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Both aspiring and established authors use social media as a powerful way to connect with readers, grow visibility, and build the kind of “know, like, and trust” that turns casual followers into loyal fans.

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Strategies for Facebook, GoodReads, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky
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The post Social Media Author Round Table appeared first on Ninety Degrees Media.

Bee Bloeser discussed her inspiration for Vaccines and Bayonets and her unique method of organizing the storyline. She emphasized the importance of beta readers and editors in the writing process and highlighted the research process for her book. Additionally, she offered advice for individuals looking to write about their past experiences and discussed the process of hybrid publishing.

Key Points

• Bee explains the inspiration behind her book Vaccines and Bayonets and how she felt compelled to write it after going through documents from her time in West Africa.
• Bee describes her unique method of organizing the storyline by creating a timeline with flags, moving cards around on her living room floor, and later on a closet door to structure the chapters and ensure a good story arc.
• Lisa and Bee discuss the importance of beta readers and editors in the writing process, emphasizing the value of constructive criticism and the impact it makes on the final product.
• Bee elaborates on the research process for her book, highlighting the need for historical context, utilizing resources like State Department recordings and memoirs, and even finding visual aids on platforms like YouTube to enhance her storytelling.
• Bee offers advice to individuals looking to write about their past experiences or turn documents into a story, emphasizing the importance of starting to write, preserving documents, identifying a central theme, and considering the audience for whom the story is intended.
• Bee explains the process of hybrid publishing and why she chose Wheatmark Publishing in Tucson, Arizona.
• Bee discusses how her book’s purpose evolved from telling stories to inspiring readers, leading to the upcoming release of an audiobook version of Vaccines and Bayonets.

I’m here today with author and speaker and memoirist Bee Bloeser. Welcome, Bee.

Bee: Thanks, Lisa. It’s great to have going to be on your show.

Lisa: Bee and I first met when we both released books in the spring of 2021. Mine was a novel and hers a memoir. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about your book and your journey to publication?

Bee: Sure. The title of the book is Vaccines and Bayonets: Fighting Smallpox in Africa Amid Tribalism, Terror and the Cold War. It’s a historical memoir of our time in West Africa. When my husband was helping to wipe smallpox off the face of the earth. It began as a public health journey and became a geopolitical one with somewhat of a political thriller aspect to it.

When we were transferred to a country that was in the grip of a vicious dictator who had won the first presidential election, the book was I didn’t start out to write a book. It’s just that I had all these documents. My husband had passed away. This is like 12 years ago. He was a paperholic and I was reading through this entire file drawer of documents from our time in West Africa.

And they just screamed at me, You have to write this book. You have to write this book. I had no choice. So that’s how I started documenting a really important story.

Lisa: So you had all these documents and you had a story that you knew was in there that you knew you had to tell. So how did you find the story among these documents? You said he was a paperaholic, so there must have been a lot of documents, a lot of duplicates, a lot of stuff that didn’t really add to the story. How did you go through all that and find the story?

Bee: Well, it was a daunting task. When I had these documents spread out on the on my bed and on my table, and I tried to figure out how to make sense of the storyline because there were one of the problems was that there were multiple documents talking about the same thing.

There were Karl’s official reports to CDC. There were official government documents, embassy documents, all unclassified. You understand? I have no classified documents in my possession, but many of these talked about some of the same things.

So actually, I finally put a painter’s tape the entire length of the hallway in my apartment and started putting little flags of the events and so on.

And actually, Lisa, I kept it when I moved out of that apartment, had a ceremony with champagne and cheese and took it down and saved it. I know that people who are just on and people on audio cannot see this. And I don’t know if it shows up at all.

Lisa: Yeah. Because we are just a podcast, but maybe I can post a short clip of this video on YouTube so you can see that. Yeah. So you did a timeline. You’ve got the timeline of events, but then, you know, stories aren’t necessary linear. So how did you go from that then to going to organizing it into a story?

Bee: I worked from my memories, then plugged these events into memories of things that were just emblazoned in my memory from time there. I did not write the book chronologically, even though it does happen and the story is in a chronological order for the most part. But I first wrote the events, then the stories.

Like each chapter is a story within the story and of the events that were the most burned into my memory because of the traumatic nature of them. Those were the things I wrote first, and I wound up then later organizing. I put the different stories or chapter tentative titles or keywords on the backs of old business cards.

And I first spread them all over my living room floor and then thought, okay, well, this should come first or this story is getting a little too tense here. I need to give the reader a break with something light. And so would plug in to that spot and remove the cards around and think, okay, this slightly humorous story or lighthearted, this lighthearted incident would give the reader a break from the tension and curious on to the next part of both of my memories and about my story.

Lisa: And you did that on your living room floor?

Bee: It started on my living room floor. And then one evening I was having some people over. And so obviously it had to go and I had moved them to a table. They wound up eventually on the back of the hall closet door with Scotch tape. And many, many, many times over the months, I would move those things around.

And no, no, this really needs to be here so that we had a good story arc and also the conflict and so on, building toward the conflict situations and then the relief from that and then building some more building hire for the next episode, next thing, the next bit of conflict.

Lisa: So did you have some people helping you with this? I mean, did you invite them to come into your closet or.

Bee: No, I didn’t. I showed it to a number of my fellow writers as we went along. And in fact, I mentioned taking down the timeline when I was ready to move, the apartment was totally empty. The furniture, everything, all the boxes, they were gone. The only thing left in the apartment was the timeline, and I had that there for five years at that point.

So my fellow memoirists, the Memoir Mavens came over to this empty apartment, brought champagne and cheese, and we had this little ceremony, and I took the timeline down off the wall. So no one helped me with changing the order of chapters. But they enjoyed. And a number of them said this is really helpful to them.

And some of them began to use the same system I did. Some people use it entirely digital system. But for me it has to be something organic, something I can touch and physically move around.

Lisa: So you suggest that the method of using cards and taping them to a door?

Bee: Yes. For some people I think that at least a number of people told me it was helpful and somebody even asked my permission to write an article about the way I did it. So I assume some of your listeners could find it helpful to them as well.

Lisa: So when you went in, you were looking at these cards. You asked yourself, did you have like a checklist of things that you would ask yourself when you were looking at these?

Bee: I suppose there was a mental checklist. I didn’t think of it in those terms. It was just more my feeling about it. My feeling about each chapter. Some of them, you know, I felt the tension myself when I really thought about that chapter when I was working on that chapter. Sometimes I was as I was writing and rewriting and rewriting, I would go and think, okay, this is having this on this part of an arc.

I need to go in and switch this card with this one. And so it just kept evolving as I went along. And then, of course, you know, I think writers should always be in a good critique group and I had a great critique group. And of course, most of those people were only seeing one chapter at a time.

But then when I put the manuscript out to beta readers, that led to two or three other rearranging of chapters.

Lisa: Yeah, beta readers are very important as well as editors, because a lot of people may be in critique groups, but those critique, those people who are in your critique group, they are not necessarily editors, they’re not necessarily people who have even written the whole book themselves. But so beta readers can be very important.

Bee: Yeah, that’s a really good point. I happen to be fortunate enough to have a fantastic critique group. There were three people in the group who were retired college professors of creative writing and two people who had careers as editors, but their editing background was not in the creative writing, it was in technical writing. So, you know, they had to learn creative writing themselves as they were bringing their own work.

But there was a really high quality critique group. So I’m glad you pointed that out, Lisa, because you can just be in a group with other people who are learning just as you are.

Lisa: So you got the timeline down and the structure that you wanted down. So what other things did you do to research. There were some dates. Were there dates or facts or things that just were not hazy, that you knew you need to look into more exact?

Bee: When I first started working on this book, I thought, Oh, this is, you know, I’m not going to need to have a bibliography even because this book is going to be entirely from my own documents and my own memories. Well, as I went along, it was obvious that, oh, well, I’m talking about this, but the reader needs some context.

They need the historical context of what was going on at that time. They need this. How did this early post-colonial period work? You know, a lot of different things that I realized had to be researched. Of course, I researched from other books of other historians and so on. But also the State Department has a what do they call it, A and acidity, American State Department.

Anyway, it’s a voice recording of interviews with every ambassador. When they retire, they do a recording about their career. And there were also recordings with CDC at the 30th anniversary of the Eradication of Smallpox, which is a really historic event. There is no other disease, human disease, has ever been eradicated to this point. So at the 30th anniversary, they did a lot of interviews and interviewed a number of our colleagues and so listening to those fleshed out a lot of my memories of the State Department recordings, absolutely went to YouTube and found a let’s see, it was a 60 minute recording that had been done at the time we were in.

We were first in northern Nigeria and that was during the Nigeria Biafra war. And there was a 60 minute show that had been done about that conflict. There were so, so many options out there or finding elements that fit into my story. I also read other memoirs of people writing about their time in Africa, and they would mention some a smell or something like that.

I think, Oh yeah, I remember that. And it would jog my memory about that, about things that had happened. I even found on YouTube I was writing about this old historic market place in in Kano, Nigeria, and I found a video of someone who was just a tourist and they were walking through that market and the person was videotaping as they were walking through.

And I had been writing about the way the stalls were constructed, but I didn’t have a clear memory of that. And here was this video showing that. So there are so many resources out there that you might not think about initially.

What other research sources are there that you discovered along the way?

Bee: One was, besides the ones I’ve just mentioned, Google Earth, where you can pull up and see the topography and everything of an area that you’re writing about. And if you’re writing about a fairly current event, you can see the buildings and all of this. There’s also now I didn’t discover this until later, so this wasn’t something I used.

But there is a resource, a radio garden, it’s an app you can download free radio garden and you can access radio stations all over the world and hear current news. You can hear the music and all these things. So that was another resource. And maybe at some other time when there’s time to discuss it, I can go into how I organized all of that external resource research and organize that in a way that made sense.

Plus gave me a way to work with it and then winnowed that down as I went along. I had a mentor who was a university professor at the University of Arizona, and she had mentored many Ph.D. candidates through their dissertation. And she’s the one who gave me this method of working with organizing that material.

Lisa: So if somebody is out there and maybe they’re in a similar situation where they’ve lost loved ones who have a bunch of documents that could be made into a story and or a memoir or somebody has adventures in their past they wanted to write about someday. What kind of advice would you give those people?

Bee: I think to start with, I would give them the advice a creative writing group gave me when I walked in. Had I just had the idea I have to write this book, but I didn’t know where to start. I walked into this meetup group and I said, I have all these documents and they said, Just start writing.

Start writing.

And then secure these documents. Make sure that there are copies or whatever. So you’re not going to lose these as time goes on. So that’s one piece of advice. And I would say, you know, just start out, don’t delay, start with it. And I think first of all, I think what does this mean in your life or what kind of story do you want to tell?

What kind of message you want to get across? Kind of think of your central theme, central purpose, I think writing a book or putting these into a some type of a book like framework and think about who you want to do it for. Some people just want to do this for their grandchildren, for example.

But a number of people who start out that way wind up writing a book that becomes a really good book for anybody who has family. One of my fellow critique partners, and says her book is for anybody with ancestors. There are many ways to go about it, but I guess mainly think about your your purpose.

Lisa: So you got a draft together that you were happy with and you got a publisher. Was that a hard process or not so hard?

Bee: Well, you know, I wound up, I sent query letters and so on for a while. But this book is a niche book. I would say it is. I think it’s important in many different areas. There are probably about three large niche audiences for it. Public health, early post-colonial history, African history. And also one of the categories that the book does well in is African tribal guides for some reason.

But, Lisa, I just forgot your main question.

You got the book a publisher.

Bee: I wound up doing a hybrid publishing. I found a publishing company that I was familiar with actually, because I had four fellow writers who published with them. And so I knew the quality of their work. I used a hybrid publisher where and I didn’t mind paying them to aggregate these, these tests that I would have had to find my own editor and formatter and all of these different aspects to actually putting a book physically together.

So I used a Wheatmark Publishing in Tucson, Arizona.

Lisa: That’s good. A lot of people just don’t want to wait any longer. And hybrid publishing is a good option. I think I might do an episode about that soon, actually. So you’ve got your book out there. You’re now using your book for speaking. And so what’s next?

Bee: Well, that’s a great question, Lisa, and I’ve got two answers for that. I will back up a second. When I first started to write the book, I mentioned know your purpose in it may evolve, but excuse me. My purpose initially was just thinking of a much shorter book than what I eventually published.

I was just setting out to tell some stories, some really interesting stories and important stories. And then that grew into a goal to educate. And now, as I especially as I’ve spoken in many different places about my book, it has evolved into a mission to inspire. And now my mission is to inspire one reader, one audience at a time, to find a way to make a difference in the world.

And so that is kind of a new realization for me. And it’s so the book has changed me in that respect. But and what is next now is that I am about to come out with an audiobook version of Vaccines & Bayonets, and I’m just thrilled to death about that.

Lisa: Well, that’s good. Yeah. So I think you even have ideas about the narrator.

Bee: Yes, I have a great narrator, Claudia Dunn. She is a classically trained actor. She’s done voice acting, voice overs, voice, you know, generic book narration. She also does a lot of the audio description for PBS’s Masterpiece shows. She just has great credentials and she’s just super talented and I’m just thrilled to have her doing the narration.

And it’s not going to be too long coming. The master recording is supposed to be ready August 30, 2024, and then about 30 to 45 days after that. It will be available on retail sites all over the world and libraries and so on. So I’m really excited about it.

Lisa: Well, that’s great. I really look forward to that. And because I primarily do my reading through audio, so I’ll look forward to that and I’ll look for your next speaking engagement as well.

The post S2, E5: Researching a Memoir appeared first on Ninety Degrees Media.

Derek Doepker discussed the importance of storytelling in email marketing, and the use of lead magnets and viral giveaways to grow email lists effectively. He emphasized the “aspire” method for book promotion and shared a success story of an author who built a substantial engaged list through viral giveaways.

Key Points

• Derek discusses his learning process in email marketing, emphasizing the importance of storytelling and absorbing engaging content from other email lists.
• Lisa shares her experience with different email styles, contrasting Ben Settle’s lengthy emails with Derek Doepker’s concise and valuable content.
• Lisa praises Derek’s storytelling in his emails, specifically mentioning a series about mistakes and the positive response to a video glitch. She appreciates the humanity in his emails and asks about handling criticism.
• Lisa shifts the discussion towards audience building, highlighting the importance of content for audience retention and inquires about advice for authors on finding and growing their audience.
• Derek introduces the ASPIRE method as a high-level strategy for book promotion, emphasizing the significance of building an email list through various tactics like ads and social media.
• Derek explains the concept of lead magnets, advising on providing examples of writing style or genre as lead magnets for fiction authors and offering insights into creating lead magnets for both fiction and nonfiction authors.
• Derek introduces the concept of viral giveaways as a strategy to grow email lists effectively, sharing a success story of an author who built a substantial engaged list through this method.

I am here today with book marketer extraordinaire, Derek Deepker. Welcome, Derek.

Derek: Yeah, Lisa. Glad to be here.

Lisa: I receive an email from you just about every day, and I read most every one of them. Have you always kicked butt at email marketing, or was this something that you had to learn?

Derek: I’d say just about everything that I do, I’ve had to learn at some point. I mean, I don’t think I popped out of the womb being great at email marketing. So it was definitely a learned skill. And this is something for authors in particular you have the advantage of. You know, you’re a writer, and email is the perfect outlet to continue your writing and using it for marketing. That said, writing a novel or writing a nonfiction book, whatever you do, it is different than writing an email. So this is something that learning and wrapping my mind around email marketing was something, if I give one, just quick tip off the bat, it’s signing up for other people’s email lists who you really like, their emails, and that’s probably not going to be the majority of emails out there. Most newsletters are kind of boring, or it’s just a purely promotional thing, which, of course is fine on occasion, or when you need to promote something. It’s through finding emails that are really engaging. You know, they tell good stories or they have, you know, there’s something fun about them, something really valuable, educational, whatever the case might be. So it was a lot of absorbing other people’s emails, getting inspiration, and then also just going, what do I enjoy talking about? And so my email newsletter, the one you’re referring to, is on book marketing. At the same time, I’m into psychology. I geek out about psychology stuff. So I might read an interesting psychology study and tie that into, here’s how it applies to selling books. Or I’ll watch a movie and I’ll be like, here’s the lesson from the movie or the tv show that applies to you as an author. And so this is something that really any of us can do. You can take things that you’re interested in, that you’re passionate about, and then use your skills of storytelling or education or whatever the case might be, and apply it to your emails.

Lisa: So you belong to a lot of other people’s email lists. Do you have any favorite email lists you belong to?

Derek: Yeah, well, I mean, first, I’ve been on a number of different lists over the years that these days I actually tend to, let’s say, read less emails. You know, I’m pretty, I don’t know what word I’m looking for off the top of my head, selective maybe, about the newsletters I get. So I’m not overloaded with email newsletters, which I know is a challenge for some people. Yeah, I mean, some people who I’ve liked Ben Settle is a big name in the email marketing world. He’s kind of like a love him or hate them sort of person. I like learning from people like that where I don’t have to agree with everyones philosophy or whatever to study what they’re doing.

Another person I like Laura Belgray of talking shrimp. She’s got really kind of like funny emails, a lot of personality in her emails.

Ian Stanley is another guy. I’ve studied from Ian a number of his email marketing trainings. He’s another guy, he’s a stand up comedian. The same disclaimer for all these people, there’s a lesson in that. It’s like they’re not for everyone. Some people don’t like certain words that Ian uses, certain crass course language or whatever. And so it’s not saying that you have to. My choices don’t have to be your choices. You can find people that you like. That might be different. That is a lesson, though, that I notice whenever I talk about the people whose email lists I really like and enjoy reading. There’s almost always that disclaimer, hey, they’re not for everyone. And that’s kind of the point. They’re not being like controversial for the sake of being controversial. It’s not always controversial stuff. It’s more they have a strong personality. They take a stand. They’re willing to express themselves, their beliefs, their philosophy. They’re willing to inject, maybe their sense of humor or their attitude about things into their email. So now all of a sudden, they stand out and they’re unique. And in doing so, just as a byproduct, you’re not going to be for everyone.

Who am I not for?

So that’s another sort of email marketing lesson we can talk about how to build your email list. A big part of building your email list and writing emails, though, is knowing who am I not for? And that’s a great question. It’s actually an email I sent recently about writing a book. You talk about finding your ideal reader, whether that’s for a book or an email list.

First you might consider who’s your I would call anti reader, who’s really not going to like it, not respond to it. I’ll give you a hint. Anyone who doesn’t like to read probably isn’t going to read a book, right? So that’s an easy starting point. You might think, what are the things you really want to talk about? And this now all of a sudden it gives you permission to go, oh, instead of walking on eggshells worried about what if this person likes it or doesn’t like it, what if I get some unsubscribes? My attitude is it’s not in an arrogant or posturing sort of way. I really mean it. If I say, hey, if someone unsubscribes, they’re not for me. I don’t want to waste their time with emails that they’re not interested in. I don’t want to pay money for subscribers on my email list who they’re not going to benefit from it.

So as one of my mentors, Joel Bauer, has a saying, gotta paraphrase like, you know, don’t want to be in a marriage with someone who doesn’t want to be in a marriage with you. If you think about that for your readers or your email list, if they don’t want to be in a marriage with you, they don’t want to be in a relationship with you. Set them free. There is someone else who better suits them. And I’m saying all of this, some of it might be common sense, some of it might be really important for some people to hear because, or be reminded of because there is, if we get into email marketing, kind of that sense of, how do I do this? What do I say? What if some people don’t like it? What if I get unsubscribes? And the sooner you can sort of recognize, hey, you know what? It’s totally cool if some people don’t like my emails. It’s going to, if anything, just strengthen the people who do resonate with the type of emails that you write.

Lisa: I completely agree. I actually did sign up. You suggested Ben Settle and I signed up for his email list. And thing is, I ended up unsubscribing just because his style was more of a long email with big, dense paragraphs and I felt overwhelmed. Whereas I know with your emails, I like the fact that you’ve got, they’re very quick to read. And it’s like, I start to read one, I’m like, boy, I got the message and finished the email within, you know, short amount of time. And I thought it was very well worth the minute, couple of minutes I spent on it, reading it. So that’s one thing that I have to commend you for, is keeping your emails very short and to the point.

Derek: Yeah. And that’s something. It’s not an absolute rule. So a lot of times when I’m giving feedback on people’s emails, I am saying, you can cut it down. It could be less words then I get continuously. Give the caveat, though. You could have a 2,000-word email where if it’s super engaging, people will follow along if they’re interested in it. Right.

The thing about email, though, is it is somewhat the medium does affect the types of content you put in there. So I tend to keep my emails maybe 500 words or less. That’s not an absolute rule. I just found that’s what the typical average is. It’s one of those things. It’s funny. Uh, you know, someone might be like. It’s the framing. So if you tell someone, hey, do you want to watch this? A ten-hour long movie? Most people are going to say, oh, no. Ten hour movie? Are you kidding me? That’s ridiculous. Hey, do you want to watch this tv series? And it just so happens to be ten one-hour long episodes, and someone might binge the whole thing in a day, right? You call it a ten-hour movie. They don’t want it, but you call it a tv series, and all of a sudden, you know, people consume it differently.

So there is an element of that in email where I find that there’s something about email where you can get people engaged. I tend to not go too much long form content in email. If I want to do that, I’ll send them elsewhere. That said, it’s not an absolute requirement. If the biggest rule of thumb, just like when writing a book and you’re wondering how long should a book be? It’s like, well, as long as it needs to be and no longer. How long should a piece of string be? It’s like you can’t really answer these questions.

What you’re saying here is something that I generally value having something because I send daily emails. I like it. You can get through it in a minute or two. And I know daily emails aren’t going to be for everyone, and I’m not saying they have to be. It’s funny, sometimes people are like, oh, could you send a once a week email or something like that? And we could get into why I personally choose not to do that. But it’s like, well, if I send a longer email that took you ten minutes to read once a week, or if I sent you five emails that take you one minute to read, it’s actually quicker. Just having little daily doses, like little bite sized things that you could read. You could literally be going to the bathroom and read it. I can be through it. So I kind of keep that in mind that I am smaller doses, but then the frequency of it is typically five to seven days a week. So every day it’s like a little bit of a motivational or educational boost for people.

Lisa: So one of the great things about email marketing is that you can schedule out these emails. So do you have like a flow that you do, like sit down one day and just batch these emails that you schedule out for a couple of weeks or what’s your process?

Derek: My process has evolved and I keep coming back to this idea as I talk throughout it of here’s what I do or here’s what I might be doing. I want to separate that to a degree from what might be best for you as someone watching or listening to this because you might have a different style or productivity method that works better for you. And there’s different times in my life where I’ve done different things. So when I first started out, and even to this day, I tend, unless it’s an autoresponder that I’m writing, where I might do a batch of maybe five to seven emails, which for those who don’t know, autoresponder that’s, well, could be anything that you schedule in advance. Usually, though, it’s like the welcome sequence. Someone signs up, they get a freebie, then they maybe get a series of emails after that.

When I was first setting things up, I probably batched out, wrote a handful of emails that I know. Okay, each one of these is going to go out. Then after that, most of the emails I write, either I’ve written it the same day it goes out, or usually I do like to have it maybe the day before. Right. So I have today, I have tomorrow’s email scheduled out, and tomorrow I’ll schedule the next day. I’m going in traveling or something. Then I might schedule it out for a week. And that’s usually the thing, if I’m traveling is when I get it more scheduled out.

For me, though, it’s a lot of times a couple things. One is having my finger on the pulse of what’s happening right now. Even when I’m doing a launch or something. I might schedule out a couple emails, but then people send me some questions and I go, oh, that’s a great idea for another email. Then I can write the email based off of that. So it’s a little bit more of that interactive, or there’s a news event or, hey, here’s this new article that just came out that I read. I like having it be a little more present time where it’s not like I have a whole month of email scheduled out in advance. I don’t usually do that as someone who writes fairly consistent emails.

Another thing though, is because I’ve written so many emails over the years, a lot of the emails I’ve been sending out now are sometimes repeats of past emails. Whether I sent it out could be months ago, but usually a year or a couple of years ago, I’ve sent out an email. I’m like, that was a good email. A lot of people haven’t seen it, or if they have seen it, they’ll appreciate seeing it again. These days it’s gotten easier because I’ve been doing it for so many years that I can reuse, repurpose some emails and then also because I do promotions. If I’m launching a certain, or let’s say doing a promotion for a certain course, I’ve probably already written five to ten emails promoting that course back when I maybe promoted it six months or a year ago. I’ll just reuse those emails.

