The Creative Penn

How can you write science-based fiction without info-dumping your research? How can you use AI tools in a creative way, while still focusing on a human-first approach? Why is adapting to the fast pace of change so difficult and how can we make the most of this time? Jamie Metzl talks about Superconvergence and more.

In the intro, How to avoid author scams [Written Word Media]; Spotify vs Audible audiobook strategy [The New Publishing Standard]; Thoughts on Author Nation and why constraints are important in your author life [Self-Publishing with ALLi];
Alchemical History And Beautiful Architecture: Prague with Lisa M Lilly on my Books and Travel Podcast.

Today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, self-publishing with support, where you can get free formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Just go to www.draft2digital.com to get started.

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 

Jamie Metzl is a technology futurist, professional speaker, entrepreneur, and the author of sci-fi thrillers and futurist nonfiction books, including the revised and updated edition of Superconvergence: How the Genetics, Biotech, and AI Revolutions Will Transform Our Lives, Work, and World.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

You can find Jamie at JamieMetzl.com.

Jo: Jamie Metzl is a technology futurist, professional speaker, entrepreneur, and the author of sci-fi thrillers and futurist nonfiction books, including the revised and updated edition of Superconvergence: How the Genetics, Biotech, and AI Revolutions Will Transform Our Lives, Work, and World. So welcome, Jamie.

Jamie: Thank you so much, Jo. Very happy to be here with you.

Jo: There is so much we could talk about, but let's start with you telling us a bit more about you and how you got into writing.

Jamie: Well, I think like a lot of writers, I didn't know I was a writer. I was just a kid who loved writing.

Actually, just last week I was going through a bunch of boxes from my parents' house and I found my autobiography, which I wrote when I was nine years old. So I've been writing my whole life and loving it. It was always something that was very important to me.

When I finished my DPhil, my PhD at Oxford, and my dissertation came out, it just got scooped up by Macmillan in like two minutes. And I thought, “God, that was easy.”

That got me started thinking about writing books. I wanted to write a novel based on the same historical period – my PhD was in Southeast Asian history – and I wanted to write a historical novel set in the same period as my dissertation, because I felt like the dissertation had missed the human element of the story I was telling, which was related to the Cambodian genocide and its aftermath.

So I wrote what became my first novel, and I thought, “Wow, now I'm a writer.” I thought, “All right, I've already published one book. I'm gonna get this other book out into the world.” And then I ran into the brick wall of: it's really hard to be a writer. It's almost easier to write something than to get it published.

I had to learn a ton, and it took nine years from when I started writing that first novel, The Depths of the Sea, to when it finally came out. But it was such a positive experience, especially to have something so personal to me as that story. I'd lived in Cambodia for two years, I’d worked on the Thai-Cambodian border, and I'm the child of a Holocaust survivor. So there was a whole lot that was very emotional for me.

That set a pattern for the rest of my life as a writer, at least where, in my nonfiction books, I'm thinking about whatever the issues are that are most important to me. Whether it was that historical book, which was my first book, or Hacking Darwin on the future of human genetic engineering, which was my last book, or Superconvergence, which, as you mentioned in the intro, is my current book.

But in every one of those stories, the human element is so deep and so profound. You can get at some of that in nonfiction, but I've also loved exploring those issues in deeper ways in my fiction.

So in my more recent novels, Genesis Code and Eternal Sonata, I've looked at the human side of the story of genetic engineering and human life extension. And now my agent has just submitted my new novel, Virtuoso, about the intersection of AI, robotics, and classical music.

With all of this, who knows what's the real difference between fiction and nonfiction? We're all humans trying to figure things out on many different levels.

Jo: I knew that you were a polymath, someone who's interested in so many things, but the music angle with robotics and AI is fascinating.

I do just want to ask you, because I was also at Oxford – what college were you at?

Jamie: I was in St. Antony's.

Jo: I was at Mansfield, so we were in that slightly smaller, less famous college group, if people don't know.

Jamie: You know, but we're small but proud.

Jo: Exactly. That's fantastic.

You mentioned that you were on the historical side of things at the beginning and now you've moved into technology and also science, because this book Superconvergence has a lot of science. So how did you go from history and the past into science and the future?

Jamie: It's a great question. I'll start at the end and then back up.

A few years ago I was speaking at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which is one of the big scientific labs here in the United States. I was a guest of the director and I was speaking to their 300 top scientists.

I said to them, “I'm here to speak with you about the future of biology at the invitation of your director, and I'm really excited. But if you hear something wrong, please raise your hand and let me know, because I'm entirely self-taught. The last biology course I took was in 11th grade of high school in Kansas City.”

Of course I wouldn't say that if I didn't have a lot of confidence in my process. But in many ways I'm self-taught in the sciences. As you know, Jo, and as all of your listeners know, the foundation of everything is curiosity and then a disciplined process for learning.

Even our greatest super-specialists in the world now – whatever their background – the world is changing so fast that if anyone says, “Oh, I have a PhD in physics/chemistry/biology from 30 years ago,” the exact topic they learned 30 years ago is less significant than their process for continuous learning.

More specifically, in the 1990s I was working on the National Security Council for President Clinton, which is the president’s foreign policy staff. My then boss and now close friend, Richard Clarke – who became famous as the guy who had tragically predicted 9/11 – used to say that the key to efficacy in Washington and in life is to try to solve problems that other people can't see.

For me, almost 30 years ago, I felt to my bones that this intersection of what we now call AI and the nascent genetics revolution and the nascent biotechnology revolution was going to have profound implications for humanity. So I just started obsessively educating myself.

When I was ready, I started writing obscure national security articles. Those got a decent amount of attention, so I was invited to testify before the United States Congress. I was speaking out a lot, saying, “Hey, this is a really important story. A lot of people are missing it. Here are the things we should be thinking about for the future.”

I wasn't getting the kind of traction that I wanted. I mentioned before that my first book had been this dry Oxford PhD dissertation, and that had led to my first novel. So I thought, why don't I try the same approach again – writing novels to tell this story about the genetics, biotech, and what later became known popularly as the AI revolution?

That led to my two near-term sci-fi novels, Genesis Code and Eternal Sonata. On my book tours for those novels, when I explained the underlying science to people in my way, as someone who taught myself, I could see in their eyes that they were recognizing not just that something big was happening, but that they could understand it and feel like they were part of that story.

That's what led me to write Hacking Darwin, as I mentioned. That book really unlocked a lot of things. I had essentially predicted the CRISPR babies that were born in China before it happened – down to the specific gene I thought would be targeted, which in fact was the case.

After that book was published, Dr. Tedros, the Director-General of the World Health Organization, invited me to join the WHO Expert Advisory Committee on Human Genome Editing, which I did. It was a really great experience and got me thinking a lot about the upside of this revolution and the downside.

Jamie: I get a lot of wonderful invitations to speak, and I have two basic rules for speaking:

Because of that, when I speak, my talks tend to migrate. I’d be speaking with people about the genetics revolution as it applied to humans, and I'd say, “Well, this is just a little piece of a much bigger story.”

The bigger story is that after nearly four billion years of life on Earth, our one species has the increasing ability to engineer novel intelligence and re-engineer life. The big question for us, and frankly for the world, is whether we're going to be able to use that almost godlike superpower wisely.

As that idea got bigger and bigger, it became this inevitable force. You write so many books, Jo, that I think it's second nature for you. Every time I finish a book, I think, “Wow, that was really hard. I'm never doing that again.” And then the books creep up on you. They call to you. At some point you say, “All right, now I'm going to do it.”

So that was my current book, Superconvergence. Like everything, every journey you take a step, and that step inspires another step and another. That's why writing and living creatively is such a wonderfully exciting thing – there's always more to learn and always great opportunities to push ourselves in new ways.

Jo: Yeah, absolutely. I love that you've followed your curiosity and then done this disciplined process for learning. I completely understand that.

But one of the big issues with people like us who love the research – and having read your Superconvergence, I know how deeply you go into this and how deeply you care that it's correct – is that with fiction, one of the big problems with too much research is the danger of brain-dumping.

Readers go to fiction for escapism. They want the interesting side of it, but they want a story first.

What are your tips for authors who might feel like, “Where's the line between putting in my research so that it's interesting for readers, but not going too far and turning it into a textbook?” How do you find that balance?

Jamie: It's such a great question.

I live in New York now, but I used to live in Washington when I was working for the U.S. government, and there were a number of people I served with who later wrote novels. Some of those novels felt like policy memos with a few sex scenes – and that's not what to do.

To write something that's informed by science or really by anything, everything needs to be subservient to the story and the characters. The question is: what is the essential piece of information that can convey something that's both important to your story and your character development, and is also an accurate representation of the world as you want it to be?

I certainly write novels that are set in the future – although some of them were a future that's now already happened because I wrote them a long time ago. You can make stuff up, but as an author you have to decide what your connection to existing science and existing technology and the existing world is going to be.

I come at it from two angles. One: I read a huge number of scientific papers and think, “What does this mean for now, and if you extrapolate into the future, where might that go?”

Two: I think about how to condense things. We've all read books where you're humming along because people read fiction for story and emotional connection, and then you hit a bit like: “I sat down in front of the president, and the president said, ‘Tell me what I need to know about the nuclear threat.'” And then it’s like: insert memo. That's a deal-killer.

It's like all things – how do you have a meaningful relationship with another person? It's not by just telling them your story. Even when you're telling them something about you, you need to be imagining yourself sitting in their shoes, hearing you.

These are very different disciplines, fiction and nonfiction. But for the speculative nonfiction I write – “here's where things are now, and here's where the world is heading” – there's a lot of imagination that goes into that too. It feels in many ways like we're living in a sci-fi world because the rate of technological change has been accelerating continuously, certainly for the last 12,000 years since the dawn of agriculture.

It's a balance.

For me, I feel like I'm a better fiction writer because I write nonfiction, and I'm a better nonfiction writer because I write fiction. When I'm writing nonfiction, I don't want it to be boring either – I want people to feel like there's a story and characters and that they can feel themselves inside that story.

Jo: Yeah, definitely. I think having some distance helps as well. If you're really deep into your topics, as you are, you have to leave that manuscript a little bit so you can go back with the eyes of the reader as opposed to your eyes as the expert. Then you can get their experience, which is great.

Jo: I want to come to your technical knowledge, because AI is a big thing in the author and creative community, like everywhere else.

One of the issues is that creators are focusing on just this tiny part of the impact of AI, and there's a much bigger picture. For example, in 2024, Demis Hassabis from Google DeepMind and his collaborative partner John Jumper won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry with AlphaFold.

It feels to me like there's this massive world of what's happening with AI in health, climate, and other areas, and yet we are so focused on a lot of the negative stuff.

Maybe you could give us a couple of things about what there is to be excited and optimistic about in terms of AI-powered science?

Jamie: Sure. I'm so excited about all of the new opportunities that AI creates. But I also think there's a reason why evolution has preserved this very human feeling of anxiety: because there are real dangers.

Anybody who's Pollyanna-ish and says, “Oh, the AI story is inevitably positive,” I’d be distrustful. And anyone who says, “We're absolutely doomed, this is the end of humanity,” I'd also be distrustful.

So let me tell you the positives and the negatives, and maybe some thoughts about how we navigate toward the former and away from the latter.

Jamie: When people think of AI right now, they’re thinking very narrowly about these AI tools and ChatGPT. But we don't think of electricity that way.

Nobody says, “I know electricity – electricity is what happens at the power station.” We've internalised the idea that electricity is woven into not just our communication systems or our houses, but into our clothes, our glasses – it's woven into everything and has super-empowered almost everything in our modern lives.

That's what AI is.

In Superconvergence, the majority of the book is about positive opportunities:

In healthcare, moving from generalised healthcare based on population averages to personalised or precision healthcare based on a molecular understanding of each person's individual biology.

As we build these massive datasets like the UK Biobank, we can take a next jump toward predictive and preventive healthcare, where we're able to address health issues far earlier in the process, when interventions can be far more benign.

I'm really excited about that, not to mention the incredible new kinds of treatments – gene therapies, or pharmaceuticals based on genetics and systems-biology analyses of patients.

Then there's agriculture. Over the last hundred years, because of the technologies of the Green Revolution and synthetic fertilisers, we've had an incredible increase in agricultural productivity. That's what's allowed us to quadruple the global population.

But if we just continue agriculture as it is, as we get towards ten billion wealthier, more empowered people wanting to eat like we eat, we're going to have to wipe out all the wild spaces on Earth to feed them.

These technologies help provide different paths toward increasing agricultural productivity with fewer inputs of land, water, fertiliser, insecticides, and pesticides. That's really positive.

I could go on and on about these positives – and I do – but there are very real negatives.

I was a member of the WHO Expert Advisory Committee on Human Genome Editing after the first CRISPR babies were very unethically created in China. I'm extremely aware that these same capabilities have potentially incredible upsides and very real downsides. That's the same as every technology in the past, but this is happening so quickly that it's triggering a lot of anxieties.

Jamie: The question now is: how do we optimise the benefits and minimise the harms? The short, unsexy word for that is governance.

Governance is not just what governments do; it's what all of us do. That's why I try to write books, both fiction and nonfiction, to bring people into this story.

If people “other” this story – if they say, “There's a technology revolution, it has nothing to do with me, I'm going to keep my head down” – I think that's dangerous.

The way we're going to handle this as responsibly as possible is if everybody says, “I have some role. Maybe it's small, maybe it's big. The first step is I need to educate myself. Then I need to have conversations with people around me. I need to express my desires, wishes, and thoughts – with political leaders, organisations I’m part of, businesses.”

That has to happen at every level.

You're in the UK – you know the anti-slavery movement started with a handful of people in Cambridge and grew into a global movement. I really believe in the power of ideas, but ideas don't spread on their own. These are very human networks, and that's why writing, speaking, communicating – probably for every single person listening to this podcast – is so important.

Jo: Mm, yeah.

Jo: Have you read AI 2041 by Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan?

Jamie: No. I heard a bunch of their interviews when the book came out, but I haven't read it.

Jo: I think that's another good one because it's fiction – a whole load of short stories. It came out a few years ago now, but the issues they cover in the stories, about different people in different countries – I remember one about deepfakes – make you think more about the topics and help you figure out where you stand.

I think that's the issue right now: it's so complex, there are so many things. I'm generally positive about AI, but of course I don't want autonomous drone weapons, you know?

Jamie: Can I ask you about that? Because this is why it's so complicated.

Like you, I think nobody wants autonomous killer drones anywhere in the world. But if you right now were the defence minister of Ukraine, and your children are being kidnapped, your country is being destroyed, you're fighting for your survival, you're getting attacked every night – and you're getting attacked by the Russians, who are investing more and more in autonomous killer robots – you kind of have two choices.

You can say, “I'm going to surrender,” or, “I'm going to use what technology I have available to defend myself, and hopefully fight to either victory or some kind of stand-off.”

That's what our societies did with nuclear weapons. Maybe not every American recognises that Churchill gave Britain's nuclear secrets to America as a way of greasing the wheels of the Anglo-American alliance during the Second World War – but that was our programme: we couldn't afford to lose that war, and we couldn't afford to let the Nazis get nuclear weapons before we did.

So there's the abstract feeling of, “I'm against all war in the abstract. I'm against autonomous killer robots in the abstract.” But if I were the defence minister of Ukraine, I would say, “What will it take for us to build the weapons we can use to defend ourselves?”

That's why all this stuff gets so complicated. And frankly, it's why the relationship between fiction and nonfiction is so important.

If every novel had a situation where every character said, “Oh, I know exactly the right answer,” and then they just did the right answer and it was obviously right, it wouldn't make for great fiction.

We're dealing with really complex humans. We have conflicting impulses. We're not perfect. Maybe there are no perfect answers – but how do we strive toward better rather than worse? That’s the question.

Jo: Absolutely. I don't want to get too political on things.

Jo: Let's come back to authors.

In terms of the creative process, the writing process, the research process, and the business of being an author – what are some of the ways that you already use AI tools, and some of the ways, given your futurist brain, that you think things are going to change for us?

Jamie: Great question. I'll start with a little middle piece.

I found you, Jo, through GPT-5. I asked ChatGPT, “I'm coming out with this book and I want to connect with podcasters who are a little different from the ones I've done in the past. I've been a guest on Joe Rogan twice and some of the bigger podcasts. Make me a list of really interesting people I can have great conversations with.”

That's how I found you. So this is one reward of that process.

Let me say that in the last year I've worked on three books, and I'll explain how my relationship with AI has changed over those books.

Jamie: First is the highly revised paperback edition of Superconvergence.

When the hardback came out, I had – I don't normally work with research assistants because I like to dig into everything myself – but the one thing I do use a research assistant for is that I can't be bothered, when I'm writing something, to do the full Chicago-style footnote if I'm already referencing an academic paper.

So I'd just put the URL as the footnote and then hire a research assistant and say, “Go to this URL and change it into a Chicago-style citation. That's it.”

Unfortunately, my research assistant on the hardback used early-days ChatGPT for that work. He did the whole thing, came back, everything looked perfect. I said, “Wow, amazing job.”

It was only later, as I was going through them, that I realised something like 50% of them were invented footnotes. It was very painful to go back and fix, and it took ten times more time.

With the paperback edition, I didn't use AI that much, but I did say things like, “Here's all the information – generate a Chicago-style citation.” That was better.

I noticed there were a few things where I stopped using the thesaurus function on Microsoft Word because I'd just put the whole paragraph into the AI and say, “Give me ten other options for this one word,” and it would be like a contextual thesaurus. That was pretty good.

Jamie: Then, for my new novel Virtuoso, I was writing a character who is a futurist robot that plays the piano very beautifully – not just humanly, but almost finding new things in the music we've written and composing music that resonates with us.

I described the actions of that robot in the novel, but I didn't describe the inner workings of the robot’s mind.

In thinking about that character, I realised I was the first science-fiction writer in history who could interrogate a machine about what it was “thinking” in a particular context.

I had the most beautiful conversations with ChatGPT, where I would give scenarios and ask, “What are you thinking? What are you feeling in this context?”

It was all background for that character, but it was truly profound.

Jamie: Third, I have another book coming out in May in the United States.

I gave a talk this summer at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York about AI and spirituality. I talked about the history of our human relationship with our technology, about how all our religious and spiritual traditions have deep technological underpinnings – certainly our Abrahamic religions are deeply connected to farming, and Protestantism to the printing press.

Then I had a section about the role of AI in generating moral codes that would resonate with humans.

Everybody went nuts for this talk, and I thought, “I think I'm going to write a book.” I decided to write it differently, with GPT-5 as my named co-author.

The first thing I did was outline the entire book based on the talk, which I’d already spent a huge amount of time thinking about and organising. Then I did a full outline of the arguments and structures. Then I trained GPT-5 on my writing style.

The way I did it – which I fully describe in the introduction to the book – was that I'd handle all the framing: the full introduction, the argument, the structure.

But if there was a section where, for a few paragraphs, I was summarising a huge field of data, even something I knew well, I'd give GPT-5 the intro sentence and say, “In my writing style, prepare four paragraphs on this.”

For example, I might write: “AI has the potential to see us humans like we humans see ant colonies.” Then I’d say, “Give me four paragraphs on the relationship between the individual and the collective in ant colonies.”

I could have written those four paragraphs myself, but it would’ve taken a month to read the life’s work of E.O. Wilson and then write them. GPT-5 wrote them in seconds or minutes, in its thinking mode.

I'd then say, “It's not quite right – change this, change that,” and we'd go back and forth three or four times. Then I’d edit the whole thing and put it into the text.

So this book that I could have written on my own in a year, I wrote a first draft of with GPT-5 as my named co-author in two days. The whole project will take about six months from start to finish, and I'm having massive human editing – multiple edits from me, plus a professional editor.

It's not a magic AI button. But I feel strongly about listing GPT-5 as a co-author because I've written it differently than previous books.

I'm a huge believer in the old-fashioned lone author struggling and suffering – that’s in my novels, and in Virtuoso I explore that. But other forms are going to emerge, just like video games are a creative, artistic form deeply connected to technology.

The novel hasn’t been around forever – the current format is only a few centuries old – and forms are always changing.

There are real opportunities for authors, and there will be so much crap flooding the market because everybody can write something and put it up on Amazon. But I think there will be a very special place for thoughtful human authors who have an idea of what humans do at our best, and who translate that into content other humans can enjoy.

Jo: I'm interested – you mentioned that it's your named co-author. Is this book going through a traditional publisher, and what do they think about that? Or are you going to publish it yourself?

Jamie: It's such a smart question.

What I found quickly is that when you get to be an author later in your career, you have all the infrastructure – a track record, a fantastic agent, all of that. But there were two things that were really important to me here:

I spoke with my agent, who I absolutely love, and she said that for this particular project it was going to be really hard in traditional publishing.

So I did a huge amount of research, because I'd never done anything in the self-publishing world before. I looked at different models. There was one hybrid model that's basically the same as traditional, but you pay for the things the publisher would normally pay for.

I ended up not doing that. Instead, I decided on a self-publishing route where I disaggregated the publishing process. I found three teams: one for producing the book, one for getting the book out into the world, and a smaller one for the audiobook.

I still believe in traditional publishing – there's a lot of wonderful human value-add. But some works just don't lend themselves to traditional publishing. For this book, which is called The AI Ten Commandments, that's the path I've chosen.

Jo: And when's that out? I think people will be interested.

Jamie: April 26th.

Those of us used to traditional publishing think, “I've finished the book, sold the proposal, it’ll be out any day now,” and then it can be a year and a half. It's frustrating.

With this, the process can be much faster because it's possible to control more of the variables. But the key – as I was saying – is to make sure it's as good a book as everything else you've written. It's great to speed up, but you don't want to compromise on quality.

Jo: Yeah, absolutely.

We're almost out of time, but I want to come back to your “flood of crap” and the “AI slop” idea that's going around. Because you are working with GPT-5 – and I do as well, and I work with Claude and Gemini – and right now there are still issues. Like you said about referencing, there are still hallucinations, though fewer.

But fast-forward two, five years: it's not a flood of crap. It's a flood of excellent. It's a flood of stuff that's better than us.

Jamie: We're humans. It's better than us in certain ways. If you have farm machinery, it's better than us at certain aspects of farming.

I'm a true humanist. I think there will be lots of things machines do better than us, but there will be tons of things we do better than them.

There's a reason humans still care about chess, even though machines can beat humans at chess.

Some people are saying things I fully disagree with, like this concept of AGI – artificial general intelligence – where machines do everything better than humans. I've summarised my position in seven letters: “AGI is BS.”

The only way you can believe in AGI in that sense is if your concept of what a human is and what a human mind is is so narrow that you think it's just a narrow range of analytical skills. We are so much more than that.

Humans represent almost four billion years of embodied evolution. There's so much about ourselves that we don't know. As incredible as these machines are and will become, there will always be wonderful things humans can do that are different from machines.

What I always tell people is: whatever you're doing, don't be a second-rate machine. Be a first-rate human.

If you're doing something and a machine is doing that thing much better than you, then shift to something where your unique capacities as a human give you the opportunity to do something better.

So yes, I totally agree that the quality of AI-generated stuff will get better. But I think the most creative and successful humans will be the ones who say, “I recognise that this is creating new opportunities, and I'm going to insert my core humanity to do something magical and new.”

People are “othering” these technologies, but the technologies themselves are magnificent human-generated artefacts. They're not alien UFOs that landed here.

It's a scary moment for creatives, no doubt, because there are things all of us did in the past that machines can now do really well. But this is the moment where the most creative people ask themselves, “What does it mean for me to be a great human?”

The pat answers won't apply.

In my Virtuoso novel I explore that a lot. The idea that “machines don't do creativity” – they will do incredible creativity; it just won't be exactly human creativity. We will be potentially huge beneficiaries of these capabilities, but we really have to believe in and invest in the magic of our core humanity.

Jo: Brilliant. So where can people find you and your books online?

Jamie: Thank you so much for asking.

My website is jamiemetzl.com – and my books are available everywhere.

Jo: Fantastic. Thanks so much for your time, Jamie. That was great.

Jamie: Thank you, Joanna.

The post Writing The Future, And Being More Human In An Age of AI With Jamie Metzl first appeared on The Creative Penn.

In early November 2025, I attended and spoke at Author Nation in Las Vegas. It was a fantastic conference for authors at all levels, and in this episode, I share my lessons learned and tips from reflecting on the event.

In the intro, scam emails and what to watch out for; Spotify launches Recaps, and how I currently self-publish audiobooks; Successful Self-Publishing 4th Edition free audiobook; My audiobooks on YouTube The Creative Penn / Fiction/memoir audiobooks on JFPennAuthor; 22 ways to grow your author email list [BookBub]; Author Nation with the Wish I’d Known Then Podcast; and Your Author Business Plan on special.

Bookfunnel, the essential tool for your author business, sponsors today's show. Whether it’s delivering your reader magnet, sending out advanced copies of your book, handing out ebooks at a conference, or fulfilling your digital sales to readers, BookFunnel does it all. Check it out at bookfunnel.com/thecreativepenn

Joanna Penn writes non-fiction for authors and is an award-winning, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of thrillers, dark fantasy, and memoir as J.F. Penn. She’s also an award-winning podcaster, creative entrepreneur, and international professional speaker.

You can find Author Nation at AuthorNation.live. You can find my books on writing craft and author business in all formats at CreativePennBooks.com, or on your favourite online store, or request at your local bookstore or library.

In early November 2025, I attended Author Nation in Las Vegas along with around 1500 other authors, and lots of vendors. There were about 80 different sessions over four days and a Reader Nation signing and book sales event. The sessions were on different tracks so you could go to basic craft and self-publishing things, or more advanced sessions on author business and mindset.

I spoke several times, once as part of a panel on long-term career strategies, once in my own solo session on collaboration with AI, all the things you can use AI for that are not writing, and once in a private meet up for my Patrons. 

Congratulations to the Author Nation team for delivering such a fantastic conference! I know how hard everyone worked and it went super well from what I could see. If you’re interested in learning more, just go to https://www.authornation.live/

Here are some of my thoughts from the 2025 conference, but of course, remember, I am a writing conference veteran and have been an author entrepreneur for a long time, so my takeaways will be different to someone who is at a different place in their career.  

To be clear, I know this isn’t possible for everyone, because of time or money or health reasons, or caring responsibilities, as Donn’s recent interview illustrated. But if you can, it’s always worth going to conferences in person. 

If you attend, organise well in advance. Schedule meetings early, but also leave room for serendipity. Make the most of meeting people at your level; build your network. There were people I hadn’t seen for years at Author Nation, so much elbow bumping, human connection — and LOTS of coffee.

While I attended a few sessions, most of my time was back-to-back meetings and chats with other authors and vendors, and we had a great Patreon meet-up with over 100 people.

Author conferences are a great way to build relationships, and if you start with people at your level now, over time, you will all grow and change, and people will become successful in different ways, or disappear sometimes.

The longer you are in this business, and the more you join in and help others, the more people you get to know and social karma kicks in. Some of those relationships naturally turn into business opportunities, and other author friends will be your support crew over the inevitable challenging years ahead.

So if you feel like you don’t have any author friends, or know enough people at your level, then consider booking an in-person conference for 2026. It could be a genre conference, or a broader overall conference like Author Nation, but get away from your screen and do some peopling! As hard as it is, it’s worth it.

Drew Davies did the opening keynote, and if you want to be a keynote speaker and get paid the big bucks, then it was a masterclass in professional speaking.

I’ve done a lot of speaker training and it was inspiring to watch Drew’s presentation and consider how he used multimedia, how he engaged with different mediums, how he made people laugh, and brought emotion in, as well as deliver a message.

If you’re ever in sessions or at events and you want to learn on a different level, consider the person and their skill — or lack of it — instead of the content. You can learn a lot from watching or listening to the person delivering, and how they speak or teach or react to the room.

Drew’s content was great too, and he spoke on the Cube of Constraints which can be the catalyst for supercharging your creativity. He had an actual cube too, which he built into a sculpture later, part of his multi-faceted teaching style.

In a world of unlimited possibilities, it’s hard to stick to one choice, and especially if you listen to author podcasts like this one, or go to conferences where you ingest a ton of sessions like Author Nation, you will have hundreds of ideas, and you can have popcorn brain with things firing off everywhere.

But if you don’t settle into one thing and focus, you might not achieve much, so Drew recommended deliberately constraining your work in 4 ways. 

What can you stop doing in order to pursue the new thing? If you start something new, kill two things. Kill the easy one, then kill the hard one.

When I was writing my first book and trying to exit my day job to become a full-time author, I gave up TV and this was before smartphones and social media, so that wasn’t even a distraction. Giving up TV in the evenings gave me the time I needed to build a new direction. You have to make the time somehow.  

What single result defines success? For example, with my first novel, Pentecost, which became Stone of Fire, the goal was to publish it on Amazon by my birthday. I ended up falling short by about a month, but a birthday-related goal is always a good one as it’s so memorable and clear. 

What unreasonable limitations can you apply to your project?

Give it a time limit, and a creative limit. That creative limit is a good one, for example, if you constrain the genre or the number of POV characters in your book, it will make it easier to achieve your goal.

What specifically will happen if you fail?

This is a tough one, as it’s so personal. For me, I like achieving goals, and so failing a goal is a big enough stake for me. Some people talk about signing a cheque to a charity they hate or something and sending it off if they fail, but that doesn't motivate me. Whatever floats your boat, but decide what the stakes are. As we know with writing fiction, high stakes are important to keep things moving! 

Drew also talked about turning constraints you already have, like time and budget, into positives.

This kind of reframing can help you embrace your situation. For example, if you only have 30 minutes per day to write while commuting, well, so be it. Try dictating or typing on your phone, and I know several authors who have written many books during a work commute. Or busy mums who dictate while doing chores.

Or again, coming back to Donn’s interview, if you’re a carer, raging against it may not help as much as adapting and changing your creative goals and being more relaxed about time.

I’ve embraced my constraints recently as I’m doing this Masters in Death, Religion, and Culture. It’s full-time, so I am doing at least 20 hours a week of study and online lectures and reading on some really interesting topics. I’m writing essays, so I don’t have time or the headspace to write books, too. I’m currently working on three essays — one on natural burial, one on the ethics of using dead bodies to inspire commercial fiction, and one on the depiction of hell in an area of art history.

I am clearly collecting ideas for when I am ready to write fiction again, but the constraint of study is focusing my mind on the bare minimum I need to do to keep my author business running and the money coming in. My Books and Travel Podcast is going on hiatus again soon, and I’m going to do fewer interviews here in 2026. 

What constraints do you have, and how can you reframe them? Or how can you add constraints rather than giving yourself unlimited possibilities? 

Becca Syme did a talk on sustainability for a long-term career, which tied into the theme of Author Nation, which was ‘Build your best life through writing.’

Becca was on the show recently – Loki is in charge – and she is always worth listening to as she will definitely say something challenging in any session.

Becca started with a need for basic self-knowledge. Do you know yourself well enough to understand what works for you, and what you’re capable of doing? Do you know what to say yes to and what to say no to? How are you learning more about yourself and your personality?

There’s always a lot of talk about the Clifton Strengths Assessment as that’s what Becca specialises in, and I have found that very useful. I also love Myers Briggs. I’m INFJ, which is uncommon in the wider population but very common in the author community. 

Some of the other things Becca talked about included understanding the limits of your energy so you don’t burn out, and making sure you reflect on and audit tasks so you know what to do more of and what to get rid of. For example, it’s more common now to find some authors who are not doing social media at all, or are reducing it because it doesn’t feed them, whereas others love it as the basis of their business. 

Becca also talked about the need for a ‘personal growth stimulator,’ a way to make sure you’re always learning and growing and finding community. For me, that’s mostly listening to podcasts and reading books, and at the moment, my Masters course, which is mostly reading a lot of sources and then writing essays on diverse topics. 

 Becca also said you need to do a business edit and/or a persona edit every now and then, as —

You need to take things OFF your plate, not keep adding more. She said, “When you prune a tree, it grows more.”

Also, one very key point: 

My take on this is about understanding ‘ease.’ What is easy for you? What do you love that other people think is hard? 

For example, people often ask me, how do I find time to learn so much about what’s going on, and input so much, so I can share with you every week? Well, my top 5 Clifton Strengths are Learner, Intellection, Strategic, Input, and Futuristic. By my very nature, I am constantly inputting and learning and thinking, and considering the impact on the future. It’s easy and fun for me as I live in the stream of input and I love it!

However, my bottom ‘strengths’ i.e. my weaknesses, mean that hard things include peopling and crowds, social energy in person or online, and doing things off the cuff (as I need to plan way in advance). 

If you do Clifton Strengths or any of the personality tests, it might help you figure things out, but you can also just pay more attention to what is easy for you, what brings you joy and energy and fun, versus what drains you and makes you unhappy. 

Becca also said that you need the ability to set boundaries and understand who to say yes to, and who to say no to. You also need a community for support, care for your physical body, and a source of hope for the future. 

I hope I can remain a part of that for you, as I remain hopeful and excited about so many things. Change will continue as ever, but there are more opportunities ahead. What do you need to have in place if you want a long-term sustainable career? 

You can find many more of Becca’s wise words in her books and also on her QuitCast and on her Patreon. 

Katie Cross did a great session on SOPs, Standard Operating Procedures, which are just documents or spreadsheets with step-by-step instructions on specific tasks.

They also include sections on WHY things are done and why they are important to your business, and I feel like many people miss out on these important aspects, preferring to focus on the ‘how to’ rather than the ‘why’ which is more critical.

For example, selling direct is trendy in the indie author community, and some of the numbers thrown around are inspiring, but also need to be questioned, since it is not for everyone, at every stage.

I love selling direct through Kickstarter and Shopify in my limited way, but I don’t want a warehouse like Sacha Black or Adam Beswick or David Viergutz. I also don’t recommend selling direct if you don’t have an audience or a budget or a marketing funnel, or time to set up and/or test the technical side of it.

Selling direct is not a silver bullet to becoming a successful indie author. It’s also a lot of work, so you need a good reason to commit to it for the long term, and it needs to be part of a considered author business plan.

At the end of the day, it doesn't matter what platform you put your book/s on. You won’t sell any copies if you don’t do any marketing, and that is often the side of the author business that is missing.

