The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers

How do you approach writing a second edition of a non-fiction book? How does self-publishing compare to working with a traditional publisher? Can you build a viable business without active social media use? Gin Stephens shares her tips.

In the intro, the end of Kindle Vella [Amazon]; Lessons from week one of the book launch for This is Strategy [Seth Godin]; Seahenge is out now on my store, and on pre-order elsewhere; ChatGPT launched Search [OpenAI]; How Generative AI Search Will Impact Book Discoverability in the Next Decade.

Write and format stunning books with Atticus. Create professional print books and eBooks easily with the all-in-one book writing software. Try it out at Atticus.io

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

Gin Stephens is the New York Times bestselling author of Delay, Don't Deny, Fast. Feast. Repeat., Clean(ish), and other health-related nonfiction books. She's also a podcaster at Intermittent Fasting Stories.

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 Gin at GinStephens.com.

Joanna: Gin Stephens is the New York Times bestselling author of Delay, Don't Deny, Fast. Feast. Repeat., Clean(ish), and other health-related nonfiction books. She's also a podcaster at Intermittent Fasting Stories. So welcome back to the show, Gin.

Gin: It is so great to talk to you again.

Joanna: Yes, it's been a few years [Gin's previous interview here]. Now, you have recently released the second edition of Delay, Don't Deny, and I completely get the pain of a subsequent edition. It's just a bit of a nightmare. So I wanted to start by asking you—

Gin: Well, that is a great question. I have written new things since writing the original Delay, Don't Deny. This original book that I wrote in 2016, Delay, Don't Deny, and self-published, is just really the bedrock that everything else has been built upon.

I've learned so much more about the topic since I wrote it in 2016, and this book just needed a refresh. It needed some love. I really didn't understand how some people love this one the most.

I was speaking at an event a few years ago, and someone in the audience said, “Which of your books should we start with? Delay, Don't Deny or Fast. Feast. Repeat.?”

Fast. Feast. Repeat. was a New York Times bestseller. It's comprehensive, it's thorough, it's thick. It's every question you could possibly ask about intermittent fasting. It's well referenced. So I said, “Of course start with Fast. Feast. Repeat.“

Then someone in the audience said, “Can I disagree?” I'm like, “Well, go ahead.” She said, “Delay, Don't Deny. I love that one the most.” That got the wheels turning in my head because ever since I moved towards traditional publishing, I hadn't self-published anything.

So I thought, people love that original book. I never talked about it anymore, but it kept selling, and people kept buying it. It did need to be updated because some of the advice I did not necessarily agree with anymore.

From 2016 to 2024, things are going to change. There were just some things that were out of date, so it deserved some love.

You know what kept me from revising it sooner? The audiobook. I didn't want to rerecord the audiobook, and of course, you want them to match. Finally, I just bit the bullet.

First I offered it to my publisher, and the amount that they wanted to give me for an advance was so itty bitty. I was like, well, forget that. I'll redo it myself.

Joanna: That's interesting. I want to come back. So you said there Fast. Feast. Repeat. I've got these books, I've got several of your books, and Fast. Feast. Repeat., you said it's comprehensive, it's thick, it's well referenced. You're a scientist. You do a lot of research. You are very knowledgeable.

Gin: Well, it depends on the person. There are people who resonate with each kind, and that's what I realized. I would like the one with all the references in there, definitely. I want to be able to look at them. I actually do that, by the way, when I read a book written by a scientist or a doctor.

I'll turn to the reference section, especially if something doesn't sound right, I'm like let me look at that myself. I've actually found places where they did not actually represent the study the same way—after I read it—it's not what they said about it.

I also want to correct, I am not a practicing research scientist. I have a master's degree in natural sciences and a doctorate in gifted education. At my root, I'm very much a teacher.

I had to write a dissertation, I learned how to research, I learned how to share all of that research as a part of going through my doctoral program. So I just wanted to make that clear.

So some people just want the basics, and that's what Delay, Don't Deny is for. So it really needed to be updated, like I said, because the people that preferred, you know, just tell me the quick part, give me the stories, they needed Delay, Don't Deny.

Then I actually am now recommending everyone start with Delay, Don't Deny because it might be all you need, but if you want more, that's when it's time to turn to Fast. Feast. Repeat.

I also think that once you've lived the lifestyle for a while, everything in Fast. Feast. Repeat. will click, if that makes sense. You'll understand it better, and you're ready to dig into the science more than maybe on day one.

Joanna: Yes, I totally agree. I discovered you on the podcast years ago, and I still am IF. It's so funny though, I almost don't say I'm IF anymore because I never eat breakfast, or very occasionally, but mostly I start after lunch sometime and have sort of an 18:6 type of lifestyle, as you say. It's almost like I don't even consider that to be IF anymore.

I know you've been doing Intermittent Fasting for years. Do you kind of feel that way sometimes?

Gin: It's just what we do. I've been doing it for over 10 years now, and it's just what I do. I don't have to think about it. You're not like, what am I doing today? What's my window? You just live your life, and then you have your window.

Joanna: No, it's interesting.

Coming back on the book, you said it needed a refresh. So I've done several subsequent editions, and I know how that feels. For people listening, how do you know? So you're reading it, and are you just like, “oh my goodness, I can't believe this”?

Gin: Well, I know what questions people have, and I know where the confusions lie. You're familiar with the terminology “clean fast”, and that is foundational in my work. What's funny is, when I wrote Delay, Don't Deny in 2016, we had not started using the terminology “clean fast” in my groups yet.

I came up with that wording at some point in 2017, and it stuck. So it's just kind of funny that Delay, Don't Deny doesn't have the wording “clean fast” in it. I also was a little wishy-washy about a few things related to the clean fast and how to fast properly.

That was because there was the doctor who had written a book, Dr. Jason Fung, The Obesity Code. He was like, “Well, have a little lemon if you want,” and I didn't want to contradict him in my book. Who am I to contradict him? So I'm like, well, I'll just kind of go along with what he said.

Then the longer that I supported people through intermittent fasting and my Facebook groups, we had about 500,000 combined members before I ended up leaving Facebook. So over time I realized the lemon does make a difference, and that little splash of cream does make a difference.

So I became more emphatic, I guess is the word I would use, about the clean fast, just because we had it validated with so many people who found that the clean fast changed the whole experience. So I developed confidence, and I can say with confidence, this is how it works better, and you should give this a try.

By the time Fast. Feast. Repeat. came out in 2020, I was really embraced to the idea of the clean fast and very confidently saying, “This is what I think would work for you better. Try this.” So I needed to get that into Delay, Don't Deny as well.

Not to mention the success stories in the back. Looking back at it through fresh eyes today, when I wrote Delay, Don't Deny, I was just leading a small Facebook group. At that time we had like, I don't know, 1500 members or something. I can't even remember.

So I just put out into the group, “Hey, anybody want to share their story in my book? Just send it to me and I'll put it in,” but I hadn't written anything yet. I didn't have any podcasts yet. I was just leading people who had joined together in a Facebook group.

So the stories are just very ‘interesting' that are in the original Delay, Don't Deny. I'm just going to say they're ‘interesting' because I'm so grateful for the people who shared their stories early on. Now, many of them are not things I would recommend that you do. So reading through them years later, I'm like, oooh.

So what I love more than anything about the revised second edition of Delay, Don't Deny is the success stories section.

I was like, how am I going to gather them just in my community? Am I going to need to email my whole list? How many stories will come in? I just put it out into my private intermittent fasting community and said, “Here's the Google link. Fill out this form if you want to.”

Then I just left it there, and people submitted their stories, and they're just amazing. The beauty of it this time is that they have read my books, and listened to my podcast, and been a part of the community. So all the stories align with the advice I would give.

There was nothing that jumped out as, oooh, I wouldn't suggest that someone do that. Instead, they're all aligned. So that was really, really important to me to get the good stories with the aligned recommendations out there.

Joanna: Then I guess there'll be some people listening, people who want to write a non-fiction book, that feel a bit like you did, which is, “Oh, well, there's a doctor who's written a book on this. Maybe I can't because I'm not special,” or whatever it is.

Looking back, you're happy with that? You're not embarrassed? How can you encourage people to put the book out there even though, as you say now, maybe everything wasn't perfect?

Gin: It wasn't perfect.

If you look at books written by doctors, they don't all agree. Doctors are people with opinions and blinders on for certain things on occasion.

So the more you read and see what's out there and how people disagree, the more you feel like, oh, I can have an opinion too. Now, do I regret putting it out there? Absolutely not.

I've sold over 380,000 copies of that first little book, and for a self-published book that is only available in paperback through Amazon I feel pretty good about that. I mean, that's it. I don't have it wide. You want the paperback. It's Amazon. That's it.

Just think of all the lives that have been touched by intermittent fasting. I'm not pretending to be something that I'm not. I'm very, very clear throughout the book of who I am, what my background is like.

For example, I mentioned that I have a doctorate in gifted and talented education. I remember when I first joined this like health and wellness community with influencers, writers, podcasters, a lot of doctors, actual medical doctors in this group.

One of the first things the people running this group said to me is, “You're Doctor Stephens. You have a doctorate. You should put doctor on the front of your books.” I'm like, nope, because I'm not that kind of doctor. I don't want to misrepresent myself.

Be confident in who you are. I know what my skills are. I'm a teacher. I can read things and then teach them to you. I taught math, and I'm not a mathematician. I taught history, and I'm not a historian. I taught reading, and I'm not a linguist or whatever.

I am able to teach things and say, “Here's what I have learned, and I'm sharing that with you. Here are some resources where you can go learn more.” I think the fact that I'm not a medical doctor, and that I am a teacher, has been my superpower because people can understand what I write.

Joanna: Absolutely. There'll be some people listening who listen to the medical podcasts out there, Peter Attia and things like that, where you're like, okay, but I can't listen to this because it's way too technical for me.

I mean, Intermittent Fasting Stories is normal people talking about normal life, and not using difficult words about whatever hormones. You do go through things like hormone effect and all of that kind of thing in Fast. Feast. Repeat., I think, but it's like you don't need that to get started. You can just get started with the story.

So I think that's so important. I think this is one of the problems with nonfiction books, is people think they need to be all fact based and emotionless. You've written with real voice, like your actual voice is in the book.

Gin: I think it's just a matter of readers want to connect with stories, whether they're reading nonfiction or fiction. We enjoy connecting with stories. Stories are powerful.

So when I first wanted to write a book about intermittent fasting and share what I knew to help people learn how to do it and apply it into their lives, I was really inspired by a set of books that I read when I was pregnant and a new mother. It was The Girlfriends' Guide to Pregnancy. Do you remember that series?

Joanna: No, but I'm happily child free, so not my thing.

Gin: I was pregnant, and my babies were born in '98 and '99. So that tells you when those books were really, really popular. There was the Bible of pregnancy, What to Expect When You're Expecting, and that one was dry, and it was like factual.

You definitely needed that one, but The Girlfriends' Guide to Pregnancy was irreverent, and it was funny, and it was like a girlfriend was talking to you. You wanted to read it. I mean, I read that multiple times.

The same thing with, she had The Girlfriends' Guide to the First Year and The Girlfriends' Guide to the Toddler Years. You just felt like somebody got it. You're learning about it from someone who got it, and it was funny, and you didn't feel alone.

I think that when we're thinking about health and wellness and the diet industry, you know, you can read a book written by the person who is maybe a nutritionist or a workout expert, and they've never struggled like you. They've never been overweight, really. Maybe they had to lose five pounds or something.

They've got this book for you, and you're like, but do they really get what it's like to weigh 210 pounds? You know, I know what that's like because I did weigh 210 pounds. I was obese, and I lost 80 pounds with intermittent fasting.

I know what it's like to be on that diet roller coaster of up and down. I know what it's like to read all the diet books, and try everything, and just be so stuck. So I wanted that to all come through in a way that was relatable. It's my story in there interwoven through Delay, Don't Deny.

I think the reason people love this book so much, and I've heard this hundreds or thousands of times, I don't even know how many times, that people will say—

It was just the fact that they felt like it was a real person that was telling them there's hope, and here's the science. You know, I'm putting the science in there too. It's not just only my story, I have the science in there.

I talk about autophagy. I talk about the problem with calories in, calories out. The Biggest Loser study, and why low calorie diets fail us. So the science is there. It's got that underpinning of science, but it's also relatable, and you know that you can do it.

Joanna: Absolutely. So one of the other interesting things is that when you started out on intermittent fasting over a decade ago, there really wasn't much out there about it, but now it feels like the market is saturated.

There's books and podcasts. You go on TikTok or Instagram or whatever, reels, and there's positive stuff, there's negative stuff, and there's just a lot of stuff. I mean, even on Amazon, there's just a ton of stuff.

Especially when there's a lot of hype, misinformation, and people might put you in the same bracket as some of the people who aren't so good, let's say.

Gin: I will say the truth sells. There's a lot of misinformation out there, but the truth will make the difference. The truth of the clean fast and the way that that will change the experience for you.

For everybody listening who may be like, “Well, I tried intermittent fasting. It didn't work for me,” I bet you weren't fasting clean. I bet you were trying something overcomplicated. So my magic secret, which isn't so magic and it's not really a secret, is word of mouth.

If somebody read my book, let's just say the original Delay, Don't Deny, and they read it in early 2017 when it first hit the market, and then they had great success. Well, people around them notice, and they're like, “Hey, what are you doing?” And then they tell them, and then you're just spreading the word like that.

That's really been the magic of my work reaching a lot of people. Yes, I've got the podcast, Intermittent Fasting Stories, and my newer one Fast. Feast. Repeat. we've been doing for just over a year.

People might just stumble across them, and then they hear the stories, and then they're like, well, let me see what Gin has written. Then they end up with my books, and then they try it, and then it works. Then they tell people.

There was a commercial in the United States in, I don't know, the 70s, the 80s, it was like a shampoo commercial. Maybe it was Faberge Organics, I can't remember, but it was, “And then I told two friends, and then she told two friends, and then she told two friends.” It was just like, yes, word of mouth really can spread the word.

So, yes, there's a lot of confusing information out there.

But I think those kind of fall from the wayside. Delay, Don't Deny has been selling steadily since I released at the end of 2016. Other fasting books come and go.

The same with Fast. Feast. Repeat. It's been selling steadily since 2020. If you compare it to the other fasting books that are out there, almost 100% of the other fasting books also have a diet plan they want you to follow.

Maybe they want you to be intermittent fasting plus paleo. Or maybe they want you to be intermittent fasting plus keto. Or you have to be intermittent fasting plus whole food, plant based, low fat, or whatever it might be.

My work is intermittent fasting plus eat the way that makes you feel your best, whatever that is, and it will probably change over time. It really empowers you, instead of being a prescriptive plan.

People want that. They might not know they want it. They might be used to a prescriptive plan. There's a lot of magic in being empowered to choose for yourself.

Joanna: This word of mouth, I totally agree with you. You said there, selling steadily, which is the mark of word of mouth. It's not like you put everything into the first month and then it all disappears.

This is also one of the challenges of a second edition because with a true second edition, you lose all those reviews. You lose all the incoming links from all the websites that linked to that edition of the book. So presumably you feel that's worth it because—

Gin: It does, and you know what? I put that out there in August of this year, 2024, and I think it's got 78 reviews already. Whereas my other one had like 13,000, okay.

Joanna: It takes time.

Gin: It does take time. When I'm looking to buy a book, I look at the overall ratings. I'm not going to read 13,000 reviews, right. A book with 78 reviews, and it's 4.9 stars, I'm going to be really excited about that book.

I'm very clear in the updated description that it's a second edition, and I talk about the updates and how it's changed. I had to really think about that, since I'm self-published, I could have just slipped the revisions in the old version. I could have done it.

I debated about that and decided not to for multiple reasons. One of which is used copies, and then people would accidentally end up with the used copy of the first edition, and I didn't want them to read the first edition anymore. I wanted them to read the second edition.

So I just made that decision, and it was not easy that day that I started with zero reviews on the new edition. Luckily, my community, of course, they're the ones who found it first. My community found it, and they're the ones giving it the five star reviews because they're already fans. So hopefully that will lead more people to it.

Joanna: Then I've got to return to the audiobook because you said you did not want to do the audiobook. So tell us—

Gin: I just hate doing audiobooks, but I have to read them myself because everyone's used to my voice. They listen to my podcast. So I know I have to read it myself. Also I'm going to give it the right kind of intonation. I know how it should be emphasized.

It's a lot of work, and I don't edit audio. I can edit the written word. I can design my own book. By the way, you self-publish, right? You're self-published?

Joanna: Yes, but I employ freelancers to design things.

Gin: Well, I'm pretty much a one stop shop when it comes to the paperback. I just have started using Atticus for formatting.

Joanna: Yes, sponsor of the show. Atticus.

Gin: Atticus, you are amazing. I don't know how I found out about it, but that's another reason why I needed to do a second edition because, embarrassing, my first edition, I did it in Word. It looked crazy when I put them side by side.

I mean, people still bought it, but after being traditionally published with professional book designers, I was like, oh my gosh, Delay, Don't Deny looks like I made it on Word, Whereas —

The thing about the audiobook is I had to hire somebody. I had to go to a recording studio. I'm still going through the editing process right now. So it's just a lot of work. It's like running a marathon.

Joanna: Yes, it's definitely something you have to get used to. After my first audiobook I did myself, I was like never again. Then I started hiring people, and then I went back to it.

I've got an audio studio here in my office, so I just now do it myself. There's a lot of AI tools you can use for editing. So I think it depends how many books you end up doing yourself. Maybe there's more.

Gin: I'm grateful that I can outsource it. Just like you said, you send some things to designers. For me, it's the audio part.

That's the part I want everyone who's listening to hear. Be confident in the part you can do, and also be confident in the part you can't do. If that's the part holding you back, you can hire somebody to do stuff for you and get a professional product out there.

Joanna: Absolutely. Let's come to the publishing bit because, like you said, you started out in self-publishing, but then you did several books with traditional publishers.

What did you find useful? What did you enjoy? Since I know you love learning.

Gin: There are definitely parts that I enjoy. I enjoy having copy editors who read my work and find mistakes, but they also don't find everything. Let me just put it that way. Even after a book has been completely copy edited, things can still get out of whack through the traditional publishing process.

I enjoy that there are cover designers to work on the cover, but again, also you want to be able to give your input. You have to put your foot down sometimes and say, no, I want it to look more like this, and that's important to know.

I enjoy that they have a liaison with Amazon if those scammers get out there, and they will, and they do. Putting out their little scam books, and it ends up in the listing, and they can get right on there with Amazon and get that taken care of for you. So I really enjoy that.

It feels great to be supported through the audiobook process. MacMillan Audio handled everything. They set up the studio. All I had to do was show up. There was a director there with me, the audio engineer.

Actually, two of my audiobooks I did at home because of COVID. Like even though I had MacMillan Audio and professional directors, we did it from home with them with me throughout the process. It was just because of COVID both times.

The third time I went to the recording studio, and that's where I connected with the guy. When I did my latest book, 28-Day FAST Start Day-by-Day, which was my last to be traditionally published, they found the audio engineer with a recording studio close to me.

I didn't have to try to put blankets up in my office, for example, like I did the last two times in my little blanket recording fort. So that was really, really nice having the professionals to go through it and listen to it and make sure it's just right, all of that. It's just nice to have those eyes.

I learned a lot, and I think it made me have a better product. Like I said, looking at the results of how my first edition looked compared to how my second edition looks, it just made me bump it up. You want to have a book that compares.

Joanna: Yes, I think that's it. People listening, know that you can hire editors, you can hire book cover designers. As you have done, you can hire audio people. You can hire pretty much everyone now, a lot of whom used to work for traditional publishing. So there's options both ways.

What's interesting, of course, and you mentioned that the advance you were offered was not enough to be interesting.

Gin: Just because Delay, Don't Deny is like I wanted it like I wanted it. That's one of the tradeoffs of working with a traditional publisher. From the title, to the book cover, to what they put on the back, to what's written in the Amazon listing.

Every single one of my traditionally published books, the way it's worded in the Amazon listing is not the way I would word it. Every one of them. The back matter is not the way I would have worded it.

As a part of the collaborative process, you might get a first draft from your editor, and then you make suggestions, but it's still that somebody else is uploading that to Amazon. Somebody else is doing all of that.

I mentioned to you before we recorded, in an email, I have another book that I'm going to be working on, and my agent shopped it to my editor, and I got a very substantial six figure advance offer from it, and I have turned it down. I'm going to self-publish the new book as well.

I mean, it made total sense to do the second edition of Delay, Don't Deny myself, but for a new book with a great advance offer from a traditional publisher that I enjoy working with. I love my editor. I love my agent. They're great people. They have a great team.

I looked back at a book that I wrote in 2017 called Feast Without Fear, and I haven't talked about that one much, and I looked at my earnings from 2017 through today, and my earnings on that little book I never really talk about are almost as much as the big six figure advance that they're offering me. I was like, huh—

I have an audience of people who are going to be interested in reading what I have to put out there.

Of course, it's not all about the money, but now that I have realized with Atticus, and I've got someone who can help me with the audiobook, I really can do it myself now. I have the skills to do it. I have the support.

So everything that I really enjoyed about traditional publishing, I can make my new book look very professional, and do it myself, and retain the royalties, and have control.

The new book that I'm got in my head, and I have it a little bit outlined, both my agent and my editor said, “I like the idea, but you're going to need to work on the title. We don't really like that.”

I'm like, well, I don't want to work on the title. I really like it the way I want it. So just all those little things along the way that you lose control of when you do traditional publishing. That's important when you're a writer and you're a little bit of an artist too, and you want it like you want it.

Joanna: Yes, I think that's important. One of the biggest things there, of course, is that you have a community. Now, like everyone, you started with no community, so you did have nobody. Then over time, like you said, you started on Facebook groups.

 This is something that many people are petrified of. A, of leaving Facebook, but B, starting a paid community. So can you maybe talk about that? Why you did it, why you left, and any tips?

Gin: I could do like a five hour show about why I left! When I left, it was the end of 2020, going into 2021, and you can remember what a charged time that was on Facebook. Okay, now imagine I'm running health related groups, and also imagine that there are almost 500,000 combined members.

So you could just imagine how charged that time was and how difficult it was. One thing about Facebook groups, especially in the health and wellness community, is that Facebook was shutting people down for things.

I mean, I don't know if they're still doing that in groups. I don't really know since I don't run any groups. I can remember somebody that was actually in my community, in my Facebook community, had some sort of recipe group or something related to food. It was a Facebook group with maybe 10,000 members.

She woke up one day and the entire group had been shut down by Facebook, and there was no way for her to get it back. I thought, what if Facebook decides that fasting is dangerous and shuts me down? I would have no recourse. It would all be lost. All these people that are in my community would just be gone.

We got dings against our group for things like AI didn't like certain wording, like they really don't like the word fat. In a fasting community, there's something called being fat adapted, and that is actually a good thing. You want to be fat adapted, meaning your body has flipped the metabolic switch and is running on fat easily.

AI would be like, “You used the word fat, and you're the admin. Three more strikes, we'll shut down your group.” I mean, you'd get an AI-generated ding. Somebody who was a moderator accidentally did some emoji, and then she's like, “Oops, sorry. I didn't mean to pick the angry emoji. Fat thumbs.” Ding, bullying.

She's like, “Wait, no, that was me. I said I had fat thumbs.” You know what fat thumbs means. It's not bullying. It means you accidentally clicked the wrong thing.

