The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers

Joanna Penn

Writing Craft and Creative Business

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Apr 24, 2023 • 1h 9min

Prolific Writing, Diversification, And Using Emerging Technologies With Joseph Nassise

If you want a long-term successful career as an author, you need to learn the craft and the business of writing. Joseph Nassise talks about his writing process, how he diversifies his business across different publishers, different products, and different technologies, as well as how he is embracing new options for his books. In the intro, Draft2Digital opens up Print for everyone; Future Today Institute Trends report; Microsoft introduces the AI-powered 365 Co-pilot; Google unveils generative AI tools; Ethical AI Publishing newsletter from Monica Leonelle. Plus, pictures from Wales on Instagram @jfpennauthor and Facebook @jfpennauthor; my new craft course on Writing Setting and Sense of Place; With a Demon's Eye on my store, and everywhere else. Today's show is sponsored by Ingram Spark, which I use to print and distribute my print-on-demand books to 40,000 retailers including independent bookstores, schools and universities, libraries, and more. It's your content—do more with it through IngramSpark.com. Joseph Nassise is the award-nominated New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of more than 50 books across horror, urban fantasy, supernatural thrillers, as well as epic fantasy and Arthurian mythos under other pen names. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes The story of how Joseph's first book became a success Deciding between the traditional or indie route for individual projects Diversification and creating multiple streams of income from your intellectual property StoryCraft — Tips for learning how to write a commercial novel and publish/sell it Why create NFT editions of your book The future of NFTs and how they will become normalized Using generative AI as part of your creative process You can find Joseph at JosephNassise.com Transcript of Interview with Joseph Nassise Joanna: Joseph Nassise is the award-nominated New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of more than 50 books across horror, urban fantasy, supernatural thrillers, as well as epic fantasy and Arthurian mythos under other pen names. So welcome to the show, Joe. Joseph: Thank you so much. Pleasure to be here. Joanna: Oh, I'm excited to talk with you. So first up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. Joseph: Okay, well, you know how superheroes have origin stories, I have a very strange writer origin story. I wrote my first novel in college to win a case of beer. I had finished reading something, a thriller by a fairly popular thriller writer at the time, and absolutely hated it. Apparently, I wouldn't shut up about it because my roommate bet me a case of bass ale that I couldn't write a book, never mind write one that was of decent quality. So you know, hey, gauntlet thrown down, challenge accepted. I worked nights in college for the security crew, and I sat in this little booth on the side of campus from midnight to 8 am. So I used that time to write my first novel. It went into a shoebox after I won my case of beer and sat in that shoebox for 11 years until after I'd gotten married. My wife found it when we moved into a new house, she asked to read it, thought it was pretty good, and convinced me to type it up because it had been written longhand on legal pads. And so we use this old brother word processor, and this was back in 2000, so ancient history these days, but I used this Brother word processor to print it up. We submitted it, a small press bought it, and then a few months later, Simon and Schuster came along and bought mass market rights and that kicked off my career. Interestingly, that book was the one that was nominated for my first time for the Bram Stoker award for first novel and for the International Horror Guild Award for first novel. So that really kicked things off for me. It was a great start from a really weird beginning. Joanna: Okay, that's crazy. Did you edit that book again to submit it to the publisher? I mean, it can't just have been the same draft that won the case of beer that got you Award nominations, a small press deal, and Simon and Schuster. Joseph: So I was very fortunate in having married a woman who is an exceptional editor. She went through it first and then we submitted it. And then by the time Pocket bought it, the paperback division of Simon and Schuster, I was fortunate to have as my editor, Amy Pierpont, who was the Executive Editor for the entire line. And she then again went through and edited it, and I learned a ton in that process. So I'm extremely fortunate to have both of those ladies in my life at the right time to o make this book a success. It certainly wasn't any skill on my part at that point. Joanna: That's just fascinating. Let's say to the listeners, don't expect that to happen with your beer novel! Joseph: Not common! Joanna: Not common, indeed. But tell us what happened from then. So this was 2000, I guess 2002ish maybe, the book came out. But I know you as an indie writer. Joseph: Yes. Joanna: So with your Heretic series, that's how I kind of know you. Tell us how you got into indie. Joseph: Sure. Heretic was actually the untitled second book in my Pocket Books contract. So that came out from Pocket Books in 2005. And then I couldn't sell the darn thing for about three years, and that wigged me out. I was like, okay, I'm not a one-hit wonder, I'm a two-hit wonder, but that's as far as I was going to get. So I kept trying to figure out my process and what worked for me. I ended up selling a trilogy overseas to Germany to a publisher called Droemer Knaur, and then that was bought by Tor, and those were my first hardbacks in the US. So I spent the first 10 years of my career with traditional publishing. Simon and Schuster, Tor Books, Gallery, Harper Voyager, I did number a series for a number of publishers. I did 10 books for Gold Eagle Harlequin. But that's when the Kindle came out, right around 2009, so I've been in the industry for almost a decade. And I found ebooks, as a technology, fascinating. And the idea that — We suddenly have this platform where we can put out the work that we want to write, when we want to write it, in the form that we want to put it out in, and not have to deal with gatekeepers and things of that nature. That to me was what I think of as a disruptive technology, and that was great. So I jumped full feet into that, and so I had this hybrid career where I continued to sell the New York, and I also do independent publishing. So when the rights to my Templar Chronicle Series, for which The Heretic was the first book, reverted back to me in 2010, I put those out and then continued the series as an indie writer. And so those books have sold more than a million copies worldwide, have done very well for me as an indie writer, where they didn't find the audience that I had hoped they would have found back as a traditional published work. So yeah, I've been doing both for a number of years now. And to me, diversification is one of the things you must do as an author these days. So that was the foundation for me, is keep writing traditional books and publish as many independent ones as I could. Joanna: So do you always submit new work to traditional publishing? Or do you have these two parallel things going on? Joseph: Two parallel things. I will definitely look and decide, okay, do I think this will work or not work as a traditionally published book? For me, I think of publishing as a business. I'm here to support myself and my family. So as crass as it may sound, money is key. And so I look at projects and decide, okay, where am I going to get the best return for my time and energy? And how will that work? So for example, I did an anthology project as an editor with Clive Barker, and my coeditor Del Howison. And we looked at Clive's novella, Cabal, and his movie, Nightbreed, and we picked up the story where Clive left off. We brought in a number of writers to tell the story of the Nightbreed as they disperse into the world at the end of the film Nightbreed. That's not a project that really would have worked as well as an indie project because traditional publishing, and obviously Clive's background and his popularity, that has the scope to reach a lot more readers through traditional publishing than it would, I think, through indie publishing. So we went that route with that particular project. You know, you mentioned the retelling of the Arthurian mythos. We took those and modernized them and made them modern urban fantasy, and turned it into a shared world with 10 writers. And that was the kind of project that just wasn't going to work as a traditionally published project. There's too many moving parts, timelines were not something that traditional publishing could handle, and so that was clearly an independent publishing work. So depending on the project, that's the way I try to figure out which is going to be the best avenue and then pursue that avenue with that particular project. Joanna: I love that attitude. And what's interesting is we were just chatting before we started recording, and you told me that you've also recently done an MFA, which kind of made me gulp. You've written all these books, you have decades of experience, and now you're going back to get an MFA. And I mean, many people who come out of MFAs are writing their first novel. Tell us, why do an MFA and what did you get out of it? Joseph: So it's definitely a bizarre experience, I'll say that. Initially, I decided I wanted to get an MFA because I wanted to have a backup for my current job as a writer, as a teacher of writing. Having insurance is always a very good thing for a writer and having a job that provides insurance is a good thing. My wife is a flight attendant, and she's been doing that job for more than 35 years at this point. At some point, she's going to want to retire. And so having this ability to be able to go out and say, okay, I'm going to get a job as a teacher teaching writing, that will provide insurance. You know, all that was just kind of smart moves in terms of life. So I decided, alright, I'm going to go get an MFA. I've gone through the process. I'm in my final thesis class at the moment. So I will graduate in May. And I have to say that it's been interesting because A, as you said, most of my fellow students haven't written a complete work, and I've written more than, well not just written, I've published more than 50 of them. So I didn't go into it expecting to learn a whole bunch, especially where MFA programs, Master of Fine Arts and Creative Writing, are focused so much on literary fiction, and I don't write literary fiction. Joanna: Did you have to for the course? Joseph: I did not, thankfully. I chose a course that allowed me to write commercial fiction. I wrote an urban fantasy novel for my thesis, which is right up my alley. That's what I've been writing for more than two decades now. So that was fun. I came out of the course saying it's a shame that there aren't courses of this type that teach the nitty gritty of writing commercial fiction, you know. I had attended a seminar at ASU, Arizona State University, not too long ago, and the instructor at the seminar was talking about how, as a literary writer, he will do 10 drafts of his novels, and he will throw the first nine away and each time start fresh. As a commercial novelist, I mean I wanted to stand up and scream. I thought that was the craziest thing I've ever heard. In the time it takes him to write one book, I will have written 10, and sold all 10, and made money from all 10. So it's definitely two different mindsets. So I did learn a lot about literary culture and literary fiction, but I came away with that feeling of, ‘oh, it would be better if there was something that could help people who want to write commercial novels in a commercial fashion.' So I got together with my buddy Tom Levine, who is a Random House author. He's done a number of books, both for Random House and Simon and Schuster, primarily in the YA culture. Then he went indie, just like I did, and has a hybrid career where he's been putting out indie books. We sat down and we designed a course that we're going to launch next month called StoryCraft. And it is totally focused on everything that wasn't in that MFA program that I wished was there for people to learn. And so we're going to take our 40 years of combined publishing experience, and put it all out there for anyone who wants to learn how to write a commercial novel, and then either publish or sell that novel depending on the route they want to take. Joanna: And that just sounds fascinating to me, and also that it's almost like you took that MFA course and then wrote all the other material that you actually think is what you need. But it's interesting, maybe you could give us a few tips, and also clarify commercial. Does commercial mean genre fiction, in this case? So, like you said, horror, urban fantasy, thrillers, epic fantasy, these are what many people consider genre fiction. So — What is commercial? And give us a few tips from StoryCraft on how to write it. Joseph: Sure, yes, I use commercial and genre fiction interchangeably. Thank you for pointing that out because that could have been very confusing for people who are listening. Anything, you know, mystery, thriller, romance, urban fantasy, fantasy, westerns, horror, or what have you, they're all genre fiction. They're all commercial fiction. They're not designed for college courses, or all that, although they should be. They're just designed for entertainment. To me, the primary goal of a writer is to take the reader on an emotional journey, and another word for that is to entertain them. And so it's all about writing books of that type. And that's what I've been doing for, what is this 2023, so for 23 years now. Some tips, here's one big one that I learned early in my career. So I have a kind of quirky way of writing, I don't write books in order. I will plot out an entire book, and then I will write whatever chapter strikes me as interesting that day when I sit down to write. So I might write chapter three, and then chapter 47, and then chapter eight, and then chapter one, and then chapter 23. And once I've done all the chapters, I build the bridges and connect them all. This drives editors crazy, but it works for me. When I started out, I tried to write a book a year, as they taught you back in the early 2000s. And I would write it in order, and I would write about a book a year because it would take me that long to write something, writing it in order. I don't know why, it's just like this block in my brain. I couldn't write well that way. The moment I gave myself permission to find a way that worked for me, and to write the way I wanted to write, my career changed. I went from writing one book a year, to writing four or five novels a year. Which was a good thing, because those were the days when I was writing books for the Rogue Angel series from Harlequin Gold Eagle, and we had a new book come out every two months. There were six of us writing for the series, and every 60 days a new book would hit in mass market paperback. So I had to be able to write multiple books a year. Being able to find that process, being able to trust what worked for me was the right thing to do was a huge change in my career. The other major thing that I would say to people is that understand that this is a business. You know, the days of writing for the sake of art, from a commercial standpoint, are over. If you want to write for art's sake, go write and be happy and put the manuscript back in your drawer and don't worry about it. But if you want to write for a living, if you want to write so that you make money from it and provide for your family and things of that nature, then you got to understand it's a business. Whether you're doing it through traditional publishing or whether you're doing it through independent publishing. You have to understand as many aspects of the business as you can. I mean, if you're traditional publishing, understand how they select books, understand how books are sold to the major chains. Understand the seasons of publishing, and why they do what they do when they do it. If you're independently published, you know as well as I do that it's not just about writing. It's about marketing, and promotion, and understanding things like finances and taxes, and all the fun stuff that comes along with being a businessman. If you do that, if you understand those things, your career will be that much better. Because, essentially, you're in control of it, and being in control of it and having those reins in hand, directing the horses the way you want them to go, is a huge part of it all. Joanna: It's so interesting. You mentioned diversification earlier. And obviously, this course is another example of one of your multiple streams of income. Can you tell us what are some of the ways that your business makes money in terms of, I mean, obviously, you've mentioned that some of the series are indie, some of them are traditional, you've got the course. On your website, I saw Shopify, Patreon, translations. I mean— Tell us about the other streams of your business. Joseph: Certainly. Kind of as a foundation, I don't think of my work as a book, I think of it as intellectual property. Here's a character, or a setting, or a story, that can be expanded in multiple directions. And so that's where I start. How many different directions can I take this particular work? So that looks at things like if I'm going to publish it in print, I'm going to publish it digitally as an eBook, I'm going to put out audiobooks. My work has been translated into seven different languages. So when I sell a book, I don't just look at the US market. Like I said, I've sold originals to Germany, I've sold originals to Italy, I've translated books from English and sold them to the Russian market and the Italian market and the Polish market and the Chinese market. These are all silos of opportunity where a writer can then earn more income, especially for work that's already been written. You only have to write the book once, but then you can sell it into a dozen different languages and get a payday every time you do that. So that's kind of the first set, what are my various formats that I can sell into? And NFT digital collectible editions of the books is the latest one of those silos that I'm currently working with. Then I'll also look at, okay, what are the products that I can build out from those books? I'm in the process of writing a Templar Chronicles role-playing game, so that'll be another avenue. I've sold comic book editions of my Templar Chronicles, so that was a third Avenue. I have a Shopify store, so I sell everything directly from my website. So if people don't want to deal with Amazon or any of the other various vendors, they can come direct to me, they'll get some decent pricing by the fact that they're doing that, they might get personalized signed editions, things of that nature. They'll get exclusive content that they can't get anywhere else from my Shopify store. So that's an avenue. The Patreon thing is a way of providing coaching advice and providing an inside look at my work before it hits the market. So if you want those kinds of perks, you want to see what's coming before it's all polished and spiffy and nice, well then come on over to the Patreon. Each of these things, again, like you said, they're silos of opportunity. They provide a means to reach fans in a new and different way. That holds true for merchandise as well. I sell T shirts, I sell sweatshirts. We're going to be doing a line of journals, all of these based on my various series and the various characters or settings that come in those series. So it's not just a book, it's a piece of an intellectual property. And I want to exploit that property as many times and in as many ways as I possibly can. Joanna: I love that. And we were talking before we started recording, and I was