Back to Katie’s talk, I went along because I’m interested in how we will work with AI agents in the coming years, and I want to have SOPs so I can give them to my AI partners, rather than human assistants. Katie didn’t even mention AI as she is a superstar at working with other humans, but the processes can be used for either/both. 

She also mentioned that “some SOPs are just for me,” which is a really good point. You can document your own processes, and put at the top:

Why am I doing this? Why is this important to my author business? If you can’t answer the question, maybe you need to eliminate that task altogether.

The team at Author Nation had to deal with lots of challenges. It’s extremely hard to run any conference, let alone a big conference, so congratulations to Joe and Suze, and Chelle, Jamie, Isabella, and the team for pulling it off and doing an amazing job. It went incredibly well, and it is a great conference that I highly recommend for authors.

But what happened on the last few days was also a good lesson for all of us in business.

James Patterson was meant to be the closing keynote speaker, and do a VIP evening thing, and then sign at Reader Nation the next day, and his attendance in person was a draw card for many. But he got sick and pulled out, only appearing on zoom for a short time instead. 

On top of that challenge, the government shutdown impacted flights, so many people changed their flights to leave early rather than get caught up in the expected delays. 

But the Author Nation team did a great job of “the show must go on,” bringing in James Patterson by zoom and then interviewing other successful authors, and the pivot in such a short time was impressive — but it also made me want to reflect on the bigger lesson.

Things will not always go to plan. 

People will disappoint you. So will publishers, so will your own marketing attempts. 

Readers will leave you one star reviews. 

People will say things about you that are not true. 

People will judge you — and that has always been my biggest fear, and yet, it continues to happen. 

If you are out in the world in public in any way, you will get criticism and rejection, and yes, there will be haters. 

If you hide and try not to attract any attention at all, no one will find your books, and you won’t sell anything, and you will moan about not selling instead. This is the reality of the author life, so you have to accept that. 

You can’t let these things stop you. The writing life show must go on.

Even if you have everything sorted, something may happen that is outside your control. 

Like James Patterson cancelling and flights being disrupted, and a political situation that makes people not want to travel, anyway.

Like the pandemic. 

Like the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). 

Like the dot com crash. 

All of which I have been through in my working adult life, as will many of you listening. These will not be the only large-scale disruptions in our lifetime, and there will, of course, be personal disruptions that will blindside you too.

So what do we do — in addition to keep creating?   

I talked on the long-term success panel about the biggest mistake I’ve seen authors make, and that is bad financial management. 

It’s the thing that destroys businesses regardless of what kind of business you run, or what job you have. I have seen many authors hit it big and then spend it all without saving for the inevitable down times, or who take on too much debt, or over-expose themselves to risk. Or those who have one stream of income instead of many, and when that one stream dries up, they have to start again. 

Then we all got laid off in one day and none of us had work, and that day, back in 2008, was the day I said I would build multiple streams and that no single company would ever be able to take away all my income in one fell swoop again. I now have so many streams of income, I need a pretty developed accounting system to keep track! 

Hard times will come; they inevitably do, so make sure you have a buffer to weather the storm. 

To be clear, this is not about the conference business of Author Nation, as Joe and Suze Solari are experienced business people and they know about managing risk and cash flow and all that. Joe has a consulting business that helps authors in that specific way. But many authors are not so experienced in business or money management. 

If you don’t feel confident in this area, check out my list of resources at www.thecreativepenn.com/moneybooks  

So the question for you here is, how exposed is your author business — or just your life and job in general — to disruption if it’s out of your control? What’s the worst that can happen? Can you build multiple streams of income? Can you make contingency plans? 

What can you do to de-risk? Within reason of course, but you need to have plans for when things go right, and when things go wrong.

We use the term ‘self-publishing’ alongside being an ‘indie author,’ but of course, we are not truly independent and you can’t be a successful author on your own. We need service providers and software vendors and publishing partners, and there are many of them trying to catch your attention. 

It’s always lovely to catch up with various vendors I’ve been working with for years, many of whom I consider friends now, and at Author Nation I spoke to people from Draft2Digital, Bookfunnel, Kickstarter, ProWritingAid, Reedsy, and BookVault, as well as my editor Kristen Tate, and others. 

There were LOTS of vendors at Author Nation, some with brand new businesses, many I had never heard of, and I wanted to give you some advice about deciding which companies to work with. There are so many these days online and at conferences, and I thought it might be useful to give you a framework.

For example, it makes sense for an author working on their first book to spend money on editing, but to avoid vendors who want to help you sell direct as it is way too early for that. 

Here are some questions I consider when weighing up new vendors or services, or reconsidering them over time, as the industry changes, and my needs change, too. 

You could always paste these into ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini and ask it to help you evaluate a service if you don’t want to ask the vendor directly.
 

Once you have all this information, you can make a more informed decision as to whether to sign up.

And of course, I say all this as I see authors getting excited and making emotional choices without considering their author business plan for the years ahead! Or signing up for so many things, they are overwhelmed.

As an example, let’s take BookFunnel — and full disclosure, Bookfunnel was a primary sponsor of AuthorNation, and they sponsor my podcast, and I am an affiliate — because I am a happy user of the service since the beginning and believe it is a great company and useful product (for many authors, but not all.) 

I’ve used BookFunnel for years to give away my free books, which was primarily a way of marketing to bring people into my ecosystem so they would buy other books, and now I also use them for direct sales of ebooks and audiobooks. I would struggle to make money selling direct without BookFunnel, so yes, they make me money and they are worth the cost. Of course, if you are just writing your first book, you don’t need them yet, so don’t sign up! 

I pay an annual subscription to use Bookfunnel, as do many thousands of other authors worldwide, so they have consistent cash flow. Damon Courtney, a wonderful coder and fantasy author, founded Bookfunnel a decade ago when he recognised the need in the author community for an easy way to deliver ebooks directly. 

Every year since, Damon has expanded the offerings, and I know he cares about authors because he IS an author. He also understands his responsibility to the community, and his business has already lasted more than 8 years. Considering most businesses fail within 5 years, any company that has managed for longer is doing well. They also have a succession plan in case anything happens to Damon, and I know this, because I asked him specifically! I’m always thinking about death as you know! 

I also wanted to mention BookFunnel as they launched personalised, signed ebooks at Author Nation, which is a fantastic feature where you can sign a copy of an ebook for a fan, or personalise it with a message.

Of course, I asked about personalised audiobooks which will hopefully come in 2026, as I definitely want to do both of those. Again, this is something for authors with an existing fan base, not brand new authors with no readers yet.

I wanted to talk about this kind of financial and market analysis of vendors since —

For example, going to sessions on advertising or Kickstarter when they haven’t even finished a first draft of their first book, or signing up with a vendor or a service too early, and spending money too soon. The industry changes fast, so finish that book first! 

The industry changes fast, so you will need to keep adapting, and keep letting go of things that don’t work anymore. Either they don’t work anymore because they don’t work for everyone i.e. the industry or the market has changed, or they don’t work for you personally because your life has changed.

I certainly have different goals at 50 than I did at 30, and back then, I hustled so much more than I am willing to do now. I am in a different life stage and my author business is mature and stable, so I can do things differently than I did when I was starting out.

I started writing seriously for publication in 2005, 20 years ago. I was 30, living in New Zealand and then Australia, and I had just met Jonathan. There was no iPhone, no Kindle or Amazon KDP, no TikTok, no mobile commerce. Ebooks were downloadable PDFs. Audiobooks were still mostly on tape or CD, or they were downloadable MP3s. There was no real infrastructure for an indie author business. The term ‘indie author’ was only starting to be used as a term to be proud of. It was a different world. 

We are so lucky now to have such a fantastic ecosystem for indie authors, to have so many companies who help us with our writing craft and our author business, and also our community and finding friends along the way. Author conferences are certainly an important part of this, so a big thank you to Joe and Suze Solari and the Author Nation team and all the vendors who supported the show, and all the authors who attended.  

My perspective is only one view, and I attended Author Nation primarily as a speaker and also as a Patreon host, and of course, as a podcaster, author of several decades, and veteran of many, many author conferences all over the world. I didn’t go to many sessions or take many photos, I didn’t keep a daily log, and most of my interactions were private one-on-one meetings, so I wanted to share a couple of other perspectives, and these people might be listening so hello to — 

Amber Field, who did a post on 5 overarching themes of Author Nation said,

“My hope was to meet other authors like me and to get inspired to do more book promotion — a task I hate and procrastinate on…badly. I’ve been a published author since 2023, but this was my first writing conference. It really paid off for me! I met amazing authors, got tips for every part of my author business, and just plain had a lot of fun.”

The themes she identified were: AI is changing how we work but not necessarily how we write. Absolutely, you can use it for so many things without ever using it for writing, and Amber shared how she got ideas about using AI in marketing from my session and others (and thanks for sharing the lovely picture of us, Amber!)

Some of her other themes: When it comes to marketing, you don’t have to do everything; as well as Be yourself. She says,

 “None of the most successful authors at the conference followed in another author’s footprints exactly. 100% of them followed a path that can only be described as “doing what they liked”, which often included hopping genres and doing side projects that they found fulfilling.”

So true, and this year, my short story collection and my Masters in Death and certainly evidence of that! Lots more detail and photos at Amber’s Medium post here. 

Pamela Hines, posted on Substack every day, and in her round-up piece with links to all the daily posts, she says,

“I went to Author Nation as an editor and coach, but also as a writer in need of reconnection. I wanted to learn, recharge, and see where this rapidly evolving publishing world is headed. I came home with a clearer vision for my work and a renewed faith in what happens when we gather.”

She also noted,

“The first day of any conference begins long before the first keynote. It starts with a decision: to show up. [It’s] the power of presence — of choosing to step back into community even when it feels easier to stay home. For many writers, the hardest part isn’t pitching or networking. It’s walking into the room in the first place.

Las Vegas may not sound like a literary destination, but Author Nation (following the tradition of 20BooksVegas) transforms it into one. Between the hotels, neon, and laughter, I found my people — fellow professionals determined to grow, learn, and connect. The first handshake, the first panel, the first “Oh, you too?” moment reminded me that creativity expands in the presence of others.”

At the end of the week, she says,

“This conference has reminded me never to forget that the thing I work on alone in my writing space is part of a larger whole. That whole includes small entrepreneurs, big corporations, innovative idealists, editors, consultants, and, most importantly, readers.

We write to share something meaningful. All of it exists to serve a single, simple act—someone reading a story and being changed by it. This conference allowed me to connect directly with that meaning and those individuals.

As an editor, book coach, and writer, I’m leaving with sharper tools and deeper clarity. But more than that, I’m leaving with gratitude—for the people who read, who believe in story, and who remind me that art isn’t finished until it’s received.”

Wonderful posts, Pamela, and I know how much work you put into all that, so thanks for sharing!

If you want to get a sense of what happened as well as notes on many of the sessions, and photos, check out Pamela’s Substack, or her main site with links here. 

As an aside, I asked ChatGPT to find me posts about Author Nation 2025, and both of these showed up, so Pamela and Amber, congratulations, you are discoverable! 

Author Nation is a fantastic conference, and I highly recommend the show whether you are just starting out, or whether you are a more experienced author. 

However, I won’t be attending in 2026 as I need a year off Las Vegas. I’ve done three years in a row, and I want to make room for other travel and other possibilities. I’m also doing this full-time Masters which goes through to next autumn, and I don’t know what conferences, if any, I will do in 2026. But as I said, I highly recommend Author Nation, and you never know, I might be back in 2027! 

The post Lessons Learned From Author Nation 2025 With Joanna Penn first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Why do so many memoir manuscripts fail to engage readers, even when the writer has lived through extraordinary experiences? What's the hidden code that separates a chronological account of events from a compelling memoir that readers can't put down? How do you know when you're ready to write about trauma, and where's the ethical line between truth and storytelling? With Wendy Dale

In the intro, Amazon Kindle Translate, and the Writing Storybundle.

Today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, self-publishing with support, where you can get free formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Just go to www.draft2digital.com to get started.

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 

Wendy Dale is a memoir author and teacher, as well as a screenwriter. Today we are talking about The Memoir Engineering System: Make Your First Draft Your Final Draft.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

You can find Wendy at GeniusMemoirWriting.com.

Joanna: Wendy Dale is a memoir author and teacher, as well as a screenwriter. Today we are talking about The Memoir Engineering System: Make Your First Draft Your Final Draft. So welcome to the show, Wendy.

Wendy: Thank you so much for inviting me, Joanna. It's exciting to talk about this topic.

Joanna: First up—

Wendy: I think I grew up loving books and I always wanted to be a writer when I was a little girl. I really dreamed of being a writer. My mother said, “No, it's just way too hard. So few people have success. Why don't you become an actress?” So I actually moved to Los Angeles when I was 17 to become an actress.

I really did not like the film industry at all from an acting perspective. I was studying acting at UCLA and decided I was really going to be a writer. That was when I changed and really felt like I'd found my calling. That was always what I'd wanted to do.

So I tried writing a novel at 19 that didn't go so well. But when I was 23 I started working on a memoir. From there, I have worked in writing in all different aspects, but really my first love will always be books.

Now having made that decision, I haven't always done the kind of writing that I would always want to do, right? So sometimes I've done ad copywriting, which actually I did rather love. I've done screenwriting, I've done all kinds of writing, not always my first choice of the type of writing I was doing.

For the most part, I have made it work though. So being flexible, you can't always get exactly what you want. I didn't say I'm going to only earn my living publishing books. I don't know if that would've been possible, but I have, for the most part, managed to earn my living as a writer.

Wendy: So I started trying to write this novel at 19, and it was very difficult and I didn't know what I was doing. I thought, well, it would be so much easier to write about my life. Are you laughing, Joanna?

Joanna: Yes, sure. Writing a memoir, right?

Wendy: So another misguided idea. I thought, oh, memoir would be easy because you don't even have to come up with the plot. You just write down what you lived through. Lots of misconceptions in everything I just said, but that was how I started writing a memoir.

Around this time my parents also made this decision that they were going to retire in their forties and take their life savings and move to a developing country. They sold everything. I mean, they really just fled the United States and moved to Honduras with the idea of retiring early.

So I went to visit them and I was like, well, this could be something to write about. So that actually wound up being the first chapter of my memoir.

Joanna: And you were telling me before you live in Peru, right?

Wendy: I do, yes. I've lived in Peru for almost six years now.

Joanna: Oh, right. So, why do that? I mean, a lot of people want to travel.

Wendy: I lived in Peru when I was a child and really, it sounds kind of strange, but I think deep down I've always had this identity of feeling Peruvian, right? You look at me and Peruvians don't think I am Peruvian, but really, my first memories as a child were growing up in Peru.

Coming back here has been really incredible. So I feel very much at home. I've actually lived by this point, almost half my life in Latin America. Not just Peru—Bolivia, other Latin American countries.

So, yes, I've lived half my life in the United States, the other half in Latin America. So I really do feel at home here, partly because my first memories were growing up in Peru.

Joanna: Well, I think this might segue into why writing memoir is not just “this is what happened,” because I feel like, as you mentioned, one of the misconceptions is almost that it's just an autobiography. Like, this happened, this happened, this happened.

As you said there, for example, the fact that you spent half your life in Latin America, half in the USA, to me is immediately like a potential hook into stories about your life that aren't necessarily in order.

Wendy: Oh, I'm going to take a deep sigh here because I just think back to writing this memoir and all of the misconceptions I had.

Now, I love prose. I just love prose. I love putting words on the page. I think words are so beautiful. Sometimes I just want to eat them. I'm a prose writer. I don't like structure, I don't like plot, and I didn't even realize the importance of plot until I thought I had finished this memoir.

So first chapter starts in Honduras. The last chapter ends in Bolivia because by this point my parents had moved to Bolivia, and all the chapters in between are all these different countries that I went to on my own.

I'd finished the book, or so I thought, and I started sending it out to agents and really wasn't getting the response I had hoped for. Then finally I got an agent who called me up, and that was really good news, and she said, “You're a really good prose writer.”

I was like, yes, I love writing prose. And she says, “But you know nothing about structure.” And I honestly—are you laughing?

Joanna: Yes.

Wendy: Right, and I remember the words that went through my head. I was like, what is this structure thing she's talking about? I'd never heard the word.

So obviously I knew nothing about structure, and that was kind of the beginning of what I guess would become my life's work—really comprehending memoir structure.

So that was a long time ago. That was the beginning of the process, but I didn't even understand that plot plays such a huge role in memoir. I just thought you wrote about your life, and I think that is what a lot of people don't understand, right?

It's really easy to confuse the memories of your life with thinking that it's plot, and it just isn't. So one thing I tell my clients is you are not writing a chronicle of what you've lived through. You are taking true stories from your life and turning them into art. This is an art form for other people to enjoy.

It's true, but you are creating art. It's very different than chronicling your life. It took me a long time to learn that.

Joanna: Yes. Let's come back to this word “art,” but first of all, I want us to tackle structure because, okay, I also learned this the hard way.

When I wrote my travel memoir, Pilgrimage, I had like over a hundred thousand words of writing, and I just couldn't figure out how the structure of the book could work until I found another book that helped me figure out the structure.

Like, there are lots of different types of memoir structures and mine I found a sort of model and then I was like, oh, okay, this is how it works.

Even if we're someone like me who might be a discovery writer first, or like you by the sound of it.

Wendy: Oh, well, absolutely. So I hate structure, right? And that's why I became an expert in it—in order to make it a lot easier for me to understand.

So I am not a planner, right? In fact, there's a line in my memoir about there are two different kinds of travelers. There are planners and there are fun people, right? So I've never been a planner in any aspect of my life. So the fact that I would become this expert in structure is kind of ironic.

Let me go back to this idea of structure. So I think when people talk about structure, their first thought is three acts. Or are you doing a dual timeline? How is the big picture? How is your book going to play out?

When I use the word structure, I am referring to how structure plays itself out in every sentence of your book. I mean, it's such a critical part of your story.

So there's global structure, which is really referring to how you're going to use chronology in your book, how you're going to tell this story, and then there is structure on every page of your book.

So what happened is I actually started teaching after my memoir got published. Several years later, I started teaching memoir writing, and teaching is very different than doing, right?

I wrote my memoir by a process of trial and error. Eventually, this agent did sign me and kind of helped me understand what wasn't working in the manuscript that I'd submitted, and I spent a year rewriting it. It eventually got published.

When I started teaching memoir writing, it was different because teaching someone how to do this is very different than this trial and error of doing it yourself. So as time went on, I would see the same mistakes over and over again.

I started to say, well, there are these categories of mistakes, and what if I reverse engineered this and kept people from making these mistakes? So in order to not make the mistake, there must be a principle that people need to follow. So that was the beginning of The Memoir Engineering System.

It took me 15 years to understand that — 

Now, why do I say that?

Well, the problem with memoir writing is that it's very tempting to feel like the things that you did—the things that you're including in your memoir—let's say it's a travel memoir.

So arriving in Paris and then going out to eat for the first time, and then walking down the Champs-Élysées, and then going to the Louvre. So I just mentioned several things that you might have done, that a person might have theoretically done in this memoir on Paris.

The problem with this from a reader's perspective is that this is not plot, and the reason it's not plot is that these things are not related to one another. So by relating them, it could be with an idea. What do all of these things have in common other than they are things that you did in Paris?

You need something a little deeper than that. You take these disconnected events—I went to the restaurant, I walked down the Champs-Élysées, I went to the Louvre—and you turn them into plot. So that really is the basis of everything I teach is that connected events equal plot.

A memoir writer's biggest challenge is taking all these things that they lived through, whether it's a travel narrative or different kind of narrative. It's a bunch of stuff that happened to you, and that's not plot.

How do you take a bunch of stuff that happened to you and turn it into plot? You let your reader know how these events are connected. So that's really the basis of what I teach. Does that make sense?

Joanna: Yes. Well, maybe give us a concrete example with your own memoir, Avoiding Prison and Other Noble Vacation Goals: Adventures in Love and Danger, which obviously are connected events. They would be vignettes, I imagine, about these different adventures.

Wendy: So this is called The Memoir Engineering System, right? I really believe that there was this hidden code underlying memoir. I promise I'm not avoiding the question, Joanna. I'm going to get to it in a second.

In order to explain how this works, what took me 15 years of reading over a thousand manuscripts to understand about how memoir actually is doing, how it actually works, is that there are two different components in your book. You have scenes and you have transitions.

In your scene, you have the building blocks of plot and something must happen. In your transition you have an idea that shows what happens in one scene is related to what happens in the next.

So in my own book, I didn't know this because I wrote this as a process of trial and error. If I were to go back to my made up example of, you know, I go out to eat on the Champs-Élysées and then I go to the Louvre, what do those things have to do with each other? Absolutely nothing. They're not related in any way.

But you can ask yourself is, what was I doing in Paris? What was I searching for? Maybe I was searching for a sense of understanding myself. I don't know, there's no one right answer, right? It's a fictitious example.

So in your transitions between your scenes, maybe this is a search for identity, maybe when you're outside of your own country, you understand yourself better.

So the transitions in that chapter would all be about identity and this idea of identity would infuse itself through your chapter and it would take these disconnected things you did and it would turn them into a story. Does that make more sense?

Joanna: Yes. I mean, I know what you mean because I think this is where people need to get more personal. I feel like you can write a travel guide, and when I started writing my pilgrimage books, I thought I was writing travel guides.

Then I realized I actually had a deeper sense of the whole thing. I was lost and I was trying to find myself and all that like you do at midlife. Seeking faith and all of that.

So as you mentioned there, sort of the idea that something happens, but it's your personal reflection and how your own personal transformation happens through the course of the book.

So you have to write at a much deeper level than you would if it was, say, just a travel guide about Paris.

Wendy: Oh, I think all memoir is more closely related to literary fiction than commercial fiction because you're never going to have the plot twists and turns of a detective novel, for instance. So it's really dependent on the depth of the prose, right? Your insights. That is why people read memoir.

So you need some plot, but you're never going to have those twists and turns and surprises and unbelievable suspense that you would have in commercial fiction. In that way, it's more like literary fiction.

So it's so dependent on the prose, so dependent on the insight, the quality of the prose, affecting your reader emotionally with your words. So I tell my clients structure is kind of black or white. It's either working or it's not. So don't stress over finding the best structure for your book.

Structure is there to keep your reader from being confused, to keep them from going, wait, I have no idea why you're telling me this after reading this scene. I've no idea why you're telling me about this other thing because they're not at all related.

Structure is there to keep your reader from being confused. What makes them actually love your memoir is the quality of your prose affecting them emotionally, your insight, your point of view, how subjective your writing is.

Joanna: So what are some tips for people who are finding it difficult to get down to that depth? Because it is very difficult. I found writing memoir much more difficult than fiction, and I've written lots of other kind of self-help nonfiction. You really do kind of have to bare your soul.

Wendy: Well, so what I suggest, even though I hate planning, is that people start with an outline, but a very specific outline that really consists of figuring out what their scenes are. Now, this outline can change along the way, but starting with an outline so that they ask themselves, okay, what is each scene about?

When I've had people do that, the process of writing becomes so much easier because structuring your book is a very logical process. Writing your book really is this creative process. That's the part I love. I love the creative part. I don't love the structuring part.

But when faced with the choice, okay, you can spend seven years writing and rewriting and figuring this out by trial and error, or you can spend a month of your life creating this outline and then finish your memoir in a year, somehow that investment of time starts to seem worth it.

So when it comes to actually writing, I find that any kind of writer's block, I find the reason that prompts work, I think, is that you push against limitations and that actually makes me more creative.

So I found that having the structure for my book before I start writing actually makes it so much easier to write and it makes me more creative.

If I have this outline for the book and I don't feel like writing that depressing scene about that time I got in this argument with my mother, I feel like writing this fun scene over here because I'm in a funny mood today, I can do that because I have a sense of what the book is like globally.

So I really do believe in outlines, even though I hate actually creating them. I think it makes it easier to write. I think it makes it actually more fun to write once you've gotten through the drudgery of creating this outline.

Joanna: Yes, I must say, because like I said, I'm a discovery writer. I've never ever written a book with an outline. With my book Pilgrimage, I hadn't finished the character arc until I had done three pilgrimages.

Like they've already finished their transformation, whatever that may be, or that period of their life that they want to write about.

Whereas I think when I started writing, I still hadn't found the meaning. I guess I hadn't found the, what you are calling the idea in each of the scenes.

Wendy: So I do take a really different approach than most memoir coaches. So what you're talking about, your character arc, I actually find the easiest part of any memoir, and I'll explain why in a second. Plot is difficult. Plot requires thinking and figuring out your plot.

For me, your character arc is synonymous with the theme of your book. Is it about belonging? Is it about identity? Is it about coming to terms with your childhood?

I find that that actually comes out in the writing itself because that is the theme of your life, and I think that is so much a part of everything you do and everything you write, that it comes out in the writing itself.

That to me is the easiest part of writing a memoir, is this character arc, this internal journey, and that is one of the few things that doesn't require structure because it's in the writing itself. Now there's a little bit of thought that goes into it, but I honestly find one of the easiest parts of writing a memoir.

What is actually difficult is taking a bunch of things you did in a country and connecting—this day I did this, and the next day I did this, and the next day I saw this place, and the next time I met this person.

All of that will bore your reader to tears if you don't connect these events in some way, and if you don't make them related to one another to tell a story. Otherwise you're just telling them a bunch of stuff you did and you're a stranger to them and they don't care.

If you take all of these things you did and you connect them in some way, usually with an idea—usually with some thematic idea—you are creating plot in that chapter. That's really a challenge for memoir because we don't have the advantage of making things up as a novelist does.

Joanna: Yes, we should tackle the making things up aspect because you've used language like character arc, you've used plot, you've said it is more similar to literary fiction, so you have used a lot of fiction language.

So where is the line for truth? People might know of The Salt Path controversy, which is—if people don't know—a travel memoir which is a lot of truth, but some quite core things have been challenged in the press. So there's sort of been a feeling of betrayal by people who loved that memoir.

Wendy: I honestly think the bar is pretty low in the sense that the people who are getting in trouble—and this is not the first time a memoirist has been in trouble for fabricating facts of their life—it kind of is shocking to me, right?

So I would say that all memoirs take some license, and so there's this ethical continuum and you have to feel comfortable with it. So I tell people you need to put a disclaimer in your book.

Most memoirs will play a little bit with the order of events. Now, when I'm saying that, what I mean is that I might have had a really funny conversation with my mother in October, and in the book it comes in March because that's a perfect place to put this conversation in my book.

I don't think that is being unethical, and I would also put a disclaimer in the beginning of my memoir that I have sometimes changed the chronology of the book.

Now making up huge things that never happened—so one thing I tell people I work with is I would never make up something happening.

So I had this conversation with my mother. I may not remember the dialogue exactly, but it's to the best of my memory, it's my representation of that moment in time, but I would never make up something happening.

The memoirs who are getting in trouble—so this is not the first time a memoirist has been in trouble—but all of the ones who've really had these public scandals have made up huge things.

So I don't think it's a complicated issue, to be honest with you. I think all memoirs take some license. The ones who get in trouble kind of deserve to get in trouble because these are big things they're making up. I'm thinking James Frey, do you remember James Frey?

Joanna: Yes. Was it A Million Little Pieces?

Wendy: I think that's what it was. Yes. I mean, I think Augusten Burroughs got in trouble too. There've been many cases, but people were making up big chunks of their life. They weren't moving things around in time.

Joanna: I agree, but it is hard because, for example, if people are writing something from a long time ago. So I guess I was shocked at the end of Cheryl Strayed's Wild, because suddenly it's kind of revealed at the end that she's writing it decades later.

My first thought, I think it was one of the first memoirs I kind of read, and I was like, well, how can you remember those conversations? How can you write dialogue as if it was last week?

In my own memoir, like I wrote while I was doing my pilgrimages. Over three years, I was writing journals and I wrote the book very soon after. But a lot of people do write memoir from decades ago, so how do we keep that line?

Also, I wanted to ask you, you mentioned your mother as well. A lot of people are putting family members or people they met or whatever into books.

Wendy: Oh, that's a much harder question, Joanna. Okay, to answer your first question, how do you recount dialogue? Let's say you're writing 30 years later and you're trying to recount what someone said. You do the best you can.

What I want to say is that people who are getting in trouble, famous memoirs getting in trouble, are not getting in trouble because their mother comes back and says, “You know, I didn't say exactly that 20 years ago.”

They're getting in trouble for making up big things, making up illnesses that they didn't have, making up criminal records that they didn't have. So these are big things that can be fact checked. That's what people get in trouble with.

I have never heard of a memoir getting in trouble because a family member said, “Well, I think the conversation was different.” Ever, have you? So we're talking that's a whole different level and you do the best you can. So that is not an issue for me. I have an issue with people who make up facts.

I'm doing the best I can to remember dialogue, and if I don't remember dialogue, I don't put it in my book. You don't need tons of dialogue in your book. What you need is great point of view, great prose in your scene to make it engaging to a reader.

Joanna: Yes, that's true. But on the family thing, it's more like—

Wendy: That is really difficult, right?

So first of all, one of the things I teach memoirs is that it's really important to give us a point of view. I think some of my hardest clients are journalists. They've been taught to be objective. Objective, just the facts, right? That is not what a reader wants from memoir.

We really want this point of view. It's really ironic that in being incredibly personal, you actually make your story universal. It's the only way I know to make your book universal is being so personal that I see myself in the story.

So we need that point of view, and your point of view may be very different than your mother's point of view. That's true, right? I mean, life is that way. So you do need to be faithful to your point of view.

Now, having said that, you are writing about real life people and there are repercussions. Your mother may come back to you and say, “I'm never speaking to you again. How dare you portray me that way?” I mean, it depends on your relationship with the person, but it is something to consider.

So that, to me, is a very different question. I always write my truth. Now, once I've finished writing my truth and my point of view, I go through my memoir and I say, well, whose opinion do I really care about? Is my mother going to be so devastated by this that I'm going to damage my relationship and is it worth it?

So there were some people in my book, I'm like, oh, this person's going to hate what I said about them. I don't care. I don't even like this person. So I left it.

With my mother, for instance, I said, “Well, mom, I'm going to tell you, this memoir is coming out.” This was a long time ago, by the way, kind of like Cheryl Strayed, right? So long time ago. a

I said, “Well, I say a lot of things about you, but we really needed this conclusion at the end. And in the end, this really turns out to be this character arc about understanding my relationship with my mother even better. So in the beginning, we needed lots of conflict to get there.”

Totally true, but a little out of proportion so that my mother would let me get away with talking about some of the things she probably didn't want me talking about. She took this really well, and the way I handled it was I had her read the last chapter first, where she really does come across really great, right?

I know my mother incredibly well, and I also knew what would work with her. So she loved the publicity. She would do book readings with me. She went on television with me. She hammed it up in book readings. She would read her lines in the book. So it actually brought us closer together.

My father is very different. My father does not like publicity. I knew if I had said anything negative about my father, he wouldn't speak to me again, and so I didn't.

So it wasn't that I lied, but I did take into consideration the relationship I had with my parents. They are different people and I knew they would take it in different ways. So that is a real life consideration that you do need to take into account.

Joanna: Well, I think that's very respectful of you for both of them, and the most healthy way to do things for sure.

I think another thing that happens with memoir is people have far more damaged relationships than you clearly had. I think some people want to use memoir as a form of therapy or revenge. That's another thing. Revenge, rage, anger, and a very negative emotion.

So absolutely people need to write their truth in at least the first draft, but where do you think the line is between therapy and what could be conceived?

Wendy: I think a lot of people want to write their memoir for the sake of therapy and in the end, that's really fine. I've always wanted to be a published writer.

I care about having an audience. I care about saying the truth. My truth, obviously not the truth. I care about saying my truth and creating art for an audience, and that really is a different consideration than journal writing, which is for yourself.

So if you are writing a memoir for an audience, you are writing it in a different way. So what I would say to people full of trauma and anger—yes, plenty of trauma, let me tell you, right? Plenty of trauma in my memoir as well. Even though it's a humorous book, there's plenty of trauma in there.

What I would say is that it depends on the tone you use. Let me give you an example of just talking to another human being, a stranger. If you start to talk to that stranger and they're like, “My life has been so unfair, nobody has ever given me a chance,” do you really want to talk to that stranger?

So it's a matter of tone. If that stranger says, “I have gone through so much. I was abused as a child, I suffered poverty and homelessness. Let me tell you what I've come away with.” You kind of want to lean in and you're like, “Well, tell me about being homeless.” You want to hear that story.

So it's not what you've lived through. I think it's where you are in dealing with this. So if you are still processing trauma, and you're at the stage where life is unfair, and you know, I've given up, you probably are not ready to write a memoir for other people yet.

Feel free to write to process that trauma, but if you're writing for a public, we want to learn through what you've lived through. Living through someone else's difficulties can be really therapeutic for your reader as long as you're on the other side of them.

There's a Tobias Wolff quote, and I'm not going to get it wrong—I'm paraphrasing it—but I heard this on an NPR radio interview many, many years ago. He was being interviewed, I think it might've even been for This Boy's Life. So that would've been a long time ago. He said,

Joanna: Yes. I mean having written journals through dark times in my life, and then looking at it later, when you are going through these things, your writing is really repetitive and quite frankly, boring.

Wendy: “Poor me, life is so hard,” and that's okay. It's okay in the moment.

Joanna: Yes, but as you say, nobody wants to read a repetitive journal over and over again. That's not a memoir. So it is difficult, isn't it, to find that line between sharing enough and then not being repetitive. I feel like this is where you have to keep the audience in mind. It's like, okay—

Wendy: It is, and it really depends on your goals as a writer. It really does. Both are valid. If you are writing to heal from trauma, that is a really valid reason to write. It works. It really does work to write to heal from trauma.

If you're writing for an audience, it is a different level. You might have to leave some things out of your book that really mattered to you. You are trying to take true events from your life and turn them into plot, so it is a different goal.

Joanna: Well, let's just talk about that then. Definition of success is so important and I think with every genre there are books that hit big.

So everyone thinks they're going to be Cheryl Strayed with Wild, and everyone did want to be like The Salt Path until quite recently. These books that become mega, mega bestsellers and have movies.

Wendy: It really depends on how badly you want to be financially successful when it comes to writing. Let me qualify that just a little bit. So if you really care about making money, what you do need to learn is marketing and publicity. So a huge portion of your time is going to be spent getting publicity for your book.

