The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers

How do you turn an idea into a poem? What are the publishing options for poets, and how does marketing work? Rishi Dastidar talks about his life in poetry and provides tips for taking your creative work further. In the intro, What Readers Want in 2022 [ALLi]; Ads for Authors (affiliate link); Submission on AI and copyright [ALLi]; How will Creatokia publish NFT books? [Creatokia Podcast]; AI for Voice series [VO Boss Podcast]; This episode is sponsored by ScribeCount.com, which provides automated sales aggregation from multiple publishing platforms, all combined into user-friendly charts and features, accessible in seconds. Whether you publish wide or exclusive, ScribeCount allows authors to customize reports to fit their individual needs. Check it out at ScribeCount.com. Rishi Dastidar is a poet, journalist, copywriter, and brand strategist, as well as the editor of The Craft: A Guide to Making Poetry Happen in the 21st Century, and co-editor of Too Young, Too Loud, Too Different: Poems from Malika's Poetry Kitchen. 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 sound, images and word phrases affect Rishi’s poetryTips and tools for capturing ideasCan we trust our subconscious to provide us with ideas?How to deal with dry creative periodsThe traditional publishing process for poetryThe performance side of being a poetPivoting to performing online during the pandemicThe benefits of writers’ collectives You can find Rishi Dastidar's books at online bookstores and on Twitter @betarish Transcript of Interview with Rishi Dastidar Joanna: Rishi Dastidar is a poet, journalist, copywriter, and brand strategist, as well as the editor of ‘The Craft: A Guide to Making Poetry Happen in the 21st Century,' and co-editor of ‘Too Young, Too Loud, Too Different: Poems from Malika's Poetry Kitchen.' We also both went to Mansfield College, at the University of Oxford back in the '90s. So it's been a while. Welcome to the show, Rishi. Rishi: Hi. Good to see you. And, yes, it hasn't been a while. We're not going to dwell on how many years precisely, I hope. Joanna: I know, it seems crazy. And it's funny because I always ask, my first question is tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. I still want to know that, but it's funny because I feel like I know you from a snapshot in time. And of course, things have moved on for both of us. Tell us about you and how you got into poetry. Rishi: I arrived at college with the intention that I was going to do some form of writing once I'd left, and I just had no real idea of what that might be. I ran around and did a lot of student journalism. I edited the student newspaper, edited the Student Handbook. And then after graduating, did a bit of journalism here and there. And that was fine. Then I found my way into copywriting for brands and making ads. That's the thing that really got me interested. That was all pottering along. And then, one day in about 2007, I had a proper Damascene moment in a bookshop in London, just off Oxford Street, where I picked up a book called Ashes for Breakfast by a German poet called Durs Grünbein. I started flicking through it, and I'd never seen language doing what it was doing on the page. It sounds really naïve and strange to say that now, but I'd never read any contemporary poetry until that point. I didn't know that you could do that with words on a page. I didn't know that you could not go to the right margin, I didn't know that you could leave lots of white spaces everywhere. I bought the book there and then. I was just completely entranced and completely hooked. I knew right at that moment that that was the thing that I really wanted to write. By the end of that week, I'd signed up for a course at City Lit, a college in London, the introductory to poetry course. That's where the journey really started for me. I've been pursuing it and trying to get better as a poet ever since. Joanna: Wow, I love that. I love how you said a Damascene moment, the pulling the book out, and your whole world was transformed. I love that. Because we know books can do that. You said about the words on the page, and you didn't know language could do that on a page. Of course, the layout on a page is only one aspect of poetry. So how does that shape the way you write? Are you thinking visually? Or are you thinking sounds? How do you think about poetry? Rishi: I'm going to give an annoying poet answer, which is, it depends on what you might be doing and what the language is doing at any given moment. Different poets will take a different view on this. For me, it generally always starts with a combination of a phrase that is doing something unexpected to me, new to me, and the poem will emerge out of that. The phrase will start to suggest itself, you maybe free write into it, you maybe start to put other things together. Generally, it's arresting, because it's also doing what? It's doing something that's visual. It's painting an image. I'll give you an example. Last night, I was mucking around with the phrase that was something around like, cardinal reminiscence bump. And, okay, that's just a three-letter word phrase. But you can hear within that there's something interesting sonically going on. And there's something interesting visually there as well. The idea of memory bumping up against itself. The poem will emerge out of those twin impulses, the exploration of that phrase, where the sound leads you, where that image leads you. You have to get out of the way a bit as well, just in terms of allow the poem to emerge, see where it comes out. Once you have that draft, then you can get into more of those issues around, ‘Okay, what's it doing on the page? Is there enough space? Does it need to be condensed up into one unit? Or doesn't need to breathe down the page? Do I need to give it more space?' You're then into issues and thinking about things like line breaks. How do I roll sense over the line? Where do I need to give it space to breathe? All those sorts of things. But it's hard to deconstruct in the moment that you're actually writing it or creating it. You just sort of have to let it happen. And then it's only after that you can then start to go back and go, ‘Ah, okay, so this needs to expand out more, this needs to be condensed more.' Joanna: So that phrase that you mentioned there, is that something that you heard?Where do you even find these phrases? Rishi: I'm very magpie-like in terms of how I'm going around the world and how I'm engaging with stuff that I read and hear. So that particular phrase is probably a misremembering of something that I read in ‘The New Yorker' last week, I think, an interview with Wes Anderson, the film director, and he was talking about some of the inspiration behind his new film, ‘French Dispatch.' Immediately, if something snags, you just have to write it down. Even better if you write it down incorrectly, because you're taking it into a new realm. It's not necessarily the case that a poem immediately emerges out of that phrase, but the subconscious bit of you is going, ‘Ah, there's something interesting there. I don't know what it is. I might not know what it is for 20 years, but I need to have it now.' So it's there in my bank of stuff to be revisited later on. I will do that with headlines, with taglines and ads, with broken bits of commentary that you might hear in sports matches, and news reports, in people's conversations that you might overhear. Poets are great eavesdroppers. Never be around a poet for too long because one ear is always on what someone else is saying because you know that there is something of interest going on there. And of course, there's always what we're looking at in and around the world as well. Trying to find ways of making the familiar unfamiliar, or defamiliarizing it, making it strange so you can actually get to a deeper or a different truth about it as well. Joanna: You mentioned the writing things down. I think writers are similar, whatever form you write in. Obviously, I write novels and short stories, but I write phrases down and lines and quotes in my Things app, which is on my phone. But also I use journals. Where do you write down things? How do you capture those ideas? Rishi: Oh, my system is so broken in terms of how it works. Right now, the most immediate thing is I have a little list app on my phone and that tends to be the first place where things get scribbled down. If I think that something longer is emerging in the moment, I will move it to the Notes app on the phone, and that will have a lot of stuttering first drafts on it. There is a work-in-progress notebook that always comes around with me and is currently in my jacket pocket. And then for stuff that I know, if I'm not going to do anything with right now, I have a bright orange notebook, sort of Moleskine type thing, which sits somewhere. That's my Spark book type thing where all those sorts of errant phrases that don't have a home yet, or ideas just sort of get parked. So that's there. Then I've got a drawer in my desk where fragments that could coalesce into bigger ideas, and sketches of poems or sketches of other projects, they tend to get shoved in there. And then there's some weird sort of triage system that happens as ideas gather along with each other and things will get pulled out the drawer and put to the one side of the desk and gradually out of all that something bigger starts to cohere together. I frankly have horrified myself just trying to describe that there. Joanna: You probably find this too, I'll write all this stuff down. And then so often, what I'm actually working on has no relationship to the stuff I might have written down. And then I might discover, years later, like I discovered the idea for my first novel, which I thought I'd had that idea in 2009. I found it in a journal from around 2003. So I'd had the idea before, I'd forgotten the idea, and then it had come back in my subconscious somehow. Can we trust that the important things will come back even if we think we've lost them? Rishi: I think so. I think it's also a case of trusting that they will come back when the time is right for them to come back and that you as a writer have sufficient by way of skill, ability, stamina, desire to actually get that idea out there. I'm always more worried if it feels like I'm not coming up with ideas. That's when it's like, ‘Oh, has the well run dry?' You go through periods like that where nothing is necessarily firing your interest or whatever. But gradually, it does cycle back round. Especially for a poet, planning for a poet is almost an anathema. I really don't know what the books look like until there's a certain sense that you've nearly got everything that you need. And it can start to cohere into a bundle that looks like 60, 70 pages that starts to talk, where the poems start to talk to each other. That's not a rational process at all. That is very much a subconscious emotional process more than anything else. Joanna: You did just mention about a bit of a worry if you aren't coming up with ideas, and as we speak, we're still in a pandemic, and a lot of people have struggled. I've struggled because I get a lot of ideas from my travels, all my books are about my travels. My well ran quite dry. That was the first time I'd been worried about it really in the last decade. How do you deal with those dry periods? How do you kickstart things? Do you actively go looking for stuff? Rishi: I think it's slightly a delicate balance of actually is their emotional energy and bandwidth. So a lot of the over the last 18 months, 2 years, it hasn't felt as fertile or productive a time, in part because it's been so busy at my day job. It's not felt that there has been much space for things to leak in, like moving around, going to different cities is a lot of where my inspiration and observations comes from. So that has been hard. There is always reading to be done. There is always learning from other writers to be done. And so even knowing that, okay, I might not be writing as much right now. But it's a chance to actually catch up on so many great books that have been published over how many years. The more that you read, the more that you will get fired up again because you're seeing what other people are doing, how they're experimenting, how they're addressing different subject matter. And, again, the process is not direct, but someone will do something and you've launched that away and go, ‘Okay, that's an interesting way of attacking that subject' or, ‘Okay, that's an interesting way of tweaking that form. I haven't thought of that.' Even when it's not necessarily coming from you, you know that reading as your superpower means that you can always get something that will benefit you later on. Joanna: Absolutely. And then, this might be a difficult question, but when do you know when a poem is finished? Because I feel like the tinkering of language is something that poets enjoy so much. How do you know, yes, this poem is finished? Rishi: The cliché being that a poem is never finished, it's only ever abandoned. It's different for every poet. I can characterize it no better than you have to have your spidey sense working. And it sounds mystical nonsense to say it, but the poem will generally tell you when it is finished. The best that I can characterize it as is that every poem has a certain type of energy. And what you're trying to do through the drafting process is maintain that energy, and make sure that the poem achieves what it wants to achieve within the space that you've given it. There is very definitely a point you will over-tinker, where you can take out one word too many, add one word too many change a piece of syntax or punctuation, and that energy starts to leak away. That's what I'm always looking for. Does it now feel enough on the page to me, or does it still have a liveliness and the spring to it that makes me still want to read it? And the frustrating thing is, you can't really formulize that. Sometimes it will take 17 drafts to get there. Sometimes you can be done in four, five. You just have to be alive and alert to that. And of course, that's just your judgment. I'm very fortunate to work with a brilliant editor, Jane Commane at Nine Arches Press. You end up relying a lot on that judgment as well because they're coming to it cold. They're not going to be as close to it as you are and so they will be able to see things which are screamingly obvious in terms of that need to be changed that are wrong as well. So the process is never just wholly reliant on you, but it's sort of 90% reliant on you. You have to develop that sense of judgment that the thing is done. Joanna: You mentioned a bit ago about the 60, 70 pages, which is when you have a collection, I guess, and poems start to talk to each other somehow. I got your poetry collection Ticker-tape and was having a look at that. And obviously, you play with these different forms on the page, I got it as an ebook. As an ebook, we can't control the look of the page as much as you can in a physical form. So what's your process of publication, because a lot of people listening are both independent authors, but also have traditional contracts and things like that. And we all do different formats. How does your traditional publishing process work? Rishi: I've reached the stage in my relationship with Jane where I trust her implicitly in terms of the feedback and the steer that she gives me. So I will always listen to her. Generally, I will have a loose idea in my head in terms of a theme, and arc, an idea that a book might want to carry. And then it's a process of roughly pulling things together that might speak to that. I do that in quite a quick flurry. And then I email that very rough first manuscript to Jane very hastily, and just basically saying, ‘Take it off my hands, I don't want to see it again.' And because the lead times in poetry are so long and slow, there's a lot of time for things to basically sit and mature, and wait. So if I give you an indication, we're working on my third book at the moment, and that's not due to come out until 2023. Joanna: Wow. Rishi: We've got a lot of time just to actually play about with stuff, take poems out, reorder stuff, rewrite. But we agreed that we're not going to touch it for a year. So the manuscript is just sitting and waiting. When we do come to it next year, we're going to attack it with a fresh vigor and come to it cold. That's an indication of just one editorial relationship. The good thing about poetry, of course, is that, especially now, the means of getting out there, and getting your work out there, and getting to market, are so much more wide and wildly varied than they ever have been. I work in a relatively traditional manner, directly with an independent publisher based up in Coventry. It's a non-agented relationship, so I was fortunate that I sent Jane some poems and she liked them so much, she wanted to publish the book, which became Ticker-tape, and we've developed the relationship from there. There are plenty of other people that work in different ways that go to the web as their port of call. Of course, self-publishing, maybe using social media as another means, using YouTube as another means of getting work out there. How you publish and how you get to market is really ultimately dependent on what it is that you want to achieve, and what you feel the best form for your poems are. There are plenty of poets writing, for whom actually a book is not even close to being the end goal because the poem is the poem and actually standing up performing it, it hitting the air, that's the important thing, and the book is an afterthought. There are poets like me who, because we've come up through what's called the page tradition, the book is the object has always been the ultimate goal. We work towards that end instead. So it is sort of dependent on you as a poet to have an idea of what it is that you might want to do, and where you might want to take your work as well. Joanna: Before we started recording, you said about that you do spoken word, and you do go and perform in order to sell books, which I thought was really interesting. Tell us about the performance side of being a poet. Rishi: Especially in British poetry, there's always been this divide between people who've come up through what's called the page traditions, or people who've published in magazines, probably, studied creative writing, or English, or something like that. And people who've come up through what's known as performance of the spoken word, and there's a historic overlay of race and class in that divide as well, which is probably far too complex to get into right now. Broadly speaking, and this goes back to the poet's route is the traveling troubadour, going round, bringing lyric and song to village as you go around in the middle ages. Broadly speaking, even if you're a poet who is much more literary in approach, and bent, and wants to be known for the books, the number of books that you sell is so much smaller than compared to almost any other type of literature that is published, that you just cannot rely on publishing a book and it being in bookshops. And that's it. You have to go out and meet people. And you have to go out and read the work. You have to go and organize readings, visit book shops, visit poetry nights, basically say yes to whoever will have you. So you have to learn some skills and some aspects of performance. Even if you don't call yourself a performance poet, you have to learn those things of being able to project, being able to hold a room, being able to very crudely know how to use a microphone without breaking people's eardrums. There is a level at which you have to have some degree of stagecraft, some degree of I know how to construct a setlist, I know how to take people from A to B, in a given moment, I know how to make 10 minutes of time work, even if you don't think of yourself as someone who is comfortable or natural on stage. I've certainly found that out of everything, that's been the aspect of craft that I've had to learn the most over the last couple of years, because I'm acutely aware as well that people are coming to our poetry night out of a welter of other entertainment options that they could be doing that night. They could be in watching ‘MasterChef' or watching the football or something on Netflix. The fact that people have chosen to spend time with poets and poetry, there's an element to which you have to give them a degree of show. But that doesn't mean that it has to be insubstantial. It can still be deep and serious, but there is that respect that you have to give the audience by turning up and giving your work the respect it deserves as well when it hits the air. So not mumbling, not keeping your eyes down on stage, that sort of stuff. Joanna: Have you learned that through practice and doing things, or have you done courses and things on performance? Rishi: It's mostly through learning as doing it, and sinking, or swimming, whatever it might be. I've done a couple of courses to work on stuff like my breath, and just to feel more comfortable projecting and being able to take control of a stage. I'm also fortunate that as part of Malika's Kitchen, that collective, Malika Booker, the founder, Roger Robinson, the other founder, they're two of our great poets, but they're two great performers as well. I've worked with Roger and Malika in the past to actually build up my confidence in terms of how to take hold of the stage. There was a reading that I did maybe getting on for about seven, eight years ago. Malika and Roger were directing that, it was like the soundtrack. That was basically a 2-hour masterclass for me in terms of how to take them and take them on the first stage for a 300 seat audience. Some of the things that Roger told me that day, I still use it when I'm preparing a performance just in terms of keying and what I need to key into emotionally to be able to then transfer that to the audience. How I need to hold someone's eye in the audience, how I need to find someone to direct the performance to for the evening, whether it's five minutes, whether it's half an hour, all those things you have to have at least a consideration of. It's definitely something that I've mostly learned on the job. I have had horror shows. I've had gigs where one person has turned up and, oh, my goodness, that's a tough night for all of us concerned. I've done my time standing on tables in pubs when the football's been on and tried to get attention that way. Everyone has to go through that sort of apprenticeship, without fail, and you have to tune into the absurdity of it and run with it or you don't, I think. Joanna: I've always remembered you as someone with good humor, and an ability to laugh. And my memories of you are laughing. It might have been because we were in the bar so often! Rishi: Yeah, sounds true. As serious as poetry is, and as much as it changes lives, and as much as it is an investigation of language doing different things under pressure, there is an inherently absurd aspect to it as well. Of course there is, I think, and you have to lean into that a bit. Because very few of us are going to be geniuses at the level of Penny or Hughes. For the rest of us who are toiling in their shadows, you might as well enjoy it. Otherwise, why are you doing it? That's not to detract from the seriousness of the work, or the seriousness of what you are saying. But I think as much as you want to move the audience, you want to also leave them with their hearts a little lighter as well. I think laughter is a useful tool in your armory to be able to do that. Joanna: Absolutely. Especially laughing at yourself when things are difficult, which I think we all need to do. You mentioned that obviously performing in person. How can poets and other writers embrace the audio and video opportunities available now online? Especially with the pandemic. Have you been doing a lot more online stuff in terms of multimedia? Rishi: Yes. Come March 2020, it was very acute in terms of just the juddering way in which everything moved online. I felt that very much because my second book was due to come out of the week that we went into lockdown. So my launch party, all the gigs that I had lined up for that first couple of weeks, all canceled. If producers were agile enough, some shifted online, but we were very much feeling our way, and that spirit of experimentation carried through. So I did things like, on the night of publication, I did a 20-minute set on Twitter via a periscope, just literally holding my phone up and just barking down that to the 50 of people who wanted to just spend Thursday night being shouted out by man in the crowd. The last 18 months has seen iterations of doing that sort of thing. I think you've seen that people very rapidly have found ways of working that worked for them. It's been very beneficial in terms of accessibility for people, both in terms of the fact that you can now provide captions, and the fact that you can get audiences but also perform for audiences in a much bigger locale than you ever could before. I've done gigs for American audiences which would have been a lot harder even three years ago, just in terms of not having to travel and so you're suddenly opened up to a different thing. Performing down the line does bring its own set of challenges. I think the energy that you need to actually convey the personality that you might want to project down a Zoom call is actually a lot greater than you might anticipate than if you were in the room. I find online readings actually more draining than offline readings. Learning how to make the most of the tech on the platform has been hard. Some people are better at it than others, even things like do you actually invest in ring lights? Can you actually make sure that your laptop is set up in the right height so that your eye line is level, as opposed to looking up or looking down? Things like that people have had to learn on the go, and people are getting better at it as well. The best thing that you can do is, as ever, say yes to stuff, and then work out how to do it as you go along. And not being scared of this stuff. And just go, ultimately, what's the worst that happens? You read some poems into a Zoom call, some people send some emoticons and emojis in the chat and then on you go. It's not as scary as it first feels, I think is the main thing. Try and to embrace it. Joanna: I think that's great. I do agree with you that I think people didn't realize how much energy you do expend it through a screen because you're still trying to project, in fact, you have to project energy through the screen in the same way that you would in person. I think a lot of people understand that now because people are like, ‘Oh, I just can't do Zoom calls all day, it's so tiring.' I feel like ‘normal people' in quotation marks now understand this as well as we do. Rishi: Yes, absolutely. There's something about most performances happening in different space. So you're going somewhere, you have that time to prepare, you have that time to get to that headspace, as opposed to say, in my case, I'm working from my study. And then I maybe have five minutes. I have to try and get into the performance headspace. It's a weird sort of decompression. If I could do things, again, I think I would be a lot stricter with, okay, if I am performing tonight online, I need to treat it as I would have done a physical gig and so stopped work earlier so I have time to decompress from that. I can then build the energy up to do the performance again, as opposed to at 7:00 need to log off the work, email, and jump onto the Zoom call. These are things that we've only discovered as we've had to do them, basically. Hopefully, it leads to much more by way of performance opportunities and differing modes of doing things as well. I really do hope that more producers will make more events hybrid. I'd love to be able to do more live in-person readings, but with people dialing in from all different parts of the world so you actually have this lovely mix of people and voices in the room but elsewhere around the world. That seems like one of the things that we should take away from the last two years that you can expand the possibilities. Joanna: Absolutely. You talked about the poetry collection, Malika's Poetry Kitchen. I love this idea of The Writers Collective, which I feel is not so common in perhaps the longer form book space. Tell us about Malika's Poetry Kitchen and how you work together in a collective. Rishi: Malika started Kitchen…oh, we're celebrating the 20th anniversary of The Collective actually. So that's when the book came out. We've been doing lots of events in the weekend over the last couple of months to celebrate that fact. When Malika started writing back in 2000, 2001, one of the things she quickly felt was that there was a definite lack of support for writers like her who were just starting, but also in particular writers of color who were just starting as well. The poetry establishment at the time was very sniffy, very snobby, and had effectively placed poets of color in that box, which is, ‘Okay, you are just stand up performers, you're spoken word people, you don't have a sense of craft on the page. We're not particularly that interested in helping you advance what you're writing and how you're writing.' Kitchen started from Malika and Roger wanting to change that, and in a very DIY way, saying, ‘Okay, we're going to set up something that means that we can help ourselves.' It started in Malika's house in Brixton. Malika and Roger invited a couple of other poets over who are looking for a similar thing. And it's grown from there. Basically, each week, one of them would organize some sort of workshop exercise where they'd read, they'd work through different poems, they'd bring crafts, they'd workshop those. From those small roots, it's just grown, and grown, and grown, to the point at which poets from around the world come and give masterclasses to people in the group. So many brilliant poets, who we read now who are winning awards and prizes have come through and been members of The Collective at the point. It's always been a free-floating thing. So you come and you're a member for a bit, and then you move on, or you're sort of a more long-standing member like I might be, eight, nine years or so now. The key thing has always been mutual support. And the idea that we all learn from each other. Crucially, we're not trying to impose our tastes on each other, or all trying to write in a similar voice. If you look at the book, and when you read the book, you'll see that of the 70 odd poems in that, not one sounds like the other, which is just a testament to the fact that what we're there to do when we round the table, is make everyone's work better, and help them achieve what they're trying to achieve in the work. But we're not trying to impose our own aesthetic standards on it. And through it, people have developed their skills in leading workshops, developing their performance skills, just developing their confidence and their ability to inhabit the position that says, ‘I am a writer, I'm a poet,' which is often quite a scary thing for people to actually take on as well. I think there is a part, yeah, and I think why is it that there's more sort of poetry help in that form. I think there is a practical thing here. In two hours, we can get through a lot of work, we can get through a lot of people's poems as opposed to looking at longer pieces over a longer term. I think we have more agility and fluidity when thinking about that, as opposed to thinking about big chunks of pros. Joanna: Absolutely. You mentioned what the poetry establishment was like back in the early 2000s. Do you think things have changed now? In one way, we see some things changing in some ways. Do you feel that the poetry establishment has changed and is more open now? Rishi: Yes, it has. If I give you an example of how dire things were, the Arts Council commissioned Bernadine Evaristo in fact to write a report on the state of British poetry back in 2005. What she found was that only 1% of the collections published in the previous year had been written by writers of color, which was, in terms of representation was just stunning, a stunning fact, just one word, just gobsmacking. Since that point, there has been a lot of money and effort put into bringing forward and bringing through writers of color. I've been a beneficiary of some of those schemes, so the cards on the table there. I think there has been over the last 15 years in particular, an acceptance that if your conception of what passes for poetry in Britain, is one that is very white, middle class, university-educated, you're missing out on the wide richness of what is going on. To the point at which now we're seeing writers of color winning awards, getting their dues in terms of wider coverage as well. Roger Robinson winning the T. S. Eliot, a couple of years ago, Malika won the Ford prize for best single poem a couple of years ago, Kayo Chingonyi, being nominated for Forward and T. S. Eliot prizes. I should stress these aren't just mere tokenistic representations. These are brilliant pieces of work coming through that are finding their readers, winning the plaudits, because they are so good. But there is 15 to 20 years of graft that underlies that success, and opening doors, battering down doors when they won't be opened. I say to people now that if you are writing a history of British poetry, you can't tell it credibly now without telling that story of how Black and Asian writers have contributed massively to it over the last 20, 25 years. I'm positive that there has been change. There's always plenty more to be done, but I feel like the trend is going in the right direction, certainly. Joanna: That is great and good to hear. And that poetry collection is Too Young, Too Loud, Too Different for people that are interested. Tell us where people can find you and everything you do online. Rishi: I mostly live on social media. Twitter is normally the best place to find me because that is where I hang out. And that is where I share most of my stuff. I'm @betarish. I write occasionally for ‘The Guardian.' So you'll sometimes find me there. A route of doing poetry reviews, I do stuff for ‘The Rialto' magazine. On occasion, Rialto is one of our best poetry magazines in the UK. So that's always worth a dive in when it comes out, which is three times a year. I'm sometimes lurking on Instagram, but that's mostly cat pictures. Joanna: Tell us the names of your books so that people who buy your books can get them. Rishi: Oh, well, that's very kind, the invitation to flaunt myself. But yes, as you mentioned, Ticker-tape was my debut and that came out in 2017. And then my second book Saffron Jack came out in March 2020. And they're both published by Nine Arches Press. Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Rishi. That was great. Rishi: Not at all. Lovely to speak to you again.The post The Craft And Business Of Poetry With Rishi Dastidar first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can we recognize self-doubt and create alongside it as part of the author journey? How can we write with confidence and double down on what we love the most? William Kenower talks about these aspects and more. In the intro, planning for 2022 [Ask ALLi]; Your publishing options [6 Figure Authors]; Need an audiobook narrator? Use the Findaway Marketplace; The Successful Author Mindset. 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. William Kenower is the author of nonfiction books on writing, the editor-in-chief of ‘Author Magazine' and the host of the Author2Author podcast. His latest book is Everyone Has What it Takes: A Writer's Guide to the End of Self-Doubt. 