like, how have we not connected before? I feel like we think the same things about quite a lot. It's kind of crazy. I do you want to ask, you said “we” there— Are you a one-person business? Do you have a team? Do you use freelancers? Joseph: I tend to think of it as myself and my wife because she's my editor. So that's where the “we” comes from, or it's the royal “we.” I don't know. But I am primarily a one man, one woman team between my wife and I. I do work with other writers. I've collaborated with other writers. And some of my pen names are a result of that collaboration. So for instance, I've written a series called the HELLstalkers series with my buddy Jon Merz, who is famous for his Lawson Vampire series. And when we were casting about, it was hard to put both of our names on the covers. We tried that initially, that didn't work. So we came up with a pen name J.J. Anderson to write that series under. J is for Jon and Joe, J. J., John Joe, and Anderson was a name at the top of the alphabet that was easy to remember and would have the books be in a good position in the bookstore if we sold them in that fashion. So there's where a pen name came from. So I have worked with him. I've worked with Steve Sabol. I've worked with the 10 writers when we did the Vale Knights Series, which is a shared world series. So I've done a lot of collaborative work, but company-wise, it's just me and my wife. Joanna: I mean, we haven't really even touched on what you do for marketing. What do you do for marketing? And do you do all that yourself? Joseph: I do all of that myself. I do your typical Amazon ads and Facebook ads, and I try to connect with people on things like Twitter or LinkedIn to build that audience. I have a newsletter that has been running for a while, close to a decade now or something like that. And so again, that's all part of the work of not just being an independently published writer, but just being a writer these days. I mean, publishing companies do so very little once that book hits the market that you got to learn to do all those things yourself. So you wear a lot of hats. Joanna: And I guess for people listening, I mean, both of us, you've been doing this longer than me, but we have just learned these things over time, right? It's like, oh, look, here comes the Kindle. Let's learn how to get our books on that. It's not like we were born knowing all this stuff. You can learn it, it just takes time. Joseph: Yeah, time and focus. I think that's another key, is you need to focus on certain things and not on everything. Something comes along, it's like, okay, I want to pursue that. Like I'm not on TikTok because I don't know how to do that, I don't have a lot of time to figure out how to do that, I don't like being on camera. So I just kind of said, okay, that's one thing I'm not going to pursue. I'll take the time that I might have used to pursue that and learn how to do Facebook ads better or something along those lines. So yeah, you need to focus, you need to figure out what you want to utilize, and you can't possibly utilize everything. But you're right, you just learn it. Oh, I need to learn how to do this, I'm going to go learn how to do that and add that to my repertoire. Joanna: But talking of things that you have been learning about, you are probably one of the few authors consistently doing NFT editions. You mentioned NFT digital collectibles earlier. So I've also minted, but you've minted with book.io. So tell us like, I mean, I don't want us to go into all the technical background of blockchains and NFTs because I've done quite a lot of episodes on this now. Give your explanation of a digital collectible, and then tell us a bit about why you wanted to go this way. Joseph: Certainly. I've been collecting books, print books, for a long time. And one of the joys of collecting print books with the limited edition, or the lettered edition books where they only print so many. They're fancy, they've got ribbon bookmarks, and beautiful endpapers, and different from the addition you walk into, say Barnes and Noble, and buy on the shelf. And so the idea of having something that's collectible works for me personally. When this idea came along that, hey, you could do this digitally, in a way that provides potential value for your fans, that was something that I jumped all over. And you know, blockchain as a technology, I mean, there's a lot of key benefits, but the one for me for the reader is the fact that when you buy an NFT, you actually own the digital content you buy. Unlike say Amazon or Barnes and Noble or Kobo, where you are licensing the right to read that book. Buying an NFT with a book built into the NFT, which is what book.io does, gives them actual ownership of the digital content that they bought. And that was huge for me. My presentation on NFTs for authors if you want to know more Number two, you know, it allowed that collectible edition. And one of the things book.io currently specializes in is a collectible edition where they print so many copies, just like a collectible print edition, but each of those copies has a variant cover. You know, comics and variant covers, well now we have books with variant covers. And some of those covers are common, and some of those covers are ultra rare, which can create value for those particular editions. And so it's a way to go like, hey, you want to collect baseball cards your favorite teams? Well, how about collecting the books of your favorite authors. That was something that I thought was really cool, and I dived in with both feet. As you noticed, as you said, I've minted my books with Book.io. We did the first two as straight-up mints, and then everybody who held the first two was air-dropped the third book for free. So now they have three collectible variants of my most popular selling books at that time. Joanna: I love this. And I think what's interesting is the variant cover idea. When you were minting, I went and had a look, and it's always a bit like a lottery and you kind of clicked a mint, but you don't get to know what that variant cover is. Right? Joseph: Right. Right. And that's kind of the addicting part of it. It's like, okay, we know, there's 2500 editions available. And some of those have covers where there's 400 copies of that cover, and some of those covers, there's only a single copy of those covers. But when you mint, it's a random lottery. You don't know what book is going to land in your wallet until it actually lands and you open it up. So it's this easter egg kind of excitement. Oh, what am I going to get on Christmas morning kind of thing. And that, to me is fun. You know, I have a great time. I've minted books by authors that I like. And book.io also puts out public domain titles, but again, with that collectible edition with cover rarity. So I can get a copy of Oliver Twist, or I can get a copy of Journey to the Center of the Earth, with spectacular art that is of a collectible quality. And so that's been a lot of the fun involved in in doing this. Just yesterday, I came to an agreement with HarperCollins to do NFT editions of the first two books in my Great Undead War series. And so that's a big, big thing in the sense that, you know, okay, it's one thing for an indie author to go and do an NFT, but now to have a major publisher decide, yes, we see this as a viable means to reach a new audience or provide the book in a new way, and they're willing to partner to do that. It's going to be fun. Of all the books I've written in my career, the only two books that I do not control the rights to are the two books in the Great Undead War series, which was an alternate history, World War One series with zombies. HarperCollins still controls those rights. So in order for me to do an NFT, I had to go back to them and negotiate that this was a thing that was good for both of us. But we just came to the agreement to do that yesterday, and so I'm super excited to see where that goes. Joanna: That is interesting because I've talked on this show how I've talked with a lawyer about this, and I think there's going to be an issue around NFT editions because essentially they are an EPUB, or they're a PDF, or they're a Mobi, or they are whatever they are, they are digital. So if an author has signed a contract for digital rights, or eBook rights, or audiobook rights, they can't do an NFT. So presumably, you had to go back and say, look— I want the right back to do an NFT edition and make that an exception from digital. Is that kind of how it worked? Joseph: Yeah, what we did is we did an amendment to the initial contract. Because they still controlled the rights to the series, any final decision on what happens with that series is going to come from them. So I made the pitch to them, hey, we've been publishing this thing for so long, we've made X amount of money, but here's a new way of doing it. Let's reach a new audience. Let's revitalize this series. Because the series has been out since 2011, 2012. In publishing terms, that's forever. It is a new way to bring a new audience to the series. They didn't want to give the rights back to me. So I said, let's find a new way to exploit those rights. And so after a couple of months in negotiating, we finally came to an agreement on how we would do it. And so now we'll do that, and we'll both share in the profits from doing that. That'll hopefully help us reach a whole new audience. Book three is hanging in the wind, so maybe doing this and bringing in more audience finally gets HarperCollins to pick up book three, or I'll do I do it myself as a limited NFT edition or an independently published edition. Again, it's all about revitalizing that intellectual property and using it in a new way. Joanna: I think it's great that you're doing that because I feel like there's a blockage. I mean, obviously, there was the crypto crash last year, and then also, we'll come back to AI in a minute, but I feel like the NFT space kind of went off the boil a bit. I also feel that publishers looked at it and went, oh, that's interesting. And then they went, ‘oh too complicated.' And depending on the blockchain you mint on, and which currency, and of course, there's a lot of legal stuff around coins. So there's a lot to be worked out in this space. I guess what it seems we both agree on is that this is a really interesting thing. And the digital collectible, I also believe, will become a thing. It's just whether we will use the term NFT and what chains will shake out. So I feel like we're super early on this. How long do you think it will take before NFTs are more like ebooks in terms of mainstream adoption? Joseph: Well, here's the interesting thing. One of the things that attracted me to book.io, they just started their company last July. So you know, what's that? Eight, nine months, something like that. In the process, they've already minted 45 different books, they brought in millions of dollars, but they have also partnered with, first, Ingram Content Group, which as you know, is the largest distributor in the world. And then they also partnered with Bertelsmann, which again, is another huge media conglomerate. So if companies like that are putting their weight and their money behind this emerging technology, that made me sit up and say, hmm, let me take note of that. I know you've talked about this on your show before, but blockchain is one of those disruptive technologies. 10 years from now, it's going to be as commonplace as the internet is. And I'm old enough to remember when the internet first came around, and you'd get the dial up tone through your phone, and it was text only, there wasn't any images. And here we are today, we don't even think about it. I mean, we just use it. And blockchain is going to be the same way. So I think just like those publishers, who said, oh, I'm not going to get involved in eBooks, and then regretted it as soon as eBooks became popular, Blockchain works will be the same way. And so getting in on the front end, I think, is beneficial to both authors and publishers. And we see companies like book.io who are doing that. Now, obviously, they're not the only ones. I'm working with another company called The Quest of Evolution out of Portugal, and they're creating what they call collaborative crypto novels, where they'll bring in a writer, myself, they'll bring in an artist, and they'll bring in a musician. And they'll create this three part project, where the artist creates characters and character art, the writer will then create what they call spark verses or the beginnings of a story. And then those who come and buy the NFTs for that project, then get the right to continue the story for a certain length of words. So you become this collaborative process with the original writer, the architect to the story, the musician who provides the soundtrack, and the artist who provides the art that becomes the actual NFTs. And then this story continues as those NFTs are sold and resold and move through the secondary market. So this novel can grow and live in a collaborative format that is very different than anything that we have available today. So I think we'll see more use of the technology in that kind of creative fashion. And five years from now, they'll be making movies and television shows and books and all that through this kind of process. It's going to be fascinating. I totally agree with you. And I kind of think that it's more like architecture. You mentioned the internet, it's like, we don't need to know, the TCPIP protocols or whatever to use the internet. And I almost feel like people will be using blockchain stuff, but they won't even know. And they'll be using NFTs and they won't even know. So I think that's where it's going. I think it's very interesting what you're doing. Joanna: But let's return to AI because what you talked about earlier, 2500 different covers on a drop. And of course, you're not creating that many covers individually or paying individually for those covers, they are generated by an AI. Talk about how you're using generative AI in your work. Joseph: Sure. And a yes and a no to your statement there. When we did the first drop of The Heretic, there were 1200 different covers, 65 of those were single one-one covers, the others were pulls of a various cover, and books.io's in house artist did those for me. And he used AI to get the base image and then he uses Photoshop to tweak and make them clean in the way we want them. By the time we get to book three, I had learned enough about AI art to do those covers myself. And so I went in, same process that Billy used, in the sense that, alright, we'll use text prompting to get the basic images, and then I'll pull them into Photoshop and add my changes and alterations to get them just the way we want. So it's both a process where the AI is doing work, and it's also a process where a human is being involved in making changes or alterations to that image. AI as a concept is another one of those concepts that I find fascinating. I'm one of those people who can't draw stick figures straight. So being able to create art in a way that is new and different was fascinating for me. I know that there's pros and cons to AI art, and that's an argument that I think is going to go on for the next 10 years until, like anything else, it becomes commonplace. That was the same argument that came along when Photoshop was first put out. Oh, is that what we want to use for art? Well, yeah, it's become as secondary as anything else in life. I don't understand the math behind it all. But like you say, I use a toaster every morning and don't understand how that works either. So, you know, I can use this to do things. What it does, though, it provides a new, creative outlet for me to add to my intellectual property in a way that I haven't done before. So you and I were chatting before we got on about the Templar Chronicles tarot cards that I'm producing as digital collectible NFTs through the use of AI art to get the base image, and then I alter that art in Photoshop. And those are just digital collectibles, something to go along with my books, something like baseball cards that people can collect. And I'm doing the 22 Major Arcana cards from a tarot deck, and each image is either a character or a scene from one of the books in the Templar Chronicles that correlates to what that card represents. So for instance, the first card we did was the High Priestess. That tends to correlate to feminine energy. Within the Templar Chronicle series, you know, the main icon of feminine energy in the series is a character named Gabrielle Williams, the wife of the main hero of this series, Kate Williams. And she's not all that present in the first couple of books, but by the time we get to book four, and through what will eventually be book 12, she plays a major role. So being able to have something collectible that signifies her and her role in the series was just something fun and really interesting to do for me. And it gave me another creative outlet to approach this series, and this story, and what I'm trying to say with it. Joanna: I love how experimental you're being in all these different ways. And it's fun, isn't it? You've said this, that it's fun. I did wonder if you would also comment on generative AI in text. Which since like last November with ChatGPT and Sudowrite, authors are realizing that this is not just art, this is also words. So are you being experimental there? Or any thoughts on how this will shake out? Joseph: I'm being experimental, but for a reason that I never intended. So I got sick with COVID back in April of 2020, and I'm one of those people who has long COVID. I've been dealing with chronic fatigue, brain fog, and things of that nature ever since I got sick. And we're three years on now. And in the last two years, I've produced one novel, which is crazy because normally I produce four to five a year. So it really affected my ability to do my job. There was a time when I was very concerned that I wouldn't write another book, I was quite concerned that my days as an author were done. And so I fell into AI art because of that. It gave me a way to deal with my creativity that I didn't have to sit down and write 80,000 words on a given theme and stare at a blank page with my brain fog getting in the way all the time. As time has passed, I've gotten a little better. And I'm confident now that I will continue to be an author. Like I said, I just finished a book for my thesis, so I'm back in the swing of things. But when I was in the depths of it, I started experimenting with ChatGTP because I wanted to see, can I use the works I've already written and prompts to help get past what I was thinking of as writer's block as a result of the disease, or as a result of the virus. So I did some experiments, and I'm not sure how I feel about the results. Like I've managed to get various models to replicate the style I write in, but it doesn't have the life that my writing usually has. So then it's a question of, okay, take this and then edit it and see where that takes me. All of that, I'm still experimenting with. I don't think in, you know, the next month or two, it's going to radically change the way writers write. And I don't think it'll ever replace human-oriented writing, but it's certainly helpful. I mean, when it came time to write a sales page for my new course, I threw it into there and said, you know, let's see what they come up with and then I'll edit that. And so I think it has its uses. I think, again, it's a fascinating technology that has so many uses in so many walks of life, that we're just seeing the smallest little bit of it at this moment. But it's going to be one of those ubiquitous technologies that are just everywhere, and we won't think about it when it comes time to use it, just like we don't think about the internet, or we don't think about Googling something. 20 years ago, the idea that a computer will be able to go out and find us anything we need in a matter of seconds, we would have laughed. Now it's so commonplace, it's joined the common vernacular. So I think both AI art and AI text, and even the stuff they're doing with AI video, and sound, and music, and all that, it's all going to become new ways of doing things that will, like anything else, have pros and cons attached to them. Joanna: But you're excited, and you're going to try it out. Joseph: I'm going to make use of things here and there where I can, definitely, because I think that's what you do as an entrepreneur. You find new ways of doing things. You know, the first people who used Facebook to put up ads for their ebooks, that was revolutionary at the time. Now it's so commonplace that it's just like, yeah, that's what you do. And so I think this will end up being the same way, and I'll make use of it where I think it'll work. Joanna: Fantastic. Where can people find you and your books and also your course online? Joseph: So you can find me at my website, JosephNassise.com. That's N-A-S-S-I-S-E.com. That's where my Shopify store is. That's where my print books, my eBooks, I've got a blog where I talk about technology and things like AI art, and all that kind of stuff. So all that's there. If you're interested in the StoryCraft course that is coming, you can go to StoryCraftCourse.com, and there'll be a link there to sign up for our newsletter. We'll be announcing the launch of the course, it will probably take place next month. So join the newsletter to get notified of that, and we will give you some bonuses and some benefits. So I urge everybody to do that as well. Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Joe. That was great. Joseph: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.The post Prolific Writing, Diversification, And Using Emerging Technologies With Joseph Nassise first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Mar 17, 2023 • 47min