There was also a little bit of wandering off the street in Facebook, if you know what I mean. People could find you by accident, and that was beautiful, but also not always.

Sometimes people would find you by accident, and they wouldn't have any idea about you or anything about you, or your books, or your podcast, or what you recommended, and they would come in hot. Then they'd argue with you about things.

I just want to support people who are bought into the clean fast. I want to support people who have similar goals, who have similar philosophies towards fasting. I don't want to argue with people who think that Bulletproof Coffee is a great way to start your day when you're fasting.

There are communities where those people can be really happy, but I don't want to have to police that all day long. So I would like a community where I can support people who are following the advice that I give.

So it was hard because, like I said, I had a giant community. I thought maybe I'm only selling books, and maybe people are only listening to my podcast because of my Facebook groups. Maybe leaving Facebook will make it all stop and that'll be the end. I said, it is worth it. Even if that is true, it is worth it.

So I started my private community, and, oh, some people some people were mad. People that were used to being in my Facebook group for free were super mad. They're like, I read your book, I bought your book, and now you're asking me to pay for your community.

I'm like, well, buying a book means you get a book. You got the book, right? I don't know why reading a book means you get free support for the rest of your life from me, the author. It doesn't.

So the people who joined my community wanted my support, they wanted my advice, they wanted to interact with me, and they were willing to pay for it. It's like $9.99 a month. I'm not really asking a lot, but $9.99 a month weeds out the people who really don't want to be in my community.

So I have a wonderful community, and I love interacting with the people there. They ask questions, and we help them. People post their struggles, they post their successes, and the right people find it who are excited to be there. So that fear that I had when I left, I'm so glad that I did it anyway.

I love my community so very much, and I'm grateful for everyone who has moved over with us.

Joanna: I think it's such a big thing. So at the end of 2023, I did something similar with content, which I've put within my Patreon/thecreativepenn. So I've got a Patreon, but I did the same thing. It was like—

The difference to mental health is tremendous, right? I was around you at that time, and I remember how stressed you sounded around the stuff on Facebook.

Gin: Well, it was awful in the summer of 2020, when everything was really politically charged. We had a ‘no politics' rule in our Facebook groups, but something happened while I was sleeping one night where someone tried to post something political, and my moderators did not allow it because we're not a political group, we're a Facebook group.

Whether I did or didn't agree with the post, we're not going to have political posts. So the person got really upset that the moderators wouldn't let them post something.

Then instead of just whatever, they went to Amazon and left a one star review on my book and said really mean things that were untrue about me and my personal philosophies. I wasn't even awake. I was sleeping the whole time when it happened.

So I was like, oh, we can't have this. That made me realize that there does need to be a little bit more gatekeeping. We're not going to be political in my group, no matter where we are.

We're going to help you with fasting. We're going to help you with your questions. We're not going to talk about your political leanings, no matter whether I agree with them or whether I don't.

I hope people have no idea where I stand politically. That's what I want. You got plenty of content for that, Gin Stephens doesn't need to be part of it, if you know what I mean.

Gin: I am on Facebook as Gin Stephens, the person. When I said I was leaving Facebook, I wasn't kidding. I took the app off my phone, and I did not open it or look at it for over a year.

I mean, even like, what are my high school friends doing? What are my college friends doing? I didn't know. I was in my bubble because it almost felt like PTSD, honestly. I realized, you know what, I can go back on Facebook as Gin Stephens, the person. I went in and, first of all, unfriended everybody that I didn't really know.

There were some people that I had met through intermittent fasting that I really liked, and I kept them because some of them were in my new community. Some of them weren't. I considered them friends, some of them who'd maybe been on our cruises before COVID.

So I really weeded it out, and so now Facebook really is my friends. It's people that I have from college, people that I grew up with, people I worked with, kids I taught. I mean, I can go on Facebook and just be me.

I don't interact on Facebook a lot. I definitely do not do any political commentary with friends who I may or may not agree with. I just ignore those. I'm just like, “Oh, what's she doing? Oh, she went to a concert. That's nice.” I'm using Facebook like it was originally intended, and I'm not talking about intermittent fasting at all.

Instagram is a different kind of beast. The problem with Instagram is, being a public figure on Instagram makes people sometimes think that anything you post, they can then feel free to comment on in different ways. I don't care for that.

I posted a picture of me and my husband on Instagram, just Gin Stephens, the person. It wasn't a fasting post. In some of the comments, one person wanted to critique Intermittent Fasting Stories, and one person wants fasting coaching.

I'm like, no, no. This is me and my husband on the porch. If you want fasting coaching, you will not get it through the comments on Instagram, sorry.

Also, don't critique my podcast here. Leave it a review. If you really need to say something, give it a review. I don't want to see that. I don't go read my one star reviews. I just don't, no matter where it is. I don't want to see that. I know they're out there, but I don't want to see it. It made me feel very reluctant to even post anything on Instagram. So sometimes I will, but —

Here's a little secret for everybody who's listening, most people who are commenting back to you on Instagram, that's someone on their staff doing it, not really them, anyone who is like “an influencer”.

I don't have any staff, I don't have people going in, commenting as me. So I just don't read it, and I don't have to comment or have hurt feelings. I guess that's the way I deal with it.

I'm here to help you if you would like my help. If you don't, that's fine too. There's other people out there that might resonate with you more. Go explore their content. If you don't like what I have to say, if you think the clean fast sounds really dumb and you want to have whatever, do it.

You can't please everybody, and if you try, you'll just make yourself really unhappy. So please the people who you please, they are your people.

Joanna: Yes, you have to have the boundaries. I know we're almost out of time, but I know people are now going, well— How does she get traffic to her books and her community?

So it's your business model. So you've got the Intermittent Fasting Stories Podcast and you've got a second podcast, which are the main ways people find you. Then you've got the books, and you've got the community. That's it, right?

Gin: Here's what's funny, my business plan was zero business plan. I started my first Facebook group in 2015 with no plan. I was a school teacher.

I just started a Facebook group to support me and my friends who had seen me lose 75 pounds. I wanted a place where it was me and my friends and we could talk about it.

I'd been in some other Facebook groups as I was losing the weight, and again, I don't want to argue with people on Facebook. So that's why I started my own group because I was like, I'm not going to argue with people.

Then, of course, you can't stop doing that on Facebook when people join and want to argue with you, which is why I left Facebook.

We kept the arguing behind the scenes. It was just a very, very friendly community, and it was heavily moderated.

I had a group of volunteer moderators, and they were wonderful. I'm so grateful to them, but it was still hard to keep that on Facebook.

So I also started podcasting. I released my first book at the end of 2016, put it out there. I wasn't podcasting yet. People just found the Facebook groups, and they found the books.

Then when people would find the books, that would lead them to the Facebook group. When people would find the Facebook group, that would lead them to the book. Again, I was just selling books one at a time.

Then I started podcasting. My first podcasting experience was in 2017, and I no longer do that particular podcast, but I did it for five years.

Then I started my own podcast, that was Intermittent Fasting Stories, and that's really been the baseline for me ever since. Here's a suggestion I have for people. If you're naming a podcast, name it something that people will find, like Intermittent Fasting Stories.

If someone's looking for intermittent fasting, they're going to find that because it's the key word and the title. So if your podcast is out there and people are finding it, it will direct them to the rest of your work.

So all of my things, and I didn't know anything about the word ‘funnel.' I didn't know that word.

Then when I talked earlier about joining this community of people that are health and wellness practitioners, and influencers who are writers, and podcasters and getting the word out there. One of the first sessions was all about your funnel.

They're like, what's your funnel? What's your email? I'm like, I don't have any of that. Then I realized I really did. My podcast leads people to my books. My podcast leads people to my community. My books lead people to my podcast. My books lead people to my community.

You can't consume one thing without finding the other things. If you like my podcast, you will like my books. If you like my podcast, you will like my community. So just really letting people find you and then leading them to the other things that you have.

My whole reason for being is not, what else can I sell you? Podcasts are free. You can read my books for free. You can get them from the library. You can get them from Audible. I mean, literally, you can find the content out there.

You can get the eBook from your library app. If your library doesn't have the eBook, ask them to get it. You can join my community for a very small price.

So it's not like I'm going to sell you more and more things, but the funnel kind of leads people to what they want. I'm thinking about it, I'm saying the word funnel, but it's like my own little definition of funnel.

Gin: There you go. It's a natural funnel. It's not like click funnels, where now I'm going to put you on my email list and try to sell you 42 things a week. No, it's not like that.

By the way, I don't send out email newsletters. If you are in my email list, you get a notification every time a new podcast episode drops, and that's it. I'm not like always trying to sell you things.

Joanna: I love it. I absolutely love this. People are like, what? She doesn't have proper email list. She doesn't have social media.

Gin: What's really funny also in this group that I was a part of, this teaching you how to be a successful entrepreneur in the world. They're like, “Getting an email list is the most valuable thing.”

I was in the summit, and they were like, “You had so many people with the summit that you win the email list.” I'm like, no, thank you. They're like, what? I'm like, no, I don't want that email list.

Joanna: No, that's terrible. That's unethical of them as well.

Gin: I mean, that's the name of the game, it's growing your email list so you can sell people things. That is not what I want to do. I could sell a fasting supplement, but you don't need fasting supplements, everybody. I could sell fasting electrolytes, but you don't need me to. I mean, you just don't need it.

Fasting coffee. I could sell you fasting coffee, but guess what? All coffee is fasting coffee. Get the kind you like. Ah, anyway, you have to joke about it.

Joanna: Oh, no, you do. You do. I do remember you do have a partner with some wine, right? I remember your wine recommendations.

Gin: I definitely will have affiliate links to things I love. I'm not against doing that, but I also turn down a whole lot of sponsors or affiliate relationships.

If I don't love it, we're not doing it. There are so many things that were like, “Oh, we would like to advertise our whatever on your podcast.” I'm like, no, no.

Joanna: I'm the same. I think our reputation is more important than a quick buck. So I get that.

Gin: Well, if you just go to GinStephens.com that will funnel you everywhere. There are links there to my books, and to my community, and to my podcasts.

If it all resonates with you and it sounds like what you would like to do, I would love to support you. If you would like to follow a more complicated kind of fasting, you could do that too, but I wouldn't.

You don't need to fast according to the moon, and you don't need to change 100% of what you're eating. You are empowered to find the intermittent fasting approach that works for you, and that's what I will help you do. We're not all the same. I've said this before, someone could follow me around and do exactly what I do and have different results. So my job is to help you figure out what works best for you.

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

Gin: Thank you.

The post Self-Publishing A Second Edition Of A Non-Fiction Book With Gin Stephens first appeared on The Creative Penn.

What are some of the key elements in writing horror? How can you be successful writing and self-publishing in the genre? With Boris Bacic.

In the intro, ISBNs made easy [Self-publishing Advice];
Written Word Media’s 2024 author survey; Taylor Swift self-publishing [Morning Brew]; Thoughts on audiobooks [Seth Godin]; This is Strategy: Make Better Plans – Seth Godin;

Plus, Orna Ross and I talk about our response to Google NotebookLM, while the AI hosts discuss indie author myths [Self-Publishing Advice Podcast]; Seahenge: A Short Story available now and on pre-order.

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 

Boris Bacic is a bestselling horror author from Serbia, with more than 30 books and short stories.

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 Boris at AuthorBorisBacic.com.

Joanna: Boris Bacic is a bestselling horror author from Serbia, with more than 30 books and short stories. So welcome to the show, Boris.

Boris: Thanks for having me here.

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

Boris: I started writing when I was a kid. Back then, it was fantasy. This was before the era of computers and whatnot. I was writing in my notebook. I guess somewhere along the line, it just kind of morphed into horror.

I didn't get into publishing until I was in my late 20s. I had started writing short stories for Creepypasta.com, for Reddit's NoSleep forum, and after about 20 or so unsuccessful stories, one of my stories went viral.

This was a big thing for me because so many people wanted to collaborate. YouTube narrators, Creepypasta animators, and so on. So this was a big thing for me. Somewhere along the line, one of them had asked me, like, why don't I publish a book? I said, no, no, that's not for me. I'm not cut out to be a writer.

After some time, after more successful stories, I said, okay, I'm going to take the plunge. I knew nothing about publishing, and after unsuccessful attempts to find agents and publishers, I ran into 20Booksto50K.

So this was a new thing for me, and that's eventually how I got into publishing my novels. Right now, I have more than 30.

Joanna: Wow. Okay, a few questions to come back on. First of all, explain to people what Creepypasta is. Because I think a lot of people won't know.

Boris: So Creepypasta.com, this used to be very popular back in the day. This was a website where lots of scary short stories would be hosted. So anybody could write, anybody could post them there. If they were good enough, they would be approved.

Eventually, a similar sub-reddit came out, which was NoSleep. This is exactly what it is, how it sounds. It is a forum where people can post short stories.

This was very popular back in the day because so many YouTube narrators started adapting them into narrations, and they start adding creepy music over there. This was a very good way for aspiring authors, and even established authors, to reach new audiences.

Joanna: I thought Creepypasta stories also had a sort of internet meme thing, in terms of the sort of tropes.

Boris: There are definitely lots of tropes over there, and one of the popular ones that arose from there was the type of horror where there are rules you need to follow. It became so oversaturated with this after a while, that it's like if you enter a church, don't look over your shoulder. Don't enter after 3am and so on.

So this became very popular. It was very scary back in the day, and so many stories arose from it. Even my first published anthology was exactly like that. A security guard, because I used to be a security guard, who is working in a paranormal place, and he needs to follow a set of rules. There are lots of these that are sort of outdated now, but I can see that even trad authors have started using some of the Creepypasta tropes.

Joanna: You've said “back in the day” a couple of times. So is this not a viable place now? Is Reddit kind of—well, it's not done, is it?

Boris: Oh, absolutely. Reddit is an excellent place. Creepypasta, not so much. The last time I checked, it was just not the same. I can see that most of the interest is coming from NoSleep. We've even had a lot of aspiring authors, like me, who wrote short stories to Reddit, then they had them published into novels.

I've even seen a few authors who actually got really big movie deals. So NoSleep, Reddit generally, and stuff like WattPad, these are very good platforms for that sort of thing.

Joanna: Interesting. So let's just take a step back into horror in general. In fact, as we record this today, my folk horror novel, Blood Vintage, finishes on Kickstarter. I've had so many people—I mean, it's folk horror, which is a very small sub niche—but people say, “Oh, I never read horror.”

Then I say, oh, well, it's more a sort of eerie sense of place with folklore. Then they're like, “Oh, okay. Well, that sounds interesting.” So I wondered if you'd come across this in terms of, “I never read horror,”

Horror is not just slasher/gore. What else does horror encompass?

Boris: Well, unfortunately, there's still a lot of stigma around horror, even in today's era. When people see horror, they think either a bloodbath or occult Satanism. This kind of dissuades them from reading because this is the two stuff that has evolved from the 80s.

We see it in psychological thrillers. We see it in romance and fantasy, everywhere.

It's no longer just about whatever gore is going on over there. It has sort of evolved into this psychological thing. Lots of people who say they don't read horror, chances are they do, they're just not aware of it because it's such a personal thing. It's such a unique thing, and we each experience it in our own way.

Something that is scary to you may not be scary to me and vice versa. This is the beautiful thing about it. I personally like the type of horror like you mentioned in your book. This buildup of suspense, the atmospheric buildup, this is my favorite kind.

There's nothing more beautiful and harder than that, when it just sort of builds up to a crescendo that by the time you realize what's going on, it's already too late. It's not always going to be about cutting off limbs, or being chased by monsters, or seeing boogeyman in the closets.

What terrifies me more is this personal kind of thing, like loss of a loved one. It can be claustrophobia, like being stuck in an elevator. To someone that is absolute horror. It can be isolation.

So for the people who say they don't like to read horror, they don't want to read it because of this, I can say they're probably already reading it. They're already seeing it every day. They're just sort of desensitized to it.

Joanna: Yes, I know what you mean. The word still has the stigma, as you say, but often people are labeling things differently. For example, dark fantasy, I think, has a big crossover. Do you ever label it as anything else?

Boris: So sometimes it's really difficult to categorize it. That's the thing. Since I write so many different subgenres, horror specifically, it goes into so many different directions. Sometimes somebody who reads a thriller, he's going to say, “This was a scary book. This was horror.” Whereas for me, it might be a different experience.

Oftentimes, it's really difficult to label what exactly it is. It's not clear cut. It's not like cut and dry that we know exactly what's going on. It's very abstract. I sometimes write abstract stuff that I don't even know what genre it is going to fit in.

It, again, comes back to what the reader feels about it. So some people are going to tell me this was a very good thriller book. So I tell them, okay, but I didn't have in mind to write a thriller book. This was supposed to be horror, but for them, that was what they saw.

Joanna: Yes, I think it's interesting. Now, one of the subgenres I love—I love some really small niches—and one is merfolk horror, so bad mermaids and bad mermen. So I have your book, They Came From The Ocean, on my to-be-read list at the moment. I wondered—

You said you write all over the place, but what do you come back to? And what do your readers love best?

Boris: The good thing is that my readers are very diverse, and I'm very grateful for that because when I did start writing, I didn't want to write just one subgenre. I believe that just like we have mood readers, we also probably have mood writers.

I'd say that I'm a mood writer. I'm going to write maybe two or three paranormal books, then I'm going to get bored of it, and I’m going to move on to something else. Let's do, for example, cult horror.

Then I'm going to get bored with that and move onto some something else, maybe a creature feature because creature features, in my opinion, they don't require as much planning. I guess it's more straightforward.

When I want to get into something complicated, I go back into, for example, you mentioned They Came From The Ocean. This is still one of my most popular creature features. I think one of the reasons for that is the fact that we have not explored the ocean almost at all. We have mapped maybe 5% of the ocean floor.

The same thing with space. We're pretty much playing in our backyard. I believe that this kind of creates grounds for fear of the unknown. So you can play with sci-fi and fantasy over here, and you can leave it ambiguous because there's so much going on there which we don't know. There's so much we can find.

We discover thousands of species in the ocean every year. New species that we didn't even know exist, alien-like creatures and whatnot. There's just so much going on there. This has given birth to so many conspiracy theories about merfolk and so on.

I believe this fear of the unknown, it's one of the strongest fears. I think it's very easy to bank on that in sea horror, space horror, but pretty much anything where you're just staring sort of at the abyss.

Joanna: Yes, it's interesting.

I mean, I go to the gothic cathedrals of Europe, and you walk in and feel this kind of awe at the majesty of this building. I've done quite a lot of scuba diving, and I felt the same sense of awe on the edge of the drop off with the deep ocean ahead of you. Like, oh my goodness, I am so small. I am so insignificant on the face of the earth. I find that feeling quite liberating, in a way.

As you were talking, I was like maybe that is why I like merfolk horror because the sense of awe, in a terrible sense, is kind of where we go with horror. You know what I mean?

Boris: Exactly, exactly. I totally agree with you. It's like you said, you go to this place, and you can just sort of feel the echo of what might have happened. Now, it doesn't need to be necessarily true. I think it's just our imagination conjures all sorts of different things.

Like when we both stare at the dark room, you and I are going to see different things. I think that's the beauty of it, that we can conjure so many things that might have happened there. This can, especially for writers, be very good, but also for readers.

Joanna: Yes, absolutely. Now, I'm also always interested in sense of place in writing, and one of your books, I think, is based upon your hometown. So tell us more about Serbia because many people listening are in the US or the UK and might not know that much. Also—

Boris: So Serbia is a very superstitious place. I think all Slavic countries are. Not all of it ties into horror, some of them are innocuous. Some of them are like, don't walk through the cornfield, don't go out after thunder, and so on. Then there are also the scary parts.

My grandmother, who lived most of her life in a small village, she had a bevy of stories, scary stories. My mother, also, because she was told by her mother. So they told me stories, and they were very nonplussed about this. The way they told me these stories, it was like it was a normal occurrence.

There was a case I remember that was right after my grandmother had passed. On the day of the funeral, my mother came to me and she said, “Tonight you might feel a presence in your room.”

I asked, “What? What do you mean?” She said, “Oh, you might feel like somebody is touching your face. You might hear your name being whispered. Don't worry, that's just your grandma probably visiting you.” So I thought, okay, well, that's not nightmare material at all.

So there were lots of superstitious beliefs over here, like those. Then on top of that, my hometown, it was actually and probably still is—I haven't looked into it lately—it was number one by suicides in all of Europe.

So there were lots of rumors as to why this was happening. We knew that people are very negative, they're very pessimistic, but what was going on? The town was built on top of a swamp, so there were rumors maybe noxious gasses causing them to have mental breakdowns or something.

Then there were rumors of cults, very secretive cults, that were hiding in the woods, leaving clues for people who can join if they manage to solve those clues, and so on.

This all inspired me to conduct an investigation during the writing of Suicide Town, which was my book inspired by my hometown. When you're in a small town like this, I believe there is always something going on.

It doesn't need to be a dark history or anything like that, sometimes it's just the way the people look at outsiders. Whether they're polite, whether they're rude, how they communicate with each other, there is just so much going on.

I got so much inspiration just from interviewing people there, and that helped me to kind of put together a book which blended the old Creepypasta stories along with something that was a full-fledged novel.

Joanna: I like that.

When I moved here to Bath, I was really struggling with this place. Like, do I want to live here, and what does that mean? My book Map of Shadows has a dark side of it, and it opens in Bath.

Then I found that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in Bath, and I found out all this dark stuff about Bath, and that it wasn't just famous for Jane Austen. I was like, I can't live somewhere that's sort of Jane Austen and Bridgerton. Then I discovered this dark side of Bath, and I was like, oh, yes, okay. I can live here now.

Boris: Exactly, and that's what I mentioned earlier. It's like you can see horror everywhere. Sometimes you've got to squint, but it is everywhere. Back when I lived in my old apartment, there was a radio tower across from it. Every night at 9pm the lights would turn on, and they would blink for a while, and then they would stop.

I would see it every night, and I would start to wonder—and this was the paranoid part of me—what if they're now releasing some kind of a signal to brainwash us? Maybe this is like a secret government experiment.

This actually eventually gave me an idea for my book Radio Tower, which was a very popular book back in the day. Anywhere you go, everything you see, you can see horror if you just look hard enough. I think it's just that our brains are desensitized and they are protecting us from the scary stuff.

Joanna: Yes, I think you're right. I laugh because I have the same mind. I mean, people listening will write other genres, and I think perhaps somebody who, let's say writes romance, and they're seeing that tower, that message, maybe their mind says, “Oh, that is someone signaling their love in space.” Maybe it's a sci-fi romance or something. Whereas you and I would see something darker.

It's just being open to them.

Boris: It's like exactly what you just mentioned now. I had one example where I had mentioned my lighthouse horror book, which I'm going to write.

A romance author had contacted me, a friend of mine, and she asked, like, “Okay, but my brain is not comprehending what's going to happen next. Is he going to fall in love with someone? Is he like alone there, and he's going to find somebody, the love of his life?” I was like, oh, boy, do I have news for you.

Joanna: Yes, feel free to write your own romance in a lighthouse!

Boris: Exactly.

Joanna: I mean, I guess I know a bit about Serbia. I'm in my late 40s and European.

Boris: That is interesting. That's an interesting question. I do find that the current situation, like the difficulty with the economy and all that, sort of slips into my stories from time to time.

