How do you keep the happiness and joy in your writing practice, along with managing the business side of being an author? Marissa Meyer gives her tips.

In the intro, How authors can price their books for profit [Self-Publishing with ALLi]; How to recover from author burnout [Self-Publishing Advice]; my Brooke and Daniel crime series in KU; Day of the Vikings; Outback Days and City Nights in the Lucky Country – Books and Travel; replanning with Calendarpedia.

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 

Marissa Meyer is the New York Times bestselling author of fantasy romance and graphic novels, including The Lunar Chronicles. The Happy Writer: Get More Ideas, Write More Words, and Find More Joy from First Draft to Publication and Beyond is her latest book for authors.

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 Marissa at MarissaMeyer.com or on Instagram @MarissaMeyerAuthor.

Joanna: Marissa Meyer is the New York Times bestselling author of fantasy romance and graphic novels, including The Lunar Chronicles. The Happy Writer: Get More Ideas, Write More Words, and Find More Joy from First Draft to Publication and Beyond is her latest book for authors. So welcome to the show, Marissa.

Marissa: Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

Joanna: It's great to have you on. So first up—

Marissa: Oh, goodness. I always wanted to be a writer. I am one of those. I was a huge reader growing up, loved stories, had a big imagination. So, really, from the time that I was a little kid, I started making up stories and telling them to my parents, asking them to write them down into little books for me.

Then as I got older, I, of course, started writing them myself. Then —

You could actually get paid to come up with stories and get your name printed on a book.

I think I realized really early on that that was for me, and that's what I wanted to do with my life. So I kept writing.

As a teenager, I got really into fan fiction and credit that a lot with learning how to tell a complete story. Beginning, middle, end. I got my bachelor's degree in creative writing and a master's degree in publishing because I thought writing might be a difficult career to break into.

I wanted to have a backup plan, and thought, well, if this writing thing doesn't pan out, maybe I can be an editor, maybe I can be a publicist or an agent or something.

The deeper I got into learning about publishing, the more it really just cemented how passionate I was about writing and how much I just really wanted to be the writer in this publishing equation.

So I wrote many multiple manuscripts that went nowhere, but eventually got the idea for a Cinderella retelling about a cyborg, a futuristic retelling. So that became my debut novel, Cinder.

Joanna: Wow. Okay, so it’s really interesting that you did publishing as a degree, as well as writing.

Like did you work in the publishing industry? Or did you just go straight from uni into full-time writer?

Marissa: No, I did. From university, I got a job as an editor at a very small publishing house in Seattle. That publisher focused mostly on fine art books. So those beautiful coffee table books that you get at museum exhibits and art galleries. You know those books.

So it had virtually nothing to do with my ultimate career of being a fiction writer, but it taught me a lot about just the behind the scenes, what goes into creating a book, and the actual production of it, the marketing of it, all of these various aspects.

So I did that for five years, and then I spent about a year as a freelance typesetter and proofreader. At which point my first novel sold, and I got to become a full-time writer.

Joanna: That's very cool. I love that you did typesetting and stuff like that. We'll come back to the business side, but let's get into the book.

So you use the words “happy” and “joy” in the book title, but I feel like many writers think suffering and pain is more of a hallmark of the creative process.

Marissa: Thank you so much for asking this question. It is so funny to me that we do have this stereotype of the writer. That you must be struggling in order to create art, and you must be suffering some way. If it's not painful, then how can you possibly call it quality?

This stereotype really bugs me, and I'm really trying to dismantle it with this book. But that said, we're also not shying away from the fact that writing, it's not just fun and play all the time. There are struggles, there are challenges, no matter where you are on your journey.

Whether you're suffering from writer's block or burnout, whether you're in the query trenches and you're facing rejection or criticism. There's a million things, of course, that can be roadblocks in our path to being happier writers.

That is largely what this book is about, trying to refocus our attention, not on all the things that can go wrong, not on all of the struggles that we face, but looking at the things that we really do love and enjoy about the craft of writing. The hobby, the career.

We get into it because we do have a passion. It's not the sort of job or hobby that most of us take on just for the heck of it. I mean — 

So I really encourage writers to find what it is that appeals to them about this. Do you love the process of taking a messy, complicated plot and fitting it together like a big jigsaw puzzle and that satisfying feeling when everything comes together?

Or do you love that you have the freedom to go to a cafe with your laptop and sip lattes all day and stare out at the people and let the world inspire you? Or maybe you love the research process and learning about things that you are so curious and interested in and just want to do deep dives into it.

There's a lot of things that we can find joy and satisfaction in. So that's going to be different for every writer, and that's going to be different based on where you are, both in the process of writing a particular book, but also where you are in your overall career.

Joanna: I love the research. I also love saying with a finished book, “I made this.” I always enjoy holding that book in my hand. You, coming from this fine art books thing you did early on, I guess you must love the really beautiful special editions and all that as well.

Marissa: Oh, I love it, and the smell! I love the smell of a new book. You don't always get it when a lot of books these days just come in like a cardboard box, but some of these special editions will come wrapped in plastic, and so they still maintain the smell of the ink and the binding glue. Ah, I just nerd out over it.

Joanna: Well, and that is important too, isn't it? I feel like we've come around to that. Like there was a lot of focus on digital for a while, especially for independent authors, but now it's really come round to beautiful, physical products.

That, to me, is a very exciting part of the process, finishing the whole thing with something beautiful. That satisfaction is really part of it.

Marissa: Absolutely. I'm really big on celebrations.

That is such a huge part of the process.

It's really easy—and especially like for me, I'm about 20 books now into my career— it can be easy to be like, “Oh, just another one. Set it on the shelf, and keep on working on the next deadline.” I really have tried to be very conscientious about it.

No, let's pause. Let's pop some champagne. Let's take a night off. Let's get a massage. Like, what is it that's going to make me feel like, yes, I've done it again, and I'm really proud of this moment.

Joanna: That's great. Well, you do have a section on the writing process in the book. Of course, every author is different, but if people haven't got to that 20 books place—

Which I know some people have an issue with.

Marissa: Finishing is hard. I think it's important for people to know that everyone struggles with finishing. We talk a lot about the siren song of the next project because at some point in every book you're going to reach that point where you're in the murky middle and it feels endless.

You're confused about the plot, you're frustrated that things aren't going well, and suddenly you get a sparkly new idea for the next thing.

It's so easy to think, “Ah! That one's going to be really easy and really fun, and it's not going have any of these other problems that I'm dealing with right now.”

It's very tempting to switch over and to follow that path of least resistance. I think it's important to know that that fantasy of the next one being so easy, probably not reality. Probably you will get to relatively the same point in the process and, once again, be hit with, “Ah, this is hard. It's work. What else can I do?”

For me, one of the tips that I started using fairly early in my career is when I am at the start of a project, and I'm really excited, and I've got lots of ideas, and you can feel all the potential for it, and there's a reason that you're choosing to write this thing out of all your other ideas. Why am I focusing my time on this one?

Maybe it's the romance that I'm really excited to write, or I just love the protagonist, or there's a really big twist in the plot that I can't wait to see how readers are going to react to.

Whatever it is, I will write down everything that I really love about this idea. Then when I'm a third of the way or halfway through the book and suddenly hating it and feeling like this is the worst thing I've ever written, and I can't believe that I chose this, what was I thinking, I'll go back and I'll read that list.

I will remind myself why I chose this one in the beginning, and what do I love about it? What do I still love about it? Then I will take those ideas and I will try to incorporate them into the next scene or chapter, or couple of chapters that I'm going to write.

“All right, I love the romance.” Well, let's have a romantic scene. “I think the villain is so cool.” Well, let's have a scene where we really get to see how cool the villain is. You know, whatever it is, focus on that, and that will hopefully help you get over that bad period.

You're like, I'm just going to write the climax scene because I know that will be fun, or do you write linearly?

Marissa: It really depends on the project. I have done both, and I think both processes work. Some books are more difficult than others.

The books that I'm struggling with more, then I will tend to jump around and go ahead to write a scene that I'm really excited about, but not always.

Some books have very complicated plots that are very interwoven, and in those cases, it can be less of a mental gymnastics challenge if you do write it linearly. So it really depends.

I think, for me —

whether it's a word count goal or a chapter goal or whatever it is, anything you can do any day to keep moving forward is going to be helpful.

Joanna: Sometimes that moving forward might not be getting new words down. You also have a section about filling the creative well. Sometimes, especially when you've written as many books as we both have, it can be like, okay, do you know what I need? Some more input.

Marissa: Absolutely, and that's such an important thing to note. Like you say, sometimes getting words down is not the answer.

If you're facing some amount of creative burnout, or if you're just really stuck in a plot and feel like things just aren't working, or maybe you've taken a wrong turn somewhere and you're not really sure how to fix it, sometimes the best thing you can do is take a step back, and do it intentionally.

I think there's a distinction between saying, “I have writer's block and I can't possibly write anything today,” versus, “I am choosing not to write today because I recognize that I need a moment and need some space to refill the well and tap into that creative spark again.”

So, for me, when I decide I'm going to take a day off, there's a myriad of things that I might choose to do with that time. I think getting outside, going for walks, or if you can go to a park or go on a hike somewhere, if you can go swimming. Anything like that tends to, for me, really generate some new ideas.

Spending time with my family is always good. A lot of times I will use those days off to tackle other projects, things that have kind of been looming in the background. Maybe they're taking up more mental space than they should be.

That could be things like getting your car washed, or that could be like reorganizing your pantry, just things that have been really bugging you lately.

Or you might take a day and be like, I'm going to do some really fun research about this project. Or I'm going to take a day and spend some time brainstorming or reoutlining my plot.

So you can also take a more hands on approach to writing. There's really no right or wrong here. Whatever you feel like you need, give it a shot and see if it helps break something loose.

Marissa: All of it. I really enjoy research. I love reading. I love doing deep dives, you know, going on Wikipedia and clicking the little further reading links at the bottom and seeing the rabbit holes you go down.

Also, if I can find a way to do a hands-on or more of an experiential research, that's the best. Of course, we all fantasize about being able to travel. If you can go to the place where your setting is inspired by, that is worth gold.

It's not always an option, of course, for different reasons, but if you can get out and see the world and take in these really great sensory details, it is so helpful.

It could also be talking to an expert on something about your story, something about your protagonist or your plot, because they're going to have just the best insights. They're going to clue you into things that you never would have even known to look up to research.

I've crawled under cars to see how they work because I don't know anything about cars, but I had a mechanic character, so I better learn something about cars.

I love cooking. If there's a dish that my character has to cook or bake or is served, I'll find a recipe and give it a try myself. Just little things like that to just kind of give you that hands on experience. I think it adds a lot to the authenticity as you're writing.

Joanna: It also makes it more of a fun process.

Marissa: It's more fun. Why not? We're all about trying to make it more fun.

Joanna: Yes, exactly. Well, then coming to writing series, because it feels like, obviously we need tropes in the books. If we're writing different books in a series, we need to make sure the characters are consistent and all that.

I feel like a lot of people now are sort of like, okay, is it the same thing, the same thing? What stays the same in a series book and what changes? How do you get ideas for that?

Marissa: That's a good question, and it's going to depend on if your series follows one main protagonist versus if it's more like a loosely connected series with maybe different protagonists or different love interests in each book. Generally, I think it's more common that you've got the solo protagonist who has a complete character arc.

So when I'm thinking of the entire series as a whole and trying to step back and see kind of a big picture, I will give a lot of thought to the protagonist's arc. Where do they start page one, book one? And where am I hoping they're going to end up?

Within that, depending on how many books you have in your series, there's probably going to be some reversals. There might be that in book one, your protagonist might end on a really high note.

Book two, it might be the opposite. They may be way down at the bottom now. Something terrible has happened that they have to claw their way out of.

Or they learn something about themselves in book one, but then book two, you flip it on its head and say, “They thought this thing, but surprise, actually, it's a negative in some way.”

Generally speaking, we tend to think of character arcs as being upward, but I think it's helpful to think of it more as a roller coaster. There should be dips, there should be lots of places where things are going wrong.

So that's one thing that I'm thinking about as I'm putting together a series. Then I'm also thinking about my antagonist and my conflicts. I have often likened it to like old video games, where every level ends with a boss, but then the very end of the game has the big boss that you're really trying to defeat.

So the first boss, you have barely enough skills to defeat that first boss, and maybe it takes a few tries to beat that first level, but you do it. Oh, but now you have to do the second level, and that next boss is going to be even harder.

As you go, you're getting better. Your characters are picking up new skills, new weapons, new allies. So at the end of every book we have a conflict, a climax, something that we have to face, and everyone is going to be a step up, a little more difficult than the last one.

So that we know by the time our character is finally ready to face that big conflict, the big struggle, the antagonist, villain, whatever it is you have at the end of the series, that you have given them the skills that they need to actually defeat them.

Joanna: There's some great advice there. So let's come into more of the business side because you do have this section on the to-do list. I love this because the to-do list is never ending. For indie authors, we're publishing, as well as marketing and writing and everything.

Marissa: Oh, my gosh. It is hard, and I will admit this is something that I personally have really struggled with. I'm a yes person. I like to say yes. I like to please people. I like to feel like I am doing everything within my power to make a book a success, to further my career. So I get it.

I absolutely get how difficult it is to recognize when we need a little space, or we need some downtime, or when we need to take a step back. For me, and I didn't come up with this, I read it in some productivity guide, self help guide, a long time ago, but it really resonated with me.

For example, if you say, yes, I will be on this panel at this book festival.

Okay, let's say you have to travel there. Let's say it's a full day being on the panel. There's probably going to be a signing. Maybe there's an author dinner. Another full day of travel going back home. So we've got essentially two to three days for that yes.

There's lots of times when, great, I can't wait. I'm looking forward to this. I'm going to meet some readers, I'm going to network with authors.

Maybe you recognize that by saying yes to that, I'm saying no to three days with my family, or I'm saying no to three days of working on my novel, or I'm saying no to a day where I could relax and spend a day reading a book and refilling my well.

So none of these are the right option, none of them are the wrong option, but just recognizing that there are pros and cons, and give and take, and be really picky about what you're spending your time on and what you are making your priority at any given point.

Joanna: It is interesting. You mentioned a panel there, and I feel like conferences and conventions are one of these things that is quite difficult. Now, you and I, again, have been doing this a while, so we have a community, like we have author friends.

There are people listening who might be introverts. They might feel very uncomfortable about going to writing conferences, and they're like, should I just say no to that? I guess that the question is—

When do you have to push yourself as an author, and when should you give into those feelings? I know it's tough, but when have you done this as an early writer and then later stage?

Marissa: This is one of those things where I really think people have to tap into their own psyche and recognize, what are my limitations, what are my goals? For me, early in my career, I did it all. If I was invited to something, it was an automatic yes.

I also did not have children at the start of my career, so for me, when it really started to change, as far as recognizing my time is limited, my energy is limited, I have to step back and say no to more things, was when I had kids.

Then it really became that balancing act of, when do you focus on the writing and the career? When do you focus on family?

That said, I mean, the publishing process, the writing process, there's ups and downs. There are times when you are really focused on selling a book, on marketing a book, promoting. That's both with in-person events, doing book signings, doing the festivals. There's also social media, sending out newsletters.

You can really focus on it for one, two, three months, whatever your capacity is, and then step back. Maybe take a hiatus on social media.

Maybe say, for these next five months, I need to write a new book, and I need to focus on being with my family and do some self-care. So for these five months, I'm saying no to all other requests. I mean, whatever it is. I'm just throwing out numbers. Of course, this is going to be different for everybody.

So really think about — 

I hate saying that because I am one of those people where I feel like I can do it all, just let me try. But you really can't.

You have to make choices sometimes and recognize that if you're trying to do it all for too long, then that's a recipe for burnout. That's the last thing we want.

The last thing we want is to get to a point in our career where we dread the writing, or we dread the travel, or we dread the book events.

So whenever you start to feel like it's too much, listen to that and give yourself some space. Realize that the world is not going to fall apart if you take a little bit of time off.

Joanna: I love that. Actually, I prefer this sort of campaign focus, which is what you were really saying there. It's like, go hard for, say, three months, and then take a couple of months off. I do that. I kind of step back from social media.

Some people feel like they have to do, I know the TikTok authors in particular, are doing a lot of videos every single day. They feel like if they stop, it's all going to end.

Marissa: It's true. There's always going to be the next goal post. There's always going to be that next thing that you're thinking, “Oh, if I just get this many followers, then I can slow down.”

Then you get that many followers, and you think, “Oh, but I've got a book coming out in two months, so I'll keep going until then, and then I'll slow down.” “Oh, but now I've got this other thing.” I mean, it's always going to push back. It's always going to be something else.

It's hard to recognize when you do need some personal space, but it's also really important. Not just for our mental health and wellbeing, but for our creativity too.

Joanna: Okay, so another thing that some people are not that happy or joyful about is pitching publishers and agents. Mostly people are quite stressed about that.

Now, you work with traditional publishers. I'm primarily an independent author. There are pros and cons.

Any tips for people who want to position themselves in a world of publishing flux, as ever?

Marissa: Definitely one of the most stressful periods in a career is the pitching to the agents, the querying trenches, the submission trenches. It can do some damage on your confidence, on your everything. So it's a really difficult period.

If your goal is to be traditionally published, as opposed to independently published, and as you say, great options. There's so many great directions that we have available to us today.

If you really think you want to be traditionally published, of course, number one, just make sure you've written the best book that you can. Get some feedback. Have some critique partners go over it.

Then when you feel like, okay, I've done the best I can do, write your query letter. Again, get feedback there, because query letters are particularly tricky, and there is a science and an art to them. Do your research.

Then send it off, and, number one, celebrate because it's so huge. It's such a huge accomplishment to get to the point where you're querying. So regardless of whether you get 10 agents interested and it goes to auction at publishers, or if no one bites, like regardless, you have written a complete book and submitted it.

That's so awesome, so like take a moment to congratulate yourselves and go out for pizza or whatever, whatever you do to celebrate. Then start writing the next thing.

The worst thing that we can do is have this book sent out, and then just spend all day, every day, worried about it and stressing about it and having that anxiety building up and checking our email 100 times a day, which like you're probably going to do anyway.

Then dive into it, body and soul and spirit, and try to immerse yourself in a new story.

This is for a number of reasons. One, because it's going to be a great distraction. But two, when and if your book on submission gets picked up, your agent is going to ask you, what else you got? So it's great to have something else that you can talk about.

Joanna: Then what I do like in your book—I mean, I like lots of things—but you do also —

I like that you covered this because so many people think, “Oh, if I get an agent or a publisher, that's it forever. My whole life is amazing, and I'm rich and famous, and everything will work out.”

So why might some of these things happen over a career, and what's the kind of attitude you need to survive it all?

Marissa: This was one of the big surprises for me, as I started to expand my group, my network of writers, how common it is to break up with an agent or to switch publishers, publishing houses, to switch editors. It happens all the time.

This was shocking to me because I very much felt like, no, when you've got an agent and a publisher, you are set forever. That is your career, those are your people. So I was really surprised that that is not the case.

There's so many reasons why one of these relationships may not work out. I've had friends whose agents have retired, whose editors have moved to different publishers. So it might be something rather innocuous. Life just happens.

Or it could be a matter of just not being the right fit for each other. Maybe your agent only represents kid lit and you want to move into adult. Or you really want to start writing romance, but they don't represent romance.

It could be a matter of my agents not communicating with me. Or I feel like they're no longer focused on me and my career, and I feel like I'm not getting the attention that I really need and want out of an agent.

Again, there's so many reasons, but it does happen. It's not the end of the world, it's just a little blip, another blip in your journey.

By and large, the friends I have who have left an agent, or whose agent has left their career or whatever, then when they find someone new, more often than not, they end up feeling like, you know what? This was the right thing.

I really took my time, I found someone new who is a great fit for me, who is excited about my career and my upcoming projects, and who is really working it and making things happen, and making book deals happen.

So I know it's really hard in that moment because you can feel like I worked so hard to get this agent, why would I ever leave them and go back to querying?

So really try to take a big picture look and think, well, I might be going through a bad spot now, but what is the potential payoff in the end? What do I stand to succeed and to gain in doing this? So it's a tough decision. It's not a fun part of the career, but it is a reality for a lot of us.

So you just make some more choices and carry on. We don't let that end our careers.

Marissa: Absolutely, and you're always going to be your best advocate.

We think of our agents as our advocates, and we think of our editors as our advocates. They absolutely are, but ultimately, no one is paying as much attention to your career as you are. So we really have to speak up for ourselves, first and foremost.

Joanna: We're almost out of time, but I have to ask you about book marketing because it is a part of every author's life, and again, something where happiness and joy might not be such a big part. So how can we make marketing more fun?

Marissa: Oh, my gosh. If you figure it out, you let me know.

Joanna: Well, I like podcasting. So, there you go.

Marissa: I also really enjoyed podcasting, although I did just retire my podcast because, again, too many things, too many spinning plates, and you have to make some tough choices sometimes.

For me, you know, find the things that you do enjoy. I learned early on, I don't like Facebook, and I don't like Twitter/X. It was difficult pulling back from those because I had a fair amount of followers, but when I did, it was clearly the right decision. I wish I'd done that a long time ago.

Then it allowed me to focus my energy and my attention on Instagram, which is the platform that I just naturally gravitate toward best. I just enjoy it the most.

We were talking about the TikTokers who feel like they have to make multiple videos every day. Figure out what—again, back to limitations— what is your capacity?

Have a plan in place and say, okay, I'm going to post three times a week, or five times a week. Or maybe I'm going do Fan Art Fridays, and I'm going do New Book Tuesdays or whatever it is, and then maybe I'll have one fun family post, or one fun “this is a quirky thing about me” post every week.

So you can kind of have a plan and break it down so that you're not every morning looking at your phone thinking, “Oh, I have to post on Instagram again,” or, “I have to do a TikTok video. Now, what am I going to talk about?”

I also think it's helpful to maybe once a month, or maybe at the start of a big promo season, spend some time doing your big brainstorming and kind of like batch.