Writing Fiction With Sudowrite With Leanne Leeds

We all use tools to help us improve our skills, and in this episode, Leanne Leeds explains how she uses the generative AI tool, Sudowrite, to write better books and serve her readership more effectively. In the intro, OpenAI launches GPT4, and how it can be used for accessibility with Be My Eyes. Other tools include ProWritingAid's Rephrase, and upcoming GrammarlyGo, plus keep up with the news on AI with Ben's Bites and/or The Algorithmic Bridge. You can find Sudowrite through my affiliate link at www.TheCreativePenn.com/sudowrite, and I also have a tutorial on how I use Sudowrite here. This podcast is sponsored by Written Word Media, which makes book marketing a breeze by offering quick, easy and effective ways for authors to promote their books. You can also subscribe to the Written Word Media email newsletter for book marketing tips. Leanne Leeds is the author of 27 novels across contemporary paranormal, fantasy and midlife cozy mystery. She also uses AI tools as part of her creative process, which is what we're talking about today. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes What is Sudowrite? Incorporating Sudowrite into your creative process Using AI tools to help improve certain aspects of your writing AI tools for beginners, and how to use them better Common objections to using AI tools Potential legal issues (or non-issues) around AI How AI will change how we market our books You can find Leanne Leeds at LeanneLeeds.com and her articles on Sudowrite tips at https://blog.sudowrite.com/ You can find Sudowrite through my affiliate link at www.TheCreativePenn.com/sudowrite, and I also have a tutorial on how I use Sudowrite here. Transcript of Interview with Leanne Leeds Joanna: Leanne Leeds is the author of 27 novels across contemporary paranormal, fantasy and midlife cozy mystery. She also uses AI tools as part of her creative process, which is what we're talking about today. So welcome, Leanne. Leanne: Hi, thank you for having me. Joanna: I'm excited to talk to you. But first up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. Leanne: So being a novel writer was something I always wanted to do. I think I stapled a story together when I was four. It was what I thought my life was going to be. When I went to college, I went to major in English with an option in writing. Unless you're going to be a teacher when you come out of college, there are very few ways to make money, so I found myself in IT. I started a web hosting company, sold it, then that company sold to another hosting company, until I was working for this corporate behemoth largest in the world. In which case, I became a director of a department, was told to fire everybody, and then got laid off myself. Joanna: So that's a real journey. Leanne: Right. In 2016, I kind of had this, I'm, you know, 45, I'm middle-aged, what do I do with my life now? I don't know where to go. And indie publishing came up on my radar, and I gave it a shot and was kind of okay at it. So that's how I wound up here. It's definitely my second act in life career. Joanna: Oh, that's great. So you found it in 2016 when you were laid off, basically. Leanne: Yes. Joanna: I think that's important because we're going to start talking about AI. Let's get into Sudowrite. You've been using Sudowrite since June 2021. So you had like five years of—and I was talking to someone else, like, what do we call this? Do we call this manual writing or human-only writing, but the time before AI? I don't know. How do you refer to it? Leanne: I refer to it all as writing. I don't feel like things changed a huge amount. So it's funny, I know that people definitely see it as different and I can understand why, but for me, it just feels like one long process. Things just kind of naturally change, and you discover, you know, I went from Grammarly, and then I used ProWritingAid, and then I used Sudowrite. So just pre and post AI, I guess. Joanna: I think that's interesting. In fact, for those listening, Grammarly and ProWritingAid are also AI-powered, and many people use those. So just for anyone who doesn't know— What is Sudowrite? And why did you decide to experiment with it? Leanne: So Sudowrite is a piece of software built on GPT-3, or GPT-3.5 some of it, which is a generative language writing — I don't even know the term, honestly. Joanna: A large language model. Leanne: There we go. See, you're much more well-versed in the technical stuff. It just works. I put some writing in and it gives you more writing, and that's how it works for me. But essentially, it's geared towards fiction writing and assisting fiction writers if you get stuck, if you need a description, if you need 20 descriptions to kind of get your brain going. If you need to rewrite something and you want to see different ways, it will help you do that. Joanna: And so why did you decide to get into it? Because obviously, you were writing books— Did you think this could just make things better? Leanne: I think because I was a corporate director and dealt with a lot of spreadsheets and a lot of data, I naturally geared towards seeing a lot of data to break free and move forward and make decisions. So I had a program that would search through ePubs. I could search for a phrase, “he looked,” and just kind of flip through all the author's books that I had to see how they said things in different ways, if I got stuck. You kind of quickly learned and doing that, that people say a lot of the things the same way, people phrase things simply, you don't always have to get really long, but it will sometimes just help me move. This seemed like a very natural progression to that. I wouldn't have to flip through 20 things, it would give me five that were naturally different. And so I kind of petitioned them to get in on the beta when they were first starting to show it off. Joanna: And then it's funny because I feel like I also got in at a similar time as you, but literally still the main thing I use it for is I highlight words like “underwater temple,” and I hit describe, and then I use the description stuff it pops up. For people listening, it pops up with all the sensory details and some metaphorical things. So that's literally how I use it. Can you explain how your creative writing process works now? Leanne: So, it's changed. When I first got it, I kind of pushed it to see how far can I use it, how far can I go. I was very public on Twitter with the first chapter or two, maybe three, of my third book in my third series, it's basically generated by Sudowrite. There's a button called “write,” and you can get it to write for you. I liked what it wrote, but I didn't like how I felt, and so I kind of backed up. I don't use it that way anymore. And actually, in the past two years, I've gravitated away from using it to write anything. I write, but I write differently. When I'm writing, I will not worry about fancy descriptors, fancy expressions, I will pretty much stick to kind of, quote, “boring writing.” He looked at her, she looked at him, he blinked, she kissed him. And then later during the editing, I will come back and expand those scenes out with Sudowrite or use description to weave different descriptors and expressions in to color the scene from, I guess, the scaffolding of the scene that I kind of put into place at first. Joanna: So going back to the very beginning. Do you use any other tools around ideas, like are you using ChatGPT? I mean Sudowrite has got lots of things in, like character stuff and plot stuff. So do you use anything around the ideation? Leanne: I don't use any of that. All of my characters are out of my head. I do use ChatGPT to give me specific suspects in the mystery. All of my books are cozy mystery, and I'll always know who I want to kill, generally, who did it, and how I'm going to weave it in with the standard cast, why they stumbled across it. But I will use ChatGPT to generate red herrings or generate different suspects to throw into the mix to kind of confuse everything until it all gets worked out. As far as actual characters in the book, the actual core characters, I've never used it. And I don't know why, it just never occurred to me. I never needed to, so I haven't. Joanna: I mean, I think it's interesting. So you said there's a button called “write,” which, you know, I've Sudowrite, I know about that. And you pressed it, but you didn't like how it made you feel. I think this is really interesting because you and I know, it's not 100% AI or 100% human. That's not what we're doing. It's not like you are now 100% AI. But where is the line? And this is the interesting question, isn't it? How far are other people going with what you've seen on Sudowrite? Because you do a lot of blog posts now for them, don't you? Leanne: I have. I think with AI, even in general and writing, there's a gamut of people using it a tiny bit, and using it way more than I would be comfortable with using. And I think it depends on how you feel about the technology, where your weaknesses are, and what you're trying to address with the technology. For me, I'm a dialogue-heavy writer. And you can definitely see before I used Sudowrite, that I did not describe things as well as I could have, maybe as well as I should have. I'm using the AI to address a weakness in my own writing, so that my readers have a better experience reading the book. And I'm trying to address problems that I didn't and couldn't evolve fast enough to fix, I guess. Joanna: It's interesting. You talk about weaknesses. For me, definitely, around sensory description have weaknesses around smell and sound. And so I particularly find those really, really useful. I'm really good at sense of place in terms of sight, I can see everything. I'm one of those writers who sees everything in their head. I'm terrible at dialogue. But smell and sound, I definitely fall down on, and the metaphor stuff I find amazing too. So I think exactly what you're saying. I mean, another thing I've noticed is— I think I'm becoming a better writer because it's almost like having a personal tutor around these things. Leanne: Yes. It's interesting to me that when I start a book, I'm using things quite a bit, as I'm in a new location, dealing with new buildings, new characters that have come on the scene. And I can look at each of the chapters and notice that I use Sudowrite less and less as I go towards the end of the book because I get familiar with what I have. I don't need it as much as I get further into the book, and I'm more familiar. I see what it does, and it helps me remember to do it instinctively. Joanna: Yes, I mean, a bit like ProWritingAid, we mentioned around editing. Every time I use it, I learn something about commas, I have to keep learning about commas because I'm so bad. I think I read one of your posts where you're actually writing within Sudowrite. Because what I do is I write in Scrivener, and then I copy and paste things into Sudowrite. So is that what you're doing now, actually writing within the tool? Leanne: No, I actually do not. I write within Scrivener as well, and I'm cutting and pasting. I actually have two monitors up, and so my center monitor has Scrivener and all my writing, and then the monitor to the left has basically my AI tabs, where I have ChatGPT and I have Sudowrite up and pinned in case I need it during a writing session. Joanna: I love that, “in case I need it.” I am also the same now. I have ChatGPT open during the day, and I also have Midjourney open during the day, for images if people don't know. Are there any other any other tools that you use? Leanne: I use Quillbot, it kind of cleans up a sentence. They have a mode to paraphrase sentences for fluency. And if I come across a sentence that has gotten like massively convoluted, sometimes I will drop it in there and just have it clean it up and pull it back. Joanna: That's interesting. I mean, you can do that on ChatGPT as well. You can say, “Please make this sentence make sense,” or something. Leanne: So the challenge that I have with ChatGPT is the consistency of the output. And I think that's why I love Sudowrite so much, because they tune it for me. And while I have some ability to customize, like, especially in rewrite, I love rewrites so much, and especially rewrite customizing, I almost don't use anything that they provide as a default. What Quillbot does is it fixes the sentence the same way. And I definitely don't want somebody reading my book and to suddenly have a sentence pop out that doesn't sound like me. And Sudowrite makes it sound like me, just by the way it functions. ChatGPT doesn't really, like I can get a good bland sentence, but it doesn't have that kind of fictional creative writing flair, to me, to my eye. Other people may do fine with it. I personally don't like it. Joanna: It's good for lists of things. Like I was trying to get a title, and I just couldn't get a good title. So I asked it for a list of titles using words around photography and demons and things like this. And it came up with like 50 different titles. And that just helped me with things. So I find it's really good for lists, or it's really good for fictional research. But I agree with you, I'm also like you, I don't just copy and paste finished paragraphs into my books (at the time of recording this). Leanne: Right. The thing with Quillbot is that it's going to clean up the sentence. I dial the creativity down all the way and just have it clean up what I've already written. So that's why I like it. Some of the AI stuff that's more open ended and more customized sometimes can get a little creative with its changing meaning or throwing things in, and I like it to be clean and to stay true to the way that I wrote it. Joanna: Absolutely. You mentioned how much you love Rewrite, so just explain what that function is. Leanne: So Rewrite is an aspect of Sudowrite, and you can have it rephrase anything that you've written. And they have some defaults. Right now they have more descriptive, show not tell, more inner conflict, more intense. I've used their show not tell, and I think it's wonderful. But I use customize a lot to change tense, if I accidentally write something and I throw a mix tense in there because I wasn't paying attention, it can smooth that out. It can rewrite an attitude. I love taking a paragraph, or a couple of paragraphs, where two characters are debating or arguing, and there's a little indication of how they feel, but I can ask it to add expressions on their faces. And it'll add these descriptive expressions on the characters' faces that really add to the scene. So yeah, I love rewrite. Rewrite is probably one of my favorite things. Joanna: And just to be clear, you're highlighting a passage, and then you're saying, for example, I've tried this and I've said, “rewrite to be more horror,” and then it will kind of add more sort of horror descriptions. Or, “rewrite this into first person,” for example, and then it will change the point of view. That's what you mean, isn't it? Leanne: Yes. Joanna: So that's just super useful. So I'm interested though, coming back to when you said you had two screens, my husband has two screens. And even though I worked in IT, I always find that people with two screens are technical. Now you said you're not technical, but you know, you pretty much are. So I wonder what you think about— If people literally have no technical ability, can they still Sudowrite? Leanne: Yes. It's definitely a new skill set. Prompting is a new skill set. This is a new thing that we're all doing. We're learning how to talk to computers and ask them nicely to do something that we already know in our head we want. And that's challenging, especially for a society that's used to click a button, do a thing. Sudowrite is set up very, very well to put some text in there, click a button, do a thing. It has a capability of doing so much more than that. You can twist it and try new things. And because it's a neural net, what it says it can do is not the limitation of the only thing it can do. So I think you absolutely can get started, and I think when you're comfortable, you have to start growing beyond the buttons, I guess. Especially with things like Sudowrite, where the buttons are great, and the buttons will help you, and you can instantly jump in and you can start getting help. But beyond the buttons I think is really where the brilliance starts to come in. Joanna: I like that, beyond the buttons. And yes, I totally agree. This is a skill set. And I feel like, well, let's say we've been doing this for 18 months, and there are lots of people who've just arrived now who are now discovering these tools, and they do not know really what's going on or how to use them or how to approach them. And so there's a lot of fear and anger and a lot of issues, I think, right now in the creative community. What are some of the objections that you've heard to using these tools? And what do you say to those objections? Leanne: So I think the number one objection that I've heard is surrounding the plagiarism issue, both with what went into what OpenAI did, and what they search for to build out and train the model, and the words coming out. How do you know that you're not inadvertently plagiarizing? I'm pretty comfortable with the latter, that it's a one-in-a-million chance that you would word-for-word plagiarize somebody just because of the way a predictive model works. It's really not functionally possible because it's not a database. It's predicting based on mathematical calculations what the next word will be. So I do run all my writing through a plagiarism checker just to make sure. Joanna: Me too. Yes, me too. Leanne: But I've never had it pop up. And anything that has popped up as potentially plagiarized is usually stuff I've written that's a very common turn of phrase. So that I'm not worried about the stuff coming in, I understand people's concern, I understand their fear. And to some extent, I understand their anger that this company that's now going to make millions of dollars, they have rifled through copywritten books to get an idea on how to write books. I understand that. I don't agree that it's copyright infringement. I've read the Google Authors Guild court case, where they search through books, and then use the database to do something. OpenAI, up until I think last year, was a nonprofit research laboratory. And there is, in the US at least, and I only know about the US, I'm not sure