There were a couple of books that I wrote which were set in Europe, but luckily, most of my books that I write are set in America. So it's sort of detached from the political and socioeconomic situation in Serbia. However, since I've lived here all my life, obviously, it's going to be impossible to just completely eliminate that.

So there are cases where I'm going to try to hint at certain things, but I try not to do it too often because I think it becomes obvious when an author tries to insert his own views into a book.

Joanna: Yes, it's one of my sort of things is I really enjoy the research about places. It's a fascinating topic. So I mean, on that, we should say your accent, you have an American accent, basically.

Boris: Well, thank you. Yes, and lots of people wonder how I learned English. What happened? Basically, back when I was a kid, when we had cartoons, we didn't have subtitles, we didn't have synchronized or anything. I had to watch in English. So if I wanted to understand it, I had to learn English.

So at an early age, up north where I live, we speak Serbian and Hungarian. These are the two main languages. Unfortunately, my Hungarian is terrible. I'm learning it right now. My parents had tried to force me to learn it, but I was more into English.

They said that I refuse with every atom of my being, and I instead focused on learning English. This was very beneficial for me because I write books in English. I'd even go as far as to say that my English is better than my Serbian these days.

I mean, it must be quite a small book market.

Boris: Exactly. Writing in Serbian, I guess since I grew up with all these American movies, Hollywood movies, cartoons, read books in English, it felt more at home for me. The Serbian market is very small, but the Serbian horror market is minuscule. It is not existing pretty much.

As I said, there are so many people who are very much against it. I've even had people in Serbia, since certain parts are very religious, many of them are going to ask me, like, “Oh, but what do you think? How would God feel about you writing horror?”

Joanna: I laugh, because with Blood Vintage I've been just getting a whole ton of emails about this kind of thing and how much I must be summoning demons. I'm like, seriously, just read the book. It's not about that. It is funny, isn't it?

We all have these preconceptions of what things are based on stuff. So I respect people's opinions, but read stuff before you make a decision.

I do want to come onto short stories, you mentioned them at the beginning. You write short stories, you write novels, as do I.

Boris: Well, the problem with my writing is I'm a pantser, and I usually don't know what is going to happen pretty much until I'm close to the end. So sometimes it's not going to be known whether it's a novella, a short story, or a full-length novel, until I'm pretty much close to the end.

A lot of times I get this sort of inkling for writing a short story based on a dream or whatever. I don't like the commitment, so I'm just going to go and churn out a short story in two or three days. I like that because I don't need to do extensive planning and plotting out for the whole for the whole book. You can just sit down, you can write it, and you're done.

These days, I try to focus more on novels because I like the challenge. I find it way more challenging. At the same time, as my writing has evolved, my books have become more descriptive. So there is a lot of atmospheric buildup, there's a lot of suspense, there's a lot of world building and character development.

Short stories don't really give you the freedom to do that. It's very much getting into the meat and potatoes, just get straight to the point. Whereas in a book, in a novel, you actually have time to do the slow burn.

That's where I got a lot of inspiration from Stephen King because his books are exactly like that. For about 70%, there's nothing going on, and then suddenly it just spirals out of control. I just love that kind of story.

Joanna: I'm laughing again because I know what you mean with Stephen King. Of course, he has short stories as well. I really like writing short stories, and similar to you, if there's an idea that just is annoying me, that I want to get out my head—

Boris: Exactly, and you can always do both. Some of my short stories from NoSleep actually got adapted into full novels. You can do that. It's absolutely possible.

It's just for me, it's easier to adapt a novel into a short story than the other way around because when it comes to turning a short story into a novel, you need to be careful with not adding redundant parts.

There have been authors who have made books from NoSleep to full-fledged novels, and what happened was there were lots of repetitive parts that were unnecessary, but that sort of worked really well in the short story. This is a trap that needs to be avoided when adapting one to the other.

Joanna: Yes, it's interesting because I write these short stories and then I publish them as just short stories on my website, on Amazon, and a lot of the reviews are, “This is too short.” I'm like, it's a short story. That is what it is. It is that length. But people say, “Oh, this could be a novel.”

I haven't even considered turning a short story into a novel because I feel like it's a nice, self-contained thing that, in my mind, is now finished. It is done. That's how it worked. Now I can't imagine it being anything else.

Boris: I'm exactly like that for some of the stories, especially the longer ones. I had just finished writing a trilogy, and it took me about six months. Before I finished writing it, I was thinking of doing a short story and then posting it to NoSleep so I can promote it.

Then after writing it for six months, no, I am done. I want to move onto something else. I do not want to see that book ever again.

Joanna: I guess another question on short stories is some authors think they're “not worth writing” because readers prefer long form books. You might not have enough to do an anthology like you did. They're hard to sell.

Boris: I think there are many benefits to writing short stories, but it all comes down to who you ask. I know a lot of authors who actually make a living with short stories, anthologies, and they're doing really well.

As I mentioned earlier, one of the benefits of writing short stories is you don't need to commit to it as you would to a full-fledged book. So you can write a short one, you can take a break, you can maybe come back after six months, one year, whenever you feel like it.

Then after a while, you're going to have an anthology with really no absolute commitment, which is great. Now I see that some authors, they just put short stories together into an anthology. They sell them that way.

I see some other authors who are actually selling them as standalones at 99 cents. Now, selling short stories on Amazon, and I think this is a little trick here. It's good to diversify. That's the first thing.

I don't want to be personally known as the short story author.

When it comes to short stories, there's so much diversification. There's so much advantage. For example, you can post those short stories to WattPad, to NoSleep, and you can scrape some money up from other sources.

My short stories, they still get offers from YouTube narrators, and they give me payment for the rights for narration. Then you got animators. Then you got, if you're really lucky, these content scouts who can actually find your story, they like it, and they want to produce it into a short movie, an actual movie, whatever else.

There are so many ways, and there's so many rising platforms for short stories where you can post them and you get royalties from it. So I think for short stories, Amazon is not a bad choice, but there's not like one wrong or one right way to do things. You can do it in so many ways.

Are they submitting to anthologies through the horror traditional publishers?

Boris: From what I know, doing anthologies with other authors usually doesn't yield a lot of money, sometimes nothing at all. I personally have been in some anthologies and they were not profitable.

They were very good for exposure, and they were very good for getting new readers. Somebody who reads the anthology because of some other author is going to read yours, and he might be like, okay, I like this author, I'm going to check their other books out.

When it comes to earning a full-time living with short stories, I know a few authors who actually write all of their stories, they compile them into their own anthologies, and they sell them like that. It works really well for them, but I think it's all about what kind of an audience you cultivate.

So if you start right away with cultivating short story readers then they're going to be great, you're going to have those. If you start with 99 cents deals, if you start with KU, it all depends.

I have personally tried going wide.

I think it all depends on what kind of an audience you have. For me, it's been years now, I think going into a different venue would probably not be as successful.

Joanna: Let's talk about that because I know you know David Viergutz, and he was on the show, I guess once this goes out, a couple of months ago. He talked on the show about the fact that Amazon didn't really work for his books. He moved out of KU and is basically selling mainly a lot from his website.

You mentioned there, KU is good for you, and you had crickets elsewhere. So I wondered—

Are there things that you think might work for other authors who are struggling there?

Boris: So I've been wondering about this for a long time as well. I remember David Viergutz and I, we were talking about it for a while, and we were pretty much doing the same things. I was seeing success on Amazon. For him, nothing.

It was like Amazon didn't like him. I have no idea what was going on there. He moved on to direct, which was really good. He's very successful there now.

For me, so what happened was I had first found 20Booksto50K. I published a few books, and there were some traction, but not enough to earn significant income.

I started doing marketing, but it wasn't going so well. I figured, you know what, my marketing is probably going to suck. I'm doing everything I can, but I'm going to have to take into consideration it's probably going to be bad.

Therefore, I'm going to use the method that Michael Anderle mentioned, which is publish enough books that you're going to be earning enough money. I already had three or four books that were already finished, I just hadn't published them yet.

So I started publishing them, I started running Amazon ads on them, and I started seeing more and more traction on Amazon. I believe that in today's era, which might change very soon, the algorithm is a very important thing.

Then Amazon started showing my books to other readers.

Nowadays, for example, I have mostly organic traffic. I do run ads on my new launches, but after, I turn them off. My books are gliding very nicely. They're doing everything organically. This was probably a long history of showing that my Amazon account is doing well.

So if you pair that with something like a BookBub deal, that's going to probably change everything. That was, for me, what really got me into working full time. Up until then, it was going very slow.

Some people run them on Instagram. Even TikTok these days is very profitable for some authors.

If you pair those, and you find what works for you, give it a strong push, and it's bound to work. I've even tested this with some pen names because I wanted to know what exactly worked.

With Kindle Unlimited, unfortunately it's very difficult to tell what worked because we don't have enough information like we do with direct. With direct, you can exactly tell where each sale came from, and you can pinpoint what's working and what isn't. With Kindle Unlimited, you have to guess a little bit.

So I'd experimented with different genres, different pen names, and the result was the same. If you do a strong push, whether it's with Facebook ads or Amazon ads—for me, personally, it's Facebook ads—putting the book in Kindle Unlimited, doing 99 cent deals. For me, that worked perfectly and still does.

Boris: I do all of that. Audio, print books, ebooks, even hardcovers, but most of my income does come from Kindle Unlimited. From the page reads, about 60 to 65% comes from that. The rest is ebook sales.

Print, not so much. I tried switching to direct just to sell print over there. Unfortunately, selling from my own store was not profitable because shipping from Serbia to America or the UK is very expensive. So I ended up sticking with eBook sales instead.

Joanna: Yes. Although, just on that, I mean, you could use a printer in the US.

Boris: Yes, like Ingram Spark and others. I have tried using those, but unfortunately, I didn't see any kind of sales. So maybe the algorithm over there is not in my favor.

Joanna: I think this is what's so interesting, and that's why I wanted to mention that, because —

— which is why it's good to compare you and David. Again, we're not talking about him behind his back, he said this on the show. He said it didn't work for him.

I mean, I've looked at both of your books. There's a clear genre with the covers. They're not dramatically different, as far as I could see. It was like—Why does it work for one author and not another author?

As you say, you just don't know. You just have to try things, and then if it does take off, as it did for you, you're leaning into that. It didn't for David, and he chose another path. As we said, he's doing very well. So it's so hard, isn't it, to know what to do if somebody is new, or like me, writing in a new genre.

Boris: Exactly.

I know there were so many aspiring authors who wrote an entire series and it just didn't work.

Sometimes books, they're just dead on arrival. I've had books like those as well. I've had books like my personal favorite, The Grayson Legacy, it just did not sell no matter what I did. I changed the covers, I changed the blurb, I even re-edited the entire thing. Nothing.

So I just couldn't understand. I still don't understand what is going on. I've asked around to other authors, and they tell me, okay, the cover is on point. The blurb is on point, it tells you exactly what it's about. It's just not selling. Maybe it's just currently not doing anything for the market.

You can still use those books. So I personally use The Grayson Legacy as a reader magnet, and you can use that to actually get new readers. They read that book, and they're going to be like, “Okay, I like this one. Let me check out the other books as well.” So it can still be used for something.

It's like we mentioned, there's not one wrong or right venue to take. You can go so many different directions. There are so many successful authors who are wide, and there are many who are in Kindle Unlimited.

So I know there's a lot of rivalry between the two. Kindle Unlimited authors are going to be talking bad about wide and vice versa. I really believe there's really no wrong way of doing things in this business.

Joanna: Yes, and on that, a lot of horror is standalone rather than series.

Boris: I've written both, and I can definitely say that series sell way better. Leaving books with cliff hangers and then moving on to the next one, it just naturally sells much, much better. It sells so much better that even the pre-orders for the next book in the series, they're going to be, organically, very good.

Whereas with standalones, people finish it, they're done. They need a break. Sometimes we do have readers who just want to jump straight into the next one, but when you finish a standalone, that next book doesn't have to be your book. They can start reading another book by another author.

Whereas if you give them something in a series like a cliffhanger, and it's a good enough story to get them into it, they're not going to be able to resist it. They're going to move onto the next one.

The latest trilogy I wrote, they're all connected, all three books. They're not standalones. Whereas most of my other books are standalones. Only after I started writing the series did I see a significant rise in my income.

Joanna: That's interesting.

Do you have to just create a much bigger cast?

Boris: Oh, yes, exactly. You can create a big cast, and there's a lot of these swappable characters. Some characters die, other characters get introduced. You got to think of it as a TV show with multiple seasons. So you kind of follow that concept, and it works very well.

You give them a fast paced environment. Every chapter that I end, I usually end it with a cliffhanger. So not only are they unable to stop reading the series, they're unable to stop reading the book.

What happens is I have so many readers tell me, like, “Oh, I lost a lot of sleep because I had to keep reading this.” For me, this is a huge success.

So writing a series, it's trickier because when you write about a paranormal house, for example, I did not see how this can be adapted into a series. People would get fatigued from that. So it has to be something completely original.

Like last year, I wrote a zombie series. This was more of an apocalyptic series, but it also blended horror elements to it. It was not a typical survival series. This year it was like you mentioned. A huge cast, lots of things going on, and each book was centered around a certain theme.

So you give the characters a problem they face. Just when they've solved that problem, a new one arises, and that leads into the next book.

Joanna: It's interesting, though, because you said you're a pantser—I say discovery writer—and I find that even though I have series, each book is really standalone. In that you can finish it, and I'm like, okay, story has finished. So in my discovery writing mind, I can't seem to think beyond that one story.

Boris: Well, mostly luck. You just write and hope for the best. For certain big books like those, like series, you have to have at least a vague outline. So I try to have, like, point A and point Z.

So I know what the beginning is going to be like, I know what the ending might be like, but going through the story, that is where the troubles arise. This is where there's so much rewriting, so much deletion. Thousands of words lost is the most painful thing ever. 

I think it takes a lot of effort too, because when you actually have something in your mind when you think of a scene, and when you actually start writing the scene, you figure, you know, this doesn't sound too well. It doesn't look as well as I imagined in my head. Then you need to change the whole thing.

This impacts the previous scenes, the subsequent scenes, and this is where the problem arises. This is why I'm trying to transition more into not being a pantser, but planning more. I'm just not good enough to take notes like that, and my mind is volatile.

It's like I'm going to be walking through the park, and I'm suddenly going to think, “Okay, this would make a great idea for the story. I need to change it immediately.” So I'm not good with taking notes.

Joanna: Yes, it is interesting. We all have our struggles, but I still enjoy being a discovery writer. I also want to ask you because, of course, you're in Europe—

Or just indie authors? Or do you go to American things? Like the Horror Writers Association is mostly in the US.

Boris: Yes. Funnily enough, I didn't even know there were lots of horror authors in Europe, especially in the Slavic region. I know a few authors who mostly use pen names because of the stigma, the superstitions and whatever, and they like to keep secretive.

For me, personally, I am connected with authors from America because that's how I started. I didn't know there was anything else in Europe. Since most of my books are set in the US, I try to be more aligned with that.

I have not actually been to any American gatherings yet. With book signings, I do have one next year, Books and Brews in Indiana. It's a little difficult to go to all those events.

I can see there's so many of them, and I want to attend all of them, but it takes just 10 hours just to get to the east coast. Now, getting anything further than that, it's hell. It's very expensive. I try to limit myself to only the most important events.

Joanna: Yes, and the jet lag is a killer, right?

Boris: The worst thing is that it's not bad when you're in the US, but when you return to Europe, terrible. It just sort of catches up with you.

Joanna: Oh, yes. I really struggle with that. I'm going to Author Nation. In fact, that'll be the week after this goes out, and I'm already like, I have to organize all my meetings as early in the day as possible because I'm up at 3am going, “Woo-hoo!” and then by 4pm I need to go to bed.

Boris: Oh, exactly.

Joanna: It is difficult. Well, we are out of time.

Boris: Well, all my books, since they're in KU, they can find them on Amazon. They can contact me on my website, AuthorBorisBacic.com. Or if they want to get in touch, they can also email me. I love hearing from readers, from authors. So, yes, those are good ways to go.

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

Boris: Thank you.

The post Writing Horror With Boris Bacic first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How do you successfully scale an author business? How do you delegate to your team as well as continue to research and write the books you love? With award-winning crime author, Rachel McLean.

In the intro, new Kindle devices [Amazon]; new European markets for Spotify audiobooks [Spotify]; customisable audio with Google NotebookLM;
Amazon Ads launches new AI tools for advertisers;
Enhancing Creativity with AI Tools [ALLi]; My Lessons Learned from 10 Million Downloads of the show; and Blood Vintage Kickstarter wrap-up.

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 

Rachel McLean is the award-winning author of the Dorset Crime series, as well as other crime books, and has now sold over 2 million copies.

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 Rachel at RachelMcLean.com.

Joanna: Rachel McLean is the award-winning author of the Dorset Crime series, as well as other crime books, and has now sold over 2 million copies. So welcome back to the show, Rachel.

Rachel: Thank you for having me.

Joanna: I'm excited to talk to you today. Now, you were last on the show in November 2022, and we talked about how you pivoted into crime fiction. So we're just going to jump straight into things today.

You started out with your Dorset Crime series, but you now have five series in total, and you work with multiple authors under your imprint, Ackroyd Publishing.

Rachel: In some ways it hasn't changed that much, and in other ways, it's changed massively. So the core of my business, which is about writing crime books that readers want to read, I write in a very similar style. Obviously, my craft has developed over that time.

I'm really like doubling down on engaging with readers, I see that as actually, after the writing, my most important job because that's the thing that I can do, and my team can't do for me. So that hasn't really changed, apart from the fact that it is scaled because I've got so many more readers now.

In the sort of day-to-day management of my business, that has changed hugely. I've now got a team of seven people who work for me. They're all freelance. They each work a couple of days a week, and they do various roles.

I've got a publishing and production team, and they project manage all the books, do the cover design, pull all the files together, manage the editorial and so forth.

Then I've got a marketing team who help me run my shop and do advertising and data for me. I've got somebody who liaises with bookshops. I've got somebody who does AV work for me.

A lot of my books are co-authored with people who I've known for years and who I've been working with as part of my writing group for years. That enables me to sort of manage a bigger business, which takes up more of my time, while still producing more books now than I was able to produce without them.

Also, it's really good fun, particularly on the creative side when you're generating ideas for a new book or a new series, I get to work with other people.

So we'll go for a trip to the location that the book's going to be in, and we'll walk around, and we'll sit in cafes and things. We'll chat about what's going to be in the book, and we'll come up with ideas. It's really enjoyable.

Joanna: Oh, so many follow up questions. The first one I have is—and this is quite a personal thing for me, and also people listening—because I feel like what you have done is you have gone from being an author to essentially being the CEO of a much bigger business.

Like you said, you have seven people you're co-writing. So at some point, you made the decision, I am going to scale the size of my business and the income, obviously. You decided that there was something you wanted to do around running a bigger publishing company.

Obviously, it is a much bigger deal than, like me, I have not made that choice. It's something I come up against over and over again, and I always step back from. It's like I actually don't want a bigger business. So what was that moment, so other people listening might be able to figure that out for themselves?

Rachel: Yes, it's interesting because I always thought I didn't want a bigger business and I didn't want to manage people. I think that's because my experience of managing people in the past had been in huge organizations.

I worked for government agencies and all sorts where it was very process driven. You had to do performance management on a certain day, and you had to manage people in a certain way, and you and they didn't really have all that much freedom over what you did.

Whereas I'm finding that managing people within my own business is very different because A, I get to recruit them, and I get to find people who are a really good fit for my business and have got the skills that I need and skills often that I don't have.

Then B, I get to work with them in a way that works for us, and it's really flexible because we're such a small business. It's not like one person has a particular job title and they can only do that thing. People end up dipping into other people's jobs, and we all work really closely together.

I get everybody together on a fairly regular basis. So we've got a Christmas lunch planned in December. We have an away event in the spring where we all go down to Dorset and have a couple of days together.

We have a summer lunch where we get all our editors and narrators and everybody, the whole full team together. So I found that I enjoy that much more than I thought I might. I really do enjoy it.

The point at which I had that light bulb moment, I guess in a way, I went to the 20Books Mastermind in Majorca immediately after Self-Publishing Show last year.

I went to that specifically with the goal of talking to people who were very successful, and had been very successful for a long time and were sustaining that. I wanted to learn from them because I was at a point where the Dorset Crime series had taken off.

The Kindle Storyteller Award had a massive impact on my sales, and I didn't know how to sustain that. I knew that the workload involved in that was more than I could do on my own. At that point, I was thinking, well, I need to sort of clone myself.

I actually offered that job to my wife, and she turned it down.

Joanna: I'm glad she did. Saved your marriage!

Rachel: I'm glad she did now, as well, because we're much happier having different jobs. She has a job. She works for the University of Birmingham, and she's very happy doing that. It's a whole different type of environment from what I do.

I went to the Mastermind in Majorca, and there was a talk on running your publishing business with a team. The light bulb for me with that was the fact that you don't have to hire one person to do the business management.

You can hire multiple people to each do a part of it and to each work a certain number of hours. I already had a PA, Jane. She's theoretically a VA, but she lives quite close to me, so she's not all that virtual. We do see each other.

She was already doing some of the admin for me, but I needed somebody to manage the publishing process for each book. That was the thing that I was finding was a real sticking point for me because I have a terrible memory. I was forgetting what the deadlines were.

I was uploading books to the KDP Dashboard moments before I had to in order to fulfill a pre-order. I was really disorganized. I was thinking, how do I find this person who can manage that process for me?

It just so happens that Rebecca Collins from Hobeck Books, she and I are friends, and she posted something on Facebook about some work that she was doing for another client that was exactly that work. I thought, oh, hang on a minute, I didn't know Rebecca did that.

So I gave her a call, and we had a chat, and it turned out that she had availability, and she had exactly the skills I need. So it started with Rebecca, and then it slowly grew. So I've sort of added one person at a time, and over time people's roles have grown, so there's been more work for them to do.

Rebecca's gone from doing one day a week to doing two days a week. I've got Catherine Matthews, who also works for SPS, she's running my shop.

The great thing is she also runs Clare Lydon's shop. She learns things when she's doing each of our shops that she then uses in the other one, which works for both me and Clare. Clare and I are friends as well. She writes LesFic, and I think I recommended Catherine to Clare.

Having people on my team who have got experience and skills in areas that I don't necessarily have, or who can dedicate a bit more time to learning about something specific.

So the Shopify store, Catherine and I were both quite new to that when we set it up. I said to her, well, I will pay for your time learning how to use Shopify and how to get my store set up. She went away and has been really good at just taking it on board and working things out for herself.

The other real challenge I've got is in my personal life, I have an autistic son. He's not severely affected by his autism, but it does mean that I have to be available for him more than you might do for another teenager, and that can really throw things.

Having people that I can delegate things to, it's incredibly helpful, because I know that my business isn't going to just slide if my son needs me. It means that I've been able to focus on him and develop my author career at the same time. I'm not sure I would have been able to do both at this level.

Joanna: Yes, I love that. It's so interesting, because you must be ambitious, because this is an ambitious move.

Rachel: Yes.

Joanna: Do you identify with ambition? Is that a word you identify with?

Rachel: I do.

Joanna: Yes, but you haven't mentioned, oh, I want to be a seven figure or a multi-seven figure author.

