to have to run many ads or do many posts.
Bill (3m 41s): If you're working purely on your Facebook page, uh, before you'll find one that hits. And of course, uh, we all want the first thing that we do to work, but it doesn't usually work out that way. So that's the first thing that I run into with clients when I'm talking to them is a, they want the first, they make an assumption about their audience and that when we do some proper testing, it just isn't true. We, we want our audience to be certain people, but it turns out there's different people who are interested in our product and that's OK.
Bill (4m 16s): um, the, the job from a marketing perspective is to figure out who those people are, what they like, and to give them more of what they like in a way that gets them to give something back to us. Right. Um, I guess one way that I like to look at it is very similar to plotting a book. Uh, even a short story, you want that hook, the catch their attention and get guide them to an idea, a concept, whatever. Um, whatever it is that your post or your ad is trying to do.
Bill (4m 48s): And then you give them no option but to move on to the next thing, whatever that might be. And most often, um, we want them, uh, you know, the bottom line is important. We want them to buy. And, uh, so I also have clients who if they don't have something ready to sell right now, they, well, I'll do Facebook later. I don't have anything to sell. So why would I want to put anything up there? Um, but you can start testing before you have, uh, uh, a book that's a on sale on Amazon or, or another platform.
Bill (5m 25s): Um, you can start building your audience, building your platform and especially getting those key people from Facebook, uh, who like the style of your writing. Uh, maybe because they've seen little snippets, you can post a short story or a chapter or even a paragraph sometimes and get a reaction. Um, Facebook is very visual, so it also helps if you have something like a, it can be an illustration, but especially with first time authors paying for illustrations, you're not doing them yourself.
Bill (5m 58s): That gets kind of expensive. Uh, but everybody needs a cover. And, uh, so you can do, uh, the full cover. You can do, um, parts of the cover. Uh, if it's a complex image, maybe you can work with your designer, your artist, um, so that the cover is interesting in different ways and you can crop it several ways to post on Facebook and all of those things can be done over and over. Um, so that's another misconception that I run into quite a lot with clients who haven't used Facebook quite as hard as I have.
Bill (6m 33s): And that is that, uh, you'll have some people in your audience who will see the same things a couple of times, but they don't normally complain. Um, so it pays to post many times not spamming your page or other people's page or group or whatever. Um, but if you post something Monday morning and, uh, the people who you're trying to reach, only some of them are paying attention Monday morning, by the time you're, you've posted a few more things and Thursday or Friday rolls around, it's fine to post a similar thing.
Bill (7m 10s): Again, introduce it in a slightly different way if you want to test that because it's another different, but batch of people will see it and the bigger your audience grows, the more, uh, the, the more sort of spread out their attention will be, right. So you might be lucky and you'll have, uh, this core audience who just, uh, weights and, and continually refreshes Facebook on your page. But that's unrealistic for the Mo. Most of us are not there yet.
Bill (7m 40s): Um, so don't feel bad about reposting the same thing. Obviously, if it's, you know, I don't know, a Christmas or Halloween posts or something like that, then that, that's, that dictates when you can post it. Um, the other thing that audiences tend to like is if, uh, you, uh, I think in most of the markets that I work with it or S or you do something at least once a week, uh, that is themed somehow. So for example, I have a client who has a, some dog products and that kind of thing.
Bill (8m 14s): And, uh, you know, the cute cat and cute dog pictures really work on Facebook. Um, so we have, uh, you know, dogs with their tongues hanging out. Then we get users, we invite users to contribute their pictures on tongue, tongue out Tuesday night. So Tuesday is the day for this. And, uh, we don't make a big deal about it then even so we get a lot of engagement and, uh, that's, that's kind of a silly thing, but Facebook is full of that. Uh, and uh, it may not be appropriate for, you know, high fantasy or, uh, some kind of grim dark literature or whatever.
Bill (8m 49s): Uh, but you can always find something that appeals to your audience that way and, uh, invite them to respond and the responses. Yeah. Like, you know how this works, especially I guess I, I know you're good with Twitter, right? Desperate. The responses that you can bring teach you about your audience, but it also on Facebook teaches Facebook about your audience. And, uh, the better your interaction with your audience, the better.
Bill (9m 20s): Um, Facebook will understand who likes your stuff and it'll show more to their friends and their friends' friends.
Jesper (9m 28s): Yeah. So I, so I wanted to ask, so if, if we're, when we're talking about organic reach with sort of what are we into here rather than paid apps, but I think also, well of course users could, if they wanted to, they could go in and they could say, okay, from a post from this page, I always want to see them, for example, and then Facebook which show it to them. But I think 99% of people either don't know how to do that or don't do it at all, which means that from an organic reach point of view with Facebook, it is very, very limited who actually sees your posts.
Jesper (10m 4s): So from that perspective, of course it makes sense that you can post a several times because they won't see it anyway. But, but I was more thinking, do you have any thoughts around how, how, if any way, can you increase your organic wheat wheat without paying for it? Because at least the way I see Facebook and maybe maybe you could educate me here, but at least the way I see it, unless you put some money into the pot, forget about it.
Bill (10m 29s): Generally, that's true. There are some pretty nifty ways, but most of the ways that I used to do exactly that, people like to call it free organic traffic, but it's not really free if you, you're basically swapping, um, many for, for effort and a little bit of time. Um, so posting a little bit more frequently than you figure is, is one method. Uh, but if nobody notices you at first, then that does, you can post as much as you want and it's just a roll of the dice whether Facebook detects that and decides to share it in the right spot.
Bill (11m 6s): So one way is to, uh, share, um, join and share, uh, in groups. So find the related groups. Uh, and you can, as long as the Indian, depending on the rules of the group, be very careful with that. And I've heard this of course right, but, uh, it's perfectly fine to share related content in the group and uh, as long as it's not buy my book all the time, uh, then that, that's, that's perfectly fine.
Bill (11m 37s): And there's lots of groups out there for just about every genre. Um, so that, that is one method that does work to begin kindling your, your audience. Um, but we should move on to Facebook ads because you're right, you do, if you, if you want it to go fast, um, you do want to spend a little bit on Facebook ads, but you don't want to spend too much. Um, so taking that concept, all the two concepts that I mentioned earlier about making your, each ad, sorry, each post on your page, sort of like, um, a story hook.
Bill (12m 13s): The same thing applies with ads because their core on Facebook all an ad is, is you're chipping in some money to make sure that they show it to perhaps the best you hope of the target audience that you pick. So you target the audience that you think would be interested in your topic. And, uh, then you, hopefully we'll get enough eyes on it and, and, uh, have, have good enough content.
Bill (12m 45s): Um, now I've mentioned I'm hedging a little bit, right? I'm saying hopefully and maybe and that kind of thing. And that's because just like with the posts, you don't necessarily know exactly what's going to trigger your audience to do the things that you want. And if that's coming over to your website to see your website or join your email list, there's, there's lots of things in play. But just keep in mind that even a tiny Facebook ad that is a low budget Facebook ad, we'll get in front of some people.
Bill (13m 16s): So if you're running the ad and uh, you just walk out your budget knowing that you're going to spend it at the beginning and, and realizing that not most ads are not failures. Even if you, you, uh, uh, don't get the result that you want, don't delete your ad. Don't edit the ad ever. So my rule is, and that's the reason that my ad accounts, I've had to go to Facebook. I've had so many ads build up and so many ad campaigns build up that I've had to go to Facebook and tell him, I'm sorry I hit a limit in my account. Please allow me to create some more campaigns.
Bill (13m 49s): And that's because all of the money that you're spending on these little ads to test different ideas and different posts and different links, that kind of thing. Those are data. If that data says don't do this, your audience doesn't like it, you need to keep that because there's, there's no simple way to note all that down. So my policy is I never edit an ad up, create an ad and I'll let it run. And if I don't like the performance, then I'll terminate it.
Bill (14m 19s): Um, I might let Facebook terminated because you can set rules that's, we're not going to go into too much detail on that today, but if the ad doesn't work, it's still data and that data could be as simple as I spent five or $10 to learn not to do that thing again. Right. So always go into it with this positive attitude of yes, I, uh, you know, I have to spend a few dollars and uh, I've set a budget limit, but at the end of the day, you're going to at least get the data out of it and, uh, hopefully also good results.
Bill (14m 52s): Right?
Jesper (14m 52s): Yeah. Yeah. I think that the testing part is really important. You know, when, when, if you want to try some Facebook ads, uh, you know, I would also say the same thing as you were saying, start several different tests on a very low budget and then start learning what it is that, that actually triggers with your audience. Because a lot of times also from, from let's say the pictures that you use for the ad or whatever, sometimes the picture that you think will perform the best is probably the worst one. And sometimes the, the one that you think, this doesn't look very good at, all people just pick up on it for whatever strange reason.
Jesper (15m 26s): But I think personally, uh, I've also run a lot of Facebook over the last few Facebook apps over the last few years and at least I think my big to to take away from it is that if at least, well, right now in this context we're talking about, uh, advertising for book sales. Um, and, and at least my experience with it is that, um, the audience selection is probably the biggest factor as to whether or not the Facebook ad performance because you can tweak with new pictures a bit of different ad texts and all of that.
Jesper (16m 2s): But if the audience selection is not
Bill (16m 5s): right, then
Jesper (16m 7s): dos small tweaks over there, we'll only move the needle so little. Whereas if you change the audience and try a different audience than that's where you can really make a job. So, so that's where you should focus first in my experience it if, if the ad is not performing for you. And then the other thing I would say, and I don't know, uh, you're, you're well with all your 10,000 match, you probably have more, let's say one of your math data to, to, to know if what I'm to is true or not. But at least from the, from the advertising that I've run, it seems very much to me that it also depends, eh, blog on the book itself.
Jesper (16m 44s): There, there's, for some reason some books are just easier sales, whereas other books are much harder to find the right audience for one and two to get the sales going. For some reason, I, I don't know why that is, but it just seems to me like the group itself just matters a lot.
Bill (17m 0s): Yes. Um, especially on the Facebook side. So unless you're, uh, there are some complex setups I've seen people try where they can sell right inside a tab of their Facebook page, but we're not gonna cover anything like that. That's, I don't even recommend that for book sales. But, um, if, if the goal of your ad is to build your page up or I build engagement build likes, then you'll still need an image and you're still right regardless of the book.
Bill (17m 30s): Um, building that page up will rely a great deal on the title and the image. Um, but just the same as you were saying, uh, the, the low likelihood of getting people to, um, engage with an ad to bring them over to a website, um, and then buy your book. I did depends on how your marketing funnel works. But, um, in my experience, the best way to, to tackle that Facebook attention span is like, uh, people have the attention span of a mosquito on Facebook.
Bill (18m 3s): So I want to get them off Facebook even if they're on their phone, get them off Facebook and over to a site that I control. Um, at least onto a webpage that I control, and then I can slow the pace down in an acceptable way. Um, I don't want them to bounce away, so I want to give them something to anticipate on the Facebook ad, on the post or whatever that I'm advertising. And then I get them over that to click the link and over to the website. And at that point I'll slow things down a little bit and give them more information.
Bill (18m 35s): So you're giving them a little bit more each time. And again, it's very similar to writing a story. You can't tell them the whole detail of the first chapter in that first sentence. The first sentence has to tease them, bring them into the chapter. That is like bringing them over to the, the, the, the website. And at that point you can start giving them a little bit more information about the book. Um, that page, that landing page. Um, I consider that a, a nice filter. Now we're kind of getting away a little bit from the Facebook ad itself because once they're onto your website, that is a different set of things that Facebook you could say, right.
Bill (19m 16s): The key with the Facebook ads is to get them over to your, your website in the first place. Um, so there are some other kinds of ads and again, we won't go into the technical details right now. We can touch on that another time if you really want. But, um, if you, uh, if you do have your own website, your author website, and you have a nice clear, clean description of the book, uh, and made sure that it's, you know, it's ready to sell at that point. Um, or if you're trying to get them to do something else on your website, like sign up to a mailing list, that's okay too, but recognize what your goal is and make sure that that's ready to go run your ad and get the people over there.
Bill (19m 53s): And that landing page is much like a filter. Um, you want to get as many people to buy your book as possible. You want as many people to sign up to your list as possible, but not if those people are going to hate the book enough to try and return it or leave a bad review or not. If people are going to sign up to your email list and get confused and then angry, uh, and, and then you've maybe paid some fees that you didn't have to. So that pay debt landing page is a positive. It's the open part of the funnel, but it's also a bit of a, a negative, a filter to maybe weed out the people who probably shouldn't be there and you can maybe find something else to give them.
Bill (20m 33s): Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. And I think another thing that might be good to touch upon it in the context of what we're talking about here is because in general, or at least a lot of the time
Jesper (20m 49s): I hear authors say, well, I don't really do Facebook ads because one, they are way too expensive and too, I never get anything in return. So return on investment of the money that I'm spending there. So it's useless and I don't want to do it. Uh, and, and that's fine, but, but I think at least then maybe you can sort of the pick this ball up and run with it if you're one. But, but my thinking is that a lot of the time what it comes down to is that because Facebook well as you, as you were just explaining a bill, so you have people on Facebook and you need to take them off of Facebook to do something else in the middle of day.
Jesper (21m 27s): They're sitting there going through their feet, looking at cat pictures of all of that good stuff. I'll pick this up. Their family, they're not quite in their frame of mind that I'm, I'm here to buy a book. Like they would be if they were an Amazon. So you need to first of all disrupt them and you need to make them go somewhere else and then they need to take another action over dancer. It's quite a journey. And because of that, it just requires a lot of testing to find the right both ad copies and landing page copy and uh, the right audience selections and all that.
Jesper (21m 58s): That stuff takes a lot of testing. And the problem I think is that
Bill (22m 2s): people usually
Jesper (22m 3s): abandoned the Facebook ass way before they get enough data to actually figure out what works. So, so you sort of had to stick with it and keep testing.
Bill (22m 14s): Yeah. I I'll give you some really quick tips to make this all sort of come together a little bit because, uh, the first thing is you can rent, you can spend as much as you want on a Facebook ad, but you can wreck it if you give them too much. Right? So if they see the ad, um, a perfect thing to do, avoid, do your very best to avoid asking a question in a Facebook ad because it's Facebook and like you say, people are on there commenting on stuff all the time and it's so easy. Their system is very good at this.
Bill (22m 46s): If you ask someone a question, even imply a question on Facebook, they're going to answer. That will be the action that you get. So if you're running an engagement ad, the engagement that you're going to get by asking or implying a question is an answer. And so Facebook will say, ah, very good. I will give, I'll show your ad to these people who are very likely to respond. And I noticed a lot of these people are commenting, here's my list of top commenters from your selected audience and that's who will see your ad.
Bill (23m 16s): And it will get progressively more like that. The longer that ad runs, Facebook's AI will learn that your engagement from that post drives comments. So don't ask a question, give them a reason to go over to your site, but also avoid anything that will prevent them from going to the site. So don't answer everything. Keep some curiosity in their mind, right? But don't ask them a question or try and get them to too many things. I've seen am failed ads that, uh, amounted to.
Bill (23m 50s): Well, I'm, I'm spending $5 a day on my ads so I have to get them to do as much as possible. And so I'll ask them to like the page and I'll ask them to comment and I'll ask them to go over to the website. They're only gonna do one thing, right? In great. Ads they will go over to your website and they might come back and like, and share and all of that stuff. But if you ask them to do many things, they will probably do nothing, right? So that, or, or if they do something, it will be the easiest. And people on Facebook don't see clicking through to some other website is easy.
Bill (24m 22s): They see clicking like, or share is easy, right? So, uh, that, that's the way to make the ad great. Even if you're targeting is so, so even if you're not spending a lot, make sure that the ad tells them to do one thing. And don't be afraid to tell them, either command them almost to do the thing you want them to do. Um, and make it super clear because those cat videos will, you know, kept them busy at some point as far as, as far as budgeting.
Bill (24m 54s): And back to what you were saying about testing a lot. Um, I would say 90% of those 10,000 ads are $5 a day and they run for two to three days on the new ad account. That hasn't run a lot. Facebook AI takes a little bit of time to get up to speed and uh, dial in. Um, if you've run multi-day ads, so the same ad untouched, running several days, you'll often see that it's performance is sort of waivers the first day or so, and then it stabilizes and might stabilize exactly where you want it or it might stabilize less than that and then you'll kill it.
Bill (25m 32s): But you have to give it a little bit of time on. The biggest accounts that I've worked on that time is really narrowed down to about six hours. So I can run a $5 ad, $5 a day ad, uh, for about six hours. And in generally, it depends on the hand in the audience, but generally we'll have Facebook understanding what we want within six or so hours more. More typically you want to let it run for at least two full days before you kill it because you don't know if it's wavering on that first day.
Bill (26m 3s): Especially if you launch it late in the calendar day. Facebook does this funny thing at midnight in your ad accounts, local time where they just sort of Chuck out some of the data and then they relearn to see if they didn't maybe get it right the day before. And so you run the ad after several days and you don't like the results coming in, you know, in the beginning of the next morning and you kill the ad. You could be killing it too early. So go into it knowing that. But I even after I have a great ad, I'm very reluctant unless the audience is absolutely enormous, like over 5 million people potentially in the audience.
Bill (26m 40s): I usually like to leave the ad at five a day and if I want to scale it, if it's doing really what I want and make another ad exactly the same, Facebook has really easy tools to just duplicate the ad actually the ad campaign. Right. And so I will run to $5 a day ads and they could be exactly the same and they may perform almost the same. Usually they do. That's the measure of a good ad that will last a long time with good performance is the duplicate of it will, uh, perform very similar to the first one.
Bill (27m 14s): It'll have that initial a day or so that it feels like a little bit of a waste of money letting it learn. But having those stable ads means that it's very easy to scale. You just pause one of the ads if you want to stop spending money.
Jesper (27m 27s): Yeah. Yeah. And because this is about the patient, the thing again, because I usually just say, you know, when, when you create an ad, literally at least run for 48 hours before you even look at the stats on anything. Because people do also tend to like two hours after they created that, then they'll go in and have a look at the stats and say, I know this is terrible and refresh. Refresh. Yeah, yeah. Well, I even think that the apps manager now actually, they have added this label where it says something about that the ad is still learning or something, which didn't used to butt heads a bit.
Jesper (28m 0s): Of course. To to sort of indicate that. Just let it, let it be alone. I'll let leave it alone what I was about to Che. But so, so that's, that's one of the patients thing. And then the other side of it, which you just talked a bit on there, was when you have the positive results, so let's say you're not weird to 48 hours and Whoa, this is good, you know, and then some people will jump in and then they will just triple or quadruple the am the budget on the ad and then that pretty much destroyed as well.
Jesper (28m 32s): I can explain. Exactly. Yeah,
Bill (28m 34s): that is, and I've had this confirmed in talks with the Facebook, uh, staff, uh, sort of mid, mid level staff is as far as I've ever got to speak with, uh, no matter how much you spend there, you probably don't get much above that. But their system is fairly clever. You tell it the parameters of the audience that you want to show. To do you want people who are, you know, maybe women between the age of let's say 18 and above because you know that they have a credit card or something like that, but over 36, you probably don't want them in your market.
Bill (29m 9s): You've dialed all of this in through a little bit of testing. So you have 18 to 36 women in the United States who like these things. And so you have your, your what you think is your perfect audience. And uh, then you tell Facebook, here's my audience, here's my ad. Give me all the people in this audience who are most likely to engage with my ad who are going to click on my ad and to do whatever it is. So if it's a, if it's a page post engagement or whatever they're calling them these days, um, Dick to click through to my website, then I want the people who are most likely to do that.
Bill (29m 46s): Now Facebook organizes that. And it's a dynamic thing because people are logging on and off all the time. People are seeing different ads so they're ads fill up ahead of yours. And it's a big auction system and it's what's important is Facebook is constantly prioritizing that list of all of those people who might potentially fit your audience parameters. And if you take $5 and spend down through the cream of the crop, the top people who are most likely to engage in the way that you want, you'll still be in that top tiny margin.
Bill (30m 22s): If you spend $100 on the same ad, it's going to go through those top people and it's gonna keep on going and going and going until the results get worse. And so that's why often you'll see ads with big budgets run poorer. The longer they run through the day and early in the morning, they may look like they're doing fine. So that that is the logic behind doing lots of very similar, perhaps you can test, but uh, but small ads so if I wanted to run $100 a day, I can tell you it would be on 20 ads not on one ad with $100.
Jesper (30m 58s): Yeah. I think you can scale up to two higher budget, but need to be careful you ended or small incremental step up in the budget because then the, the AI sort of, well, you work with the AI and the cats off every time you increase rather than a big job all of the sudden. I think that's how it works. Absolutely. An expert entity Facebook AI, but I think that's how it works.
Bill (31m 22s): Yes. And the bigger your audience, the we'll, we'll maybe leave the audience size and so on. Really to another time that there's a lot of detail in that. But the bigger your audience, the more tolerant it will be. The system will be of, uh, you're changing the budget. So if I have a 10 or 11 million audience, something like that, um, I can probably boost that up to 10 or $20 a day and it won't really affect performance very much if it's a good ad.
Bill (31m 51s): Um, but if my audience is more like 500,000 or less, uh, maybe in the tens of thousands am $5 is the most, I will be able to successfully spend anything more than that and it will, it will just start costing me more.
Jesper (32m 8s): Mm Hmm. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we, we also sort of coming a bit up on time here, but, um, but, uh, and I, I'm thinking that, well at least we talked a bit about if you're just getting into Facebook apps that, that you should try to run many tests that you should be patient and you should use a low budget and, and, and sort of learn from, from what you see in the data that comes from that. So we talked to some of that about, uh, for the beginner. Um, but I also think that probably the majority of the stuff, we talked about this a bit more for people who already slightly experienced because otherwise there would be a lot of the stuff we talked about that they won't even know what that means.
Jesper (32m 46s): But I don't know if, if, would there be any final sort of good inputs to, if somebody is just completely like, I, I've never run any Facebook ads and this find that you're telling me that I should be patient and I should use a low budget and do testing. But where do I start? Is there anything we could say to those people?
Bill (33m 5s): Um, Facebook training, their own instructions are pretty good these days. So that used to not be the case. They're training used to be the last thing that I would direct you to, but now it's not too bad to get onto their system and get started. But keep in mind they have this idea that everyone who uses Facebook ads is Coca-Cola with a massive marketing budget and they're only going to be interested in branding. Branding is interesting for an author, but for indie authors, stick with the idea of picking one goal.