So what makes for a successful book, I think is three things. It's writing a book that readers love. Not every reader—some people are going to hate your book. In fact, that's actually a good sign. Not everyone needs to love your book.

Some people need to love it, some should hate it. That means you've written a book that actually says something.

So you need to have written a good book. You need publicity because if no one hears about this really good book you've written, it's not going to be financially successful. And then you need luck.

So I think the Cheryl Strayeds, the Wilds of the world, also had a little bit of luck. So you can control it to a certain extent if you are willing to put in the work to do marketing and publicity on your book.

I think you could count on a modest success if you're willing to work hard on it, because the reality is, if you care about making money off of your book, the money comes from publicity and marketing.

If you don't, and you're writing a book and you've put it out in the world and it's beautiful and you want to see what happens and who finds it, and that is your satisfaction, that's valid too. It just depends on what your goals are.

If you want to make money off of a book, there really is this whole publicity and marketing side of it. That's just the reality because there are books out there, and if no one has heard of your book, no one's going to buy it.

Joanna: And that's true for all books.

Wendy: Yes, unfortunately. We hate that, right, Joanna? Don't you hate marketing?

Joanna: Oh, nobody wants to do it, but it just has to be done.

I think what's interesting about memoir though, which is a very good thing, is that it's kind of timeless. So I really think that like my memoir, Pilgrimage, and like your memoir, we can talk about them for the rest of our lives because they are part of life at a point.

Obviously there'll be other books that we write about different parts of our life, but to me it's far more timeless than other genres. I mean, you mentioned marketing. I have a book called How to Market a Book, and it's on its third edition. It needs updating all the time because marketing changes, but—

Wendy: It's evergreen. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes, though I do have to say that I wrote my memoir in my twenties though. It's been 30 years—I whisper that to you, right? So I think I wrote my truth then.

If I were to write about the exact same experiences, I would write about them in such a different way, and not in a better way. Just a different way. Hindsight is 20/20.

Joanna: Yes, but I feel like there are different times of our lives, so I feel like I will write another memoir at some point, but it won't be about pilgrimage, it'll be about something else.

Wendy: What is it going to be about? Do you know?

Joanna: I don't know yet. I haven't lived it yet. I think it will appear. Although, I've got this book around gothic cathedrals that I started out as a photo book and now it's kind of turning into half a memoir. Because I'm a discovery writer, I don't even know what happens until these things arrive.

Wendy: Fair enough. If you ever want help with an outline, you call me and I will help you with your outline.

Joanna: Fantastic. Well, tell us—

Wendy: I think the easiest way to find me is to go to GeniusMemoirWriting.com and you can find information about The Memoir Engineering System, which is my book on memoir structure. My own memoir's called Avoiding Prison and Other Noble Vacation Goals. Or just Google Wendy Dale.

I also have a YouTube channel, so Google Wendy Dale and you'll find lots of stuff.

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

Wendy: Thank you so much, Joanna.

The post Why Structure Matters More Than You Think. Writing Memoir With Wendy Dale first appeared on The Creative Penn.

What happens when your creative dreams collide with the demands of caregiving? How do you keep writing when you're caring for someone full-time? Can you still be a creative person when traditional productivity advice simply doesn't work? With Donn King.

In the intro, Agatha Christie meets Mr Men [BBC]; Podcast guesting and co-writing [Stark Reflections]; thoughts on pushing your comfort zone; Disrupt Everything and Win – James Patterson.

This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors.

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 

Donn King is a nonfiction author, college professor, pastor, speaker, and podcast host at The Alignment Show. His latest book is Creating While Caring: Practical Tips to Keep Creating While Caring for a Loved One.

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

Show Notes

You can find Donn at DonnKing.com or TheAlignmentShow.com.

Joanna: Donn King is a nonfiction author, college professor, pastor, speaker, and podcast host at The Alignment Show, which I've been on twice, which was fantastic. His latest book is Creating While Caring: Practical Tips to Keep Creating While Caring for a Loved One. So welcome to the show, Donn.

Donn: Thank you very much, Joanna. It's an honor to be on with you.

Joanna: I'm excited to talk about this. Now, first up—

Donn: Well, the short version is that I've always been a writer. People aren't seeing me, but I turned 70 this year. My first story, I think I wrote when I was about 12 years old.

I remember writing a science fiction story and I got the characters in such a situation I couldn't figure out what to do with them, and so I wrote, “and then the spaceship blew up. The end.” Not an auspicious start.

Then in eighth grade I started working at a newspaper, and in the early years, most of it was newspapers. So that's where I developed, I guess you would say, some discipline. You know, you can't wait on the muse. You've got a three o'clock deadline every day.

I did that for a few years. I worked in radio for a few years. I helped to launch one of the first electronic magazines. A lot of people know America Online. I was working with a parallel service that was known as Genie. They published a member's magazine, and I wound up as associate editor for that. We launched electronically as well as in print.

Let's see, what else. In the old days I co-authored a textbook. I still have to say traditional publishing, I think of them as third party publishers, but you know, the old fashioned way of doing things. So three books there, one of which is still in print, I think.

Then in those early days of blogging and electronic magazines, I wrote freelance for some business magazines, some local publications. It was almost always short form except for that textbook.

Then I worked in advertising. I worked for Walmart stores and helped to launch the first five Sam's Wholesale Clubs. So that was with copywriting and such.

Then in the most recent years, I have scratched that writing itch quite a bit through blogging and academic writing, helping other people to write.

As I mentioned in the current book, I did hit a space of about 10 years there when it was like the well went dry. I think this is worthwhile mentioning for folks out there—there's a difference between writer's block and what I was experiencing. It was just that there was nothing there and I really thought my writing days had ended.

Then a friend pushed me to write what became the first book in The Spark Life Chronicles, which is a business parable. It was like the floodgates had opened again after 10 years. What I realized was—I think this is the important part to say for maybe others—I thought that I wasn't writing because I was depressed. It turned out I was depressed because I wasn't writing.

Now, I don't mean to suggest that all you have to do to get over depression is to write. I think it more has to do with respecting your core values and what's important to you. Writing has always been so important to me in so many ways that when I wasn't doing that, it wasn't feeding my soul. So that's what led to the depression.

So I hope that's helpful. Maybe for somebody out there, they kind of go together, depression and not being able to do anything. But the making yourself take those steps can very well be the first step towards coming out of the depression. I found that to be the case with writing.

Joanna: Yes, and I think you're right. I mean, there are seasons of our life. Let's talk about a big season of your life, which is the caregiving.

And just tell us more about your experience and why this matters to you?

Donn: Okay, so a real quick context. Our daughter, who is now 22, she has a very rare chromosomal disorder. It's trisomy 14, mosaic partial. And any medical folks out there are going to be saying, I never heard of that.

The one study we could find about it said there were 15 to 20 like her known in the world at any given time. Probably more in third world countries, maybe where they don't have genetic testing available, but it's just very rare.

The way it manifests with her is, I guess we would say extreme cerebral palsy. She does not even close her epiglottis when she swallows, for instance. So we were older parents when she came along and I had figured I could change diapers for a couple of years. Well, I've been changing diapers for 22 years, which kind of changed things. So that's where the caregiving came in.

Now the why write this book? Honestly, I had been writing—I mentioned the Spark Life Chronicles. I've got two books out in that series, and a third one that was about two thirds of the way through.

Then you came on my podcast, and thank you. You're an excellent guest, unsurprisingly. I think it was after we had turned off the recording, we were just talking about my situation and you said, well, that sounds like something that would be useful to talk about on the creative end.

In the United States alone, there are 50 million caregivers, unpaid caregivers. Now, I don't know what it is in the rest of the world, but with that many, there must be people who are in a similar situation to me in the sense that they already had some success as a writer or a painter, a sculptor, musician, whatever creative field it might be, and then they suddenly find themselves in this caregiving role.

So, yes, that sounds great, we should have a conversation about that. It wasn't until we got off of our conversation that I thought, if we're going to be talking about this on The Creative Penn, and I think there are people out there who need this, I should write a book about it.

As you know very well, Joanna, we have tried to schedule this thing like three times because of the caregiving situation. It just points out to me that yes, there is a need for this. So this book kind of jumped the queue. It pushed itself ahead of the other book that I was working on. So now my challenge is to get back into that book.

Joanna: Well, I think you've underplayed Hannah's situation and your situation. You mentioned changing diapers there, but I mean, it was pretty hardcore caring all the time, right? This wasn't she would just get on with things during the day. Just tell us a bit more about that, because there are all kinds of spectrums of caregiving.

Obviously for some people it might be parents with dementia, for some people it's children like for you or a partner.

Donn: Yes, that's a good way to put it in context. For her first four years of life, we did not have nursing care for her because on paper I made too much money. You know, don't get me started on the system.

Joanna: Oh, we all have problems with the system for sure, but I think caregiving is a particularly difficult one for sure.

Donn: Oh, yes. When she was four years old, she wound up in the hospital for 58 straight days. The technicality there is that meant the hospital became her legal residence and therefore our income didn't figure into it anymore, and she got the nursing care.

Again, to give some quick context, she was hospitalized in her first four years 27 times. Then once we got a nursing agency to help us at home, from age four until age 22, she was hospitalized about another 10 times. So it really slowed down and the average stay was much shorter. So that nursing care was tremendously helpful.

I don't know how it is elsewhere in this country, and especially in the state of Tennessee where I live, there is a nursing shortage. So even though she qualified for 168 hours a week—that's 24/7—seldom have we had full coverage. So most recently I wound up taking care of Hannah for 108 hours out of 168 pretty much every week.

Again, for context, it's worth mentioning my wife is also partially disabled. So she just can't stand up for very long and therefore she really hasn't been able to take part in the care. Hannah's brother, technically half brother, but he has literally helped take care of her from the day she was born. He has helped, but he's keeping up a job.

I was fortunate in that I taught college all during that time and my college was very understanding of the situation. I was able to teach online a lot of those years, not all those years, but a lot of the time. So that's kind of how we managed it.

So on average I probably spent about 40 to 50 hours a week taking care of her on top of a full-time job and then doing the writing around that. Does that make sense?

Joanna: Yes, and obviously, I think one of the times that I was coming on your podcast, we postponed because a nurse was meant to come and they didn't come. So you had to change your situation. That was just like one meeting, and I think that's what really struck me was that it's so out of your control.

You know, Hannah is a person and needs caring for, and so you can't just take a meeting. Like, I would shut my cat upstairs or something if it's being too noisy. It's like, oh, well, just even the basic things of there's a meeting that starts at this time, or I want to go to a cafe and do some writing. I know I take those freedoms for granted.

In talking to you, I'm not in your situation, but reading your book, it's heartbreaking in so many ways. Also, I know for people listening who are in that situation, and why I encouraged you was so many people just want to feel like they're heard, like their situation is heard.

This sort of normal “just get it done, harden up” kind of attitude just isn't appropriate.

Donn: Well, and as you say, there are so many people in that situation, and because we're so busy, we're not out there. People don't know that there are so many of us. So, you know, it's understandable that for the average writer who's trying to get their art done, their business done, that these tips make sense.

I guess I should also say with Hannah, certainly it wasn't just changing diapers. She has a tracheotomy, so I was changing trachs, I was changing the feeding tube. She had to be fed continuously 24/7. She got some kind of medication about every two hours. So it was pretty intense, and I know that there are people listening who are in that situation.

So the tips that just don't work for caregivers that are good advice: things like block out time on your calendar and tell your family, “Don't bother me during these two hours, I really am working.”

We know that when we work at home, people assume, oh, you can just run to the grocery store for me, right? You know, so needing to get the family to respect your time and place is a realistic thing for the average writer. But for caregivers, we just can't do that.

The advice to make a special writing space. I have written in doctors' waiting rooms and hospital rooms. I've gone to the hospital chapel in the middle of the night to get some writing done.

One that I know that we hear a lot, but neither you nor I follow this one anyway, and that's the “write every day” thing. Good advice I think for most people in order to have the consistency. But with caregivers, you've just got to work it in wherever you can.

So those are just three quick examples that come to mind of the normal writing tips and advice that are good tips and advice. My concern with the book was for people who think, well, I just can't do that and therefore I can't write. That's the real concern.

You may not be able to do it perfectly, and of course, over and over we all hit that thing about perfectionism as the enemy anyway. But this is a special form of perfectionism. That if I can't do it the way that other writers do it, then I just can't do it, and I might as well give up that dream.

Joanna: Yes, and I think another thing, and you and I talked about this, because you know you are a business guy and as you said earlier, you worked in newspapers, you had the discipline to write to deadline, and you didn't miss deadlines. I know you were also kind of frustrated by not being able to meet what you set as a deadline for this book.

Is that something that helps you as well, sort of releasing that? It must be hard.

Donn: Well, and one of the things we frequently say is that Hannah has taught us to make your plans, but hold them lightly because they're going to change. So we do still make plans, but the plans are always fluid.

Similar to that, it's not only the letting go of the deadlines. I know for instance, thanks in no small degree to things that I've learned from listening to your podcast and the books that you have written and other podcasts, I know how to do a proper book launch. But if I wait until I've got everything lined up for that, I'm never going to get a book out.

So I kind of have to let go of best practices in order to have some publication, in order to get to the finish line in some way. So the metaphor that's coming to mind, we've all seen this on TV where there's somebody running like an Olympic race and they twist their ankle or whatever. They don't come in first, but they limp across the finish line.

I have had to get okay with not achieving my potential, I guess you could say. That would include not only deadlines, but also what I know about how the ideal book launch is supposed to go, for instance.

Joanna: That is so hard because, of course, you have reached your potential as a caring father and husband, but that's not measured by the level of success that anyone could see externally with a book launch.

Again, I think this is so important to people. Even if they're not in that caregiving situation—

Yet we do hold these things so tightly, don't we?

Donn: Absolutely. I mean, just the idea that it can't be measured in a great degree. I mean, my day job for so long was teaching college and very seldom would I hear back from students about how much difference it made. I taught public speaking for whatever it's worth, and for most of them it was just a required class. They just needed to check off that box so they could get their degree.

Every once in a while I will have one come back. I know one of my students has become a very successful professional speaker. I had a budding career as a professional speaker that I had to give up when Hannah came along because I couldn't be dependable.

So to be able to see that in a published book, and not, as you say, to dwell so much on the sales figures or that sort of thing. That's a good measure.

There was a study that came out some years ago that they asked people, would you like to write a book? And 85% of them said yes. Out of that 85%, only 15% of them ever started on a book, only I think it was 6% got halfway through, only 3% finished the book and one half of 1% published.

Now this study was done before independent publishing. So I imagine that's probably changed some. But given that 3% figure, there's not a lot of people that ever finish a book.

So I've learned to place my measures on what I can control. The lack of control is something you mentioned a little earlier, and that is something that I think all caregivers deal with, the lack of the sense of control.

So focusing your success measures on what you can control not only is good advice for every writer, but especially for people like caregivers who have so much of their lives that they don't have that sense of control over.

Joanna: You almost have to let it go. You can't sit there being angry and frustrated the whole time. I imagine you are some of the time, but you can't wish your life away wishing you were doing something else.

Donn: Exactly. I mean, I could drive myself nuts all day long with what I think should be happening with our healthcare system, but I can't have much impact on that. So I try to focus on what I can do as opposed to what I can't or what I can no longer do.

Joanna: Well, then just give us some practical tips. You mentioned there the hospital chapel, which I love that. I have that in my mind, I can imagine you dashing in there. So you've got some minutes, I guess you don't know how long, or maybe you think, oh, maybe I've got half an hour or something. How are you getting the writing done?

Donn: Well, one of the things that I personally had to do was to let go of the notion that I really needed uninterrupted time to be effective. We all know what task switching costs, but task switching is just a reality when you're in this situation.

So I have always kept a notebook with me, and that goes back to the newspaper days. You know, I used to keep one of those long notebooks stuck in my back pocket. After cell phones came along, I have never dictated a book, although I'm experimenting with that at this point, but I always kept the phone handy to be able to jot something down.

I will mention, in fact, I was thinking about this, I should have put it in the book and I didn't mention this specific app. It's called Say&Go — S-A-Y and then the ampersand G-O. I know it's available on iPhone. I'm not certain on Android.

I first got it really so that I could grab ideas when I was driving because you hit the icon on your phone and it immediately starts recording, so you don't have to fiddle with getting the recorder started.

It will record for seven seconds and then automatically shut off. You can tap the screen to make it go for 30 seconds. So you can tie it to a Dropbox or Evernote or something like that. So when I would be somewhere, I just grab an idea real quick.

The inspiration that you can get while caring—you know, keep reading the books. I was thinking of this this morning, Joanna, you often say send me pictures of where you're listening. There's been so many times that you have accompanied me while I was changing her feeding tube or something, and I'm thinking, Joanna doesn't want to see this!

Joanna: Oh, well I mean, that's the reality, isn't it? It's so interesting because I do hear from people who say, you don't want to see my washing machine. I mean, obviously Hannah is a person, so that is a different situation.

There might be somebody listening now who is caring for somebody, and they are like, do you really want to see the armchair where I sit next to my parents' bed or something like that?

I think it's so amazing, this kind of feeling that there are people who are going through these situations and that we can be with people virtually, or that could be people listening in years time. hatT, I mean, it's a privilege, isn't it really? I mean that's interesting. But coming back to any more practicalities, you talk there about jotting down ideas.

Donn: Right, right. Well, the way it would work with Hannah—and one of her neurological impacts is she did not sleep on a regular schedule. She might be awake for 48 straight hours and then suddenly she would sleep for 24 hours. One good thing is that once she went to sleep, she would sleep through a tornado, so I didn't have to worry about disturbing her.

So when she slept, I would do one of two things. I would sleep, I'd put a cot down right here beside her because she could have an oxygen issue at any time. So, you know, couldn't leave her by herself. But I would grab a nap and then at other times I would write.

Laptops have been a real boom. When I started with them, of course there were these big, clunky desktop computers, and so I take my laptop with me everywhere. I have a little portable keyboard that I can connect to my iPhone.

I've always got at least a pad, and so just getting those finished sentences down, I would take advantage of the time that she was asleep or that we had a nurse here at home.

I mean the home nurses, they were here primarily for her, of course, but they were a real benefit to me as well. One of the things I think I would say to anybody in this situation listening is you've got to let go of the guilt of thinking, I need to be with that person all the time. You do need to make sure they're taken care of, of course.

But many times Hannah would be in the ICU at the hospital and I would know that they are keeping watch on her. If one of her alarms goes off, there's somebody going to be there immediately. So I'd take my laptop and go to the hospital cafeteria or go to the chapel and just squeeze it out as long as I can, but also recognizing that that can stop at any minute.

So I've learned to make sure that the material is saved. I plant little breadcrumbs to help me get back into it when I come back. That's not exactly a technical tip, but I'll use square brackets for any notes to myself so that I can do a search for square brackets later to see, okay, what was it I intended to do there?

Joanna: That's a good tip. Absolutely.

Then the book is obviously an emotional book, and you are also very practical. It's not a memoir as such. There are elements of memoir, but there's a lot of practical tips for people. I think it would be useful for people with young children, although it's a very different kind of caring, it's still those little pockets of time.

There is a section, a line I wanted to read here. You say, “Emotional fatigue dulls hope. It whispers, why bother? It convinces you that what you have to say has already been said, or that even if you manage to get the words out, they won't matter.”

This really hit me because emotional fatigue for carers is extraordinary, but there's also a lot of stuff going on in the world, right? Conflict in the news. I mean, in America, here in Europe, all over the world, there is a lot of conflict and people have emotional fatigue in general, I think. So a lot of people are saying, why bother? Like it doesn't matter.

Donn: Well, it's an excellent question and I think that humans have wrestled with that question for centuries, outside of caregiving. The nihilism is a very real philosophy. You know, basically what's the point?

So the point of living, I think is to live. We could get real philosophical here and that's worth for anybody kind of digging into—what is the point? So for me, one of the things I discovered was apparently I am here to write. It's the thing that makes my heart sing.

So given that there is so much conflict in the news, and I'll tell you honestly, that I battle depression anyway, but hings are so depressing in a lot of ways. I'm not sure things are any worse now than what they have always been for humans. It's just that we have a greater ability to be aware of challenges.

So you mentioned I'm a pastor. I describe myself as a Zen Methodist. I have been encouraged by the work of like Thich Nhat Hanh, and focusing on not just mindfulness, but this breath, this step, and what can I do as opposed to what I can't or what I no longer can.

There's an old saying as I understand it, among Eastern folks, which is “chop wood, carry water.” It's what's in front of me right now.

I have learned to manage, I guess you would say, to manage social media. I spent some time training Facebook and other such things by noting the posts that I'm not interested in this, by responding to the ones that I was interested in. So my social media feed is not nearly as toxic as it could be, and I've learned to turn it off.

I mainly use it to stay in touch with old high school friends, and when I find myself reading something that just starts to get me outraged, I remind myself one of the great bits of wisdom for the internet age is don't feed the trolls.

If you let outrage lead you to post a frowny face or to argue or whatever, that just trains the algorithm that you will engage with that. It doesn't matter whether you like it or not, they just want to keep you reading. So I just ignore those things and after a while it has stopped showing me that. So that helps my peace of mind.

I wrestle with, or wrestle against, the idea of sticking my head in the sand, but I bring it right back to, okay, what can I do versus what can't I do? There are things that I can do to help in a little way make the world a better place.

When I start getting upset with the lack of empathy and caring that I see in our political class these days, I think, well, what can I do? That's when I will try to find some encouraging meme, for example, and post it to a friend that I know is struggling a bit.

Joanna: This book, for example, I don't believe there's anything political in this book about anything.

Donn: Yes.

Joanna: I think with this book, it doesn't matter where you sit on the political spectrum. It doesn't matter what religion you are, what gender you are, or anything like that. Caring for a loved one is an experience that many people, perhaps most people, will do at some point in their lifetime.

So a book like this, I feel, is at heart, it's a human book about the experience of being human and caring for another human. So to me, you're helping the world by putting this book out there.

I know one of the things that comes up for us fiction writers is, “Whoa, isn't this a waste of time? I should be writing something more important.” But amusingly, when things are bad, people like to escape into a story.

Donn: Absolutely. Yes.

Joanna: So writing, I think writing can be of service to our community and ourselves, and it doesn't have to be like a serious book, even though yours is serious, but it's also practical.

Donn: And I hope there's some comic relief in the book on occasion.

Joanna: There's some dark humor there.

Donn: Yes, and it does make me think too, just with this conversation, when we write our stories—and I haven't, other than the business parables, which they use fiction to teach nonfiction—so I've tried to learn good characterization and scene setting and dialogue and all the tools of fiction.

It occurs to me that through our books, whether it's fiction, nonfiction, whatever, we are emphasizing that as humans, we have more in common than we have differences. Yes, there are those things that divide us, but when you are sitting beside the bed of somebody who is on the verge of leaving this world or someone who's very sick, all those differences disappear.

We just all have more in common than we have differences. Through our writing, you know, the tropes that we talk about, well, they are tropes because they appeal to fairly universal human experience. So I think that's a real service that we provide to people in times of hopelessness is to reinforce the connections that we have. There's no better way to do that than through story.

Joanna: Yes, absolutely.

So another thing that's happened is after several decades of having Hannah at home and caring for her at home, she now lives in a full-time care facility. I knew that had happened, we had spoken about it, but in reading the book, I kind of was trying to reflect on how big a change this is for you.

So I wondered if you could talk about that, because I imagine there's also some relief, but also some guilt over the relief, and a whole load of emotional things. So how are you managing this?

Donn: Well, and we moved her—as we're recording this—it was about six weeks ago. So we're still getting used to the change. Initially I would say to people, I'm still getting used to the new routine, but then I realized, heck, for the first time in 22 years, I can have a routine. So that is a change. We had talked about it for a long time before moving her.

Again, just for quick context, because of her respiratory needs in particular, I had worried for years about what would happen to her when I could no longer do it because in Tennessee at the time, the only option really would've been to put her in a nursing home with octogenarians, and there was no way that she would get the attention that she needed.

So we figured that if we had to do that, she would not survive for a year. Unfortunately her brother heard us saying this. So when we made the decision to move her into this nursing care, what's different is that they opened a new wing for respiratory patients, one of only three in all of East Tennessee.

The other two were a two hour drive away, and so this one opened up a mere 30 minutes drive away. We decided to go ahead and move her because it would be better to do it in a controlled manner when the bed was available than to try to deal with it if we were in a crisis situation because I had had a heart attack or something.

So I'll admit that there is some problem because I'm not sure her brother emotionally really understands the decision. He hasn't argued or anything. I just think he's very worried.

Given that old thing about is the glass half empty or half full, he's always been of the temperament that that glass is nearly empty. Somebody's going to knock it off any minute and I'm going to have to clean it up. So it's hard on him and it's hard on my wife, hard on me, but at the same time, yes, there is some relief there.

I think one of the things we would say to listeners who are in this same situation is, in a way, you've got to learn to live with grief. It's going to be there, but don't try to make it go away. That just makes it hang around. I'm not saying ignore it, but you have to address it and let it be there.

We made the best decision that we could. Same thing for anybody else listening here, don't feel guilty if you realize that you just cannot keep up the care. Do your best, find the best care that you can get. We're over there two or three times a week. We're keeping a close eye on things, but we're also not bugging them all the time because we need to let them do their jobs.

It is different. It's just not lesser or not worse, if that makes sense.

Joanna: Well, I mean, you mentioned at the beginning, you're in your seventies now. I think this is an entirely responsible thing to do as you get older, and as you say, doing it while you can control things as opposed to in an emergency sounds very responsible to me. So I hope that settles down.

I mean, are you finding you want to write more or you can write more now? How has that changed?

Donn: I am writing more. I can write more. I can do more of the good advice we talked about earlier. I'm blocking out time on my calendar. Along with the writing, I also do book interiors and covers and formatting for other authors, so I've been spending more time on that.

The systems that I evolved over the years are standing me in good stead even in this situation, like I still leave breadcrumbs for myself. It's easier for me to pick up where I left off than what it used to be.

I'm finding, and again, you have been such a great guide on how to use AI to foster your processes. Well, like the book I mentioned that I got two thirds of the way through, and then this one jumped the queue. I gave the manuscript to my AI, whom I have named, by the way. My ChatGPT is Lizzie, named after a character in one of my short stories.

So I gave the manuscript to Lizzie and I said, “Okay, tell me where have I left off? Where are the gaps? What do I need to address next?” And she gave me some really good advice and it really cut down the time that I need for getting back into it.

Joanna: That is a good use case. It's just because it's so hard in our own brains to kind of hold everything in your brain and it can really help to use an external brain to do that.

Donn: Exactly. Yes. I think that's good.

Joanna: So we're almost out of time, but I wanted to also ask you about your podcast, The Alignment Show, which, you know, I know podcasting is a lot of work.

Donn: Well, the podcast is The Alignment Show, which you can easily find at thealignmentshow.com. It started during the pandemic. I kept hearing about the Great Resignation and I realized for a lot of people, really it was the great realignment as they realized life is short. You don't want to spend it doing something you don't want to do.

Some of them were quitting and starting businesses or going to some other job. Some people, and this has been true of some of the guests that had been on the program, they had kind of gotten a little bored with what they were doing.

The pandemic had them reassess and they realized, you know, they really took joy in what they were doing and they rediscovered that. Even within that, they decided this part of the job, it's not really essential. I can get rid of that or I can outsource it.

So just having these conversations with people I would not otherwise get to talk with. I mean, quite honestly, I think it brought you and me together. You were gracious enough to come on The Alignment Show twice.

I'll mention this, I have a small group of people that I call stars in alignment. They're people who can come on my podcast anytime they want to, because I know they will have something useful for my audience. And you are one of the stars in alignment.

Joanna: Oh, thank you.

Donn: Absolutely. But see, although I have followed you for years, I'm a patron and I would encourage anybody who benefits from your mentorship, even from afar, to take advantage of that. Despite that connection, I'm not sure we would've connected had it not been for the podcast. So that's one of the things that makes it important to me to do that.

Plus just like writing itself, it gives me an observable outcome. I started saying income—doesn't give me much. Not there. No. But it gives me an observable outcome. You know, I can tell when I've had a conversation and I've made an episode and I've posted it and I can see people responding to it.

You're on what episode, 2000?

Joanna: Not quite, but that direction.

Donn: Yes, way up there. I'm approaching 100. Well, just a fun fact, 90% of podcasts don't make it past three episodes.

Joanna: Yes.

Donn: Of those that get past three episodes, 90% of that group don't make it past episode 20. The average podcast lifespan is about 174 days. So you have far outlasted that and so have I.

I'm not to your level yet, but there is some satisfaction in that and that's encouraging when you are in a situation like caregiving where so much is just out of your control. This is something I can control.

Joanna: Yes, I think that's great. Also, it externalizes your day. I mean, if you've been caring all day and then you get an hour on the phone with someone else talking about something completely different, I imagine that's somehow refreshing as well, mentally.

Donn: Oh, yes. Absolutely. I mean, wow, there are other people on the planet!

Joanna: Yes.

Donn: You know, I got to be honest, during the pandemic when we all had the isolation and all that sort of thing, I couldn't tell much difference. I mean, it was just about what our days were like anyway. So having that connection, and we emphasized that several places in the book, find ways to have the connection, even if it is virtual.

Joanna: Yes, absolutely. Because caregivers, I think, get more sick than non-caregivers. It puts a big strain on you emotionally, physically, in every single way.

Donn: Yes. Sow I will say, for many years, even before Hannah came along, teaching college, I would not get sick during the semester because I just couldn't. Then when the semester was over, almost every semester, I would get sick for three or four days. It was like my body saying, okay, fool, you're not going to rest on your own. I'm going to make you.

Well, the last few years I have not gotten sick. You know, as we've mentioned on another conversation, Joanna, our oldest son died about eight years ago. When he died, all of us were down with the flu. So it has happened, not very often.

When we placed Hannah in the nursing home, I got sick almost immediately. I got food poisoning three times.

Joanna: Your body just shut you down, right?

Donn: Yes. That was basically it. I mean, that was the first time I'd really been sick, probably in five years.

Joanna: So it's really important to look after yourself in this transitional time for you.

So the book is fantastic. Obviously I am not a caregiver at the moment. I mean, like I said, this can come for anyone at different points in our lives. The book is Creating While Caring, but also you have lots more.

Donn: So two or three quick URLs here. The podcast is TheAlignmentShow.com. That's all one word. My base website, which needs updating is DonnKing.com. That's Donn with a double N. Where have I heard that before? And I have learned to say that from you. So D-O-N-N-K-I-N-G.com.

Within that, the most up-to-date parts, the most important ones: DonnKing.com/books. This book is at DonnKing.com/creatingwhilecaring, all one word.

And then anything else that folks want to connect with, like I'm active on LinkedIn. You can go to LinkTree, that's linktr.ee/donnking.

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

Donn: Thank you. This has been a wonderful conversation as I always love talking with you, and I hope that this is helpful to some of my friends and colleagues out there in the same situation.

The post Creating While Caring With Donn King first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Why does the publishing industry feel more chaotic than ever, and what can writers do about it? How do you know if you're truly burned out or just creatively empty? When should successful authors start saying no instead of yes to every opportunity? Becca Syme shares her hard-won wisdom about navigating burnout, embracing unpredictability, and knowing what to quit (and what not to quit) in your writing career.

In the intro, Frankfurt Book Fair AI and audio [Audible, Publishers Weekly]; Free Reads by BookBub; Halloween book sale; Writing Storybundle;

Today's show is sponsored by Bookfunnel, the essential tool for your author business. Whether it’s delivering your reader magnet, sending out advanced copies of your book, handing out ebooks at a conference, or fulfilling your digital sales to readers, BookFunnel does it all. Check it out at bookfunnel.com/thecreativepenn

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 

Becca Syme is an author, coach, and creator of the Better Faster Academy. She is a USA Today bestselling author of small town romance and cozy mystery, and also writes the Dear Writer series of non-fiction books. She's also the host of the QuitCast Podcast.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

You can find Becca at betterfasteracademy.com/links.

Joanna: Becca Syme is an author, coach, and creator of the Better Faster Academy. She is a USA Today bestselling author of small town romance and cozy mystery, and also writes the Dear Writer series of non-fiction books. She's also the host of the QuitCast Podcast. So welcome back to the show, Becca.

Becca: Thank you so much for having me again. I love being here.

Joanna: You were last on the show in March 2024, so I guess around 18 months now. Give us an update.

Becca: So I've started writing more fiction again. I think the last time I was here I was doing almost zero fiction writing, just because I was so busy. And I went through burnout, which is not going to surprise anyone. I think we've all been there.

One of the things I decided as a post-burnout goal was to try to write fiction every day. I don't every single day do it, but I do it often enough that it feels like I'm doing it every day. So I'm happy about that.

Joanna: That's interesting because you hear people saying, “Oh, I've got a block around writing fiction” or something. How do people know if they are in burnout versus they are just empty, or perhaps they have other reasons?

Becca: How long it lasts is usually the biggest indicator for me. Because if you're empty and you try to fill again, right? Like, let's go reading, let's go watching, and it doesn't come back, then it's more likely to be burnout.

Burnout itself, like the kind of extreme burnout that we hear about where you can't get up off the bathroom floor, that kind of thing, will be real evident when you're in what we call “all systems burnout.”

Usually a burnout that is a creative burnout or a physical or emotional burnout can have other potential causes. So I would always go looking for things like, “Am I in perimenopause?” I joke with people, “Is it burnout or am I in perimenopause?” because it feels the same.

So I always want to check biological first, or if I'm in a life transition, that's often the reason why I'm more blocked. So I want to look outside at environmental first to see if there's a cause. If there is, then I want the cause to get dealt with. But it's usually time. How long is it lasting?

It seems like people blame writing before anything else. I had a friend who had a death in the family and was like, “Oh, I just can't write.” And I'm like, “Give it six months.” Grieving is another reason.

There are lots of reasons why your whole self might be like, “Now's not the time to write a cozy mystery” or whatever.

Becca: I don't think we consider enough how different it is to be a creative person versus other things you might do for work. If I'm grieving, I can probably still show up to my Starbucks job and do a reasonable job of making coffee most of the time, right?

So I may not be as affected in my ability to go to the grocery store or my ability to paint houses or something. But all of our work comes from our brain, so anything that impacts our cognition, anything that impacts our processing time.