Rachel: Money is a motivation. That's less about the cash, It's more about a lifestyle. I have a lifestyle now that I really enjoy. So I spend a lot of time traveling. A lot of my books are based in Dorset, and I have a flat in Dorset now because I spend so much time down there.

It's right on the beach, and it's an absolutely wonderful place to go and clear my head, and get fresh air, and go for walks, and write, and take the family down as well. We spent a lot of time down there in the summer.

I'm working on a series, which is a spin off series for one of my characters, and each book will be set in a different European city.

Joanna: Oh, I wonder why?!

Rachel: Oh, let's travel to those European cities. I listen to you talking about your research trips, and I think, yes, I want a bit of that. I'm going to Dorset, and I'm going to Scotland, and I'm going to Cumbria for those series. It's great, and they're wonderful places to visit, but why not go to Paris?

Joanna: Then you're going to have one set in like a Maldives scuba diving resort!

Rachel: Absolutely. I've got a series that I write with Millie Ravensworth, who's actually two authors, Heide Goody and Iain Grant, that is set in London on a vintage route master London tour bus.

We've got two amateur sleuths who, because they're running these tours, they find themselves in the middle of mysteries in iconic London landmarks. We were thinking, why don't we get one of them to go and work as a guide on a cruise ship or something so we can do that? So there's a bit of a debate going on about who gets to do that research trip if we do it.

Joanna: Yes, and I think this is important, too, because —

Like, I never have any problem justifying this. I do want to come back to that I'm fascinated with the ambition to do this because you've already grown so much. You're working with these co-writers, but essentially, what you're building with Ackroyd Publishing is it's a publishing imprint that does crime books.

It made me think of Bookouture. If American authors don't know, Bookouture is an imprint. It started in crime, and it grew, and it got bought for a ton of money. I wondered—

Or that you want to grow much bigger? Or do you have grand plans?

Rachel: I think I've toyed with the idea of growing and publishing other authors. So I do have a couple of authors who are Ackroyd Publishing publishers who are not crime authors. One is my wife, Sally Brooks, so that's kind of cheating, but she writes lesbian rom coms and sapphic rom coms.

She has a day job. She loves the writing, but doesn't want to do the marketing and business side of it. So I said to her, well, how about if Ackroyd Publishing published you? To be honest, it doesn't mean we're working together because it's actually the team who are doing that. I'm not very heavily involved in the publication of her book.

I've also published Hazel Ward, who writes women's fiction. She is somebody who I've known for years, and I've been a beta reader for her books since she started. So it's very much been really, really slowly doing that. Only working with people who I know are really good writers and really good to work with.

I talked to Keshini at Hera, who published my paperbacks, about what it's like managing a lot of authors. It's hard work, and you've got to juggle a lot of different expectations and a lot of different styles of working in terms of what they expect from the publisher. I'm quite wary of that.

I'm building a really loyal readership. I've got thousands of people who will buy my books on the days they come out.

What I do, it's more like the James Patterson model, in a way. So I'm working with a co-author. They write the first draft and I write the second draft. We plan it together.

So what I do in the second draft is I will add in character detail, because I have characters who move across series, and I will also add in location detail, because we tend to write about locations that I know about. Although the Cumbria Crime ones, Joel Hames is getting to know Cumbria better than I do.

I will also tweak the style so that it's a style that my readers are familiar with. So that when a reader comes to a book that's co-written by me and any one of my co-writers, they will be slightly different. They won't just be exactly the same as a Rachel McLean book that I write on my own, but they will feel familiar.

They'll have a similar sort of structure, in terms of the number of chapters, the length of chapters, the style of writing, what you can expect from that book, the level of gore that you get in a crime book, the level of humor.

Although that's different for the cozy mysteries, they're definitely funnier. That's why I write with Heide and Iain is because they are comedy writers, and they're really good at that.

Also, they're all people who I know and have worked with have known. I mean, Heide and Iain, they were the people who first got me into self-publishing, so it's really nice to be able to involve them in it and work with them.

They both live fairly close to me, so we'll do research. One of the series we're writing is in Birmingham, so we'll meet up, and we'll go for a walk around the locations and find the place the body is going to be dumped and that sort of thing, and then go and have lunch and plan the book. So it makes it really enjoyable working. I'm working with friends.

The team in Ackroyd Publishing that I've built as well, we're developing friendships within the team. It was great when I got everybody together last March and we went down to Dorset to see everybody getting on so well and enjoying themselves.

Obviously, that's important if you've got a really small team. So I think it just adds another dimension. It takes a little bit away from that loneliness of being a writer sitting in your room producing words.

Joanna: It doesn't sound like that's your life at all.

I love that you mentioned James Patterson because he gets a lot of flak because he is the most read author, the richest author, the guy who sells the most books. As you say, he co-writes with lots and lots of different people, in lots and lots of different series.

He does still have his own, I think that Alex Cross series is just his. I think what's also interesting is you have Ackroyd, or you mentioned before, “crime books that readers want to read.”

I just want to remind listeners if they don't know, and I'll link back to our first interview, but you were not successful with your first books, right?

Rachel: No.

Joanna: And you pivoted to write crime books that readers want to read. So can you maybe just go into that a bit more? As in—

How do you add in this kind of Rachel McLean secret sauce that makes your book sell so much after failing at the beginning?

Rachel: Well, I started out by writing books that crossed genres and found it really hard to market them in any of the genres that they were in. What was useful was that I learned a lot about marketing during that time.

So when I did pivot to crime, I already had a head start there because I already had a mailing list that I'd started to grow. I already knew how to advertise and so forth.

What I did, it was January 2020, and I was at a point in my day job—I was a technical writer, I wrote about WordPress—and WordPress was in the throes of changing the programming language that it used.

I was either going to have to go back and learn JavaScript, or I was going to have to double down on the publishing and make a success of that. I was definitely keener on making a success of my writing than I was on learning JavaScript.

I was inspired by people like JD Kirk, Barry Hutchison and LJ Ross, and looking at what they'd done and the kind of books that they'd written.

Something that was becoming very prominent at the time was, in crime, the idea of the location being a key element and almost being like another character.

So my first series, which I wrote in 2020, was set in Birmingham. Those were the Zoe Finch books. I wrote those in Birmingham because I knew Birmingham like the back of my hand.

It actually turned out quite convenient because it was lock down and I couldn't have gone on research trips anywhere. I was using Google Maps the whole time. I was probably responsible for half the statistics on people using Google Maps that they do at the government briefings every evening.

What I did was I read authors of crime and thrillers who were very successful. So I read books by some of my comp authors who were published by the smaller digital-first publishers and the big indies. I read books by people like James Patterson and Dan Brown.

I was inspired to do that by, I can't remember the name of it, but I think it's Six Figure Author by Chris Fox. He said, don't read your reviews, read your competitors reviews, and find out what it is that readers love or hate.

Sometimes what readers hate will be exactly the same as what they love because you'll get some readers who are turned off by the very thing that attracts other readers to the book. So I did that, and the thing that came out was the locations and the characters.

So I spent quite a lot of time identifying what my locations were going to be. Also a lot of time working on my characters and my central team, and I developed them. Then when the Zoe Finch series came to a close, I thought, right, where am I going to go next?

I'd been visiting Dorset since I was a child. I first went there as a baby. My parents had a caravan down there. So I know Dorset really, really well. So I thought, I'll go down to Dorset.

It felt quite risky moving onto another series, because Zoe Finch books had sold enough for me to be able to give up my day job. They hadn't been hugely successful, but I was a full time author, which was what I wanted to achieve. So I moved to Dorset, and it turned out to be the best thing I ever did because a lot more people want to read about Dorset than want to read about Birmingham.

Joanna: For Americans who might not know, it's a lovely coastal area, as opposed to a gritty, massive city.

Rachel: Exactly. Imagine reading about Maine as against reading about Boston, I suppose. The other thing that worked really well was the character that I moved to Dorset, DCI Lesley Clarke, she was Zoe's boss in the Zoe Finch books. So she was a DCI.

I always enjoy writing sidekicks. I sometimes find sidekicks are a bit more real in my mind because I can see them through the eyes of the protagonist. I loved writing Lesley, so I thought, I'm going to move this grumpy middle-aged Brummie down to Dorset and see how she copes and what they make of her.

People love Lesley. Some people hate her. I've sat in author events where people have had arguments over whether they like Lesley or not, but as far as I'm concerned, that means she's real in their minds whether they like her or not. She is quite grumpy and she doesn't suffer fools gladly.

So, yes, it turned out to be the best decision I ever could have made to write a series in Dorset. I thought I was bringing that series to a close nine books in because there was a series arc. That's another thing I always do in my books, there is always a series arc.

That might be police corruption or the death of a major character, well, who would have been a major character. So it's Lesley's predecessor. That came to a close, and I thought, right, that's it, I'm done with these books.

I constantly kept having people say, is Lesley coming back? When are you going to write Lesley again? I had about a year of that, so I'm now writing another nine books in that series.

The paperbacks will be published by Hera. So Hera have republished the Dorset Crime existing books in print, but they'll be publishing them as new books in paperback. So that'll be really interesting because I'll be getting new books into bookshops.

Rachel: Yes. So Hera, they are a small publisher, a bit like Bookouture. So Keshini Naidoo, she used to work for Bookouture. She was the woman who discovered Angela Marsons.

What I like about Hera is that they are all about mainstream fiction written by diverse authors. So their authors are not the normal run of the mill people you expect to be published by traditional publishers.

They were interested in my books because Lesley is gay, and I always have gay characters in my books. It's working really well working with Hera. The way they work, and their ethos and their values fit really well with mine.

Because they're small, I'm sure I get a lot more attention than I would if I was at a bigger publisher. We just work really well together.

Joanna: So I want to come onto something—

[Press release here on Amazon]

That is astounding. Like, how did that feel, by the way?

Rachel: Oh, it felt amazing. It was really funny because the evening that it happened, JM Dalgliesh was number eight, and I was number nine. He posted a screenshot of it to Facebook where he cut it off under his name, and I thought, oh, I'm not on that list. Then Sally, my wife, she went and found the press release and said, “There you are on the list, you're just underneath him!” So I joked about it with him afterwards.

That felt like a huge achievement because there's some really big names there, and also there are people who've been writing a lot longer than me.

It's only been three and a bit years that I've been publishing my crime books, and to have sold enough to be one of the most read authors in KU in that time, it felt great.

My readers were lovely about it, because obviously I put in my newsletter and my social media, and readers were so pleased for me.

I refer to my readers as my reader army. I do things like when I've got a new edition of a paperback coming out, or a new book coming out, and I want them to buy in bookshops, I'll say to them, “Right, you're my reader army. I want you to go into bookshops and ask them to stock it.”

They'll do it. They want to help me out. So, yes, it was great.

Joanna: I wondered because you're so big on KU, which is obviously eBook first, you mentioned Shopify earlier, and also now books in bookstores.

Rachel: Yes, that is a process that we're still working on and experimenting with. So Alex, who works on my advertising, he is experimenting with various ad campaigns that run to the store.

One of the main benefits of running ads to a store, as I know you've mentioned on your podcast, is the fact that you can use conversion ads instead of traffic ads in Facebook. So Facebook actually knows if they're converting, and can therefore run better targeted ads.

It also means that we have access to data. So I know who's buying books, and I can retarget them, and I can upsell and so forth.

Where I've had the most success is in audiobooks because I found that people seem to be less wedded to listen to an audiobook on Audible than they are to getting their eBooks on Amazon. People find it difficult to understand that you can read a book on your Kindle that you haven't bought from Amazon.

So I've been pushing quite hard on audiobooks. I've been pushing the fact that I have a release date for my audiobooks on my website, which is the same as the release date for the eBook and the paperback.

It's a reliable release date. If somebody pre-orders it from me, they will get their file on that date. Whereas Audible, I can't set a release date, I can't set a pre order. I found that starting with audiobooks has been quite successful.

My next experiment I'm running, right at the end of this month it starts. I'm running a kind of Kickstarter, but I'm running it on my website instead of on Kickstarter. So it will be a two week period. So I've already got a sign up page for people to be notified when it goes live, and it'll be a two week period.

I've produced a coffee table book, which is Rachel McLean's Dorset Crime Trail. It's the story of each of the locations from each of the books in the series and why I chose to write there. It gives you information about the location, but it's told through the lens of me doing research trips to those locations. It's very anecdotal. There are stories from my childhood in those locations and that kind of thing. Lots of photos, including stock imagery, but also my photos as well.

So that's going to be exclusive to my website for two weeks, and there's going to be bundles and so forth, and add ons, just like you would with Kickstarter.

I figured that it was probably easier, because I'm already trying to educate my readers to use my website, to continue doing that than to add another platform in right now. Crime readers tend to be older and tend to be less likely to be on Kickstarter.

I got the idea for doing this from Elana Johnson, who has done the same thing. She writes cozy—well, not cozy—sweet romance, and so the demographic of her readers is quite similar to mine. She has run “Kickstarters” on her website very successfully, so we'll see how it goes.

I mean, obviously it's the first one, and there'll be teething problems and so forth. It's turning out to be a lot more work than a normal launch. I was on a video call to Rebecca, my publishing manager, yesterday, and we were trying to work out all the dates.

So it was like, right, when does it go live? When do we have to place the orders? When do we send them out? When will they eventually be released? Bookshops want them as well, but I don't want bookshops getting them until after the Kickstarter.

Joanna: Which is not a Kickstarter.

Rachel: Which is not a Kickstarter. A Kickstarter, non-Kickstarter, yes.

Kickstarter is a brand. It's a different website. It's a very different model.

What you're talking about, and what I think I'm going to do for a book as well next year, is that sort of pre-launch on your website for premium editions that you print after the pre-orders happen. Whereas indies are normally used to you can do a pre-order with an eBook, and it's done, and it just goes out, and not a big deal.

I think that's great, and I'm super jealous because I totally want to do a book like that around locations, but I have so many.

Rachel: Oh, and I know the problems that you've been having with your photographs of churches.

Joanna: Yes, photo permissions. Oh my goodness. Someone's just said to me that you just hire someone and they do all of that. It just takes a lot longer than I'm used to, but I think that's really interesting. On the audiobook—

Rachel: Well, as soon as somebody makes the purchase in Shopify, BookFunnel then sends them the email with the file.

Joanna: Just so people know, this is another app that people have to have. They have to have the BookFunnel app to listen to the audio. It's fascinating to me that what you're saying is people are more, I guess, happy to download a new app for audio than they are to consider using BookFunnel to get an eBook onto their Kindle device, which, again, is not difficult at all.

I think the more people like you and me and everyone, the more people who are actually educating people on buying direct, the easier it's going to be. We have to remember, this is only year one or two of the kind of move into selling direct.

Fast forward five years, 10 years, where will we be then? I think it'll be a very interesting ecosystem of what we can do with these direct things. I love that you're doing so much.

So on that, I do want to ask you as well, authors love to use tools. Now, you're working with a lot of freelancers. You're working with different publishers. You use different tools. One of the big discussions right now for authors is AI. So I wondered—

Rachel: I use ChatGPT to help with when I'm coming up with ideas for books and when I'm brainstorming. So the first book in my Petra McBride series, the one that's set in Paris, I had an idea which was around artworks in the Louvre.

So I needed to find artworks with particular themes, and I needed to expand on those themes and think about how those might relate to characters. So I spent a day just on my phone with Chat, just throwing ideas back and forth, and getting it to identify artworks in the Louvre that might fit with this idea.

Then getting it to tell me about areas of Paris that exemplified the kind of people who fit with the themes of these artworks. Then once I'd done that, I sort of shortlisted and came up with a final list of the artworks that I want to use in the book.

So what I then got ChatGPT to do was give me a walking route around the Louvre which will take me to all of those artworks in the most efficient way possible. So that when I go there on my research trip, I don't have to wander around the Louvre for hours trying to find all these places.

Also, I wanted it to find artworks that would be near the Mona Lisa, for example, but that's not the Mona Lisa. So nobody's looking at this other artwork, and that kind of thing. I got it to identify what they were near and what else would be going on in that part of the building.

So it's really useful for that kind of thing, so I use it at that point. Also, when I've got a whole load of ideas for a book and I'm trying to pull them all together into a coherent structure, I'll put what I've got into ChatGPT and get it to help me shuffle all the parts together and put them into a coherent structure.

I do a lot of the start of my location research often on ChatGPT. So I'm currently writing a book set on the Isle of Arran in Scotland. Before I went there, I spent a lot of time on ChatGPT. It's based around archeology, this book, researching archeological sites, the history of the island and so forth.

Then getting it to give me sources because sometimes it does make things up. You have to be aware of that. So getting it to give me links and sources, and then delving into those, and then finding places I could visit.

I also use Novelcrafter. So I use Novelcrafter with Chat and with Claude to help me with editing. I'll put a first draft through a pass of a fine tune that I've created in Novelcrafter before I then do the second draft. So it cleans it up for me.

I've developed a fine tune that is based on my own writing, where I fed that into ChatGPT. I'll put my first draft in and get it to run that fine tune, so it just tidies up all the messy bits before I do the second draft.

I'll often dictate a first draft, or I dictate my newsletter quite a lot. So I'll do my newsletter when I'm sitting in my car waiting to pick my son up from college or something, and I dictate it.

I use Otter.ai to dictate because I find that Otter is really good for the accuracy of picking up the right words, but it doesn't add punctuation. It doesn't add speech or anything. It adds punctuation as if you're in a meeting, and assumes that you're different speakers, instead of adding dialogue.

ChatGPT, when you give it something in Otter, it's really good at working out what's actually going on in terms of what's dialogue and what's not, and adding the paragraph breaks in the right place, and punctuation. So I do that as well, and that speeds things up, both with fiction and with the newsletter.

Joanna: I love that. I do think those of us, like you and I, we're pretty heavy on our research, and we use places. Like you say, if you use places and art, I also have a lot of art history in my books, and archeology and all of that. It does just really help to have a creative collaborator to help you.

I often will do exactly the same as you. I was thinking listening to you, and this is the point with AI to me as well, you are leveraging a tool to make more Rachel. Like Rachel more Rachel, for you to put more stuff out into the world.

You're also working with other humans who are helping you put more Rachel out into the world. I've also been wondering about how many issues people have with AI. I wonder, partly, if it's to do with creative confidence.

You are a confident writer. You've written millions of words at this point, as have I. Your tone of voice, my tone of voice around AI, it has no emotion. Or the only emotion it has is happy and positive. Like this is a great tool, this is really helpful to me, and I can do more with this.

I guess how I'm thinking about this is we're confident that what we produce is our work. Also, you came out of technical writing, and I was an IT consultant.

Rachel: I think so. I think the fact that I worked in IT before means that my default position with any new tech is to want to explore it and see what it can do for me, rather than to be scared of it.

I also believe very strongly that AI in itself is not good or bad. It is just a tool, and if good or bad things are done with it, that is because of the people who are doing those things. So if people use AI unethically, that's not the fault of the AI. That's the fault of the way that those people are either using or configuring the AI.

You talk a lot about doubling down on being human. Obviously, I'm using AI so it's not the full extent of my creative process, by any means. I'm adding on. I would never release something that had just been written by AI. I always work on it as well.

I also don't release books that have just been worked on by one of my co-authors. I work on them as well because I'm adding that Rachel. I mean, I actually call it Rachelifying.

So it's that thing of being visibly human and being yourself. So, interestingly, I've been using TikTok, but I hardly ever put videos out on TikTok, but I use TikTok as a video editor. TikTok's editing tools are really good, and you don't have to pay for them.

If you download the video that you've created before you publish it, you can download it without any TikTok watermarks on it, and then I'll use it on Instagram or my newsletter or whatever. So I've been doing quite a lot of video, like little snippets of me.

A thing that's becoming quite a part of my brand is me walking along a beach somewhere, talking about what the weather's doing, and where I'm going today to research the next book. Also, where I'm going to dump a body.

If you ask my readers, what does Rachel do? It would be she finds a beauty spot, and she dumps a body in it.

It's me, standing in the crime scene, telling people, “Right, this is where this is going to happen. This is where the tents are going to go.” Forensics and all that sort of stuff. It just brings it to life for readers, and I think makes them feel part of that world that I'm creating as well.

Joanna: I love that. I keep thinking, yes, I must do more video, and then I just never do. I was looking at some of yours because they're on your Shopify store as well on your book pages, and I really think that is great.

I mean, it kept me on your Shopify store page to watch a video, which gives all the signals to the algorithms or whatever. So I think, actually, it's a really strong thing to do that. So I urge people to go and have a look at one of your videos.

As much as I think you're amazing, I mean, it's not like they're amazing professional videos. They're pretty human.

Rachel: That's part of the brand is. So, for example, I recently bought a gimbal, which is a stick thing that you put your phone on and video yourself, and it supposedly self-levels and follows you as you move around. Sometimes it goes wrong, and sometimes I don't put my phone in it properly, and the balance goes off, and it just goes a bit weird.

Instead of thinking, oh, I need to edit that out, I'll just laugh about it and say, “Oh, it's doing it again. I've got to work out this gimbal,” and that just becomes part of what readers enjoy, that you're not trying to create this really polished thing.

I do a lot of video where I'm somewhere where it's windy, and I'm yelling to try and be heard. I have got little lavalier mics with the little fluffy thing on to stop the wind noise. I'm sure there's a technical term for it.

Joanna: It's called the dead cat.

Rachel: The dead cat, that's it. Oh goodness.

Even so, when you're standing on top of a mountain in Scotland filming a video of a crime scene, there's going to be wind noise, and I'm sort of yelling into the camera.

Sometimes I'll end up just doing a voiceover afterwards, but people quite enjoy that. They find it quite funny that I'm about to get blown into the sea somewhere or something like that. So, yes, I think that lack of professionalism.

I would say to people, if you're planning on making video, don't worry at all about it being polished. Just record yourself in a natural way, as if you would if you were sending a video update to one of your friends or family or something like that. Just make it you.

Joanna: Well, I'm excited to talk to you again in like two and a half years. So it's been two and a half years since we last spoke, and in two and a half years, it'll be very interesting to see where you are then because your trajectory is looking pretty good.

Rachel: Yes, they can find everything at RachelMclean.com, which is where those videos are. All my books are available for sale there as well, and my newsletter.

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

Rachel: Thank you.

The post Scaling An Author Business With Rachel McLean first appeared on The Creative Penn.

The Creative Penn Podcast just hit 10 million downloads as reported by my audio host, Blubrry!

The podcast is also the main content on my YouTube channel @thecreativepenn, which has had over 3.9 million views, so the total could be closer to 14m. I'm pretty happy with that, so thanks for listening!

Here are some fun stats, and then I share 7 lessons learned that are also applicable for authors and other creatives.

You can find The Creative Penn Podcast on your favourite podcast app, or the backlist and links are here.

My first episode went out on 15 March 2009, and there are now 775 episodes of the podcast. Links to all at TheCreativePenn.com/podcast.

The show has been downloaded in 229 countries with the top three countries being the USA (61%), UK (12%), and Australia (7%), and the most surprising being 2 downloads from Antarctica!

The four most downloaded episodes through Blubrry are as follows:

The four most watched/listened to on YouTube are quite different:

Why are these numbers so different? An audio podcast generally gets a relatively stable number of people listening every week, so there is less variability in listening numbers. YouTube is based on search and algorithms, so some videos get a LOT of views and others get almost nothing.

You don't need to know everything in advance in order to write a book, or publish, or start a podcast. Just get started and learn and adapt along the way.