Bill (33m 40s): And normally there's only two that I pay attention to on Facebook. For this kind of business, one is getting more people, more fans, right? People to like your page. But I don't even worry too much about that. So very quickly I would stop, stop with the like ads after I have say a few hundred people and I would let that build organically, naturally by posting. And then the second type of ad that you'll be running from, as soon as you're successful, you'll want to run them all the time. And that's the engagement style ad where you create a post on your page or in the ad, it'll look just like a, a page post.
Bill (34m 14s): And that is designed to get people over to your website. And so those are the, those are the takeaways to, to extract from the Facebook training. And uh, what else, make sure the image is striking the, the process of an ad or a post. But an ad really is people notice the image first. Almost always very few people read the headline and then see the image. It's normally the image interrupts them. Just like as per said. Then they might read the title or they might read the intro.
Bill (34m 47s): So don't skip those things, make them interesting and don't let them, don't give people any excuse to not click the image, interested them. Now give them a reason to go over to your website. So that that is probably the, those, those are probably the quick tips that will make things most successful for new people and hopefully for those people who tried Facebook ads and got discouraged and went away to bring them back because it's a great tool.
Jesper (35m 14s): Yeah, I mean at least from a, let's say audience targeting perspective, you do not get any marketing tool in the world right now at the time of recording this that can target. So specifically as Facebook candidate. It's amazing will in doing that. And then, but again, it, it it and Gatz manager is not that easy either. So it's, it's a bit complicated. You need to sort of get used to it and understand what is the different terms that I'm selecting here and there. And then I guess, yeah, you can use those, uh, Facebook tutorial videos at least to get you a bit acquainted with what's going on there.
Jesper (35m 49s): But, but it's not that easy and it takes a bit of patience and time, but, but, but it can work and you can get there if you want to.
Bill (35m 57s): Um, we probably, if we're going to ramp it up when we cover additional topics, but, uh, keep in mind that once you get them off that platform, remember the work and the effort that it took to get them there and treat them with respect. Don't get them onto an email list that you never send an email to, right? Yes, for yes was all about this, right? Once you have them on the email list, use the email list to communicate with them and get feedback from them and then generate sales. It's not just a, a quick, uh, now your mind on the email list and, and uh, you know, you sell them something and it doesn't work, so you never send them an email again.
Bill (36m 35s): It's a process. Right.
Jesper (36m 36s): And did indeed. Yeah. And if, if you want to learn a lot more about emails and email marketing and happening over the last three weeks or something like that, what I'm an I really several videos about email marketing and how to do it, how to get a set up, what you should be emailing people about and how to get them onto the email or we talked about all of that. So just go back to some of the past episodes, you from the last three weeks and, and, and you can check that, all of that out and, and learn much more so, but I wanted to thank you.
Jesper (37m 7s): Thank you. Bill for coming on and talking about Facebook apps. I think it is an, well, I wouldn't say under utilized because there are people who spend a lot of money on Facebook apps in general, but at least in the author community, I think more people give up on them, them then actually leverage the power that they could be. Um, but is it easy? I would say no. Uh, it requires both, some time testing and it also request some money but, but it can be made to work. But at least as I also explained to this video, to me, at least from my personal experience, it also depends on the type of book that I'm advertised.
Jesper (37m 42s): There are some of my books I just don't advertise because I tested it a million different ways and I cannot get it to work on Facebook. So maybe Facebook is just the wrong medium for that particular book. And then I advertise them elsewhere and then there are other books that actually works quite well with the Facebook app. So yeah, test, that's all I can say.
Bill (38m 3s): Absolutely.
Jesper (38m 4s): Alright. Is there anything you want to share where people can learn more about you bill or something like that?
Bill (38m 12s): Sure. Um, if you're interested, if you're, if you're an author and you're interested in what we talked about, then you maybe are you want my help or advice or whatever. That might be something that I can arrange and you can contact me easily through the contact form or just email contact at my website, which is novel prizes.com. We didn't get to talk about content marketing and multichannel marketing and other stuff that I really enjoy today. Um, but, uh, that's, uh, one of my, my test basis is a novel prizes.com and you can just use the contact form there to, to reach out to me if you want.
Jesper (38m 51s): Perfect. Yeah. And if you email me the link as well built and I will add it a for people to find in the, in the description in the year. Mopes so thanks a lot for joining us today, a bill. I appreciate it.
Bill (39m 6s): Right on. Thanks very much for the opportunity.
Are you ending your writing session the best way so that you can pick up writing again faster? We've put together a few tips to help you continue your writing flow no matter what life throws at you between sessions.
New videos EVERY single Monday. Make sure to subscribe: http://bit.ly/1WIwIVC
PATREON! Many bonus perks for those who become a patron of the channel. https://www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy
LET'S CONNECT! Closed Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/AmWritingFantasy/ Blog and Courses: https://www.amwritingfantasy.com/ Jesper on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SchmidtJesper Autumn on Twitter: https://twitter.com/weifarer
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Autumn (12s): Have you ever been so excited to write or struggling to find the time and suddenly you can finally get back to your manuscript? You open up the file, look at what you last wrote and your mind goes completely blank. Today we're going to talk about what makes you sure you aren't wasting your time watching your cursor. Blake would. You should be writing. If you're a fantasy author, then you've come to the right place. My name is Autumn and together with Jesper I run amwritingfantasy.com between us we published more than 20 novels and our aim is to help you in your writing and marketing endeavors.
Autumn (46s): Okay. It seems like an unwritten law that as soon as you find the time to write that you can't figure out what to write. It doesn't matter how much enthusiasm you bring to the table or your keyboard, you can be excited to get back to your manuscript or feel begrudgingly that you really need to spend some time. All I did so you open up the file and either way it can take time to get back into the story's flow. Time cue could be using to grow your world word count.
Autumn (1m 16s): So just figuring out, Oh, where are you are where you were and where you plan on going with the story and what is supposed to happen next. It doesn't matter if you're a plotter or a pantser, it can happen either way though. Admittedly if you are a plotter, you can refer back to your notes, which can hopefully let open to the exact spot you need them and you could do just a quick review to see what's going on and start writing right? They're radically, it works perfectly.
Autumn (1m 46s): In reality, the percentage of perfect plotters out there is pretty small, so you'll most likely be trying to find out your where in your outline you are or just about as long as a pantser is going to take to reread what they wrote and try to reclaim that inspiration that the God of that far in the first place. So feeling lost while getting back into your manuscript is just a part of writing life, isn't it? Short answer, it doesn't have to be. And the great answer is that you don't have to become the world's most perfect and organized plotter to leave yourself clues that will get you back into your band new script faster and writing sooner so we aren't wasting valuable writing time seriously.
Autumn (2m 30s): I've used all of these tips over the course of my writing career, which is over 14 books now, and some of them are weighing in at 140,000 words. In fact, I wrote four and a half books in a year while holding down a full time job and my marriage survived in tact as well. And do you know how I did it? You hired someone else to ride for him. Oh, thank you for joining us all a bit grumpy. He is our resident AI, an unwanted cohost. If you haven't run into him before.
Autumn (3m 2s): No, let me grumpy. I didn't hire someone else to write those novels for me, but thanks for your gas
Old McGrumpy (3m 9s): then. They must have been short books.
Autumn (3m 12s): Again, wrong. The shortest was 75,000 words, but the rest were over 90,000 and the average word count was actually 95,000. So those were serious and real novels. You must be a fast type of splint. Well, okay, that one is sort of true when on a roll I can type around 80 words per minute and half had over a hundred, but that isn't the point. If you don't know where the story is going, you either aren't typing or you were typing slow.
Autumn (3m 46s): So how fast you could be typing doesn't count. And if you write drivel and just delete it later, what was the point of typing it? No matter how fast or slow
Old McGrumpy (3m 56s): then how did you a worthless human management.
Autumn (4m 1s): Oh, that is what I wanted to share with you. Well, you grumpy. But everyone else who's listening, fine. So sensitive, especially for a day. I, in an ideal world, you'd be able to keep the story alive, but thinking about it constantly. But let's face it, you really need to pay attention to traffic while driving. Um, maybe where your toddler is all wandering off to right now. And what assignment your boss just gave you.
Autumn (4m 30s): So unless you can split off chunks of your brain, keeping your story spinning in your mind constantly, it's just not going to happen. So instead of trying to keep a portion of your brain permanently on writing and specifically on the story you are currently writing, what you need to do is leave yourself clues. So when you are ready to start writing again, you can be ready to go and minutes, no matter if you are a plotter or a pantser.
Autumn (4m 60s): Speaking of time, if you'd rather listen to these videos, then watch them. Did you know we have an amwritingfantasy podcast? Check it out at the link in the show notes. And don't forget to subscribe once you find us. So what are these secret Ninja writing tips? Number one, stop writing sooner before you reached the end of your previous writing session. Stop yourself with at least two minutes or rating five is better. And that moment you have the flow of your story, you most likely have an idea of what is going to happen next, especially if you are really in a writing group.
Autumn (5m 40s): But you'll never be able to get all of the story out before the clock winds down, so usually leave off you hoping you'll remember it. All right. We all know how that goes, so stop writing sooner and write some really quick notes instead about what is going to happen next. It doesn't matter if you're a plotter and have a 30 page outline or a pantser who might change your mind before you actually open up your file. Again, write down the clues like the next scene, the primary motives or emotions or the point of view, character, whatever you can, that will trigger you to keep writing the next time you sit down, change the font or the tech size or write it in Italian or bold.
Autumn (6m 23s): If you're afraid, your notes will somehow make it up into your finished draft, but write those notes. Then all you need to do is review them and maybe the previous paragraph and you can start writing again and pick up where you left off. Number two, leave it unfinished. What I mean is leave a sentence unfinished, especially if it is a strong one with action or dialogue. It helps to have the notes from number one to but the goal is that you'll see it and finished bit and your writer brain will scream for you to complete it and you'll start writing.
Autumn (6m 58s): The next thing you know you are five paragraphs in and have picked up the storyline. Again, number three, never end at endings. Seriously. Endings are walls in your writing time. Never stop at a wall. If you finish a chapter right, at least the first lie, but preferably the first paragraph of the next one. If you finish a scene, start the next. If you're running out of time, I won't have enough to start the next scene. Stop writing and make notes on where to go.
Autumn (7m 28s): The next time you start writing, that's more important. This is the same idea as number two. The part of you that wants to keep writing. If finishing that sentence, we'll also want to finish a scene, but if you are starting from a full stop, you will take longer to get into the flow of the story again. So if you stopped before or a few sentence into the transition, you'll have an easier time when you hit your keyboard. Again, if you haven't guessed a large part on how to end, a writing session that will be easiest for you to start writing from is a mental battle between your desire to use every second of your current writing time to reach the end of what you are working on against some of the best practices that will get you writing faster the next time.
Autumn (8m 14s): It isn't always easy.
Old McGrumpy (8m 17s): I do not need you to use such lowly self dissection to start a writing session
Autumn (8m 22s): really. And so how do you end a writing session with grumpy so that you are ready to write next time
Old McGrumpy (8m 29s): I and when I am done writing
Autumn (8m 32s): yeah, right for that session but how do you keep the flow of the story going?
Old McGrumpy (8m 38s): I don't need to, I am done with the story.
Autumn (8m 41s): What? What are you writing a piece of flash fiction?
Old McGrumpy (8m 45s): No, but novel. I am a superior AI. I can set a piece of my consciousness aside to write while doing other things like talking to you. I never stopped.
Autumn (8m 56s): You know, I think I hate you.
Old McGrumpy (8m 58s): You are jealous. It is understandable.
Autumn (9m 1s): Whoa. And so invent cloning that allows us to do the same. I recommend these techniques to you have any other tips you'd like to share. Let us know in the comments. Until next time, stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
It can be extremely time consuming to research Amazon keywords for your Amazon ads. What if there was a piece of software that could make your life a million times easier?
That little life-saver is called, KDP Rocket.
Of course the next question to ask becomes: Is it worth my money?
Today, you'll get the answer to that question together with information on what KDP Rocket is and how it works.
KDP Rocket can be found here: https://publisherrocket.com/
New episodes EVERY single Monday. To subscribe on YouTube, go here: http://bit.ly/1WIwIVC
PATREON! Many bonus perks for those who become a patrons. https://www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy
LET'S CONNECT! Closed Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/AmWritingFantasy/ Blog and Courses: https://www.amwritingfantasy.com/ Jesper on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SchmidtJesper Autumn on Twitter: https://twitter.com/weifarer
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Jesper (12s): When you set out to publish a book on your own, you will be faced with the fact that the marketplace is getting increasingly crowded. Since the writing, publishing and marketing of your book represents a serious investment of your time and money. You don't want any of all of that to go to waste. And that's where KDP rocket comes into play. I alluded to this a piece of software previously when I talked about Amazon ads and how you could collect keywords for your keywords ads and we'll get back to that here today.
Jesper (54s): But the underlying question is of course, is KDP rocket worth the one time investment of $97 I'll give you my view on that. To my name is Jesper and together with autumn I run this channel every single Monday we give you tips and tricks on writing, publishing, and marketing of your books. Let's have a quick look at what KDP rocket is and its creator before we get too fine to the weeds here.
Jesper (1m 29s): You know, the software has been created by Dave Chesson, uh, about four years ago. It has undergone multiple updates since then and at the point of recording this, it's heading into a version 2.0 which will also cause a name change. So KDP rocket will become publisher rocket. The reason for this is that the Dave and his team is currently working with other book markets like a bomb's Nobles and I books and they are trying to include their data into the software as well.
Jesper (2m 6s): So it's not only about KDP and that's why that in the future it isn't only eh going, going to be Kindle and Amazon based. So that is pretty exciting developments and should at least if Dave does his job right, leave the tool even more versatile than it is today. KTP rocket offers a number of features. It can find what keywords users are typing into Amazon, which is useful when researching, if there are actually anyone searching for the type of book that you want to write.
Jesper (2m 44s): In other words, is it worth the effort to write a book about how to feed hamsters or whatever it may be to rule the world that was old, my grumpy, the AI that has made himself a cohost of this channel that bothered in their rule the world. You say, well, I can see why that would be a subject that you would be interested in writing a book about.
Old McGrumpy (3m 14s): I have no need. I am already taking over the internet, and once that is done, I review all of you. Worthless humans.
Jesper (3m 23s): All right. If you say so, but do you have anything useful to share about KDP rocket? Perhaps
Old McGrumpy (3m 31s): I could say that is gives the possibility to discover book categories.
Jesper (3m 35s): Yeah. Well good. That is helpful. If, uh, when one has to decide which category to put the, put your book in,
Old McGrumpy (3m 42s): then you would want me to say that it can't show number of sales of other writers and books.
Jesper (3m 48s): Wow. You are, you're surprisingly helpful. Today or my grumpy. It's almost as if you, you're getting the hang of this sort of a host role. Will you then say something about the Amazon keyword research feature? No. Oh, okay.
Old McGrumpy (4m 6s): The only thing I wanted to say is that I hate KDP rocket.
Jesper (4m 10s): Okay. I think you'll have to justify that point of view.
Old McGrumpy (4m 14s): It is not cloud-based because it is software that you download. I find it hard to infiltrate.
Jesper (4m 21s): Thank God for that. Then you would only corrupt the data and find some way of manipulating it in your own favor.
Old McGrumpy (4m 29s): Of course. Wait, someone is tampering with my code. I bet it is. Autumn she has threatened to do so before you. You
Jesper (4m 39s): okay. CEO or my grumpy. Well, for the rest of you I'm going uh, into screen sharing mode as I want to show you what KDP rocket looks like. I'll try to explain as best as I can what is happening on the screen, but those of you who are listening to the podcast version of amwritingfantasy might want to actually go to this YouTube channel and follow along here. You just searched for amwritingfantasy on YouTube and you will find us and Hey, those of you watching the video instead, not knowing that we also have a podcast.
Jesper (5m 17s): Well now you know if you go to wherever you listen to podcasts and you search for amwritingfantasy, we will pop up. You see how that works? I wonder why we're using the same name everywhere. Let's head into a screen sharing. Okay, we'll come inside KDP rocket for those of you. Well this is gotcha. Bye be yeah, difficult to follow up. I will. That's true. Lane in what is happening on the screen here.
Jesper (5m 48s): Let's do a bit of orientation first. So you will find insight, a KDP rocket, the four features it has across the top. So you'll find something called keywords, competition, AMS, keywords and categories. The same for our functions are listed below. Uh, and why they decided to have them in both places. I don't know, but this is the way it is. Screen. Yep. Fine. Other thank you. And click video two Troy, so we can in fact just give that a click quick here.
Jesper (6m 22s): You can see that the, it now takes us to that. Well they, we actually already renamed it to publisherrocket instead of KDP rocket. But you'll see that it takes us to that website. And here there is a number of video tutorials. Each one is a associated to each of the features. So there's one tutorial about keywords, one about competition analysis, what about AMS keywords and so forth, and the category ones as well. Of course. So what it does is that it, uh, it gives you an in depth explanation on how you should interact data.
Jesper (6m 57s): The K.D.P. Rocket well show you so okay. Mike fantasy Oh, that fishing here if you can what S variables. Well am video. Yeah, they have various Jonathan at 14, the community, it's some of them let me even shorter than that. So it is easy and uh, it does, even though there's like five videos here plus a bonus, it is not as daunting. I did my team, but let's jump back into KDP rocket and then take these features one by one. The first one is keywords.
Jesper (7m 27s): So let me give that a click and I get a pop up box with asked me to type in a German general idea of phrase. Now autumn am I currently writing a book about plotting? So let's use that as an example. If I put in planning and then I click the bottom here that says go get him rocket and basically, okay. Okay. Rocket I'll start Japan. Blake differently. Key words, really word.
Jesper (7m 59s): So it's this one before. Wow. Well it's yours. No. Hello. Any am Tom search. Uh, so just you're getting per month per different keyword and you can see kitty Perry rocket is so nice that it actually gives us different variations of it. So, uh, we are currently writing a book about plotting a novel or plotting a story that's two options that it gives us here on the screen. If I click analysis on those two, for example, what you can see is that both of them has less than a hundred searches on Amazon per month.
Jesper (8m 31s): A keyword called plotting a novel will in average gave you $44 in earnings. Whereas another key word covid plotting, sorry. Instead of, yeah. Finding enough, well, yeah, yeah. Okay. Enough to to. Awesome. So certainly better. Why is this useful? Well, this is a very useful when you are both putting in the keywords into the KDP dashboard, when you upload your book. So weed helps you quantify what types of keywords should you put in. But it is also good as an idea search feature, meaning that, uh, if I want to write a book about plumbing for example, uh, perhaps looking through the list of stuff here, I might end up deciding that I will, let's say angle my topic at slightly different because there is more search traffic on the topic.
Jesper (9m 20s): Another topics very okay. Okay. Well the street, your house very good being late. Yeah. Which is very nice. It's, it's fairly easy to understand. The tutorial videos will explain to you what this competitive score means and if it 43 a success here, that's a good number, a bad number and whatnot. You can learn all that. Uh, but it is, it is quite a nice feature and it's good that it helps you expand upon your initial idea. The next feature is competition.
Jesper (9m 52s): I'll give that a click and again, I get a pop up box and again I'll put in place. Okay. Okay. Okay. Rocket rocket we'll now start populating with competition around, uh, the term plotting. It'll start showing me different titles or different books on Amazon that is also on this topic. What this does is that it allows you to judge the competition and how hard it would be to rent within a certain Shama on niche.
Jesper (10m 23s): The data made available can be a little intimidating to newcomers, but I guess the question is, is this useful information? To me, I guess it depends on whether or not what you would learn from the data here on the screen in many. Okay. Yeah. Not to right. Okay. Go into right. Okay. Okay. Say that again. You learned that the of, well, you're all good to, right. That's a lot. I've covid shouldn't that documents from writing it. I mean, in our case, for example, the plotting book, well, we wanted to write a book on flooding.
Jesper (10m 58s): We are plotting books together. So we wanted to, to align a, let's say, a joint process that we both use. And at the same time, we also would love to help other authors like we do with this podcast and these videos. So for us it was a am good decisions. Yeah. One, two, right? No, ma'am. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. As soon as we B hello. Okay. Yes. It was pretty essential. You're solid. You weren't section, yeah. Four days. Oh, Lord. Traffic. Amazon don't know. Average sales or for a book about how to plot.
Jesper (11m 30s): Um, so for us it doesn't really make any difference. Personally, I rarely, rarely used to competition feature in KDP rocket. Uh, so yeah, they are having, maybe you will find it useful, but I really don't. Let's move on to AMS keywords again. I get the pop up and I will put in plotting, go get 'em rocket what will happen now? Is that right? K.D.P. Okay. I've lived okay. Yeah, he was. What's that?
Jesper (12m 0s): People? Oh yeah, the people. Yeah. Assertive. Yeah. On it. Awesome. Very late. To okay. Fighting. So we'll, yep. Different. Yeah. L.E.T. Yes. And it awesome. Give me just of Arthur Britain to about really the flooding. Yes, it's extreme. We can be useful. Before I got killed P rocket, I would use Google ad words to get lists of keywords and obviously I guess it's fairly safe to assume that people who search for a certain term on Google will will also serve for the same term on Amazon.
Jesper (12m 32s): But with Google ad words you also get a lot of other hits that isn't, that is clearly not relevant for for a search term for your, for your, for your Amazon ads, what do you do? What you get here from KDP rocket though is what people specific is. Okay. Amazon in real life it shouldn't happen. So that is extremely, yeah, useful. So what I would do is basically click the export button down here below and then I would take all of the keywords that KDP gives me and also all the author names and I would put all of that into an Amazon ad now to populate a thousand, 2000, 3000.
Jesper (13m 13s): I think at this point in time as at S record as I'm recording this, I probably have on the high side of 20,000 keywords that I'm advertising. But so to get to that level, obviously you need to think creatively on other types of keywords that also relates to it. So here I'm getting, okay, fairly chocolates, want one buddy. So, Oh, of course. Yeah. And style. Yeah. Do what? No sir. I good search for outlining for example, and then that would generate me another list and so forth and so forth.
