The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers

If you write fiction in any genre, you need to build your world. Whether it's the cozy coffee shop in your romance, or a complete fantasy world, or a post-apocalyptic wasteland, world-building can strengthen your plot and bring depth and conflict to your characters. Angeline Trevena gives plenty of tips in this episode. In the intro, the inevitability of unlimited subscription [The New Publishing Standard]; Scarlett Johansson vs Disney [BBC]; Notes from a small London publisher [Publishing Perspectives]; the rise in ecommerce and opportunities for authors [Kris Writes]; my tutorial on selling direct; Continued difficulty in writing during the pandemic [@writermels on Twitter] 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. Angeline Trevena is the author of urban fantasy and dystopian fiction, as well as nonfiction for authors. She's the co-host of the Unstoppable Authors podcast and organizes events for authors. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes Different types of world-building Ideas for how to build different worlds Creating cultures and characters that make good stories The importance in a culture for the potential for conflict Guidelines to follow when creating a magic system The three things world building needs to achieve in a book Tips on the use of maps and where to find map illustrators or learn how to DIY Mistakes to avoid when world building How to backwards engineer an apocalypse You can find Angeline Trevena at AngelineTrevena.co.uk and on Twitter @AngelineTrevena Transcript of interview with Angeline Trevena Joanna: Angeline Trevena is the author of urban fantasy and dystopian fiction, as well as nonfiction for authors. She's the co-host of the ‘Unstoppable Authors' podcast, and organizes events for authors. Welcome to the show, Angeline. Angeline: Thank you very much for having me. Joanna: I'm excited to talk to you today on the topic of world-building, which we're going to get into. Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing. Angeline: I'm one of those people who has been writing stories since they were old enough to hold a pen, really. But it was never my dream. It wasn't my childhood dream to be an author. I always wanted to act, so my whole childhood was spent doing theater and singing lessons and dance lessons. Then went to university, and I did a degree in drama and writing, and about halfway through my first year, I realized that I hugely preferred the writing side to the theater side. It was a really strange moment to do that, because my whole life to that point had been so focused on theater, so it was like setting aside my entire being, and focusing on something else. I graduated university back in 2003, so the first Kindle wouldn't even come out for a good few years yet. So, being published, being an author was sort of pipe dream territory, and I never would have ever imagined that I would end up doing it for my job, for my living. When I finished uni, I started out writing short horror stories and submitting them to anthologies that were put out by small presses, so that's where I started out. And in about 2012, 2013, it would have been, I said to my writing group that I was a member of, I said, ‘Why don't we self-publish our own anthology of short stories together?' They actually turned around and laughed at me. They actually laughed because back then, it was still quite widely thought that self-publishing was still the last desperate attempt of someone who couldn't get a publishing deal. Joanna: And also, you're in England, right? Angeline: Yes. Joanna: Which I think is definitely, much, much worse. I moved back to England in 2011. 2012 was the first year I felt like, oh, maybe things are changing, but definitely, England was well behind the U.S. and Australia in terms of acceptance of indies. Angeline: Yeah. Luckily, I didn't let it deter me. I walked away from that conversation, and it made me think, ‘Do you know what? I'll show you. I'll show you.' And so, I self-published my first book in 2015. I actually hand-coded the ebook. It was really important to me that I learn how to do everything. So I hand-coded this ebook, because there weren't all the fancy programs that you get now. Now, all these years later, I have 18 books out, and I make my living out of being an author. So I'm pretty sure I showed them. I think I proved my point. Joanna: Well, what's funny though, is you probably didn't show them with that first book! Angeline: Oh, no. Joanna: That's the truth of it and it's probably the truth of most careers, you're just like, ‘Well, I'm going to make a success of this.' The success doesn't come in the first year. I think that's an important point. Angeline: Oh, definitely. But it is a very much thinking long-term. I really try and focus on the long term. Joanna: Oh, definitely. Today we're talking about world-building, and you've got a number of books and box sets on this from all different levels. There's so much to talk about. And we can't possibly get into it all. I've been delving into all your books and going, ‘That's interesting. That's interesting.' But let's take it right up to a high level. What are the different types of world-building, when do authors need to do it, and what genres might people consider it for? Angeline: When people think about world-building, they tend to think about fantasy. And they might think about alien worlds in science fiction as well, but actually, world-building exists in every single genre. If you write contemporary fantasy, and you create a coffee shop or a bookshop that doesn't exist, even if you set it in a real-life town, that shop that you create, that's world-building. Or if you have a detective novel set in a real place, and you make up the PI company, that in itself is world-building, or a secret government division that doesn't really exist. Or maybe it does. Who knows? That's world-building as well. So you can have world-building in literally any genre whatsoever. But the fantasy writers, and the sci-fi writers, and quite often horror writers as well, we are the heavy lifters of the world-building. Joanna: I agree with you. I have a secret government agency in my ARKANE thrillers. And I agree, people often think oh, like, ‘I'm not world-building. I'm setting this book in the real world.' My ARKANE thrillers are this time, this world, and 90% of it is real places and all of that kind of thing. But, as you say, you have to come up with the boundaries, I guess, of where you're going to do something, even like a cozy mystery, like you said, a coffee shop, you have to do that. So, what are some of the dimensions, I guess? And another thing, and we don't have to do all of them. What are some of the dimensions of world-building that we need to consider? Angeline: There are several ways that you can approach world-building, and different kinds of worlds you can build on different scales. So, you might be creating an entirely new fictional world, which would be very much like epic fantasy, so, an entire world that doesn't exist, has never existed, like Middle Earth or Narnia, which is what people think about when they think about world-building. Another way that you can do it is by taking a real place and putting it into an alternative past or giving it an alternative future. So, the genres we see, that sort of world-building in a lot is altered history, steampunk, dystopia, and post-apocalyptic. The other thing you can do is you take a real place and you have a parallel fictional world existing alongside the real world. This is urban fantasy, magical realism, and quite often, the people, the humans that live in the real world, don't know about the fantasy world because obviously, it's a great for cause of conflict when the two worlds collide. You can do world-building on a massive scale, or you can do world-building on a really tiny micro-scale. But even if you're building a huge epic world, you can go right down to the micro, which I tend to, inventing things like food, and coins, and specific jargon words. You can get right down into the nitty-gritty if your book needs that, but not all books need that. Some books can have a much looser amount of world-building doing. Joanna: There's definitely a continuum from people who just do a bit of it to the full-on world-building nerd, where you are. I think a lot of fantasy authors are, and I really only discovered this when I wrote dark fantasy. And as you say, jargon words, I ended up coming up with words and things and it was like, ‘Oh, my goodness, I guess I'm world-building.' So people might not realize they're doing it even though they actually are. You mentioned people then, and obviously, characters are important in our stories. What are some ideas for creating cultures and characters that help make good stories in the world-building sense? Angeline: In my books, I ram this down the reader's throat. I go on and on about it. The characters are the most important. Your characters are the reason your readers keep turning the pages, and hopefully, keep buying your books. Everything has to come back to character, all the time. It's the most important thing. When you're thinking about creating a culture, which can seem like quite an overwhelming thing to do, start simple. Start with what you know. Have a look at the world around you that you live in. Notice all the little nuances of your culture, the…it's probably things that you take for granted, but start noticing it. And actually, when you get used to noticing all the nuances of the culture you live in, it puts you in this really weird place where you're like, ‘My life is so strange.' Because you start noticing things that you've just never seen before, and you're like, ‘Hmm. That's really weird.' But that's always a really good place to start. Just start with what you know, look at what's happening around you, and then, if there's something in your culture that you'd like to explore, like you might want to explore gender roles in culture. You might want to explore, like, poverty and inequality. Look at the world around you, look at what you can see, and then highlight certain aspects of it. You can exaggerate certain aspects, you can twist them around completely on their head, to really hone in and make that the theme of the world that you're creating. And remember that culture is self-perpetuating. Everything affects culture, and culture, in turn, affects everything else. So that's all the institutions in your world, politics, law, education, religion. Actually, the landscape itself and the resources that are available, that affects culture, and culture can affect that as well. If a particular natural resource becomes incredibly popular for a reason, you can deplete your world of it. So, even the landscape and the resources and the weather… I think as British people, we know how much the weather affects culture and all the values that people have as well. So, think about how culture is affecting the elements of your world-building, and how the elements of your world-building are therefore pushing back and affecting the culture. Always be thinking about how it goes back and forth. And remember that cultures change over time, and these things might happen very gradually through the generations, or they might happen, like, instantaneously because of a huge event. Again, I think we all know about that as well, now. A big event happens in your world, and it can change the things that people value, the things they see as important. Culture can change very gradually through the generations, or it can just be a really, really quick thing. And most importantly, for the sake of your story, make sure you're building into your culture loads of potential for conflict. Even if you're creating a utopia, making sure there's a dark underbelly, where there's inequality, where there's the haves and the have-nots, because we all need conflict to be able to write a story. That's what stories are based on. Joanna: I think the idea of values is so important. The pandemic has shown us this so many times, and actually, something that different cultures value is old people versus children. In our English culture, it has seemed that we value children more than old people, and yet, in some cultures, the elders, the wise ones, are valued more than children. And even that seems, on the one hand, a small thing, and on the other hand, a really, really big thing as to which groups in society are valued more, and that has potentially nothing to do with the weather or the physical location. You could set that in a desert culture, like, for example, Aboriginal Australians who, I think, value elders, and obviously value children as well, but in terms of the hierarchy of a group. Or you could set that in a polar landscape. Angeline: Yep, absolutely. Joanna: For everyone listening, think about all of these things that can be dimensions and you can think about them as levers that you can move up and down. And, of course, we don't have to be original either, do we? Angeline: No. Joanna: We can borrow, like Tolkien obviously borrowed from myth and Icelandic things. Angeline: And everyone's borrowed from him. Joanna: Yes. Exactly. Or you could say we're people doing trolls or whatever, also borrowing from Iceland and that type of thing. But this kind of mixing and matching is a good way to think about it, isn't it? You don't have to come up with totally original things. Angeline: Yes. And I think, as authors, we tend to put so much pressure on ourselves to be completely original, and do something that no one's ever seen before. But actually, if you're doing things that people have seen before, they already like it, and they already know it, and there's already a market for it. So don't feel that you have to come up with some totally crazy new idea that no one's ever done before, because actually, what makes your idea unique is the way you tell it, it's your personal voice as an author. That's where the uniqueness comes in. You could give the exact same writing prompt to 10 writers and you end up with 10 totally different stories. Joanna: One very important part of the fantasy genre mainly is a magic system. And I feel like this is just so critical for world-building. How do we make sure our magic system holds together and influences the plot and character and everything? Angeline: I love magic systems. I am somebody who loves very, very heavy rule-based magic systems. There are other people who much prefer looser, freer, magic systems, but I love rules. The most important thing when you're making magic systems is you need to make it feel like it actually belongs in your world. It's not bolt-on. It's not, ‘Oh, I quite fancy having magic, so I just chuck some magic in at the end.' No. It needs to feel like it's always been in your world. It may be something that springs up new, but it needs to be integrated. Think about historical events in the timeline of your world. Which of those have been influenced by magic, which have been caused by magic? And think about the culture as well, and how magic integrates into the culture. Is it taught in schools? Is it part of the education system? How does it work in politics? There's likely to be laws around magic, maybe who can and can't do it, or when you can and can't do it. There's going to be division around magic. There's really, really great potential for conflict there, and prejudice around magic. And think about, has it been monetized? Let's face it, if magic as we think of it, was real in our world, it would be capitalized, and it would be monetized in some way. Joanna: Well the internet's magic, isn't it? Angeline: Yeah. We do have magic in this world, but pointy finger, wand-waving magic, then it would be commercialized, and you would have a lot of advertising on TV for these things. Maybe magic has even been completely outlawed in your world. So, when you're building your magic system, make sure it is fully integrating into your culture, and integrate it into the plot as well, so it can help your main character reach their ultimate goal, but it can also hinder them. It can be a source of conflict in itself. Magic can be an inciting incident, and you can use it to highlight and explore the themes of your book as well, like inequality, if some people can do magic and some people can't, or