The way you might think about this as an author is, if you have a book and you did a book launch and you wrote a number of emails promoting this book of yours, and then six months later it’s on sale and you want to promote it, you could probably just take a lot of the same emails you wrote when the book first launched. Maybe you tweak it a little bit, change dates on things of when the sale is and stuff like that. And essentially, if you have good emails, maybe you’re writing an email with some testimonials about the book, little sneak preview of the book, a description of the book, whatever it was. You don’t really have to rewrite, or totally do something from scratch for those emails. You can usually repurpose what you have.

In a nutshell, basically most of the things I do kind of on the spot, you know, a day or two in advance, if not the same day, unless I’m reusing something from a promotion, or I’m scheduling something out because I’m traveling.

Lisa: Well, one story I found in a couple of your emails that were spaced out, I think, maybe a few months, but that I enjoyed reading again because, and I think you probably framed it a little differently. But you did a little series about a month ago about mistakes.

I’ll tell you, the story I like was the one that you, because I coach a little bit about doing video to market your books. And in one of your stories. A gentleman who was doing a video and he slipped and dropped the camera and he picked it up, that he ended up editing out that, dropping the camera. But then he tried, he thought, well, why don’t I try posting the video with that glitch in it? And that glitch got a lot more response than the, than the edited video.

And part of the series that you were doing had to do with somebody criticizing you for making a grammatical mistake, which is, I agree, is kind of like a, they need to get a life if that’s what they’re doing. So I like that bit of humanity that you put into your emails.

For people who have not read that series, can you talk a little bit about how you handle people who give criticism or how you handle respond to it?

Derek: A couple things you brought up. One was Keith Yackey, who I heard that video example from, where he was recording a video. So that’s a lesson unto itself. I was at an event that he was speaking at. He was the main speaker. It was his event. I believe he was either at the event, maybe it was following on social media after, but I think it was at the live event. The whole point of the story is I was able to use that story. I gave credit. I mentioned Keith in the email saying, hey, I heard this from Keith Yackey. And the idea, though, is like, if you’re at an event, if you’re, I mentioned watching a movie, watching a tv show, you read an interesting article, you watch a TED talk, whatever it is, like all these things could be a source of inspiration for an email.

I have an email going out tomorrow called the Super Mario effect, which is this the name. I think that’s actually the name of the TED Talk. And, it’s watching the TED Talk, talking about gamification. And then I kind of relate it to being an author, your motivation and stuff like that. So one thing with writing emails, sometimes it’s just about curating content. You don’t always have to be the creator of something. You could simply sharing things. I’m often sharing things. And whenever I know the source, I’ll give credit, maybe even linked. Like tomorrow I’ll link to the TED talk and then, kind of giving my thoughts on it. So that’s one thing for email content.

When it comes to handling criticism.

For a little context, I have a few emails like this about the grammar police. So for anyone watching this and you don’t have the context. This is not me saying, oh, grammar, a bunch of grammar mistakes are fine, or don’t edit your book. That’s not what it is. It was like one of them was, I started an email, I got a question for you and they were really upset that I said, I got a question for you, instead of I’ve got a question for you. I got a question. So one of those things, it was so silly. Now, if they were, like, polite about it, it would have been one thing. But they were like, you know, I’m disappointed they even went so far later to say, like, you’re offending the author audience with all this sort of stuff. And so the way I handle criticism, most of it, I just ignore.

If it’s valid criticism, I could say, thank you for sharing. You know, just a real simple thing. It’s actually, most of the time, pretty nice behind the scenes. If someone gives me something that’s just so over the top ridiculous, then I might turn that into, like, I got this silly email and I got this and I might respond to it.

There’s a number of ways to respond to trolls or haters. One simple thing. There’s an ad for Snowbird Mountain, and they actually just took a one-star review, and that’s their ad. And the one-star review was too advanced, and then it had a little commentary. So if you google Snowbird Mountain ad or whatever, you can, you can find it. But the idea is this goes back to, if you’re not for everyone, you know, sometimes bringing up what critics say is in and of itself, you actually can get people rallying behind you. You know, people agree with the critic, then maybe they’re not a fit for you, but you can get people rallying behind you. There could be other times where I might say, hey, they have a really good point here. If I do strive to have a degree of humility, you know, with it, I’m not saying I’m perfect.

I still got an ego. And I do go, okay, well, do they have a point? Is there something, especially whether it’s your emails or whether it’s your books or whatever it is there something valid to this? Sometimes, though, it’s just silly. Like another one star review I share that some people really like is when someone left a one-star review of one of my books and had nothing to do with the book, they go, I thought this was Deepak Chopra instead of Derek Doepker. I’m like, okay, what are you going to do, right? So even just sharing little things like that, people get a kick out of it. Just like you kind of just, you got to laugh at it. And so this gives you an opportunity.

Now, whenever you see, whether it’s criticism or one star reviews that your book gets or things like that, it’s not all going to be good material. If all they said was this sucks or whatever, okay? There’s not much to work with there. But if it’s kind of funny or silly or you can kind of give a playful response to it, then you know there’s an opportunity there.

So again, to recap, most of the time I either ignore it or I thank the person if it’s kind of valid, if they’re approaching it from a well meaning place. Like if they were to say, hey, you missed this or hey, you made this little mistake there or something like that, that’s one thing. It’s when they come at you, start attacking you, calling you names and insulting you or telling you how you know you’re just destroying the world with what you’re writing about or whatever, that’s when you might use that as content. The theme here, almost everything can become content for your emails and even, maybe even go into your books as well.

Lisa: We’ve covered a lot about content, but not a lot about building up the audience. I mean, content is one thing to keep your audience. What advice do you give authors when they are trying to find their audience and build their audience?

How to Build Your Email List

Derek: One thing to point out, because building your audience, obviously that’s going to be key. And I actually got an email like this. I’m listening to these interviews. You’re talking about what to write in these emails and this and that. But how to actually build the email list. The thing I remind people of is actually focusing on the content first, at least getting a handful of emails ready to go. I actually start with that before you start building because otherwise you start getting people on your email list and then you either don’t message them that much or now it’s intimidating. What do I say to them? So I recommend having at least a few emails lined up ready to go as soon as someone signs up for your list. So focusing on that content first and then how do you build your email list? Well, there’s a number of strategies. At the end of the day, I say virtually all roads lead back to building your email list.

I’m going to give high level and then I can get into some very tactical things that you can implement, like today or this week to start building an email list.

So high level, something I call the ASPIRE method. And this is really for doing any sort of book promotion. And ASPIRE is an acronym. So A stands for ads, right? You can run ads to sell your book, like Amazon ads, Facebook ads, BookBub ads, things like that. The book promotion sites. You can also run ads to build your email list. I have an ad that is has been running for a couple years. That’s not too typical for a Facebook ad, but you usually want to refresh it and update it. I’ve had an ad that’s run for a couple of years and it brings me new email subscribers every day. So it’s going to a reader magnet or a lead magnet and I can cover that in a few moments. But basically just advertising. You’re paying to build your email list or you’re paying to sell books through ads.

Next is S and the ASPIRE method for social media. If I’m posting things on social media, if I am posting about an upcoming book launch, when I was doing this before, at the end of the post, I would say, you know, opt in here to get notified when it launched. I might even offer a free copy or review copy at some point. Either way, if I’m posting on social media, if you have link in a bio, a lot of times those things are taking people back to building your email list, right? So social media is great. The thing is, you don’t own your social media platform. You don’t own the contacts in the Facebook group, you don’t own all the followers. If a site decides to deplatform you or not show your posts as many places, whatever it is, and you know, you’re kind of at their mercy, whereas your email list is what you own. If I’m doing something on social media, usually in some way, shape or form, eventually I want to get them from social media. Opted into some sort of email list. So we have ads, social media.

Then we have P, which stands for platforms or platform leveraging. So another way of built email list is guest blogging a little bit. My main thing though is that what I’m doing right now, guest podcasting, doing interviews. So whether that’s podcast interviews, summit interviews, and sometimes even speaking on stages, live and in person, anytime someone else has a platform that they built with your audience. And this is equally relevant for novelist fiction authors. I see a lot of fiction authors who will leverage guest podcasting to, to grow their audience. The idea is, if you’re going on a platform, yes, you can maybe mention your book, if of course, and maybe you get some sales that way. My goal, though, is to build the email list. So go do interviews, use that to get people back to your site. Offer them a freebie to build your email list.

Quick recap. Ads, Social, Platforms…I influencers who are fellow authors or other people in your space. So there are people who, I’ve used this to help sell books where I’ve launched a book, and some other people have mentioned the book to their email list and also done things where I promoted someone else’s email list. They promoted my email list, whether directly or indirectly by doing a webinar or something like that together. And so influencers, these are relationships. And for authors, many times it’s going to be fellow authors. Very common way of doing this would be something like a cross promotion. And there’s places like Book Funnel that you can do this. You can also reach out directly to authors or either with a group of authors, let’s say it’s ten paranormal romance authors all get together and they create a page that has each of their freebies, each of their reader magnets on it, and all ten of them promote, hey, for, you know, two days or these next three days or for this week, you know, you can get all these books for free, and then they can click on which books they want and opt into the list. The whole idea is you’re getting together with at least one other author, if not a handful of authors, and you’re all cross promoting each other’s free book, usually, which helps all build your email list, right? So that’s influencers.

Ads, Social, Platforms, Influencers, Referrals or Readers, right? So could you get your own readers to share it? Could you offer an incentive if they say, hey, share my website, or hey, anyone else who would benefit from this newsletter or this free book or whatever it is, you know, make it easy for them to share it, give them a message they can tweet out if they want to, or whatever it is you could do. I’ve done things for book launches where it’s like, hey, if you post this on your social media, send me a screenshot and I’ll enter you in for a drawing for a prize. So you get a bunch of people sharing and talking about your book and stuff like that, and then they’re incentivized to do that.

And finally the E in the ASPIRE method is Email.

That means all these things are eventually leading back to building your email list. So a couple of things I mentioned there specifically for building your email list. Running ads is going to be one of the most direct ways of building your email list. You have doing things like. Going on other people’s platforms. Guest podcasting is a very effective way for building your email list, working with fellow authors. So that’s doing cross promotions and joint promotions, Book Funnel, Story Origin, both of those places have some built in things for that. And of course, you can directly reach out, and then I can dive more into doing a viral giveaway, which is another strategy in reader magnets. But I’ll pass it to you if you have any questions or comments on any of that so far.

Lisa: Well, the lead magnet is one of the big things that people are always asking about, particularly authors, is like, okay, well, you can’t give away your book if you only have a couple of books or something like that. What are some things that people can give away for free?

For freebies?

Derek: Yeah. So it doesn’t have to be a book. That said, if we’re talking fiction, it is nice to give them an example of your writing. So, there’s other types of lead magnets you can do for fiction. The thing is to give an example of something that I cautioned the author about is she was writing, I think it might have been some sort of historical romance or something historical. And then she had a lead magnet, which was like certain recipes, like recipes that were in the book. And I’m like, this is very creative. It’s cool. The challenge is if that’s the only lead magnet, not everyone’s interested in recipes because not everyone cooks. And this lead magnet doesn’t really introduce them to what your storytelling is like. It’s more kind of a practical resource. So I go, this is a cool thing to have. I would include it as part of a bonus package. And I would also consider, though, a lead magnet that kind of reflects your writing style, the genre, and give people more of a taste of your storytelling.

For a fiction author, you could do a prequel. I mean, it could be worth taking one day, one or two days, to just knock out a quick prequel of the story. If you have book one in a series, it could be the simplest thing, maybe not the most ideal, but it’s good in the sense that it doesn’t take much effort, be even just giving away the first few chapters. So if it’s not the whole book, you could take the first 510 percent of it, you know, even the first chapter or two. And that could be the lead magnet. And that works also even with nonfiction.

Now, in nonfiction, if you take a portion of the book, I like to take something that kind of stands alone and position it as its own thing. So let’s say, and this isn’t something I’ve done, but if I have a whole book on book marketing and maybe I have one section in there on a strategy for getting book reviews, I might just take that one thing and offer it as its own little freebie on getting book reviews. Or maybe I have something in there on building your email list. Maybe there’s a lot of other topics in there. But I have one thing. So it’s like, here’s my number one list building strategy, and I just pull that excerpt from the book and that could be its own. Own standalone lead magnet. So you can always take a sample of something from your book. And then for nonfiction, you have some more options because it could be, let’s say, educational in the sense that you could create a quick checklist or a little video course or there’s different things that you can do.

Something I did just to even kind of prove the concept was, I noticed that a lot of people were asking me about my setup. So whether or not, if you’re not watching this on video, it won’t make sense. But if you see the video of this, you’ll see I have a black backdrop of microphone. They’re like, oh, you know, how’d you do that? And all it is is just like a little backdrop that I pull up behind me and then the microphone, and then I don’t have it turned on, but I got, you know, ring light and stuff. And so I go, you know what? I’m going to create a little home studio. I forgot what I call it, you know, cheat sheet or whatever, buyer’s guide. And it took me 10-15 minutes. Right? Copy and paste the links on Amazon, do a quick little video. Then I ran some Facebook ads to test it, and I was getting really good. I mean, it might have been less than a dollar a lead using lead ads or something very, very good for, like, targeting entrepreneurs and stuff for it. I didn’t really have much to sell off the back end. I just wanted to prove the concept that you could create something in 15 minutes and then take ten minutes to set up an ad and start building your email list that way.

So again, that’s one example. It may or may not apply to you in terms of the specifics. The mindset, though, is I don’t, you don’t have to spend months creating something. There might be something really simple, whether that’s a short story, a prequel, a little buyer’s guide, cheat sheet, something like that, that you can get out there and you might evolve it or create something more comprehensive later if you want to. To me, it’s really just about getting something done, getting it out there. And sometimes it actually has higher consumption and value when it is quicker to consume. So if it’s a short story that you can read in 15 minutes, there’s actually a higher likelihood that they’re going to go through it. And if it’s really good and they go, I really like this author’s style, then that could lead them to wanting to buy your other things.

Lead Magnet Couple Things to Keep in Mind

One is just get something done. You know, done is better than perfect, and then you can always make something even better later. Consider what’s going to appeal to your audience. Hopefully, that’s an obvious thing. Also, though, then consider how does this tie into what you’re going to offer them? Is it directly related? So that home studio cheat sheet type of thing is really cool. I might not be attracting that many authors with that, though. So if I want to appeal to an author audience, which I do, I have a book, Why Authors Fail. And that’s kind of my main lead magnet because that’s directly targeting the audience I want. And finally, then another thing is you can have multiple lead magnets. So I have different things that are. All building my email list from my free book Why Authors Fail to webinars that I do that build my email list too, other little bonuses.

I sell an affordable course on getting book reviews. That helps build my email list when people buy it. So don’t compare, if you’re just starting out as, as I’ve heard, don’t compare your first draft to someone else’s final draft. If you’re just getting started, get one lead magnet done, one reader magnet done, and then realize you can always add more over time.

Lisa: That is so great. I just have one little question for you, which is, I hope it’s kind of little, but I have a couple of clients who have an email list, but they don’t use it very frequently because they’re afraid they don’t want to spam their list if they send an email every month. So they end up sending only a couple a year. I’m sure you’ve run into clients like that. What do you say to these clients?

Derek: Well, there’s a few things to keep in mind. If you’re only sending a few times a year, it’s actually going to be a lot of times a worse experience for the reader and for the person with the email list. And the reason is, if you’ve ever signed up for a list, even the next day, I don’t know if this happened to anyone watching or listening to this. I’ve signed up for stuff. And I mean, even the very next day or two, I’m like, wait, who was this person again? Now imagine months go by unless you’ve really built a very strong relationship early on. Or maybe you’re emailing them somewhat frequently and they really get to know you, then maybe it goes a month or two without hearing from them. That’s one thing. A lot of times, if you’re not emailing them that often, then it’s just people are going to forget about it and they’re actually more likely to market it as spam because they’re like, who is this person? Is this even relevant to me? And now it’s like, well, now they only seem to be emailing me when they want something, right? Which almost makes it even worse than if you’re having a continuous conversation back and back and forth. So that’s it tends to make it worse.

There’s other comparisons I can give, like a relationship, you know, how healthy is a marriage if the couple only sees each other and talks once every three months, right? Probably not going to be as good of a relationship as if they’re talking on a daily basis or at least a weekly basis or more frequently. And there’s this idea of kind of the, the mere exposure effect. I remember there’s a coffee shop I used to go to, and after, I don’t know, a few weeks or a month or something like that, they’d start to be like, hey, Derek, you know, whenever I came in, like, you recognize the, the people. And I’m like, oh, I kind of, I didn’t really know them that well, but. But there’s like, I feel more comfortable around these people just because you start to see them on a regular basis. You want your name in their inbox to have that same effect, for it to be recognizable right now.

The thing is, though, but I don’t want to spam people. I don’t want to be annoying. Well, this might sound like a Captain Obvious thing to say. It’s like, don’t write annoying emails, then don’t write boring emails. Focus. It’s focusing on what you don’t want rather than what you do want. It’s kind of playing to avoid loss rather than going, what is even the point of this email list? They signed up for it because they want to get emails. Now your job is to send them emails because that’s what they signed up for. So it’s not spam when they say, hey, I’m raising my hand and telling you I want emails where it becomes spammy, as if you’re sending them emails that don’t provide anything that they want of value. Right now, if they want to hear about your book releases, and that’s what you say, either sign up for it, then they want to hear about the book releases. If you’re good. If they want entertainment, almost everyone’s going to want entertainment.

I strive to make my emails somewhat entertaining, to have that entertainment value. And if you really get this down, well, you realize that you could send emails about almost anything. As long as people are drawn into it. Right? They’re entertained, then it’s valuable. Most people are spending their time on Instagram and TikTok and YouTube and stuff, not because it’s profoundly benefiting their life. It’s just entertainment. It’s just passing the time. Right? And as an author, you’re an entertainer. Whether you’re a novelist or whether you’re nonfiction, great nonfiction authors are going to incorporate entertainment value to what they’re doing.

So my mindset and what allows me to sort of, quote unquote, get away with writing daily emails is, first of all, I set the expectations. Here’s what you’re going to get. You’re going to get an email probably almost every day. If that’s an issue, you don’t have to sign up or you can unsubscribe. Right? So now it’s like they’re, they’re agreeing, this is what I want, and I totally am. Fine. Some people are going, oh, Derek, I don’t want daily emails. Fine. It’s okay. This isn’t for you, then. But again, they’ll be okay with an email that comes once a week that takes some ten minutes to read, whereas my emails come once a day and take one to two minutes to read. It’s the same at the end of the week. I mean, if you really were to do the math. But my mindset is I want to make this so that they’re looking forward to the emails, so they’re upset if they’re not getting them. And when you flip the switch from I don’t want to upset people by sending an email, it’s like, what would it look like? What would it be like if they were upset that you haven’t sent them an email? What kind of emails would you send? Where they’re going, it’s been a month and you haven’t sent me an email. Come on now. You know I want my fix, right? So that’s the shift to get into. And some people are going to get it, some people won’t.

The people who won’t, they’ll just lose out on a lot of sales and a lot of potential and disappoint, you know, potentially their audience. Who could have benefited from it? Those who get it will embrace it. And I’m not saying it’s an easy thing. It’s something that can take some skill to develop. There are some shortcuts, like I mentioned, though, sometimes it’s as simple as going. Found this really cool article. Thought you might like it, you know? Type of thing. I saw this really great video. Here’s something to check out. Oh, this funny thing happened to me today. It reminded me of something that happens here, or there’s correlation stories, which are great.

I was doing this as an example, working in the garden and comparing the garden to something. The character in the story. It’s like for a novel, it’s something that you learn from gardening and the life lesson you get from that. It’s the same thing that this character experiences in the story. So there’s all kinds of ways you can have fun with this. And another thing, if you’re an author, writing emails is another opportunity to work on your writing chops. And so now you’re getting to practice your writing chops. Simple emails could be short stories, and you might find that by regularly sending short stories to your audience. Eventually one of those ideas really takes off and turns into its own thing.

Or for me, nonfiction. I have a lot of emails that actually get that. I can take that and go, I really like that. I’m just going to put that into a chapter of one of my books for this concept that I’m teaching. So now all of a sudden, you go, you’re bettering yourself. If you’re making it entertaining, your audience is going to enjoy it. And one final reminder is that if you’re like, well, I get a lot of emails. I don’t like receiving emails. It’s like, I don’t take, I believe my audience are responsible adults and they can decide if they want to be on the email list or not. If it’s too much for them, they can opt out. If it’s not a fit for them, they can opt out. If they’re on 500 other email list, they can choose to stay signed, they can unsubscribe from those or not.

It’s not my job to try to manage someone else’s life. It’s my job to provide the best possible value I can provide. And I think of myself as a server. Like, you’re at a cocktail party, you’re going around, you got a tray, you want some appetizers, and they can say yes or no, but I’m not going to be like, well, I don’t want to go. What if they’re not hungry? What if they don’t want to talk to me? It’s like, would you like some? They’ll be like, sure or no, thanks. Okay, cool. Onto the next person. And people can self select if it’s something that they want.

Lisa: Wow. Well, this has just been such a wealth of information and wisdom, and I really appreciate you as a mentor. And do you want to give any last advice or tell people how they can sign up for your list or to even if they don’t read every email, at least they’ll get a lot of opportunities to learn more.

Viral Giveaways

Derek: Yeah, sure thing. So one final little quick tip. I mentioned something called viral giveaways. I have a whole training on it, so you can email me if you want more details. A viral giveaway would be something like, you can take 5-10 other books in your genre that are popular and do a giveaway for them. So let’s say it’s a fantasy list and you want to give away the Lord of the Rings trilogy box set, print book trilogy, you could do that. You have a bunch of people enter to win. One person wins it. You buy it on Amazon, you ship it to them. I ship it to them through Amazon. Or you buy the few books and you ship them to them on Amazon. And anyone who didn’t win, they can be on your email list. They opt in whenever they join the giveaway and you can offer a consolation prize.

I usually do something like the free copy of one of my books. The opportunity to be an early reader, free, get a free copy. And I’ve done this. I worked with an author, she’s a romance author. She started with the new pen name under romance and built up a list of over 10,000 people. And I think it was about three and a half months results. Not typical disclaimer on that. Yeah, it was just following the strategy that I taught. She put, I think a couple hundred, few hundred in some Facebook ads to promote the giveaways and built a really big list that way. And she said they were engaged. She got some, I think, some early readers and things through this list. A lot of people were sticking around. So that’s something.

There’s a whole strategy that I teach on that. It’s just to plant the seeds. Something you could do regardless of where you’re at. You remember, like you could just buy some books you’re not giving away not like giving away something you don’t have permission to, like an ebook of it or whatever, you’re actually purchasing the book whether you purchase the ebook or print book, but you’re purchasing it first. That’s the key. Meaning you’re not just giving away a PDF you have on your computer, you’re actually purchasing it and sending it to the winner. And so that’s something you’re totally allowed to do. A lot of times, even the authors in the giveaway, if they’re around, you can let them know about it. Sometimes they’ll even help promote it. So a whole strategy there and then just get the creative wheels turning that even if you don’t have a lead magnet at this point, there’s other ways you can leverage resources out there to build your email list.

And if you want to get on my email list, see the types of emails I send, get a free copy of Why Authors Fail as well. Then you can go to bestsellersecrets.com. Once again, bestsellersecrets.com.

Lisa: Wonderful. Thank you so much. I now have a good to do list of my own how to work through. So thank you so much.

The post S2, E4: How to Build Your Author Email List appeared first on Ninety Degrees Media.

Terra Trevor discussed her transition from short form articles to publishing her first book on her motherhood journey, as well as the fortunate circumstances that led to the publication of her niche genre book on transracial adoption. She also reflected on the impact of conducting book group meetings on Zoom during the pandemic, which increased readership.

Key Points

• Terra explains how she transitioned from writing short form articles to publishing her first book about her motherhood journey, leveraging her existing connections.
• Shares how she found her publisher for her niche genre book on transracial adoption, detailing the fortunate circumstances that led to its publication.
• Reflects on the shift to primarily conducting book group meetings on Zoom during the pandemic, highlighting the impact of increased engagement during that time.
• Explains the schedule for the creative nonfiction workshop at the Santa Barbara Writers conference, alternating teaching days with Andrea Weir Estrada.
• Discusses the challenges of combining fiction techniques with nonfiction writing, specifically incorporating dialogue into scenes.
  Emphasizes the importance of marketing books through word of mouth and personal connections.
• Talks about receiving deeply personal questions during book group presentations, where attendees focus on the author’s motivations rather than the content of the book.

I am here today with Terra Trevor, a memoirist and essayist. Welcome, Tara.

Terra: Thank you for inviting me, Lisa. Yeah.

Lisa: You started out with feature articles and columns and essays, short form. When did you know you wanted to do a book?