So I'll spend a day brainstorming what I want to post, and then I'll spend a few hours taking the necessary photos and trying to put together the captions or trying to put together the graphics or whatever. Then that's done, and I don't have to worry about that for a couple of weeks, maybe a month, if you're really productive.

So it's a really nice, efficient way to tackle that and then be able to move back to writing, which is, for most of us, the thing that we would rather be doing.

Joanna: Absolutely. Now, the book is The Happy Writer.

Marissa: Thank you so much. I can be found on Instagram at MarissaMeyerAuthor, or on my website at MarissaMeyer.com. Books are available pretty much wherever you like to get your books.

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

Marissa: My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.

The post The Happy Writer With Marissa Meyer first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can you use short stories to improve your writing craft across different genres? How can you make money from licensing your short stories in different ways? How do you structure a short story collection? Douglas Smith shares his tips.

In the intro, S&S imprint says that authors no longer need to get blurbs for their books [The Guardian]; James Patterson will be headlining Author Nation 2025; How to sell books from a table [Novel Marketing Podcast]; My lessons learned about screenwriting; Death Valley, a Thriller.

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 

Douglas Smith is a multi-award-winning Canadian author of novels, short stories and nonfiction, with over 200 short fiction publications in 36 countries and 27 languages. He's also the author of Playing the Short Game: How to Market and Sell Short Fiction, now out in its second edition.

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 Doug at SmithWriter.com.

Joanna: Douglas Smith is a multi-award-winning Canadian author of novels, short stories and nonfiction, with over 200 short fiction publications in 36 countries and 27 languages. He's also the author of Playing the Short Game: How to Market and Sell Short Fiction, now out in its second edition. So welcome back to the show, Doug.

Douglas: Oh, thank you, Joanna. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me back.

Joanna: Oh, yes. So first up­—

Douglas: Well, I guess I did a fair bit of writing in high school and a bit in university. Then I just drifted away from it, pursuing a business career and raising a family, etc. I always told myself I would go back and chase the writing dream someday.

I remember, I was in my early 40s, and I came back from a family vacation, and one of the first things I read was the obituary for one of my all-time favorite writers, Roger Zelazny. He was the American science fiction fantasy writer, and he had died far too early at, I think, 56 from cancer.

That just drove home the fact that none of us are guaranteed of a someday. So I started writing that summer and turned out about eight short stories. I joined a writing group to get feedback on my writing.

Then about a year and a half later, it was actually on New Year's Eve of the following year, I got my first acceptance letter. So that was a great way to end a year and start a new one. So that's how I started. I started with short fiction. I started because one of my favorite writers died far too young.

Joanna: What was your previous career?

Douglas: I was an IT executive. Just in case people are wondering, I remained an IT executive. I did not give up the day job, so writing was done in spare time. Especially when I started with short fiction, it's very hard to live and raise a family on the proceeds of short stories.

Joanna: I think that's a really important thing to say. I suspected you were going to say that. Then just with perspective—

So what year was it that you did that first sale?

Douglas: That story came out in '97, so a long time ago. That story actually ended up winning an award. So, yes, it was a good start, but I stayed with writing short fiction for about 10 years.

Part of that was inertia, and part of it was just writing a novel at that time seemed kind of daunting. I finally did decide that I needed, for the same someday issue, that I wanted to move into novels, and I better not wait any longer.

Joanna: Yes. I mean, obviously the publishing industry is quite different from 1997, and we'll come back to some of the other markets. What have you noticed with short fiction in particular, or in general with the indie author community, and things changing? I mean—

Douglas: Yes, I did, and my novels as well. My collections, which were the first things I put out, they came out from traditional publishers that are small press publishers, one in the UK and one in Canada.

When it came to the point where I was ready to publish my first novel, for me, I saw no upside in trying to go a traditional publishing route.

Ironically, my advice is quite different for short fiction. One, I think writers should start with short fiction and that they should pursue the traditional short story markets that are, if anything, far more numerous now than when I started.

Thanks to the option of a lot of these short fiction magazines or anthologies, they put out ebook editions, so it's a lot easier. You don't have to worry about the physical distribution, physical production of the magazines.

There's still a lot of print magazines around, still a lot of print anthologies, but you'll find there's a lot of options for selling short fiction. Much more than when I started.

Joanna: So let's get to some of the pros and cons, I guess. So you said there you do think fiction authors should start with short stories. Why do you recommend that?

Douglas: Yes, it is fun. I mean, if you do not like short fiction as a reader, it's going to be difficult for you to be successful as a writer. So that would be the first thing. The standard advice for any writer is you've got to be a reader.

If you don't read, you're not going to be a writer.

Why short fiction to start with? My main, strongest argument is that it helps you learn your craft. It teaches you how to be a writer.

There are far too many indie novels out there that are, quite frankly, terrible.

The good thing with short fiction is that it gives you a method where you can try out a lot of different types of stories, types of story structure. You can basically build your toolbox as a writer, and many of those tools are the same ones you're going to need if you move onto novels.

The other thing is it gives you a benchmark. If you're writing short stories and sending them out to professional markets—and I assume we'll get into that—you get a wonderful little measuring stick for when you've become a professional writer.

Or in other words, when your writing has become good enough that someone out there wants to pay you money to publish it, in the hopes that they will make money from what they publish.

So if you don't do that, if you just jump into indie and send your stories out into the world, put them up on retail sites, quite frankly, it's probably not going to be a very good piece of writing. It's hard to develop a craft.

One of the complaints I have with a lot of the indie writers out there is, and you see it if you go to convention, all they focus on is, “I've written a book. Now, how can I market it? Please tell me the secret to beating an algorithm.”

There are good marketing approaches. The problem is, if you come up with a good marketing approach for your novel, your first novel, it's probably going to do you more harm than good. Because if you get a lot of people to read it, and they read it and say, this is not very good, they're never going to come back to your writing.

As opposed to if you've taught yourself the craft of writing, and you become a competent writer, and you get to the point where professional publishers are willing to give you money for your short stories, your writing has reached that point.

So when you move to a novel, it's going to be a different beast than short stories, but you're going to have a lot of the skills already in place that you've honed over the time you've been writing short fiction.

One more thing is, the example I love to give is, you can try a lot more points of view: first person, third person. Different story structures, things you want to try. Genres: horror, science fiction, fantasy, mainstream.

You can try more of those over 25,000-word short stories than you can in one 100,000-word novel.

You've written the same number of words, but you're going to come out at the end of those 20 short stories being much more knowledgeable and a better writer than writing that first 100,000 word novel.

Joanna: I mean, I totally agree with you there in terms of the potential for doing shorter stories. I mean, you said 5000 words.

Because people often get obsessed with this.

Douglas: Yes, and the definitions I'll give are from the Science Fiction Fantasy Writers Association. So a short story is anything up to, I think it's 7500 words. Then a novelette is above that, up to 17,750 or 17,500, I can't remember which.

Then a novella is above that, up to 40,000 words. Then flash, it varies. Anything typically up to 1000 words is called flash.

Your typical short story, if you look at markets out there, they will want something in the range of 3000 to 5000 words. If you write above that, the other tip I'll give is, the longer the story is, the harder it will be to sell.

If you've got a 10,000-word story, and an editor loves your story, but they also love two 5000-word stories from two other writers, they're probably going to buy those two stories as opposed to your one big one. They're taking a bigger chance on your single story.

Joanna: Okay, well, let's talk about those markets then, because you mentioned the traditional short story markets, but that there are a lot more of them these days.

Obviously, just so everyone knows, in the book you go through this extensively. So I highly recommend people get the book for more detail, but just give us an overview.

Douglas: Well, generally speaking, your markets for any story that you write—and we're going to have to get into the rights that you'll be dealing with when you're trying to market a short story—but simply, it's a magazine.

There are lots of magazine markets out there, and those are ones that come up with a different issue—not too many do it monthly anymore—but four times a year, three times a year. They are either in print format and/or electronic edition. So they're called serial publications.

Then the other main market is an anthology, the anthology markets. Those are books that contain stories from different authors. So those are your two main options.

Anthologies typically are themed, so they have the advantage of, if you've got a very strange story, you may luck out and find that there is an anthology coming out of radioactive chickens from space or something. You haven't been able to sell that story of yours, and now you probably have a higher probability.

So anthologies and magazines. The other major market would be audio markets.

Again, there can be audio anthologies or audio zines as well, and they will be producing essentially a podcast version of your story. They will have a narrator that will read your story and dramatize it. That's the third type.

Joanna: Let's talk about the different rights.

Because it is quite different, isn't it, to long form fiction and nonfiction.

Douglas: In many ways, it's very similar. The main thing that if you're going to start writing at all is understand that you have rights.

So for short stories, when a publisher that you've submitted to comes back to you and says, “Hey, I love this story, I want to publish it,” we typically say, “Hey, I sold a short story.” You actually haven't sold anything. What you're going to be doing is licensing a very particular set of rights to that publisher.

They're going to have a number of dimensions. The first dimension I deal with in the book is, I call it the Media Dimension, and we just talked about the three different types of markets.

So if you're selling to a print magazine, they're going to want to license print rights. If they're only in electronic format, then they'll want electronic rights. If they're an audiobook publisher, they'll want audio rights.

So there's that, there's the three dimensions of types of media, and that's combined with whether they're an anthologist or a magazine. So for example, if I sold a story to a magazine that only has print editions, they would want to license serial print rights.

Serial means they're a magazine, and they need print rights to legally publish my story, because that's the format they're in. If they also have an ebook edition, then they'd ask for print and electronic serial rights.

The other dimension is language. So, I mean, most of your listeners are going to be writing in English.

Then the other dimension is geography. Some publishers, short fiction publishers, are still restricted to a particular geography, and that is usually only for print publishers. So if a magazine publishes in Canada only, and distributes in Canada only, for example, they would ask for first Canadian print serial rights.

So all these things in English, all these things, as you see, get combined into a collection of rights that they'll be licensing from you.

Joanna: You mentioned first serial rights there, and this is what's quite different.

Douglas: I call them old currents rights. The very first time you sell a story, they will be licensing first rights from you. It'll be first—whatever those other rights were—first print rights, first audio rights, etc.

After that, there's a time period associated with rights, and it's called the reversion period. After your story has been published, the rights will revert to you. Meaning that the publisher will say, “Hey, the story is yours again. You can do whatever you want with it.”

Typically, if it's a magazine, they will ask for a reversion period that will be somewhere around where the following issue comes out. So if they publish four times a year, they'll probably ask for about a six-month reversion period, and that's very fair.

Anthologists will ask for anything from a year to two years after the publication date.

So let's say that reversion period has passed, the rights come back to you. Those rights come back as second rights, not first rights. You only get to sell license first rights once.

When you do have those rights come back to you though, you can now, what we call, sell a reprint. In other words, you can market to another publication that accepts reprints and sell the story over and over and over again. No matter how many times you sell a reprint, you're always licensing second right.

So there's no such thing as third rights or fourth rights or anything. It's one time for first rights, and after that, you can license second rights as many times as you can find a market who wants to publish your reprint.

Joanna: I feel like that is one of the big differences with rights for a novel. I mean, I see a lot of authors getting term of copyright contracts, or really, really long time limits. Whereas, as you say with shorts, they're maybe six months or up to two years, but then you can keep selling it over and over again. I'm sure you have sold some of your shorts multiple times over decades.

Douglas: Yes, for sure. I've got stories that I've sold 30-plus times.

Joanna: Wow. So, well, then for people listening, 30-plus times—

Douglas: So that's a good question, and it leads into what my strategy is for short fiction that I recommend to writers. It's that you're only going to get the top rates from a short fiction market if it's a pro market.

Pro markets only license first rights, they don't take reprints.

So I'll eventually answer your question, but the main point I want to make is my strong recommendation is that when you're sending your stories out, when you try to sell them for the first time, you only submit to the top professional markets.

That's the only time you'll ever get a chance to get into an Asimov, or a Fantasy and Science Fiction, or a Lightspeed, etc, because once you've sold that story, they're never going to be interested in it.

So you need to, as I say in the book, start at the top. Start at your most desired markets, the ones that have the most cachet. Those are also the ones that pay the top pro rates, and also the ones that get the most awards, press, and nods, etc.

After you get the rights back from that, you can market it to any market that takes a reprint. You'll find anything. You'll find markets that will simply publish your story and not give you any money.

You can find markets that will pay you up to five, six cents a word for a reprint. Whereas pro rates, I think, they're still at eight cents a word for SFWA. So it really ranges. So how much money you can make from a story kind of depends on what you want to sell your reprint at.

I personally warn authors that if you sell a story anytime, it's going to involve work and time on your part. So you should set sort of a minimum dollar amount that you're willing to accept to pay you for your time to work with the editor, go over the print copy before it's published, etc.

Joanna: So on that, eight cents a word, it'd be around $400 then for a 5000-word story at premium market.

Douglas: Yes. At US dollar rates, yes.

Joanna: US dollar rates. Then, let's say, in six months, you get that story back, and then you can do what you like with it. As you said, you can license it over and over again.

It's so interesting. I've written now a few short stories and have been in a few anthologies, but basically, I've never submitted to any traditional markets. Mainly because of my lack of patience and the fact that, I guess, I know that if I publish it myself and put it out right now, then I'm going to get some money.

Especially if I'm selling direct, I'm going to make more than that $400 from my own audience. So it's a very different definition of success, I guess, in terms of cachet and awards versus money in your pocket now.

Douglas: Sure, so one comment on that. I mean, you have a name, and you have a huge audience and platform, so it's more conceivable that you're going to be able to indie publish a piece of short fiction and get more money than a beginner.

So my comments are focused at the beginning writer, and if you want to get the most mileage out of your short story that comes from selling it to a top pro market. It helps you build your resume. You can also build up a backlist.

So it helps you build up your own network. So, you know, you're in a position where you already have that. If I'm a beginning writer, my advice to them is I would still start with short fiction.

So, yes, probably about two dozen of my early short stories are available in ebook format. So those are all stories that I sold first rights for to a traditional market. So in other words, when I did an ebook for those stories, the rights had already reverted back to me. The story had been out.

A lot of them were award winners or award finalists. I did it at the time because I was sort of just getting into looking at indie publishing. I didn't have any novels, so I thought I'd try just putting out some of my short stories as individual ebooks, use them as reader magnets, etc.

I got a great artist who gave me a great deal on producing covers for them, so they all have the same cover. It was a price that made it sensible to try that experiment.

So, yes, if you go to Amazon, any of the retailers, if you go to the bookstore on my website, you'll be able to buy my short stories individually. That's not how I started, and I would never put out a new short story that way. I'd still go to a traditional market for it.

Joanna: Okay, I think that's really interesting. I do want to point out to everyone that I grew my audience, and that everyone has to grow their own audience over a long, long time.

You've obviously done the same thing, I think starting at different times. I started a decade after you, so 2007 was my first book that I self-published. So it's kind of interesting how things change over time.

I do want to just ask about collections because, obviously, you have collections. Here I'm saying a collection as a single author, as opposed to an anthology with multiple authors with shorts.

Douglas: The first step is to make sure that you have enough quality stories. So enough means, you know, minimum 80,000 words. I think a dozen stories that is at least that length would be reasonable.

The main point is that those stories all have to be good. A collection, it's like a chain is strong as the weakest length. It's going to be judged on the worst story in the book. So as soon as the reader hits a weak one, sadly, they're probably going to remember that one.

So you really need your 12, whatever, best stories. So you need to have written more than 12 stories because probably the 12 that you've written aren't the best. They all should have appeared in a top market because that is one of the ways you can tell it's a good story. Someone paid you pro rates for it.

If you have any award winners or award finalists or stories that appeared in annual best of anthologies, they go in as well. So that's the main thing. They have to be quality stories because this collection is going to be a calling card for you.

After that, it depends. The next piece, let's say you've picked your great stories that you want to put in the collection, he next thing is, what order do you put them in? The rule for doing collections or anthologies pretty much has stayed the same since I started writing, anyway.

So the idea is you want to pull the reader in with two really good stories and then leave them with a positive memory the collection when they read the last one.

If you have another really good one, you should put it in the middle as sort of a tent pole in case things are flagging. So that's the quality criteria for sorting through what order you want to put your stories in.

After that, it comes down to, as I say in the book, trying to craft a reader experience. You have to sit down and think, “Okay, they just finished this story. What should come next?” There's so many ways to do that.

I write in science fiction, and fantasy, and horror, and some Slipstream, etc. So do I mix all those? Do I put one section for all my science fiction? Do I put one section for my fantasy, etc.? The questions I put out, I alternate, but I also look at the tone. You have to look at the length too.

By tone, I mean, if you have a really, really downer story, you might want to follow that with something more upbeat. The reverse is true too.

If you have a couple that are like novel at length, you probably don't want to put them back to back. You want to have a shorter story following a long story.

Joanna: I read a lot of short story collections and anthologies, and it's more that I dip in, and I never, ever read them in order. I usually only read like one story at a time. It's something I do before I go to sleep, like just before bed.

So it's very weird because I feel like different readers have different experiences. So we can try our best, but readers might just decide to do what the hell they want. I do have two other points on this.

So I'm going to do a Kickstarter for my collection, and I'm thinking of including a couple of short stories that have not been seen anywhere else, so they're real exclusives.

Then also, I was wondering about extra material. So I always do an author's note as to what inspired the story. I was thinking of expanding those sort of into interstitial pieces. So any thoughts on those two things?

Douglas: Yes, both good points. One is if you have a story that has not been published anywhere else, you should include one of those.

One, it's a bit of a teaser. If you have a fan who's a completist and they just want to read everything that you write, the only way they're going to be able to read that story is if they buy the collection. So it is a good policy to include one previously unpublished short story in a collection.

The additional material, the author notes around stories, I personally love, and I'd recommend it. I mentioned Roger Zelazny is one of my favorite writers, and he had a lot of collections.

What I enjoyed about his collections were his either forwards or afterwards where he talks about the story and how the idea arrived, and maybe how it ties into other stories he'd written, etc. I love that.

I know I had a couple of comments on my collections where people were saying they didn't like it. They just want to read the short stories. So, I mean, you can't please everybody.

I would say, in general, most of the feedback I've received on my short stories, my collections, has been that the reader enjoys learning more about the story. Either how you wrote it, or why you wrote it, or whatever. So I'd recommend putting that in.

Sometimes I've done it as forwards, sometimes afterwards. Depends if there's any spoilers. Sometimes both.

Joanna: Yes, I think that's really good. I mean, I'm thinking in my special edition for the Kickstarter, I'll include photos if I can, as to some of the things that sparked the idea or a thing to make it a special, special collection. Which I feel is possible now with the print possibilities we can do.

I also wondered just on the audio, so at the moment, I narrate my own short stories and just release them as individuals. With a collection, again, I will narrate the whole thing and release that separately.

Douglas: Interesting. I'm not sure I have the patience to do my own narration, so I think it's a personal thing. I certainly don't have the expertise to talk about producing audiobooks. I've had a lot of my short stories produced as audio plays, but that's because I've submitted them to audio markets.

There are good productions and bad productions. I've sort of found the ones that I absolutely love and who will actually cast a story, and they'll have different voice actors for the different characters. I find that just so awesome.

I think if you're an indie writer and you're thinking of doing your audiobooks, I know I would say, first of all, am I willing to invest in the necessary audio setup? Do I have the patience to do the narration and do the editing, etc.? I think it's a personal choice. Audio is a growing market.

Joanna: Yes, and it's really interesting because I talked to Spotify at Author Nation last year, and they said what they're often now doing is audio that's under an hour.

Generally, an hour of audio is about 9000 words, so pretty much all short stories are going to be under their range of an hour. So they're kind of serving those in their discovery thing for people's commute because that's the average commute.

So just a tip for people listening, creating playlists on Spotify of short story collections or anthologies, just with other people. You don't have to publish them. You can just link to them in a playlist.

[Here's a playlist of my short stories on Spotify, most narrated by me.]

I think that's actually a really good discoverability mechanism for things like Spotify, which is now trying to get more and more people into audio fiction and audio nonfiction.

Douglas: Yes, especially if it leads listeners to your other work.

Joanna: Yes, exactly. You can do cross promotion that way. So I can link one of my horror short stories, to one of yours, to one of Mark Leslie Lefebvre’s. So we can make these playlists mixing stories that we like, just as a more discoverability mechanism, as I mentioned.

So I think that's something new that's really only emerged in the last couple of years. Anything else on short stories? Because I do have one other question before we finish.

Douglas: I'm making notes here because that's going to go into the next edition, in terms of audio versions and Spotify.

I mean, there's so much to talk about. One of the reasons I put out the second edition is, well, one, it had been 10 years since the first one. Then, two, when I looked at my notes, there had been so many things that had changed over the past decade.

Joanna: Well, that is my last question. I've also just done a second edition of my How To Write Non-Fiction, which now includes memoir and all of this. I know a second edition can be a right pain.

So I wondered if you had any thoughts for nonfiction authors who are listening—

Since many people, including me, also have your first edition.

Douglas: What I did when I put out the first one, my email is in the back, and people would get in touch with me via the website. I encouraged writers to reach out to me because it was sort of my way of paying forward to new writers to write that book.

If they had any questions interpreting what I'd written, or something I didn't cover, I encouraged them to please reach out to me, and a lot of writers did. Sometimes it was just clarifying what I had in the book.

Other times it was, “Wow, that's a really good question. I didn't think of that scenario,” and I would just start to keep a file of things to add to the second edition.

So when I realized it had been a decade, and I started coming across things like Ralland.com, which was my go to market list, and he stopped updating his website. So I realized that there's probably a lot of other changes. I looked at that file and said, yup, there's ever so much I can put into a new edition. So it was that.

When is the right time? I think when you start to look at the first version and say, “Wow, no, that's actually not right anymore,” or, “I should say more about that particular topic.”

Douglas: I'm not big on marketing, I guess. I don't do a lot around that, and probably should do more. For this one, I told my newsletter subscribers. Most of them are readers, not writers, but there is some overlap.