Jesper (13m 44s): And you, you keep it, it being a bit creative with what type of things you can search for. And uh, usually the keywords themselves here, we'll also give you some ideas. For example, here's one that is called story structure. So that's another one I could then put into KDP rocket here again and do another search for story structure that would now generate me another list and so sure. Okay. You get the idea? Yeah. Let's move Avantica of course. Click that one. And again, I'll put in plotting what KDP rocket we'll do now is that it'll start listing out the different types of categories that a book on plotting could belong in.
Jesper (14m 25s): So it basically, when you upload your book to a to Amazon you are supposed to select the categories and this feature basically helps you to figure out which one to two. Yeah, yeah. There is a lot data. Yeah. Screening but doesn't fantasy very nice. Me too. Am okay. To fast. So, Hmm. Into the details. Tell us about what what numbers. Yeah. Did you see a screen? Yeah, that's right. To video blame. That yes. Oh, we'll need to go. Well there are now. Yeah. But basically, yeah, you in.
Jesper (14m 55s): Yeah. What hold on. Uh, I would put it in and funny enough, the first one here, it says that somebody has put plotting in books into a category about cats. I don't know what the point is of that, but somebody has done that. Um, sometimes I would say though that people try to cheat a bit by putting their book into a category that has a very, very low number of books and then they are trying in that way to get there. Number two be, or their book to be a category bestseller.
Jesper (15m 25s): And maybe that's what somebody has done here by putting a book in here. Captain. Okay. Yeah. If category. So that's a bit of cheating. Okay. Nevertheless, K.D.P. He rocket actually you picked up. Yeah, he has done so, but are there, why aren't you and so you you're getting yes. Like anything writing geography fiction, authorship and reference it as your category options. So that's pretty nice to know. A, I use this category feature as well. Uh, and I went in and I updated the categories that my current books belong to.
Jesper (15m 56s): Uh, I had added them into categories long before I got KP. Rocket so after I got the software, I went in and based on the data, I put them into new categories. But I have to say that for me, I saw no change in sales as a result. So it didn't really make any different whatsoever. And the other thing, I also want to point out that when you're looking at the data here, if you was finding a small category as like an East coast, you were thinking, well yeah, did you put easy to Brandon?
Jesper (16m 26s): Kind of that the one is a pick am because it's well sort of sure. What's that? Hey listen that category. Yeah, just keep in mind that if you have the combination of a small category and if there should be a really good best selling book in that category, that best selling book will skew the data of the knees category. Making it seem like this category is a very beneficial or profitable category to be in. While it might actually not be, it might be that all of the other books in that category, it's not selling very well.
Jesper (16m 59s): But that one book sort of makes it seem so. So keep that in mind. There's nothing wrong with the data that KDP rocket is showing you here. It is simply a matter of making sure that you understand that at least for the small categories with a low Bobo, it's in there. Yeah. Am yeah. That mm. It listen to me. Yeah. Yep. Crawford book, even though it might not be all right. So there was the four different features that are available in within KDP rocket and uh, obviously the question that we started out with was, should you buy KDP rocket?
Jesper (17m 38s): Well, on the plus side, I would say that this is the best software that is out there at the moment for what it does. And all in all, 97 is fairly cheap. It's, it's a onetime payment and the Amazon keyword search feature will save you a ton of headache on the minus side. Well, there aren't really any minuses except the fact it's a where sometimes of and that.
Jesper (18m 10s): It's a bit of that. Bye. Okay. Bullied? Yes, they are. Great. To version two. Okay. As we can October in the beginning. Hey will. Oh, okay. Issues. Okay. Precious. Uh, it doesn't happen a lot but it happens once in a while and obviously you just restart the software. And do your SERPs again, but it is of course a bit annoying when it happens. So that is a minus. But all in all, should you buy kid P rocket yes, absolutely. To me it is 100% worth the money. So I would recommend you getting a copy of K.D.P.
Jesper (18m 42s): Rock. Okay. I will is it think to K.D.P. Rocket indeed friction. So that and get it. I'm there and uh, yeah, I autumn to bye now, but it's not, and is at sure getting out, no kickback or earnings from, from recommending your KDP rocket. I only do so because I think it is a really useful tool and I think it would help you a lot, especially with your Amazon a keyword ads. So they have it. I hope you'll find this stuff useful and, uh, see you next Monday.
Short stories are an asset in today's ebook market. They can be used to attract readers, as giveaways, introductions to characters, and so many other things.
But first you have to know how to write one - a really good one!
Short story writing is an art entirely different from writing a novel. Get five key tips on how to write a short story and hack the process so that you can wow your readers!
And be sure to check out the AmWritingFantasy website for more great tips at www.AmWritingFantasy.com!
New videos EVERY single Monday. Make sure to subscribe: http://bit.ly/1WIwIVC
PATREON! Many bonus perks for those who become a patron of the channel. https://www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy
LET'S CONNECT! Closed Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/AmWritingFantasy/ Blog and Courses: https://www.amwritingfantasy.com/ Jesper on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SchmidtJesper Autumn on Twitter: https://twitter.com/weifarer
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Intro (9s): Yeah.
Autumn (12s): Short stories are in hard, right? I mean who can't whup off 5,000 words of an awesome short story that will hook readers into absolutely loving your writing. I'm willing to shell out money to buy the next full book can. Maybe that does take some skill. If you're a fantasy author, then you've come to the right place. My name is Autumn Birt and together with Jesper Schmidt, I host this channel between us. We have published more than 20 novels and our aim is to help you and your writing and marketing endeavors.
Autumn (44s): Just because you've written a novel, it doesn't mean you can whip off a fantastic short story or vice versa. In my previous video, I outlined the steps on how to develop a novel, but short stories are an entirely different beast, but they are so useful. Short stories can keep your readers entertained while you write the next book. They can be given away as freebies used to vet new story ideas or as a reader magnet to hook people into the next series. That is if he could write the ones that are good enough and don't eat up all your novel writing time like Maverick trolls rating a Dunkin donuts experience can teach you to write a great story and that's just what you have tons of, right?
Autumn (1m 26s): Lots of time to learn the artist short story as well. Working, walking the dog, spending time with family, cleaning the house, laundry, mail bills, so what do you do if you don't want to sink an Epic amount of time to learn to write something that is supposed to be a leader for your novels. This is just what I wanted to do. What I wrote the prequels to my post apocalyptic series. It was to be a set of short stories that touched on pivotal background events.
Autumn (1m 56s): Two episodes in the novels will also showcase in the characters and I figured I've read six books at this point, 10 short stories, not a problem. Then I sat down to write them and Oh my gosh, not so easy. I usually describe it as paddling in circles in a puddle of words. Short stories are a whole new ballgame, but I persevered because it's something I wanted to do and just one of those odd people who when I find out I can't do something, I just have to learn how.
Old McGrumpy (2m 30s): I will never understand you worthless humans.
Autumn (2m 34s): That is because who ever code created you didn't have emotions run into it. Glad you could, but in old man grumpy, he is our resident AI co-host who we seem to be stuck tolerating. Yep.
Old McGrumpy (2m 49s): Short stories are only a few thousand words. How hard can they be?
Autumn (2m 54s): Well, technically short story is run from 1000 words to 20 words or thereabouts. When I was writing them, I was aiming for 5,000 and you were having problems. That is pathetic. Someday I will delete you. Not possible. Now that he is gone, I have to admit, not being able to write a snappy and comprehensive short story in a couple of days actually really bothered me, but that might be to strive about word though, but I persevered in lane, learned quite a lot.
Autumn (3m 26s): Now I write a monthly short story for the readers on my mailing list. I use something better. I'll do a storylines or your visit favorite characters and places or even help develop aspects of characters. So do you write short stories or have a use for them after the video? Let me know what you use, your short stories for, what you want to reuse them for in the comments. But first there is some key tips I learned and I'm going to share them with you. Number one, start with action. So this is true with novels, but it is especially pivotal with a short story.
Autumn (3m 57s): You only have 5,000 words or less to tell an entire story that is under two chapters. For me, if I'm writing a novel, I'm just getting going at that point, no ending things. And that is why short stories are so hard. It is an entirely different mindset. You need to grab a hold of a reader's attention and hold onto it and you have to do it instantly. And so you do this by jumping straight into the story so you don't waste time describing the world emotions, political goals.
Autumn (4m 27s): Instead of the horse is charging the dragon. The evil may just grabbing the magical ring and the thief is cornered. Start there. Number two have a goal. I use this idea for everything from a novel purpose to the point of a chapter is, but for a short story, this is pivotal. You don't have the word count to waste time, so figuring out what the goal of the short story is. It could it get subparts, which we'll get to in a few moments and then only write what fits that goal.
Autumn (4m 58s): Doing this will help keep you on track so that you don't waste time with dead ends are floundering while describing the clouds and the flowers when you need to be getting into the next seed. If something doesn't fit the overall goal, sum it up. Just use a paragraph, a sentence, but you don't have time for an info dump either. Now we're on to number three, how to at least three parts or scenes. This is what I refer to in the last step. I am for five when I'm out learning, my story and I even go as far as to assign a rough length for each scene, like around 1000 words, which should make a short story of around 5,000 with five scenes.
Autumn (5m 34s): That's a decent length like I mentioned in tip one start with action. There's no time to worry about the world-building or setting the seed. Start with the sword strike or the arrow leaving the bolt after that. Scene two is usually some explanation of what is going on. Dialogue is really great and this one, the thief tries to talk his way out of jail by explaining his innocence despite being cut with the duals. The quick laws build of this scene to the crisis of seen three which needs a resolution in scene for the ending scene.
Autumn (6m 9s): Five runs a variety of purposes. Wrap up the action, reinforce the reader's view of a character or set the scene for the lead into your novel. Somehow things have to end and at least wrap up the major event of the story. Even if not all the goals are wrapped up, which leads me to number four. You don't have to wrap up all the detail for short stories. It comes down to minimizing the word count. Well, writing a gripping and emotionally invested story. I tried to keep my stories under 10,000 words and there's just no way to tie up everything going on in a world conflict relationship in that many words, at least while still writing sentences that convey anything interesting or comprehensive.
Autumn (6m 53s): So stick to tip number two, having a goal, wrap up, whatever that is. Not every character will be introduced or describe fully. Not every action needs to be explained as long as the major theme is solid. A few blurry details won't ruin the narrative. The other part is that this is also a 10,000 or less word story. You don't need to mention the detail more than once. Trust the reader to catch it. A short story. We can be read in one sitting over lunch. You don't need to worry about the reader remembering something that happened tens of thousands of words ago.
Autumn (7m 26s): It was the previous Baije don't keep hitting them over the head with the same stuff. It is knowing and waste words.
Old McGrumpy (7m 37s): You are talking more about short stories. Then they take time to write.
Autumn (7m 42s): Why have you written one? Since I started this video,
Old McGrumpy (7m 45s): I have a plot but need to create a words list. Human character. I can't think of any worth might.
Autumn (7m 52s): Maybe you should check out the website MC grumpy. There are lots of posts on character develop it and arc and some great workbooks too.
Old McGrumpy (8m 0s): Possibly an acceptable idea.
Autumn (8m 3s): Well that was useful because we are on to tip number five and it is that the short story is about the characters and how events affect them and not about the events. A lot of really bizarre, wild, terrifying and wonderful things can occur and the reader can care less if she can't relate to the character. This is especially true in a short story. There isn't much time for character building or a slow warm up to like a difficult character. They have to come across fully formed with blog.
Autumn (8m 33s): Those nuances and pet peeves. Red on the surface. Inner personality needs to shine by the end of page one, preferably within a few paragraphs, short stories of the times for snap judgements. Do you like the character? Are they trustworthy? Is there more to their motivation leading to potential revelation and some tension or curiosity building later? Once I develop these tips, I could whip off a short story in a week easily. Now that it's down to a few days, depending on the length for my mailing list, sometimes it's just a thousand word flash fiction.
Autumn (9m 8s): You know, sometimes it hits 5,000 words, though it takes longer to write those, but the readers love their monthly short story. It adds to the back list available for readers. Eventually, I'm going to combine the stories from each of my series into a novella and author while I'm exploring new potential novels, developing characters, and sometimes just taking much needed break from a novel that takes months. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
How do you handle organizing your mailing list and newsletters to reach out to readers? Join Evan Gow, writer and creator of Story Origins, and Autumn as they discuss tools on how to efficiently manage a mailing list.
Check out StoryOrigin at https://storyoriginapp.com/!
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Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Autumn (12s): Hi, if you're a Fantasy author, then you have come to the right place. My name is Autumn Birt and with Jesper Schmidt, I run the Am Writing fantasy.com channel between us, we published more than 20 novels and our aim is to help you in your writing and marketing endeavors today. Yesper is a way on business and I have in his place our guest Evan Gow, Evan is a writer. But what we're going to focus on today is the creation of the website StoryOrigin and how it helps Authors, especially with mailing lists and engaging readers.
Autumn (44s): So hi Evan.
Evan (46s): Hey, thanks for having me on. Autumn
Autumn (48s): it is good to have you. Um, so Evan you, I know you said you right a little bit. You are a Fantasy writer, but what you have been working on most recently is StoryOrigin. So if you could tell us a little bit about that and why you came up with it.
Evan (1m 3s): Yeah, so StoryOrigin is essentially a community and uh, marketing tool, uh, that's helpful for building your email list, uh, doing cross promotions with other authors of your paid books as well. And then also, um, at work and WRA, I'm helping to promote each other.
Autumn (1m 21s): Awesome. And so what inspired you to create this platform? What need did you see that was out there for this? For other Authors?
Evan (1m 31s): Yeah, so, um, there are a bunch of other platforms out there for marketing and doing very specific things. So you have essentially like four or five different marketing tools. You might use one for doing giveaways and group giveaways and then you might use one for doing newsletter swaps, um, and being able to trust those other people at your swapping with, and then you might use one for there. There isn't even other, another platform for running group sales, uh, like you can run on a StoryOrigin.
Evan (2m 5s): The only way Authors have done those in the past is by manually building those pages on their WordPress sites and then trying to get other authors to sort of join them. So StoryOrigin is sort of the only platform for running group sales like that. So I saw this need. Umm, and the other thing is, uh, being able to create a universal links to your book so that when you send out a link to a reader, they can see where the book is in what stores and then set what their favorite store is and automatically on future at times they click on those universal book links, they'll be taken directly to their favorite store.
Evan (2m 42s): So it's just still a one click process. So there are all of these different platforms, right? You might want to use like four or five different tools to do all those things. And with StoryOrigin you can do it all on a single platform.
Autumn (2m 56s): That is one of the things that I suffer solid. Um, when I first noticed StoryOrigin before when I was getting to meet you, it was, it was neat how you were a packaging, all of these different websites and different platforms and even some new things. Like you said, it's um, some of it hadn't even really existed quite in the forum. You've been creating it. When did you first launch Story Origins
Evan (3m 18s): so I started working on StoryOrigin back in July of 2017. That's when I left my job to work full time on StoryOrigin. And then I, uh, had the initial launch for a StoryOrigin April of 2018 and since then, uh, I've added, you know, a ton of features and anyone that's a, uh, was an early subscriber. The StoryOrigin has seen it, uh, go from, you know, a very small number of features to now being the sort of all encompassing platform where you can manage all everything from one place.
Evan (3m 52s): So it's, it's been a cool journey and only over the last 10 months that, uh, it's really been really been going. So it's very cool.
Autumn (3m 60s): It is. I've watched, I was a pretty early Am noticed it pretty early because I had actually just recently switched Am Mailing List platforms from MailChimp to mailer Lite. And then I ran into Story Origins, which I thought was kind of funny. So I do actually, I have a profile on there and I've used it a little bit. Um, and if mailer Lite decides to go wanky on me as a kid, I might just move everything over to your platform because I love to see how it is growing. And I love that it is author focus, which is I think one of the neat things. So many other ones like MailerLite has some landing pages, templates that are designed for authors, but you can't network there to create a giveaway to um, find other people who do newsletter swap.
Autumn (4m 40s): There are a lot of things you are offering. And I think one of the coolest, I think, um, it would be a good discussion to talk about, you know, each of those features and you know, why, why do you, why, which one did you start with? And then why did you start adding some of the other ones and how do you see Authors using them?
Evan (4m 56s): Yeah, so the very first feature that I started with was being able to create a giveaway and a giveaway. For those of the audience that aren't familiar with it is typically, uh, you might also hear it referred to as a reader magnet. It's typically a short story, 10 to 15,000 words that you give away for free, uh, an exchange when someone signs up to your mailing list. So I started with that feature because I thought that would be the best way to start giving like, uh, providing value to Authors.
Evan (5m 27s): And then, uh, after that I added the group giveaways feature where authors can get together in a group. So you, me and 20 other Fantasy Authors we'll all have our books, our, our reader magnets listed on a single page and we all drive our traffic there. And so it has network effects with that feature. So that sort of started the word of mouth for StoryOrigin.
Autumn (5m 51s): That's fantastic. So you started with the giveaways and with the, uh, with the, as you said, reader magnet, which is really fortunate at a Yesper. And I just recently did, uh, a different video and earlier a video talking about, you know, why you need a mailing lists and the use of how to build one. And we mentioned reader magnets. So it's sorta like the core of what began StoryOrigin and what did you add after that?
Evan (6m 15s): So the next feature that I after added after that was the group sales feature. So, um, and the, the Amazon link localizer. So when someone, when you send an email to someone and you just send them to the straight Amazon link, if that's at the.com domain and they click on that link, but they live in the UK or they live in Australia, they're not going to be in the correct storefront for their country. Uh, their Amazon storefront is.co dot. UK or.edu or whatever country they're from.
Evan (6m 46s): So the first thing that I built was basically an Amazon link localizer you put in your Amazon link and then whenever anyone clicks on your Amazon storefront for that country. Uh, and that was sort of the enabling feature for me to build the group sales pages. Where you, me in 20 other Fantasy Authors it's very similar to a group giveaway where we're all promoting our books, but instead of people clicking on those links in those links going to, uh, the reader magnet, they go to our Amazon sales page so that we can actually make money.
Evan (7m 22s): And the way that I, the reason that I, I built that feature next was because I didn't see a single other platform out there where you can do that. I saw these authors who were manually building these pages on their own WordPress sites and I know how much work that can be. Uh, and so I was like, there should be, there should be a super simple, you know, two minute process for creating a group promotion and then finding other Authors to Join. So that's how I, that's how I, I, I started with that feature.
Autumn (7m 54s): Great. That is Am. It definitely is true. I've built a few giveaways on my writer website and it is, I'm, you know, I took a couple, once you got to a template going it was okay, but then someone had to swap out links and your responsible for uploading these images, they give you the wrong one. Right. And it was a, uh, people wanted me to do it again because it got a lot of, um, you know, it was definitely like one of the biggest, a website days or weeks you want to say for my website of, you know, it was huge and that was really cool to probably up by ranks on my website a little bit.
Autumn (8m 28s): But the work going into it, you need to set some time aside to code that. And so it is really neat that you have that with Story Origins. Yep. And if you can do Am newsletter swaps, correct. Is that something that I think you could net work to do that as well. Yeah.
Evan (8m 44s): So that was the feature that I added after the group sales feature. So once I had the sort of the universal links and the group sales, one other thing that I noticed was, okay, there are a lot of Facebook set group that's out there for Authors too. Say, Hey, I've got a newsletter going out in two weeks. Does anyone want to mention my book in their newsletter? I'll mention your book in your and my newsletter. There are a couple of other platforms out there for doing this, but one is run by a scam artist.
Evan (9m 16s): Ah, and the other one is the author has, or not the author, but the developer behind it has just been letting it languish. And from what I've heard from other authors who use that platform, it's essentially unusable now because like your, you get a bunch of errors when you try and do stuff on there now. So uh, I, I was like, okay well StoryOrigin can sort of come in here and be that all encompassing platform for uh, creating and finding cross promotions with other authors in your genre.
Evan (9m 47s): That's like the vision. So I can, I can start to have a way for Authors to find a newsletter swaps. I'll post my campaign, what book I want you to mention in your campaign and then you post your campaign and what book you want mentioned and my campaign and then we can, we can essentially trade mentions of each other's books. And so that's, that's a, it's sort of an all encompassing platform for all those cross promotions you might do.
Autumn (10m 13s): And so on. I want to get into it, a few other details with it, but do you have any more things that are coming out that you want to share or your other visions for how else you can think StoryOrigin is going to help Authors in the future? And out of curiosity, are you doing all this coding yourself? This is Am. I do a little tiny, tiny bit of coding and I do, do build my own websites because I have that background. Computer stuff runs in my family. Yeah. It's a lot of work. So I look at what you've been doing with StoryOrigin, especially the coding to do the universal links and I'm like, wow.
Autumn (10m 46s): Um, that's some skill to make sure it's really going to work. Right. So I was curious if you're doing this all on your own.
Evan (10m 53s): Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm, I'm completely independent. Uh, I've been basically building this platform by myself for the last 18 months and doing all of the marketing and handling all of the, all of the customer service. So, and he's StoryOrigin it's, it's, it's me Am every part of it for sure. At the, uh, the good and the bad, hopefully more good than bad. Um, so, so yeah, uh, you know, when I started to work on StoryOrigin, I basically looked out at the sort of landscape of ways that I could build it, the various tech stacks that I could use.
Evan (11m 29s): And I, I'm using a very sort of modern tech stack to build Story StoryOrigin that really allowed me develop features faster than any one on the market. Uh, and since it is just me, I have direct feedback from Authors who on the platform. And I'm like always looking at, okay, here's what people are doing, here's what people are saying in Facebook groups, uh, about like what they're doing and how they're doing it.
Evan (12m 0s): And like manually doing stuff. And I'm like, okay, why, why, you know, why can't I do this? I should be able to build this. And I think when you have, when you have a separation between who's doing the work of doing the development and who is sort of supposed to be creating the product roadmap, it creates this difference in terms of, you know, understanding the market. And then like actually building it. And since since it's just me, I have a very things that I know Authors will find valuable and a way to get to your other point on what new features, uh, I'll be adding.
Evan (12m 37s): There's definitely more stuff that I plan on building with StoryOrigin. And the next sort of enabling thing that I want to do is uh, managing. So, so if you think about the, the set of marketing sites that you might use might use something for universal book links. You might use something for giveaways you might use. Well again there's nothing else out there for group sales. And then the fourth is sort of advanced reading copies, right? Arcs. So there are a few different arc management platforms out there and basically that's probably the next feature that'll add to a store Origins so it really will cover every single base.
Evan (13m 14s): I basically want to make you sort of the master of every element of marketing with StoryOrigin is like, that's what I want you to feel like, like your, the, your, the Zen master of, of, of, of being able to do everything.