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 A winding route to writing and publishing Validation — and the need to find it within ourselves The different ways that writers experience self-doubt Learning to recognize self-doubt and create, anyway When is self-doubt justified, and what can you do about it? Does everyone have what it takes to be a writer? Commonalities among successful writers You can find William Kenower at WilliamKenower.com and on Twitter @wdbk Transcript of Interview with William Kenower Joanna: William Kenower is the author of nonfiction books on writing, the editor-in-chief of ‘Author Magazine' and the host of the ‘Author2Author' podcast. His latest book is Everyone Has What it Takes: A Writer's Guide to the End of Self-Doubt. Welcome to the show, Bill. William: Thank you, Joanna. It's good to be here. Joanna: It's great to have you on the show. Tell us a little bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. William: Writing, I got into very young. I knew the arts were really the only path I was interested in. And though I dabbled in theater pretty seriously in my early to mid-20s and I went to Hollywood briefly with the idea of being a screenwriter. Prose was really where I was most comfortable and writing and prose was where I was most comfortable. And so that was really always the plan for me. I knew people did want to be things besides artists, but it was hard for me to understand why. It just seemed like the best possible way to earn a living if you could do that. I was singularly set on that. As far as publishing though, when I thought about being a writer, publishing was simply what other people did; it was like a giant oven run by agents and editors, into which I inserted a manuscript and out popped mysteriously, a fully baked book. I didn't see myself as getting into publishing. Although interestingly, Joanna… Actually, I was thinking about this beforehand in a way because I know this podcast, a lot of your listeners are indie published. The theater I did when I was in my early 20s, my brother and I put on a sketch comedy show and it came about because I was doing poetry readings that were very theatrical, and my brother and I said, ‘Let's do a show.' And part of the reason we did it was I was writing stories and poems and sending them off to magazines and was not enjoying. Of course, I just didn't like the rejection, but also, I was frustrated with the gatekeeper set up, what I thought of as the gatekeeper. I thought, ‘Well, why does this one person determine who gets to read my stuff?‘ It seemed weird. When I found myself standing on a stage because it was sort of like I was going to just art spaces and areas where anybody could just get up and do stuff, sort of like open mic type situations. I thought, ‘Well, why not just find some place where I put the thing up and anybody who wants come can come and they can decide if they like it or not.' So it was essentially self-publishing theater. I wrote it, my brother and I directed it. We found the venue, we put up the posters and people started coming. So it was independent. It made sense to me at the time. Joanna: I would also argue you're a podcaster and this is publication. We create a product with our voices. We hit publish and no one else gets in the way, right? How long have you been podcasting now? William: I've been podcasting for 10 years. And even before that, this is what I was going to say, is I was writing and submitting. And remember when I started writing fiction, this was in the early '90s. Self-publishing was such a hard sell because it didn't have the digital world, right? Joanna: And there was a big stigma back then. William: And it was a stigma around it. I just had zero interest in it. So I was wanting to publish traditionally and not having much luck. When I started ‘Author Magazine,' I was publishing an essay every day. I would write one a day. But I was the editor-in-chief. I was the gatekeeper. So I was essentially self…not essentially. I was self-publishing. It's just that I had an established audience. That was really where I found my voice. One of the challenges that people have around publishing, and it's a pretty… It's not even disguised, the idea of getting published traditionally, which I am now. That's what I do, latest last few books were. But there's a wanting of validation. That's a big reason people go towards the publishers. They want that validation and they feel that they'll get it. They'll feel that validation in themselves when a New York publisher says, ‘Yeah. We'll take your book.' I don't think you can get that from other people until you give it to yourself. When I published those essays without any gatekeeper, without even barely a proofreader, frankly, I didn't finally find someone who would proofread them because I was putting them out so fast. I was saying to myself, ‘I don't need to look to anybody.' That really taught me how to work with traditional publishers to find the correct emotional set point to work with people in the traditional publishing world that I really got from being essentially self-published. Does that make sense? Joanna: Absolutely. You mentioned validation there and, of course, this book. You've got a number of books, but this one is about the end of self-doubt and I feel what's so interesting in the traditional industry is there's a lot of rejection, as you mentioned, which amplifies self-doubt even further. So let's get into it. What are the different aspects of when you might feel that way? What are the different ways that authors might experience self-doubt? William: I think it's basically writing is like a task designed to confront your own feelings of self-doubt because you sit down and you face a blank page and really all you know is that you're interested in the story. That's all you know about the story, that you are interested. You don't know who else is going to be interested in it. You have to trust the fact that your interest in it is enough to, A, that that story is worthy of your attention and that if you're interested, someone else might be interested, but it's not known. That is a level of faith that you need because all you have is what's inside you. So that's where it starts. The fact that you're interested has to be enough. When I'm giving these talks, it's like, that's all Shakespeare got. That's all Emily Dickinson, or Toni Morrison, or Stephen King, or Joanna Penn. That's all you get. Eventually, people start saying, ‘Oh, I really liked your stuff.' That's nice, but it doesn't start there. Even if you get praise as a young person, is that step to professionalism? Does the praise you get from your teachers or parents or whoever, does it translate? Will it translate? And it's very easy to question whether it would. So I think it begins right away. It happens every time you reach the end of a sentence and you're not sure what comes next. This is a common experience. You're riding along, it's going great, and then you're not sure what comes next. That is the moment where you also have to deal with self-doubt because you have to trust that the next idea will come, the next sentence will come. And if you begin to doubt that it will come, it won't. Period. As long as you are holding doubt that the next idea will come, it's like you're holding the door to where ideas come from closed. So you have to be in a constant trusting state to allow the ideas to come. Because if you knew the whole thing, you wouldn't write it. You're writing to discover. And then, of course, rejection. I'm the editor of ‘Author Magazine' so people send me ideas for articles. And I say no to some of them, to a lot of them. Sometimes it's because they're just not the kind of thing I want to publish. Sometimes it's too similar to something I have published recently. A lot of times it's because the person writing the essay doesn't really have a grasp on what makes a strong essay of this kind, particularly for what I'm looking for. And so I have to say no. Sometimes I try to guide them, but it doesn't really mean anything about them, but it's very easy to assume when someone doesn't want your work, that they don't want you, that no one would want your work, that your work has no value. I liken it to relationships. I'm married. I have been married for a long time, but I used to date a lot when I was a young fellow and I came to realize that when people break up, I really came to see it as the person who ended it, if it was one person, simply was the first one to recognize the relationship wasn't working. I do not believe the relationship could be great and one person wants out. I always think they just simply saw, this isn't working. And so they ended it. I think that publishing is like that. You're not looking for someone to validate you just the same way you wouldn't look for a boyfriend, or girlfriend, or husband, or wife so you can feel good about yourself. You want a companion, you want a friend, and a publishing experience is a relationship. In my case, if you're traditionally published, you need to find someone who's into what you're into, who gets it, who is as excited as you are. And that's a relationship. And that requires, Joanna, you to validate yourself, the value of what you're offering. Joanna: I think that finding someone who's into what you're into, it's the same as an independent author, but we're looking for readers. William: Yeah. It's the same thing. Joanna: As an indie, you have to find readers who were into what you're into. But it's interesting around self-doubt because what you've been talking about there is almost within the writing process. And, in fact, I have on my wall here, a little sign that says “trust emergence,” as in, something's going to emerge eventually if I just keep going through the page. But then there's also, I've written like 30-plus books now, and I'm going to write in a new genre and I feel massive self-doubt about writing a new genre because I feel like I'm starting all over again, I'm putting myself out there in a different way. I feel vulnerable about it. It's going to have memoir in. So this is a lot of personal stuff. Can there ever really be an end to self-doubt? William: I think what it's like is in my last book, Fearless Writing, I talked about mastery and I defined it this way. I tell this story, it's a pretty famous story in the martial arts community. I took Aikido and there's the guy who founded Aikido was named Morihei Ueshiba, but they called him Ōsensei, meaning first teacher. Aikido is a defensive martial art and the whole key to it is staying balanced. If you're in balance, then it's very hard to knock you over and it's very easy to throw someone who's attacking you because attacks always put people off balance. So whole point, you stay on balance, stay on balance, stay on balance. That's the whole practice. There's a story of where one of Ōsensei's longtime students is watching him and he just can't believe how grounded and balanced Ōsensei is. Until finally the student comes up to him and says, ‘Ōsensei, I train every day. And every time I train, I am off balance and then I watch you and you are never off-balance. How do you do it?' Ōsensei says, ‘Oh, no, no, no. I am frequently off-balanced. I am just very fast to get back on balance.' What you're wanting is the difference. It's never going to happen that the thought won't come into your head. What if I can't do this, right? You can't inoculate yourself against it, but you don't have to spend days swimming around and wondering about the future. You can, with practice say, ‘I don't know what's going to happen, but I do know I'm interested. Is that enough? Can I be okay with that being enough? Not understanding what will happen with this book.' That happens to me every time I write. I don't know really what's going to happen with this book. I don't know where it's going. I don't know who's going to buy it. I interviewed Alice Hoffman who sold like what? Thirty books. I don't think she's ever been rejected. She's had her movies made. She's won rewards. And I was talking to her and she was like, ‘Every time I write a book, I think, I don't know how to do this. I don't know how to write a book.' Every time she starts a new one and every time she's in the middle, she thinks, ‘This is just not going to work. I won't get it and no one will like it.' And then she finishes it. So she's going through that process again and again. The question is how much time will you spend in self-doubt? What I've realized is I've gotten faster and faster at letting that thought go, realizing there's no way to answer it. There's no way to answer that question, what will happen? You don't know. You've got to focus on what you do know and what you always know is, ‘I'm interested.' But can I be more interested in how I translate this new idea than in who will like it?' That's down the road. I'll figure that out once I'm actually finished with it because, by the way, Joanna, until you finish the book, you don't really know how to sell it, for instance. You've got to finish it. You got to know what the heck you've got. Even though if you have a concept of it, I don't think until you've reached the end, you really understand what you're trying to write. And then you could have a sense of how you sell it. It's never going to go away, but you don't have to wallow in it. You don't have to indulge the thought. You don't have to answer the question, ‘What if no one likes it?' You can't answer it for one thing and you don't even have to address it. Everyone has what it takes really is an attempt to address the question, what if I don't have what it takes? And it's an unanswerable question. The question you shouldn't ever ask it, frankly. Joanna: I think also sometimes self-doubt is justified. For example, when you write in your first novel, there's a lot you need to learn. Or, in fact, even when you're writing your 10th novel, there's always something to learn. I think we need to recognize what category the self-doubt goes into. William: I would just want to get rid of the word doubt. It's semantics, but I will push back just a bit in that doubt is wondering… It is perfectly legitimate to say, ‘I don't know how to do this. I have to learn. And I want to learn if I even want to do it.' Am I interested enough to put the work in to figure it out? Because writing a novel is a whole thing. Writing a book is the whole thing. You don't know how to do it. You've got to learn and you also got to learn if you want to do it. Sometimes you've got to do it for six months to go like, ‘This is just not my thing. I'm not interested. I want to do something else.' Like a relationship. It is legitimate to say I don't know, but you don't have to doubt yourself. You've got to pay attention to what you do know, which is I'm interested, and that has to be enough to see how far can I go with this? Because the doubt is just saying, ‘Well, what if I don't?' But there's no way to answer that. There's no way to answer, ‘What if I can't? What if I don't?' Until you get there and then you'll know if you care, because I will say, because if you had told me… I didn't publish my first book, really. And I started writing novels, books when I was 25 and I didn't really publish till I was what? 50. Really. If you had told me, ‘Okay, get ready. 20, 25 years,' I would've said, ‘Just kill me now.' I cannot do that. I will never be happy for that time. That is unlivable. But I was wrong. If I said, ‘What if I don't publish them?' I wouldn't have known how to answer. And I'd learned how to live and not publish them. I had to do it by experience. Does that make sense? Joanna: Absolutely. I also do want to come back on the other bit of the title, is Everyone Has What It Takes. And again, this comes back to your relationship thing. I've been doing this really since 2006, I started writing properly. And so many people have left the industry. So many writers, some people really do only have one book in them or they just decide, ‘I'm done.' Does everyone really have what it takes? When is it okay to quit? William: I was teaching this class on ‘Everyone Has What It Takes.' And if I could have written the whole title, it would have been, ‘Everyone Has What It Takes To Succeed At The Thing They Love To Do.' Everyone has what it takes to do the thing they love to do. It may not be writing. No, everyone does not have what it takes to be a writer because not everyone wants to write. Not everyone wants to sit alone in front of a blank page. There's a lot of people who need the thing they do to involve other people and writing may eventually, but a lot of that time is spent without other people. Everyone has what it takes to and if it's just write one book, well, then that's fine too. Like there's no one career that is correct. You don't have to write. It's not fair to say that if you write three books a year, those books must be crap, or what's wrong with you? You're only producing one book every five years, you must be lazy. Or what was wrong with the woman who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird? But she only wrote one. What's up with JD Salinger? He quit publishing. There's no one way to do it. I know people are all perfectly equipped to do the thing they absolutely want to do. For instance, that sketch comedy show started because of poetry. And I ran out of poetry. I just stopped. When I tuned my dial to the poetry, they stopped coming. But suddenly, I was performing the poems and those became theater, became sketch comedy. It just evolved. I saw the sketch comedy. I know it's weird as an evolution of poetry readings in its own way. And so maybe it'll change. I thought I was a novelist. I was sure I was a novelist. That was it. If you had told me what I was going to write, I would have said, ‘You are thinking of somebody else. I don't even walk into that part of the bookstore. I want nothing to do with that kind of stuff.' Now that's what I do. I had to evolve and learn what it is I actually want to do. So I think everybody has what it takes to do the thing they love to do. Their job is to find what that is. The poetry became theater because I was the performance side of it, I was really interested in and the novels became creative non-fiction. I knew I wanted to write when I was 25, but I didn't really know what it was and I just chose fiction because that's what I first was drawn to as a reader even though when I started writing fiction, I had stopped reading fiction. If I was really tuned in, I would have noticed like, ‘That's not where you are you're at anymore,' but I still stuck with it for 20 years. It was hard journey for me to come to finding what it is I really love to do. What I say, when everyone has what it takes, you can't sit around wondering if you have what it takes. You'll never be able to answer that. The only question you can answer is, ‘What is so interesting to me?' and that you have the answer to. Joanna: And that changes over time. I think what you've said is really important. I always say to people, it's more like skiing. It's like a zigzag down the slope of life like you did. You're like, ‘Okay. I like poetry.' And then it's like, ‘Hmm, not quite.' I'm the same. I did poetry in my younger years and got published as a poet and then it disappeared. It wasn't the thing. And then I went in another direction and now I'm about to start writing in another genre. Is that what you've seen? You've interviewed so many writers as part of your ‘Author2Author' podcast. Have you seen this zigzag across people's careers in general? William: Sure. Some really they find their thing and they do it. It's like science fiction, science fiction, science fiction, and that's it. Or romance, romance, romance, but other people zigzag, yeah. Absolutely. I always say your job isn't to get out of your comfort zone. It's to keep up with your comfort zone. I think it's always moving. I think you're always evolving and my job is to keep up with myself. My work is similar, but it's changing. The work I do now, it's very similar because it's about creativity and spirituality, but it's growing and it's evolving. I see it in the other writers I've interviewed, how it's grown and changed. Sometimes changed dramatically and sometimes just change subtly because they've really found the thing they love to do. But absolutely. Absolutely, it changes. Sometimes subtly and sometimes absolutely dramatically. I just interviewed one of my friends, David Laskin. He had been a journalist for a while. He had written a bunch of journalistic narratives, and some of have been bestsellers, and he'd done really well, but he made a huge switch and wrote his first novel at 65 or whatever. He had tried to do it as a memoir and had gotten rejected. He got rejected for the first time in his long writing life. And he was very distraught, but he turned it into a novel and it's doing great. That happened in his 60s. There was a huge departure, but he did it and it was fantastic. So yeah, of course. People change it. You've got to follow yourself. You've got to be able to ask yourself, ‘What do I want now? What's interesting to me now? I know this was interesting yesterday, but is it still interesting in the same way? You're like a tree that keeps growing. I was thinking the tree is such a great analogy. I've got one in my backyard, this apple tree. It's complete, but it keeps growing. It's a total tree. There's nothing missing from it and yet it keeps changing. And I think we're like that. Joanna: Again, just coming back on all the authors you've interviewed: What else have you seen in terms of commonalities of long-term success with a writing career, whether that might be practice, or business stuff? William: It's definitely: write the thing you love. That is the common thread through. I've interviewed writers, all shapes and sizes, romance, memoir, poetry, screenplays, literary fiction, whatever and it's always, they just love the thing. They just love that story. I think that is it. Love is the organizing principle of the universe, it's the fuel that drives creativity, it's the light that you follow through the jungle. It's everything. So that is it. What's the story you love to read, you love to tell? What excites you? What story has your unconditional attention? What are you interested in just because you're interested in it? That is absolutely the most common thing. All have that in common. Everybody approaches business differently. Most of them have a writing routine, but not all of them. Some of them don't. I knew one woman who wrote novels and the way she wrote them is she only did the dialogue first. She just wrote complete dialogue and then she'd go back and put the prose. And I was like, ‘What?' But yeah, that's how she did it. So there's no one way to write. Although I would say do try to come up with a regular time to write if you can; it's a good idea, but there are writers who say I do it on the airplane, I do it on the train. I do it wherever I can. So there's always an exception. The one thing that there is not an exception to, I think, is that the writer loves the story. I know that sounds pat, but you'll never be better at anything than the thing you love to do, period. If you love doing it, that's the best you'll be. So find the story you love. Joanna: I think that's right. What's interesting is obviously we're recording this. We're still in pandemic times and you write a lot about mindset and obviously creativity. And yet, even if we love writing, a lot of people have suffered from burnout, mental health issues. I get my inspiration from traveling. So my well is dry, basically, which is one of the reasons I'm looking at different genres because I'm struggling with writing what I normally love. So how do we deal with this? Should we just force ourselves into it or should we really listen to what's going on and change what we do? William: So the question is how do you deal with burnout? Because of the, say the circumstances we're in. Is that what you're asking? Joanna: Exactly. William: I think of conditions like a surface I stand on. So to go back to the Ōsensei metaphor, remember, he just wanted to be balanced. The conditions are like the surface. Sometimes I'm trying to walk on a balance beam and sometimes I'm standing on flat ground. I can always find my balance, but it's easier. So for you, your creativity, you discovered that you could be inspired by traveling. You found inspiration in that. I would posit to you, your inspiration comes from the same place everybody's does, which is inside you. It actually didn't come from outside of you, but the experience was one that you found easily sent you into where inspiration was. I can never attribute my complete well-being to my conditions. Now, there are conditions like being in the middle of a war zone that would be like walking a tight rope for me and I fall off a tight rope, but somewhere is someone who can be at peace in a war zone. I'm not that person now, but I didn't think I was the person who could live with all that rejection and be okay. And I was. To me, that was a tight rope and I fell off it, but I learned how to walk it. So I would say if you're feeling down because conditions have changed, your situation has changed, you never want to feel that your happiness is dependent on something outside your own heart because that can always go away. And so I would say look in. Maybe this opportunity to do this work is a way of teaching you that you're even more creative than you thought, that you have a wellspring that doesn't rely on that completely. There's nothing wrong with it. There are a lot of things I do which help bring out creativity in me, but I never want to mistake the activity for the creativity itself. I love to write. Writing is great. I love the experience, but still, it's not the writing. I love. It's where I go when I write. It's easiest to go there while writing, but I can go there just sitting in a chair by myself. It's not dependent on the writing. The writing just helps me get there. We're going deep here, Joanna, but I think that's what you're asking. Do I need these conditions to be that way to be creative? And I say no. Let this experience be an opportunity to learn where your real creativity is, which is really always inside you. It's always coming from within you. Does that make sense? Joanna: It does. Although you also talked about, you have to follow your curiosity and what you love and what you're curious about. I'm basically curious about places and historical things. William: Here's what I would say then. Then this is what you do too. Because that's not going away, right? Obviously, that's not going away that curiosity. You can't make your curiosity go away. It doesn't go anywhere. Then you say, ‘Okay, so what do I do with that? I'm used to having the opportunity to literally physically go out and follow that curiosity across the globe. How does that curiosity express itself now?' Maybe there's a way to express itself that you simply haven't found. You're so used to being able to do it this other way for obvious reasons. And, by the way, you'll get to do it again. That'll come back, but maybe there is another way for it to express itself that you haven't discovered yet because you may not have asked the question. You may have assumed it had to go this way, that you simply never asked the question and so you didn't discover the answer. Joanna: In my case, I just decided to travel in my own country. So I'm writing books about my own country instead of other places. But I want to come back to what you said. You said, ‘I have a lot of things I do that bring out creativity in me.' What are those things? William: Well, doing this. Honestly; conversations. I play the piano and I write music. That's a hobby of mine that might've been a profession if I were slightly different person. So that for sure. I design games, I'm a game designer, role-playing games. And the podcast is creative. I don't prepare anything, but it doesn't matter. Some people prepare, some people don't, but I look upon it as just like let's see what's going to happen. I'm so interested to learn about this person. It's what we call a co-creative experience. I feed off of them, they feed off of me. Conversations, workshops, clients, all these things generate creativity in me because I have to think differently about that moment. I have to think differently about the client, I have to think differently about the guest, I have to think differently about the song I'm writing, the game I'm designing. All of it is creative. Really, all of life is creative. The more I have learned to see my life away from the desk as no different from my life at the desk, the more I'm able to see myself as the author of my life, not just this person dealing with it, and managing it, and reacting to it, the better I've been. The more I can see the whole life experience as creative, like my life is a blank page, the happier I am and the more I thrive and the better husband, and father, and friend, I am. I always benefit when I see life itself as a creative act. Joanna: I agree with you. I think there's so much that can be creative. I guess obviously this show is very much about the business of being a writer as well as the art. And so there you talked about music, about game design. Are these creative play activities or these creative business activities? William: They've been both. I'm an award-winning game designer. We published a bunch of these things through our company, but I also do it for fun. The music is for fun, but I think I secretly wish it was a profession, but I'm shy about my voice, my singing voice, not my speaking voice, but my singing. So I haven't allowed it to become more than an extremely prolific hobby. I try to see all of my work as play as much as possible. I say everything I'm paid to do, I would happily do for free. I also like getting paid for it, but that's my framework. I know how to work. I know how to do things that I don't really want to do and get paid for it and I spent a long time doing that, and I'm not interested in that anymore. Now I want to see how I can make money doing something that feels like fun. In fact, this is true. I was just doing, so recording the book yesterday at this lovely studio here in Seattle and so I go there and there's the technician in there and then we've got this director who's, I don't know, in LA or something, we're all wired together. I've got my headphones on and, Will, the engineer, this really sweet guy, just as we're about to start, he's like, ‘Man, isn't this fun? Guys, can you believe we get to be paid to do this? Isn't this great?' And I was like, ‘Man, he is singing my tune. He is singing my tune.' Joanna: I'm with you. I love all this. I love the podcast as well. And I also think it is creative. It's interesting how people seem to talk about podcasting as marketing, but I think you and I can see that it's actually a creative process. And as you say, often I change my mind in talking to people or I get ideas when I'm talking to people. In your ‘Author2Author Magazine' and the podcast and everything, obviously book marketing is a practical part of the business. What are your thoughts on that? You are an author, you have the magazine, you have all this stuff. What do you do for book marketing personally? William: Actually one of my popular classes, Joanna, I teach is called ‘Fearless Marketing.' Joanna: Wonderful. William: What I always say when I teach the class is like I'm not going to actually teach you how to do any marketing. What I'm going to teach you to do is stop hating it because you can't do it well until you stop hating it. What I think about marketing, here's the first thing I think of. I'm trying to define the conversation I'm offering. So I go to a writer's conference. I like to go to writers, conference. Well, once again, I will go to them. Every classroom is offering a different conversation. Some are talking about how to use social media, another one is like, how do you have a grabber opening? Mine is about the emotional challenges of writing. All the conversations are legitimate. How do you world-build all? These are good conversations for writers to have. This is the conversation I want to have. I try to describe the conversation accurately in the little brochure and say, ‘Who wants to come?' And people want to come. Here's the conversation I'm interested in. And so that's the first thing I think it's really helpful for writers, define the conversation. If you write romance, you want to be with other romance writers who want to think about romance in that way. They want to think about love and relationships in that way. I'm interested in creativity and spirituality. That's a different conversation. You go to a party and it's like they're talking about politics over here, and soccer over there, and science-fiction over there. What conversation do you want to be a part of? That's the first thing I say. There are so many different ways to market yourself. Find the thing that you are most interested in. I like to write essays, blogs. So I do that. And with the theory that if you like my blog, you might like my book. It's the same kind of stuff. And if you listen to my podcast, technically, Joanna, my podcast, it's my platform as you know, that word. My platform is just, I like talking to people who make stuff. It took an agent saying, ‘Bill, you have a platform.' I was like, ‘No, I don't. I just have a bunch of things I like to do.' And she said, ‘That's a platform. What do you think a platform is?' I do the things I like to do. I like talking to people in these interviews. I like doing workshops for people and I like writing essays and I post them on Twitter, and Facebook, and Instagram. Now I'm figuring that out. But I let it be an expression of the stuff that interests me. There's a lot of things you can do. I knew someone who marketed his book by giving readings at dive bars. That was his big idea. And it worked for him. Another one did his readings on subways. He thought that was a great idea. I'd never do that, but he'll love to do that. It sounded awful, but to him, it was an inspiration. I would say to your listeners, try to approach marketing with as much creativity as you can. It's great having someone like Joanna because you say, ‘I really want to dive into social media. That seems so cool.' There are people like yourself or lots of people out there who say, ‘Okay. I will now teach you how to actually do it, but let's figure out what you're interested in.' There's no one right way to market a book, I don't think, in the same way, there's no right way to write a book. But you've got to find the thing that you think is cool about it and you can't hate it. You can't turn your nose up at it. You can't think it's slimy. You can't think, ‘Nobody wants to hear from me.' You got to be as interested in, ‘How do I find the people who are interested in the same stuff I'm interested in? What would be the best way to describe this conversation such that people who are interested in it could recognize it as the kind of conversation they would want to have?' That to me is the friendliest way to think about marketing because that's really what it is. I'm on Twitter sometimes and people would basically saying, ‘Buy my book, buy my book.' And I'm like, ‘That can't work. What's the what's in it for me?' I've got to know what I'm being offered in this experience you want me to pay for. What's in it for me. If I can define a conversation, and again, probably like your fiction writers won't see it that way, but it is. It's a conversation. You start a story, the reader finishes it. Think of all you have to leave out in your stories that the reader's imagination fills in. That's a conversation. So that's how I would define it because then you know what it is you're really offering the people that they're getting from the experience. Joanna: I like that you say define the conversation because I think for non-fiction it is a title. William: It's in the title, right? Joanna: Yes. Your book title included the end of self-doubt and I'm like, ‘We should talk about that.' For fiction, I almost feel it's the promise of the genre, the title, the cover, the hook. You have to make it very clear what you're offering and then someone chooses to join that conversation. William: That's right. I've worked a lot with writers and I find that that's one of the most common things, is they don't want to sell. They don't see themselves as salespeople. They see this odious and beneath them and it seems like they don't like being sold but they do like having conversations they want to have. They've got to see it in a friendly way. Every book's a conversation about something, about weakness and strength, about love or loss, about what's cool. It's always about something. From a certain angle. And so define that for yourself. As an author, you are so interested in that conversation. There's no way you can write a book and not be. And so you just got to know there's other people out there who want to have that conversation too. Joanna: Absolutely. Brilliant. Where can people find you and your books and everything you do online? William: The hub of my internet empire, Joanna, is williamkenower.com. So you can go there. And obviously, there's links to books. There's links to my podcast, to ‘Author Magazine,' to my coaching. If I remember, I post things I'm doing there in terms of like online workshops and stuff. I am a writing coach. I'm not a book editor, book doctor, but I do help people with their craft and also with the many, many emotional challenges writers face, like why should I do this? Am I any good? That's sort of my sweet spot. I work with people one-on-one with that. And, of course, it's all over Zoom now. Anyway, go to williamkenower.com. And if you want to learn more, it's all there. Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Bill. That was great. William: Thank you, Joanna. Keep doing what you're doing. It's awesome.The post A Writer’s Guide To The End Of Self-Doubt With William Kenower first appeared on The Creative Penn.