one kind of magic is thought of as better than the other. If your theme is about the environment, then you can have a very nature-based magic system. Your themes might be like found family or sacrifice. You can bring magic into these themes, so that it really feels integrated in your story. And, of course, it has to affect your character. So think about the character arc. Maybe a big part of it is a training sequence. I love training montage. I love it. I want to see your character burning their eyebrows off when they first try magic. So, make sure it's really integrated in there. Make sure also that you're not using it as a crutch or an excuse, which is where the rules come into magic systems. You don't use it as a God in the machine moment, right at the end, if you haven't foreshadowed it. It's something you need to be really aware of, that you're foreshadowing your magic and the amount of magic, and the way that magic can and can't be used. So, like I say, I love rules in magic systems. You can have a very rule-based magic system with lots of limitations on the actual magic itself, or you can have a magic system that has no rules or limitations, too, but has really severe consequences for using magic. Or you can write a magic system that has both lots of limitations and consequences of using it. And those limitations and consequences might be actually within the magic itself, or it might be cultural, so it might be that it's illegal to use magic, therefore, that would be a consequence and a limitation on your magic system. But you can go crazy and really base your magic system on anything you want. So, again, go back to what you know. Think about what you're interested in. You might base your magic system on ancient words, it might be animal-based, or based on symbols. Maybe you really enjoy dancing and you have magic dances that create magic. Start with things that you're interested in, and don't be scared to incorporate futuristic tech into magic as well. I love that mix of, like, futuristic tech and magic. I think it's awesome. Joanna: Yes. A fantasy techno-thriller. I also read in that kind of crossover genre, although I would say it's quite a small one. But coming to this, you mentioned the word foreshadowing, and I guess, if people don't know what that is, it means that there are hints earlier on so that when something happens, it's not a surprise. But I wanted to add; I'm a discovery writer. Angeline: Me too. Joanna: Okay. Well, that's great you say that, because I feel like a lot of people think, ‘Oh, well, I have to spend 6 months, or 10 years planning my world, and doing all the world-building as a separate activity to writing.' Whereas how I did my Mapwalker series is I just started writing, and some stuff appeared. And then foreshadowing, to me, means in editing, going back to earlier chapters, and making sure there are hints that things are going to happen. So you don't have to know in advance, you just have to put it so the reader gets it in advance. How do we get this balance between spending way too much time world-building and balancing what's actually needed? Angeline: It is a danger. I'm one of those writers who I could quite happily world-build forever and never actually write the bloomin' book itself. And so I have to be really disciplined. And because I am a discovery writer, I have started writing with just one world-building idea, like I want to write about a world where this one cool thing happens. And a lot of my world-building is done while I'm writing my first draft. So, yes, very much my foreshadowing's done in editing. But I do like to do a little bit beforehand, but it's usually just in my head. I might spend three months doing world-building, but only in my head, and it's while I'm writing something else usually. But it can become a distraction from actually writing. It can become a form of procrastination, and I think we all know what happens when you fall down a research rabbit hole as well. That can happen. So, basically, you are going to do more world-building than you actually end up within the book. I think that's always going to happen, that you'll always do a little bit more. But you need to know enough about your world that you know why things are the way they are, because that's how you make things make sense in your world and make it feel like it belongs in the world and in your story, and that's how you make it affect your character. You need to know enough about your world that you know why things are the way that they are. But your readers might not need to know all of that. There are three things that your world-building needs to do in your book. One is to reveal character. Two is to push the plot forward. And three is to explore themes. If they're not doing any of those things, then it is probably info-dumping. You probably don't need it and you can probably leave it out. Now, we like to put lots of colorful things in our world and, like, ‘Oh, that's fun.' I'm a sucker for carnivals. I love writing carnivals and markets into my world. So, I have to be really disciplined. And quite often, yes, it comes in editing for me because I'm a discovery writer, that I have to go back and go, ‘Okay. This world-building, although I love it, it's not actually doing anything for the story at all.' And it's flabbiness, it's just stuff there for world-building's sake. It's not helping push the plot forward or helping your character arc or exploring the themes, then sorry, you have to kill your darlings. It's so hard. Joanna: Or turn it into something that helps something else. So, like obviously, the tavern scene in epic fantasy or even in sci-fi now, you know, like in the ‘Star Wars' bar. Angeline: Yeah. Cantina. Joanna: The cantina now appears in everything. And if it's not there, people get upset. It's like, where's the bar scene? Where's the cantina scene? But you can use that to move character forward as you say. You have to use it for something else. You can't just have a random market. Angeline: Yeah. Sadly. Joanna: I have a lot of tombs and crypts and archeological things, and you just have to find a way to include your world-building in your plot and your character. And you can start wherever. I'm so glad you're a discovery writer, because I feel like with my Mapwalker series, it was like, oh, what would happen if you could walk through maps? That was literally where I started. And then as you said, you thought about it. I thought about, ‘Well, what does that mean? Where does it go, if you carry on; how could that happen?' So you can, as you say, world-build in your head, or, let's talk about maps, because I feel like map-making becomes a sort of fetish object. Angeline: It really is. Joanna: In the world-building sense. And now, first of all, it can be absolutely amazing. And if you have any physical, artistic ability, then go for it. Angeline: Definitely. Joanna: So many of us don't necessarily have that skill. Do we need maps? What are your recommendations around maps? Angeline: When you're writing your first draft, I would say, in 99% of cases, you need a map. Have a map next to you, because it is so useful when you're writing. It's so easy to get lost in your world. If you have a book and your characters are traveling from A to B, and B point is a coastal town at one moment, and then halfway through the next book, or even in the next book of the series, if it's a mountain town, people will notice, your readers will notice. So, having a map, I would say have one. When you're writing, and you've got that map next to you, that's all it's for. No one need ever see it, ever. If it's a childish scrawl on the back of an envelope, that's fine. That's fine, because it only needs to be useful to you. So, you don't need to be an amazing artist to have a map next to you when you're writing. Believe me, I'm not. I'm not an amazing artist at all. So, don't worry about it when you're writing. If you want to include a map in your book, there is loads of help out there for us less artistically-inclined people, which is brilliant. We love that. One of the things you can do is you can hire an artist, and there are actually an increasing number of artists out there who literally specialize in making fantasy maps. And I tell you, they are absolutely stunning. Joanna: Where are you getting those people from? Angeline: Instagram is a good place to get people. And there's a lot on Fiverr as well. Now, I haven't yet hired a map artist. I don't have a specific recommendation of one that I can give, but you go into a fantasy author group on Facebook, ask for a recommendation, and you'll probably be bombarded with recommendations. There are loads of people. And I see it more and more often, people making these amazing… They're so beautiful. Yes, it is definitely a fetish. There are other places that you can get help as well. Like, there's this great program called Inkarnate. It's spelled ‘ink,' as I-N-K. And you can just go online and use that, and you can create a map. Just be careful, because if you want to use the map that you create commercially, you have to pay for a license. And actually, I've been reading a lot of map drawing books recently. The two that have been really helpful to me is Fantasy Mapmaker by Jared Blando, and Fantasy Mapping by Wesley Jones. Honestly, going through those two books and just practicing my drawing, I have got so much better at drawing maps. Those two books are absolutely fantastic. So, there's a lot of help out there for you. Joanna: That's great. I was going to say the only one I've done is the co-written book I did with J Thorn Risen Gods, which is set in New Zealand. So, we did get a map of New Zealand done, and we used 99designs in 2015, and things have moved on since then. Map of New Zealand Aotearoa created for Risen Gods by J.F. Penn and J. Thorn We were really happy with that, and because it's a real place anyway, it wasn't too hard, but I love these resources. And as you say, I think things have moved on so much and there's an increasing amount of artistic talent that you can find to help you. But as you said, be really careful about the licensing. And also, licensing our merchandise, because there's a difference between using a map in the front of a book and using it on a t-shirt, or as a basis of a game, or all these things. So definitely check your contracts with designers around merchandise and other things. Joanna: Any examples of big things that go wrong, and not-so-good worlds, or any problems you see? What are some of the things that people get wrong with world-building? Angeline: Probably the main mistake that people make with world-building is not integrating it into their world properly, so that it doesn't feel like it belongs in the story and it's just bolt-on stuff, but an afterthought. Please don't make world-building your afterthought. That's the biggest mistake that people make. Another one is including too much world-building, going in the opposite direction, and just info-dumping, pouring out pages and pages of history. The best way to explain your world-building to your readers is through showing it. We all know the old adage, ‘Show, don't tell,' and it's exactly the same with world-building. There may be times when you do need to tell a bit of world-building, to explain something in your world, but it's much better to show it. So, telling your readers. You might have to do it now and again, but it's not the ideal. Having characters have a conversation, and explaining part of your world that's slightly better, but you often get that, ‘Oh, as you know, blah, blah, blah,' which is, it's the same as info-dumping. It's exactly the same as info-dumping. You've just put it, that info dump in dialogue. But the best way to reveal your world-building is by showing it through your characters' actions and the way the world affects them, and most importantly, your character's reaction to something, because every time you put something new in your world that is unfamiliar to your reader, so something that doesn't exist in reality, you're adding to their learning curve, and you want to make that learning curve as gentle as possible for them so that they're not hugely confused or overwhelmed by just information. Let your characters show your readers how they should feel about the world. If unicorns are totally normal in your world, then your characters won't react to them. They barely even notice them. And that's a big clue to your readers that they are normal in that world. So including too much makes that learning curve for your readers way too steep, and they'll just be overwhelmed and confused. Good examples of world-building, let's face it, we have to mention Middle Earth. It's the gold standard there. I read a lot of books by M. R. Carey, and he is fantastic at his world-building. What he's particularly very good at is building a culture that really affects the characters, and showing the culture through what the characters do, like their habits and their rituals and things like that. I'm currently reading his ‘Rampart' trilogy, which is post-apocalyptic, and it's a really, really good example of showing how culture affects the characters and just the way they live their everyday lives. Less good examples of world-building or ones I have little niggles with is, for one, it's Narnia. I'm really sorry. I love Narnia. I'm obsessed with ‘The Chronicles of Narnia.' So I'm not bashing ‘Chronicles of Narnia.' I love it. But it does tend to use magic as a crutch excuse for things, like whenever there's a problem or anything, it's like, ‘Oh, it's just magic.' It does tend to use magic as a crutch a little bit too much, but I do love Narnia. The other one is James Cameron's ‘Avatar' movie, which, again, I love. I love it. But oh, there are some real niggles in the way of the evolution of the creatures, like the way that the Na'vi bond to the animals, and basically, it's like mind control. From an evolutionary standpoint, that's a really bizarre vulnerability that would evolve in animals, because it goes completely against survival instinct. But it doesn't matter, because that world does what it set out to do, which was basically to look beautiful for 3D movies, which it did. Joanna: And there's another one coming sometime. Angeline: Yes. I'm looking forward to it. It's great. It's just little niggles, really. Joanna: Those are two good examples because, of course, everyone probably will have in their mind that world of James Cameron that they built, and fit visually, that's an incredible world, because it was built for visual impact. Narnia is a Christian parable, and it's almost like that was the reason for it. Perhaps our reasoning behind our world-building is important. I was also thinking this is genre-specific. You take the big historical epics like Edward Rutherford's and the James Clavell and James Michener, these big doorstop books, where, actually, if you do an info dump as a description of how a cathedral is built, that can actually be part of what a historical fiction reader wants, but done in a way that is genre-specific. Versus an urban fantasy setting with vampires fighting, whatever, you don't want to spend that long discussing the building materials. So, it is very genre-specific. Angeline: It is, yeah, because the different readers of the different genres have very different expectations, and they want very different things. Epic fantasy readers will quite happily read a whole chapter of history, but urban fantasy readers would be far less accepting of that. Joanna: My husband only will listen to audiobooks that are at least 40 hours long. He won't accept an epic fantasy series unless he has to spend 400 hours on. And I'm not joking; these sort of massive epic fantasy series. You have to think about your readers, but again, we write what we love. So you should know what your readers want. We could talk about this forever, but I do want to ask you, one of your books is How to Destroy the World: An Author's Guide to Writing Dystopia and Post-Apocalypse, which I love. I'm always trying to destroy the world. Angeline: Why not? Joanna: If we know that we're going to be setting something in, say, a post-apocalyptic setting, how do we backwards engineer the world, and not front-load it all into the backstory? Angeline: Backwards engineering is fantastic in world-building, because as writers, we're