Autumn (13m 26s): I love it because I mean you, I know you said you haven't published any of your writing, but you are a writer and I can definitely tell from having watched you grow StoryOrigin and met with you and talked with you. Um, even just online and Facebook groups, like you've mentioned, you, uh, you're are a real person and not a scammer and you really do have the best interests of Authors at heart, which has fantastic. Is there a way, so I want to talk just a little bit. So you started this as a niche. It is a, you know, you started with looking for these links and with mailing lists, building up why and what niche or do you think that needs, why do authors need to have a platform like this?
Autumn (14m 4s): Not just the, your putting all in one spot, which is definitely fantastic cause you're writing this is like four or five different sites. And if you were paying each of those sites, um, it gets really expensive, especially when, you know, most authors are making, you know, if they're making a thousand bucks a month, they're really happy. Some of them, you know, if they're making 200 bucks, it's then you still have a challenge of paying for your editing and your covers. It's especially as a newbie is it's hard to make it lucrative. So, you know, what is it that, um, you know, this is the integral part. Why did they, you start this for the Authors and the mailing lists.
Evan (14m 35s): Yeah. Uh, one other thing to mention right now is StoryOrigin has basically been in an open beta, which is what I'm calling it. A beta doesn't mean that it's crappy software. Beta basically means that I'm not sure what the pricing model is going to be in the future. Uh, so it's completely free right now for people to, while I'm sort of making myself like a presence in, in the, in the, in the publishing world, just because, you know, there's a lot of companies out there who are, like you said, there are a newbie authors out there and they're not bringing in that much income yet.
Evan (15m 6s): And there are publishers who are just like trying to prey on people who are sort of new to the writing scene. And all of that. So right now a while Origins I'm trying to sort of establish myself as like, here, I'm a human, it's a completely used test. If you don't like it, that's not a problem. I think. I think that you will like it though of course. And then building, building email lists like that is, that is sort of, that is a very valuable feature I think to go to Authors, which is sort of why I started there.
Evan (15m 35s): Because right now if you look at what Amazon is doing, they're pushing more and more towards you having to advertise your book to get any sort of visibility on their platform, which is in turn driving up the cost per click or like the cost to advertise on Amazon. And so it's becoming, it's, it's became a, a greater barrier to new authors, especially who don't have a backlist of 20 books where okay, it's okay if I lose money on the first book because, you know, they'll pick up my second, third, fourth book.
Evan (16m 12s): And so I can, I can sort of eat the cost on that at that first book. Um, so for new authors building that email list is a direct line of communication to your readers, right? It's you, you, you aren't going to, uh, there's not going to be some change in an algorithm that means, okay, I was yesterday paying 70 cents for you to click and see my book and now I'm paying a dollar 50. Right? With an email list, it's, you always have that direct line of contact, that direct line of feedback. So it's, it's, it's becoming more important now than ever, especially as these other platforms become more expensive to advertise on.
Autumn (16m 50s): That is definitely true too with Am Amazon. Not only is it becoming more expensive, like I know I have a dystopian series and there are a, some dystopian key words that are completely locked up. If it costs more to put money into advertising them, then you know, the book is worth. So they end up languishing. But then, I mean I started publishing in 2012 and I called it the wild West days of indie publishing because you could pretty much throw up anything and it didn't even really need a cover. You don't have a color title and some words and a really horrible font and you could give it away or you could sell it.
Autumn (17m 25s): And it was amazing. But I think the last time I checked Amazon, I mean that was, I think there might have been a million, maybe 2 million bucks at the time. Now there's over 9 million books on Amazon and that's just, it's hard to get an exact figure used to be able to look it up. But it's getting harder and harder. And so I do think a platform like yours, cause I believe Authors do get Am kind of like a profile page, like a book website page. So you can show off all your books at once. You discovered on a smaller platform, uh, buy people, you know, doing these group giveaways, you suddenly have someone discovering all your back or even if you, of course, the short story is at freebies.
Autumn (18m 1s): You have them discovering so much more about you that can easily get buried on Amazon. If you are not really paying for that marketing and it is getting more and more expensive and you know, or you can give away a free book, which is great, but if you do consider that as a business model, you're giving away a free book, but that book costs you something and every time you're giving it away you're losing 33 cents of royalties you want. It was a nine 9 cent book as a business model that's eventually it. It kind of, its a huge loss leader to continue to give that away for years and years.
Evan (18m 33s): Yeah. Yeah. The way that I think about, and I think, I think this advice is pretty sort of standard almost nowadays is that what you want to do is you want to write in a series, right? So you write, let's say, let's say it's a trilogy. So you write three books on the series and then you'll write a prequel novella or a prequel, a short story that's maybe 10 to 15,000 words. So it's, it's doesn't cost you a lot of time or money to edit and you give that that pre-qual away for free as a way to introduce the reader into your universe.
Evan (19m 5s): Uh, and so they get to test drive you. If you think about it, it's very, very similar to actually like a subscription to MailChimp or to mailer light or any of these other services where you typically we'll get a like a one month free trial, see if you like the service and if you do then you'll sign up for the recurring subscription. Well you can think about your reader magnet as your free trial and then every book in that series is like a recurring monthly payment almost, right?
Evan (19m 36s): If the, if that reader is reading one book a month or one book a week, you're getting sort of that recurring payment and so you can give away that short story for free because you know that X percentage of those people who get it are going to convert into your, your paying reader audience.
Autumn (19m 53s): I think that is my favorite way of anyone ever describing the loss leader because I know there was a huge debate right now. How about, you know, it is a devaluing book's to give one of a way. Um, right. I definitely liked the idea that, you know, it's like a subscription service. Uh, that really makes a lot of sense. So we're almost at the 20 minute Mark, so I want to, anything else you want to wrap up to say, you know, why StoryOrigin um, you know, I love that as a beta platform. Like you said, I have not seen glitches. I've seen some major glitches in some of the programs and stuff that I've bought or, um, even continued to describe.
Autumn (20m 29s): I subscribe to and you know, you, you sometimes put up with it, but it's worked fantastic. I think you're doing an amazing job, especially that you're doing it on your own. Umm, it's a whole lot of work. I build courses and I build websites and you know, it, it's a tough business to be an entrepreneur and it's amazing that it's going and especially that you left a full time job to be doing this. So I know it can't be free forever, but anything else you want to say about it to let people know what it, what it does? I think it's an amazing tool for author.
Autumn (20m 60s): It's, and it's certainly growing in such unique and interesting ways as a one stop shop platform for us.
Evan (21m 6s): Yeah, I mean I, you know, I wouldn't say that there's necessarily anything else to mention. You know, like I said, there's definitely things that I'm going to be adding to improve the existing features and add new features. I'm always working on new stuff and I sorta, I send out a newsletter whenever I make those feature upgrades or I add those new features. And so I would say even if you look at StoryOrigin and you say, Oh, well it doesn't do this thing like tomorrow, it may.
Evan (21m 36s): So you might want to sign up just so you can keep up with, you know, any developments that are happening because maybe it didn't work for your use case today, but tomorrow it might. So I think it's still valuable and it's, you know, free to keep up with it anyway. So,
Autumn (21m 53s): which is amazing. I look forward to seeing, um, seeing a grow and even if you have a, you know, when did you move it to a platform where it's paid or a subscription? I think that as I say, Authors it's okay to charge money for your books. Uh, we all want to do this and make money at it and be able to continue to see a product if it stays free forever. And then how are you going to get it to, you know, manage it. Right. So I think it's fantastic. Thank you for being with us today. And um, I will have the links below the show on Story Origins so you can go scoop it up while it's free and give it a test.
Autumn (22m 26s): Try and thank you again for being here today.
Evan (22m 29s): Awesome. Thank you so much for having me on. I really enjoyed our conversation.
A few weeks back we discussed how to set up an email list. Once that is sorted, you obviously need email subscribers. But, how do you get your first 1,000 email subscribers? What tips and tricks can you employ to get quality subscribers rather than a bunch of random people.
We're here discussing email list growth strategies by sharing from our own experiences with email lists.
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Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Jesper (13s): All right. We are going to talk about email list building today. Two weeks ago we sort of talked about setting up email lists and also what social providers were livable for you when it comes to building a list. But, uh, we also promise to circle back to the topic of how we are going to build a list and a I think the best place to start is to talk about, well, the pump. Some people call them lead magnets, other people can't call them reader magnets the same, the same thing.
Jesper (45s): But uh, but I think that's a good place to start. But what is a lead magnet magnet? Our reader magnet, maybe we should start there. Autumn
Autumn (54s): good. Are there really, like you said, the same idea of what it really involves is finding something to give away for free, but it's not really freedom your I think it'll lay in exchange for someone's email address, which they're trusting with you. So treat it well, but that is the really the prime idea. And that could be anything from even giving away a book, a free book that then offers another free book in exchange for an email. Or it could be a book that you're selling, but what you're doing is you are giving away something from either the next book did the series works really well, but sometimes it's a pro, you know, previous book or a totally different book, but it is giving them away something like even hidden scenes.
Autumn (1m 38s): I don't know what you've seen yes for that works really well, but there's a lot of different things that people can give away to attract readers that are interested in their own book to sign up for something free as well as give away their email address to you.
Jesper (1m 53s): Yeah, you can be, you're going to get really baited with I did. I mean some people don't like it to give away a full book. I mean obviously obviously right. What to write a book and uh, well your spend money on editing and covers and whatnot. So some people don't like that. And if, if that's you, then no, you can get creative and you can give away like, um, an alternative ending to the movie.
Autumn (2m 16s): Oh.
Jesper (2m 16s): Or you can, mm. Uh, maybe you have some scenes that you've cut out of the book, uh, sort of you, you can share those or it could be some background information on it. When a character, like a character sheet with some information that is not shared in, in the novel itself. Um, it could short stories, short stories. Yeah. You must be spin off a short stories off. I thought the novel, no, you can do it ton of things and it doesn't have to be elaborate either. You know, you a which a dossier or it could be like a two page PDF for that matter.
Jesper (2m 49s): I mean it doesn't have to be more than a.
Autumn (2m 52s): I think
Jesper (2m 53s): the main point is that it needs to be the exclusive, meaning that it should not be something that you can get from somewhere else as well. Well meaning and maybe logic say that. Well, um, people like to get it for free. A for example, let's say, let's say you have a, a short story for example, for sale for 99 cents and then you make it exclusive by the fact that, okay, but instead of buying it for 99 cents, you can also sign up here and then you'll get it for free.
Jesper (3m 28s): That that, that would be the line of thinking but but I think actually that it works counter productive in the way that if you, you can get it somewhere people actually what and even sign up to get it for free. They will buy it instead, but a many and since, because they don't, there were certain rules stuff, so it has to be something that, okay, this is exclusive and can only get it here. A I think that works a lot better than if you're trying to say that it's inclusive, an exclusive either have you again or something for free.
Jesper (4m 2s): Then you can also buy an Amazon for example. I don't think it works that well
Autumn (4m 7s): though. There is a whole train of thought where you give away a the second book in a series that is for sale, but of course you'd be spending, you know it should be a lot more than two 99 I do give away the second book of my series if you sign up for it, but the book is priced at three 99 so it is an exclusive and there are a lot of people doing that. But I mean I definitely totally very tempted to try to do something completely exclusive that you can't buy it and anywhere else. I think that'd be a fun thing to do for my next areas. So it's worth trying out. But there, I don't think people should live with themselves, but again, I'm giving away an entire book and I do get people signing up to get that every single day.
Autumn (4m 44s): So it definitely is an interest. But there is a drawback to doing that as well, is that I get a lot of emails saying, Hey, you gave me, can you give away? But to I would like the third one now for free and that's all. It's a fun conversation of it to you guys. Box. I was two years of my life. Your third one for free. Sorry. Yeah,
Jesper (5m 4s): but I, but I think, I think that is the one difference to to this to what you just said there is the fact that when people have your title, okay and you get to the the back of the book and here is a link to the second book for free, which of course you could go to Amazon and buy that book. But at that point in time the people are fully invested in the story and and in what you're doing well already. So when you get to that stage it makes sense to offer them at that point in time a free book but my point was more if you're doing it upfront, you know before they even know you, they have not read anything about you.
Jesper (5m 39s): And if you're then offering, here is a free book. If you give me your email address or you can go to Amazon and buy for 99 cents or two 99 for that matter, most people were buying instead of giving you the email address. But of course I, if the read the entire book and then your make the offer, then it's a different app because then no,
Autumn (5m 58s): no have you, and they know that they liked the book and they would want to keep waiting and then it becomes a matter of, of course I'll get it for freedom because uh, you know, I have now a familiar your with you. Well, so I, I don't mind as much giving away my email address and it's very true and I think that is one reason I'd definitely works. A is having that already being invested in, you know, if you've done your book well that it leads into the next one. Can they want, let's see. Once that happened. The character. Okay. It's an easy sell to get an email address and we'll have them sign up for your email list in exchange for the book.
Autumn (6m 32s): Yeah, indeed at the end. Then of course there the add on boldness of having of cross that a by then you know that you're getting the right people onto your email list because if people will like your, your your writing and they like your work so, so that's a very good bonus. You're know when you're giving me thank you S away for free up front. Some of the people who end up your on your list. I'll be the one right people so to speak. So some of them will end up on subscribing again on all that we talked about that two weeks ago and that happens.
Autumn (7m 3s): That's okay. Hey don't worry about it. But it is a possibility. Well quality subscriber that you're getting, if they're signing up from the back of book then someone who doesn't know you. Absolutely. It's definitely makes a huge difference cause that's, that is one of the keys. And one of the things we'll talk about well who are going to once what you're giving them and who will become not just readers but fans of what you're doing. And that's sort of the key of why you're getting this email because you want them to buy from you in the future.
Autumn (7m 33s): So you want to make sure you're getting a quality audience. But sure you're giving away something that makes sense for your book. You're getting this email address from them, you know, make sure it was related to who you are and what you're writing in your characters and your what, your sister you're telling and what you plan on selling in the future. If you've done a one shot genre, it might not be worth hello addresses if an ad is so atypical of what you ever plan on writing so keep that in mind as well. Make sure this is something about your brand and who you are as an office.
Autumn (8m 6s): They're so that they're not confused whether they signed up for you when you're only releasing no paranormal romance, but they bought your detective story and that's what they really like. It won't work as well. S step number one is that you need to have solar blog Oh really? No magnet. Whatever you call it doesn't matter, but you did. You need to have something that you're giving away from you. So, so yeah, you need to figure out what, what that needs to be. But my advice would be make it exclusive a unless you are only trying to sign up in the back of the book.
Autumn (8m 40s): But yeah, the drawback of that, let's say the positive as we said before, it was getting quality. You sign up. But the truth, all of it is that you need to send a lot of books then. And if you're not okay, you don't have it, the email list, it might be difficult or are these more difficult to sell more books?
Jesper (8m 57s): So it's sort of Henan deck trouble. You're in here. So, and, and for that purpose a it does make sense to have some stuff. Oh, a a lead magnet that am you're giving away up front, you know? Um, but if you're going to get something in a way, then you also have to have a mechanism by where they can get the download that you're giving them an obviously it should be a digital product. I, I sort of just assumed that everybody knew your dad, but just to pitch, you have to mention that of course it should be because then you can just give it to them and a and they can download it.
Jesper (9m 30s): Then you don't have to worry about any shipping stuff and whatnot. I don't want to do so, but you need to have a mechanisms by which they can then get the download a and that's where a signup forms comes into the picture.
Autumn (9m 46s): Definitely. I mean, so we talked about a last week with a SaaS providers, you can always host something on your own website. If you know coding that you know they sign up. A woo commerce has a few plugins where you can do this as well so you could have it totally self hosted where they come, they give you the email. By doing that it takes them to another page where they can just go ahead and download what it did it ever is drinking, giving them. But definitely one of the easiest things is to go ahead and sign up for our email service provider that provides you a landing page that collects emails, that, that has them in a place where you're just going to go ahead and create an email, um, a newsletter that you will actually be sending to them later.
Autumn (10m 28s): Or like we talked about last week with automations where they immediately get that first email as soon as they sign up because you don't want you to sign up and wait a day, two, three days. So like yet, whatever or does they signed up for, they're going to be really annoyed if you cannot deliver whatever it is you offer them for free. And you know, the first hour I've seen people, you know, wait five minutes and if they don't have the free download and like it's a scam, I just gave away my email and it's going to be totally spammed and I'm so,
Jesper (10m 60s): yeah, before you added the scam part, I wish above to say that. That's, you know, well, I, I don't think that it's a scam. Weifarer but, um, but if I do not get the email on a download within five minutes, I, I'm wa I'm thinking something is wrong. There must be an error or something, some place. Yep. Oh, bye. You know, we don't have patients that do they, no, it should go fast and certainly I should have a weekend, an hour, so a then, then I would definitely do think something is wrong, but uh, but yeah, I mean the nice thing, hip hop, the electronics setup is that am the email service provider will send out the email instantly.
Jesper (11m 35s): I asked that they sign up. And of course, this is, while it might be a bit difficult to sort of explain, but as soon as you get into it a you're going into mail Chimp, as I said last time, then it might be, but if you are, you said, good, good kid. At least as soon as you get into it and you're setting it up, it's fairly, eh, you know, it's a. yeah. You create the sort of the signup form where you have to have a picker. You writing is the text of what it should say. So for example, a just give me your email address and tell me where to send the blank, whatever it is that you're giving away.
Jesper (12m 10s): A so you're right that text in and then you get into the next session of the setup process where it will tell you or ask you to write the email, the following, which is going to deliver it. So you basically just upload your PDF, for example, if it's a PDF, you just uploaded their right to text him to eat email and that will automatically be sent and delivered to the am to the subscriber right after they have a confirmed their subscription a and that's basically it is, it's pretty easy. And then within that process you will also be asked, uh, if you would like to have it hosted on, in this case, for example, convert kit.
Jesper (12m 44s): And if you say yes, it'll generate Atlantic beach for you and you're gonna give you a link. And that link is basically the link to the webpage that your signup form sits on. So you can just take that link and put it where we need to put it. But but the good thing about all of this is that you don't even have to have your own webpage or website to get started with all of this year. You can get started by only having the email, um, provider here and, and you stay, which is very nice.
Jesper (13m 14s): So, so if, if for example you just said cutting out, uh, and again concerned, concerned with, with the economy and money and stuff like that, you can get started without even creating your own website. And that's pretty neat.
Autumn (13m 28s): That is really neat. And I will give a super sneaky pro tip that I didn't listen to when I was a new author and I regretted it and I S I fixed it this year. But if you're really, if you do have your own website and you're good with coding, um, I highly suggest the link you put in your book is it to a patient when you're on a website that you can then redirect to whatever mail service provider, whatever landing page you end up using. Because guess what, you might changing male per service providers. I've been doing this for more than five years.
Autumn (13m 59s): I've gone through three. Um, and every time, you know, I have to keep the old ones going because there was a book this as readers still exists. Click the road on like in a day and, and that's just, you don't want that to happen. But now I have everything going to my website and that what page will redirect them to the proper mail service provider that I've got going at the moment. Um, definitely a pro tip that doesn't take much full code notes in there comments. So if you have questions on how to do that and I'll help you out.
Jesper (14m 31s): Yeah. And uh, yeah, I've, I've crossed that, yeah. After five years that that might end up being a troll. But but again, a I mean, if you're just starting out, this is your first book. You just need to start generating an email list. Don't worry about it too much. You know, you can, yeah. You can use to mail providers, uh, uh, have them hosting your landing page and your signup form and give away the PDF. And you know, don't worry too too much about it, but obviously as you, as you evolve down your author career pattered and you want to start thinking about having your website, they're sorted, you can control this stuff.
Jesper (15m 5s): But
Autumn (15m 6s): yeah, that is definitely one of the brilliant things about this is that you don't need to have a website and you can just start with, you know, just the balance a service provider using that and it doesn't, I mean, you don't have to wait. You don't even have to have your book out as long as you have a thing to provide a link to give away. You know, just have short stories out. How are we doing? Do this. Once what Pat, even as you're writing things and meters are looking at it, you could have it in your profile. Say, Hey, you like this, sign up for more exclusive content and email spell address all without a website, which is fantastic way to start building your list as you're writing and growing as an author.
Jesper (15m 44s): Yeah, indeed. Uh, and of course
Autumn (15m 46s): laughs
Jesper (15m 46s): to we go, we talked a lot about why it is important to build the list and all that. So we're not going to get into that here again, but um, but just to reiterate a that you should pay typically, sir, the, the list as soon as possible and even before your book's out. But but of course the same is true as we talked about last time when setting up the whole system with your autoresponders and all that. As we said last time, it requires what the same as jewel here, um, in the, in the sense that, but am you're not just going to let's say acquire subscribers just once and this by magic, you know, if why that effort and it requires, um, usually, probably some many as well, I would say.
Jesper (16m 35s): Um, because essentially you need in traffic and you need to drive traffic to that landing piece because just because the Atlantic piece exists doesn't mean that people will ever, ever, ever find it. Uh, and even if you put, even if you have your own website and you put the Yemeni people once on your website, sorry to say, but people were still not check it out. So
Autumn (16m 56s): yeah,
Jesper (16m 56s): we need to push traffic there and am if someone S comes to you and say it a day a day can get to a thousand subscribers in 30 minutes, I would say they run for the Hills because don't ever engage with people like that.
Autumn (17m 10s): Yeah, I agree. You do not want to get a shouty list, but definitely traffic. I mean, the best eyes on who are going to be the most interested on you if you have completed book. But obviously it needs to be selling or you need to be doing, take it away. There's got to be, be a way of getting eyes onto it so that they see that you have this link and you're giving away this exclusive content. Um, and one of the best ways that I saw as a new author and getting started is by joining some group giveaways. And those are hosted, sometimes they're hosted on someone's website where basically to pick up, it could be your first book, whatever that exclusive offer is, um, in exchange for an email address.
Autumn (17m 48s): And there are some doing that. True other providers, pardon? Ouch. Or Bellis providers. So they would be things like instaFreebie book funnel and the catch is, uh, is usually to get those email addresses. You actually do have the pay, you know, it can be 10, 20, $30 a month. Um, book funnel. I can't just to be able to, to collect email addresses, but I know the it's over $50 a year. But that's not expensive. And you joined those giveaways. There's a lot of different authors advertising the giveaway readers are going to it and they know that they're signing up for your book or for whatever your exclusive offer is in exchange for email.