The retailer sites help because the first edition sold pretty, pretty consistently. So, now if you go to Amazon and look for this, you're only going to find the second edition. So linking the first edition to, “Hey, there's a new edition,” things like that, but honestly, that was it.

Joanna: Well, I must say, you didn't pitch me for this. I pitched you because I saw it in, I think it was a StoryBundle last year.

Douglas: Yes, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. She will do these wonderful reader bundles. She does at least one a year, etc.

I communicate with Kris and Dean fairly regularly, and she reached out to me and said, “I see you're putting out a second edition. I've got a StoryBundle that's coming out in two months. Would you have an ebook edition ready for that time frame?”

I said, “Yes, sure. Can you write a new introduction for it?”

Joanna: So I think that's important because —

Obviously, Kris is an amazing writer. She was also an editor in short story markets and all that.

So that's part of your network giving you opportunities, which is just as important.

Douglas: Yes, for sure. I know Jason, who runs StoryBundle, so it all helps. There's different ways to market.

I know Kris and Dean because I went to their workshop a couple of decades ago. The first one I went to was How to Write Short Fiction.

Joanna: Amazing.

Douglas: Led by Kris and Gardner Dozois, the late Gardner Dozois. I think Kris is the only person who beat Gardner for a Hugo for Best Editor.

Joanna: Wow. I've been on Dean and Kris's workshops and things like that, and that's kind of how I've ended up discovering your work. So just for people listening, again, sometimes these things take decades to come around, but that's okay.

Douglas: Sure. The best starting point is my website, which is SmithWriter.com. You can find links to my own bookstore or to all the retailer sites.

I just completed an urban fantasy trilogy called The Dream Rider Saga, and the books are The Hollow Boys, The Crystal Key and The Lost Expedition. The Hollow Boys won two awards when it came out. The third book, The Lost Expedition, just came out last year, and I had an earlier novel as well.

You can find links to those and all my collections on the website.

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

Douglas: Okay, thanks for having me on again, Joanna.

The post Writing And Selling Short Stories With Douglas Smith first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Why is ‘story' more important than ‘writing'? How can you write characters that engage the reader? And how can you sell more books by connecting authentically? Douglas Vigliotti shares his tips.

In the intro, Bookshop.org will start selling ebooks [TechCrunch]; LinkedIn for Book Promotion [ALLi]; The Money Making Expert, branding and marketing [DOAC]; 24 Assets – Daniel Priestley; My J.F. Penn books by location; Death Valley, A Thriller; Copyright and Artificial Intelligence [US Copyright Office]; Superagency: What could possibly go right with our AI Future – Reid Hoffman and Greg Beato

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 

Douglas Vigliotti is the author of four books, a poet, and podcaster. His latest book is Aristotle for Novelists: 14 Timeless Principles on the Art of Story.

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 Douglas at DouglasVigliotti.com and his latest book at AristotleForNovelists.com.

Joanna: Douglas Vigliotti is the author of four books, a poet, and podcaster. His latest book is Aristotle for Novelists: 14 Timeless Principles on the Art of Story. So welcome to the show, Doug.

Douglas: Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Joanna: It's great to have you on the show. So first up, just—

Douglas: My journey is long and winding, but that's probably similar to most writers. I grew up as a pretty, I would say, average or normal American childhood. Youngest of five boys, played hockey, played sports.

Believe it or not, writing and books and all of that was not even a thought in my mind until I reached probably my 20s, early 20s, mid 20s. Then kind of a light switch turned on. The first book that I ever wrote, and the first writing that I ever did publicly, was actually a derivative of my business career.

It took me following my interest, and growing as a writer and as an artist, to start exploring that more creative side of writing. Then that's how I ended up writing novels and poetry and all that good stuff.

Joanna: What was that business?

Douglas: My professional career, I started, let's see, 20 years ago. It was sales, selling.

Then I wrote a business book called The Salesperson Paradox, and it was in conjunction with my sales consulting company at the time, and that was how I started into my creative career. So it was totally, totally orthogonal to where I ended up.

Joanna: Well, or not. We're going to come back to that because I love this. I love that you have a sales person background.

Just so you know, I'm actually the eldest of five children. Obviously, not all boys. So being of five siblings, I completely get, which is very cool.

Let's get into the book itself. In case people don't know—

Douglas: So I think in modern day, we throw around the name Aristotle quite a bit because it's referenced a lot in pop culture. I think it's one of those things where you hear the name and you assume—I don't know what you assume. You assume smart, you assume historic, you assume legendary.

People probably don't know who he is, and that's always an interesting thing. The fact that he's lasted over 2300 years is something of a testament to itself. So he was a philosopher and a polymath, really. I think his life, it was 384 BC to 322 BC. He studied under Plato, and Plato studied under Socrates before him.

When I said he was a polymath, that's really essential to understanding who he is, because he wrote over 200 works that spanned across a plethora of topics.

From politics, to economics, to poetics, and all of these different subject matters that ended up becoming, in some cases, the foundational material for many of these disciplines in universities across the world.

So the fact that his ideas and his philosophies and concepts have stood the test of time is sort of a testament in itself, as I alluded to. One of the interesting things about those 200 works is that many of them, call it 80%, so I think we've only recovered 30-something of his works.

I mean, the number is kind of debated. I don't know how they quantify this, because if they're lost, how do we know how many we recovered? But they've only recovered 30-something of his works.

One of those is Poetics. So that is actually the nature of tragedies, but more broadly, storytelling. It's one of the major reasons why I ended up writing this book, obviously.

Joanna: You didn't say there that we're talking about Ancient Greece. So we're in Europe. I often think Americans forget that it all started over here in Europe.

Douglas: Sorry, I tend to skip over things sometimes, but you are correct. Ancient Greece.

Joanna: It's funny because we seem to be at this period in history, in literature, when people just refer a lot to, obviously, the Stoic Movement and a lot about Marcus Aurelius. Obviously, Roman emperor, but the empire that came after the Greeks. A lot of this is resurfacing, isn't it, in culture?

Douglas: So in a general sense, or in a broad sense, I think it's more comfortable for people to reference people who are already gone, so to speak. I don't think it's as easy for people to credit living legends or living thinkers as it is to credit people who are gone. So I think there's something to that.

I also think that there's something to the idea of grabbing onto something that gives people a framework to think that they know, even though they might not really know. Like foundational philosophical thinkers, they were at some of these topics first, so they have some really strong ideas around a plethora of things.

So I think when we bring them to life, to this day and age, we realize, wow, there's really—and I'm going to use a biblical quote here, not to be religious—but it's nothing new under the sun.

Look, I think there's a certain thing to nostalgia that we have as a society. It's a saleable commodity.

I didn't write this book because I was trying to fill a void with Aristotle and his ideas and storytelling. To me, when I started to research story as a concept, everything started funneling back to Aristotle. Then I realized, wow, everything is there. You know, it was how I learned about story.

So the fact that Aristotle, his ideas in this book came to fruition, was more of a function of me realizing that all the theorists in modern day, or practitioners for that matter—so people in the dramatic world, like Aaron Sorkin or David Mamet or a lot of these people, they'll often reference Aristotle.

Or if you read theorists like Robert McKee, they'll often reference Aristotle. So for me, it was only natural to then double down on Aristotle, and read Poetics, and read multiple translations of Poetics, and really understand the text.

Then what I quickly realized was how resonant these ideas were in modern storytelling, on both the screen, the page, and in our lives. I think that that's one of the big things that drew Aristotle to storytelling in general was how intrinsically linked it is to living, because we live stories.

So I think that the principles that we'll talk about, or some of these ideas that we'll talk about, they are applicable to our life, as well as they are applicable on the page and on the screen.

Joanna: Yes, and of course that quote you mentioned is from the book of Ecclesiastes. I quote that in a number of my novels, actually. It's probably my favorite book of the Bible, Ecclesiastes.

I think part of that is what you're talking about, is that —

I was thinking as you were talking, like maybe part of the reason we're re-latching onto this now is because there's so much change in the world. With AI, and technology, and social media, and all this constant stream of stuff that there is—

Maybe we're sort of harking back to things that don't change, and that perhaps helps a little.

Douglas: I totally agree with you. I think when we're talking about stories specifically, there are a couple fundamental elements that are there in almost every story that we tell, at least in Western society.

In Western society, the stories we tell, almost all of them, even in sprawling epics or multiple storyline plots and all this stuff, they have three characteristics that are always there.

I think if we zoom out and we look at our lives, Joanna Penn's life, Douglas Vigliotti's life, I'm a protagonist who wants something, and I have obstacles standing in my way that are both internal and external.

Do I overcome those obstacles?

Well, then we end up with an Aristotelian comedy. I end up better off at the end, even if it's only temporarily.

Do I succumb to those obstacles, both internal and external? Well, then we have an Aristotelian tragedy because I end up worse off.

So these ideas are baked right into our lives. You can see the framework for story everywhere as you walk through life if you understand these core components of what makes up a story. Again, like I said, at least in a Western sense.

Joanna: Yes, well, since we're on characters then. A quote from the book, you say —

“Novels should contain true characters.”

Now, I find this word ‘true' extremely difficult because fiction, you know, it's fiction. True, in general, is very hard. So what do you mean by this?

Douglas: I think that you hit the nail on the head. True has multiple meanings to multiple people. I'm speaking specifically in the sense of what would Aristotle say would be true.

To Aristotle, there's four elements to characters, in general. They are goodness, so it's your characters are good if their choices are good. Appropriateness would be, are they acting appropriately? Not right or wrong, but based on who they are, are they acting truly to who they are? So are they acting appropriately?

So that directly links to this trueness of character in, are you writing characters that are true to who that character is? Not true to real life, true to who that character is. There's a big difference there. It's not about fact and fiction.

The third element is relatability. That has more to do with, are you making the character relatable? So are you giving them characteristics that embody human characteristics? The best way to do that is through imperfection.

Despite what our world wants to try to convince us every day —

not because of our perfections. So there's this big chasm between what we see every day and what we should be depicting in our stories or on the page, and what we actually relate to.

If we sat down and had a conversation, we're probably going to relate based on some of our struggles more than we're going to relate on some of our successes.

Then the fourth piece is consistency. Even if you were to write a character, a true character, who is inconsistent, Aristotle would say, by nature, they should be consistently inconsistent.

We see this all the time in storytelling with unreliable narrators. They are consistently inconsistent. What ends up happening with those unreliable narrators is this ties into something else that Aristotle talks about or that you can observe in stories, but eventually what they say doesn't line up with what they do.

It's always what a character does, it's always what we show, it's always about action. That is the more important piece. So we can get into trouble in life or in stories if we're only listening to what characters are saying. I could say one thing and do another, and doing is more important than saying.

So to answer that question and peel back to it, those are the four characteristics that would make up a true character in an Aristotelian sense.

Joanna: Yes, I think it's an interesting way forward. I like the relatability because if you're writing, let's say sci fi, and you have aliens there, or you're writing something literary and writing from the perspective of like a plant or an animal or something—

That kind of comes across whatever type of character you're writing, essentially.

Douglas: 100%. Aristotle is very specific in Poetic, saying that he believes that the two reasons why storytelling began for us humans, one is because of imitation. So we learn how to imitate to live. So as young kids, we imitate the world around us, the people around us, our parents, and that's how we learn how to actually live.

So storytelling is a derivative of that. So we should be imitating what is happening in the real world. Not writing realist fiction or realist work, but we should be embracing all of human nature has to offer, because that is why, according to Aristotle, storytelling actually began.

It's what's relatable to humans, so we should be reflecting all of those qualities in our work.

For anyone who's interested, the second reason is rhythm. So he thinks we have a natural rhythm, and I tend to agree with him because even if you are writing, all writers know voice, they know pacing, they know tone.

I think this is one of the big reasons why, as a writer, you don't even need to know grammar to be able to write. If you have rhythm, it's going to work on the page. You have editors for that stuff.

I think musicians are great examples of this because so many of them don't learn how to—you know, top level musicians, I mean, people who are iconic. In the book I talk about some examples of Billy Joel, and Bruce Springsteen, and American musicians who didn't know how to read music, and things turned out pretty well for them.

Not to say that that's the benchmark, but it's countless, the amount of “I don't know how to read music, I learned how to play the guitar.” All of that's based off of rhythm. Writing and voice on the page is no different, really. Aristotle would call that your meter, your poetic meter.

Joanna: Yes, that's interesting. Actually, you do say this in the introduction,

“Writing is not story.”

I guess there you mentioned you don't have to know grammar to write story, and this is a tension. Of course, you're a poet as well, and writers often prioritize the intricacies of language before the story.

Especially in this sort of age of AI, when word generation, however you generate words, whether you're writing them by hand or you're generating them with AI, that doesn't matter so much.

Douglas: So, for me, this is a really important distinction. I think oftentimes writers, at least through conversations that I have with them, we confuse writing and story.

To me, there's a very, very clear distinction, in that story is governed by what I would call principles, whereas writing is governed by style.

I really have no interest in telling someone how I think they should write their story. I don't even believe that you can. Even the best prose—and I'm using air quotes because best is so subjective—it could take me 15, 20 pages to get used to that writing or I could never get used to that writing.

Writing is that different from person to person, writer to writer. I have this funny saying, where it's, “Story is why they come, writing is why they stay.”

That's why you can watch movies, you can listen to audiobooks, you can engage with all these other forms of media and learn how to tell story. That doesn't mean you're going to learn how to write because writing is a different thing.

Aristotle does have some ideas on what he thinks around style, of course, and I have my own opinions on that as well.

Ultimately, what I'm trying to achieve with Aristotle for Novelists, let's say, is more of a foundational education on the principles of what makes up a story. So there is a difference between the two, at least in my view.

Joanna: So I guess one of the other things, we talked a bit about character there, but we should also talk about plot. You say,

“Novels have a complication and a resolution.”

Even though they may, or sometimes we feel like, maybe they've heard this before or read this before?

Douglas: So my favorite Aristotle quote is, “Many poets tie the knot well, but unravel it ill.” What he's talking about there—and when he says poets, he's talking about something much wider in scope than literally poets. The same could be said, by the way, for poetics in general.

What he meant by poetics is something much larger in scope than poetry, so for anybody who's wondering that.

What he's talking about there is the difference between a complication and a resolution. So we all know that when we come to our stories, we come because we have an idea for the complication of that story. We have a character who is put in a situation and we wind that up.

What he's saying is that it takes the truly great writers the ability to unwind that, to unravel that knot. There's so many ways that we could go wrong when we're doing that. Whether it's lack of believability, lack of cohesion, illogical, impossibility, irrationality.

There's so many different ways that we could falter as we try to resolve the complication that we depicted in the early part of our story. I find it helpful when I read books and when I watch movies—I'm a bit of a story junkie, so I do both quite a bit.

I look particularly for, when does that writer or when does that story begin to unravel the knot? Some would say, in a traditional three-act structure sense, you begin to unravel the knot—and Aristotle would say this—when that change of fortune actually happens.

So if it's at a tragedy, it would be when that character is at the ultimate high before they fall. Or if it was in a comedy, it would be at that ultimate low before they rise. You start to unravel that knot a little bit.

I find it helpful to start thinking about and answering little questions that you propose earlier in your novels, somewhere around the midway point. Never actually answering that big question, right?

Then there's other people who would suggest you keep that tension as taut as possible all the way through until you get to the very, very end. So what you'll find is there's a lot of differences in how people achieve this.

I think one of the things that you will see consistently is there is a complication and there is a resolution. One of the things that Aristotle is really, really insistent about is he calls it avoiding Deus Ex Machina. So things coming from outside of your plot to solve plot problems.

I see this all the time, I'm going to be honest, in stories where it's like, solve the plot problems within the existing world that you depicted. Now, obviously you can introduce new characters and all of that stuff, but when stuff comes out of left field to solve a plot problem, you're not unraveling the knot well, so to speak.

He has a great quote, and he says,

I find that to be a really informative quote, and also a benchmark to try to hit every time you write a story. Whether that story is short as a poem in five sentences, or whether it's extrapolated out to an 80,000 word novel.

Joanna: That's actually great. People are like, oh, but how do I do that? Then I'm like, well, that's why we do self-editing, because if you get to a point in your book and you finish your book, you just go back and edit in something earlier on in the process.

So I don't understand how people can't figure that out later on. As you say, you can just put in things earlier on that will help you resolve it later. That's why we edit. So I think that's quite cool.

I want to come back to something you said earlier about your previous career and your book, The Salesperson Paradox. I feel like this is a problem for most authors. So if you're a poet, you've got this book, Aristotle for Novelists, you've got other books, and you also come from sales.

So how are you marketing your books? How are you selling your books?

Douglas: I do think that they are driven by two completely different motors. I have this conversation since I have my toe in both worlds, and I have for a long time now. The creative side is run by a different engine than the business side is, at least for me.

I do think one informs the other when you start thinking about what it's like when your actual work hits the real world and becomes a commercial entity. Just because you're near and dear to it, and it's so close to you. Believe me, I write super personal stuff, so I totally, totally get it.

For anybody who's out there saying, “I'm an artist, and I write from the heart,” — 

For sales, there's one thing that The Salesperson Paradox hits on, and that has been the bedrock for my success in that world. It's simply helping people get what they already want. We lose sight that there's people out there that already want what you have. You have to find them and give it to them. That's it.

It's that simple. You're never going to force somebody to want something that they don't want, but if you find the people who want the thing that you provide, you will be able to sell much more of whatever you're selling.

You're helping somebody get what they want, not selling them a good or a service. It's face to face, over the phone, on a zoom, anywhere. That distinction is critical.

If we look at books in general, I often say that there's four elements to value, and that value framework is time, status, ease and money. So we all want things that save us time or increase the speed of things.

Apps do that, you mentioned AI before. All of that hits on time value. Time, it's a value driver, innate value driver for humans.

Ease. Am I making it easy for the person to say yes, or am I making it hard? The easier I make it for someone to say yes, the more likely they're going to say yes. You can infuse that into when you're doing outreach via email or outreach via phone.

How easy are you making it for people to say yes? Come have this conversation with me about your book or whatever. There's multiple ways that you could go about something. Are you making it easy for someone to say yes? That's a big driver for us. It's a big driver for me, and it's a big driver for most people.

Status is another huge innate human driver. We all have people we want to look good toward, and can I help that person look good towards those people? That is a huge, huge value driver.

It happens in a micro-sense when you're dealing with people on a one-off level, like a one-on-one level. So it's like, I don't know, maybe that person wants to look good to their mother. Maybe this person wants to look good to an audience. Maybe this person wants to look good to their boss.

Can you help that person look good to that individual? That's a huge innate value driver because we are all status creatures, whether we want to admit it or not.

The fourth piece is money. If you can make someone money or save them money, that's a huge value driver. So I always look at when I'm trying to sell things on a commercial aspect, how could I fit it into that value equation, whether it's on a micro sense or a macro sense.

I know that if I'm able to create some kind of value proposition around that, at least I'm going to have a story that I'm going to be able to communicate. So that's going to put me in a better position to actually sell things. I hope that's helpful.

Joanna: It's helpful as a framework. So like if someone has a thriller novel or a sci-fi novel—

Douglas: 100% agree with you. It becomes really hard when you're talking about fiction.

I have a podcast, it's called Books for Men, and when I have conversations with other men about books—because the podcast is designed to inspire men to read—the number one thing is that most of them aren't reading fiction, and they're reading nonfiction.

The reason why they're reading nonfiction is because it has a higher value proposition. So when we're looking at the bigger picture, fiction struggles to sell consistently for a lot of people because it doesn't fit into the value framework.

Like creating a podcast, having a blog, you have to do that.

If you don't do that, you're never going to sell the thing consistently, unless you just want to roll the dice and look hope for luck. I think that in a world of AI, that personal connection as creators, writers, filmmakers, is going to be even more important.

People are going to want to buy from people that they know, like, and trust. So the more you can build that personal connection with people, the better off I think you're going to be in the long term.

So while people are all concerned about the craft element of writing a thriller novel—believe me, I'm a craft junkie, and I totally empathize with that—but —

Do they know what Joanna Penn is about? Do they know what Douglas Vigliiotti is about? If they do, they're going to be more likely to buy from you. In an art sense, it's really the only strategy that you have moving forward.

Unless you're lucky enough where you're that one in a million shot, where your work just shoots up the charts and everything you become after that becomes saleable.

You hit on something very, very important. Fiction in art doesn't necessarily fit into that framework, and that's what makes it such a challenge to sell it.

Joanna: Yes, or you pay a ton for Amazon and Facebook ads. That's another way.

Douglas: For me, that's a tactic. It's not a strategy. Like, so that's a great tactic, but to me, tactics are endless. Like they're endless. What works for some people, might not work for somebody else.

It goes back to that whole help people get what they already want. Do your best to create the thing and draw people that would like that thing into it. Not try to create the thing for people.

Just create the art, create the thing, and then try to build the framework around your creative career that people come in and they engage with you because they're interested in you. To me, that's like the only selling point that we're going to have as we move forward into this new world, 10, 20, 30 years.

I mean, people have a really myopic view about what is happening with AI right now. It's not meant to scare people. It's just how crowded and how cloudy the content and art and creation aspect already is, it's going to get 10 times worse.

So the only thing that I think is worth investing in, from a sales standpoint, is individuality and building something that is personally who you are, and so people can engage with that.

I know that's scary for a lot of writers, but to me, it's inevitable. It's the only thing that we have, the only selling point we have moving forward.

Joanna: Yes, I often say —

Your voice, and your face, and I'd say an author's note in the back of fiction grounds your story and why you care as a person.

On this, you have a podcast, Books for Men, as you mentioned. Obviously, I have this podcast, I've had other podcasts. I think voice is a big thing. As you say, people can get to know you, like you, and trust you. So I'd say podcasting is a great way to do book marketing. Obviously, you think the same thing.

Just as tips for people listening, if people listening want to pitch a podcast, not you or me, obviously, but other podcasts—because I get terrible pitches every single day. Your pitch was very good.