Terra: I knew I wanted to do a book when my readers were saying, when are you going to do a memoir? And I was like, oh, my goodness, I’d never even thought about it. So I began writing. It took me about eleven years to write my first book. It was a story about my motherhood journey. And I already had readers from my columns. I had a lot of readers who were ready to buy the book. And I also spoke at a yearly conference. So I was luckier than most authors when I started out. I already had readers and I already had a way to promote my book. And so that grew from there, doing book groups. And after book groups would read the book, then they would invite me to come and be their guest speaker. And it was fun. I traveled all over the United States to different book groups. And this was in, the first book was published in 2006, and it had a good, strong ten year run.

Lisa: How did you find your publisher?

Terra: Well, my publisher, it was a niche genre. It was about transracial adoption. I had a child adopted from Korea, and so I was looking for a publisher. And before I wanted to make sure that I had a good, strong manuscript, so I sent it to someone. It was friends from the Korean American Adoptee Adoptive Family Network. And I sent it to the founder and I had her read it and I said, what do you think? And she wrote back and she said, I love it. And interestingly, we’re just getting ready to start a new publishing group and we’re going to publish two books this year, and I want yours to be one of them. So again, I got luckier than you usually are. And so it was published. And that’s how I started out with my first book. But then my second book, which just came out last year, way different story. I had to do all the whole traditional search, querying many, many, many different publishers, and the University of Nebraska Press said yes. So that was my second book just came out. It’s We Who Walk the Seven Ways, and it’s also a memoir. So for the past year, I’ve been doing book groups for this new book.

Lisa: How do you go about finding the book groups who want to read your book?

Terra: Well, this time, it wasn’t near as easy as with my first book because I didn’t have that built in readership, so I had to do it word of mouth. And what I’ve discovered is if you just tell a few people, they tell many people, we always have this idea that there’s some magical link that you can get on book groups, and now they’re, you know, book clubs are going to want to buy your book, and it’ll be easy, but it’s not ever, ever, ever easy. University of Nebraska Press has a catalog of native studies memoirs, so I have the opportunity to do readership of anyone who’s interested in reading books about native American journeys and also memoir. So those are pretty much my readers. I’ve gone to Unitarian Universalists. They have book groups, and all the unitarian churches have book groups, and they like books on spirituality. So that’s been a good avenue.

Lisa: That’s a good market to tap into. Yeah.

Terra: So I have the faith based communities that I can go into, but again, it’s just contacting lots of different people and, you know, and hearing a lot, just not hearing anything back at all. And then every now and then you get a yes, and then that one yes leads to another one. And then another thing that I’ve been doing is if I speak to a book group and I know of another author, that they would really also enjoy their book, I’ll recommend them. And so, in turn, that happens to me.

Lisa: So you’re doing all this footwork yourself of finding these groups. You don’t have a service or something that you’ve subscribed to?

Terra: No, I don’t. So far, I haven’t been able to be hooked up to it. I think I have the same dream that all authors have, is that one day something will lead to that link where you have a service or some kind of connection.

Lisa: So how’s the process go? When you find a group and you book to speak? With them. How does it happen?

Terra: Well, with my first book, I just put out the word. And so I never asked to be invited. And with my first book, I never would charge anything because I always thought that if they buy the book, that’s payment enough for me, but then they would give me an honorarium, and so that’s what I’m doing at this time, and I’m just open. I don’t say anything. And sometimes they decide to give you an honorarium, and sometimes they don’t. You know, if you have the luxury to have a book that’s a bestseller or you’re a bestselling author, but I’m just thankful to have the opportunity to have written this book for the University of Nebraska Press to publish it and for readers to buy the book and want to read it. So sometimes I go, if it’s easy to travel, I’ll travel and meet with the book group in person. But I do lots of books group meetings on Zoom.

Lisa: Is that primarily how you do it these days?

Terra: Primarily, it is. And it started during the pandemic. My book was published in 2006, and it actually sold out during the pandemic because there were so many people reading, and one word of mouth would lead to another. And I did lots and lots of Zoom book groups during the pandemic.

Lisa: Which one do you prefer? Do you prefer to go in person, or do you prefer the online version?

Terra: I love being able to go in person when I can. That’s the best. We just sit around and it’s usually hosted in a very relaxed atmosphere. Sometimes people’s living rooms, sometimes out in the backyard. If it’s a large group, it’ll be in their meeting space, like unitarian churches. They always have really nice lounges that we meet in, but it’s just you sit around and you have a conversation, very candid, and I love it.

Lisa: Do you ever find that you go, and there are people who haven’t read the book?

Terra: Often. And then I’ve had some of the readers come back and say they read part of the book, and they’re not even very strong readers, but they actually read it. Then I’ve actually had one person said she wasn’t sure that she was going to enjoy the book, but she said I wasn’t happy in the middle. She goes, but then I was very, very happy when I got to the end, and I thought that might be the best comment of all because she pushed through to the end to read it. In both of my books there are deaths, and some people can’t handle sad stories, so I understand.

Lisa: Do you find that by going to these groups it helps you get reviews?

Terra: No, it doesn’t help. Forget reviews. Sometimes if they ask me, I will say, oh, it would be so helpful if you would go on Goodreads and rate the book, say, well, you know, that would, that’s, how do you want to be thanked? And I said, well, if you like the book enough to go give it a rating, I’d be very thankful for that. No, but it’s the joy of having written a book, being able to share it with others who’ve enjoyed it.

Lisa: So they contact you and they say, we’re going to read your book and we want you to come speak to this in person or through the computer. And how long usually is it that between somebody asking you to present and you actually doing the event?

Terra: It depends on what their schedule is and mine. Sometimes it can be just if I don’t have anything going on, and neither do they. It could be very soon. Other times we book quite a bit in advance, and if travel is involved, then we always in advance. Well in advance. And I have a link up on my website that says I’d be delighted to talk with your book group. And mostly that’s how I’m contacted.

Lisa: Do you have a list of questions you send them that they can discuss?

Terra: Sometimes we do. It depends on what their topic of their book group is, if it’s spirituality. I’ve actually talked to memoir classes. They’ve contacted me and said that we’re writing memoir and we loved yours and we’d like to talk about that. So it’s always tailored different depending on which group is reading it, what their special interest is.

So you teach memoir workshops?

Terra: Yeah. I didn’t plan on teaching memoir workshops, but I’ve had two groups contact me recently and ask if I’d talk about writing memoir. So I’ve done that, and that was a lot of fun also.

Lisa: Well, that’s great. So I guess that’s probably what you’ll have to put into your bag of tricks. Now, I know you’re going to teach a nonfiction writing class at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference. Why don’t you tell me a little bit more about that?

Terra: Andrea Weir Estrada and I are both going to teach the creative nonfiction workshop, which combines fiction techniques with nonfiction writing. And Andrea is going to lead the workshop on Monday. Let’s see, Monday, Tuesday, and Friday afternoons from 1:00 to 3:30. And then I’m going to lead it on Wednesday and Thursday. And the reason I’m leading it less days is because I’m no longer living in Santa Barbara. I’m in Santa Cruz now. So those are the two days I’m able to get there. Then Andrea was kind enough to say she’d do three days. So we’re looking forward to that.

Lisa: What do you find is people’s challenges when they go to try to do creative nonfiction? What do you think people find is the hardest part?

Terra: Probably when you have to take scenes and have dialogue and work it in. So, I try to help them understand. You have your manuscript, you have everything, and then we pick out which is better told as a scene rather than narrative, where in your nonfiction, it’s strict narrative, and that’s easy. But if you want to combine it, you have to put that dialogue in there in realistic. That for me, as an early writer, that was my biggest challenge.

Did you have any mentors that helped you with that?

Terra: I did. I started out, Bill Downey was one of my mentors. I’m from way back from those days, early days in the eighties, the Writers Conference, Shelley Lowenkopf and Barnaby. I hail from the way aarly Writers Conference. So those are my mentors. Grace Rachow everyone from way back. And most of, many of us are, you know, are continuing on.

Lisa: Yeah, that was really fun back at the Miramar. And it’s still pretty fun.

Terra: It’s still fun. Yeah, yeah. I learned from Fannie Flagg when I was learning how to you write a book and she said she had a clothesline in her house and she would hang up her pages on her clothesline. And so when I was doing my first, even in my second book, I don’t have a clothesline. So I’d line all my pages up and down the hallway from one room to another to know and rearrange chapters.

Lisa: Yes, that’s, that is a, that’s a great, a great method. And a lot of people do that, too, with writing on index cards and rearranging those. Which scene goes where. Yeah, that’s it. That’s a great method. I like that one. Do you do anything else to try to market your books?

Terra: Yes, constantly. I say writing your book is the fun part for me, but for marketing, and that’s huge because what good is it if you have a book that nobody’s reading? Social media constantly. But I don’t really find that works as well as word of mouth, again, just depending on who you’re friends with. And, gosh, recently a friend told me that she walks everyday and she always sees a woman in her neighborhood and they wave and they’ve been seeing each other for the longest time. But recently they got into a conversation and they started talking about books. And she said, oh, I’ve just read a book you might like. So she went over and loaned my book to her and then that person shared it with someone else. So you never know how it’s going to turn out. But I really think it’s a matter of who you know and who you might meet and who they might tell. And, you know, you just, and also faith. Just a lot of faith.

Lisa: Yes, definitely. So going back to book groups, what’s the hardest part about presenting to a book group?

Terra: Well, presenting isn’t a bit hard. It’s hardest to find the groups again, sending out lots and lots of emails saying that you’re the author of this book. And see if they have a book club, book group, and if they do, please consider my book. That’s the hard part for me. But once you get a book group and you’re sitting down talking, it flows. You never know which direction it’s going to flow in, but, you know, it does.

Do you get hard questions?

Terra: Sometimes I do. And I get deeply personal questions because oftentimes they don’t want to talk about the book. They want to talk about what I wrote in the book, which caused them to wonder, what if? And did I also do something else and what led me to what I did?

Lisa: But you’re pretty well practiced. And what do you do to prepare? Because I know it must be when people have to go up on stage and speak or the whole actors kind of preparation and stuff. Do you find it hard to prepare yourself emotionally?

Terra: Not anymore. Used to. I’ve been speaking, being a panelist, and I’ve led workshops at a number of different conferences since my first book was published in 2006. So I’ve had a lot of practice, but at first, yes, I was nervous, and I actually love being on panels where there’s three, four of us and we tackle a topic together. That’s one of my favorites.

Lisa: So it’s mainly the practice, and just the more you do it, the more comfortable you are?

Terra: I think so.

Lisa: Do you have any advice to people who have, say, a memoir out and they’re looking to speak to book groups?

Terra: Don’t give up. Continue searching. If you just send out your emails, continue doing your social media, talk to everyone who you think is interested, and just realize that if you don’t hear anything at all, it doesn’t mean that something’s not happening behind the scenes. Just hold on to faith and keep pushing on.

Lisa: Sounds like you have a couple of different niches, you’ve got the faith and the Native American and the several different niches. Do you think that helps?

Terra: Very, very much so. I can’t even imagine how you would do it if your book, if you just had a novel like that. It would depend on what your niche is for a novel. But I only know what particular genres that I’ve been writing, but I think it would translate for whatever someone has, whichever book, it would just search your subjects and in the beginning of the book, how they catalog it. That also gives you a lot of ideas of how, where to begin, like looking for, for your book group readers.

Lisa: Well, that’s great. Do you have any groups coming up in the near future?

Terra: One, but it’s a friend’s. Oh, that’s another good important thing. Thank you for bringing this up. Sometimes it’s just a friend’s readers group, a group of people, maybe six women that are all get together and read the same book. It doesn’t have to be an organized group. So I do. I have a local group coming up soon. We’re going to do that. And that’s just sitting around the backyard drinking lemonade, talking about the book, and it’s fun.

Lisa: I hope other authors will get into finding these little groups. And do you ever give, like, a book discount to the group?

Terra: I don’t have any way to do that. I don’t sell them the books University of Nebraska often does sell book. There’s so many books sold, they will do a discount. And then also, it just depends on where. I always encourage my readers to go to their favorite local bookstore first, and my book is in most bookstores, and it can also be ordered, and it’s also in many libraries. And I’m just as happy if somebody wants to get my book from a library as well. In fact, that’s a great honor.

Lisa: That’s true. And as we’re speaking, it’s National Library Week, so it’s great to encourage getting things from the library anytime of the year. Well, I thank you very much, and I look forward to your workshop at the Santa Barbara Writers conference.

Terra: Thank you. I’m looking forward as well.

The post S2 E3: Presenting Memoirs to Book Groups appeared first on Ninety Degrees Media.

Caitlin Rother, a successful author, discusses her experience writing and publishing books, emphasizing the importance of book proposals and persistence in the face of rejection. She also mentions the need for multiple income streams and advises aspiring authors to have patience and work hard on promoting their books.

Key Points

• Caitlin discusses her career as a crime writer and how she got her start covering the Kristin Rossum case, which led to her first book deal
• Caitlin has written many book proposals and helps other authors write them as well, emphasizing their importance as a marketing vehicle to sell an idea
• Caitlin writes narrative nonfiction. Fiction so that it reads like a novel. But it’s all true
• Caitlin discusses her experience getting her first book published, transitioning from fiction to nonfiction, and working on a sequel during COVID. She also mentions hurting her wrists while writing quickly for NaNoWriMo and now reads her work aloud while editing.
• Caitlin’s writing routine varies depending on where she is in the process of a nonfiction book, but she is at the computer every day unless she can’t type due to other business tasks like revisions, copy editing, book tours, etc.
• Caitlin advises aspiring authors to have patience, not quit their day job until they have a contract and to prepare themselves to work hard on marketing their books. She also emphasizes the importance of persistence and not giving up too soon.
• Caitlin emphasizes the need to use rejection as a way to improve

I am here today with Caitlin Rother, rhymes with author. I first met her about eight years ago, I think, when she spoke at the Santa Barbara Writers conference. And she’s going to speak again this June 13 again at the Santa Barbara Writers conference down by the beach at the Mar Monte Hotel. So I thought I’d catch up with her and see what she’s doing lately. Welcome.

Caitlin: Thank you for having me.

Lisa: You’ve been recognized for your investigative journalism and you have 14 books you have written and coauthored. Did you always know you wanted to become a writer?

Caitlin: Well, I’ve always enjoyed writing, and I’ve been writing stories since I was a little girl back in the first grade. I remember we had an assignment in class to create our own book, and with colored pencils, I drew the pictures about a little family of mice that lived in the forest. And. My mother was very concerned because I killed off the mother of the mice family. I said, well, it just seems like there’s no story unless somebody dies. So that’s how it all got started. I didn’t really know I was going to be a writer, but I’ve always been writing stories, and I was an only child and not very social. I was very shy and introverted, and I told myself stories and I’d have voices that I’d do too myself to keep myself busy because I read a million of books. That’s what I did.

Lisa: And a lot of those when we’re kids, a lot of those fairy tales are, I mean, if you watch Disney, yeah, somebody has to die.

Caitlin: Well, some of those fairy tales, like Grimm’s fairy tales, you know, those things are dark, right? When I was in college at Berkeley, I worked for the school newspaper, and I also had an internship at a radio station. So I got into journalism. I took a class in journalism. I took fiction writing. I mean, I took everything. I had a very broad education at Berkeley in all kinds of things. So it was a great place to go because there were so many choices. But I didn’t really think about journalism because I didn’t want to go live in a small town. And that’s pretty much what I heard is when you start out in journalism, way back when you are expected to go to the middle of nowhere and pay your dues and work your way up. And so I eventually did do that. But, yes, I was working in corporate communications, which I absolutely hated. And I said, I got to get out of this. I’m going to go to journalism school because I thought the degree would help me. I ended up in the middle of nowhere, just like I said I didn‘t want to. And I actually got fired from my first journalism job because they’re like, you just don’t have it. I had to show them I did, and I didn’t miss a day of work. I went to the next job. They said, oh, you should just be in TV, which they thought was kind of an insult. But here we are years later, and I’m on 20/20, and I’ve got almost 15 books now. I think the laugh is on them. Determination and persistence and rebounding from rejection, those are the keys to getting where you need to go in this world as an author.

Lisa: Definitely the truth. Yeah. So how did your first book come about?

Caitlin: I worked at the San Diego Union Tribune. Most of what I covered during my career, I spent 19 years as an investigative newspaper reporter at mostly major metropolitan daily newspapers was government. I covered government and politics, so people think, oh, she was a crime writer, but I wasn’t. I covered incompetence and negligence and stupidity and people who lied and went bankrupt, and people still elected them. Even though I wrote these investigative stories, it made me a little crazy. So after covering government and politics and getting so disheartened by people, kept electing these people who were not qualified, in my opinion. And even when I wrote these stories exposing all that, they still got elected, which takes us to this election still happening. But I got sick of that.

I started getting more interested in crime writing. So on the Saturday shift, I asked for the police beat that day. And if there was a murder, I’d write about murder on a Saturday. And that’s kind of how I got into it. But to get my first book, I was working at county government, the beat, and I was no longer covering that. I was doing some kind of free floating fill in for everybody on the government team and enterprise team. I got a tip that this county toxicologist had been arrested for murder. And so I started covering the Kristin Rossum story from day one. It was my story. I broke the story. Turns out she was arrested for killing her husband, and she was accused of stealing drugs from the medical examiner’s office where she worked and using them to poison him. And she claimed he had killed himself because he was depressed and upset that she was leaving him for her boss, who was also married. So anyway, it was a great story, and I wrote 50 stories for the paper. I wrote a story for Cosmopolitan, which ran
in their international editions. And once that was over, I was allowed by my paper to pursue a book deal. I wrote a book proposal, which was rejected by a bunch of places. But I got it accepted and took six months off unpaid. Took a big risk. And it’s actually sold better than any of my other books. It is my best selling book.

That’s how I got started. I loved it. I got addicted to writing books because it’s journalism, but it’s long form journalism, so you can just go. The problem with journalism, especially, even more so today, is that shorter, shorter, shorter. There’s no room. The papers have gotten smaller and smaller and thinner and thinner until they’re like a pamphlet. So that’s why I really enjoyed it, I got to really dig into the investigative of side of the job, which I love. And then I got to write scenes. So I write narrative nonfiction. Fiction so that it reads like a novel. But it’s all true

Lisa: You had to write a book proposal, which, for nonfiction, that’s just like, standard. Right. But a lot of people find that kind of hard. Did you find writing that and you said it was rejected it a few times. Did you find yourself going back and revising it, or did you have to struggle a lot over that book proposal?

Caitlin: Book proposals are hard to write, but once you get the hang of it. I’ve written more than 25, and I work as a writing coach now and help other authors write book proposals because most of my book proposals have sold and are books. And when I’ve helped my clients, their book proposals have sold also.

I took a class for it. And the funny thing is, it’s fine to take a class. It’s fine to read a book on how to write a book proposal. But the real world is different. So I submitted it to an agent, and she had me rewrite the whole thing, like, three times. And I’ve stuck with the format she had me use, and it’s worked, and I’ve stuck with it. So she was right, and she didn’t end up taking me on, but I did get an agent, and then from there, I’ve had probably five agents. I think I’m on my fifth agent by now. But, you know, it’s not. It’s not that hard once you get the hang of it, but it’s important. It’s the marketing vehicle to sell your idea. So, you know, it’s a different kind of writing than your book.

Lisa: Yes, I know. Even writing query letters, I’ve written query letters for fiction.

Caitlin: It’s harder to write the synopsis than it is to write the book. Seriously? I think,

Lisa: Definitely. So you were very successful with your first book. Yes. How did you get into the second book?

Caitlin: Well, my first book, Poisoned Love, I was just so happy writing that. I remember I was just, God, this is so much fun. This is so great. Even though I’m not making any money and I’m taking this risk, and my advance was teeny. Right? The great thing was it went to a second printing within, like, I don’t know, a few weeks. And back in those days, true crime sold a lot more than it does now. And that’s what part of what makes life for true crime writers harder and harder is there’s so much on TV, there’s so many podcasts that people feel like they already know the story, and there’s just fewer and fewer people who buy the book. Unfortunately a lot of the TV shows and the podcasts use your book as the material. Don’t give any credit, and you don’t get paid. So it’s frustrating.

But my first book I ever wrote was fiction, and it’s Naked Addiction, and it’s what I actually wanted to do was to write crime fiction. I couldn’t get it published, though, because it’s very difficult, and even more so today, to get your first fiction book published. It’s just difficult. I was a professional nonfiction writer journalist, and I thought, well, okay, the universe is telling me I probably should get published in what I actually have a job in. I learned how to do narrative nonfiction at the paper. I wrote long narrative journalism, stories that took up 100 inches in the paper, where you’re basically telling a story through characters and scenes and dialogue, just like you would in a book. I was able to kind of transfer those skills.

I was writing fiction on the weekend and trying to get it published, and it took me, what, 17 years to get my first novel published. It’s kind of interesting, though, because in this last year, I’ve been rewriting the second book. So the sequel to that book has a detective, a surfing detective, named Ken Good. And this is kind of funny, given what’s going on these days, but kind of Ken, like Barbie and Ken. I kind of thought of him like a really smart, educated, New York Times Albert Camus reading detective. Right. Who’s sarcastic and smart and good and a good person. Right? So because of nonfiction, it’s so all encompassing, and the research takes so much time and takes all of my brain. I really couldn’t get back to the fiction because you really need to get into the fiction and have enough time to keep with it. And I really haven’t had that luxury.

So during COVID when I lost one of my book contracts because they lost their funding, I got back into writing the next book in what I wanted to be, a series. But because it had been so long since the first book, you have to write it as a standalone. So that’s what I did, and I worked on it for a long time, and it went through a couple of agents who said it needed work. And so I worked on it again, completely rewrote it, overhauled it a few times. That’s what I’ve been working on. And then while I sent it to my agent, it’s still with my agent. I haven’t heard a decision yet whether he’s going send it out. Or if he thinks it needs more work too. I have written a sequel to that one. I wrote that really quickly because I did the NaNoWriMo thing, and I wrote a whole book in less than two and a half months.

Lisa: Wow.

Caitlin: Yeah. And I hurt my wrists. Now I can’t type at all. So I’m reading it aloud because it’s too long anyway. And so I’m editing. I’m still kind of working, but I have to read it aloud, which is good, because you need to do that anyway.

Lisa: Do you think you’ll narrate the audiobook?

Caitlin: No. I actually have a great narrator who did the audiobook for the first one, and I need to keep him if I can. If I change publishers, I’m hoping to bring him with me, but, yeah, I mean, it’s actually not that common for an author to narrate their own book. The publishers want a professional actress or actor to do that, usually, unless you’re really big, which I’m not.

You did NaNoWriMo, but in general, do you have a writing routine you stick to?

Caitlin: Not really, because it really depends on what I’m working on. If I’m under contract with a nonfiction book, there’ll be months where I won’t be writing at all, just doing research, and then there are some months where I’ll do research and writing, and then months where I’ll just writing, then months where I’m just rewriting, all crammed into nine months to a year. It depends on where I am in the process. And then there’s revisions and copy editing and galley proofs and writing another book proposal and writing fiction and events and planning a book tour and doing your website and doing podcasts. No, I don’t write every day, but I am at the computer every day, unless I can’t type.

Lisa: Yeah, I know how that goes. I wrote a novel and self published it, and then I’m trying to work on the sequel, and I’ve had a lot of plot adjustments to work on. And then, of course, like you said, there’s all sorts of other business stuff that comes in. And so when you’re talking about writing fiction, sometimes it can be hard to get back into it.

Caitlin: Yeah. For the past year, that’s all I’ve been doing, pretty much, is writing fiction, because my next book, which is down to the bone on the murder of the McStay family, was supposed to come out in January. So I planned to do a giant book tour. At this point. I was supposed to be on the book tour, but my publisher delayed it, and so now it has a pub date in October. I did not line up another nonfiction book.

I said to myself, hey, you know what? I’m going to write fiction. I’m going to give myself this time to write fiction. I was also hoping to work on a screenplay. Um, my most recent book, Death on Ocean Boulevard, which is the one that’s going to be featured at the conference, has been optioned for a TV series, so they’re still in development. The option has been renewed because we got in the middle of the writers and actor strike, which totally screwed everything up and postponed everything, and we kind of lost our momentum there. But once that gets going, I’m going to be involved in that. And I wanted to learn script writing so I could potentially adapt my other books to limited series or movies or what have you.

That was going to be, hopefully, mt next part of my career as I’m continually having to evolve and change with the incredible shrinking media and the incredible shrinking publishing world and all of the changes that requires and reinventions. And at the same time, the development production company is also trying to get me a podcast deal where it would be a seasonal and episodic kind of way of reusing the material from my books.