so often used to that question, ‘What if?' It's held up as the ultimate that you should always know the ‘what if' of your books. What if this happened, what would be the consequences of it? But, with backwards engineering, you can start with the consequence. So, then you need to ask yourself, ‘Why?' Why has the world ended up like this all the time? And a lot of time, this is where my world-building ideas start. So many of my stories start from a world-building idea, and it's so often the consequence of something, and then I have to work backwards to find out why. For example, you might have an idea where you want to write about a world where surrogates are billionaires. So, you've got to ask yourself ‘Why?' Why are surrogates all billionaires? Why do they charge and earn so much for their services? You might track it back to a mass infertility issue in the world, or you might track it back to genetic defects, or you might track it back to a growing obsession with athletic bodies, and women just don't want to get pregnant anymore. You can absolutely backwards engineer stuff, which is really good, because sometimes your whole world-building is just based on a really cool idea, where you're like, ‘I really want to write about flying cars.' Backwards engineer it. Work out how they ended up in your world. It's a really, really good way. So, just to keep asking yourself, ‘Why?' and work your way backwards. I'm a big fan of spider diagrams and mind mapping, because for one thing, it allows you to explore loads of different paths, but start with your consequence right in the middle of your page and explore all of these backwards engineering legs outwards, to see what works, choose which one you want to do, and you can start your story at any point along that timeline. You can start your story, if you're writing post-apocalypse, you can start your story at the apocalyptic event. And again, it comes back to showing and not telling. You don't want to info-dump just a chapter of history of how this happened. Show it through your characters' actions, show it through characters having conversations, but not that ‘As you know' conversations. You can start anywhere you want along the timeline. You can show the world falling apart, you can show the consequences of the world falling apart, or you can show both, obviously. You can have the apocalyptic event right in the middle of your novel, if you want to. Backwards engineering is as completely valid as forwards engineering things. You don't actually need to know 10 million years of history of your world.You might want to. Some people do. That's fine, if that's what you're into, but you don't need to know 10 million years' worth of history. And your readers certainly don't need to know it. Especially if you're writing in this world, which a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction is, then you don't need to write a whole load of history, because people know it, because it's the world they live in. You can start at any point and just start to show what's going wrong, because your readers want to see what's changing, what's different, and most importantly, your readers want to see you putting your characters through absolute hell. That's the important bit. When you're writing post-apocalypse and dystopia, just be mean to your characters for a whole novel, you're fine. Joanna: I do read some of this, and it just makes you feel good about living in a culture… Even during a pandemic, you're like, ‘Well, at least it's not like that pandemic in that book.' I mean a Stephen King, The Stand pandemic. Angeline: Absolutely. Yes. Things could always be worse. But, do you know, I always think of post-apoc and dystopia as very hopeful genres. People often think they're really depressing, and I'm like, ‘No. What you do is you get this marginalized character, and you face them against insurmountable odds, and then you watch them succeed. And what's more hopeful than that?' If they can do it, then surely we can as well. If this marginalized person can change the world forever and make it better, then we can as well. They're my favorite genres. I love it. Joanna: Coming back to horror, where you started as well, I feel like horror is very hopeful, because it's not about the monster, it's about fighting the monster, and hopefully, somebody left at the end. Angeline: Hopefully. Joanna: We could talk about this forever, but we're going to end here. Tell us briefly about your Unstoppable Authors podcast, and also the books you have, and all the various things you have available. Angeline: I am the co-host of Unstoppable Authors with H.B. Lyne, who is also a fantasy author. She writes dark fantasy. We're across all of the platforms, so, iTunes, Spotify, all of the others you want to listen on, and you can find us at unstoppableauthors.com. We talk about indie authoring, and all the things to do with that. And we just have a lot of good fun on that podcast. I actually started it solo, as a world-building podcast, but kind of gave up and Holly came along and rescued it. I've currently got four world-building books out. They are available in ebook, but they're also available in paperback. The thing about the paperbacks is you get lots of spaces. It's a workbook, so you've got loads of blank pages, so you can write all your answers to all the prompts and everything. And, then you've got a world-building Bible that you can have next to you while you're writing, so you don't forget anything, which is perfect. My paperbacks are available on Amazon. My ebooks I publish wide, so they're available any way you can get ebooks, and direct from me as well. My website is angelinetrevena.co.uk. Or you can get that from .com. And I'm all over social media as well. Instagram mostly, but also Facebook and Twitter. Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Angeline. That was great. Angeline: Thank you so much for having me.The post Worldbuilding With Angeline Trevena first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Web 2.0 enabled the digital revolution that transformed the possibilities for authors and creators, so how will Web 3.0 transform it again over the next decade? This is a special futurist in-betweenisode on what many are calling Web 3.0 which encompasses virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), the metaverse, and the spatial web. It’s intended to give you an awareness of what’s coming as opposed to specific advice on what to do about it since this really is an emerging area.  Thanks to my patrons whose support enables me to do these special extra episodes. If you find this useful, please consider supporting the show at patreon.com/thecreativepenn or BuyMeACoffee.com/thecreativepenn  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 Definitions of AR, VR, Web 3.0, the metaverse, and the spatial webVirtual worlds and augmented reality for authors and publishing — Chapter 5 from Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain and Virtual Worlds: The Impact of Converging Technologies on Authors and the Publishing IndustryDevelopments since December 2020 — and the potential opportunities for authors and publishing in the next few yearsWhat you can do now to prepare Recommended books and resources You can find more of my future of publishing episodes here. Definitions of AR, VR, Web 3.0, the metaverse, and the spatial web AR (Augmented Reality) — AR layers digital over physical reality and this is already available in limited ways through your phone. For example, you might have played with filters on social media changing the color of your hair, or adding ears or other features.  AR hair and makeup filters will make it SOOOOOO much easier to do video! IKEA has an app that will place furniture in your house. Just choose the furniture, hold up your phone and you can see it in your living room.  There is a 3D option within Google Maps where it will layer directions over the real world, pointing you in the right direction.  Google Maps 3D overlays directions on top of the real world You can also use Google real-time translation. Open the Google app and use Google Lens. Choose the Translate option and hold the camera over some text in another language. Here’s one of my ebooks in French which you can see translated in real-time. translation in google lens. the formatting isn't great but the meaning is clear AR applications can be accessed through mobile devices with cameras and also wearables like glasses or even contact lenses in coming years. This is already being used at the enterprise level with devices like Microsoft Hololens in manufacturing, healthcare and education. VR (Virtual Reality) — VR is about immersing yourself in a fully virtual world. The real world disappears. Think Ready Player One, which is a great movie even if you haven’t read the book. This is the experience economy where gaming and entertainment are taken to a new level, but it’s also a virtual space for commerce, networking, training, travel, and more. VR is currently accessed through headsets like Facebook’s Oculus, HTC Vive,  You might also hear terms like mixed reality or extended reality, where the lines between AR and VR are blended.  The Metaverse Neal Stephenson first came up with this term in his 1992 novel, Snow Crash, and it encompasses both physical and digital worlds. It won’t be a single place run by one specific company. It’s more like ‘the internet,’ a term that encompasses so much. It will be accessed and experienced through AR and VR devices, rather than just 2D screens. Venture capitalist Matthew Ball describes the metaverse not as a virtual world or a space, but as “a sort of successor state to the mobile internet” — a framework for an extremely connected life. There “will be no clean ‘Before Metaverse’ and ‘After Metaverse.' Instead, it will slowly emerge over time as different products, services and capabilities integrate and meld together.” Web 3.0 Web 1.0 (around 1991 – 2005) consisted of mainly static websites on desktops and laptops. It was expensive to create a site and so only big companies had them and they were mainly for pushing information or as replacing things like the Yellow Pages for finding things.  Web 2.0 is social and mobile and characterised by an explosion of digital creation though blogging, podcasting, social media, video, comments, digital publishing and digital commerce. The cost of creation basically went to zero and everyone with a mobile device and/or access to the internet could have an online presence. Facebook launched in 2004 and Twitter in 2006. The iPhone and the Kindle were both launched in 2007, which is when web 2.0 really took off.  Web 3.0 is the next stage and we are in the early stages now, kind of like the years 2004-2006 when early adopters began blogging, way before it went mainstream. Web 3.0 is about exponential converging technologies, rather than one thing on its own. It encompasses the decentralized web powered by blockchain technology and decentralized finance including tokenization and digital currencies (which will be launched by banks as official country-specific currencies). It will also encompass the spatial web which will blur the boundaries between digital and physical though the use of sensors (the Internet of Things), AR and VR. Artificial intelligence and 5G connectivity will underly everything, a bit like electricity and mobile internet do now. To put it another way, The Augmented Workforce states, “In the first phase of the internet, we connected information. The second phase connected people. The third phase is connecting people, places and things in a more dynamic and amplified way.” The Infinite Retina states that spatial computing “comprises all software and hardware technologies that enable humans, virtual beings or robots to move through real or virtual worlds, and includes Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Augmented Reality (AR), VR, Sensor Technology, and Automated Vehicles.” Web 3.0 hardware will include wearables like smart glasses, watches, smart clothing, and for some people contact lenses and some may choose more direct brain interfaces as they emerge. We will interact primarily through voice, eye tracking and physical gestures rather than typing or touching, although haptic feedback will enable something like touch. Think Minority Report with Tom Cruise swiping screens in mid-air. Right now, you probably access the internet through your phone or mobile device or tablet but glasses and other wearables will make it more integrated. Before you decide that this couldn’t possibly be for you, then consider how much the internet is already in your life, for good and bad, and how much you use your phone as part of that. I still remember saying to my husband back in 2007 that I didn’t need a smart phone, I was very happy with my little Nokia as I only texted people anyway. Now I can run my business from my phone and it is never far from my hand. There are many things we do now that we never imagined we would back then. I was writing a book in 2007, which later became Career Change, but I didn’t have a website or a podcast or social media, or an online business, or an email list, or any of what is now my multi-six-figure business based on my writing and powered by the internet.  I am super excited about where web 3.0 will take us as creators — it feels like it will bring even more opportunities to create new things, make more money, connect to more people. Think about how web 2.0 enabled us as Indies — and now think that web 3.0 could give us even more possibilities. So those are some definitions and initial thoughts. Let’s get into more specific applications for authors and publishing. This is chapter 5 from my book, Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain and Virtual Worlds: The Impact of Converging Technologies on Authors and the Publishing Industry. I narrated the audiobook so I will insert the audio here, or the chapter is in the show notes, then I’ll return with some updates and implications for what you should do in order to be ready for the shift over the coming few years. Virtual worlds and augmented reality The pandemic of 2020 accelerated the need for different ways of running business online and has proved the use case for virtual reality (VR) in education and training, co-working and collaboration, remote assistance, and other applications beyond the gaming community. At WIRED Live (online) in November 2020, Anne Sheehan from Vodafone UK spoke about how 5G is the enabler for virtual reality and it has “come of age” during the pandemic. For example, Coventry University in the UK is now using VR as part of their medical training. In April 2020, Singularity Hub reported on Virtual Market 4 (V-Ket 4), a “Japanese expo spanning 36 separate worlds contained within the VRChat ecosystem,” with a “primary purpose to sell virtual apparel and avatars”. More than a million people were expected over ten days, making it the largest social VR gathering ever, and exhibitors included Audi, Netflix, Panasonic, and Sega. The article notes, “Today’s biggest limitation to social VR experiences is the limited technology to facilitate a truly connected experience,” but the acceleration of 5G will mitigate that. It also notes, “For us westerners, it’s a reminder that development of the technologies doesn’t occur at a uniform speed across various geographies. When I visited China and Japan a few years ago, it was already clear that consumer adoption of virtual reality was far beyond what we currently see in the West.” I’ve been waiting for this for a while! Back in 2015, I wrote an article for The Bookseller in the UK on “Virtual Reality and the Future of Publishing”. “Imagine walking along a street of bookstores, each one with an enticing window display of eye-catching new covers that appeal to readers of a certain genre. You walk inside one with the dark, brooding atmosphere of the crime/thriller lover and find yourself in a bookstore with shelves of books configured just for your tastes. You’re drawn to a cover, pick up the book and start to read. You turn the pages, feeling the quality paper, smelling that new book scent. You continue browsing and when you’re ready to purchase, you choose your format and the book is sent to you in the format you choose.  