Honestly, if the stakes go up even just a little bit in our real life, there's a likelihood that it's going to impact our creativity to a point where sometimes, “I'm afraid I might lose my job,” then all of a sudden the creativity dries up and goes away.

Or “I'm afraid of what might happen if…” and then insert a million things here that can be making me feel afraid. Creativity can just go away because, again, it's Maslow's hierarchy, right?

I know it's not 100% one layer at a time all the time, but if your base level foundation is being attacked, if you don't know for sure how you're going to make your mortgage next month, it's going to be real hard to reach creative freedom if you're worried about stuff.

Joanna: Thinking about ourselves as whole people rather than like you can just turn on the writing even if everything else is kind of crazy.

I've got to ask you, Becca, since you are a coach, you're a very wise person, you've been on this show lots, and you've helped me, helped many people that you coach, and you've talked about avoiding burnout before—

Becca: So some of it is high stakes, right? It's not uncommon for people when they see a lot of success in their business to be overwhelmed by all the things that there are to do, to have a hard time delegating.

It's kind of in the phases of a business and the way businesses grow. There's a phase that is like massive growth. Infrastructure causes massive growth.

Then if you don't adapt to that easily or quickly by either offloading things off your plate or lowering the financial stakes, a lot of people will get burned out when they have to make all of these decisions about money. Money stresses them out.

So you have high stakes, that means the stress goes up, which means it costs me more energy to do things that I would have done previously with less energy. It can kind of sneak up on you if you're not conscious about it all the time.

Then, of course, you have to quit stuff. You would think being the quit coach, I would be really great at that, but it's really hard to quit something that has been good or beneficial, even if it is having a high cost.

Joanna: I mean, obviously being a coach, you give a lot of yourself to other people. I just can't imagine how hard that is. I mean, one of the reasons I do this podcast is I hope to help people through the show, but it's not the intensity that coaches like yourself do.

Becca: I'm probably doing more similar things to what you've been doing, which is trying to create more what I would call large scale, right? Like doing more podcast episodes. I'm trying to travel less and be really intentional about the places I travel being worth it for my energy and time.

Then I'm also doing more volume. So I'm trying to do more books, more posts, more social media time, things that don't cost me one-on-one. For a long time and probably the last time I was here, I was at maybe not the height, but pretty close to the height. I was coaching eight to ten hours a day, every day sometimes.

Joanna: Oh my goodness.

Becca: Yes, so I was doing super high volume coaching and then also traveling a lot at the same time. I would travel two times a month for conference speaking sometimes, and every single month of the year. I never really had a break from it, but that was again, my own choice. Nobody forced me to do it.

So I had to quit saying yes to everything, which was very difficult. Then I had to quit saying yes to all coaching. I had to do things like raise my coaching prices, but then I also have to create the value in other places.

So go back to making the QuitCast again, start producing more non-fiction books, doing more high volume courses like small free courses and stuff like that. So I'm doing similar high volume things, but it is a transition for me who's used to being accessible and reachable and able to help people one-on-one a lot. It's been a challenge.

Joanna: I get that. I guess for people listening, I mean, there's a point in your career, whatever that is, where you do have to say yes a lot. Then there's a point where you have to start saying no more.

How do people figure out when the hell that is? Is it like you say, at the point of overwhelm, you are almost forced into it?

Becca: So usually you learn by the sort of everything crashes down, right? Like you have a burnout, you miss a big important deadline, you let somebody down. So that's usually where most of us get our awareness or our learning curve of like, “Oh, I need to quit these things.”

It is possible to see the patterns coming and sort of strategize for yourself about how to be more intentional with your time, especially as you see growth happening.

Once you get into a place with your author career where there's demand for what you're doing, there's going to only be increasing demand because demand is so unusual, like high levels of demand. So once you see that coming, if you want to not get into a burnout place, you want to be more strategic about it.

You can say no earlier, but you have to be willing to pay the price for it. I think that's what a lot of us aren't capable of doing, that we're so afraid of what happens if we say no, that we get that FOMO, right? The fear of missing out and we're not able to say no.

So we sort of have to teach ourselves that JOMO concept, the joy of missing out, by being forced to say no by life or energy or just circumstances. So most of us have to learn by falling face first into it.

Joanna: Which happened to you. It's so interesting because literally just before we got on the phone, I had an email about a speaking opportunity and part of me was like, “Oh, that would be really good networking.” So this was not a money thing, this was more a networking thing, and I was like, “Maybe I should say yes.”

Then I remembered that I keep an email template for precisely this time, which basically says reasons why I'm not doing this kind of thing. So I copy and paste that email and then make a few adjustments to it. I did send that email, and I didn't think about it too long, and I've kind of reached that point now.

Having the email template helps me a lot because—

I mean, you don't, but I feel like I do.

Becca: I think a lot of people pleasers do though, and there's a fair number of us in the artistic industry, right? The way that we got here is often because we like to make people happy.

So you need to know that whatever consequence you're afraid of paying is either not as bad as you think it's going to be. So me saying no, I think that stakes are very high for that, but it turns out they're not as high as I am afraid that they are.

So just knowing with practice that it does actually get easier to say no if I will allow myself to practice it. The problem is we don't understand what's going on in our brain, right? So with a lot of us, we actually have life and death stakes attached to the idea of saying no at all.

I think somehow it's going to be this nebulous outcome. So anytime I think, “Well, what happens if I say no?” and I get a fear that is so nebulous, I can't tell you what it is that I'm actually afraid of.

That's something we can just not listen to because that's a fear response. That's not helpful. A lot of us need to learn how to say no by doing. We can't just have a magical feeling that we're waiting for. “I'll say no when it feels okay to say no.” Well, it's never going to feel okay to say no.

You've got to do it. Then it feels better each time you do it because it turns out that it didn't kill me to say no, and that's what I'm afraid of.

Joanna: As you said, it's not hard to say no to things you hate. It's hard to say no to things that are good and would be good for your business or would be good connections or whatever. But if you say no, then you have more energy for the things that you want to do. So I think that's so important.

Okay, I wanted to ask you about something. I've heard you say this a couple of times, and on your Facebook page just last week, you had a post saying “Loki is in charge.” So I wanted to ask you what do you mean by that? It's fascinating, but—

Becca: Yes, the God of chaos, right? So Loki is the God of mischief or the God of chaos and the things that are unpredictable. So I'll use the Marvel version because it's easy to kind of contrast Loki with Captain America inside of Marvel.

I mean, Loki is like the commonly known God of chaos or God of mischief. But inside of the Marvel universe, Captain America is the sort of logical… everything is logical, everything's predictable, everything that's good is good, everything that's bad is bad.

The consequences seem to follow logically that if you do good, good things happen. If you do bad, bad things happen. That's kind of the template that we have in our head about how we think the world should work.

So a lot of writers think, “Well, if I do the work, I'll get the outcome. If I run these ads, I'll sell books. If I do this thing, I'll sell…” The logical follow of doing work is that it will naturally be the consequence of something sort of like one plus one equals two.

We think that that math is in charge of the publishing industry, that somehow good books will sell, or if I write more books, I will sell, or if I write to market, I will sell.

So sometimes the things that you do have no impact whatsoever, and sometimes they have all the impact. Sometimes you change covers and it makes the book sell, and sometimes you change covers and it doesn't.

I think part of what I'm trying to say in this “Loki is in charge” is not about the future, right? It's not to say, “Well, we should all be very afraid because Loki's in charge and Loki's in charge of the future.” No, no, no.

The question is if I am looking backwards and I'm trying to evaluate what I have done and I have come to the end of my evaluation and can't find a reason why it's not happening.

So I'm three months past a launch and the books didn't sell the way I wanted them to sell, and my tendency internally is to say, “Well, the rules of the publishing industry are logical and therefore there must be a logical reason, a logical cause for why this didn't happen that I could find and change, and then next time I will sell better.”

Sometimes the answer is literally “Loki's in charge.” We don't know what happened. It's not worth trying to figure it out is essentially what I'm saying, right?

Like, yes, there's a reason somewhere, but it's not worth spending your time trying to figure it out or trying to iterate when the highest level of chance that you have at better results is starting a new thing. Right? So like writing a new book, starting a new launch, doing a new series.

The answer isn't always start a new series, but it might be do the next book in the series you're not enough books in. So many of us are trying to be so precious with each individual action that we take and figure out what it was that didn't work as though somehow there's this very easy to find causal reason, a one-to-one reason.

So often what I want people to do is just look backwards and be like, “Okay, well, sometimes the answer is Loki's in charge and I need to not worry too much about it because I'm wasting my time trying to find the reason.”

When sometimes the reason is there are too many people publishing that day or you didn't happen to take off on TikTok and that is not something you can control and do anything about. So a lot of it is just what's in our control and what's not, and trying to be more comfortable with things being out of our control.

So I use Loki because we all laugh when I say it, right? It's like “Loki's in charge. Oh, Loki. Stupid Loki,” right? Like whatever. It makes the cause be something that feels enough out of your control in a safe way instead of it feeling like, “No, I have to figure this out and fix it.” Right?

It's sort of meant to be a tongue-in-cheek way of being like, “Okay, let's just move on. You're going to be okay. Let's do the next one.”

Joanna: Who is this Kevin you keep talking to?

Becca: Kevin is like the John Doe, right? Like the sort of John Doe. I use George and Kevin and Carol sort of interchangeably when I'm talking to a random writer. Like trying to say, “All right, let's go. It's okay to move on.”

Joanna: I thought… and everyone, Becca does know my name. It's not Kevin. This is not Kevin.

So, well, I think this is interesting and I wonder whether you feel that there is more chaos right now? As in we've always had chaos in the publishing industry, but it does seem like there is a lot of transition right now. There are things that were working even kind of last month, and now people are like, “Oh no, this is bad.”

Becca: I sort of go back and forth on whether there is more. Usually in transition periods there is a little bit more, right?

Like if you think about when you live in your house on a normal day, there's very little unpredictable stuff that's probably going to happen. When you're moving, all of a sudden there's probably more unpredictable stuff that's going to happen, just because the added sort of transition causes more chaos.

So I do think it's possible that there's more chaos. What I think is happening is that the unpredictability is becoming more visible than it's ever been before, because in the past it feels sort of like the people who were getting the unpredictable results were either not being heard effectively.

Just speaking objectively as a coach, there's always been a high level of unpredictability in this industry. It's just that the people who are teaching are often the ones who are getting whatever result and then saying, “Oh, this is what should be happening when you do this.”

So the people who are at what I would call that kind of expert level often feel like there's a lot more predictability, ahat's not always the case anymore.

I think there's a lot of teachers and a lot of speakers and presenters who are feeling the unpredictability more than maybe they were in the past. So now we're seeing it a little bit more visibly.

I don't know that I believe there's any more unpredictability other than the typical transitional stuff of like, “Well, that used to work and now it doesn't work anymore.” But if you've been in this industry as long as I think some of us have who listen to this show, this happens every time there's a transition.

It happened in the transition between when Facebook ads slowed down in their effectiveness or changed in effectiveness. It happened when Instagram changed in its effectiveness. It's happened when KU first started, it happened in KU 2.0 launch. There's always some transition feeling.

I think there's additionally more transition globally and internationally and nationally than there has been in the past too. So less stability in other places makes it feel more unstable.

So I go back and forth about if there's actually less predictability or if we're just more conscious of it. But either way, we feel like there is more now, for sure.

Joanna: I was just reflecting as you were talking about the people who were teaching, but there's quite a few who've dropped away. I mean, if you think about Author Nation, the speakers are quite different and new voices come in and teach new things, and I'm not going to necessarily pivot into others.

So for example, TikTok is always my go-to example of, I am not going to. I did not pivot into TikTok. I'm not going to, that is just not my thing.

So there's lots of people who are starting now who I'm like, “No, no, you really maybe should try TikTok. Don't listen to me. You can't have my career in the same way.” People can't have your career. Lee Child always says you can't have my career. When you're starting out fresh, you almost need to look for different people to follow.

Becca: Ultimately, and this is why I said I think it might feel like there's more chaos, is because we do get a lot of security out of people who are starting something new, right? Because they have a lot of brash excitement and they believe that things are possible.

It's almost like a wave that crests on the shore. In order for us to maintain that level of progress as an industry, we need new people to always be coming up over the old wave and coming up over the old wave. The old wave might go out and then come back again.

There may be that I need to retreat a little bit and kind of regroup and then come back with new enthusiasm.

Sure, but in a creative industry, because so much of creativity happens when I am more secure, what we always need is to listen to people who make us feel like there is a security about what could be happening, like what could be possible.

The reality of the industry on just a one-to-one basis is not something that most of us need to be worried about because it is so unpredictable. Who will and who won't? What will take off and what won't? What will work and what won't?

It's so unpredictable. All you need to do is just have the resilience to keep going, and I think we need that new wave to come up every once in a while to remind us all and fill us all with this renewed hope of like, “Oh my gosh, think about what might happen if…” et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Whenever I hear that there's new people teaching new stuff, I get excited about it because I think authors need to have that excitement and enthusiasm and “this is what's possible.”

Then they learn something new and it opens their mind, it helps them get through transitions, it creates more stability. We get more engaged, we have more fun. Like ultimately that is the way we thrive long term, that we have a sustainable career.

Joanna: I guess, obviously as you said, we're both learners and there are things that we both have changed our businesses. Although I've been selling direct since I started in 2008, I only adopted Kickstarter a couple of years ago and now I love it. I absolutely love it.

It's a really important part of my business financially, but also creatively. Like the things I create in my Kickstarters are so important to me in so many ways.

You are doing a Kickstarter. So tell us a bit more about that and why you are doing that. You've done them before too, haven't you?

Becca: So, I love being able to bring a new book to people and like, I usually do a book and a tool, right? Like some kind of workshop or card deck or like, something that I will do in addition to the non-fiction book.

There's something that happens around when we infuse new learning into a community, and specifically my community is very learner focused in the sort of the Better Faster, QuitCast kind of arena.

So my first book that I sort of took off with was called Dear Writer, You Need to Quit. And I've become the QuitCast and quit books and quit coach and all those things. So the new book is called Dear Writer, You Still Need to Quit.

It is basically the same sort of structure as the first book in terms of one essay will be aimed at this group and the next essay will be aimed at a different group. I think I had 18 or 19 chapters in the first book, and this one has 40 so far.

Joanna: Love it.

Becca: There are probably more coming apart from that. What I'm trying to do with this book is sort of give us this… almost like these aren't the droids you're looking for moment, right? Like it's okay to just let that go. It's okay to not worry about that.

It's okay to look away, and try to remind people like what is it that's really important about maintaining forward motion in your career? And what are the rules that you actually need to live by? And what are the forms and functions you actually need to live by and what can you release and just stop worrying about?

So much of what I want to get across to authors is like we worry about so much that is just, you can't know any of these things. Like you can't know whether a book is going to take off until after you've released it.

So the more we worry that it won't happen, instead of encouraging ourselves to practice the resilience that will allow us to see incremental growth as beneficial and also prepare us for larger growth when it happens. And to know that incremental growth doesn't preclude you from having larger growth in the future.

So sort of things like, here's how we might misunderstand what a career trajectory looks like, and we worry so much about following a particular pattern, not realizing that there are 300 other patterns that can also lead to the success that we want.

So I think a lot of what I'm trying to do is just remind us like, these aren't the droids you're looking for. It's fine to ignore this stuff. Let's refocus on what's really, really important.

Joanna: It's interesting that you said about we don't know whether a book will take off. I just got to be realistic. I mean, I've written like nearly 50 books and I've never had a book like take off in the sense of like traditional media going, “Wow, this is amazing,” or number one on Amazon.

Becca: A fulfilling career, and not just a fulfilling career, but it doesn't mean that you're not successful.

I think we all look at these sort of success patterns of like, “Okay, this person went from selling 10 books a month to selling 10,000 books a month,” and now we're like, “Well if I don't hit that trajectory that somehow there's something wrong with me.”

As opposed to, “Well, okay, but that's just one story.” Joanna is a great example. You build over time or you get a little bit more each release and then you have a thing where you have a slump where you don't sell as much.

Sometimes when people go into those slumps, they're like, “Oh, well my career is over. I stopped growing. So clearly there's a problem now.” Where I would say, “But if you look from a big picture at it, this is probably just a downturn that needs a creative upturn, rather than this is the end. I'm never going to be able to do this again.”

We just make so many pronouncements about things, or we're afraid of those pronouncements in our heads because we don't actually know what it is that could be happening.

We're too ready to be afraid that it's all going to be over, as opposed to, “You know what, I can weather this. So if I have to get a second job for a while so that I can continue to write, I don't see that as a failure. I see that as resilience and progress and me being creative and still being able to write. Like I just want to never stop writing.”

We have these templates in our head that we get so attached to, and I just want us to remember that resilience is important and there's more that could be possible than you would ever think because of what we're afraid might happen.

That fear keeps us really narrowed and tight and stressed, and the hope really makes us more expansive and feel better in our skin.

Joanna: Well, I'm looking forward to all the 45-plus different things I need to quit. Obviously we're not going to go through everything now, but just maybe—

Becca: Yes. Quit going to book signings. This is my little bit of a soapbox about this. By all means go to book signings if what you want is to network, like if your goal is networking or if your goal is like, “I'll take whatever new readers I can get and I'm not going to try to break even,” let's say on book signings.

Because I think book signings are something that went through a phase in like 2014, 15, 16 as well, where we had a similar fervor about like, “Let's start 55 book signings and everybody's going to do one, and this is going to be it for me. I'm investing $5,000 into this and so in order for me to get out what I need, I have to break even because this is a business expense.”

And I'm like, “No. If you are a mid-list or low-list author, book signings are either ways for you to connect with the fans that you already have.” So seeing it as an investment with the fans and trying to increase your longevity of your career by keeping those fans around. Or it's an opportunity for you to network with other authors.

Very rarely is it going to sell enough books at enough volume that it's going to be a good investment of your time and money. I think a lot of us see book signings as something that we have to do in order to grow, but we just don't understand that growth doesn't happen that way.

You can't create demand in that way unless demand is already visible in other places.

So what I'd rather see people do, if it was me, I'd rather see people have much lower price or free books if they're low and mid-list authors paperbacks at the book signings and see it as almost like a lead magnet sample promotional opportunity rather than trying to feel like I have to.

I think we treat it like an investment when that's not a great business decision for most of us.

I would rather see people do fewer signings or treat them like promotional opportunities and really invest in getting as broad of a reach as you can rather than trying to see it as an investment financially, like where I'm going to try to make all my money back, and then people price their books really high and they don't sell.

Joanna: It's interesting though because I've had quite a few people on recently who—I mean, I think you mean a different kind of thing—but people selling at fairs, people selling in person direct from a store.

Becca: Direct from a store? Like from a stall?

Joanna: Yes, like a market stall or a…

Becca: So I'm a fan of stuff like that if the person is going into it knowing that this is going to be a very high level of investment for one sale at a time, right? Or there are some people out there who adore hand selling.

Again, I think part of what happens when we look at other people's stories is we have to say, “Was there already a demand for their books that they're responding to?” Like, is there already a high level of demand for those books? And they're essentially filling a demand that already exists.

Or if I think about like a fair or a farmer's market or a craft fair or something where there is no one else selling books there, so they're taking advantage of the blue water.

That's a totally different thing for me from attending a book signing where there's 500 authors and I'm going there assuming that if I can somehow compete with those top sellers, that I'm going to be able to sell all of my books at full price.

I see people signing up for four and five and six and seven signings a year, and I'm like, we disrupt our travel, we spend more time. Again, unless you love it—because my caveat for things is always, if you love hand selling, please do it. If you love festivals, please do it. If you love signings, please do it.

If you're feeling pressured to do it because everybody's doing it, please question the premise. Not everyone has the same experience. Again, Loki's in charge, right? It doesn't react the same when everyone does it.

Joanna: Or it's just not your thing. I find it interesting talking to people who really enjoy hand selling because it's not at all what I enjoy. I have a bit of a soapbox too, and I thought I'd put this in.

Particularly because as independent authors, we are responsible for our creative choices, our business choices. We are independent.

At the moment there just seems to be a lot more hating on other authors and judging other authors, because of the AI stuff in a major way. So what do you think about this?

Becca: I feel like anytime there is a level of judgment with other people, there's always a fear at the core of it, right? So if I find myself having really big responses to something, like I see people doing a certain thing online, whatever the thing is, and I get really up in my feelings about it, there are two options there.

One is I can do the work internally to try to figure out what that emotion is and walk away from the keyboard. I can let myself calm down first, and then come back and have a conversation that is less emotional about it.

I think the problem usually with people who are hating on other people online, like they're getting very up in their feelings, is that they're not pausing at all. When they feel frustrated or angry or judgmental, they're just going along with the dysregulation and they don't understand.

So if you think about Joanna and I in a room with 300 people, let's just say we're at Author Nation, we're all in a room with 300 people in that room. We're all listening to someone talk and we're all feeling very safe and secure and excited and we're having all these positive feelings.

Then there are people in the room who see danger somewhere, like let's say there's a bear in the back corner of the room. Most of the room can't see it, and there's like 10 people in the back of the room who can see it.

Then they can actually feel feelings that are big enough that they can dysregulate the rest of the room no matter what's happening from the front. We won't even realize that it's happening until we all turn and look at the bear and see it and then run away, right?

So we mass dysregulate each other. When we're online and we don't realize that the exact same thing is happening, that we all feel like, “Oh, there's this… I'm feeling a lot of fear or frustration and I'm going to the computer because I feel dysregulated. I want to express it.”

Usually we express emotion and then somehow we get regulated by that. But because when we dysregulate other people, they dysregulate us, it's like this big dysregulation fest that ends up happening. When we're all getting on, let's say, Threads and complaining about something, right?

The goal in complaining one person to one person is that somebody listens, somebody talks, and then we regulate each other by coming to a conclusion of how we can handle the situation. What we don't realize is if I feel really big feelings, the goal of me feeling those big feelings is to regulate the situation for me to feel secure again.

When we take it to the internet or we start complaining or yelling or getting frustrated or whatever, we're looking for that loop close of that validation of those feelings, but then we end up just mass dysregulating each other.

The problem is because we're not 300 people in a room, we are each in our own room with our own computer, there is no loop closed to that dysregulation pattern. It just keeps growing and growing and growing and getting worse and worse and worse and worse and worse.

There's no end to the dysregulation until we get so overwhelmed that we have to walk away from the computer.

The reason I say I would like us to walk away from the computer first and then come back and engage after we have gotten rid of that emotion, rather than communicating in the middle of it, is that you cannot mass regulate people.

So I can't say something, for instance, on Threads in a response to a comment chain that has gone sort of off the rails. Everybody that's reading it is dysregulated. I can't say something that will regulate all of those people because they want to be dysregulated in that moment, unless I specifically answer the one thing that they're saying.

So I will say the judgment also frustrates me, but for a different reason. It frustrates me because it's not helpful. Us all getting dysregulated together doesn't actually help solve any of the problems. All it does is make us spend more time on social media or make us spend more time on Threads or TikTok or YouTube or whatever.

It takes us away from the thing that could regulate us, which is people actually listening and talking and coming to a conclusion and having a conversation. I'd rather see us call a friend than comment on Threads, because then at least we could have a conversation that's relational and we could get somewhere productive.

I just wish people could understand, you cannot mass regulate people. You can only mass dysregulate them. So the computer and the phone are just an excuse for waiting to be dysregulated at some point. I wish more people would think about the fact that it's not helping the way we think it's helping.

Joanna: To engage with that.

Becca: Yes.

Joanna: So the answer is to walk away rather than…

Becca: I would rather have us walk away first. Yes.

Joanna: I mean, I do that. I just see so much misinformation, and you know how it is. I guess we started off by sort of saying no more. In general, I do just walk away. I really just take myself out of it rather than, as you say—

Becca: Yes.

Joanna: As you also mentioned, we are at a time in history where there's a lot, a lot going on, let's say. There's so much going on. So as you say, if you are head up around whatever you are, head up around politically or wars and all kinds of things to get angry about.

Then you see another comment about something in the author world, I suppose it's all just very triggering at the moment. So it would be good if we all walked away a lot more. It is hard. It is hard though, isn't it?

Becca: Yes, it does. It feels so unpredictable and chaotic, but so much of that again is because we are not all in a room together. We're each in our own rooms at the computer.

If you think about what benefits digital spaces is actually benefits all digital spaces for us to be dysregulated, not for us to be regulated. Because regulated people don't need to spend time on social media. They can be like, “Oh, look at this cool thing, and oh, puppy,” and then they go about their life.

When I'm dysregulated, I have to spend more time there because I'm trying to close whatever loop it is. So it's either the boredom loop that I'm trying to close that will never close because it keeps just opening more boredom loops, one after another. Or it's an anger loop, or a sadness loop, or a fear loop.

heT Internet's not going to close any of those for us. All it's going to do is keep them open because it benefits when our loops are open.

This is why I end all of my QuitCasts now with “shut the computer down, turn off the phone, go open the manuscript,” because that has a higher percentage of ability to regulate you than anything you're going to read on Facebook or Threads, or see on TikTok or whatever.

Including the positive stuff because the positive stuff is just anesthetic to keep you engaged until the negative stuff catches you and then it can suck you in.

So on some level, and I know I'm sounding very negative to social media, some of it's really fine and beneficial, but the number one difference in people who easily and quickly are productive versus the people who aren't, almost 2-to-1 is how much time they allow themselves to spend on social media.

It's whether or not they reach for their phone first thing in the morning or whether they don't. It's so hard sometimes to convince people that it's actually dangerous enough to be there, that we should really be avoiding it as much as possible.

Tt the same time, I understand we're all adults, we're going to make our own choices. Realistically, I think a lot of our productivity woes, our selling woes, et cetera, could be helped if we would just not reach for the phone first thing in the morning.

Joanna: I find going for a walk helps. Getting outside. Like, oh, there's a world out there. The world is not in the screen. The world is actually a lot bigger. I find that helps.

Joanna: Okay, so we are almost out of time, but obviously, so the campaign is “Dear Writer, You Still Need to Quit,” but—

Becca: So we do not need to quit writing.

Joanna: Yay.

Becca: That's the key for me. I think no matter what happens on any level, no matter how bad the predictions get about whatever's going to change, there is no need for us to quit writing or to believe that writing is going to be taken away from us.

Even if the capacity to sell in one way is taken away, there's always going to be other ways. I feel like we need to just remind ourselves almost like that kind of motto or catchphrase that you repeat to yourself every time it comes up. Like the jingles, right?

There's this “Save big money at Menards” thing that comes up a lot in the Midwest because we see Menards signs everywhere, and I always think “Save big money at Menards.” Like I sing it in my head.

I wish that people would sing in their head, “Open the manuscript, open the manuscript, open the manuscript” just over and over and over again.

So much of our fear can be combated by stopping ourselves from thinking about what might happen and just continuing to practice the opening of the manuscript and the disappearing into the writing and the enjoyment of the writing, as often as possible.

No matter how bad the predictions are, I still don't believe that there's a reason for us to stop hoping for writing and wanting to write more. On that note, I just don't believe there's a reason for us not to be hopeful about the future.

We might go through some hard stuff. We might have change, so learn how to be resilient, learn how to pivot, learn how to be flexible. There's an element of learning that no matter what you think is being taken away, there's always a possibility that we could switch back, that things could transition backwards, right?

I don't mean to come off saying don't be worried about. I'm not saying don't be worried about anything. I'm specifically talking about it in the publishing industry.

I think we think about what might happen and we get so closed off about the future and there's going to be so much fear and change and closing. So many of us don't realize that we will be good at change when it happens.

We're not going to be good at change now, but we can be more flexible and more hopeful about the future if we look for things to be flexible and hopeful about instead of focusing on the things that we're not.

So there's no reason for us to quit being hopeful about the future. There's no reason for us to quit writing, and if we can just focus on that, there's always some more interesting thing I could be writing, some manuscript that I could open, something that I could hope for.

There's always possibility in the future. There's always possibility of selling, there's always possibility of new readers. There's always going to be possibility. So if we can just focus on that, it's going to be a lot easier to get through the hard things if we don't lose our hope about the future.

Joanna: Absolutely. Brilliant.

Becca: betterfasteracademy.com/links will have everything. So all one word, all lowercase. That is the one-stop shop for Becca.

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

Becca: Thank you for having me.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and readability while maintaining the authentic voices and insights of both speakers.

The post Loki Is In Charge. How Authors Can Thrive In A Time Of Transition With Becca Syme first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can authors write about climate change without preaching? What happens when your publisher goes under just before your book launch? How do theatre skills translate to better dialogue, readings, and author events? With author and theater director Laura Baggaley.

In the intro, Indie presses are in existential crisis [The Bookseller]; what to do when things are hard [Wish I'd Known Then]; Book marketing with garlic-infused ink [The Guardian]; Writing Storybundle; Halloween horror promo; Blood Vintage folk horror; My new author photos; Day of the Dead [Books and Travel];

Today's show is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing and integration with writing software, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 15% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 

Laura Baggaley is an award-nominated children's and YA author, theater director, and also teaches acting, writing, and literature at City Lit College in London.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

You can find Laura at LauraBaggaley.co.uk.

Jo: Laura Baggaley is an award-nominated children's and YA author, theater director, and also teaches acting, writing, and literature at City Lit College in London. So welcome to the show, Laura.

Laura: Thank you, Jo. It's lovely to be here.

Jo: Yes, I'm excited to talk to you today. First up—

Laura: Well, I was one of those kids who always had their nose in a book, you know, loved reading. Whenever anyone said, “What are you going to be when you grow up?” I would say, “A writer,” like, straight away, no question about it. So that was always the plan.

In my late teens, I changed schools for sixth form. I went to this school that was really strong on performing arts. I started to get into drama and doing lots of acting and school plays. Then at university started directing plays, which was even more fun than acting.

I just found myself pursuing a different path and became a theater director for about 15 years. That was really creatively exciting, but after a while, I started to feel something was missing, I guess.

Of course the writing had been completely sidelined, but I came back to it and I started writing again.

First of all, I started working on a literary novel that I was trying to craft with extremely beautiful language and lovely sentences. When I got to the end of the draft and I read it, I realized it was incredibly boring because like nothing happened in the book. So I put that in a drawer and started again.

I started working on another one and I was sort of crafting my sentences. And anyway, fortunately about halfway through that one, I had this idea, this story came to me about a 15-year-old kid in a dystopian future. It had to be a young protagonist and it had to be a YA book. I just really wanted to tell this story.

So I chucked the boring literary half-written draft in that same drawer and started working on the YA book. So that's where I really started to sort of find my voice as it were.

Laura: Oh gosh, before the pandemic, which is kind of how we judge everything time-wise these days, isn't it? I think it was 2019 that I was a finalist in the Mslexia Children's Fiction Competition with that manuscript.

So I'd obviously written it before then, and then through that competition, got an agent and had wrote another book, and got a publishing deal with a small indie publisher called Neem Tree Press.

Jo: I wanted to talk to you about this. So you were a finalist, Mslexia, if people don't know, is very prestigious magazine here in the UK. You've got an agent, you've got a deal. So what happened then?

Laura: Well, I think the term is probably rollercoaster. I was really excited to sign this contract and obviously to have this publishing contract. But what happened was, publication obviously takes a long time. So it was going to be 18 months or so before the book came out.

After about a year of this process, Neem Tree Press merged with a much bigger UK publisher called Unbound. And they were saying how great this was because obviously there were advantages of scale, like wider distribution to bookshops, that kind of thing.

I don't think that Neem Tree Press quite realized how much financial trouble Unbound was in when they merged. Essentially Unbound folded and took Neem Tree press down with them. So the two books that I'd been so excited to get published with Neem Tree have not been published.

However, on the plus side, the rights have reverted to me, and now I can do what I want with them. So they will be coming out, just not with Neem Tree Press.

The good thing was, is that in the meantime I'd got on with writing another YA book and that has been published by Habitat Press. So I carried on writing.

Jo: The thing is we hear this over and over again. Like there's pros and cons with small press versus big houses and one of the benefits of a big house is it's very unlikely to go under. But one of the benefits of small press is you get a lot more attention and you know the people and you feel it's a much more personal process.

There's pros and cons every which way, but over the years I've been in publishing, almost 20 years now, so many small press companies either get bought or things happen. Things happen. Let's just say things happen.

So this happened. How did you deal with this, like mentally and thinking about whether it was all going to happen? Because obviously writers look forward to their publication and you're going through this process.

Laura: As I say, it was really up and down. There were some months early on where I was really down about it because I just didn't hear anything.

So I think that was the most frustrating thing is I'd be sending emails saying, “When are we going to start on the edits?” and just not hear anything. So it felt like I was sort of being ghosted, you know?

The positive thing I think was that because of listening to your podcast and doing lots of research into indie publishing, I'd already decided that even if I had a traditional publishing deal, I was going to pursue my author business in an entrepreneurial way.

So I'd already decided, you know, why can't a traditionally published author have a reader magnet, for example? So I got on with doing things in the meantime. I wasn't just waiting, and I think if I just waited, it would have been really crushing.

As it was when I finally had the sort of confirmation that Neem Tree Press had closed and there was no chance of the books being published, what I felt was relief and a sense of almost kind of empowerment. As like, well, thank goodness the books are mine again. Now I can get on with publishing them.

Jo: That's really interesting. I think that empowerment, it's such a good energy. Being long time indie, I think that empowerment and that sort of, “I can do this” and like you said, “I got on with doing things.”

If you are a doer and you like doing things, then being an indie author is a good thing because you can move at your pace. Let's face it—

Laura: Exactly. Exactly. I think just that feeling of I'm not going to wait for permission anymore. I've had enough of that.

Habitat Press, who brought out Dirt, my new book, they've been a joy to work with because they're much more flexible and collaborative. So I don't feel like I've given up all my power working with them, so that's really nice.

Laura: TBC. I'm hoping that one of them might come out with Habitat Press and one of them will be self-published. That's the current plan. I'm waiting for Habitat Press to read the greener one because Habitat Press is the green, environmental kind of publisher.

Jo: Yes. Well, let's talk about that because your novel Dirt is eco fiction or climate fiction, and this is turning into a bit of a niche. So tell us what are the hallmarks of that genre.