If the pandemic has affected your sleep, you are not alone! If you want to sort out your sleep issues and improve your creativity — and your life — as we head into a new year, this episode with Dr. Anne D. Bartolucci will help. In the intro, publishing industry trends for 2022 [Written Word Media; Stark Reflections; Mark Coker Smashwords]; my Sell Direct Tutorial; Mark Dawson's Ads for Authors, which now includes Booktok; GPT-4 [Towards Data Science]; AI-Assisted Author course. Today's show is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing, and integration with Scrivener MS Word, Chrome and more, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 25% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna Dr. Anne Bartolucci is a licensed psychologist and a certified behavioral sleep medicine specialist. She's the author of two non-fiction books, including Better Sleep for the Overachiever, and she's also a best-selling steampunk and urban fantasy author under Cecilia Dominic. 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 Why sleep matters, especially for creativesHow the pandemic has affected sleeping habitsThe different sleeping issues we can encounter at different times of lifeBusting sleep mythsDifferent kinds of insomniaHow to improve your falling asleep timeWhy the ‘rules’ are less important than what works for us individuallyDo mindfulness and meditation help with sleep?How Anne manages her day job and her author life — and lessons learned You can find Dr. Anne Bartolucci at OverachieverBook.com and on Twitter @CeciliaDominic Transcript of Interview with Anne D. Bartolucci Joanna Penn: Dr. Anne Bartolucci is a licensed psychologist and a certified behavioral sleep medicine specialist. She's the author of two non-fiction books, including Better Sleep for the Overachiever, and she's also a best-selling steampunk and urban fantasy author under Cecilia Dominic. Welcome, Anne. Anne Bartolucci: Thank you so much, Joanna. I'm really excited to be here. Joanna Penn: Well, this is super important, but before we get into the topic… Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing, as well as how you split your creative self between the two different careers. Anne Bartolucci: That last part of the question is definitely the challenging bit. So I apparently have been writing since I was very little. My mom claims that I wrote my first story when I was two. And I'm sure she has it somewhere. Apparently, what it lacked in plot and character development, it more than made up for in enthusiasm. I've written all through school and, of course, creative writing was always a pleasure thing, really more than a career path for me. I got the message that many people get, ‘That's a fun hobby, but you can't really do it for a career.' So I let it lapse a bit when I was in high school and definitely in college. And then when I got to graduate school, I had a little bit of a setback that I do talk about in the book. I went to the bookstore to console myself as we writer types do. And I stumbled across an issue of ‘Writer's Digest Magazine.' And it just blew my mind because I was like, ‘Holy crap, people get paid for this.' So I picked up my creative writing again and did it through grad school as a self-sanity thing. And then started working on my novel, which, of course, that first novel took me like four or five years. And then I pitched that for a long time, and wrote some other novels. Finally, that one sold to Samhain Publishing in 2013. So I started out traditionally published, and they were a mid-sized genre outfit out of Cincinnati, Ohio, mostly doing romance and associated genres. I had 7 books with them when they closed in 2017 when I got my rights back. I have been indie pubbed since then until just recently, when I signed a three-book contract with Flagstaff Publishing for a time-travel action-adventure series, and those should start coming out next year. So I guess at this point, I can call myself hybrid. And for splitting my creative self between the two, I used to try to keep the two very, very separate, hence the pen name. I started my online writing with a wine blog. And, of course, I live in a part of the United States where some people have some very interesting attitudes towards alcohol. Like in my state, Georgia, we weren't even allowed buy alcohol on Sundays until about 10 years ago. Now we still have to wait until 11:30 on Sundays. Joanna Penn: After church, but, of course, I guess if you have communion, you do get your wine! Anne Bartolucci: Yes. Especially for those of us in churches where they do have real wine for communion, although not since the pandemic interestingly. So, make your brunch plans accordingly. Joanna Penn: You do manage these two very differently. Do you work as a psychologist now? Anne Bartolucci: I do. I have my own private practice, Atlanta Insomnia and Behavioral Health Services. I started that in 2008. At this point, we've grown. It's me and a full-time other psychologist and a part-time psychologist, had to bring somebody else on because we got very busy over the past year, as you can imagine. It's a full load of patients and all the administrative stuff. I realized with telehealth that I can't do as many telehealth sessions in a day as I do in-person sessions just because it is more of a physical strain on my eyes. It's more of a brain strain because I'm having to extrapolate a lot more information from a lot fewer cues. And so I cut back on those hours and have tried to expand my writing hours, which has gone with mixed success. Joanna Penn: It's so interesting that you said that with telehealth, presumably through Zoom or whatever, Skype, makes you more tired because I feel like before the pandemic people assumed that it was easy to do this stuff. But now there seems to be this understanding that it is very tiring, and speaking through Zoom is just or even more tiring than doing it in person, right? Do you think that there is now the acceptance of how tiring online communication is? Anne Bartolucci: I hope so. It's going to be interesting to see what happens with insurance reimbursements as we move forward because they're trying to pay us less because they're like, ‘Oh, well, you don't have as much overhead if you're just sitting at home with your computer.' I don't know that they're really thinking about the balance of it's a lot harder physically. They are not necessarily noticing it, but other people, especially those whose whole lives have moved on to these video platforms definitely notice. We have this term Zoom fatigue to describe all of it. Even though we don't use Zoom, we use a HIPAA compliant platform that comes through our electronic health record system, but it definitely is a valid thing. I know I've heard you talk on your podcast about how you were doing online events that you have cut back. I've done the same thing because it's no fun to sit and talk to your computer for five hours giving a workshop. Joanna Penn: Exactly. You and I recording this without the video on but some people say, ‘I want the video on so I can watch your body language.' And I'm like, ‘But I don't want to have to look at your body language because it's tiring.' So, even though we're in front of the computer now, I feel like having the video off and the lights turned down can really help. But, of course, you can't do that in a psychological appointment. It's like, ‘Excuse me, any way to turn the lights down?' Anne Bartolucci: Not really. And then patients get really disappointed if they can't see my cat when I'm working from home. Joanna Penn: Oh, there you go. Yeah. Anyway, let's get into the topic, which is we're talking about sleep. It's a crazy question, given how we have so little of it. Why is sleep so important for mental health and happiness, as well as creativity for writers? Anne Bartolucci: If you think about it, we know a lot of why we need sleep because of what happens when we don't sleep. So if you're not sleeping or if you've had a rough night, we notice that we're not as sharp the next day. We notice that it's a lot harder to communicate maybe. It's harder to focus on things, and we're grumpy. It's really hard to be creative when you're in this foggy, grumpy, irritable state, especially if that's your normal state because you haven't been getting good sleep for a long time. I was at a convention this past weekend here in Atlanta, and I heard at least two people talk about how when they come to a thorny problem in their writing and their manuscripts, they will think about it before they go to bed. And then often when they wake up, they'll have a solution. We have all these interesting mental processes that happen when we sleep. Our brain doesn't just shut off. It is working through the night and it's able to work in different ways while we sleep than it does during the day. Joanna Penn: And lack of sleep or sleep issues, how is that related to depression and mental health? Especially during the pandemic, you mentioned how much more work you've got now. Even people who didn't have mental health problems, now do. How does sleep play into depression and mental health? Anne Bartolucci: A lot of times people look at anxiety and depression and sleep and think, ‘Oh, well, sleep problems are secondary to anxiety and depression.' And at this point, we don't even talk about primary versus secondary insomnia because we have enough research that shows that if people aren't getting enough sleep, they're more likely to develop anxiety or they're more likely to have relapses back into depression. If you think about this part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex, which basically helps the executive of the brain know what to pay attention to. So if your frontal lobes are your executive, the prefrontal cortex are the administrative assistant sitting outside the executive office saying, ‘Okay, pay attention to this. Don't pay attention to that.' When we are sleep-deprived, the prefrontal cortex actually is less active. So the secretary is just letting everything through, including the emotions from the more ‘primitive' part of the brain. I don't like calling it the primitive part of the brain because it's still very necessary. Let's just say the older, more mature part of the brain is letting everything through, and so it's a lot harder for our brains to sort out what's important. What should we react to? What should we not react to? Which leads to more experiences of negative emotion and with anxiety, and we're focusing on things that make us anxious and worried. Joanna Penn: It's crazy how important it is, and yet how much we all struggle. And so what are the different types of insomnia? People say, ‘I have insomnia,' but it's not just one thing, is it? Anne Bartolucci: No. We divide insomnia into a few different types. There's sleep-onset insomnia, which is difficulty falling asleep at the beginning of the night. And then there is sleep maintenance insomnia, which is where people have long awakenings during the night. Or terminal insomnia, which I tend to lump in with sleep maintenance insomnia, which is where people just wake up before their alarm or before they're supposed to be up and they're awake for a long time and never go back to sleep. To get back to your question about why it's become worse during the pandemic, this feeds into the question about how to improve our sleep. One facet of it is that people used to have bigger barriers between the stressors of the day, work stressors, school stressors, and then home life. I've been listening to your podcast on the anthropology for world-building. And in your intro, you talk about St. Cuthbert and how he went to his island, and he put his wall up so he didn't have to look at his day job. And I was thinking, ‘Cuthbert, dude, I am right there with you,' because as soon as I could get back into my physical office, I did. Because it's really hard to turn off the brain, to turn off the work brain when we are working from home. Here in Atlanta, a lot of people have really long commutes. And so they lost that. So while they might have been able to sleep a little bit more, they were having a harder time drawing that separation between work-life and home and sleep life. Joanna Penn: Absolutely. And we'll come back to how we can improve sleep. I just wanted to return to the different types of insomnia because in my family, there was always this story. My granddad, my mom's dad could fall asleep anywhere. And my mom would tell the story of he would go out to hang out the washing and he'd sort of hang himself over the washing line and he'd fall asleep there. Anne Bartolucci: Oh, no. Joanna Penn: The family story is we can fall asleep anywhere. I absolutely was that person really until a couple of years ago. And I'm in that certain bracket of age where hormonal changes start to impact my sleep. So I do often wake up at 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. and I don't go back to sleep. And I've always been a morning person, but anything with a 3 in it can be a little bit annoying. Anne Bartolucci: Yeah. That's early. Joanna Penn: But then it's funny because I've started to tell the difference between that kind of waking up. And then when I wake up because of stress or anxiety or reasons where my mind…it's either my mind or it's my hormones. I have different reactions to that kind of sleeplessness. Is that a common thing for people to have these different reasons for insomnia at different times of their life? Anne Bartolucci: Yes. As you mentioned, especially for us women and I am right there with you in that bracket. And nobody ever talks about perimenopause, they always talk about menopause. So you think you're safe until you're 50, but you're really not. Joanna Penn: No, you're 10 years behind. Anne Bartolucci: Yes, exactly. It's one of the things that people think that they should be able to just go to sleep and sleep straight for seven to eight hours and never wake up. And the thing is that it is normal for adults to have awakenings during the night. The hope is that if you do have an awakening, okay, maybe you get up, you go pee, or you roll over, or you think for a couple of seconds or a few minutes, and then you fall back asleep. That's normal. If you are waking up for more than a half-hour total during the night, that is considered insomnia. And as for the different reasons, sure we can get into them a little bit during insomnia treatment, but we basically do very similar things regardless of why people are waking up. Joanna Penn: It's interesting. Again, I do like a drink. I've been quite open about that on the podcast, but I have noticed that I used to really like a Pinot noir, and I've almost completely stopped drinking red wine now because I can feel the impact on my sleep, whereas I'm quite fine with Prosecco or Rose. Anne Bartolucci: Oh my gosh, me too. I have really cut back on my red wine drinking. And you see my last name, this is my last name. This is not my husband's last name. I feel like I should be able to drink those good Italian reds, but yes. More than two glasses, or sometimes even more than one glass and it comes back to get me later. Joanna Penn: It's almost being much more self-aware around the things that make a difference in those. I tried valerian tea for a while. That did make a difference for a bit, and then it stopped working. So I gave up on that. I think there's a difference, like you said, about the acceptance. It's like, okay, this is just part of life. And I'm lucky in that I don't have any kind of day job so I can work. I often will just start work at 4:00 a.m. Anne Bartolucci: Oh, wow. Joanna Penn: And then I just stop and by 4:00 p.m, I'm like, ‘Okay, pretty much it's all over, red rover.' I feel like the anxiety about not sleeping can often just build up and build up and then make it harder to sleep. How do we get over that fear of not sleeping and maybe accept where we are at? Anne Bartolucci: Definitely. That is honestly a lot of what we treat in my practice is anxiety over not sleeping. And that's really come to the forefront in the past year, not just with the pandemic where everybody's just more anxious and the anxiety is attaching to whatever it can. Also for the people who have had COVID and who have had these really rough weeks of sleep and it's being perpetuated by the fact that yes, that was such a rough week, it was a traumatic experience. And they're afraid that it's going to happen again. There is this big sleep myth that we must get eight hours. We see that number everywhere, eight hours of sleep. Whereas that's an average. The National Institute for Health here recommends that adults get between seven and nine hours with the very often not mentioned caveat that some people can sleep safely on average for an hour outside of those hills. So it's a bell curve. Adult sleep range may be even as wide as 6 to 10 hours. And another thing to consider is that we need different amounts of sleep on different nights. You might have a range of sleep that you know your body likes. I know my body likes between seven and a half to nine hours of sleep a night. And if you think about it, that's a pretty big range. But on nights when maybe I've been more active, I have to admit I have not once logged 10 hours a day for 4 days straight ever. But you probably slept great on those nights when you were walking all day. Joanna Penn: Oh, I don't know. No, I didn't, actually. Anne Bartolucci: You didn't? Joanna Penn: No. Again, I fall asleep very easily and I would fall asleep. And for people listening, that was the St Cuthbert's Way pilgrimage I did recently. I fell asleep very quickly, but then, again, I would wake up at 3:00 a.m. So I'd find that almost the being physically tired doesn't actually necessarily help with that waking up insomnia. Although I don't like the phrase terminal insomnia, that sounds pretty serious. Anne Bartolucci: I know. That sounds like something that might come up in one of your books. Joanna Penn: Exactly. Yeah. Maybe that's giving me an idea. Anne Bartolucci: Oh, there you go. Joanna Penn: And we should say that seven hours to nine hours or whatever, that also includes these normal periods of waking for short amounts of time. Does anyone really sleep without waking up after a certain age? Anne Bartolucci: It's very rare for adults. I have had patients who have said that they've gotten there or that before their insomnia developed a couple of years ago, that's what they were doing. But I suspect they were waking up briefly and did not remember it. Generally, when somebody is sleeping seven, eight, nine hours straight, that's when they are in their childhood, teens, maybe early 20s, or late 20s. Generally once we get past 30, we are going to have small awakenings. Joanna Penn: Any other common sleep myths? Anne Bartolucci: The one that really irritates me is when should you go to bed every night at the same time. That is not the case because a lot of times if people are going to bed before they are truly sleepy, they're going to lie awake in bed, which then teaches your body and your brain that bed is for being awake, not for being asleep. I have a lot of people who perhaps their problems started because they heard that eight-hour number. They said, ‘Okay, I'm getting up at 6:00 in the morning for work. That means I need to be in bed by 10:00, even though my body isn't getting tired until 11:00 or 12:00.' And so they ended up getting themselves into trouble with that. Joanna Penn: Some people really are night owls, aren't they? Their body wants to be awake in the dark. And it seems such an unacceptable way to live in the modern world, and yet it feels like there are a proportion of people who are that way. Some people really are night owls, aren't they? Anne Bartolucci: Yes. That's another one of those things that really irritates me is that idea that the ideal sleep schedule is from 10:00 to 6:00. And there is there's even information out there that, oh, well, you're only going to get really good sleep in those hours before midnight. And that's really not the case. We all have different circadian rhythms. It's one of my big soapboxes in sleep that we should be able to live and work according to our natural rhythms rather than being shoe-horned into whatever this ideal is. Honestly, that's one of the reasons why I am self-employed, so that I can set my own hours because I'm a little phase delayed. I don't think I've ever gotten up regularly at 6:00 since I was in high school in the '90s and had to get up early because I had to have that perfect '90s hairstyle. That fell off quickly. Joanna Penn: I love that. You used ‘phase delayed'. I think that's brilliant because you're right, it's not necessarily a night owl, someone who wants to be awake when it's dark. It's that just even a couple of hours difference to even your potential, your partner, your kids. There are going to be difficult things in relationships is setting when that happens. I also find a lot of writers were into this because they can't necessarily work normal job hours. I have found writing is a career you can do when you're phase delayed. Anne Bartolucci: Exactly. It's perfect for us. And there's another one of those sleep myths versus writing myths is that the best writing time is first thing in the morning whereas for me, my brain just does not work like that. It works better for me to write after dinner. I talk about this in the book Better Sleep for the Overachiever, that I struggled for so long trying to fit into that (so-called) ideal mode of, ‘I must get up early. I must write for an hour before I go to work. I must do this, this, and this in order to be successful.' Finally, I threw all those rules out the window and thought, ‘You know what? Let me just write when it works for me.' That is when I'm getting my NaNoWriMo words done this month is after dinner and it pushes my bedtime a little bit later, and that's okay. Joanna Penn: That's great you say that because, well, I'm one of those people who does write in the morning and sometimes really early, but now I think this is so important. Dean Wesley Smith, who's been on the show and he's a virtual mentor for me. And he, I think, starts about 11:00 p.m. His writing phase is definitely over the night. And it's so interesting to hear that. Some people listening that it doesn't matter when it is. We're all different. Let's talk about how can we improve our sleep. The early bits or sleep rituals. How do we improve with falling asleep? Anne Bartolucci: If you think about it, we are behavioral creatures. Even though we have evolved, we are still very behavioral creatures and our bodies and our minds like our routines. Admittedly, some people intellectually like routines a little bit better than others, but generally, we can train ourselves. One big way to improve falling asleep is to give yourself adequate time and space to wind down. So think about those computers back in the '90s. You remember they took such a long time to shut down all of their various processes that we chose a song to play while they did that. Our brains are kind of like that. Giving ourselves at least an hour of no screens because screens have that blue light that is activating to our brain and also a lot of the content on screens, even though we might tell ourselves it's relaxing, it can be activating. Joanna Penn: Especially in the pandemic, the doom scrolling. ‘Oh, just check it. Check it one more time.' Anne Bartolucci: Oh gosh, yes. I would have to say that's probably the biggest piece of advice that I've been giving since, oh, about say 2016 in this country, which is to really limit your news exposure. Joanna Penn: I used to wake up in the morning and check the news and twitter. And that borders on addiction and I completely get it in my own behavior. I read on a Kindle Paperwhite, which has an e-ink screen and I dial down the brightness all the way, and because it's only black and white…well, it's not white, it's kind of dark gray by the time that happens. Is using eInk screens like a Kindle or Kobo device okay? Anne Bartolucci: Yes. As long as you have dialed it back so that there is no glow at all, that's great. I got the Kindle Oasis for that reason because that is the one where you can dial it completely dark and you do need a light to read it. So you can see if perhaps the Paperwhite is still giving you enough light that it could disturb sleep. I know you say you have no trouble falling asleep, but it's interesting after having looked at tens of thousands of sleep diaries at this point, late-night light exposure can definitely impact sleep later on. Joanna Penn: I also wear an eye mask, quite a thick eye mask and I also wear earplugs. My husband does maybe snore. And so I pretty much cut out all light in that way as well and sound. So I go into my little sensory deprivation tank. Anne Bartolucci: My husband maybe snores too. I understand. Joanna Penn: Does that help? Is that something you recommend for people, the eye mask, earplugs combination? Anne Bartolucci: Only if they are really sensitive to light and noise. Joanna Penn: I think I am. Anne Bartolucci: Otherwise, we try to make sleep as simple as possible and so we try to not have too much extraneous things that need to happen in order for somebody to sleep, which is also another reason why we recommend that people not use sleep medication and we spend a lot of time getting people off-sleep medication. And that includes over-the-counter things like diphenhydramine. As we were talking about before, melatonin, we can get that very easily here. I know you guys can't. But when you're taking something, you're giving yourself the signal that, ‘Hey, I can't sleep on my own.' Joanna Penn: I must say when I come to the U.S., it does shock me. I know lots of people who take something to go to sleep and then take something in the morning to kind of get them going or that kind of thing. And that medication, it must be very easy to get hooked on that. I have thought at times going to a doctor and getting something. But what I found is that getting rid of the anxiety around sleep has actually just helped a lot. Anne Bartolucci: Oh, definitely. Joanna Penn: Your book is full of all the things so that you understand what's natural, as opposed to some sort of pop news tells you it's normal. Anne Bartolucci: Right. And the pop news will just take the very simplest thing without the context and try to put that out there as a hard-and-fast rule. With a few exceptions, there really aren't any hard-and-fast rules that are going to work the same way for every single person. Joanna Penn: There's one that says don't eat or drink X number of hours before bed. And then another one that says have some hot milk with honey or whatever. What about eating and/or drinking before bed? Anne Bartolucci: That's a great question because that's another one of those things that's super individual. You want to find this balance where you're not going to bed hungry, but you're also not going to bed stuffed. You want to be, shall we say, comfortably satisfied when you go to bed. For some reason, having hot milk helps with that. Maybe there's probably not enough tryptophan in there to make a real big difference, but it has some carbs and it has some protein, which keeps you from having those blood sugar spikes. So there's probably something to that. Again, for certain people, it works, and for other people, it doesn't. So for example, if somebody has reflux issues, they probably don't want to be drinking a glass of warm milk before bed because that's going to then disturb them. Joanna Penn: Any other things on improving sleep? Anne Bartolucci: Since you talked about, or since you asked about food, exercise is another one of those things that there's a lot of conflicting information about. We hear you should not exercise close to bedtime, and that's another one of those really individual variables. Whereas some people, especially if they are a bit more anxious, tend to benefit from exercise closer to bedtime because it's helping to burn off some of that cortisol that's built up during the day from their anxiety. So for some people that works. Otherwise think about how exercise affects you. Some people exercise wakes them up. They're the ones who are at the gym at 5:00, 6:00 in the morning and they're great for the rest of the day. I wish I was one of those people. I'm one of those people where exercise wears me out. If I exercise first thing in the morning, like I did today, I am probably going to be a little tired for the rest of the day, but you know what, at least I got it over with. Joanna Penn: Oh, that's interesting. I always exercise in the morning pretty much. After lunchtime, I'm not interested. It's good to know that there are no rules. There's different categories and it's like each part of us fits into a different category. We're all individuals, which is a relief, I suppose. Anne Bartolucci: Yes. I would say the only hard-and-fast rules for sleep if you want to know where to start with the basics are: try to wake up at around the same time every day because we have these circadian rhythms, these internal clocks that tell us when to be awake, when to be asleep, when to be hungry. If you want your body to know when it's supposed to be asleep, it needs to know when it's supposed to wake up. That's why they say get up at the same time every single day. It's not just to torture you on weekends like a lot of people think. On the other hand, don't go to bed until you're sleepy. And then yes, cut out screens an hour before bedtime and have a routine. I would say those are the basics. Of course, there are tons of other interfering things that happen that keep people from sleeping, which I talk about more of those in the book, but I want to say if you want just the core rules, those would be them. Joanna Penn: Again, simple, but it's not easy. Anne Bartolucci: No. Joanna Penn: But such is life. Anne Bartolucci: I'm very thankful that I sleep well because I will admit the getting up at the same time, I try to give myself an hour range and no more, although sometimes that can be difficult, especially after I've gone through a period where I'm now in introvert exhaustion. Like I mentioned, I was at a convention last weekend and we're recording this in early November, which means that we just had daylight savings time go off. And, oh my gosh, that extra hour of sleep on Sunday morning of convention was the best thing ever. Joanna Penn: You do have a section on mindfulness and meditation, but you do also acknowledge it's not for everyone because this is something that people say. My husband goes through phases when he will meditate every day and he finds it very useful, but it's not something I've found useful. Tell us a bit about mindfulness if people want to try it or some of the alternatives. Anne Bartolucci: I think you bring up a great question because there is a little bit of a distinction in that mindfulness is more of a way of approaching reality whereas meditation is a type of mindfulness activity. There are a lot of other different mindfulness activities that people can do if meditation just really isn't their thing. And that's fine. Sometimes it's not. I have had so many people tell me that they have failed at meditation where just to make a little distinction, a lot of times people think that the purpose of meditation is to clear your mind. Our minds don't do that, their job is to think, they're really good at it. The point is to get practiced at noticing when the mind is wandering and then bringing it back and noticing when it's wandering and bringing it back. By doing that over and over and over again during the practices, you then learn to better do that outside of the practices in times when it's more important. For example, if you wake up and your mind starts wandering in a not-so-useful direction, you're able to catch it more quickly before it gets as far as making you be up for hours. I do like to try to draw that distinction because there is so much misconception about mindfulness. I'm a regular meditator. I have found it to be very useful, but there are other aspects of mindfulness that I've found to be just as useful outside of that. For example, non-judgemental observation is a core mindfulness principle, and you've already talked about applying it, perhaps without realizing it, in that when you wake up, you don't get upset about being awake, you accept it. You approach that non-judgementally. Joanna Penn: That's made a big difference to me, actually. And, in fact, talking about our hormonal phase of life, I'm taking that attitude now a lot more about a lot of things and also having had COVID, and all the things I've been through this year. Maybe acceptance is just an attitude towards life in general. Anne Bartolucci: Right. Exactly. I was thinking about this question and a lot of times people want to use mindfulness for stress reduction, which it's very useful, but if that's not really your philosophy or your thing, there are a couple of questions to ask that might be good alternatives that are still tangentially related. For example, when you find yourself getting upset over something, one thing to ask that comes maybe more out of the cognitive therapy world is, ‘Where am I blowing up the drama?‘ Because as humans, we're wired for drama and our minds will automatically do that without us realizing it. That's why we like stories. Because they're full of drama. We tell ourselves stories that might be more full of drama than they need to be. Maybe we're filling in what other people are thinking without checking with them or without really knowing how often do we do that. Another way to approach it is, ‘Okay, is this thought useful or not useful?‘ And it sort of relates back to your interview with Becca Syme, with question the premise. ‘Is this a useful premise for me to be operating from, or is this a useful thought for me to be engaging with and chewing on right now?' Joanna Penn: Right now is the point, isn't it? It's like, ‘Okay, I've woken up and I'm thinking about this, this, this, and this. Maybe I could leave that till later rather than focusing on it.' Now also, I do find breathing exercises useful because I'm someone I do hold my breath. When I think, when I do a lot of things, I hold my breath. It's on my list, learn breath work. But I have learned some basic breathing, like belly breathing and things like that to four-point breathing or whatever it's called and counting breaths. I have found breathing exercises to be quite useful in some ways. Anne Bartolucci: Yes, that's one thing I definitely do with all of my patients is we all start off with diaphragmatic breathing or as you call it, belly breathing, not only because it helps to calm the mind, but because breathing like that, breathing from your belly and keeping the chest still helps to turn on the parasympathetic or calming part of the autonomic nervous system, which then helps us to come out of fight or flight more quickly. Joanna Penn: Fantastic. Joanna Penn: The book has a lot about mindset and you talk about your author experiences in the examples, which I think is brilliant. It's very revealing. And I appreciate what you share in the book. Maybe you could share just a couple of things. What have you learned from your indie author journey that informs your work as a psychologist? Anne Bartolucci: Oh, that is a great question because typically people want to know how being a psychologist has helped me be a better writer. So that is a very creative way to ask the question. I would say first, just being a writer has helped me to be a better psychotherapist because I'm a lot more creative. I believe, as a result, I'm able to look at things in perhaps different ways than what we were taught and then how. I'm able to explain things in different ways if people don't quite get the traditional wording and the traditional language. So that has definitely helped. Broadly, as you know and as you read in the book, my indie author journey has had plenty of ups and downs. It's helped me be a better psychologist because it's helped me to accept for that there are going to be ups and downs, that there are going to be successes and failures. I think it's helped me to be a little, maybe not a lot, but a little bit more tolerant of uncertainty in my business and also know, ‘Okay, well, this thing didn't work. It doesn't mean I'm a failure. It just means I need to try something else.' I can bring that to my patients as well, which is, ‘Okay, you know what, so you tried this thing, didn't work. It's okay. Try something different.' Joanna Penn: I think that's really important. And do you enjoy the fact that you have this very different day job because sometimes there's this feeling in the community and I do try and dispel it, but I am a full-time creative entrepreneur. Having a day job is also a really great thing because it means the entire pressure isn't on your creative work as such? Anne Bartolucci: Yes. I was so relieved to hear, I think, I can't remember if it was you or Mark who was reading that part in The Relaxed Author, which is if you have a day job that you like, or that works for you, it is perfectly okay to not want to be a full-time author. I had already felt that and I was like, ‘Yes, validation.' Joanna Penn: And to be honest, it's actually may be easier and better because it separates what you said at the beginning about a problem between separating the barrier between home and work. This is something I just struggle with so much. If you can separate your life into these different areas, both of which fulfill you in a different way, that just seems magic. Anne Bartolucci: I know you've talked about how hard you found it to write from home during the pandemic because you like to write at coffee shops, and I am the same way. I prefer to not write in the space where I see my clients. That's another thing that I have found that's nice about writing in the evening because I put the day job to bed at 6:00 or 7:00. We're done. No more day job stuff. No more emails or looking at the calendar or anything like that, and at least I try to follow that rule. And then after that, my mental shift is switching my home office to, ‘Okay, this is my writing space now.' I have my headphones and my music and the cat's always there regardless of which job it is. I have my wine. Obviously, I don't have that while I'm seeing patients. Joanna Penn: Do you find that having the different names helps you switch your headspace? Anne Bartolucci: Yes. Although it's funny since turning 40, my Cecilia Dominic persona, I would go to conventions. We're very fortunate to have a lot of local fantasy and pop culture conventions here in the Atlanta area. The biggest one is, of course, Dragon Con, but we have a bunch of smaller ones as well and across the Southeast. I would go to conventions and I found for a while that Cecilia Dominic was a lot more outgoing, a lot more confident maybe, a lot more just…I'm trying to think of the right word. Maybe just like genuinely an author persona, whereas Anne Bartolucci is like more of a therapist persona, but since I've turned 40, the two have pretty much merged. Joanna Penn: Oh, that's interesting. You're on the show with both names but I am interviewing Anne, not Cecilia, but you're able to reconcile them both. Are you more comfortable sharing your professional side now? Anne Bartolucci: Yes, now I'm much better able to reconcile the two of them. And I call the Cecilia Dominic persona the not-so-secret alter ego because if it's appropriate, of course, I will share that with my patients and here in my office where I see patients physically, although still only about a third of them coming in in-person, I have my ego shelf on the top of my bookshelf with all my books. So they see them. Joanna Penn: That's great. And, of course, no judgment for anyone who doesn't want to share their alter egos and their writer names, but obviously, I did this myself and I find it useful. Last question before we wind up, we're almost out of time, but so now, obviously, you're marketing non-fiction books and also your steampunk and urban fantasy under Cecilia. What differences have you found between the writing and the book marketing processes? Anne Bartolucci: So I don't know if this is the case for you, but for me, writing non-fiction is a lot harder. Joanna Penn: Oh, it's the opposite for me. Anne Bartolucci: I thought you might say that. With non-fiction, when you get stuck, you can't just kill somebody off. The police don't like that. So I get non-fiction to be a lot harder. And a lot of the things I talk about in the books, in the book like perfectionism and procrastination and imposter syndrome, I experienced while I was writing that book because I was trying to be as genuine as possible and as honest and upfront about my struggles as possible. I had to recognize and resist that little voice that kept saying, ‘Oh, nobody really cares what you have to say.' When I'm writing as Cecilia, of course, it's fictional worlds, fictional characters, and I feel like maybe they're a little bit more separated for me. So I would say that would be the difference in the writing. And then as for marketing, I've definitely learned a lot about marketing from being an indie author, which has helped me with my non-fiction and even my practice. I would never have thought to run Facebook ads, for example, for my practice had I not done it first as an indie author. I still do mostly the paid ads for the fiction. I have a newsletter that I've had for a while. Talking to other authors, doing newsletter swaps and things like that, whereas for non-fiction, it's definitely been more of a strategy of let me get this book into the hands of people who can recommend it. For example, I send copies to a bunch of my referral sources and that was one reason that I put it out in 2019 or in 2020, which was because I knew they needed resources for their patients. And so I was so busy at the practice, like, ‘Okay, I can't do a lot of publicity for this right now, but let me just get it out there so the people who need it can have it as a resource.' And I'm also doing podcast interviews like this one. I did one for the ‘Self-Employed Life‘ a few weeks ago that just recently dropped. I ended up not being consistent about pitching other podcasts, but I'm going to get back to it. So yes, getting the non-fiction into the hands of experts and people who can recommend it is that strategy, whereas the fiction, it's more of, I guess, a wide wider strategy of getting it directly to consumers. Joanna Penn: I think that is interesting. And, of course, the book is Better Sleep for the Overachiever. Although if you don't feel like an overachiever, it's still useful. Anne Bartolucci: Thank you. Joanna Penn: I'm sure you called it that, but it's also if you feel like you're an underachiever, it's also useful. Brilliant. Where can people find you and your books online? Anne Bartolucci: You can find my Cecilia Dominic self at my website, ceciliadominic.com. And that is ceciliadominic.com since there are two ways to spell Cecilia. Mine's one with an I. If you are interested in Better Sleep for the Overachiever with the blog that I update occasionally, that one is at overachieverbook.com. I was really excited when I got that website domain. And then if you're interested in me or my practice, if you're here in the States, of course, we can do telehealth with anybody in Georgia. And we're also SIPAC providers, which means that we serve several other states as well. So you can find us, and I say us, not as the royal we, but since there are three of us, at sleepyintheatl.com. Joanna Penn: Fantastic. Thanks so much for your time, Anne. That was great. Anne Bartolucci: Thank you, Joanna. I really enjoyed it.The post Improve Your Sleep And Creativity With Dr. Anne D. Bartolucci first appeared on The Creative Penn.