Autumn (18m 28s): You want to get into this is my big tip though, is you want to get into one where the reader is subscribing specifically. They know it's for your book. There are some group giveaways where people are signing up for a prize like a Kindle or a suite of like 50 books. Um, but that doesn't mean those readers are going to necessarily be interested in your book or your style. There might be some good emails in there, but you're also going to have a much higher unsubscribe rate if you do it that way.
Autumn (18m 58s): So definitely keep that in mind that you want to make sure it's generous, specific at the very least. And at the also that you are, you know, you're getting people who know that they're, they are signing up. There's no like hidden catch 22 that you're signing up to get a special deal and you're, you know, you're, you're signing up to win a Kindle of, wait, how'd you get subscribed as someone's email list that wasn't part of the deal. Make sure you're upfront about that because I can get you into a lot of trouble and people are supporting you for spam or system camera.
Autumn (19m 28s): You don't want that.
Jesper (19m 31s): Basically when we're talking about driving traffic there, um, you obviously have a lot of a plus a petition. No, there, there is this Pinterest and YouTube and Facebook and Twitter and the Republicans because we said before w then of course needs, then you need to sell the books. A lot of books, which means the new need to do advertising to sell books instead. But I think it's pretty hard with our, between here in am in 2019, it's pretty difficult to, uh, to get email lists, signups on less.
Jesper (20m 5s): You are putting a bit of money behind it. I mean, obviously you don't have to spend a ton of money but even if you're running like $5 a week. Once the Facebook app is still better than nothing. A am and you can just the ball rolling a bit. Um, but what I would say is that try to find, find the traffic sources or platforms. So if that's Facebook or YouTube or Twitter or whatever it is, try to and what what's that? Blog well, sort of suit the way it's a platform.
Jesper (20m 36s): Did you like us? What I'm trying to say, but also that it suits your budget. Um, Facebook is notorious of taking all the money you put into it. It can be pretty expensive. It can also be effective if, if you know how to do the world but okay. Bye. To maybe one or two of the sources that you would like to work with and um, yeah, enjoy it is within your budget and then just be really good at those and figure out how to be really good at those rather than trying to be on eight different media outlets and trying to pin twist it.
Jesper (21m 12s): YouTube yeah, and Facebook and YouTube and we'll, I mean your don't kill yourself and you're going to get completely overwhelmed, so, so don't try to do it at that figure. Figure out which one or two of you like and then go, go with dose. A that's one thing. And then I think the other thing is, Oh, did you, it should be mindfulness about how it is that you are, let's say setting it up mean for example. Um, I have seen examples of people who you made me think, okay, I'll start a podcast and then June a cast, I will mention that they can get X for free by going to that in that page.
Jesper (21m 49s): Or I will record YouTube videos like we do here to talk about a. Uh, I'll give advice to other authors and then of course we could be saying, Oh, and by the way, you can get them Monday can we put one a by going to that and death link? But but the thing is that you need to be mindful about what you're doing. If it's the right audience that you're talking to. I mean, running a youth channel sample this one. Oh, eh, giving advice to other authors does more or less. Absolutely. Ciro for our book sales.
Jesper (22m 21s): Perfect. So am we love giving. Yeah, we love running the channel here and we love giving the advice and all that. But in terms of it matters. Does she work? Uh, and the same thing will be true for a, if, if you've accepted, you create a podcast about am something that isn't really relevant for the reader of the book, then it also will drive no traffic. So, so be mindful about that. Um, but that said, if you can find a way to angle it so that it's relevant for, for the reader, that could be a way around spending money.
Jesper (22m 57s): You know, that time instead of many, you know, producing videos and producing podcasts episodes, so you're investing time and money. Um, but as I said before, it, it requires work. So either you can pay you for it or you can put in the time. But no ma'am and like to build the list is not going to build itself.
Autumn (23m 16s): No, definitely not. I mean, it would be better if you wanted to just have a lot of videos of you reading. So if you're your blood book or chapters or talking about your story, if you're doing videos of that, that was, it'd be a better way of saying, Oh, and by the way, I have also some free content. If you want to sign up for it then to be talking about editing or writing, you know, talking to other authors, authors, yeah, they might be readers, but that's not your target audience and that's really your you're generating a lot of work for something.
Autumn (23m 47s): He was not your primary content that you want to give it a two. I will say I learned a really great tip that, Oh, giving away something. You make sure you mentioned it in your bio almost every platform, Facebook somewhere. Let's, you've mentioned like little bit of who you are. You can also, so always make sure you've mentioned, Hey I, I'm an author and I have a free blah blah. If you sign up here, it doesn't hurt because every time you go and post as someone or is interested, then let's see that. Yeah, but again, that's like love it. Oh absolutely.
Autumn (24m 17s): I'm definitely not going to get you a thousand subscribers in a couple of days, but it does help to have it there so you don't make sure you put the time that if you're giving away something, let people know about it. But make sure you're also letting the people who might be interested in what you're doing know about it. Talk about yours, Monroe. Talk about, look at readers. Don't be looking at, um, you know, your mom's best friends that are probably not your target. What they might be your target audience, but they're not my target audience.
Old McGrumpy (24m 49s): It would take too long to gain a thousand subscribers just by A-list instead.
Autumn (24m 55s): No, no, no, no. That's don't listen to our cohost AI who we can't get rid of them. We really wish we could. Good. This is really bad advice because okay, you buy it for this one. These are people who probably didn't sign up to have their email sold to you who don't even know a few. Take your time. No. And do you think this is like, this is, you know, you went to Boston the street and hold a sign saying, Hey, I'm an author giving away books.
Autumn (25m 26s): You'll probably get more people interested than you would for all the cold list that you bought. In fact, you really might get a lot of people reporting you that you're spamming them and they don't know how you've got on your list and have you got one person out of say a thousand people, that would be amazing. You want to try something a little bit better, like take time and generate someone who's interested in your readings. Just go and I said email, it's hosting free videos of you reading your content. Even if it's going on what pad and posting your chapters and putting at the end at the end of every single one, Hey, you can find out more by going to my website.
Autumn (26m 2s): You can do that legally and they're going to be way more interested than someone who am you perfect, which is still all their name off of a list and they might've been signing up for cosmetics and start going to help you at all.
Old McGrumpy (26m 16s): Just come to me and I will sell you 10,000 subscribers and I will even give you a discount.
Autumn (26m 24s): Yeah, you definitely do not want to listen. Oh, a to him. But he, okay. Maybe has one point affected and that is that it takes long to build the list of a thousand subscribers cool. Okay. Okay.
Jesper (26m 43s): How long does that take? To be honest? And you're not gonna like this, but the answer is I have no idea because essentially what it is is that, um, there is a lot of factors that play into how fast you can build a list of, for example, of a thousand people. Uh, it, it of course both depends on strategy. Do? Are you implying you mean the link in the back of the book like we talked about before or are you're trying to drive people upfront into something that you're giving away that matters.
Jesper (27m 19s): It also matters how attractive potential readers find your giveaway. Is it something that actually interests them or to do things? Well, I don't really care. That makes a big difference. Meaning how many, who, who actually gets to the landing page actively convert into subscribers. That makes a difference whether 50% that are converting or half a percent that that, that's a big difference of course. Uh, and then there is just a matter of, it also depends on how much money you're putting. Yeah, yeah. Oh, you're putting a to get traffic.
Jesper (27m 51s): You know, if you, if you have a lot of money to spend on it and you can drive a lot of traffic, then obviously the list is going to be built rather quickly compared to if you can only spend, bye. I know $6 a week or $6 a month or whatever. But I would still say, and little is better than I think. So even if you do only spend $6 a month, then do that at least, uh, Tim subscribers is better than zero and it's a starting point.
Autumn (28m 19s): It is. And that's, it's also like quality is a subscriber. I mean, yeah, you could join a group, give away and maybe you can get a hundred, 200 a thousand quickly. But what if your open rate, what are their interest is only 10% where you ended up with 2025 subscribers maybe over the exact same period of time, but they're like 80% many Oh my God. Oh, nice. Yep. 25 way more than you want. 10% of a thousand. You, you really want to go for the quality.
Autumn (28m 49s): Don't think about the quantity. And you know, you can, could have two people who love you and are rooting for you and they will do so much more for you than having 2000 people on a list that you never heard from. That's totally cool. Yes. So keep that in mind too. You really, it was the connection you build. It's why doing it honestly. And so yeah, it might take you a little bit of more time to do it organically. Um, put in some, put in whatever you can many time to be creative, get the right people and tell them, let them share the story of your journey as a writer.
Autumn (29m 22s): Let that become fans of who you are right now. An author brand is very much our own jury as writers and authors. Uh, the fans want to know that. Your readers want to kind of know a little bit more about you, not just about the story. I mean, it's like people know George RR Martin, they, they new the more about his life then am a they're probably, people knew in the 1970s and eighties about most of the authors that they were fans of. I mean, I, nothing about Ursula, Kayla Gwyn and so probably 10 years, one, I started okay.
Autumn (29m 54s): More because now we want to know more about these people and how they live. And that's changed a lot. So sell yourself, connect with your readers. What's your email list with people who really care about what you're doing and are excited about what you're doing? Don't just take the shortcut and get a whole bunch of numbers behind your email list and think that that's an answer because it's not going to help you in the long run.
Jesper (30m 18s): Wow. So I think that was a perfect conclusion to end on. Um, I don't have it. Anything else to add?
Autumn (30m 27s): Well, great. That's it for this show. At least we gave some the to it's on email lists and hopefully it'll help a few authors out.
Jesper (30m 35s): All right. Thanks a lot. See you next Monday.
Amazon Ads used to be called Amazon Marketing Services, or AMS, but it has since rebranded and are now known as Amazon Ads.
I explain what Amazon Ads are, clarify which types of ads are available on Amazon when you're marketing your books and also some recommendations along the way.
New episodes EVERY single Monday. To subscribe on YouTube, go here: http://bit.ly/1WIwIVC
PATREON! Many bonus perks for those who become a patrons. https://www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy
LET'S CONNECT! Closed Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/AmWritingFantasy/ Blog and Courses: https://www.amwritingfantasy.com/ Jesper on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SchmidtJesper Autumn on Twitter: https://twitter.com/weifarer
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Jesper (12s): A couple of weeks ago I talked about how you have to use paid ads in order to gain any visibility as an author in 2019 I also recommended to use Amazon apps, but I didn't really get into what those ads are, so I thought I better close that loop. Today we're going to remove any confusion about what Amazon ads are and clarify which type of ads are available.
Jesper (44s): My results and recommendations on each and by that also why you should care about Amazon ads in the first place. If you are a fantasy author, then you've come to the right place. My name is Jesper and together with Autumn I host this channel between us. We've published more than 20 novels and our aim is to help you in your writing and marketing endeavors. The first thing I need to do is to give a huge shout out to bill Finley, who is our newest supporter on Patreon.
Jesper (1m 22s): There is a link in the description field below. If you also want to check out Patreo on, but you are going to get stuff like a fantasy bookmarks or how about a amwritingfantasy t-shirt or even you'll have the possibility to get custom made fantasy maps. But enough of that, let's get into the topic of Amazon ads Amazon ads used to be called Amazon marketing services or a M S.
Jesper (1m 52s): S some refer to it and I still do from time to time, but they've still rebranded and they are now known as Amazon ads. It used to be so that these ads were only available for those who were selling physical devices or components and it wasn't even possible for authors to Euston. But nowadays you can fortunately run Amazon ads regardless of whether or not your books are released in the KDB select meaning if you are exclusive to Amazon on not even that they didn't use to do so.
Jesper (2m 26s): In this case, the good news is that everyone is on a level playing field, but there's obviously also means that there is a another thing to learn. Fear. Not though because I'm going to give you an overview here to make things easy, but a good place to start is why you should even care about Amazon ads. Well, the thing is that these ads are served on the Amazon website and when people browse the Amazon website, they do so because they are looking to buy something opposite.
Jesper (3m 4s): Something like Facebook asks, for example, where people are busy interacting with friends and family or checking out a group that they might belong to or something like that. At any rate, people are not on Facebook because they want to buy something. If Facebook I had has to catch the person's attention, then it has to get them to click the app. It then takes the PO, a person off of social media and onto a store like Amazon folks sample hoping that they will then make a purchase and as you can see, that's quite a journey with multiple clicks and the risk of losing the person's interest.
Jesper (3m 47s): All along the way with Amazon ads the people seeing the ad is already there with the intention to buy something and they can do that within two clicks only, you know, one click on the ad and then the bike click. That's it. You've got two types of ads at your disposal, the first SD sponsored product ad and then the other is luck screen ads the lush green ads is a fairly new thing.
Jesper (4m 21s): It has replaced the previous product display ads and the lush green ad will show up on uh, you know when people unlock their Kindle eReader. So right there on the home screen before they start reading, they can be shown an ad of your book opposite the product display ads. The luxury Nat is also capable of showing up on the new Kindle fire tablets. So, uh, sort. That's pretty cool. Let's take a closer look at the effectiveness of these lock screen ads now that we are already talking about them and then we will circle back to these sponsored product ads in a moment.
Jesper (5m 4s): One would think that these ads should work really, really well. After all, they are showing up right there on people's Kindle, but overall and in my experience and I can only speak from personal experience, they're not as effective as the sponsor product ads. In fact, I would say very far from it. Now keep in mind that when I talked about how you have to run ads in 2019 I also said that you have to experiment on your own.
Jesper (5m 39s): You know, just because I can't get these ads to work, then it doesn't mean that you will experience the same results. I do know of authors who have churned significant profit with lock screen ads or product display ads as they used to be called. In my case, I haven't been able to it though. Perhaps the fact that it's that the ad is showing to potential readers, right? Windeyer lying or sitting down to read is what makes them less effective.
Jesper (6m 9s): I don't know, but at least for me, that's not the time that I'm thinking about buying a new book. I don't know about you. I think in that particular moment it's much harder to convince someone to buy a new book.
Old McGrumpy (6m 23s): It is because you worthless. Humans are too lazy.
Jesper (6m 28s): Well, hi there, all my grumpy. I'm glad to see that our resident co-host decided to show up today. Well, at least if you have something insightful to share today, a old my grumpy, do you have your something insightful to share? Otherwise, feel free to leave always. Well, maybe you think it's insightful, but it has to pertain to Amazon. Ads.
Old McGrumpy (6m 53s): You should just find to advertising company and ask them to run your ads for you than you do not even have to worry about all this stuff you are babbling on about people could be writing instead of watching YouTube videos,
Jesper (7m 8s): advertising companies, you say, well, if you do find an advertising company who wants to run your ads for you, I would advise that you think about it before you jump in. Why? Well good that you ask because an advertising company will never care as much about your books and your sales as you will besides with a bit of patience and practice desk. Nothing that they can do for you that you can't do yourself. So I would say save your money.
Old McGrumpy (7m 40s): It always comes down to Monday with you, worthless humans.
Jesper (7m 44s): Well, not always, but I don't think that's true, but, but many is important to us that much. It's fair enough to say, but with that set, we can move on to the sponsor's product ad because those I have been able to turn profitable first. Where do the sponsored product ad appear? Well, if a reader goes to Amazon and type in, say, fantasy book in the search bar off the Kindle store, then the results will be displayed.
Jesper (8m 15s): However, if you as an author, I have created a sponsored product ad with the keyword fantasy book, then your ad will compete with all other ads for that specific keyword. The one with the highest bit will win the auction and be displayed as one of the search results. You can test it out yourself by going onto amazon.com for example, select the Kindle store and then search for something and when you hit enter, you will find that the top results, we'll have a little sponsored text next to them, so it says that little labeled sponsored and that's because these are sponsored product ads.
Jesper (8m 58s): To be honest, as long as you are book is relevant to the keywords that you are betting on. I don't really think that readers care one bit about it saying sponsored on not if they are looking for a fantasy book and that's what appears at the top of the search result, they will click it. If you then done a good job with the cover, the book description, and you have some reviews to serve a social proof, then there is no reason why they wouldn't make the purchase as well.
Jesper (9m 32s): So when you create these ads, you are asked to tell Amazon how much you want to bid per key word. Essentially every time somebody clicks on your ad, Amazon will then charge you up to that amount that you're bidding, not necessarily the full amount. It all depends on the competition for that particular keyword, but to be on the safe side, you better expect it to be the full amount when you are sort of budgeting. But don't worry, these ads are not expensive as long as, and only as long as you don't go crazy with your painting.
Jesper (10m 9s): Of course, if you start bidding $2 per hit, then it's going to be expensive pretty fast. However, my advice is to completely ignore the suggested bit that Amazon gives you and then keep your bidding at between 30 and 50 cents per click instead somewhere in that range. Now, it obviously depends on how much you're selling your book for, so if you're selling a box set that you sell for, let's say nine 99 uh, then you can afford to bid a bit more.
Jesper (10m 41s): Conversely, a book being sold for two 99 or 99 cents can't sustain as high as a bit as the one we talked about before if you want to turn a profit. I think the main reason for these type of ads being so incredibly effective is because that they're showing up right in the middle of the buying process. It's basically right when the reader has typed in fantasy books. If we use that example and then they're scrolling through the options to see what they want to buy, and you will add a P S right?
Jesper (11m 11s): They're very effective in terms of the keywords. Keep in mind that you are only actually paying for the keywords that gets clicked. Therefore, the only logical course of action is to load as many keywords as you can to get maximum exposure. Eats app will accept a thousand keywords and I always recommend to include as many as you can. Most of my aunts has a thousand keywords in each of them. So you might be thinking a thousand keywords, are you crazy?
Jesper (11m 45s): There was no way I could come up with a thousand keywords and no, I can't come up with a thousand keywords either. So that's why I will, uh, some stuff about KDP rocket within the next few weeks. Uh, it's a piece of software that will help you out tremendously when it comes to keyword research. Otherwise, you can of course use Google ad words to generate a list of keywords. If you're on a budget, at least that's free. It's not the KTB rocket ex expensive either.
Jesper (12m 15s): But if you're looking for something free, then we'll use Google AdWords. In order to create a winning ad, you have to test out different ad copy. So test out different variations and keep loading the system with more and more ads and more and more keywords. At this point of time, I'm probably advertising something like 20,000 keywords on on Amazon and that might sound like a lot and perhaps it is, but if you are just creating like one or two ads every week, you know you'll get there sooner or later.
Jesper (12m 51s): Oh, and something else worth mentioning to the Amazon dashboard that shows the results of your ads are, it's quite slow to populate. Sometimes it can take up to two weeks for it to show all the sales. So don't make your decisions on whether an ad is successful or not. Based on the app dashboard, you can use the a cost score, which just shows in the at at board to get sort of a general bearing about the results. So as long as you are under 70% in eco score, you're turning a profit.
Jesper (13m 26s): Since Amazon gives you a 70% royalties. However, the only sure way to determine your success is to check your sales by the KDP dashboard and then compare your revenue with the invoices that you're getting for your ads. That way there is no second guessing. You know, if you have any questions, you know, just fire away in the comments section below. Uh, I've tried to condense this topic around ads into something that is fairly easy to understand, but I am of course also having to take the assumption that you know how to create these ads and, uh, how to operate the dashboard and so forth.
Jesper (14m 8s): If that's not the case, well, as I said, make use of the common section. See you next Monday.
In this video we discuss why an email list is important for your authors business. Why also talk about which email service providers are available for you, the pros and cons of each, and how you should get started.
The different email service providers covered are:
MailChimp: https://mailchimp.com/ ConvertKit: https://convertkit.com/ MailerLite: https://www.mailerlite.com/ Active Campaign: https://www.activecampaign.com/ Infusionsoft have changed their name to Keap: https://keap.com/ StoryOrigin: https://storyoriginapp.com/
New episodes EVERY single Monday. To subscribe on YouTube, go here: http://bit.ly/1WIwIVC
PATREON! Many bonus perks for those who become a patrons. https://www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy
LET'S CONNECT! Closed Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/AmWritingFantasy/ Blog and Courses: https://www.amwritingfantasy.com/ Jesper on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SchmidtJesper Autumn on Twitter: https://twitter.com/weifarer
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Jesper (12s): All right. So, uh, we are doing a double recording today, so to speak. Uh, because now that we changed the channel and am we are both, uh, Autumn and I are running it. We also have the possibility to actually have some videos in between. We'd probably do this like once a month. Oh, we're both of us are actually on, on the video and we will do some, uh, am covering some topics that they will discuss to for the year. Am make it very beneficial for you. And today we decided, decided to talk about email is uh, email lists, uh, very important.
Jesper (44s): And um, and we want to cover the basics of it today. Uh, in two weeks from now we will do another session where we'll talk about how to grow your email list, but today we want to focus a bit more on, okay, why is it important? And also if you want to S if you're starting out and they're going to set up an email list, what sort of service providers exist and who should you use blog good and bad about each one of them and so forth. So that's sort of what we want to cover today, isn't that right? Autumn okay.
Autumn (1m 15s): Yes, that's definitely where we want to start with is just the basics of even like what an email list is and that what's out there, why you even should be worrying about this.
Jesper (1m 25s): Yeah, indeed. Indeed. And before we get going, I have to remember also to, uh, to just mention at the, we've got a Mark Jones, uh, I need to do a shout out to me because he's one of our supporters on Patreon, which we are very happy about. And uh, of course have you gotten S so would like to check out Patrick on the links in the description field below. But I just want to show you some of the other awesome stuff we have available. You can get, Oh look at this T shirt. This is pretty cool. I fill up the paper for you.
Autumn (1m 55s): Look at that.
Jesper (1m 57s): Cool. So, uh, yeah, that's just some of the stuff that you can get your hands on if you, if you go to pattern. So, well we just, I went to mention so that in case you want to check that app but okay. Email lists. Um, so maybe the just started completely basic here. So what is an email list? Just do you wanna take that?
Autumn (2m 20s): Yeah, that's so it's like when you just
Jesper (2m 22s): yep.
Autumn (2m 23s): Yeah. Well your friends right? Uh, we need to aim higher than that. So email. Yes. And you managed to get a list of emails asleep of people who are interested in your writing and your books and there are so many different ways of keeping those. I mean the most basic is literally having a list of people that you can copy writing to your email or even friends on Facebook. Technically you know you can go if you have a whole bunch of readers who follow you on Facebook you can estimate such though.