But I have a lot of material that didn’t even get into the books. I have audio interviews and other things that wouldn’t go into a book. They would only be suited for a sound format. I’ve got a bunch of irons in the fire, all different kinds of stuff that I can do with the same set of skills because I do TV as well. I’ve been on 20/20 twice recently. I just had a conversation yesterday with a producer in England who wants me to do a show actually on my first book. They still are looking for stories, and they can’t find new ones, so they go back 20 years to the stories that have been done already. It’s kind of funny, but that’s actually a whole other line of skills that I’ve developed by being an author. So podcasts, TV, radio, all kinds of things, blogging and coaching and teaching, and all these things are all related to being an author. And you need all those income streams to keep you going.

TV deal and the screenwriting, that sounds very exciting.

Caitlin: The producer is actually also reading my fiction that I’ve worked on. So she’s interested in that as well. So we’ll see what happens.

Lisa: Yeah, that’s great. To bring it back to the Santa Barbara Writers Conference, the founder, Barnaby Conrad, he wrote the bestselling book around 1950, Matador. And I think over the course of the rest of his life, it was optioned for film, like, several times. He got a lot of money on that. But they never made the film.

Caitlin: That’s not unusual. Yeah, just because your book is optioned does not mean it gets to TV. Everyone like, oh, when can we watch that? I’m like, let’s hire some writers first. And a showrunner, let’s get there first.

Lisa: So when you submit things and they get sent back to you, and when a deal falls through, and that must be kind of crushing. How do you handle that?

Caitlin: Well, I’ll tell you what. The past year I’ve been tested mightily. The delays in the book for the McStay book, that’s been very frustrating for me because I can’t do anything until that gets out. I’ve been having to wait. It was in legal review for a long time, and I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t set up a book tour. I couldn’t promote it. I just had to wait.

Then I did the fiction, and I had to wait for the agent to get back to me. So there’s been a lot of waiting, and that is not unusual right now. Everybody’s backed up. The actors and writer strike really screwed up a lot of things. So did COVID, and it’s completely changed again and made more dysfunctional and already pretty difficult industry. So agents are tired. Their submissions are completely backed up, and apparently, so are the editors. There are fewer editors. The agents are tired. I mean, it’s just a difficult time to get something published. And so the big writers who are already big, they’re doing okay. But the midlist authors like me and the newbies who are trying to break in, it’s much more difficult. And I’ve got a lot of books.

It’s not like I haven’t been successful so far. I have been, and I keep getting book contracts. When I write a nonfiction book proposal, it generally sells. There have been a couple that haven’t, but the vast majority of them have. So it’s just that it’s gotten really difficult also to write nonfiction, and the kind of nonfiction that I write. Because true crime, like I said, there’s so much of it on TV in these podcasts that the market is saturated.

But also the resources for research are also less so. I’m lucky I have good sources. I’ve managed to get entire sheriff’s investigative files through the discovery process. There’s somebody involved in the case, but if you don’t get that, you got to go to the court. I’ve gone to some of these courts, and I’d open up the file, and there’s nothing in it. Back when I was a newspaper reporter, it would be packed with stuff, but we have these new laws and a governor who thinks that rehabilitation is really important. And so the people who have criminal convictions and criminal pasts, once they get out, there’s a time limit now where that information is in the file and then it’s taken out. So I went back like a year later to go look at something that I looked at a year later and a year before, and it was gone. Everything I wanted to look at was gone. It’s even more difficult to write my primary genre that I’ve been working in for all these years. So I’m kind of having to rejigger where I’m going and what I’m going
to be doing in all those different ways.

Then there’s TikTok. So don’t even get me started on how much time that takes and that intimidates me. And Congress is trying to ban it. I am on TikTok, but I haven’t really made use of anything because it’s so time consuming. And I’ve tried doing one of those little things, and I’m just not good at it. I need an assistant. I need somebody who’s young and good at that.

Lisa: But you do coaching yourself. What kind of things do you do to help authors?

Caitlin: Well, I am really good, I think, at developmental shaping. So editing on the front end, helping somebody kind of shape an idea, helping somebody sell their book proposal, so putting the book proposal together, and this is also how they write the book. If they come to me early enough, I will help them figure out what needs to be in the book and how to create a narrative structure and how to tell a story and how to do research, because research is my big thing.

I’m a research consultant also, so I get hired sometimes just to do research for people for various personal or professional reasons. I help people with writing, I help people with research, help people with book proposals, help people shape their book ideas. They’ll come to me and they’ll say, I have an idea for a book. And I’ll say, tell me about it. And then I’ll help them shape it and what they need to do next.

Lisa: Yes, adapting and pivoting and patience. All those things are things we need. Are there any other parting advice that you have for authors out there?

Caitlin: If you’re like me and you feel like you have a calling, I mean, I wanted more than anything to have a book published, and it took me, I think it was 17 years to get my novel published. It took me 15 years to get my first book published. So I had been trying to get published for 15 years when I got the Poisoned Love deal. And I can’t tell you how much I was ecstatic when I got that first contract. I was, like, beyond ecstatic. And it was addictive and I kept at it. And even though things are hard and they continue to be hard, there still isn’t anything else that I can see myself doing. And so it doesn’t pay very much. But like I said, you have all these other things that you end up developing as other income streams.

Some people don’t quit their day job, which is my advice.

Until you really have, you’re into the groove and you know you’re going to get more contracts. Don’t quit your day job. People say, well, I don’t have time and I don’t have the energy to write. I’m like, well, I worked at the newspaper and then I wrote around the time that I was at work. It’s before work, after work, on the weekends. So you have two jobs. I did that for a number of years. And then once you are an author, you still have to bust your butt to be promoting and marketing and blogging. I don’t know so much now, but newsletters or podcasts or whatever it is that you’re going to do to promote yourself because the books don’t sell themselves.

It’s a lot of work. But if you really believe in it and you really want to do it, you do it. Because the problem is if people who give up too soon, the overnight success, 20 to 30 years. Look at Robert Downey, Jr. When did he say, 40 years? He’s been an actor before he won his first Academy Award. That’s literally not everybody, Meryl Streep. And that’s the same thing with being an author. It’s a lot of hard work and determination, rejection, rebounding from rejection and persistence, and you got to get up every day and keep going because the day you quit, that’s the day that you’re not going to get there.

Lisa: That’s true. It sounds like things are changing in your career and developing every day, every week. And so we’ve got a couple of months until you speak on June 13 at the Santa Barbara Writers conference, so I’m sure things could change again and you’ll have a lot of news and updates for people then.

Caitlin: Probably. I hope to have good news.

Lisa: I’m sure you will. Well, thank you so much for all that. I think this has been very encouraging.

Caitlin: Oh, good, because I was worried that I didn’t want to be Debbie Downer.

Lisa: No, I think it’s been very encouraging and people really do need to. I mean, speaking of writers conferences, I’ve heard that there are people who will go to a writer’s conference and they’ll be there for a couple of days and they’ll say, nobody wants to publish my work now I’m going to leave.

Caitlin: Then they’re not going to get anywhere because you get kicked to the curb about a million times and you just got to get up again. That’s it. You just got to brush yourself off and go, okay. Either I don’t trust or believe what that person said. I believe in this or he’s right or she’s right, and I do need to do more work. And then you use that to improve.

Lisa: Yes. Well, I’m looking forward to seeing you in person in June.

The post S2 E2: Getting Where You Need to Go As an Author appeared first on Ninety Degrees Media.

Dave Chesson, founder of Kindlepreneur.com, stresses the importance of a book’s landing page, keywords, book cover, and book description to attract and retain shoppers on Amazon. He also advises authors to approach marketing their book as a skill and to keep practicing and learning. Dave discusses Amazon’s slow pace of updating and improving various tools and systems.

Key Points

• Dave emphasizes the importance of a book’s landing page (Amazon sales page) and suggests testing the effectiveness of the book cover by covering up the title and information and guessing what the book is about
• Dave explains the process of an Amazon shopper and how important it is to have the right keywords, book cover, and book description to attract and retain shoppers
• Dave and Lisa discuss companies cutting costs and the future of Amazon’s book selling and KDP
• Dave explains his personal workflow for publishing books on different markets and using Draft2Digital
• Dave discusses Amazon’s slow pace of updating and improving various tools and systems, including the dashboard and category system
• Dave’s advice for authors is to approach marketing their book as a skill and to not get discouraged by initial lack of success, but to keep practicing and learning

Lisa: I’m here today with Dave Chesson, who a lot of people know as the Kindlepreneur. Welcome, Dave.

Dave: Thank you for having me.

Lisa: I know I’m on your newsletter list, and I go to your website a couple of times a month to see what’s new there. Why don’t you tell us how you became the Kindlepreneur.

Dave: I grew up with dyslexia, so I never really thought I was meant to be a writer. I struggled mightily in English class. And so you go through and you think, not for me. But it doesn’t mean I didn’t like writing. I loved analyzing stories. I loved being able to teach. And so when the day came that I decided I wanted to write a book, I knew I wasn’t at a level, especially my writing style, to be able to just sit down and write anything and have it really resonate with people. So I actually started looking at the Amazon marketplace, and this was years ago, kind of when it was like a new thing to think of Amazon truly as a marketplace and as full of data and information that you could learn about the market as a whole. And so when I started to do this, I started to realize that there were all these things that were really unique to Amazon, like trying to understand why Amazon would make this book show up more often than this one. Why is it that one’s beating mine? How is Amazon sending people? And so when I started doing this, I realized that nobody else was writing about it. And so I created Kindlepreneur, which has been focused on all the things we authors can do in order not to just be authors, but also to be bestselling authors and to make those sales. And that’s really where it came from.

Lisa: What year was that?

Dave: Oh, jeepers, that had to be maybe 10, 11 years ago. And like I said back then, it was sort of like the Wild, Wild West. A lot of the ideas back then it wasn’t as competitive, so it wasn’t as necessary for authors to really understand the nuances. Hey, you got a good book. Get it up there. People will find it. Now there’s a lot more books. And so it’s funny is that even over the years, that information and that understanding just a little bit more gives authors a competitive advantage over those that don’t take the time to even look at it or read.

Lisa: Yeah, I know. I’ve been asked sometimes by people who say, I’ve put my book up on Amazon. Can you tell me how to promote it? And I take a look at it. I say, well, first of all, you should have had it edited before you uploaded.

Dave: You know, it’s interesting that there’s a lot of times where I’ll see people who say, how can I promote my, you know, the first thing I like to do is go right back to the book and look at, look at its cover, look at its information, the book description. Because what’s interesting about book marketing is there’s really two parts, okay? The first is your landing page. It’s the place where you want people to go. And in this case, it’s your Amazon sales page. Now, if your product is not good, if your landing page doesn’t convince people, if your book cover or the image of your product is bad, it doesn’t matter what else you do, you’re not going to sell well. So you really need to get that done right.

But then after you’ve done that, it’s about how do you bring people to your landing page, aka your Amazon sales page. And when you’ve done that, you start to really see that next level. So really the first thing the author should do is start by looking at their landing page.

One of my favorite tests I like to do with an author, when an author sits me down and says, okay, Dave, what should I do? And when they bring up the book, I’ll immediately cover up the title and the information. And what I’ll do is I’ll look at the book cover and just by the book cover, I’ll try to actually guess at what the book is about. Now, if I am way off, then that means there’s a huge issue with the cover. And if I’m right on, then at least you’ve got a good cover.

Now, what I mean by that is, for example, there was this one author and this book cover showed the silhouette of a woman and she was holding a gun. And you could kind of maybe tell there was a cop hat in the silhouette, right? It was like a shadow, and then it was some hot fuchsia and pink swirling in the background like a storm. And you could see the outline of the city. So this is probably about a cop. Maybe it’s a female cop. It’s probably like a sleuth detective, and she’s in the city trying to solve a mystery. And the person said, well, no, it’s an ex-detective and it’s a girl, but she’s investigating these horrendous murders. And I was like, oh, so it’s not lighthearted? They were like, no, this is actually like a slasher kind of thing. This is a mass murderer on the spree who is murdering women in gruesome ways. Well, your cover does not fit that whatsoever. Your cover looks too lighthearted. It looks like Charlie’s Angels kind of thing. And when I said that, she goes, oh, yeah, I see what you mean.

So now imagine I’m a shopper. I go to your Amazon page and I’m expecting, this is lighthearted. I start reading your book description, I’m like, whoa, that’s not what I thought this was. And I’ll back right out. So this is what I’m saying about kind of identifying problems with your book and making sure that because you as the author, you know all these things, but your market, when they’re trying to discover you for the first time, they don’t know these things. And so it’s things like that that I think are really important for authors to understand to ensure that the health of their sales page is good.

Lisa: Yes, definitely. One of the things I really love about your website is that it runs the gamut as far as you talk about writing, you talk about designing the book and you talk about selling. Oh, and then, of course, optimizing, not just selling, but optimizing your Amazon page. And there is just so much that goes into that? How much do you think depends on the book cover? How much of a percentage is the book cover versus the description?

Process of an Amazon Shopper

Dave: Well, let’s walk through the process of an Amazon shopper, and that might kind of helps. When shoppers go to Amazon, they go to the search bar and they type in a description of the kind of book they want to read. A lot of times they’ll start by saying, let’s say a detective story. And then they look at the covers and they look at the titles and they quickly see if Amazon has presented them with what they visualize as their kind of book. Okay, now, most of the time they start this. It might start with some broad phrase. And then they’re, okay, wait, I want an ex female cop detective book. And so then all of a sudden, Amazon will present them again with a list of covers and titles. And they’re looking at the covers and they’re seeing if anything interests them.

Now they might be like, oh, man, you know what? I want a slasher. So now it’s x. And usually what we do is just add a word to the phrase that exists. So that’s why you get some really crazy keyword phrases. So it’s x, Detective Cop, thriller, slasher. And now all of a sudden. So what we’re doing is we’re now judging whether the cover fits the kind of story we’re looking for.

And then we’re looking at the title, and we might see the reviews, and if there’s enough there that says, okay, this looks like my kind of book, or that book looks interesting. That’s when we’ll click, okay, and we’ll go to your Amazon sales page. And then as the shopper, we will go, and what I found is a lot of people will scroll down first and just kind of look at some of the information, like the reviews or any of the editorials. They’ll come back and if they’re still interested and it looks legitimate, they’ll click to read the book description.

The book description is that final sales point. If you have done a great job of writing a very crafty book description and it’s clear this book is the kind of book they thought it would be, it matches their expectation and it seems interesting, then they will buy. So if we go through that step quickly, we’re typing in keyword phrases at the top to figure out what it is we want. We’re looking for book covers that fit that and then we’re looking at book descriptions that fit all of that. And if somewhere in that chain you don’t have it right, you are going to lose more shoppers than you will. And when you lose shoppers, Amazon says to themselves, oh, well, this isn’t a good book to show for that because people aren’t buying, they’re not clicking. And so that’s when books start to disappear on the Amazon store.

Lisa: Do you think people pay much attention to how many stars a book gets?

Dave: Absolutely. We did a heat map kind of analysis on Kindlepreneur, looking at where people were searching on Amazon. And the number of stars is sort of like social proof. And what I mean by that is that, look, if nobody’s read this book, so there’s no review, I don’t want to be the first person to do that. Or if this book has 100 five star reviews, like, wow, this has got to be a good book, right? If it’s got 100 two stars, then, wow, why did so many people try the book when it’s clear it’s a bad book? So that would definitely affect your sales if you have like 100 two stars, right? But I’m going to be more likely to buy if I see other people have bought it and other people have liked it.

Amazon Getting Out of the Book Selling Biz?

Lisa: Well, that’s definitely true. And you’re talking a lot about Amazon specifically and of course, because Kindle is in the name of your company. But the big thing that I’ve seen lately is I talked to this one publisher and he said that because of all the layoffs within Amazon, specifically with Kindle, he said he thought that within the year Amazon would be getting out of the book selling trade. Do you think that’s true?

Dave: No, I don’t think so. The fact that Amazon has spent so much money in developing so many new, no, they’ve invested like from author advantage to they’ve invested like other smaller companies in the publishing realm, it seems as though that’s too lucrative of a model for them to just decide to ditch. It seems that they’ve put too many resources, even just recently for this to be something.

Now maybe I could see them no longer like they might start cutting some of those programs, right? If they require a certain operational cost and they’re not cutting it, they might cut it out. But to get rid of the KDP process as a whole, I think would not help the bottom line. I think it would hurt.

Lisa: They really are the biggest resource for independents. With my book, I got author copies from Amazon and I got author copies from Ingram Spark. And I actually liked the ones from Amazon better than I did the author copies I got from Ingram Spark. So I think Amazon does do a pretty good job. So I’m really hoping that they don’t quit.

Dave: I haven’t seen any signs of that. Also, if we look at history, Amazon started as a bookstore. That’s what it was at first. Their first product was selling a book. And you might say, well, things change. But Jeff Bezos still uses the same desk that he had when he first started, which is a door. It’s actually a door. And that’s out of a reminder of where they started from. So still with the leader of the company still sticking to his roots, and truly have started as a bookstore that would be huge if they got rid of it. But again, the financials don’t make sense of them cutting.

Lisa: But they have made a lot of cuts in employees and budgets and all this. So can you give me kind of a rundown about the recent changes at Amazon?

Dave: Well, I can give you some of my theories, and I think it’s supported by a lot of Silicon Valley. But if you look at all of Silicon Valley and all these large digital monsters out there, scaling was a major thing, wasn’t really about profit focus and that there was a very large increase. Of just hiring and kind of building out as many systems. And I think it’s caused a lot of inefficiencies.

And now we’re kind of coming to a time where a lot of companies aren’t looking at just scaling at all costs, that they’re looking at cutting costs. And so therefore, that’s realizing that, hey, we hired eight people to do one job. We have these parts of our system that don’t need as much.

Not to stir any controversy, but when Elon Musk took over X or bought X, he cut a very significant 80% comes to mind, of the workforce. And I was just talking to somebody. It’s very interesting that as a company, now, granted, I’m not saying leadership here. I’m just trying to say operationally, X is still working Twitter, right? It’s still working. It hasn’t crashed. And that’s very interesting. And if you look at companies across the board, they’re doing that. So Amazon is definitely looking at cutting costs. I think profitability is a little bit more of a concern, but I think there’s just too much revenue coming in from books. And I don’t see it being such a costly endeavor to maintain that they would want to just get rid of the entire thing. That would be like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Lisa: So Amazon bookselling won’t go. KDP won’t be going away. But still, do you encourage authors to sign up with Ingram Spark and Draft to Digital and those kind of services?

Recommended Publishing Process

Dave: That depends. I think everybody has different needs. Like, for example, some authors hate Amazon. And I’m like, well, then definitely don’t do personally the way that I do my books. And this is just the best way to answer it, is that I have my books, I upload them to KDP myself. I upload them to Barnes and Noble myself, and I upload them to ibooks, Apple books myself. Then I go to Draft2Digital, and I tell Draft2Digital, all right, put my books on all the other markets as well, just not Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or ibooks, because I did that myself. And so they do it, and that gets my books on every market. And I think it’s the most optimal for my profitability. And the way I see it is any books that are sold on any of those other markets is money I wouldn’t have made anyway. So Draft to Digital, you take your cut. I’m proud of you.

Publishers Rocket

Lisa: You don’t just do books. You also offer tools. I know I’ve used Publishers Rocket. And so are you going to keep up with that?

Dave: Absolutely, yes. So publisher Rocket and Atticus are the two companies that I’m a part of, and both of those were built because as an author, there were certain things I wish I had with Publisher Rocket. It was kind of frustrating back in the day because publishing companies had access to amazing information. Publishing companies don’t just randomly choose a book. They don’t randomly choose a genre. They don’t kind of just choose out of thin air where they’re going to put their marketing money. They’re using key data and market trends and analysis to kind of figure out where they should focus and how they should approach things. They’ve been doing this for years and years. And back when I started getting into Amazon, that data was not available to self published authors. And so it was my goal in creating Publisher Rocket to take that kind of information and bring it to the fingertips of self published authors so they can make those same kind of decisions. But I took it a step more because it’s important
for authors to know what keywords to choose for their book, which helps their book to show up more in Amazon, as well as what are the right categories to be a part of and some of the pitfalls that exist in the category system. So that’s why I created publisher Rocket.

Then I created Atticus because I’d used Scrivener for writing my books. I then would use Google Docs to coordinate with my editor, and then I would use something like judo or another book formatting software to then format it, which kind of stinks if you think about having to write, collaborate and format your book in three different programs. And so my dream was to have one program that I could write, collaborate and format within with ease. And so that’s why I created Atticus. And so far we have our formatting, I think is one of the easiest and most robust for the self published author to be able to create beautiful books. You can absolutely write your books in it. And this summer we’re coming out with collaboration. And so by this summer, authors will never have to leave the program. They can literally write inside of it, collaborate with their editor, and edit within it with track changes, and then be able to format it. And the coolest part about that process, by the way, is that when you’ve done it insid
e of your program, if, say, two years later, you want to edit something, or let’s say after you publish, you find out you had a mistake, all you have to do is just click on that book, add the words, and then hit export. It’s all done. Which to me is like the greatest thing. Now, updating your book is super easy. If you’re using a formatter, you have to go back to the formatter. And sometimes they charge you just to add a word or fix a mistake. And let’s face it, it’s so much harder to do at that point. A lot of people just don’t do it.

So for me, it’s like being an author and having your own programming team is super fun because it’s like sometimes I’m sitting around just saying to myself, oh, man, nice. If I could just do that. Hey, guys, guess what? I got an idea. Come in here. Let’s work on this. Us. And so yeah, it’s been fun.

Lisa: I really appreciate your tools with the publisher’s know. I’ll have a client call me up and say, oh, I need categories, I’m going to put up a book and Publishers Rocket is just great with that. And you keep it updated and stuff because Amazon is always changing. As a matter of fact, I heard you speaking recently about all the different changes with the categories and everything. This year they made a bunch of changes to the categories and with all the things going on, what do you think they’ll be doing next? What should we be watching out for?

Dave: I think Amazon is very slow with things. Case in point, ten years ago we didn’t have the ability to see how many sales in a day we made. It was a weird system, the dashboard. You would think you would want a good dashboard for authors using Kindle Direct Publishing. And it was horrible. Six years later they finally updated it and it wasn’t that great, but they haven’t touched it since. It’s like, okay, that’s strange. That’s such a huge problem. Why aren’t you fixing it? Same thing with their free formatting tool for just ebooks, right? Kindle Create that thing they created way back in the day, they haven’t touched it. It’s problematic, but it might be on his last legs. You would think they’d want to improve that, but they don’t. The Amazon ad system, they created this. It brings in a lot of money for them. They have added some things to it because it is such a cash generator for everyone. But there’s a lot of things you would think they would have done in a couple of years and they haven’t.

The category system you mentioned, same thing. They had a very complicated system that required a lot of people to help them maintain and it took them years to finally update it. And I think the reason why they update it was just kind of cutting cost. There’s a lot less people working on just the category system now with this new system. And so while we do talk about this thing, they changed. Notice that many of the things I brought up still haven’t changed. And the things I have would be super important and only changed once in the past ten years. That’s to kind of highlight the point that it’s hard to tell what they will update or improve, or change. But truth be told is the best way to think about it is they’re super slow about everything. So I wouldn’t expect anything crazy in the next year or two just based off of historical data points, but we’ll see. They could always surprise me.

Lisa: What do you have coming up? Do you have anything in development for your own company or for new books or anything?

Dave: I’m always working on books. That passion has never gone away, but there’s a couple of projects I’m working on. I’ve started to become more of a consultant for others. I’ve been a consultant for publishing companies for a long time. But what’s interesting is because of my experience with Publisher’s Rocket and Atticus and Kindlepreneur, so I’ve started to become a bit of a consultant to other publishing companies or tools or software companies as well, just kind of helping them with understanding, because it’s rare to find an author with that software and businesses software background. So there’s a lot of things that will be coming out very soon that I’m very proud of, and I think it’s been wonderful, but I’m not at liberty to say yet.

Lisa: Okay, but do you have any parting advice for authors in general?

Dave: Yeah. My favorite piece of advice to give to authors is that authors need to look at marketing a book like a skill. Now, I know that sounds obvious, but let me break that down so that it’s more clear. Skills are things that take time, right? Let’s say you want to learn to juggle. You might be able to juggle two balls right away, but what happens when you add the third and then a fourth ball and a fifth ball and 6th and 7th? Like, these things take a lot of time before you can juggle eight, nine balls in the air. But every day you go out there and you try to juggle, you get better and better. The same thing comes to marketing a book. It’s a skill set.

So for all the authors out there, where they’re discouraged because they didn’t make thousands of dollars on the first try, note that the next try will be better. It’ll be easier, it’ll come faster. You’ll know what to do and what not to do. And if you really approach it like a skill and think of it like you’re practicing a piano, you will have a much better go of it than discrediting yourself because you didn’t see instantaneous success on the first try.