“We make plans, God laughs.” The old Yiddish proverb will no doubt stand true for another year, but I just can’t help myself!  I need to make plans to have something to aim for, but given how 2021 didn’t turn out as expected, for 2022 I will hold my plans and goals loosely and won’t be surprised if they change. If I start off with lower expectations, perhaps it will turn out to be a spectacular year for us all (fingers crossed!). Here’s what I’m planning, and I’d love to hear about your goals, so please leave a comment here if you’d like to share and we can keep each other accountable. Embrace multi-passionate creativity — and optimize for curiosityBooks for authors — Joanna PennFiction as J.F. Penn — thrillers, dark fantasy, crime, horror, short storiesThe Creative Penn website and podcastThe Creative Future — putting new technologies into practiceBooks and TravelMore tech, less tech. Health, travel, and connectionFinancial Goals  Remember, I am a full-time author-entrepreneur so I have a lot going on — if your goals are simpler — like finishing your book, or publishing for the first time, or selling 1000 copies, then fantastic! You don’t have to have such extensive goals as me! Embrace multi-passionate creativity — and optimize for curiosity Every year, I think that I “might be more successful” if I can focus on a limited number of things, but as Walt Whitman said, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” As much as I try to say ‘no’ more, life proliferates and I find so many things interesting along the way that I want to do it all, or at least investigate things further.  As Lisa Cron pointed out in episode 592, “Emotion telegraphs meaning.” If I am excited about a project or a topic, then I need to give it some time, even if the practical application (and the revenue) might not be obvious. I’m an author (across multiple genres). I’m a podcaster. I’m an audiobook narrator. I’m a course creator. I’m a speaker. I’m a futurist. These days, I optimize more for curiosity than for maintenance of the status quo.  Following my curiosity, J.F. Penn book research trip, Lisbon 2019 — featured in Tree of Life Yes, there needs to be a balance, but I’ve been a full-time author entrepreneur since 2011 and so it cannot just be the same old, same old. It can't just be ‘write, publish, repeat.' I cannot write to market, and I cannot write because I have to. I refuse to grind it out.  I have so many things I want to create in 2022, and so many more things I want to learn about and share with you. I know I can’t do it all, so I will embrace my multi-passionate creativity, follow the paths my curiosity takes me down — and see where the year takes me. Here are my creative and business goals — some of them will happen, some won't, and I am far more accepting of that these days!  Books for authors under Joanna Penn I have three current works in progress, all with significant words in draft form:  How to Write a Novel — 95KThe Shadow Book (working title) — 30KThe AI-Assisted Author — 50K Although I’d love to say I’ll write and publish them all, each is a significant piece of work, and I have a lot of other things I want to do, so there will be at least one non-fiction book for authors— but I don’t know which as yet. There might also be a surprise book since that sometimes happens. I won’t second guess my Muse this early in the year. Some of my many journals I also have a LOT of words in draft — so I might also need to revisit Turning Pro by Steven Pressfield and consider what my Resistance is to finishing these projects. In terms of marketing for non-fiction, my main focus continues to be a weekly show on The Creative Penn Podcast, my Blueprint and email list, and Twitter @thecreativepenn (to a much lesser extent). I’ve been paying an excellent freelancer through Reedsy for managing my Amazon Ads for non-fiction, so I will continue to do that in 2022.  Books under J.F. Penn: Thrillers, dark fantasy, horror, crime — and travel! I have quite a few books I want to write:  Travelogue / travel memoirs — The Pilgrim’s Way (currently at 30K draft) and also The St Cuthbert’s Way (20K draft). It makes sense from a marketing point of view to put these out together, so hopefully, I will have both done this year. I’m also considering a Kickstarter for a special print run as I’d love to have some beautiful paper editions, and it’s something I am talking to White Fox about as they help with bespoke publishing projects (as we discussed in episode 566).Short stories — I have so many ideas, so I need to get some of these out of my head. I’d like to do one short story a month. I’ll also record the audio versions myself, and I might even have enough for a collection by the end of 2022.ARKANE thriller #13 — the story opens in Vienna, which I hope to visit in person depending on Covid restrictionsI have 13 more fiction projects sitting in Scrivener files — including several standalones that are half-formed ideas, so there might be something else, too. On the pilgrim's way — I still need to write this up! I’m pretty sure I’ll publish the travel books under J.F. Penn rather than a new pen-name, like Jo Frances Penn. The benefit of a new name for a new genre is mainly around keeping readers separate, training the algorithms for targeting and easier auto-advertising.  But I don’t have the bandwidth for another active brand and I’m not willing to start any new social media profiles or email lists — and one of my goals is to bring new readers to my fiction — so I am erring on the side of sticking with J.F. Penn for the travel books at the moment.  In terms of marketing, I mainly use free or discounted first in series, scheduling promotions like Freebooksy, or BargainBooksy, or BookBub, or other ad pushes to attract readers to my ARKANE series. The ARKANE series has 12 books, and I have two trilogies — Brooke & Daniel psychological/crime thrillers, and the Mapwalker fantasy trilogy.  I'm also optimizing my backlist. I’m currently updating all the blurbs based on hiring Michaelbrent Collings (as per episode 591). I’m going to do another light edit on Stone of Fire to tighten it up a little as that’s where I focus my marketing spend and it needs to draw people through into the other books. My writing has improved a lot over a decade, so even though part of me hates to revisit it, I want more people to continue in the series, so it’s worth a little time to re-edit.  As I am (mostly) wide and also write cross-genre, I haven’t found that Amazon Ads have worked well for my fiction in the past, so I am going to try again with Facebook Ads. Beginner's mind! I’m working through Skye Warren’s Author Ads Intensive, and will also go through Mark Dawson’s Ads for Authors course again to revisit the principles.  In terms of maintenance, I need to redesign my JFPenn.com website in 2022 and it generally needs some back-end technical love. Plus, I need to work through and update my email list automations. Not sexy — but all necessary business work that needs to be done! The Creative Penn Website and Podcast Thanks to everyone who completed the recent survey for the podcast. It helps me to know what you enjoy and find useful about the show. We’ll hit episode 600 in the next month, and then it’s onward to 700, which I am committing to now the wave of change is accelerating. The indie author ride is about to get more exciting and I’m keen to keep surfing it and sharing the journey with you! I asked about the main topic split in the survey, and overall, it seemed that all are still relevant. Respondents could select multiple options and they were pretty close, with the order of preference being:  Book marketingWriting craft – fiction Self-publishing Business of writing Mindset Futurist topicsWriting craft – non-fiction  I also received lots of ideas on what else to cover, but overall, it seems like the podcast is still serving you and the wider author community, so expect the podcast to continue with a mix of writing craft, publishing, marketing, author business, and futurist episodes.  Thanks so much to the corporate sponsors of the show and huge thanks also to my patrons at patreon.com/thecreativepenn and also those who bought me coffee at BuyMeACoffee.com/thecreativepenn. Your contribution enables me time to think about the bigger topics and particularly to keep reporting on and delving into the futurist topics, which will benefit us all at some point! Talking of which…  The Creative Future — putting new technologies into practice  In 2021, I talked about a lot of technological developments, and in 2022, I’ll put more of them into practice and integrate them into my creative process and my author business. It’s time to turn ideas into income! While there are many changes ahead, there are three that I consider practical for 2022: NFTs, AI narration, and AI writing tools. I continue to be excited about the potential of blockchain applications for the Creator Economy. I intend to drop some kind of NFT book — and earn ETH, or another cryptocurrency. While I think there is definitely a bubble in some aspects of NFTs, it’s important to keep an eye on the underlying infrastructure shift rather than the ‘froth’ of media hype.  It’s not just about the jpeg, it’s about NFTs as unique digital assets, about tokens for membership and community, about resale of digital assets, and much more. Please don’t dismiss NFTs overall, just because you think $69m for Beeple art or $10K on digital trainers is ridiculous!  Blockchain and NFTs are creating more potential revenue streams and business models for creatives, so I will keep an eye on that for you and share what I learn as ever. I also hope to work with DeepZen to build my AI narrator voice and use it to narrate one of my books — and maybe even make it available for licensing as another scalable income stream.  I will use Sudowrite (and/or other AI creative tools) within my fiction writing process, mainly as an extended thesaurus for multi-sensory description. I will continue to be an ethical author and use an AI usage statement in the back of my fiction. I think transparency will become ever more important as ‘deep fakes’ and AI-generated content becomes more common.  I’m also super curious about generative art — one of my favorite creators is The Archangel, who you’ll appreciate if you enjoy my fiction as J.F. Penn! Given that AI tools can now generate art from words, I’m planning to experiment with creating visual art from passages of my fiction. I want to do a special futurist episode on generative art, so if it’s something you’re into already, please contact me and mention this episode. I’ve found that writers become far more open to AI tools in other creative arenas than writing! If you want to know more about futurist/ technological topics, check out the resources on TheCreativePenn.com/future and my online course, The AI-Assisted Author. Books and Travel  I love my Books and Travel Podcast.  The podcast enables virtual escape without the hassle. Every time I interview someone, I’m transported to a different culture and the creative spark fuels my Muse and gives me ideas for where I’d like to go when the world (eventually) opens up again. Plus, I am writing some travel memoirs, so it will eventually serve a marketing purpose as well.  But I am seriously out of love with physical travel right now due to my experience with quarantine, isolation, repeated testing, and vaccine passport bureaucracy in New Zealand. And I need more time for writing and thinking and finishing all the projects I have in draft form. So the Books and Travel Podcast will go monthly from January, and I’ll add in extra ad hoc personal and solo shows as they emerge, and probably extra interviews as I find interesting people to talk to. I’ll also still blog and share photos from my travels and walks, which I intend to do more of in 2022. More tech, less tech. Health, travel, and connection As the digital and online world becomes ever more important for my work and my social contacts as well as creative experimentation (more tech), I also want to focus on the physical world and human connection (less tech.)  We are not just brains — we are physical humans. We need movement and we need connection with others.  So while I want to immerse further in the digital stream, I also want to disconnect more, and be more embodied. I don’t think these two are mutually exclusive. Both can exist together. In fact, they have to. Because we need more tech as authors, and we need more offline time for life and love and everything else that matters. As I mentioned in my 2021 round-up, I’ve struggled with physical and mental health in the last year and the health gains I did manage in the first half of the year, broke down when I had Covid and with the disruption of international travel.  Walking the Pilgrims' Way, October 2020 — happily unplugged! So, in 2022, I am recommitting to my intermittent fasting practice, my daily walks, and also my longer multi-day walks, as well as my twice-weekly weights workout with my personal trainer, Dan. I’ll also focus on sorting out my sleep — I have a whole ton of things to try, and I know that if I can sleep more effectively, a lot of other things will fall back into place. I need to get my fitness back as I’ll be walking my Camino de Santiago in Q3 (if Covid restrictions allow) and I’m considering several routes at the moment. I also want to do the London Orbital, which is not a pilgrimage, but a walk I really fancy doing around a city that is endlessly fascinating — with no travel restrictions or testing requirements. We’d also really like a holiday somewhere in Europe but we’re not booking anything because of uncertainty. I have some in-person conferences on the horizon (again, if Covid restrictions allow!) — London Book Fair in April, the Creator Economy Expo (CEX) in Arizona in May, Thrillerfest in New York City in June, Mark Dawson’s SPF Live also in June, and 20BooksVegas in November. It’s unlikely that all those things will happen — but I’ve penciled them in. Joanna Penn and Orna Ross at London Book Fair, 2018 Given my experience with Covid, as well as New Zealand quarantine, testing, and vaccine passport difficulties based on international differences, I’ll only travel if restrictions are not too difficult in the destination country, state, and city. You might think it’s easy enough to get a vaccine pass in your own country, but try dealing with someone else’s bureaucracy!  Financial goals  As I mentioned in my 2021 round-up, my overall income dipped last year and I need to reverse the trend. If you want to increase profit in a business, there are two main levers you can use — cut costs or increase revenue — or do both. My business is already pretty lean on costs and, in fact, that is part of the problem. Most successful authors now spend more than I do on advertising and marketing — so once again, it’s back to the fundamentals with ads. I will never be a super-fast writer publishing a book a month, but I now have a decent backlist for fiction and non-fiction, so if I bring more readers into those eco-systems (without spending TOO much), then it should result in financial growth.  While I’ve spent less within the business, I have invested a lot more than usual over the pandemic and that continues to be a focus. My next financial goal is to make more from my investments than my ‘work’ — but that is a multi-year plan with a lot of facets. Clearly, this is not a financial or investment-focused site, but I do have a list of recommended money books if you want to take this further yourself.  So once again, like most author entrepreneurs, the plan is to write more books — fiction and non-fiction, optimize my backlist, refocus on ads, and continue with my investment plans. Thank you for being part of my community in the last year — for buying my books in all formats, for being a patron of the show, for clicking my affiliate links, for leaving positive reviews on the books and the podcast, and for recommending them to others. I wouldn’t have this career without you, so thank you so much and I hope you’ll join me for the year ahead. Happy New year from auckland, new zealand! Onwards into 2022, creatives! Let’s make it a good one as much as possible. What are your creative and business plans for 2022? Please leave a comment if you’d like to share and let’s keep each other accountable for another year. You can also tweet me @thecreativepenn The post My Creative And Business Goals For 2022 With Joanna Penn first appeared on The Creative Penn.

As we all look back at the past year, it feels like it’s flown by — but also that time has warped in a way and it feels like we’ve been stuck in this pandemic for much longer than we expected. So here’s my 2021 year in review and an update on whether I managed to meet my goals. I hope this helps you with your own annual review, and feel free to share your achievements and lessons learned in the comments so we can all celebrate (and/or commiserate) together. A year of physical and mental health issues — for all of us. You are not alone!Joanna Penn — books for authorsThe Creative Penn website and podcast The Creative FutureJ.F. Penn — thrillers, dark fantasy, crime, horrorBooks and TravelHealth, travel, walkingFinancial goals I hope that you can look back and celebrate whatever you have achieved — even if that is just making it through alive! Writing remains for all of us a haven for our thoughts, not just words for publication — so I hope you have some time to step back, think and write about the year that is almost over.  If you’d like to share your thoughts, please do leave a comment, or blog about it and tweet me the link. I’ll be back soon with my plans and goals for 2021. Ever the optimist, I wrote on 1 Jan, 2021: “I’m expecting it to be at least a full pandemic year — from March 2020 to March 2021, but I am really hoping to be back in the world in the second half of this year.”  I also intended 2021 “to be a year of expansion — creatively in terms of what I write, mentally in terms of the things I learn about, and physically, in terms of my health and where I travel (once we're out of the woods with the virus, of course.)” Well, this year did not turn out as we all hoped, did it?! Part of me doesn’t want to do this round-up because I don’t really want to relive most of the year. But I’ve always found it incredibly useful to be accountable to you as my audience, and by looking back, we can be thankful to have made it through — and if you’re reading/listening to this, you have made it through — and hopefully, gain some perspective on what might be possible in the year ahead.  I will talk about some of the creative goals I achieved — and missed — but I want to start with something far more important. If you’re utterly exhausted and struggling with physical and mental health issues, you’re not alone.  I’ve talked about my various issues on the podcast over the year but essentially, it’s been one of my worst years ever in terms of mental and physical health. I share these things not for sympathy, but in the hope that it helps you if you have felt or are still feeling the same way, because we are certainly not alone. The UK winter lockdown (6 Jan – mid-March 2021) was brutal. I always have some form of SAD (seasonal affective disorder) but it was compounded by sleep issues, resulting from a combination of age-related hormonal changes and pandemic anxiety.  Sleep issues have been reported across the world during the pandemic (APA, The Lancet), but that doesn’t make it easier for any of us experiencing lack of it. That hasn’t resolved, but my anxiety about not sleeping has lessened, and in fact, I have a sleep psychologist on the show in early January since I have a feeling many of you are struggling with it, too. Another common pandemic issue is feeling constantly tired, on the edge of fatigue, and almost burned-out from the bad news, uncertainty, and anxiety. I didn’t really have this in 2020. Yes, the fear was real, but I was able to rally all my energy and go hard in making sure my business would survive. In 2020, I wrote a lot of books, did a lot of marketing, worked super hard — and all that probably contributed to feeling even more tired in 2021! That kind of energy is unsustainable and as the pandemic grinds on, it grinds us all down. We might feel a flurry of hope at some good news, and then it sinks away again as the next wave hits and we can’t help but doomscroll, looking for just that tiny bit of news that might change things.  Then, I contracted the Delta variant in mid-July 2021 along with a ton of other people in the UK. (Yes, I was double-vaxxed. No health or political comments, please!) I didn’t experience breathing issues and didn’t need hospitalization, so I am grateful for the vaccine — but it was still a very difficult few weeks of sickness (the sickest I have ever been) followed by around two and a half months of recovery. I still don’t have my sense of smell back entirely, and I have more difficulty getting my breath on hills that used to be easy. But given that my cousin was in a coma on a ventilator in the first wave, again, I am very grateful for the vaccine. The physical symptoms of Covid also came with a surprising amount of mental health issues — depression, anxiety, fear of ever getting better, inability to concentrate, weeping — and I’m not sure that has entirely receded. I read Kris Rusch’s book, Writing with Chronic Illness, while I was sick, and I listened to a LOT of audiobooks.  I did walk the St Cuthbert’s Way in October 2021, more on that later, to prove to myself I was physically better and that helped a lot. Covid also broke my intermittent fasting regime as I could only taste texture and salt, so I lived on sourdough toast, butter and Bovril for several weeks, and then my energy was so low, and I use food for emotional support — so it all fell apart. Then in late November, we experienced the stress of international travel to Aotearoa New Zealand to visit my mother-in-law who has advanced cancer. I’m writing and recording this from Auckland.  NZ has (mostly) kept Covid out, as they have one of the strictest border control, quarantine, and isolation regimes in the world. It took months to get a slot in MIQ and then began a bureaucratic nightmare, paperwork, vaccine passports — and what I struggled with the most — seven days of quarantine in a room with no opening window, 23.5 hours a day inside that room with only 30 minutes walking slowly clockwise around a carpark, guarded by the military; tested by people in hazmat gear; and generally treated like a virus-vector rather than a human. Even when we made it out, it took several weeks of chasing bureaucracy to get a vaccine passport because we were vaxxed in the UK, which made us second-class citizens for a while.  As a result of all this, I am seriously out of love with travel — which is something I didn’t think I would ever say. More on that to come as well.  I have also learned a lot about acceptance in terms of a limited physical and mental capacity. My upbringing was very much ‘power of positive thinking’ and a Protestant work ethic and sickness was almost a moral weakness. Take some vitamin C tablets and soldier on. But that has been impossible for much of the year — and I raged against it — but then I had to just let it be, and go back to bed and rest. Memento mori indeed.  All of this to say that this has been one of the most difficult years of my life — and I know my life is not as challenging as many others — so if you feel any of this, then you are not alone. But despite all this, I did manage to do a few things.  Joanna Penn — Books for authors One of my goals was to write How to Make a Living with your Writing Third Edition — which I did in the first quarter and narrated the audiobook.  I also intended to finish How to Write a Novel, but once again, I opened the Scrivener file several times and just couldn’t get on with it. I have some imposter syndrome around the topic, for sure. After all, Stephen King wrote a book On Writing! It’s also such a dauntingly large subject so I need to pick an angle, but it remains on the To Write list.  The surprise book of the year was The Relaxed Author, which I co-wrote with Mark Leslie Lefebvre — and we both did the audiobook narration. It sprang out of an interview conversation and then we had so many comments saying it was needed, that we went ahead and wrote the book. We both had to clear our schedules to write it, but I’m glad we did. Lots of you have said it’s been useful in a year when we all needed to relax more. Luckily, I finished it just before getting Covid and you can listen to us talking about our process and what we learned about each other in episode 575.  In foreign rights, I self-published Your Author Business Plan in German and also licensed some more non-fiction books for authors in French. I intended to double down on selling direct which I have definitely achieved. There’s more I could do, but I sell ebooks and audiobooks every day from payhip.com/thecreativepenn. You get a good deal, and I get money in my bank account immediately.  I know many of you have used my tutorial on selling direct to set up your own direct sales, so I’m pleased that’s becoming more of a trend for indies. The Creative Penn Website In May 2021, Google updated their algorithm around page speed and some other metrics, so I implemented a new theme and some technical backend things on TheCreativePenn.com, one of those tasks that you just have to do sporadically with what is now a 13-year-old site!  You should now find it easier to search if you use the Search Bar on the Start Here page and there are more landing pages and resource pages for the most common things: editors, book cover design, tools for authors, etc. If you run an author business, your website and email list are assets, just as much as your books. I frequently get offers for this site but of course, it’s not for sale. It is the hub for everything I do online, and it drives significant revenue — and importantly, I control it.  We have to maintain our backlist books, but we also have to maintain our backlist website/s. So this was a business-critical task that just had to be done. The Creative Penn Podcast It’s been an epic year for The Creative Penn Podcast with weekly episodes as usual, plus a lot of extra in-between-isodes and futurist shows (69 episodes in 2021 in total). Thanks to my corporate sponsors and to my patrons at patreon.com/thecreativepenn for continuing to support the show. It helps me financially and also emotionally — particularly in this challenging year.  I did a survey in the last few weeks, so I’ll share the way ahead for the podcast as we head toward episode 700 in my new year goals episode. The Creative Future  One of my biggest goals for 2021 was to dive deeper into the technological changes that accelerated due to the pandemic — and I said in my 2020 roundup, “I've been bored for a while now, with a feeling of stagnation in the status quo of the publishing industry. But I see things coming on the horizon that we need to prepare for, especially with the acceleration of digital transformation in the pandemic year.” Things have moved much faster than even I expected, and in fact, much of what was considered futurist is now moving into the present. 2021 certainly ended with a lot more people knowing words like NFTs and metaverse!  I also intended 2021 to be a “year of expansion — creatively in terms of what I write, mentally in terms of the things I learn about, and physically, in terms of my health and where I travel.”  One out of three isn’t bad, as I certainly expanded my understanding of these areas, joined new communities, and have started to grasp how this could all look in the years to come. My futurist episodes included:  Blockchain and NFTs — Publishing on blockchain; NFTs for Authors; The Ownership Economy; Creatokia: A World of Digital Originals; The metaverse for authors and publishing: Web 3.0, VR, AR, and the Spatial Web — published in August 2021, before Facebook rebranded as Meta in October 2021 and the metaverse hit the news Co-writing with AI — Sudowrite; Non-fiction and art; Fiction (trad pub); Fiction (indie); AI-powered creativityDigital narration with AI Voices (Deep Zen) Plus, an interview with me on techno-optimism! You can find a round-up of all the episodes as well as a list of AI writing tools, my book and course, The AI-Assisted Author, at www.TheCreativePenn.com/future  I also started putting these futurist elements into action in my creative work and business:  I’ve incorporated Sudowrite into my process and used it in Tomb of Relics, and now include a Statement of AI usage in my Author’s Note, mainly for transparency reasons. I’ve also worked with Orna Ross at the Alliance of Independent Authors around shaping a submission on AI and intellectual property to the WIPO and the UK government, as well as contributing to the ALLi statement of practical and ethical guidelines around AI for writingI published a book on the Ethereum blockchain through BookChain – although I haven’t earned any ETH (or any other crypto-currency — yet!) It was more to test the process, and the marketplace for books on chain is more likely to be NFTs in 2022, until the bigger platforms adopt architecture changes (as Kickstarter is doing). I worked with Deep Zen to create an AI-narrated edition of a Co-writing a Book and also A Thousand Fiendish Angels — both of which are clearly marked as auto-narrated and have a badge on the cover, again, for transparency reasons. You can listen to samples at the end of episode 589, or on the audiobook pages on Payhip here.  I’ve published more futurist episodes than I expected because of the acceleration of change. While many of you appreciated these episodes and found them interesting, others didn’t find them so palatable. In fact, I have received more hate and negativity — through emails, comments, and social media — in the last few months than I have received in my entire author career over these things. There was even a moment when I thought I might separate out the futurist stuff into another private, paid podcast and website and never mention it again here, but my wonderful patrons — and many listeners by email and comments — helped me see that the information is worthwhile and important to keep sharing.  Change is hard, but it’s also inevitable.  I started sharing my journey here in 2008 in the early days of ebooks, print on demand, and later digital audio and then streaming, and then all the other things. Technology will keep changing and will bring us more opportunity and inevitably more challenge. I’ll keep sharing what I learn and you can expect more futurist episodes — and application of the technology — in 2022. J.F. Penn — Thrillers, dark fantasy, crime, and horror I found it incredibly hard to write fiction this year, so it’s not been a stellar year for J.F. Penn! I have journaled a LOT but that is not for publication, at least not for right now. In terms of new creative works, I wrote Tomb of Relics (previous working title, Day of the Martyr). It was a hard-won book — and turned out as a novella, not a full-length novel — because I am usually inspired to write by my travels, which clearly, didn’t happen.  (My conversation with Becca Syme in episode 572 on strengths helped me understand why travel is so important for me.) I wrote one new short story which I’ll publish in January (Blood, Sweat, and Flame), and edited and published a story I’ve been sitting on for a few years as it never seemed quite the right time to publish it — A Midwinter Sacrifice. But being an indie author is not just about producing new work, it’s also about making the most of your intellectual property assets, and being a good publisher.  This year I started doing hardcovers through KDP Print, as well as Ingram. I also published the Mapwalker Trilogy in all the formats, and Tree of Life in audiobook.  I pulled the first three ARKANE thrillers out of ACX exclusivity and took them wide. Plus, I engaged Michaelbrent Collings to help with my fiction book descriptions after his fantastic interview on the topic in episode 591. I’m in the middle of updating all of that through the publishing eco-system.   Books and Travel My Books and Travel Podcast is now at 76 episodes and this year, I found solace in virtual escape and dreams of travel that the interviews provided me — and from the comments and emails, my listeners found that too. It is a podcast of love and still doesn’t bring me any direct income, because I haven’t written the travel books I intended to, but it has brought me happiness.  I’m also using the site as a blog to share articles and pictures from places I travel, so you can read and see the pictures from the St Cuthbert’s Way, even though I haven’t done a solo episode on it, or written the book yet.  If you’d like some virtual travel, or some musings on the deeper side of it all, just search for Books and Travel Podcast on your favourite app, or check out the backlist at BooksAndTravel.page/listen Health, travel, walking  In my 2021 goals, I said, “I’m expecting it to be at least a full pandemic year — from March 2020 to March 2021, but I am really hoping to be back in the world in the second half of this year. I'm planning trips to Portugal and Japan, as well as some more ultra-marathons and another walking pilgrimage in the north of England. My plan is to work hard in the earlier months so I can have more time off later in the year for some much-needed travel, family catch-ups, and book research trips.” Hmm, well, once again, not really as expected — but we made the most of our beautiful country and I appreciate the UK as a holiday destination more than ever! We did the following:  Cycled from Oxford to Bath through the CotswoldsWalked along the Jurassic Coast and visited the gorgeous coastal town of Lyme RegisWalked in Puzzle Wood, part of the ancient Forest of Dean that inspired Tolkien’s Fangorn I walked the St Cuthbert’s Way from the borders of Scotland across Northumberland to Lindisfarne, Holy IslandAfter an incredible amount of stress — and a double dose of bureaucratic hell and quarantine difficulties — we made it to Auckland, New Zealand. It’s a family trip and not a holiday, since my mother-in-law is immune-compromised, so we can’t do much, but it is warm and there is sea and bush to walk beside. Pics on Instagram and Facebook @jfpennauthor Financial goals  My main financial goal for the year was to sustain The Creative Penn income at a steady level while freeing up time to write the books I want to write, and have time to play with the new technologies — and to do extra podcast episodes to report back.  While still a very good living, my revenue did drop this year — not unexpected given how much work I didn’t do! I stopped doing webinars and most ads and pulled back on a lot of things, plus I didn’t write many books. I spent a lot of time on things that don’t bring in immediate revenue, but should add revenue streams in the future. I also said ‘no’ to many opportunities for income for mental health reasons, and just because it wasn’t interesting to me.  While I want to continue with the experimentation in 2022, I do want to try and lift my income again, so more on that in my 2022 goals.  This too shall pass. From my day at the letterpress collective, bristol. Right, that’s about it for 2021. I don’t want to wish the time away, but I am glad the year is over!  I hope that you can look back and celebrate whatever you have achieved — even if that is just making it through alive! Writing remains for all of us a haven for our thoughts, not just words for publication — so I hope you have some time to step back, think and write about the year that is almost over.  If you’d like to share your thoughts, please leave a comment, or blog about it and tweet me the link. I’ll be back soon with my plans and goals for 2021.The post Not Quite The Year We Hoped For. Review Of My 2021 Creative Business Goals first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Our publishing, marketing and author business tasks are important — but at the end of the day, it all comes down to writing. We are authors. We are writers. So as we head toward a new year, how can you find the time to write? How can you make the most of your writing time? In the intro, The Big Split [Kris Rusch]; thoughts on long-term creation and serendipity in marketing [Tim Ferriss, 4000 Weeks, Johnny Truant]; Web 3 opportunities [Yaro Starak]; A Midwinter Sacrifice; Risen Gods. Plus, 30% off my ebooks and audiobooks at Payhip.com/thecreativepenn with coupon: 2021 — and 30% off my courses for authors on Teachable with coupon: 2021 (valid until end of 2021.) This podcast episode is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo ecosystem. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors.  Today's show features two chapters from Productivity for Authors, written and narrated by Joanna Penn. Joanna Penn writes non-fiction for authors and is an award-nominated, New York Times and USA Today bestselling thriller author as J.F. Penn. She’s also an award-winning podcaster, creative entrepreneur, and international professional speaker. 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 to find the time to write — schedule your writing timeTrack how you spend your timeHow much do you really want this?Where can you carve out time?No one said this would be easyMake the most of your writing time — find the right locationGet into the right mindset — quicklyTurn off distractionsUse timed writingStop procrastinatingMeasure your progressQuestions to help you You can find Productivity for Authors: Find Time to Write, Organize Your Author Life, and Decide What Really Matters in ebook, print, workbook, and audiobook editions on your favorite store. Click here for all the links. How to find the time to write Finding time to write is the most important step in writing more, but how do you find the time? In the previous chapters, we started on the process of culling your To Do list, and now we’re going to take it a step further. Because after over a decade of writing and more than 30 books published, I’ve found there is only one answer. Schedule your writing time Seriously, this could be a transformational step if you’ve not done this before. It’s not complicated. Get out your calendar or your smartphone app or however you schedule your time, and put in slots for writing. Then show up for that time to write just as you would show up for a business meeting or a gym class or anything else that is time-sensitive. Stop making your writing slot optional or showing up late as if it doesn’t matter. As Stephen King says in On Writing, “Don't wait for the muse. Your job is to make sure the muse knows where you're going to be every day, from 9:00 till noon, or 7:00 till 3:00. If he does know, I assure you that sooner or later he'll start showing up.” You can understand the muse as a metaphor or as more literal if you prefer. Steven Pressfield, author of The War of Art, invokes the muse before he writes in the classical sense of asking the divine to help inspire his work. Whatever works for you. I know that if I show up to the page, eventually something's going to happen. When I’m working on a first draft, I sit down for my scheduled writing session from 7:00 am until around 9:30-10 am. I take a break, then maybe do another session later on in the day. If I’m sitting at my specific table in my local café, my creative brain knows I’m there to write or edit. I don't have any other tasks booked in for that time. If I turn up for my scheduled writing slot, I’m far more likely to write something than if I wait until I have a spare moment. Because let’s face it, no one ever has a spare moment! If you don't already use a planning calendar, then it's time to start You must, must, must schedule your writing time. Presumably, you schedule other things in your life, like going to the day job or your kid's school events, or your dentist appointment, or going to the gym regularly, or whatever. That's how you need to schedule your writing. But what if you try to schedule your writing time and can’t find a slot?  Track how you spend your time now This can be challenging and can also be a shock. I did this back when I wanted to write my first non-fiction book in 2006-2007. I looked at my time and realized that I went to the gym in the morning, then I went to work, then I would come home exhausted, make dinner, and sometimes we’d watch three hours of TV before bed. That was every night, or at least most nights in a week.  When I discovered the amount of time I was watching TV, consuming rather than producing, I decided to cut back. TV is a lot better these days, but if you're watching three hours a night, you can definitely cut back, too. I also know authors who gave up gaming when they became writers, or at least rationed their gaming hours, as it can be such a time suck.  What about the gym and exercise time? We all need to stay healthy, and I'll come back to health in Chapter 13, but maybe there are things you can change. For example, in the last couple of years, I've been walking ultra-marathons, so in training for that, I would spend eight to ten hours walking. In that time, I listened to a lot of audiobooks and sometimes did a bit of dictation. When I realized I needed that time back, I switched to spin class and yoga, which take up less time, and I can still achieve my health goals with a longer walk on Sundays.  If you're going to prioritize your writing, you have to change something. I don't recommend you cut out sleep, but there are ways you can optimize it, for example, go to bed earlier, get up earlier and write in the early morning.  If you’re still struggling to find the time, here’s some tough love.  How much do you really want this? What is your why and what are you willing to give up for your goal? Because something has to give. There are a few other things I did to make time between 2006 and 2011 when I had a day job, before I went full-time as an author entrepreneur. I wrote my first four books in those years, blogged at The Creative Penn, started podcasting and learned about all the things that are needed to build and grow a creative business.  I worked a demanding day job but I still made time to write. I got up at 5 a.m. to write before work. I was never going to be able to write after work because I was exhausted by the time I came home. That morning session was always for writing or editing or working on a book, and the extra time I had in the evenings after cutting down TV was for marketing and building my author platform. I opted out of the career ladder. If you have a day job and you’re doing everything you can to advance up that career ladder, you will often do a lot more than your official job requires. You’ll put in more hours and often work from home, taking up more time but also headspace that you can’t use for your writing.  