Laura: That is so important, isn't it? Yes. So what climate fiction is, I mean, I'd say it's any story with a focus on environmental or climate issues. So it could be a thriller, it could be a romance, it could be crime fiction. It's a really kind of broad genre.

But from my perspective, when I think about it, the key thing is climate solutions. It's about looking forward to joyful possibilities and about kind of normalizing positive action.

So not writing a book to tell everybody to buy an electric car or something, but just kind of in the world building embedding things like yes, solar panels or heat pumps or whatever as just normal parts of life.

Of course in my books, because I tend to write near future dystopias, it's really easy to imagine a future where say everyone gets all their energy from renewable energy. So the eco element, it's in the background and just taken for granted rather than trying to preach. If that makes sense.

Jo: That's interesting because I know Habitat Press wants a positive spin on it, but I was thinking one of the books I've read, I guess a few years ago now, The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, I don't think of that as a positive book.

Laura: I know, I know that book. I love that book. Yes, I know what you mean. I mean, it has one of the bleakest beginnings, but it stayed with me. I have never forgotten that book. What I would say about that book is it is absolutely packed with ideas for ways of moving towards a better future.

He's got all kinds of economic innovations and ideas about blockchain and how world banks could work together. So I would say although it's in the action and the plot, there are bleak elements. I mean, overall, I would call it really quite hopeful.

I mean, I sort of got into all this through the Green Stories Project. They run free writing competitions, encouraging writers to explore embedding climate solutions into their work. And of course, Habitat Press kind of emerged out of the Green Stories Project. I think you interviewed Denise from Habitat Press some years ago.

Jo: Yes.

Laura: Another thing that they did, which I really thought was really fun, was the Green Stories collaboration with BAFTA on #ClimateCharacters.

Laura: They were comparing fictional characters with high and low carbon lifestyles. So they took like James Bond versus Jack Reacher. Jack Reacher, he spends his money on like coffee and public transport, whereas James Bond is all like jet skis and smart suits and expensive cars.

I mean, I love both those characters of course, but if you're looking at what you glamorize in your fiction, it's a choice that you can make.

So in one of my books, I have all the rich kids at school wearing CarPos trainers. And CarPos in my sort of future world is short for carbon positivity. So they're carbon positive trainers that have absorbed more carbon in the manufacture than they've emitted, and that's this massive status symbol.

So the cool kids all have CarPos. Then of course, my protagonist, who's not a rich kid, his trainers are just neutral, which means like carbon neutral.

That's not what the plot is about, but I like the idea that in a world where legislation has said that all manufacturing processes have to be carbon neutral, it becomes a status symbol to be sustainable. Like who can be the most eco.

Jo: Yes, I absolutely agree. So I think that's a good sort of pointer is put it in the world building, don't lecture.

You don't have to have characters lecturing other characters about their behavior, which I feel like is one of the bad things with any movement is bashing people over the head with stuff as opposed to trying to put things into stories that it's almost invisible, but yet still impactful, I suppose.

Laura: Yes, I think Denise at Habitat Press talks about smuggling the messages in. You know, that you want the book to be exciting because it's got great characters and a great story, and that the eco stuff is incidental almost. But there's just a little bit of a mind shift going on in the way that you construct the world of the book.

Jo: So I wanted to come onto your theater background. Well, first of all, I should ask—

Laura: Mainly directing, but I did do some devised productions when I was directing, so I did write some scripts for those. I wrote several scripts actually for children's plays, which were kind of adaptations.

Then it was in 2019, I devised and wrote a play for a London New Writing Festival called This Play Will Solve Climate Change.

Jo: Yes, that's a bit more on the nose as a title.

Laura: It was, yes. It was a full on activist kind of physical theater, experimental production. It was really fun. It was perhaps a kind of a step back towards writing for me.

Jo: Well, because this is interesting, right? So I write a novel, you write a novel, and we can upload it to Amazon. Let's say the very basic thing you can do is upload it to Amazon. People can buy it and you get some money.

With a play, it just isn't like that, is it? I mean—

Laura: I have to say, not that I know of with scripts at all. In fact, with the climate change play that I wrote, well, I actually set up a little theater company around that time, and we called ourselves Reusable Theater. The idea was that our scripts could be reused by anyone, anywhere, because we wanted to to generate more of this kind of work.

I mean, there were theater makers all over the place generating their own productions and putting on work independently. So yes, but I don't think anyone's making any money out of it is the thing.

Jo: No, exactly. I mean there are obviously people who buy scripts to put on at schools and stuff, usually you have to buy the certain text or whatever, but people don't really shop for plays, I guess.

Laura: I don't think so.

Jo: So, yes, it is difficult. So I'm glad you've discovered the business of books.

In terms of if people are interested in adaptation—like you said there, you did some adaptations—

Or even just brought alive with marketing, with images and that kind of thing?

Laura: That's a really interesting question, because I think in some ways, theater is a really expansive, inventive storytelling mode. So you can almost put anything on stage, but what I would say is, I think it's primarily about theater and film being really visual mediums.

This is often the case in marketing as well, isn't it? So it's about finding those really striking images and just thinking about your plot does. Are there key moments that have really clear, vivid images attached to them?

I think I'm often really inspired by images. So there was a play I directed once simply because I loved the opening image on stage and it was a 18th century garden in Lambeth with an apple tree. There were two figures, a man and a woman sitting in the tree with their backs to the audience, both completely naked.

I just thought this was such a kind of striking image. Of course, we didn't have a tree on stage. We had apples suspended from invisible threads. So the actors were sitting on a step ladder in this kind of cloud of apples. It was really beautiful. I guess that's the kind of thing you are thinking about.

With Dirt, that whole book really started with an image for me. There's an expansive desert, a single road running through it. A girl wearing a sun hat as big as a bicycle wheel cycling alone along that road towards us.

That was like the first idea for the story in my head. It was kind of like a western, you know, a stranger rides into town. So that's where my inspiration, I think, often comes from. I think that does translate well into marketing, for instance.

Jo: Yes. I guess another thing is dialogue, because if you are on the stage, then you're going to have to have some people speaking. So you've probably read a heck of a lot of very bad dialogue or heard dialogue that might look okay on the text, but then an actor tries to perform it and it sounds terrible.

Laura: Yes, I've certainly encountered some terrible dialogue. I think for me the clunkiest is when characters say things without motivation just to further the plot.

I get students doing this in my acting classes. Sometimes they'll be improvising and they'll say something like, “Oh, Uncle Bernard, how good to see you after you've spent 10 years in Australia” and I'll be like, “Bernard knows he's been in Australia and he knows it's been a long time.”

So the character, like, there's just no reason for them to say that. It always tells me that the actor is being super conscious of the audience, trying to convey information rather than getting into the character's skin. I think with dialogue it's about really immersing yourself, getting in there in the character's head.

What is the character's attitude to this situation? What's the relationship to the other people? How are they feeling? And then you get that kind of, what would I say if I was this person in this situation? And that's where the dialogue should be coming from.

I think you really hit on it, Jo, when you said, it's reading it aloud. It can read well on the page, but to test it, read it aloud and better get other people to read it aloud for you.

I mean, in theater it's standard practice. You've got a new script, you workshop it, get a load of actors, playwright sits with a red pen and their script and listens and scribbles all over the script while the actors read it out.

Jo: Yes, it's funny, I've actually just yesterday finished the audiobook of Blood Vintage, which is my folk horror novel. I've done it with ElevenLabs using my voice clone, which is very, very good.

So it's very strange because I'm listening to myself and then I direct myself, the AI, and—

Laura: Wow. That's brilliant.

Jo: It is. It's really funny. The other thing that I found, and again, like I've literally just sort of discovered this is at the end of chapters, sometimes I've rewritten things in order that they end on a with a certain sound as opposed to how they can end in the text.

You would have come across this too. There can be sounds that written down, don't look like they match, but when you speak them, the sounds resonate with each other and then it just sounds wrong basically.

Laura: Yes. Yes, absolutely. It sound like ending a chapter sounds a bit to me, like doing what we call a button at the end of a scene or at the end of a musical number, you need that kind of finishing moment.

Jo: Yes. Finishing moment. Rather than with text, you can easily cut something and the reader's going to turn the page. But if you are driving and you're listening to an audiobook, there's a few seconds of space.

So you almost need it to end in a certain audio way to make a point. Like you say, button's a really good word. I've never heard it in that context.

Laura: Yes, absolutely. You need to navigate to guide them through the text because they haven't got that kind of expanse of the blank bit of page at the end of the chapter or whatever.

Jo: So then I guess the other thing about theater is performance and I feel like a lot of authors think they have no need to learn performance because they're just going to be in their rooms writing.

If you are successful or if you want to be successful, yes, you are going to have to do stuff. You have to speak on a podcast, you have to speak at a festival, you have to do a reading, you have to talk to media.

I guess from seeing a lot of bad performances as well, what can we do? We want to be authentic, like we don't need to be rah rah. How can we do it where we can deliver the best to the people who are listening?

Laura: Yes, it's such a good question. I think for me there's kind of two things. So I find—and this is probably my theater background—but I find it really helps to imagine a character who is a version of me and that's who I'm playing in public.

The character is essentially the same. They're me just a bit more confident, you know, a slightly shinier version. So like, I'm Laura and then there's Laura Baggaley Writer.

If you ask those two people like, “How is your new book going?” Like, me, Laura sitting at my desk might say, “Oh, I'm really struggling. I'm trying to write in this new utopian genre. And I've got ideas for two characters, but the world isn't clear at all and I'm just not sure which plot strand to prioritize” and so on.

But if you ask Laura Baggaley Writer, she might say, “Oh, it's exciting. I'm experimenting with a new literary genre. I'm writing a utopian novel for young adults, and it's about two teenage girls. They're both outsiders in different ways.”

So like both of those statements are completely true. I'm not being inauthentic because it is exciting that I'm writing this book in this genre. But one of them, I hope you'll agree, one of them sounds better than the other. It's a bit like putting on a smart jacket for a book reading. It's just getting into character. Does that make sense?

Jo: Yes, I totally agree. I think the smart jacket is a point as well.

Makeup for women, I mean, you don't have to, but I remember I did professional speaker training back in Australia like 20 years ago, and I remember seeing these women and they wore, they didn't have to be designer clothes, but they wore smart clothes on stage and they looked professional and their hair was done and their makeup was done.

I just learned a lot from that because it gives a professional impression and I feel that's the thing.

So whatever that means, however you want to dress. I think again, whether it's a smart jacket or it's just different clothes, I feel it can really help.

Laura: That is so true. I mean, a lot of actors talk about needing to find the right shoes for a character. They put on their costume and then that's part of the process of getting ready for performance. So I think that's absolutely right.

Jo: This is terrible. I was just thinking then, so I've been to some of these pitch things, right? For film and TV and stuff. The last one I went to, they sent an email out and the email basically said, “please chew gum or use mints.”

Laura: Oh, oh no.

Jo: No, I mean not to me personally, but the email went out and it also said, “use deodorant.” And I was like, if you are emailing a group of people and telling them to use mints and deodorant, then what the hell happened last year?

Laura: That's horrendous. Oh my goodness.

Jo: Yes, I know. I was just thinking about that. I think, again, as authors it's fine to sit here at your desk in your tracky bottoms and your whatever and mess. Like, I basically don't do my hair most of the time.

But if you are going to do a reading or you're going to a conference or you are doing anything where you are Joanna Penn Writer or Laura Baggaley Writer—

Even if it's hard. And it is hard, isn't it?

Laura: Yes, it is hard. I think it does boost your confidence to be wearing the right stuff. There are practical performance tips as well. I would say practice a lot out loud.

Sometimes with my students, I'll see them rehearsing a speech in their head and I'll say, “Come on. No, no, do it out loud because you need your mouth to practice saying the words, there's a muscle memory involved.”

So if you are doing a reading of your own book, you might know the book inside out, but your mouth might not know it. If you read it out loud to the mirror to a friend multiple times, when you are feeling really nervous up on stage, your mouth will do some of the work because it already knows what it has to do.

It sounds really silly, but just practice, practice, practice and remember to slow down because adrenaline makes us all speed up.

Actors often say to me like, “Oh, what do I do about nerves?” When they're just starting out, they might be doing their first ever acting performance. And I say, “Well, it's part of performance. It's absolutely natural. It's a completely normal response to the situation.”

Even though you can't just tell your brain to calm down, you can physically relax your body. So you can lift your shoulders right up to your ears and then drop them down and feel the difference. That is physical relaxation.

So even if your brain and your stomach are churning, you can consciously physically relax your body and do that breathing. My favorite breathing is in for two out for three. Just extend the out breath and doing that, it's so obvious, but it does help.

Jo: Yes, and on that breathing and that practicing things with your mouth, that's so good.

The other thing with our own writing, if you're not reading it aloud or you don't do anything with audio, especially with literary writing, you can get some really long sentences. Where do you breathe? Decide where you are going to breathe.

Laura: Yes, absolutely. In fact, audiobook narrators will. I've done a lot of my own audiobook, so you mark up your script where you're going to breathe. So as an audiobook narrator, you prepare a document with that kind of thing if it's a difficult bit.

Jo: So if someone's got a reading coming up—I know you have got one coming up, you talked about that beforehand. So I guess another question would be, what do you pick?

Some people say, “Oh, well, I just start at the beginning,” but I've been to so many readings where I'm like, “I don't think that's the best section to read.” What bits do you pick?

I think, you know, pick an exciting bit.

Laura: Yes, exactly. I mean, sort of obvious, but if the beginning of your book is really intriguing and gets straight into the action, then go for it. You want to excite people, don't you? You want to inspire them to want to read more.

So you might even want to choose a bit that ends on a bit of a cliffhanger. Not right at the end, no spoilers, but choose an exciting bit and a bit that will be fun to read out loud, and then practice and decide how you are going to read it.

Really think about that performance element. How can you draw people in by varying the volume or the tempo of the reading? You know, you might want to just slow down a little bit on a suspenseful moment.

Are you going to do anything when you do dialogue? You know, I don't think anyone should do silly voices, by the way.

Jo: Unless you are an actor, and well, yes you can.

Laura: Yes. But you probably do want to speak slightly differently so that we know it's dialogue, for instance, you know?

Jo: Yes, I think, and also—

Because I think you still have to, as if you were doing an interview. You are always looking out to the audience now and then, or if you are doing a professional speaking engagement, you are meeting eyes of the audience.

I feel with the reading, like the worst readings I've seen is the author literally has got their nose in the book and doesn't even look up. They're just like rushing through it. So you do have to look up, don't you, to bring people in.

Laura: I couldn't agree more. It's so important. I mean, that kind of reading from a script while still connecting with the other character is a really basic part of actor training. Reading and connecting with the audience is so important.

It just comes from practice and knowing the text really, really well. Not quite memorizing it, but having such a clear sense of the shape of it and what happens in the sentences that you can look away from the page a lot.

Jo: Because at the end of the day, it's that—is it Maya Angelou? People will forget what you said, but they won't forget how they feel.

Laura: Yes.

Jo: So, you want people to go away feeling like, “Wow, that author was really great. I'm really interested in that book.” They might not remember what the hell you read, but if you read it in a way that connects with them. I think you just have to bring that energy, don't you, in some form.

Laura: Yes, and the other thing to remember is that people who come to book readings come because they enjoy it. They come because they want to have a good time. So if you are scared to make eye contact with them, you are sort of pushing them away a bit.

If you look around the room as people are arriving, if you look and you make eye contact, they'll probably smile at you because they're excited to hear from your book. They're probably excited to be there. At the very least, they want you to succeed.

So don't be scared of your audience. Think of them as a group of people who just want to share in the pleasure of hearing your work.

Jo: Yes, and I think just to encourage people, obviously both of us, I have different experience to you, but—

Laura: It really, really, really does. I mean, I used to be terrified of directing, of teaching, of leading workshops, of all the things that I have spent most of my life doing, the first time I did it.

Not just the first time, for a while it was nerve wracking, but it's a great feeling when you've done it, and then when you meet someone or they send you a message saying, “Oh, that was great.” You know, it's just wonderful.

Jo: Well, you mentioned workshops there, and I think this is another skill that's different to reading or speaking. A lot of writers teach at retreats and also attend retreats or doing classes.

Like, have you come across any particular challenges there?

Laura: Yes, I think for me, for like leading workshops, it's all about preparation and knowing what the purpose of the workshop is. So what do you want people to go away with? You know, what skill or experience are you trying to convey?

If you've done lots of prep, and you've got discussion topics and activities fulfilling that objective, then that's a confidence booster. Just knowing that you've got lots of stuff to fill the time.

Then if you are really struggling with nerves, make sure that you get the participants to do some of the work. Because you can set them a task. They're there to learn to do, and people learn by doing. They learn by experience.

So you can even have a task that they get stuck into straight away so that they're all busy writing while you are doing your careful breathing and getting command of yourself. Then get them to discuss. So try and structure it in a way that's helpful to you.

Jo: Yes, I think preparation is a huge part of helping introverts in particular. I don't know, I think it is correlated with introversion, like needing preparation. I sent you questions for this interview and we probably could have winged it, but I hate winging it. I need to have questions.

Laura: Me too.

Jo: We might not stick with them, but at least we both know that we are prepared and that makes me feel better, even if you don't even look at them. Some people come on and say, “Oh, I didn't even look at your questions.” Oh my goodness. No.

Laura: I love getting questions. I love being prepared. I would never go into a workshop or a rehearsal without a really clear sense of what I'm going to do because that's how the participants are going to get the best experience, I think, out of the workshop.

I think also just thinking about participants, if people who are introverted attend a workshop, they should think about how they can get their needs met because you don't want to go and be too shy and not get value from the workshop.

So, for instance, things like if you hate the thought of reading your work aloud for it to be critiqued, get in touch with the workshop leader or the tutor in advance or speak to them on the day or just slip them a note and just tell them that. They'll get someone else to read it out. You can find ways to mitigate your anxiety and still get the most out of it.

Jo: So we're almost out of time, but I did also want to ask you, you collaborate with a group of authors on a Substack magazine—I guess online magazine—called Bending the Arc. I always find collaborative author things a challenge. You are in theater, so you're used to collaboration. So tell us—

Laura: Well, I sort of have to say where it comes from because Bending the Arc, it emerged out of my exploration of climate fiction that I've been doing. It led me to Manda Scott's Thrutopia Masterclass, which was an online study course. So we were five of us teamed up in 2024 to study this masterclass for six months.

I don't know if people are familiar with the term thrutopia. I think it's still quite new. So it was a term that Rupert Reed came up with. He's an environmental academic and it means telling stories that aren't dystopias.

So not imagining how awful everything's going to be, but not utopias where you've got a kind of magically perfect future, but looking at thrutopia. How do we get through from here to a better place? So it fits in a lot with the Green Stories idea and the climate fiction.

So for this masterclass, we met every week for six months, watched a weekly video, did writing exercises, and discussed it. When we got to the end of it, we didn't want to stop. We didn't want to stop meeting.

We had generated some new, some work in this new genre, and we wanted a place to showcase it. Also, probably as importantly, we wanted to invite other writers to experiment with this kind of work as well. So we thought a Substack magazine would be a good way of doing this.

I feel like a lot of the experimental writing we do and group writing and everything is great for a certain amount of time. But then having obviously podcasted for years and done various things, things do not continue unless there is a benefit to the people involved at some point. So, for example, marketing your own books or something.

Laura: Yes. Yes. I mean, I think there's sort of two things. One is, I've made lots of really interesting connections with people that I just wouldn't have met without this.

There's five of us. So putting out a Substack with five people's networks, we were very quickly reaching a lot more people than just I would reach on my own. I have used it to promote my own work in that an extract from Dirt was in the first edition.

Also I think what I get out of it is we are like a writer support group. We critique each other's work, we champion each other, so it gives us a focus for our weekly meetings. We are meeting lots of other writers through it when we open up submissions so that it's coming out in two editions at the moment.

We're doing it twice a year, so we send out a flurry of posts. It's not like we put out a post every week. So it's a slightly different way of using Substack.

Laura: Oh, I would say I'm following all the advice on all the webinars and podcasts and Alliance of Independent Authors. I've got my author newsletter that I'm doing. Obviously Dirt is for children and young adults, so I'm going into schools, I'm doing talks in libraries, a blog tour, all those kinds of things.

Jo: Great.

Laura: So my website is LauraBaggaley.co.uk and that's Baggaley, B-A-double-G-A-L-E-Y. I'm on Instagram, @LauraBaggaleyWriter.

The Thrutopian Magazine, Bending the Arc is on Substack. If anyone is interested in the thrutopian genre or Green Stories or anything else we've talked about, drop me a line. I love talking about all this, and as I said, I love connecting with other writers.

Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Laura. That was great.

Laura: It's been a pleasure. Thank you for having me.

The post Performance Tips For Authors, And Writing Climate Fiction With Laura Baggaley first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How do you stand out as an author when thousands of books are published every day? What's the difference between having a logo and having a real brand that sells books? Is it possible to maintain your authentic voice while appealing to genre readers who seem more loyal to categories than authors? With Steve Brock

In the intro, Baker & Taylor shutting down [The Bottom Line]; Holiday promotions for your books [Productive indie fiction writer]; Writing Storybundle; Updating Shopify metadata — Hextom app; Publishing and change [Publishing Perspectives]; Paying AIs to read my books [Kevin Kelly]; signing my special editions at BookVault; The Critically Reflective Practitioner; Deliciously twisted Halloween book sale.

Today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, self-publishing with support, where you can get free formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Just go to www.draft2digital.com to get started.

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 

Steve Brock is a nonfiction author, photographer, and branding expert. His books include Hidden Travel, which he has talked about on my Books and Travel podcast, as well as The Creative Wild, Make Something Beautiful, and Brand Something Beautiful: A Branding Workbook for Artists, Writers, and Other Creatives.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

You can find Steve at BrandSomethingBeautiful.com or brandsomethingbeautiful.substack.com.

Joanna: Steve Brock is a nonfiction author, photographer, and branding expert. His books include Hidden Travel, which he has talked about on my Books and Travel podcast, as well as The Creative Wild, Make Something Beautiful, and Brand Something Beautiful: A Branding Workbook for Artists, Writers, and Other Creatives, which we are talking about today. Welcome to the show, Steve.

Steve: Thank you, Joanna. It's a pleasure to be here.

Joanna: So much to talk about. But first up—

Steve: I've written all my adult life, but it was more in the realms of school writing and then working in branding and marketing agencies, doing a lot of marketing copy and ad copy.

Then in 2007, I think, I had this sense of wanting to work on a book, which was the one that ended up becoming Hidden Travel. It only took 14 years to get that from idea to publication. Since then, as you mentioned, some other books, so I've embraced that.

The branding has come along actually in parallel, and it's a great point of how one area of your life, particularly your creative life, affects the other. Branding fundamentally is about telling your story well. It's understanding who you are, what you do, and what makes you different.

There's a lot of storytelling involved. So the more I focus and spend time on writing, particularly in the fiction realm, which has been mostly just short stories for me lately, the more that it has improved the work of branding.

I find branding interesting because, like we've talked about with travel, branding is really about exploration. It's diving deep into understanding something that is hidden and bringing that to light.

Joanna: Before we get back into branding—

Steve: No, those have always been a sideline. I have a novel that I started when I got stuck on Hidden Travel, and it's about maybe a third done, so that'll be the next effort that I focus on for the fiction realm. But no, the short stories have always just been more for my own craft building and just the enjoyment of it. I'm looking forward to actually reading yours that's coming out, or is it out?

Joanna: Well, as we record this, the Kickstarter has just finished. So depending on when this comes out, it may be available. The Buried and the Drowned is my short story collection.

I think it's interesting because you can play with short stories and you can explore, as you mentioned there, exploring and looking at hidden things. I think it's much easier to play around with short stories because you can just do such different things.

Let's come to branding, because the word “brand” is really difficult and people are already flinching. They're like, “Oh, I don't want to think about author brand.” So you mentioned a little bit there, but—

Steve: The word “brand” applies whether you are a major corporation, a nonprofit organization, a single solopreneur, or an author, because it's all about perception.

A lot of people think of branding as being about your logo or your tagline, or maybe the colors that you use in the background of your Instagram reels and having consistency there. That's part of it, but it's such a small part of it.

Branding is fundamentally about the overall perception that people have of you or your creative work. If I say, for example, Stephen King, or James Patterson, or Toni Morrison, there are going to be associations you have with each of those people, and those associations are actually what make up their brand.

The brand is a tricky thing because we think we can control it, but we can't. The brand exists in the minds of your audiences. So for writers, that means the minds of your readers out there.

Your job is to craft it, to know the story you want people to tell and be able to reinforce that over time so that they're telling the same story. Because if you do not know the story you want to tell, someone else is going to do it for you, and most likely in a way that's not going to be helpful to you.

So just think of brand almost like your reputation. What are you doing to build up your reputation? That's maybe the simplest way to think about brand and branding.

Joanna: For authors, I mean for me, I have Joanna Penn and I have J.F. Penn.

Steve: Yes and no. Because you show up in a lot of places. For example, on this podcast, you show up as both people, not your products necessarily, but you as a person that represents both of those brands.

When you have an author brand with multiple pen names, there are elements of that you may want to keep discrete and separate. But on the other hand, in your case, the real divide there is—to oversimplify—J.F. Penn for the fiction and Joanna Penn for the nonfiction.

You as the person and the brand that you represent, there's a lot of consistency between those two. What you don't want to do is if those two brand names or author names are different and they represent two completely different audiences that you really want to keep separate.

The example I give in the book is if you're writing both children's illustrated fiction books and you're also writing erotica, you do not want those two audiences to even really know that you're the same person. So you would keep those dramatically separate.

It's the same in the corporate world where we talk about what the fancy jargony term is “a brand spectrum.” You have, for example, a branded house like BMW, and then a house of brands like Procter & Gamble, which has a whole bunch of sub-brands underneath that, and some people may not even know that Procter & Gamble is behind those.

If your pen names are really different genres, you're probably more like a house of brands. Whereas if you have a consistent vibe or theme or thing you want to be known for, you would be more like a branded house, even if you have different pen names.

Joanna: I like “branded house” and I like “brand spectrum.” That feels more natural, I think. There are also two angles that potentially we can approach this from. Maybe we can take them separately.

One is new author or author wanting to start a new pen name, wanting to construct a brand from nothing, from scratch—actually control it and build it.

The other way is discovery branding, let's call it, where you look back at your work and you go, “I guess I've somehow created a brand. I just can't figure out really what it is, but I just keep writing stuff and it kind of gets created.”

Steve: That's a great question because I would say that discovering it is probably the more common approach.

One of the elements of your brand is your voice or your style, and I define those as three different things. Brand is the overarching perception. Style is the visual representation of the brand. Voice is the verbal or written representation.

I think that part of finding what your style and your voice are comes through discovery almost entirely. If you try to overthink it, it's really hard.

If you start that journey of discovery, focusing on a consistent and distinctive voice, it kind of emerges naturally and it's easy to step into that. There's a point though, even on a discovery brand as you name it, that it becomes intentional.

That's where you start to identify certain themes that have emerged that you want to be known for, and then you want to elevate those or amplify those. Honestly, that's like discovery writing. I'm kind of a hybrid myself. I will do an outline, but then I'll go off of it. Same thing here.

You're discovering your brand, but once you find, “Okay, that really resonates, that element really resonates with my audiences,” then you want to amplify that and make sure that gets incorporated into everything you're doing.

Now if you're just creating from scratch, you can actually define what those elements are. That's what the book is really about—how to create what we call a brand identity, which is just like a personal identity.

It's who you are, what are the elements, what are your characteristics, what are your personality traits, what's the promise that you make to your audiences? If you craft that from scratch, you can be very intentional.

I would say even there, just like a planner writer goes off script sometimes and starts going in directions they find that their characters have a life of their own, the same way here is you can map out that planned brand, but still be able to change it as you start to find things that resonate or that you want to lean into.

Joanna: One thing that I think of when it comes to brand is also book covers. Even if I used exactly the same name, if I used Joanna Penn for all of my books, my fiction would look quite different. Different color palette, different font, different design elements.

Steve: It's consistency. Consistency is the key to all branding, whether it's for authors or anyone. As long as people can recognize you—think about branding, where it came from. It came from the American West and branding cattle to know that they belonged to a particular ranch.

A brand has evolved, but it is essentially about identification. I want to know what that brand stands for, who is it and who's behind it, and what does it stand for? On covers, you want consistency, you want a through line.

Really that's another way of thinking about a brand—what is that through line that you're going to find?

Now this is a key for authors, which doesn't exist completely in the same way in other industries: there are many, many readers out there that will always be more loyal to a genre than they are to a brand.

If you have a reader who absolutely loves your thrillers, and then all of a sudden you decide you want to start writing something in the romance category, well, they may still like you and get your books, but they're not going to necessarily buy your romance because the brand's not as strong as the loyalty to the genre.

Joanna: It's interesting also because I feel like authors know publishers and know imprints, but most readers wouldn't even know. They don't know HarperCollins or they don't necessarily know an imprint. Most readers are not loyal to those brand name publishing houses.

Secondarily, they may or may not care about an author brand, and as you say, they're more likely to be faithful to a genre. Most of us can't remember the names of the authors whose books we read. It's a sad truth, but some people will remember, and those are the people who I guess we're trying to connect with.

Is that right, or—

Steve: It's a little bit of both because we're dealing with that really wacky, crazy inconsistent thing called human beings. We're all that way. Like Walt Whitman said, we contain multitudes and we do contradict ourselves.

What you're really going after is not really like Kevin Kelly's thousand true fans, but something close to that. It's finding that super fan, it's finding those people that are going to follow you no matter what you put out.

The nicest compliment I ever received was at a travel writer conference. I did a workshop and the head of it said he really liked the particular piece and he said, “You're on your way to being that person of whom it is said, ‘Whatever Steve Brock writes, I will read it. I will read anything from him.'”

I am nowhere near there. I don't know if I will ever achieve that, but that's kind of the goal that you want to be for those particular super fans.

Here's where the brand kicks in. You can still betray even the most loyal fan if you write something that doesn't feel true to who you are as an author.

For example, let's think of Richard Osman. Richard Osman, who wrote The Thursday Murder Club and all those—if he were to go and write a science fiction genre book, there would be a ton of people that would follow him and want to read that book.

If, however, that science fiction book had no humor in it, and the characters were downright mean to each other and it was really violent and graphic, he would not only lose those readers, but they would probably be hesitant to pick up the next book in The Thursday Murder Club series because he's kind of wrecked his brand.

Joanna: It's so interesting. I'm going to blame you Americans for this because we're not so sensitive here in the UK, but swearing is a really interesting thing.

When I wrote my first book, in my private life, I do swear sometimes. In my first book, I had naturally written as a British person, had included some words.

The reaction I had from my American readers, who were not bothered by the violence—and I don't write graphic violence, but I write thrillers, so there's some body count—the reaction to the swear words made me decide, this is back in 2009 now, I was like, “Okay, I won't swear in my books.”

So I don't use swear words at all. It's so interesting how there are a lot of different genre elements that might put people off, but—

Steve: Honestly, in today's world—and again, yes, you can blame America, but it has spread everywhere in terms of just how divided we are and how prickly we are in terms of topics and issues—basically anything you do will upset somebody. So you can't worry about that.

This is why you have to focus on that persona of that one true fan, your best fan, that you're writing towards. Because if you try to write towards every possible criticism, you're going to mess up. Just stick to that. Know that not everyone's going to be happy.

The example we give in a lot of corporate branding workshops: there's always a good number of people sitting around in the conference room with a MacBook or some Apple product, and I mention to them, “Do you realize that there are far more people in the world that absolutely rabidly hate Apple than there are people that love Apple?”

Just sheer numbers. If you look at PCs, for example, Apple has maybe an 8% market share. Is Apple a bad brand because so many people hate it? The reality is no, it's a great brand because those who do love it are even more passionate about it.

You're not going to be able to please everybody, but if you can please those who are in your tribe, then you're going to succeed. After all, we're in a “niches are riches” world. The more you niche down, the more profitable it is in today's world.

So don't be afraid of being true to who you are, but also being sensitive to who that audience is.

Joanna: I wasn't saying don't swear. I was saying if you decide to swear or not swear, stay consistent. The level of sex and the level of violence—if you're writing fiction, those three things are things that people's preferences generally stay pretty similar on within a brand.

So the mainstream thriller niche, those things—you could read a lot of mainstream thrillers and they would obey those rules as well.

You mentioned niching down and thinking about that, but one of the things you had in the book—and you have some really big questions in the book because one that is very difficult is: say you are writing action adventure thrillers.

So my Arcane series, a bit like Dan Brown. Dan Brown has a new book out, The Secret of Secrets, and I'm reading it at the moment and it makes me feel both happy because I write similar books to him, but also, “Oh no, I write similar books to him.”

You tackle this: how do I make my work distinctive and stand out amid all the noise? There is so much noise and I'm not competing with Dan Brown, by the way, but in terms of action adventure thrillers, there's tons of them.

Steve: I would say by knowing what it is that makes you distinctive. Part of it is your voice, part of it is your interest, part of it is just the way you go about framing sentences and plots and so forth.

Take, going back to Stephen King as an example—part of it, for loyal fans, they know this and they don't necessarily like it, but part of his brand is he doesn't end his books well. He's known in a lot of circles as just having pretty mediocre endings. But people don't care because they know that the journey to get there was really rewarding.

I would say things like that—being known for just a surprise ending, being known for—you know, the O. Henry Awards, right? We look at O. Henry simply because he was so good at those surprise twists at the end that we actually use his name today associated with that. Or even like Hemingway, his style, the short, curt sentences.

There are elements of your book that are going to be unique to you. For example, your voice, your human voice that comes across in your brand here. That's the main thing that I think people will identify with—separating out you and your products from you the person.

That can get kind of complex, but one of the key things to me is recognizing that your products are going to have a certain voice to them, and that voice in those genres may be different from genre to genre.

You as the author, as you're interfacing with the public, will have a consistent voice, but it's still different from you the person from Joanna Penn the person versus Joanna Penn the brand. Those are two different things, and that's hard for a lot of people. If you think about like an actor playing a character, it works pretty well.

We as authors, when we're publicly speaking or talking, there's a character that represents our brand that is going to be, in some ways the best of our personal characteristics, but it's not us. And that gives you some padding, some distance from it so that you can separate that out and be able to address it.