I found that working with lots of authors over the years, the ones that understood that principle most and were still devoted to it, are the ones that I’ve seen hit that mark that everybody dreams of more so than the ones that don’t.

Now, granted, there are lottery winners out there, okay? Lottery ticket winners. I have seen people on their first go just slam dunk it. Right book, right place, right time. But to the mass, mass majority of it, it’s those that have really looked at as, like, a skill. And that’s why a lot of people call it an author career. Right. Well, when you become good at your career, it’s because you’ve built up a lot of skills in what you do. And the same thing goes with being an author. So don’t discourage yourself when you didn’t hit it. Just know that every time you go down to your computer and you start to read and learn and apply and try, your skill set is growing more and more with each day.

Lisa: That’s really good advice, and I really thank you a lot for doing this interview. Appreciate it. I think you’ve helped a lot of authors feel a little bit more secure that whether they love Amazon or hate it, at least it won’t be going away in the next couple of years or so.

The post S2 Ep1: The Changing Landscape of Amazon appeared first on Ninety Degrees Media.

This is the last episode of the first season of Literary Combo 2.0. I’m looking forward to season two, but this first season I’ve dedicated to the memory of the original host of the Literary Gumbo talk show, Fred Klein, who had a very long and illustrious career in traditional New York publishing, which looks so completely different than today. So I wanted to explore how publishing has changed over the last 50 years. To do that, I came up with the perfect guest for today, everybody’s favorite writing guru, Shelly Lowenkopf. Welcome, Shelly.

Shelly: Well, thank you very much, Lisa. And of course, you start right off by mentioning one of my oldest friends and connections in the publishing industry, the late lamented Fred Klein. And when I first met him, this is an interesting story. I was at the time the editor for a publisher out of Los Angeles. And we were we were a general trade publisher trying to make our way.

And basically we were relying on sales, you know, losing the paperback rights to publishers like Bantam and Dell and New American Library. And so I had a couple of close associates in Bantam and there I was with a project under my arm. And I was thinking, well, maybe I’ll pick up a commitment from Bantam and I hear this sound coming from down the hall and it’s sort of a bellowing calf.

And the person who overseeing them says, Oh, don’t worry about that. That’s Fred Klien. He always talks like that. And before our last meeting, I had to go down and introduce myself and said, Fred, you probably don’t know me, but. And you know the rest of it because how many times in your memory did you pin the microphone or my lapel when I was on Fred’s Literary Gumbo show?

But that was the beginning. But to get directly to your subject also at that time, let me start with this little bit of background. I got into publishing by complete accident.

All I ever wanted in life was to be a writer.

And that was my goal, my ambition. And I saw something. I saw nothing more. And basically that led me to the other side of the table, as it were, before I got this particular job, which launched my publishing career, which was way back in  early 1970s. Can you go back that far? And I had a friend from the Thursday night writer’s poker game he was born in Chicago with the name of Gunner Jarvis, and he changed his name wisely enough to day in day like any.

And he sort of dropped this little bomb on me and said, if you really want to make it as a writer you’ve got to develop your chops. In the easiest way to do that is to write a novel a month. Oh, okay, no problem. And I did. And then I said, So. Okay. Couple of months after three or four months, I got screened for novels and said, Well, now the trick, of course, is to sell.

And that was the next step. And in the process, I found a publisher of magazines and journals in Los Angeles who got into the so-called paperback revolution. And he hired me. He said, I have a list of books here. And how long do you think it would take you to  write, or how many of these do you think you can write?

And I, of course, scanned the list and pretended to read. There are no problems. I can write all of them because there it was again an opportunity to pay the rent every month. So I was writing a novel and a work of nonfiction every month. And at the time, it was indeed possible to make a living, if not a respectable living, at least enough to pay the rent.

So in the course of that, the publisher who I was writing the nonfiction books for Salamander, was often said, You know, I appreciate what you’re doing, but the time is right and I need more product. You must have some friends who are writers. I said, Sure. Thus, that was my first step into becoming an editor, calling Francine and saying, Hey, I’ve got a gig here for you if you can handle this.

And after a time the publisher said, Let’s get serious because you are in New York. And that’s where his background was. And he then hired a friend who was a sales manager at Grove Press, which was one of the icons, one of the early hard cover publishers of material that they approached not mainstream, but certainly sold today on eBay for big bucks.

And so in comes a guy by the name of says you guys are doing this all wrong. We got to get things going here. And first and foremost, surely you’ve got to have an office. You can’t just keep coming in here and hang around, so we’ll get you tarred better and put you over here.

Oh, and by the way, I’m putting in for a subscription to Publishers Weekly. You got to find out what’s going on in the industry. And after about two months, he said, okay, now I’m getting your subscription to the Library Journal, because, as you will quickly see, that’s where most of our sales will come from, libraries. And at the time, this was a big deal.

If a hardcover book was taken around by, say, the Brooklyn Library or the Manhattan Library, that alone would pay for the production of the book. And so that was almost a guarantee of some kind of breaking even or profit. Well, that’s how it was at the time. But also because of taking Gunnar Keirstead, who introduced me to his agent, Donald MacCampbell, who at the time was known as the king of the paperbacks.

And so MacCampbell took me on as a client, and he said you’re no longer going to have a problem selling these books you write every month. But while we’re at it and this is how publishing was also at the time, MacCampbell said, By the way, I’ve been working on a memoir. Any chance you would be interested?

So here it is. And probably I am the first editor because I didn’t consider myself really an editor. Then I just fulfilled a function and I was certainly trying to develop my chops and get more and more experience and reach. But sure, I acquired Donald MacCampbell’s memoir, and indeed, you could still find it on eBay. And I think I even saw it not all that long had gone on Amazon  and the title of it is Don’t Step On It—It Might Be a Writer.

Lisa: Yeah, that’s right.

Shelly: MacCampbell certainly had that attitude and he well, I kept getting writing assignments for him. But after a while, it began to seem like I could make a living as an editor. And so I cut back on my writing output and spent a lot of time reading books, talking to people that I knew and trusted.

And by the way, I’m going to drop another name for you and somebody who might be a good person to do an appear. I have a  pretty tight friend here in Santa Barbara by the name of Max Talley. His father worked for new American Library and that I kind of wanted to be I sort of saw as a role model.

His name was Edward, or his nicknamed Ned Chase. And that’s one of my connections with Mac I knew and admired Ned Chase. And his father was an editor for Ned Chase, who was the editorial director of New American Library and it so the subtext here is, is contact being in the publisher industry. One got it made in one direction.

No other editors because when write in the process of my first job as an editor, one of the paperback editors I saw in New York was her name was Agnes Birnbaum. Well, she was the editorial director of a small paperback publisher. And I sold, you know, so I think I leased some of the rights to the titles I had published here in Los Angeles.

And after a while, as soon as change sometimes happens, Agnes got tired of her job with the small publishing company that became a literary agent. And one of the first things that happened was she said, I know you’re not happy with that. But MacCampbell, he keeps throwing these awful assignments at you. I think I can do better. And so in a sense, yeah, she poached me away from MacCampbell.

But the point is that it was more or less like a fraternity. And indeed, as I said in the beginning, all I wanted to do was be a writer and make my living that way. However well that went. And finally, the deal was that at the time I had been fired away from my job with the right publisher to run the Los Angeles office of an organization that was then called Dial Delacorte Press, my rival.

And this goes back in a way, to my association with Fred and some of the great people at Bantam. My rival was a guy by the name of Charlie Bloch, who ran the Bantam office in Los Angeles. One day Charlie  calls me for coffee and we’re talking. And he said, Listen, you’re going to do me a favor.

We’re having our sales meeting and I’m going to be out of town for a couple of weeks, maybe three weeks. And I would really be grateful to you if you would take my courses at USC and teach them in my absence. So what I have done here in years is conversationally. And what kind of mountain goat leaps of logic.

So is it show the accidental or distractions from my real purpose of writing. You know, first becoming an editor and getting to do no other men and women who are in the publishing industry and then as a teacher, because after taking college classes, there was a graduate program at USC called the Professional Writing Program. Which and USC almost most universities make the distinction between a program and a department in a program the faculty does not have to have a Ph.D. does not have to worry about tenure, track or any of that sort of thing.

And so, okay, the head of the department at the professional writing program called me in after Charlie came back from the sales manager sales meeting and wanted to get back to teaching again. The German emcee of a successful screenwriter called me in to his office and said, Listen, the students are threatening armed revolt if if, you know, if you don’t come back.

So promise me that I can rely on you to teach your course next semester. Sure. What the heck it’s income. Why not? The thing that  rankled me then and even to this very day, in a sense rankles me, is that I was a graduate that made the university across the city from USC, and we were in a kind of bitter rival to sort of like the rivalry between, say, Duke and the University of North Carolina.

And it always rankled me that I had never been invited to teach it at UCLA, rather at USC, where it became a kind of institution that lasted for 35 years. And indeed, in more recent times, like around, you know, to 2010, 2012, around here I was teaching and in another interesting program at UCSB. And every time I drove on that campus, which I have to admit is a pretty attractive college campus, I’ve been on college campuses before, and that’s with the possible exception of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

They’re all beautiful. And that’s just sort of well, that’s a lot of stairs. But every time I drive onto the campus at UCSB, the first thing that comes to my mind is this isn’t UCLA. It kind of rankles. But to get back to the subject then when publishing and teaching were distractions from my goal of wanting to do nothing but writing and the way I want to tie that up is to suggest this, Lisa, that it is my belief now

things have happened in publishing and have progressed and not necessarily for the good, but not necessarily for evil either.

But publishing has changed and it is no longer that easy for an individual to make a living as such in publishing. And that also includes editorial salary. So some publishers pay fairly well, but not outrageously. There are better ways if income only is an issue like, say, plumbing or carpentry or even being a pizza chef.

But that being said, there are more and more small publishers. The big thing at the time I fell into the industry and began making friends. Well, had to do with the seasonal list in the catalog. And every publisher was working this is why in a lot of cases you send a manuscript to a publisher and you don’t hear anything for a month, two months, three months, because the editor and the sales manager and everybody else is busy putting together the catalog for the coming year.

And the larger publishers would have, you know, 30, 40 books a season and the smaller ones would have, say, eight or ten a season, meaning, you know, more than than ten books, 20 books a year. And then the smaller publishers would publish maybe five or six books a year.

But now there has been a proliferation of smaller publishers.

And here we go with the letter situation. At the time I got into publishing, there was a term the publishing industry equivalent of the N word, you know, in common conversation, and that would be vanity publishing. Yes, that’s what it was called. Oh, she’s published by a vanity publisher, meaning, you know, and now through euphemism, it’s self publishing.

And indeed, I have known people who have done quite well with self-publishing, and there is nothing but generally good in both the product they produce and the service it provides, but largely and this in a way, there’s an interesting equivalence now as the introduction of artificial intelligence into our life and culture is made. If self-publishing is a factor and it’s not going to go away.

And in fact, it wasn’t all that long ago when I even had an occasion to crow the very same Max Talley I mentioned to you earlier, and I said, Do you have an accurate definition for this term hybrid publishing? I have an idea what it means, but I want to hear what you think because I think it means self-publishing.

And he more or less agreed with me and I said how do you square the fact that you, as a workshop leader and a participant in the Santa Barbara Writers Conference include that is a part of the menu you offer for people and you know and galleries aren’t your I think it just goes right straight to the point he said well because it’s a reality and people need to have a choice.

So what I’m about to say now is, is my opinion, it’s the way I see it. And I’m simply here being responsive to  your goal here of getting me to talk about some of the changes in publishing and what it involves is this It’s a shift game of the risk factor. The hybrid publisher has shifted the risk.

The financial risk to the writer.

Most self-publishing publishers are hybrid publishers, but don’t lose money because their income, yeah, is affected by sales, but it is not adversely affected by sales. Which is to say that in most cases the writer bears the cost. The risk. And back in the day, one of the things you one of my early jobs is as a publisher and an editorial meeting, there’s a particular project I’m really plumping for I want to publish.

And I think that this book has merit and that there’s an audience for it and that it’s going to do all right. And I also have in mind some of the, shall we say, the benchmark is an important benchmark paper printing and binding. How much is that going to cost?

Lisa: Yes.

Shelly: You’re aware of that. And then there’s another one which is the author is royalty too, because at the time I was first involved with publishing the standard royalty went like this for a hardcover book. The first 5,000 copies of the book actually sold. The author gets 10% of the cover price, right? And then if it sells an additional 5,000 copies, that goes up to 12 and a half percent.

And then if it sells the 10,000 and all subsequent copies that are sold, the author gets 15% of the sales price burn off that they don’t that’s equitable some might say that is not. But that works out pretty well particularly when you consider that even today and even in the case of self-publishing and whatnot, let’s say that you and I have books.

Well, of course, in fact, we do. But we well, we take our book to a place like Chaucer’s and say, okay, will you stock my book? And the discount schedule. There is 40% off the cover price. So a book that would sell for $10, I’m using that just because I’m awful at math in my head and I can I can mess with that.

But a book that would sell for $10 at Chaucer’s would pay four dollars. And so the publisher then would get in theory that remaining $6 from which they had to pay the author and amortize the cost of paper printing and binding plus there’s this wonderful weasel word called overhead. See? And at the time I was involved, my first experience in publishing, which was based in Los Angeles, it became really important and financially feasible for us to have a warehouse to store our unsold books or books that were about to be delivered in Nevada.

So Sparks, Nevada. Why Nevada? Because California has an inventory tax. You didn’t know that? Well, yeah, you have to pay X percent on every year on an inventory, whether it’s books or sausage or anything else. And also in California, things in storage in California had then an unpleasant habit of being invaded by things like mice, which is what Fred had a great term for books that mice had gotten to. Those are hurt books that have been hurt by the mouse bites because they could be sold well. Okay. Those are all factors that cut into the publisher’s ability to gain anything back. And I remember giving this example of a particular book I wanted to publish. The publisher stopped me and he said, and again, this is historically sensitive. Interest rates in banks and whatnot were somewhat different than they are now.

But what he said to me was, okay, we’re looking at about 40 or $50,000 that it would take to do, you know, give the rancher an advance and pay for things like typesetting and promotion and all of that. You’re saying that if I turned 40 or $50,000 and put it in the bank and bought a certificate of deposit for six months, that the sale and the ultimate sale of this book would bring me a greater profit, which is one of the things editors have to learn.

And if they don’t read it, they need to get another job someplace else. The other job they get is as a literary agent. But this is what I meant when I say that, that the heritage publishers, the standard publishers, bore the financial risk. And that’s the whole concept of arrangement. Your financial arrangement between author and publisher.

Most contracts. And for most of the publishers I work for, in fact, with that very culture, bear in mind I have a contract that says that if there are subsidiary rights sold, the publisher gets a piece of the action. The company I work for in most hardcover publishers ask for an auction, got 50% of the income. If a title was sold.

It was reprinted as a mass market paperback or even what we call a trade paperback. And then another important allied and subsidiary write had to do with motion picture sales. And we would get a small percentage of that. And remember also, Lisa, that most American contracts with traditional publishers say in as many words, the author has first English language rights or North American rights write in the following project meaning that there is a possibility for added income in in French, Spanish, Italian, German and Japanese, Chinese.

So this term allied and subsidiary rights. That was also part of the algebra that an editor has to be aware of in the traditional sense. Now, another interesting thing too, because publishers are always busy doing what they do. It’s how much time do they spend with acquisition and how much effort do they put into it. And just as briefly as I can tell it right now, because I know we’re on an hourglass here, here’s an example of how this works.

There is still a publisher who had a very reliable writer his books sold fantastically well. Some of them were made into movies. There was no trouble selling his book, his name was, and he was a really good writer. Larry McMurtry. So to show you how the information and intelligence, the action in publishing works, the word is and somebody McMurtry’s publisher gets the news.

McMurtry has gotten on a plane in Dallas and he’s flying to New York with his new novel. And unfortunately, it’s a thousand pages, which means it’s going to be it’s going to be expensive. And then somebody else adds to it and says, Oh, we had a brief chat with him and unfortunately, it’s going to be a Western.

Well, okay, this information was in hand before McMurtry even dropped in New York before the plane landed and the decision had already been made. He we owe him. We’d made money from him. He’s a great addition to our list. He’s got a great future as a writer. So here’s what we will do. We will give him a medium sized advance, which is to say, an interest free loan on potential sales.

And we will commit to publishing 3,500 copies of the book and we’ll write it off as a loss, because a book that size and one string in today’s market can’t possibly sell. But there, of course, is the clause in his contract that says we get first look at his next book and his past books have done well. And this is, you know, and all right, this is giving him a chance.

He wants to write a Western. Let him write a Western. Okay. They had no idea what they were getting into because, of course, the book and you probably guess this, Lisa was Lonesome Dove, which is still selling copies, which shows in many ways how much publishers really know when you come down to it. So, you know, in an attempt to tidy up this business, I’ll say this, that one of the reasons self-publishing is so popular is because a lot of people who want to write, who are concerned about the quality of writing and who may in fact even think that what they have their project has some literary merit or worse or lasting value, or do impatient and too frustrated by not getting answers or by being put on hold. I had a student and in fact, maybe you even know her because I think she’s come to the writers conference a couple of times and she’s from Ventura. It took her something like, oh, four or five years to get a novel. And she was working on in a condition where a publisher wanted to publish it.

And even then, after the publisher said, Yes, we will publish it. And then there was the process of editing and copy editing and all of that. It was 18 months after the agreement was signed, before she hefted an advance copy of the book in her hand and some people are really too impatient and too frustrated. And of course, they sent things.

They send a query letter to an agent and sometimes they don’t hear for a month or six months, or sometimes they never hear. And so it’s like that play on her. And she heard that TV series Orange is the New Black. No comment or no answers is the new No. So naturally they go to the so-called hybrid or self-published venue where indeed they are told, oh, we can do we can handle this.

Oh yeah, we love your book. But in so many ways, these hybrid or self-publishing venues do not have connections for distribution. And so it becomes up to the author, literally driving around with a station wagon filled with copies of the book going from bookstore to bookstore. You know, you start here and then you go to L.A. and then you drive to San Francisco or maybe Denver.

And of course, there’s Portland and Parallels books and then there’s Seattle. And it puts more of the work that the traditional publisher does. And they’re responsible. They wanted the author, and I would say 80 to 90% of the risk.

Lisa: I’ve been ticking off a lot of what you were saying as far as all the different changes that we see now and it’s like starting with that, when you first started, they said, oh, okay, we got to get you an office, we got to get you in here, which is something that we see today. We read about how publishers, whether they’re in New York or no matter how big they are, they’ve got these people who hardly ever come in to the office once a week, but most people work from home these days in business.

Shelly: And indeed you take that one step further. They set up some of these people in hybrid or self-publishing. Can sit or there’s a side hustle. This is not their entire source of income.

Lisa: Yes, there’s got to be a lot of different things. And then there’s a what you’ve talked about paper. You talked a lot about things that come back to paper and how much paper you must have dealt with over the years as far as even probably just starting with typing something with carbon paper.

Shelly: Oh, yeah, absolutely. You start one of the big sounds I still hear in my ear and think about fondly. And it just reflects the change in technology. When I first started, it was a series of some typewriters, in some cases standard typewriters or portable typewriters, and then one at the appropriate time in my life, my father was working for an auctioneer, auctioning off the businesses that went bankrupt or some kind of failure.

There were always typewriters around.

So I never really had to buy a typewriter. And then indeed, a deer jumped in the university. It gave me a wonderful typewriter that was all very portable. But what I’m getting at is the sound, and then you evoke that when you read it. You said that word that really sets the sound, the ear ratcheting when you pull a sheet of paper out of the platform of the typewriter, and then you wad it up, and then you toss it to a nearby wastepaper basket.

And here’s something else that has changed in the publishing industry, because I remember vividly, I had a gift from my cherished big sister. It was an oversize wastepaper basket,  that came with the pattern on it. But very quickly that became covered with rejections. So where I write based on the rejection slips, you’re rubber cement on the wastepaper basket.

And it was covered. It was just there that was learned of the bit you try to manuscript. You put it in an envelope. You went to the post office and send it off. And of course you had return postage so they could send the manuscript back. And more often than not, it came back with something the size of a small snapshot and say we regret your information, your material was not found acceptable or words to that effect.

And now that’s pretty much gone. I remember I used to take a huge manila envelope filled with rejection slips and dump them on the desk and say, Anybody know what these are? And look at your order. I said, Well, your grade depends on it because it was I can see that you’ve gotten five or six of these.

You’re not going to get anything higher than to see meaning I want you to be sending stuff out. Well, now the rejection slips are e-mails, but almost invariably you’re again, talking about assigning your risk to the publisher. You know, we look to see more of your work and we’ll be happy to do. But I want to suggest you subscribe to our magazine.

And in future, you know, let us know if you’re a subscriber we will read your manuscript sooner. Okay. So it’s all right, I think somewhat, but not entirely facetious about it, because individuals come along and in our way. Lisa, I have to point my finger at both you and me, because this is one of our one of our hazards to we consider ourselves in other terms.

And yes, I agree entirely. And you know, from past experience that I’m well aware of your editing experience, and I know you appreciate mine, but a lot of people call themselves editors. And what they mean is that they’ve got an A in grammar.

Lisa: Oh, yes. They say that if you want to find a good editor, make sure you don’t get an English teacher.

Shelly: Yes, absolutely. Oh, that’s the worst kind. Because one of the great things we both learned is that you don’t need complete sentences when in fact sometimes complete sentences are way too formal and in due date, former student of mine just had an experience with a literary agent that you and I both know. And being the literary agent we share.

Why are you sending me people who are so formal using complete sentences and all of that. Well, yes. So it is in a way,

I believe in the jungle that publishing was in the beginning when I started has transformed. It was a friendlier jungle. But there are all kinds of people who are angling around now and interested in making sure that their efforts don’t go unrewarded, meaning there’s a payment up front.

And my it’s a kind of rhetorical question about what you write. You’re supposed to deal with this when a writer is probably managing you, you’re just barely managing to be able to do what they read in Internet bills to keep the computer going in order to be able to send letters and manuscripts to very well wishers. And we were the agents writing most books most in trade publishing, by which I mean books, hardcover, paperback, trade, paperback are sold in bookstores, in the newsstands.

And of course, sometimes through mail order, through Amazon and Abebooks and other platforms. But trade publishing is distinguished by the fact that in any given year and certainly in this particular century, we’re getting close to having knocked off a quarter of this century already. But as far as this century is concerned, the average novel sells 500 copies or less.

And that goes back. That includes, by the way, the so-called heritage or brick and mortar publishers, the Simon and Schuster publishers and whatnot. And there are all kinds of interesting deals. And just to show you how this works here in beautiful downtown Santa Barbara, and this was back toward the end of last year, I think would have been around October of last year.

I had a deal, an arrangement with our local bookstore, Chaucer’s, because I had a book coming from the Berkeley imprint of the the Random Penguin family. And I was even given an evening and a book signing and you can talk about your books and read the first chapter and then a box arrives.

This usually happens from publishers with authors copies of the book that I see and printed across the cover. It’s for sale only at WalMart.

Lisa: Oh, no.

Shelly: Oh, yes. And that’s part of the deals that publishers are making now. So Michael Johnson says, I can’t let you in this store with a cover that says available only at WalMart.

So much for that and there it is. But by the same token. Yeah right. He said a quick note to the editor on Friday. She said, well, do you have any idea what Wal-Mart’s first order read your book was? No. She said, Well, would you believe your first order for the whole list is for the whole chain?

But they ordered 25,000 copies in a bar variation. Well, that’s certainly true, but my papers are paper printing and vinyl booted. And she said, Oh, boy, will it ever end. And if it does well, they’ll order another 25,000. So they’re JP In Hanoi, some kind of big gamble by excluding other possibilities or other sales platforms. But that’s another one of the changes that have happened in in traditional publishing.

And the difference is they the traditional publisher, is aware of that and basing a lot of their go or don’t go decisions on it, which is why in a sense, you have to look to writers such as I’m thinking Jane Smiley, because I’m so fond of her work, or Louise Erdrich, who, if she wants to get a Nobel Prize pretty soon, there is no justice in the world.

We know there are books are outstanding and literary quality, and they can pretty well do whatever they want. So that’s not even a question or an issue. 

Lisa: So you’ve got the book that’s available at WalMart. You know, you’ve also have dealt with small publishers with your The Fiction Writer’s Handbook.

Shelly: Oh, yeah. And, you know, it’s different altogether.

That was different altogether because the place where that book was launched is one of my favorite bookstores of all time, and that’s romance. Yeah, I remember very vividly as a kid, at 13 and my father taking me in there and saying, This is what a bookstore should be. And right there I’m looking around and looking for titles that are recognized and I’m saying, No, babe, I’m going to have a book in here.