Douglas: Get to the point. Not you. That's the tip.

Get to the point. The briefer you can make it, and the more pointed that you could make it, the better off you are. If I could do the email in three sentences, I would do it. If it has to be five, then I'll do it in five. If it has to be 10, then I'll do it in 10.

I want to make the email as short as I possibly need to make it so you understand why I'm emailing you, where the benefit is, and what I'm asking you to do.

Even when I had my own podcast where I was doing a lot of interviewing, I was reaching out to a lot of really big names in the space and trying to get them to come onto the show because that's how I thought I was going to be able to drive audience. Even in that sense, I was doing extremely short emails.

So most people when they email somebody, they think that telling them everything they need to know because they don't want to miss a little possible thing that could spark Joanna, or Doug, or somebody, to say, “Oh, I like that.”

The reality is, is if as soon as you get an email from somebody that is a chunk of text, you don't read any of it.

The other rule is, if you wouldn't say it in real life, don't say it in an email. I think emails live forever, and we forget that when you press send, that email is going to sit there.

I've sent a lot of bad emails over the years to learn this lesson, and me thinking to myself, wow, how did I say that in an email?

Now one of the biggest things that I focus on, aside from brevity, is would I say this to this person face to face? If I wouldn't say it face to face, then I wouldn't put it in an email.

It turns out that those two things go hand in hand. How often do you go up to somebody and read them three pages of material about who you are, what you're doing, what your books are about? Never. What you do is you get right to the point. “Hey, I'm Doug. I'm a writer. X, Y and Z,” blah, blah, blah, whatever.

I mean, that's not what I would say in an email, but you do it short and brief, and then let the person respond.

Joanna: Just to come back there, you said, “what the benefit is,” and you said that quite quickly.

I get so many pitches that say, “I'm blah, blah, blah author. I've written this book. When can I schedule myself onto your show for my book tour?”

Douglas: Well, here's the thing, with books specifically—you know this better than anybody, you probably get tons and tons—podcasts have almost become an adjunct of the publishing industry. A new book comes out, and now this is the best way to sell this.

It's the same method that was utilized forever, where you'd go on radio talk shows, you'd go on Johnny Carson, I don't know, like all these talk shows.

Now that there's podcasts, and because of technology there's so many of them, what the publishing industry realized is the best way to sell books is the same way it's always been to sell books, which is get people on shows and get people in front of audiences that they don't already have.

So now, people like yourself and all of these podcast hosts are getting hundreds and hundreds of pitches, especially if the show is popular, getting so many of these. So what could you do to stand out from that? Get it so someone would actually read it.

So how do people read things?

If it's short and to the point at why it would be beneficial for that person to have you on the show, then in my world, you're more prone to get through.

Again, this is not something that I've just utilized in outreach with podcast pitching. I have 20 years of sales experience where I've utilized this in other aspects too, to get in front of prospective buyers and whatnot.

It's short, and it goes back to what I was saying before. You want good guests. I don't have guests on my show anymore, but I would want good guests on my show. What I don't want is a long, extended email about all these different things.

What I do want is a short, polite, direct email of telling me why you're emailing me and why it would benefit me to have you on the show, in as short as possible. I found that people, in general, they respond well to that strategy over the span of life, not just in the podcast world.

It's because you're putting it in their world. I'm having respect for you. I'm having empathy for you.

Something that I was talking about before, am I saving you time? And status, am I making that person look good if they have me on the show? These are all things that a human would innately consider, even if they're not consciously considering them.

So you could sell something, yourself in this situation, via email by utilizing that value framework that I was referencing before.

Joanna: Fantastic. So lots of tips there.

Douglas: So it's very, very easy. For me, just go to my website, DouglasVigliotti.com. If you want to know more about the podcast, BooksForMen.org is the best place to check that out. Again, that's a podcast to inspire more men to read. Then for the book, it's AristotleForNovelists.com.

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

Douglas: Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

The post Aristotle for Novelists, And A Strategy For Selling More Books With Douglas Vigliotti first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How does generative AI relate to fair use when it comes to copyright? What are the possibilities for AI licensing? Alicia Wright shares her thoughts on generative AI for authors.

In the intro, Publishing leaders share 9 Bold Predictions for 2025 [BookBub]; OpenAI launches Operator [The Verge]; Bertelsmann (who own Penguin Random House) intends to work with OpenAI to expand and accelerate the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the media, services, and education sectors; Death Valley — A Thriller.

Today's show is sponsored by my patrons! Join my community and get access to extra videos on writing craft, author business, AI and behind the scenes info, plus an extra Q&A show a month where I answer Patron questions. It's about the same as a black coffee a month! Join the community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn

Alicia Wright is an intellectual property lawyer for a technology company, and also writes science fiction and mystery as Alicia Ellis. With two degrees in computer science and an MFA in writing popular fiction, she is expertly placed to comment on AI as it applies to writers.

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 Alicia at WriterAlicia.com and on social media @WriterAlicia.

Joanna: Alicia Wright is an intellectual property lawyer for a technology company, and also writes science fiction and mystery as Alicia Ellis.

With two degrees in computer science and an MFA in writing popular fiction, she is expertly placed to comment on AI as it applies to writers, which we're talking about today. So welcome to the show, Alicia.

Alicia: Thank you so much, Jo. I'm happy to be here.

Joanna: Oh, I'm excited to talk to you. So first up—

Alicia: All right. Well, I should say that I got into AI and technology first. I was always one of those science and math people. Math was my favorite subject in school. Not a lot of people say that, but I loved math. I loved the sciences. I always was reading forward in my textbooks.

Then my mother didn't want us watching TV, so we read a lot of books. I got into writing poetry, writing song lyrics, writing short stories, and the creative side of me came out.

It never occurred to me to write something longer—because I was a math/science person—until I got into law school, and there you have to write all the time. You have to write briefs, you know, these 30 page documents.

Then it occurred to me that, hey, I'd like to write a novel. So I would say the technology interest was always there, and the creative interest, the writing, came later.

In my work as a patent attorney, I have encountered AI-related applications throughout the years, even generative AI technologies as far as 10 years back. So I had an interest in that even before it became relevant to the writing industry.

Joanna: So when did you get into writing fiction? How many years have you been writing fiction, as well as doing your incredible job?

Alicia: I have been writing fiction, specifically long form fiction, for as long as I have been a lawyer. The time is almost exact. I know this because I was in my final year of law school and sort of had this crisis. Like, I'm graduating law school, do I want to be a lawyer?

I spent time thinking about that. Just sat down for really a day and went through what I would do if it wasn't law. I decided that I did want to do law, but I also wanted to write novels.

So as soon as I graduated law school, I enrolled in some local writing courses. So I've been practicing law and writing for the same amount of time.

Joanna: Which is approximately?

Alicia: 17 years. I got into indie publishing in maybe 2013, but I've been writing for 17 and a half years.

Joanna: Brilliant. So you mentioned there that you, as a patent attorney, you look at AI applications. You did mention using a bit of generative technology there.

Alicia: In my business work, well, I see a lot of AI technologies in what I'm writing patent applications for, and that's what I was referring to before.

In managing a patent portfolio at the cybersecurity firm where I work right now, I definitely use AI technologies to help inventors organize their thoughts when they submit to us to do analyses. Sometimes I'm dealing with a huge patent portfolio, and AI can help organize the analyses and my thoughts on that.

I always tell it that it's my junior partner because it tends to go off on its own, and I like to reel it in to run the show, if you will.

I give it my ideas. Often I'll ask it to, say, “Give me five ideas on how to put these things together,” or, “Give me 10 ideas on how to put these things together.” Even if they're bad ideas, it helps me sort of organize my thoughts. Like, why don't I like these ideas?

So, together, we walk through what I want to do. We create a Save the Cat outline. Which I usually start it off once we have all the ideas on the table, I ask it to create the Save the Cat outline.

Usually, I have a lot of changes. We make those changes, and then we'll break it down into a scene list that follows the three act structure.

because, honestly, I'm no good with thinking about what does this setting look like. What kind of house is this? Bricks? Facade? I don't care. So the AI is really helpful with that.

There's a lot of editing, a lot of back and forth. AI is a great partner for brainstorming and plotting.

When we get into the writing, my authorial voice is really important to me, in part, probably because I have diagnosed OCD. I have experimented with using AI in pretty much every aspect of my process, but for me, personally, the writing part I have to do. I would spend more time editing AI output than I would have just writing it myself.

— and they'll catch the dictation error, so I have a much cleaner copy going forward. Then when I'm done writing, I'll use a little AI for developmental editing.

Joanna: I love that. You sound similar to me in the way you're using it. You're using the word ‘partner', your junior partner, your collaborator. You use the word ‘we', which I really like as well because I feel that too.

Like with Claude, I feel this is almost my—not so much co-writer—but like you said, collaborator. It really is a backwards and forwards way of doing it.

Alicia: It's so fun, and I feel like my work is better, that this brings out a better side of me. Connections that I hadn't made, problems that I didn't foresee. It's having a partner, so that it's improved. It's not just me, it's me plus some artificial intelligence.

Joanna: Yes. So we could geek out about how amazing it is all day, but I did want to ask you about some of the objections that authors have. You did this great talk at Author Nation, and you were so clear on it.

I don't think there are many people in our community who have degrees in computer science and law, and an MFA, and are an active indie author. I think you're the only person, right?

Alicia: Maybe.

Joanna: Maybe.

What are your thoughts on this, and how does it relate to fair use?

Alicia: So when I think of the word stolen, I think of an illegal taking. So I think, are we talking about copyright infringement here? I would say, in my opinion, that the work is not stolen.

The reason I phrase it that way, in my opinion, is because I'm sure a lot of folks know, there's ongoing litigation about whether the use of copyrighted works in training data is copyright infringement.

Until those are actually decided, until those cases are actually decided, I can't say definitively, but I feel pretty confident that the training of AI using copyrighted works is fair use.

Fair use is an exception to copyright infringement. Basically it says, yes, we copied copyrighted works, except we did it for a use where this exception is cut out.

There's four factors in the US that courts consider for fair use, and one of the key factors is, is your use transformative?

I think that's really important to what fair use is about. Have you created something new? Have you created something that can be used in a different way?

There's case law that's related to using copyrighted works, even for AI in the past, but not for generative AI in the way we're talking about now. I feel that the case law is pushing US courts towards saying that this is fair use. We will see, probably in a couple years, for sure.

I would say that I don't feel like AI is theft. I feel like it will be shown at a later date that AI is not theft, but I can't say 100%. I certainly think that it is premature to say that it is theft.

Joanna: It's interesting. I mean, I would have thought that the US would be further ahead on this. Maybe with your incoming Trump administration, those cases might get settled more quickly.

Here in the UK, our government has literally, like yesterday, come out with the AI plan, and they are almost pushing for an exception around data training in copyright, which is really interesting. We have a very different rule around this.

The argument here with the British government is that these strict things restrain innovation or restrict innovation. As you mentioned, fair use is so we can have more innovation, and we don't want to stifle that.

Alicia: Exactly.

They can't create anything original. They can only spit out things that come from other people's work. What are your thoughts on that?

Alicia: Calling AI plagiarism, saying that that's all it does, reflects a basic misunderstanding of how AI works at a technical level.

They've taken in—read, if you will—millions, billions of pieces of writing or images, in the case of the image generators.

Then based on basically statistics—it's much more complex than that, but I'm going to simplify it by saying it's a statistical model—it determines what token—a token could be a word or a symbol, like a period—what token comes after the previous token, and it forms output based on that, one token at a time.

The reason I want to emphasize that it's one token at a time is that you're not lifting even phrases from existing work. It's not at the phrase level. It's at the word level, just like you and I write.

You can't take a combination of words taken from millions of other works and say you plagiarized it because you took a word that was over here and a word that was over there.

It's not a logical reflection of how AI works at the technical level.

Asking, can it only create things that already exist? I would say humans also can only create things that already exist. We all learn from what exists. You're going to see cliche phrases in AI output because, statistically, you'll see words together that you often see together in writing.

So you're going to see things like, “She released the breath that she didn't know she'd been holding,” because you've seen it a lot of other works. In the same way that that's not plagiarism when you write it, it's not plagiarism when the AI writes it, either.

Joanna: I keep hearing people say —

with the assumption that only bad quality writing can be generated. So given that you and I use this a lot, our prompts are very, very different to somebody who is brand new to generative AI.

Do you think that the quality—and I know quality is a tough word—but—Is the quality of writing from generative AI when you use the right prompts?

Alicia: I think — 

Especially if you're using AI for the writing part, say, for a first draft or for a final draft, however you use it in the actual writing part, I think it's important to prompt it to write like your authorial voice.

The more you do that, I think it's going to be closer to you and may even be better writing, assuming that your author voice is well developed. I think if you just ask the AI—well, I've seen from experience—that if you just ask the AI to write something, it's not necessarily going to be a style that's appropriate for what you're writing.

The more specific you are about how that writing should look, or even give it samples of your writing, describe your own writing, the writing gets better. By better, I mean closer to what you as an author want it to be.

Joanna: Yes, I agree. I mean, sometimes my prompts can be like 100 words. With Claude, I'm prompting with whole sentences and beats and all kinds of things that at the beginning of my use I didn't necessarily know how to do.

Again, coming back to the co-writer idea, the collaborator idea, it's like working with another person. You mentioned you're OCD. I'm not OCD, but I'm certainly into control around my writing.

I found it very hard to work with a human co-writer, but I love working with Claude for this reason.

Alicia: Right. I 100% agree with that. I've been using AI in my work, in my planning for my writing, and bits and pieces in my actual writing since it first went mainstream the end of 2022.

My prompts are so much longer now than they were then because I've learned how they're going to respond.

Then my prompts for different AI models are different. My prompts for Claude might be different than my prompts for ChatGPT because I have a sense of how they interpret things.

Joanna: Yes, and that is why I've been harping on about this for so long, because every month that goes past that people don't even try it for little things, they are missing out on time to learn what is essentially, what I think, it kind of underpins the next technological change in our society.

A bit like the internet changed so much, this is going to change so much. Do you feel it's that significant, as well?

Alicia: That is going to change a lot? Absolutely, and there's a lot of change that I look forward to. I'm interested in how the writing industry is going to look when these legal cases are decided. Speculate and say that it's determined that it is okay to train AI models based on copyrighted works.

I'm interested to see how those who are so anti-AI in the writing industry would respond to that. But more than that —

I'm hard of hearing, and I'm really looking forward to outside of the writing industry, some sort of captions. You know, they're making smart glasses. I want smart glasses with captions. I'm just waiting for it. I'm rubbing my hands together. I can't wait. Some of this stuff is going to be life changing.

Joanna: Wow, okay. So you mean you're looking at someone while wearing the smart glasses, and as they speak, you'll see captions of what they're saying?

Alicia: That's the dream.

Joanna: That is amazing, and of course, why wouldn't you have that? That just seems very sensible. So I don't even think that's that far away, surely. Let's hope so.

Well, look, let's come to those court cases. So in the USA, and there are still these open court cases against various AI companies, but there are also now far more companies that have done intellectual property licensing deals for data training, including some publishers and media companies.

Now, as we record this in the middle of January 2025, a company called CreatedByHumans.ai has just launched, and they're partnering with the Authors Guild in the US. The aim is to help authors license their IP for training and AI usage.

Now, this is a non-exclusive thing, and authors can choose how the data is used.

Alicia: I think the main thing I want to say about this is, if you're being offered a licensing contract for using your work to train AI, that I would jump on that.

It may be that soon courts bring down decisions that this is fair use, and in that case, they can use your work without a license.

So someone's offering you money for it now, I would say, get into those negotiations and think about getting that locked down.

Specifically with respect to terms, I would say, know the scope and the type of model that your work is going to be used for. If it's going to be used for a general purpose that could be used to create competing works, then maybe you want to be paid more than if it's going to be used internally at law firms, for example.

So know what it's going to be used for because that tells you what the value of this license is. I would say, make sure that your terms don't include derivative works, or are very specific about what derivative works are included in what you're giving.

You don't want someone using AI to generate works that are directly based off your work, like sequels. Just make sure that that's something that's out of the scope of the license.

It would exclude anything about sub licenses, unless you're getting paid for a sub license. Ideally, put a term on it, on the licensing of your work, because this area is developing.

You don't know what's going to happen five years from now, 10 years from now. There may be whole new clauses that you want in there because of how technology has developed.

So I would, personally, try to avoid a license that's 20 years or the term of your copyright because you want to be able to develop that license as the technology develops.

I would also limit how your work is going to appear in outputs, meaning the percentage of your work that can appear in outputs.

It is unlikely that with a general purpose chat bot where millions or billions of works are used to train that a significant portion of your work would appear in the output because it wouldn't have that large an input on the statistical model that is the AI model.

However, you don't know how big the model is going to be or how many works are going to be used to train it. So I think it could be worthwhile to have a percentage, say, only 2% of my work at a time can appear in any given outbreak.

That's something that they can program as a layer above a generative AI model, so that it sort of screens that before any output gets put out to a user. So that's something that I would have in there as well.

In general, make sure your contract has remedies, so that if there's a breach, you can cancel the contract, for example. As opposed to just getting paid out, or whatever remedies you prefer, make sure they're outlined in there.

Ideally, you want a right to audit what's happening with your work in the training, so that you can take advantage of those remedies. If you can't see what's going on, then the remedies aren't doing you much good.

Joanna: Those are all really useful things. It's funny because the first thing you said was, get into this because things might change, and we might not get anything if it becomes fair use.

The other thing I thought is we almost have a burning platform on the creation of synthetic data. So I've been looking at the OpenAI's o1 model, and some people are saying that one of the reasons it was created is because it can create really good synthetic data to train the o3 models.

Alicia: Oh, wow.

Joanna: I know. I was like, wow—

Although I guess the original sin, as such, may still stand. I don't know. I mean, any thoughts on that?

Alicia: Well, I hadn't heard that about the o1 and the o3 model, but synthetic data, that's something that I'm excited about because I want these models to improve. I want them to use my work to train the models. Synthetic can write more like me, make my job easier.

I'm excited for more training data. I hope that more folks in the writing industry get on board and allow their works to be licensed if allowance is needed. Even if allowance is not needed, I know that folks in the AI industry are feeling the pushback from the writing industry, and it may slow them down.

I don't want them to be slowed down. I want to see this stuff develop.

Joanna: It's interesting that we both want our data in the models. Partly, I also think there's a big change in generative search, in that I mainly use ChatGPT now to do my searches.

So I've been trying to do sort of book discovery, you know, “Give me 10 books that are action adventure thrillers with a female protagonist set in this area.” Then it gives me 10, and I'm like, “Well, what about this book by JF Penn?” I'm like almost trying to train it to think of my books as well.

If we're not there, we just won't be found.

Alicia: If we're not there, they just won't be found. What do you mean by that?

Joanna: Well, as in, the models have access to certain data and certain data that's on the internet. So a lot of the time, it can look at Goodreads, or it can look at Amazon.

I want ChatGPT and Claude to know J.F. Penn, so that if someone is searching for something to read—and a lot of the apps that go on top of things now are powered by these tools—

Alicia: Oh, for sure. I know there are anti-AI folks in the writing industry who don't want AI anywhere near their work. I'm more what you just said. I want AI to be able to find me. I want AI to be able to write more like me.

I believe strongly in my own creativity and my ability to create something that is specifically me, and because of that, I'm not concerned about AI being near my work. I want it to help me.

Joanna: I love that, and I actually think the same thing.

I wonder if this is creative confidence that comes from—like both of us have been 17 years writing, and previously I was in tech as well. Not quite as deep as you, but I'm confident with tech.

So this kind of creative confidence in our own work and in our own worth that some newer writers might not have, I guess.

Alicia: This may be strange coming from someone who is very fond of AI, I have a lot of fun with it, but I would say that maybe building that creative confidence means not using AI for a while.

It means discovering who you are as an author, what sort of things you like to write before bringing in a partner, be it AI or a human writer of another sort. Really find your uniqueness and your identity as a writer before you start adding tools into the mix.

Joanna: That is actually a really good point.

Then I just wonder if maybe people who are younger in the usage of these tools, or people younger in their journey, or just physically younger, are going to do things differently. Like you and I grew up without iPhones, and we grew up without television.

My mum was the same as your mum. We weren't allowed to watch TV until I was about 12. So I feel like maybe people will develop their voice differently now.

Alicia: That's a really good point, and I honestly don't know what that will look like, but I'm excited to see it.

Joanna: Yes, me too. Okay, so let's just circle back on copyright because another sticking point for authors in using these tools is—

How is it in the US? Because it's different in the UK.

Alicia: Right. In the US, first of all, expression that is generated by artificial intelligence, by a machine, is not copyrightable. However, your authorship is copyrightable. Thus, when you combine your authorship with an AI-generated output, then the part of that that is your creative expression is still copyrightable.

So what that means is, if there's a combination, if you're using AI as a partner, then whatever expression that you contribute to that final product is copyrightable in the US.

Thus, say someone was to copy a chapter of your book that has you in it, as opposed to telling the AI in a short paragraph to write a chapter, if you've been a part of selecting what goes in that chapter, arranging that chapter, editing words that were initially output by the AI, that's all your expression.

One cannot copy that chapter without copying that expression, which is yours.

The Copyright Office has confirmed this. This isn't all theoretical here. The Copyright Office has handled some cases.

[Note from Jo — here are some excerpts from the US Copyright Office info, and also the UK, as they differ. Please check your jurisdiction. ]

In the UK, Section 9(3) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 around authorship and ownership of copyright states:

In the case of a literary, dramatic, musical, or artistic work which is computer-generated, the author shall be taken to be the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken.

In the US, copyright is all about ‘human authorship,’ and in March 2023, the United States Copyright Office issued guidance around the definition of human authorship in an age of generative AI. They note:

A human may select or arrange AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way that ‘the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship.’

Importantly, they also say,

This policy does not mean that technological tools cannot be part of the creative process. Authors have long used such tools to create their works or to recast, transform, or adapt their expressive authorship.