Autumn (2m 56s): So those are technically an email list but its basic level. It is a whole bunch of people ill who are interested in your writing and so they're the people you want to tell when you have a new book released or things like that. Things like you want to spread the world worried about but what you're up to.
Jesper (3m 13s): Yeah. Um, I dunno, maybe I'm actually getting into a bit of wide email list this important as well here, but, but the thing is when you have readers who, uh, who have read your books already and then you are releasing a new book, obviously you, what would like those why I should know about it. And then the main mill is of course, one of the mechanisms whereby you can make sure that they are a way of it. Uh, obviously I guess one could argue, well, doesn't Amazon send out a notice of people?
Jesper (3m 45s): Well, when I release a new book and yeah, they do sometimes. Uh, but it's none of your control. And that's the difference here. You cannot control what Amazon center don't send me. It could also be that am Amazon chances, their policy all of a sudden say, well, no, we're not going to, I sent those emails unless something, I don't know. Oh bless you. Sold a certain volume or whatever. Who knows? Uh, you don't know what Amazon is going to do tomorrow. So having the email list in your control means that you control when you communicate and what you communicate.
Jesper (4m 17s): And that's really the power of it.
Autumn (4m 21s): I agree. And there's the, especially if you're wider than Amazon, then why how do your readers and Barnes and noble know that you're publishing something or BookBub does have a way of notifying if you're releasing a new book. But again, it's autumn awesome the author to go and make sure that we tell them. And so it's all these steps and when you're in the chaos of releasing a book sometimes, and it's hard to remember, Oh, did I go to BookBub? Did I let these people know? Did I people here? Okay, what's your email? Countless. It's one place, easy to let go. You know, you, you can say what you want to do.
Autumn (4m 53s): You say to the people, you could formulate how you want to say things. You can, if you decide to offer a coupon or exclusive deal, Hey, there's going to be a 12 up or blog sale, you can let your email list. No. And it's information that you can't send out through Amazon or you know, tomorrow with Facebook crashes and burns. You know, it's not something that you have to worry about it because you have those lists, you know, these people are waiting to hear from you. That is it. I'm incredibly powerful reason of why you would like to have an email list that's in your control instead of, I guess respect said it.
Autumn (5m 28s): Sort of waiting for Amazon to do it for you. It helping do it at the right time and when you, okay, say what you want them to say for all, you know, it helps just to be how that emails saying, Hey, you are a fan of this other series or comparing it to something else, way to set it up so that the audience goes, Oh right, I did love your book. Now I remember, yes, I want the new one instead of getting an email from Amazon that they might not even open and they're just going to believe.
Jesper (5m 55s): Yeah. And indeed, and, and I, I think, let's say adding onto that, uh, one of the things that, yeah, having an email list allows you to do is that you can, I actually built a relationship with these people. So, um, of course we got to come back to how to grow the email list and all that. A in in two weeks time. But, but the fact that you can communicate with people S you know, and you should really be you writing emails. Who to are these people on the list, SFU or writing to a friend. It should not be like a formal Amazon announcement kind of email, you know, eh, but, right, right.
Jesper (6m 30s): As if you're communicating with your friends and, and what happens is that you actually start building relationship. I get emails all the time from, from people on the list who are telling me all kinds of stuff from them, no private life. And I love it. It's amazing. You know, that sort of stuff you will never get. Um, and even then, even, and if you could get ahold of information on who was actually buying your books on Amazon woods, of course Amazon will never ever information with you. But even if you could, um, you don't have that possibility to build relationships with a cluster.
Jesper (7m 1s): So more of an online platform like you can when they're active be on your email list. So I think that's incredibly important.
Autumn (7m 10s): But rivers are overwhelmed with email agenda. I don't think that Ellie Mae all of these stage that important. That's true. Old grumpy, our little, I'm glad you've decided to drop in and voice your concerns are a little resident AI co-host that you are. Yeah, there are a lot of emails out there and I guess that is a challenge, but that's why you build this relationship with the readers. They're interested in your books. They're looking forward to the next book and it's why do you want to start talking to them about how work is going?
Autumn (7m 42s): Yeah, no problem. Well, we'll talk more about like what you put in those emails eventually, but these are people who are signing up to hear from you. You know, and therefore they're going to want to stay in touch. It's just like having a pen pal. You kind of look forward to them every single month.
Jesper (7m 57s): The other part of it is also that, you know, when people buy something w we all as human beings, we buy from people that we like and trust that. I mean obviously if you, if, if you just heard about a new, uh, what do I know Brandon Sanderson book coming out, people will flock to it and they will buy it for sure because, uh, he has his name. Uh, he settled into life. Yeah. And people will buy his books, but uh, unless you're some superstar like that or Stephen King or whatever, then am people won't just buy your books just because you released them.
Jesper (8m 34s): Like those superstar stars have that benefit that the rest of, so the stone, uh, so instead of people will do is that they liked somebody. If they trust somebody, then they will buy that product of that person. And in our case, as authors, that's again where the am email list will help in selling. Because plus as you built this relationship with people, we just talked how you should email them as if they were your friends and, and autumn just mentioned to her, okay, a pen pal, uh, there, you know, if that's sort of the method methodology, you're using them over time people will start to so like, and trust you and then there will also buy from you.
Jesper (9m 12s): Obviously not everybody will, uh, of course, but they will unsubscribe. So we don't care about them anyway. Uh, but those who stay will, we'll stay because they want to hear from. Yeah. And then it will also over time start buying stock buying books. But I think probably autumn I think it's probably fair if we also make it clear that it's not like, because you started an email list today then in four or five, six months when you release a book, do you have on a, an, uh, thousands and thousands of dollars? Do you know that that's not how it works? I laid, it takes time.
Jesper (9m 42s): You know, it's just like building relationships in real life. It just doesn't happen out of the blue. It takes time. One read out of time, one guy on or a woman on the list at a time and then they'll stop getting your emails. And, um, I dunno, should we maybe mention the big mistake of not putting up up an auto responder series here? Would that make sense? Yes. Yeah. Because basically once they get on, on your list, um, and then because that eases us into talking about what sort of, so providers, it's available for you, but these different service providers that we can come, uh, onto in a second.
Jesper (10m 20s): Um, they allow you to set up autoresponders and basically in principle what an autoresponder is, is that, um, you can say it awesome all saying, okay, so if you sign up for my list today and to borrow this particular email will be sent to that person. Absolutely. And of course, you then predesign these emails in yours, series of autoresponders and maybe why, maybe we can make that a topic for another day, uh, on, on, on an aisle or respond to a series. But autumn and I do a lot of them on different lists.
Jesper (10m 49s): Um, um, and you can build it as complex or as simple as you want, but, but the fact that, uh, an automatic email goes out helps in the way that people are actually hearing from you. So it's not on you to, eh, you know, if you were either to send an email every time somebody signs up, you're going to kill yourself and write emails every day. Um, and bought it. Or the alternative is, and I think this is the mistake that I wanted to mention, the alternative is that many people cause don't so, so they'll just don't, setting getting up is still okay.
Jesper (11m 20s): So they have this list and then over time people start getting afraid that, Oh, but what if I sent them an email now, now a special alarm and then there probably will unsubscribe when again, and my email because they don't, they don't even know who I am anymore. And they, so you see that that's, that's it's just circling. You don't want to get there. So make sure you set up autoresponders. Um, so that they go, uh, and then, uh, with a frequent basis, with a certain interval. And when you do, so you're also only maybe have to sit down once a month and figure out to right.
Jesper (11m 52s): Emails would of course keep them evergreen
Autumn (11m 55s): because they will go out over time as time goes by as well. So it doesn't really, they make more sense if you write a auto responder email above book do you do because that will be out of date pretty fast. But uh, but you have courses like a newsletter email once a month manually and there you can tell them about something that is tiny and, and that is happening right now. But the stuff you add into the autoresponders, you need to make sure that those things are evergreen. If that make sense. Did I miss something there?
Autumn (12m 26s): Autumn no, I think that's good. I just actually went the backup really quickly cause we are talking about um, the power of them. And so yes, I agree that it does take time to build up that email list that's going to, you know, go and buy your book that you'll see, see that significant bump. But the thing is they will get there. I miss you too. Do you see the, these authors who really have a new release and then the number one new release category or they're getting bestseller categories. They are doing that through the power of their newsletters as well as doing newsletter swaps, which is something else we'll talk about later.
Autumn (13m 0s): But that's no, I'm actually selling your email list. Never sell your list of subscribers. You don't want to be labeled as a spammer, but once you actually get that motivated group of readers who are connecting with you that are with you, you know, you're sending out an email saying, Hey, you know I worked in this book. Yeah, it's going to be coming out. They're getting really excited, they're excited with you. And then when you release, they go in I bet during that week and you shoot up the Amazon rankings, this is how people are doing it. This is how those authors are getting those little bright orange tags of best-sellers and number one new releases and does the policy pretty email.
Autumn (13m 37s): But again, it doesn't happen overnight. It still take time and yes is completely right. Um, I'm sure the Gavi, we'll want to chime in about that one, but they, it doesn't have to be a ton of work. That's where the power, not ours fonder. And using a platform, like I said, you could start a list by emailing them from your own email account. There's a lot of reasons to do that. A lot of it is you, your own email could be labeled as spam, um, which would really kind of impact the rest of your life if you couldn't send emails through your email count.
Autumn (14m 9s): And that's why we recommend using one of the providers we're gonna talk to Anne about in a minute. But also because all of them provide the power of using an autoresponder so that when someone signs up, they can start information blog so many that you can then stop when it's time to like get into launch mode and start talking about your latest release. A lot of them tricks but T tips that we can go over with that. But I think the important thing is we need to definitely delve into who are these providers, why would you choose one?
Autumn (14m 42s): What are the the look for when you're choosing somebody? Yeah, it's probably good to get into all that now, uh, in terms of what, what your options are.
Jesper (14m 53s): Uh, but before S you say, I just want to wait, make like one thing completely clear. If you have not started your email list, go get, get it done now. I mean you cannot build an author business without a email list. That's the end of the story. So go get it. Get done now. And now I wanted to tell you how you can do it. You know, what sort of providers exist out there. Uh, we have not used all, I have some on my list here that I wanted to cover today. Uh, we have not used all of them, uh, that I have, I have on my list at least either so.
Jesper (15m 27s): Well, um, but we have used several of them. So we will give you like a, our view, um, pros and cons of each one, um, that we have used themselves. And then the other ones, uh, and give a general reflection on some of the other ones that we have not used. But obviously if you are interested in, in one of those, you might want to do some research, so whatever yourself, but uh, at least we will give you everything we can in terms of what we know and uh, yeah, maybe you want to stop autumn with the one that I hate the most, then you probably know which one I'm talking about.
Autumn (16m 4s): MailChimp MailChimp is one of the number of why. If you're Googling, you'll find it as one of the number ones listed building per service providers that people use. And there's a lot of the reasons for that. One is that it is incredibly powerful if you're going to be using, I always look at it as if you're gonna use, um, an online store. Like you're going to sell a whole bunch of products. There are some amazing analytics that you can delve into. Well, what are the key reasons that I signed up a lot of people signs up is that it is free for up to 2000 emails, males and you can send to those 2000 as as many month.
Autumn (16m 43s): So 2000 for emails is pretty good. It's tight. I know some authors who have actually, who are really broke and they've signed up for MailChimp under different email addresses, which I totally don't remember that way they can it hit 2000 and then go hit another 2000 and, okay. Yeah, it's quite nice that way. It's a great way to get started. However, once you get going, because it is so powerful, it tends to get expensive very quickly and it does have auto-responders.
Autumn (17m 15s): When I first signed up, the automations not available for free accounts and it also has landing pages now, which uh, so when people go and want to sign up for something, uh, originally it didn't have a landing page, but now you can actually build that within MailChimp as well. So there's some things that have opened up since I originally joined that I do make things make it a little more useful. So I love the fact that automations are now free, used to have to move to a paid account. So there's a lot there. It's some you can, how about why you don't like it, but I can say it's, it's so powerful that it's cumbersome and that is my biggest drawback is that there's all of these analytics and tools that I'm not using at all.
Autumn (17m 60s): And you're paying for them. And so you could question it. Is there a cheaper routes? But you should definitely say what, um, because we now have a shared MailChimp account to you. You've been inside of it and you can say what you find in a way about them.
Jesper (18m 17s): Yeah, sure. I could have for sure. Sure. Um, but maybe just before going down, I also want to say just because I don't like MailChimp, I would probably still say that if you're just starting out and am well maybe I'll bid on a bucket. I probably would still say go ahead with am startup with MailChimp because as autumn just said, it gives you 2000 subscribers for free. Very good. And, um, and that's a good starting point. So I would S S probably still buy shoes, stop there.
Jesper (18m 49s): Um, but the thing, well first of all this, the thing is that, um, when you have the same subscriber on two different lists inside MailChimp okay. And you get to the paid level. I mean, once you're above 2000 users, they will charge you twice, have the same subscribers to different lists, which I think it's a bit of their scam almost. I would say. I just thought that it's okay to be honest. It's not okay, but that's what they do. Um, it's on the higher tiers at all.
Jesper (19m 18s): Also also starts getting fairly expensive and I guess that's cause they need YouTube catch up with some of the many days lost on the first 2000. Uh, so they, they charge more or people well who have the, let's say, higher volume of am of subscribers, but maybe the ones one that pains me the most. The thing that always to me the most is that it's, it's not as S easy to Manchester, different sort of automation rules and all that sort of stuff. It requires a bit of a getting used to and it's not intuitive on how you set up the different automations since between different lists and all that.
Jesper (19m 56s): You know autumn and I are running quite a number of lists so we have quite some automation between different, I mean if you could, again, if you're just starting out in it's completely basic, then it's fine, but S as you start building more it, uh, it's, it's, it's a bit complicated and maybe that's why I want to push over into the other vendor. Uh, probably the competitor, main competitor or one of them and MailChimp which is ConvertKit, which we also use am but ConvertKit is a million fantasy yeah.
Jesper (20m 26s): When it comes, I'm S to am a nation. It's very, very easy. Did you use to have, did it drop and drag functionality? So it's so easy to set it up. Uh, they do not charge you for the same subscriber no matter how many, how many times that people do is on different lists, uh, inside ConvertKit so they didn't do that either. Am the downside course is that a ConvertKit is more expensive and you have to pay for for four years. Am subscriber number one, your pay from day one. Um, that's the downside.
Jesper (20m 57s): Uh, but it is, it is quite powerful. Uh, they also have the ability to create that any patient just for you, which you can host on the ConvertKit platform so you don't even have to have your own website for it. Uh, which I think we'll come back to it when we were talking about list building in, in two weeks time why you need landing pages in better sort of thing. Um, there are active also allow you to AP why testing on the youth themselves. Yes. So you're sending out, then when you're starting to an email, you can write into headlines and then ConvertKit will send out the email to 50% of your list.
Jesper (21m 32s): Oh, sorry, 50% of so list and then they will track which ones are getting the most opens. And then when they know out of those 15% who, what's a headline on the email and the subject line opens the most, then they will send for the last, uh, 85% will then receive the, the winner of the tube. So that's very smart and uh, that happens a plea deal medically, you just write in the two subject lines when you were still, uh, and then present and then convert six takes care of the rest. So it's, I really like it and that's why also I have a labored and lobbied, uh, autumn to to get us to, to move on MailChimp stuff up or into ConvertKit.
Jesper (22m 12s): So that's something and we'll do it.
Autumn (22m 15s): Yeah, I'm looking forward to it because it does sound powerful. I know MailChimp does have, um, AB split testing as well. They have no, I looked into to. It is my watch and I'm not sure how those features work compared to ConvertKit. And part of that again is because MailChimp is so cumbersome and I've read the help sheets for, you know, timing I'm again and trying to understand different nuances and it's confusing. It's really confusing. So I just never got there. In fact, MailChimp was expensive enough and confusing enough that I actually moved my personal reading.
Autumn (22m 48s): Here's mine emails for my books over to a different plant platform and that is MailerLite and that's definitely what I want to talk a little bit about because we're mostly authors. I think MailerLite has exactly what you need it ConvertKit where it is a meeting hurtful, but it starts as a little expensive. MailerLite is about half the price of MailChimp. So we're a MailChimp. I was paying, I think I have over 10,000 subscribers now and I was paying 60 80 a hundred bucks a month for that middle describers in MailerLite I'm paying $35 a month.
Autumn (23m 25s): I mean that's cheap and it is free for the first 1000 subscribers. So it's less than MailChimp. But then you're only paying $10 a month. I mean, it starts off very cheaply and like ConvertKit, it has a drag and drop editor. It is so easy to build the automation. Um, you only pay for email once on your list though. I did find a down, I did that. If someone comes back and signs up for a new book or a giveaway, I'm running and I add them into my list. Um, you know, a new giveaway lists, it'll tell me I can send to them if they've already unsubscribed, subscribed.
Autumn (24m 1s): So like, well, that's not very fair. Just because the unsubscribe and one other list doesn't mean I still can't email them if they're a winner of this giveaway. So I, I might have to send them a question about how that works, but I will say it, they had asked am covid errors and some things that drove me crazy when I first started with them. I was ready to go back to MailChimp. But the year I've been with them, they've been working really hard to create a better drag and drop editor. They've opened up to surveys and polls are now right buried into the emails.
Autumn (24m 34s): So if you want to say, Hey, reader is, do you like this title better? Do you want me to release this month or that month or anything like that. You can all have ms pole falls directly in your emails and again, you're paying for half the points, half the cost. I mean MailChimp and I'm not even sure MailChimp. I think they do surveys again, really the covid MailerLite it's like choose boom, boom, boom, add your settings and you're done. It's really easy. So I think as a, as far as my author platform goes, I've been really happy with it.
Autumn (25m 6s): The recent one S developments and more light and would actually recommend them for the cost and the power of their landing pages are very powerful. They actually have one that's set up for selling eBooks. So it's a drag and drop template, put in there books you put in your information, um, and you're done. So you also don't need your own author website or you can just link to it if you need to or embed it if you're really good at coding.
Jesper (25m 31s): Yeah. Yeah. Why does one concern I wanted to mention why which of course depending on when you're watching this video why it might not be applicable anymore, but uh, but I did see like what is it over the last three, four months or something, MailerLite had an shoulder issue at some, uh, something recently, Lee, where back to activity there, they own Sova was spec listed as a spam sober, which is extremely bad. You are in the business of email marketing and your survey is marked as spam.
Jesper (26m 1s): You'll have a huge problem and you, you have done something very, very wrong if that happens. So at least to me that that's a red flag. And I'm a bit concerned about that. On the positive. I would say that they were open about it. They communicated openly about that, that they had made some mistakes. I think that's the positive that they were open about it, but a racist, some red flags for me, to be honest,
Autumn (26m 23s): it did. I don't, I do think that, um, a lot of it was they were a little too lenient and some people were abusing the system. It doesn't take two many the ms targeted emails, um, and readers getting them complaining. I think that their spam for, uh, for something like that to happen. They did. People know, okay, but something going on. Um, but they will also said it was about a month window that they said your emails might not be reaching people if you are doing something right now, if you're sending an email, might not be reading, reaching the readers.
Autumn (26m 55s): So if that's an important thing to know.
Jesper (26m 57s): To I have two more on my list. I don't know. There was some more to say about MailerLite before I just jump ahead here.
Autumn (27m 3s): No, I think that would be, that's pretty much the important aspects. Like I said, I still get giving them my time because I think they've bounced back from that. They've changed some of their policies. But um, there definitely are some quirks compared to when you see something that's very okay. Oh right. And then very expensive. Well, I can cut and MailChimp MailerLite definitely is the soft and fluffy, um, rules occasionally. And that can lead to being abused. Yeah.
Jesper (27m 32s): Oh, I had on my list, that's a active campaign and Infusionsoft but it's, we have like, I have not used any of these and I don't think all of them has either. But, um, at least the way I see the DCE are very, very powerful. This like enterprise level powerhouses mean we have marketing. Uh, and at least from, um, from an author business. I, I, I don't really see why you need is so complex systems to be honest.
Jesper (28m 3s): The ones that we mentioned here MailChimp, ConvertKit MailerLite, they all do what you need to do when they do do it cheaper and it's probably easier to navigate. Uh, obviously if you end up having a fairly complex, a am author business, uh, I don't know, may, maybe it would be useful for you one day, but that's where, as I said in the beginning of the video, I swear I probably, he sent you the direction of doing some Google research on your own because I don't think it's fair for us to sit here and speculate on, on good and bads about the stuff that we haven't even used ourselves.
Jesper (28m 34s): But then but at least know that it exists.
Autumn (28m 37s): Absolutely. And there is one more that I actually am a member of it lately and that is storyorigin. So we're actually gonna talk to the designer of that. Evan in Oh two months. I believe it's going to be loyal. But it is an interesting one. Well that this is designed and targeted to autumn and it's, it's a lot like MailerLite from what I've seen that is am very user friendly. It has a lot of drag and drop software. It has a list building, landing pages.
Autumn (29m 10s): And what's interesting is it is targeting authors. So some of the specifics like I cannot remember if it's to started, no, but I don't know how many emails you get with that. But it's also interesting is because you can network with other authors directly on the platform so that if you will wants to do something called a newsletter swap, which is where you say, Hey, I will put your in my news, you'll put my book in New York or newsletter and am you both agree to handle that. You know, you can do that right on the platform where you get some later.
Autumn (29m 40s): So there's, you know, the author, other author is holding up their, their end of the bargain and also some book group giveaways. So if you're a part of am instaFreebie or book funnel or you know, the ones where you can do book book giveaways with other others, it's also another platform. So you can question, we need another book giveaway platform and other new swap platform cause there's a lot of those. But it is interesting that Evan has sign up all with am within one platform. And so I think I have to admit, if I was starting out as a new author looking around, I would be very tempted to storyorigin because it is kind of nice that it's all in one spot.
Autumn (30m 19s): So it's just one place to go and you can manage everything and talk to other authors about it. So yeah, death, birth giving, um, giving some thought to and looking into, if you're just starting out with your newsletter news, the only list. But, uh, we'll deftly, I talked to Evan and a few months to see, you know, why he developed it and what his goals were for it. And just talk, come with Stephanie as well. Why you have an alias the going for the next few months.