I recorded my first podcast interview in March 2009 over a landline, which I put on speakerphone, next to which I placed a handheld digital audio recorder.

I didn't really know what I was doing, but despite my nerves, I was still able to interview a breakout self-published author in the Australian book scene, Rachael Bermingham. (I lived in Brisbane, Australia at the time.)

I've always done extensive research on my guests and provided questions in advance, but my interview skills have definitely improved since then — both as a host and a guest. Everything gets better with practice, and that includes your writing, too!

My tools have also changed. My recording went from a phone to Skype to Zoom and now Riverside.fm, and I've upgraded my microphone (and pop filter) several times.

I used to just record in any room with the accompanying echo noises Later, I moved into a padded cupboard, and now I have a home audio booth where I record my solo episodes, weekly introduction, and my audiobooks.

My editing tools went from Audacity to Amadeus Pro, and I now use Descript.com to edit the main audio before mastering with Amadeus Pro and Auphonic.

I still use the same WordPress plugin, Blubrry, which is one of the oldest and most reputable independent podcast hosts. I have always paid for hosting the feed, first on AWS and then on Blubrry itself. As ever, I really love my independence!

If you're not paying for a product, then question how that company is making money. Is your content actually the product? (as is the case for most social media platforms).

If you try to write a book in a market you don't read, you will likely get it wrong and readers won't resonate with the content or buy more from you.

If you start a podcast without an understanding of what the audience want, then you will fail in a similar way. But you can avoid this by BEING the audience you seek to connect with.

When I started The Creative Penn Podcast in 2009, I had self-published a couple of non-fiction books, and I'd learned so much from those initial failures that I wanted to share what I'd learned.

I was also really lonely and I didn't have any author friends or a community. I wanted a way to virtually meet and talk to other authors so I could learn from those ahead of me on the path— and maybe make some friends.

Over the years since, I've continued to interview people who I want to talk to and learn from as well as share my own lessons learned from the author journey.

I never designed a podcast for a target market. I didn't have to, because I was that market. It's the same with my books. I don't write to market. I just write books about what I learn (non-fiction), or stories I would want to read (fiction).

The content of the podcast has changed over time, and these days, I focus much more on the business of being an author as well as the writing craft.

But I'm still an author and a podcaster, and I'm still learning things, so I am still my own audience and the downloads demonstrate the content is clearly still of value, because I am still getting downloads of the show, and still selling books.

Back in 2009, podcasting wasn't popular, and it didn't really move into the mainstream until the true crime podcast Serial took off in 2014.

Between 2009 and 2014, it often felt like I was howling into the wind, as tumbleweed rolled past in the empty desert. Those were also the years when self-publishing was considered ‘vanity press' and when authors who went indie were generally shunned and considered to be desperate wannabes instead of smart business people.

Thankfully, that has mostly changed, and the fights about indie vs trad have dissipated, to be replaced by fights about AI and whatever is the latest drama in Authorlandia!

From 2014, my traffic started to take off and grew for a few years before leveling off and has remained pretty steady over the last 5+ years. Episodes now get between 8000 – 20,000 downloads, depending on the topic.

But like everyone, I started with no audience, no readers, no listeners, no books, no income from my creative work. I just worked steadily for years, producing content in different ways.

Slowly, people discovered the show and my books, mainly through word of mouth and SEO (search engine optimisation) since I have never advertised the podcast.

So take heart if you are just getting started. Create, put your content out there, in whatever medium you choose, and over time, you will attract an audience.

The Creative Penn Podcast really has changed my life in so many ways, and the relationships I've built are perhaps the most important part.

It helped me find other indie authors who were doing what I wanted to do, and I was able to meet many of them online and at conferences. Some of those initial conversations on the show turned into IRL friendships, and others turned into business opportunities and collaborations.

There's also the relationships with you, the listeners of the show, even if I don't know all of your names.

Audio is such a personal and intimate medium, and long-form audio even more so. You know so much about me — more than my family sometimes! — and when we meet in person, or you email with your thoughts, I know there is more of a connection because you listen to the show.

Thank you for making me part of your weekly listening time!

As an author, you need other writers for a sustainable long-term career. You need people who understand the challenges of the creative life. You need a community, even if you're an introvert, happy working on your own most of the time.

You don't need a podcast for this. You can find people through online groups, going to conferences, and social media.

But then take it a step further. We are humans, we need other people!

If you resonate with someone, connect with them for a coffee offline, or have a private zoom call. This is ‘friend dating' and it's something you'll need to do multiple times over your career as you change, your friends change, and maybe you change locations and life circumstances.

(Obviously, this needs to be appropriate to your life and family situation, as well as your stage on the author journey.)

For the first few years of the podcast, I didn't do an introduction. I just jumped straight into the interview. After all, no one wanted to know about me or my life — but it turned out they did!

A listener emailed and suggested I do an introduction as a way for people to get to know me as well as my guests, and years later, I know many of you come for the introduction and might not stay for the interview.

I've changed it up over the years adding the different sections around news and AI updates as well as my personal journey, but it's a core part of my show now.

As a listener to other podcasts, I also understand that listeners come back each week for the host and their take on whatever the topic is. Guests may borrow part of that attention and may have book sales or a new fan based on the episode, but listeners return again and again to the same show for the host.

To foster this kind of connection, whether it's as a podcast host or as an author, you have to double down on being human. You have to share personal things, whether that's the inspiration for your books and stories, or photos from your life, which you can put in your email newsletter, and/or social media.

You need to do this, but you get to set your boundaries. For example, I talk about my husband Jonathan sometimes, but we don't share a last name and he has his own career, so I respect his privacy and don't share our personal photos. However, our cats, Cashew and Noisette, and photos from my research trips are all over social media!

Some authors talk about their kids but give them code-names and don't share pictures for privacy reasons. Some authors with pseudonyms just share pictures from their garden or things they like, giving an insight into them as a person without revealing identifying details.

You have to decide on your boundaries, but do it early, when no one knows who you are. Because if a book takes off or you go viral on social media, or something else happens to bring you attention, you want to have privacy in place to protect yourself.

When I decided to become a full-time author, I always intended it to be a viable business. I was not going to leave my six-figure consulting job to be a poor author in a garret, so I planned my creative business — and then took action towards that goal. [More on this in Your Author Business Plan.]

I started writing seriously in 2006, left my job in 2011, and in 2015, I made six figures, and then the following year, multi-six-figures, which I have sustained ever since across multiple streams of income. Check out my timeline for more details.

The podcast was originally designed as part of that business plan as a marketing channel to being people to my books and courses, which at the time were all non-fiction based.

Podcasting works very well for marketing non-fiction books, and guesting on shows is a great way to reach readers, even if you don't want to start a show yourself.

The early years of The Creative Penn Podcast did achieve the goal of marketing, but around 2015, the hosting costs were getting expensive, and it was taking more time as I moved from ad hoc to a weekly show.

Amanda Palmer's book, The Art of Asking came out in 2014, which focused on building genuine connections with her audience and personal stories about crowdfunding and subscriptions. It talks about embracing the discomfort of asking, and highlights how openness can foster deeper relationships and support creativity.

Amanda is VERY open, down to doing nude pics and letting her fans write on her body — not really my style! I'm also (very) British and we are not good at the hard sell, and never want to sound ‘desperate,' so I struggled with knowing how I could ask for money for the show after years of it being free.

That year, I talked to Jim Kukral about aspects of selling direct through our own stores as well as crowdfunding. The interview is just as current now as it was back then, especially as it seems indie authors are finally embracing the direct model.

Jim: The whole concept of patrons goes back thousands of years. Michelangelo had a patron, right? Patrons are a very important part of the artist/storytelling community, and we've gotten away from it, and we've gotten into this transaction based hard sticker price world with e-commerce, right?

I guess the whole entire concept of patronage is letting people support you. It doesn't have to be one wealthy patron who gave you a stipend to do your art for the next 30 years. You could have a thousand people, or fifty people each giving you a little bit of money that can help support you. And I believe that every artist and content creator should be trying this 'cause it's an amazingly powerful movement.

You need to use words like support. Don't ask for handouts. Say it's my content. I'm giving it to you. If you would like to support me and the work that I do, then you can go here.

It's a little psychological switch in a person's head when they hear, ‘you can support me,' as opposed to ‘you can donate to me.' You have so many fans who love to listen to the podcast. Would 2000 people give you $1 every time you do a podcast?

Jo: And that's the thing, because I've now got transcripts and there's the time it takes. There is an amount I would want to make just to cover costs, let alone anything else. But I have been thinking about this — let's talk about the psychology of asking. I'm very British. I want to talk about money, but it is a very difficult thing for many people to even be thinking about these things.

Jim: This is a tough thing, because we've been told and taught that it's like begging, right?

Jo: I don't wanna do that!

Jim: Yeah, but you have to change your mindset, right?

Jo: It's interesting because I just wrote down like when I thought, why am I having problem? The problem I have is being independent. And that's so crazy because that's what we're talking about.

I mean, like even my mum, I would never even ask my mum for money. I had a job at 13 and earned the money that I needed to do to for stuff. And I've always felt that way but what you're saying is actually is to be independent, we need to develop that kind of trust.

I mean, this is like an emotional risk though, isn't it? What if I put myself out there and nobody catches me and I hit the floor?

Jim: I think it's going to depend on who your true fans are and if you've really connected with them or not. This will not work for people who create content that's not amazing.

People are fans of things that really entertain them or solve their problems. So if you're not creating something amazing, this will never work for anyone which is why it's the level playing field, only the people who really are producing something that people want are going to be the ones who are gonna be able to do this.”

Click here for the whole interview with Jim on selling direct. Jim is a professional speaker and non-fiction self-help author and used to co-host the Sell More Books Show with Bryan Cohen. You can still find him at JimKukral.com]

Amanda's book and the discussion with Jim helped me reframe the podcast.

In 2015, I added corporate sponsor ad reads with the earliest being Kobo Writing Life, Draft2Digital, and ProWritingAid, still sponsors of the show, and companies I use personally and am more than happy to recommend. I later expanded to add Ingram Spark, FindawayVoices, and also Publisher Rocket, and Written Word Media.

I've been approached by companies who offer more money in terms of sponsorship, but who aren't a good fit for the show, and it's important to me that I only advertise those companies I continue to use and recommend.

THANKS to my corporate sponsors — you are fantastic!

Also in 2015, I started my subscription at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn and this started as a way for listeners to support the show and get an extra solo episode a month where I answered Patron questions.

The top tier of Patrons also get my non-fiction ebooks as part of the subscription. I also occasionally did extra things but the main focus was supporting the show.

At the end of 2023, as part of my 15 year pivot, I changed the Patreon into almost a separate Community where I now share extra weekly content, mainly on using various AI tools, as well as writing craft and author business audio and videos. I've also started doing live Office Hours and I still do the monthly Q&A audio.

This has dramatically accelerated growth and I now have over 1200 paid Patrons, some of whom have said they would stick around in that Community even if I ended the podcast (don't worry, that's not happening at the moment!)

THANK YOU, Patrons! You are amazing! Come and join us at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn where you can get everything for less than a coffee a month, or a couple of coffees if you're feeling generous.

I'm not the only podcaster in the indie author community, but I'm pretty sure I'm the longest running at this point!

Since I started my show in March 2009, there have been many other podcasts that have started and ended — and the same is true of the author community.

There have been authors with breakout successes who disappeared as fast as they arrived. Others stuck around for years, but eventually faded away. There are some who are still here, many who started before me, some who came after me, who have stuck it out through the good times and the bad.

There are many good reasons people end a podcast or decide being an author is not for them. But there is only one reason to keep doing either.

It has to be worth it.

The definition of ‘worth it' differs for everyone, but for me, there are a couple of reasons I continue to host The Creative Penn Podcast.

(a) Patrons and listeners tell me it is still useful and — even though I am an ‘older' voice in the industry now — I still have something to contribute to the conversation, especially in the era of generative AI.

Perhaps my longevity even gives me some authority because I've seen so much drama rise and fall over the years, and I know ‘this too shall pass.'

(b) I'm also still learning, and my #1 Clifton Strengths is Learner! Every conversation I have that makes me think differently, or helps my craft or business, is worth it, and to be able to help others by recording the conversation is an added bonus!

(c) It makes great money! With corporate sponsors and the Patreon, in addition to affiliate links and marketing my books and other things, The Creative Penn Podcast is a significant business on its own. I love having multiple streams of income, so it's worth it financially to continue.

Some people might say that ‘loving' something is enough. That might carry you through for a while, but it's not sustainable for the long term.

I loved my Books and Travel Podcast and happily did that for a few years. The evergreen episodes are all still on the feed and the transcripts are on my blog.

But as much as I loved the conversations and connection, I could not figure out a decent business model for it, and I learned enough about the travel writing industry to see that it was not a good fit for me.

There's nothing wrong with ending a show, and there's nothing wrong with deciding you don't want to keep pushing in an author career either.

Everyone changes over time, and what is ‘worth it' for you at one book or the first 20 episodes of a podcast will be quite different by book 10, or a podcast you are still trying to do years later without enough reward.

But if you do stay the course, your time in the market becomes an almost unstoppable force on its own. With time and persistence and continuous creation over years, you gather readers and listeners and income streams, and together, they snowball into something bigger than you ever thought they might be.

I'm not promising I will be here for 20 million downloads — who knows how long that will take! — but for now, The Creative Penn Podcast continues on, Creatives, and I hope you will keep listening as take another step forward on the author journey.

Let me know your thoughts or any questions in the comments. Thanks for listening!

The post 7 Lessons Learned From Over 10 Million Downloads Of The Creative Penn Podcast first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Can you be successful as an author across different genres and different pen names? How do traditional publishing and going indie compare? How can you diversify into multiple streams of income as an author? With Emily E.K. Murdoch.

In the intro, Planning for retirement [Self-Publishing Advice]; my list of money books; Red flags in serialised (and other) fiction contracts [Self-Published Advice]; The Author's Guild partners with Created by Humans for AI licensing; Nobel Prizes for AI-related research [The Economist]; Last chance for Blood Vintage, and where did the idea come from?; plus, what I'm working on next.

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 

Emily E K Murdoch is the USA Today bestselling author of over 100 historical romances across medieval, western and regency, and mixed between steamy and sweet. She's also the author of nonfiction history book Regina: The Queens Who Could Have Been under Emily Murdoch Perkins.

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 Emily at EmilyEKMurdoch.com.

Joanna: Emily E K Murdoch is the USA Today bestselling author of over 100 historical romances across medieval, western and regency, and mixed between steamy and sweet. She's also the author of nonfiction history book Regina: The Queens Who Could Have Been under Emily Murdoch Perkins. So welcome to the show, Emily.

Emily: Thank you so much for having me. It's a real joy to be here.

Joanna: Oh, yes. There's so much to talk about, but first up—

Emily: Well, I am one of those authors who very much grew up knowing that I wanted to be a writer. It's a family legend that my end of year report at five years old includes the phrase, “Emily keeps telling us she's going to be an author.”

So I very much started strong, but it was one of those things that was always going to be in the future. I was chatting about my dreams, about wanting to be an author, wanting to write, with a boyfriend as we were coming up to university graduation.

I said, “Look, I will be an author one day. It's absolutely going to happen.” You know, with all the confidence of a 21 year old. “But, obviously that is something I'll do when I'm older. I'll have to do a proper job first. So maybe in my 40s, 50s, 60s, when I've had a career, that's what I'll do.”

He looked at me and was like, “I don't understand why you've got to wait. I don't see why you can't write a book right now.” And reader, I married him! I also published for the first time two years later.

Joanna: Ooh. Everyone's like, okay, okay. So first up, excellent, that you married such a supportive person. I know some people listening will be like, oh my goodness. They're jealous because I think that's quite rare for someone to say that. Let's get into this hundred books. Give us an idea how many years ago that was and how you then progressed.

Emily: My first book came out in 2013, so that's 11 years ago. It was written and finished the year before then. I thought, I'll be smart about this. I'll take it to a publisher who really understands historical romance, which was the novel. So I actually submitted to Harlequin, which is part of HarperCollins.

I'm going to be honest, I didn't understand how slow traditional publishing was. I waited six months for a reply, which to me, was an age. Eventually I got tired, and I withdrew it, and I took it elsewhere. I do wonder sometimes what might have been if I'd stuck it out.

I do actually now publish, ironically, with Harlequin HarperCollins. So I've kind of come full circle in that way. So, yes, 11 years. 11 years, and I went full time after eight. So it was very much an overnight success with an eight year slow burn.

I feel like a lot of romance authors—the books are shorter, aren't they? So that is one aspect. Tell us about that.

Emily: Yes and no. Some of my historical romances are novellas. They're 30,000 to 40,000 words, so they are on the shorter end. One of my historical romance series is at least over 100,000 – 110,000 per book. So there's a real spread in terms of how long I write.

There are certain things you can teach about being a fast author. It's something that I do teach, and I do mentor and advise other authors on, but there is something I think innate. I don't want people to ever feel like they should be forcing themselves to write faster.

Having said that, I write 10,000 words a day, every working day. So that enables me to build up quite a backlog. It means that I can rapid release, whatever that looks like for you. Some of my rapid releases have been a book every three months. I've done a book every month.

I did a series once which was 12 Christmas novellas based on the 12 Days of Christmas song, and I released a novella a week for 12 weeks. October, November, December, the lead up to Christmas one year. So there's a real range there.

Joanna: I think this is so interesting because when you first said to your now husband, “I'll write it one day,” he said, “do it now,” you didn't just write one book. I feel like that's the other part of it—

Did you meet other people along the way who were like, how are you doing this? Like, shouldn't you just write one book for 10 years?

Emily: There are certainly people who maybe are new to publishing, or don't know publishing at all, and have this kind of Patrick Rothfuss or George R R Martin, “oh, it takes a decade to write a good book” mindset, and that's true sometimes.

Sometimes really great books come out of a decade of working, and reworking, and editing, and putting it down and picking it up again.

Really good books can also be written really fast. That has been a challenge for me in my craft because I can write very fast, and then I hate editing. So it's very easy for me to be tempted to go, well, it's written. I mean, it's written, my editor can worry about fixing it.

Actually, over the last, I would say five years, I've really tried to work on my editing myself, my own words, because actually there is that 10%, 20%, 30% improvement that I can bring before it even goes to another set of eyes.

Actually, that's when things slow down for me. The writing itself is very fast, but the editing is where that refinement and that polishing comes, as much as I loathe it. I'm quite open about the fact that I really struggle. It's just self-criticism, which is not something many creators enjoy.

Joanna: That's so interesting. I think there's people who love first draft like you, and people who love editing, like me. I feel like my first draft is not fun. I love the research, I love the ideas, I love kind of noodling around. Then—

I feel like my self-edit is where a lot of the work is done. So I think that there are two types of people in that kind of writing.

Emily: I completely agree. I do wonder if we mapped plotters versus pantsers across people who love first drafts or people who love edits, I think there'll be a strong correlation.

I love plotting. I'm a deep plotter. I plot very heavily before I write. So when I write, I write very fast, partly because I know exactly where I'm going. I even have dialogue snippets, descriptions, every scene is outlined. All I'm doing is following the pegs in a line along a road, and I know exactly where I'm going.

So when it comes to edits, it feels like I'm second guessing all the previous work I've put in. I've got lots and lots of author friends who, like yourself, are discovery writers. They're pantsing.

For them, the edits are where they spot all the clues that their subconscious laid down for them that they didn't notice at the time. So that is really joyful for them. I do wonder if there's a correlation there.

Joanna: I think you're probably right. I also think that people who do plot are more consistent with the 10,000 words a day, or whatever, because you know what you're going to write.

Whereas some days I might write—well, I don't ever really write that much. Some days I'll sit down and I find I kind of have a feeling for this scene, it might happen, and then some days it won't. So for people listening, it really doesn't matter how your process works. With the finished book, you wouldn't be able to tell how someone constructed it, basically.

I do just want to ask on your research. I love research, and one of the things that “slows me down” is the amount of research I do. So, for example, Spear of Destiny, I just had to go to Austria and Germany. I have to do these research trips because that's the only way I can write.

You're a medieval historian with degrees in history and English, as well as medieval studies. You've done lots of cool stuff, especially for someone like me who geeks out on ancient manuscripts and Gothic cathedrals.

Emily: I have to say up front, I have the benefit of being born and raised in Canterbury, which has a fantastic cathedral. It's a Roman-founded medieval city. It's got walls, it's got a river going through it, a cathedral in the middle.

I then went to York and did both of my degrees, which is a Roman-based, medieval, walled, river going through it, minster in the middle. Now I've lived near Bath for the last five years, which, again, is Roman.

I have a type in terms of where I like to live, and being British does help. I know that sounds very flippant. I've got lots and lots of American friends, lots of Australian friends who are authors, who are very envious of my ability to just hop on a train and be in the place that I want to write about.

In a very dull way, and I think this might give hope to more of our international listeners, so much is digitized now. Although I do go to somewhere and kind of absorb the atmosphere, most of what I do is digital records trawling when I'm looking for something in particular.

It is not nearly as exciting as saying, “Well, I'm just going to have to go to the British Library for a week. Oh no,” but actually it is a lot more productive. It means I can usually check things within an hour or two, rather than waiting for a week in my calendar where I can head off to London.

Joanna: You write historical fiction. I mean—

Emily: This is going to sound terrible, and I want everyone to take this with a huge grain of salt, now, not very much because I'm like 70, 80, 90 books in.

When you're writing in the same time period over and over and over and over again, when you've already studied history at University for four years, when you absorb yourself in that time period through my casual reading. I'm the sort of person that relaxes by reading academic texts or popular history.

I do find that I don't end up needing to do a huge amount of research now. Now, 10 years ago, very different story. There was a lot of, to be honest, starting in Wikipedia. I know there's going to be a lot of people flinching at that. It is not what it was 20 years ago.

Actually, the references and the citations at the bottom are where you want to go. Ignore most of the actual article. If you find something that you want to know a lot about, there will be a list of sources, primary sources, secondary sources, at the bottom, go there.

Then befriend your local librarian. If you're close to a university, befriend those librarians because they have resources beyond what I could have imagined. For example, at Bristol University Library I got to handle primary sources. It was just amazing. So I don't know if that answers your question.

Joanna: I think it does. Just that walking into a library, I wrote quite a lot in the London Library. I call it the serendipity of the stacks, when you actually are in a physical library, as opposed to digitally, because you stumble across things that you may never have found otherwise.

I also think now, just in terms of online research, I've been using Perplexity a lot. So it's perplexity.ai, and it's what a lot of researchers now use instead of Google and other sources because it uses the ChatGPT, the best one. Then it also does citations. So it's really, really good.

It does have a free tier. So that's actually what I've been using now. I use that for lots of things.

Emily: As you well know, Joanna, there is a wide spread of people's comfort with AI in general. I think hearing about something that cites where the information is coming from, I think is going to put a lot of fears to rest for people who want to use that sort of tool. That would always worry me, that I would be using something that I would be not knowing where it came from.

Joanna: Yes, it's like Google powered by a lot of AI, so you can ask a lot more nuanced questions. I encourage people to give it a try. It's more like Google than anything else, basically. It's not a generative tool where you use it in any other way.

Let's get into your latest book. So I think we say here, we say Regina, right, but Americans say Regeena.

Emily: Regina. Regeena. I say both. Either is fine. I don't get worried about it.