For example, a visual artist who uses Adobe Photoshop to edit an image remains the author of the modified image, and a musical artist may use effects such as guitar pedals when creating a sound recording.

In each case, what matters is the extent to which the human had creative control over the work’s expression and ‘actually formed’ the traditional elements of authorship.

There was a semi-well known case with a graphic novel where the author had generated each image using AI, but the copyright office determined that the arrangement of those images, the selection of those images and arranging them into a story, was copyright protected.

Thus you can't just take that graphic novel and copy it and sell it, because the author's expression is in there. That's the case with cover art as well as written work.

Audiobooks with AI narration are a little different because your copyrighted expression is already in the input, and the output is just your words spoken. So you don't even have to edit that output, it already has your expression in it, and is copyright eligible in the US.

I know in the UK, there are even stronger protections for copyright eligibility of AI-generated works. I think if you direct the creation of it, it's yours.

Joanna: Yes, and I think that's probably why so many people are putting offices here. OpenAI has an office here. I mean, Runway ML, the video generator, they've got an office here, and are partnering with the UK film company. It's essentially like if a machine generates something, it belongs to the person who who directed it.

I was thinking about this, like I like the word director because, increasingly, if you think about a film director—and you know, people will have their favorite movie directors—

So I almost wonder if that's the direction we're going is—This much bigger role, where we can do much bigger things, with a lot more help.

Alicia: I think so. I think that there's a lot that we can do with AI to create and expand our creativity besides just writing. We can direct a little movie now ourselves with AI-generated visuals.

However, I also predict, I don't know for sure, that we're going to see copyright eligibility of AI-generated outputs that are unedited in the US. We're going to see some of that become protectable. Right now, that's really shaky ground, except with the exception of audiobooks and the like.

It's really shaky ground, say that an AI-generated image as is, would get any kind of copyright protection. I think we may see that depending on how specific your prompt is, that there may be some copyright protection based on the creativity that you put into that.

Joanna: Yes, I think so. As these models get better and better, you can have a much bigger process. So let's come to that, because we're still in these early days, like we're literally like 2001 in terms of the internet.

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, just shared in a new blog post, Reflections, last week,

I'm like, hell yes, give me some agents to do things. I'll do the stuff I love, and my little AI agents will do the rest. I mean the word ‘agent' is difficult in the publishing industry, but think about little bots or little employees doing your work.

Alicia: I'd personally love a social media agent because I am no good at keeping up with what's going on my social media accounts. They will go dark for a month and a half, and then I'll remember that I have them and should use them. So I'd love a social media agent.

I kind of have a custom GPT, a prompt set up to help me plan my social media. I've actually tried some products that try to be social media agents that I don't love.

I feel that the writing industry is going to be reluctant to take on these agents. Just based on what I've seen about how protective the writing industry has been—some people in the writing industry—about related industries, like cover artists and voice narrators, how protective they've been wanting writers who want to use AI to hire a cover artist.

They're being very insistent about that, some anti-AI folks. They're being very insistent about hiring a human narrator for your book. I think that we may see that same protectiveness over virtual assistants.

I think we may see some pushback from this same segment of the writing industry that's opposed to using AI-generated cover art.

We're going to see some pushback saying, hey, you should hire a virtual assistant instead.

Joanna: I totally agree, but I think that people are going to use these things anyway. Especially, coming back to creative confidence again, if you are strong in what you want, then actually using these agents.

You mentioned a chain of prompts earlier, and I just have these amazing ideas about how—

There is absolutely no way it would be affordable to have that where humans do it.

Alicia: Absolutely. Yes, affordability is a huge issue. If you weren't going to hire someone, I don't understand the objection to passing along to AI to do it for you so that it gets done, as opposed to not getting done.

I've actually used virtual assistants in the past, and it didn't work so well because I'm so particular. First of all, I felt like a jerk wanting to tweak things all the time. I don't feel like a jerk when I talk to AI. Then it wasn't saving me time because of the amount of time I was spending tweaking things.

So for me, having an AI social media agent would be something that I wouldn't hire someone for anyway. I don't think that's a requirement for using AI, but it expands what we can do, having these agents, having AI in general. I love that.

Joanna: I mean, I think — 

I see that one could almost have an agent per book even, who's responsible for making sure that book gets marketed.

I mean, we've got multiple books, and I find myself marketing whichever one that catches my eye, but there's so much of a backlist I just completely ignore. So I'd really love to have things surfaced from my backlist of work. Also things like having an AI—

They only just started it like yesterday, the ChatGPT Tasks.

Alicia: Tasks? Oh, I have not. I noticed it a couple days ago, and instead, I started using Projects. I recently restarted my ChatGPT Pro or Plus account. I sort of switch which AI I want to use at any given time.

So right now I'm digging into the ChatGPT projects, but digging into the Tasks is definitely on my to-do list. I'm hoping I can get it to remind me of stuff that we've generated that I need to do.

Joanna: So for people listening, this is brand new. It's very, very small, as in you ask it to do a task, and it will do something for you at a certain time. So I've just set my ChatGPT so that —

Basically, I gave it a list of things I'm interested in writing for my fiction, and then it'll bring me five headlines that I can click through to that will just give me ideas. So every morning, I get this really cool message, and then I go and just have a look. It just helps me think about stuff. So that's my first task, that's what I did.

Alicia: I love that. I'm totally going to steal that.

Since I'm into near future science fiction, I make a point to read technology magazines and subscribe to them, but then I have to actively go to those sources and read them. I love the idea of having them come to me like that. So I've just stolen your idea, Jo.

Joanna: Fantastic. Well, I wanted to mention it because this is an example of something where it will do some work for you and it helps you, but it's certainly not writing your book. So for people listening, please do steal that idea. That is a ChatGPT task. So we are out of time.

Alicia: As we said at the beginning, I write under the name Alicia Ellis. My website is WriterAlicia.com. My social media handle across the board, across everywhere, is @WriterAlicia.

I use Instagram the most, and BlueSky I'm just getting into. Like I said, I go dark for an extended period of time, and then remember that social media exists. So WriterAlicia.com is the main place you can find me.

Joanna: Great. Well, thanks so much for your time, Alicia. That was amazing.

Alicia: Thank you, Jo. I really appreciate you. This has been fun.

The post Fair Use, Copyright, And Licensing. AI And The Author Business With Alicia Wright first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can you build a long-term author career with multiple streams of income? How can you use technology for the grunt work and not the fun part of writing? Kevin J Anderson gives his tips.

In the intro, has TikTok gone dark? [AP]; BookVault is expanding printing to Australia; GPSR, the EU’s new General Product Safety Regulation [Self-Publishing Advice]; CreatedByHumans.ai launches in partnership with The Authors Guild for AI data licensing [Publishing Perspectives]; Simon & Schuster launches audio-first imprint featuring content from self-published authors [Publishers Weekly].

Plus, 7 Steps for How to Write Non-Fiction [Reedsy Live replay]; Publishing predictions for 2025 [Draft2Digital’s Self-Publishing Insiders]; Creative and life challenges with me and Orna Ross [Self-Publishing with ALLi]; Death Valley – A Thriller, coming in March!

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 

Kevin J. Anderson is the multi-award-winning and internationally bestselling author of over 190 books across different genres, with over 24 million copies in print across 34 languages. He's also the director of publishing at Western Colorado University, as well as a publisher at WordFire Press, an editor and rock album lyricist, and he's co-written Dune books and worked on the recent Dune movies and TV show.

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 Kevin at WordFire.com and buy his books direct at WordFireShop.com.

Joanna: Kevin J. Anderson is the multi-award-winning and internationally bestselling author of over 190 books across different genres, with over 24 million copies in print across 34 languages.

He's also the director of publishing at Western Colorado University, as well as a publisher at WordFire Press, an editor and rock album lyricist, and he's co-written Dune books and worked on the recent Dune movies and TV show. So welcome back to the show, Kevin.

Kevin: It's been too long, Joanna. We should do this more often.

Joanna: Oh, yes. Well, you've got so much going on. So we've gone into your background before, so we're going to jump straight in. This, being in the author business a long time, is incredible. Tell us. You just told me about a big milestone.

Kevin: It was the new year, so I was just kind of doing my year round up and everything, and I realized that my very first professional publication was in January 1985, Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. So that means —

Joanna: Wow.

Kevin: So I look back, and it was 1995 when I quit my day job, and I have been a full-time ‘earning all my living by writing stuff' for 30 years. Which, I don't know if I live frugally. No you've met my wife, I don't live frugally. I've just been at it for a long time.

My gosh, it's not like doing the same thing every day, like working on a factory assembly line for 30 years —

This has required just keeping a lookout, and being adaptive, and reinventing myself over and over and over again.

Joanna: Well, let's just focus on that then.

You mentioned being adaptive and reinventing yourself, but I mean, this really takes a different kind of mindset, I think. I haven't been in it as long as you, but I've seen many authors disappear from the industry, perhaps because they couldn't adapt.

So how do you keep that sort of ever learning process, even when you're already so successful?

Kevin: Well, here's the thing, I am not interested in just one thing or one type of writing.

What happens is that something will be really hot one year, and then nobody wants it the next year, but I've got five other things going, so then we hope something else gets really hot.

If you are only writing steampunk vampire romances, great. They might be super hot this year, but 10 years from now, maybe people don't want to read steampunk vampire romances. I'm just making that up, just as an example.

For instance, let me go back. My big claim to fame, I had my first giant career boost was about 1992. So my first novel was published in 1988, and yes, listeners, I know it sounds like I'm really old, but I'm in good shape.

So 1988, my first novel was published. I published, I think, six or seven novels. This is trad days, there was no option for indie. Then I got a phone call from Lucasfilm saying, “Kevin, would you write Star Wars books for us?”

So, suddenly, instead of just being this author who wrote some books that maybe got some reviews, and you got advances in those days, and I maybe earned $4,000 on a book for working on it for six, eight months.

Then suddenly I was writing Star Wars books, and I was a New York Times bestselling author, and I was selling millions of copies. That was huge for me. So I did all these Star Wars books, and through Star Wars, I did Star Wars comics, and then I learned how to write comics.

That was a huge comics boom, so I was writing monthly comic books and doing all kinds of successful things like that. And because of Star Wars, they asked me to write X Files. I wrote all these movie tie-in books. I wrote the novels for like these science fiction movies that came out.

I was pulling up the drawbridge because people kept throwing books at me as fast as I could write them.

People might remember, every time a movie came out, you could walk into the grocery store or the airport and there would be a paperback novel of that movie. I mean, that was steady work.

I could pick up the phone saying, “I've got a month free. Give me a movie novelization.” Those things paid like $15,000 or so, and it took three or four weeks’ worth of work, but they just stopped doing that. It wasn't that I gave up on it, or I stopped being good at it or anything, it's just that entire part of the career dried up.

Then I'm not sure exactly the years, but like 2005 or 2006, the entire comic book industry imploded. My comic that used to sell maybe 500,000 copies an issue suddenly sold 50,000 copies an issue, just because people stopped buying comics. That's not anything that's in my control.

There's a whole lot of reasons why authors screw up their own careers.

I mean, we can talk about that for a while, but —

I had all these things going, but I kept spinning other plates up. I would write mysteries and horror because then the science fiction dried up. Or I would write young adults with my wife, and then young adults suddenly became hot. I just kept trying all of the above.

You've noticed, in fact, I've given you a cup of my coffee, which is like five times stronger than what you ever would drink. I am fairly energetic, and I like to work all the time, and I keep going.

Now, there's a couple of other things. Well, first we mentioned, I'm the director of the Master's Degree Program in Publishing at Western Colorado University, and I started that about seven years ago. In fact, I had to go back to university myself and get an MFA after I had already published 150 books and had 57 bestsellers.

I had to get the degree because you can't teach creative writing unless you have a degree. So I got a master's degree. Now, in fact, we're taking applications for our seventh cohort now. So seven years, I've had this group of students.

I teach them grad-level publishing, both traditional and indie. I put them through the paces. They do their own books, they edit an anthology, they read the slush pile. I mean, it's all hands-on stuff.

The reason I'm mentioning all that, other than telling everybody to check out the program, but that is a completely different plan. Plan Z. I mean teaching at the university and teaching publishing, actually, it pays a monthly salary, which isn't bad.

I get health benefits. You're in the UK, so you don't know how desperate that is over here in the US that you need to have health insurance. So all of that is a completely different track. Like, okay, I'll spend a lot of time teaching graduate students Just try different things.

It's not like I'm working as an automobile mechanic in my day job. Everything is related to writing or publishing, but there's different aspects of it.

It's almost like playing Whack-a-Mole. One thing will pop up and be really successful, but then that will go away, and then something else will pop up. You need to make sure you have a lot of moles to pop up in the Whack-a-Mole room.

Joanna: That's fantastic. I mean, it is amazing. Also, yes, I still remember your coffee. I felt fantastic. I haven't been able to replicate that ever since, so I'm going to have to see you in Vegas for more coffee!

Kevin: One more thing I want to throw into that. I was at 20Books and Author Nation, and I was talking to lots of fabulously successful indie authors. They're fabulously successful this year, but they weren't last year.

The attitude that some people get is if they have a really, really good year, it's always going to be that way, and it isn't. So if you have a really, really good year, don't go out and buy a private jet like.

People might remember MC Hammer, the guy who had some really big hits and that didn't have hits, and he spent all of his money. You don't want to be like that. If you're super successful right now, it doesn't mean you will always be super successful.

Joanna: Yes, absolutely. I always talk about investing and how I don't expect writing to pay my pension. I'm building a pension to pay my pension, and writing can be extra. [Check out my list of money books here.]

I do want to get into your writing process because, as you mentioned, you're energetic, you're in good shape, and you hike a lot. You dictate as you walk, and you've been on the show before talking about dictation.

Now, I noticed that you have a new edition out of On Being a Dictator with two co-writers, which is a book on dictation.

Kevin: Well, there's one other cautionary tale I want to throw in there. It's probably been 30, maybe even 40 years, that I've just dictated my writing. That's how my process works. I love just walking and dictating.

You know this, Joanna. It just gets your creative process going, it gets your thoughts going. I love hiking, and I'm outside. I've got myself so trained that I can't sit there and stare at the screen and be very creative. I have to be out walking and moving around. I go hiking and mountain climbing, and everything's wonderful.

A slight problem happened last August as I was climbing down a mountain pass in the rain on the rocks, and the mud was like Vaseline. I slipped and fell, and I broke my ankle. I had to limp a mile back to my car on this rocky trail on a broken ankle, and I was 12 weeks in a boot and then in an ankle brace.

No tears or anything, it healed just fine, but for those 12 weeks, I was unable to do writing the way I wanted to write. I couldn't really walk. I wasn't supposed to move around very much. So I had to just sit on the back porch with my digital recorder and stare off into the distance and dictate.

Man, that cut my productivity in half. It's not the same just sitting there as it is walking. So I guess my downside was that I was so dependent on being able to write while I walk, that when I suddenly couldn't walk for 12 weeks, I didn't have my own Plan B very well in in action.

I mean, I got my book done. I was a little late on it, but it was not as much fun to sit there and write.

So anyway, to your question, the dictation process hasn't really changed. I'm an outliner. I go through and I have my 90 chapters outlined, or whatever, for my big books. I know exactly what happens in chapter one and chapter two. Now, they might change. I might modify the outline, so it's not like I'm completely locked in.

So I'll take my notes for usually two chapters, sometimes three if I go out on a really long hike, and I just get into the zone. I know what's going to happen, and I just tell my story, and I dictate it.

I'm pretty good at being consistent, not stumbling. So that's what I've done all along.

I would take those audio files and I download them, and I had a typing service. So I would upload them to my typing service. They loved working with me because the typing service usually works on like legal documents and medical reports and things like that, which are very boring.

They liked my zombie detective chapters, or they liked my epic fantasy chapters. So they would always fight over my stuff, and I'd get it turned around fairly quickly.

So it wasn't causing much problems. I would get their dictation back in Word files in two days maybe. So it's not really a problem, but it's not cheap. It was like a penny a word to get it done. So 100,000 word book was $1,000.

As of last February, one of my other dictators at Superstars Writing Seminar last February, she was so excited and came up saying, “Oh, you've got to try this AI transcription.”

She showed me how to do it and I played with it a little bit. What I use is called MacWhisper, but there are other transcription things out there.

[Note, Kevin said MacWrite, but he meant MacWhisper]

Suddenly I just feed my audio file into it, and it transcribes it. It takes a little while to teach the damn thing not to rewrite my words—

Joanna: Particularly with fantasy.

Kevin: All I use it for is to transcribe what I wrote, but I've got my AI trained right now, so that it pops out and it does all the drudgery work. So I don't have to put the paragraphs and the quote marks. It's kind of mind boggling to me how well it does.

For a while, you know me well, I'm not an anti-AI person, but I don't want to get people put out of their jobs. So I thought, “But my typing service, then I don't use the typing service. Those people depended on me.”

My friend said, “Kevin, if they're a decent typing service, don't you think they're already using this to do the first cut on your transcriptions?” And I went, “Oh, probably.”

I come home, I get my dictation things, I load the files up, I go off and eat lunch, and I come back, and they're transcribed.

It has taken an entire chunk of the pain in the butt, time consuming work that has nothing to do with being creative. It, to me, has made things much more streamlined.

The book I wrote, probably 10 years ago, called On Being a Dictator, because I was really one of the first early adopters of walking and dictating. Everybody's always asking, “Well, how can you do that?” Well, I got tired of answering them, so I wrote it up. Now they have to pay five bucks to get my answer.

Joanna: It is a really useful book. I love the fact that, again, you're being adaptive, and you're changing the bits of the process you don't enjoy, or the drudgery side, or the overly expensive side for what it is, and you've changed that process. Your creative process remains the same.

I love that you're adopting these different things.

Kevin: Well, the walking and dictating, that's the fun part. Why would I want AI to do that for me? That's the fun part.

Look, I'm one of these writers that really does enjoy writing. I mean, I love going out and doing my chapter and seeing the adventures unfold.

I have a humorous mystery horror series called Dan Shamble Zombie P. I. and we just did a Kickstarter for Book 11 on it. It's a bunch of dad jokes. It's like the Naked Gun meets the Addams Family. Those stories are so much fun to write, and I find myself like laughing out loud when I go out dictating those things.

My wife will say, “Kevin, you're writing a Dan Shamble book right now because you're always in a good mood.” I love going out and doing that. Why would I want an AI to do all the fun part? AI and computers are supposed to take the grunt work away, not the fun work away.

Joanna: Absolutely. Now, I also wanted to ask you about Kickstarter. So you've done seven, as we record this, Kickstarter projects across various genres.

What are any of your tips for authors who want to use it in 2025?

Kevin: Well, it has entirely changed how I do things. Remember, I came out through trad, and in trad, you have to convince some other publisher that they should publish this project that I want to do.

That would always involve writing proposals up and trying to convince an editor or publisher that, yes, they should take a chance on this project or that project. Then they would pay you in advance, and that's what I would live on while I wrote the book.

Indie is entirely different. You don't get paid anything until you publish it and you start earning sales and royalties.

Well, Dan Shambles is a good example because I love this series. It was with a traditional publisher, and they did the first four books in the series. Let's just say that we didn't really see eye to eye.

I do my own marketing. As you know, I've been doing this for a long time, and I kind of know what works and what doesn't. So this is a fast and funny series. You read one in a couple of sittings, and then you want the next one.

I'm a fast writer, so they bought the first three books, and I said, “Great, let's bring them out like every six months.” Then they went, “Oh, no, we can't do that. It has to be a year and a half apart.”

Well, but this is a fast series, you don't want a year and a half. So we didn't see eye to eye on that.

So then I wrote a standalone story. Like, here's my original, just an introduction to Dan Shamble. It's a standalone mystery. So I wrote it, and I was going to publish it myself, upload it before the first novel came out. Like, here's an appetizer. You can read this free story and then get interested in the series.

So I wrote it, I was going to publish that. They got all bent out of shape, “No, no, no, we have to publish it.”

So I'm like, “Alright. I don't know that you know anything about ebooks, but okay.” So I gave them the story, but they, of course, couldn't release the story before the book was published. They released the story a year later, before Book Two was published.

This is audio, so you can hear the sound of me slapping my forehead. Then the book comes out as $15 as a trade paperback. It was $15 for an ebook and $15 for the print book. I said, “That's insane. You put the ebook at like $5, or something like that.”

They said, “Well, we don't want to cut into our print sales.” Well, it's apples and oranges. The ebook readers are going to buy the ebook, and the print book readers are going to buy the print book. So they said that their ebook sales were disappointing. Well, duh.

Joanna: That's because they're so expensive!

Kevin: So anyway, after four books of that—and I am going to answer your question about Kickstarters after all this, I promise. So they did four books, and I got the rights back.

I released a short story collection because I'd written a bunch of these other short stories, and that came out, and it did okay, and I reprinted them, and they did okay. But I'm writing Dune novels, and I'm doing these really big projects that, frankly, paid a lot.

My re-issues of the Dan Shamble books were okay, but they weren't huge hits. I really wanted to continue the series, it's just there was no real incentive to do so.

Then my friend Dean Wesley Smith, who's run a lot of Kickstarters, said, “Kevin, you should run a Kickstarter for it.” I had this attitude of, well, Kickstarters are for whiny authors that don't have any money and they're begging for money. He said, no, you got it completely wrong.

He's right. I had it completely wrong.

I mean, my Kickstarter people get their books three, four months before anybody else can get them.

They might get expanded editions, or they might get separate things. So, okay, I decided to try it. If anybody wants a new Dan Shamble novel, which I wanted to write, and the fans kept asking for.

So I ran a Kickstarter for another Dan Shamble novel, and bam, it funded in like 30 minutes. It ended up like 15 times what we asked for, and it raised more than triple what the trad publisher was paying. I went, oh, okay, this is pretty nice.

I had another series that I had done, the first book of it was called The Dragon Business. 47 North published it. It was sort of like The Princess Bride meets Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. It was a fun fantasy. It did okay, but not great.