So, I mentally opted out of my consulting career. I knew I didn’t want to follow that path and I didn’t want to become a manager. I wanted to do my work, then leave on time. I also worked from home as much as possible, often with two laptops open so I could fit in creative business tasks alongside my day job work. I eventually moved to working four days a week at the day job, essentially cutting 20% of my income and 20% of the time that I had to spend at work. Of course, you often have to get as much done in four days as they ask you to do in five, but it helps if you don't have to commute, check email and answer phone calls on that other day. You can just focus on writing. That was how I made the time, but of course, you will have to find what works for you. Where can you carve out time? “Write at the edges of the day.” Toni Morrison It doesn't need to be big chunks. You don't need a two-hour block to get more writing done. I know of one particular author with five children who keeps her laptop in the kitchen and somehow writes while managing her hectic family life. She has around 50 novels written over the years of child-rearing.  For other people, it's writing when the children are asleep in the early morning or late evening. I mentioned TV and gaming, and the other thing that takes time is household tasks. I’ve outsourced my cleaning for the last decade, which has freed up a lot more of my time. How about combining activities? For example, write while commuting. Mark Dawson, bestselling thriller author, wrote his first five novels while commuting by train for a few hours each day. If you walk or you’re in the car, you could try dictating, covered in Chapter 8.  Once you have time blocks available in your calendar, schedule in the number you need in order to get to your goal. You calculated this in Chapter 3 on deadlines. Using that example, if you carve out five hours a week for writing, that's 5,000 words per week, so it will take you 14 weeks to write 70,000 words of a first draft.  Get out your schedule and put in your weekly blocks for 14 weeks. That might be one hour per week day or maybe three blocks in the week and a two-hour session at the weekend. Whatever works for you: But you do need to actually schedule it. Don’t skip this step. When you see the time block in your calendar, it is not optional. If you’re tempted to skip it, say to yourself, “My writing is important. I will be there at that time and I will write.” If you do that, you will achieve your goal. Find the time, turn up, do the work and then carry on with your busy life. No one said this was going to be easy If it was easy, everyone would be writing a book. Everyone says they're writing a book, but in order to actually achieve your goal, you have to turn up and do the work.  Some surveys say that 80% of people want to write a book, but very few of those people end up publishing, and even fewer of those end up making a good living with their writing. So the question is, who do you want to be? “On the field of the Self, stand a knight and a dragon. You are the knight, resistance is the dragon. The battle must be fought every day.” Steven Pressfield, The War of Art I’ve had this quote on my wall for years. I wrote it out in ink a long time ago and it’s faded now but I know it off by heart because the battle must indeed be fought every day. Even if you schedule those 14 weeks of time blocks into your calendar, what happens at 6 a.m. on a cold morning as you lie in bed and think, “I really don't want to do this. What’s the point? I’ll just have another hour in bed.” There will always be things that will get in your way, and your mind may be your greatest challenge. You must fight that resistance if you want to succeed as a writer. Get up and do your work. Questions:  Are you scheduling your writing time at the moment? If not, why not? Where is your resistance?Do you have an accurate view of how you spend your time? If not, track a week of activities including TV and gaming.What are you going to give up in order to find time for your writing?Have you done the calculation on how much time you need for that first draft? Or revision time or whatever you need.Have you scheduled your next block of writing time? Make the most of your writing time Now you’ve carved out the time and scheduled the writing sessions that will help you to achieve your goal, what can you do to make the most effective use of your writing time? (1) Choose the right location There are no rules, but I suggest that your writing place should be different to the places you do other things. Humans are habitual creatures. We like doing the same things in the same place and it sets off a certain frame of mind. I have a home office where I do my podcasting, interviews, email, accounting and other business tasks. I cannot write or edit my books at the same desk. I write my first drafts and edit at a local café. I go early when it opens so they have tables spare and I buy a black coffee every hour in exchange for the writing space. Most people come for takeaways at that time of day and I’m gone before the rush after 10 am. If you like to work in a cafe, make sure to respect the business and be a good customer so they’re happy to have you there.  When I’m working on my laptop, I use a Nexstand riser and external keyboard for ergonomic positioning. If I'm editing, I print out the whole manuscript and edit by hand. I sometimes edit at home on the dining room table, but never in my office.  It helps to keep my spaces separate, because when I’m in my home office, there is always more to do on the business, but when I’m at the café, I’m only there for one reason. To create something new in the world. You could go to the library or hire a desk or a room in a co-working space, common in most cities now. If I’m working to a first draft deadline, I will often hire a local room for dictation in addition to my morning café sessions. It costs me around US$15 per hour. If I cancel too late, then I'll have to pay for it anyway, so it forces me to turn up. This accountability helps, especially if I don't feel like writing, and it enables me to finish the first draft more quickly. Of course, the writing process is not just about getting words on a page. This creative time slot is for whatever phase of the creative project that you're in. It might be planning or plotting, research, outlining, first draft writing or editing. But don’t mix it up with publishing or marketing activities which use other parts of your brain. Keep one special location for your creative tasks.  (2) Get into the right mindset — quickly “The last thing I do before I sit down to work is say my prayer to the Muse. I say it out loud, in absolute earnest. Only then do I get down to business.” Steven Pressfield, The War of Art Many writers use a ritual to get into the creative mindset but it is specific to them and not some magic way that can be used by others. So, don't get obsessed with finding a perfect ritual, but do establish a routine and a habit around your writing practice, so you can switch into your writing mindset quickly and get on with your work. I go to the café and sit at a specific table, order my black coffee, put on my noise-canceling headphones with Rain and Thunderstorms on repeat, then write. I use Bose QuietComfort noise-canceling headphones and I love them. I also wear them on airplanes and anywhere noise gets to me. As an introvert, I’m highly sensitive to sound. They’re pricey but they’re seriously one of the best investments I've ever made in my writing, creativity and productivity.  I’ve also been listening to the same Rain and Thunderstorms album for over a decade. What a bargain! You can also use the RainyMood app or find free ambient sounds online to shut out other noise. As soon as the rain starts, my brain knows I’m in a creative space. Nothing else matters. I almost don’t hear it anymore, but you will find a storm in almost all of my novels, so it must have some influence! If you like more exciting music or you're interested in what other writers listen to, check out the Undercover Soundtrack blog by Roz Morris which features authors and the soundtracks for their books. I'm definitely the most boring person ever in terms of my listening habits while I write, but it works for me. You need to find what works for you.  (3) Turn off distractions Turn off your phone and any notifications. Put it on airplane mode or silent. If you’re worried about an emergency with your kids or your job, put your phone on vibrate but do whatever you can to stop yourself looking at it during the writing session. No multitasking. In this specific block of writing time, you are not allowed to do anything else other than work on your book. If you’re writing a first draft, then write the first draft. If you're editing, then edit. If you know that you will end up going down an Internet rabbit-hole of research, then turn off the Internet. Just put a note in the document and come back to it later. Stop making excuses. Do the work.  (4) Use timed writing Timed writing changed my life back in the days when I still dreamed of being a writer. One year, I went to a creative writing class at the Sydney Writers' Festival. I’m a very good student, so I had my notebook at the ready to write down pearls of wisdom. I was prepared to listen and learn. But then the teacher said, “The first thing we're going do is write for ten minutes about a day when you discovered something that would change your life.” He looked at his watch. “Ten minutes. Off you go.”  Everyone around me started writing fast as I sat there for a moment, stunned. You mean I actually have to write something? As I picked up my pen, I realized that I had not faced a timed writing exercise since school exams, and it was definitely my first time with a creative writing prompt. But I started writing anyway, and after ten minutes, I had a couple of paragraphs about a particular memory. It shocked me and changed my life, because I really didn’t think I could create from my brain like that. It pushed me past my self-doubt and I started using timed writing sessions for everything. In 2009, I did NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, and I used timed writing to get my first 20,000 words down. I eventually turned those words into the beginning of Stone of Fire. You can try writing sprints if you're in a writing group online or off. You could also try NaNoWriMo.org in November when lots of people write at the same time. You'll often find writing groups in your town during this period. There are also habit-tracking apps that you can use with writing timers, or check out the Pomodoro Technique, developed by Francesco Cirillo. You can find information about that online. You may find other techniques useful, but timed writing was the thing that got me over myself. Don't just sit down and see what you can come up with in an hour. Do several timed blocks with a little break in between and you will achieve more in the same time. (5) Stop procrastinating If you’re still struggling with checking email and social media, or gaming apps, whatever else you’re procrastinating with, you need to be self-aware enough to say, “I’ve got to stop this.” Put your phone on airplane mode and turn off notifications. How many times do I have to say this?! Seriously, I’ve been to so many writing events where authors will have notifications coming through constantly. Ping, ping, ping. Don't do that! If you’re still struggling, schedule a procrastination break. Say to yourself, “I know my brain needs to procrastinate, so, I'm going to write for 20 minutes and then I'm going to stop and have a social media or email break,” or whatever you need. Set a timer for five minutes so you don’t lose track of time, then get back to writing. “The professional shows up every day. The professional is committed over the long haul. The amateur tweets, the pro works.” Steven Pressfield, Turning Pro I reread Turning Pro every new year because it continues to challenge me in my creative life because I do tweet @TheCreativePenn. I like tweeting and it serves my business. I like Instagram, too. Social media has its place, but not when it takes your writing time. (6) Measure your progress It can be really hard to see your progress, especially in the first draft of your first book. In your mind, you can see a finished book. It's amazing! But then you sit down and write 500 words and realize you have a long way to go. And you do. But everything worth doing takes time! There are a number of ways you can measure your progress. I use Project Targets on Scrivener, which has a progress bar that turns from red to green for each writing session and also for the book as a whole. Many writers use spreadsheets or apps to track word count.  I used a physical wall calendar when I started out, as it keeps creation top of mind. I used colored pens and stickers to reward my creative self. Who doesn’t love a sticker for good work? I’d get a sticker for 2,000+ words in a session, and if I was under, I’d just write the word count in a colored pen. One month, I logged 42,905 words that way and it was motivating to see the word count add up over the days. This idea of ‘don’t break the chain,’ or ‘don’t break the streak,’ is common in habit formation, and it’s a great idea if you’re in first draft mode. Word count matters less when you’re in editing or other stages of the creative process, but you might still log hours spent on the project or pages edited. In James Clear's book, Atomic Habits, he suggests filling a jar with paperclips and putting an empty jar beside it. Each paperclip could represent a writing session, or a thousand words, or whatever is appropriate. After each session, move a paper clip from one jar to the other and over time, the originally empty jar will fill up and you can see your progress. You might feel like you haven't achieved much in one writing session, but if you focus on the process rather than the finished product, you will see progress over time. “Habit tracking keeps your eye on the ball. You're focused on the process rather than the results. It's remarkable what you can build if you just don't stop.” James Clear, Atomic Habits (7) Know what you’re going to write before you write it This is definitely a way to make the most of your writing time, but how you do this will depend on the kind of writer you are. I’m a discovery writer, so I don’t outline. However, on my walk to the cafe or the days between, or out on a walk, I’ll be thinking about my characters or the topic I want to write about for non-fiction, and I might jot down some notes, or think about possibilities, so that when I sit down to write, I know what I’m there to do or at least have a starting point. Other writers swear by an outline, perhaps a few lines or paragraph per chapter which you can expand during your writing time. Some authors, like thriller author Jeffrey Deaver, write extensive outlines. Of course, you don’t have to do it all in advance. You could spend five to ten minutes at the beginning of your writing session thinking about what you will write. Jot down a few bullet points and then expand them in your writing session. (8) Spend more hours in the chair Authors who are massively productive spend more of their time writing. Fantasy author Lindsay Buroker will sometimes write for eight hours a day. She can write a book a month because she puts in the hours. I have never written for eight hours in a single day so it takes me longer to put the hours in so I don’t produce as many books. If you spend more hours in the writing chair, you are going to spend more time writing. You will write more words per day as a result. If you don’t have more hours in the day, then carve out more writing sessions in the week. If you’re managing one hour, three times a week, but you want to be more productive with your writing, then do one hour, six times a week. You will double the number of words written and get to your goal faster. (9) No excuses What if you don't feel like writing? What if you’re too tired or you've got a headache? Would you go to your day job in your current condition? Are you taking your writing just as seriously? Obviously, if you’re really sick, then no worries. Take a break. But many people go to their day job when they don't ‘feel’ like it, or they're tired, or they have a headache. They still manage to get their work done even if they’re not in the mood. There are days when I sit down to write and I find it so hard. I really don’t want to be there. Then another day it feels amazing. I’m in flow and everything is brilliant. But the truth is, you will not be able to tell the difference between those two pieces of writing when you read the book later. It makes no difference to the finished product.  No excuses. Do your work. “Don't wait for the muse … he's a hardheaded guy who's not susceptible to a lot of creative fluttering. This isn't the Ouija board or the spirit-world we're talking about here, but just another job like laying pipe or driving long-haul trucks.” Stephen King, On Writing Questions: What does your creative setup and ritual look like?How will you stop distractions and interruptions?Have you tried timed writing? If not, why not?How will you measure your progress?How could you write faster?Are there any other ways that will help you make the most of your time writing? You can find Productivity for Authors: Find Time to Write, Organize Your Author Life, and Decide What Really Matters in ebook, print, workbook, and audiobook editions on your favorite store. Click here for all the links. The post How To Find The Time To Write And Make The Most Of Your Writing Time With Joanna Penn first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Why is story so important — no matter what genre we write? How can we use emotion to hook readers — and also tap into what matters in our own lives? Lisa Cron talks about these questions and more in this discussion about Story or Die. In the intro, Ultimate Guide to Copyright [ALLi]; How do you see your book — is it a baby, is it art, or is it a product? [Jane Friedman's blog]; The History Quill convention online; The Creative Penn Podcast Survey (by 21 Dec); 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. 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. Lisa Cron is a story coach for writers and a story consultant for film and TV, as well as a professional speaker. She’s also the author of Wired for Story, Story Genius, and her latest book, Story Or Die: How to Use Brain Science to Engage, Persuade, and Change Minds in Business and in Life. Show Notes Why story is so important for humans — and why it's present in every area of life What stories are really aboutThe brain chemicals that a good story will activate — and how to write so they are triggeredStory principles in non-fictionEmotion telegraphs meaningThe three biggest lies that are taught about writing You can find Lisa Cron at WiredForStory.com and on Twitter @LisaCron Transcript of Interview with Lisa Cron Joanna: Welcome back to the show, Lisa. Lisa: Thank you. It is an utter pleasure to be here. Joanna: I'm excited to talk about this again. So, quoting from the book, you say, “Story far predates written language, and evolved as an essential survival tool, long before it was mis-classified as fiction,” which I love. Why does story matter in every book we write, no matter the genre? Lisa: Well, because first of all, story is story, regardless of genre, regardless of the format, whether you're talking about a two-word tweet or War and Peace, it is always the same. And it predates, really, everything. It really goes back to, if you want to think about it, our brains' last, as we've all heard, big growth spurt, which was about 100,000 years ago. What we were taught, what evolutionary biologists thought for a long time, was that the reason for that growth spurt was because that was when we got the ability to think analytically. That analytic thought became possible at that time. And that's true, it did. But what they know now is that that wasn't the reason for it. The reason for it was because by that time, and we were, at that time, in the middle of the food chain. And by that time, if we were going to leap to the front of the food chain, which we did, we needed to learn to do that thing that we've been told to do since kindergarten, since primary school, which is, we needed to learn to work well with others. At that time, the need to belong to a group became as hardwired as is our need for food, air, and water. You often get people who go, ‘I'm a lone wolf. I don't need anybody else. I've done everything on my own. I'm totally self-made.' And I always want to go, ‘Well, you do know the wolves travel in packs.' In the wolf community, a lone wolf is a wolf that has done something that was so egregious to the pack that they're ostracized and left to die. The point is, is that we really are wired to need to work with other people and to band together in order to figure out literally how to survive. That's where story comes in, because story is the thing that lets us step out of the present, so we can envision the future and think about what would we need to do in order to survive the next wolf pack attack or saber-toothed tiger attack, or how to bring food together. And that's really what stories are about. At that time, it really became wired that stories aren't just about how to solve something logistically, like how to survive a wolf attack. Stories are really about how to survive in the social world. When I say in the social world, I don't just mean the world of dating. I mean literally the world of other people. Because that's what we come to story for. Now, for the past 100,000 years, and in every story, what we're wired to come for is asking that question, ‘How is this going to help me make it through the night?' How is it going to help me achieve my agenda, given what I want? Is it going to help me? Or is it going to hurt me? And stories are, again, about the internal workings, literally of the mind. Why is somebody doing what they're doing? Story is never about what someone does, because what someone does on the surface, and the reasons we attribute to it, are almost always wrong. Stories are about why they're doing it, and how they're making sense of it, so that we can really understand the meaning of the action, and why they're doing what they're doing, and what it means to them. And that's what allows us to empathize with them, which is what allows us to really understand other people, and also, to really understand why they're doing what they're doing, especially if they're doing something that we feel is counterproductive, shall we say, and we have a notion of what a better thing to do would be. If we understand not just what they're doing, but in their opinion, deep down, why they're really doing it, that might lead us to understand what their, as I'm fond of saying, their misbelief is about it. Then we can create a story, whether, again, it's War and Peace, or a tweet, or a mission statement, that's going to help them really see and understand and feel that the way that they're looking at it is counterproductive to their actual belief system. That's what story is. Story isn't about what happens on the surface. Story is about how what happens on the surface affects someone's belief system, and how that belief system has to change in order for them to solve whatever intractable problem they're facing on the surface. All stories are about change. They're about how we change. And all change is hard. Again, change isn't just some external change we make. It's the internal shift in belief system that allows us to see the reasoning and believe the reasoning, given our own belief system, as to why that change is necessary. That's what story is. And, again, story is story, and has been from time immemorial. It's just that, if I could just say real quickly, the difference is, and part of the reason I think we think of it as fiction often now, is because think about it in terms of the history of the world, and of the human race or of all life on Earth. The time that we've had, what we would consider fiction, in other words, stories that we would read kind of because we want to, not because it's something that we need to know in order to survive in this moment, is something that's really new. We tend to think of that as something completely separate from how we see the world, what we do in the world, from anything that actually makes us who we are, or gets us what we need. We tend to think of story, sadly, as something that is entertainment. When we think of it as entertainment, because we love it so much, feels so good to get lost in a story, and therefore we think of story as optional, as if it doesn't serve any actual purpose. And it does. Again, as I'm fond of saying, and I know you guys have probably heard me say this before, story was more crucial to our evolution than our much-touted and admittedly beloved opposable thumbs. Because all opposable thumbs do is let us hang on. Story lets us know what to hang on to. The thing to keep in mind is what we're wired to look for in a story from time immemorial is the same, again, whether it's a tweet or War and Peace, or whatever you're writing right now. It is the exact same thing that pulls us in. And when it pulls us in, we're toast. We've all heard that old chestnut from, I think it was Coleridge who said, ‘To get lost in a story demands a willing suspension of disbelief.' As if we have some control over it, as if it's a decision. It's not. Once story grabs us, and there's a literal chemical cocktail that immediately starts to surge through our veins, we're literally catapulted out of our everyday reality, and we are within the world of the story. Those functional MRI studies show, when you're lost in a story, same areas of your brain are lighting up that would light up if you're doing what the protagonist is doing. You really are there. And I know that's a long way to answer your question, but there you go. Joanna: You mentioned a bit about the chemicals, and of course, the book, the subtitle has ‘Brain Science,' we're talking brain science. This is not just you making this stuff up. As you mentioned, there's fMRI study. You talk about these neurotransmitters that activate during the story. Can you talk a bit more in detail about how that works, and why it's so important, and maybe also how we hit those points? How do we activate those brain chemicals in a reader? Lisa: Oh, absolutely, because they come in unison. And again, yes, this is research. Look at the work of Paul Zak. I do so much research. As we were talking sort of before we began this, there are great things about the internet, and then terrifying things about it. One of the great things is that it is so easy to do research. I can be reading an article in ‘The New York Times' or ‘The Washington Post,' or in ‘The Wall Street Journal' that mentions the study, and often, literally within three minutes, I can be reading the scholarly paper or Ph.D. thesis in which all of the research was done. But anyway, so, what pulls us into a story? It is a chemical cocktail of three things. First, I'll just say it in order. It's not 1, 2, 3. It's they come in unison. But since we're speaking in a linear way, the first one would be dopamine. Dopamine, we've all heard of dopamine these days. Dopamine is often said to be the pleasure hormone. But it isn't, actually. It's actually really stoked, what triggers dopamine is curiosity. ‘I'm going to go through this to find out what might happen, because it might be pleasurable,' which is something I think we've all experienced in the past, I don't know, 10 years or whatever, since all of us, or so many of us have smartphones. You get that ding when you've gotten an email, and instantly there's a dopamine, because you want to open it up because hey, maybe you did win the lottery or something. Then comes cortisol. Cortisol is the stress hormone. Cortisol comes when I want to find out what's happening, I'm curious, and there's something at stake. There's something that for lack of a better way of putting it, something bad might happen. Something is at risk here, and I want to find out what's going to happen. Those two things alone don't do it. In fact, often, writers will make the mistake of having something, this is an oxymoron, objectively dramatic, happening. If it's objective, it can't be dramatic, because something is dramatic, it's affecting someone, and that brings us to the third thing, which is, the third hormone, which is oxytocin, which is the empathy hormone. In other words, there has to be someone who we care about, who has something at risk, that matters to them in a way that isn't just generic. In other words, it would matter to them in a surface way that it would matter to all of us, like they're running down the street, and someone's chasing them with a baseball bat, and they're about to hit them with the baseball bat, and they're running because they don't want to get hit by a baseball bat. Well, who wants to get hit by a baseball bat? None of us. So, that isn't the meaning. The meaning that comes from it is that there's something at stake that matters to them. Those are the three things that have to be there, literally on the first page. If you don't have something that is going to instantly trigger that chemical cocktail, we're not going to read forward. Why would we? We've got no skin in the game. It's that that catapults us out of the world that we're in, and into the world of the story. That is the chemical cocktail. When that happens, we're toast. You don't stop and go, ‘Wait a minute. Do I really want to do this?' You're just, ‘Oh my god. I gotta find out what happened.' You're suddenly sucked into that world of the story. And the scary thing, again, coming away from just talking, and I don't mean ‘just,' but talking about not only, this is only with a ‘just,' novels and movies, and and all the TV shows we've been binge watching for the past 18 months while we've been at home. Any kind of a story, we're affected by stories, every minute of every day, whether we know it or not. Mostly we don't and stories are really effective. As we can see, story pulls us into places where if we were just thinking about it, we'd never go, you know. Hello, QAnon, I'm talking to you. There's so many things that are out there in the world, back when we had actual facts, that are just painfully obviously untrue, and it doesn't matter. We've been pulled into a story, and now, it's really resonating with us, and we see it as true. It becomes part of the lens through which we read meaning into everything. Joanna: This is important to touch on maybe a bit further, which is, as you said, we're not just talking about fiction. I think in a way fiction's easier, because you know that you need a character and they're in a situation, and they want to achieve something, and you try and stop them, and they have to overcome it, and they change, and that is a story with fiction. I feel like with nonfiction, and a lot of listeners write nonfiction books, you write nonfiction books, it's the same principle, but in that case, is the character we're using, is the character us, in a nonfiction book? And let's assume people are trying to convince people, in good ways, about good and useful things. How do we bring those principles of story into a nonfiction book? Lisa: Again, it depends on the type of nonfiction you're writing. If you're trying to change somebody's mind about something, and you know who your target audience is, which is a difference between writing a novel, where you have some idea of who your target audience is. If you're writing erotica in the romance vein, you know who your audience is, you know what they expect, you know what they want. But that's a very wide audience. If you're trying to change somebody's mind about something, you need to figure out who your target audience is, and then are they the protagonist in the story that you're writing? Whether you're writing literally about that particular person? Yeah, of course they are. You're in their mindset, and you're looking for the situation in which you can show them, by taking them through that, again, in a story form, the thing that you have identified as their misbelief. In other words, the reason why, in their opinion, they believe that something is a particular way, and then diving into it and creating that external situation that is going to force them to really re-evaluate their belief in order to solve whatever the problem is that they're going to be facing. Stories are about how we solve a problem that we can't simply walk away from. That's what, whether you're writing fiction, nonfiction, or anything, that's what stories are always about. The point is, in order to write anything in nonfiction, whether we're talking about a mission statement or a pitch letter, you're trying to sell yourself, or a resume, you really need to put yourself into the mindset of the person who you're trying to convince first and foremost. And that is really hard, because the two things that people do when they're trying to convince people of something is number one, they'll give the same reasons why it would convince them. That absolutely doesn't work, because if that worked, you wouldn't be trying to convince them, they'd already be on your side. The problem when you give people reasons that would convince you is that they often also tend to be things that the people out there can't even unpack. Because you're using facts that you understand, you're using facts that you can unpack. And often, they don't even know what those facts actually mean, nor can they see how they would affect them in their lives. If they can, and if you are asking them to change, that is going to bring up that part of our brain that wants to argue back. Because whenever anybody says anything that goes against what we already believe, even if it's that I believe my toothpaste is the best in the world, and in fact, it is, that becomes, literally, it's taken by our brain as a personal attack. Once we believe something, it becomes not only part of our self-identity, but it becomes part of how we hew to our — for lack of a better term — tribe. In other words, it's the group that gives us meaning, and that if we go against them, or do something that's going to cause them to look at us and ostracize us, we really process that the same way as we would process physical pain. This is something I think that we're all going to go through soon, because a lot of the restrictions have come down and the holidays are coming up, and we're going to be back out there with our families. That means that considering how polarized everything is, everybody's probably got that Uncle Joe out there who believes the opposite of what you do. Over the holidays, he's probably going to sit you down and try to tell you why everything you believe is wrong and why what he believes is right. When that happens, think about you when you're reading stuff and it goes by on social media. This is a perfect metaphor, your blood starts to boil, right? It starts to boil. You don't decide to boil it, you don't consciously decide to turn up. It boils, and it boils because to your brain, those beliefs come in as a personal attack. It's not because we're stubborn. It's not because we're quote-unquote…and I'd love to talk a bit about emotion and being, 'emotional,' which is so deeply misunderstood. It's because literally, as far as our brain's concerned, and this is, again, the way we're wired, and the way we were wired 100,000 years ago, is because that threat is wired to come in as the same thing as literally a physical threat. Fun fact: When someone attacks your beliefs, your blood rushes to your thighs in case you need to make a quick getaway. The brain does not distinguish between those two things. And the problem is we're taught that it can. We're taught that it's a weakness to do that. It isn't. The sad and interesting and fascinating truth is we're wired to live in a world we don't live in anymore. And so, the goal is to really understand that, and then figure out hacks around it. And that's what story is about. Joanna: I think that's really interesting, that you said we're wired to live in a world that doesn't exist. You also said that you wanted to maybe talk a bit about emotions, because I definitely feel like we have access to all this information. Again, you and I were talking about this. We have access to all this information. So, I have all these opinions and emotions about things that I don't know enough about, but I think are really important. This can be absolutely massive things like climate change. It can be political issues, Brexit, American politics, the health issues, the pandemic, these things all feel so enormous. We have these stories that we all believe. Then we have emotions that are attached to those stories. Even though logically, I know that I, how can I have an informed opinion on this? But I certainly have emotion. You mentioned there about hacks. What did you mean by that? Lisa: Two things. One, just as we were talking before we began, it's true, because there is so much deeply technical information, when you talk about climate change, for instance, that it literally does become impossible to have an informed decision unless you have a Ph.D. in it. So we have to take what's up there on top and figure out literally as we do, okay, given that, and once it actually is explained, not explained, but put into story form so that we understand how those things will affect us, then we can decide what we want to do about it. The problem with the way that we look at it, and the way we've been taught just to process information, is literally biologically wrong. The cornerstone, truly, of Western thought is biologically wrong, from Plato on down, because we've been taught that there's logic, and there's emotion, and they're binary, and that the goal of emotion is to subvert logic. In other words, my metaphor these days for that is we're taught to think of emotion as mold. I don't mean any mold, but you open your refrigerator and you look at that thing in the back, and like, ‘Oh my god. What's that green stuff growing on the yogurt?' The thing about mold, when you think of it as mold, it's not yogurt mold, or steak mold, or carrot mold. Its goal is to just destroy whatever the food is. It doesn't have any goal other than to destroy that. That's how we're taught to think of emotion. And that literally is not what emotion is. What emotion does is —  Emotion telegraphs meaning. In other words, from the time that we're small, we have what's known as an avidity for patternicity, which is a perfect reason why you never want to use $25 words, because, like, what is that? Joanna: I was going to say, what does that mean?! Lisa: What it means is literally from the time we're born, and I mean, from the minute that they've wiped us off and given us to our mom, we're looking for patterns, causality. If this, then that. If I cry real loud, that nice person is going to come in and give me milk. Got it. And once there is a pattern that's established, it gets relegated to what's known as our cognitive unconscious, which is where we make almost all the decisions that we make. I think studies show we make 35,000 decisions a day. And of those decisions, we're only consciously aware of about 70 of them. And those decisions, I think so many of them are on the level of, ‘Do I wear the blue socks, or the green and pink paisley socks?' In other words, things that don't really matter. Most of our decisions are made by our cognitive unconscious, and its way of letting us know what we should do is through emotion. We feel something. There is nothing that ever happens in our lives, whether we think about or experience or read about, that doesn't bring with it a chorus of emotion, which is a chemical reaction, that our brilliant brain and nervous system then translates into feeling, lets us know what we should do about it. In other words, emotion isn't some free-floating thing that's going to cloud your judgment. It literally lets you know what is important to you and what isn't. We're terrified of emotion. I actually think we're terrified of emotion in a very gendered way. And this isn't anything that we would feel out of the bat. As babies, we are all the same. But men are taught to be afraid of emotion. You're supposed to be strong, and emotion is weakness, and if you show emotion, it will make you feel weak. Very early on, we learn that if we even feel emotion and we're trying not to show it, it leaks out, so I'm not going to feel emotion. Men are terrified of emotion. Women are terrified that if they show emotion, they're going to get clobbered by men. Joanna: Or other women. Lisa: Right, exactly, because we've all been told, ‘Oh, they're so emotional,' meaning showing emotion. If you couldn't feel emotion, you couldn't make a single rational decision. Now, I'm not saying that it's binary the other way, it's all emotion and not thought. It's definitely both. It's a both-and, but emotion is the final decider. In other words, if you couldn't feel emotion, you couldn't make a single rational decision. I could go into the story of, and if you want to take a look, Antonio Damasio, who's a neuroscientist, frequently writes about a patient, he had a man by the name of Elliot, who, through an operation, had lost his ability to feel and process emotion. Should I tell the story quickly? Joanna: Yes. Sure. Lisa: Elliot was a really successful guy. He had a great job. He had a great family. He was one of those guys you would call a pillar of the community. But he also had a benign brain tumor, and they were able to get all of it, but to get all of it, they had to take part of his prefrontal cortex. When he recovered his body was hale and hearty. But he had lost his job, he lost his family, he lost all his money to con men. He was home living with his parents. The government was cutting off his disability checks because they said, ‘Dude, you were this productive member of society. What are you now a malingerer? Why aren't you out there doing what you did before?' So, his parents called in Damasio to run this long and large battery of tests. And what Damasio discovered is that Elliot had lost the ability to feel and process emotion. Keep in mind, he still tested in the 97th percentile in intelligence. He could enumerate every possible solution to any problem you could pitch at him. He just couldn't pick one. He'd come into his office in the morning and go, ‘Should I do that thing my boss seems to really want me to do? Or would it be a better use of time to re-alphabetize my file folders again today? And if I do the file folder thing, would it be better to use the blue pen or the black pen?' At lunch, he'd go from restaurant to restaurant looking at menus, but he never went in because he didn't know what he felt like eating. Can you imagine that? If everything really was six of one half a dozen of the other, how would