But going back to your point: knowing what the distinctives are of your own personality and the brand there, and being able to identify those and call those out—that's what helps you be distinctive.

If you do not know what those distinctives are, how you're different from Dan Brown in this particular case, it will be very difficult. And by just reading Dan Brown, it starts to seep in, and you might start writing like Dan Brown and you don't want to do that.

Joanna: I don't know, getting banned by the Vatican was the best marketing move he ever made! But on this, like you said there, if you don't know what makes you distinctive—from the side of many authors listening—

It is very hard. We have this thing in particularly the fiction community of finding your author voice. The reason we say “finding” it is because it's so hard, it's not obvious, and it takes practice writing lots of words and then something kind of emerges from it.

I think the question of what is distinctive—this is where AI can help. I've certainly done this: if people are happy uploading their work into ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini—read the terms and conditions as I always say—but you can then have a discussion with it as to what makes you distinctive, where do you fit in the spectrum of different authors.

I've actually found that the most useful tool, even though I've been doing this for a couple of decades, because it's so hard to figure it out yourself.

Steve: I totally agree with your last statement there, and I think that is a really good tactic for doing that. I would just add to it another thing that seems obvious, but I know so many authors who have never done this: You ask your audience. You ask your readers.

You take a dozen readers of any of your series, and you ask them, “Okay, why is this book different? What do you love most about this? What makes it distinctive from others?”

Now, they're not always going to be able to give you a clear idea, but pretty soon it's really interesting how themes start to emerge there when you start doing that.

I mentioned Richard Osman, for example. I could just whip off those as just three characteristics that make his books different: he has a really good sense of humor, his characters are all caring about each other, and he addresses age from a fresh perspective.

Many, many other authors address those three type of elements, but not in quite the same way. So in the same way with you, there's going to be elements that are going to be similar to Dan Brown and others, but that combination of those—that's something that only you do.

Joanna: I guess we've been talking a lot about fiction.

Steve: I think the principles are even clearer and in some ways easier to manage for nonfiction writers because you can talk about the subject. If you're thinking about nonfiction, it's like, “How do I become the thought leader expert on this?” And then what are the distinctive ways I'm going to treat things?

I can speak to it. Let's talk about from the standpoint of this book and from my own branding. I have been told by clients over the years—probably the best compliment I get is that “we've hired branding experts before, they come in, they tell us what they think our brand should be, and then we fire them.”

“We don't like consultants, but you don't act like a consultant. You came in and you listened and you heard us, and then you didn't tell us what we should be. You told us what we already knew, but we didn't have the words to use to explain that.”

So that tells me that my own brand is: there's a high degree of empathy, there's a high degree of listening, but there's also an element of synthesis. I can start to unpack those and say, “Okay, this is why my nonfiction book or works, in particular this book on branding for artists and writers, is going to be different.”

Another element would be simplifying. I've seen too many organizations, particularly working with nonprofits, that fail because they've tried to take on too much. So a key part of this is making it simple.

You start to understand what those elements—simplicity, empathy, synthesis—those things can become brand points, characteristics, distinctives, that then I could apply to other nonfiction works that I do.

Joanna: So then once we've got these, I guess, quite nebulous words around branding, how do we turn that into effective book marketing?

Steve: I would say listen to your episode from, I think it was in August, where you read from Marketing for Authors, and you have the entire list of the specifics there. So those are the tactics that you can do in terms of selling more books.

Marketing is downstream from branding. But here's how branding can help you sell more books—two ways: internal and external.

First is the internal. Branding gives you the clarity of the messages that you want to communicate because it gives you a sense of what it is that you're really about. There's almost this idea of mindset that comes and the confidence that comes from having that clarity about what you stand for, what you believe.

One of the examples in the book is this exercise of “I believe… I exist to…” Just that simple sense of knowing what your purpose is and your beliefs and values are—that alone can help provide that clarity. So there's clarity, there's mindset, there's confidence.

Externally, your messaging becomes so much clearer because you know how to talk about yourself. That's the thing—authors, we are great at telling stories, but we're terrible at telling our own story.

That's what branding is about, is helping you to tell your own story better, so it builds the confidence, gives you the story that you want others to tell so that they can in turn tell others about you.

That's a huge piece of it. It's like the game of telephone. If you have a very clear and consistent message, they can tell others about you in a way that they couldn't before.

I think another aspect about this is that quite frankly, most authors can go out there and ask ChatGPT, “Give me 20 tactics that I need to do to market my book,” and you'll get them right away. There's no lack of access to information on how to market your book out there. The problem is we don't do it.

The reason we don't do it is because usually we're afraid. We're either afraid of what might happen, what people might think. We don't think we know enough to do it. We do all these things where we do not act.

Part of the beauty of the brand—you say it's nebulous concepts, but I would say that the nebulous concepts, the intangibles of life: trust, relationships, love, friendship, hope, accomplishment. Those are all nebulous concepts, but those are also the most powerful drivers that we have in life.

I think the same thing is here. You get that nebulous concept of knowing what you're doing and how you're different and how to tell your story better, and that builds your confidence. So you are far more likely to engage in doing those tactics that are going to help you sell the books.

Joanna: I wonder if it's also that in book marketing we do rely a lot on things like paid ads where the book cover is the thing that draws people in, and so having this sort of whole-self approach is less used.

Is that a good way for authors to think about pitching different podcasts around elements of their brand—in terms of their story behind the books, the person behind the books?

Steve: Yes, I think podcast is one channel for that. I mean, your blog, if you have one, even your social media—all of those are ways for the audience to connect with you as the author, and you're absolutely spot on.

Because the problem a lot of times with author marketing is we confuse the author brand—which is almost like the equivalent of an organizational brand, but you're just a one-person organization—we confuse that with a product brand. The book itself is a product. It has in some ways its own brand, so it has to relate.

Just like I'm selling products on a shelf in a store, you're going to have one reaction to the product itself, and you're going to compare that to other products on the shelf.

Over time, if you find that there is a particular product from a particular manufacturer that you really like, you're going to be more loyal and you're going to start looking for other products in that line.

So the podcast, the blog, all these other touchpoints give people a way to engage with you so they know what other products… Here's a key thing about all this: think in terms of ecosystems.

We tend to think in terms of one-offs, like, “Oh, okay, I've got to work on this particular book. I'm launching this particular book. I'm doing the Facebook ads for this particular book,” and not thinking about how it relates back.

To your earlier question or comment about having consistency in the book covers, same type of thing. You want people to know that there is this through line, that there's this consistent connection back to something more.

If they can connect that to you as a person through the podcast or other ways of having more of the personality of you and everything else, all the better.

Joanna: I did want to also talk to you about the product itself, your book, which is this workbook. It's more than a workbook though because I think I have called some of my workbooks—they really only just contain the questions, not the full text.

Mine are also not designed and laid out as yours is. It really is a beautiful product in the layout, in the way it's done, and it makes me want to do better with mine. I wondered if you could maybe—

Steve: Thank you for that. I would say thank you also because unbeknownst to you, you were actually one of the reasons for this particular format.

It was probably a year or so ago on one of the podcasts where you said, “Amazon's pulling my workbooks because they're pulling everybody's workbooks because they're finding that people are using AI to say, ‘Hey, Claude, give me 40 different questions about this topic and some exercises,' and then they add in some fill-in-the-blank lines and publish it on Amazon.”

So the idea of that traditional fill-in-the-blank workbook, I think it made me hesitant to try something like that.

The other thing was I started this off as a course, and so the course creation—I had a lot of the graphics and different things in place, and it just ended up being that this became a hybrid.

So it's both a workbook and a book, but I think this is key, and I would say for a lot of listeners, if you're doing something particularly like this in nonfiction, to consider this approach.

It's not just a hybrid from a formatting standpoint, it's a hybrid in terms of the outcome or the goal of the book. Here's the thing I say in the book: The goal of this book is not to make you an expert on branding. The goal of this book is to help you create your own creative brand.

So this book, I do not care. After you're done with it, you've filled it in, it's an artifact of your learning. Every other book I've worked on has always been about educating, and this one is about accomplishment.

I think people today—we have too much information out there. People want to achieve things and get things done, and so the more that you can think of formats that are going to help with that, I think the better.

The other thing about it is breaking it down to smaller bites and takeaways that people can use.

I'm also mindful of just the positioning of it. I think it was Jonah Berger in his book Contagious, who talks about venture capitalists and how when they're evaluating a company, they look at it and say, “Is this company a vitamin or a painkiller?”

A vitamin is something that's very good for you and very useful and very healthy, but you can put it off. A painkiller—if you got pain, you need it right away.

My previous book, The Creative Wild on creativity, it was very vitamin-like. I would actually say that even Hidden Travel was more of a vitamin. It's good for you, it's interesting, it's about meaningful travel, all of that. But it's not a pressing felt need for a lot of people.

I think this book on branding for those who are struggling with marketing and everything—I positioned this one, it really is more of a painkiller. So the question for all of you out there listening is—

Then look at other formats that are related to it. Another key aspect of this is that the workbook has a paper and a Kindle version, but then the worksheets—I call them worksheets—I have two versions: a Google Doc version and a fillable or editable PDF version that are on my website that have all the questions.

It doesn't have all the explanatory text, but it has all the questions and all the fields. But what I'm doing is I'm sending people to my website and they have to sign up for it. So now all of a sudden you've got them into the broader ecosystem there. And there could be follow-ups, right?

You've already written the marketing book, so I don't need to do that, but I could take any chapter and go into much more detail about it. I could do this and there's a tiny element in this thing on choose-your-own-adventure.

There are ways of formatting a book so it's more of a choose-your-own-adventure or a scavenger hunt, which is more of a guidebook that could help people. You can have additional merchandise that's related to it. All these different things.

I have a friend, Naomi Kinsman, who has a “creativity in a box” type of thing. So these boxed elements, lots of ancillary products that you can add to that for multiple streams of income as well.

Joanna: Your book also leads to speaking engagements. It really is—it's beautiful. I do want to emphasize that, but you've also made it harder on yourself. So one of the reasons that we as independent authors have done more basic workbooks and have done more basic books is because of the cost of production. I wondered—

Or are there different versions of the print edition for, say, Amazon print-on-demand versus selling from your website, for example? Because it looks very high quality.

Steve: Yes, but it is the same for all of us, right? The more heavy lifting you do upfront, the easier you make it for others. So yes, it has been a pain. I will not argue about that.

I think the writing of this was the easiest book of all because it's just 27 years worth of expertise that I could just—I didn't have to research anything. I just whipped it out. That part was easy.

Formatting it, getting into all that—pain in the ankle. But I think that it makes it more accessible for people, because a lot of people have the same reaction that you have. With the title, like Brand Something Beautiful, you kind of want it to look that way.

That has been actually an allure to people. I don't think that a lot of the graphics got translated into the Kindle version of it. The tablet version that's full color works, the Kindle version—I had to scale down a lot. But that's okay because it still delivers the product as well.

Joanna: I love AI, everybody knows that, and I use it a lot, but I also don't like the sort of mass-produced books that are coming out. So anyone who puts more effort into physical production of beautiful products is going to stand out.

I mentioned about what is it that makes you distinctive, and I'm at this kind of point in my career where I also want to be known for making beautiful books. So I love that you've used the word “beautiful.” We all love beautiful books and we buy stuff because we love covers and we love the foil, and we love all the cool stuff.

Just so people know, on your website, brandsomethingbeautiful.com, you can see examples of the interior pages so people can see how that is done.

Steve: I worked with the designer actually, though the full disclosure is my son is a graphic designer and a brilliant one. So he did all the graphic elements.

What I did was—and this is taking the extra step—I remember there was, I think it was Steve Zaillian, some producer in Hollywood years ago who's been dramatically successful, and someone said, “How did you become so good at this?” And he said, “Because I looked around at the work that needed to be done and I looked at the level of effort that other people were making, and I just did a little bit more.”

I think on here, I upped my game using Adobe InDesign for the layouts and things like that. I would encourage people that there's so much you can do in Canva these days. Just dive into it and get competent in it. But I think there are also times when you do want some professional design help on it as well.

Joanna: It's interesting you mentioned Canva because I'm sure you've heard me talk about my gothic cathedral book, and over the summer I was looking at my photos,and obviously you are a photographer as well and you do travel stuff, and I was like, “Oh my goodness, there's so many ways this book could go in terms of how the beautiful layout is done.”

It almost just opens up a completely different form of creativity, even though that's not something I'm focusing on right now because it feels like a whole other area. I also feel like it does help set us apart. As you said, it's that extra effort in terms of making a beautiful interior as well as a beautiful cover.

I think nonfiction, this is easier because, fiction, obviously the inside of a novel is plain text mostly—you can do some extra title pages or maps or whatever, but I think these nonfiction books can have all kinds of elements of design that help people: pull-outs and quotes and diagrams and all this kind of thing.

Steve: It totally is. I just read a book—we're about to head off to Portugal soon, just for vacation—but I was reading a book that takes place in Lisbon called The Murderer's Ape, like ape as in gorilla. It's about a gorilla who can speak and is an engineer on this guy's boat.

The long story of it is at the beginning of each chapter are just kind of these beautiful hand-drawn pen and ink illustrations, and just having that makes it such a richer experience. Little things like that.

So there's a case where, if I had more time in my life and everything, I would be focusing on illustrated adult books, which are fictional like a novel, but that I illustrate.

What is it? The T.S. Spivet by… can't remember his name. They made it into a movie, but The Life of T.S. Spivet. Anyway, he does that. It's a brilliant book because of the illustrations that are on the margins of almost every single page. So there are ways of doing that even in fiction.

Joanna: We've all got to do more creative stuff in order to stand out, and for ourselves as well as for the readers. It kind of just brings the material alive. So I think that's really cool.

But you mentioned there heading off to Portugal, and you and I connected around our love of travel. Hidden Travel I think is a wonderful book and you came on my Books and Travel podcast and we talked about that.

This is an interesting thing, right? Even for your brand, because brandsomethingbeautiful.com to me doesn't look like the same person who did Hidden Travel. The conversation we had around that, to me, is very different conversation to the one we've had today.

Steve: Oh, you called me out because it's like, you know, do what I say, not what I do. Because I totally feel that way. Honestly, from my own brand and what I'm trying to do, I probably should. You know, what is it? The cobbler's children have no shoes.

Joanna: The cobbler's children have no shoes or something like that.

Steve: Right, exactly. Well, but the answer to that is, what you're going to see over time is I start to build out more of particularly some of the social media stuff for Brand Something Beautiful, and this goes back to the idea of confidence.

Once the book is done, I'm into getting it out there. I'm like you, I do not like video, I do not like to be on video, et cetera. So I've never done anything, but I decided for this book I'm going to do Instagram reels.

One of the things I did was—I think it was either Gemini or ChatGPT—I just said, “Okay, here are the themes that I want to cover. These are going to be like blog posts and Substack type of things and LinkedIn articles over the next 12 weeks. Give me—and I'm going to be in these places in Portugal. I want to create reels that illustrate these points. Give me some ideas.”

It came out with some really wonderful ideas like the 25th of April Bridge in Lisbon. It said the point is that one of the points in the book is that the brand is the bridge between the making of something beautiful and the marketing of it.

Most people, artists especially, and writers, we hate marketing, but if you do the branding right, it's the bridge between it, so it makes the marketing easier. And so then have a shot of me holding the book in front of the bridge and blah, blah, blah.

Joanna: Nice. That is great, actually, that's a really good prompt. Thank you for that.

Steve: Yes. So those type of things. I'm definitely using those, so you will start to see a connection between the travel and the brand, but it will emerge over time because in a way, I have my brandwallop.com, which is the company, the agency I've run for decades.

That's really more for corporations and nonprofits. So this Brand Something Beautiful is really more the individual brand type of stuff. It is exactly what you were talking about earlier. There's some intentionality to it. I have not fully lived and leaned into that as much.

The travel and adventure—because the theme of my other book, The Creative Wild, was about what does it mean to create adventurously? It really is like a sequel to Hidden Travel in the sense of what do we learn from travel that we can apply to our creativity?

How do you create adventurously? What does that mean? What does that look like? How does discovery fit into creativity? All of that type of thing.

So that will all get woven in there. But the main thing of all is that even if it never shows up in my external artifacts and manifestation of the brand, it is affecting me as a person, as a creative.

As you know, in fact, one of the quotes—I paraphrase, I should say—from you, I think it was on the St… was it St. Cuthbert, the one you did in the southern part of England?

Joanna: The Pilgrims Way to Canterbury.

Steve: Okay, the Pilgrims Way. You said something after that in one of the podcasts, which I have told so many other people because it is so true. When I heard you, it's like, “Okay, validation.”

It was this: “I went on this pilgrimage thinking I would have all this time walking and I would have all this time to come up with new ideas. And I had like virtually none on the trip itself.”

Joanna: Hmm.

Steve: But then two weeks later, after I got back, I couldn't stop the ideas. I was overwhelmed with all the new ideas that came, and to me that's the benefit of travel for all of us.

Yes, you can use the sites for, if you're writing a novel, for getting the research. I know you love doing that and that's a key piece of it, but just the experience of getting out of your comfort zone, being in a foreign place, particularly where your senses are picking up on things.

You notice things better, you pay better attention. All of that is going to help you as a creative.

Joanna: It's so interesting and I'm glad we kind of finished with your own personal journey of growing into this other side of yourself as well, or trying to knit them together. I think that's brilliant. It certainly shows that we're all on this journey. This is a lifetime of experience and we just keep creating.

Steve: It is absolutely true, and that would be one thing I didn't mention earlier, really quickly, that relates to this in terms of those other streams of income: this idea of combinatorial thinking, where everything you do affects everything else in a good way.

To me in terms of multiple streams of income, the question is, rather than thinking of these one-offs, but this idea of ecosystems—how it all relates to each other and how can I leverage that?

I may do this, but I would say advice to anyone out there is: instead of selling individual courses—not instead of, in addition to selling like individual courses and books—start thinking in terms of membership programs.

There's a ton of membership programs out there, but most of those memberships, or even like the subscriptions, like if you have a paid subscription on Substack or something like that, or even Patreon, is to treat those less as just like this gathering place for people to get additional content, but to make it more achievement-oriented.

What can I accomplish? Are there steps? Think in terms of the audience's pathways and their journey through that, so that membership has these elements of like, “I'm gaining something and I'm growing through this.”

Key to that is gamification. Things like levels of rewards, of access, of just status. All these different things we can learn from gamification that you can be applying to that.

Quite frankly, I don't think you have done this overtly or consciously, Joanna, but I think you do a great job of that. Like with your Patreon, you don't just say, “Okay, I'm going to give you access to just additional content.”

Yes, you do that, but in addition, there's a sense of belonging, there's a sense of participation, there's a sense of access that you get to you. And all those little elements really are about the key.

The last section of Brand Something Beautiful is all about creating experiences of delight rather than trying to see your audience as someone you want to sell to. It's someone you want to delight. So what do you do? What can you do with every little touchpoint?

All these little touchpoints add up. So whether it's travel and how that helps us to learn new things, or it's intentionally using your multiple streams of income—all the different books, merch, all that stuff coming together. If you focus on it being about delighting your audience, it just changes the whole way you look at them.

Joanna: Fantastic.

Steve: Probably the easiest way for the purposes here would be BrandSomethingBeautiful.com or Substack, brandsomethingbeautiful.substack.com.

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

Steve: Thank you.

The post Brand Something Beautiful: How Authors Can Stand Out In A Crowded Market with Steve Brock first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How do you know when it's time to wrap up one phase of your life and move on to the next? What's the secret to staying connected as a writer when you're working alone? And if you have multiple passions and endless ideas, how do you actually finish things instead of constantly starting new projects? Pilar Orti gives her tips in this interview.

In the intro, Writing Storybundle; An honest accounting from an extensive self audit of an indie author publishing business [The Author Stack]; Money books; Direct purchases through ChatGPT; Book discovery and GEO; The ultimate guide to AEO [Lenny's Podcast]; Conversions through Chat [SearchEngineLand]; SORA video app; AI for eCommerce and Amazon Sellers; Deliciously twisted Halloween book sale.

This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors.

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 

Pilar Orti is a nonfiction and memoir author, as well as a voiceover artist, podcaster, and Pilates instructor.

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

Show Notes

You can find Pilar at PilarWrites.com or on LinkedIn.

Jo: Pilar Orti is a nonfiction and memoir author, as well as a voiceover artist, podcaster, and Pilates instructor. So welcome to the show, Pilar.

Pilar: Thank you very much, Jo. Hello everyone. Hello creatives. It's exciting to talk to you.

Pilar: I'm going to try and give you the bit that's more related to writing, because if not, we'll be here for half an hour just with me bubbling on.

I always liked writing, and I was thinking about this, I wrote my first play to be performed when I was seven. I got all my friends together and we did this little show. I think it was about a soldier or something, I don't know why.

All throughout my teens I kept writing plays and got my friends together to do them, and we put on the shows. Looking back, I think for me writing has always been about sharing. All the writing I've done, I've always wanted it to be public, so I've never journaled or anything like that.

I continued writing plays. Eventually I set up a theater company with a friend and we did some plays. Then I did a translation of a Lorca play, When Five Years Pass. That was the first time that I started to think that my work could be published in some way.

So I looked for literary managers in theaters to see if they were interested in the show. I even sent it to Samuel French and Oberon Books, all these small presses that specialized in theater. They all came back with that same thing: “It's a great translation, but it's really niche and nobody's going to want to see this Lorca play.”

So I started to think about how to put it out there and came across self-publishing. Once I saw that my work could get out there relatively easily—I didn't have to go through the whole trying to find a publisher process—I started to write a lot more.

I continued doing some stuff for the theater company and then I started blogging as well. We're talking now about the end of the 90s, 2000s.

Then I wrote a book called The A to Z of Spanish Culture, which was supposed to be a nice project with lots of friends. We would each take a letter of the alphabet and of course, like these projects go, everyone dropped out and I ended up doing the whole thing myself.

Jo: We should just say at this point, you're Spanish.

Pilar: So I went to an English school. I landed there when I was five, in Madrid. So I'm bilingual. My first written language is English and my first spoken language is Spanish. Unfortunately I've dropped writing in Spanish and I really struggle, but my entire academic career has also been in English.

So I think English is the language I feel most comfortable in when I'm writing. Everything I've written has been in English.

Looking at The A to Z of Spanish Culture, I was sharing an office with a theater company and a couple of other theater companies at the time. At some point I mentioned this book, and someone said, “Oh, you're a writer or you want to publish some books. You have to listen to this great podcast called The Creative Penn.”

That was my gateway into the whole world of podcasting. I mean, I knew about podcasting because I'm also a voiceover artist—I've been one since '98—but that really opened up that world.

So I continued writing, and my relationship with writing up to a couple of years ago was just that I wrote mainly nonfiction about things I wanted to write about, looking back at where I was at that time.

Then I published a book on physical theater, a very small book, just as I was leaving the theater company. I also wrote a little book about my life as a voiceover as I saw that work was starting to dry out. I think I'm wrapping up parts of my life with books.

Last year, as I came to the end of my consultancy career talking about working with remote teams, I spent some time just writing, either editing something I was working on or writing. I decided after trying it for a few months that now was the time to write all those books

I wanted to write and to also start looking at my writing as the main thing I was focusing on, because as you said, I always do lots of things. So that's where I am with the writing.

Jo: I like this idea of wrapping up parts of your life with books. I actually think that's a really interesting comment and I definitely feel that. I guess I've started to do that too. I feel that it's true for me, for my fiction as well.

My Desecration, Delirium and Deviance series, I wrote when we were in London and they're about London. When I moved to Bath, I wrote my Matt Walker series, which was set in Bath. Then the Pilgrimage book was about that pilgrimage. So I really like that insight, that sort of wrapping up parts of your life with books.

Just coming back, you said you finished the consulting side. Was that a decision? I really wanted to get your insights on this finishing up things.

Pilar: It's a mixture of things and I think also a great reflection of why do we end things, especially professional ones. I set up a consultancy called “Virtual Not Distant” around maybe nine, ten years ago to help leaders of remote teams and remote teams. Of course that was a different world then.

Then through the pandemic, as we know, it all exploded. So I started to get more work, but maybe not the kind of work I really wanted to do. I was coming into helping remote teams and remote work as an alternative way of working and something that could be embraced and set up carefully and in a sustainable way.

What I found after all the lockdowns and all the remote work—the forced remote work—and as organizations started to adopt maybe a little bit more flexible working, hybrid work, the clients or the people I would end up working with were not the ones that I should be helping.

Or at least I couldn't help them in the way I wanted to help them because I have my vision. What had been left was a very different world. I just wasn't comfortable anymore with what I was finding when I was going in.

At the same time, let's be honest, the work started to dry up. There wasn't this need anymore for people who needed to work remotel. They'd figured out some version that worked more or less for them. I see it with my peers as well, that the whole cohort, almost everyone has pivoted or shifted.

So it was a mixture of both. I have to say that I don't think the market wanted me anymore as much, because before the pandemic it was great fun. But also I couldn't shape that way of working like I wanted to. So I decided to write more instead about it, as you say, to wrap up.

Jo: That's interesting. So this new book, Connection and Disconnection in Remote Teams, this is really, as you've said, summing up all your thoughts and what your ideal situation is, I guess. Lots of people listening work their day jobs separately and often write alone.

Writers, we're often disconnected in many ways and we are not really in teams, but certainly I feel like connection and disconnection are huge themes for writers.

Pilar: Unfortunately one of the reasons I left consultancy was because all my answers were “it depends,” and that's why I moved into Pilates teaching because that is very set and “it depends” very little. A few things—when I'm talking about wrapping up, I think that's going to be my theme.

In 2019, this season of Connection and Disconnection in Remote Teams was a podcast season that I created with a collaborator and with lots of other people actually, to talk about this theme of loneliness in remote teams, because we saw that was something that remote teams were struggling with a lot then.

We created a seven-part episode series around it. For all these years I've been looking back at that and thinking there's a lot of material here which could be useful for a lot of people. We don't want this loneliness thing of working alone becoming a problem because of loneliness.

What this book shows, what the podcast showed, and my co-author Bree Katy actually led most of those interviews, is that you need a high level of self-awareness to really find how you connect with others and then a level of awareness about how other people like to connect. So that's why it really “it depends.”

I think that level of self-awareness is:

Like I belong with other professionals? Like I connect to my collaborators? What is it about it? I came up with three things which you can look at.

Do you connect across the work? So is that where you really get your value of “Yes, we're doing something together and this is interesting. This makes me want to be with you. We are together in this.” So is it across the work, or is it around the work?

Is it actually the conversations like this one, Joanna, that we're having, which is around what's happening? Or is it away from the work? So some people do not connect through the work they do, but they really connect with somebody else's personal story or personal life or hobbies, etc.

I think work connection has a general meaning that's out there, but it's very wide. In understanding how you connect or when you prefer to connect in each way—because that also happens—then you can seek those opportunities, which can be, as you're saying, in our case, online communities.

But is it enough to be on a forum-type community and that's enough for you to feel like you belong? Or do you actually need to find people who will go on a Zoom call with you? The technology has opened up lots of avenues and this is what's exciting and complicated.

If you're someone who connects through writing and through being okay being a little bit anonymous, you've got that. And if you're someone who likes to have a more interactive experience, seeing people and being real time, you can look for meetups online or in person.

Jo: I think, like you said, it's understanding yourself and being self-aware and then respecting other people too. For example, we've emailed for many years. I was on your podcast years ago, but we've not hung out. Right now we're on audio only. We're not on video because I prefer audio, especially later in the day.

So we are connected, but we are not closely connected. And yet, I would say we're aware of each other and we are in a sort of adjoining community. That's completely different from somebody who wants to be on video talking to people on Slack every day, wanting to be always chatting with other people.

We have to learn how we can do this sustainably because that's the other thing, isn't it? I can do video, but it's so tiring to me that I can't do it sustainably.

Pilar: And I think you mentioned as well, respecting other people. I would add to that asking people and learning to find out about other people. That's how we can respect each other.

The learning aspect, there's something that my friend Lisette Sutherland is very hot on, which are called personal manual. These are things that people in remote teams do where they say how they work best or how they prefer to connect with other people or how they like to spend their day.

Because what happens when you're away from people is that you're missing a lot of information and sometimes we have to make this information explicit.

If I'm trying to build a relationship, a professional relationship with someone, or if I want to connect a little bit more around the work, then I can say a little bit more about, “Well, I much prefer an audio conversation next time. Can we do audio?”

Or “Hey, I had a great time doing this video thing. Do you ever meet up with other colleagues?” or “When we talk together, do you prefer email?”

I think questioning how other people want to connect as well will help us then to strengthen those relationships. Sometimes we can maybe try something that we hadn't tried before or find out how other people are doing it.

For example, I get a lot of pleasure from reading people's comments on Google Docs when I'm working on something together. So for me, working on a shared document really gives me something more than if an email is coming backwards and forwards because the comments are always there.

In a way, when I go into a Google Doc, it's like I'm going to see someone else. I'm going to see the people I'm working with in the shared document. So that says to me, okay, if I can, I'll ask if we can work in this way.

Whereas other people prefer email for whatever reason, or audio as well. Audio recordings. So I think, like you said, being aware of all the different modes of communication and seeing when we go, “Ah, yes, okay. Now I'm really comfortable,” or “I'm really excited now about this.”

Jo: It's funny, I was just thinking then, a lot of people pitch me by sending a video and I never ever, ever, ever, ever will click on any video if they recorded some Loom or even a personalized YouTube video. I literally will never look at them.

Even people will send me an audio message and then expect me to listen to it. Even though I am generally audio, I'm like, definitely not. So this is about understanding for pitching as well.

It's also fascinating to me that you love Google Doc comments because I hate that too. Is it our age as well, do you think? I'm 50 and I feel like Slack messaging, for example, completely passed me by.

Pilar: I don't think it's age because I'm only three years older than you. As you say, I love Slack, but I have a way of using it. That's another thing, this feels very strange, but when you're working with someone in remote teams, you have to make explicit things like this.

So if you decide you're going to use Slack, okay, how are we going to use it? When can I get you urgently? And is it okay to wait two days to reply to your message? It is, by the way, unless it's urgent. But it's the use of it. That's another very important thing, Joanna.

When we are going more into the working together or even in communities, the technology is really widespread, is ubiquitous at the moment, and a lot of people have used either this technology or something similar. We all have our own ways of doing it.

So we need to agree on one or two things so that we use it in the same way, so that we don't get frustrated. For example, if you prefer to wait three or four days, and I'm the one that wants everything urgently.

I think it's just being explicit. I don't really know because I only worked with people who were like 10 years younger or, well, my collaborator Bree is 20 years younger and we got on well with the docs.

Jo: Yes. It's just not imposing judgment on other people based on how they prefer to do things. It's just like, well, we have to agree on a way to work together. But as you said, you've co-written this book, Connection and Disconnection, with a writer in Australia without meeting in person. So obviously you use Google Docs, but—

Pilar: I love co-writing, and to be honest, I've been waiting to co-write a book for ages. I did co-create a book together, which was a collection of blog posts with my colleague Maya Middlemiss, a long time ago.

This has been getting something almost from scratch, so I think the fact that we had done that podcast season is important because we'd already worked together. So there were a couple of things that meant that the book got—as I'm talking to you, it's not finished yet, but hopefully when this comes out, it will be at least on preorder.

There were a few things: one, we already had the material, but the material needed shaping. That actually took a few years because we started one process that didn't work and then we started a new process which has worked.

I think that has been finding that we could both hook onto a process that was sustainable and that would get us both onto the computer. That's been really important.

I'd met Bree more or less a few times working on the season together. We also did do about a monthly catch-up on Zoom or Google Hangouts, whatever, online. I think that was quite important because it just meant that we could just relax a little bit more in the conversation, and the conversation could go anywhere.

Of course we could make faster decisions, so we had that. We didn't have that as a rule, but it happened and neither of us are very meeting people. So we were fine with that.

You would've hated this process—we had so many Google Docs. But what we decided was instead of using a chat-based application or email, we started talking in a Google document. It could be a Word document, so a shared document where we would work a little bit on the book.

Then we'd check out at the end of the day and we just write a few things. Or if something had happened in our personal lives that the other person needed to know, we wrote it there.

What's really nice about that is, one, we didn't end up with more chat messages. We always knew our conversation was only there, our written conversation. And now we have a record. We have a whole year of this project from the start, right to the end. We might not do anything with it, but it's really nice to have.

From the practical point of view of working on the text, we've used shared documents. We split up the chapters—we had one person writing the first draft and then we went in and commented, etc.

The one thing I do have to say, and thanks to you, Joanna, because you've introduced me to generative AI—I'd been playing a lot with ChatGPT, Claude, feeding into my own writing work, and that's why I approached Bree again last year in 2024 to start to work on this again.

We'd already tried to put the book together and we'd found it very daunting because we had transcripts from seven episodes plus all the full interviews of about seven or eight guests that Bree had done. We were finding it really difficult to come to the page.

So I ran by her, I said, “What do you feel about generative AI?” I ran some ideas via Claude. I asked it to maybe generate some text based on the transcripts from our interviews. We saw that there could be something there. What Bree was saying was really useful for her was the fact that we created a project in Claude, which had all the transcripts.

So you could say, “Oh, at some point we talked about somebody who had moved to the middle of nowhere and suddenly realized that their career prospects had decreased or something. Who was that? What episode was that in and what did they say?”

The other thing was that for some chunks it started to give us a common voice. It's not that Claude was writing everything, but it started to smooth the differences in both our voices. So we found one voice for the book without, and you can't really tell who's writing which bit, but it's still us. It's really still us.

So it's been interesting. We've had technology as an intermediary, not just in the communication process, but also in the writing process.

Jo: I think that's great. I certainly think these tools are really useful for when you have your own material. I'd also suggest to people listening, Google's Notebook LM, where you can actually load the transcripts and it will only use those. Whereas the other models will kind of bring insights from the rest of the model. So I think that's super useful.

You did mention that you basically failed the first time around and the process didn't work the first time around, so you said it was just too daunting. Was it literally just the volume of stuff and you didn't know where to start?

What other insights do you have from failing that first time around? Because I feel like a lot of people when they approach any sort of big project, do maybe fail at things and then they don't come back to it.