Joanna: Okay, but the word means queen, and the subtitle is “The Queens Who Could Have Been,” which considers what queens England would have had if firstborn daughters, not firstborn sons, had inherited the throne.

Emily: I've always wanted to write nonfiction. It was one of the things when I realized that actually I was in a place where I could write full time that I wanted to add to my bow. Mostly because I am that person who corners someone at a party and is like, “But honestly, Henry II, so underrated, and here's 14 reasons why.”

I'm that person that wants to kind of dive into these stories and tell them. There's so much of history that we don't know, or isn't popular, or isn't taught. You can't teach everything in a school curriculum. There simply isn't time.

So I realized quite quickly on going full time that my nonfiction niche is that untold stories through history. I find the British Monarchy fascinating. It's almost fantasy. You have this chosen one, the idea that for someone, a child, their life is mapped out for them as the heir to the throne.

When Elizabeth II died, and Charles immediately came to the throne, I kept watching Princess Anne on screen, on the TV, being involved in all of these memorials and celebrations of her mother's life.

I thought, gosh, her life didn't have that blueprint, that purpose, that direction, but she has still grown up with all of the same restrictions. I started to wonder, what sort of women would we have had on the throne if we didn't have Richard III or Henry VIII, if we had women inheriting and not men?

All these women's stories that I don't know, and I'm a public historian who's done four years of university and has continued keeping history as part of my life. It was challenging, I will be honest, trying to research and understand who these women were, because for many of them, we don't have anything.

In the early chapters, I have to say to the reader, I don't have birth dates, death dates, marriage dates. I don't really have any evidence of what they did, where they went, or who they spoke to. There is enough sprinkled through the records that we might not expect. We'll see lists of Christmas gifts or bills for jewelry.

I think one of the challenges when I came to writing the book itself was making the decision, if there isn't enough information about the woman herself, but we know loads about the men in her life, how do we tell that story?

A story about a woman, but unfortunately, through the eyes of the men who knew her. It's been completely different to fiction. With fiction, I can get away with quite a lot, even within historical romance, but writing nonfiction has been completely different.

Joanna: Yes, very different process. I imagine that your fiction abilities helped because you've written romances with female perspectives for so long around different historical periods.

So I would expect that you are able to sort of cast your mind into this, and that you had a lot of knowledge about the time period. You just seem very well placed to write this.

Emily: Oh, well, thank you. It's very kind of you, Joanna. I think one of the joys about it is that I believe very much—you know, I don't have a PhD. I'm a public historian, I'm not an academic historian.

I'm not undergoing fresh new research. I'm finding the tales that academics have already found, but have stayed within a very niche, small subset of academics. I'm kind of bringing those out for people to hear about.

There is an opportunity in the book to say, well, I don't actually know, but based on context, based on my research, based on what people think, this is what could have been. That's the joy of this speculative element. I'm quite open. I end each section by saying, okay, so now we know this factual information about this princess, let's speculate. What do we think she would have been like as a queen?

Having that openness in the book of like, well, we don't know everything. It's okay not to look perfect or have all the answers. It's okay to say we don't know these things, so let's guess. There's a joy in that for me as an author, and I'm hoping that readers will find that as well.

Joanna: Yes, and in that way, it being speculative, and you're publishing this with a traditional publisher, The History Press. So it does seem like a slightly odd book, given that, as you say, you're essentially proposing what could have happened.

Especially as, I don't know, some of the views of romance authors might prevent a serious press from thinking of you that way.

Emily: So I have a word for the year every year to inspire myself and direct myself and build some momentum. The year that I sold this book on proposal, 2022, the word of the year was diversification.

Now I know, Joanna, that you may have heard of this! Regular listeners may be going, hmm, I sense some deja vu here. I think it was really important, and I knew that adding traditional publishing to my strings was important.

I've self-published. I've worked with independent presses. I'd offered editing services. I thought nonfiction and trad go very well together, and this might be the right time to pursue it.

I was really fortunate to secure a wonderful agent at a very prestigious agency in London. In our first meeting, which I was very excited about over Zoom, she said, “I absolutely love your vision. This book will not be done in time. We've got to can your idea.”

So, for context, my idea was to do a history of coronations, of English and British coronations, in the lead up to Charles. I thought, we've got nine months, how long could it possibly take? As a self-published person, who if I decide to put up a manuscript, it's up within three days maximum.

I knew traditional publishing timelines were long, but I had no idea how long. So she said, “Look, I really believe in you as an author. What other ideas do you have?” The story for Regina was one of those.

So it came about in a bit of a backwards way. My agent was very good at explaining, look, because it's 80% history, 20% speculative, there are going to be presses and imprints that don't want to touch this.

Ironically, there's an imprint at Penguin who absolutely loved the idea, but said they'll never get this through sales. The editorial team loved it, but they were like, we know that sales won't touch this because it's not pure history, and that is what we're meant to do.

Thankfully, so far, I'm touching all the wood, the fact that I still write and proudly write and publish romance has never come up as a problem. I'm sure there may have been some snootiness behind the scenes of imprints who didn't offer on Regina, but it's their loss. Publishing is indebted to romance, not just because it is one of the most popular genres that people read.

Joanna: It pays the bills.

Emily: It's the most popular genre to pay everyone.

So I mean, I think romance is fantastic, and that is a hill I will very much die on. I never hid that I wrote romance. I was very open about the pen name that I use for romance, and I never hid that I was going to continue writing it. I shared all the publication dates and all the commitments with my other publishers, Dragonblade, Harlequin, and HarperCollins.

I was very careful to remove any mention of exclusivity, of first refusal. I wanted to keep that freedom for myself.

Joanna: Right. So it ended up being a one book deal, did it?

Emily: It ended up being a one book deal, as per my request, because I don't want to be tied into something that I haven't tested myself. That can sound very flippant, and I'm sure if someone had offered me a five book nonfiction deal for millions of pounds, we would have had a conversation.

I can't imagine anything worse than trying to write a book that I don't believe in or I'm not excited about.

Readers are not stupid. They're going to tell very quickly that this is something that has been churned out to fulfill a contract. You see that in the music industry. People have three great albums and then a fourth terrible one.

Everyone goes, well, this feels like it's been rushed out, and it's because they've got a four album contract, and they're desperate to get out of it. So they just put out whatever they have. I never wanted to feel like I was put in the position where I was desperate to get out of a contract.

Joanna: Then, obviously, you mentioned the speed of things. You said 2022, it's now towards the end of 2024 as we are recording this. So if people listening are like, I really want a traditional deal, I currently have a book on submission.

Emily: I think we have to differentiate fiction from nonfiction because as a general rule—and we are talking generalizations here, there will always be someone who does thing a bit different—but as a general rule, fiction in the traditional world, you write the book completely, and then you try to sell it.

So the sales process can be a bit shorter because they know exactly what they're buying into. The editorial process can be shorter because it's a refinement of an existing book.

So you write almost kind of a business case for the book. What's the market? What's the audience? Why should you be writing it? What do you bring to the table? An outline of the chapters in the book. Then a sample chapter, maybe two or three.

Then when you sell it, you then have to go away and write it. So that adds a huge element to the timeline because that could take you six months. It could take you a year.

I've seen some people who sign a nonfiction contract, and then five years later the book comes out because it took them two and a half years to write.

So I think a big con for tradition publishing in general, is if you need to see the fruit of your labor and you need to start earning money quickly, trad is maybe not for you, at least for now. There's nothing stopping you coming to it later.

I think a big positive for me is that it gives me access to spaces that I haven't had access to before as an independent. Part of that is snobbery. I had a feature published in The Daily Mirror as of recording a few days ago. They would never have even considered that if I wasn't attached to a traditional publishing house.

Unfortunately, that is just the truth. I don't like it, but that is the truth. They wouldn't have considered it. I will be in bricks and mortar all over the country. None of my romance books are in bricks and mortar across the country.

So it's those little things where you have to weigh up what you want to get out of it, which sounds very mercenary. I say to my publishers all the time — 

I'm not ashamed about that. There is a time for art and beauty and craft, and then there is a time to say, but can I pay my mortgage if I sell this book?

Joanna: No, that's exactly right. I do think the definition of success, what am I actually looking to achieve? Like you said, you're accessing a different audience. That's how I feel as well. It's just another group of people you might never reach as an indie.

I think it also gives you opportunities. Well, like you mentioned the media thing, but also just different things come up. I mean, you may end up now being a speaker at history conferences or something because you have a nonfiction book in that area.

Emily: Absolutely. This makes me sound far more exciting and dramatic than it is, but I'm filming some TV next week for a subscription online service. It's not going to be on Channel Four Documentary. It's a short. It's half an hour with myself and two other historians discussing my book.

No one would have me on TV for half an hour to discuss a historical romance, sadly. Long may that become suddenly realized, but it just wouldn't happen. With nonfiction, with traditional, that is a possibility now.

That's really exciting because, as you say, I'm going to access different readers, and there's absolutely nothing to prevent those new readers from going to my back catalog and reading historical romance. I'm also bringing a lot of historical romance with me to read the nonfiction.

Joanna: Yes, well, let's talk about that then because what may stop them is that the book is coming out under another name. So you're Emily Murdoch Perkins for the nonfiction. I went on the Amazon page, and of course, this is your only book.

Someone may come along and go, “Oh, she's only written one book,” and not having a clue. So, first of all, did you choose that? Secondly—

Emily: In a previous life, a long time ago now it feels like, I was the Chief Brand Officer for a health tech company, and before that, I was an associate director for a PR company. So branding is something that I'm very comfortable in.

I really wanted to make it clear to readers that they were getting a different kind of book. It's different content, but it's also a different tone. It's very much still me, but it is different. So that was a decision that I suggested, and I actually fought for with my agent and my publishers.

From my perspective, the pros are that it really helps with separation in the writing process, especially. It helps my positioning as I'm sitting at the keyboard because I write in a slightly different tone, as I say. It also does help my agent and my editor and my publisher sales teams.

As we've already discussed, not everyone reads romance, so a lot of people have unpleasant views about it. What they didn't want, and what I didn't want, was for that new audience to be put off by the idea that she only writes smut, as I've had said to my face.

Joanna: Not that there's anything wrong with that, by the way.

Emily: I mean, I love a bit of smut. I read it, I write it. There's absolutely no problem with it, but it is unpleasant to have it thrown in your face as if it's the worst thing you could do.

Of course, a con is that you are trying to manage two pen names. Now, I've taken the decision to be very open about both of my pen names. My newsletter list, I think it's about 10,000 people now, all my socials, my website, I'm openly saying, “I'm writing this here, and I'm writing this here. You will enjoy both.”

I've kept my social media the same. So I'm piggybacking off the work and investment of the last 11 years on social and on the website.

Amazon is the difference because the algorithms, as we all know, are constantly shifting and nonsensical at times. I wanted to make it easy for Amazon to distill. Actually, my also-boughts and my comparative titles for nonfiction are different, and so I have taken a slightly different strategy.

To be quite honest, it would be a challenge to maintain two sets of social media for two pen names. I don't have the capacity to do it. Some people do, and that's amazing. I don't, and I'd rather do some things well than try to do everything poorly.

Joanna: Yes, I totally agree with you. I very much value having two names, as J.F. Penn writing my fiction, and also some nonfiction. I feel like mentally, as you say —

Also, I agree with you on the branding and the marketing. I think it helps in a lot of ways. I do have different social media, but again, it's not like I hide it. I mean, similar to you, the names are still recognizable. So I think that's fine, but certainly people should know.

I think your nonfiction book is a very different audience, potentially, to your romance.

My audience is also very different. If you were writing, I don't know, maybe you wrote a historical thriller, I don't think you would need another name, right?

Emily: No, and this is the thing, I've got a more pure historical fiction book with my agent right now. So if anyone's listening and you are an editor at any publishing house, please do get in touch.

I don't see a reason to change that. It's historical. It's fiction. It fits very neatly under the Emily E K Murdoch, Emily Murdoch branding.

With nonfiction, because it is that whole category separate, I just thought it was better to have a relatively clean break. Again, as you say, I'm not hiding it. It's still my name. It's just a slightly different configuration of my name.

Joanna: Yes, absolutely. So then what was also interesting is you have a blurb from Julia Quinn of Bridgerton fame, and everyone's like, oooh! It's saying, “A fantastic, feminist dance through history.” I was looking at this going, oooh, Julia!

I'm sure Julia gets a ton of people asking her to blurb. Many authors want a big name author on their cover. Many people listening will be like—

Emily: Isn't it absolutely wild. I couldn't believe it when the email came through. Honestly, I wonder if Julia does get a ton of people asking her to blurb.

Joanna: Oh, because she's ‘too' famous.

Emily: She's too famous. So about five months ago, I read an interview with Cher, the singer, who we absolutely love. She agreed to cameo in an animated film a few years ago, and everyone was astonished that Cher would do this.

She was asked about it, and she said, and I'm quoting exactly here, “I've been famous for a million years, and no one has ever asked me to do a voiceover.” She was so famous that no one ever asked.

I just emailed. I went to her website, and it had her agent's email for publicity requests. I just sent him the exact same email that I'd sent a few others, and I'll outline that as best I can remember.

So it was a one line about what my book was about. I said that I would love to send the PDF copy of the book, and if, big if, if they were happy to blurb it, I would need those comments by this date, but if they didn't want to, it's absolutely fine, no pressure at all. That was literally it.

I think that sometimes people are quite literal with their blurb requests. I would imagine that if people are asking Julia Quinn of Bridgerton fame, it's historical romance authors.

I could imagine that she might be inundated with them, and then how do you pick one? If you say one yes to one of them, do you feel obliged to say yes to everyone?

So I would say, if you're out there and thinking, oh gosh, I would love to have a famous name attached to my book, I would see what names are adjacent to you and maybe try them.

Joanna: I think that's great. I also think that Julia Quinn, presumably, does a lot of research. She may be reading your book for research, and could have gone, “Oh, that's a good idea. That's a good idea.”

Emily: I did have a moment of panic because, of course, I write about the regency era because they have princesses,. I thought, oh my gosh, did she read that and go, “I wouldn't have done that.”

Joanna: Well, I just think we have to remember that famous authors are just like us, they just got famous. Julia, I presume, loves reading history. She was probably like, oh, yes, this is right up my alley. Therefore that was a good fit, and I think this is the most important thing.

I get pitched every single day, multiple times, and most of them are completely inappropriate pitches. I mean, you pitched me and it was completely appropriate.

That's the thing, when you're the person on the other end, whether this is appropriate or not. So the job of the person pitching really should be—

Emily: Do your research. In today's modern age, when people are sharing/oversharing, there's almost no excuse not to do your research. Most people, even if they're quite private personally, they ensure that their professional brand is quite clear.

For example, I really wanted to ask Alison Weir to blurb Regina. I absolutely love Alison. I actually met her at the very beginning of my author journey. She will not remember, but she was such an inspiration. She is such an inspiration because she writes nonfiction and she writes historical fiction.

I went to her website, and there was a little note on her contact page saying, “I'm inundated. I'm not accepting any more blurbs,” and so I didn't send an email.

Now, someone might say, “Oh, well, you could have just tried.” No, I don't want to annoy someone who has been really clear about their boundary, their expectations, their ability right now. Actually, I might ask her to blurb a book in the future when she does have the capacity.

If I had gone against her wishes and emailed her anyway, I can pretty much guarantee you my email would be blocked and it would be ignored the next time I asked. So there's a way to research, and it's not difficult. It's all online.

Joanna: Yes. In fact, on my contact page, it says, “I do not accept guest post submissions,” and every day I get two or three guest post submissions.

Emily: I'm cringing.

Joanna: I'm like, seriously. I just delete it. I don't reply anymore. So I think you're right.

Also, just again, Julia Quinn is a normal person, like we're normal people, and people have lives going on. It's not all about you. It's that they have their life.

It just might be the wrong time. So I really love that.

Emily: Sometimes you get a yes that becomes a no. So I also asked the authors of Lady Jane to blurb, who wrote the amazing book which the TV series was made of. They said, absolutely, we'd love to do that. Then the show got canceled, and you know what, they had other more important things to do.

I just sent a note being like, you know what, focus on yourselves, focus on what's next. We are all people, as you say. People have a lot going on, and life always comes first.

Joanna: Yes, absolutely. I did want to ask you about marketing because obviously you've spent like a decade or so marketing romance on Amazon, presumably, mainly, and that is completely different to what you're now doing. So tell us—

Emily: I knew early on that I would be spread way too thin if I tried to manage completely different strategies and completely different tactics for all the things that I want to continue doing for historical romance.

I knew that years ago. I knew that when I started thinking I would like to do more things, I would like to diversify. So I have been very conscious in making myself the brand. Emily is the brand.

So whether I'm writing historical romance as Emily E K Murdoch or historical nonfiction as Emily Murdoch Perkins, I am passionate, I'm curious. I love history. I love unusual facts. I love sharing photos of churches or old buildings. I love sharing photos of the food I'm cooking.

Emily loves cheese, long country walks, no matter what she's writing. So that has been a really crucial foundation that I put in place quite a few years ago, so that when this happened, I had a foundation that I could kind of stand on without trying to juggle about a bazillion things.

Having said that, having a traditional publisher means I now have Graham, who's fantastic. Thank you, Graham. He is the PR and promotions and marketing manager at The History Press.

I get an email from him at least twice a week with ideas of pitches that he's done, or I'm speaking to this person, I'm speaking to that person. As an indie, I pitched broadsheets and I pitched newspapers, I got absolutely nowhere.

That was someone who's, at the time, full time job was pitching for clients to broadsheets and newspapers, and I got loads of coverage for them.

So things are different now, and as I said, I had a feature published for The Daily Mirror. It's a UK national newspaper with something like 800,000 copies printed every day. 32 million adults individually visit the website every month, and they paid me to write it.

There are higher profile opportunities with trad, but that is based on that foundational brand of Emily, the passionate historian who loves saying, “Did you know?” That enables me to then leverage the opportunities that the publishers are working to bring to me. Does that make sense?

Joanna: Did you know? Did you know that I almost started another podcast called, “Did You Know?”

Emily: Joanna, should we do it together?!

Joanna: Oh, don't say that because that literally went into my head. We'll talk about this offline and see what the listeners think.

It's so great you have Graham. I think that's really interesting. I think a lot of authors who get traditional publishing deals don't seem to get so much active PR.

I guess sometimes they do get it, but it's only in a short period around launch, and then that person obviously moves onto another author. As we speak, you're in that launch period, aren't you? That kind of launch period?

Emily: So much we can unpack here. When I was speaking to different imprints and different publishers about Regina, before we'd sold it, it was really important to me, not that I got a ton of money in advance because I didn't, but actually how important I was going to be valued by the publishers.

I am moving into a new category, nonfiction. I don't have any experience in nonfiction. I don't have pure nonfiction readers that I can bring to the table.

So I knew that if I was essentially a midlist author for that imprint, someone who, sure, we'll publish the book, but we're not going to make a song and dance out about it. We're not going to push you forward for PR and promotions. We're not going to do a big marketing campaign. I knew that book would not succeed.

They said to me, you are going to be one of our most important titles for autumn/winter, and we are going to put a lot behind it. So that gave me a lot of confidence, and I think a lot of openness between us.

I had a call with my commissioning editor yesterday, and most of the call was, right, what do I want The History Press to be doing? What does The History Press want me to be doing?

We can be quite open about that because we said way at the beginning that we are going to really push this, but it requires a lot of input from both sides.

Joanna: Yes, I think that's great in thinking of a partnership. Again, you're very experienced. You've been doing this a while, and you have different expectations than someone who maybe it's their first book, and they don't really know the business of things.

Like you said, your aim is to make everyone more money.

I think that's a real mindset shift that authors who are also business people have, and authors who potentially are not, don't have. So just on the future of that—

Do you see yourself writing more of these historical nonfiction books? Or is this more of an experiment?

Emily: This is an experiment that is going so well, so far that my second nonfiction book proposal is currently being shopped by my agent. I can't say any more than that because discussions are ongoing, insert business talk here.

It's something that I've enjoyed and that is important to me. I spend all day writing, creating, networking, promoting. This is my job. I spend more time here than with my significant other. If I'm not going to enjoy it, I don't really want to do it again.

Also, the response from readers has been so positive. The pre-order numbers look very positive. So it's definitely something that I would like to do again.

I am able because I write full time, and I'm conscious that a lot of people aren't at that stage, or don't want to be at that stage. That's not something they're aiming for. I think it's also important to stay I am child-free by choice, and I have no caring responsibilities, and that is on purpose.

I have a lot of capacity, but I don't want to spend that capacity on something I don't enjoy. I've really loved exploring a different type of craft, a different type of audience, a different type of marketing, a different type of research.

I have been challenged, not all of it has been wonderful, but it's something that I could see myself doing alongside my fiction for a really long time.

Joanna: That's great. We're almost out of time, but I did just want to ask about something you've mentioned several times, diversification. Obviously, your business is actually more than just books.

Emily: Well, I very much followed the advice of someone called Joanna Penn, who really understands the author mindset. So I have multiple streams of income. Some of them are very big, and some of them are very small that I hope to grow, or actually that can just tick over and be passive in their own way.

I'm wide with half of my self-published books. I'm in KU for the other half. I teach my own courses.

I have a course called “You Can Write More Words” which is designed specifically to help people either write more words in the same amount of time or compress how much time you need to write the same number of words. I'm more than happy to offer a 75% off coupon for your listeners.

I teach through other organizations. So I have three classes a year come out through the Regency Academy. I teach a masterclass once a year or so. So I'm doing one this November with The History Quill.

I have Patreon, where I'm writing a Patreon-exclusive historical romance, which is one chapter a week. I offer developmental editing, line editing, I proofread. It's a lot, but it's not all of these things all of the time. I think that's really important.

Some things are set and forget. Some books I wrote a decade ago. Some teaching, I set up the course, and then it's self-service. I only take on multiple streams of income that I enjoy, which now I say that aloud, has also been a theme of this chat.

If I don't enjoy it, chances are that I won't do it well. I only want to be putting out work into the world, and being a good person to work with, someone that people want to work with, and creating brilliant books that people love to read and reread. That's really, really important to me.

Joanna: Fantastic.

Emily: It has a code. I will make the code JOANNA, all caps. Here's the course again.

Joanna: Great. We'll put that in the show notes because I'm sure some people will be interested in that.

Emily: Please do read Regina. I would love for people to read and enjoy it. You can get it anywhere that books are sold. You can find me at @EmilyEKMurdoch. That's Murdoch ending with C-H. That's all the socials, and it's also my website, EmilyEKMurdoch.com.

If you want to get in touch with me, any editing support, my courses, any collaborations, I love hearing from other authors and other creatives. That's [email protected].

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

Emily: My absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me.

The post Writing Historical Fiction And Non-Fiction With Emily E K Murdoch first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can the ‘hungry author' mindset help you become more of a successful author? Why do you need to shift your point of view to that of the reader so your book resonates with them? What are some of the key aspects of writing and marketing non-fiction books? Ariel Curry gives her tips in this episode.

In the intro, tackling imposter syndrome [Ink in Your Veins];
Novel Study: Decoding the Secrets and Structures of Contemporary Fiction by Kristen Tate; StoryBundle for Writers; Publishing for Profit conference from ALLi; Tap to Pay on mobile for live events [Zettle/PayPal]; Blood Vintage and Discovery Writing webinar; I'm on The Unreserved Wine Talk Podcast, and The Nightmare Engine Podcast.