Then you take off your VR headset and carry on with your day.” In the article, I speculated on the design and business model of a VR bookstore that could change based on what it knew about the customer, an Amazon or Bookshop.org that can be personalized, but also offer the experience of being inside a real shop. At the end of the article, I noted, “We’re not competing against each other, we’re competing against gaming and on-demand film/TV as well as music. These industries are embracing VR, and the immersive experience will take consumers even farther from books. We need to embrace this technology and invest in what the online retail environment will be in five years' time.” Clearly, I was early on the idea of a VR store, but perhaps I was only a few years out in terms of this becoming a reality, as online experiences and commerce are now moving into virtual worlds. In 2019, Fortnite held its first live concert inside a video game, “a glimpse into the future of interactive entertainment, where the worlds of gaming, music, and celebrity combined to create a virtual experience we’ve never quite seen before” [The Verge]. In October 2020, The Verge reported that “more than a million people showed up to an album launch party inside the virtual world of Roblox. American pop star Ava Max held a ‘virtual fan meetup’ in the game to celebrate the launch of her new album Heaven & Hell.”  Roblox is a gaming platform that’s been around since 2006, but Jon Vlassopulos, Roblox’s head of music said, “The stretch goal is to go to the non-obvious places, where we can make the virtual experience even better than the real-world experience … The confluence of virtual spaces and music has been steadily growing for some time, but it’s really accelerated in 2020 due to the pandemic. With live, in-person events almost entirely canceled across the globe, artists have been searching for new ways to connect with fans.” [The Verge] At WIRED Live (online) in November 2020, the CEO of Improbable.io, Herman Narula, said that “the virtual world won’t replace the ‘real’ world,” but it will improve our interactions, because it is one of the few places where age, gender, race, sexuality, nationality and language don’t matter. He predicted that there would be jobs inside virtual worlds within five years, and that VR has the potential to be as transformative as the internet. There have been virtual economies within virtual worlds for years. Second Life was established in 2003 and still has active users who interact, buy and sell with avatars, but it’s all 2D on a screen. As the price of virtual reality headsets drop, and more people use them for work, education, and gaming, new forms of retail will emerge. VR offers a new way to teach, connect, earn additional revenue and market books. Many writers teach, and many also speak and network at in-person events and conventions. While these physical events will continue, online and virtual events will only expand, and I expect to be speaking in VR before 2030. Augmented reality (AR) With augmented reality, a computer-generated layer is superimposed onto the physical world. This might be a game like Hot Lava, played at home on your phone, virtual anatomy superimposed over the person in front of you for medical training, or designing IKEA furniture inside your actual home. All of these are demonstrated in Apple’s video of augmented reality in the home using an iPad.  This might bring to mind Google Glass, unveiled in 2012. I tried a pair at Google’s Headquarters in London at an event back then, but the tech was glitchy, and it was clearly too early for mass adoption. But now 5G technology, as well as the Internet of Things and advances in optics, means that heads up display may well be coming in the next few years. In November 2020, MacRumors reported the possibility of an AR headset and Smart Glasses which would work with the iPhone. The headset is rumored to be coming in 2021 with the glasses in 2022. Singularity Hub reported on the development of AR contact lens by Mojo Lens in January 2020. I wore contact lenses for twenty years before I had laser eye surgery, so I’m ready for those when they emerge. For authors and publishing, this will enable interesting possibilities.  As a consumer of primarily digital ebooks and audiobooks, I would love to see them on a virtual shelf in my home. I have bookshelves of physical books, but limited space. My library would include several thousands more if I could ‘see’ my virtual books in AR. This would allow me the joy of browsing my digital archive and revisiting favourites in the same way I do with my physical shelves. I would catch sight of books I enjoyed and might check out the author to see what they’ve released recently, driving further sales. The same depth could be added to physical bookstores, which cannot possibly display all the product available at one time, inevitably driving people online to buy. But imagine being in your favourite shop, browsing the fantasy section with its limited physical options. Tap your AR glasses and a curated extra shelf opens up digitally offering new and related books. Select and the order goes through digitally with the book sent overnight with print-on-demand. The retailer has valuable data on preferences, driving follow-up emails with more personalised recommendations. This serendipity of browsing in a combination of the physical and digital stacks could drive more purchases in the real world. AR would also enable the creation of extra products. I want to create a companion walking tour of my books through London (for my Brooke and Daniel crime thrillers) and through Bath (for my Mapwalker fantasy trilogy). Walk the physical streets with AR glasses and I’ll be there with you explaining the history of the area and how it inspired my novels — with opportunities to buy, of course! There are lots of audio-only walking tours available now, but AR will enable the digitalization of such experiences and further integration with retail. It could also improve in-person conferences and conventions, enabling enhanced networking and business opportunities. For example, I might wear AR glasses at Thrillerfest, where I network with other authors, agents, publishers, and retailers. Their social media profiles might appear in my heads-up display with the sub-genre they write, making it easier to connect. Or I’m at London Book Fair and I can see what company people work for, or which country they’re from, as well as if people are on my email list or are a Patron, which would help me with interactions. VR and AR technologies offer exciting new ways for the expansion of the industry and new revenue streams for authors and publishing. These are only a few of my ideas, but there is a (virtual) world of opportunity ahead. Developments since Dec 2020 — and potential opportunities for authors and publishing in the next few years I wanted to do this update as my brother is a fashion designer and has just started a job as a 3D designer for a multi-national sportswear company. Retail is getting ready for 3D shopping. Entertainment is getting ready for immersive reality through AR and VR. As authors, we are in the retail and entertainment industries, so we need to pay attention. A Deloitte report on Augmented Shopping notes that it, “Enables customers to engage with brands and products via digital experiences that allow them to try on, try out, interact, or personalize their product virtually; these experiences help deliver more detailed, intuitive product information than standard web experiences.” We have all increasingly shopped online in the pandemic and how much better will be when we can try clothes on a realistic avatar of ourselves and customise according to our body shape instead of buying things that look good on models. Contextual digital assets will increasingly be overlaid on the real-world environment and visible through digital screens like mobile phones and smart glasses. I mentioned the idea of the AR enabled bookstore in my narrated chapter above, where the physical shelves have a lot more options in the digital space driving more sales for bookstores — and authors. Another idea might be to hold a book launch at a physical location and instead of having to direct buyers to a URL to buy my book, there would be a way to buy it directly within the AR environment overlaid on the physical space, or maybe a limited run of NFTs that you can only get from me at that location at that particular time. This kind of augmented retail expands the possibilities far beyond anything we have right now and will make it much easier to sell books and expand inventory in a physical space, as well as create new places to sell within the metaverse. Virtual travel and leisure experiences will also be a huge industry with immersive games and experiences — you’ll be able to see your favourite band perform in your living room with AR, or join millions of other fans in a VR environment.  Personally, I will still want to physically travel for an extended time, but would definitely do short virtual trips for book research or just interest. At the moment, I might visit a virtual art gallery or virtual tour of a museum or cathedral on my computer screen but it would be much cooler to be in a more immersive VR environment where I could see things in 3D. I would definitely visit places like St Peters in Rome, where I have been several times in person, but would go back to spend more time looking at the architecture and art in more detail with overlaid information that I could interact with. I almost got an Oculus Quest recently in order to do more virtual travel but I have decided to wait for the Apple headset as VR is currently much easier with a PC. Health-wise, working in this kind of immersive environment should be much better for us. The aim is a head-ups display instead of the hunched over posture that causes so many issues with sitting at computers now. We’ll be able to use our bodies to interact far more so start to get more comfortable with voice and gesture. I currently work out with Bakari on Apple+ Fitness, a trainer in an LA studio whose workouts I do and I watch him on my iPad screen. My heart rate from my Apple Watch is displayed on the screen and paces me with other participants in the online class. I can imagine wearing sports lens that made Bakari and the other trainers appear life-size in my room instead of the small screen with much more personalised adjustments based on my data. In terms of the impact to independent creators, we will have many more options to create digital assets like NFTs, and create new income streams through tokenization and even independent economies like creator coins through sites like Rally. This is all just emerging but what was way too technical a year ago is becoming more of an easy-to-use interface, for example, Shopify announcing NFTs on their platform which people can buy with normal debit’ credit cards without the need for crypto-currency. You don’t need to worry about the technical details of this, all you really need to know is that within the next couple of years, there will be more payment options — in the same way that we now have PayPal and TransferWise and Stripe and products that make it easy to do digital business. There will be more ways to turn your ideas into different digital products like NFTs and a resale economy will emerge that will enable more streams of income. There will be more ways to reach readers and fans through 3D spaces on the metaverse, in a similar way to doing something like a Facebook Live video or Zoom webinar now in 2D, but this will be more immersive. I can barely scratch the surface of the transformation here, but consider the difference in the world between 2005 and 2021 and you will catch a glimpse of the shift. So how fast will this happen?  Right now, most AR applications are still a gimmick and not widely used, and most users of VR are in entertainment, like gaming and of course, the more adult side of entertainment, which is always ahead of the pack! But VR is also in military and businesses for a training environment. It’s much cheaper to train in VR and easier to manipulate different environments. Microsoft’s Hololens is mainly used in enterprise environments, focusing on manufacturing, healthcare and education. Cryptocurrency is starting to move into mainstream news articles, especially as country specific central banks investigate launching digital currencies. I definitely like the sound of Britcoin, which is the term being discussed here in the UK.  So web 3.0 is not mainstream — yet. But it could be in the next year or two. The big players are starting to get serious about it. Mark Zuckerberg announced in June 2021 that Facebook would become a metaverse company. Facebook bought Oculus in 2014 so they have been working on this for a while and there’s already a growing VR ecosystem but this marks a shift towards a more mainstream focus. Zuckerberg said, “The metaverse will bring enormous opportunity to individual creators and artists; to individuals who want to work and own homes far from today’s urban centers; and to people who live in places where opportunities for education or recreation are more limited. A realized metaverse could be the next best thing to a working teleportation device, he says. With the company’s Oculus division, which produces the Quest headset, Facebook is trying to develop one.” Whatever you think about Mark Zuckerberg or Facebook, you have to acknowledge the power they have to reach people, and they have the user base to roll this out. They also have a price point for Oculus that means it may well be the mainstream version for headsets or at least one of them. They’ve also announced a partnership with RayBan for smart glasses.  MacRumors reports that Apple is likely to release an AR headset in 2022 with Apple Glasses to follow. Some commentators think that in the same way 2007 marked the beginning of web 2.0 with the first iPhone, 2022 will be the start of web 3.0 as Apple takes the metaverse mainstream. Snap is developing Spectacles for AR experiences. The Verge reported in July 2021 that “While Snap first used its augmented reality tech for silly effects like puking rainbows and dancing hotdogs, the company increasingly sees AR as a way to shop. Early tests of AR shopping experiences, such as a recent collaboration with Gucci to let people virtually try on a pair of limited-edition sneakers, have shown Snap that people are more likely to buy something after they interact with it in 3D.” Amazon has smart audio Echo Frames that integrate with Alexa, and presumably will have AR functionality in the future, and there are many more products being developed.  This has all accelerated due to digital focus in the pandemic, plus the desire to work remotely and how disappointing and difficult it has been in many situations. Sure, Zoom and other online tools have enabled us to work and socialize in a functional way, and businesses have increasingly moved to ecommerce, but it’s not ideal. Web 3.0 will take much of what is currently in 2D on a screen like a phone, or a computer screen, and make it immersive.  As Mark Zuckerberg says, “an environment where you’re embodied in it. That can be 3D — but it doesn’t have to be. I don’t think that this is primarily about being engaged with the internet more. I think it’s about being engaged more naturally. What virtual and augmented reality can do, and what the metaverse broadly is going to help people experience, is a sense of presence that I think is just much more natural in the way that we’re made to interact. And I think it will be more comfortable. The interactions that we have will be a lot richer, they’ll feel real … in terms of designing places where people hang out, this is going to be a massive part of the creator economy. You’ll have individual creators designing experiences and places.” If you’re interested in going into more detail on how this might look technically, check out The Spatial Web, which goes into detail about how the technology might all hang together.  If you are dubious about these virtual world possibilities, they note, “As of 2019, the important thing to note about Minecraft is that a young generation of 100 million kids has grown up designing and building an entire virtual world that collectively is nearly eight times the size of planet Earth.” They also state that, “Virtual assets will become the largest asset class in history.” If you think about how much people are paying for digital assets in the form of NFTs right now, and how digital currencies and coins are taking off in many different spheres, you can catch a glimpse of this emerging economy.  