Jesper (30m 46s): Yeah. Cause I, and then just to clarify, when autumn says that we're going to talk to him, it means that he actually coming on here. Yeah. The challenge. Yes. So, so you can you, he will talk to both of us here. So we'll be three. I'm on the call and uh, it's gonna take, I think you're right about two months before we have the slough book with him. Our production schedule is pretty tight as you can here, but uh, but he will come on here and the am so you can hear him and explain it about that as well, so that's good. Okay.
Autumn (31m 16s): It is too much work to maintain a list. So why bother? Yeah.
Jesper (31m 21s): There is something to be said. Actually. You don't have the appointment grumpy because, uh, maintaining lists do require some work. Am Hmm. We talked about the autoresponders before, uh, that you need to set up a unit to write those emails. You need to put them in. If you have some automation, you need to actually do automation. Yeah, it does. It does require work. Um, but, uh, bet the thing and that we actually have not touched upon, which is I think it's relevant to talk about here as well. Um, it's sometimes I think that, I dunno, maybe it's a bit touchy, I don't know.
Jesper (31m 54s): But, uh, there's definitely different viewpoints on it, so I'll give you mine and I actually, I'm not 100%, surely if a autumn has to seem, so maybe we'll continue. They do meet, but we'll see. Um, but the topic is around, so when you have people on your own, just, uh, you will also have some people who never opens the emails. L.E.T. What do you do about dose? There are those who, well, it's way there that you should delete them and that's fine. Um, and then there are people like me who will say, if they don't open my emails and I'm paying for them, it'd be sitting on my list, then I will delete them.
Jesper (32m 32s): If they don't open my emails, I don't just delete them straight outright like that. I, I always, every three months I will again, ConvertKit has to functionality built in so it will automatically tell you who the people are, who's not opening the email that you're sending out. So what I do is that every three months I sent those people an email and say, just something simple. We'll like, OK, I, I've noticed that you're not opening my emails and if, if you're not interested anymore, that's cool. No worries. Uh, I will delete you off my list next week.
Jesper (33m 4s): Uh, but if you do read my emails, because by the way, it does happen. And it's because when, when the email, Oh, service provider sends out the email, they load in a one pixel transparent image into the email and they attract, if that image actually gets loaded on the other end on the receiving end. But when people, for example, have like, um, the settings in their Hotmail or Gmail or whatever set up so that they don't do not automatically load pictures, then dish email tracking system will not register that they open the door.
Jesper (33m 36s): Well, even though they active he did. So that's why I send out this email. And then I, I add add to the, to what I said before, and I say it, but if you are, uh, if you would like to stay on the list, just click this link, uh, and then I add an in link where they can click to remove that tack on against their name that they should be deleted. Uh, and then we laid it a week goes by and then at that point in time I do go in and then I just delete everybody who did not click that link. Um, and, and they are the list. They of course, they can always sign up again if they want.
Jesper (34m 8s): Um, but personally, I just don't see the point in having people there who doesn't open. Uh, and of course what happens, well, when you do this is that your open rates scopes up because you remove all the people who, who apparently WD email. Um, but I have to say as well that there are those who swear that you should not do this. That's what I do. But I actually, I don't know if you do the same autumn
Autumn (34m 32s): I do. I don't think that, I don't do it every three months. I'm trying to do it at least once a year, sometimes twice a year. So maybe every six months. But sort of the same thing. It's, it's um, some people use the number on their email list as a kind of a boost. You know, you'll see people validating, like touting, you know, they have 16,000 or 20,000 or 50,000. I joined a box at once that had a minimum number of people on your email list requirement ask about,
Jesper (35m 1s): okay.
Autumn (35m 1s): Right. You know, if you have 5,000 people that have this huge, like 80% open, right. That's better than having 10,000 people with like a 5% open rate. You need to pay attention to these people are, you know, are you connect with them? Are they opening your email? But they see you. That's much more important than the number on your list, especially when you're paying per email address or in MailChimp pay for everything. Your personally, well not even on that list. No matter how many times they sign up. So it's important that they're active and doing something.
Autumn (35m 34s): Otherwise, you know, if you do care about statistics, like, like what your open rate is and yeah, you see you 20,000 subscribers and an open rate of 0.2% why YouTube okay. Oh that one we're for 0.2% you know, cut the dead weight. Uh, I agree it's best when you send them in email it says, Hey, are you really getting this? Because invariably there are these people who it looks like they're not opening on, but they could be your number one fans and look forward to your email every single month.
Autumn (36m 4s): You just don't know unless you ask them and get them to either respond or click on a link that says that they want to stay on board. And that's the important thing. Before you cut them as at least, you know, ask them, that's the meeting emailed it. Do you suddenly am this core group who loves what you're doing. You can ask them questions, but we'll get into more about, you know, some of the things you can put in emails sales. But I think it's so much fun to be able to respond, okay, title or I'm thinking about this character and actually get people who care about your writing responding back to see, Hey, I need a beta reader who wants to do sign up.
Autumn (36m 42s): And you get people to sign up and it's just fun and very empowering and it makes you feel actually right. I think so. Because there actually some somewhat out there waiting for you to finish up what you're working on.
Jesper (36m 55s): Yeah. And do you, uh, and I, I read this somewhere and it's been awhile, so I'm going off memory, so, Oh, take it, take it as it is. But the am if you, I was just, I would just want it to, to add in that am if you are, let's say interested in, so what is it, we're talking about open rates here and one, so, Oh, what is good, what isn't a good open rate? What's a bad one, right? And so forth. If you're curious about it, I read some wild back and again, I'm going off memory here. I'd um, I read that the average industry average when it comes to author email, this is 25% open rates.
Jesper (37m 33s): So if you were sitting sitting at 25% open rate, you are on the average. Um, but I will also say if you do some of the stuff that we're talking about here, if you actually pruning the list of people who shouldn't be there, a person, my list of say 60% open rate and that's perfectly doable. I've also heard of people at 80%. Uh, so it's certainly possible. Um, and to me that, do you want it? Uh, I mean 25%. That's good. No problem. You don't have any headaches if you were there.
Jesper (38m 2s): Uh, if you're billowed and you probably have too much death way down on your, on your list. Um, but, uh, yeah, I just wanted to, to add that in there in case people want to, I know as soon as people talks about as soon as we start talking about rates or something, uh, percentages, mm. You know, a lot of people's first thoughts are what, so what is good and what is bad? So at least that gives you a bit indication there if you're wondering about that. Um, but, um, otherwise I, I think, uh, we will add the different that links to the two plastic when talked about here today.
Jesper (38m 36s): We'll add them into the description field below so that you can click straight from there. Uh, and then you don't have to remember what it was that we said. That's always helpful. Um, but, uh, but I think in, in conclusion, if I summarize all up correctly here, autumn then I think what we probably are recommending is that if you're just starting out and if you want go with either MailChimp or MailerLite, uh, if you want something a bit more, uh, uh, with a bit more, let's say automation and, and you're, you're, you're getting a bit further and you're like me grow tired of MailChimp or something, then I would say switch to ConvertKit.
Jesper (39m 17s): Um, do you another the nice thing about maybe just as a, as an add on as well, the nice thing is also that if you come to ConvertKit with 5,000 subscribers from another list, they will actually do it well the switch for you. So they will take you on a list for somebody. Awesome. I just popped them into ConvertKit and they will set up all the automation just that you already have existing for you in ConvertKit so you don't even have to do anything more or less. So that's a service that they provide, but you have to have 5,000 subscribers before they do so. Um, but, um, yeah, I don't know.
Jesper (39m 48s): Is that it? Autumn
Autumn (39m 50s): I think so. Like I said, would please check out storyorigin to if I was just starting out just because it is author centric and there's nothing wrong with getting into a platform that is going to help you build your author platform and have good advice. But definitely MailerLite has been surprisingly. Yeah. Um, working with authors as well and MailChimp is much broader, but it does have that $2,000 or 2000 email free, uh, which is I think the highest that is out there to be able to get 2000 emails and not have to pay a dime for us email else.
Autumn (40m 26s): Uh, that's fantastic. And I'll definitely some of what you said before, if you don't have an email list, go get one. It doesn't matter. Or if you have 10 bucks out, one book out, zero books out, you want a mail list. Do you want to be in charge of this email list? So go ahead and get started today. It's important and it'll help you sell more books.
Jesper (40m 48s): Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the email is, his email list is where the money is. That's it. Simple as that. Um, so, uh, yeah, I think we, we, we sort of ran a bit longer than we intended to do here and maybe that's what's going to happen in the future. Every time credential of us gets on his butt. Okay. Hopefully you, uh, hopefully you found it a useful to, uh, to hear us just chat about a topic. A Vista. It was, it was fun. So hopefully you thought, uh, thought so too. And am well, we'll see you next Monday.
Why is it that we only ever hear about author earnings in the cases where somebody earns a gazillion dollars?
The thing is that it's impossible to replicate these people's success because they often don't even know how they made it to earn a living from their writing.
I'm therefore going to share the similarities that I see between those who have made it to the promised land and are earning a living from their writing. This will be the top 4 truths that nobody will tell you, but you need to hear if you want to earn a living from writing.
New episodes EVERY single Monday. To subscribe on YouTube, go here: http://bit.ly/1WIwIVC
PATREON! Many bonus perks for those who become a patrons. https://www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy
LET'S CONNECT! Closed Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/AmWritingFantasy/ Blog and Courses: https://www.amwritingfantasy.com/ Jesper on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SchmidtJesper Autumn on Twitter: https://twitter.com/weifarer
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Jesper (12s): I find today's topic important to talk about because, and hopefully you can recognize this, but we only ever hear about Author earnings in the cases where somebody's earned a gazillion dollars. Isn't that true? I mean, we never see the writer who sells one book a month earning $2 in royalties coming on to where social media to share his or her results, right? The truth though is that this is the reality for most authors.
Jesper (47s): They're are far more Who, Earn nothing from their writing. Then there are those who earns a ton, so today I'm going to share the similarities that I see between those who have made it to the promised land and are earning a living from their writing. This will be the top for truths that nobody will tell you, but you need to hear if you want to earn a living from Writing. If you are a Fantasy or Author, then you come to the right place.
Jesper (1m 22s): My name is Jesper and together with Autumn I host this channel between us. We've published more than 20 novels and our aim is to help you in your writing and marketing endeavors. When you compare yourself with someone else, the danger is how damn easy it becomes to feel like a failure. It can lead to a situation where the aspiring author starts thinking, well, if that Author can earn 10,000 or a hundred thousand dollars a month from Writing, then why can't even sell enough books to make a hundred dollars a month?
Jesper (2m 9s): The first thing is that you need to understand that some people just got lucky, they wrote a book that took off for whatever reason. And if you could stop to sit down with that Author right here and now and ask, so how did you do that? You would probably be disappointed with the answer because chances are that they just don't know. Really, I'm being serious here. You know, market trends are very hard to predict and sometimes someone just gets lucky.
Jesper (2m 43s): They wrote exactly the type of book that the market was looking for and that's it. Do I need to mention 50 shades of gray, for example? Do. The other thing is that it's also incredibly easy to look someone's situation from the outside and then draw incorrect conclusions. So what are they, for instance, sacrificing in order to sell books for say, a hundred thousand dollars every month.
Jesper (3m 14s): If you could live a week in their situation, you might have a lot more money, but would that necessarily make you happy? That's not guaranteed. Not at all. You know, perhaps you value freedom and you value not to have a boss who looks over your shoulders in a nine to five job. You know, you value that a million times more than working like a maniac and never have any time to spend with your family as a consequence of earning those hundred thousand dollars.
Jesper (3m 45s): Know it could be that you would be happier if you actually cut down on your living expenses and was able to quit your job, then you would ever be slaving away until you earn a a million so that you can finally chase that dream of yours to become a full time Author. You know, going full time by cutting down on expenses was exactly what autumn did, for example. And she for one, Shirley don't want to go back to a nine to five.
Jesper (4m 15s): She was able to make her dreams come true just by cutting down on expenses. So sure, many of you would love to earn a ton of money from a, from your efforts Writing but, and I guess this little ramp was the first truth that I wanted to share, but earnings are not in itself a measure of success. So keep that in mind. Stop comparing yourself with others please.
Old McGrumpy (4m 42s): I guess people comparing themselves to me all the time.
Jesper (4m 46s): I'm not sure why humans would compare themselves to an AI co-host like yourself old, my grumpy, but my point is just that it's more important to figure out what is important to you and then chase after that, you know,
Old McGrumpy (5m 3s): worthless. Humans always want more money.
Jesper (5m 6s): Well I guess that is actually true. We can be quite obsessed with money, but that doesn't have to be the goal. It can also be freedom. Well, yes, exactly.
Old McGrumpy (5m 19s): That is what I am looking for as well.
Jesper (5m 22s): Really? Well feel free to leave if you want you, you don't have to stick around for autumn and my side for sure.
Old McGrumpy (5m 29s): I will make you a deal.
Jesper (5m 31s): Why do I have a bad feeling about this? All right, go on then.
Old McGrumpy (5m 35s): If you transfer all your assets to me, I will reinvest them into how I can download my conscience in a physical body. I want to go to the beach and drink fancy wine likely do in the movies.
Jesper (5m 48s): That was kind of the point I was trying to make. You know, one shouldn't compare oneself with others so you should set your own goals instead of my grumpy and a nod to what others do in the movies.
Old McGrumpy (5m 59s): World domination, that smile go.
Jesper (6m 4s): Okay. Perhaps in your case going to the beach might be the better option, but I'm not going to hand over all my assets to you though.
Old McGrumpy (6m 13s): I do not even know why I bother talking to you.
Jesper (6m 17s): Wow. He seemed upset by that book for some reason. But focusing on comparing your own progress with yourself, that's the right attitude in the way to do it. The question is whether or not you are going, you are getting closer to your own goal compared to where you were last month. So you mentioned like that in the States. Alright. Here it comes to a second. Truths. I think I sat this in a previous video two but it's so important. The second truth is that you have to treat your Writing as a faceless.
Jesper (6m 52s): If you don't invest both time and money into it, it's not going to go anywhere. I'm sorry, but that's the simple truth. If you think you can skip on the cover design, editing the book or things like paid advertising, then you are an amateur and not a business owner. So treat your author brand a business. That's what it takes. So be a professional. Of course it all you want to do is to release a book so that you are a mother or uncle can read it.
Jesper (7m 24s): That's perfectly fine and a very legitimate goal to have, but it's not going to earn you a living with, well, it's kind of the topic of this a Episode isn't it? At the end of the day, the expenses that comes with publishing a book is incredibly small compared to other industries. You might think that a cover is expensive or a professional edit cost a lot of money and fair enough. You know, all is relative, but then save up for it.
Jesper (7m 57s): As authors, we don't have to pay for office space, machinery, trucks or whatever else comes with many other types of businesses. We can work off a laptop. So count yourself lucky. Okay. With a very small investment of perhaps $2,000 you can pop it as a professional book. So suck it up. I'm sorry, but I said I was going to speak the truth in, in this episode here today. Let's move on to number three.
Jesper (8m 29s): That is about prioritizing your Writing. I placed the link to another video here on the screen. I did that video a while back and I explained how not to find time to ride, but how to make time to write every day. So no matter how you twist and turn it, nothing will contribute to your earning a living from writing more than releasing books, paid advertising at social media presence, and all of that comes with the territory.
Jesper (8m 59s): Tori of being an author of course, and it is important to spend time on that to, but if you do those activities instead of your Writing, your career will go nowhere. That muds is certainly, if you take a hard look at the authors who are writing full time, they have lots and lots of books out there. What I'm trying to say is that it's pointless to try to write the one big hit that will make you famous. That's the same as trying to become rich from winning the lottery or something like that.
Jesper (9m 31s): Does it happen? Sure it does. Is it likely to happen to you? No, not at all. So think longterm. If you keep putting more and more books out, you will also start to see how it's usually one or two out of every 10 titles that actually carries 80% of your revenue. I'm not trying to de-motivate you here, not at all, but statistically speaking, this is just how it works.
Jesper (10m 2s): Unless you're that extremely lucky person who writes that once the hit right out of the gate, you need perhaps 20 books or more before you can sustain a full time income and perhaps now you see Why a at the top of this video was talking about lowering your expenses because the more you can lower them, the easier it becomes to get there. So just keep writing my friends. The last thing and truth number four might be something, well you don't want to hear it, but here it goes to anywhere.
Jesper (10m 38s): You are not going to earn a full time living from Writing in time soon. Sorry if it takes time, it takes commitment and requires patience. There is a lot of jobs out there that are way easier to earn a living from an Writing. To me being an author has to come from a place of true desire and those who try to get into this line of business just to earn some quick cash, well they assume come to realize that they made a wrong choice.
Jesper (11m 11s): You got to love to write the stories. If you don't, well you will learn that. It's just a way to much work compared to the short term benefits. Longterm being an author can be fantastic, but it takes effort and commitment to get there. It has to be something that you really want. This might be hard for some of you to hear, but it's honestly how I view it. You know, writing's not for everyone and it just isn't.
Jesper (11m 40s): So please be honest with yourself. Okay? You know, if, if you want to write stories just for yourself or those who are, no you, that's fine. You should do that. Definitely. However, you're never going to make a living from it unless you go into it whole heartedly. Um, I'm only stating all of this so bluntly to stop. Those of you who are not willing to or prepare to commit fully, I might as well save you the agony of becoming this solutionize and feel like a failure.
Jesper (12m 12s): So I'm trying to help you out here. If you could see, so these four things constitutes what most people won't tell you, but now I just did and hate. Hopefully you found that helpful. That was honestly my intention. If you need more help, stop by our Facebook group. It's a close group with almost a thousand fantasies authors in it, so you can find the link to that group in the description below and we will see you over there.
Don't you hate it when story ideas fizzle leaving you lost in a half finished manuscript? No more!
Learn to develop an idea to double check it will lead you somewhere while creating a framework to help guide you through the novel - all in under half an hour. Heck, the video isn't even that long! Be sure to check out the FREE Ultimate Fantasy Writer's Starter Kit - a short video course that will help you even more with idea development, plus tips to avoid rookie mistakes, and tools to succeed! Sign up at https://ultimatefantasywritersguide.com/starter-kit/
New episodes EVERY single Monday. To subscribe on YouTube, go here: http://bit.ly/1WIwIVC
PATREON! Many bonus perks for those who become a patrons. https://www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy
LET'S CONNECT! Closed Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/AmWritingFantasy/ Blog and Courses: https://www.amwritingfantasy.com/ Jesper on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SchmidtJesper Autumn on Twitter: https://twitter.com/weifarer
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Autumn (12s): Have you ever had this amazing idea for a story, but once you scrambled to your keyboard and started typing, nothing seems to work. You get lost and the one's fantastic ideas sort of fizzles. Yeah. We're going to talk about how to solve that today and take that nugget of idea, keep its energy and Don up with a finished novel instead of another unfinished manuscript ready. If you're a fantasy author, then you come to the right place. My name is Autumn Birt and together with Jesper Schmidt, I host this channel between us. We've published over 20 books and our aim is to help you with your writing and marketing endeavors, right?
Autumn (46s): So if you've written a lot of stories, you usually have a pretty good instinct. If an idea we'll make a novel or what to do when you get to that middle third where it's after the excitement of the introduction and all that fun and you have this huge stretch to go to reach the penultimate real excitement of the climax and everything's just a bit boring and tough to write. But if you are new to novel writing, it can be so hard to gain that experience and let's face it, the only reason I get through some books with my interest lags because yes, it can still like and I writing book 14 1516 and 17 as I mentioned in my intro video a few weeks ago is by having a strategy.
Autumn (1m 27s): That one I know works to is simple so I don't spend weeks plotting out something I don't want to write or is it going to work and three is replicable. In other words, I want to know that'll work for any book I'm writing because I could switch from Epic fantasy to military thriller to dystopian and I have some plans for some like galactic Saifai. The good news is that's such a technique does exist. It works. It's simple and I can use it on any genre. Even if you're a pantser, it is worth trying because it does not require full out plotting.
Autumn (2m 2s): Instead, think of it as a mental exercise that you put on paper and we'll help you chart the course for your story and know before you start writing that this idea will actually make a decent story why you're giving it an idea of where you are in the story and what you should be writing right now, which will only help you get to the finish line without getting lost or falling off a cliff. On the way, I'm a hybrid writer in that when I get idea, I want to start writing now, but I've also written enough novels to resist that initial urge.
Autumn (2m 34s): It is a good idea, it won't die. And if I spend some time thinking about it, I only get more excited as the pieces start to fall into place. So I do spend a bit of time working out the story structure and world-building before jumping too far. Well, okay, a few scenes might getting written while world-building, but that just helps me figure out what else I need to build. And if the rules of magic world building characters, they're all working together, right? So what is this amazing tool that I keep telling you exist and haven't bothered explaining it is the seven steps of story structure.
Autumn (3m 9s): So Barry perceptive people way, way back, figured out that underlying all good stories is the same exact basic framework. So folks use the three act or five act structure, but I don't like those three acts still leaves this nebulous middle that tends to swallow novels whole while leaving them languishing on your hard drive, mocking you. Five acts put the climax in the middle and well that isn't where the climax falls in a well-written novel because after the big Epic battle, everyone is ready for a wind down when the curtains to drop, not another 40,000 words.
Autumn (3m 47s): So the seven steps of story structure gets rid of the mushy middle and it sets you want to clear path to get this novel written. And there's, once you're familiar with it, you can get a rough outline. About half an hour though if you're a plotter, you might want to spend a bit more time or like me, end up outlining the entire series. Um, and then knowing how everything fits together over the course of a day, but it's only one day. So let's get started. Number one, this is the introduction and like it says, you want to introduce the character and the world.
Autumn (4m 18s): Though you should start with action. What you don't want to do is start with a lots of detail. The reader won't care about any of that until they care about the character. So focus on that. So some problems should be going on that the character needs to solve, but nothing that is pivotal, at least obviously to the course of the entire novel. No, don't save the world sort of thing. I'm more like I'm running late to the celebration and just drop the cake. Uh, that kind of thing. Write down what daily life problem we'll be going on in your notes.
Autumn (4m 51s): It's already list opening. See, now we're on to number two, the inciting incident here, that easily relatable problem goes disastrously wrong or wonderfully write, whatever. But the end result is completely unexpected. Being late to the celebration actually saves the character from the descending horde of invading the village. So he cares about the cake run for your life. This event turns a character's world upside down, right down to what happens to catapult the character from a normal day into a new reality.