what the situation is in the UK and other countries. But in the US, you don't have to have a copyright owner's permission to use a book for research. Now, again, I'm not a lawyer, I could be wrong. There could be a court case and they're going to revisit it and they're going to change it. I'm not super crazy, frothing at the mouth about it. I'm perfectly willing to understand there's a difference, and something changes, and to change the way I'm doing things. But for right now, I am very comfortable with what they did to train the database and that what I'm doing is probably going to wind up being complete legal from beginning to end because the court cases and copyright stuff has said research is fine. Joanna: And more than that, like you said, you are not a lawyer, I'm not a lawyer, this is not legal advice at all. But I'll tell you who (probably) has the best lawyers in the world, and that's Microsoft. And Microsoft, if people don't know, Microsoft has a massive investment in OpenAI, and they are rolling out all of OpenAI's tools into Microsoft. So if you use Teams at work, if you use Microsoft Word to write your books, if you use PowerPoint, if you use all of these tools, including Bing search engine and all these things. So Microsoft, I can only imagine the legal team from Microsoft, what they did in order to do the investment in OpenAI. So yes, I'm with you. I feel like the legal team there has sorted it out. Now there are other cases, obviously, where they're going up against—and I'm thinking of Getty, particularly for images. But again, with that one, Getty's building their own AI out of their own copyright images. So none of these legal cases will shut down the technology, right? That's basically it. Leanne: And they go out of their way to say they're not trying to stop the technology. The technology is here, and none of these court cases are trying to make it go away. Joanna: Exactly. Okay. So you mentioned one of the issues people have is the plagiarism, what went in and what comes out. So we've dealt with that. Are there any other objections that you hear from authors about this? Leanne: I have heard it's cheating. Joanna: Yes, cheating. You're cheating! Leanne: That I'm cheating because I'm using something to help me get words for my books. And when I shared it with my readership on my mailing list, I did have a woman that's read me since book that wrote me back and said, well, “If you use it a little bit, just the way you said, that's fine. But if you use it any more than that, you're cheating.” I'm not sure where this concept comes from that we authors have only one way to do it. It has to be done one way, and it has to be done in the hardest, least supportive environment. Did we have to turn the heat up? Do we have to suffer? Do we really have to bleed on our keyboards? It just feels to me like there's this very antiquated idea of how little we can get help and what kind of help we can get. Nobody would tell you that you can't call up your author friend and go, “I have this paragraph, I cannot figure it out. Let me read it to you.” And have your author friend go, “Well, try saying it like this.” Nobody would say that that's a bad thing, or that it's something you shouldn't do, or it's cheating. But yet, if you're doing exactly that with a computer, somehow everybody gets really freaked out about it. And I have to admit, I don't really understand why that is because it's essentially the same action, it's just who you're asking that's slightly different. Joanna: Yes, and I mean, obviously painting, and photography, and then digital photography, and then Photoshop. This is a continuum of visual art. And there are just different categories, aren't there? And this is what I'm wondering, given that Microsoft is including, let's say, GPT 3.5, into MS Word, probably as we record this in the next couple of months. So will it be that just in the next couple of years that we won't even be talking about this? A bit like how we used to talk about self-publishing in a certain way, and now it's just accepted as a choice for an author to make. Will we just be using AI tools and not even discussing these things soon? Leanne: I would imagine there's always going to be somebody in the community that will always be discussing it. Joanna: I hope we're not! Leanne: I do. I think this is always going to bother a small contingent of people. But I know that when I started getting into this, the whole reason I did a section on my site of, “Hey, I'm using Sudowrite. I see absolutely nothing about it anywhere. Let me tell you what it was like for me.” Because literally, I saw nobody else talking about it. I was like, okay, either nobody's using this, or nobody's talking about it, or everybody's afraid to say something. So I'm going to say something. Now, there are hundreds of people in these groups. Like I'm shocked at some of the names that I'm seeing in some of the groups that I'm in talking about AI positively. ChatGPT changed the game, absolutely, in my opinion, changed the game. And it happened so fast, and I think it's going to continue. I think we're going to be talking about it, but I didn't think we're going to be talking about it in a couple of years with, “should we use it?” I think it's going to be, “how are you using it?” Because that's what the questions are. I'm getting many more questions with, how are you using it? And how can I use it to make some of my stuff better? As opposed to kind of the reaction I would get six months ago with, you're doing what with what? Joanna: Yes, I mean, I almost left the internet because of the amount of stuff I was getting around talking about this. I mean, it got really bad. But I feel like, as you said, ChatGPT has changed things. Probably because it's very easy to use, and you just go there and type something in, and there's no barrier to entry, especially because it's free. So you feel like, oh, look, and then the curiosity kicks in. And I think curiosity is what all of us who are trying to improve our processes, whether that's creative process, or business processes, that's what we want to do, isn't it? We want to improve and get better and create better books than we did before. Leanne: Right. My job is, as a writer, and as a commercial writer, is I have to serve my readership in the best way I know how, and I have to give them the best product that I know how to give them. If there is something that can do descriptions better than me, and it can do descriptions better than me, I feel like I owe it to my readership to use that to get them a better book than I, alone, can write without that support. Joanna: Absolutely. Now, it's interesting. So another objection, and I think an objection that's probably growing as people realize what you can do with these tools, is the speed at which people can do things. We're not just generating all the text, slapping a cover on, and publishing it on Kindle, but that is clearly going on. Or for example, I mean, people have always plagiarized and stolen and pirated, and all of this stuff. So AI just kind of puts that on steroids. So for example, someone messaged me and said, “Someone's taken this book, and they've used one of these tools to rewrite it with a different character name, change a few details, and then publish it.” Now, we've seen that happen in the community before AI, but that will now happen more with AI. What do you think about the potential for misuse? And do we just get on and just ignore that, or should we worry about that? Leanne: So I came into the internet when it was a baby. I worked for one of the first ISPs in the state of Texas. I was one of the first five people to sit and give technical support about how you get online. So, I'm old, and I've seen the internet grow. And at every stage of the internet, as things get open, and as things get more accessible, there's always a contingent that's going to exploit it for fast money. It's happened with everything. I don't want to run through like porn and this and that and the other, but it just always happens. It's happened with KDP since the beginning. There was, you know, first the indies are going to take over everything. Then there was, okay the indies are alright, but the book stuffers are horrible, and they're taking all the money there and they're generating. It's always going to happen. Yes, this has made it easier. It's another avenue for the scammers to exploit. It makes our job a little bit harder. It makes selling books a little bit harder. From my perspective, that's life, you can't stop progress or not progress, just because somebody's going to exploit something. From my perspective, it's really up to Amazon, with their millions of dollars, to get better at checking these things and trying to keep them out. Joanna: Yes, and as we've seen with all of these things, like this scam pops up, and then the hammer comes down, and that goes away, and probably some other innocent people are caught up in that. And then something else comes along and they get rid of that. It's a constant thing. It's the same with hacking in general, isn't it. There's always someone trying to exploit a problem and then someone who's trying to fix it. We want to be part of the good side, right? We're part of those wanting to use these things in responsible ways to enhance our own creative process, not infringe on anyone else. I mean, nobody listening to this is going to be doing that, but what I feel is that people are worried. So at the moment, for example, if I publish on Kindle, I'm up against something like 26 million books, which as you said, it's a challenge right now. But what if it's 26 billion in a couple of years because of AI generation? So what are you thinking in terms of being a writer who makes money with your books? You said you are a commercial writer, so you want to make money. What are you thinking around marketing? Are you going to change your marketing? What are you going to do to stand out, potentially? Leanne: It's a hard question because I'm the type of commercial writer that's just happy to have a career. I'm not chasing millions in the bank, I'm not hoping Hollywood comes calling and makes a Netflix special out of my books. I just want to entertain some people, and I want to be able to go to Disney World every few years, and then I'm good. So for me, marketing is a requirement. I have to put money into marketing my books. I have to deliver when I say I'm going to deliver. I have to listen to my readership to make sure that I'm delivering to them what they want to see. They have to be quality, they have to be edited. It's the same thing I've always done, and I don't think I'm going to do anything all that much different just because there might be a flood of rewritten books coming in. Joanna: Yes. One of my things I was thinking is that like, we're talking, audio only, these are our voices. Now, of course, you can voice synth, you can do an AI voice synth, but this is at least one more thing that makes us us. So do you think using either pictures, or if people aren't happy with pictures, using voice or video to kind of emphasize their humanity? Or even just at the back of the book, like an author's note about your life and that you're a human. And again, all of this can be faked— But I almost feel like it's another layer of doubling down on being human. Leanne: Yeah, I'm terrible at the marketing aspect, because they just don't like the, “buy my book, buy my book, buy my book,” kind of social media presence. So on my Facebook, I share silly, tangentially connected memes. On Instagram, I just started taking passages from my books and just dropping them into Midjourney and seeing what Midjourney thinks, which often is hilarious. On Twitter, I'm much more kind of, quote, “politically involved” in the discussion on AI and what's happening and paying attention. Then my mailing list goes out every Thursday, and so my folks know about restaurants that I've gone to, or you know, what inspired this scene in this book. And next week, we're starting to release Midjourney-interpreted character images. So I think people can differentiate themselves by being real. The one thing that ChatGPT does phenomenally is marketing copy. So your marketing copy is going to have to be on point to compete with everybody else that's getting their marketing copy from ChatGPT. It's incredible at it. Joanna: That's so right. And in fact, I said to someone the other day, they were like, “I would never use AI for my writing.” I'm like, well, don't then but use it for your sales description and your ad copy. Like, do you really want to write that? And then people were like, “Well, I might use it for that, but I'd never use it for fiction.” There's like a sliding scale. Leanne: I was talking to a friend that just absolutely swore that she would never use AI for anything. And then ChatGPT came out, and then she found out that people were using it to make free blurbs. And it seems to be like blurbs are like the universal thing. We're all writers, and we can write a 75,000-word novel, but try and come up with 200 elevator pitch points in a blurb, and all of us blank. Just everybody I know hates it. She found out she could get it free, could hit a button, and it was so much better than what she came up with. She was like done, she was sold. Joanna: I think it's like the entry drug, basically. It's ChatGPT for marketing copy. We're almost out of time. So I wondered like, it feels like the beginning of something. So you said you were around at the beginning of the internet. I feel like this is like 2007, a bit like the beginning of the iPhone when we were like, why would I need that? Or a few people were starting to use it, but we didn't really have a full mobile economy for even like a decade maybe. So this feels like the beginning years of this really taking off. So what are you excited about coming? What's on your wish list for what comes next in AI? Leanne: I don't even know that I have one. I actually think this is probably going to, in retrospect, be as kind of earth-shattering as the printing press invention. I really do believe that as it matures, and it gets better, and it gets tuned, we incorporate it more and more into our lives, we're going to be shocked that we ever did so many things without artificial intelligence. It's a very, very exciting time to be alive, in general, but definitely to be a writer. You can do so many things. I wish that people wouldn't have such a knee-jerk reaction to it because I really do believe that AI is going to help, especially with voices that haven't been heard. Like disabled folks that maybe can't sit and grind out a chapter, it's going to be easier for them to write and get their point across. I know my child has slight brain damage from an open heart surgery, and she's using Sudowrite to try and write a story which is something she's wanted to do for years and just couldn't sit to do. I think we're going to be amazed at where it takes us. I do think there's some ethical things still to be discussed, but I think in the end, in general, people are good, and we'll work it out, and it's going to be amazing. Joanna: Brilliant. I feel the same way. Where can people find you and your books and everything you do online? Leanne: So I am an Amazon-exclusive writer, like a lot of other paranormal cozy writers. So you can find my books on Amazon, and you can find everything about me at LeanneLeeds.com. Joanna: Brilliant. Thanks so much for your time, Leanne. That was great. Leanne: Thank you for having me. You can find Sudowrite through my affiliate link at www.TheCreativePenn.com/sudowrite, and I also have a tutorial on how I use Sudowrite here.The post Writing Fiction With Sudowrite With Leanne Leeds first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Mar 13, 2023 • 57min

Content For Everyone: Accessibility For Authors With Jeff Adams

Writers and readers are a diverse bunch, and we all want to do our best to make sure our content is accessible to all. But how do we do that when it seems like a huge (and time-consuming) challenge for an individual creator? Jeff Adams gives some tips for getting started. In the intro, making as marketing [Ryan Holiday]; Enter awards but make sure they are worthwhile [ALLi; Reedsy; BookAwardPro]; The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin. This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors. Jeff Adams is the author of YA thrillers and gay romance, as well as the co-host of The Big Gay Fiction Podcast with his husband and business partner, Will. Jeff's latest book is Content for Everyone, A Practical Guide for Creative Entrepreneurs to Produce Accessible and Usable Web Content, co-written with Michele Lucchini. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes Staying involved in the author community when you're not writing What is accessible content? Why is it important? How to address the associated cost of making content more accessible Using alternative text tags on images Improving link text to be more descriptive How screen readers process emojis and image text—and how to improve this Tips for improving accessibility of print books Publishing in multiple formats to improve accessibility You can find Jeff at JeffAdamsWrites.com, his podcast at BigGayFictionPodcast.com, and his latest book at ContentForEveryone.info Header image generated by Joanna Penn on Midjourney. Transcript of Interview with Jeff Adams Jeff: Jeff Adams is the author of YA thrillers and gay romance, as well as the co-host of The Big Gay Fiction Podcast with his husband and business partner, Will. Jeff's latest book is Content for Everyone, A Practical Guide for Creative Entrepreneurs to Produce Accessible and Usable Web Content, co-written with Michele Lucchini. So welcome back to the show, Jeff. Thank you, Joanna. It's so wonderful to be here. Joanna: Oh, yes. And of course, we met in person at Podcast Movement. And you were on the show with Will back in April 2020, which is a long time ago. Give us an update on what you've been up to since then, in terms of your books and the Big Gay Media Empire. Jeff: I aspire to it being an empire. Joanna: I love it. It sounds like a massive empire, like Big Gay Media. You know, it sounds like you should be doing TV shows and all kinds of things. Jeff: Definitely an aspirational thing there. The last couple of years since April 2020, I think like for so many creatives, and you hear it on the show all the time, it's like it's been a difficult span, with the pandemic and things just going on in the world. And the last novel I published was actually the same month I was on your show last. I've been doing some short stories, novellas that have been in anthologies, but the creative writing has really been kind of difficult. That said, we've kept going with the podcast, that's still going. We're in our eighth year now of Big Gay Fiction. Joanna: Oh, wow. Jeff: This nonfiction book, though, has seemed to spark my desire for fiction again. I feel those juices flowing. And it makes me think about what you talk about here sometimes, the way that you do fiction, and then you do a nonfiction. You kind of pivot back and forth, kind of have a palate-cleansing moment. I think I've maybe shooed away all the bad stuff, maybe, to let me refocus on fiction. Joanna: Although, that's interesting that you say that. I haven't written a full novel, either, since probably that year, or maybe 2021. I've mainly been making short stories, and I did a novella, as well. So how does that feel? Because I mean, you have a day job, and this book is partly to do with that. How has not producing much made you feel as a creator? Especially in the communities we're in where kind of rapid production, especially in romance, is kind of the thing. Jeff: I've been through a lot of feelings on that. Initially, it's like, why can't I continue to do what I've been doing for like the last 2,3,4 years before that? Because I'd gotten into a pace where I was doing 2,3,4 books in a calendar year, and then it kind of all fell apart what I was trying to do there. So there was a little bit of beating myself up, but then it was like, this is the best that I can do right now, and