I don’t think we as independent creators are going to necessarily create entire virtual worlds ourselves, the cost is too high. But we will build destinations on existing worlds, for example, there might be an Alliance of Independent Authors place in the metaverse, where authors can write together and I could rent virtual space to run events. You will very likely use web 3.0 as part of your job in the next decade, for example, replacing Zoom with a space in the metaverse and we could all be doing conferences within VR instead of watching flatscreens. We might create location and time-specific stories, and we will use our avatars in marketing or as part of content. For example, if you write knitting cozy mysteries or knitting non-fiction, you’ll be able to record yourself demonstrating knitting specific things. I’ll be able to play you in my AR headset and you’ll be right next to me instead of on a tiny YouTube screen. This ‘how-to’ stuff will move from flat YouTube to AR, for example, Jonathan used a plumbing video on his phone to fix the U-bend under the sink whereas in the future he could be wearing the glasses and the way to fix it would be overlaid onto the physical environment.  There will also be expanded possibilities around licensing as well as writing for VR and AR companies to create experiences. I can only touch on some possibilities in this episode but think about it this way — the internet has transformed our lives in so many ways, and in the same way, web 3.0 will transform it again. What can you do right now?  This is an awareness episode, a bit like the sessions on NFTs and blockchain as well as writing with AI. Early adopters are already embracing these areas, but the shift will certainly take years. However, sometimes it’s good to be in the early wave as you will positioned for success.  Those who jumped on ebooks and Kindle in 2007-2009 were well positioned for success even though it was more like 2012 when ebooks went mainstream (and even now it’s only just starting in some markets). I started podcasting in 2009 and it was 2015 before it really started to take off in the mainstream. Now digital audio is an ever-expanding market.  I’m certainly intending to experiment as much as possible with AR, VR and the metaverse, as well as trying out NFTs and using digital currency and blockchain apps as they expand into mainstream markets.  You could try some simple AR things right now with your phone. Try Google Maps with 3D or Translate options in Google Lens for real-time translation. If you have the opportunity to try a VR headset, then give it a go. There are VR arcades popping up in major cities with experiences like Escape Rooms and games to play with friend. I’ve tried a few headsets at various events but I’m waiting for Apple to launch their glasses/headset as that’s my primary eco-system. I expect to adopt more AR into my life first. Web 3.0 will need new infrastructure and inevitably we will need to update our eco-systems as technology changes and new companies emerge. It’s much easier to build from scratch on a new platform than it is to re-engineer an old one. But remember, if you own and control your intellectual property rights, you can easily move onto these new platforms or adapt as things change. As many of us did when ebooks and then digital audio became mainstream. This shift will lead to new ways of creating, as well as more opportunities for creation and sales of digital assets, plus new ways to network and market. It is the emergence of a new eco-system. So, even more exciting times ahead, creatives! I’ll keep sharing as I learn along the way and I hope to do a session like this in the metaverse before 2025!  Please leave a comment or question here, and I am also interested in hearing from people who are already embedded in this space. You can Contact Me here. Thanks again to my patrons whose support enables me to do these special extra shows. They fund my brain to read and research and think about these things and then put together the futurist episodes. If you have found this useful, please consider supporting the show at patreon.com/thecreativepenn or you can buy me a coffee (or a gin!) at BuyMeACoffee.com/thecreativepenn Books and Resources The Metaverse Primer – https://www.matthewball.vc/the-metaverse-primer The Spatial Web: How Web 3.0 Will Connect Humans, Machines, and AI To Transform The World — Gabriel René, Dan Makes, Jay Samit The Augmented Workforce: How Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, and 5G Will Impact Every Dollar You Make — Cathy Hackl, John Buzzell Future Presence: How Virtual Reality Is Changing Human Connection, Intimacy, and the Limits of Ordinary Life — Peter Rubin The Infinite Retina: Spatial Computing, Augmented Reality, and How a Collision of New Technologies are Bringing About The Next Tech Revolution — Irena Cronin & Robert ScobleThe post The Metaverse For Authors And Publishing. Web 3.0, VR, AR, And The Spatial Web first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Taking the long-term view plus taking advantage of new marketing tactics can help you sell more books, as Karen Inglis talks about in this interview. In the intro, Pearson launches a subscription app [The Bookseller]; A+ content could help you sell more books [The Hotsheet]; Takeaways from Podcast Movement 2021 around the audio eco-system and Facebook for Podcasts. Plus, new free video series on book marketing from Nick Stephenson, and Ask an Adventurer by Alastair Humphreys. Today's show is sponsored by IngramSpark, which I use to print and distribute my print-on-demand books to 39,000 retailers including independent bookstores, schools and universities, libraries and more. It's your content–do more with it through IngramSpark.com. Karen Inglis is the best-selling author of books for children, including The Secret Lake, Eeek! The Runaway Alien and The Tell-Me Tree. Her book for authors, How to Self-Publish and Market a Children's Book has recently been released as a second edition. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes Writing children's books across different age groupsSales split between print and ebookQuality of picture books from POD suppliers and when it's worth doing a print runSelling local. Schools, bookstores, and librariesHow marketing children’s books has changedWhy experimenting with ads is keyLicensing foreign rightsThe long-term view of success You can find Karen Inglis at SelfPublishingAdventures.com and on Twitter @kareninglis Transcript of Interview with Karen Inglis Joanna: Karen Inglis is the best-selling author of books for children, including The Secret Lake, Eeek! The Runaway Alien and The Tell-Me Tree. Her book for authors, How to Self-Publish and Market a Children's Book has recently been released as a second edition. Welcome back to the show, Karen. Karen: Oh, thank you for having me again, Joanna. It's lovely to be here. Joanna: Now, you were last on the show in 2018. And since then, of course, you've written more books. Give us an overview as to what books you have now and also what age groups because I know that's always important for the children's market. Karen: In terms of new books beyond those I have already, of course, I've got my picture books, the original ones, Ferdinand Fox picture books. But I now have two new picture books since we last spoke. I have The Christmas Tree Wish, which is for ages three to six, three to five, and The Tell-Me Tree. The Christmas Tree Wish came out in 2019, so probably a year or so after we spoke. And then The Tell-Me Tree came out last summer. Beyond that, I have brought out German versions of The Secret Lake, French and German versions of The Christmas Tree Wish and The Tell-Me Tree. And then, of course, my big nonfiction book. And then beyond that, of course, I've still got my chapter book, Eeek! The Runaway Alien for ages 7 to 10. I've got Henry Haynes and The Great Escape for ages six to eight, and The Secret Lake and Walter Brown. This is of ages 8 to 11. Joanna: It's a really interesting spread. Karen: I know. I can say it's by accident rather than design. Joanna: It's good you're taking them through from 3 till 11. There are lots of options as the kids grow. Karen: Exactly. And I always say that just comes because my stories come to me rather than me deciding I'm going to write a book for a certain age. It's always something I hear or see that then triggers the book. The Christmas Tree Wish, the one that came out the year after you last interviewed me, the idea, I'd seen a tree on valance green several years earlier and I knew I wanted to write a story about it, but I was waiting. And then suddenly I overheard a conversation that suddenly made me realize what the story would be. And likewise with The Tell-Me Tree a very similar story. So, I never know what's coming next. Joanna: What has changed for children's authors in terms of publishing options since the last edition of your nonfiction book? So, for example, is digital any bigger or is still print as dominant? And anything on audio as well because I think that might be something that might have changed. Karen: I would say that in terms of publishing options, and what sells, print is still dominant. It still makes up 95% of my sales and of most middle-grade authors I know, but there's one or two exceptions. And there was a slight increase in digital during the pandemic particularly the early part. I certainly saw that, and again, other authors I know saw that, but it has dropped back again to the usual split, for the most part. I'd say the only exception to that might be if somebody is writing for sort of somewhere that's middle grade, but slightly touching on young adult. So, maybe you might sell a little bit more digitally then. Audio uptake, I think, it's the same for children's books as it is across the board. It is on the increase. But in terms of publishing options, they are all the same as they have been up to now. What has changed is that the tools to get books to market and promote them have evolved and improved, as we all know, generally for everybody, but since you and I spoke, certainly, for children's authors because it's a lot easier to now promote your book. Joanna: We'll come back to marketing. So, 95% of your sales are in print, which is fascinating. Are you only using print-on-demand or are you also doing short runs and warehousing and that type of thing? Karen: I'm doing short runs but only in a very limited fashion. And I would only recommend this personally in this sort of circumstance. I'm doing it for The Secret Lake. And the reason being The Secret Lake, as you probably know has sort of become a best-seller. Back in 2018 when I saw how much it was selling on Amazon in the UK and as well as in other countries, I anticipated. I thought, ‘Well, hang on a minute. At some stage, word of mouth is going to really take over here.' I can imagine people walking into bookshops in the UK asking for copies of it because they're not buying from Amazon. Then they would probably have this problem of the delivery time through IngramSpark, which we're all aware of, which is not IngramSpark's fault, it's to do with the whole supply chain getting it to the bookshop. So I've got an arrangement with Clays Publishers here in the UK where I do upfront printing, they store it for me, and they send it to Gardners Wholesalers. So, that's how I work. There are children's authors and certainly, there are children's authors over in the U.S. who do actually regularly do upfront print ones. They sometimes even shipping from China and they do Kickstarter and all that sort of thing to have big runs that they sell themselves. But that's a lot of work and it's something I would only personally recommend once you know that you've got an established brand and you're selling well if you know what I mean. I just think there's too much risk involved, otherwise, in having basements full of books, if that makes sense. Joanna: Absolutely. Certainly, it's not something I personally do myself. And it's interesting to hear that you only do it with that one book, The Secret Lake, which is your bestseller. Karen: Absolutely. Joanna: So you use print-on-demand for the other books, even those picture books. I feel that some people still have doubts about the quality of picture books if they're printing on demand. Any comment on that? Karen: No, I think they're absolutely fine. I blogged about this way back in the early days. If you're doing print-on-demand, you will not get the silk finished pages. And that is disappointing. I love the moment that that becomes available. In the early days, I did with Ferdinand Fox's Big Sleep, I was so worried about that. I did pay upfront to have 500 printed. The parents really didn't notice the difference. I think the time it does make a difference is possibly if you're standing in a bookshop. But even then I've noticed picture books in bookshops now aren't all that silk finish paper either. Maybe that's for environmental reasons. I'm not sure the sorts of papers that are being used. I've been very happy on the whole with the quality, but we all hear stories, sometimes KDP their color is coming out better than IngramSpark, and sometimes it's vice versa. At the moment, I would say my KDP color picture books look better on paper than the Ingram ones from time to time. I think Ingram's changed one of their printers at some stage. So, I wouldn't say there's a quality problem. It's just that you're not going to get like-for-like if you're thinking that you want to have silk-finish pages. Joanna: And important to say there that the variability with print-on-demand having visited, like, the Ingram site and, of course, Amazon in some territories use Ingram to print, anyway. Karen: Exactly. Joanna: And it might depend on the machine, the batch run, the plants you're getting it from. So, people listening, you can order an author copy and someone in Australia, for example, might get something that looks completely different. Well, not completely different, but the colors might be a bit different or the paper might be a bit different. I think that is important is when you do one, say, 500 print run, then all the copies should be the same, but we all have to be a bit more confident with variability. Karen: Exactly. And as you say, they get printed in different places. And where your author copies come from isn't necessarily where the copy's going to come from to somebody who orders online. And it really just varies. I think the trade-off is it's just a slight compromise you have to have with having that access to not having to fill your house up with thousands of books and then find a way to sell them. On the whole, I'm very happy. On the few occasions where there has been an issue, Amazon has immediately replaced without any questions, from that perspective. The other thing I would say about picture books with KDP print is you can get a very good unit price with your author books. A 32-page color picture book here in the UK is something like two pounds and five pence for an author copy, which is pretty damn good, actually, however few or many you order. That's pretty good. Joanna: Definitely. And then you mentioned bookstores briefly because, of course, bookstores can order and the copies might come from Ingram or from Gardeners, as you say but is there a difficulty? Many indie authors struggle to get their books into bookstores and libraries even. What are your tips, or how have you achieved getting into bookstores and libraries? Karen: In terms of bookstores, I've only ever tried to get into local bookshops. And that's what I would always say to children's authors is market yourself locally, to begin with. Get to know your local bookshops. Because beyond that it's not really worth the effort because the likelihood of somebody going into a bookshop and asking for your book is fairly low. And so it's going to be a lot of effort for you to try and spend all that time marketing to bookshops around the country, a huge amount of time. So, just focus locally where you can have a relationship and you can take in consignment copies to them and signed copies