Pilar: I think it was the fact that we were always coming to a blank page. So we had the material, and especially Bree, she was closer to the material and she had less time than I had as well. So I think time was definitely a factor, which is why I went back to her and said, “Look, I think this can save us some time,” as well as help us in other ways. So time was really a factor.

The blank page was a factor, whereas this time we felt that we could start with something, even if it was that I prompted the generative AI with this prompt to write, I don't know, chapter one, and this is what it's come up with.

“Okay. Well I like this point. I like this point. Yes. Okay. So we can now work on chapter one, but at least we've got something that we could both start from as well,” which is quite important.

So I think it was the classic, it was time and it was the blank page, and also this feeling of how we had organized the material. Again, technology, you need to find the right space for you to work in.

We were using Notion, which has a lot of moving parts, and in the end we just went back to transcripts, PDFs, Google Doc, which are nicely set in our folder. So that was another learning—we needed our own office space that worked for us and the first time it didn't quite work and the second time it helped us.

Jo: I've tried Notion several times. I even had like a tutorial with someone and it just didn't work for me. It didn't click at all. I think this is really important for people listening.

You can't force it into a different way. Try things. I have tried Notion several times and I'm like, no, I just cannot get it. I still use Scrivener for my first drafts and I just paste everything into Scrivener.

When I co-write, I have co-written several times using Google Drive and Google Docs as the sort of beginning place. It is still probably the simplest idea, isn't it?

Pilar: Yes. I think Google Docs is definitely simple because you've got a blank page, but now of course you have to push away the AI that's trying to do everything.

I think what you said about why—what was it about the first time that didn't work—is really important because this is something that is often missing, one as individuals and then also definitely as collaborators and in teams, is that we try something, it doesn't work, and we don't stop to think why.

It doesn't mean we go, “Why?” and then we try and make it work again. No. We think, “Okay, why didn't this work? What else could work?” Or sometimes we've got the right technology, but we need to adapt something.

So we ask “Why didn't this work?” and we went, “Okay, maybe what we need to do is something different.” Or actually, like you say, “Well, this is not going to work, but now we know that when we look for the next thing, it's got to have this, this, and this.”

But that step, especially because we don't like to think back, “Why didn't that work?” It's quite hard work for the brain. But I think it's quite important. I feel like some apps, I find them so easy to use and other ones they just…

I mean, technology and humans, they go together. For me, technology, sometimes you have to have that connection with it. It's easy. You can get your brain around it, you can get your hands around it in a way, metaphorically. I think we should acknowledge that and it's fine.

Jo: Yes, exactly. Use what works for you.

I wanted to circle back on the sort of ending things, because you have paused and you've done the seasons. Like you said, this book was born out of a seven-part season. You've paused some of your shows, you've ended others. Maybe just talk about how do you know when something is ending? When is it not failure?

Because you've just explained how something didn't work, so that was a failure, but you did decide to end that. Whereas some of your podcasts, and like your consulting, you ended that. It wasn't a failure. You made a decision to end it.

Pilar: For me it's when I really don't want to do something anymore or when something is a bit of a drag. Sometimes there are some signs.

I'll go back to a very long time ago. I used to teach physical theater and acting a long time ago. I was doing maybe two hours a week only in a drama school around the corner. I went on my way there and every now and then, because this was before lots of email, I would turn up and my class would've been canceled.

It was great because I still got paid, but my class would've been canceled and no one had told me. I found myself walking one day towards the school going, “I wish, I hope that the class is being canceled” and I went, “Okay. That's it. This is something I don't want to do anymore.”

So there are those kinds of signs that I really listen to—when I really don't want to do something.

Then the podcasts, the podcasts are creative projects, so they're driven by a curiosity at that moment. Or I have to say, a lot of the shows I've done, I've done with co-hosts. Sometimes I've just done it because I wanted to do something with this person and something has come up.

I think that even with podcasting, because you mentioned the podcasts in particular, I didn't have anything else to say. I had nothing more to say and I thought, “Well, that's it.”

So I was doing a show called Management Cafe with Tim Burgess, who is actually the boss of Bree, who I'm writing with. Both of us have left the organizational world. Neither of us lead people anymore. We were like, “What are we doing?”

The show Management Cafe was just like therapy and reminiscing of how it used to be and what happened to this and what happened to that.

I think understanding, especially if it's a creative project that you keep doing, and suddenly you're like, “I don't know why I'm doing this. I have nothing more to say. I'm getting tired of the sound of my own voice” in whatever way.

Then wrapping up, I think especially with creative projects, we need to try so many things to understand what it is we want to do, what it is that we like doing, and I'm being very lucky in that respect that I've been able to try lots of different things in my life.

Because of that, I've learned to try things that don't work out without thinking that there's something wrong with it. Of course some things don't work out and they have larger consequences than others.

So understanding that, especially in a creative process, whatever you're doing, you touch on one thing and then that doesn't work. Well, maybe that's not the right thing for you right now. You can always come back to those kinds of things.

So I think it's recognizing that that's not the right thing to be doing anymore, and just seeing it as something that I'm going to put to one side now because, okay, it might be doing well, but I'm not getting anything out of it.

Jo: It's funny though. I was thinking there, you mentioned earlier that your voiceover work, that there's less work there than there used to be. I guess that's a lot to do with AI, digital voice.

I guess for some people sometimes the decision as to things ending is not necessarily theirs. Or they need to do it for money or something. I think this is probably happening to a lot of people. They're seeing some streams of income begin to dwindle because of whatever reasons.

Do you end something and then learn something new? Or do you make sure these overlap so you have periods where you're still earning from the old ways?

Pilar: Just going back to the voiceover, because that's a very good example, as you said. I still work as a voiceover, but not very much. When we're talking a few years ago, actually, my own work didn't decrease because of the AI.

It decreased because of the internet, great internet connections that we can now have with voices in Spain. So I'm a Spanish voiceover in London, and before we always did our recordings in London. Whereas as the internet connections got better, they can now beam into Spain and they have a wider talent pool there.

The other thing that happened was the home studios. I don't have a home studio. My bedroom's good enough for podcasting, but not for client work.

I started to see it was pre-pandemic that the artificial intelligence was taking all the small jobs, like the “press one for this, press two for that.” That was actually a decision, talking about when to shift.

I saw that coming and I had to make a choice for myself, which was do I set up a home studio? Or do I get out and do something else? Which is why I started the consultancy on the side. Of course, I love voiceover and it still brings some income. So talking of that—

You can start to try it. Like maybe I'm going to do this thing, I don't know, could be writing.

“I really want to write, but I don't have the time. I'm going to try and do two hours a day and see if I still like it if I have to do it.” Because I think that when you discover that you can go into a profession is if you have to do something, is it still that joyful?

So finding out how sustainable your new career might be by doing little experiments before you decide to take a big plunge.

Again, you've said it many times and your guests have as well, that when we leave something that is a recurring income at the moment, we have to look at our figures. We have to look at how we are going to live before we take that plunge and then start making our plans around that.

Can you work a little bit less at your full-time job, you know, four days a week instead of five, and things like that? And not be afraid of the fact that that might not happen.

We might try it and it's okay if actually we discover that, “You know what? The stress of thinking that I'm going to have to earn an income with this is making me sick.” That's fine. Pull right back. It might not be the right moment as well. Again, see what it is bringing up in you.

So I've recently trained as a Pilates teacher, which actually, talking of income, it's going to be a small part of my income, but I just noticed that I was really enjoying the classes that I was taking, getting really curious about it.

That's how I know that it's time to move on to something else. I might not leave behind what I've already got, but I need to start looking into something else. I find myself listening to podcasts around the subject. I read around the subject. I start to want to know more, and that's when I know.

When I start to bring in the input from other places, and when I start to really soak in lots of other information, that's when I know, “Okay, something is shifting. I have to look at this.”

I've tried lots of things. At one point, I started doing cartoons, and I've got this happy daisy. So I looked into merchandising, could that work? Well, no, because the money coming in from all the print-on-demand merchandising side is really small and also they treat you not very well.

Okay. That won't do, I'll put it to one side. It might turn into a comic at some point, but for now I've got to do something else.

I've had to train myself because you can hear that I can go anywhere, anytime. I've had to train myself now to go, “No, that is for later. Write it down, make notes, have a place where you can record your thoughts around that thing you really want to do. But now is not the right moment.”

So now I'm doing this book and I'm doing the Pilates thing. That's it for now. I've got lots of things that are going to come after, but for now, not everything all at once.

Jo: Because you are also a finisher. I think this is really important. It's interesting because I do talk to a lot of creatives who are similar to both you and me. We have lots and lots of ideas and start lots of things, but a lot of people can't finish them. So they've got too many projects on the go at the same time.

People say to me all the time, “Oh, you must be so busy.” And I'm like, actually, I'm not that busy. It might sound like I work on a ton of things, but I don't really. I'm kind of launching one book, and then writing another book and doing this show.

So is that something you've had to learn or is that just something you have naturally, which is, I must finish this thing before I move on to the next thing?

Pilar: It's natural. I've always had this. When we first set up the theater company, I remember my friend Philip, who we set it up with, he said, “I'm like an ideas person. You're a finisher.” Yes, I am. I think it comes naturally. I don't like open endings and open loops.

It also comes back to this knowing that because you don't succeed at something, it doesn't mean you are not a great person. You know what I mean? So finishing for me sometimes is not doing it anymore. It doesn't mean I've completed the project. It doesn't mean that I've made a success of this thing I wanted to do.

It means I've gone, “You know what? In one year, how much have I enjoyed this? How successful was it? If it was supposed to bring income, did it bring an income?” You know what? Okay, let's wrap that up and that's okay. Put it away.

Sometimes it is about, “Okay. This book, it's dragging.” My books, Joanna, they take like three or four years. If it's worth it, then I finish it. I have put some books away. I put some ideas away.

I had some brilliant ideas about things and I thought, “Am I going to be able to do that? It's going to take me three more years and I have to do all this research.” Put it in the ideas list, and being okay with that.

Jo: I think being okay with it, I mean, I'm the same. I have a massive drive, so I use Dropbox for my main drive. I've got this “for later” kind of folder structure. Sometimes I do indulge myself, especially now with like deep research on ChatGPT.

Sometimes I'll be like, “Do a deep research into this topic,” to just see if I want to go deeper into it. I always say, “Recommend like 20 books on this subject.” Then if I want desperately to kind of get into all that, it's like you said, if I feel that need to research, then I will dive into that more seriously.

Like right now by my desk, I have about 20 physical books on gothic cathedrals and architecture and beauty and awe and wonder. I just needed to go down that rabbit hole. But a lot of the time I'll be like, “Okay, I am not quite ready to do that.”

Pilar: Yes, and I think you develop an instinct at some point, or a process, or you trust that the right thing will kind of stay you in the face or something. Because I think that that is also a process and it'll be different for everyone, is learning to trust how we manage our ideas.

There was something else I was going to say. Oh, the other thing is, of course, that it's also okay to dream. So sometimes I know I'm not going to do something. I would've loved to be a cozy mystery writer. I still have my first novel there waiting for me and sometimes I just dream. I dream I have this series and it's okay.

I don't have to then turn it into anything. I wonder sometimes when something we love doing, like writing, can be so close to how we want to earn an income. I think that sometimes we forget that it's okay to dream about plans and then we let them go and that's fine.

Jo: I think that's good. Hold some of them lightly or hold them lightly until you decide to commit. Then if you're going to commit, then absolutely commit. This has been super useful and we are out of time.

Pilar: I have one website that I'm sure will be there for a while, which is PilarWrites.com. That's P-I-L-A-R-writes, as in writing. Then on LinkedIn, I'm Pilar Orti.

Jo: Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for your time, Pilar. That was great.

Pilar: Thanks Joanna. Thank you so much. I've been listening to your show forever, so this has been amazing. Thank you everyone for listening too. Thank you, Joanna.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and readability while maintaining the authentic conversational tone and key insights shared by both speakers.

The post How to Pivot Careers, Co-Write Books, And Stay Connected As A Remote Creative With Pilar Orti first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Have you optimized the seven essential elements of your Amazon book page before you even consider marketing? Are you making the most of A+ content, and advertising with Amazon? Amazon Ads expert Geoff Affleck gives his tips.

In the intro, potential TikTok US changes [BBC]; Special editions [Written Word Media]; Self-Publishing with Dale Kickstarter books; Successful Self-Publishing Fourth Edition; Egypt beyond the pyramids, an example of fiction-adjacent content marketing [Books and Travel]; British Powerlifting; Starting something new, clearing space, beginner's mind, and Leuchtturm1917 journals.

This episode is supported by my patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 

Geoff Affleck is a bestselling nonfiction author, self-publishing consultant, and Amazon ads expert working with authors to produce and promote their books through his business, Authorpreneur Publishing. Geoff is originally Australian but now lives in Canada.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

You can find Geoff at GeoffAffleck.com.

Joanna: Geoff Affleck is a bestselling nonfiction author, self-publishing consultant, and Amazon ads expert working with authors to produce and promote their books through his business, Authorpreneur Publishing. Geoff is originally Australian but now lives in Canada. So welcome to the show, Geoff.

Geoff: Hi Joanna, thanks for having me here. It's great.

Joanna: Yes, this is an interesting topic. So first up—

Geoff: Sure. It was about 15 years ago that I started getting involved in this industry. I had always been involved in marketing in more of a corporate job.

I got involved in personal development for myself, just for personal growth, and managed to connect up with some New York Times bestselling authors who appeared in the movie The Secret.

Joanna: Oh yes, wonderful time!

Geoff: Right. So I worked as a marketing director for a couple of these authors who were part of that movie and, as a result, got exposed to the world of traditional publishing because they had New York Times bestselling books.

We started a course where we would invite people to come and learn about—basically the premise was we'll teach you how to become a bestselling self-help author.

I was the marketing guy, mostly talking about building their author platforms, and became really interested in the self-publishing side of it because that was really the door that most of these authors would come into rather than traditional, and had to learn very quickly about self-publishing.

So this was, as I mentioned, probably now 2012 or thereabouts. As I learned about self-publishing, we decided to self-publish a book ourselves, the four of us. Since then, I've just continued to be really enamored by the whole industry.

I realized quickly that I'm not really an author. I've co-authored a number of books, but writing's not my passion, although copywriting is, but not story writing.

I really love the production side of it and the book launches, the marketing, especially with Amazon. So that's really where I focused in my business over the last eight years or so.

Joanna: That's so funny with The Secret—it brings back those days. I remember reading that and it's where I really first learned about affirmations. My first affirmation that really changed my life was “I am creative. I am an author.” And I said that years before it actually happened.

I know it's funny now, isn't it? We kind of look back and I don't think it's been tarnished, but there's not so much a halo around the law of attraction stuff. At the time, I feel like that really made such a big hit. A lot of the mindset stuff around it I still feel is valuable.

Let's get into the advertising stuff, but before we get into that, I feel like a lot of authors jump into ads like they're some kind of magic bullet.

We're going to focus on Amazon today.

Geoff: Right. Yes, absolutely. This is the starting point, and it should be the starting point for anyone who's looking to publish a book, let alone promote it or spend money on it with Amazon ads.

You have to think about the conversions. What I mean by that is that if you're going to generate clicks to your book page, you have to be confident that a reasonable percentage of those clicks will turn into orders, or if you're in Kindle Unlimited, you know, Kindle Unlimited page reads.

The number that we look for is 10%. So if you get 10 clicks from an ad, you want to get one sale or the equivalent of that in page reads.

So it's really important to optimize your Amazon page—some people call it a product page or a book listing—so that when people land, they're going to be attracted to buying your book. Just makes sense, doesn't it?

Joanna: Mm-hmm.

Geoff: There are about seven elements that we focus on that you really need to get right, and you need to get all of them right. Sometimes just having one of them a little bit off can skew it. I could do a two-hour talk on this, but I'll just give you a quick introduction.

And that's the one that actually helps generate ad clicks because people don't see a lot about your book. They just see the cover, the title, how many reviews you have and so on.

If it looks interesting, they'll click on it. So if you've got a cover that stands out as a little thumbnail on an Amazon ad, you're more likely to get a higher click-through rate on your ads, which means more traffic. So that's super important. Of course, the cover has to be aligned with the genre and be legible and all of that.

You probably know that when you self-publish, there's seven keywords you can put in the metadata when you upload your book to Amazon, right? Most people don't give a lot of thought to that—just put in some words and hope that's okay.

Keywords are really important, and it's a whole thing to learn how to get them right. Finding keywords that are popular yet not too competitive is the key because that's what Amazon's algorithm looks at when it's deciding whether your book's going to show up or not on a search.

It's really important to get at least one good keyword phrase into your title or, more often, into your subtitle. I see a lot of authors that they'll publish a novel with a title and then leave the subtitle blank.

So adding a subtitle that describes a little bit about the genre or a trope—like “A Billionaire Office Romance” could be a subtitle for a romance novel—that tells the reader something, but it also tells the algorithm something. That is one of the most important fields I find.

If you're only relying on your seven keywords, I think you're potentially missing out on organic traffic. Beyond that—

Those are super important. So doing whatever you can to boost the number of reviews and ratings early on will give your conversion rate a big boost.

So beyond that though—

Usually there's a whole structure for blurbs, but not too long. Back even a few years ago, we were writing longer blurbs. Now it's around 200 words. A really strong headline with a hook, bolded is nice. Short paragraphs, the right elements, and then a call to action. I won't go any further than that, but that is key.

But beyond that, a lot of people don't read blurbs. They kind of skim them. That's why shorter is often a little bit better.

So it's kind of like an additional blurb where we can put graphics up on the page that will help the reader understand more about the book and some reasons why they should buy it.

It can't be too high or even too low—that can sometimes be a disincentive because price and quality are often correlated.

Categories that are relevant. Sometimes I see people, even people who are helping other authors, put their books in categories that just aren't relevant in order to try to game the system and get a bestseller badge. That just doesn't work.

Joanna: Yeah, that again feels like a tactic from like 15 years ago.

Geoff: Let's just put it here in basket weaving, even though it's a basket weaving romance!

Joanna: That is interesting. Lots of things to come back on here, but the A+ Content—your team helped me do some A+ Content for my How to Write a Novel book. I think as a buyer, like as a reader, I never, ever, ever scroll down that far. So I had some hesitation of, was this worth it?

Geoff: Well, first of all, for anyone who's not familiar with A+ Content, it doesn't say that word anywhere on your book page. But if you notice, as you're browsing on Amazon, you'll see the section called “From the Publisher.” So that's what we're referring to.

You go below the book description, below the first couple of carousels of ads or suggestions, and then you'll see it there. It'll be snuggled in just above the editorial review section. What it is is kind of like a magazine-style layout of banners and images.

You can have up to five rows of them, and you can choose as few as one or as many as five different banners. There are different layouts, and it's all template-driven on the backend of Amazon through your KDP account. It's also available to traditional publishers using Amazon Advantage.

So I think the only time you can't really use it is, let's say you publish with IngramSpark or Draft2Digital—you won't be able to apply Amazon A+ Content to your books.

Anyway, lots of different layouts available, including for nonfiction you can do side-by-side charts and this type of thing. You can provide, for a series, a series layout where people can see all the books in your series, or up to six anyway, and then click directly through to the different books.

I think, other than being visually appealing—provided, and this is really important, they must be designed well—you design them outside of Amazon usually, although Amazon does have some sort of an AI image generator.

Last time I checked it wasn't very good, so I don't use it. I get a professional graphic designer to design the graphics and then we upload them ourselves.

We find that generally speaking, it will help increase your conversion rate because as people skim the book blurb, maybe don't take it all in, it gives you another chance to connect with them.

It's visually appealing, so it tends to stop shoppers from scrolling because it's a little more interesting. So it's something they can quickly read and perhaps even get more of an emotional connection to the book.

You can use it to build trust and authority for the author in a way that you can't really do in the blurb. As I mentioned, you can showcase the series, and it gives you an SEO boost because behind each image you get to input more keywords.

We all know that Amazon is basically just a big search engine. Search engines are driven by keywords. So you can have, in addition to the seven boxes on your book listing, you can add more keywords on the backend of your Amazon A+ Content.

So I think for most authors, it's worth doing. It can work very well for series authors, children's authors, because you can show the visuals of the inside of the book. I feel like if you're not doing it, you're sort of leaving something on the table that with not much effort you could do.

I mean, obviously if you hire someone to make the images that costs money, but actually you can just add it onto your KDP account per book and per country as well. It has to be done per country, which is a bit of a pain, but it's not a great interface, to be fair.

Geoff: No, no, it's not.

Joanna: But it's free.

Geoff: Absolutely. I will say that some authors that I've come across have done their own A+ Content using say one of those design tools like Canva or something, which can be great if you are a graphic designer.

I've seen some pretty poor A+ Content design, and that can detract from the book and it can actually impact your sales negatively because I think if readers see sort of amateurish graphic design, they subconsciously think, well geez, what's the writing like?

I'd caution your listeners to get a professional designer. It doesn't have to be expensive—a hundred dollars or something—and you get some good design.

Joanna: Yes, absolutely.

Joanna: Okay, so let's come to the advertising. We're going to assume now that we've got our page sorted with all those things, and I know some people who haven't heard this before are like, “Goodness me, that's a lot to do before just clicking on an ad.” But as you say, it's not just a magic bullet.

People back in the old days could just upload a book on Amazon and it would sell. Is that possible anymore? Is organic reach a reality?

Geoff: I don't really think so. For new authors, for most authors who don't have a platform—say a large email list, social media following and so on—it's pretty hard to get noticed. I don't know what you've heard. I think it's something like 5,000 books a day are published on Amazon or something.

Joanna: It is ridiculous. It's just crazy.

Geoff: Right. So you've got all this clutter that you've got to cut through. I came across someone last week who'd done nothing. He'd published his book in July and he said, “Oh, I think we've done all right. We sold 1,800 copies so far.” I said, “Oh my God, that's really good.”

Joanna: That's very good.

Geoff: That's really good. It's his first book, and no advertising. “What did you do?” “Oh, well I've got a pretty big email list.” “Ah, right.” So we all know that that's important, but he's probably tapped out his email list by now.

So now we're doing the things we just talked about, optimizing the product page, and then starting Amazon ads, because eventually your email list is going to run dry.

So in the absence of a platform or some way to promote your book, Amazon ads are, I think, the best way to have your book put in front of thousands, even millions of shoppers over time.

Usually we see it takes about a thousand impressions to get a click. So in other words, your ads show a thousand times, you get a click—that's average, sometimes better, sometimes worse. So you've got to get lots of impressions of your ads to get a small number of clicks, to get a small number of sales.

So I think it's important unless you've got something else that works for you. Some authors do really well with Facebook ads, and I think that's great too.

To me, Amazon ads is like you're going to the supermarket and you're looking for soup. You go to the soup aisle and you look at the soup, and then another can of soup catches your eye. And you know what? That's interesting. I think I'll try that one.

Whereas something like a Facebook ad is more like you're at the supermarket and you're looking for corn, and then you're at the checkout. You happen to see candy or some gum, and so you go, “Oh, impulse buy.” It's not really what you were on Facebook looking for—it's sort of a random thing. It does seem to work for some authors, so…

Joanna: Yes, as you say, there's lots of different options. I mean, even like podcasting—you can't track clicks from podcasts because it's more of a brand-building approach and people will go look for stuff. But it's definitely a way to market. So there's lots of different options, but as we said, we're focusing on Amazon ads.

So your team helped me with some nonfiction books, and one of the things that I thought was great about your approach is even on your website, you are really clear about what books ads work best for and what they don't work well for. So let's start with the good stuff.

Geoff: Yes, they work best for series or if perhaps you have multiple standalones. The reason, of course, is read-through. Usually you're going to spend a little more, perhaps break even, on getting those initial readers. But if they enjoy your books, they're going to want to read more.

Usually they're not clicking on an ad for the second, third, fourth, fifth book. They're going to just find it directly. So that becomes an organic sale with full royalties. So series can work very, very well with Amazon ads.

I think in general, any book where the book page converts from clicks to orders. So that can be the book one in a series, which perhaps has a low price to entice the reader. It can also be a standalone. It could be a standalone nonfiction, could be a standalone novel, as long as it converts.

We've got some examples where we just know that for every six clicks that this author gets, there's a sale. It just happens over and over again, probably because they've got the great product page and good reviews.

I think sometimes it doesn't work as well if you're in a very low-volume niche, something that's just really obscure. That's more because there's just not much traffic, you know? So I think those are probably the best answers I can give for you.

Geoff: Yes, absolutely. Amazon ads will certainly drive up your KU. We've got one author in particular is doing 150,000 monthly page reads on KU from her ad clicks, but a million and a half monthly overall. So the ad clicks are just driving people into book one, and then they just keep on reading.

Joanna: You mentioned series, but for example, there are some genres where most of the series in a genre might be in KU, and then if you're trying to advertise a book that's not in KU, it might not work so well.

Geoff: Yes, we find it works either way. It really varies from case to case, but Amazon ads on the dashboard, it does track your page reads that you generate from the ads as well as the orders that you generate. So you can really effectively see the impact of the ads—exactly how many page reads came from your ads versus orders.

Joanna: You've mentioned reviews briefly. Many authors, who are new to self-publishing especially, think that they should be advertising at launch doing Amazon ads.

Geoff: Well, one thing about advertising at launch—it can help you certainly get your book, your brand out there with all of the different impressions of your ads. And Amazon gives you like a little banner on your ads when your book is new that says “Just Released.” It's a little gray banner that goes right above the cover.

I think even if you have low reviews, because you have the “Just Released” banner on, shoppers might be a little more forgiving about the low number of reviews because it's obviously just released.

So when we do book launches, I almost always include Amazon ads in the book launch. It might not be a really high budget, but just to continue to do everything we can to get that initial traffic. Because what we're trying to do with a launch is really three things:

So I think Amazon ads play an important role in helping the algorithm understand your book.

Joanna: But if someone is brand new, it's their first book, is that a good fit? Or are we really looking at—

Geoff: Yes, it's a good question. I think with new authors, in a way today, you have to be prepared either to invest in your book, in book marketing. It's kind of like, I used to often use the analogy of a rocket launch—rockets burn a lot of fuel to get off the ground. Without the fuel, they stay on the ground.

So there's that consideration that if you want the book to have a chance, you've got to invest in marketing somehow, whether it's Amazon ads or whether it's paid third-party book promotions through the different book promotion websites, or Facebook or TikTok, or whatever you are able to do. Email, whatever you can do.

A small Amazon ads budget can help. Even if you're not doing $20 a day, which is what we would normally recommend, you might find that you can start to generate some sales with a much smaller budget and very conservative bids or cost per click.

Perhaps you're only spending $3 a day and you're only picking up a couple of sales a week or something. But you've just got to do something to get that initial inertia going. Otherwise, the Amazon algorithm will basically drop you like a hot potato.

Joanna: So that's new authors, but then authors who've been around a while, like myself, who have big backlists—and as you are talking about the seven things we need to have, I know there's people listening in the same place as me. They're like, “Well, we've got 40 books, 50 books, 100 books. This is way too depressing.”

I was in my KDP dashboard like yesterday, and I realized that a whole load of my sales descriptions had reformatted to some old version. I don't even know when that happened, but it made me laugh. Then I looked down at my keywords and my categories.

So if we want to keep things moving, how often should we be reviewing these fields if we've been going a while?

Geoff: Yes, good idea. I think it was perhaps a year and a half ago, Amazon changed their category rules where you used to be able to have 10 and now you have three.

So some authors who were grandfathered into the old 10-category system, it may be well enough just to leave that alone because it's great to have to be across all of those categories.

I think keywords is probably the most important thing to look at. Well, I'll say book blurb and keywords. Book blurb for sure, because that's very much customer-facing. Keywords aren't customer-facing. They're Amazon algorithm-facing.

I was just listening to Dave Chesson last week with a webinar that he presented on Amazon's new algorithm. He stressed the importance of finding the right keywords, but also the importance of having the keywords in your book blurb. It must be done in a way that doesn't sound like it was just written by AI or something, you know?

So that's probably one area to really take a good look at and republish. Publisher Rocket is a great tool for researching the best keywords. You can look up other books and see what keywords those books are ranking for, and therefore that might be a good set of keywords for you.

So it is something worth doing and spending an hour or two on, as well as book blurb is also worth spending time on for sure.

Joanna: Yes, it's one of these things that the more you write, the more you publish, and then the backlist becomes this kind of sprawling thing, especially when you're wide like I am.

Then you have all these different formats and platforms, and you figure how traditional publishers forget to maintain things. It's kind of obvious when you realize how many books they manage.

Geoff: You mentioned formatting issues with book blurbs, and that's quite common too. Because Amazon's little WYSIWYG where you enter your book description isn't perfect, and it does strange things. So you've really got to—

I can't tell you how many times I've seen all bold…

Joanna: Oh yeah, all bold or…

Geoff: All bold or large heading, or all italic, no spaces between the paragraphs or whatever. So you've got to really check your output as well. There are tools out there that can generate the HTML so that you could put it in directly that way.

Get some eyeballs on your product pages, whether it's yours, but better off someone else's, or even better, someone like me who does this for a living. Get some opinions on what are customers seeing when they come to your product page.

Usually you're, as an author, too close to it. You can't see the forest for the trees, so to speak. So get some other opinions on what do you think about my blurb and the cover? Is it clear? Because it might be clear to you, but it might not be clear to someone who's never heard of your book before.

Joanna: Yes, absolutely. There are so many things, and that's partly why I wanted to talk to you because I feel like people just say “advertising” or “paid ads” as if it is going to solve all the problems of selling books. And yet so much stuff does go into it.

A lot of it is basics, like it's basic marketing 101, but it's still hard, particularly for cross-genre books. A lot of my fiction, I found that many of the standard approaches don't work on Amazon when you write cross-genre because just in the categories and the keywords, it doesn't fit the boxes.

Geoff: Yes, cross-genre is a tough one for sure.

Joanna: Yes, it is. So my answer to that is to focus on the books that are more easily marketed. That's another trick, isn't it? You don't have to market every single book.

Geoff: Oh no, you don't. Absolutely not.

Joanna: Just market the ones that are going to make you the most money and the ones that are more easily marketed on this platform. So for me, Amazon ads work best for my nonfiction because it's really obvious what it is.

Geoff: Yes, that makes sense. Absolutely.

Joanna: So I did want to ask you, because I've used a combination of auto ads and manual targeting.

Geoff: Oh, absolutely. So with Amazon ads, the way that they work is all about something called targeting. And targeting, you can think of it like this: Which other books on Amazon do you want to piggyback on? Which ones are like yours?

If you can find books that are like yours, then when someone's browsing that book, they'll see your ad, they'll click on it, and they might buy your book. So we want to target, and there's really two—we call it three ways of targeting your ads.

Amazon decides where it thinks your ads should be displayed, so you have no control over where they show up. You just trust the algorithm understands your book and will put it in the right place.

Now usually it's going to advertise it on books that are in the same categories as you. That's sort of the default. That can result in some wasted reach because it might just not be really zeroing in on books that are like yours, especially if you're in a little bit of a broader category.

The other thing we find with auto ads is that quite often you don't get that many impressions. Impressions is how many times your ads are displayed. When you have low impressions, you have lower clicks, and when you have lower clicks, you have lower sales.

So while auto ads can be a sort of a time saver—they don't take much research to set up, you just fill in the boxes and click the button and off they go—usually they don't have a terrific result until such time as the algorithm really understands your book.

So we don't set up auto ads at the beginning when we work with authors. We wait until we feel like the algorithm has a better understanding of the book.

So what do we do? We do manual campaigns.

And there are two types of manual campaigns:

One's called a keywords campaign, and as the name implies, you would enter in, let's say, 50 keywords that you want to use for your ads. They could be author names of comps, they could be other book titles or series titles, and they could be genre or trope-related terms or even character types, et cetera.

So if you have a combination of those things, which you should—which you have to manually research by perhaps looking at the also-boughts for your book that are showing up on your product page, using Publisher Rocket is a great tool. Even AI can help you come up with your keywords.

Then the second kind of manual ad is the product ad. With that ad, we're targeting specific categories of books and also specific ASINs. ASIN being a product number. So you find the ASIN of a book like yours and you target it, and we might target five categories and 20 ASINs to start with, something like that.

With those ads, we find that we usually get better results because we are in control of where the ads are showing. So it's one of those things—it's easier to show than tell.

If you can just remember, there's auto and manual. There's two types of manual. When you're starting out, manual's the way to go because you will get more traction with manual ads.

Joanna: I think another issue with the manual advertising, certainly for anyone who's like me, who's just not that interested in data—this is where it becomes difficult. People are like, “Oh my goodness, this is so difficult.” So if people are manually doing their own ads, should they have to log in every day to check things?

Geoff: Not every day. Although at the beginning, it's hard to resist the temptation sometimes to log in every day.

It's a bit like when I first started buying stocks for investments—I'd check the stock price every day, but you drive yourself mad. Every time it would go down, you'd get all stressed out, and then it would go up, you'd get all excited.

So probably once a week is a better timeframe. Maybe a little bit more in the first week, but you can set some parameters to make sure that your ads don't run away. That's important. You can set a daily budget, you can set a monthly budget, and then when your ads hit those upper limits, they'll just stop. So that's really good.

You don't want to have that problem where you suddenly get a huge bill that you weren't expecting. You also want to check on them to make sure that you haven't perhaps accidentally bid too high on one of your targets.

Every target, you set a dollar or pound or euro amount for how much you're willing to pay for a click on that target. Sometimes, if you're a little bit careless, you could accidentally bid too much because they may default to a suggested bid, which might be $2.

Well, imagine you're paying $2 for a click and you're making, maybe you're only making $2 on a sale—you could be really upside down on your advertising. So do take care, make sure nothing's gone awry.

You also want to be checking to see which of those targets are getting the clicks and the sales, and then adjusting bids up and down accordingly. If one of your targets is really working for you, you might want to increase the amount that you're willing to bid.

That'll make your ad show up closer to the top, which is going to get you more clicks. Similarly, if you've got targets that are getting clicks but not sales, you may want to turn those off. We usually use a rule of thumb of 20. When we get 20 clicks and we haven't had any orders, we'll turn it off.

So you do need to do some adjustments, and usually twice a month or so is enough time between adjustments.

Joanna: Obviously authors can do their own ads. It's just available. People can log into their KDP dashboard, or there's just one marketing link for the whole thing. You can go in and manage it all there.