I have to take care of myself. Which I think I'm in a position to do, because I don't try to do this full time at the moment. I can't imagine the stress on somebody who was in the mindset that I was, but also has to pay the bills with their creative output at the same time. Joanna: I think that's so important. And I often try to bring it back to this as well, which is most authors do have a day job. And I guess one of the things in the indie community, or even with traditional publishing, is like, oh, to be a proper writer or whatever, you must be full-time. But that's not actually true. I mean, even I could say this podcast is like my day job. It brings me an income, it's not technically writing, although the transcripts are millions of words at this point. So you said, you know, the best I could do now. How many books do you have, though? You have quite a few. Jeff: It's quite a few. I mean, one of the things that I did through those years I wasn't writing was getting some stuff republished because I had gotten a whole bunch of rights back at the end of 2019 and the early part of 2020. So I did do some republishing, I did do some freshening of some things. So I think in total, I think right now, I think it's eight novels, and probably five or six short stories out there. Joanna: But this is a funny thing, right? Because you see, some authors are like, yeah, I have one book or three books or five books, and for some people, that is a whole career. So we have got to be a bit more gentle on ourselves. Jeff: Absolutely. I learned that for sure. Joanna: Well, that's good. I'm glad. What does the Big Gay Fiction podcast do for you and the business? Jeff: It definitely keeps the name out there. And we continue to put across like, “If you like the books we talked about on this show, we've written books you might also like.” So it still is that marketing element that it was even going back to when we started it when I was writing much more. It also lets us keep our networking into the community. Even if we're not working with other authors on like cross promoting books through our email lists or all those things that authors might gather up to do, even in this moment where I'm not writing, I'm still active in that author community through the podcast and promoting the genre, instead of just potentially dropping out entirely if we hadn't had the show, and then I'm not writing at the same time. So I feel like it's definitely helped to maintain that connection and network to the genre that we operate in. Joanna: And that's really good. I feel the same. I mean, I don't think we've actually spoken since when we spoke in April 2020. I mean, we're kind of aware of each other, and we email sometimes, and there's a sort of connection between community members which supports all of us. So yeah, I mean, I feel the same way with my show. Also, we don't know who's listening. We don't know who's listening to this. They may never have heard of the Big Gay Fiction Podcast, but now they have, and it is one of the best show names in the industry. I still love it. So we should probably talk about the book, which is this Content for Everyone. What is accessible content? Because it's one of those terms we've heard, we might not understand. And why is it important? And why do you care? Jeff: We could probably talk the next hour about that, but I'll bring it down to some key points. So if you think about the content that's out there on the web, and I think most of us think about engaging with content in the way that we personally do. And for most of us, it's engaging with it visually on our screen. We're probably navigating with a mouse or maybe a trackball or a trackpad, or whatever that is. If you're on a mobile device or a tablet, it's tap, and zoom, and pinch and whatnot. But if you think about people who need to use other methods to interact, perhaps they're blind and using a screen reader, there's going to be barriers to them potentially accessing your content because of how it's done. You could have somebody, certainly anybody who has hearing loss, transcripts for our shows are so important for them to be able to get the messages, understand what we're putting out on our shows. Similarly, captions for videos. Think about images. Images of text are used all the time in our industry. I think one of the things we see for authors right now that are so popular, are those square images with the book in the middle and all the arrows coming into the book cover, you know, talking about tropes and plot points and whatnot. So not only if people are blind, they're obviously going to need some other text, either in the alternative text or in the post itself to give us what's in the image. But then if they're low vision, and you've got bad color contrast in that image, people aren't able to connect with that. If somebody's dyslexic, and the font you've chosen is really curly and fancy, maybe they can't connect with that. Those are just some easy examples to talk about when we think about accessible content. It's important because everything is on the internet these days. And certainly for us independent authors, we rely on our websites, on the stores that we run, on social media, on our newsletters, to convey these messages. And if you think about the population that has some form of disability, you're talking over a billion people across the world. Roughly 20% to 25% of the population has a disability that is somehow reported. Whether it's because they're maybe getting disability from the government agency, it's recorded with their insurance, or maybe they filled it out on a survey form at some point. And that's just the people that are categorized as such. If you add things that are temporary, like somebody breaks their arm, they can't use their mouse, they need to navigate by keyboard. Something that's more situational. Think about somebody maybe holding an infant and can't get to their cell phone at the moment, they may ask one of the assistants on the phone to do the job. I won't say the name, lest one of them go off. Or somebody even episodic, with a migraine or an arthritis flare up and how that impacts how they deal with the world that day. Accessible content matters. And one callback I'll make to the episode that's just been out the week that we're talking, which is 675, you mentioned that report from Ben Evans. 5 billion people have a smartphone. And, you know, the pandemic remade eCommerce and the internet. More people are online, there's more people to access the content, so if your content is not accessible, then you're missing people. Joanna: Why do you, in particular, care about this? Jeff: It's been my day job. For the last more than a decade now I've worked for a company called UsableNet. UsableNet was founded as a company working in digital accessibility. And in particular, over the last six, seven years, I've been working closely with companies on their accessibility programs, and really looking at the broad range of things that go into digital accessibility, which is far more than we talk about in this book. Learning that, working with these companies, working with them on their content, it started with just me tying it back to my own websites. Like if I'm going to talk about this, I need to make them as accessible as I can, with my technical experience, which is pretty close to none outside of what I could do in those platforms. Because I can't manipulate, for example, my WordPress theme. I can only do the things that I can do within the content entry place itself. Then beyond trying to improve my own sites, you know, I see what my fellow podcasters, my fellow authors, others in the creative community, put out there. Once you know what not-accessible content is, it's really hard not to focus on it when you see it somewhere. It's like, oh, those colors, that's a problem. Oh, this link text, I wish that was something better for people, you know. And so, like, I want to help spread the word in a place where it's not talked about that much. It's talked so much, especially here in the US, because it's very litigious for ecommerce companies who aren't accessible. But there's so many more people to talk to about this, and to improve the internet for everybody. So it's become my thing in a way I never thought it would. I never thought I'd write a book about my day job, essentially. Joanna: Well, and we're going to get into some tips for what we can do in a bit more detail. But I am going to play devil's advocate, because one of the things that people think, so for example, I have always had a transcript on the show since the beginning. And at the beginning, I used to do it myself, and then I started paying humans, and then the AI tools came along, and then you still need them cleaning up, and blah, blah, blah. I've always done transcripts primarily for a business reason, which is SEO. And it's had the wonderful side effect of making the content accessible. And in fact, some people listening, they're not listening, they're reading the transcript. A lot of people do just read the transcript from my show. But the point being, I had a business reason, so over the years, I've invested. But I know a lot of podcasters, we both know podcasters, who do not do a transcript because it's either expensive financially, or expensive timewise if you try and do it yourself. The same way, if you say like an image on a blog, or a social media, like if I upload an image to Instagram, or an author listening goes, okay, I'm going to upload one of those images to Instagram or I'm going to upload an image every day. Do I make a halfhearted attempt to try and describe it? That's going to take me another minute or two, it's too long. Or like you say, captions on video. I have to hold my hand up and say I don't do captions because of the amount of time it takes, or I would have to outsource it. It's going to cost us time and possibly money to do this. So how can we address that? Because I'm pretty sure everyone wants to be the best we can be, right? But how do we get over that hump? Or do you have a principle we can approach that with? Jeff: There's a lot of ways to approach that. And I'm right there with you, like Big Gay Fiction, we started transcribing our interviews at Episode 180, because we didn't have the resource and the money coming in to do it. And we finally expanded to full episode transcripts probably about 50 to 75 episodes after that. Big Gay Author rarely had transcripts, because again, a monetary issue. You have to do the best that you can with what you have and decide the areas where you know that your audience will get a lot from it. For you, like you had the business case early on with the podcast for SEO purposes. And certainly it improves SEO because of all the words that are in the transcript. And really think about what your audience is going to need and the audience you might be missing because something's not there. I'll give you an example of something that's in the book actually. We interviewed a few people for the book to get different perspectives from people with different disabilities and where the barriers are problematic for them. So author EM Lindsey, they want and have tried to many times in the past to take courses, whether it's a craft course, an ads course, a marketing course. You know, the breadth of the things that are out there for authors to take to improve. They so often find that in live scenarios, captions aren't available, even if they are automated. They're not there to help because they have hearing loss. Often the replays don't have captions, and this is for something that somebody has paid for. Joanna: Can I just jump in there. Okay, so I have video courses— I don't have captions, but I always have transcripts. Is that not good enough? Jeff: The transcript definitely works because you are giving an alternative way for somebody who can't engage with the audio. So in that case, the transcript definitely works because then the information is still available to that person. That's just an example of you have to think about what your audience needs, what you can give them, what fits within the budget. Because I definitely understand that you can't do everything all the time. It's like almost any other decision that you make in your business. And here, it's just a matter of doing what you can to improve the experience for as much of your audience as you can. Progress over perfection It really dials back to something that we've mentioned in the book a couple of times about progress over perfection. Do something to start to improve, whether it's the images, whether it's captions, whether it's use of colors, whether it's how you do your link text. Whatever that is, think about the things that we present in the book, and then figure out how that maybe adapts to your business now, what you might adjust from your previously posted content, and what you'll do going forward into the future as well. Joanna: Yes, so images, for example. I probably spent the first five years of my internet life not even doing the alt text field, I mean, even for SEO, that's really bad. So can you just go into some specifics around images? And I still find this difficult. Like on Twitter, for example, you can type in some descriptive text, and I just find it really hard. The example you gave of the book with the arrows going onto it, can you tell us what we would tag that with? What text would we use? Jeff: Sure. So there are a couple places you can do this too, because you could also put it in the post itself, rather than the alt text, so that it's just there for anybody who needs it. They can get it from the image and get it from the post. But if you think about one of those arrow ones, you could say—and I actually built an example of this as one of the things that we have as one of the extras in the book. So Tracker Hacker by Jeff Adams is a YA thriller that includes hiding secrets, rescuing the dad, hacking into computer systems, on and on and on. So each of those things would have been the arrow, and then it just becomes a sentence whether it's in there as the alt text itself, or if it's even in the post, it restates what's in the image, but then it essentially makes the image into being decorative. So if nobody saw the image, for whatever reason, they still understand everything about the book because of what you've written in the post or in the alt text. Pilgrimage is a travel memoir by J.F. Penn. It contains solo walking tips, and features the camino de santiago, historic and spiritual places, midlife angst, and questions for you to consider. Joanna: But do you have to say, “with book cover showing person standing by a lake on a yellow background?” Jeff: Not necessarily because it likely doesn't matter. Joanna: I think that's what confuses me because you see some people doing it, and they're describing all the different things about the landscape that's on the book cover or something. And I think that's what makes it hard. It's almost like there are different rules for the different types of images. You're saying it's essentially making sure someone who can't see the picture gets the gist of what you're trying to say, not an exact description of the image. Jeff: Exactly, and it matters in context, as well. So the book cover on that image, on that promo image, the book cover itself probably doesn't matter. The key things are the title, the author, and what the plot points are. That's what's driving that promo image. If that cover sits on a cover artists website, then the alternative text is probably describing everything that's in the cover itself, the landscape, the lake, the colors, et cetera, because maybe it's up for sale as a premade cover. So somebody who maybe can't see it does need the additional information. So the context matters. And the high level kind of thing that I always say is, if you can't see that image, what do you, as the content creator, need me to get from it? And it probably isn't the detail on the book, but the promotional element of what you're doing that image for. Joanna: Yes, I can see that. I mean, I'm a very visual person, but actually I also have a lot of visual issues. So this is something I care very much about. So this is something that I do think about, and I just think I get wrong all the time. This is something I'm interested in learning more about. You mentioned link text a couple of times. Can you explain how to do that properly? Jeff: Before I get into link text, I want to say one more quick thing about images that I think a lot of people also don't know. Instagram and Facebook automatically write your alt text for you. Joanna: Oh, well that's handy. Twitter doesn't. Jeff: Twitter does not, thank goodness. Do not let Facebook and Instagram write your alt text because it will be wrong. If there's text in your image, and I'll use the idea of the arrow picture again, the promo image, it's going to read all the texts left to right. So it's not going to like figure out that the thing on the right side of the book is all one thing and the thing on the left side is all one thing. It's good to read straight across, no matter what. It's going to read all the text off your book as it goes through left to right, and it'll just flat be wrong and a bunch of garbage. So you should always be looking at what it's automatically generating for you and then writing your own so you don't end up with gibberish. Joanna: Right. So you upload an image on Facebook, and then the image will give you some options. And if you don't type it in, then it will just do that, basically. So you need to overtype it or something. Jeff: Yeah, definitely overtype it because it's always wrong. I've never seen good auto generated text on either platform. Joanna: Do you think this is going to get better, though? I mean, obviously, there are a lot of AI tools, and some of them are getting better. Will the auto-tools improve? Jeff: I'd like to think so. I think where AI will always struggle is to get the context concept, unless they're going to tie the AI to actually look at the text of the post to decide how to marry it to the image. I'd like to think that it'll get there though. AI, as you point out all the time, the things you were thinking were going to come in five or 10 years are here now. Yeah, so it's got to get better. It's just I don't know how it'll deal with generating the right context, but hopefully, it can at least get better at what's actually present in the image and parsing that information out better. Joanna: Okay, so what about link text? Improving link text Jeff: Link text. So I'm sure we see this all the time, where it's just “click here,” “buy now,” “buy this,” “add to cart,” “read more,” etc. People who use screen readers, for example, and other forms of assistive technology have the ability to pull up and review a list of links. The screen reader will just read out every link that's on the page, which can be really handy to jump to what you need. But if you are faced with a full page of click here, read more, add to cart, you have no idea where any of those links go off to. So create a good link text is something I hope that we could all start to do relatively easy. So instead of saying, “click here,” be more specific. You know, “click to Amazon to see Content for Everyone,” “Get Content for Everyone at my store.” It'll be longer link text, but it'll be more descriptive link text, which could also be good for even some people who have some cognitive disabilities, who might maybe have even short term memory loss, where seeing those very words as an underlying link text will go yes, that's what I need, even if I don't recall what might have been in the paragraph before it. It'll help everybody scan the page faster to find exactly the link they may want. As opposed to just seeing a bunch of “click here,” where they are going to have to actually read through everything else to see what each individually “click here” is within a context. Joanna: Yes, and it's funny, again— I think this is a practice that I started doing because of SEO —because Google links and all the SEO stuff, you need a descriptive link to make it rank better. So again, I think I fell into