or whatever. And even now, The Secret Lake, I wouldn't say… Although it's a best-seller, there is huge demand for it. I wouldn't say you're going to walk into many bookshops on the high street and find it sitting there. It tends to be when people are asking for it, particularly because it's not a new book either. So, just focus your effort locally in terms of that. In terms of libraries, I would say contact your local library hub and see if you can persuade them to take your book. And the way that you can persuade them to do that will be through giving them evidence of the fact you're selling locally. And again, that comes around to your local marketing during your school visits and so on and building up from there because then if the library likes it, then they may talk to other librarians. I have to say, I'm guilty I haven't done. I've listened to over the years and kept notes on, but never at the moment found time to strategically market myself to the whole of the UK library system, for example. Joanna: That's a big call. Karen: Well, precisely. As we know, we're always very busy. Again, it's one of those things that's on the list, as it were, or perhaps if I hired myself an assistant or something. What you want to do is write a really good book, start to market it locally in that word of mouth spread, and then you go out from there. And then I'm sure we'll be coming on to talk about advertising and online sales, which is where I think…whereas a while ago, I would have said, ‘Well, most of your books you're going to sell are going to be at face-to-face events.' A lot has changed since you and I last spoke on that front. So, I will be putting my effort into understanding how that side of things works rather than getting obsessed with thinking that you're going to get your book into every bookshop because it's not going to happen. You would have to allow returns, which will carry too much risk. And so you're not going to allow the returns and therefore the chances of bookshops ordering them in is pretty low. But it's not going to prevent somebody walking into a shop anywhere in the country or indeed around the world and saying they would like your book. They can still order it provided you bought it with Ingram Spark. Joanna: Let's talk about marketing then, because you've done super well. And I remember when I first met you, I think it's probably coming up for, like, a decade or something. Karen: I think we probably met face to face at the ALLi Opening in London. Joanna: 2012 London Book Fair. Karen: Yes. Joanna: I remember back then and you only had a couple of books then or maybe even one book and you were like, ‘Children's books just don't sell as many copies as other ones.' And look at you now. A lot of that has to do with the advent of Amazon ads and online marketing. Tell us how things have changed, and what you're doing as your main marketing sources. Karen: What I would say just to start off is that never mind the fact we've now got all the online advertising. Still really important not to underestimate that power of that local marketing. Still do all of that. I had sold 7000 copies, I think, of The Secret Lake and 10,000 books in all, by the end of 2017 before the online marketing thing really started to take off. And that by its own standards was pretty good compared with what a lot of traditionally published mid-list authors sell. So, don't underestimate that. What has really changed is, since we last spoke is the fact that Amazon ads have opened up and put us all on a level playing field. And so that discoverability thing has come about which for children's authors was so much harder because we've got the gatekeeper. Our audience is not online at the end of the day. And so not only they were not seeing the books because they weren't there, even if they happen to see them as a barrier because they're not the reader so they're not going to make spur of the moment purchases as it were and on top of that, of course, they're all in print. The fact that the advertising on Amazon came along meant that you could now target and could get your book on the virtual bookshelf next to books like yours that were selling on Amazon already. If you've got a good title, now it can be seen and you've got as good chances as anybody else of being able to just sell your books. Joanna: Give us a bit more specifics on that. You mentioned targeting. So, was that your main Amazon advertising? Were you picking a list of the top-selling children's books and bidding on those? Karen: Yes. The principles are the same really as for adults. You've just got to put yourself in the customer's shoes. So, on the one hand, I would be targeting books similar in theme to The Secret Lake. Traditional classic children's books like The Secret Garden, Alice in Wonderland, all those sorts of things. Whereas with Eeek I might be targeting books from Jeff Kinney, Tom Gates, chapter-type books. And as you know and everybody listening will know is the tools to help us do all that targeting. Again, when I first started, it was all very manual. You had to go on and really do it by hand. Now, there's a lot of things that can help you with that now to scrape or to take some of those details more quickly than we used to be able to. But it is that principle of going in and looking at books like yours in categories like yours, provided they're relevant. So, that's the one way of doing it. And then the other way is, obviously, using generic keywords like, you know, if it's Runaway Alien, it might be chapter book for boys, book for boys age seven. Again, thinking in terms of your target audience, what are they likely to be pushing into, putting into Amazon when they're searching, and then grouping advertising accordingly? Having said that we have all these wonderful tools, I do have to say, because a lot of you have said to me, ‘Well, how is it you've done so well, for example, with The Secret Lake advertising?' Because Amazon is very tricky and difficult to understand. I think some of that is just the fact that I was in there early, and so I have the benefit of the history of the algorithms sitting there behind a lot of my ads. And because in the early days, it was all manual. When I did try to use tools, I found that they were returning keywords and books that just weren't relevant or they were adult books mixed in with them. So, I actually spent quite a long time hand-harvesting my search terms and keywords. I think maybe that does pay off. I do even say that now is, yes, you can use some of these tools to help you see what categories exist, but I would still probably manually go through when it comes to it, don't just harvest things blanket and just say, ‘Oh, that category is the chapter book, so I'm going to target the whole of that category.' I probably wouldn't do that because the evidence I can give over the years it's the ads where you have really hand-selected. And it's a lot of work to begin with, but there's a long tail on it. Joanna: I think when you got into Amazon ads, there weren't many children's authors potentially advertising in that area. And traditional publishing doesn't really need to because they have the front table at Waterstones or whatever and that's where they make most of their sales. So, I believe you had quite cheap ads at the beginning. During the pandemic, because we're still in a pandemic, the cost per click I found in many of my areas is very, very expensive. Traditional publishers and other marketers have come into our area. Have you found the cost per click has changed, and have you changed your strategy at all? Karen: I'm not paying high cost per click and I won't do that. I don't know what you would classify as high, but I would think they probably average about 20p, 20 cents, 25 cents, that sort of thing or lower and often a lot lower. I think a lot of that, again, has to do with the history of ads, which have just been running a long time and a lot of my auto ads seem to be doing a lot of the heavy lifting for me. They've just learned over the years and they're just sort of keeping going and they're quite low maintenance in that sense, but a few times. And by the way, children's publishers were advertising when we were first let in. They were all doing it. And I remember looking at it and, ‘Why can't I get onto this?' if you know what I mean. So, there was that competition there and it was hard to begin with. But over time, yes, it seems to work out. But what happened was at one point something happened. I don't know what it was. I think we started off getting in through Amazon advantage through the back door in the very early days. Then when KDP advertising was open to everybody, which, absolutely, we all wanted, the prices didn't go up at that point. I found the American market just became too expensive with The Secret Lake and I actually paused a lot of my advertising. It just wasn't doable, but I never ever archived anything. It was because the rates were starting to go up to sort of 45 cents and I just thought, ‘I'm not making money.' And I wouldn't advocate doing that. So, I left that and concentrated on the UK. And my other problem was, I had something like 14 or 15 reviews in the U.S. So, I needed time for those reviews to organically build up, which takes forever with children's publishing. Then in 2018, the UK market opened up and The Secret Lake started to sell very quickly. It was very noticeable how quickly it went up. And then the reviews organically started to appear. I then went back to the U.S., I said, ‘Wait. It's been off for about six months or longer.' And switched back on some of those ads that I turned off. But I didn't change any of the bids so it was still low. And somehow it just remembered everything. And by then I think slowly The Secret Lake was making its name in America and people started gradually to leave reviews, and then it just carried on from there. I have been lucky in that sense. But equally when I've released new books like The Christmas Tree Wish and The Tell-Me Tree I've had to go in with slightly higher bids, maybe 35 cents or something to feel the market and see what's working and what isn't, and then sort of stop things that aren't working, carry on with what is for a while, and then try lowering the price a bit. You're feeling your way, it's quite difficult. I think I'm down to running maybe just one ad on Amazon in the UK for The Tell-Me Tree, which is making me an okay return. I switched off the others. In the States, I can't make it work. So, it is very difficult. But equally, I have discovered I've got one Facebook ad running, which is doing extremely well for The Tell-Me Tree. And that's the only Facebook ad I've ever made work. Joanna: The tip for people listening is you have to experiment and try things and see what works for your books, for your genre. We've had so many tales in the community and, me, for my own books, ads work for some books, not for others, and ads don't really work for my personality. Karen: Likewise. It was so weird doing the Facebook ad because I dabbled with that years ago and I just decided not to. But I suddenly realized with The Tell-Me Tree that actually I had an audience that wasn't just parents, it was specifically teachers and specifically people who work in children's mental health. And I suddenly go, ‘Oh, there, I can actually from recollection go into Facebook and find people who identify with those cohorts.' That's actually done very well. I think the main thing is if you're advertising with Amazon is if things aren't working, or they start not to work, don't archive, don't archive stuff. Pause it because you can always go back in and look at the stats there and set it going again. And in fact, if I had just turned on an ad that's been off for a while because I just changed the cover because that's sold pretty well but not as well as it should. I've changed the description and I don't think it's the description and that. Actually, maybe it's the cover. The cover isn't telling enough of the story of what's going on in the book because it's just a popular at my school events as The Secret Lake and it's well-reviewed, but getting it to take off online is difficult. So, I'm still experimenting in the same way that everybody else is. And then what I've done is I've switched on an ad that hadn't been on for a while, but when I looked at the lifetime ACOS for that ad, it was actually pretty decent, if you see what I mean. It was only in the more recent period that you did, I guess, with all the competition going on, it had started to creep up and not become viable but I'm trying now. We'll see what happens. Joanna: You mentioned before and, obviously, if you don't want to share, no worries, but you mentioned you sold 10,000 copies up to around 2017 before the ads kicked in. Are you happy to share where you are now? Karen: Yes. And in fact, my self-publishing books that's just come out, the second edition, I do share that, really. The Secret Lake has now sold over 300,000 print copies in the English language. Joanna: That's just crazy. Karen: It quite astonishing. And actually, we're coming up on the 10-year anniversary. And I'm guessing by the time this goes out, we'll pretty much be at the 10-year anniversary. Joanna: Okay. Just stop there a minute, because this is so important. You said this earlier; The Secret Lake is not a new book. Karen: No. Joanna: And you'd sold 10,000 in the first, what, seven years or whatever. Karen: I said 7000 because 10,000 books overall. Joanna: So, 7000. And now you've sold 300,000. Karen: I know. It's bonkers. And in addition, I've sold foreign rights to seven countries. And I've also managed the translation into German where it's doing very well. Someone said to me, ‘What's the trick there?' I think it's the story. The story captures people's imaginations and that's definitely part of it. Joanna: The story was the same, Karen. The story is the same at the beginning and you haven't changed the story. In fact, I don't believe you've even changed the cover because you don't want to break what's working. Right? Karen: I changed the cover once in 2018 just after I started advertising. I think I was advertising with the old cover between February and May of 2018 and the sales were already going up. And that was the point at which I thought, ‘I've got to change the cover.' Dare I do that? Now the sales are taking off, but I did do it, and it was fine, and it carried on. Joanna: So, it really was the stories. The story was amazing, but, clearly, it's the marketing giving it that push so that people actually notice the story. Karen: Exactly. A hundred percent. And then what's happened is because now that's so high volume, I suppose what's happening is that foreign publishers have seen how well it's doing and, therefore, they must be scouring the selling stats because those deals have all come as a result of people writing and contacting me and going from there. Where with the journal model lot of other people we know, the adult books, I could see the English language version of the book that was already selling quite well. And I do have an O-level in German and I would never even deem to even try… Languages I read, so French and German. My next thing is to actually project manage the French translation. But that's gone very well. I've worked with a professional German translator, professional German editor, professional German proofreader, and the first two are experienced in children's books. You have to do it properly if you're going to do it. Joanna: In fact, we've seen this in the ALLi forum even in the last few days, I see people saying, ‘I've had a foreign publisher approach me. Should I now get an agent or what should I do?' And, of course, I've had them too and signed some deals. If people get that email from a foreign publisher, what should they do? What have you done? Karen: I basically followed my own instinct. I didn't start looking for an agent, but, one of my deals has been via an agent, the Turkish one, and it was an established agent. So, my tips would be whoever contacts you check their credentials, go and look at them online, look at their website. Are they publishing other children's books that you know of? I had one in the early days, a couple of Turkish companies I looked at them and I realized, in fact, I ended up talking with Victoria Strauss Writer