you ever make any decision about anything? Think about it now, because as you guys probably saw the other day, it won't be the other day now when this comes out, but right now the other day, I think the U.S. finally is letting people come in. They've relaxed the controls because of COVID. And we see all these wonderful stories of people who, for the past 18 months, haven't been able to see their loved one. Imagine if now that's happening, and the loved one is finally coming in, and they get off the plane and they're there at the airport, and they're walking toward the person who hasn't seen them in 18 months, and that person feels nothing. It's like, ‘Uh-oh.' In other words, emotion's what telegraphs meaning. If we couldn't feel emotion, we couldn't make a single rational decision. And that comes back to story. Story, like life, is all emotion-driven. And my goal in life, my two goals in life, are one, really to get people to understand the power of story, the power that story has over us, and the genuine role that emotion plays, so it stops being vilified, and also, overturn the patriarchy. That's my other goal! Joanna: Just some small goals! I want to bring it back to the writers listening, because, when you think about it, our job is to elicit emotion in the reader. In order to do that, we actually have to manipulate them with story. We have to become masters of story manipulation in order to elicit emotions and spark off these neurotransmitters in people's brains. We have to control that through our writing. Lisa: Yes. Joanna: So, it really is focusing down on the emotion first. I know I struggle with this. I get so excited about all kinds of different convoluted plots, and historical details, and interesting locations. Do you suggest we start with what emotion do I want to elicit, and how do I get there? Lisa: It depends on what you're doing. If you're writing to convince someone of something, that's different, and there is part there. But let's talk to writers, because that's who our main audience is, right? Joanna: Yeah. Lisa: Okay. Here's the thing. The answer to what you just said is absolutely not. No. Do not think about what we want to elicit. Let's talk about how to get emotion onto the page. I think that would be the most valuable, because, as I'm very fond of saying, and I truly believe this, I think writing is taught wrong everywhere. I really do. Hundred percent. Because the way you get emotion onto the page has nothing to do with thinking about what emotion you want to get onto the page. You do want to think about what point are you making overall. You do not get emotion onto the page by writing about emotion. You never need to name an emotion. You do not get emotion onto the page through body language. Body language is vastly overrated in fiction, because body language is literally speaking body-to-body, not description of body language to someone's brain. Completely different. Besides the fact that body language is blunt force. You could write some beautiful metaphor about what someone looks like when they're crying, but so what? I know they're crying. I want to know why. The way emotion gets onto the page is via the internal struggle that your protagonist or point-of-view character is going through, in the moment, on the page, as, in each and every scene, they are forced to make a difficult decision. All we need to do is to be in their head as they're trying to figure out what to do. Not only in every scene that they're making a difficult decision, but think of it this way. You've got the this versus that. This meaning, in this scene, ‘I need to do,' blank. I'm being asked to do blank, or to consider blank, or to change about blank. And that's going to cost me this other thing that really matters to me. This versus that, and the this versus that is always specific. It's not, ‘I'm being forced to consider this and I might get shot,' and the that is, ‘I don't want to get shot.' Because nobody wants to get shot. But it's, what are those two things? And also, within the V of that, if you kind of think of it as a V, and then you're going to pour something in, think of a martini glass shaped like a V. Within that is that I'm vulnerable, and I want to give away as little as I possibly can to let someone know what I'm really feeling. Within that struggle, that's what elicits emotion. In other words, that struggle lets us know what the protagonist is feeling, not because we've been told, not because they're shivering or sweating, or their heart's pounding or they're sobbing. But because that struggle elicits the emotion in them. And guess what? That is what elicits the emotion in us. What you're looking for from beginning, as I'm fond of saying, all stories begin in medias res. And where that comes from, comes from all of your protagonist's backstory, because the biggest lie, that the writing world tells, the biggest lie, I think… Well, there are three of them. Joanna: Big three lies, wow. Lisa: Almost every writing myth is wrong. The biggest lie is, use backstory sparingly, and then only when the reader needs to know something. First of all, you never put anything in because the reader needs to know it. They might. Hundred percent. But that's not why it's there. Backstory is the most fundamental layer of story. It is laced into every page. Backstory is what gives meaning to what's happening now. When we're talking about, when I said before, what pulls us in to that, and unleashes that chemical cocktail, that, the oxytocin of empathy, and the cortisol of, ‘Oh, my god,' stress, is, ‘What does it mean to the character? Why is what they're being asked to do? What's at risk?' comes from the past, by definition, because that's how we work as humans. I just finished reading a book called Your Brain Is a Time Machine, by a neuroscientist whose name I can't pronounce, so I'm not going to try. And he said, basically, and he's not the only one who says it, obviously. The sole purpose of your brain, and memory, is to record past events in order to predict the future. Your brain is a prediction machine. The predictions come from what we've run into our past that gives us the meaning of what's happening now. And how does it give us that meaning? Through emotion. And then, that triggers these thoughts. So, backstory's the most fundamental layer of any story. And watch, as I'm fond of saying. I was working with a writer a while ago, who said, ‘I want to see that. I hear what you're saying, but I want to see it.' And she was reading Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn, who wrote Gone Girl. Joanna: Ooh, I love that book. Lisa: Great book. And so, she said, ‘I took a highlighter,' she said, ‘I'm halfway through the book, and I've highlit 60,' that's six zero percent, of what's in the book. Sixty percent was this internality and backstory. That's where story lives and breathes. If you don't create that first, you don't have a story. You just have, very sadly, what most manuscripts end up being. As I'm fond of saying, you know, for most of the manuscripts I've read, and I've read thousands, if you ask me what it's about, I'd go, ‘It's about 300 pages. I don't know. It's just a bunch of things that happen.' Story's not about the plot. It is not about the plot. That's why if it was up to me, I'd take every story structure book, from The Hero's Journey up to, and I'm not going to name it, but it's in my head, the most popular one now, that is so deeply wrong it makes me want to pull my hair out. Because first of all, it's a misnomer. It's not story structure, it's plot structure. And the story's not about the plot. The story's about how the plot affects the protagonist, and is driven by that internal consequence that causes the protagonist to see it differently and then take action. If you come up with just a plot, you're going to end up with nothing but a bunch of things that happen, because then the protagonist is going to, scene by scene, going to have to ring a particular bell in order to make the plot work. Usually what's happening on page one, what the protagonist does, means that person would never do the thing that they've gotta do on page 50. But oh, well, they've gotta do it, and now you have destroyed what's really pulling us through, because when writers talk about what's the narrative thread, again, they mistake it for the plot. Narrative thread is not the plot. The narrative thread is the internal, subjective narrative that the protagonist is using to make sense of what's happening in the plot, and then deciding what to do. That is the narrative thread. When you're lost in a story, you really are lost in that protagonist's world. They're your avatar. You are that person. That's why story works. Story is the world's first virtual reality, literally, as I said. This functional MRI studies showing the same areas of your brain light up, as I said earlier, that would light up if you're doing what the protagonist is doing. You literally are there. But not because you're watching them externally do something, because you're in their head, experiencing the subjective ‘why' they're doing it, and what it means to them. And because you're there at what it means to them, you are feeling something. Joanna: It's really good to come back to these basics, I think. We're almost out of time, and you mentioned there were three big lies, and you only gave us one. I just know everyone's going, ‘Wait, what are the other two lies?' Lisa: One of the other ones is, hold things back in the beginning for a big reveal, and that's going to pull people in. And it does the exact opposite. Give us all of it right there in the beginning. What happens is people end up holding back the very thing that would pull us in. We literally see the writer when they do that. They feel like the writer's saying, ‘I know something you don't know. And if you read forward, maybe I'll tell you,' which is as annoying as my voice just was. I can hardly say my voice that way, because it creeps me out. But we're looking to be able to put things together. We're looking for the deeper why. When people hold things back for a reveal later, that means that everything that is there, especially in the beginning, is very general. And the general has no legs. We can't try to figure out what's going on, we can't try to figure out what matters, we can't try to figure out what it means for people. Okay, now let me tell you the other one. And this kind of does, too. And this is super incendiary. The biggest lie, in my opinion, that the writing world says, beyond this thing about backstory, because you must create the story-specific backstory first, or you have no story. It's like saying, ‘I'm going to write a 327-page novel about the most important turning point in someone's life, whom I know absolutely nothing about.' And that delivers us to this third thing, which is, back in the day, when we could go to actual writing conferences. If you ever went to one, you go and you can get your badge, and really often, and they do this to be nice, I totally get it, but the person that's giving you the badge will go, ‘Okay, are you a pantser or a plotter?' And then we'll put a little thing on your page. A pox on both your houses. Neither one works. Pantsing is the absolute worst way to ever write anything, because stories are layered. Because without the backstory, without story-specific backstory, for your protagonist, and other characters, you have no idea what's going on. Everything is generic. And then writers start writing really, really pretty, because they've been told it's about wordsmithing and writing beautiful sentences. And this is why 99% of what comes into agents and editors, in publishing houses, gets rejected. Because it literally doesn't work. I think it's also why the statistic is that only 3 out of 100 people make it to the end of just any kind of a first draft, because they start writing and they have no idea what they're doing. And the thing that kills me is, it's that notion of if you learn all of these techniques of writing, and then you unleash your creativity, a story is going to appear. You know, ‘if you have the talent. And if you don't, oh, well.' I cannot tell you how many people I've worked with who seemed to have nothing, but once they started to do this, oh my god. That has nothing to do with talent. It is just a complete and total, literal lie. The other is that plotting works. And that is that you're going to sit down and come up with a plot and external series of things are going to happen, and you're going to use, you know, ‘The Hero's Journey,' and we talk about how misogynist that was. But I mean, all of whatever the most recent book is, again, I won't name it, but I'm thinking it. You have 10% of the book is this, and 20% is this. And by this time, you've got to do that. And so, you've got some external generic grab bag of, as I said earlier, objectively dramatic things that you start throwing in, in order to amp up the tension and make things happen. And it is all, literally, from the outside in. Story is not top-down. Story is bottom-up, meaning it comes from your protagonist. And without creating that, you've got nothing. So, yeah, I can't tell you how strongly I feel this. Joanna: Oh, you have told us how strongly, Lisa! Lisa: I know. Joanna: I love talking to you because I feel like you bring some good challenge into some of the established ways of doing stuff. And of course, you're a story consultant for film and TV, and you do all this stuff, so you know what you're talking about. If people want to check out your books, and everything you do and your consulting and things, where can we find you online? Lisa: I am at wiredforstory.com. I'm there. My books are everywhere. Amazon, any place that sells books online, I'm pretty sure they would be there. Yeah, on Twitter, I'm just, you know, @lisacron. Just, my name. That's it. And that's the only social media I'm on. I feel safe there. I didn't feel safer anywhere else, really. Joanna: I know how you feel. Well, thanks so much for your time, Lisa. That was great. Lisa: Oh, my utter pleasure. This was super fun. I love talking to you, Joanna. I hope we get to do it again soon.The post Story Or Die With Lisa Cron first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Readers buy or borrow your book based on your cover and book description, so how can we make sure the description is the best it can be? How can we make readers want to click Buy Now and start reading immediately? Michaelbrent Collings provides useful tips — and tough love! — for authors who struggle with book descriptions (which includes me!) In the intro, I talk about being back in Auckland and reflect on the passing of time. This episode is sponsored by Publisher Rocket, which will help you get your book in front of more Amazon readers so you can spend less time marketing and more time writing. I use Publisher Rocket for researching book titles, categories, and keywords — for new books and for updating my backlist. Check it out at www.PublisherRocket.com Michaelbrent Collings is an internationally best-selling novelist, and the only author to be a finalist for a Dragon Award, Bram Stoker Award, and RONE Award. A Ranker survey recently named Michaelbrent one of the top 100 Greatest All-Time Horror Writers, but he's written bestsellers in a dozen different genres. His latest book, Malignant, debuted on Amazon's bestseller lists all over the world.  Michaelbrent is also a screenwriter — and helps authors with their book descriptions over on Fiverr Pro/mbcollings.  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 Why is an effective book description so important? What authors get wrong with book descriptions Thinking about your book like a movie — what are the high points of the trailer? Tips for writing a great hook How a good book description can help with advertising You can find Michaelbrent Collings at WrittenInsomnia.com and on Twitter @mbcollings. You can hire Michaelbrent on Fiverr Pro here. Transcript of Interview with Michaelbrent Collings Joanna: Welcome back to the show, Michaelbrent. Michaelbrent: Hello, I'm so happy to be here. Joanna: It's great to have you back on the show. And you have been on the show a number of times. Michaelbrent: Yes. Joanna: So we're not going to go into your backstory, we're going to get straight into the topic today, which is all about book descriptions. And this is a very interesting topic. You have a ton of books, I have quite a lot of books, and I still feel this is an issue. Why is an effective book description so important, and why are they so difficult? Michaelbrent: Oh, my gosh, okay. Well, I think, first of all, the reason they're super important. There's the obvious; it's one of the first things people see. So like, your cover, as much as authors hate to admit it, because we're like, ‘My book should sell this book.' People are shallow. If I go on to an Amazon book page, and the cover looks like it was done by like a five-year-old using Windows Paint on a Commodore 64, or some godawful combination like that, people are just going to be turned off, because they know you're not operating at a level of professionality. I compare book purchases to dating. But it's almost worse because with a date, you're committing to a couple of hours with a person and it goes badly, and you never have to see or think of them again. With a book, you're committing to potentially a lifetime with that thing because if it's good, it's going to live in you forever. And if it's bad enough, you will always remember. I can tell you exactly the one book I hurled across the room because I was so upset. And that happened when I was 16, so, these things stay with you. And so the cover is a big deal. Then the next big deal, assuming you've gotten them to your book page because most people buy books electronically, we just have to face that, is the book description. The difference there is you're like, now I'm starting my job because most authors, the book cover is going to be outsourced, which is a wise thing to do. For most authors, you get to that book description, and it's like, here's me, I'm appearing for the first time. And so it's super important because if you're reading a book description, and it's terrible, well, you already know the author is not a wordsmith. Because they have failed to accomplish their primary objectives in this first couple of paragraphs. Or even the first couple sentences. I have a couple of book descriptions that are five or six sentences short. And if you can't do that, why am I going to let you into my brain for 100,000 words? Joanna: It just seems so unfair. It's unfair that we have to sell ourselves, our book, not ourselves, we don't attach ourselves to the book, obviously. Michaelbrent: It's not that kind of book. Joanna: It's so unfair that we have to write a whole thing. And then we have to come up with a pithy, whatever, book description that is the thing that represents us. It feels so hard to me because I have written a book and it's all this massive thing in my head, and it's full of cool characters and great plot, loads of great writing, obviously. And now I have to boil it down to a catchy description. So, what is a terrible book description? You pitched me with this idea, because you said you'd seen a lot of them. What do people get wrong? What is a terrible description? Michaelbrent: Honestly, most of them. If you open Amazon up to a random author, you don't know. If it's Stephen King, and you're buying Stephen King, you don't really even read the book description, you've already decided it. So I'm not talking about your favorite author. Go to some rando, and read the description and you're just like, ‘Oh, this kind of sucks,' because most of them do. And the problem is, well, first of all, most authors hate the book description, they're like you, ‘This is unfair, I already did all this work. And now I have to do another thing.' But that's life. Unlike this date analogy, if I go on a date, and we've all had that thing where I don't date anymore, except for my wife, I date her regularly. But you have this thing where you're putting on the perfect tie, or the perfect dress, and you spend 45 minutes, and I would always get there. But ultimately, in the back of my mind, I'm like, ‘But I still look like me. So there's that chance gone.' That's okay though, you're ultimately on the date. It's you. And that's what the book description really is. Don't think of it as now I have to try on a million dresses. It's now I get to show them upfront you can have confidence in me. And you can do that. If you are a good enough author to write all of these words that make sense and keep all the plots together, have a little confidence. You can do a good book description. The biggest mistake that most authors make is exactly something you said; I have it full of all these cool characters and cool ideas. And you have these fun complicated plots, and you want to put it all down. Joanna: I really do. Michaelbrent: You're like I spent so much time, people should know — The only job of a cover and description is to create a question. Take notes, people: create a question that can only be answered by reading the book. A great cover description creates a question that the reader has to have answered, and can only get an answer by reading the book. So most authors want to put everything and the reality is the best cover descriptions for a new author for someone you're unfamiliar with, tells you very little. It will give you a sense of the genre, you want them to know that, and then it will give them a basic setup, and then it will leave them with some questions in their head. You don't have to actually ask questions, although I do in a lot of my book descriptions, I find it effective. But you want them to go, ‘Wait, then what happens?' And, of course, they have to read it. Joanna: I completely agree with you, and then it's really hard to actually put into action. So we're going to try and talk about the actual process of doing it because, we're going to take it from two angles. The first angle is the person like me, who is a discovery writer, doesn't really know what they're writing. Knows it's a thriller, for example, knows the genre, writes the book, and then has to come up with the book description. Or someone who already has a book, and they have a book description, and they want to rewrite it or write it from scratch. If we are someone who already has the book and has to now write this description, how do we go about it? Do we just write everything down we possibly can and then narrow it down? How do we go about it if we have the book already? Michaelbrent: That's a super good question. I'm going to back it up even a step before that and encourage people. You can be a discovery writer and still have a great hook in mind. So I'm going to use one of my books that's really easy is ‘Strangers.' I didn't know where it was going to lead or how it was going to end or anything when I started writing it. But I knew the hook, which is a family wakes up in their own home, discovers that all the doors have been jammed closed from the outside. And all the windows are covered with sheet metal, and there's a killer inside with them who wants some alone time. I still got to discover everything. But I started from a point where I was like, ‘Okay, that would make a cool movie poster.' And that's where I encourage people to start with when they're beginning, think, ‘Is this a cool movie poster?' Movie posters encapsulate all of the basic elements of a good cover description for me. They have a central image that tells you like, ‘Oh, it's a slasher, or oh, this is a romance.' It gives you that sense, here's what I'm getting into, and then it shows you enough cool imagery that you see a few money shots. You know Kylo Ren is going to fight with Rey because they're standing next to each other with their lightsabers crossed. So you can discovery write, but it's not mutually exclusive from saying when you start, think to yourself, is there a hook here? Because audiences really like hooks, it excites them. One of the easiest sells in a movie was ‘Underworld,' which was a vampire movie 20 years ago, and I was working in Hollywood at the time. And it was like Romeo and Juliet with vampires and werewolves and everyone went, ‘Oh,' immediately, obviously, that's going to make a million dollars. And now there's been five movies in that series. So you want to hopefully start and if you can't figure out that hook, maybe rethink your project, maybe think, ‘Okay, is there something else I could do?' Because it's just the reality, if you want to be selling books, you have to do things that sell books. Joanna: You've jumped into my alternate thing, which is coming up with the hook early. So let's stay on that then and we'll come back to the other one. Because I feel like you're completely right, I would love to come up with a hook before I write something. And I feel like that answers the question of what to do with the book description. But the fact is that most of us can't come up with hooks beforehand. What are some of your tips for coming up with those hooks? Michaelbrent: First of all, don't fight it. So many writers and artists, in general, feel like, my universe should be boundless. My universe should be without rules, but no, your universe functions within rules. And if you want to be an artist and make things that are aesthetically pleasing to your muse, that's cool. I'm not knocking that but that's very different from I want to be a published author and make enough money to put food on the table for me and my family. And in that case, you have to go in it from that mindset. I don't mind that. At first, I was like everybody else, why should I have to do that? But now I really enjoy it. It's a process that I get a kick out of. So, if you want to write something with a hook, basically, you want to be able to explain it in that sentence or two. I put like a 50 or 60 word limit on myself. And if I can't explain it to my nine-year-old…or seven-year-old and have him get stoked about it, I'm going, ‘This probably isn't great.' And it's not because I'm saying that the average market has a seven-year-old mental capacity. But kids are great litmus tests for cool. They see Disneyland and know it's cool. They see school and immediately there is nothing here that I'm going to be excited about. There are quirks and irregularities and exceptions, Disneyland has terrible lines, the school has recess and lunchtime, they discover, but they are good. They can tell, overall, I'm going to like this, overall, I'm not. So I will pitch my kids, I'll say, ‘Here's some thoughts.' And they're like, ‘Oh, that one's great and that one's not.' So find a disinterested person who's enthusiastic and say, ‘I've got 50 words.' and look at them. And at the end, if they're not going like, ‘Yeah, and?' Then go back to the drawing board. That's hard because people come up with an idea and they're really excited. And that's the easiest part to write for every writer. It's like, I came up with the beginning and I'm 20 pages in because that's exciting and that's fun, and then the work starts. And here, Michaelbrent is saying only now throw away the fun part because you're going to do work right at the beginning. But you have to do it if you're going to write to your market, you're thinking, ‘What do they like?' And then you're thinking, ‘How can I grab them quickly?' So I try desperately not to go into a book unless I can have 60 words that explain the overarching concept, not the theme, because themes are subtle, and themes tease out over time, and not all the characters and not all their interactions. But the basic idea, strangers, a family is trapped in their own home with a serial killer, boom. And everyone's like, ‘Okay, I know what that is.' Joanna: So, in that situation, this hook needs to have some idea of the character, it doesn't need to be their name, or whatever. We need to have a person or an alien, whatever that character is, and then we need to have a setting, and then we need to have a situation. Michaelbrent: Yes. And that's it, Joanna, those are the things. And they should all three come together enough that you're like, ‘That is going to be exciting.' And the way you get there, people will sit there and go, ‘Hooks and hook writing is really difficult.' It is and it isn't. You can go into any part of writing, saying, ‘Well, this part's really difficult.' Or you can go into it and say, ‘But it's writing and I love writing.' So hooks are part of your writing. And that's part of standing out from the market. There are at least 10 million books on Amazon now. So you want to stand out, you want to have that hook immediately. It's a process of asking questions. You want to ask, ‘What's my situation? What's my setting? What are the characters?' And the way you can go about that is just say, start with the one that's interesting. I wrote a book called The Loon with the process. Joanna: I read that one. It's great! Michaelbrent: Oh, good. Okay. So the process for that was really a matter of questions. I literally sat down and went, ‘What's a scary place? A haunted house? No, I did one of those recently. Okay, what else? Prison. Oh, those are scary.' And then I went, ‘What is scarier? A prison full of crazy people. What's scarier than that? Mental health institution with the lights out. Oh, What's scarier than that? What if there's a monster in the basement that wants to eat everyone?' Now I have a really fun setting that grew into a situation. And my last question becomes, ‘Who would that hurt the most? The staff. Who in particular in the staff? The guy in charge because he feels responsible. Why does he feel responsible? Oh, he actually lost a child, like through his own self-perceived negligence, his own son was killed.' And that was literally what I did. It took about a day and a half. I was walking tight little circles in the middle of the living room. I'm not exaggerating, super inconvenient for my wife. She's like, ‘Get out of the way I'm trying to watch TV,' and I'm just mumbling to myself. It boiled down to those questions. And it ends up in The Loon, which is the pitch. A maximum-security penitentiary for the criminally insane gets hit by a blizzard so severe all communications with the outside world is cut off. And the inmates are able to escape but cannot leave, which is a problem for the staff. But the bigger problem is the monster in the basement that wants to eat all of them. And at this point, what have I told you about the main character? Nothing really. What have I told you about the monster? Nothing really. What about the details of the layout of The Loon, which is the facility itself, which is a cool facility, like I could tell you all the research and stuff I did about that, and it was super fun. But you don't know anything about it. I haven't told you the cool things. So that's the tough thing for any writer trying to design their cover description, you have to be able to say, ‘I'm not going to tell them all the cool things. If I did that, why would they read my book?' So that you get to the end of the pitch and the person who's reading the cover description of The Loon is like, ‘What kind of prison is that? Wait, what? A monster? Who's in the basement? Tell me more.' You've created those questions that must be answered. These are serious questions. A really good analogy for cover descriptions is we've all had that co-worker who comes up to us and pulls out baby photos. And I love babies. But as important as babies are, your random baby has no place in my heart. So as soon as they pull out the pictures, you're like, ‘Oh, baby with no relationship to me, no importance in my life, no real impact. I'm going to sit here and try and look interested because all babies that aren't mine kind of look alike.' That's how most people tell their cover descriptions. They intrude into your life and tell you a long series of facts that don't matter to you. If the same person walks up and grabs his wallet, and as he's opening it, says, ‘So, little Timmy's face caught fire yesterday.' ‘What?' And now he can open or she can open their wallet and they're like, ‘Okay, we're going to start, he was as an egg cell. It doesn't matter you're totally in because you're like, I know there's value at the end of this story. There's a kid with his face on fire, and that's terrible but awesome. What's the story here? That's your cover description. You don't want to walk up and tell them all your baby facts about your baby that they don't know and don't care about yet. You want to give them something huge that slams into them, ‘Hey, Little Timmy's face caught on fire.' Joanna: So obviously, this is genre-specific. You write horror, which has plot and character and setting, it has the same as everything else. But I also feel like, with series descriptions, it's also slightly different because you're addressing new readers, but you're also addressing readers who already know who your characters are. Michaelbrent: Yes. What about series descriptions? Joanna: So you always need to mention your character names or what they do, because they want to know those characters back and kind of doing their thing. Can we go back to this question? I absolutely think your process is the best process. But the truth is a lot of us don't do that. Michaelbrent: We are already there. Joanna: We've already got the book. What is the trick then to find the key place where things get excited and focus on that. But also, in action-adventure books like mine or a thriller, that's what we're searching for, and that might be part of a mystery. How do we do it when we need to keep the coolest things hidden rather than emphasize them? Michaelbrent: That's a great question. And the answer is, look at a movie trailer. In the movie trailers, they give you all the money shots. You go to a movie and you realize that the movie trailer showed the climax. But you don't know that in the movie trailer because you're giving it without super amounts of context as to what's happening. You can do that in a book description. So, as far as like reintroducing new readers and keeping old readers, your main character in a thriller or in any series, they should be somebody who's interesting and likable to everybody. In the Stranger book, which is actually a series, the bad guy in that evolves and is over time actually becoming a good guy who's hunting down bad guys. His name is Legion. And so you can say for your old readers, ‘Legion is back.' They know they know who Legion is. And for the new readers, you can say, ‘A psychopath on the hunt for other psychopaths with his two dead brothers calling the shots.' My old readers know exactly what I'm talking about now, and the new readers should be going, ‘Wait, what the what? He's a killer hunting killers? That's cool. And his two dead brothers are involved, so what's…?' And now you've noticed they've already got those questions. So you can update the new readers very quickly. And if your character was cool enough to pitch in that first book, you can pitch them again every book. Because you're going to do it so quickly and efficiently that your old readers aren't going to have to spend a page on it. They're like, ‘Yeah, yeah, I'm stoked. Oh, it's still Legion.' And then you get into the next question. You're going to be showing big moments. Again, bear in mind, if every one of your big moments can fit into a 2 or 3 or 10 paragraph description, you already are in trouble because you don't have enough cool moments for a 100,000-word book, or even a 50,000 or 30,000 word novella. Cool moments don't have to be explosions, or stabs, or anything like that, again, you think of the romantic melodrama trailers. ‘He's standing in the rain, pleading, I love you, and you complete me.' They're all these moments that are enough to get the watcher invested. And also go, ‘That's so cool. Oh, I'm in love again'. But when you get to the movie, the movie isn't about those big moments, it becomes about how they are threaded together, and the same as with any book. So of course, if you're writing about a romance, it's going to be a different tack on the book cover. You're not going to write, spend quite so much time on the action necessarily, as on the melodrama between the two. I write Western romances under a pen name, Angelica Hart. ‘Grace Isabella is a woman on the run, haunted by her past, and the only man she loved still after her.' I'm making that up kind of off the top of my head off of a very old memory. But you see we've been told there's loving in this, Grace Isabella is on the run from the only man she loves and it's created, again, these questions. It's told a really cool thing, which is, the guy that she married is still after her. And he's trying to make her life miserable. He's doing all these awful things. And then you say, ‘But Paul, a lonely ranch hand with secrets of his own.' ‘What secret?' says the reader at this point. You're creating these compelling questions within the framework of your book. So if you are done with your book, just look at it and go, ‘What are the awesomest parts of my book?' Well, there's a fight with Ninja robots on top of the Eiffel Tower. That's cool. The Earth blows up, that's an interesting moment. Oh, yeah, it turns out the main character is half a snake. And those are your three big huge moments. Can you tell them in the book cover without revealing your story? Yeah, I mean, just right now, if I told you those three things, nobody listening to that, I bet you, aren't going, ‘Oh, yeah, I see exactly how those three things tie together. I totally know this story.' You're like, ‘Wait, what? There's robot ninja fighting and there's a guy who's a snake and…? Wait, wait, back up. Tell me more.' And that's where I'm like, ‘Ha-ha, I refuse, click Buy now. One click.' And that's your job. You haven't given away the awesomeness of your story. Because the genius of your story isn't the cool moments, it's the fact that you, the author, have come up with so very many cool moments, and then made them all make sense together. Joanna: And that can also apply to literary fiction that don't have massive plot details. Michaelbrent: Yes. Joanna: Just to be clear, people! Michaelbrent: Yes, anything, whatever it is, there's a framework, and for your audience, they're going to go, ‘This is the coolest moment. This is the second coolest moment. This is the third coolest moment.' You've got 20 cool moments, you can pull three out of them, and mention them quickly. And you should still have enough left over that your audience is enraptured every page. Do you want to be the author who's like, ‘I am great at coming up with one idea. And I spent a page on that and the other 399 are just boring and crappy.' No, of course not. You are an awesome author, especially like Joanna Penn, folks, I'm serious. Like the Mapwalker series is just so much fun, I tell people about it all the time. Joanna: Thank you. Michaelbrent: And, oh, so good. Joanna: We'll come into that. So basically what you're saying is, if we've written the book already, we get the coolest things in the book, and instead of having a more sort of introductory paragraph, which is what a lot of people do, including myself. We put the coolest things on and then we also make sure we've put questions into the heads of the reader. Whether or not it's an actual question or not is fine. The reader should read it and have just a ton of questions that now need to be answered by reading the book, essentially. Michaelbrent: Yeah. Pitching ‘Mapwalkers,' I would say, I would not talk about all the depth of character, there's tons of characters. It's a cool fantasy, but I'd be like, ‘Okay, I'm talking to Ralph.' I'm using that name because nobody's named Ralph anymore. My grandpa was Ralph though, so it's still a cool name. ‘Ralph, have you read the Mapwalkers?' ‘No.' ‘Okay. Oh, my, gosh, dude, what if you could draw maps and they came true. Okay? And oh, and what if like the most powerful maps you drew like they were tattooed on you, Ralph? And in human blood,' okay. I'm not even telling accurately the story anymore, but I'm excited about it. And Ralph's going, ‘Wait, how does that work?' Because and I've told him two big things about your series. Does anybody going into your series on page one go, ‘Oh, yeah, I know exactly what to expect?' No. But they've got this really cool framework. It's obviously fantasy because there's magic involved. Things come to pass, kind of creatio ex-nihilo in some ways, but they don't know all these details. They don't know what happens to maps that are forgotten. They don't know the details of all the dark shadowlands that the characters will enter and the forgotten places and things. There's so many things that you can get into with ‘The Mapwalker' series I just touched on two big ones, they still don't have a context. And so you're not giving away a secret. Now, in a mystery book, obviously, you're not going to want to start out with the whole point of the MacGuffin is finding out who did it. You're not going to want to say, ‘The Butler did it. But detective Max Stone doesn't know that yet.' That's not how you go about it. You've actually just given a question away. And so you don't want to answer that. You're going to say, ‘A body was found in a car in a locked room, in a locked house that had been surrounded by concrete. Max Driver is on the case.' And people are already like, ‘Oh, okay, I know what I'm getting into. And wait, what? First of all, how did that happen? And second of all, what kind of person would encase an entire home in concrete?' I've told some really bitchin' stuff that Max Driver is going to spend 200 pages even getting through the concrete. Like he's like, ‘Oh, we finally got to the house.' Twist, ‘The house is locked, what do we do?' And so Max is still having all these twists and also, you have to remember, here's one thing in a good book readers do, they read it and they get involved, and they forget about the world. Here's one thing about the way people read books that no one ever does. Book open in the right hand, in the left the cover description. Me matching facts like, ‘Oh, okay, yeah, that happened? Okay, good. Good. I was waiting. Oh, I see.' If you're doing your job, by page one, they've forgotten about the cover blurb and they're just all in on your book, even if you did tell them, ‘The Butler did it.' By page 10 they're going, ‘How, though? How did the butler do it, this is an impossible situation.' No matter how much you've told them, they should still have more, you're only working with a page here. So have a little confidence in your own work. But the shorter you can get it, the more respectful you are of them as well, of their time. You're saying, ‘You don't know me, I don't know you, here's three sentences, interested?' And they'll either walk on happy, or they'll buy your book. But if you capture them and hold them against their