47 North is Amazon's print imprint for science fiction and fantasy. Surprise, surprise, brick and mortar bookstores don't want to carry books that are published by Amazon. So the sales for that weren't as great as they expected.

I got the rights back, and I wanted to do a sequel to it because I wanted to build that into a fun fantasy series. So I thought, oh, well, why don't we see if the Kickstarter people want a sequel to that?

Again, I ran a Kickstarter for it, and again, more than triple what the trad publisher was paying. Remember, I'm already an indie author and an indie publisher. So I know how to publish a book. It's not like this is a learning experience for me.

Joanna: Just on that, just to bring you back to Kickstarter for newer authors. I mean, obviously you're talking about established series, so people might think, well, there's already readers for that. What is different about Kickstarter?

Kevin: Well, actually, it's almost the opposite answer, because this is really designed for people who do have a platform, who do have a fan base, because you can tap into them.

If you're brand new and don't have followers, you have to find some way to get people interested in your project.

Maybe it's connected to a very interesting subject. In fact, one of my grad students right now is a recovering alcoholic, and she's got a whole bunch of self-help books on how to overcome addiction.

She's not famous. Nobody really knows who she is, but she's plugged into this network of people who are trying to help one another through situations like this. So she's able to get attention for that particular subject.

I'm going to run a Kickstarter this spring with my grad students because the poetry concentration director also runs this big Writers Workshop in Montana, I think, which is for indigenous writers, and it's taught by all indigenous instructors.

There are a lot of foundations for the arts supporting them, but they never have enough money to run the workshop. So we're going to run a Kickstarter for them, and we will be tapping into a lot of people to say help support this indigenous workshop.

I haven't run it yet, so we don't know if it's successful, but I'm pretty confident it's going to be. My students are going to help promote it. Now, they're not famous, but when you have this good cause that you're promoting it for, then you can get attention that way.

If you're just, “I'm Bill, brand new indie author. Here's my short story collection. Here's my Kickstarter,” you may be starting too soon for that.

Also, you need to be able to convince your backers that you will actually deliver on what you promise.

I've supported probably 50 Kickstarter campaigns, and probably 20 of them I never got the stuff I paid for because they just don't know how to produce it.

So don't let that happen to you. Make sure you know what you're doing.

At 20Books, last year or the year before, I was talking to the head of publishing at Kickstarter. She was kind of rolling her eyes and shaking her head, saying that they've had people that ran campaigns for a fantasy book, and the campaign was successful.

Then the person wrote her and said, “Okay, my campaign was successful. Now, how do I publish a book?”

Joanna: Well, we generally say now—

That's the advice, I think.

Kevin: I mean, even me, everybody knows that I'm going to be reliable. I've written 190 books. If I say I'm going to write one, I'm going to do it. But I feel that you want to deliver your stuff fairly soon, while people remember that they're still waiting for it.

How many people are really still waiting for the next Game of Thrones book? I've given up on that.

Also, so I write my book before—either completely done, or at least the draft is done and I'm editing it—before I run the campaign. I want to be able to turn it over and just deliver the books within a month or two. I always under promise and over deliver.

So right now, I've got the Dan Shamble campaign that ended in the first week of November. I promised them books by March, we are sending them out this week because I got it done faster.

There are times where there are delays, especially if you're doing, say, bespoke editions that have to be shipped from China or something. Those are things you can't count on. I always really want to have everything done and ready.

The other thing is —

I don't want to go to my backers and say, “Hey, support my next one,” if I haven't delivered the previous stuff yet. You want to be reliable. Make sure you're not doing it too soon. There are pieces you need to put in place.

Here's an example. So I'm writing Dune books and things. Those go to the trad publisher because they have a much bigger footprint in brick and mortar stores and things. Kickstarter lets me do the projects that are my passion projects, really big things that I want to do that might not fit with trad publishing.

In fact, I ended up with a whole lot of short stories, like 150 of them or so.

I even found the very first thing that I wrote when I was eight years old. I typed it on my dad's typewriter. It was this little three-page story about a mad scientist making monsters. I found that one, and so I included that in there.

So that meant that by putting the story when I was eight years old, I could do this short story collection that covered 50 years of my career. For each one of those stories, I wrote a little intro of, here's how I wrote this one, or here's how I wrote that one.

So it was three volumes of science fiction, two volumes of fantasy, two volumes of horror/dark fantasy. 750,000 words, all told.

Joanna: Wow.

Kevin: This is a huge job just putting all these stories together. So here's the point, and yes, I do have one, and I eventually get around to it. So I put all these things together, and I went to my New York literary agent. I knew the answer, I just wanted to do it.

So I went to him, and this is the guy who sold million dollar contracts for me, and I said, “I'm going to do a seven volume collection of my reprint short stories, and I want to do them all in hardcover. Who could you sell that to?”

It was like silence on the phone. He said, “Well, nobody. Nobody would want that.

So, hello, my fans do want it. With the Kickstarter, it's between creator and the reader. There aren't 25 other middlemen between it. There aren't all these other people telling you, no, you can't do it. So it's just a direct me and the readers.

I guess the point of that was, this was a project I wanted to do. Without Kickstarter, I could never, ever have done it.

I mean, it took a lot of time and a lot of work, and it was expensive to do those books. So if I didn't have the money from Kickstarter, I could not have seen that project through.

Joanna: Well, I did want to ask you about short stories. Doing short story collections was one of my reasons that I wanted you to come back on the show.

I mean, there are obviously still short story markets, and lots of them, if you focus on that. But many indie authors are like, why would I bother? So, thoughts on short stories?

Kevin: Getting back to the long career retrospective. When I started out, every author's career path was that you wrote a bunch of short stories, you published them in the numerous magazines, and you built up a little bit of a following, and then you graduated to writing novels. Short stories were your training ground.

That's not the case anymore because there just really aren't nearly as many short story markets, and even then, you might not get it published.

The big advantage indies have is —

You put it in your newsletter, or you use it as, “Get a free story when you sign up for my mailing list,” or something like that.

So short stories have a very good purpose right now, as you use them as like carrots to get people to check out your series. Or you can use it to maybe test out a new character if you want to. Always, short stories are a great way to experiment as a writer.

I mean, it takes me a couple of days to do a short story. So if you think, well, maybe I should try dark fantasy and see how it works. Well, write a short story and see if it works, rather than writing a novel, which is going to take you however long it takes you to write a novel. So it's a training ground, and that's very good to do.

Today, I would look at short stories as an adjunct or as supplementary things, rather than your main focus. They're kind of like the garnish on a plate instead of the steak.

There are many ways to use them. You can swap short stories. With other writers that have newsletters, you give them a story and they give you a story, so then you can get their readers to read your character and maybe pick up your series. That's where I would do it.

The Kevin J. Anderson Short Fiction Library, that came from people who were already interested in my stuff. If you're brand new and you don't have a big following already, I'm not exactly sure that that would be my main focus, doing an original story collection.

Joanna: I will come back on that. One of the reasons I'm thinking of doing this on Kickstarter is because I have bought so many on Kickstarter.

So it's one of those things that when you find a tiny niche of people who are interested in a certain type of product, then there are people there. So that's actually why I was thinking of even doing one on Kickstarter, because I am part of that audience. So I guess it's a different angle.

Kevin: But you do have a following, and you do have a platform.

Joanna: That's true.

Kevin: Now for you, though, one of the interesting enticements might be to do a short story collection paired with one of your writing books. Like my grad students, we assign them your Your Author Business Plan book, and they read it every spring and build their business plan based on your book.

So you might want to do, here's my story collection and here's my—if you have a new book on writing advice or something.

Joanna: Or writing short stories. Yes, absolutely.

Kevin: If you have one on writing short stories, that would be an ideal pairing. Like, here's my short story collection and here's my book on how to write short stories. That's genius. That would work. Brilliant.

Joanna: I think that's what we think around these Kickstarter projects, is it's not like on Amazon where if you pair something and your algorithm goes horribly wrong because those readers don't normally buy that kind of thing. Whereas—

Kevin: Exactly. So, here's the other thing. With doing a Kickstarter and raising money that way, that is completely separate from your indie publishing.

So when I get a Dan Shamble Kickstarter, and those books go out—again, they're going out to all my Kickstarter backers in the next week or two—the official release of this book to the public is like April.

So then we put up preorders on Amazon, and then everybody else buys them.

It's a special audience.

So most people are going to wait for it to come out on Amazon. So then you basically start all over from scratch. But hey, I just got a whole bunch of extra money up front to do this project. I am clearly a convert, as you can tell.

Joanna: Absolutely. Now, we're almost out of time, but I want to come back to something you said earlier.

You said, “How do authors screw up their own careers?” Then you said, “Well, we could talk about that if you'd like.” So I was thinking that, yes, I would like to talk about that.

Kevin: Well, my biggest piece of advice is, don't be an asshole. Well, first off, I have a policy of I do not make political postings on any of my social media. That is a great way to get rid of half of your readers is to start spouting something.

I wasn't joking, don't be an asshole. Authors talk. Reader's talk. If you're like this total jerk, people are like, I like the books, but I can't stand the person, so I'm not going to buy anymore. So just don't do that.

Deliver your stuff when you say you're gonna deliver it.

If you promised everybody your next book is coming out in April, well, don't make it five years later. I mean, obviously there are extenuating circumstances, you can have a medical issues or some other things.

I like networking, and networking works the opposite way too. If you screw somebody over, everybody else is going to know about it.

In the indie author community, just look at all the people who come to Superstars, or to Author Nation, or 20Books, or these various things. People will know if you stop being ethical and reliable.

I have a policy of I just don't ever talk smack about other authors. I was on a panel once where it was about bestselling books or something, and everybody was just bitching and whining about the Twilight books or about Hugh Howey's books. They didn't like them, or Dan Brown's.

I just went, “Guys, tens of millions of people bought them, so there was something done right. Learn from it rather than complain about it.” I think we're all colleagues. Like, Joanna, you're successful. It doesn't make me any less successful.

I like to read books too. So just because somebody's selling books, doesn't cost me anything. I believe in the rising tide lifts all boats. I like being supportive and helpful, and I do my best not to be an asshole and help other people. It's karma points. It comes back at you.

It also works the opposite way. If you're this very negative person, and you constantly screw things up, you're alienating your readers, you're alienating your fans, you're being a jerk on social media, well, that's a great career suicide.

Just look at some of the actors who have had careers that have instantly crashed and burned because of some stupid thing they did. So don't do the stupid thing.

Joanna: Well, that's really interesting. So you've basically gone for the personality as opposed to the craft, which I think is really interesting. I was kind of expecting you to say they stop writing or they stop marketing, or something like that.

Kevin: Well, obviously if you stop writing. If you do a series—and I joked earlier about Game of Thrones—I mean, there's a contract there. If you started reading this book, you invested lots of time in this series, and I don't know what it is now, 10 years, 12 years since the last one. I'm not waiting for it anymore.

I loved those books. I'm not waiting for it anymore. If you do a series and you're producing them regularly, and you just stop, the reader's attention span is not long because there are so many other things to read. Don't expect them to be like pining by the telephone, waiting for somebody to ask you out on a date.

Now, again, we get back to the longevity of a career. It is exhausting to write lots of books a year, and most people can't keep doing that for 20 years or 30 years.

That's one of the reasons, especially indie authors, where readers expect you to write several books a year. Some indie authors I know are writing a book a month. I couldn't do that for any long period. Well, I couldn't do that probably for a single year.

You start building expectations, and when you fail to meet those expectations, they will leave you very quickly. That's why you should have Plan Bs.

If you really, really can't stand writing your steampunk vampire romance series after book number 29, well, make sure that you have some other series you're starting and building up.

Well, Hugh Howey's got several series that are going. Michael Anderle has all kinds of series, and Craig Martelle has all kinds of series. You don't just put all your eggs in one basket. You need to have Plan B and Plan C, to circle around to what I started with.

Joanna: Well, that is fantastic.

Kevin: My website is WordFire.com. My store WordFireShop.com. After COVID, I realized I needed to sell books direct, and that's doing very well for me. Facebook, just look up my name, Kevin J. Anderson. I've got a couple of different pages, and you'll find it.

Also on WordFire.com, there's a whole section about the graduate program in publishing, if anybody's interested in becoming a Master of Publishing with the piece of paper to prove it.

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

Kevin: Thanks, Joanna. I always love talking to you.

The post Building A Long Term Author Business, Dictation, Kickstarter, and Short Story Collections With Kevin J Anderson first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can you balance creativity with business in order to have a profitable, long-term author career? What were the successes and challenges of the Author Nation conference? Joe Solari shares his perspective.

In the intro, the money episode [Ink In Your Veins]; WISE for multi-currency banking; creative planning tips for 2025 [Self~Publishing Advice]; Surprising Trends Authors Can’t Ignore in 2025 [Novel Marketing Podcast]. Plus, an update on Death Valley, A Thriller, and reflections on seeing live theatre vs online & stream/subscription models.

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 

Joe Solari helps authors build great businesses through books, courses, and podcasting, as well as strategy and operations consulting. He's also the managing director of Author Nation, the biggest conference for indie authors in the 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 Joe at JoeSolari.com and AuthorNation.live.

Joanna: Joe Solari helps authors build great businesses through books, courses, and podcasting, as well as strategy and operations consulting. He's also the managing director of Author Nation, the biggest conference for indie authors in the world. So welcome back to the show, Joe.

Joe: Thanks for having me on again. I really enjoy the time we get to spend together. It seems like we talk more on the show than we do at events that we meet each other at.

Joanna: Absolutely. Well, we're often both very busy. You've been on the show a couple of times before—and I'll link to those in the show notes—so we're just going to jump in today.

Now, as we head into 2025, authors are assessing their priorities for the year. Now, in your experience helping authors build profitable businesses—

Joe: That's such an awesome question. I think a lot of folks that are used to hearing me on your podcast or other podcasts are going to think that I'm going to go right into talking about profitability or budgeting, but I'm going to actually get a little different approach for you on this whole thing.

Let me give you some context first, and that is—

Joanna: Personally, a lot of my ideas come from traveling and places, in particular. So I have to go and visit things and input in order to have ideas.

Joe: Yes, and that doesn't surprise me. I've asked the question of a lot of creatives, and what I've discovered in asking that question is there tends to be two different things that come up. Like, it's when I do something like go on walks. Or a lot of times it's things like driving or a shower.

Why that is, there's science behind this, and it's you have two distinct networks in your brain that you need to use for creativity.

One is the default mode network. That's what your body goes into when you daydream. It's when you were sitting in class and getting bored by your teacher, and it would make you go off and think into your imaginary world. That's a natural place for you to go.

The other system is your executive functioning system, which is what helps you focus and get words out and hit deadlines.

They're two distinct systems that sometimes will overlap, like in a venn diagram. When that happens, that's your flow state where you feel like the ideas are coming and you're getting them down on paper.

The interesting thing about that is that it’s completely counter to what you're told to do as an entrepreneur and hustle culture. You're just supposed to produce. You're supposed to produce words. You're supposed to sit in a chair. You're supposed to produce.

So what you do is, when you are only focused on that one side, the executive function side, you detach yourself and you distance yourself from your creative well.

So my answer to your question is that — I suggest that authors start to build into their process in 2025 more time to tap into that default mode network and spend time thinking about how they can spend some real quality time and —

When you feel like you're being blocked, it's because you're disconnecting yourself from that default mode network. So it's sound business advice, in the sense of there's this process that's core to your business that we need to get more efficient and think about how we can improve its performance.

Joanna: I really like that, and I feel like this is something I've always done is that I separate my time into creative time and business and marketing time. I find like I can't do both in the same time period.

When I had a day job, first thing in the morning—you know, I'm a morning person—so I'd write before going to work. Then in the evening, I could do business and marketing. This podcast was started after my work, back in the day.

So perhaps that fits into what you're saying is that you have to schedule different types of time, some for input and creativity and thinking and not doing much sometimes. Then other time for business and marketing.

Joe: Absolutely, you're really getting into the core of this.

There are different systems, and they have to be honored in different ways, and you need them both. We're on The Creative Penn show, come on, we have got to talk about creativity. It's like, we forget that's the source of the product.

We get very focused on, oh, it's a business. You have this product you have to put out. You have these customers you need to serve. All that stuff, it has to be done, but what you asked was —

What I'm getting at is there's some things that we can do to make that process easier. What it means is understanding that this isn't up and to the right like a business chart of sales. It's an undulating cycle.

Let me give you another context for this. If we look at creativity as a profession, you have this natural talent as a creator. We've identified that you've got this active imagination, and you love to spend time in the story world, and it's fulfilling to you. That's no different than if we noticed some natural athletic talent.

So what would we do around that if we saw that you were a really good tennis player? Well, we would work on your endurance and your speed. We would work on racket skills. We would work on all these different things to supplement that natural talent.

We wouldn't just say after you finished winning Wimbledon to go play the French Open. We'd put you in an ice bath, we'd stretch you out, we'd go into some kind of a process that would get you to be ready for the next time you play.

I think that goes, again, back to that first question of yours, what could you do to make 2025 better? It's like, how do you build a recovery process?

There's a lot of things right now in the world that are really, really detrimental to you refilling the well. We're talking about this really powerful default mode network and that time where you just need to be bored to let it kick in.

What do we do? Well, we get on social media, and we doom scroll, and we do a bunch of stuff to fill in that time that really deteriorates. It does two things, right.

You lose that time that you need, and it deteriorates your capacity because you're doing really horrible things to your neuro-chemical system with these dopamine hits from scrolling.

I've been doing this research, and it's kind of scary to see what could potentially happen with this. It's destroying all this creative capacity out there that we need to have new ideas come up, whether it's a new story or the cure for some disease.

Joanna: Yes, it is tough. In fact, one of the things I do is try to be active in my open time. So you said there be bored, and being bored is really hard, as you say. So I go for a walk often, and going for a walk means I can't look at my phone while I'm out walking. I'm looking at nature.

You mentioned the shower. We cannot stay in the shower for hours at a time, but I can walk for hours at a time. Most people, wherever they are, there should be somewhere you can go and walk.

Although, perhaps not at a gym. I don't know, a gym is also very stimulating in terms of the screens. Particularly in your American gyms, there are so many screens everywhere.

This is also really hard for people, and I know there will be people saying, “but social media is how I”—not me particularly—”but how I might be selling books.”

So this is the hard part, right? This is what it comes down to. I love what you're saying, but then people are like—

So let's talk about that, about the business side as well.

Joe: So again, you have to put it into context. So let's use this perfect example of a bunch of folks out there that are listening that are seeing really amazing success with their strategies on TikTok. So they're going to say what you just said, “I have to be on this platform.”

It's like, yes, you do, but how are you on the platform? Are you on this platform to develop meaningful relationships with your audience? Because also this thing is about, how do you make your business fulfill you?

If it's just about hitting business goals, that gets you on that hedonic treadmill where you always have to be hitting goals to feel like something's happening. Versus like, no, I'm really trying to help an audience connect with work that's meaningful to me and will be meaningful to them.

So in that process, I need to carve out some specific time to be on TikTok, and I need to do these specific things on TikTok. That's all executive functioning kind of stuff.

Now, they may be like, “Well, I need to come up with some creative stuff for TikTok.” Well, maybe you need to spend some time in that default network space to think of those ideas.

Just sitting for an hour and a half scrolling on TikTok instead of being on a walk or doing something that gets you into that space, is going to hurt your business, not help your business. So I think that —

Then you get into the whole other side of how social media can make us get into comparison and all kinds of other horrible things. We could talk about that for hours.

Joanna: Yes, and it's interesting because we also do have to make decisions about time. You mentioned time, and we only have limited time. You and I are older now, and time gets more and more limited, unfortunately.

When TikTok blew up, and I've looked at it several times, and every time I go, “I choose not to do this because my time doing other things is more valuable.” Like I'm doing calisthenics and practicing doing handstands. At this point in my life, practicing doing handstands is more important than TikTok!

Other people make a different decision, but I think it's very interesting. So this is one thing is we have limited time, and we have to make a choice over the time. Also, we do have to schedule downtime.

Again, back on the profitable or for business, but also the fulfillment that you mentioned?

Joe: So I think that—and again, this plays off of what you just said—is we think that we have to do it all.

Whatever comes into our feed or starts to trend with whatever place where we're getting information, it's like, “Oh, I have to do this thing now. Like, I have to do TikTok. It's obvious that I've got to do TikTok because I see these people that are making all this money at this.”

To your point, you chose to do something different. I think this is —

The reality is, if you look at something like venture capital or private equity, they're in the business of saying no.

They have a process that they evaluate what they're going to invest in and what they're going to do because they know they have a finite amount of time and capital. If they don't say no to 99% of the things that come over the transom to them, they're just going to run out of money and have bad investments.

So they have to have a system where they evaluate what is the best use of time and money. The reality is that for authors, that time component is the real finite resource.

There's so many authors that have figured out how to get a business ramped up and make money with no money. Like this is the land of bootstrapping, right? Whereas a lot of other businesses, you can't even get into the business unless you have capital.

So here's one where people have figured out ways to do that, but if you're not looking at the best use of your time. What we talked about earlier is now we're saying you need to think about a chunk of that time in a different space that isn't necessarily doing businessy stuff. That means you have less time, right?

I think that you're better to pick one or two things and really invest and do them well than try to do 10 things halfheartedly.

Joanna: So how do people pick one or two things?

I remember this, back in 2009 when I started this podcast, I'd never done a podcast before. It was very, very new, actually, in podcasting era. I was like, I'm just going to try this. At the same time, I started a YouTube channel, again, quite early on in that time.

Although I still have a YouTube channel, it didn't become the thing that I enjoyed, or that actually is part of a profitable part of my business, but I didn't know that before I started.

So if people listening, they're like, okay, well, should I try TikTok? Or should I do Facebook ads? Or should I use a subscription service? How do they know, or—

Joe: Again, this is where you have to kind of step back and ask yourself these questions. What is my natural curiosity leading me to? When do I feel that it's being fulfilled? So we can just use your examples.