Beware right away because I just thought this looks dodgy to me. They looked as though they were just chancing it looking for things to probably put through an AI translation or something. So, look at the websites. And it will be very obvious. You'll start to see other UK books there, titles that you recognize, and then you can feel confident that it's genuine. And if it's an agent, look at who they're representing. And then look at what sales they're making. And that's your starting point. I didn't go for an agent. I just started reading up as much as I could on what sorts of things to look out for in contracts and took it from there. It was a learning thing. And then the point at which you get so far down the line. I think maybe with the Russian one it might have been I was talking to ALLi, I was talking with Alliance of Independent Authors about the key offer and the Albanian one. I'm also a member of the Society of Authors. So, they also offer a sort of contract advice service. So, I tend to use those. And then the more you do, the more you learn. Where I was quite lucky as well in that one of the early ones, I think it was the Russian one. They sent me a template contract, which clearly had been used by one of the big traditional publishing houses. So, I had quite a good starting point without, if you see what I mean. And then over time, I've plain English, with my business writing hat on, a lot of them. So, I just like to lay it out my way as it were. But the initial contact you get is usually in advance, a royalty rate, an initial print run, and an expected RRP or wholesale price because that's one of the tips I would say is, especially in Eastern Bloc countries, a lot of the royalty rate is based on the wholesale price and not the retail prices. So, sort of ask those questions. The other tip I give is if you've got a good cover, be ready to let them use it. I've read everything saying that they won't want to use your own cover because everything is different. And obviously, you will know, not really. From my perspective, that's a sort of brand marketing tool your cover. So, if you're already selling well, I would recommend that. And that's what's happened with The Secret Lake. Everybody, so far, is using the cover. And then it's a question of the usual things, make sure you've got a time limit of the contract. Make sure that they must publish it within a certain time period, and if not, you get the rights back. And separate royalty rates or audio and all that kind of thing. And then one of the most interesting things that's come up recently, and I'm sure you've read about it, is this whole Disney… Is it called Disney gate? I'm trying to remember. Joanna: Yeah. DisneyMustPay, where basically some people are claiming, alleging that some people aren't paying contracts saying that they have the asset, but they don't have the liability to pay the contract Karen: That was it. They take over. They said we're inheriting the… Joanna: The IP. Karen: Yes. But we're not inheriting any debts. Joanna: Yeah, we're not going to pay anyone. Karen: So, my lesson is next time I'll say, ‘I want a clause saying you get your rights back if the publishing company is sold, the royalty payments are not honored.' Have something in there that it's an automatic reversion or something like that. My book, How to Self-Publish and Market a Children's Book Second Edition goes into all that and gives more practical details and all that side of things. Joanna: I did also just want to emphasize. You do have a background in business writing, finance writing. It's interesting because you've got this very creative side, obviously, of your fiction side for children, but your nonfiction is very well structured. I definitely recommend people look at that. And you're super organized. Karen: It's much easier for me. When you look at my output compared with everyone else on all their fiction, I manage one book a year, and sometimes that's 500 words. But this one has come in a third as long. So, I would highly recommend if somebody's got the first edition, it's definitely worth getting the second edition, but yet, it's very clearly structured. And that was my whole background for over 30 years is putting stuff into plain English and never assume that a reader knows something, but it's structured in a way that if you do know stuff, you can jump forward. I've even gone so far as to create a separate edition called ‘How To Market a Children's Book' for people who just know the self-publishing thing back to front then you can go through the other one. But yes. So, having that background, I enjoy it, I enjoy it, but it's a big job putting that book out, I'd have to say. Joanna: You say know the self-publishing market back to front. I've been doing this a long time as well. And I'm still learning things all the time because we're such a broad church and people do things differently. Even if you think you know an area or a platform or something, you can still learn things from what other people are doing. Karen: Oh, 100%, which is why I would actually say to anyone, ‘Get the big book.' As I said, there's this whole community mostly in the States doing Kickstarter campaigns and ordering their books up-front. And some of them are doing very well. Again, I treat it with caution. You've just got to be a bit careful, but if you've got a real business mind and you've got a proven product and you've got guts and you've got a garage, that can work for some people. I do cover that at a high level, but then sort of signpost to groups and authors to look at to get more information. But equally, when I'm in those groups, I'm sometimes surprised when I hear somebody saying, ‘Oh, what's IngramSpark?' They don't know that there's this thing that you don't use of opting out of expanded distribution. Some of them don't know what KDP is. And I'm definitely not being critical in any way. It is exactly what we're saying. There's so much to know. And if you're in one area, you might not necessarily know everything. And again, what I'm very conscious of is because, like a lot of children's authors, I'm not wide with my e-books, not with my e-books because so few e-books are read and sold. And the advantage of keeping them in Amazon is that it does give you marketing opportunities where, particularly, with picture books because if you have your five free days, you can use those five free days to try to get some early reviews. Now, you couldn't be doing all that, if you were wide, for example, and it just helps kick things off. And because picture books are short to read and there are many, many children's authors who are also parents who might be in a group, there are groups where people will just say that if it's available for five days, my new book if you've got little ones, lovely if you take the copy and if done properly very much, ‘Please leave a review if you enjoy. No obligation.' I think what I was coming around to say is I'm not as well versed in all the possibilities as wide as I might be. Joanna: Actually, I'll come back and challenge that on because if 95% of your sales are print book, then what's the harm in having a permafree e-book and it actually acts as marketing across a whole network of other platforms and is actually much easier to get reviews on because free e-books get a lot more reviews? That would be a source of another angle for wide e-books is make it permafree. Karen: Yes. It could be if only the kids would read e-books, but they're not reading them. I have had The Secret Lake wide on two occasions. And I think now it probably would sell a lot more. So, we are talking in the days when it wasn't so well known. It sold a bit but not a huge amount. And the reviews don't get written because the children aren't reading the e-book if you follow me. They need to be reading the print books. So, I suppose what you're saying is the parent might see the e-book for free and, therefore, might buy the print book. Yes, I could see that would be an argument. But I think I slightly come back to it and I have no evidence for this, but if you're advertising on Amazon, having the e-book available on Kindle, KDP, I just sense all my gut instinct is that it somehow gives some advantage to your print book advertising, your overall advertising visibility. And because it's so difficult anyway with children's book advertising, that's the sort of space I'm in. Joanna: Absolutely. Karen: It is on my radar to go back out and try again a bit more as and if more children stick or move towards e-books post-pandemic. I was waiting when I wrote the nonfiction book for new statistics to come out and they hadn't quite come out in terms of longitudinal statistics on reading of e-books a good year on, if you follow me. If those statistics go up, then I think there's more of a case. And there's always a case if you've got a book which is for slightly older middle grade, then I would say going wide is possibly more of a strategic good decision to make. Joanna: Obviously, it's people's personal choice and more things to experiment with. Coming back to the 10-year thing and in the book, you basically say that you're now making a good living from your books and after a lot of hard work and learning which you've been talking about. Reflecting on the 10 years, how have you changed in your author business, how has that changed in terms of self-development and any key lessons learned? Karen: Gosh. Obviously, I've got a lot more self-confidence and self-belief, particularly, with things like The Secret Lake taking off the way it has. I'm a lot more busy. Karen: First of all, I would come back to saying don't underestimate the power of local as a children's author. Use all that to establish your brand because, eventually, it's going to lead to bigger things. And take advantage of all these wonderful tools that are around now that weren't when we all started out, so, things like Canva and Book Brush to help with your marketing support material for flyers, for libraries, and all that stuff. And use all that to build your brand locally as well as doing your online stuff. Keep learning. I listen to loads of podcasts when I'm doing exercise so I've tried to kill two birds with one stone. There's always something new to learn. And it doesn't have to be necessarily just listening to children's podcasts. And most of the ones I listen to aren't. But take advantage of all those. Again, there are more places out there now that you can find children's book reviews, for example. So, I've been asked a lot about, ‘Where do I get reviews from?' Well, mine are also happening organically now, but, certainly, things like StoryOrigins and BookSirens, they all have now places where you can actually actively find people who are looking to review children's books as it were. Start local, do all that. Make sure you keep learning and look at all the sort of sites that are around there. Make use of your KDP Select free days for marketing, if you are a KDP Select, which on balance, I would probably say when starting out that's what you need to be to use e-books for your marketing, to support your marketing. Joanna: I think that's right. And also, I guess, as a reflection of time, because if you had said, ‘Oh, I've been doing this for six years and it just hasn't happened for me. I'm just not successful enough. I'm going to give up.' And then it was kind of that seventh year when your numbers started to go up and the tools emerged. That long-term mindset has helped as well. Karen: Oh, yeah. And I think that the thing about that, what you've just described is I knew that the book, I could tell from all the hard local work, it's a good barometer, actually, of was it a good book? And it was a good barometer of that. Now we have all these other fantastic tools to help, taken a lot wider, so you have to embrace it. But it is a lot of hard work still. I think it's just the thing is you can't put a book up, throw up some ads, and then expect that you're going to do well. Coming back to The Tell-Me Tree my latest book, which is a picture book. It came out this time last year. When I did my figures a couple of weeks ago, it sold over 4000 copies now in print, which for a children's picture book is pretty good. But it's taken a lot of hard work tweaking around with the ads and trying to work out what didn't work and didn't work, did work, and then trying with Facebook ads, which I hadn't used for ages and then stumbling around in those and getting things wrong and right. So, you do have to have that business mind that you're going to learn, you're going to fail. But as long as you're getting decent reviews and from the feedback that the book is good, then you've just got to keep at it. Joanna: Where can people find you and your books and everything you do online? Karen: For advice on self-publishing, I would recommend going to selfpublishingadventures.com. And there you can find everything you need to know including the second edition of How to Self-Publish and Market a Children's Book. And then if you want to see my titles, then it's kareninglisauthor.com. Those are the two best, simplest ways, I think, to find me. Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Karen. That was great. Karen: All right. Thanks for having me.The post Lessons Learned From A Decade Of Self-Publishing And Marketing Children’s Books With Karen Inglis first appeared on The Creative Penn.

What has changed in publishing over the last decade? How can a reputable author services company help you achieve your publishing goals? In this interview with John Bond from White Fox, we discuss aspects of the publishing journey. If you are considering working with an author services company or publishing partner, check whether they are a Partner Member of the Alliance of Independent Authors and whether the ALLi Watchdog service rates them well. You can also check for scams and bad companies at Writer Beware. John Bond is the CEO of White Fox, a premium publishing and book marketing partner for industry leaders, writers, and brands based in the UK and U.S. 