will, like, I'm going to drag you through all of this, whether you want it or not. They're going to go away and say, not only, ‘Eh, not interested, but oh, stay away from that Amazon page, it's the worst.' Joanna: You've obviously been writing for many years now. If you were to go back to one of your older books, do you rewrite blurbs? Michaelbrent: Oh, yeah. Joanna: Do you take one and tinker with it? In my situation would you say start from a blank page, don't tinker with the one you've already written, come up with a blank page and start afresh? I feel like many of us have tinkered with book descriptions in order to maybe put some genre-specific words in or we've just tinkered a little bit. Might a fresh page approach be better? Michaelbrent: I used to be an attorney, so I will give you an attorney answer, which is, maybe you can do both things and try them both. And incidentally, you mentioned something about genre-specific wording, and we're talking now about Amazon's algorithm and things like that. I would counsel you, don't have that in mind at this point. SEO search terms can always be added in, and if you've done your job describing it to market, they shouldn't be hard to add in. If you spend six pages talking about the love story on your cover description, and then you're like, ‘Oh, how do I work in the word serial killer?' Well, first of all, you've already screwed up the description. You're not even describing it as a serial killer book. So I would say do both. There's some that I have looked at. And at the time, they are great. I'll tell you one of my shortest blurbs or cover descriptions I ever had was for a book called Run. And it did really well. It was the number one thriller and sci-fi and horror, a bunch of big categories. The cover description was definitely part of it at the time, because it was, gosh, I can almost do it probably by heart, even though it was 10 years ago. ‘What do you do if everyone you know, family, friends, everyone, is trying to kill you? Answer, you run.' I've created a lot of questions. I directly asked a question. But the questions that should spring to mind in the reader's head are like, ‘Wait, why would your friends and family and everyone want to kill you?' It was a very effective cover description to the point that I got a phone call from a major Hollywood studio. And he's like, ‘Are the rights for that available?' I said, ‘Yeah, they are. So you are interested?' He said, ‘Yeah, it's kick-ass, man,' and I'm actually editing for content there. And I said, ‘Oh, what did you like about it?' He goes, ‘Oh, I've never read the book,' like, ‘Who has time for a 400-page book, the description was awesome. That's a total movie.' But over time, it didn't work as well, because the market shifts. And now the description is more detailed. And it says basically, the main character is a man who has never left his little tiny hometown his entire life, except for once when he went overseas for war and saw a man graphically murdered, and 10 years later, that man shows up in the town. Everyone the main character asks about it tries to kill him. And by the end of the day, the whole town's after him. So the new one is completely different, but if you look at it the same core elements are still there. It's about everyone he asks is trying to kill him. And by the end of the day, he's on the run. I've still kept those money shots from the trailer. I've added information because audiences, A, like if you're going to one of my book pages, chances are now you've at least heard of me, just because my name shows up in horror lists a lot. If only subconsciously you are like, ‘Oh, yeah, I think I've seen this guy.' And so I can afford a little bit more time to show even more cool parts. But I'm not going to show all of them. Joanna: On the sales page, I'm looking at Run now. So you… Michaelbrent: Oh, no! Joanna: As you said, now you are emphasizing something about yourself as a multiple Bram Stoker Award finalist. Because you know that your potential audience understand what that means and the quality of the book. You've also included review quotes, which I also noticed on Malignant, which is one of your current ones. And this is a question that a lot of writers have, which is, there is this obsession in traditional publishing with asking other authors for blurbs or getting quotes to go on the cover. Most authors are not Bram Stoker nominees, or multi-award-winning writers like yourself. Should we just leave all that stuff off and not worry about that until potentially later and just go with the book, actual book description? How important are those accolades and awards? Michaelbrent: Excellent question. Here's why I include them. And I do that with all my books. I include blurbs in the middle. I'm a fan of movies, I think in movie terms. And again, you think of that trailer, it's like the money shot, and the guy is walking away from the car as it explodes because he's so cool. And then it goes, big words, ‘Jaw-dropping. Variety,' and then the next money shot. You don't get taken out of it. That's just social proof that they're injecting into the trailer itself. You see this particularly on Oscar bait, it shows Tom Hanks, and Minnie Driver, and Michael Keaton and all these big names, standing, yelling at each other, ‘I will tell the truth, then you're fired.' ‘Fantastic, says the Hollywood Reporter.' It doesn't pull you out of the storyline because people can take that kind of multiple, nonlinear storytelling. They're telling two stories. One is the story of the book, and one is the story of everyone's response to the book is amazing, folks. But if you don't have that, you don't need it. You don't have to do it. It doesn't hurt it if you've done your job. So I will inject them if they're really good, or if they're important in some way. But they are primarily there for people who maybe have heard of me or seen one of my ads, and they're clicking. They don't know anything about me but they see, oh, ‘A Master, Scream Magazine,' and they're like, ‘Oh, well, this guy, okay, somebody likes him.' If you don't have that, of course, don't put it, or if your only review is literally like, ‘I thought this book definitely had words in it, Mom and pops podcast, podcast number one for mom's basement,' that's not going to be a super helpful one, leave it out. But your cover blurb should still be super, super cool. Joanna: I think that's important. I don't really seek out quotes at this point. But I can see why they're useful, something I might get into. You did mention ads there, the hook, or the one or two sentences. Are you using that part of the description in more places than the book sales page? For example, in ads, in emails, and social media? Michaelbrent: Definitely. And that's why it's important to get it short, too. Because you think about the average ad, how much you care about it. You don't, unless there's something incredibly compelling really, really fast. And you can complain about this if you want to. I find it kind of funny when authors complain about reality. It's like, well, we're really glad no one has to write like Dickens anymore, because Dickens writing is really hard. But I'm going to be upset, because along with all of this freedom comes the reality that people expect some interesting stuff to happen right away. Dickens could lay out 472 character names, and then be like, ‘And now page 87, we begin the setting description,' and you're like, ‘Oh, my gosh.' We get to jump right into stuff, we're much more immediate. It starts out with, ‘The bullet tore through her forearm, entering her radius, exiting her ulna, and really screwing up her day.' That's so fun, we get to have a cool opening. But that also means we're training our readers to want stuff fast. So like a good example is, I wrote a book called Terminal and it did really well. The hook is, and I would do this on a Facebook ad. ‘Ten strangers in a bus terminal are forced by a supernatural entity to choose one among them to survive, all the others will be murdered. The vote must be unanimous.' At this point, they should be like, ‘What?' And then I hit the kicker, which is, ‘And they quickly realized the best way to get a unanimous vote is to kill everyone else.' I've said two sentences. The opening was strangers in a bus terminal, which is kind of evocative. It might not be of interest to you, but a lot of people found it evocative. And I front-loaded everything awesome about the setup there. Did I front-load all the awesome details? No, I couldn't have, I had two sentences. These descriptions show up everywhere. And again, if you can winnow them out and find that description, it's going to help your ads because, instead of having to figure out some new, compelling copy every time, you've already got all the elements. It doesn't matter if it's Facebook, if it's Amazon, if it's a TikTok ad. It doesn't matter. You know the basic elements, and you're going to be able to get them in a single sentence, two sentences, or a 10-second video ad, you're going to be able to do that. It makes marketing much more compelling, and much easier because I can port everything. My Amazon description for Terminal – Amazon ads are very short. And it's like, ‘Ten strangers in a bus terminal, forced to decide who lives. Let the killing begin,' something like that. It's super fast and super easy because I've already created it at a base level very short. Joanna: I think the overarching message here is to try and spend some time upfront coming up with a good hook. I think it's because I like spending time on research, for example, is how to spend the time. And I also think the amount of time is exactly the point, it sounds like you spend, as you said, you spent like a day and a half walking around in circles, thinking about the hook. Even if it's after the book is written, it's the amount of time you spend on it, I have to admit to just doing my descriptions as a sort of, they just have to be done. Whereas, I think what you're really saying is to spend time on that. It might take a day and a half to write two lines, but so be it. Michaelbrent: Yes. And think of it this way; a day and a half. Who here, I say, you're going to spend two solid days, you're going to spend a week, eight hours a day thinking of nothing but your description? I'm going to make you do it kind of to your head and everybody goes, ‘Oh, forget it.' Alternate situation. You don't have to, but if you do, at the end of the week, you get $30,000. Everybody does it now. And that's kind of the mindset that's more helpful to have because your book description is so important. Again, I had one of the people who produce ‘The Matrix' call me up based on a book description. It really impressed upon me the importance of this. And then also, when I go to new pages, even with authors I do know, I look at that book description. And I'm like, ‘Wow, this is a muddled mess. I am going to pass on this one. I'm too busy.' Joanna: I think your analogy there of, it's basically spend the time and get the money. The reader is actually buying the book description. They don't know what's in the book, they're buying the cover plus the book description. And like you say, I think a lot of us outsource the cover. And some people do outsource the book description. But when you do outsource it, you still have to tell people the gist of it because they won't read the book either. So I think it's a very interesting challenge. I have one more question for you, because last year, you came on the show, and you talked about rebooting an author career. And that was pretty much, COVID had only really just started. Also, traditional publishing had not really discovered digital. They'd started to. I feel like in the last year, things have really changed in that traditional publishers have really muscled in on a lot of things that indie authors have been doing for years, for example, ads and all of these things. What do you think has changed in the last year? And in terms of what you're doing now has anything changed? Or are you finding things more challenging? What does the reboot your author career look like this year? Michaelbrent: Oh, I'm rebooting it again. Luckily, it's not at the same place I rebooted it last time, but I had to reboot then and I'm still rebooting. The biggest changes I've noticed with traditional muscling in is, number one, ads are much more expensive. So it used to be the way Amazon works is there's kind of a bidding war that goes on behind the scenes digitally. Instead of an auctioneer you're going, ‘Oh, give me 5 by 5, 4,' it's just their computer going zap, you've got the high bid. Traditional publishing is doing a lot more of digital ads and so it makes the bids higher. The biggest problem I found in the last year has actually not been issues with traditional publishers, but the privacy rules on platforms like Facebook, and Twitter, and even Google and things like that. They've really tightened up on privacy, which is a good thing for everybody except someone trying to sell an ad to a specific person. So I'm going for somebody who reads Stephen King, and Dean Koontz, and Clive Barker, and likes these seven things, and lives in this area. I used to be able to winnow it down really specifically and get inexpensive ads to the right people. And now it's a lot harder. So that's the biggest difference. I continually reboot, so you have to get more creative. It is difficult, I don't want to paint a picture like, ‘Oh, but no matter what, I'm smiling.' Because one of my other podcasts with you is about depression, I have severe depressive disorder and a couple of other fun little mental things. And so this isn't easy, but it can also be kind of, I want to say joyous in a way because you are coming up with new ideas that nobody else has ever thought of in your books. Now you get to do the same thing as a marketer, you're still engaging your creativity, which in a way is really fun. So what are new creative ideas I can come up with? There's definitely a lot more what can I do that's different? Thought, versus, what is everyone doing that works? Because if everyone's doing it and it works, it's probably too expensive for an indie. So, once again, as authors, as artistic, creative, awesome people, it stands to us to go, ‘All right, I'm going to do something different, something fun. I'm going to do a video, I'm going to do giveaways for this and that and the other thing.' The fun part of it is, it does engage your audience and it makes it really delightful. I had a fan reach out and say it was something like, ‘You know what I like? I like that your books are good, but I love that I go to your Facebook page and everyone is nice and happy.' And that was a really cool thing. I was like, ‘Oh, rad, screw being a writer, I made somebody's day good.' Joanna: I think what is important also, and I think you're very good at this, is nurturing your existing fans, and I feel like that's something that a lot of people forget. The fact is you don't need to do Amazon ads necessarily to the people who already are on your email list because you can email them. Or people will get that pushed into their recommendation list, for example. And with your emails, you do talk quite openly about some of your challenges, and also the books and also the giveaways. I feel like that nurturing your existing fan base actually generates more word-of-mouth, it generates podcast opportunities, it generates them to buy your next book. And perhaps that's what we're coming back to, perhaps we're coming back to word-of-mouth and nurturing our existing fan base. The basics that have always worked, email marketing, all have always worked. Michaelbrent: Yes. And here's an important thing too that I really encourage, especially since I had that reboot. You reached out and I like to think part of why you reached out to me and a couple of other people did. I like to think part of it's because like, you were going, ‘You're a good author, you should still write,' but I know part of it too is we're just friends, and you're a nice person. When you're friends with nice people, and they view you as a nice person, you help each other through the tough times. That's something that I do encourage as far as marketing, you cannot say to yourself, ‘I'm going to be the most successful person in my field.' You can't, you'll be lying because there's always someone who's more successful on some level. And there's just too many variables. It's impossible to predict that or to demand it of yourself. But you can say, ‘I am going to strive every day to be the nicest and most professional acting person in my field'. And that reaps benefits, not just with your peers, but with your fans. Joanna: I think that's super important. If people want to try your books, or check out what you do online, where can people find you and everything you do? Michaelbrent: First of all, just enter my first name in Google. Michaelbrent is actually my first name. I'm the only Michaelbrent in the world. You can go to my website, writteninsomnia.com. Written Insomnia, stories that keep you up all night, or novelthrills.com. If you go there, you can get one of my books for free, sign up for my newsletter. I try and keep my newsletters entertaining, there are commercials in them, but I try and make them not the main thing, because I'm a writer, so I should entertain you. And if you want help on this particular subject, I'm actually what's called a Fiverr Pro. So if you go to fiverr.com/mbcollings, which is like an outsourcing thing, they have certain people that they actually reach out to and say, ‘You're a professional in this field, would you be interested in working through us?' So if you want help with your cover description, you can find me on fiverr.com and reach out to me there and I can give you some assistance. Joanna: Fantastic. Thank you so much for your time as ever, Michaelbrent, that was great. Michaelbrent: Thank you, Joanna. You are awesome.The post Writing Hooks And Improving Your Fiction Book Description With Michaelbrent Collings first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can you cultivate patience for your long-term author career? How can you figure out your personal, creative and financial goals and make choices toward them? MK Williams talks about these questions, as well as podcast marketing and turning a blog or transcript into a book. In the intro, my reflections on the UK FutureBook conference, and Tomb of Relics is out this week. This episode is sponsored by ScribeCount.com, which provides automated sales aggregation from 7+ publishing platforms, all combined into user-friendly charts and features, accessible in seconds. Whether you publish wide or exclusive, ScribeCount allows authors to customize reports to fit their individual needs. Check it out at ScribeCount.com. MK Williams is the author of eight books across multiple genres, including dystopian sci-fi, literary suspense, and non-fiction for authors, as well as a coach and creative entrepreneur. 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 importance of peer support and community for authorsStop waiting for permissionCultivating patienceFinancial independence on your own terms — and figuring out what you really want. You can find my list of books on money here.Tips for pitching podcasts and giving great valueHow to turn blog posts or interview transcripts into a book You can find MK Williams at AuthorYourAmbition.com and on Twitter @1mkwilliams Transcript of interview with MK Williams Joanna: MK Williams is the author of eight books across multiple genres, including dystopian sci-fi, literary suspense, and non-fiction for authors, as well as a coach and creative entrepreneur. Welcome, MK. MK: Hi, Joanna. Thank you so much for having me on the show today. Joanna: I'm excited to talk to you. So let's get started. Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. MK: Well, it was a snowy day in Indiana when I was born! … but I've loved reading my entire life. I was an only child, so books were a great source of entertainment. I love to write. I had my angsty teenage poetry phase, which… Joanna: Oh, me too. MK: Yes. So many of us do. And I got to college, and I picked the safe major that was supposed to guarantee me a great job. But I was still able to take some creative writing seminars. I was very fortunate in my writing killer fiction, which was the title of the course, to have a professor who really encouraged me to keep writing. And so when I graduated into a lousy economy with no job prospects, my hobby just became writing. I really enjoyed starting to do longer-form fiction and felt with that professor's encouragement that I could write a novel, and I kept going for that. And that novel was finished, and I did what I had to do and go start pitching agents, right? That's what you're supposed to do. Every rejection and every bit of silence was, okay, well, that's just one more no, until I finally get my yes. Then I wrote another book and did the same thing. And surprise, surprise, I never heard anything. I finally went to an in-person event with a local author here in Florida. I was just thinking this is it, somebody else who's an author, we're going to become best friends, we're going to do writing together, we're just going to commiserate. This is it. I'm finally going to have an author friend and the opposite of that happened. She looked at me and she said, ‘You're what? 23? What could you possibly have to say?' Joanna: Oh. MK: Yes. To my face, she said this. I was 24 at the time. So I was flattered for maybe a minute that she said I looked like I was 23, but then the rest of it was pretty horrible. I just was very defeated from that. Traditional publishing wasn't responding to me that I wasn't getting any agent responses, it was more that lack of author community that really shut me down. My husband at that time noticed I suddenly wasn't writing, I wasn't spending every free second trying to get things into my Word document. He asked ‘What's going on? And traditional is not working, why don't you try self-publishing?' It was 2013 and so I told him, ‘No. You don't understand. I can't self-publish because then all these reasons.' He said, ‘Okay. Well, prove me wrong.' So I went online and tend to prove him wrong. And I found information on KDP and Smashwords, and this entire sea of information about self-publishing, and I said, ‘You know what, I think he might be onto something.' That's where my journey as an author really kicked off. Instead of asking for permission to be an author, I just said, ‘I'm going to learn this and become an author.' So, that's how we got here. Joanna: I love that. I did a blog post about really early on in my career; stop asking for permission. We've known each other for a while, I think maybe you're a bit like me. We're good girls, right? We want to do the right thing. And traditional publishing seemed like the right thing, but you need all these permissions. It actually takes a bit to rebel against that and say, ‘You know what, I don't need permission.' And you don't need the permission of that author who said that nasty comment, which is really bad. We should all encourage everyone. That makes me so crazy. That really does. MK: And what's so interesting is that I'm, I guess, a very bad millennial, and that I wasn't looking online, on Facebook, on forums for this community, that I let that one person in-person shut me down when so many of the great resources that are available now are so encouraging. I think that's helped me as well to have more confidence in that. No, this is right, I can keep doing this and I can keep growing and learning. Joanna: I think we still want acceptance from our peers who live in the same area. I feel like that is still something that this is one of the issues for indies is really this peer acceptance in a physical community, whereas we have this great community online. Not many of us have a physical community, especially not in these times of the pandemic. MK: Absolutely. Or you go to something with other aspiring authors and you say, ‘Oh, I'm an author,' and they say, ‘Oh, so you've got a publisher?' And I just say, ‘I sure do. She's great. The best person you'll ever meet.' Because there is this idea that you can't say author without the qualification of self-publish, but really, the book gets out to the reader the same way. Now, the quality of self-published books are so good, the reader probably can't distinguish. So why do I have to put a clarification or an asterisk next to my title? I shouldn't have to and I deal with that imposter syndrome all the time. I'm constantly battling it. I can sound very confident right now, but an hour from now I'll be quaking in my boots like I don't know if I can do this. So we all are on that roller coaster. Joanna: Yeah. That never stops. It's interesting because I guess I'm Gen X and you're a millennial. And I kind of was hoping millennials would have broken out of the stigma, but maybe it will be Gen Z or whatever we call that, younger generation or like you have a baby. Maybe by the time your baby is in school, there won't be a stigma anymore. Who knows what school will be by the time your baby grows up? MK: Exactly. She'll get to brag to all of her friends that her mom's an author and I'll volunteer for the Scholastic Book Fair, and I'll do all the bookish things. Joanna: There will no way be book fairs by then or they'll be in the metaverse, for example, anyway. You've basically been on this journey now, I guess then for over a decade, the writing and publishing journey, and you help others publish too. What mistakes have you made that you've learned from in order to grow as an author? MK: I was thinking about this. There's three big categories, right? There's craft mistakes, there's marketing mistakes, and business mistakes I've made. I think they all boil down to patience, is when I've been impatient to say, you know what, that very first book I put out, I just wanted it done. I was so sick of it. I was like, ‘Nope, I've been waiting. I know what I need to do. I just want this out.' Inevitably, the first book, I think I've heard the quote, ‘If you don't hate your first project, you launched too late.' When I look back on Nailbiters I cringe, not just because it's a little scary, but because it was the worst quality. I think my quality has improved since then. I think it's still good, but I look back and I think, wow, I really could have done with taking more time to really go through and have a second editor come behind and really giving myself the time and not setting an arbitrary date of I just want it out by this date. Having that patience really would have helped me. I did actually go back and take a remedial English language course through Coursera for free, and I was the only native English speaker in there, but I know where to put commas now. I feel more confident with it. Joanna: I still don't! I use ProWritingAid. MK: Yeah. My editor still has a job. But I definitely had to swallow my pride and learn a bit more and accept that I'm going to keep learning each time. I won't be perfect, but that patience has helped. The same with my marketing, I just had no patience for email marketing because that was my day job before I became a full-time author. I still don't have much patience for email marketing because it still feels like the job part of this job. But I know that that's important to do, so I have to do that. A lot of my mistakes come down to not being patient, not being as focused as I should be. When I just say, ‘I just want to play on right, or I just want to get the book out.' And that's led to the biggest issues. Going back, taking a moment, making a solid plan has always helped. I've had to learn that and now I try to teach people that too and say,' Don't repeat my mistakes, make a plan. Be patient.' Joanna: Some people can't plan. I've been learning much more recently about our various strengths. I feel like obviously, I've got a book on Your Author Business Plan and I do plans and I love plans. But my husband just doesn't plan. It drives me up the wall. You mentioned that you're getting sick of email marketing, not enjoying it because it feels like the job part of the job. But this is the truth, right? For people who are doing this full-time or want to do this full-time, there are tasks that you have to do that are the job part of the job. You mentioned the writing is more play, which is awesome because you have to keep that part of it. You don't want a job that you hate. We do have to accept that you can't enjoy everything about what you do for a living. MK: Exactly. I think even on my worst day or the days where I have to do just the most email marketing for this job, it's still 10 times better than my old career. So I have to remind myself of that. I can't have it all, there has to be some workdays or some difficult frustrating times, but I think that's part of it. I'd still pick this job over any other one. Joanna: How can we cultivate patience? MK: I practice. I think this is the hardest part and even with the authors that I work with, it's that patience of, ‘Hey, your eBook link is showing. The paper backlink is not going to show for a couple more days as it gets through Ingram to show up on Amazon. Don't send the link.' And they're like, ‘But, but, but.' I'm like ‘No. Don't do it. I will tell you.' It's almost I feel that what I do when I help authors is I'm almost that buffer of like, I will tell you what button to press and when. So now I'm becoming your patience checkpoint of ‘Don't send anything, don't do anything. I'll tell you when the link is ready.' Because of that excitement, I'm wanting to send it prematurely. I tell them, ‘If you send the link when there's only the eBook, then people will think, oh, it's only an eBook. And I want to print.' And then when you remind them two days later the print is available, they don't go back. I become that buffer. Having somebody to help you do that can help. Or I use Asana as a project manager, and I will put dates in there. I tell myself, if the date is in there, that's the date it gets done. I don't jump the gun, I don't delay it. That's the day it gets done. It's understanding where your own issues are, where your own shortcomings are as an author, as a business owner to say, ‘I need somebody to help with this. I need a system to help with this and fixing for it.' Everybody is different, some of us are planners, some of us aren't. But for the people who aren't planners, find somebody who is as an accountability buddy. My task management software, my Trello, my Asana, that's my accountability buddy. Getting to know yourself, which is, of course, the lifelong objective, we all want to know ourselves, but really trying to figure out what's going to work for you. And there's going to be trial and error with it. It's not always going to be perfect, but always aiming for that patient, planning, well-executed. The more we strive for that, the better we get each time we release a book. Joanna: Although I'll be devil's advocate on this and say that, I think that people who just do this in a very messy way can also be successful because patience is also a longer-term game. So even if it takes you three months to put out your eBook and then the paperback and then figure out that you need an email list, or if it takes three years. For example, in 2012 I rebranded my initial fiction as JF Penn and started building an entire another brand. We all make these decisions/mistakes along the way. What's so great about being indie is that you can fix it later, but you do have to have that longer-term patience, as you mentioned, for years. It's not just patience for that launch link. That's short-term patience, but also there's longer term patience that, look, you can't have a career with one book, for example, your first book. It's very unlikely. MK: Yes. I am often the dream crusher when I tell people, you're not going to quit your day job off of the first book, maybe by the fifth. Aim for that. Don't put too much pressure on that first book. Joanna: Coming to money because, of course, if you want to be a full-time creative entrepreneur, then you do need to think about the money. And you and I connected at the ‘Choose FI Podcast‘ and FI standing there for financial independence. Money is this super emotive topic. Many authors struggle with finances like on the one hand, they want to sell a million copies and make a million dollars and whatever. But on the other hand, they don't actually want to talk about the details. What's your money story? How did you learn about money? What are some of the principles you're following now in terms of managing money as a full-time author entrepreneur? MK: Money is definitely this very taboo topic. In most of our societies, you don't talk about it, whether you have it or don't have it. And so for me, I've always just been frugal. My mom jokes I still have my second-grade lunch money somewhere saved. So that was just my nature. I was very fortunate that I met my husband when I did. We both had debt and we were both very focused on paying it off and very quickly enabled each other, we said, ‘Okay. Well, instead of going out to dinners and dates, we'll cook in, we'll go to parks, we'll do that.' We definitely bonded and connected over that. We paid off our debt. And we thought, well, now what? All this money, we were shoveling toward student loan and a mortgage, well, what do we do with it? We were very fortunate to find Early Retirement Extreme and Mister Money Mustache about that time. Talking about this crazy concept of if you save enough money and invest it, you don't have to work till your mid-60s at a corporate day job, you can leave earlier and design the life you want, or have some variation in between it. Isn't this all or nothing? You work and then you quit working and you never work again and you sit on the beach with your umbrella drink. At that point, we thought, well, that would be nice to be able to take the pressure off of these long careers that could be very demanding of us. And for me, the idea was sparked up. Maybe I could buy back some time to try being a full-time author. Because even then, early on, I was writing I was enjoying it. I was trying to get everything together to self-publish, but I thought like this is a whole extra job on top of my day job. I really wanted that. So that gave me that focus on what was a priority to me. And I think for authors out there who are struggling with a financial element, I think what they first need to do is figure out for their personal life, what do they value, and then spend their time and their dollars there. If you say, well, I value time with my kids, I value time with my family, I value my time writing, but you're spending your time and your dollars on things that don't get you there, then there's a time to pivot and reframe it. And that's what I do. For me, I value my time with my family, I value my time writing and so I don't spend money on TV subscription services, which is crazy. I think some people are like ‘Wait, you don't have Netflix or Hulu or any of that?' No, don't have it. Because I don't spend my time there, so I don't spend my money there because there's only so many hours in a day and that's just one little thing that I do that works for me. I think authors need to define what we want, and then what we need. And obviously, having my personal financial house in order helped to make the jump to full-time author easier. Very few people are going to be multi-six figure authors within a couple of years. It takes a lot of work. Sometimes that means leaving that solid, nice corporate salary that comes in every few weeks to say I'm going to go the entrepreneurial route. There's a roller coaster, you get paid not regularly, sometimes you have to track down somebody to say, ‘Hey, you owe me this payment, things are lumpy.' Having that financial basis, a strong foundation to that financial house has made that transition easier. And now I make a solid salary. I'm not going to be going on any luxury trips on it, but I have a salary. And that's fine for me for where I am. I do think my FI roots, my frugal roots have maybe held me back in some cases where there could be opportunities to invest in a certain writing software or a different technology or take this course to learn to do ads and put money there. I've been very slow to adopt those because of that frugality. Maybe it's held me back, but at the same time, I don't have any sinking holes on my profit and loss statement. So I think it's worked out for me, but for others who are very frugal, I feel your pain. There's always something new coming up for us authors to buy or invest in or spend money on. And it's very hard to keep saying no or let me think about it. But I think the let me think about it gives you space to say is this the right purchase for my business right now? Or is this good for later or just not for me? Joanna: You covered a lot there. I'll come back on a few things. It took me eight years to get to six figures. So just in case people are interested, of which five of those years were still in my day job. So five years of working both jobs and then left my job in 2011. In 2014, I made six figures, and then 2015 moved into more, which was very good. It takes a long time. I think that's important. I love your frugality. When I was your age, you were being frugal — and I was spending all my money on good times. I think I'm a proponent of what they call “fat fire,” which is an unfortunate phrase! There is “lean fire,” which is the frugal one, and the fat fire, which I love, which is you mentioned value. I think that's what the important thing is. We do spend money on restaurants, for example. And when we can, we will spend money on travel, but we don't have a car, for example. We live in a modest house, a lot less than we could have bought. We focus on what we love to spend money on and then invest the rest. So there are lots of different ways to do this. But I guess our overwhelming recommendation is that you learn about yourself, but also learn about money. Understand your own money story and how that impacts your life now and then you can make changes. MK: Absolutely. I know a lot of people when they start to hear about the concept of FI they look back and they think, ‘Oh, all these money mistakes I made.' But the good thing is you can make more money. There are different ways that we can find a job, do a side hustle, sell some books, and you can overcome those financial mistakes. There's nobody who's too far gone. If you feel like, ‘Well, I want what MK has, I want what Joanna has, I want this full-time business, but my money past is holding me back.' It's only holding you back as long as you're allowing it to. If you learn, if you find that option. I was so frugal when I started, I was like, ‘Okay. I'm going to buy my ISBNs, I'm going to pay for a cover. How am I going to do that?' I did freelance writing articles for a health website. The most notorious one was how to peel a banana was the most ridiculous article I ever wrote. But they paid me for that. I did email marketing on the side because that was my day job. I did that too, and got that extra cash that way to then pay for those ISBNs and that cover. So there were little things that I did to jumpstart and now I'm just reinvesting those royalties all the time into the business. So it takes a while, it takes a little grit, a little elbow grease, as they say, but it can definitely be done. Joanna: And if people are interested, I've got a book list at the thecreativepenn.com/moneybooks, which also has podcasts on and one of those podcasts again is the ‘Choose FI' podcast. Coming to that, you've been part of the podcast production team and involved in many interviews, including my interview on the show. So I wanted to ask because book marketing these days, podcasting is so valuable. It must be becoming more mainstream because I get pitched by traditional publishers and PR every day. What are some tips for authors who want to pitch podcasters? MK: I helped on the production side for several years, I'm now just helping on their publishing arm. But I too have read through many podcast pitches and some still find their way to my inbox. I will say there's several no nos I would suggest. And the first one is, don't ever send an unsolicited manuscript. Don't do it. Joanna: Why? MK: Wait till the person writes back and says, ‘Oh, that's a great topic idea, I'd love to read your book,' then send it, if they haven't made that ask, don't send it. I would say also keep your pitch short and simple. There's really big podcasts, and even to a certain extent, smaller podcasts, they are getting inundated by pitches. If you wrote a novel, to be able to pitch, don't write a novel in that email. Keep it short, maybe three to five bullets of topics you can talk about because that's where their eyes going to go first when somebody is getting to the pitch. And then they'll look through the window dressing of who are you, why are you going to talk about this? I would say, obviously, podcasts help to market books. I know every week you talk about comments people leave where they say, ‘Hey, podcasts sell books, I bought the book that was on your podcast.' So that's great. Make sure that you're providing value to the audience first. If you are going to the podcast host and saying, ‘I have a book coming out, I want to promote it on your podcast.' Hey, I have a book coming out about X, Y, Z topic, your audience can learn from what I have to say about that topic in these ways.' Ding, ding, ding, you want to provide value to the audience first because that helps the podcast host because they need good, valuable content. And then by the end, people are like, ‘Oh, that person knows what they're talking about. I think I'll buy their book.' If you get on the podcast and you just say, ‘In my book, in my book in my book,' people tune out to that. That's annoying, too. So it's focusing on the value you can give to the audience first. And then people will say, ‘Huh, she sounds pretty smart. I think I'll go check her out.' So it's always that focus on the audience as your primary focus. Joanna: Yes. And in fact, now I use Descript to edit my shows, which is when you load up the audio and it has it in text, so you can actually edit text. If someone keeps saying, ‘In my book in chapter three, I talk about that, Joanna.' I'm like, ‘Yeah. That's coming out.' So I will actually edit out those things now. But it annoys me if I have to edit it out because you shouldn't have to say it, just answer the question. You don't have to say, ‘In chapter three of my book, I said this.' No. Just answer the question in a really useful way. I know some probably new authors or people who haven't done much of this kind of media worry about giving away the farm. But we both know, you can give away the farm in your podcast interview. You can give away the secrets of your book