that for good business reasons. And now most of my site would be alright for that. Although I'm still guilty of it sometimes, for sure. Actually, I say that, in the show notes I'll say, maybe talking about this particular topic, and then I'll have the source in a bracket, and it will just say The Guardian or something like that. I don't include the whole headline because those show notes go into like Spotify and stuff like that. So it is difficult, isn't it, because we're kind of also designing our content for these different tools that read into it. Like Twitter, you only have a certain amount of words, so you have to change what you do in order to make that right. So it's tough, isn't it? Are there any other particular ones for authors, where you think this is something people could improve? Let's say not do wrong, but could improve? Jeff: Don't use emails that are all images. I mean based on what we talked about a moment ago with images, you can imagine if you've got an email full of images and no text. Joanna: Do people really do that? Jeff: People really do that. Yes, including big ecommerce companies do it all the time. And we keep telling them, please don't do that because there's going to be an entire segment of your population that is going to have no idea for any number of reasons. From color contrast, font choices, you're probably not loading up good alt text in your email forms all too often. And so all of that plays into it. And doing good link text in an email because certainly in an email if you're like listing a bunch of books, “blurb one, buy now,” “blurb two, buy now.” Be more specific about what books somebody is going to be able to buy now. Be careful with emoji use. Everybody loves their emojis. Joanna: I don't know what most of them mean. I literally use smiley face and thumbs up. That's about it. Jeff: That's good because those are often well-read. But you could find places where people will put an emoji between each word in a headline, for example. So if you use the emoji that is the smiley face with the stars in its eyes, you know the one I'm talking about? Joanna: Yes, it means like, surprise, or wow, or something like that, does it? Jeff: Well, a screen reader will read it out as starstruck. So imagine a headline that might be, “On sale now, 40% off.” And if you've got that emoji between each of them, it'll be something to the effect of, “on, star struck, sale, star struck, now, star struck, 40, star struck, percent, star struck, off.” Joanna: How annoying. Jeff: Exactly. And it can be trouble for cognitively disabled users too, trying to figure out what those words mean, with those emojis between them, what are the emojis meaning context, trying to parse the whole sentence. So just maybe put the star struck off at the end, so that it ends with that thing, but using it between each word can be problematic. And then if you're stringing a whole bunch of emojis together, you can't be sure that a screen reader is going to read out what you actually mean those to say. Joanna: Yeah, yeah, it's difficult, isn't it. I mean, again, we only have so much time to do things. And you did mention progress over perfection. Maybe the tip is: Just pick one thing to start doing better. So for me, I am definitely going to try and get better at text or describing my images because I know it's something that I do, but I don't do it very well. So I think I could get better at that. I mean, is that the way to do it? Like, don't try and do everything, because let's face it, we all have a lot of things to do. Jeff: Yes, it's really the best way to consider it. I would say, if I were to break things down, it's like, pick one or two things from the book and decide, I'm going to do, in your case, images better, maybe I'm going to do link text better. And when you get comfortable doing that, and it becomes just part of the process and the way you do things, maybe you go back and pick up another thing to start doing well, and start going forward. Look at your website too. Just look at your homepage, for example. Is your homepage meeting the requirements that we've laid out in the book? And if not, do you want to do a quick update there to make that better. Even like top level pages, maybe make those better. But definitely parse it all out, don't stop writing your book to go fix this. But start to understand it, see where you could start chipping away at it, and over time, it becomes a thing that you just do. You know, I don't do my alt text perfectly every time either because it's like, I'm just trying to post this right now. I know that I'm not supposed to do that, but as always, progress over perfection. Maybe I'll go back and fix it later, you know, if I'm on the run or something as I'm posting, or just flat forget it sometimes. Also, these platforms don't make it super easy to go do it. Twitter does, but Facebook and Instagram don't. Joanna: Just on the website thing, I mean, generally, the older your website is, the less accessible it is. A lot of the modern themes, on WordPress certainly, are mobile compatible. They scale depending on what kind of device you're on. I mean sometimes I'll click on a tweet that somebody has put out because I still use Twitter a lot. I'll click on a tweet on my phone, and I'll end up on someone's website that is sort of pre-2000, probably, and it's like a black background and it's tiny because it's not scaled to a mobile device. And so you have to pinch and try and scroll in. I mean, I find the white text on a black background is utterly ridiculous. Or like you mentioned about color stuff. It's not necessarily even that people are entirely blind, although obviously some people are, but for some people there's just other things going on, aren't there. Jeff: Do the best you can. I mean, it sounds like I'm saying don't do anything at all. But it's like, if you've got an older website, see how it can fit into your plan to upgrade your template, upgrade your platform, to move yourself into the 2023's. Yeah, you're right, there are companies and individuals who still have those pre-2000 websites that don't scale up on the phone. It's interesting you mentioned that dark background with white text doesn't work for you, because I actually operate in dark mode all the time. So even my Word document is black background with white text, it's just easier on my eyes. Joanna: That's so interesting. My husband does the same. And I'm not going to say anything about your age, but I feel like people who used to use computers back in the day when that's what they were. Is that where it comes from for you? Jeff: It's really only recently I've switched to this more dark mode setting because it was recommended to me actually by somebody I interviewed for the book. She operates in dark mode all the time. And she's like, give it a shot, you might actually like it. And then within a couple of weeks, I had it across all my devices. I think I spend so much time in front of a device or a screen, that it just does make it easier for me, I think from a brightness point of view and from a text sharpness point of view, for me to operate. It's something like 50% of people, 50 – 55% prefer dark mode on their devices for whatever reason. There's also a great statistic around captions that like 60 – 70% of people will have captions on if they're available because it's how they prefer to engage. Whether it's a TV show, something on YouTube, to have those on because it's a little bit more way for them to connect with the content. Joanna: Yes, and there's some crazy stat now that it's not just people of older category, it's a lot of young people prefer captions on Netflix and stuff like that. And it's interesting, because we've been watching a lot of Korean TV on Netflix, and of course it is all captioned. And it was so funny, I found myself saying to Jonathan, “Oh, can you turn it up a bit.” Even though we're watching the captions, I still want to hear the sound, I really like the Korean language. It's interesting, we've talked mainly, well entirely, really, about digital. But of course, we all do print books as well. So I've been doing large print for years now. For many years, I've been doing large print and sell a lot of large print romance because my mum writes more senior romance as Penny Appleton. What I found like personally, I'm almost 48, my eyes are going the other way, I'll pick up a book in a bookstore, like in a physical bookstore, and I'll open it and the text will be so tiny, presumably because of paper stock or cost of printing, and then I just put it straight down again. Or, for example, I used to buy Wired magazine in print, but what was happening is, again, they were using things like white text on the orange background and printing the font so small. Obviously I could get my glasses, but even with that, the contrast. And I just felt like these are being formatted by young people. You can see, but it's not an age thing is it. It's just a difference in in ability. What are your tips for accessibility for print books? Jeff: Definitely large print where you can. Like Content for Everyone, for me, is my first large print that I've done, and I will definitely be, as soon as I can get a little bit of bandwidth, going back to my other print books and creating the large print version of it. Because for those who want to read a physical book, I think the large print is good to have. Certainly, and I think this becomes easier like if you're doing something in Vellum or something to create these multiple formats, but to also pick a good font. You want to pick a font that is as accessible as possible. And those tend to be fonts like Times New Roman, Arial, Tahoma. You really want to look for the ones that have good character differentiation, and not like the ones where the uppercase I's and the lowercase l's and the 1's all look the same. To help people who are dyslexic be able to parse the letters and people with lower vision having an easier time to parse even in the large print format. So I think it's mostly about minding good fonts. And within the book, we actually talk about what the accessible fonts are, and I listed off a couple of them there. Joanna: What about italics? Jeff: Use italics judiciously and as you're supposed to. Don't do massive blocks of text in italic, for example. Like, don't have a four page flashback that you're doing in italic, for some reason. Joanna: People do that. Or they put the whole prologue in italics. And I'm sorry, I literally can't read it. Like, it's obviously not just me, but I find italics incredibly hard to read. And it's like, I just can't read that. So I will put the book down or send it back or whatever. Jeff: Yeah, you know, album names, TV shows, movies, those get italics because that's just the proper way to designate them, but don't do that with the whole prologue in italics. Use bold judiciously, and not whole big text blocks. Don't do whole blocks or whole big, large piece of text in capital letters, for example. Keep things left justified. I think sometimes people want to use the justified so it has the same endpoints left and right, but the variation that you can get between the words can be disruptive for some people. Don't do a lot of centered texts, big blocks of center text, because it's more of a cognitive drain and can be more difficult to fully understand something if you're having to move your eye to the beginning of where each of the lines happens to be. Joanna: The more we get into this, the more you realize this is just a huge deal. I mean, an audio obviously, this is primarily an audio podcast, having our books in audio format is something that we've been advocating a long time. But again, with the rise of AI narration, I think this will finally become something very accessible. I mean, that is the primary driving force, well, one of the driving forces behind it, is anyone should be able to listen to anything. For me, like I often say this like, I don't want to just listen to American men reading business books, for example. I would like to listen to British women or somebody else, and other people have other voices in their heads. So I think, again, the tools, because again, it's not affordable for people to do audiobooks a lot of the time, but this is another way we'll be able to use the tools to make things more accessible, I guess. Jeff: I'm such an advocate of being, much like you are, as wide as you can be, with as many products as you can be. And I think those two things connect to accessibility. When you consider, for example, by and large, statistically, people who are disabled are underemployed, so they're not employed to their full potential skill level, and they're underpaid. And they're underpaid, and they have other expenses to manage their health, potentially to get assistive technologies or other things to help them live their life. So they may not have the discretionary income that somebody else does. Having your books available in the library, in print, in eBook, in audio, brings the accessibility of that book to them. Because the library may be their primary source for books because they're not going to spend their discretionary funds, even on a KU membership, or an audiobook membership to get credits, because those can be pricey. And certainly, AI audiobooks do fill a price point because you're going to be able to offer those at a lower cost to the libraries, to individuals, rather than the more spendy, I think a standard audiobook price these days, not counting a credit, is at least in the $20 range, if not a little bit higher. Then the subscriptions to Audible or Spotify or whatever, those also cost money that somebody may not have as a discretionary fund. So the more wide and the more price points, I think the better. Joanna: Yes, and of course we can have our books in libraries, eBook, audio, and print as you said, that's all available to us now. So there's a lot we can do. And I hope that this interview has given people a lot of tips. If people want to find the book and everything else you do, where can people find you online? Jeff: So the book is at contentforeveryone.info. And if you want to pick up the book from my store, you can grab it at contentforeveryone.info/purchase. It is of course available wide, currently eBook and standard print and large print paperback, with an audiobook yet to come. My writing you can find at JeffAdamsWrites.com and podcast at BigGayFictionPodcast.com. Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Jeff. That was great. Jeff: Yeah, thank you so much.The post Content For Everyone: Accessibility For Authors With Jeff Adams first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Mar 6, 2023 • 1h 3min

Writing And Investing For A Long Term Indie Author Career With Lindsay Buroker

What are the core fundamentals of a successful independent author business? How can you focus on writing, as well as sell more books, and stay healthy? Prolific fantasy author Lindsay Buroker shares her tips. In the intro, YouTube gets into audio-only podcasts; Seth Godin's book marketing for The Song of Significance; How to make more money than the average author [Ask ALLi]; Independent author income survey from ALLi; The Authors Guild updated their model contract with a new clause: No Generative AI Training Use. Plus, my photos from Washington D.C.; I'm on the Write Now with Scrivener Podcast; Pictures from signing hardbacks at Bookvault in Peterborough. Today's podcast sponsor is Findaway Voices, which gives you access to the world's largest network of audiobook sellers and everything you need to create and sell professional audiobooks. Take back your freedom. Choose your price, choose how you sell, choose how you distribute audio. Check it out at FindawayVoices.com. Lindsay Buroker is the author of over 100 books across epic fantasy, urban fantasy, science fiction, fantasy, romance, and more. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes How Lindsay's current business works, and how she's ready to pivot and is considering other things, like Kickstarter The core fundamentals for a long-term author business What changes and what stays the same Pros and cons of writing under a pen name Dealing with negative feedback Investing, and thinking about the future for our intellectual property You can find Lindsay at LindsayBuroker.com and listen to the backlist at https://6figureauthors.com/. Header image created by Joanna Penn on Midjourney. Transcript of Interview with Lindsay Buroker Joanna: Lindsay Buroker is the author of over 100 books across epic fantasy, urban fantasy, science fiction, fantasy, romance, and more. So welcome back to the show, Lindsay. Lindsay: Hey, thanks for having me. It's been a couple years. So we'll see what's going on. Joanna: It's so exciting to talk to you because lots of people miss you, and they miss the Six Figure Authors Podcast. I do. I used to listen to that show every week, whenever it was, and we have not heard your news for a while. So you did the last main episode of Six Figure Authors in April 2022, and did a surprise extra in October 2022, but give us an update. What does your book business look like now? And what have you been writing in the last year? Lindsay: I feel a little bad about that October episode because it was super doom and gloom. Joanna: It was really good. Lindsay: We're probably going to do another one, just pop into update. For my book business, I haven't changed a lot. I've slowed down a little bit, which it may not look like from the outside because the series I'm working on their shorter, like 80 – 90,000 words, which, compared to some of my epic fantasy stuff that's short. So I'm writing fewer words a day, I used to shoot for like 7,000 to 10,000. And now I'm just like, yeah, screw that, maybe 5,000. But because they're shorter books, I've still been publishing as much. I don't know if that will continue. I haven't made a lot of changes. I'm still launching new stuff into Kindle Unlimited. Things are still working pretty well for me, but I'm definitely keeping an eye on what's going on. You know, you were talking about selling direct and the people that are just doing other things, and Kickstarters, and I do have the Patreon. So I'm always ready. If I have to pivot, I want to be prepared. I might do a Kickstarter and try some stuff, regardless, but it's a lot of work as I think you've been talking about the Kickstarter you did. And until you actually know how much you're going to make from it, it's a bit of a question mark. Like if I'm not going to make more than I'm making a month from Amazon, do I really want to put all this extra work above and beyond what I usually do? So that's why I haven't done it yet. I am excited about all the things that people are doing now and all the ways you can make money from your books. It's pretty fun to watch all the various ways people succeed and contemplate trying some things myself. Joanna: Well, just on the Kickstarter, I mean, your social media posts are often just interesting things with dragons on them, right, like lamps and random stuff with dragons. And if you did a Kickstarter, you would have to do merchandise of some kind because everyone will want some kind of dragon thing. Lindsay: It's true. And I don't really have a go-to person for creating things like that for art, other than cover designs and such. So that's extra work, finding that. I think people want a hardback, like a signed hardback edition, which I'd be open to, but again, I haven't done it yet. Everything would be like the first time it'd be the hardest. And I'm sure you could become like Kris and Dean (WMG Publishing) doing their monthly Kickstarter, like the way I am releasing on Amazon, like, oh, it's no big deal, it's just another series. So I think it's just that first time that's got me hesitating a little bit because I know it will be a learning curve. I did do a Kickstarter like 10 years ago, so I do have some experience with it, but now I actually have fans. I had a few back then, like it worked out. It was good. Joanna: What did you make? Do you remember? What did you make on that? Lindsay: I was just funding my audiobooks, because early on, it cost quite a