Of course, you're going to want to try these things as they come up. You're going to see, oh, this is a new thing, but what is it that I want to get out of it? So from a personal standpoint, am I feeling energy come to me?

Number two is, how does it align with your business practices? When you step into something like TikTok, there's the how-to. There's courses. There's all kinds of people that have talked on shows like mine about how to do this, but is that the audience you're looking for. Is that the kind of interaction you want to have with your audience?

Using you as an example, you've been very deliberate and said no in instances that probably have pissed some people off. It's because you understand that in the long run, it's not going to work out well for anybody because you're not going to be getting fulfilled. Is that a fair statement?

Joanna: Oh, yes, but I also annoy myself sometimes. I'm like, why can't I do video? As you say, curiosity, and also what drains you. Video drains me, and it always has. Some people say, oh, it's because you're getting older. I'm like, no, it always, always has.

Also, I don't listen to music. I don't do noise. I like silence. I like quiet. I think, as you say—

Joe: I think when we go back to thinking about where your creative well gets filled is that them going to a coffee shop is a place of creativity. I go there and I'm eavesdropping on people's conversations, and thinking about the coffee, like it's not a place where I can do that.

So part of this idea is for you, as a listener on the show, thinking about these ideas, what is it for you? Not, what is the community saying?

There's no shortage of ideas on ways to make money as an author or to monetize your creativity, and there'll be more coming.

You need to be really deliberate and pick the ones that do two things, in my view, and that is to connect you with the audience that you want to connect with. Because, again, if this is about making money, you need to have people that see that your creative content is worth more than the cold, hard cash in their wallet.

Then two, it fulfills you, and fulfills you in the right way.

Okay, what do I mean by that? Not that it makes you get your ego pumped up or gives you a bunch of status in fake things like rank, but that it fulfills you by like, “I am now truly in touch with my meaning.”

It helps you understand why you're on this planet. This helps you to feel like a full human being. That's the part that I think is getting lost in this whole hustle culture, is that you're going to feel good when you hit this particular monumental thing like making seven figures. No, you won't. You won't.

I know this because I've worked with so many people that have done that, and they come to me and they're like, “I've worked harder. I'm more burnt out. I have the mantle. I won the trophy. I sold a million dollars’ worth of books this year. But you know what? I can't keep this up.”

What ends up happening is —

They find that sweet spot because they've changed their focus.

They've gotten to be like, “Hey, wait a minute. If I do some things with my business, tune some things up here, I can make more money than I've ever made before. I can feel good and I can tap into things that I was missing out.”

“I can connect with my family more. I can travel more. I can feel that I can leave certain parts of my business and not think that it's all going to crash into a heap.”

Joanna: Yes, exactly. That's why we were emphasizing ‘profitable.' I know you talk about this a lot because a lot of the numbers that you can see, screenshots on various social media or whatever, are the above-the-line figures. They're not necessarily the profit figures. They're the income or the revenue, but not the profit.

So that's where we like to focus. Profitable life, I think in general, just having a happier life.

I want us to get into Author Nation now. 2024 was the first year, and I was there. It was fantastic. I bought my ticket for 2025 before I even left Vegas. So I was one of those that as you were talking about it, I went on and bought it. Let's just, first of all, from your perspective—

From, I guess, you and from Suze and the team, but also from feedback that you got.

Joe: Oh, well, I don't even know where to start. There's so much. I think the funny thing was, so many people were like, “Oh, you have to be really stressed out. There's got to be a lot of stuff going on.” The feeling was more like being the host of a party or your wedding.

Like you have this big event that you've planned, you want to make sure everyone's having a good time, but it wasn't like there were fires to really put out.

We had been working on this thing for over a year. We have a team that really did an amazing job at putting together the programming and building a system like that. Like people don't understand this is where my creativity really was able to come out and take a business and work on it.

The show as a whole was surprising to people at the things that we focused in on. Like, we spent a lot of time with the space. We made sure that the space was open and inviting. We had rented a bunch of furniture, couches and stuff, so people had these conversation pits to hang out in.

That came out of observing other shows that tended to, in my view, make authors feel anxious and confined and claustrophobic. So we didn't want that to be the case.

We wanted to make sure that there was different facets for authors. So the folks that were really there to kind of fill their well with information, we had a lot of great sessions. Yours was a great example of that.

We also know that there's a lot of people that they never go into those sessions. They just need a place to hang out, and do deals, and talk, and network. So we had different spaces for that. We had, like I said, these conversation pits. We also had a bunch of tables around where people could sit and work together.

All of that stuff was designed to hit the needs that we kept hearing people say when we asked them about what they want out of a show. Now, the feedback we've gotten, that's the other thing—we built a system so we were able to collect reviews off of every single session and about the overall show.

So we ended up with 866 reviews of sessions. We reviewed on two things: were the objectives clear and where the objectives met? We had, on the first one, it was like a 4.6 out of 5, and the objectives met was like a 4.55.

So we had a really, really good feedback system, and we had good feedback. The great thing was, is we then—like, I'm sure you were sent your reviews.

Joanna: Yes, that was great. Yes, really good.

Joe: So it's funny, when we did that, there was some people that, again, we can all be self-conscious. It's like, no, those aren't bad reviews. You got to filter out some of this stuff.

Joanna: Yes, for sure. Actually, this would be a tip for people if they are coming, if you're using that app again, I didn't make the most of that app until towards the end of the week. Then I realized that there were slides on there from people's talks.

and all of that kind of thing, as well as doing the ratings. So, yes, that app, I think next time I'll be using that. Are you going to use that same app again?

Joe: Yes, we're going to use that again. I actually had somebody come up at the show that's a programmer, and he talked about programming something specific for us. So we're going to look at that as a potential, but the idea is having something like that.

We were really happy with the tool we used. The only thing we were hoping to add into that was better group communication, so a way for authors that are there to have a single platform to network between themselves and message each other. So that's the one thing that we're trying to figure out.

All those pieces, we spent a lot of time on. If you noticed, we have a numbering system that tells you what room something is in, what day it is, what session during the day.

That all feeds back into our system because this year what we're really working on is all the stuff that was kind of manual processes that we hand carried through the building. It's like we're automating all that stuff. We're using agents and tools that are now available to us.

So you'll see this, for folks that are submitting to speak, that starts you in a process that will eventually feed all the information into the contract we send you. Then that'll push information into our system so that our folks don't have to be typing stuff in.

Joanna: That is good. I actually did submit mine—because I knew we were talking—I was like, right, I'm going to submit my talk. So I did actually go through that process, and I noticed it was very organized, and there were all the things I could put in. So that was that was super useful.

On that, I guess you mentioned there the automations and agents and AI. There was a lot of AI sessions at Author Nation 2024. There was also a lot on direct sales. There was lots on Kickstarter and people selling on Shopify. These are some big trends that are coming or are here.

Will you continue to cover them in the show in 2025?

Joe: I think we probably had the single most comprehensive track on AI that anyone's ever put together in the creative community, while at the same time having a massive amount of information on how to be an artisan.

So the idea for us isn't to be one thing to everyone, other than the place you come to get exposed to everything.

The idea that there's one way to do this is ludicrous. This kind of gets to some of the stuff you and I have talked about—how we do things today is very different than how we've done things in the past.

You're going to make decisions. Hopefully, you're getting to a point where you're saying there's some stuff I'm not going to do.

I think one of the best examples of all of bringing that change is we had Johnny Truant at the show, one of the co-authors of Write. Publish. Repeat.

Here is like the OG of like fast publishing doing a session on being an artisan and how his focus is now on creating meaningful relationships around his work with a small, intimate group of fans that can support him.

There's two parts of that. One is like, how does he do that? But also that bigger message of like, yes, I've matured and changed what I think is important for me to be fulfilled. So that's what we want the show to be about.

The hard part can be is if you're newer and you come in, it's like, oh my god, there's too much stuff on the buffet. That's our responsibility to try to help people manage and absorb this content.

Joanna: Yes, and on that, you have tracks, don't you, for people who haven't written a book yet. For different genres, for people like me who want the much more advanced content, but—

Joe: Yes, it's so that if you've never written a book, you can come.

Frankly, if you haven't written a book, you're in that part of your publishing career, there isn't a better thing to do. Why is that? Well, there's more people on the planet in that one room for that five days that have done what you want to do than anywhere else.

So why not be there and ask them questions, and learn from them, and see what is their way of doing it. Because in the beginning, you just need to get that book out. Then you can start understanding some deeper things about what your business will look like.

You and I are a long way away from that first published book, but that was a massive endeavor. We forget about that sometimes of what a massive endeavor that first book is.

So once that does happen, then it's like, oh, well, that wasn't that bad. I can do that again. Now, how do I want to do that? How do I want to connect with people? There's so many different ways now, that's the other thing. It used to be, oh, well, you just have to get on Amazon.

Well, no, maybe for you, the best thing because of your writing style and the way you work is that you're building your business on Kickstarter. So we'll have people there, like we have the Kickstarter people, right?

Joanna: Yes, Oriana.

Joe: What we're doing is, now that we've gotten the first one under our belt, we're going out to folks. I had a conversation with Oriana just before the New Year for next year. Like, okay, what if in our online community, you come in and coach a cohort of people to do Kickstarters?

So instead of having a session at Author Nation that is educational, “hey, you should do Kickstarters,” you have a session where you meet with those people and talk about what worked and didn't work in those Kickstarters that you ran over the year.

That's a whole different way that we use the idea of community and a week-long show to get the support mechanism that people really need.

Sure, we can run a great show and take out our firehose and just drowned you in ideas, but — 

The first part is what we're talking about, picking the ones to implement.

Joanna: Very important.

Joe: Sitting in front of a notebook with 60 great ideas can be paralyzing. So how do we get you to the ones that are going to have the—and it's something we talked about at the show—high impact, low effort.

Joanna: Yes, and I think —

So even though it's not up there yet, towards November the schedule will be around. So people can kind of see, all right, well, what do I really want to go to?

What I had in my schedule, which I planned ages in advance because I was arranging meetings and all of that kind of thing was, this is a session I have to attend, and then there might be other sessions I'm like, that will get a two, and if I'm around, I'll go to that, and if not, I'll figure it out later.

So really, planning in advance. Then, as you say, afterwards, like reviewing your list at least a week later and seeing what still resonates from what you went through.

There might be a ton of stuff you wrote down that a week later you're not so enamored with. So I think that's really useful, is putting the extra time in to do the scheduling and then do the thinking later.

Joe: Yes, and there's two things that I want to touch on that.

The first is, is one of the areas where we recognize that we can do a better job, and that is when there were lower reviews on sessions, the trend seemed to be that we didn't do a really good job at helping the audience understand that topic.

The way we did our reviews is we also asked what level you were in as an author. Then what we would see is these stratifications where it's like, oh, look at all the high reviews from these people that were beginners, and all these low reviews from people that were advanced.

We screwed up and we made this thing seem like it was for everybody. So one of the things that Chelle and I were talking about is that if you want to get your session approved, you're going to have a higher chance of doing that saying, “This is for this specific group,” than saying, “Oh no, this is for everybody.”

The second thing is, if you went to the show and you were a maniac and went to a session every time there was a session open, the best you could have seen was about 23% of the content that we put together. So I mean 70% of the sessions you miss.

Now, let's put a little math on that. You're probably not going to look at all those because of, again, what level you are. So let's say you missed half of what you should have seen. Well, that's why we're doing this whole thing about the after party that starts the 11th.

It is this idea of like, hey, we're going to have all these videos in an area. You can watch the videos that you didn't see. There's a spot where you can go and put in questions. We're going to submit those questions to the presenters, and then we're going to have hour-long Q&A sessions on Zoom to get those questions answered.

So you get a couple things out of this that never has happened at a show before. One is — 

Two is, you get a way to get more value out of those sessions that you missed.

Three is, even with a session you went to, you now had time to digest it and look at your notes and think through some things on your business without being at a crazy show with all your friends.

So you may have some more questions that you want to get clarified with the speaker, and now you can get on there and say, “Hey, now I'm looking at my business. What about this or that?” And they'll be able to give you really good feedback that's pertinent to your business.

So we're really trying to think how this is a community of communities that gets results.

Joanna: Now, we do have to say that there are inevitable challenges with every business, and in fact, one of the challenges was my session, the recording didn't work. So I am actually redoing my session as part of this after party.

I'm actually going to give the session again with some updates because, of course, my talk was on AI, and it was in November, and we're two months on, and things have changed. So I'm going to be doing that again. So, yes, the challenge is sometimes things don't work.

You've talked about some of them, but anything else?

Joe: So on that particular subject, out of 160 sessions, I think there were eight that we had technical issues with. So like, we want to have zero fault on that, but fortunately, we've got a solution. In your case, you don't have to record video. You just show your slides. I know this is not a thrill for you!

Joanna: No, definitely not a thrill, but I'm happy to update the slides and do it again. Like you said, you're doing the after party, so it might actually work really well.

Joe: Yes, the point is having this situation where we can interact around that material. Frankly, we have to get that session done because you were one of the highest rated sessions there were.

I think we had a fundamental difference in how AI was seen at the show, and why was that was how we were approaching the subject matter. This wasn't about how it is just used in creation of content, we were talking about all kinds of stuff.

The good and the bad of it, and as well as how this is going to be able to do things for you and your business that you don't want to do, or frankly, you're not that good at, and the machine is going to be better at it than you. So that's part of it.

Your question was about what could we do better. We have the reader event, and we're always going to struggle with that until we get to the point where we can do that on a full weekend. We know that having a Saturday for that means we get a lot more people to show up.

We rolled out some technology at that event. It was the first time it was ever used. It went pretty well, but we've got a whole list of stuff we have to improve with that. We wouldn't have had that list unless we went and did that project, right?

So the idea of us creating a way for us to sell print books at a show, and authors not have to figure out how to get the books there. We've got the first part of that solution. The readers could order books, we had them printed on demand and delivered to the show.

Now that we have that system working, and we know that it works, we need to get it so that it's a really pleasant experience for everybody. So those kind of things are marginal things that we need to adjust to make things better.

Again, this is stuff I enjoy.

Joanna: It's only year one!

Joe: I think that that was for us, this first year was a lot about like, okay, I've never run a show before. It's the first time I've done this.

There were people on our team that were involved with the previous show and knew what to do at the show, but we were making so many changes that there was a lot of moving parts that were new and had to be watched.

The beauty of something like this is to see the impact that it has on the community, while at the same time being able to work with people on making it happen.

So it's very fulfilling for me because this is how my creativity comes out in working on a business. It's even more rewarding because I'm doing it with people, and we're having fun. We're a very high performing team.

Joanna: Well, fantastic. So if people want to come—

Joe: Sure. So right now, early ticket sales are open. So we have a deeply discounted ticket that you can buy in the month of January. So if you came to the show and bought your ticket at the show, they got the best price, and that was only available to those people that came to the show.

Now we have our early bird special, and you can go to AuthorNation.live and sign up for that.

We also have another offer there called the Regret Remedy Bundle. So what is that? There was a lot of people that were like, well, I'm going to just wait and see how this show went.

Then they lost their mind after they saw all the fun and their friends were who were at the show that were like, “Oh my God, this thing is amazing,” and all over Facebook are people sitting on these big white leather couches with smiles on their faces.

So if you, for whatever reason, didn't come, you can buy this Regret Remedy package. It includes the after party, so you'll get all the videos from 2024. Also, it's bundled with a ticket for 2025.

In both cases, we offer an installment plan, so we're trying to help you manage your cash flow as well. If you can't afford the full ticket, you can break that up over a six-month period to manage your cash flow better.

So again, go to AuthorNation.live to learn more about those. We've got some examples of the sessions from 2024 to give you a feel for what the show is like and all the fun testimonials from people.

I can say this, as far as the 2025 show, we've got some amazing stuff lined up. We haven't announced it yet because we're contracting things right now, but when you look at last year, we had Kevin Smith—did you stay around for the Kevin Smith?

Joanna: Yes, I was there. I'd never heard of him. Then I was like, oh, this dude is funny.

Joe: I think that a lot of people were like, why Kevin Smith? He's this old director from the 90s. One, he was so generous with his time. The session alone was almost two hours, and then he hung around with people. More so, he honestly spoke about being a creator and talked about major issues that he had in his life.

He had a severe heart attack that almost killed him. He had a nervous breakdown. He spent time in a psychiatric hospital. He talked about all those issues and was really motivational to people.

So those are the kind of people we're bringing in to have authors see, like, you're not the only ones that are having these kind of issues. Here's a dude who's a big Hollywood movie guy, and he's dealing with the same stuff as a creator getting words on the paper.

Joanna: Yes, fantastic. Also, we should say, since this is a podcast, you have a podcast.

Joe: Sure. So you can find me at JoeSolari.com. If you're interested in some of the stuff I'm talking about around how your creativity works and this up-spiral concept of designing your business around your creative cycles, that's where that information will be.

One of my things is that I do a paid newsletter, and each year I have 45 emails on a specific subject. This year, all the research I did last year on this is being pumped out in those emails.

I talk about, like, how do you honor your default mode network? How do you work on your executive function? How do you think about becoming a creative athlete?

Oh, and then the Author Nation Podcast. That's another thing. That's on all the major channels. We have a YouTube channel as well, that way you can watch the video.

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

Joe: Well, thank you. I just want to put out a special thanks to all the folks in your community that came to the show. It's not lost on Suze and I the time and effort it takes to come to an event like that. I want your community that comes every year to feel welcome and that we really love having you there.

Joanna: Oh, well, thanks so much.

The post Balancing Creativity With Building A Business, And Author Nation With Joe Solari first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Are you curious about the hidden structures that turn ordinary manuscripts into irresistible page-turning stories? Wondering how to shape your characters, scenes, and chapters so readers can’t put your book down? Kristen Tate shares her tips.

In the intro, key book publishing paths [Jane Friedman]; sub-rights and why it’s important to understand how many ways your book can make money [Renee Fountain]; the innovation of the indie author community and biggest changes in publishing with Michael Tamblyn [KWL Podcast];

Plus, 10 publishing trends for 2025 [Written Word Media]; Unveiling 2025: Indie authors gear up for AI innovations and craft renaissance [Indie Author Magazine];
How to Write Non-Fiction, Second Edition is out now; and join me for a live webinar: 7 steps to write your non-fiction book in 2025, 15 Jan.

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 

Kristen Tate is an editor and founder of the Blue Garret, offering editing services and advice for authors. She has a PhD in English from Columbia University, focusing on novels and publishing history. Her latest book is Novel Study: Decoding the Secrets and Structures of Contemporary Fiction.

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 Kristen at TheBlueGarret.com.

Joanna: Kristen Tate is an editor and founder of the Blue Garret, offering editing services and advice for authors. She has a PhD in English from Columbia University, focusing on novels and publishing history. Her latest book is Novel Study: Decoding the Secrets and Structures of Contemporary Fiction.

Welcome back to the show, Kristen.

Kristen: Oh, thanks. It's great to be back with you.

Joanna: Yes, and you are primarily an editor, and you're actually my editor. So we've talked about that before. So it is very interesting having you on the show to talk about this book.

Kristen: So I think for me, and I think this is true to some extent for you and other people who write nonfiction, but I really write to learn. It's just one of the ways I understand the world. So this book was one that when I started editing fiction, I wanted to be able to find this book, and never did find it.

We were talking a little bit before the interview started about my first book. It's a collection of book reviews of writing craft books. At the end of writing that book, I realized that all along I had secretly been hoping to find like the one true formula for writing an amazing novel.

I did find formulas, they are out there. They can be really useful, especially for beginning writers who are just starting to feel out what it takes to shape a plot or something like that.

From an editing standpoint, they don't really fit a lot of books. Each book is kind of its own, you know, it's kind of like children. They're all pretty unique.

So I decided that I really wanted to start from the other end, and start from novels that I thought were successful in different ways, and just take them apart and figure out how they worked. So I just kind of did that through writing.

It started as a blog, and then it eventually turned into a book so I could formalize it and share it with a wider audience.

Joanna: You mentioned there that you focused on books that were successful in different ways. What I actually appreciated is you didn't go to the common classics. I think so many writing books use older books that I feel in many ways aren't so relevant to modern fiction writers.

Kristen: So this is one of the beauties, actually, of being an indie author. So it was partly my taste. I didn't have to do this strategically. I didn't have an editor or a publishing house saying, “We want you to cover these books,” or, “It would be more saleable if you covered X, Y and Z.”

I really started from books that I knew I wanted to learn from and thought were doing something interesting. I also really deliberately chose a big range of genres, in part because I wanted mystery writers to find something there for them, and romance writers to find something there for them.

Also, I feel really strongly that if you're writing genre fiction, it can be really helpful to learn from other genres. And so I wanted to give readers a way, even if they don't read a lot of mystery novels or fantasy novels or whatever, I wanted them to get a sense of just what the different opportunities are in that genre.

Joanna: I actually ended up buying one of the books.

Kristen: I keep hearing that. I think that's lovely.

Joanna: Yes, and just to be clear, there were no spoilers in the book. You managed to avoid that. So that was quite a feat as well.

Kristen: Well, for most of the books, there's a big chapter on like the overall structure, but there's a spoiler alert. So you know that if you want to read the book first before getting the spoilers, you have to hurry up and do that before you read that chapter.

Joanna: Yes. So the book is full of common questions that writers ask, or perhaps don't even know how to ask, so we're just going to go through a couple of them. You say, “Having edited hundreds of novels by this point in my career, I can tell you that the opening is the most challenging section for most writers.”

Kristen: So I think there are two big ones that I see over and over, and it's mostly just a misunderstanding of what readers want to know first.

So I often see newer writers try to give us all the information, all the kind of surface information about their protagonist. Things like their full name, like their last name, their hair color, their eye color, and all of this detail about physical appearance.

While we want to know about that eventually, the thing that readers really want to know is what is this character thinking and feeling. What's their story? What are they up against? What do they want? What do they need? What's standing in the way of them getting that?