Well, it was true. But now small publishers have to work harder. And truth to tell a romance. In this particular case, their first order of book was ten copies. And so, in effect, the publisher knew all about this. So we both went to that with a carton of we bought them in our car just in case.

But here again, a nursery here is a carton of books. And I think there were something like 50 in there. And in order to filter it, to sell it, even though they didn’t buy it or order it in the first place, we had to give them a 40% discount because they’ve got to make that issue right too.

But there it goes, right back down to your question of risk. And in the in a way, Mark Twain, one of my favorite writers of all time, wrote a book that in so many ways informs my attitude, my literary voice, my approach to writing and to the right. That’s called the Innocents Abroad. The writer today, she knows exactly what’s going on in the world of publishing, is an innocent abroad and is likely to be taken in by.

There’s one particular editor I call him, and he comes out of New York, and I know it’s hit at least ten or 12 people here in Santa Barbara, He hits them for a $10,000 editing fee. And there’s no promise that the book is going to get published. I’ll do my best to make it count to the attention of people I know.

And again, to go back to that theme of they at one time at least the the closeness of writing. Well community, one of the people I met very early in my writing career was the publisher of a small New York publisher which called Stein, and they sold Stein and Patricia Day, a husband and wife. And from that point on, saw this being a very close friend and associate.

And one of his books, Stein On Writing, is the Bible for people who want to be fiction writers. And indeed, my copy of Stein On Writing, which was a gift from Sol himself, is from Shelly, the Energy who edits editors, because, yes, he used to pay me to read his manuscripts of his novels and leaps that you mention that one of my nonfiction books called The Fiction Writers Handbook.

There’s a blurb on the front cover from a dear friend, Reni Brown, who at one time was the senior editor, the lead fiction editor for W.W. Norton, one of the early and continued forces in literary fiction in America today. So it was a tiny group. And just simply to give you another interesting look on Fred Klein, you mentioned with such fondness when you began in the Literary Gumbo not that many years ago.

Of course, we still both in lived in Santa Barbara, but Fred and I and Mark Jaffe, the former editor in chief of books, were having breakfast. And Mark Jaffe is saying, you know, you are particular interest in mystery fiction or what not. We are starting a small publishing company, just the three of us. And Shelly, you and I would be the editors and I do all the paperwork, the publishing stuff, and Fred could be the sales manager.

And of course, my contribution know we call it OF books or old farts. Well, but again, it’s there. There is a kind of a closeness of people in in the industry. It’s still there and but it is more dispersed because more into visual arts or whatever their reasons for going to graduate programs in colleges encouraged by the way, incredible student debts to learn their way into writing.

And you know, in German some of the things that lady said I know you read every book on writing that’s coming out and you’ve got a great memory and you cite even the page where. MA It’s a particular game and I really admire that. But they also were using that as a way to get jobs in the publishing industry.

One of  my better students at USC became a senior editor at the St Martin’s Press and remained in that position for several years and she couldn’t take it anymore and is now a literary agent. And it just this year most people who have been through the publishing process in the tradition in a way are, I would say, more stable and have a greater overall integrity and awareness of the publishing process and those who don’t work, who haven’t had the option of doing one of the things you do.

So well late summer, which is tracking the new books about writing and publishing and then digesting and then putting the work to use. Most time and again, there’s a literary agent you and I both know, and it’s one of her favorite job jokes for author is out there. I’ve got good news for you and bad news that, of course, the writers say, What’s the good news?

You’re getting published. All right. And what’s now what’s the bad news? You’re getting published and you sometimes you don’t realize until you’ve been through the process. Lisa, I know you’re not. You certainly know the difference, but how many want to be writers? How many people who have paid five or $10,000 to a self-published? You know, the difference between development and content editing and copy editing?

Lisa: That’s true.

Shelly: Not many. And I not least I know you’re know, because you even heard me telling the story at one point where a copy editor dinged me in a historical novel. And I mentioned somebody showing fuller brushes save for a brush salesman, and the copy editor sent a note and says Fuller Brush was not in operation at this time. So you’re really going to have to change that reference or change the timeframe of your story for accuracy. And of course, answer to that is I said, no, no, it was this was when Fuller was selling the brushes out of his parent’s garage.

And she bought it. She did that, which told me immediately, well, that one only saying told me something about her that she was quite a bit younger then than me. Because Lisa, you probably remember a radio program, two great Canadian comics, Bob and Ray. Does that ring a bell?

Well, they had a couple of fictional characters that that they used in some of their skits. One of them was named Wally Ballou. He was he was the incredible run of Chet Huntley and I’m sorry, of Tom Brokaw. And then there was Chet Sturdily, who was meant to be the governor under Chet Huntley. Well, I drew a character in this book, and I named him Chet sturdily and she didn’t question him.

It he let it go and we shot it. Just little, little things. We play little games. But the change is growing toward smaller and more independent venues. But I had this to say and this goes all the way down the line was the oldest publisher in America is still publishing their first publisher. The first publisher in America.

You’ll never guess what its its major title is, the For Dummies books, which shows how it goes from biography, autobiography and history to the For Dummies series.

Lisa: Yeah.

Shelly: Well, that’s one of the big changes. But there are a lot of small publishing ventures and they last maybe a year, five years, ten years. Well, there is still what Grove Press back in the day when I knew it, it was avant garde, you know, and political and somewhat sexual. And I knew Barney Rosset. They publisher very well.

There was a really wonderful publisher here in Santa Barbara when I first came. It was called Black Sparrow Press. He moved. He sold his home, in fact, in Santa Barbara and moved north because he made enough money on it so that he was able to buy a piece of property in Northern California that had not only a home but a storage building to store books and then eventually sold Black Sparrow Press to do another larger publisher.

So that’s still in the market. But bookstores, restaurants and publishers, the three business ventures or hustles that have the greatest risk and go out of business more often than not. And yeah, things are changing. I predict that there will be a lot more small publishers and a lot of these small publishers are going to do very well and be very responsible.

Who would have thought, you know, we’d think about publishing, We still think New York or Chicago, and certainly some of the university presses because they sell an awful lot of books. Right. So New Haven, which is for Yale University Press and Berkeley, of all places, which is where the University of California Press head office is located. But mostly when we think about publishing, we think, say, New York.

For a while we thought about San Francisco, and certainly we think about Boston, we think about the East. So who would have thought and let’s say you probably already know the answer and you, but you can look it up very easily. Who would have thought Minneapolis would have two real small, independent publishers today? They both do like ten or 12 books a year, which is to say the equivalent of one new book a month.

But they’re beautiful, they’re well printed, they’re well edited, they are well reviewed, they are well written. And so is it you know, is all of this stuff about hybrid and self-publishing and damaging only to those who don’t take the trouble to learn the the trade in the craft properly.

Lisa: That’s true because, you know, I’ve been contacted by people who say, can you help me promote my book? It’s up on Amazon. And I go, and do the look inside and read the first couple of pages and say, well, you know, first of all, you need to hire an editor. And so they know how to use a computer and Microsoft Word, they can just go take their manuscript and put it up on Amazon without any help from anybody else. That doesn’t mean that it’s maybe it’s a good story, but it needs work and need It needs help. And People won’t buy it unless it’s got that that polish to it. No matter how good a book marketer is, you can’t sell something that doesn’t have a good cover, that doesn’t have a good description.

Shelly: Yes. And that was another thing, too. When I first started in publishing, it was not just a tradition. It was an imperative. You wanted to be an editor. You had to work at least for the first five years on the job. You had to work two weeks a in a bookstore simply to get the sense of how people behaved in bookstores, what people were looking for.

And you’re mentioning and we said the cover is so important. And there are some artists who have made their name because of the book covers that they desire. And I’m thinking particularly of laughs. Noted and legendary book designer Chip Kidd. By now I have a great friend in Toronto whose designs are always winning awards in Canada, and one of my personal favorites, because she’s done a number of my books, is Deb Daly, who lives in Venice. But for the longest time, she was the design chief at St Martin’s Press. They have an idea of the philosophy and psychology of graphic arts. And you need all of this. It’s a dangerous and it’s a scary game, but it’s a playable game, a winnable game.

Lisa: Well, this has been a fascinating discussion and very educational, and I just I can’t thank you enough.

Shelly: Thank you for inviting me.

The post S1 Ep. 10 Fifty Years of Publishing appeared first on Ninety Degrees Media.

I’m here today with Jennifer Silva Redmond, an author and editor. She is very excited about helping people achieve their publishing goals. Welcome, Jennifer.

Jennifer: Hey, Lisa. It’s great to be here.

Lisa: Why don’t you let us know how you got into this writing and editing kind of wacky world?

Jennifer: Well, about 35 years ago, I was an actor living in New York City, which means, of course, I was waiting tables and I came back to San Diego to visit my family, ran into my old boyfriend, Russell. We decided to get married like you do over a weekend. And the next thing I knew, we were taking off on a 26 foot boat for a thousand mile voyage to Cabo San Lucas.

So that’s the subject of my new memoir, which comes out in September. And during that year, I discovered I still loved writing, which I’d been doing all my life, and that it gave me just as much. There were as many rewards and enjoyment found in performing on paper, as it were, as opposed to performing on stage.

And I also enjoyed the fact that I could do it from anywhere, which of course, is still true right now. I’m on my boat in Washington and we’re doing that. So both of us work from the boat. Still 34 years later. So yeah, well, I really enjoyed working on other people’s stories in books and I enjoyed working on my own writing.

So in that first year, I really kind of became a writer. And as soon as we got back to San Diego, with our subsequent voyages on our boat, I ended up working for a publisher and worked my way up over a period of years to being editor in chief of Sunbelt Publications in San Diego, who I still work with.

I worked on other people’s books, editing other people’s books, also I’ve worked with the Southern California Writers Conference in San Diego for many years, teaching people about editing their own work and also how to work with an editor.

I think there’s a sort of a mystery about what editors do and whether people really need an editor. And, of course, the answer is, yes, you do.

Lisa: You needed to get an editor for your own book. So how did you go about that?

Jennifer: Well, luckily, my book is being published by rebooks of Toronto, Canada. So I had a publisher and she assigned one of her editors that she works with, Deanna McFadden, who was wonderful. And I think part of what was so challenging is that I had been working on the book for 25 years. I mean, off and on I’d been working on polishing it.

I had some pieces published as just individuals. And I would work on them individually. But I had just kind of recently, maybe two years ago, put it together in a form that I thought worked as a book. And so I started working with Deanna and she said, I love this, I love this. Now you need to tell me more about this and you need to explain better about this part of sailing, or you need to explain more about the geography of Baja, or you need to explain or fleshed this out more.

So she would definitely tell me things that even though I’m a structural editor, I could not see it in my own work, which is very common in there was so much that was in my head that I was filling in and I would read it. And that’s something that’s very common, especially in memoir. But it happens in fiction of all genres as well.

The author knows what they’re saying. They can envision the world or their memories of what happened, and they’re filling that in. And the editors, they’re saying, No, it’s not on the page, it’s just not on the page, it’s in your head. So now you need to, you know, flesh this out, bring this more to life, make this more active.

And those were the things she was telling me, all the things that I tell authors all the time in my in my day job. So it was fun to be on the other side of it, but also quite a challenge.

Lisa: Did you have any squabbles?

Jennifer: Not really. I think there was one time that there was one chapter that was a lot about music, which is a big thing for both of us. And she kept saying, there’s no story here. It doesn’t have to do with the rest of the book. And I kept saying, no, but I love it. And it’s the old kill your darlings.

Eventually I had to say, She’s right, it really doesn’t belong. So I was able to take little elements from it and add that to other chapters. But it really wasn’t part of the of the story arc, the larger story arc, nor was it as a chapter that rewarding to anyone but me. And so I had to learn that had to go.

But basically it was she and my editor, Rebecca, both got the book right away. They got to know what I was trying to say with it. And they just loved it. So that was a huge help. Of course, when somebody saying, I like it now, just give me a little more of this or a little more of that.

And then once I would flesh things out, of course, we’d go back in and shape them so that they fit, they became chapters that led one to the other and told a cohesive story in the end, you know, so that there was a structure to it. As I say, that I can do that with other people’s writing, but apparently I couldn’t do it with my own very well.

Lisa: So that must have been interesting being on the other side. Now, that you’ve done that, are you going to change anything when you go to work with other authors?

Jennifer: You know, I think that she and I work together a lot. Like I work with authors. I mean, I try and find their strengths and play to those strengths. I think every book, like every human, is its own entity. So you have to look at it as like, okay, I’m coming in with my template of what I do.

There may be a sense of the way you work with people, but basically each book is going to tell you how it needs to be told, if that makes sense. Sounds a little woo woo, but every book needs to be told in the way that suits that cast of characters, as it were, the setting, the genre, the, you know, who it’s directed to, the readership.

You could write the exact same book in the same setting for different audiences, and it would become a completely different book. So how I work with people is very much read it and think about is this coming across as well as they can. And I like to use the metaphor that people are broadcasting and I’m in there trying to tune out the static, trying to make their voice come through as clearly as possible.

I don’t want anybody to be writing in my voice, and I don’t want to come in and say, this is how you should write. It’s more, I get what you’re doing, but this isn’t coming across or this chapter is getting in the way of the progression of the book. It needs to go somewhere early or later. You know, those things that get in the way of the of the clear story that you’re trying to tell.

I’m not even talking about copyediting at this point, which is a whole other thing. But I’m talking about content and structural editing, where the pieces of the puzzle need to go together in a certain way to tell the story effectively. And of course, as you say, being on the other side of it, I would go, Oh, yeah, why didn’t I see that?

But once again, it’s very hard to work on your own work because you’re filling it in and filling it in with hundreds of days that went into those 40 chapters. So lots is left out, but it’s all in my mind and in my memories. So it’s very hard to read something without all of that coming through and kind of confusing, diluting it in some way that somebody else is reading it.

Lisa: But then there’s the copy editing, too. My last podcast guest said how a client of hers brought her a book for publicity, he said was perfectly edited. She spotted a couple of mistakes in there. So she sent him to a an editor that she had worked with before, who found like 800 errors.

Jennifer: Welcome to my world when I read books and I just read one. And it was published by Simon and Schuster. So it’s not a schlocky publisher. It was full of errors. Full of errors, I mean, from wrong placement of commas to literally the wrong word, poor instead of pour or peek instead of pique. I mean, just like any copy editor would have caught them.

Definitely a challenging part of this for me because I’m so incredibly picky, you know, and of course, I want as an editor, I want something out there that’s going to represent me really well and not be, you know, full of errors, of course. So that was really quite a challenge.

We went back and forth quite a bit and even like two weeks ago when it was going to the to the printer, I was still finding things that were bugging me, so I would go, Can I just get this change? One more thing. I read the audiobook for it and in a recording studio in Seattle, and while I was reading, I was finding things that were still wrong, little errors.

And I was going, Oh my God, this is terrible. I’ll never stop finding these errors. And she said, Don’t worry, if something’s really bad, we’ll fix it. And if not, we’ll fix it in the next printing and it’s like, Oh, I don’t want something out there that isn’t 100% perfect. But that’s the nature of a collaborative art form.

It’s never going to be perfect, but you want to try and get it as perfect as possible. So for people who want to self-publish, they have to remember that they have to put on all the hats. I like to say a book never happens slow enough for a publisher or fast enough for an author because authors are already I want the book out.

I want to be doing events. I want to be showing it to my friends and the publisher is going, slow down. We got plenty of time. Let’s make it perfect. Well, in this case, I was the one saying slow down, and she was the one saying we wanted out in September. So that was interesting. But for those who are self-publishing or considering self-publishing, you have to remember that you’ve got to take all of those steps yourself, sit down with a copy, with the content editor and go through those changes that are going to change the structure of the book, the content of the book, how chapters lead to each other,

How they’ve fulfilled the genre, how they work for readers. That story well told. Right. But then after you’ve done those two or three or four rewrites, however many it takes to get it the way you want it, then you’ve got to go through that process again with line editing or copyediting to make sure that each sentence works as well as it can with just the right words, and that each sentence within the paragraph belongs and comes in the right place, and that each paragraph comes in the right place on the page, and that every page, you know, works within that chapter because every chapter is its own little story arc.

So that leaves you wanting more, but also satisfies you. So that’s something that your content editor would do, but that your line editor or in some cases copy editor will do as well. And then there’s the final copy edit for all the little tiny commas versus semicolon or period versus semicolon or dash or all of that persnickety things.

You know, and there’s so many good copy editors out there, there’s no excuse to not have it as good as you can get it.

Lisa: I like what you said about the audiobook, because I have spoken to two people who publish their own books, and that seems to be a really good way of catching things. And yes, matter of fact, the one indie publisher I talked to, he said that’s his final edit is he records his own audiobooks and that will be his final edit because he still catches more errors.

Jennifer: Exactly. Gayle Carline, who you may know, she has been at a number of conferences in Southern California. She’s written seven or eight or nine books. I can’t keep track anymore. She’s got a couple of series. They’re all wonderful, different genres. But she says every time she records the book, then she listens to it with the printout in front of her.

And that was exactly what I did as well, reading it out loud once just for the story. Then the second time with that, with the manuscript in front of me to make sure, am I saying exactly what I want to be saying with those words? And stop and start and start, you know, so that you get that flow even after all those process is to be reading the audiobook from my computer manuscript, you know, on my computer screen.

That’s when I saw some things I hadn’t seen before. I would say not once, but twice reading it aloud with the manuscript in front of you. So incredibly helpful. And it was great. Also, I read it out loud that first time for the flow with to my husband so he was able to say wait, but he could also point out some things like that’s confusing. I’m not sure what you’re saying there, you know, so that was really helpful to see if you have somebody whose arm you can twist to listen to it. That’s such a helpful tool.

Lisa: Yeah. Because and these days too. And also listening without looking at the paper, but listening to it. Also something I recommend and you can do that just by hearing it flat to if you have your computer read it. Word will, you can tell it to read it. Yeah. And just listening to that flat AI voice reading it will help you.

Jennifer: Yes. Because something isn’t helping you to sound more dramatic or more interesting, which a narrator always tries to make it sound more interesting. And I found myself even doing that with my own book, like eliding over a word because I didn’t love it, you know? But I won’t do that. That automatic robot voice will point out all those little things.

Lisa: And some people might not want to do read their own audiobook. But if you do, I’ve been recommending to people that they do take their chapter that they think is pretty much there, take it and try reading it out loud and recording it as if they were going to produce their own audiobook. It’s like, Oh, well, those two characters sound a lot alike. Right. Oh, I need to make these those sound different.

Jennifer: Yeah, exactly. And that’s something that, having worked on editing many books, but in screenplays as well, one of the things that we’re always told is make sure I can tell the difference when someone is speaking even before the dialog tag, even before it says Bob said, I should know it’s Bob talking because the way he talks and it can be very tricky when you’re writing like there are certain people, Aaron Sorkin, everyone loves Aaron Sorkin.

And of course he’s good. But you’ll find, especially in earlier manuscripts, you’ll find that a lot of the screenplays, I should say, are the people sound identical. They’re all witty and they’re all insightful and they’re all incisive and they’re all kind of cynical and they’re all kind of right. And it’s like, who is this? I would not be able to tell, you know, lines of dialog.

So it’s something we have to definitely point out when people are writing a lot of dialog. Is that how can we tell who is speaking? You know, obviously are going to say he said, she said or Mary said Bob said. But even without those tags, how can we tell from the words they’re using who is speaking or how they’re saying it or some gesture that goes along with it?

You know, he ran his hands through his hair, exasperated. And then on the lot, you know, if we know this person is the person in the scene that’s stressed out in a book or in a film, then we can say, oh, that’s going to be Bob, you know. So hints that that that help us to figure that out.

But you’re right we have so many tools now that there’s no excuse for people would say, oh, I don’t know how to do that or I, I can’t read out loud or I don’t like the sound of my own voice or whatever. You know, there’s so many tools you have now to be able to do that.

Lisa: One of the copy editors that I worked with on the book I put out, she’s really good about catching over use of words or, you know, maybe clauses in a sentence that need to be rearranged and all that kind of stuff. But my kryptonite is those homophones and that seemed to be something that she didn’t seem to catch all of them. But what ended up happening is I had some beta readers and I had one beta reader that was really good at capturing homophones. So do you also recommend beta readers?

Jennifer: I definitely do. And actually with most authors, I would say do beta readers before you bring me your manuscript, because a lot of times what will happen is you’re writing and your rewriting and rewriting it again and you’re moving things around it and you will forget that you your hero’s name was Adonis when you started out and then you changed it to D’Artagnan or something, and you’ve literally forgotten and you haven’t been reading it out loud to point that out.

So your beta reader will go now wait who. Oh right. I named him that. Or I always love to tell the story of a memoir where a woman was talking about her life and she had this teenage son. And then halfway through the book, he just disappears. She never mentions him again. And I’m like, well, you know, teenagers are pretty insistently part of your life. I know they don’t just disappear. So, this is something you have to bring this up. What happened to him? Where’d he go? What was going on at that point?

So, yeah, it’s things you know or in a novel, somebody has a dog in chapter one because it’s useful to the author for some reason. And then they forget that character has a dog. Like they don’t, it just disappeared, if they’re off at the dog sitter, that’s an issue to, you know, make it clear. But beta readers are great at that and they’re great at pointing out those things that you did because it was handed to you as an author and saying like, yeah, that’s not going to fly.

So that way when you come to me or to any other content or structural editor, you’re not wasting our time on that, on that low hanging fruit that gives us the opportunity to look much more deeply and look at the not just the Matisse story, but the little layers within them to make sure that it’s as good as it can be.

Because I’m not having to worry about who was Tom again, because before his name was Ben. So those things can be caught by your beta readers. I mean, it was somebody like Gayle who does all of that great work before she brings it to me. That’s great. You know, so it’s your choice how you want to do it.

But to me, beta readers, are you alpha readers, your first beta readers, could be three people that you know and love and they support you. That could be your first readership. And then once you’ve done the rewrite based on that feedback, you could go to another level of beta readers, people who maybe you know from a conference, they’re other authors, but maybe they’re not your best friend or your mom or your spouse or your honey pie.

Somebody who’s going to be a little bit tougher with you. And then once you’ve gone through those passes and done the rewriting based on their feedback, that’s when you want to start spending the money. You don’t want to spend the money. I’m just done with my book. I press send it off to somebody, make it good because you’re going to spend more time and money because more time I spend the more money for you.

So, all those steps, like you say, using the people in your circle and finding those people, and writing groups or events or conferences is hugely, hugely helpful to you.

Lisa: Yes, definitely. I totally agree. I mean, I’ve written a novel and…..

Jennifer: It’s very good.

Lisa: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I’m just saying that I think when I was proofing the audiobook. It was told from a male point of view. So I had somebody else narrate the audiobook. And when I was listening to it, I realized, oh, no, I changed one of the names. And then I’m like, Oh, it’s going to be easier just to have him redo one sections.

Jennifer: Yeah, I was just telling my husband about your book because he loves dialects and stuff, and I said she did it just right. So many people either do too much or too little. And I thought you did it right on. I could hear that voice in my head. So now I’m interested in hearing the audiobook, so maybe I’ll get to hear it again, hear it the first time. That sounds great. Yeah, it was such a cinematic story.

Lisa: Well, thank you very much. Okay, here’s some advice I kind of need, and I’m sure it will help other people. I recently spoke to somebody who called about publishing advice as far as shorter works, should I put them together or publish them separately kind of thing. And I said do you have your team lined up? Do you have your editors and cover designers and stuff? He says oh, well, I don’t need an editor, because he had put out other books in the past. He published other books with his own press, and he said he didn’t need an editor. I’ve run across that before. What do you say when in that circumstance?

Jennifer: You know, I have heard everything. I actually heard an author say I bring out my books on e-books first. And I let all my readers find the errors for me. And then I bring the book to print. And I just thought, what? Why would you want people reading your work that is not in a finished state?

That makes no sense to me. I can unequivocally state there is never been a book that I have read, published by anyone that I have not found an error. And now if that can be true at the level of the big five publishers, where they’re hiring people and paying people good money to edit these books, how do you possibly think that an author who is so close to their own book can be able to tell not only that things that are structurally off or confusing or could be better in terms of the structure of the book and content of the book, but also to be able to see every word for the first time. Because once you’ve read a book a couple of times, that’s exactly why I oftentimes will do a content edit followed by a line edit, but I never do a copy edit for the same author and I tell them I would rather you go to somebody else and I’ll recommend people to them. Because the same thing you talked about with rein versus reign, she pulled on the reins spelled like a queen’s reign.

And I’m saying I wouldn’t see that because I’ve already seen it a couple of times. My eye may just go right over it, whereas a new copy editor is going to come in and say, Oh, she means rein like a horse’s reins in this case, you know, or peek and peak any of those. And I see them over and over and over again in published books.