and people will still want the book to read the detail. I think that's super important. MK: Absolutely. If you provide the value, people will still want to endorse that. And I know within the FI space, J. L. Collins wrote The Simple Path to Wealth. He's very commonly said everything in my book you can find on my website, but there's people who don't go to my website. So I put it in a book. Now, he obviously did a lot of editing and making it polished and good for book form, but he still sells so many copies of that book. So yes, giving it away for free on his blog has not hurt his book sales. It's reaching people where they are. And again, it always comes back to that value. If you give people value, they're going to appreciate that. And then they want to support you, regardless of whether they've already got all the information from the book. They think, ‘I like what that person has to say, I want to see them succeed.' Look at their book. Joanna: Yes, because and a podcast transcript is very different to a book. This is interesting to me because as you said, you help the Choose FI with their publishing arm. And you've helped a number of podcasters and bloggers publish their books. We also both use content marketing in our businesses, we understand this. But when is something an article or a video or a podcast alone, and when is it part of the book? How do you turn that kind of content into a book without it sounding ridiculous or being massive amounts of work to turn a transcript into a chapter? MK: It is a good amount of work, to be sure. And so I would say something in my mind becomes a book when you feel that I have 10 videos or 10 articles that I could maybe string together and fill in between here and that's really a lot of content. Some of the bloggers I work with, they do 1,000 to 3,000-word articles. Well, even the shortest book that I would consider a book is about 25,000 to 30,000 words. So if they're stringing these together, okay, they need to have at least 10 solid pieces of content there that needs to flow together. And then I think, ‘Okay. This could work.' The benefit of blogging and podcasting is as things change, you can update it. If the topic changes too frequently, if there's too many updates, for example, I'm working with somebody now on a book about the solo 401k, which is an option for retirement savings here in the U.S., but the tax laws are potentially about to change. And so they said, ‘Oh, I want to wait to update the manuscript till that's done.' I said, ‘Well, is this going to happen every year? Because if it is, it maybe shouldn't be a book because then you're constantly chasing yourself.' Having those kind of upfront conversations. I think it's the volume of content, it's the breadth of the topic that determines if it's a book versus just a video or a podcast or an article. And to the point of not making it too difficult and to reword it and rework it, I've noticed a few patterns of bloggers when they are converting to a book. And that's the blog speak that is there, the way you speak in a blog should sound like that person's talking to you. They can almost hear your voice in their head with little mannerisms and you'll end a paragraph with lol, facepalm, or whatever they're talking about. You probably wouldn't put that in a book because blog readers are different than book readers. Now, some people will read both. But people who only read blogs look for one thing and people who only read books do not like blog speak. And they will let you know in the reviews and comments that they do not like blog speak. So it's going back and cleaning up some of that informality. You can't do memes or GIFs in your book for lots of reasons. Joanna: You could put a QR code link to them. MK: You could, but it's one of those things where I try to work with some of the bloggers to say, how important is this funny GIF to you? Is it going to take somebody out of the flow of what you're doing? Links are an option in eBooks, but not so much in print. I find a lot of bloggers that I've worked with are thankfully very good at citing their sources in text. They're in the blog and they'll hyperlink out to the source article for whatever data that presenting I'm like, that's great. In print, you need a bibliography. Got to just click on all those. The best bloggers I know are very good when they're talking to people at promoting their blog, ‘Hey, I talk about this on my blog and other things, go check it out.' And they have to do that. If they want to monetize their blog, they need traffic. It's then coaching them in the book and giving them a maximum of two blog references. You can mention your blog once at the beginning and once at the end, and nowhere in between because they're very good at saying, ‘Hey, check out this other article on my blog, check out this, check out this.' Somebody who buys a book is going to be very frustrated at I just spent how much on my hard-earned money and this guy keeps telling me to go to his blog. They want to feel that they got the value from the book. And again, when they really enjoy the book content, they will go to the blog and read other items if that is a goal for the author. That's one thing I would suggest any bloggers or podcasters who are listening, go through really critically and say for the book reader who's never heard of your content before is this the best representation to get them to like you, want to cheer for you, and want to check out your content versus just a marketing ploy to say, ‘Go to my blog, listen to my podcast, buy, buy, buy,' whatever the item is. Joanna: Yes. I can definitely tell if something has gone blog to book without enough editing. Probably my best tip is if you want to go from blog to book, do your best you can in the manuscript, but then print it out as if it was a book in physical form and put it in a folder like we do with all our books. At the moment, I'm hand-editing Tomb Of Relics, my next novel. And if you go through and hand-edit a book and read it end-to-end, I feel like you'll be able to pick up the issues around flow. And as you mentioned, I feel like that's one of the biggest issues. I actually don't mind this sort of lol, facepalm thing, I don't mind that relaxed speak, but I can definitely tell that things have either been written as separate pieces or as a flowing whole that takes the reader on a journey. And with a book, you're taking the reader on a journey. This is the other interesting thing about audio because people say ‘Oh, well, someone can just use the table of contents and skip to the chapter they're interested in.' But if you're listening on an audiobook, they are unlikely to do that. And I mean sometimes but I listen to a lot of audiobooks and it is a journey. It goes from the beginning to the end. So you need to make sure you structure that and I feel like bloggers, they'll be like, ‘Okay. This week…' Usually, you don't structure a blog from beginning to end because you change and time changes and you're like, ‘Okay. Well, that article on mindset, for example, is really useful, but I wrote that a couple of years ago.' And then this is something more recent. A book has to flow. That's probably the biggest mistake I see. MK: Absolutely. And that was the reason the guys at ‘Choose FI' asked me to come in was they had this podcast, they had mapped out the first, I think, dozen or so episodes were very linear, and then it was no longer linear. And they kept telling people, ‘Go to this episode to listen to our guide of the episodes, listen to an order.' And then they're like, ‘If we put it in a book, we can guide people through this journey of the thought process you have to go through.' I appreciated that they had that mindset going in because it made it much easier to work with them through the editing process. It should be one cohesive journey for the reader, whether it's a fiction book, a non-fiction book, a guide, a cookbook, whatever it is. I mean, even cookbooks, you start with appetizers and you go to desserts. Joanna: That's a good point. The other thing that annoys me, people do this to me, sometimes they'll email me and say, ‘Hey, can I put the transcript of our conversation in a book?' I'm like, ‘Well, technically, you can, but why would you?' As a book reader, I do not want to read a transcript. I just don't want to do that. And if you do want to use it, I have used transcripts in appendices, in my public speaking book, some excerpts from discussions that were valuable, but they weren't in the appendices. Again, if you think about audio, I think about audio all the time now, you can't read this stuff out loud. It sounds ridiculous. MK: Absolutely. That's the same thing I find with bloggers who are very… they like their graphs and their charts because it's visual. And I feel like I'm constantly reminded. I'm like, ‘Have you explained it well enough in the text that somebody listening to it isn't going to be frustrated that when they get home from their commute, or wherever they have to go online to look at this graph?' The text should be doing the work for you. The graphs and charts are window dressing. I think that's a good rule, whether it's eBook or print format, but it's especially important with audio is the image supports the text, it does not do the work for you. Joanna: That is a really good tip and also important for all those people who say, ‘Oh, I want to put loads of photographs in my book.' It is like, again, I mean, yes, maybe that goes in the limited edition print that you want to spend money on, but it means nothing in audio. And remember, obviously, we want to be inclusive and it's for accessibility, but it's also for people like me who want to listen to your book rather than read it. MK: Absolutely. I have a saying with my clients that every word in your book has to pay rent. And every picture… they're at the penthouse level of rent. That picture really has to earn its place in your book because yes, accessibility and audiobooks. Plus it's more expensive to print with images, it's going to make your eBook file heavier. There's lots of things that go with that. So that's why I say the rent for images is much higher. So if it's paying rent, it can stay. But if it's not paying rent, it's got to go. Joanna: Yes. And obviously, will exempt you for things like recipe books like you mentioned. MK: Yes. Joanna: Children's books, etc. Yes, obviously. If you're sitting there, comics, graphic novels, yes, we understand. But just the vast amount of narrative. I want to ask you about your site, ‘Author Your Ambition,' and I feel like ambition is one of those words a bit like money as a really difficult term. Why is it important to be clear on our ambitions at different stages of the author business? MK: I think it's super important for a lot of reasons, but I think the most important one is that if you as the author if you don't have a clear ambition, or goal or vision, or focus, whatever word you'd like to use for that, if you don't like ambition, if you feel odd about that. But if you don't have a clear ambition, goal, vision, focus, a guru will be happy to sell you one, and it will not be yours. I constantly feel that there are so many new authors in the space who are so excited, they're very earnest, they say, ‘My goal is to get this information out to the world. I know it can help people or my goal is to write this book and show my kids that this can be done.' They have this very altruistic goal. Ultimately, what happens as they go through and they listen to more information from different sources is, well, I need to launch on this exact day so I can hit this list and all these other reasons, and that's going to help them get X, Y, Z dollars. What I always say is that it's okay to have the altruistic goal of I want to prove I can do it to my kids, I want to help the world with my message. And it's okay to have the financial goal of I want my book to at least earn back what I've invested, I want my book to fund X, Y, Z, extra side hustle dollars, or to go full-time as an author. It's okay to have both of those goals, but one of them has to be the primary. Ultimately, you'll have to make decisions as an author that come down to, well, which one's more important? Is it the nice altruistic, warm, fuzzy goal of reaching your creative challenges and things like that? Or is it the financial goal? There will be a time where there are decisions to be made where those two are in conflict. One of them has to be the priority. If you start out on this process and you haven't written down what the goal is, you haven't really taken the time to define it, it will get murky. And by the end of the process, you'll just feel like, ‘Well, am I successful? Did I do the thing?' I think I did the thing because the work never ends for books. So there's really no set date to say, ‘Hey, measure success, yes or no?' Unless you draw that line in the sand and you define it. I've seen a lot of authors get burned out because of that constant hamster wheel of I have to do all the things. Well, you have to do the things to get you to your goal. And maybe for the next book, you set in a different goal and the next one and the next one. Otherwise, yeah, you'll burn out and you won't have the patience for this long author journey. That makes me sad when I see that happen to people because it's so fun to launch a book. It's the most exciting day ever when you get to finally hold your book. I want that joy to be there without the burnout. Joanna: Me too. Which is, as we record this, I just put out The Relaxed Author, co-written with Mark Leslie Lefebvre. That was one of the reasons we did it was because there's so much kind of hamster wheel running in the indie author world. People think that that's the way you have to do was, of course, it's not. And your ambition, you mentioned spending time with your family, the ambition could be to work less. That's probably where I am at this point. For example, I started out with leaving my job goals and financial goals, I still have financial goals, but I also would like to win an award as a fiction writer. And that's a very specific goal. It's out of my control, ultimately, but all I can do is focus on developing my craft to the next level and submit to awards. So you can do different things at different points. What are your ambitions as you continue on the author journey? MK: Right now my ambition is to have an adaptable business. When I left my corporate job my writing work had been fit into these little hours and pockets. And then it was my full-time all-day job until my daughter was born last fall. And now I am fitting my work into two or three hours a day. As long as I can continue to do that for the next few years until she's in preschool and grammar school, I will be very happy. I am looking to scale back my business in certain areas, do less of the work where I have to be in the chair and have more passive lines of income in terms of making sure my YouTube channel is getting the information out to people. If I'm not available to work with you one-on-one, great, all my information is on my YouTube channel, it's in my books, it's available in so many different places. So I can still be there to help people, but I'm maximizing my valuable time that keeps getting shorter and shorter every day to be able to have the life I want. Then yes, when my daughter goes to school, I will happily ramp it back up again and do all the things we're supposed to do as authors and things like that. So that's my ambition right now is a business that is sustainable, long-term, and adaptable. Joanna: I think that's great. And I'm happily childfree. But when I had COVID, a few months ago, and was quite sick and went on for a while. I felt the same way like so super grateful that my business is adaptable and makes money without me actually having to do very much at all, I wasn't able to do much really for a month or so. I'm back to full strength as we record this and excited to be back out at 100% going fast. But as you said, having a child or children, if you go further, that's what you want to spend your time doing. And your writing is a different point then. Obviously, time passes and the kids leave home and you want to have these different stages in your life as well as your author business. It's so important and circling right back to the beginning, we talked about patience. And I think that's what it comes down to, isn't it? It's patience in every area of our life, I guess. MK: Absolutely. It's understanding that this current moment won't last forever. Whether it's a frustrating moment when I think I just need to get this done and she won't take her nap, please go to sleep so I can get some work done. Or the moments where I'm thinking things are good right now in the business. But it's not going to be like this forever if I don't think strategically on the business and I'm just constantly in it. I think the fact that life and our businesses are always changing, always gives us the opportunity to reassess and plan for the future and really design the life that we want. That was part of my FI journey, that's now part of my author journey is, in five years if my life is exactly the way it is right now, will I still be happier? What will be missing? Really thinking about that critically. It's so hard in our society just to take the time to have those thoughts. The leisure of just sitting and thinking about, what do I want in the future? What's right for me? Because there's always so much to do in our author business in our lives, but the best growth comes from asking those tough questions and positing those tough hypotheticals, and then making the changes necessary to get you to where you want to be. Joanna: I love that. And you have lots of interesting stuff. Where can people find you and your books and everything you do online? MK: Yes. So I'm all over social media as at 1mkwilliams.com I used to say it's because I'm the one MK Williams, but there is a male author who's in the UK. He's also named M. K. Williams. So if you find M. K. Williams, and he looks like a dude, that's not me. I'm the one who looks like a girl in front of a bookshelf with a smile. I'm 1mkwilliams.com, authoryourambition.com. You can find from there my YouTube channel, my books, my ‘Author Your Ambition' series of books for first-time authors. The latest one, which is coming out November 2nd is ‘Going Wide: Self-publishing Your Books Outside The Amazon Ecosystem.' Then you can find all my fiction books on 1mkwilliams.com. If you're into science fiction, a little scary, a little fun. I've got something for everybody. Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time. MK, that was great. MK: Thank you.The post Patience, Ambition, And Financial Independence With MK Williams first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Is digital narration with AI voices good enough for non-fiction or fiction audiobooks? Can human narrators benefit through voice licensing? What are the options for sales and distribution? Taylan Kamis from Deep Zen explains digital narration for audiobooks, and I share some samples from my digitally narrated books through Deep Zen. Taylan Kamis is the CEO and co-founder of Deep Zen Limited. 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 Deep Zen?How good is the quality of AI narration for non-fiction — and for fiction, where emotional resonance is so important?How AI narration may benefit human narrators with voice licensing, and Deep Zen's Ethical StatementWhere can you distribute and sell AI narrated audiobooks — and when will this expand for indie authors?Cost and revenue related to AI narrationWhen will AI narration become mainstream? You can find Taylan Kamis at deepzen.io and on Twitter @DeepZen4 I also included samples of my fiction and non-fiction books that Deep Zen has digitally narrated. You can listen on the links below: Co-Writing a Book: Benefits of Co-Writing. Digitally narrated by Alice (British female)Sins of Violence, a short story. Digitally narrated by William (British male) If you'd like to listen to the entire books, you can purchase the digitally narrated audiobooks for 30% off using discount coupon: 2021 (until the end of Dec 2021) directly from me at Payhip.com/thecreativepenn. [Here's how to apply the coupon.] The audiobooks are delivered by Bookfunnel and you can listen on their free app. Transcript of Interview with Taylan Kamis Joanna: Taylan Kamis is the CEO and co-founder of Deep Zen Limited. Welcome to the show, Taylan. Taylan: Thank you. Thanks for having me. Joanna: It's so interesting to talk to you. What is Deep Zen and why are you so passionate about AI for voice? Taylan: Deep Zen is a synthetic voice company focusing on creating human-like speech and emotion using AI. As a background, I was always interested in human-machine interaction. So the starting idea was to build a system that can read any text as a human would do, and it will be indistinguishable. Then we start looking into the technical side; what are the obstacles, whether the technology is there. And in the last three, four years, the deep learning, the AI has come so far that we achieved what we were aiming for three, four years ago, sooner than we were expecting. I think it is about productivity, making it easier to create audiobooks. So if you think about the content production on six, seven hours of recording, editing for one hour of finished content. Historically, I think it's hampered growth on the availability of audio content, especially non-English languages. I would like to remove the barriers around audio content creation and make the content available to a wider audience with a better and wider selection. So it is about I think, the high level, it's about having a choice and availability. And it's also, I think when you introduce a new technology, it also opens up new ways of looking at different businesses. So publishing is one of our verticals. We also work as a platform company supporting online education businesses, synthetic video companies. But even in publishing, for example, there are some use cases that some publishers are actually experimenting with having an early audio version of the books that are going to be released next year, for example, next season as an advanced copy and send them to the buyer. If you're a buyer who needs to go through 12 books a week, it is also about convenience. I think making those content available to the wider publishing community in different use cases is also about improving productivity, making life easier for people. Joanna: I love that idea of the digital ARC. I've heard that a couple of times now and we all think about selling them later on, but you're right. There are these other use cases. Let's talk about what some people call the ‘quality,' because you said that what you envisioned three or four years ago has now come to pass. And certainly, I'll be sharing my examples from Deep Zen on this show. Where do you think we are? People seem to think that nonfiction is better than fiction. Is that about the technology or is that about expectations of listeners around actors and that kind of thing? Where's the quality right now with AI narrated audio? Taylan: Currently we get great results with nonfiction with little editing. We have human inputs in our processes, so you get the first natural language processing and the speech system giving you the first version. Although we are a voice company, we also build a system that can analyze the context, looking into the characters, identifying the genre. So all that information is also passed to the system. Then we have the human inputs in terms of the editing, but more and more, it's actually, especially for the nonfiction titles, the output that we are getting from the system is good enough that very little touch points are required, which will actually help the authors because it means that we can provide it at a more reasonable cost point. So it will make the technology more available to the authors. I think the key difference between fiction and nonfiction is dialogue. So how actually the story is told. We've been working really hard actually on this, the natural language processing system to actually identify the characters. We are moving to the next stage in the development that the AI can change the voice based on the story, the characters. At some point, I think, we will be available to have multiple voices talking to each other. So it's a development, but you are right, so far, the nonfiction we are getting better results and it needs a little bit more human input for the fiction side, if it makes sense. Joanna: Absolutely. And, of course, there are fears around this as there are about a lot of AI things. One of the biggest is around AI, these synthetic voices taking jobs away from narrators and voice talent. I know you have an ethical statement on Deep Zen, so I'd love you to talk a bit about that. What are your thoughts on AI narration taking jobs from human narrators? Taylan: I think human and AI systems can coexist. We work with the narrator community and we license voices. Once we actually bring a new voice artist into our platform, for each piece of work that we are actually completing using that artist's voice, we pay a royalty scheme back to the artist. And we use pseudonym names and it is actually an additional revenue stream. Think about the physical limitations of recording and how many titles that voice artists can complete in a year. So if you actually extrapolate and if you introduce AI and make it available in different use cases, different platforms, different countries, it will be an addition. I see it as a contribution to the narrators' mainstream work and they don't have to do anything for that. We have some cases, for example, especially, for example, on the language training side, we have overseas customers using U.K.-based narrators to create content. So normally those people wouldn't be coming into U.K. markets to hire voice artists, narrators. So that's, for example, an additional revenue stream that wouldn't normally be coming to that narrator's voice side. And I think it's also about the scale. Just to give you the idea, there are 50 million eBooks, I think about 50 million print titles. And so far, the audiobook numbers are around half a million. And if you think about it, 90% is in English. And if you think about American's Audible starting this 20 years, 25 years ago, There's no way you can make all this content, 50 million ebooks available in audio format without having some sort of AI solution involved. And when you look into the other markets, non-English markets, like, French, German, Spanish, the numbers are really, really miniscule. So I think in Germany, where you have the highest spending per capita for books, we have around 30,000 titles, in French, I think less than 15,000. So there's a huge disparity between the availability in different languages. I think AI is going to make that content available on a larger scale. And in our model, what we actually want is the narrators to benefit from that. So we want to share the value created by using AI with the narrator community. That's kind our approach from the beginning. Joanna: Now I love that. And that's why I've chosen to make my first books with Deep Zen, because I like that ethical statement. I think that's really great. And I'm using one of those voices. And in fact, I agree that we absolutely must get more content into audio, not just in English, but as you say, in all these languages where they don't have such a mature audiobook market. But even in English, I've just done a short story, which I also read myself. I'm obviously British female. And the voice I used from Deep Zen is a British male, the voice of William. And what I like is the ability to make more versions of our audio in different voices that might either help the story or just that people like to listen in accents that reflect their own life experience. So perhaps an American female might like to listen to that voice, whereas I like to listen to British female. So I see that there are also opportunities for multiple voices within a language or even multiple accents, for example, how many accents there are in each different language. I see this as almost, even bigger than just language. Taylan: Yes. The other example I would give is the Edward Herman example. Edward Herman was a very well-known and liked American artist and also audiobook narrator. He passed away in 2014. We actually got in touch with his estate family. We licensed his voice. We used old recordings, audiobook recordings. Now his legacy goes on. So we are actually able to produce audiobooks. He's one of the favorite narrators in our system. So it is possible. The AI also makes all these different use cases possible. One of the other things that we are thinking about is also introducing a narrator program. So working with narrators, creating a digital replica of their voices, and get them on board with our system. Then we are thinking about opening the system, the software to the narrators, and they can actually create books, produce books, using their own voices, but the synthetic versions of them. It will enable them to actually produce a higher number of outputs. For example, they can keep on doing the human narration or they can use the automated AI version and go and edit the book and they can actually produce it through their own voices. So that's one of the things that we are actually currently exploring about as well. Joanna: That is absolutely what I want to do. I'll be a customer for you as soon as I can be! Taylan: You should do it. Yes. Joanna: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Because for my own audiobooks, because now I've experienced the quality of yours. Even if I just get the AI model to read it, and it's 90%, even if it's 90% or 80% complete, and I'm happy, then there's just the little edits that have to be done. That just makes things a lot easier. I think that's going to be brilliant and that will put the power into the hands of the narrators because then they can be the ones to say, ‘Okay, I can do more work this way,' as you said. That brings in a question about what is digital narration, though? Because at the moment, a lot of the big audiobook platforms don't allow digital narration, but if it's actually a licensed voice of a real human that's mastered by an AI or whatever, that seems to cross a line. I wonder what the definition will be at that point. Taylan: It is an interesting question, actually. I think it's a timing question. It is not ‘if', but ‘when' question for adoption and I think we can refer to some of the research work. I think the Audio Publishers Association, they did a consumer survey. I think they're saying that the broad acceptance of AI narrators, 81% saying that they would still be interested in listening an audiobook narrated using a high-quality artificial intelligence or AI voice. And they say 58% saying discovering a book that they enjoy, AI narrator, it has no impact on their opinion. So I think it might be early days, but I think it's going to become norm. As the acceptance increases, I think there's going to be an amalgamation of human voice and the AI voice. There are some platforms that are actually helping podcast producers to actually edit some of the pick-up sessions or the changes using the synthetic copy of their voices. So it is the human narration plus the AI kind of edit. What our technology is, it can actually enable the other way around, so you can actually create the whole content. We are advanced enough to give you the ability to create the whole content in a synthetic version of your voice. It's very similar to yours. Then you have the control, you can actually, if you are doing the editing, then it wouldn't be any different to your own articles. I think it's going to be a convergence of the two in terms of, I think, the near future. Joanna: In terms of right now, or at least in the next year or two, how are you selling audiobooks, distributing and selling? Obviously, for independent authors, it's not possible at the moment, but I think Deep Zen has some distribution already. What platforms are allowing AI narrated audio? Taylan: Starting from day one, we've been really careful about the quality and how we communicate with both the publishers, authors and the retailers. We wouldn't want to become something with subpar quality. So that enabled us to secure the distribution. With Deep Zen, if you produce the content with us, we can actually distribute our content to 50 different retailers and streaming services and the libraries through the distribution partnership agreements that we signed. We are actually thinking about making that available to the independent authors. If you are actually working with us and if you're getting your digitally narrated audiobook produced with us, we will be offering that distribution service through our own distribution agreements. And we can make that content available in the different platforms. So far, it will be restricted to our own distribution channel. But I think with wider acceptance, the other platforms will probably going to be accepting directly in later stages. I think the exception is Audible, so far, and I think they're also looking into it. They are a big part of the ecosystem, obviously, and they're also starting looking into how they can introduce AI generated content into the platform in the near future. Joanna: Obviously, they're owned by Amazon, and Amazon have Amazon Polly, which is another AI voice. I imagine that they might want to develop their own ecosystem. Taylan: I can't go into too much detail. There are some works in process. Joanna: I'm sure. Taylan: I think the good thing having Deep Zen available to the authors and the publishers, we are independent. The key thing is if you are going with one of these larger, bigger platforms that it comes with the conditions attached to it. So you have to make it exclusive to one platform, you can't do it in the other one. We are platform agnostic, neutral. And that's actually a good thing to give the choice back to the authors and the publishers in terms of where they want to list their content, how they can distribute their content, how they can actually maximize the value they are going to be driving from their content, their work. I'm playing a really critical role in terms of staying independent and providing that platform, the equally good technical platform to the wider publisher and author community. Joanna: I know you might not be able to answer exactly, but is there a roadmap in terms of timeline for opening up to authors? Because I feel like I've been talking about this for a few years and everyone laughs at me and says, ‘Oh, it's years and years away.' How long do you think it will be before this is possible for independent authors? Taylan: Oh, for us, basically using Deep Zen's technology you mean? Joanna: Yes. Taylan: It's very soon. We started to make it available. We built a publishing portal. So if you go to portal.deepzen.io and you can actually sign up to our portal, give your business details, upload your manuscript. And that service is actually now available. Joanna: Yes, that's the service I've just used to do two audiobooks. When would we be able to distribute through Deep Zen to the 50 retailers, for example? Taylan: We are aiming to do it before the end of the year. Joanna: Oh, great. Wow. Okay. That's amazing. Taylan: Yes. There's some infrastructure that needs to be put in place in terms of how we are going to be managing it. So there's some development work that's being currently done, but we would like to do it as soon as possible. Joanna: Well, that would be great. Then in that case, I want to ask about price because there's a couple of things with price. On the one hand, people think, ‘Oh, it should be really, really cheap to do AI voice,' where, of course, it's technology and it's got a lot of value. So even though it might be cheaper than necessarily hiring a famous narrator, it's still got costs. So that's the cost on the one hand, will that come down? And on the other hand, the pricing, is there an expectation that the pricing of an AI narrated audiobook should be cheaper because it's not a human? What's happening with both the costs and the revenue when it comes to AI? Taylan: In terms of the cost structure on our side, the human input part, we have two tiers of services. The first one is if you want the quality QC process, if you would like to give inputs and if you want us to change and make edits on the book, then it requires a rigorous process with the editors and it increases the cost on our side. Currently, it's around $100 per finished hour, $100 to $130, that price range. And the majority is actually the human editing, which is involved in that. But now we are getting confident to a level that we can actually eliminate some of that process. Especially for the nonfiction, the content is actually good enough to be distributed with minimal human touch. We will be enabling the price point to come down to around $50 per finished hour, $40 to $50 range that we are looking into. But that service wouldn't have the same QC process, but we will be doing the lexicons or the pronunciation is going to be perfect. But small changes maybe, like, if you want to pause after certain words, variable detailed editing, that won't be available, you need to rely on the machine's accuracy. We are actually getting very confident that with the minimal input, we can get a really high-quality output from that, which we will be passing the savings to the customers. In terms of the pricing, whether it should be cheaper, the AI content, not necessarily. I think the value of the content, the intellectual value and how it is produced are a little bit separate things. Ultimately if you think about it, the availability and the choice, I think price was one of the barriers that actually stopped more content being available. My expectation is as we pass along these savings then it will be more feasible to break even and start making money with a smaller number of copies that are sold, which will actually help the authors and the publishers to price them more reasonably. So they will be probably more competitive. That's how I'm thinking. Long term, it will help the price points to come down while actually keeping the same amount of returns to the publishers. Joanna: I think there's going to be a lot of different options within the next few years, and that will change, but I agree with you. I think the content is one thing. The other thing I'm interested in is I used to think that we were trying to replicate human voice and, obviously, we are trying to replicate emotion and that kind of thing. I think it's important that we label things as digitally narrated, for example, and I'm even putting labels on the audiobook cover so that they can be easily recognized as digitally narrated, because I feel that's also to be embraced. There are special things about audio narration as there are special things about human narration and we don't want to try and fake it in a way. Do you think that we need to encourage this kind of different labelling in order to encourage trust from people? Or do you think it doesn't matter because people will just listen anyway? Taylan: We advise, as the best practice, to do it in the metadata, to actually label it in the way that it's synthesized with the digital voice of the narrator or the pseudonym. That's how we see it to be open and frank with the customer, with the community. I agree with you. That's something that we are recommending, and I think that showing the distinction would be probably beneficial in the long term. Joanna: Great. So we've talked a bit about what's happening right now. When do you see this being completely accepted by both the publishing industry and by listeners? Are we talking 5 years, 10 years? When will AI narration be mainstream? Taylan: A couple of years, I don't think that it will take five years. I think it will be probably with different use cases, probably more on the fiction side. We've been working on this for three, four years now and we see the reports. The content is consumed in libraries, and on different platforms. People are actually paying for it. So I think it's just the mindset and also probably the bigger platforms and the publishers are slowly adopting it. Maybe the change should come from the authors and the narrators that it is actually the more people are actually using it, taking the advantage. And we would like to be the platform that is actually enabling it rather than the big parties controlling it and just doing it in one go. So I think the way I see it is yeah, the next couple of years, I think it will start to emerge definitely in non-English markets because we get quite a lot of inbound requests from German publishers, French publishers. If you think about the audio, all these services are actually bringing in more people as the subscribers, users and they want to give them a good experience and people want the content in their native languages. All the studios in Germany, what we are actually hearing is they're all full all the time. Even if you want to pay premium prices and if you get the narrators, there's not enough studio capability or capacity to get your book on time. I think it will probably be an earlier adoption in non-English markets. That's what I'm expecting. And that will drive the change probably in U.S. and UK. Joanna: I totally agree with you. I think the non-English language services will want this more and then it will drive everything forward and then the rest of us will be like, ‘Yeah, we want to get involved.' Taylan: Our thinking is for the publishers. I think you can get your content in audio now in a more reasonable price point. If you are thinking about rights, we are talking about five to seven years. There are some platforms that currently you can sell your content. Also, for example, on the Audible question, once they start selling, then you will have an early start, for example, you will have your content rather than trying to get everything adopted at that stage. So I think early adoption is key in this case and it is certainly not going to be four- or five-years' time. It's going to be next year and the year after. I think we will see a big mass shift in that in a massive scale. Joanna: Excellent. I've been excited about this for years, so I'm glad it's finally happening. Where can people find Deep Zen online? Where can everyone find you? Taylan: Sure. Our web address is deepzen.io. For the authors, they can sign up to our portal, it's portal.deepzen.io. And if you have any queries, then the email is hello@deepzen.io. Joanna: Fantastic. Thanks so much for your time, Taylan. That was great. Taylan: Thank you. Thanks for having me. Have a good day. Thank you. Bye-bye.The post Digital Narration With AI Voices With Taylan From DeepZen first appeared on The Creative Penn.