All of this other stuff that I think writers are very anxious about, like, how do I get my character in front of a mirror so I can have them looking at themselves and describing themselves? You know, that's not a problem you have to solve.

Just wait for a moment where it's going to come up organically. Maybe it doesn't even ever come up, and it's just less important.

Then the other common problem I see is that, especially for a character-driven work, I'll see writers try to front load the character's backstory.

So they want us to know all of this really important information about how this character came to have the problems or the weaknesses that they have and that they're going to have to get over.

Like that's the really important part of the character arc. We need to know what's holding them back and how all of that happened, but rather than starting with it, you really want it to come more in the first third of the novel, or maybe in the halfway point. We just don't need it up front.

Again, what we need up front is what's happening right now because that's the thing that's going to pull us into the novel and give us a reason to keep reading. Everything else is kind of old news, right? The character still needs to wrestle with it, but it's already happened. So it's just not as interesting to us as a reader.

Joanna: On that, I remember taking ages to understand what a scene was. I think it was Larry Brooks' Story Engineering book that I finally learned what it was, like about four or five years into writing fiction. I confused it with a chapter.

Of course, there are writers like James Patterson who has one scene per chapter, and that might work with a lot of thrillers.

Kristen: Yes, that's a great question. I like to think of scenes and chapters as being just different size containers. It's really important to remember that readers experience your book across time.

I think when we are deep inside a book, like we've been in it so long and we know the whole story. This happens to me as an editor too. We forget that the readers are understanding the story sequentially.

So part of what's important about scenes and chapters are the white space breaks, like getting to the end of that container. The size of the container conveys different messages, so a scene break is a smaller break and signals to the reader that there's some kind of shift happening.

We might be doing a time jump, maybe we're switching to a different point of view, any of those kinds of things. Whereas a chapter break is much more emphatic and gives you a chance, as a writer, to use that extra white space to underscore something like a theme moment.

I really like writers to pay a lot of extra attention to the few sentences right before a chapter break because they get to resonate over that white space. So it's this extra tool that you get.

Then within the container, those are all kind of little mini stories in there. So they have a beginning and a middle and an end. It's not just like you're taking this big, giant stretch of material that is your story and arbitrarily breaking it up into pieces that go in these different containers.

The scene is where you really get to be thoughtful about how those pieces work. It's a way too of communicating to the reader in a subtle way what the structure of your book is.

So you can see this where many authors will include part breaks, and that's just a way of waving a flag to the reader and saying, okay, we're having an even bigger shift here. We're going to move to like a whole different act two of the novel.

Joanna: I think also when I first was writing, I liked to end the chapter with something that wraps it up. Whereas, what I think I learned from James Patterson is that you can include a cliffhanger to make readers turn the page.

I know you said there's some nice white space there, but if you want to increase the pace, you can split a scene across a chapter. So it carries on as if there's no time difference, no person difference, but it gets them into a new chapter.

As you say, some people might read two chapters before bed or something like that. So it just keeps reading. So you can play with these containers as well.

Kristen: Yes, and I mean, that's a good thing. You don't want every chapter to be a cliffhanger. You want to mix it up. Thinking about those containers as ending in different ways is a really useful way to do it.

Joanna: So another thing I think is really interesting in the book is you go through how to plot a page-turner. You know that I'm a discovery writer, and this is something that I have really thought about.

In fact, it might be something that I could achieve working with ChatGPT or Claude or something to help it corral my chaos into some kind of order.

Kristen: Yes, I mean, this was one of the big questions I came into the writing of the book with. How does a writer go about constructing these complex plots, and just how do they work?

I think a lot in metaphors and visual metaphors, they really helped me. So I think for a page-turner book, I really think about roller coasters. So a lot of it is about managing the kind of tension and expectation for readers.

So if you think about a roller coaster, one of the key experiences is that very slow, steady climb up to this big height. You're building the anticipation, and you know you're going to go over that cliff, but a good roller coaster, that's not the only thing that happens.

You might have one of those at the beginning and another really cool one at the end, but in the middle, you have to provide other fun experiences. So there have to be some like loop-de-loops and like an unexpected curve.

So I think that's really what's happening in a page-turner, where you're trying to maximize the reader's investment and get them to leap over those white spaces at the end of the chapter. So that's one part of it.

I think the other part is really characters.

Often too, I think you need very high stakes. So it really needs to be life or death. Or I think romance authors can tap into this sometimes, the happiness of the whole rest of your life is at stake. So I think those are the two qualities.

Then in terms of writing one, I think this part is hard. I didn't do a lot of research into the writing process for the books I studied, but I did look at some interviews and tried to find some detail about what these authors said about revision.

I think one of the takeaways is it can take a lot of revision, especially if you're a discovery writer. You really have to go back and spend some time engineering your story once you know what it is, and maybe building in some extra turns or adding some extra suspense through different techniques.

So I think you can, as a discovery writer, get it all down on the page and then go back and retool.

Joanna: Another discovery writer friend said to me that perhaps the only way to do it as a discovery writer is to think that anyone could have done it. Let's say it's a murder, you have to kind of write as if each of these characters did it, and then decide much later in the process who actually did it.

Kristen: You might just find in that case that you have to go back in and drop in your red herrings or your extra clues or something like that. So I think revision can be the key. I think it's really hard to plot a book like that with that kind of complexity and with characters that we really care about.

I think it's really hard to plot that without getting into the writing. I have not found an example, and maybe you'll get people writing into this saying that they know an example, but I haven't seen an example of someone saying, “Yes, I have been able to plot one of these very complex page-turner type novels from the outline stage.”

I think it's hard because I think that doesn't give you time to develop the characters that we care about and know what they might do.

I think often the best moments in a novel are where a writer will say to me, “Yes, like this character actually surprised me, and I thought they were going to do X, and they did Y.” I think that comes through in the writing, so I think it's good to tap into those discovery elements when you can harness them.

Joanna: Yes, it is interesting. I do remember seeing a picture of JK Rowling's spreadsheet for, I think, one of the Harry Potter's, or it might have been one of the Cormoran Strike books. I was sort of looking at the picture going, okay, that's how you plot something complicated with all of these different things.

I know some people use different software and all of that kind of thing, but it does feel like to do this kind of thing, sometimes you do need to plot a lot more in advance. I don't know, I feel like I go back and forth on wanting to try to change the way I write, and then just not doing that. I don't know.

Kristen: Yes, I think they do. I think a lot of it is knowing what your strengths are. If you're trying to make yourself do something you hate, that's just never going to work. I have definitely seen authors who have started out writing their early books, really from instinct.

Once they see the kind of revisions that I ask them to do—and I use a story spreadsheet, it's basically a reverse outline, really, as part of my developmental editing process.

Once they start to get those back and get the skill of seeing their novels from the top down, they start to learn how to build some of that stuff into the initial writing process. They also learn that, okay, this is something I can do during revision.

I'll see what happens when they're basically doing their own developmental edit at that point. So they'll write a draft just as they have always done, they'll do this reverse outline, and then they'll do their own revision round, and then be able to come to me and go straight into copy editing because they just built that in.

I definitely have seen that happen, and I think you learn new things with each book. I think there's something that happens after you get 10 books in or 20 books in, and some of that story sense just becomes really intuitive.

You don't have to think so much about things that you had to think a lot about at the beginning, like what is a scene? That just become second nature.

Joanna: Yes, definitely. I mean — 

Kristen: Right, it's no fun then.

Joanna: Exactly. One of the things that I do hear from some people—I mean, I read a lot of fiction, I know you obviously do—but some authors say they can't read fiction in a niche, or just in general, because it affects their work or that they're worried about plagiarism.

Then the way you're writing about fiction here is in a much more deconstructive way. So how can authors read fiction, I guess, in one way to learn and structure and all of that kind of thing, but also sometimes turn it off and just try to enjoy a book. It's really kind of hard to balance both.

Kristen: I have people ask me all the time—

I am able to just turn off the editor brain. I think it helps that I don't read books that I'm working on on my Kindle, and that's what I read 90% of my for pleasure reading is on the Kindle now.

I do understand this concern about the inadvertent plagiarism, and I think it's one of those anxieties that is not a real thing. Especially if you are putting your heart and soul into a book and weaving your own experience into it, I think writers are going to be less influenced than they fear by what they read.

That's especially true if you read a lot. I could see if you are doing a deep dive into James Patterson or something, I could see being influenced by his style. If you're reading a different author every couple of weeks, I just don't think that that's going to happen.

I think when you are not reading, especially like very recent fiction—and this is why I picked very recent books—you're not getting a sense of how style is changing, of other like tips and techniques and tools you might be reading.

I just feel really strongly that novels, I mean, going back to that child metaphor, they're all so different.

So the second you see a technique that another writer has used and pull it into your book, when you apply it to your own characters and your own plot and your own style, it's not going to be really recognizable as that same technique. It's going to feel really, really different.

I just think reading is one of those ways where we get to like writing —

I really advocate for writers reading more, and like I said, reading outside of their genre.

I guess if you really can't get over that kind of anxiety of influence, that would be what I would recommend. If you're writing genre fiction, go read some literary fiction. Or if you're writing mysteries, start reading fantasy novels. You'll pick up some really cool techniques to bring back into your genre that could be exciting.

Joanna: Or it can actually just really help you on voice. I do think about author voice. I don't know if you read Richard Osman, The Thursday Murder Club?

Kristen: Yes. Oh, they're so fun. I actually had COVID a couple years ago, and I had such a terrible headache that I couldn't read. So I listened to them all on audio, and I still have a positive memory of my COVID experience because I spent a week just listening to those books.

Joanna: Oh, fantastic. There's going to be a movie, so if people haven't read the books. I was really resistant to the book because he's very famous here in the UK. So I kind of thought it was one of those cases of a celebrity who got a book deal, and it was going to be bad. It's so not bad. It's just fantastic.

I read all of them, as you have, and I've started his new series and everything. When I was reading it, I was like, wow, this is so different to a book that I could ever write or would want to write.

I've read a few kind of cozies, and they haven't come across in the same way. I think I learned from that that you can enjoy books, because I mostly read darker books. I was like, wow—

Kristen: Yes, absolutely. I think, too, that's a lesson to put more of your own personality, and humor, and weirdness, and all of that into your books.

That's the thing that's so unique to you and is going to distinguish yourself from all of the other books that might have very similar plot moves. Often, they do, and readers just don't care.

Joanna: Or they want that, often.

Kristen: Yes. I mean, that's what tropes are all about. They want to see that familiar roller coaster move coming around there, it's exciting, but they want to see your spin on it.

Joanna: We talked a bit there about inadvertent plagiarism. I wanted to come back to the quotes in the book because, of course, you're quoting writers and the chapters are also themed around certain books and authors.

There'll be people listening who are writing nonfiction books and who are collecting quotes. So how do we both use quotes within the bounds of fair use, and maybe we need to explain what that is, and also—

Kristen: I have an academic background, and that really got pulled into this book. When you're writing an English Lit paper, you're taught to do close reading and use textual evidence. So it's second nature to me to, if I'm making a point about the way something works in a book, to pull in a passage and take a look at it.

Let's step back a minute and talk a little bit about fair use. So the way I often see this pop up as an editor is authors wanting to use song lyrics in their books. I can't even count the number of times this has come up, and I think you've had legal advisors on your show, and it's a tricky issue.

It's a little bit different for songs because they're so short. So part of what the fair use principle is you're using a very tiny percentage of a work. We're respecting other people's copyright and IP and all of that. Songs are very, very short. Something that's a book length work is a lot longer.

There's kind of rules of thumb out there. This is one of those gray areas in the legal context, which is frustrating, I think, for those of us who want to follow the rules and have it be very black and white.

One figure I've seen floating around is not to use more than 10% of a work. So for an 80,000 word novel, that's actually a really high number. I didn't even come close to that.

In terms of writing nonfiction and using things deliberately, I think some of it is ethical. What I do see out there that I think crosses an ethical line are these things that are study guides of popular nonfiction books where it's kind of encouraging you to buy this shortened summary version in place of buying the actual book.

Joanna: They drive me mad!

Kristen: Oh, yes. I mean, that's one of those things where I see them out there, and I think this doesn't seem right, and how is this allowed? That's certainly not what I'm doing. It's not what you're doing. You often use epigraphs, I know, in your nonfiction books, and all of that's fine.

What we're doing when we're quoting authors in that way is really encouraging readers to go take a look at these books. You include a resource section at the end of all of your nonfiction chapters, actually pointing readers to those sources that you've quoted from. So that's really important.

I use the highlighting tool on Kindle or transcribe notes. I don't paraphrase when I am taking notes because I want to be able to go back and check exactly what the original quote is.

So I want to know when I'm quoting and when I'm not, so I can make sure I flag that in the book. It's just about really keeping records, making sure it's all in one place, and you can go back and check that later. Or your copy editor can check it later and make sure it's accurate, and make sure that readers can find what you're quoting.

Joanna: Yes, so just basically —

I think some of the other things around fair use are parody. So you can use things for parody, but parody is very difficult. It's not something we're particularly doing.

Also as part of education and commentary, which is what you're doing. With your book particularly, I feel like it is commentary. When you've quoted things, even though they're within the fair use boundaries, it's still commentary. So it's transformative as well.

Kristen: Exactly. It's really just a matter of, as an author, you want to treat other authors with respect. If you're doing that, you're not going to go wrong.

Joanna: Yes, and also context. So somebody did this to me once, and I'm still sore about it. They took a line from one of my novels to make a case that I was some kind of fascist. I was like, that is a character saying something in a novel that you've taken completely out of context.

I feel like that is part of, like you said, about respecting other people. You can probably find quotes in people's books, like people picking quotes out of the Bible and things out of context. I feel like, as you said—

You don't want anyone to happen upon your book, or for you to share it and just be really upset that you've quoted them in some way.

Kristen: I really think of nonfiction books in particular as part of a conversation, but actually, I think you can think of fiction books the same way. So just in a conversation with another human being, you don't want to mischaracterize what they're saying. That just doesn't lead to a productive conversation.

What I'm trying to do in this book is show how these books work and encourage readers to read them. So I'm kind of extending the conversation that these authors have already started by publishing their novel.

Joanna: Nonfiction books, to me, have a lot of elements that might come off the page in some way.

Kristen: This is something I feel like you do really well in your nonfiction as well, is you and your chapters with often questions, and as I said, your resources list.

I think, for me, this happened in two ways. As I said, I'm a very visual learner, and so when I was wrestling with, especially a lot of the kind of structural elements of these novels—

There's a chapter on N. K. Jemisin's The City We Became, which is such a great book. She has, I think, six or seven different point of view characters and narrators. So to wrap my head around how that worked, I ended up creating figures for a lot of these things.

They're kind of graphical, so I could wrap my head around it. So that's something that I have used as a learning tool. They're on my website, and so that's something that kind of comes off the page and can help readers.

Then another thing I'm getting ready to do in the new year that I'm super excited about is I'm going to start a Novel Study Book Club. So we're going to kind of keep this reading going. The theme for next year is going to be bestsellers.

There's going to be a Patreon community. We're going to vote on a recent bestseller to take apart and study this way each month. So I'm really excited to see how that's going to work and just use it as a way to encourage people to read more.

I think if people can do it in a community, and hopefully get some kind of resources around how to unpack the structure and how to understand it, that it might be more profitable and just feel a little bit less lonely.

Joanna: Yes, I think it is interesting to do that, and often when someone else points things out. Well, in my fiction, for example, sometimes you say things in the edit and I'm like, oh, I didn't even know I thought that, or I didn't even know that that was there.

Kristen: I think this can really help authors be better editors of their own work. If the way another reader is experiencing something surprises you, that's really a learning experience right there. That's a way you might come back to your own work and think, oh, well, how can I apply this here?

As a reader, I might experience this this way, but now that I know that another reader experiences it in a very different way, I can play around with my choices here.

Joanna: Yes, it's all about learning things and then putting it into practice. I was thinking about this, and obviously as we've mentioned, you're my editor, but I also use ProWritingAid, and we are in this time in the writing and publishing history of generative AI.

It feels like an author could put all the craft books into practice, including yours, and then work with ChatGPT or Claude and ProWritingAid and say, do I even need a human editor? Like, why would someone hire Kristen or hire another human editor?

When does it add more than software, basically? I know it's a super leading question!

Kristen: Well, I mean, it's complicated, and I think the answer to this is going to change. I mean, I think the part that's not going to change is that ultimately, you're looking for human readers. As good as these tools are, and many of them are quite good, they just are not a stand in for a human reader, and that's what your editor is.

I think the other thing that I see happening in particular right now with these tools is that they tend to move people towards the most common solution or answer. That's a plus in many ways, but often if you're writing fiction, that's actually not what you want.

So especially if I'm working with an author who I know has used one of these tools, either in the planning process or maybe in part in the generating process, then as a human editor, my role is to help them be even more human.

If I can kind of then tease out an element that I can see, “Oh, I think this is your voice versus the AI voice, and let's figure out how to heighten that.” Or, “Here's a place where you took the most obvious next step in your plot. What are five or ten ways that you could just make a left turn here, and how would that impact the reader's experience?”

The other piece is really the human coaching element. I find this becomes a bigger and bigger part of my editing practice is that writers, it doesn't matter how experienced they are, there's going to be some kind of emotional or psychological stumbling block in a book.

They may run into imposter syndrome, or they just get stuck, or they encounter writer's block or something. You really need a little bit of, I think of it as book therapy, to get a writer out of that.

It's a mix of encouragement and reminding them of the elements that are already working in their book and trying to give them a layout of a reasonable path in front of them for how to do the revision work that they need. An AI cannot do that very convincingly yet.

I think you really do need a human being on the other end of the screen, or the phone, or just in the Microsoft Word comments to help keep you going.

Joanna: Yes, which is that real value added side of things. I still think perhaps early writers believe that editing is just fixing grammar and typos, whereas that's a tiny, tiny piece of it. I mean an important piece, but still, as you say, it's not necessarily the most important.

You did say that sometimes when you're working with people who use AI tools—obviously, I'm very honest with you about my usage, and you've not had an issue with that, and obviously I use things in an ethical way.

So can you tell then, if someone hasn't told you, do you notice? Also, do you have a problem with AI use? Also, you're part of an organization for editors.

Kristen: I think everyone's got to decide this for themselves. People have really strong feelings on this issue, and I understand them. I have the advantage of I live in San Francisco, and my partner works in tech. He told me, probably three years ago, these LLMs are going to be able to write a novel.

I was horrified, and said absolutely not, I don't believe you. I kind of had a mini tantrum. It prepared me for the fact that actually, now they can.

Now I definitely don't have people coming to me who have just spat out an entire novel using one of these tools. The fact is that they are not good at that. Yes, it can be done, but they're just going to be cliched and boring and generic.

Again, these models, they're geared not towards creativity and uniqueness and all of that. That's just not what they do. I think also you can detect when that human element isn't there.

So I don't have any problem with writers using them.

I can often tell, especially if it's a writer I've worked with a lot, and then they'll send me a synopsis or something, and it's just in a really different voice. The AI voice tends to be quite flat. It's very correct, but it's very flat. So that is something I've started to notice.

I think the thing that we have to do on both sides of the editor-author relationship is just be really upfront about how we're using these tools, when we're using them, and experiment with when they're helpful and when they're not.

Or for example, in my own book, what I did use it for was to help me with the takeaways that are at the end because they're really good at summarizing.

I then had to rewrite them in my own voice because they didn't have my voice, but even that part might come. So I think it's just going to be a matter of communicating with one another. I think being really upfront with what we're doing.

One of the things I'm adding to my contracts for 2025 is having a clause in there that makes it really clear that I'm going to ask for consent before I use one of these tools on anyone's novel.

Many of my clients are going to say no. In fact, I would say probably the majority of them really don't want me using any of these tools, and that's absolutely fine.

I think on the other side, just authors coming to me, they can tell me, “Okay, well, I've used this tool for outlining.” Certainly, some authors are not as good at a dialogue, or they're not as good at setting, or they don't think about smell or whatever.

They have a weakness that they know that they're trying to compensate for, and they can use one of those tools to provide ideas. If I know how they're using it, then I can, again, make sure that human element doesn't get lost.

I can make sure we're finding all of the opportunities to get their own voice in there and get rid of that kind of AI flatness that can creep in.

Joanna: Yes, interesting times indeed. We've been working together quite a few years now, and I use the tools more and more for different things, but as you know, I work with you on every book and every short story, and I don't feel like there's any detriment to the process.

I feel like it's almost improved a lot of areas of my business and my writing, and using ProWritingAid I hope takes a bit of the basics off your shoulders so you can focus on the more interesting side of editing and the more human element side of editing, I guess.

Kristen: Yes, and I think this is kind of where we're heading, where a lot of these tools are actually not very good at some things. You know, some of the things like commas and all of that, and there are a lot of false positives. So I actually don't use those as an editor, myself, because it slows me down.

Just like you said, then I can focus on the really important stuff, like line editing. That's where the real magic of editing comes. I think for a lot of editors, like that's what they want to do as well.

Like commas interest me, but they're not quite as thrilling as taking a line that's a little clunky, or just flat, or the author is missing an opportunity to introduce a really beautiful parallelism, or sharpen up a metaphor. Like, that's where the real magic comes, and that's the stuff I love, and I know most editors love that as well.

It's much more exciting than fixing typos. The typos are important to me, and I'm a perfectionist, and I want you to have a perfect book, but let's focus in on the stuff that's really about the art. Let some of these tools do the heavy lifting in terms of things like fact checking, and for your books, in particular, checking quotations.

There are things now that these tools just make so much faster and easier, and we can use our very limited human time to focus on the stuff that will make a big difference.

Joanna: Fantastic.

Kristen: So my business is the Blue Garret, and you can find me at TheBlueGarret.com. Then if you're interested in joining that Novel Study Book Club, you can find me on Patreon at Patreon.com/BlueGarret.

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

Kristen: That was a lot of fun.

The post Writing Tips: Craft, Structure, and Voice With Kristen Tate first appeared on The Creative Penn.