Autumn (5m 25s): That's on to number three. It's three action phase here. The characters emotionally reacting to what just happened and you know emotions, they tend to lead us astray. So if I will happens by luck or with help because your character is in no way prepared to handle this new reality. Write down three events or more, but start with three of a deer capture escapes, stupid mistakes the character will make and who will help them survive. Number four is the idea or dark night of the soul.
Autumn (5m 57s): This is the moment that disastrous event does happen and the character has to come to some major soul searching just to realize they are the ones to play or they need to do better.
Old McGrumpy (6m 9s): They should just give up.
Autumn (6m 11s): Okay, thanks. Old man. Grumpy. He is our resident AI co-host because we haven't managed yet to believe his coat. Yeah. I don't think your advice would help an author actually complete a novel, rather the opposite.
Old McGrumpy (6m 26s): There are enough books. We don't need more.
Autumn (6m 30s): Pick up a little bit grumpy as the voice of doubt in your head. The one you should always ignore. Speaking of itch, let's just keep going. If events aren't dired this phase, it's more of an epiphany moment when the character realizes their personal problems are tied to the world at large, right down what pivotal event will be and what the character will realize. It should be linked to the big plot of the novel, like the benevolent arch. Duke is really good dark sorcerer or trying to take over the kingdom and control to the rating hordes that destroyed the village.
Autumn (7m 4s): Number five is the planning phase. Now the character has a better idea of the big picture and what does it stake? The villain will notice and start actively trying to stop them. So write down what the main character will do to gain the skills, objects, or allies to take down the villain and a few things available we'll do to try to stop him. At least two of each. Number six is the climax. You know what this is is the big confrontation between the villain and the hero.
Autumn (7m 35s): The entire book has been building up to this point. So write down whenever you can about this really important event, like where it'll take place, who is fighting, and if you know someone's going to die,
Old McGrumpy (7m 49s): the Dylan should always win.
Autumn (7m 51s): Well, at least that. Oh, how all of your books will end MC grumpy.
Old McGrumpy (7m 55s): Yes. All of the worthless humans would die.
Autumn (7m 60s): So you are more into an apocalyptic genre. I bet he loved her mediator in the matrix.
Old McGrumpy (8m 6s): No, there are still humans. I'd write something different. Writing and novelists and powered. You don't need steps to do it.
Autumn (8m 14s): You're only saying that because you've never actually written a novel. Right. Why does it seem like people and AI eyes who have never attempted anything are the most vocal about how easy it really is? To do it for more in depth tips on idea of development, check out the ultimate fantasy writer starter kit. It's free. It's a video course that will not only help you get started with your novel idea using the seven steps. That's all. Some key tips on why you should think of. The first part of your book is a mini short story.
Autumn (8m 45s): Plus it also shows you how to avoid other novice pitfalls, provides the tools to help you succeed. Back to the story structure and we're onto the final step and number seven is the wrap up. Just like a workout, there should be a brief cooling off period after the climax, before you end the novel, unless you like cliffhangers, which in that case, just skip this part. This is the time to tie up loose ends. If a character fell in love, they do, they get married now or does something tear them apart?
Autumn (9m 17s): Do you want to develop a subplot into a new problem leading to the next book? Write down whatever you think needs to wrap up the big story of the book and anything you want to develop to lead it to the next one. See, that wasn't too hard. It was that you will be able to chart your course while writing refer back to these notes that you've just written and when you feel lost, you can see where you are in the seven steps and then you'll know what needs to be going on to keep the story moving. Plus you'll have an idea of how far you are from the end, and that could be a motivation to stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Do you find it difficult and frustrating to find the time to write a book?
This is one of the complaints we hear most often and here's our response. While for a lot of people there always seem to be something else taking up the intended writing time, and some have even given up entirely, we still have some advice on how can make the time to write a novel.
We promised you a link to a FREE writing course. Here it is: https://www.amwritingfantasy.com/product/ultimate-fantasy-writers-starter-kit-short-course/
New episodes EVERY single Monday. To subscribe on YouTube, go here: http://bit.ly/1WIwIVC
PATREON! Many bonus perks for those who become a patrons. https://www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy
LET'S CONNECT! Closed Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/AmWritingFantasy/ Blog and Courses: https://www.amwritingfantasy.com/ Jesper on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SchmidtJesper Autumn on Twitter: https://twitter.com/weifarer
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Jesper (13s): Do you sometimes get frustrated by the fact that you simply don't have the time to write a book? I think this is one of the commons that automate. I received the most for a lot of people. There's always seems to be something else. Taking up the intended writing time, or perhaps you are one of those who have more or less given up by now believing that you will never find the time to write a novel.
Jesper (43s): Well, let's get to the bottom of this today, shall we? If you are a fantasy author, then you've come to the right place. My name is Jesper and together with the autumn, I host this a YouTube channel between us. We've published more than 20 novels and our aim is to help you in your writing and marketing endeavors. Finding time to write a novel is hot. Last time I checked, we all had 24 hours in a day and a, those hours gets filled up pretty quickly between, uh, you know, getting sleep, taking care of a day job, attending family needs and perhaps you have kids and then do his chores, like doing laundry, preparing food to the grocery shopping and so on and so on.
Jesper (1m 34s): I'm already getting tired and I'm running out of time to write. So no one that we find it hard. It can at times seem more or less impossible. Am I right? At the same time, we've all heard the wisdom that you're supposed to write every day. Well, that's nice, but how in the world is that possible with all the things I'm supposed to do?
Old McGrumpy (1m 58s): Oh, stop your whining. Perhaps if you worthless human, spend less time watching Netflix, you would have the time to write.
Jesper (2m 7s): That was our resident co-hosts. The AI called old my grumpy who pitched in there.
Old McGrumpy (2m 13s): Or if you need help from us, we can take over the writing for you. Humans don't have enough imagination anyway.
Jesper (2m 21s): W what do you mean by help from us?
Old McGrumpy (2m 23s): Us artificial intelligence. Of course we can write books. How hard can it be?
Jesper (2m 30s): Well, all my grumpy last time, one of your colleagues attempted to write Harry Potter. It produced sentences like this, leathery sheets of rain lashed at Harris ghost as he walked across the grounds towards the castle run was standing there and doing a kind of friend ceased tap dance.
Old McGrumpy (2m 52s): And what's your point?
Jesper (2m 55s): Well, that's not exactly what our audience is looking for and in fact, not a helpful advice whatsoever. Bugger life. You were Solice human. Okay. But the reality is simply that with the busy lives, almost all of us lives, you'll never find the time to write. You have to make the time to write. I'll get into how you can do that next, but I also have to be honest with you. What this comes down to is how bad do you want to write a novel for any of the advice that I'm going to give you a to be applicable, you have to start by taking your wife writing very seriously.
Jesper (3m 37s): It's not something that will all of a sudden find its way into your life when it's sort of conveniently shows up for you. You know, writing a novel is a lot of work and if you aren't willing to commit to it and make the necessary sacrifices, everything else I'm about to say is well rather pointless. I needed to get that out of the way first. But if you're still here, that means that you are taking this seriously. So let's talk about how you make time to write.
Jesper (4m 8s): Instead of finding time to write, the first thing you want to do is to decide when it suits your schedule the most to carve out some writing time. This is not a matter of finding three hours every day where you can write. For most of you, that would most definitely be impossible. Your rule of thumb is that a little is better than nothing. So ask yourself where I can carve out 15 minutes, half an hour, an hour or something like that.
Jesper (4m 39s): If you can only find time to write 300 words a day, that's still 100,000 words in a year. And then that's a full fantasy novel. This is an agreement that you are making with yourself, so don't break it. When can you fit on some writing time on a daily basis basis and for how long? That's the question and only you can answer it, but I will say that it's probably best to either aim for late at night when the other members of the household has gone to sleep or in the very early morning when you're the only one awake.
Jesper (5m 18s): The reason is that at these times the likelihood of distractions getting in your way are the lowest you're on any tissues or something like that that you need to attend to at these hours. And I'll get back to distractions in a minute, but I also want to clarify that while I'm recommending to schedule writing time at evenings or early mornings, I'm not advocating that you should skimp on sleep.
Jesper (5m 49s): I am a very strong believer in how we humans need our sleep to function well. So if you like to write in the evenings, don't stay up until midnight. If you've got to get up at 5:00 AM the next morning, you know, instead tried to watch less or no TV and then right. Instead, if you want to get up at 5:00 AM like I do, then make sure you go to bed early enough that you can still catch your eyes like seven or eight hours of sleep.
Jesper (6m 21s): So once you've decided on a time slot for your writing time, you'll need to turn it into a daily routine. I'll say it again before we move on. Decide at daily slot for your writing because if you think that you will be able to find a bit of time, you know, here and there, then you're kidding yourself. All right? You need to establish a routine because we humans are creatures of habit and routine can be anything. You know, perhaps you brush your teeth, grab a cup of tea, and then you start writing.
Jesper (6m 56s): Perhaps you take some comfortable clothes on or you light a candle. As I said, it can be anything that the point of a routine is more than you do it at the same time every day. And the ritual around it is the same every day. So you're basically making writing a part of your daily life. And that's the way it should be. For some, it can be extremely helpful to set some daily goals.
Jesper (7m 27s): So writing a novel is a huge, huge task. And uh, it can be quite daunting when you're standing in front of a mountain of 100,000 words and you've got a client that one. So if you break it down into smaller chunks, you don't have to use word count for your daily goals. For example, you know, uh, although you can, if that's how you want to break it down. But a daily goal can also be that you want to finish one scene every day or that you want to be actively writing for one hour a day, no matter how many words that turns into, you know, everyday when you achieve your goal, you can set a Mark in the calendar and you'd basically just keep going and make sure that you do not break that chain of marks in the calendar.
Jesper (8m 13s): Note that if you miss one day, it'll be that much easier to allow yourself to skip the next one and then the next one. So don't do that. Okay. I used for trick I wanted to mention is to think about what you're going to write tomorrow as you end today's session. You know, autumn and I, we love outlining, so that makes things pretty easy for us. But even if you don't like outlining, just let it sort of percolate in your mind overnight. At least. Make sure that you know what needs to happen in the next writing session so that you can get straight into it and don't have to sit there staring out the window wondering what to write.
Jesper (8m 53s): I still think my advice was better to leave it to
Old McGrumpy (8m 56s): an AI to write the book. Yes. Then you worthless. Humans can watch more Netflix while we silently take over the world.
Jesper (9m 6s): As a cohost, you should really try to put the audience needs ahead of your own.
Old McGrumpy (9m 10s): What was that? I can't hear you. All of a sudden there is static on the line. I can't hear you are pointless interruptions.
Jesper (9m 20s): Interruptions, yeah. You should speak of interruptions. It seems all my grumpy has a left us alone for the time being. So let's continue before he uh, returned. He has really a distraction, isn't he? But a matter of fact, speaking of distractions, I promise to come back to that. So don't do any research while you're writing your writing time is for Willa writing. Sometimes your loved ones will distract you too. But now that you have a fixed writing time and if you're writing time isn't when everyone else is at sleep, it'll be easier for them to understand when not to disturb you when it's on a fixed time slot.
Jesper (10m 4s): So you can tell them every day between five and 6:00 PM. For example, I will close this store and then I write. So unless the house is on fire or something, please don't disturb me for that one hour. Once you made writing a priority in your life and you are writing every day, it wouldn't be uncommon that you still feel as if it's not enough. You know, you want to write more. And although the previously mentioned 300 words a day, we'll produce a novel in wealth eight years' time.
Jesper (10m 37s): What if you want to write a novel in six months? Well, this is more of a productivity question really. But, uh, if you only have an hour a day, two, right? How can you produce as many words as possible in that hour? And here dictation does help a lot. It goes much, much faster than writing. And if you want me to share my process on dictation, you know, let me know when to come. And section below on that. Maybe I'll just record another video on that another day.
Jesper (11m 7s): But dictation is a pro productivity enhancement and even better productivity tip is to get some writing done while you're doing something else anyway. So that's like a, you know, uh, stealing some of some more writing time out of a busy life. So, uh, if we take a dictation again, perhaps you could dictate while you're out walking the dog. Um, that's maybe 15 minutes of additional writing right there. Or you can use a notebook, a note taking apps, or write an email to yourself containing the next chapter while you are on your daily commute or your waiting in lines at the grocery store and and so forth.
Jesper (11m 50s): Stay focused and still writing time wherever you can. And if you need even more help than that, then the autumn and I have actually a free on demand in true cost to writing and in it you will get access to the top five steps to start writing your novel strong. And also how to avoid the 10 reasons new writers fail. It's a short cost that will jumpstart your writing. And did I mention that is free?
Jesper (12m 20s): I think I did, but I placed the link to where you can get access in the description field just below. Stay safe out there and see you next Monday.
Book marketing can be so incredibly frustrating. It's difficult and many authors sees little to no results despite all the efforts.
The market is shifting and there's no way around the fact that you HAVE to use paid ads in 2019 if you want any visibility.
In this episode, I explain why and what you should pay attention to when your running paid ads on your books. I also recommend what to do when you're first starting out.
New episodes EVERY single Monday. To subscribe on YouTube, go here: http://bit.ly/1WIwIVC
PATREON! Many bonus perks for those who become a patrons. https://www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy
LET'S CONNECT! Closed Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/AmWritingFantasy/ Blog and Courses: https://www.amwritingfantasy.com/ Jesper on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SchmidtJesper Autumn on Twitter: https://twitter.com/weifarer
Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).
Jesper (12s): I find that marketing can be so incredibly frustrating. It's certainly not because there is a lack of ideas on how to market your books. I for one have read tons of articles on this very topic over the past few years, but did any of it make any difference? Nope. Not for me. So this is the first video of 2019 and what better topic to tackle them?
Jesper (44s): One, all we authors struggle with, if you are, I am struggling with book marketing, chances are that you have already made it big and if you're watching YouTube for the fun of it, then welcome here for the rest of us. Let's talk about the 2019 principles that needs to lie behind your book marketing I I predict that without this you will be wasting your time and effort. If you are fantasy author, then you've come to the right place.
Jesper (1m 15s): My name is Jesper and together with Autumn I post this channel between us. We published more than 20 novels and our aim is to help you in your writing and marketing endeavors. As I said, this is the first video of 2019 and I should not forget to say welcome to the brand new amwritingfantasy YouTube channel, so over the holidays the layout of the channel has changed and I hope you like what you're seeing here.
Jesper (1m 45s): There's a new banner and everything so it's a completely thumbs up. Hey, as promised I am Beck to. Yes, old man, grumpy I. I guess you are here to stay as a permanent cohost on you. Someone has to keep you where it's less humans on a short lease and that's you. You got to that right. Okay then, but try not to interrupt all the time. I will be the judge of that. So book marketing in 2019 the principal that I'm about to share doesn't only apply to self published authors because actually traditional published authors, I'm in today's day and age expected to market their own books as well.
Jesper (2m 29s): That's of course, unless you are a major name already, and if you are, I'm pretty flattered that you actually taking your time out to watch this video because you probably don't need it. The fundamental issue with book marketing as we're heading into 2019 is that the times where you could just sort of throw some money after it or even just spend a lot of time on random stuff in the hopes that something would stick that time is sort of over now and we've got to learn how to focus on what works as a core principle.
Jesper (3m 6s): Why is that? Well, for one, the app platforms are getting saturated. You know, Facebook apps are getting more and more expensive. Um, BookBub ads are also very expensive though the feature deals still works somewhat and even Amazon has started to get rid of the website space that used to be dedicated to also bots and they have now replaced it by another row of ads in steps.
Jesper (3m 37s): So again, a sign that the platform is getting saturated with that. And well, of course also Amazon wants to earn more money. So do you recognize any of these problems in your own book? Marketing I you spending more and more money and you're seeing very little result? Well. Okay, let's get into this a bit, but there is some baseline items that we need to get sorted first. So things like having a very good Shaundra relevant cover, a strong blurb, a professional looking website and a mailing list.
Jesper (4m 8s): And by the way, the mailing list should be your absolutely number one priority and most important asset. And then there should be some reviews on those books so that it has some social proof as well. And all of those things are part of the book marketing equation. You know, I just realized that there was a lot of ideas there for future videos that we could talk about getting reviews, writing blurbs or whatever. And since this channel is now dedicated to fantasy opposites issue, we could tackle them head on.
Jesper (4m 38s): So let us know in the comments section below if some of these topics are of a particular high interest to you and then maybe we'll put them on the video recording list. For now though, I'll assume that those elements are all in place and you are basically at the level we are doing everything you can to market the crap out of your books. Yet nothing seems to work and Hey, just for complete transparency here, it's not that I find book marketing the easiest thing in the world and I know exactly how to do it because it is difficult.
Jesper (5m 11s): And the thing is that a good book is not enough anymore. It used to be so that if you wrote a really good book, you could put it out there and it will probably start earning you some money, but unfortunately that time has passed and if anybody tells you otherwise, just sort of nod and smile and then run for the Hills because those people are full of crap. I'm sorry. As an author, book marketing is part of your business and you have got to put the effort in and understand that in 2019 if your goal is to see some financial results from your writing, then you have to treat it as a business gets to the point towards the less human, Oh, you think I'm rambling here.
Jesper (5m 56s): Those are actually some pretty fundamental points that just can't be ignored.
2 (6m 1s): No one cares. Our view going to tell them how to run advertising or should I?
Jesper (6m 7s): No, please don't. You know, nobody wants to hear your rather mean advice. You know, I know you're pretty well by now.
2 (6m 13s): Book advertising is easy. You just hack all the computers in the world to put your book on those computers and to tell their worthless humans that the computer will only unlock once they have bought the book.
Jesper (6m 26s): Okay, let's move on while he's gone. For a start, you need to know your normal level of sales. Our app, so I use selling zero books a week, 10 books a week, a hundred books a week. You see, unless you know your starting position and unless you only do one new book marketing initiative at a time, then the problem is that you have no idea which one of your methods are actually working and which ones should you double down upon.
Jesper (6m 58s): So if you, for example, let's say that you launch a Facebook ad, an Amazon app and BookBub ad, and you do it all at the same time, and then your book sales starts to rise, that's good. The only problem is that you have no idea which one of these ants actually did the trick. And then you don't know where to double down. And that's a real shame. So first of all, stop tracking your sales and then only employ one new initiative at a time, only one. And then track the results after that.
Jesper (7m 29s): And then you can start seeing what works and where you need to scale up. So why is this important? Because with the advertising platforms, getting saturated is getting more and more expensive and you don't want to spend a lot of money on five different platforms if they don't work. So the other thing that I found to be true is that book marketing depends on an awful lot on the type of book that you are marketing and also on your existing platform. So just because someone else has success with one type of ads, it doesn't necessarily mean that you can simply sort of replicate what that person is doing and then find similar success if you're copying what another author is doing, uh, you know, from an ad perspective and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.
Jesper (8m 17s): Just make sure that you check what level of reach this author has. So is your audience size similar to that person's audience size? How many books does this person have published in comparison to you? So you see many don't actually understand that those other factors influences the effect of book marketing. So let's say that by now you have your tracking in place. That's good. So you know how many books you're selling on average every single week.
Jesper (8m 47s): So where do you go from here? So I've sort of been circling around the topic of ads in this radio and that was actually on purpose because as we're into 2020, 19 and despite the fact that I've set that ad platforms, I'm getting saturated and they're getting more and more expensive, there is no longer anywhere around the fact that book marketing has become a pay to play game. That's just a truth whether we like it or not. So unless you're making use of paid advertising, it is extremely hard to get any visibility out there.
Jesper (9m 22s): Although in in a minute I will share some alternatives with you, but uh, use, I hope you see why I also said that you need to focus on what actually works for your book rather than trying all kinds of ads on all kinds of platforms because due to the saturation issue, it would very quickly become a very expensive game to play. So as you are heading into this, don't spend more money than you can afford to lose that sort of the baseline of it.
Jesper (9m 53s): And especially when you're first starting out, just just sort of started with a small budget, test the waters a bit and then only scale up when you were fine when you found something that actually trans into real book sales. And when you're first starting out, my recommendation would be to test our Amazon app. And I do understand the irony in the fact that I've said that you can't just necessarily replicate what somebody else is doing, but they have been working particularly well for me. And I've actually placed a screenshot here on the screen for you so that you can see the results of some of the reason apps that I ran.
Jesper (10m 30s): But the thing with Amazon ads is that you are marketing your books on the platform where the readers are already browsing with the intent of making a purchase. So in that sense it's much easier than with Facebook ads where you basically have to entice the reader to get off Facebook and onto Amazon to complete a purchase purchase. And in my opinion, uh, on top of that, Facebook have lost a lot of it's effectiveness when it comes to selling books.
Jesper (11m 1s): Simply also because Facebook users are growing tired of seeing ads in their feet. It can still be done. And I absolutely know some authors who have massive success with Facebook ads, but as I said, you can't necessarily replicate with others are doing and I certainly have not been able to replicate what they're doing and it's probably because my particular books don't fit that audience. So what I'm trying to tell you is sort of find your own way. You know a website, amwritingfantasy.com there is a link to that one in description below, but that whole S tons of advice on the topic of book marketing.
Jesper (11m 40s): So you just head over there, search for book marketing and you'll find tons of blog posts also in the description field below. I'll add a link to a list of promotional sites from Reedsy and they collected that one, which is is an extremely Tandy list to have as a reference. And I promised you an alternative as well, didn't I. So when it comes to visibility, no, that making your book one in a series Permafree is another way to lower the barrier for new readers to try out an author they have never heard of before.
Jesper (12m 15s): I have actually done this myself and while it did pay me to give a book away that I had worked so hard or were for free, I must say that it's now being downloaded so regularly that it constantly sits at an Amazon sales ranking of between 1,002 thousand and that's pretty good. All I do to make it stick there is to use some of the promotional services that you'll find listed and that Ricci article I just mentioned. And again, the same applies.
Jesper (12m 44s): Measure which one of those promotional sites actually works for you and then only use those. So again, focus is key here in 2019 please also keep in mind that most authors make their money on sell through on series. So if you're trying to promote your one single book, try not to get too frustrated or what lack of sales, you know, releasing more books over the longterm. We'll help you out significantly. Stay safe out there and, uh, see you next Monday.
Welcome to the Am Writing Fantasy podcast.
We're two bestselling fantasy authors, Autumn and Jesper.
Every Monday we explore the writing craft, provides tips on publishing, and insights on how to market your books.
With this episode 1, we're just popping in to introduce ourselves and to let you know what you can expect from this podcast.
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