We don’t see it because we know what we wrote, we know what we meant. So we’re just seeing what we meant to write, not what we actually wrote. So for somebody to say that they can proof their own work and know that it’s error free, it’s unbelievable to me literally unbelievable that could be true because having tried to proof my own work, I know how difficult it is.

You could read backwards and all those little tricks, so time consuming and you still will not find the things that are on another level, content or structural. Because once again, you’re filling things into those blanks that come from your knowledge of the characters or in memoir, your knowledge of your actual life. You’re filling those in and the reader can’t do that.

The reader is just going to read what’s on the page. They’re going to judge it and why somebody would want a book out there for four decades that could have been so much better with a couple more thousand dollars and a couple more months. It just it to me is just such a such a waste of time and money to have spent all the money and all the other pieces like you’re talking about, to put it out there and then have it not be as good as it could be, it just seems a shame.

Lisa: Well, although you are preaching to the choir here, I think you have really proved that writers need editors. So how do you recommend people go about finding editors?

Jennifer: Well, there’s a number of different ways. If you’re at a conference, obviously, talk to people who’ve already published books, who have self-published, have their own team. I love that you said that. I say having a publishing team, I like to tell people, don’t self publish, publish with a team. You know, find those people that are good at what they do.

And I find it funny that a lot of really good editors are not really good at marketing themselves. So sometimes you’ll look for quite a while and then you’ll hear somebody say, Oh, you don’t know Laurie Gibson. You know, she’s the greatest editor. And Laurie, you don’t even have a website. But you know, for example, that’s just something that happens in life and all of the best book editors and designers that I know many of them don’t have websites and don’t promote themselves very much.

So they just get word of mouth. And that’s good. If you’re really good that proves that you really are. So I think there is a million different ways to do it. But, certainly get out and talk to other writers who have successfully self-published if that’s what you’re going to do and or talk to editors.

I always tell people they could certainly go to jennyredbug.com. And you can see people that I have talked about, but my email is on there they can shoot me an email and if I’m not available to do content or other types of editing, I always recommend other people. I know there’s websites out there that will talk about editors in a specific city or in a specific region.

But there aren’t too many that are just like the greatest editors out there, because also there’s a lot of people out there that charge an awful lot and they’re not better than people who charge less necessarily. They just live in New York or Chicago or L.A. and so they notice that they can it’s their prices. And so they do.

I don’t begrudge them that. If they end up with happy customers. But I haven’t seen like a Yelp thing for editing. I mean, that would be great if somebody started doing that. But I definitely know a handful of editors that I’m happy to recommend to people. So, without cluttering this up with reciting a list of names, they’re definitely lots of places to look in your particular hometown, wherever that is. Start reaching out to your local. Of course, in Santa Barbara, the writers conference, San Diego, the Southern California Writers Conference, Los Angeles. I think there were a number of groups that specialize in writers. And, ask your writer friends, certainly on Facebook. I see people do that all the time. They go, oh, I thought I was going to work with so-and-so, but she’s busy. Anybody knows somebody great and they’ll get five or six names right away.

That’s what social media is really good for. The hive mind thing, help me out here, people.

So your book is coming out in September. What are you doing to promote it?

Jennifer: Well, I’m going on podcasts. I just did a couple of podcasts last week. I did an article for a Cruising magazine that specializes in people that sail, and another one coming out in a couple of months. I’ve been doing my own blog. I joined Substack, which I don’t know if your listeners are familiar with Substack, but it’s basically a software set up where you can go on and create your own newsletter that is then delivered to people into their emails, and then people can click on the site from their email and be able to comment with the other people on the substack.

So it’s been really, really cool and if you just Google Honeymoon at Sea, you’ll see it pretty quickly. There isn’t a lot of everything else and honeymoon at sea has to do with some place you’re going to, you know, buy a package to Fiji or something. So you’ll be able to tell quickly which one is my substack and I transferred everything from my old blog over there.

So there’s a whole lot of archives about writing things that I talk about with editing and writing tips. I’m also writing and editing books, so that’s happening at the same time. But I’ve just been doing all kinds of things. And as I said, doing the audiobook was very exciting and somewhat terrifying experience to do and also just been working on all the little marketing things.

Hopefully I’ll get the ARCs of the book. I haven’t even had advance reading copies yet. I’ve been sending people PDFs, but luckily I’ve had a lot of people review it. A lot of people say a lot of great things. So that’s been very helpful to me to be able to put that out there. And for about five hours the other day I was the number one new release in the Hispanic and Latino literature on Amazon.

And I wish they had a California subject line, but they don’t. So, well, they have to work on their keywords, I think. But it’s been a great deal of fun, you know, and talking with people that were on my mailing list for years and years that are like, Oh, you wrote a book? I didn’t even know that.

So they’re trying to rattle the bushes in every way, and I’ll be looking forward to planning something out a bookstore soon. And then, as I said, I’ll be down in San Diego and Southern California at the beginning of next year with the books doing the Southern California Writers Conference and some other writers conferences and have the books with me. So that’ll be very exciting.

Lisa: Yes, that is awesome. That sounds like an interesting journey. This season of this podcast is almost over. So maybe next season I’ll have you back. Tell us about Substack.

Jennifer: I’d love that. Yeah. I think there’s so many different opportunities nowadays to even make money as a writer without being published by a publisher. Substack allows you to charge people if you want to write now, because I’m trying to push people in a very gentle, loving way. Preorders are now like one of the most important things that an author and a publisher have going for them before the book actually hits the bookstores.

My book comes out September 19th, but we already have preorders and have been pushing those for another a couple of weeks. And that’s one of the things I keep telling people. If you’re going to buy the book, please order it now, because that really helps us to get exposure. And when I come back, next time I’ll be able to tell you, yeah, Honeymoon at Sea debuted with this kind of preorders.

I don’t know that yet. But hopefully I have a good story to tell about all of our pushing on all different what’s the phrase keep an equal strain on all parts to try and get things moving in a marketing way. And then, of course, once the book is out, I’ll be doing events, book signings.

Lisa: Well, thank you so much. This has been a gold mine. I really appreciate it.

Jennifer: Thank you, Lisa. I really appreciate you inviting me. And I will look forward to coming back again when Honeymoon at Sea is out.

The post S1 Ep. 9 Working with an Editor appeared first on Ninety Degrees Media.

Kathleen Kaiser discusses book marketing and the importance of joining writing communities for support and advice. Kathleen shared her experiences in the publishing industry and warned about scammers.

Key Points

• Kathleen emphasizes the importance of building a community and network in the writing industry
• Kathleen discusses the issue of scammers in the publishing industry and how WPN tries to alert members about them, as well as her experience helping someone ripped off by a hybrid publisher
• Kathleen emphasizes the importance of joining a community like WPN for support and advice in navigating the constantly changing publishing industry.

I’m here today with book marketing extraordinaire, President of Kathleen Kaisers and Associates, the Southern California Book Publicists’ Book Publicist of the Year for 2016, and President of the Writers and Publishers Network. Kathleen Kaiser, welcome.

Kathleen: Thank you, Lisa. I’m glad to be here. All those titles sound daunting.

Lisa: I know you have a very long and illustrious career in publicity for rock and roll and tech and all sorts of industries all over the world. And I encourage people to go on your website and read about that. But I was wondering if you would share how you got into the book marketing world.

Kathleen: I always knew I’d end the last part of my life. The last stage was going to be writing books, and I started on this journey in my fifties researching an idea I had for a book. And then in 1998, I was in my forties. 1998, I thought I had my first draft done. So I went to the Santa Barbara Writers Conference.

And I encourage anybody that can go to a conference, go to it because you’ll never believe how nice the people are, everybody you meet and the network you build. But I went there and I went into something called the Pirate sessions, which was from 9:00 at night till whenever it ended in two or three in the morning sometimes. Shelly Lowenkopf, the legendary west coast editor, when we used to have real publishing companies out here. And he’s written God so many books. He started in the 1950s writing pulp fiction. But he’s an amazing man and he’s an executive editor. And I sat down with my five pages and I said, Well, listen to a couple of people, and then I’ll read my pages.

And I sat in the back, Well, five days later, I’m still sitting in the back with my pages because I suddenly realized I had been writing for years, I was a journalist. I had written four books that had been published, but they were all nonfiction. And I realized listening to Shelly, I had no idea what I was doing with fiction, that there was a whole other language in terms and stuff.

So I got to know him and he introduced me to other people. And then in 2000, I was really busy producing things all over the world with conferences because I was doing technology, trade shows and conferences then and producing. And I had my own team. I had my own company. Well, Kathleen Kaiser and Associates has been around for 31 years now.

I started it in 1993, but as a emerging technology thing. But I realized I’m going to be winding down here a bit and it’s time to start really getting that book written and finished. I published it in 2009. I self-published it and I did everything wrong that you could do to promote a book. And having spent 50 years as a publicist and marketer, I couldn’t believe how stupid I was.

So I spent the next two years getting to know people, people that I knew who had introduced me to other people I knew. I have a question about this. You know, I have a question about that. What is really the value of e-books in da da da da da da? And I sort of went on a research project to bring myself up to speed, because luckily, when I was in tech for 20 years, I was writing the desktop publishing revolution into the internet revolution.

So I understood all the technology. I just didn’t know where the tools that I’d been using. I mean, since my Beatle fan club at 16, when you’re doing five part labels, you know, and typing up labels to stick on envelopes all the way to now everything’s on email and social media. So that was that was my journey.

And a dear friend who I’d known for a long time, Ivor Davis, had his book coming out in 2014 on The Beatles because he toured with them in 64. He was the only British journalist with them for the whole tour. He was on the plane with them, in the hotels with them, everything, and he asked me to do the PR and I sort of jumped in and said, okay, I can do this.

I had been doing a little PR and a few other things before then with authors and a lot of nonprofits. I’d been focusing on arts, nonprofit, but I said, I really like this. This is fun. So from him, other people came, and now that’s what I do full time happy, helping other authors get their books promoted.

Watching the evolution since 2009 till today, you know nothing’s the same.

You know, Amazon even has changed and they’re like, they stay with the clunkier software there is until it absolutely breaks. Well, they finally gave up on that stupid mobi that they were making Kindle and that was the worst program in the world and software application.

And now they use epub like everybody else. They sort of snuck that in without much fanfare that hello, we were a failure, but it happened. But in getting to know that what I like to do is a I found that the books that I want to promote, books I love.And if I’m not passionate about the book, I can’t do it.

So I’ve really found I go, I’m big on memoirs, I’m big on historical fiction. I love to work with those kind of books because I love to hear people’s stories. And I also love history and then mysteries, especially like detective mysteries and legal thrillers. Those are the areas that I think I excel at because I love those.

That’s what I read. I don’t do political nonfiction, but I read way too much of it. But I’m kind of a news junkie on part time, but I, I find people that are writing things and I won’t take on a client till I’ve read their whole manuscript and review it and make sure it’s something I want.

I know I can help them with because if I can’t help them, I’m not going to take their money. It’s a problem. And so then we put together a whole scope of how we’re going to market it. And if they’ve had other books out, we put together e-book promotion campaigns before the launch. We do a lot of different things.

We’ve found some really great vendors over the last five years that we get really good results from.

Lisa: Great. So I went to the Santa Barbara Writers Conference in the nineties as well, Fortunately, because I was living in San Luis Obispo at the time, but my parents still lived in Santa Barbara, so I was able to stay there and attend the conference. But while I was living in San Luis Obispo in the nineties, I belong to a group called the NightWriters and I guess it’s because a majority of the people had their day jobs and they wrote at night.

I guess that was the concept when it was founded, although there was a lot of people who did come into the organization who were fulltime writers, whether, you know, nonfiction or journalists and that kind of thing. But it was good because we we would meet once a month and have a speaker and we would have breakout critique groups that met at people’s houses.

Back in those days, I don’t know what that organization’s doing these days, but I know that when I moved back to Santa Barbara, I wanted to find something like that because I liked that feeling of associating with other writers and being able to talk about kind of that unique perspective that we have and so besides attending the writers conference. I know you’re also on the board of IWOSC the Independent writers of Southern California, but I want to talk about other groups that have helped you along the way.

Kathleen: I’d say the number one group that helped me the most before I published my book was in late 2008. I joined the Ventura County Writers Club, which has been around since 1935, and they had monthly meetings and they had critique groups.

So I joined a critique group. First group didn’t get along with well, they didn’t believe in Oxford commas. I said, That’s what you have to do for publishing. So, yes. I said, Okay, you guys really don’t know anything about publishing. At least I knew that. So I found another group that was formed in very heavy testosterone Men and me, and I’m writing a woman’s Point of view book and they’re all off on an action adventure and all this other junk.

But it was really interesting to debate with our on different points. Women really think like this, you know, you know and when they would we be critiquing their stuff. It’s like I’ve never heard a woman say that you know, that was they were looking they were writing women as if they were male lite or something. That was my term. I came up with it, but that helped me a great deal and it introduced me to other people.

And as usual, I volunteered to help them with their PR. They had no idea how to write a press release, and I’ve been writing press releases since 1969. So I went and then I end up on the board and then I end up president.

But it really helped me meet local writers, and that’s when I got into IWOSC and I met Flo Salomon was the president, and she just won a lifetime achievement award from Book Fest. And she’s amazing. She has been a book publishers her entire career and the last like 15 years. She’s now just doing what she loves best, which is copyediting. She calls herself the woman with the red pencil. Now it’s the red type, red font, but she does it and she’s great. I gave her one book Ivor’s books  he was working on. He thought it had been edited perfectly. I realized it hadn’t been. I mean, I’m not an editor, but I can read something and when I see mistakes.

She found over 800 mistakes in the supposedly perfectly edited book. Those are the kind of people that you get to meet. And so I love turning people on to them. It’s like, you know, I like what you’ve done here, but this isn’t right. It’s got to get cleaned up a bit. I try to be gracious, and I’m not an editor.

I totally admit that I have dyslexia for being a writer. That’s always fun, too. I could never be an editor because of that. I would be too concerned. I’m making mistakes and would make even more mistakes. But it’s been a really great journey. And this is where I always said I’d end up my life and this is where I am.

It’s my third industry as far as I’m concerned. And because I did 16 years in rock and roll and 20 years in technology, and then during the eighties, I spent four years in New York writing and then floated around doing, producing some international conferences every month. But I really got into the conference and trade show business in the late 80s, and that took me till when everything crashed and exploded and my partners and I decided we were going to close that venture we were doing together.

And I just moved forward on my own with my own company. I had ten employees, but I discovered I could save $3,500 a month in rent by sending them home, giving them a computer, a printer, paying for their Internet access and a phone line in 1997 and close the office because that $3,500 was coming from my money and we were producing paperless trade shows, you know, promoting how to have the paperless office. I put it into action.

Lisa: Wow, you are really ahead of your time because you started something that, you know, 23 years later just blew up very ahead of your time.

Kathleen: Thank you. You know, the funny thing is, though, what I learned from that and I’m seeing it now with what’s happened because of COVID, there are people that can work alone at home and get a lot done. And there are people that really want that watercooler. Want the interaction with people. And if they don’t do well at home.

Lisa: They want to go someplace else. They don’t want to work in their home. My sister does that. Her work said they don’t have room for employees where she works. So instead of working at home, she drives down the street and around the corner to my mom’s house and uses my mom’s home office as her office.

Kathleen:  Wow. So she had to be somewhere out of her house. Yeah, I have made my whole home circle around the fact that I’m here 95% of the time. So everything is supportive of me. Whatever I’m doing here.

Lisa: Yes. And I know writers who do the same thing,they actually rent a room where they can go and do their writing off away from their home. 

Kathleen: Well, you each have to do what works for you. You know, I like being in my house. I love it. So I actually turn the master bedroom into a library office because it has a great view of a mountain in the backyard. And I can sit here and look at my mountain instead of staring at a wall in my office.

So I just flipped everything on its head. But, you know, you have to find what is right for you. And I think building a community and making contacts. Do you know Sheila Lowe? She’s the handwriting forensic handwriting expert who’s written God like 30 books or something. She has the Claudia Rose series. She’s like a sleuth who uses forensic handwriting to solve mysteries.

Yeah. Sheila has put together an amazing network of people. I just went to the launch of her new memoir. She’s finally written. Her daughter was murdered in 2000, and she’s finally been able to write about it. But I went to the launch of it last week. But she has really put together a whole network of other writers because we’re really not competitors.

Nobody’s telling your story. Nobody’s going to steal your story. They have their own stories to tell. Okay, Stealing stories is the movie business. You’re not in that. You’re in the book business. And what she’s done is get like minded people and puts together. So when she has something five or six other writers are they’re all signing books and selling their books and enlarging their network and having people sign up to get their newsletters.

Sheila puts out a newsletter once or twice a month that is just amazing. And she’s put together over the last 15 years an amazing newsletter list, and she announces the new book. She announces other people’s books. You know, she really promotes that. She promotes the the world of writers. And I think more of us need to do that.

It’s something like with the Writers and Publishers Network. I really like it because we try to be resource driven because writing is a lonely business. I mean, you hear that over and over, but it really is unless you’re collaborating with somebody, you’re alone at the keyboard, but you need to know about who are whose. You know, if you’re going to self-publish, who’s really a reliable, maybe high bread publisher or a designer or someone who can upload all your thing and set up all of your accounts, what to do with this and that.

That’s what we are, how to market. I mean, as far as I’m concerned that 50% of writing a book is marketing it, because you can write the book and you can get it up on Amazon, who’s going to know it if you don’t market it? And, you know, and that’s part of like with the Writers and Publishers Network, we have our monthly newsletter, which gives you hints from some top people in the industry we have as columnists, some on grammar and different things.

Bobbi Christmas is fabulous at that. Penny Sansevieri has her column on marketing. Penney’s, one of the top marketers. Jay Hartman has just left a publishing firm starting another one. But he’s been a poet. I’ve been a publisher for about 15 years, so he has the publisher’s perspective. And then for members of the Writers and Publishers Network, we have the market update, which I think is an incredibly valuable resource because we tell you here’s seven or eight new agents that are looking for clients in these categories.

We give you all kinds of tips on what’s really going on inside the business. Here is the latest stupid thing Amazon’s done. You know, it’s about how to work around it. Well, it’s true. Because they’re always doing something dumb, but they just keep it’s like I really hate tech guys who can’t leave a great website alone. They’ve got to screw with it so that you can’t use it.

You know, it’s like you’re on a continual learning curve. I actually hit a point about a year and a half ago and said, No more new applications. I’m learning nothing else because I have been learning software since 1985. I think I’ve maxed out, you know, I can play around in a few things, but how many more new things do I really need to learn at this point?

And what I’ve decided? I just hire people in their thirties and forties, you know, and they do that for me. And it works out because I know what my strengths are and that’s what I focus on and that’s what I think any writer needs to know, right. What’s your strengths? What do you have a passion about?

Because if you don’t have a passion about what you’re writing, it’s going to show. It’s going to show in the writing, be it fiction or nonfiction. The passion for the subject matter is what’s important. And getting that message out to people and one of the best ways, like you said, is critique groups.

You can see if you’re hitting them or not. You know, when you read the pages or if you guys, critique in advance and then review it, you’ll know if you’re hitting a spot or not. It’s like when I go back to that group I had with before men, there would be times I’d read some and it was like they were knocked out because it was like I said, okay, I got my message across here, you know, I got my message.

And other times they didn’t get it at all. But so it made me really think, well, there will be men that read this. Even though they’re only 20% of the book buying market, I would think one of them or two of them might pick it up someday. And it’s good to have that other perspective because writing is a growing process.

You’re constantly growing and learning and getting better at it. I don’t know one, and I now, because I used to produce the 805 Writers Conference, I was speaking with New York Times bestselling authors that we’d have as speakers. And there’s not one of them who doesn’t think their first two or three books were junk, even though some of them were bestsellers.

They are such better writers after a while and it’s that constantly growing because writing’s an art. There isn’t a painter that paints immediately a Picasso quality picture.

It’s development. The other advice I give to writers and it’s what helped me a lot in the when I was been writing throughout my life, write articles, submit articles to magazines, submit articles. If you’re a mystery writer, there’s mystery magazines, come up with some short stories, do stuff, get out there and put you’ve put yourself out there because a, if nothing else, it’s building you a reputation because you’ve been published somewhere. Even if it was a magazine and it’s establishing you as a legitimate writer.

Lisa: And also a great opportunity is that if anybody wants to write for our Writers and Publishers Network newsletter, there is a great audience for you. You want to connect with other writers, write an article or WPN.

Kathleen: Absolutely, because a lot of those articles are people just talking about their journey and what they’ve learned, and I think that so revising and if you go to writersandpublishersnetwork.com, you can sign up for the newsletter for free and just receive it every month.

Lisa: And you’ll receive two free ebooks as well.

Kathleen: Now we send out thousands of copies. We have a really good list, but it’s people that stick with us too. We have a very low unsubscribed rate, less than 5%.

Lisa: That’s great. And, you know, I remember when I first moved back to Santa Barbara, I was looking for my tribe and I went to the our local book and author festival. And I picked up a little brochure and thought I would contact this group called SPAWN, Small publishers, Writers, and Artists Network. And if anybody has heard of that. That is what is now Writers and Publishers Network. We had to kind of change that name and rebrand. And I think and that was after you took over, I believe you took over in leadership of the organization in 2014. Correct? And since then it’s really changed the website and made a lot of changes to the newsletter and it’s really grown and we’re continually offering new member benefits.

Kathleen: Oh, constantly. There’s nothings coming along and there are some consistent ones that are like, the Chicago Manual of Style, which is online. And it might be daunting, especially if you’re not very good at grammar, but, you know, doing something like that for a while we had a discount program to get Grammarly Pro, which I love. It’s in my emails, it’s on Facebook and everything I do, and it’s cleaning up my writing because sometimes you can put stuff on Facebook that makes no sense and you don’t want to do that if you’re promoting something, especially for a writer. So I’ve just sort of said, Well, I’ll just plug that into everything and do better.

But you when you have a group like Writers and Publishers Network, it’s there to support you. We really mean it. It’s like anybody who’s a member as President, they can email me and ask me questions. And often, you know, we have long emails or I’ll say, you know what? Why don’t you give me a call?

Let’s set a time to talk, because some of them are struggling with a problem or they’ve ran into trouble. I went through that last year with one person who was getting completely ripped off by this, supposed hybrid publisher. And because we put out scam alerts, that’s the other thing. Because there are so many scammers out there right now that are pretending to be publishers and doing this and doing that, and all of the creeps that were with Author Solutions, which was a complete boiler room con job they went and bought when they sort of got ran out of business, they went and bought iUniverse and some other ones and now they’ve got quote legitimacy and it’s the same scam they’re running. Once you get on their list, they call you daily trying to sell you something and emailing you. And it’s really a you know, we try to alert people of that, especially when they come up with a new incarnation. And that’s like whack a mole.

It’s so easy to get a new name and search out a new website and just be doing the same garbage or like I was talking about I’m going, do I really think I want to put the article in Writer’s Digest instead of the IBPA magazine. But I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it, but I’m doing a case study on this couple that wrote three books and maybe gotten $40 from their publisher, where I know we sold over 400 e-books last December, and she claims there were three.

Lisa: Oh, wow.

Kathleen: Yeah. And she has total control over everything and they can’t get their rights back. She charged them to have the book design. She charged them to do everything. She takes a percentage of everything, and then she expects them to pay her to get their stuff back that they already paid for. And she has a contract that is complete garbage.

I can read contracts. I was part of the Society of Independent Show organizers in the nineties and I chaired the contract committee and I got to work with the top attorneys in the trade show industry. So I learned how to do contracts and I can read a contract. And I realized she had stolen this contract from someone.

And because I’m reading and suddenly other company names and initials are showing up. And she hadn’t even edited the contract correctly and she had stuff up on her website. If you’ve ever published something, you know, on Amazon, they ask if you want international exposure or different things, you just check a box. Okay. She had a huge long list of Amazon, UK, Amazon, Germany. She went on like she was doing all this stuff, setting all of this up for you. Barnes Noble’s here and dotted it. And it was like, Oh my God, this is like a complete con job. But the people who she had done this to that I know I’m working with them, they thought that was really fabulous.

She had all these connections and ways to do things and, it was just complete garbage. I don’t know. I don’t like people that scam people. I think it’s horrible to take advantage of people because just because they don’t know.

Lisa: And just knowing about these companies to avoid and I yeah, I hear about that all the time and things popping up and all the changes, even just changes in publishing, not necessarily, bad things or scams, but also just basic changes. Like you said mobi going away and epub becoming the the major. There’s people who don’t know about this thing. And so that’s why these communities are really helpful.

Is there any kind of last advice you would like to to impart? 