Geoff: Yes, sure. Everyone can do Amazon ads, even if you self-published, or even if you're traditionally published, you can still run Amazon ads. That's just fine.

I should just mention those who are traditionally published won't have a KDP dashboard, but you can get into Amazon ads through your Author Central account under the Marketing and Reports tab.

We offer a managed Amazon ad service. We've been doing that since 2019. Basically, you turn over your ads to us.

We access your ads account through what is known as editor access, which basically is a permission that you grant us so that we can log into your ads account through my account. We don't need your password. We can't go shopping and buy anything on your Amazon.

We handle the setup of the ads, including all the keyword and target research, set up the ads, and then monitor, analyze, and optimize regularly. We provide support for authors as well.

In particular, we'll take a good look at your product page—back to the beginning of our conversation. That's actually our first step before we even run the ads. We'll have a session with you.

One of my team will evaluate your product page and make written recommendations about what we recommend that you would improve before you even start advertising. Then we give you the guidance on what to do. If you can't do it yourself, we can help you with those things usually too.

Joanna: Fantastic.

Geoff: Thanks. My website has everything there. All our pricing and everything is upfront. It's GeoffAffleck.com. Or you can go to GeoffAffleck.com/ads. That goes directly to the Amazon Ads page on my website.

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

Geoff: Thanks, Joanna. I appreciate you having me on today.

The post Amazon Advertising For Books With Geoff Affleck first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Are you truly procrastinating, or are you protecting yourself from uncomfortable emotions? What if the real reason you're not finishing your book has nothing to do with laziness or lack of motivation? Colleen Story explores the types of procrastination that keep writers stuck and how you can move past them into success.

In the intro, lessons learned from 14 years as an author entrepreneur; Surprised by Pilgrimage on The Leader's Way Podcast; Blood Vintage, out now.

Write and format stunning books with Atticus. Create professional print books and eBooks easily with the all-in-one book writing software. Try it out at Atticus.io

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 

Colleen Story is the award-winning author of historical fantasy, supernatural thrillers and motivational books for writers. Her latest book is Escape the Writer's Web: Untangle Your Procrastination Type, Discover Personalized Solutions, and Transform Your Writing Life.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

You can find Colleen at ColleenMStory.com and MasterWriterMindset.com.

Joanna: Colleen Story is the award-winning author of historical fantasy, supernatural thrillers and motivational books for writers. Her latest book is Escape the Writer's Web: Untangle Your Procrastination Type, Discover Personalized Solutions, and Transform Your Writing Life. So welcome to the show, Colleen.

Colleen: Thanks, Joanna. It's great to be here. I'm really excited to have this chat today.

Joanna: It's such an interesting topic. But first up—

Colleen: Well, you know, I wasn't one of those people who knew from the time I was in the cradle that I wanted to be a writer. I hear about that a lot, that people seem to know early on. I did not.

I always enjoyed reading. I don't know if anybody will remember the bookmobile that used to come down the street in our neighborhood. That was a highlight of my week, going out and seeing the books in the bookmobile.

So I was always a big reader, and I enjoyed whenever there was an essay test in school. I was thrilled because I felt like I could do well at those.

I didn't think about writing until I had actually graduated with my music degree. Music came first for me. I graduated with a music degree and had moved to a different state, which gave me a little time to think.

When you go to a different state, I would have had to have gone back to more classes to have gotten my teaching certificate in that state. So I just kind of took some time to think.

It was during that time that I got bit by the writing bug. It's just kind of weird how it happened, but it was like out of the blue. I wanted to all of a sudden write stories.

I grabbed a word processor—shows you how long ago this was—and started writing short stories. Within three years I had gotten my first short story published and I got a $10 check for it, which felt so awesome. I had to frame that and put it up. It's still on my writing desk.

So that kind of changed the whole trajectory of my career because I continued to teach music privately, and I still play in the local symphonies and pit orchestras, but as far as my job went, writing just was the thing.

After I got that publication, it was soon after that a copywriting job opened in my town and I got it. That kind of sent me on this new career. I started out as a corporate copywriter and was promoted to managing editor before I left there. I was there for about three years.

My dream at that point was to write a novel and have it traditionally published. I knew that as long as I worked for the corporation, I wouldn't have the time to devote to that—that I needed to really learn the craft of writing a novel.

So I went ahead and went freelance so that I could control my schedule a bit more. I worked on the side for about six months and then turned in my notice. I've been a freelance writer full-time ever since then.

So that got me into the business side of writing. Then on the side I was working on novels for many, many years and got my first novel published in 2015. As of this year, I've now published 10 books, both fiction and nonfiction. That's kind of how it happened for me. I almost fell into it accidentally, but I'm really glad I did.

Joanna: That's interesting.

Colleen: I am hybrid. Yes, my novels were all traditionally published until my very latest series, the historical fantasy series. So my first three were traditionally published.

Then when I started writing for writers, that kind of happened accidentally too. I had never intended to be a nonfiction writer. But when my second novel came out, the publisher—this was back in 2017 when it was released—was wanting you to build more of an online author platform.

The one that I had started, the blog I had started, was not doing very well. So I wanted to try something else. I ended up combining my day job expertise, which was really as a health and wellness writer, with my passion for creativity and I created what was then called Writing and Wellness.

I've since morphed that into Master Writer Mindset, but Writing and Wellness kind of took off and was doing very well. I started getting invitations to go speak at conferences and workshops and things. During that time I was really discussing issues with writers and realizing that they needed some help in different areas of productivity.

Time management at that time was what I was looking into, and I decided I wanted to go ahead and write a book on that. But I didn't want to submit it to a publisher because I knew I would have to create a marketing plan and everything for it, and then I would have to allow them to change it however they felt that they should.

I kind of knew what writers were looking for at that point. I wanted more control over that book so I could really deliver what my writers and my subscribers were telling me they needed. So that's when I dove into self-publishing, was with my writing books, and I've done those that way ever since.

Joanna: That's interesting. So then this book, which is about procrastination specifically, I mean, to me it's like, wow, a whole book on procrastination. You were not procrastinating when you decided on this one.

I said to you before we started recording, I personally don't understand procrastination because I just don't suffer from it myself, but I know that lots of other writers do. So when you sent this to me, I was like, oh yes, this is something that writers really do need. It was interesting, but—

Colleen: It was interesting, and right, I never would have thought of myself as a procrastinator. I typically do surveys of my subscribers and it seems like over the years… I mean, I started the Writing and Wellness, I think it was around 2015. So it's been about 10 years and I will regularly do these surveys.

Repeatedly the subject of productivity, time management, and procrastination would come back as one of the main things that writers were struggling with every year that I would survey.

So I had done some articles, some blog posts on procrastination. I did a couple of YouTube videos on it, but I kept hearing this come back to me. I also would talk to writers at conferences and things, or even at signings.

I would have people come up and say, “I started this book and I never finished it,” or “I really wanted to write this book, but I just never did.” I would talk to writers over and over again and just see this haunted look in their faces about this dream that was untapped. They just had not been able to find a way to finish it.

Then even those writers who had dove in with lots of enthusiasm and maybe were halfway through and then they got stuck, or maybe they got almost finished, but then they weren't sure what to do next. So the story would end up sitting there and they would never actually complete that cycle.

That made me feel really badly because I know what a joy it is to actually go through, finish the project, put it out there, get feedback, and then be on that road of actually being a writer.

There are so many benefits to that that it just felt so badly for these people who were struggling with the different steps along the way that would lead to procrastination.

It's interesting though, as I started doing research for this book, which I did quite a bit, that I did learn that I had procrastinated in the past in certain ways. Because procrastination doesn't always look like completely avoiding the project or scrolling your TikTok feed while you're supposed to be writing.

These are the ways we normally think of what procrastination looks like, and I don't usually do those things. I learned as I was doing the research that I had done some other forms of procrastination that I didn't realize at the time were procrastination.

Joanna: So what were they? Now I'm writing down a list too. What else?

Colleen: Well, it's kind of like anytime that we avoid doing what we know is the next step, and it's usually very subtle and devious how procrastination works, this type of procrastination, because even very productive writers can end up procrastinating on things that bring up uncomfortable emotions.

At its core, procrastination is always an emotional coping technique. It is a way to protect us from any sort of uncomfortable emotions we may be feeling around doing a certain task.

So I'll give you an example. Where I realized it had happened for me was in submitting my work to editors and publishers. So there came a point in my career as I was writing that I had a novel that I felt was potentially good enough to get a traditional publishing contract, but I wasn't being serious about taking that next step.

I might offhandedly find one publisher, work really hard on the query letter and the synopsis, send it off, get the expected rejection, and then I wouldn't touch it again for another six months to a year.

I was looking back now—I didn't know it at the time—but looking back now, I realize I was totally procrastinating on getting serious about submitting my novel because when I'm honest about it, it was because I was afraid of getting rejected, which makes total sense. All of us are afraid of that.

So I was afraid after all this blood, sweat, and tears I put into this novel to put it out there, nobody was going to want it. So my procrastination was protecting me from the reality of potentially being rejected or having this story never be picked up by a traditional publisher.

It wasn't until I finally got ticked off at myself for not getting serious about this, that I started really making it part of my schedule. So I would make it part of my weekly writing schedule to research publishers, to find their submission guidelines, to create query letters that would go with what they were looking for, to really dig deeper into finding publishers that would fit for my project.

When I finally did that and got serious about it and stopped dancing around it, that's when I got my first publishing contract. So looking back, I could see, okay, I was procrastinating on the part of the job, so to speak, that I needed to tackle, but that brought up uncomfortable emotions.

I've since realized that even very productive writers, I hear this from other writers, perhaps in their marketing side of the work that they do that brings up uncomfortable emotions. So they may avoid that or decide they're too busy for that, or just, “Well, I'm just going to focus on writing and not worry about that.”

We're actually procrastinating on this other part of our craft or business that we know we should be doing because it's uncomfortable for us.

Joanna: Yes. Well, it's good we're talking about this because I now think back to when I started writing. So when you are at the beginning of your writing journey—and I did all the course. I love learning. I spent really years doing courses, going to conferences, taking a lot of notes.

Colleen: That sounds familiar.

Joanna: Yes, exactly. I know this is common. There are people listening who are like, yes, I'm still doing that too. So perhaps I was procrastinating about actually writing my own work by thinking I was doing all the right stuff, you know?

I was going to all the conferences and actually I was going on courses, but I was never writing my own work as such. Or if I did, it was just a tiny piece.

Then I remember going to one course and this guy said, “Okay, before we get started, we're going to do some writing.” He said, “The time is starting now. Write for five minutes on the moment where you knew something had happened, like the moment you knew this thing had happened.”

I was like, “What? We have to do some writing. This isn't what I signed up for. You're meant to tell me more stuff so I can avoid writing.”

So I guess that's an example from my earlier days. Then after I did that timed writing exercise, that kind of just tipped me over and I've never struggled with that since. It literally is, if there's an issue, do some timed writing exercises.

So if people are listening and they're like, yes, I recognize myself, how do you get over it? Like, what are some of the things we can do? Timed writing worked for me.

Colleen: Well, I think the first thing we have to do is be aware. I mean, because most of us at the time, I certainly wasn't aware that that's what I was doing until I finally got ticked off enough that I was like, I need to move forward or I need to forget this.

So I think we have to be aware that what we're doing is actually procrastinating on the next step we need to take. That can be, I think, the most difficult part because it's like you said, you didn't feel like you were avoiding anything. I didn't feel like I was.

So I think we have to kind of take a step back and say, am I doing what I need to do to progress to the next level I want to get to?

If I'm really serious about whatever your next goal is, whether that be selling your self-published book, or that be trying to get a traditional publishing contract, or that be actually finishing this novel, whatever it might be for you.

What you were speaking of reminded me of one of the types in my book, which is the overthinker. We think that thinking is going to help us progress. I have been guilty of that myself in the past, thinking if I think through things that that's going to help me move forward.

I've since learned that doing is a far better teacher. It's like you said, once you start doing the writing, that is going to take you a lot farther.

There's an example in my history that I was leaving a lot of novels half finished because I would get halfway through, I would get stuck, and then I would start thinking about it.

So I would say, “Okay, well this must not be a very good idea, or the idea must not be good enough to carry through a novel, so I need to actually think about a new one and start a new one.” I would do that over and over.

It wasn't until I had a mentor talk about how important it was to actually finish the story. “You can't learn how to write a story until you finish this story,” that I realized I was procrastinating, that I was not doing what I needed to do to get to the next level, which for me was learning how to tell the complete story.

The only way that I could learn to do that was to do it. I had to stick with the story I had and go back and study story structure, go get some help from an editor or book coach, or do something to help me take it to the next level, which was to actually finish the book.

So I think the first thing we have to do is be aware of what we're dancing around or what we're avoiding because it makes us feel nervous or afraid, or we won't be up to this next step. That's often what happens is we don't feel ready for the next step.

We have to bring that into our awareness and then say, okay, I think the best way to always approach it is in the smallest step possible.

So what you said about some timed writing, he asked you to write for five minutes. That's one of my favorites, is the five minute rule, to sit down and do something for five minutes. That can apply to most anything.

For a lot of writers that are struggling with, “How can I start building my platform?” or “How can I start marketing this book?” Say, “Today I'm going to sit down for five minutes and I'm going to create some graphics for my social media posts,” or “Today I am going to sit down for five minutes and I'm going to start researching places where I might be able to promote my book,” whatever it might be.

Taking little, tiny, small wins is a way to ease yourself into what this is really about, which is building a new identity. Because if we take a look at this seriously, procrastination is a comforting, emotional coping tool that keeps us in the identity we are at right now.

So if I look back at the example I gave, I was the writer who was not yet published. I was the aspiring writer. I was the writer who wanted to be published, and that was my identity at the time. So there was a lot wrapped up into that. You know, I was comfortable being that person.

I was trying to get better at writing. I was trying to finish a good novel. I was trying to create a novel that was good enough to be published, and that was my identity at the time.

What I needed to do was step into a new identity of being a traditionally published author. That is a big step in our brains because we are very used to being who we are. Anything that takes us beyond that feels scary to us. So we have to then take a very small step.

So the small step, anything that has to do with, “I want to get here. So what's the smallest step I can take to start down that path?” If we take one little tiny step at a time, we can gradually ease our brains and our identities into this new identity we want to create, if that makes sense.

Joanna: Yes, I like that. It's interesting. I think the five minute thing is also good the other way.

So you mentioned before, are we avoiding things by, for example, scrolling TikTok. Or, for me, I'll sometimes check X or go and look at my Feedly list of blog posts and things that I've got on there. So I give myself five minutes in that direction sometimes.

So it's like, this isn't procrastination, this is a break. This is a break. I think these types of behaviors can turn into a way of procrastinating if they go on for an unlimited amount of time. Like people look up and suddenly they've actually spent two hours on social media or something instead.

Colleen: Well, what you said sounds like something that I recommend to people who have a type of brain that seeks out that novelty, that seeks out that occasional distraction. That's another type of brain I talk about in the book.

There is actually a distracted type of procrastination, and I've actually discussed this with several different writers who do struggle with this. They have found success doing that very thing, giving themselves a limited amount of time.

“Okay, so I'm going to do whatever distracted behavior I enjoy,” whatever those various things you mentioned, whatever it might be, “but I'm going to do it for a set amount of time.”

Some people will also trade time, so they'll say 10 minutes of distraction for 20 minutes of writing. So you might have a half an hour blocked out for writing, and 20 minutes of that time will be writing and 10 minutes will be your chosen form of distraction, whatever that may be.

One of the things I talk about in the book a lot and in my videos too, is this importance of self understanding, being able to understand the kind of creative brains that we have. I've learned over the research of this book and just over my experience working with different writers, that we are all so very different.

We all often talk about what we have in common as far as being writers go, but we're all very different in how our brains work and how our creative selves operate. Knowing how they operate and what they need to operate at their best can really help us improve our productivity and take that next step into the next identity that we want to reach.

So finding out that this is something that you need or that you enjoy or that helps you stay on task, can be a good piece of knowledge that you can then turn around and say, “Okay, how can I use this to help myself be more productive?”

Joanna: Yes, I think that's so important, this self understanding. I spoke to someone recently and she was almost having guilt over not writing. Guilt seems to be a massive thing in the writing community. “Oh, I didn't write, therefore I feel guilty,” which is crazy because there are a lot better things to feel guilty about, I think, than not writing.

It's so interesting that it's very real though. I think the self understanding is like not beating yourself up over this. It's trying to figure out who you are and what works for you, and then figuring out a way that will make it work for you if you like.

If you really do want to write a book, for example, then you have to figure out your type as such.

Colleen: Well, let's talk about the great one that you just brought up there. I do actually have a guilty type in my book because this is so pervasive in the writing community.

I saw this many, many years ago. I did a blog post on writing guilt and just punched it in at Google at the time—”Writer's Guilt”—and I was shocked about how many posts came back. I was like, “Wow, this is huge in the writing community.” It's this thing that so many of us writers seem to carry around with us.

It's like we're guilty when we're writing and we're guilty when we're not writing. Many people end up in this place so they feel guilty if they don't get the writing done. But then if they actually set the time aside for themselves to write, then they feel guilty about what they're not doing when they're writing.

So it's this really mean double-edged sword that can just tear a person's whole motivation for going after this dream down into shreds. So in the book, I talk about guilt as it relates to that, but also as it relates to procrastination.

You procrastinate on your writing for whatever the reason is. There are many different reasons. Then you feel guilty that you procrastinated.

So you come back and try to restart your writing process, but that guilt gets in the way and you're feeling bad about everything you haven't done that you should be at this certain point in your book or whatever it might be. That kind of tends to destroy the joy you might have brought to writing for that day.

So there's all kinds of coping techniques for that. One of them is just that you have to always allow yourself to start fresh. Always allow yourself to start fresh.

Then if you're someone who tends to feel guilty one way or the other, whether you're writing or not, I think that often is a case of not allowing yourself to follow your dreams.

There's a whole thing about people pleasing that I'm going to talk about on YouTube because I was definitely a people pleaser for a long time that we have to reckon ourselves with.

This is one of the things I'm really passionate about helping writers with because as you and I know having lived the writing life, we realize all the benefits that come from devoting your life to a craft like writing.

It's not just about finishing the books or having something to leave behind you. It's all the ways that it shapes you. There are studies proving that regularly writing helps to shape your brain. It helps you to become smarter in a lot of ways. It increases the connections in your brain.

It makes you more empathetic. Studies have shown that as well, that you tend to overcome difficulties and challenges along the way because we all know how difficult the writing life can be. You become a more resilient and stronger person.

Also, you're always expressing yourself through writing, which can really be, even if you're not writing about your own life experiences, it can be really therapeutic.

So people that are robbing themselves of that by not allowing themselves to take their dreams seriously, aren't just robbing themselves of the book they may write, they're robbing themselves of the people they could be becoming by going through the process of writing and completing a book and perhaps publishing it.

So I try to emphasize to people that if you have a dream to write, there's usually a deeper reason for it besides just that you want to write a book. There's usually, I like a calling to your soul that is asking you to step up and be even more than perhaps you are right now.

If you deny that, if you say, “Well, it's not that important,” or “What other people want me to do is more important,” or you feel guilty because you're making room in your life for that.

Imagine if you had a friend who was doing that, and you could see this in this friend wanting to come out, you can see that this is where this friend needs to go in their own personal development and they're denying themselves that. It's really a crime because it's kind of like you're robbing this person of their ability to self-actualize at an even higher level.

So I try to impress upon people to give your dream the position it needs in your life so that you understand that making it a priority is not about being selfish or self-indulgent. It's about your own development, about becoming the best person you possibly can be.

If that dream is there and has been there, especially for the person you are talking about for 30 years, that dream has not left, and there's a reason for that. I believe there's kind of a soul calling reason for that, whether people believe that or not. It doesn't matter.

Giving yourself that importance in your dreams and allowing yourself that time is going to make you a happier person. So I would just suggest, again, a small win. Set aside 15, 20 minutes, however many days of the week that you can make it, and start making that a priority. Don't allow anyone to take that time away from you.

You will start to see how beneficial it is for yourself. How much better you feel, how much more whole as a person you feel because we've all experienced it as writers. When we actually make the time and we honor that part of ourselves, how much better people we are.

Once a person starts doing that, they'll realize that they're a better person, not only for themselves, but for everyone around them. So that's a little bit about the guilty type.

Joanna: Yes, I think it's interesting. I mean, you said there about, think about it as another friend or something, you wouldn't knock down their dream.

Like you, there's the child inside you who wants to write and as you say, this kind of calling, creative calling that we have had for a long time whenever it came up in our lives. You had it for music at the beginning and then it came for writing.

For me it probably was always writing. Like you would never say to like a 6-year-old or an 8-year-old, “No. Go and do some accounting or something.”

Like you encourage—you know, nothing wrong with accounting—but I mean, you wouldn't say to a little 6-year-old, “No, you can't go write a story or you can't go play with words or play music or whatever.” We encourage that behavior in children.

So I think when we squash down that creative self in our own lives, it can almost feel like that growth is stunted somehow, or there's this kind of sad child inside that just really wants to play with words or play with music. So we want to help that and facilitate that. As you say, find the joy.

Colleen: Exactly. And I think when you become an adult, I would almost say it's even more important than I think that it is in children because of the many benefits I see that in people and that the studies have found in people when you write and you write regularly.

It's hard to describe when you've gone through a lifetime of writing as you and I have, but it's kind of like imagining myself not having devoted my life to the craft of writing and everything that entails.

I mean, you go through the process of just writing a story is a huge thing that happens in your brain when you learn how to do that, and that happens with your empathy. Studies have found that we become more empathetic as we write about different characters, and we have to be in their skin as we write about them.

We go through the process of actually completing this story, and then we publish it, and then we get feedback, and then we go back and do it again. This is all very much a personal development thing that happens.

So we are becoming better versions of ourselves through this whole process. Like you say, if we squash it down, then we're denying ourselves that ability to become that person. It's almost like we kind of sit there and we stay at the same level rather than growing, which we would hope to do throughout our lives.

Joanna: Absolutely. Okay. So one more type.

Colleen: Yes, and that would be the perfectionist, I think. When I was asking writers to complete the questionnaire that I have in the story and making sure that it was all coming out accurate and everything, a great number of them were coming back as the perfectionist types.

In my book, just so people know, there usually isn't just one type. There usually is maybe one or two primary types. But when I was doing this, checking with writers and having them take this quiz, I often found that many of them were a blend of perhaps two or three more types.

I talk about the blend and how that operates in your writing life, but many of them had the perfectionist in there. It was either their primary type or perhaps their secondary type. The whole thing about perfecting our work. I've always known that I was a perfectionist as well, and so many writers came back with that.

So it's kind of like the guilty type that seems very pervasive among writers as creators. So I looked into that research a little bit more carefully, and what I discovered surprised me and has helped me with my perfectionism as well.

So we often think when we're perfectionists we're like, “Well, I just want this project to be as good as it can be,” and there is a lot of that in there.

I mean, often perfectionists do put out very high quality work, but there's also something else behind that if we are so perfectionist that we are endlessly tweaking and “here's draft number 75” and we're not taking that next step to share our work. What's really at the core of that is this huge fear of failure.

So in perfectionist writers, I feel like one of the big things they have to help themselves with is to gather the courage to take the risk that they need to take. Because one thing that I've learned over my writing career, the more that I risk failure, the less of a big deal it seems to be.

So I'm more willing now to go out and try things that I may fail at or some new marketing technique or some new author platform building thing, or some different type of book or story, because now I realize that failure is not as big a deal. In fact, failure is great. It's a good way for us to learn.

When you're in the early stages of being a perfectionist, that can really hold you back because you're just constantly thinking about it. One example that I hear often from writers is they're on the same book. They've been working on this first book that they wrote for 10 years because they got to make this book just perfect.

They have this belief that this one book is going to kind of be their writing career. I understand that because I did that too. I really focused on that book number one. Book number one was going to be what launched me into my novel writing career, which looking back now to me seems really silly.

After I had written seven half-finished manuscripts and I finally managed to complete one that I felt was good enough for publication, and it did get published. But still looking back at it now, it's like, “Okay, well that was just practice.”

We start to realize the more we do, and this is going back to that thing, that doing is so much better than thinking. Doing the book and going to the next book and going to the next book.

Perfectionists tend to really get caught up, especially young writers in that first book and not taking the long view of, “Okay, do you want to be a writer for life? Then you want to be thinking about book five, book 10, book 15 down the road. When we think that way, we are less likely to be so nitpicky about that first one.

Yes, make it as high quality as you can, but have a time limit. You know, “I have this book, and I'm going to give myself one year or two years, or whatever it is to finish it, and then I'm going to move on and I'm going to risk failure.”

I'm going to risk perhaps this not being perfect or perhaps it not selling millions of copies or whatever our dreams might be for it, because I know that this is about my experience and getting better and developing my skills as a writer. I do that by writing the next book.

Joanna: Yes, I actually get really annoyed at this kind of “my book is my baby” metaphor. I mean, obviously babies are very precious and special when they're with you for a long, long time and all of that, and so you attach the kind of emotional language around a book.

People just get obsessed with this one book for years and years and years. I have a lot of books now too, and it's sort of that they're employees actually. Once they're finished and they go out in the world, they're employees.

Colleen: That's a great way to think of it. I haven't thought of it that way.

Joanna: Yes, they're assets.

Now, of course, I didn't think about that at the beginning of my career, but it feels like a much, yes, I do the best job I can on every single book, but I'm not so emotionally attached, you know, to them, I think in the same way.

So as you say, it's changing the attitude, and I agree with you. There's so many people who just fixate on one book for a really long time, and also I think you, you don't think you have any more ideas.

I remember that from the beginning of my career. It was like, “Well, I'll never have any ideas.” But the truth is, once you clear that pipe—that's how I call it, it's like a pipe—you just need to clear that first blockage out the way, and then that pipe just keeps flowing. The ideas keep flowing, but you need to kind of unblock it with that first book.

Colleen: Oh, so very true. I was going to say, even if you do remain emotionally connected, which I think many of us do, I'm emotionally connected to my stories.

The whole thing of finding the courage and risking getting that book out there is such a good skill to develop because once you put it out there and you realize, like you say that the pipe is now open and you're off working on book number two, suddenly book number one is not as important to you.

You're now attached to book number two, and it happens that way with every single one that you go on and do next. Your next book is the one that you're really emotionally invested in.

So I think that's the other thing we don't see when we're just starting out, is that this same sort of investment could apply to a different child, so to speak, if that's how we look at our work. We could apply to the next story that we're doing.

We think this is the only one in our lives, which is just a shortsighted way of looking at it. So I try to encourage young writers to try to take that longer view and like you say, to realize that they have a lot more in them than just the one book.

I think the other big problem with that approach is that then when you finally do get it out there, if it doesn't fulfill all of your dreams, it is so hugely crushing and is so discouraging.

Esepcially for young writers to have put all this stuff in there, maybe 10 years, 15 years, 20 years on one single book, and then you finally get it to where you think it's amazing and you put it out there and it doesn't do everything you wanted it to do.

Then you, instead of realizing this was book number one and I have a lot more in me and I need to keep going and get better and go on and have this writing life, you think, “Oh. Well, this wasn't what I thought it was going to be, so I guess I better just quit” because it becomes such a crushing defeat, if that makes sense.

So I think trying to reprogram kind of your thinking into “there will be another one that I can be invested in. There will be the next project, and the important thing is to get this out and give myself the time to do these other books that are going to come along afterwards” is going to help you retain much more of your courage and your motivation as you move forward than if you put all your eggs in one basket, so to speak.

Joanna: You've used the phrase “young writers” a couple of times. Just to be clear for people, you mean people who have a low writing age, as in people who are still on one book or only started writing last year, whatever their actual age, they might be 65.

Colleen: Right, exactly. Exactly. Still a young writer. I think that's really important.

Joanna: And then you just said something like, and if that book doesn't fulfill all the dreams you had for it, then you might be disappointed. I'm thinking—

Colleen: Right. But I mean, I remember thinking that when I was first starting out that this book was, and I hear that from so many writers. They're, “Here's draft number 20 of the first book that they're working on.”

What really kills me is when it's book one in a series, and they've still got book two and three to write and they're putting all their eggs in this basket and I can just see this huge fall coming in the future. I don't want that to happen.

Joanna: Well, I guess we've talked about that writing craft side, but I'm also interested around the business side because you said earlier that you did procrastinate around sending out the book and pitching and that kind of thing. I feel like writers also procrastinate on marketing.

So you write fiction and nonfiction, you're also a freelance writer.

Colleen: Yes. I feel like that is a huge side of it that I wouldn't have really thought about procrastinating applying to before I did the research for this book. I am definitely a good candidate for this because I'm more on the creative side. I was not looking at this as a business early on.

This has been something that I've tried to then develop later in my career, because I've always had my freelance writing job to cover the bills, so to speak. So the writing was my creative outlet on the side.

Then as I've grown as a writer and have several books now, and I've gotten older and kind of in looking at the future, I'm like, “Boy, I really would like this to be more on the business side of what I do.”

Also, I'm experiencing changes now because as AI comes on, the whole freelance writing industry is going through a lot of big upheavals and changes. So as I look at that, I think, “Okay, well I need to tackle the business side of this as well.”

I've always had that along there as far as I have built author platforms that have grown and I've got a subscriber list and I'm doing all those things. I find that the marketing things that work change so often that it becomes like this whole other part of what we do as creatives that we need to learn about and get better at as we go.

So for me, it's become very much a self-education thing, and I'm learning and then I'm doing, and I'm learning and I'm trying something else, and I'm learning and trying something else. I think the whole thing of being willing to risk failure really comes in huge on the marketing side.

Maybe you are really good at creating a blog and that becomes your platform. Maybe you are better at doing YouTube videos and that becomes your platform. Maybe you do a podcast like you do, and that becomes how you reach people.

At the end of the day, marketing is just about trying to introduce our work to more people. So it's like, “How do I do that, and what are my natural strengths, and how can I apply those to the marketing side of things?”

I think most writers are uncomfortable with this because we never learned how to do this. Many of us are not natural business people or marketing people. That's not something we've done in our past. We were drawn to the creative side, but the business side seems very foreign to us.

So many writers will come to me at workshops and say, “I'm bad at marketing.” And I don't think that that's it necessarily. I think we just didn't learn how to do this and perhaps we're not naturally gifted at it, but that doesn't mean that we can't educate ourselves and put ourselves out there.

So I think for me, the key has been just trying this and trying that. The more I do that, the more marketing becomes fun because it's like experimentation and trying different things to get word about my book out there, and then just seeing what works and going back and analyzing the results and then doing more of what does and less of what didn't.

So for me, I'm definitely not a master marketer by any means, and I'm always listening to The Creative Penn podcast so that I could learn more about all of that. The Novel Marketing podcast and some of those others that I'm always tuning into.

I've kind of made it part of my writing life now. I think that's another key for writers is just to bring that marketing side in more often in what you're exposing yourself to and working into your weekly timeline of what you're tackling so that you have writing time, but you also have marketing time.

That's how I'm tackling it at this point. I don't know if that really answered your question, but that's where I'm at.

Joanna: Well, I mean, even that you said you listen to podcasts and here you are on the podcast. I feel like people feel—and I have had this feeling—like I should be doing something like TikTok. TikTok is the obvious one we should be doing, you know, short form video.

I'm like, I did try and literally my friend Sacha Black got on the phone with me, tried to help me do it, and I had a TikTok account for about six hours, and I just hated it. I hate it.

The main thing is, like you said, I don't consume short form video. Not on Instagram. Not on YouTube, not on TikTok, not anywhere. I don't really watch video, but I listen to a lot of podcasts.

So whether this has all become one because I've been podcasting so long, but the fact is, of course I can do podcasting and I listen to podcasts so I know the medium and it suits me and it's what I enjoy—the longer form discussions.

Whereas somebody who loves being on TikTok as a consumer would also be better at it as a creator. So we have to think about it that way, don't we?

Colleen: You're exactly right. This comes back to that self-knowledge. What are we? What do we naturally gravitate toward? What are we good at? And what do we enjoy?

Personally, I enjoy doing YouTube videos. I didn't think I would, but I saw that YouTube was a place where you could connect with people. I started picking that up. I'd had the channel for a while, but I hadn't done much with it.

Last August, actually, I decided to get serious and start posting once a week, and I found that I really enjoy that format. It seems a little similar to blogging to me, which I did well with my blog on my platform.

Now it seems like video's kind of becoming even more of an immediate way to reach people, especially in an age of AI. So the long form video, kind of the educational type videos I've taken to, and I think people have to decide what is going to work best.

I think often the only way you can figure that out is to try it. You just have to give it a try. The good thing is, I think the biggest thing that's helped me is most people don't care. They're not watching you.

You know, when I was first thinking about getting on video, I'm like, “Oh my gosh, people are going to see me and this is going to be scary and all that.” But you realize after you do it that it's really hard to build an audience and you have to get serious about it.

You have to have a regular plan for how you're doing it. It has to be in your writing life regularly. So one video, two videos, three videos is pretty much probably going to be ignored. We can assume that. So that kind of takes some of the fear out of it. It's like, “Oh, go ahead and try it. See what happens.”

If you have an inclination to do short form video, give it a try, see how it goes. You're not going to get 50 zillion views on your first or second or third video most likely, but you can determine if you enjoy it.

Do you enjoy this type of creative outlet? Do you enjoy blogging? Do you enjoy creating graphics and things on social media?

Now, one of my writing friends just loves Instagram. Is always creating reels and things for Instagram, not really my cup of tea. I found out that that's not really where my interests lie, but again, it's just trying these different things and seeing what works for you and what helps you to connect with new readers.

Joanna: Right.

Colleen: My writing motivational site is MasterWriterMindset.com, and then my author site is just my name, ColleenMStory.com. People always ask me, that is my real name. My dad gifted me with a pen name. It's cool how often that happens actually.

Those are my two main websites. I am on YouTube at ColleenMStoryteller, and there is actually a free quiz that people can take that's related to the procrastination book that's on my website right now. That's called MasterWriterMindset.com/findyours.

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

Colleen: Thank you, Joanna. It was great to be here.

The post Overcoming Procrastination With Colleen M. Story first appeared on The Creative Penn.