Plus, Leveraging AI for book covers and ads [Brave New Bookshelf]; More controls coming for Google NotebookLM [VentureBeat]; Meta’s new generative video model, Movie Gen.

Today’s show is sponsored by FindawayVoices by Spotify, the platform for independent authors who want to unlock the world’s largest audiobook platforms. Take your audiobook everywhere to earn everywhere with Findaway Voices by Spotify. Go to findawayvoices.com/penn to publish your next audiobook project.

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

Ariel Curry is a writer, editor and book coach, and the co-author of Hungry Authors: The Indispensable Guide to Planning, Writing, and Publishing a Nonfiction Book.

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 Ariel at HungryAuthors.com

Joanna: Ariel Curry is a writer, editor and book coach, and the co-author of Hungry Authors: The Indispensable Guide to Planning, Writing, and Publishing a Nonfiction Book. So welcome to the show, Ariel.

Ariel: Thank you so much for having me, Joanna. I'm so happy to be here.

Joanna: Great. Well, first up—

Ariel: Sure. Well, like many people in the publishing industry, I was an English major who didn't really know what she wanted to do. I thought I might do teaching. I tried that for a little bit. That did not go well.

So I thought, you know what, why not just shoot for the stars? I've always loved books, and so I thought, well, it never hurts to apply to publishing internships. So I did that. I got an internship in London at Anthem Press, which is a little bit more of an academic publisher. That eventually led to a role as an editorial assistant at Corwin Press in California. Then from there, I moved up the ladder to acquisitions editor.

Then I took a little bit of a break from the traditional publishing corporate world for a few years. I was freelancing, I was doing collaborations, and I was doing developmental editing.

Then just recently, I decided to rejoin the corporate publishing industry, and I took a role as an acquisitions editor at Sourcebooks. So that's where I am currently, and I specialize in nonfiction.

Ariel: It is a lot of fun. The thing that I always remind authors of is it's a business. So my job there is to be an investor in great ideas, and great writers, and great writing. I think that's the part that a lot of people don't necessarily understand.

Sometimes it's a little sad because it seems to take some of the romance and the feelings of creativity out of it, I think, but at the end of the day, everyone in the publishing industry just truly loves books. So we totally get the romance and the special feelings that come with pouring everything that you have into a book.

Someone has to be the person to make it successful on a broad scale. That's what people in the publishing industry are here to do is to take the very, very, very best of writers and writing and help to blast that, hopefully as to as wide an audience as possible. That's what we're all here to do.

Sometimes it takes a little bit of the romance away, but honestly, I absolutely love what I do. I love working in the corporate publishing sphere, so I don't see that going away anytime soon.

Joanna: That's great. Well, let's get into the book because I think it is good to know of your background, too. For nonfiction authors, in particular, is what we're really talking about today. Also, to know the mindset of an acquisitions editor is great. So getting into the book—

Ariel: Yes, so here's our official definition of a hungry author.

We say, “A hungry author is a writer who is determined to succeed. They want to and will be published. They take feedback well and don't shy away from the hard work. You will find their butts in the chairs and fingers on the keyboard. They believe in their ideas and know they will impact others. “

So we wanted to write this book, and we called it Hungry Authors because my co-author, Liz Morrow, and I—she is a full time collaborator, she's a ghost writer, and obviously I work in acquisitions.

We just saw every single day that authors, even with small to no platform—which is the thing that everyone says you have to have but —

Like if you look at the New York Times Bestseller list, you will often find authors that you cannot find on social media. We were like, what is it about those people? How do they break the code or go against the grain of all of this advice that we typically hear that, “Oh, you have to…”

Especially for nonfiction, “You've got to have a great platform. You've got to be a celebrity.” There's all of these myths around what you have to be or have to have to make it and to succeed as a traditionally published author. We know from both of our experience that that's not necessarily true.

As she and I both started working with more clients who were doing that, who were getting traditional book deals, who were self-publishing their books to great success, we were like, what is it that makes these authors so different?

In the reverse and opposite end, why is it that some authors with huge platforms can publish a book and it's a total flop? We've realized it's their mindset.

It's that gumption and determination and grit that compels them to succeed. Those are the kinds of authors that, especially as an acquisitions editor, I'm like, I want to work with someone like that.

If I have confidence, and I can see that they are determined to succeed and to make it work, and they're working as hard as they can to make it happen, then I have more confidence in them. I want to go wherever they're going.

So that's what we wanted to encourage authors with, is to have that gumption and to embody that determination.

Joanna: Yes, I totally get what you mean. It's interesting, I first self-published in 2007, and in the last almost 16 or 17 years, whatever it is, there have been so many authors who I've seen along the way who have left the industry. It's one of the things I've asked often is—

This comes up over and over again, this grit, resilience, bouncing back, trying again. You're calling it being hungry, I guess, being hungry for it. It's almost like just keeping going.

It might not happen with the first book or the second book, or I will often think it might not ever happen. You might not ever hit the New York Times list or whatever.

So I guess this is important for longevity as well. You must see this in the industry.

Ariel: Yes, that's right. In fact, in chapter one of our book, we've got five tenets or five components of the hungry author's mindset, and one of them is, “This book is just my first book, or my second book, or my third book, but I will write more books.” That longevity piece of it is really vital.

To me, that's almost the most important component of the hungry author's mindset because that component says, “I'm in it for me. I'm in it for the belief that I have in my own writing. It's for the determination and the commitment I feel to serving my readers.”

So when you have your “why” aligned in that way, when you really know I'm in it for the journey, and not necessarily the destination, you will be able to keep going and to be resilient. You'll also have more success, ironically.

Joanna: Yes, that is ironic. We'll come back to that because we are, in this approach, designing a book, but sometimes that doesn't work either. So let's just first define nonfiction because I feel like it's quite a misunderstood term, almost. There's so many subcategories.

Ariel: Yes. So at the broadest level, nonfiction are books that, if it's a story, then it's grounded in reality, and it's based on true events that truly happened and usually can be factually proven. Although sometimes in memoir, there aren't necessarily other sources that can verify the story.

Certainly in narrative nonfiction, there are going to be primary sources and other things that you're using that would validate the story as you were telling it. Then it's also informational books.

So in the story category, we've got the two primary genres are going to be narrative nonfiction, which are stories about real life people or places, or even time periods, where that thing is the subject of the story. Then you've got memoir, which is the author's own story about a situation or event in their life.

On the informational side, you've got self-help, which is nonfiction that is directed towards a transformation in the reader's life. Then you've got thought leadership, which is a book that is meant to transform our society as a whole.

So when I think of thought leadership books, I'm thinking of like Siddhartha Mukherjee or like Simon Sinek, or the really big names that you hear about in these kind of groundbreaking books.

Like I would say, Jonathan Haidt's new book, The Anxious Generation, would be an example of a thought leadership book. His aim is really to expose this part of our society, and part of how the world works, and what's happening in the zeitgeist right now, and help us have a deeper understanding of that.

He's not necessarily trying to change the reader at an individual level, although that may happen, but really the goal is more broad societal change for thought leadership books.

So for example, a book on history, that's not either of those other things.

Ariel: Right. Yes, that's true. In the Hungry Authors book, we don't talk a lot about reference books. We kind of narrowed it down to what are the genres that people come to us for help with the most and that are the most like commercial nonfiction genres.

So, yes, there is certainly history, there's reference books, there's even like professional development books in some more niche categories. I used to work in education professional development.

There's books that are professional development for bankers, or for finance experts, or whatever. There's all kinds of nonfiction books that are in more niche categories as well.

Joanna: Well, I think this gets to an important point. You mentioned the word commercial, and I feel like that is what a lot of beginning authors certainly forget about.

I was thinking back to when I wrote my first nonfiction book in 2007, I later rewrote it as Career Change, and I really thought it was for everyone. Like, when people say, oh, who's the book for? I'd be like, oh, it's for everyone.

I still hear that, and I'm sure you hear that. It's like, okay, this is a real issue with new authors, but can be an issue with established authors as well.

Ariel: Yes, that's such a good question. You're right, it comes up all the time, and it plays into that genre factor that we were just talking about too.

So we always tell authors to think about who would enjoy your book most, or who would benefit most from your book. Start there.

Yes, maybe everyone could find some kind of way into your book, but who are the people who are going to see your book and just immediately think, “Oh my gosh, that is for me. I need that,” and they're going to get the maximum benefit out of it. Think about those people.

That's going to be your primary audience. Then if there are other audiences that might also benefit, but maybe to a little bit lesser extent, those are going to be your secondary or tertiary audiences.

It really, for me, starts with that question of:

We like to say too about audience, that you have to find your goldilocks audience.

You don't want your audience to be too big because, like you said, if it's too big, if you try to make something that's going to appeal to everyone, it's not going to deliver the maximum benefits for anyone.

So that's not going to be good because no one is going to pick up your book and feel like, “oh, this is for me,” if you try to make it work for everyone. On the opposite side, you also don't want it to be so incredibly niche and specific that your audience is like 20 people.

For example, I had someone come to me one time and say, “Okay, I want to write a book that is for Christian campus leaders who serve veterans with PTSD through paper craft making.” I'm not joking there, that is a real story.

I was like, there are so many filters on your audience there that I would be shocked if we can find five Christian campus leaders who serve military veterans with PTSD through paper craft making. I would just be shocked if we could find five. So that's clearly too small of an audience.

So it has to be somewhere in between, and the right in between is going to look a little bit different depending on whatever your topic is.

Joanna: Yes, it is really hard.

I've written one memoir, which is called Pilgrimage, so even with just the word, you're going know if either you're interested or you're not interested. It's a solo travel book, and there are a lot of other intersecting audiences, but the title I feel like makes a big difference.

I mean, like your book title. Again—

Ariel: Yes, definitely. As many authors do, when we were dreaming up the book that would become Hungry Authors, we did have a moment where we were like, well, should we just make this really broad? Should we make it about finding your purpose or whatever?

Then we're like, hold on, hold on. We serve writers. That's who we can serve best and who would benefit the most from our work. So we put some reins on our dreams for a minute, and maybe we'll branch out later in future books, but it is really important to really get clear on those questions.

Yes, the title has to reflect the people that you're trying to reach. They have to see your title and immediately go, “Ooh, that could be me,” or, “I really want that transformation in my life.”

Joanna: Let's get into the book map because you really emphasize mapping out a book before writing a draft. I'm a discovery writer, so I find this challenging.

So people can kind of picture it. I know there's a lot in the book, but try and give us an overview.

Ariel: Yes, definitely. I love the term discovery writer, rather than pantsing. I think discovery writer really captures what you're trying to do so much better than pantsing. To be fair, I do think that a book map can be helpful for discovery writers as well, almost as more of an intervention.

So I have had authors come to me before and say, “I wrote this—for lack of a better term—like word vomit type draft. I kind of poured out everything I know, but I know it's a mess, and I don't know how to start organizing it. So I've got 60,000 words, but they're all a loose jumble of puzzle pieces, and I need you to help me create a picture from them.”

So in those kinds of situations, I would also say a book map is super helpful for imposing a structure, even after the fact. After you've got all the puzzle pieces on the table, a book map is going to help you arrange those puzzle pieces into something that looks like a comprehensive and cohesive picture. So to answer your question—

That can be a straightforward outline at its most basic level. Like in school, most of us learned how to make a super basic outline.

I would say that's the foundation of a book map is the outline concepts, but we take that initial outlining so much further. What we saw kept happening is that authors would start writing, and even if they had created a very vague table of contents.

They're like, okay, I know I'm going to need an introduction. I know I'm going to need a chapter one. They map out 10 chapters and a conclusion, and then they start writing, and they still get stuck somewhere in like chapter four, chapter three, because they don't actually know what's going to go in those chapters.

So sometimes we saw that a lot of authors when they create an “outline”, they were really just identifying topics for each supposed chapter. That kind of an outline did not give them a really clear pathway to how all of those pieces fit together, what is actually going to go in those chapters.

What we do is start with identifying the transformation that you're trying to accomplish. If you're writing memoir, then you're trying to depict the transformation of yourself, your own transformation through an event or circumstance in your life.

If you're writing a prescriptive nonfiction book, and that's going to be self-help or thought leadership, then you're trying to accomplish a transformation for the reader. So you start with—

Then you say, okay, what are the big steps that need to happen to convey that transformation? So where am I starting? Where are we trying to end? Then what are all the big steps in between to get from beginning to end? Then those big steps are typically going to be your chapters.

From there, then you have to say, okay, for each chapter, what is the little big idea that I'm trying to convey in that chapter? So, often for prescriptive nonfiction, each chapter is going to have some kind of smaller argument that is going to contribute towards the reader's change towards that transformation.

Then you have to say, okay, well, how do I defend that little argument? If chapter seven is about why you should never take your car to a mechanic and you should learn how to fix your car yourself, what are the things you're going to need to defend that argument?

So a book map is going to help you think through all of the pieces that you need to defend your argument in every single chapter, and then on a broad scale, for the entire book.

So we like to see a book map that identifies the overall transformation, all of the chapters, and all of the stuff that's going in the chapters.

Obviously, for memoir, for narrative nonfiction, what's going to go in the chapters is going to be a little bit different. It's going to be the key scenes that add up to a smaller bit of the transformation in your story. I feel like that's a little complicated to talk about without a picture, but hopefully that helps.

Joanna: My two cents on this as a discovery writer is, first of all, your book has a lot for people who are discovery writers. So I think that's important to say.

Secondly, as a discovery writer who has written quite a lot of nonfiction, and even for the memoir I wrote, I kind of also think about it as bottom up or top down.

You're doing a top down structure where you're like, it goes this way and then it goes back up. Whereas discovery writers write a ton of stuff and then organize it later.

So every single nonfiction book I have written and published, I have not known the structure until I have enough words that suddenly it kind of fell into place. Every single book I have restructured about three quarters through the project.

I think that the same thing ends up happening regardless of how you write, but the idea of the book map—so if people listening are like, I'm a discovery writer and what you just said was just too structured, then you can do it later on in the process.

It's actually a really good thing when you start to, I say—

Once you switch your head to the reader, you have to structure this.

Ariel: Exactly, and I think that's part of why my co-author, Liz, and I believe so strongly in this method is because it's very reader-focused. A lot of writing teachers come at it from a very author-focused perspective, and there's nothing wrong with that.

We firmly believe in the benefits and the power of writing for the benefit of the author.

We are trying to create every single day, and our full time jobs are to create marketable, successful, commercial books. So if that's the kind of book you want to write, something that has the potential to sell on a broad scale, then you're going to need to think about it from the reader's perspective.

Like you said, knowing that transformation and being able to convey some kind of structure that feels really intuitive to the reader. Actually, I would say, often the structure facilitates the reader's understanding of what you're trying to say.

That's what you're going to need at some point, whether it comes at the very beginning or even after you write the draft. You're going to need that commercial lens at some point.

Joanna: Yes, absolutely. I just feel that for discovery writers, it just comes later on in the process, but it still has to come.

You are an acquisitions editor, and this is something that if people are pitching nonfiction, it's differently to fiction. With fiction, you generally have to have finished the book, but with nonfiction, people can pitch projects without having written the book.

What's interesting, in the book you say, “Much of the job is saying no, even to authors, books, and possibilities you think are good.”

Ariel: Sure. Well, on the most basic level, it could just be that it's your project. As wonderful and as amazing as it sounds, and as good as your writing is or whatever, it's just not something that we do. Or it's just not something that we have the resources to support.

So every publisher, to some extent, except maybe the Big Five because they tend to kind of do everything, but even within the Big Five, there are imprints where they specialize.

Like, there's Portfolio that does more business-type stuff. Then there's Atria that does more of the commercial, interesting, more scientific stuff sometimes. There are different imprints that focus on different things, even within the Big Five.

So a really wise literary agent is going to be looking at a proposal and thinking which imprints or which editors at which publishers specialize in this thing. Those are the people that I'm going to be trying to pitch.

So an agent themselves will have, here are the things that I'm really passionate about, here are the things that I love to represent, and here are the connections in my network that I have.

So if a literary agent focuses on nonfiction and they get a book of poetry, they might go, “Well, I just don't have the connections to all of the poetry editors in the industry, so I just can't represent this.”

You've got to make sure that whoever you're pitching actually does the thing that you're trying to do. That's kind of at the ground level, but then we can talk about platform.

I would say there are different platform expectations, depending on the publisher, depending on your genre. With fiction and memoir, platform isn't quite as strong a requirement as it is for prescriptive nonfiction.

In prescriptive nonfiction, the reader is looking to you as a credible authority. So if you don't have some kind of proof as a credible authority, it's going to be hard for a publisher to sell your book or an agent to sell your book. So that's something to keep in mind as well.

I would also say that often authors have not done enough research to know what other books are already out there that are doing the same thing. Often I reject books because an author comes to me and they're like, “This is brilliant. This is groundbreaking. This is going to be the book that changes the game on X.”

I'm like, okay, how is it different from these five other books on that same topic? Either they don't know, or what they tell me is actually exactly what those other books say. I'm like, okay, clearly you have not done your research.

That is honestly the biggest thing is that the idea an author's pitching isn't actually new, or isn't actually that different from what everyone else is saying.

That is one thing that I tell authors over and over again. I'm like, okay —

Joanna: Yes, and I have a tip for everyone here.

If people haven't tried ChatGPT for this, it is so good. If you say, “My book is like ‘this book, this book and this book.' Please give me a list of 30 more books in this area,” it's going to give it to you, and then you can go research them.

I find it super, super useful. I've been doing it with a latest folk horror novel, but I find this very useful.

Ariel: That is such good advice. We are big fans of using AI where appropriate and in ways, obviously, that are ethical, but certainly comps research. I've been using Blinkist. Do you know Blinkist?

Joanna: Yes, it does summaries, right?

Ariel: Yes, so I've been using Blinkist. If I need to know what is this book about, and I need the top five points about it, but I don't really have time to go read a 320 page book, then I go to Blinkist and see if I can find a really in depth summary.

It'll even read it out loud to you so I can almost listen to the summary like a podcast. Then it's like, okay, all right, now I know the main gist of this book. It is so incredibly helpful. So use your tools, absolutely, to help you do that research.

Joanna: On that, I mean, obviously you mentioned the dreaded word “platform”, but also said it is important for nonfiction. So what are some of the elements?

I feel like there was a period where people really wanted high social media followings, and then I think publishers realized that high following on social media doesn't necessarily translate to high book sales. Has that changed?

Ariel: Yes, I think you're right that there has been a softening, I'll say. Platform is still important, and I still see a lot of agents who will not work with authors who do not have a platform.

I don't just mean social media because sometimes, like David Grand, I don't think David Grand is on social media, but you better bet that every agent would love to be his agent, and every editor would love to be his editor. He does have a platform because he's a prolific writer and he's earned his stripes in other ways.

So that's the thing with platform, is there are lots of ways to build a platform. So I think nonfiction authors, if social media is not your thing—and I get it because it's not my thing either. I do it because I kind of feel like I have to, which is the same for a lot of authors I know.

You can build your platform in many ways. You can build your platform with speaking engagements, or with selling online courses, or doing consulting, or writing for the New York Times, or pitching articles at whatever publications.

I would say that's probably a smart way to build your platform anyways because social media is fickle, and the algorithms change, and it's really hard to grow a platform on social media.

So I do still see that agents and publishers want a larger platform. They care about it because it is, like I said, it's proof that you can attract an audience to your message.

Again, going back to the fact that agents are investors. Think about it from if you were looking to invest in something, and you've got two projects in front of you.

One of them is like a really great idea, really great writing, but entirely unknown in the universe. Versus a project that has a really great idea, really great writing, and they've already got 20,000 subscribers to their newsletter list, and they've already proven that they can sell online courses, and they're out speaking.

I mean, which one do you think is going to be more successful? Obviously, the second one.

Joanna: I think that's a good way to think about it. Just on social media, my husband is in corporate and uses LinkedIn a lot.

I feel like there's such a focus in the media industry around BookTok and Instagram, but— LinkedIn, for nonfiction, seems to be the very best social network to build on. What are your thoughts on that for nonfiction?

Ariel: Yes, I think that's a really good point. LinkedIn has a lot of tools that are cool, like you can do a LinkedIn newsletter. Again, the downside of that is that you're not necessarily able to keep all of your subscribers' email addresses. So that's the downside.

I wouldn't be dependent on LinkedIn, but if you can use LinkedIn to grow your network and then use that to convert people to actual email subscribers, that seems like a really, really good way to go.

You're right, that is where a lot of the more professional spaces are. So if you're a nonfiction author, especially doing prescriptive nonfiction, LinkedIn might be a really good place to build your audience.

Joanna: I get a lot of my recommendations from podcasting because I mainly listen to podcasts, and I listen to audiobooks and nonfiction as well when I'm walking and all of this. So I actually get so many recommendations from podcasting.

You have The Hungry Authors Podcast, and obviously you're here, you pitched my podcast.

Obviously, people don't need to start their own show, but any tips around doing audio?

Ariel: Yes, I personally think that podcasting is such a great way to build your platform because you're able to leverage other people's platforms.

To be totally transparent, obviously I pitched you because I'm like, well, I've been following you for over a decade, and I know you've got a great audience already built in. Any nonfiction authors who are listening to you, I want to reach those people, so I'm going to pitch her to go on this podcast.

You don't have to have your own podcast, like you said, to do that. In fact, sometimes it's almost better to just be a really frequent guest on other people's podcasts because you're reaching new audiences all the time, and you're growing your own audience by utilizing their audiences.

So I think it's a super smart strategy for building your platform, building your audience, and getting word about your book out there. It's one of the top things that I recommend to authors all the time.

When I was ghost writing book proposals for clients, I would always include a podcast section of the book proposal and say, okay, let's identify like 20 really likely podcasts that you feel comfortable pitching, and let's promise that you're going to pitch those podcasts when your book comes out.

Obviously, you don't know yet if they're going to say yes, but that's going to look really attractive to publishers. Just like you, so many nonfiction listeners are listening to podcasts because it's an information based platform, and they love reading information.

If you're selling a prescriptive nonfiction book that is entirely information, then it makes sense to market it on another information-based media.

Joanna: Yes, then on that, I get so many pitches every day, like a ridiculous number of pitches. I think traditional publishing discovered podcasts, and now it's crazy.

I mean, I get them from big publishers every day for books that are completely irrelevant to my show. So when a pitch like yours arrives, I obviously am interested.

Ariel: So I always start by identifying the podcasts that your complimentary authors have been on. So if you say, okay, these are my top five comp books—by comp, I mean complimentary or competing or comparative books, whatever you want comp to be short for.

Identify those top books and then look at the podcasts that those authors have been on. Those are going to be your most likely podcasts to start pitching. You can say in your query to them, “Hey, you had this person on.”

For a writing podcast, I might say like, “Oh, hey, you had Jane Friedman on your podcast, or you had Joanna Penn on your podcast, or you had AJ Harper on your podcast. Guess what? I'm friends with that person, and we have a lot of things in common. I've written a similar book, and I think it might appeal to your audience in these ways.”

Being really careful about podcasts that you pitch is the first part. Just like with pitching agents and editors, pitch the right people.

Then using some kind of personal connection like that is really, really helpful too. “Like I am acquainted with the person that you've already interviewed,” or, “We have some kind of connection.” I find that works really well too is finding a point of connection.