bit to have those done. And in those days, I was doing like free audiobooks, and gosh, I can't even remember, was ACX a thing? I feel like it might have been, but that was the only game in town. So audiobooks weren't profitable for me, but people wanted them. So I was funding a couple of those. I give away the audiobooks, but I also gave away sign paperbacks of this series. Those were very popular. So I had to sign all this stuff. Everybody wanted a custom message from one of the characters. And I'm like, of course, of course! So that was a lot of work. And I found out how much international shipping was the hard way. Like there weren't as many calculators and stuff to warn you back then that it was going to be $50 to ship a couple books to Australia. So I ended up doing okay, but it was definitely a lot of work. Joanna: Well, as we're recording this, I'm going to the printer next week, my books are printing right now, but things have definitely changed in terms of the technology. I'm kind of keeping this list at the moment of the new jobs that we need virtual assistants for. And I think running a Kickstarter campaign for authors, maybe Monica and Russell, in their group, they have people who are going to do this. But you would have a massive Kickstarter now, and you could actually hire someone to run it. I actually think that type of job is going to be an emergent one in the future because it's like a project manager role, really. There's so much to organize, and for people who actually can drive the back end of Kickstarter and the backer kit and all that, I think that's a real skill. I mean— Would you hire someone like that if you were going to do a Kickstarter? I mean, you wouldn't do all yourself. Lindsay: It's funny because I've actually asked someone, and she said yes. So I won't out her on this show because I don't know if she wants to be like, oh, that's going to be my new job, everybody's going to want me to run one, because I think they've done a couple of now. So I am keeping that in mind, I agree. Maybe you do it yourself the first time or with guidance so you kind of learn everything, but yeah, I could definitely see that just then you make a list, right. Here’s what I need done, and you hand it off to someone. I think there are more jobs that are going to be available for people that are willing to help, you know, there are already lots of author assistants, editing, cover art, but we are seeing more opportunities. You know, just like you don't want to manage your ads, maybe you don't want to manage your Kickstarter. And it does make sense for anyone that thinks they're going to make enough. Maybe you've already got an established fan base, and you're doing a new installment in a series that you know people will say yes because they already like it. In that case, you might know you're going to make enough to pay someone and make it worth their time. Joanna: It's interesting what changes. I feel like when we both went full-time, both of us it was 2011, wasn't it? Lindsay: It might have been 2012 for me by the time I was like, oh, I'm actually making more than the old day job. But I kind of had a year where I was sort of checked out on what I was doing before and really focused on writing. Joanna: I mean, and back then, there just wasn't the ecosystem for authors. There wasn't the technology that we have now. Like you said, I mean, Kickstarter was around back then, but it wasn't a place really for publishing and authors, whereas that's definitely really changed. Is there anything else that you're looking at now that you think, okay, maybe this is something more interesting, this is a way that I could do? I mean, the thing is, your business is running so well, like you said. When do you think you might just go, right, I need to pivot? Is it when the income drops? Lindsay: Right. Amazon, they've been cutting corners in this supposed recession we're having, or going to have. Amazon's been laying people off and cutting out some things. So I'm just watching like, well, let's see if they cut on KU or change the royalty rate or something. Hopefully not. But I always try to think, well, what would I do if that happened? I think I'll try some things regardless of whether that happens eventually, just, you know, it's kind of fun. You go through different phases where you're like, ‘I'm just tired, I can't do anything, like I can't handle anything else'. And other times when you have more energy, it sounds fun. I am also interested, like selling direct, I know is something you're doing a lot of and there are so many more tools now to make it easy. I think you have a Shopify store, [CreativePennBooks.com]like we didn't have that. I actually sold direct an early release of one of my Emperor's Edge books, my first series. I think it was like, between book five and six or something, there was a cliffhanger, and people really wanted the next one. So for $10, you could buy on my site for one weekend, you'd get the manuscript. I don't think it had been edited yet, and then you also get the eBook when it released. I had to do this with Pay Pal. And there was no BookFunnel, so I had to email them the documents. And I had to do it like when I saw the money come in. I remember, for whatever reason, I was at the US Open, the tennis thing in New York when I was doing this, because why wouldn't you be on vacation while you're trying to do something like this? And so I'm sitting there in the seats, watching Roger Federer, a new order came in, I have to email the eBooks to this person, and then hope they know how to sideload it. So that's come a long way. So I'm a little more interested now in selling direct that there are a lot more tools for that. Joanna: That's so funny. I was at Superstars in Colorado with Damon Courtney, and I introduced him to someone who had never heard of BookFunnel. And I was like, BookFunnel changed our lives! We used to have to direct people to download this Mobi file and then teach them how to sideload it. No one even uses the phrase ‘sideload' anymore. We're so old! Lindsay: I know, I don't even know how to do it anymore. Like my phone just opens up whatever, or I think most people's phones are like that now. So yeah, and then BookFunnel has their app. Joanna: I mean, remember the customer support. It's like, well, I didn't know how to get this on my Samsung granny tablet. And it's like, I'm sorry, I'll just give you your money back. Lindsay: I think I had like bookmarked a forum post from like smart eReader, one of those kinds of things, and I just directed people there. Maybe this will help you because I don't know anything about your device. Joanna: Exactly. So thank you, Damon from BookFunnel. And I did say to Damon, it's about time you came back on the show because there are just so many things now that BookFunnel does. Again, this is the other thing with you and I, right, so we've been doing this a long time, we both have our processes, and there are things we might not have revisited for a long time. So for me, one of the things I'm really questioning at the moment is social media. I think we even met on Twitter back in the day, and now it seems that Twitter is just spiraling the drain and I don't necessarily want to replace it, but I find myself going more into Facebook, for example. Or people are going into LinkedIn, which is kind of scary. Are there things that you're questioning or revisiting in your business? Is social media something you're questioning? Lindsay: Well, I've actually never successfully sold books on Twitter, so I don't really care. Everybody that was signing off, like, oh, I'm going to Mastodon. I'm like, have fun, see you later. I probably just will never leave Twitter or not check it as much, maybe. I didn't feel like, oh, I got to go replace this and find some way to sell books again. Facebook, on the other hand, has been a good way to sell books for me. It's number two, after my newsletter, when I post the links there. I think it's just that I have that demographic, that sort of mid-30s and up, that's more on Facebook. A lot of my characters are that age, so it makes sense. So that one works well, for me, and I like that, and I shouldn't like it maybe, but they separated your book profile page from your personal account. So I never have to log on to my personal account anymore, and I don't. I will once in a while, and there's a bunch of messages. I'm like, guys, I haven't posted on here since 2019, why are you sending me messages this way? I actually answer emails better than this thing. Yeah, I'm still quite active on the Facebook page. I'm happy that everybody that's done well with TikTok, that's awesome. Like I've been saying for years, like just wait, a new thing will come, like a new tactic, and you can get in early and use it. And people have. And I don't know what the next thing will be, but it's not really for me. I even gave it a shot. I hired a VA because it was very easy to hand that to someone because I didn't care. I didn't even have an account on there at the time. And nothing happened, she did it for like five months. It wasn't surprising to me because I think the people who I see on there are on there with their faces, and being funny, and doing little bits, and showing off their books. And I see why it works for them. If somebody does the book flip thing where they're just showing quotes is working for somebody else too, great, awesome. But I don't feel compelled to jump on every new thing. What I'm doing, like the core fundamental stuff, doesn't ever seem to change. Like maybe you try new things as they come along, and if something comes along that suits you, yay, I would be happy to. Like the next introvert social media thing… Yeah, I think that's an oxymoron. I'll be all over that. Joanna: Okay, so you said the ‘core fundamental things' there. What are those core fundamentals for your author business? Lindsay: So releasing series as a foundation. Every now and then I divert, and I do one offs or something that's not quite the same. Sometimes it works fabulously and launches a new series, sometimes it doesn't work. So having the series that I build with like an arc, and I know this doesn't work in every genre, romances have to have a new couple in each one, so they have to like make their town or something. You know, really create a setting that brings in the cohesiveness and gets people to want to stay in that setting. But it follows an arc, and in my case, I have to do like this slow-burn romance over the series. And there's like maybe a mystery of something that's going around in the background. So something that keeps people wanting to read book after book until it's complete. So I have that at the core. Then the marketing, no matter what I do, no matter what tactics change, I'm always trying to get people to try book one, and I often make book one free. So I've got the newsletter, and I've never gone into building a newsletter solely on throwing stuff out there and trying to get people to sign up in order to try something, which I know people have, worked fabulous for them, and awesome. I've always been like, here's the sign-up at the end of the book. Like at the end of the book, if you want the free prequel, or if you want the other POV, like here's the hero romantic lead that we never get to see in his head in the main series. If you want some scenes from his POV, sign up for the newsletter. And that works very well. I can tell which extra ones are super effective of those because people will email me because they couldn't get it. The technology is still not perfect, right? A lot of stuff goes through those spam folders and things. They're like, I need this. So I know that one was good because people care that they signed up for the newsletter and it never came. So that's at the core. I'm always trying to get more fans onto the newsletter. I'm not as good about it. I used to do something for every series. And now when you sign up, you get like 10 things. I figure some of that's good because it can get them interested in the series they haven't tried yet. So that's always at the core, whether it's spending money advertising book one or whether it's just a perma-free. With all my wide series that are in all the bookstores, I've got a book one free if it's five books or more. Since I've been releasing more into KU, those have fallen off, but they still are selling some, even though I may forget for a long time to try to get a BookBub. I don't get the BookBubs as much anymore, I have to say. My career is not dependent on BookBub in any way anymore. And it's not that I don't like them, they just don't like me as much anymore. Joanna: Yes, I mean, things have obviously changed. I found a blog post about the launch of my first novel back when it was called Pentecost in 2011. If people are interested, it's at thecreativepenn.com/firstnovel. And it's like there are all these posts about writing this novel and stuff. And that book launched at 340 in the whole Amazon.com store. This is before paid ads, this is before all of this stuff, right? And I was laughing going, gosh— How much effort does it take to launch a book into under 500 on the Amazon.com store now? I mean, it's just a completely different world, isn't it? Lindsay: Well, it's funny, because a lot of people are not happy that it's pay-to-play, right? You have to advertise probably to get any visibility on Amazon. And I'm like, well, when I started, there was no way to get visibility on Amazon, either, because there wasn't a way to advertise. And I did not have that experience. My books went out there and nobody bought them. And it wasn't until Book Three, like I managed to get a few sales. I still remember, thank you to the guy that runs the Fantasy Book Critic for reviewing one of my books. And I remember I got a bunch of sales on Smashwords from that. And it was like, yay! But it wasn't until I started putting stuff out for free, first, a short story, and later, I made Book One free when Book Three came out, that finally people started finding stuff. I will say, at least when I got started, the free list on Amazon was easier to find. And there was no Kindle Unlimited, so people that were budget conscious were definitely skimming through the free list to look for books. So things change, you know, but having that series, and at least for me, for fiction, is kind of core. And then you can figure out each year, there's some new way that you're going to try to sell that first book. Having that newsletter, continuing to build the fan base, of course, is the most reliable thing because those are all these people that are going to go out and buy your new book and support you. I'm thankful for them big time. I have a kind of quirky sense of humor. It's not for everyone, but the people that it's for, you know, I've had a lot of them say like, “Oh, you're my favorite author. I'm reading some other author now, but only because I'm waiting for your next book.” So it's good. It's hard to find your tribe, but over time, it's kind of cumulative. The efforts do pay off over time. Joanna: Yes, exactly. It is absolutely that. Now, before you mentioned phases of our careers and when we get bored with something, we try something new. So for example, a few years back, you created a new pen name, which you then outted, like it's not a secret pen name anymore. It was at the beginning, right. And you wrote more the steamy romance under that name. Looking back now, are you happy that you wrote under another name? Or has it just become more hassle than it's worth? As in you set up a second newsletter, you set up all that other stuff for another name. What are the pros and cons, I guess? What do you advise people now? Lindsay: I think it was worth it at the time. Like it was part of an experiment too. I wanted to see, like this was probably the end of 2014, like, can you still start from scratch and succeed? Because there were a lot of people saying you couldn't get started in 2014. And now people getting started like, ‘oh, I wish it was 2014.' So I don't regret it, but I actually probably will, I keep thinking about this, I need to get the covers redone, and I'll probably do Ruby Lionsdrake, that was the name, and Lindsay Buroker, and put them on my author page too. So people realize that, okay, these are something different, but they'll find them. I haven't done a new book for Ruby in probably like four years. So sales are like way fallen off, of course. Every now and then I mention, oh, by the way, I have these other books, and people are like, “you have a pen name?” And they'll go out and buy them. But if they can find them by searching me on Amazon, my regular name, I think, you know, because I still I thought they were good stories, most of them. There might have been a couple, you know, you get experimental. Like I have so much respect for romance authors that can keep writing basically the same formula, in that he and she get together and they have the same kind of sex. Joanna: I mean, some people do she and she, or he and he, or a whole tribe or the harem. Lindsay: But whatever you start doing, you have to do that thing, or your readers are like, I'm not interested in that, and it flops. You get kind of locked in with romance, I feel like. Whereas maybe some genres are a little more accepting of straying a little bit from exactly what they thought they signed up for. But yeah, I was like, oh, let's do a threesome in this book, why wouldn't you, and my readers were like, what? Joanna: Oh, we don't want that! Lindsay: Yeah, that was like the least well-rated. So I did it, I did a couple series with them, and then I was ready to go back to my main stuff. One of the reasons I had started it was because I felt like I might be publishing too often under my regular name because I started writing more quickly at that point. So that was another one of the reasons. I thought, well, I'll alternate. I'll do the pen name and then my regular name. But yeah, at this point, I'm like, nobody cares. They'll just catch up when they catch up, or some of them read a book a day, and they'll read it and be like, when's the next one coming out? So nobody seems to care as much. There was also a lot of negative, like people talking about, ‘oh, if you write fast, you must be just throwing out crap.' So that might have been in the back of my head too, like, oh, I shouldn't do more than a book every three or four months. Joanna: Are you over that now, do you think? Lindsay: Yeah, I just do whatever at this point. I think part of it is you get to a stage in your career, and also in your life, where you stop caring as much. You’re always going to have your detractors, right? And I just delete those emails these days. I used to feel you had to be really good and a good customer service person and write back some polite, well, thank you for sharing your opinion, I will take this into consideration. Now I'm like, delete. I don't have time, I don't have the bandwidth that I want to spend on responding to the critics. Joanna: Oh, I'm glad you said that. And people listening, I hope you can hear that we've been doing this for a while now, and I still have difficult days. Like today, I had a bit of a difficult day, I got a whole load of very negative comments on my blog. And my first response was, I was like, no, you're wrong, I want to argue with you. And then I was like, no, it's my blog. Delete, delete, delete. Lindsay: I know, there's a lot of blogs where they start to get more popular, and all of a sudden—well, not so much today, because who blogs anymore, right? Joanna: They are just show notes of the podcast. Lindsay: Yeah, they would just turn the comments off. And you're like, well, they got tired of dealing with it. So you can tell, you get more popular, and you probably get like 90 – 95% great feedback, love the books, you know, and then there's those couple. Joanna: And you only remember the difficult ones. So I went for a walk, and I was like, look, you think of all the people who are lovely and want this content, or whatever, this book or whatever, but it's the negative ones that are difficult to get out your head. I mean, I say things change, but are there any sort