Kathleen: Really think one thing that’ll help you the most is get out there and join something. The Writers and Publishers Network, when it was SPAWN, was created in 1995 or 96. I wasn’t a part of it then, but they created it because they saw the Internet was going to be. It’s like a national literary nonprofit.

So we have members all over the country. The board of directors is all over the country and it’s, you know, get with people so that you can learn and don’t be afraid of it, because there really are simple steps that you can take. Book marketing terrifies some people, but there really are simple ways you can start doing something and, you know, just sign up for the newsletter.

Look around, Google if there’s any writing groups in your town and see if you can join them. Because because if you join five other people in a critique group, they’ll probably know five other people who are doing it too. And you can say, I’m trying to learn about X, Y, Z, and they’ll they all know somebody who can help you, and that’s how you build a support network.

The post S1 Ep. 8: Writers Helping Writers appeared first on Ninety Degrees Media.

Desiree Duffy discusses the use of AI in writing, including the benefits and recommended starting with ChatGPT for those interested in trying it out.

Key Points

• Desiree Duffy addresses apprehensions about using AI for writing, advocating for its use as an assistive tool rather than a replacement for writers
• Desiree discusses how authors struggle with distilling their book into a description or log line, and how ChatGPT can assist with this
• She explains how authors can use large language models like ChatGPT to generate book descriptions, titles, and even ideas for market research
• Desiree recommends starting with ChatGPT and trying out the free version before deciding to subscribe to the paid version

I’m here today with Desiree Duffy, who has a career spanning 20 years in marketing and public relations. Her current enterprises include Black Chateau, Books That Make You, and the BookFest. I’ve known you through the Independent Writers of Southern California, IWOSC. And I’ve seen you around quite a bit. You’re doing quite a lot. Why don’t you tell us what all you’re doing?

Desiree: Yes, I have three brands. We have Black Chateau, which is the PR marketing agency that started it all. I worked many years doing PR marketing, and my last professional position before starting the company was vice president of a digital marketing agency. And when I started Black Chateau, it was with an idea of, Hey, there’s so many authors out there who don’t really have a lot of the tools that marketers are using in the digital era.

Now, this was six years ago, seven years ago, actually, when I started Black Chateau. And since then, it’s evolved even more. But what I took from my previous positions and brought into Black Chateau was a lot of the digital aspects of PR and marketing and integrated that into what we call the author network, which is designed for book launches. It uses a combination of online tools, traditional media pitching articles, SEO, etc.. And then in addition to that, as we market our author’s books and doing all the things we were doing, we wanted to have a forum that reached the readers because authors, when you’re promoting their books, they want to reach readers. That’s their audience, right?

So that’s where we created Books That Make You, our consumer facing brand and it features book reviews. We do the Books That Make You show. I have my own podcast there. We do events and we celebrate authors. We have stories and articles about authors and a Webby Award-winning newsletter as well. The Books That Make You newsletter won a Webby Award.

Then when the lockdown hit a few years ago, back in 2020, we were getting ready to do fun things. So being from Southern California and the independent writers of Southern California, what we would always do every year is we’d be at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books over on USC campus. When we realized we weren’t able to do that in 2020 because everything was shut down, we decided to create an online event as a lot of people did. That’s when people started using Zoom and having Zoom meetings and hangouts and virtual events became a thing. Well, that’s when we created the BookFest and we have grown.

We do it twice a year now in the spring and the fall. We’re online, we’ve always been online and we embrace that because then we reach readers and writers from around the world. Day one is always dedicated to the reader and then day two is dedicated to the writer. And we do lots of programing, including at the last one we had a very wonderful conversation, interesting and in-depth about the use of artificial intelligence in the writing world and quote unquote, back then, all the way back in April, which seems like forever ago.

But the changing landscape in the way AI is evolving is just on fire. So even when I look back at that panel discussion, it was with Russell Nohelty and Lori Schwartz, I think, wow. Even then we were talking about things in a very rote manner. We still didn’t understand what was happening. So, you know, that panel and so many others people can access if they go to the BookFest to see what I mean.

Lisa: I guess the world has changed so much in the last three years. And I actually am thankful and I think a lot of people in Southern California, I’m in Santa Barbara, and even people who are in Los Angeles, they say that they love online events because going to live events, they get in their car and by the time they get there, they’re exhausted. So online events, I think, are kind of a blessing. I mean, there’s in-person is great, but if you just want to learn something new, online events are just wonderful.

Desiree: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. It’s accessible. It’s quote unquote easy. Once we got past the learning curve of trying to figure out what Zoom was, and I was like, Oh, my gosh, why weren’t we doing this before? Because the technology was there. And sometimes you have to get a little bit uncomfortable. You know, you have to break out of that comfort zone. And then new experiences and learning can happen.

Lisa: Yeah. And that is probably the same thing with AI, artificial intelligence. I actually mentioned in a writing workshop, I said, well, that character needs some work because it sounds kind of AI. And somebody thought I meant author interference, but we’re talking about artificial intelligence, which is, you know, I tell you, when I go to check my email and clean everything out, you know, all the newsletters and file them and stuff seems like at least five of them a day mention AI. So this is just a broadening world and something that’s changing all the time, right now, just like you said. And we have to adapt and change with it. So what kind of uses are you finding right now?

Desiree: There are so many uses. I don’t know how long this interview is going to be, but we could do entire classes on all the things you can do. One of the things I’m going to address first, because what I’ve seen and heard, Lisa, is some really big apprehensions about using artificial intelligence for writers. And I want to address that elephant in the room first, because a lot of people, I know where their heads are going and I know what they’re thinking in the back of their head is AI is replacing writers.

They’re thinking of things like the writers strike that’s going on. They’re thinking that, Oh, I heard that AI really doesn’t write good stories. And we should just get away with it. There is a lot of people out there making judgments, I feel, without necessarily having the full lay of the landscape. And that’s hard because that landscape, like we keep saying, is changing all the time.

It’s hard to keep up. But what I’ve been using AI for is not replacing writers, so to speak, or not using it to totally write a story. There are people out there who are doing that. There is artificial intelligence or large language models, as they’re called, like ChatGPT to write an entire book. I don’t necessarily advocate for that, but I do advocate for using it to assist you in a myriad of ways.

Just like using Google as a search engine, as a tool. And we’d never think of telling an author, You shouldn’t use Google to do your research. You must go to the library. Nowadays, like we’ve all accepted that Google is a legitimate search tool, right? Just like we’ve accepted that spellcheck. And the fact that a computer can help us with our writing, with our grammar is there.

So with all of that said, some of the things I’m going to talk about, we’re going to be assisting authors and writers to do what they do best. And that’s being the creator, being the driving force behind those ideas because I don’t know about you, but when I’m writing, a lot of times I create this word salad, you know, especially in the term in the world of marketing and PR.

Once I know the author’s branding and I know their mission and I know the book description, I have all of those things and say, we need to put together an article about that author and their book. It’s just taking all those pieces and putting them together in new and exciting ways. And the nice thing about ChatGPT, I’m going to use that as the example, just simply because it’s the largest one.

There’s many other language models out there, but the nice thing is I can feed that and it can help me kind of restructure something that I’ve already written. Give it a new take. And the other thing I love about it too, is I have a chart where I have told it. All of your future inputs should be doing these things and some of those things are using Chicago Style Manual because I like the Chicago Style Manual we all have, probably remember and I still have mine up on my shelf for people that can see I’m pointing up because that style book that I used to have to look up how do I make a title? How do I cite this? How we’ve all done that? So guess what? ChatGPT does that for me. I don’t have to think about it. Our style guide is right there in ChatGPT and whether you use AP or Chicago or whatever, you can have it put or create those outputs in that style.

I’m using it to help do spellcheck and check for grammar. And sure there’s Grammarly and there’s Word and there’s all of these other tools. It’s nice, though, to have it right there in front of me integrated and then doing all of these things at once. And sometimes it comes back and I was like, Oh my gosh, I didn’t even know that wasn’t necessarily the right thing.

I get surprised sometimes that some of the things that it says so even just kind of underscore what I what I said, they’re helping rewrite, restructure and retool things. You know, do copy edit proofing, punching up. I even just asked my ChatGPT the other day, do you know what the term punching up means? Punching up writing. And it said yes and it told me what it meant. And I was like, okay, future outputs. Can you please make sure to punch up some of my writing? And so it kind of gives me a new take on some things and it really is a shortcut and saves a lot of time, especially sometimes when we’re doing some marketing and PR writing.

Lisa: Yeah, but it sounds like you’ve done a lot of training, you’ve had to train it. I guess you put a lot of effort into training this AI, it sounds like it and other people want to make sure to weed out punctuation and maybe they’re not good with that or something, but I’m wondering how much training does it need? But I guess the good news is, is that like with a lot of assistants or virtual assistants it’s not going to go find another job and move along. So at least with all this training you’re giving it, it’s not going to take it with it and leave you.

Desiree: That’s a good way to look at it. It is like having a virtual assistant that once you train it, it remembers and retains that. I’ll throw in a couple of caveats because we’ve all seen the examples of a ChatGPT that spits out stuff that’s not factual and I had somebody call me on it. Well you shouldn’t use ChatGPT. It is known to lie and make things up and of course it is. But you also can spend a little bit of time training it and saying, hey, future outputs need to be X, Y and Z. And that little bit of time that you take, like you’re saying in showing and training your chat is actually probably less time than if you were to bring on an assistant to help you do that and it makes your work go faster.

And people might say, Oh no, now there’s virtual assistants who are going to lose jobs. Well, I think there’s going to be a lot of jobs out there for people who can train, ChatGPT, and other large language models and AI prompting engineering, which is what we’re talking about that’s getting it to do what you want that in and of itself is turning into a marketable talent right now.

So if you’re listening to me and going, Desiree, there is no way I could ever do what you’re talking about and train ChatGPT because I barely understand what’s going on. The nice thing is there’s people out there who can do that and they can get it up and running for you. You can hire people to help you.

Or people can be working on different aspects in the world of, you know, just everything vertical at this point, from marketing to PR to writing to even online shopping and everything is using or is integrating different aspects of AI. So having people there who can do that, prompting and engineer those, that is a new skill set that didn’t exist before.

Sure, there might be some jobs that are going away and that’s a very legitimate concern. But it’s also opening up avenues and new exciting platforms for people to work in that didn’t exist before.

Lisa: Yes, definitely. So I can see my vision of using any type of ChatGPT or tool like that would be. I remember going through and trying to write the Amazon description for my novel. And that was just like you said. I looked at all the comp titles and I took words, I made a word salad, like you said. And that’s a great term. And then I used those to make it and it really had nothing to do with my writing it because it’s not what would appeal to me, it’s what would appeal to general readers, readers in general who search Amazon looking for something new to read. So that’s where those AO generators, I think, can help.

Desiree: I think you nailed it there. Lisa, when it comes to a book description or a logline as another great example, a lot of authors struggle with that. It’s a common thing. I hear it all the time. Oh, my God. I need to distill my book down to just a couple of sentences or a couple of paragraphs. It’s so hard for an author who’s written this entire volume that that’s usually where they bring in a marketer.

In most cases, if they’re with a traditional publisher, the publisher is going to do their description, etc. But if they are an independent or an indie author or self-published author, or nowadays there’s a lot of hybrid publishers that still depend upon the author to provide them with a lot of that stuff anyway. So they can use large language models like ChatGPT to help them.

And it’s not an exaggeration to say that an author is going to spend several hours, if not days, because then they’re going to go back and they’re going to rewrite it, or they’re going to look at it again. They’re going to ask their friends feedback to now take all of those concepts and words and terms that they know they want in there, and to basically cobble it together into a sloppy copy, kind of that word salad and feed it to chat and say, Hey, turn this into a book description for me.

Can you make it between 100-200 words, two or three paragraphs at the end? I want to fit the hook that’s going to attract the reader. And then you see what it gives you. It’s going to give you an output and probably just a few seconds or a minute tops, and then you can read that if you don’t like it.

One of my favorite prompts I use all the time is try again. It’ll retool it. Maybe you like part of it, maybe like the first paragraph, but not the second paragraph. Or it didn’t capture something. Hey, the protagonist, you know, they actually go on this journey, make sure you explain that more fully and say, try again. And now what might have taken hours, days, weeks, even, or a marketing department all that time to flesh out is given to you. And then I always recommend Lisa, once you take it out of ChatGPT, put it into word, and even then you might want to do some light copy editing of your own. Maybe you didn’t like the adjective that it used needed just a little bit of you.

Now you’re punching up the copy a little bit, or maybe it kind of said things a little bit differently. So I always recommend, once you have it, take it out, put it into Word or whatever software you use and then read it. And even then if you want to take it and sit on it for a day or two and go back to it, you can but yeah, to answer your question, that’s an exact perfect example of what Chachi can be used for.

Lisa: But what, what else? Like stuff like generating titles or that kind of stuff. What other kind of uses are off the top of the list for what authors can do?

Desiree: Yeah, titles, subtitles, all of that. ChatGPT can go back on the internet as of 2021. So anything that’s too fresh and new, it’s not going to know and it’s going to tell you, I don’t know this because this is as far back as I go, but if you wanted titles, for example, or you wanted it to generate ideas for where you should be writing, you know, the old saying skate to where the puck is going, not to where it lands.

Authors and writers are always trying to figure out what’s going to be new and fresh in the market. What do people want to read? So you could ask it to help you do some market research. What titles, what genres are selling right now? Should I write a cozy mystery, or should it be a hardboiled thriller? Oh, what’s selling nowadays?

Again, it’s only going to be able to go back to 2021, but it can be used to generate ideas like that. One of the things that I think it’s really interesting for, especially if you’re writing historical fiction or something that does have a place and time that it’s going to be very knowledgeable. It can be hard sometimes to do all of that Googling right. What did they wear in court and 1520s in France? You know, we can Google that and then you’ll find little pieces here and you’ll cobble it together. You’ll kind of wonder if it’s giving you the right information. You can create an entire thread that’s just about a period in time and you can ask it very specific questions.

I do suggest you fact check it using Google just to make sure. But it’s amazing. You know, this is what the gentleman of the time who were wealthy would wear, you know, the tights and the overcoats and whatnot. What would a woman wear on her head? What would her garments be like? What was the political climate? Who were some of the main players?

And, you know, the lands at that time. I mean, Europe over many years, just like every place in the world went through so much, power struggles, who was king at the time? What was the role of the pope at the time? So being able to just ask those questions and get very specific answers rather than searching and going on Google and going into the box and trying to collated all together can be a nice little aide or assistant, like you said, as you’re writing that novel.

So that’s another way I feel authors can specifically use large language models to help them out.

Lisa: Yeah, research. Research is a big one and marketing’s a big one. How about like, I guess for fiction writers it would be plot. And then I guess for nonfiction writers it would be outlining, organization kind of thing. Is there ways that it can help organize material?

Desiree: Yeah, absolutely. So if you want to ask it and give it the information or the plot points, for example, that you already have an ask it to chart that out. It can help you do that. There are even plugins that are an option. Now in ChatGPT. If you have chat up for so the plugins include a plethora of things even as far as making charts and graphs.

So if you’re a visual learner and you want to take your plot, for example, and have a chat with the use of that plugin, I do believe it’s at the paid subscription. It’s $20 a month if you want to pay for it. Otherwise there’s the free versions. But by adding plugins like that, you could get a visual representation of your plot or a graph, the traditional plot, ascending items and then the climax and descending so it could plot things out for you.

You could also use it to help you remember your characters. I hear this a lot, especially authors of science fiction and fantasy and the ones who have big worlds. Lots of characters, right? It’s really easy to lose track of, okay, this person, they have dark skin and green hair and yellow eyes and they’re from the blah, blah, blah race.

You can use it to create character profiles that you can just add to and go back to. Sure. Of course, you can use Word for that. I know a lot of authors who have a Bible that they create, but you can use ChatGPT and other forms of AI for that. Ancillary to what writers use when they’re creating worlds gamemasters.

I’m somebody who back in the day I played Dungeons and Dragons. I was a Dungeon Master, and I had the dice and I had the world and I had the notebooks and I had the monstrous compendium and the D’nD guide, and I had all of the books, all of the volumes. Well, nowadays, artificial intelligence is being used by gamers to create these worlds, to remember these worlds, to create a lot of the stuff.

And it’s very akin to what a writer might need it for, especially, again, if they’re creating robust worlds in their book series and they need to remember, retain and maybe even need a little bit of creative inspiration along the way.

Lisa: That’s great. Very, very helpful. So you mentioned that the paid version of ChatGPT is $20 a month at this time. So do you think that is worth it to go for that? Or do you think people can get enough out of the free version? Or is there is there are other programs people might want to use? I know some people do all that organizing and stuff in Scribner. I’ve never used it, but a lot of people like to use programs like that, and maybe those companies are going to be developing AI to go into their programs or anything like that. Have you heard since you’re out there in this community of people, on this groundbreaking industry, have you heard anything?

Desiree: That there are a lot of companies, you’re absolutely right, that are using AI integration and a lot of companies popping up out there. You mentioned you’re getting a lot of emails. A lot of them are powered by ChatGPT or powered by something underneath that. And you’ll hear that a lot. Even Bing is powered by ChatGPT.

So there’s a lot of elaborate action and things that are happening on that front. I have noticed, yes, one of the platforms I use and I’m not endorsing it in any way even a paid endorsement. I don’t even know if they know I use it. But it is AutoCrit and is a community as well as you can put your manuscript in it, you can evaluate it.

I like to use AutoCrit as a marketer because I have authors that come to me and they want me to represent their book and then they’re like, Hey, can you read my entire manuscript? I’m like, Hey, I’m sorry, I can’t read all 250 pages in the next day I get many, many people. But I do want to evaluate your writing kind of quickly and get an idea of where you land.

One of the things that AutoCrit does is using a form of artificial intelligence. I can’t speak to exactly what kind, but it’s really nice because you can upload your main manuscript or pages or a chapter even, and it’ll give you outputs and it’ll compare it to different authors within your genre. It’ll search and identify different areas in your writing where you could use improvement.

It’ll tell you how many adjectives you’re using, how much dialog you have. There’s a whole list of things that AutoCrit helps you with. So that’s one thing that I know personally that is using some form of AI. Is Scrivener using that? I can’t speak to that. However, I could see them and so many other platforms out there if they’re not adapting to it yet, they will be soon because it is such a powerful tool.

You know, even we mentioned Grammarly earlier, all of these tools already out there and that we’ve used and even search, Google, Bing, etc. all of that was the precursor to where we are now with AI. So one could argue that even running something through Word was a precursor to what’s out there nowadays. So to answer your question, I think a lot of the platforms we’re familiar with are going to be using it. And if they’re not, they will be using it soon. I as a marketer get messages and emails and notifications too. I just logged in to one of our websites the other day and I can see that WordPress Elementor, which we run on our websites has a new AI integrations. I just logged in to Constant Contact the other day, where we do our email marketing and I saw them posting a notification about their AI integration. So those are some of the things that I’m seeing and keeping up with. And so I recommend that to any of your listeners out there. Take a few minutes to explore it, see what they’re doing, see if it can benefit you, because again, AI integration is already underneath and probably powering or will soon be powering a lot of the platforms you use.

Lisa: Yes. AI is here to stay, it looks like. So if somebody is just starting out and they want to try and see what they can do with it. So you recommend first starting with ChatGPT?

Desiree: I think so. And I’ll fully answer that question because you did ask, should they use the free version or the paid version, you can go to Open AI, and you can sign up for a free version of ChatGPT. I think it’s ChatGPT 3.5 at this stage is what you get. I recommend trying it out the free version. And if you decide that you like it and you would like to unlock some of the paid aspects of it, if you think it is for you, then you can subscribe and it’s $20 a month. You can cancel at any time. I don’t think that’s a huge investment. It actually kind of came out of the gate full throttle and surpassed Google.

As far as search engines in the world of AI, Google has been doing stuff for many, many years and they were kind of playing their cards close to the vest and then here came Open AI. It came out with ChatGPT and a lot of these firms just went barreling past Google in a lot of ways. So it’s interesting because if you use Bing, you can actually use their search functionality in Skype and you’re like, OMG, you old fogey, you still use Skype? Yeah, I still use Skype. And actually right now I really like Skype because it’s got AI built right into it and just sit there as if I was chatting with a friend on Skype and chat with Bing AI and it has it’s citing sources, it’s citing where it’s finding this information. So those are just a few ways that if somebody wants to explore this and they’re like, well, I don’t necessarily want to do the ChatGPT, you can find it in other platforms as well.

Lisa: Have you tried Google’s BARD?

Desiree: No, I have not. I have you.

Lisa: No, I haven’t. Let’s see where they go with that. But you mentioned AutoCrit. Is that how it’s called?

Desiree: I believe that’s how you pronounce it.
Lisa: Yeah. And how much is that?

Desiree: Good question. I saw an offer at the beginning of the year. They were doing a sale. So I signed up, I believe it was for a year subscription and I think it was around don’t quote me on this around $300 ish. But I thought again, for me to be able to quickly evaluate some of the potential authors that we work with, I thought it would be a valuable tool and I really like it.

It’s fun to work with it and see that evaluation. Another thing that I saw they do and I’ve only participated in one, so I really can’t speak too much about it, but they have groups and webinars very much like writers groups. So you can join that group of writers and share your writing get feedback. So they do that with different genres, whether you’re in romance or nonfiction, I believe that they have different writing groups you can subscribe to as well.

Lisa: Okay, so that’s great. So that’s something I think I will look into. I think other people will too. It’s just been so informative and I think I will have to have you back at some point, because I think things are going to change a lot and a bunch of new information is going to be popping up every day. Anything that you want to leave people with?

Desiree: Yeah, because we scratched the surface on the large language models. Some of the things I think are really exciting too is the art. And again, I know that people are upset because they feel that if it’s deriving from something that exists and the artist, the creator, is not being paid, that’s an issue. I agree. But Midjourney can be used for some really cool things.

We had an author not too long ago who had a vision for his book cover, but he was kind of pulling stuff together and it just wasn’t collated. I noticed a quote from his book and the description of a scene, and I took that along with the image and kind of fleshed it out a little bit and we put it into Midjourney and we got some really fast concepts and the author went, OMG, you nailed it.

So if anybody has ever worked with a cover artist and has been trying to get them to see their vision and it’s just not working, that can be really frustrating. Take again days weeks to get some concepts, to get an idea of where that graphic artist designer cover artist might go can be a benefit for authors if they’re using Midjourney.

And again, there’s DALL·E 2 and there’s so many other image generators. So that’s another thing that I think is really exciting and could be useful for writers. And one more thing I’ll throw out there the voice over aspects of artificial intelligence.

Lisa: I know that I spoke with a literary agent and he was saying that one of the changes that is coming in contracts now is authors can say, no way will AI narrate my audiobook.

Desiree: Exactly, exactly. Or and I know this can cause debate. But what about the author who could never, ever afford to hire a voiceover artist? It’s just not in their budget. They’re an independent author and they’re struggling and they’re doing it all on their own. They’re an entrepreneur. What a great opportunity they might have using an artificial, intelligent voice for their book narration. So I’d like to see both sides. And I think as creators, as writers, a lot of times it’s really easy to say, Oh yeah, you need to go hire a publicist. I’m a publicist, so I get that a marketer, you need to hire all these teams. But I recognize that there’s people out there who can’t afford these things. They never could. And if they never could, it’s not like you’re taking money away from these voiceover artists or these folks that are doing it, but you’re scoring those authors to have a seat at the table and to be at least competing more closely with some of the big players out there.

Lisa: That’s very true. But they’re with a big publisher, that big publisher better not be scrimping on the narration. So that’s what that is. How about you, do you have anything coming up that you want to plug, any events?

Desiree: Oh, yeah. We have the next BookFest. That’s coming up October 21st and 22nd. Like I said in the beginning, we do the BookFest twice a year in the spring and the fall right now, currently until the end of Labor Day in September for the BookFest awards submissions are open. So if you’re an author who has a book, consider submitting it for a BookFest Award.

It was really cool this just a couple of weeks ago or last month, I should say. Several of the last BookFest Award-winners opted in to participate in the salute to the BookFest Award winners. And we had a big display on the Nasdaq board in Times Square, New York. So it was a really cool moment.

So we’re going to do that again for select winners again, but you can submit for that. And the podcast is going to be filled with panels and discussions and authors talking about the craft of writing and so much more. And I can tell you this, I’m not going to tell you too much because I want you to find out when you’re doing this. But there will be an artificial intelligence/new technology discussion happening at the next BookFest as well. And people sign up, get email updates, just go to the website for that.

Lisa: Great. Everything is so very cutting edge right now and exciting and I just want to thank you for taking some time and sharing this with us and giving us an introduction to this big new thing, big, new world.

Desiree: Oh, absolutely. My pleasure. Lisa, thank you so much for having me.

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