Even being able to say, like, “Hey, I'm a big fan, genuinely. I'm genuinely a big fan of yours.” That is obviously very complimentary to people, and tends to soften the awkwardness, potentially, of a cold email.

So that's the key thing, too. In any cold query that I'm making, I like to just do kind of a bulleted list of like, here are the things that I can talk about that I think your listeners would love to learn about. So hopefully that's going to seal the deal for you.

Joanna: Yes, I think that helps. That bullet list of how your book has specific topics that my audience will like, that is the key. It's just incredible how many pitches I get, mainly from traditional publishing now, and they are just a press release about a book.

Actually, that's not a pitch, but they're using the email to pitch the podcast. They're like, “Do you want to interview this author?” and then they put in a press release about a book.

I guess, like you were saying, a lot of the time you don't have time to read the whole book. Like with your book, I've scanned through it. Obviously, I didn't read every single line, but I went through it and looked at little bits of it and pulled out quotes and things.

It seems to me that so often when people are pitching, they don't put themselves in the position of the podcast host.

So again, it's so funny because it echoes what you were saying earlier around thinking about what the reader wants from a book, or an editor wants, or an acquisitions person wants.

Ariel: That's right. Yes, that is exactly right. It's such an important skill. With pitching, like publicists sending you a cold query and just including the press release, I would say that's just a factor of they just don't have a lot of time.

They are trying to pitch several books to so many people, and it does take time to really put together a thoughtful query and a thoughtful pitch. So for myself, I guess this is another tip, I tend to block out some time.

Like, okay, I'm going to do an hour, and I'm just going to do five pitches. My goal in that hour is to do five pitches. It doesn't sound like a lot, but actually, when you are taking the time to put a lot of thought into a query and really customize it for whoever's receiving that query, it does take time.

So certainly with podcasting, and definitely with pitching books, you're going to want to take some time to be really thoughtful about how you're making a query.

Like you said, it really makes a difference to the person who's receiving it. You're wanting that person to say yes to you, so it's worth the time to make sure that they're going to really enjoy receiving your query.

Joanna: Yes. It is a super useful book. It's very well organized. I think people will find it useful.

Ariel: So you can find everything that we do on HungryAuthors.com. We've got the podcast, which you mentioned. We also do online cohorts a couple times a year. We obviously have the book. Then you can follow us on social media at HungryAuthors as well.

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

Ariel: Thank you so much, Joanna.

The post Author Mindset, Writing And Marketing Non-Fiction With Ariel Curry first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can you bring laughter into your books regardless of genre? What are the challenges of writing a novel after an award-winning career as a comedy writer for TV and radio? Dave Cohen shares his lessons learned in this interview.

In the intro, how to keep a career fresh over multiple books [Author Nation Podcast]; Best practices of successful indie authors [Draft2Digital];
Director James Cameron joins the board of Stability AI [Hollywood Reporter];
Google NotebookLM; Full audio expanding snippet; Photos from Ely Cathedral; Blood Vintage.

This episode is sponsored by Publisher Rocket, which will help you get your book in front of more Amazon readers so you can spend less time marketing and more time writing. I use Publisher Rocket for researching book titles, categories, and keywords — for new books and for updating my backlist. Check it out at www.PublisherRocket.com

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

Dave Cohen is a multi-award-winning BBC comedy writer who has worked on shows like Horrible Histories, as well as a comedy novelist, podcaster, and author of nonfiction. His latest book is Funny Up Your Fiction: How to Add Light, Shade, and Laughs to Your Novel.

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 Dave at DaveCohen.org.uk.

Joanna: Dave Cohen is a multi-award-winning BBC comedy writer who has worked on shows like Horrible Histories, as well as a comedy novelist, podcaster, and author of nonfiction. His latest book is How to Write a Funny Novel. So welcome to the show, Dave.

Dave: Hi. Thanks very much for having me. Pleasure to be here.

Joanna: I'm excited to talk to you today. First up—

Dave: Well, I'd always wanted to be a novelist, really since I was a teenager, but I got a little bit distracted on the way. I happened to spend 10 years as a stand-up comedian, and that was followed by about 20 years of writing for comedy for TV and radio.

It was never quite the right time to start that novel writing career. Then I got to my 59th birthday, this was in 2017, and I finally thought, well, this is the time that I decide I have to write the novel now. I have to do it now and be damned.

So I did, and I wrote my first novel. I was very pleased, and I got it all ready to send off to agents. I finished it and it was ready March 2020, at which point COVID happened.

Every one of my comedy friends and colleagues, stand-up comedians, writers, all of the people who are far more successful than me, were suddenly out of work. So they had to think, “What am I going to do next? I'll write a book.”

So I suddenly thought, ah, right, my book isn't going to get anywhere with an agent, I might as well self-publish. That's the next part of the journey, and that's how I've ended up here now.

Joanna: Just go into that bit more then because obviously working a couple of decades with the BBC—which if people don't know, as there's a lot of people in America, it's probably the most traditional of traditional media you could possibly imagine.

I mean, things have obviously changed since I self-published back in 2007, but how did you get around that?

Dave: Well, I mean, first of all, I would say people think of the BBC as this sort of very respectable giant monolith, but actually it's loads and loads of different quirky little places.

So it sounds great to say writing for the BBC, but a lot of that was writing for BBC Radio, which was about five people in a broom cupboard. Also children's TV, which is only three people in a smaller cupboard.

So the kind of pioneering way of the BBC is it's able to make things despite this sort of reputation as this very fusty corporation, rather than because of it. I think that's very much the kind of spirit that I found fairly straightforwardly, actually.

That's one of the things that was fairly easy to come to from being in the world of TV writing, was moving away from the BBC that's just full of people who just do it and do it for love. So from that point of view, it was a fairly straightforward move.

I think that the harder move was coming from being somebody who was a professional writer and was used to a process, that often ended up in rejection, but it was still a process anyway. So moving from that to a situation, the jungle, I suppose, of self-publishing, where it's free for all.

Joanna: Yes, and there are obviously pros and cons in that. I mean, you mentioned your previous writing, and one of the things you say in the book is that much of it was quite short, lyrics and shorter things.

Dave: Well, this probably sounds quite stupid, but it's actually true. The number of words, indeed, is quite a challenge because a single joke can be four words long.

There's a great comedian, Tim Vine, a British comedian, and he had a joke which went, “Velcro, what a rip off.” That's a joke he did that's four words long. So the idea is, oh, what do I do? Do I have to write 20,000 four-word jokes?

Obviously, the numbers thing is part of the issue. Like a half-hour sitcom is about 4000 words long. To develop a new idea for a sitcom and to write a pilot script for one, it's quite a lot of work.

It's almost not quite as much work as developing a novel, a whole novel, but it's months of playing with stuff and thinking of things. So the words was the first thing, but then the next problem was going to the other extreme.

It was like, aha! I can write as much as I want now. So you'd end up overwriting. The sky wasn't just blue, it was a pastel blue with the clouds breezing along. You go, oh, I can just do this. Whereas when you're writing a script, you just have to get straight to the point. “Character knocks on door, other character answers, straight into conversation.”

So, yes, one of the main things was overcompensating. That did lead me to another true fact, I think of whatever you're writing, in whatever form you're writing in, whether it's screenplays, novels, books, jokes, whatever, you have to keep cutting all the time. Cut, cut, cut.

You can always overwrite, and you always need to get to the point. I think just one other thing, the main other thing that I learned was you don't actually have to be funny all the time when you're writing a novel. I think that would just be too much. It'd be like banging the reader over the head with a plastic mallet.

Joanna: Yes, exactly. Oh, well, that's interesting. Well, let's come back to the comedy then. Why is comedy so important for writers, anyway? I mean, I write darker books, and some people tell me that they laugh in my books, and I certainly didn't intend it. Or specifically funny books, more like yours.

Dave: I mean, because the Bible tells us it is. You know the phrase, “laughter is the best medicine,” do you know where that's from?

Joanna: It's got to be from Proverbs or something.

Dave: That's correct. Yes, yes. With your background in theology, I thought you might get that. Yes, it's from Proverbs. Laughter is the best medicine, and people love laughter.

I grew up always loving comedy, listening to comedy on the radio. Also just the great thing was the whole family, we would all sit around the TV, and there were some great TV shows in Britain in the 1970s. We'd all sit around and watch Dad's Army and Reggie Perrin and Morecambe and Wise.

Comedy, it's just lovely. It brings people together, really.

Joanna: It's difficult though, isn't it? I mean, you talk there about sitting around together. I think maybe it's partly my family, but my brother is very funny and laughs a lot, and I laugh with him, but when we were kids, I would just be like, I don't even know why he's finding this funny, this is ridiculous.

So how do we write a novel where you don't really have the delivery timing that you would in stand up. In stand up, you're reacting to the crowd, and you can do all that. Or like when I'm speaking professionally, I can see how things are landing.

With a novel, or with a short story or whatever, you can't see the audience's reaction. So how are you dealing with this individual sense of humour and broader appeal when you're writing a novel?

Dave: Well, the first thing, just before I answer that specific question, I would like to say this book that I've written now, How to Write a Funny Novel, is as much for me to learn by writing that down.

The first thing that became very clear to me was I needed to distinguish between what we might call a funny novel. Like, say, Bridget Jones books or PG Wodehouse, those are just funny novels that you sit and you laugh and you read them in a half a day or whatever.

Then there are also books that are written in genre, and you add humor to them. So you might think of something like, say, the Richard Osman Murder Mystery books. These are great books, but they're funny as well. Sophie Kinsella writes romance, but those books are very funny.

So there are two types of comedy in that sense. There is writing as a style, say, and writing as a genre. I think for you, as a writer, to find your funny.

Going for another old proverb. Sorry to go even further back, but we're with Socrates now. Socrates said, “Know thyself.” That's one of the key elements, I think.

If you want to write a funny character, you're going to need awareness of your own weaknesses and foibles.

I know in drama, and in fact, I know you've written a book about this, about discovering yourself and finding your dark side. In comedy, you don't quite need to go that far, but you need to find what I call “cringe corner”. You need to find those elements about yourself.

Like, how do you react to certain people? What irritates you? Why when you're standing in the queue in the post office and the woman in front of you is taking 20 minutes to buy a stamp, why are you getting so angry? What's the flaw in your character that's making you do this?

I've got an example in How to Write a Funny Novel of a story, a thing that happened to me in 1982. So this is going back to my early 20s.

I was involved in setting up a music festival, and I was handing out checks to people, not knowing that these checks were going to bounce the next day. I was potentially going to get into big trouble for this and go to jail, possibly.

Luckily, a couple of rock stars paid off the money, and the losses that the festival made were paid. After that time, I got very angry with the people who put me in that position, and I held this grudge.

I realized in 2022, 40 years later, I was still holding a grudge against these people from 1982. I think about it, and what was the point of that? What good was that doing anybody? I mean, it was certainly not me. I was arguing with this guy in my head, and he wasn't there to answer. He was just in my head.

I realized that this is just the most ridiculous thing that I'm holding onto this grudge. It actually became a very useful thing for me, not that particular story, but it became a useful thing for the second novel in my series, Barry Goldman, which is very loosely autobiographical.

I was able to bring all of the anger, 40 years of realization, where I was able to kind of put that into the book. It helped the character, I think.

Joanna: It's interesting, that kind of situational thing. You mentioned Richard Osman. I eventually picked up The Thursday Murder Club. I was like, oh, it's so popular because he's famous. In the UK he's a famous guy, and so it can't be good.

Then I just chortled my way through the whole thing. I've read all of them, pre-ordered them. I love that series.

You're right about the sort of ridiculousness. His main narrator, you know that they're in a retirement home, and his main narrator is just so funny. She's talking about what's going on, and gossiping, and it's all funny, even though she's not trying to be.

You just think, oh, that's just getting into that character. I mean, you mentioned there your Barry Goldman book.

Dave: I think writing comedy, adding funny to a novel or writing a funny novel, is not a very different process from writing any other type of novel.

If you think about what you need when you're starting to come up with an idea for a novel, it's the same as what you need for anything, a drama, a movie or whatever. You've got these four principal elements that everybody has.

You have a character, or two characters, possibly. The character has a goal, and that's the second thing. Then there are obstacles in the way of that goal. Then the fourth thing is the world that these people inhabit. That's every single story ever written, 99.99% of stories, they are that.

A character goes on a journey. They've got a goal. Then they meet these obstacles, they fight them, they slay the dragon, whatever. So you start at that very general place, and there's just two crucial differences with a comedy character in that situation.

They still go on the same journey, and they've got the goals, and they've got the obstacles. The two differences are that when you get to the end of a drama, your character has been through hell, they've slain the dragon, whatever, they've saved the world, but they've also learnt something along the way.

They've had, a lovely Greek word, catharsis. They're a different person at the end compared to the beginning. In comedy, that doesn't happen. I mean, especially in sitcom, a character just comes back week in, week out to make the same mistakes because —

It's true in novels as well. Even when they get to the end and they've solved the problem, they've got the girl or whatever, they still haven't quite changed. So that's number one.

The second thing, which is really the most crucial difference between characters in drama and comedy, is that in drama, we often talk about the protagonist is the main character and the antagonist is the enemy character.

More often than not, most times in comedy, the antagonist is the same person. So the obstacles are your obstacles. The flaws in your character have come due to this lack of self-awareness. So the biggest enemy to a comedy character is staring back at them in the mirror.

Joanna: That's so interesting that you say comedy characters never learn. They just keep coming back and making the same mistakes. My husband recently really got into the show Silicon Valley. Have you seen that?

Dave: I haven't, no, but I've heard lots of good things about that.

Joanna: You would understand it completely because I got annoyed. I mean, it's got like six seasons or something. I was like, “Look, I know exactly how these characters are going to react every time.” He's laughing away, and I laughed away a little bit, but then I was like, it's just the same every single episode.

Is it that the success of these types of shows, is it that people really want—They crave that same experience which means that the character can never learn?

Dave: Yes, I think there's a few things there. There's a sort of but for the grace of God go I that he's going to do that again.

If you think about the Charlie Brown, the Peanuts cartoon, there's this running gag that just never gets old. “Honestly, Charlie, I'm not going to take the ball away this time. I'm going to leave it there. You can kick the ball.” Of course, Lucy takes it away at the last moment. It's every time.

It's like yes, you can look at that from a logical point of view and say, well, he should just not try kicking the ball again, but that's the sort of thing that's part of the lack of self-awareness.

I can show that as a sort of optimism of a person. They just can't believe that anyone would be so mean that. They have such faith in humanity that they're going to keep trying to do this.

There's a great British TV comedy writer, Dennis Norden. He described every joke as a momentary removal of a sympathy.

So when you see that person walk into a lamp post, or fall flat on their backside, or do the thing that they keep doing, you sort of laugh at them, but it's momentary because you kind of feel like, yeah, I know what that's like.

Joanna: I was thinking as you were talking, about Dilbert, the cartoon, and also The Office, the show that we had here in the UK and also in the US. Again, it's very normal situations, and we recognize the working culture.

It's funny because we recognize those characters. Those characters, you know, the bad manager, it's kind of a cliche, isn't it?

Dave: Yes, that's a very good question. Nine times out of ten, or a lot of times, we don't. Again, it's the same as avoiding cliches in any form, really. Coming back to what I've already spoken about, in a sense you're bringing your self-awareness to some things.

So I cliches are actually very good at the starting point when you're creating a comedy show. Again, it also works with drama. What is this show about? It's about a fish out of water.

So, yes, I suppose the answer is that you put your cliches into the theme of what something's about. Cliches are cliches because they are shortcuts to truth. So everybody gets that straight away.

Someone like Arthur Dent in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, he's a fish out of water. He's out of his depth. So you've got a story that's as original and startling as the Hitchhiker's Guide, but you've still got these kind of comedy characters. So it's the places that you put your characters in.

Yes, they're doing the same things over and over, but you avoid cliche because you keep coming back to the character, as I keep doing talking to you now.

Joanna: Yes, it's very interesting. So your Barry Goldman books, you mentioned they're loosely autobiographical and that they are about a stand-up comedian and how his life developed. So was that what came to you when you wanted to write the novel?

I mean, that's obviously a very different approach to the Richard Osman Thursday Murder Club, a load of retirees in a retirement home.

Dave: Well, yes, and I partly put that down to my lack of experience. Again, this is quite a common thing that I find with people when they're starting out. The first thing that people often want to write in comedy is their story.

The reason for this is quite valid because the two pieces of advice you hear over and over again for writers are, number one is write what you know. Number two is write in your own voice.

These are phrases that are banded about, but they need some careful examination, because just because this thing happened to you, doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to be the best person to write about it.

I think writing what you don't know is as important, that you're finding out stuff. When you find out new stuff, you don't know a huge amount, but you know just enough more than the person who's going to read your book to be like one step ahead of them.

So the next point is about writing in your voice. Well, this is my story, so it's going to be my voice. Again, I don't think that's really what one's voice is. I think you find your voice just by writing and trying new things all the time.

It's also the sum of everything that you've ever done up to the point that you start writing. So I think —

I think now, I'm just writing book three, the last in the Barry Goldman trilogy, and compared to the first one, it's just there's nothing in book three that's really autobiographical. Little episodes here or there, but the first book was much more about me.

I think that was just me writing, getting that first novel out of the way so that I could become a novelist. I think a piece of advice I give to people is, if you're thinking, “I'm going to write my story, that's my first novel,” maybe just park that for a moment and maybe just try and come up with a different thing.

You won't be so emotionally attached to it, and you might be able to look at the bigger picture, rather than be kind of stuck inside it.

Joanna: It'll be interesting to see where you go. I was thinking then of David Baddiel, who was originally very much a comedy writer. Then over the years—I mean, obviously he still does some comedy—but over the years, his books have become very serious and tackling some really big topics.

He's really changed as a writer over the decades that I've certainly been reading him. I think that's important too, isn't it? It's not like you're necessarily only ever going to write comedy books.

Dave: Yes, I think that's true. I mean, I've been writing for 40 odd years now. David's been writing for almost as long, probably 30 years.

In fact, it's a sort of parallel almost, in that I was doing stand-up before him, and I was the Jewish comedy stand up at that time. Then as I stopped, he took over, and that became his role. Then he went on, and he did a lot of this stuff about football and things. Each new project brings new things, and we get old, and we have different experiences.

So I think there is a bit of a problem with writing comedy, writing a comic novel. I do listen to a lot of podcasts about self-publishing, and people do attach a lot of importance to the cover.

It's fine if you're writing, like Richard Osman, you're writing a murder mystery. You look at the cover of Richard Osman's book, and it looks like all the other covers of all the murder mysteries. It just happens to be funny as well.

Likewise, you look at Emily Henry, an American romance novelist, you look at her covers, and they're very similar to the sorts of covers of romance novels, but hers happened to be funny as well.

A comic novel, I mean, I can't make a cover that's like Bridget Jones because it's not a romance. Or I can't do a cover like Hitchhiker's Guide, it's not science fiction.

So yes, I did try with the novels to get something that conveys humor without having the luxury of being able to say, “Oh, and you'll find it in this shelf in the library or at the bookshop.”

Joanna: No, it is difficult. As you say, it's more of a crossover in terms of where it fits. I understand the difficulty in marketing that.

I did also just want to touch on something that a lot of people are very scared about in this culture, this sort of cancel culture outrage. There are certainly some comics on Netflix, and right now as we're recording, the Edinburgh Festival.

People get offended, and they can put bad reviews, or they can tear people down on social media. I was thinking even how publishers have rewritten Roald Dahl, which was my childhood comedy, and how dated things are.

I was thinking about Benny Hill. I mean, you could not have a Benny Hill film on TV anymore. I mean, it's just really offensive.

Because it often does skirt the line of what's accessible.

Dave: I will answer that with regard to the specifics of the moment, and cancel culture and all these handy words of the moment. But I would like to go to a more important point which I think obscures this, which I think a lot of people fear writing comedy.

Interestingly, I find when people come to me as writers wanting to do stuff, it's almost invariably women, because men just think, “Oh, I'm going to write comedy,” and that's how it is. Women will write to me and say, “I want to write comedy, but I'm not sure that I'm funny enough.”

Actually, there is this sort of problem that people are worried that, like you say, you'll get a bad review or whatever, and that does happen. Also, it is true that comedy, unlike drama, it's like you were saying with your husband, he's laughing there, and you're getting annoyed.

If you watch a drama and you don't like it, you just go, “Oh, I didn't like that.” You watch a comedy show and you don't like it, you get really angry. “How could they think that's funny?” Like you were saying earlier, “I don't find that funny. How can anyone else find it funny?”

So you will get that, I'm afraid, but actually, people need to overcome that fear. The worst thing with comedy, and I certainly found this with my first novel, is indifference, much more than hostility people.

You might think, “Oh, I'm a bit worried someone might take offense at this.” Well, just be grateful that someone's even actually got around to reading it. So that's the first thing I would say about that.

So yes, you do have to have a little bit of a thick skin, I think, to be able to do comedy. If you think you're funny, just try it and send it out to people and see what people say.

Someone will find it funny, not everyone. So the people who don't find it funny say, “Oh, I didn't find that funny,” but some people will. So that's something that I really would encourage people because it is definitely something that does frustrate me sometimes.

I'll see very good, very funny writers who are held back by that thing of, well, some people won't find it funny, and I'm a bit nervous about putting it out there. Well, that's fine. That's part of being a writer is being nervous about what you put out there. I think that is just much more important.

I think it's quite hard to get canceled nowadays. I wouldn't worry about that. Certainly, Roald Dahl and Benny Hill, they're not around to worry about it anymore. That's somebody else's problem, not your problem.

That always, for me, is the number one key thing.

Joanna: It's interesting thinking about dated language. It doesn't relate to getting canceled, but when I rewrote my first novel, Stone of Fire, after more than a decade, I found conversation in there that I just would not write any more. There were terms that have really dated in terms of just technology and stuff.

I rewrote those and was very happy that as a self-published author, you can just rewrite and upload new files. That is a possibility.

Dave: Yes, it's interesting because that's been something that I've had to revisit. The first song that I wrote for Horrible Histories was a song about the four King Georges, Georges I, II, III, and IV.

It's still a very popular song, and people go to that song, but there are lines in that song that there's no way that I would write lines like that now. That was only 2008, so it's not like it was eons away.

I think there have definitely been very big changes in language, and I think if you are able to go back—and this is one of the great things, as you say, about self-publishing.

In fact, there were a couple of things in the first Barry book that after I published it the first time, somebody read a couple of things and said, oh, that's a bit dodgy. Even though it was from a sympathetic point of view, it still potentially came across as something that people might be upset by.

So I was able to, like you say, just go into the document, change it, and put it back again in 72 hours, rather than eight months or whatever.

Joanna: I was just thinking there, I think Dickens republished one of his stories after some feedback for something that was taken as much more offensive. So I think this is not a new thing, people changing what they've written. I hope what you've said helps people just put stuff out there.

I like that you mentioned obscurity because this is so true. When we see comics canceled or people taken down on social media, they are often very famous. The reality is—

Dave: I mean, an interesting one is, I mean, there's a couple of comedians, notably Ricky Gervais and Dave Chappelle, who their job, they think, is to offend. They do that job really well.

People get offended, and they say, “Look at what Ricky Gervais has just done.” The algorithm, which doesn't understand divisiveness or woke cancer culture, says, “Oh, twice as many people are telling me to show this Ricky Gervais thing. This must be really popular.”