of things that you feel you haven't achieved? Like you've sold tons of books, you've made lots of cash. I mean— Are there things that you still want to achieve as an author? Lindsay: I will probably keep doing the same things, but I would still enjoy if somebody came and said like, hey, we'd like to do a movie, or a Netflix series, or something. And I know it'd be horrible because they're never true to the books. And all my fans would be like, oh, they're awful, the book was better, but I would enjoy it. That'd be kind of neat to have somebody make something. I think sort of fantasy and sci fi are really expensive to make, so I don't know what the odds are. Every now and then you hear somebody got picked up. And then will the movie ever get made? That's really rare, right? They'll option it, but not make it. So that would be fun, but it's not something that I can control. I'm not going to go knocking on doors and try to pitch my novel or hire someone to. That's not me. I'm very much, if they want it, they'll come to me and we'll talk. Joanna: I love this about you. I often use you as an example of a relaxed author who mainly focuses on writing. I mean, your main marketing is, like you said, releasing a series. And for you, that's like an eight-book series of over 120,000 words each or something. It's not like one of my series when they're like 60,000 words. So that's kind of one of the main things you've done. But you also said that you're writing less now, 5000 to 7000 words per day, as opposed to over sort of 10,000. Tell us how do you write. What is your writing process? And has that changed over time? Lindsay: Well, it's not very romantic, or what you imagine with writers, but I feel like I'm kind of a factory, I write my rough draft in maybe two or three weeks, do an editing pass, send it off to my beta readers, and then I start working on the next thing while they have it. And they'll send it back, and I do some tweaks and usually another quick editing pass, and send it to my editor, and get back to the other thing. By the time it's ready to go eventually to my typo hunters and Patreon and eventually out to Amazon for the exclusive stuff, I'm usually sending the next book off to the beta readers. So I just kind of keep cycling through, and maybe I take a few days off between projects here and there. I just keep things rolling along, and book cover artists and editors well in advance. I don't always know what they're going to get. Like the editor will be like, I wonder when I'm getting the summer? And I'm like, something, I'll keep you working. So they're very nice to be flexible with that stuff. As far as like ideas and sort of the process, this is one of the reasons I'm still writing a lot, is I still have like three or four ideas ahead that I want to get to. Like when I finish this series, I want to do this and this, and then I'm going to do a new sci fi. And so that's why I haven't really slowed down that much. And I figured someday, maybe, I don't know that I'll ever run out of ideas. I feel like some people are just like that. I try to mostly read other people's fiction in between my projects, because it gives me ideas. I'm just reading their story, and I'm like, oh, yeah, I would do that, but I would do it this way. And then I'm like, I should do that. Of course, I should write one like that. It's like, you're still working on another series, stop. You're not going to jump off right now and start that. I listen to nonfiction anytime, but for some reason, fiction, I just start reading somebody's book and I'm off on, ooh, this is what I want to do. So I have to be careful. Joanna: Do you still just sit down and type? Is that how you write? Or do you dictate? Lindsay: I do type. I have never gotten into dictation. I've tried it hiking, but my dogs have always been like, umm, no. I've always had like hunting breeds, I don't hunt, but they're that breed, and so they're always off. Like, I have to pay attention to them when I'm out there. Then there are so many errors when I've tried it that I'm like, what is this, when I tried to go back and do it. I think you just talked about this somewhere, you can do it on the nonfiction more easily than on the fiction. But I actually type pretty quickly, so I'm not sure, even if I got good at it. And then your voice gets tired. Like, I go to a conference or something and I'm dying after because I never have to talk to anyone as an introvert. Now and then you go out into the world and speak with people, but not like these long, extended things. So you end up having to kind of train your voice to be able to handle that much too. After so many years, I don't really think about the typing of the words, I'm just kind of seeing the story playing out in my head. And it makes for some interesting typos and stuff later. I tend to revert back to like the words I learned when I was younger, they're really drilled in there. And so if I learned something incorrectly, like which sheer to use, whether it's S-H-E-E-R, S-H-E-A-R. Yeah, my brain doesn't know that when I'm just writing the script for the story playing in my head. So I get a lot of errors. Thank goodness for my editors and beta readers. And every now and then they get some entertainment when I did not find the correct word or cannot remember. You know, ricocheted has two T's or is it one T? See, I can't even remember. Yeah, and who cares because we have editors, and we have ProWritingAid, and we have all of that. Joanna: Do you have a full-time editor and a full-time cover designer? Lindsay: Well, I think I give them enough work. Actually with my audiobook narrator I've joked like I paid her enough last year she could buy a new car. I mean, I know she pays her producer and stuff out of that too. Just like us, we have expenses beyond just the top line income we get. But I have people that I've been working with so long that they usually just make a slot for me every month, like my editor does. They're not full-time with me, but I definitely keep them busy. Joanna: For sure. And then just on health, I want to mention health because you said you're ‘a factory.' Lindsay: Is that not healthy, Joanna?! Joanna: It doesn't sound too healthy, Lindsay! How do you keep your factory-self healthy? Lindsay: Well, 5000 to 7000 words is about three hours of work, of solid work. You know as a writer you wander off often. so I'm not really working more than a normal day anymore. Like I used to early on because I was doing the writing, and the day job, and you're learning everything, and doing everything you can with marketing because just nothing's working in the beginning. It's just like, ah, how do I make this work? How do I sell books? Now it's more of a system, so I don't have to spend much time on the marketing side anymore. The writing is thing I enjoy the most, so it's less onerous. I actually get upset on days when like I have a couple appointments or something, and it's like, oh, I can't write, or it's going to be all broken up so it's just no good. I'm just not going to write that day. I love my days where I just don't have anything else to do and I can just have my laptop and get cozy with a dog under the blankets and work from an unergonomic position on the couch. Joanna: But you do walk with your dogs? Lindsay: I walk a lot. Like most of my health stuff is like from exercise. Like right now, my IT bands are all messed up. It's like, oh stop walking. The IT band is bad because I was running and walking so much I had plantar fasciitis, so I got a peloton and started riding, and like well, now I get the IT band thing from that. Joanna: You need a foam roller. Lindsay: I do all the things. I do all the trigger point and rolling and working on stuff. I do take breaks, but I find that a lot of times in the days where I'm trying to take off, I'm just like, oh, this stuff sucks. I'd rather be writing because usually you end up doing all your errands and things on your suppose it off day. I could be better about taking vacations though, but I always end up thinking about stuff. Like I said, once I start relaxing and reading somebody else's book, pretty soon I've got my phone out and I'm taking notes with ideas. So I'm not the best at that. Like I do try to have a good diet and exercise every day and make sure I'm not like sitting for hours and hours or anything like that. But I'm probably not the best model of work-life balance. You have to decide that, people have to decide that. Are you going to have work-life balance or are you going to be successful? Like, it's really rare for somebody that's really chill and just working a little bit when they feel motivated to also be successful and reach their financial goals. I guess we don't want to believe that, especially some generations don't want to believe that, but you have to pick. Like, which do you want? It's very rare for somebody to really get both. Joanna: I think that is a good tip. And I mean, I certainly have worked harder since I left my day job. Lindsay: Well, that's just it. I used to work like three hours a day when I was doing blogging and writing content. I made money from Amazon ads, or not Amazon, but Amazon affiliate programs and other affiliate programs and Google AdSense ads. And I used to work a lot less and play a lot more World of Warcraft. Joanna: You gave that up, didn't you? Lindsay: I had to give it up. I was too addicted. So I had to give it up to start finishing books. I actually used to work less, but I was less happy because I was writing about crap I didn't care that much about. Like, I was able to work from home, so that was cool, but it wasn't fulfilling writing. Like I really enjoyed that I can tell stories for a living now, but that's the trap. Once you're doing what you love, you never stop working. You want to just keep doing it. I talk about like retiring, I really just say, this my goal where I'll consider myself completely financially independent, and then I don't care about book sales and stuff, but I wouldn't stop writing. What else would you do? It's fun for you, and it helps other people. Like you get emails from people that are like, I'm having a really hard time, I just got through chemotherapy or lost somebody, and I really needed the laughs. So you feel like, oh, it's not just about me and how much money I can make, I'm actually helping people in a small way. Joanna: Yes, it's an escape from your life into a story. And I totally agree with you. I mean, you and I have also always been interested in money and finance and investing. And this is not any kind of investment advice, we're not financial advisors, blah, blah, blah, but both of us have always thought about that side of things. We've never just said, right, this is cashflow money. We have also tried to put money away in investments, in like property, and you've done more of that than me. So when we talk about retirement, I guess like you say, we're not talking about giving it all up, but we might change the amount of time on it. Would you even bother book marketing if you were financially independent? Lindsay: I'd probably do what I'm doing now, which is emailing the newsletter, maintaining the newsletter, and then throwing some money into Amazon ads. That's sort of in the last couple of years about all I've done for that stuff. Maybe I would write less, I probably would, but I don't know, we'll see. It’s not like I couldn't slow down now, but I haven't yet. Like I said, there are always like four things waiting in the wings that I want to work on. So, I don't know, it's hard to say. I always, as somebody, and I know you don't have kids either, and then I don't have siblings or anything like that, and I'm not married. So I've never had a safety net, so I've always been conscious of that and it's that's what's made me like okay, while the getting is good, get—whatever the saying is—while you can, make extra to put away for the future. In America, we have to Social Security, but it's pretty lame, so I don't want to depend on that. Joanna: I don't think you're going to need that! It's interesting because you're exactly right. I mean, this is another thing that's missing really in the community is dead indie author estate management, which is interesting. I was very interested that Justin Bieber, the Beeb, is one of the musicians who has sold his entire backlist. Now he's a young man, like he's in his 30s, I guess. So he's got the rest of his life, he can literally just say, well, it's day one, and I'm going to start all over again. So he sold his IP, and everything in the future, I guess is his again. What are your thoughts on licensing or even packaging up and selling your IP as a backlist? Or what are we going to do with dead indie authors like ourselves at some point? Lindsay: Yeah, it is a question mark. Like, obviously, in his case, he's super popular. So there's a lot of money there. In our case, I don't know, because there's so much content being put out right now. I don't know how many books that we're producing are going to really outlive us. You know, even when you look back in the 20th century, there were so few books that remained in print and became kind of perennial things that the publishers kept selling, or the estates did. I'm not saying it can't happen, especially if you've got somebody that would take over, maybe even keep publishing new titles under your name, like if you had a kid or something. But yeah, it's a little bit of a question mark when you don't have somebody. Like, right now, I'm just like, somebody's going to get my passwords and like they can do what they want. I don't want to say I don't care, but I'm maybe realistic in believing that. I see how much things drop off when I stopped publishing, and I'm like, well, if I stopped publishing for a year, or three or four years, how much can Amazon ads alone, or whatever, keep things going? And maybe there'd be some, but I don't know that it would be at such a level that it's worth having somebody full-time managing your estate. And I don't know, like, if somebody came and said, “Hey, I want to buy your backlist,” maybe I'd entertain that. I don't know that I've ever had a hit or been popular enough that that's going to happen. Joanna: I also think you were a very quiet success. Partly because you're an introvert and you don't particularly care or you don't want fame or attention. You'd rather just stay quiet where you are. But you're very successful. And I feel like at some point, a bit like these music industry people have been going around buying backlists, that's going to be the future. Especially if you think about how big publishing is, the Penguin Random House thing, they're not allowed to buy Simon and Schuster. I know a lot of indie authors who have had offers for their backlists. And most of them say no, because they know how much money they can make over the next few decades if things continue as they are. But given how fast you can write, like you said, if someone gave you a good offer for a chunk of cash, then I don't know, why not? Lindsay: Well, maybe, but would it be a good offer? Because publishers never want to give you very much. Joanna: It'd have to be a good offer. That's what I mean. I presume the Beeb got a decent offer. Lindsay: I would think so. I'm also like, I don't want a whole lot. Like, I'm just like, what would I do? You know, I just want to make sure I don't need anything in retirement, and that I don't have to like step down my standard of living. So that's one point. But I'm almost there now, so I'm like, what am I going to do with $10 million, or something? I'm like, well, I'll buy some more dividend stocks, I guess. I actually kind of geek out on that stuff. Right now, I'm planning, well, what charities do I leave stuff to eventually? And maybe you find a charity that they can manage your IP. Maybe there'll be more of an industry around this stuff going forward. Like, I feel like it's still hard to find somebody who can run your Amazon ads effectively. But things are evolving, maybe the AIs will run our estates, and they want to charge a fee. Joanna: Yeah, well, I mean, and again, totally another topic, but I have sort of postulated a blockchain where if you set things up right on blockchain and have smart contracts, that should just be able to go to whatever wallet you set up in the future. So it could be more automatic in the future than it is now. [Covered in my book, Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, and Virtual Worlds.] Whereas if you go to these agencies, they're literally manually still running all these reports and sending out money, but that's completely unrealistic for the future. I mean, so many interesting things have happened since we've known each other, and so much ahead. So just as we finish up now— Anything you're particularly excited about other than dividend stocks!? Lindsay: This is funny. This is actually why I watch your show because you're so positive. And I'm a bit of a glass-half-empty person, like I feel there's a lot of collective anxiety in the world right now about everything. So it's hard for me to pick, well, what's happening that's super exciting. Like I like that there are more tools, so especially new indie authors that don't have money for editor and cover designer, they're going to be able to go to whatever AI and go make me a cover, and it's going to be good enough. I guess I'm excited to, I don't know, be more introverted going forward and maybe eventually back off answering emails. I still like that, and the fans like it, so it's hard. I think you've tried to get away from answering emails at one point too. Joanna: It didn't work out really. Lindsay: Yeah, it's hard to find somebody. You know, the readers get so excited sometimes. Some of them are so excited when you answer them, and, you know, write something that says you read their email. So it's hard to want to just push that off on someone else. I think there are just more tools coming along, and it's going to be a lot easier to just sort of focus on the thing you like and that you're really good at. And like, I already do only auto ads, almost exclusively, for Amazon. And like, there's people that they're in there making their 5000 keywords. I'm like, well, if that's working for you, great. But honestly, I get charged more when I try to pick keywords than if I just let the auto ads run and give it a max bid. And it's doing pretty good, but I obviously don't have to worry too much about the budget. I find that if you're selling enough, you get organic sales too, so it kind of evens things out. If you're doing $5 a day or something, you're not going to get any charts, and you're not going to get any organic sales, so you have to be really careful about what you're spending. I'm seeing all this stuff improving and getting easier. So you no longer have to be a marketing major, as well as an author, and even managing the finances and everything gets easier. There are so many more tools these days for that stuff. So that's one thing, I guess I'm enjoying watching where things are going and finding more tools to help us. Joanna: Where can people find you and your books online? Lindsay: LindsayBuroker.com, I need to update that. Joanna: And you mentioned the Six Figure Authors might return again. Lindsay: Well, for like a one-off, I want to do something positive, like how to handle the recession in a happy way. Like how to keep the books selling. Because I am still seeing books are doing well. Maybe there are more KU reads right now than purchases, or maybe people who are wide are finding that their free stuff is doing better and there are a little fewer sales, but those times don't last. So just survive, and then we can thrive in the future. Joanna: Fantastic. well, we will look forward to that. Thank you so much for your time. It was lovely to talk. Lindsay: Thank you and happy writing everyone.The post Writing And Investing For A Long Term Indie Author Career With Lindsay Buroker first appeared on The Creative Penn.

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Writing And Investing For A Long Term Indie Author Career With Lindsay Buroker

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