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’s changed in the decade since John started White Fox How the pandemic has accelerated changes in publishing How attitudes toward independent creatives have changed in the last decade Crowdfunding for special limited edition book projects How to find a quality publishing partner and avoid getting scammed You can find John Bond at wearewhitefox.com — or if you want to support the podcast, please use TheCreativePenn.com/whitefox or tell him I sent you! You can also find him on Twitter @wearewhitefox Transcript of interview with John Bond Joanna Penn: John Bond is the CEO of whitefox, a premium publishing and book marketing partner for industry leaders, writers, and brands based in the UK and U.S. Welcome, John. John Bond: Hello, Joanna, how are you? Joanna Penn: I'm excited to talk to you today. So let's start. Tell us a bit more about you and your publishing journey. John Bond: I started, I guess in a bookshop. That was the beginning, a bookshop in North London. I ended up applying for and getting a job as you did in those days as a marketing manager at Penguin, as it was then, now Penguin Random House, in the early 1990s. I had three interviews for that job. The last one of which was two questions. What are you reading? And do you play golf? So I think that probably says more about that period of publishing. Joanna Penn: Publishing history, indeed! John Bond: I ended up being marketing director there and then I went to HarperCollins in the UK and ran sales and marketing there. I ended up running their literary fiction and non-fiction division, including Fourth Estate. I left HarperCollins in the UK in 2011 and set up White Fox early in 2012 with one of my colleagues from HarperCollins, Annabel Wright. We started working in a cafe in East London with two laptops and trying to organize a diaspora of freelancers around the world. That was the beginning. Joanna Penn: Obviously, a lot has changed since 2012. That actually seems pretty prescient when you started because it really was the beginning of a lot of technological changes that enabled digital publishing. What are the major changes that you've seen in the industry since you started almost a decade ago? And what might've accelerated in the last 18 months due to the pandemic? John Bond: I think that's exactly right. I think everything that was changing has just sped up in the last 18 months. We definitely, started really primarily providing project management services for traditional publishers. What's happened is we've gradually developed much more of a business working with individuals and companies and brands who want to do their own thing. They want to have more creative control over their publishing. They want to make something happen in 3 to 6 months rather than a year to 18 months. All those things have really accelerated during the pandemic; the migration to online sales versus bricks and mortar retailers, people really wanting to understand what moves the dial on marketing that they can do themselves. And the pandemic we found, at a time when so much was out of people's control in terms of their life, writing something, publishing something, starting something, finishing something, finding readers was something that people could do. And we could work remotely with those people. We weren't in an office, we were all in our homes. And seeing people developing their writing and their businesses around their writing was amazing and inspiring, actually. Joanna Penn: You mentioned the diaspora of freelancers and I wondered, you mentioned Penguin before PRH, you mentioned HarperCollins, obviously, there's the Simon & Schuster acquisition which is happening. Have you seen a lot more freelancers coming out of traditional publishing and moving into servicing the independent community? John Bond: Yes. And I think that's also happened in the last 18 months. People who have decided that they quite like their lifestyle, a portfolio lifestyle at home working with people like us who can represent a pipeline of work, but that work actually ends up being quite varied. I think for many people, it's more interesting. And I think there's a particular journey you go on within a publishing house and you can often meet a kind of dead-end or a point where you just think, ‘I can't really progress any further,' or, ‘I don't want to progress any further.' The people that we work with, that we love working with, I think, love the variety and the fact that there's all sorts of different kind of things coming across their desk, as opposed to, ‘I am an expert in this particular niche, and this is all I can do.' If I'm a cover designer, I can only do crime thriller or I can only do cookery or whatever. So, I think we've definitely seen more people choosing to work as a freelancer, work from home wherever they are in the world, and we love that. And there are plenty of ways of finding freelancers, but we also like to think that we're testing those freelancers editorially. Just because someone says they've worked somewhere doesn't mean anything particularly, but make sure that those people are as good as they say they are, and also developing a relationship with them so that they can be introduced to projects that they would not normally see through a traditional publishing house. So yeah, we've loved doing that. Joanna Penn: I think that's really interesting and we've certainly seen a lot more freelancers coming in into the indie community. And I wondered about the attitude of people within traditional publishing. Obviously, you know many people within traditional publishing and you've been in the industry so long. Do you think the attitude to independent creatives has changed since 2012? John Bond: Frankly, there was some retraining involved and some recalibrating of brains that are used to thinking there is only one route to market for certain sorts of books. And that is an agent sells a book to a publisher, a publisher convinces an internal team that this author should be worthy of an advance. What's been utterly liberating and wonderful is seeing that model completely turned on its head. We're increasingly working with people who could find traditional publishers, do have an agent, or used to have an agent and are choosing to go their own way and do it for themselves because they want to be in creative control. They want to be in control of the schedule. They want to have their own brief based on the book that they've spent years writing for the cover, and that cover not to be decided by someone in-house in sales, who hasn't read the book, but who's thinking about a supermarket or something. So, I think definitely. And the quality of so much that we're seeing is amazing. And I think it's definitely been the case that quite a lot of editors and designers have come to those projects potentially with some kind of residual prejudice from their time in-house, and they've had their socks knocked off by the quality of it. Joanna Penn: That is really good to hear, and I think I've seen that because I moved back to the UK in 2011. I might even have met you around then. John Bond: You did. Joanna Penn: FutureBook or something like that. I've definitely seen things change a lot. Let's give some tips because you've helped and worked with a lot of authors over the years to successfully publish and sell books. What are some tips for authors that you've seen work if they want to be successful? John Bond: You will know as well as I do, embrace the process, be authentic, love social media if you can, but if you hate it, don't worry. What's the point? Because people will know that. And it's a marathon, it's not a sprint. Think about publishing your book as if you're starting a small business, what works and what doesn't for your genre of book? Always, always, always make your book as good as it can possibly be, but also don't forget it will never be perfect. So let go of it at some point, you know, and manage your expectations. It's hard, but learn through every iteration, every publication, every release, every launch. You know yourself, Joanna, how important has become the pre-publication process, laying the groundwork, making sure that people are aware of the particular date. It used to be that it was all about the launch, but now it's so much about the run-up the launch to make sure that everything is set up as it possibly can be for potential awareness and discoverability, and success. Joanna Penn: I love what you said at first there, which is to embrace the process. It's so interesting to hear you say that because, obviously, I feel like books are a project. They are a project approach. I used to work in consulting, and everything was a project. And so there's this cycle, and the cycle happens every single time. It has to happen in the same kind of way. And yet the reason we're still in publishing is that every project is different and every book is different. And yet the process is really the same. Isn't it? Is that what you mean by that? John Bond: It is, but I think if you're doing it yourself and you're launching your own project onto the world, and you've not done it before, I think it's hard now to say, ‘Well, look, I've done the writing. That's the hard bit. Now, it's over to whatever's going to happen and I can't influence that.' I think if you are going to publish the book yourself, you should embrace that process. The process from the beginning of the book to whatever marketing, whatever attempts you have at distribution and selling and publicizing the book. So that's what I mean. And for us, everything is bespoke. We are not a publisher with a publishing schedule. Every single book we work on, we don't own rights, it's the IP of whoever it is we're working with. And so, even though the processes are so similar, everything does feel as if it is a bespoke, one-off thing. Joanna Penn: I feel that with every book it's like, okay, I know how the process works, but it's different again for every single thing. But it's interesting when you say that, obviously, you're not a traditional publisher and the IP remains with the author and everything. What does White Fox offer for authors and how are you different to a traditional publisher? John Bond: We try to keep things as transparent as possible. We're committed to as good, if not better quality, than any traditional publisher can bring. We facilitate the process and hold the hand of every single person that we work with. And there's a lot of work done at the beginning of the process to make sure there's absolute clarity as to what is going to happen. There's that Mike Shatzkin phrase of “unbundling publishing” and what we see as doing. There is this single work of publishing, it relates to a multitude of processes and it's complex. And we like to feel that we're helping somebody by guiding them through it and holding their hand through the whole thing. We've had a number of writers who've made a success of their publishing via us who then gone on to find a traditional publishing deal because that's what they want to do. And we say best of luck with that. We're very happy if that's what they want. If you look on our website, you will see there's more non-fiction than there is fiction, but we love working with people who have a fiction platform as well. What we're trying to do is to really give everybody the success that they want, their version of success that they want for their book, whichever that may be, if that doesn't sound a bit hokey. Joanna Penn: Just to be specific, what actual parts of the process can you help people with? John Bond: Everything. We usually work with somebody when they come to us with a manuscript, which may or may not have had any editing whatsoever. And then we map out a publishing plan, which goes from that manuscript through to a publication sales, marketing, distribution end of it. We're a partner with Ingram globally. If we want to make something available as POD, we can do that. If we want help with marketing publicity, we can do everything that a publisher can do, except we're an agency. And if we're selling the book, we don't have 50 reps, obviously. We utilize the network that we've got and the people that we have within our database. We give people what we hope is the service that is relevant for their particular publication. Joanna Penn: Many authors obviously want to see their books in physical bookstores. So what are the key elements around that? And what do you do in terms of print runs or help people with? Print-on-demand is obviously one thing, but print runs and bookstore distribution is something that many authors are interested in. John Bond: To be honest, we're quite cautious about that. The days of thinking that you have to block out the light sales front-of-store in Barnes & Noble or Waterstones or wherever are gone. Seventy percent or so of sales have migrated to being online. That's not just Amazon. There are plenty of other places to buy books online, but clearly, the acceleration of ebooks and audio and POD is a very liberating thing. And we always say to people, ‘There's no point lending your books to bookshops.' Inventory, wherever you have it, is an expensive thing. We love working with authors where there is the joy of reprinting because it means that it's working. I'm talking about a lot of managing expectations in this interview, but it seems to me that's a big part of it to be realistic about what aspirations can be done in terms of brick and mortar retailers. For example, we're very, very encouraging to people who want to work with local bookshops, wherever they are, because that's great for them and their community and that book and also a launch or whatever it is that they want to do. But trying to get people to think that online is a good way of starting as well. And it doesn't mean that just if your book is available initially only online, that it can't ultimately be made available in bookstores. We're trying to tell people that it's no longer the case, the coverage in bookshops. Also, bookshops won't take your book unless they think somebody is going to come in and buy it. So you need to convince them at head office level that the marketing and PR you're doing wherever you are in the world is strong enough and real and going to persuade people to come into that bookshop to buy them. Whereas online, it's there 24/7 anywhere in the world. Joanna Penn: I love that you're managing expectations. I do a lot of that on this show too, so that's good. And I feel like some of the most disappointed people in the world are authors on their first book release with a traditional publishing deal who thought that was the way in, that they've made it, but it's just the beginning. I have talked to you privately about the possibility of doing a crowdfunding project because I can easily do print-on-demand myself, but in terms of organizing a really beautiful and designing a beautiful print run and having it printed and organizing that, to me, the crowdfunding project of a special edition is something that I feel like I would need help with. Are you seeing people doing these kinds of special crowdfunding projects and other limited print runs of beautiful books for these special things? John Bond: We are a business that's driven by recommendation and referral, and it's so interesting that you and I had that conversation, and there is absolutely something zeitgeisty going on with people, very cognizant of ways in which they can raise the funds to do something special. We're really excited about that. And we're increasingly helping people to understand how to do that. They can do that via, obviously, the bigger platforms, but they can also have success doing it privately. We worked with a historian on our own extraordinary project earlier this year, David Hargreaves, who was a teacher in London who wrote with a colleague a week-by-week oral history of the First World War. It ended up being an absolutely massive project where he was charging £100 for a four-book box set across around 3,000 pages, the whole volume was. And this had obviously been to years and years and years in the making, but his ability to pre-sell copies of that book to actually ultimately a few hundred people initially enabled him to finance the project and make it available. And then actually it's done incredibly well, and thousands of copies later, he has a success on his hand and it led to a review in ‘The Sunday Times.' This is not about 10,000 people, it's about hardcore fans, people with whom you have the ability to engage helping you realize something which is different, is special, is beautiful, and has an enormous value in and of itself. And we like that approach because it feels very collaborative. The best part of coming out of a big publishing house and coming into the space where we work now is honestly the collaborative nature, the partnerships, the idea of people working together, which again, I know it probably sounds a bit hokey, but it's really true. And we love that idea of, you know, 2 and 2 plus 2 equaling 12. It's great. Joanna Penn: That sounds good. I do feel like yes, we all might make the bulk of our money through digital and ebooks and print-on-demand and digital audio, but at the end of the day, we're book people. I'm surrounded by a lot of hard books, and I'll buy books because they have nice foil on the cover and just like something about a physical object. I do think this is something that a lot of indie authors want to do more of, which is these more beautiful books. They have some longevity, I think, that's what we also want, we want that physical object. And like you say, if it's only a print run of 200 or 400 or 500, those are special editions. I think that's a very exciting part of it. I did want to ask because you briefly mentioned Barnes & Noble. Obviously, you're British. What work do you do in the USA or globally if people are interested, what territories do you work in? John Bond: The lion's share of our people are in London. My business partner, Annabel, is now in Los Angeles and is running White Fox U.S. from there. And that's a growing part of our business, which we're extremely excited about. We also have somebody in France and we're increasingly working lately on non-English language projects, often books that start from the UK or the U.S., but where people want French or Spanish or Italian or German versions of those books. We're trying not to overstretch ourselves by being distracted, but we're very keen on developing the U.S. side of the market because we think it's a really, really interesting space and definitely on the continent as well at the moment. Joanna Penn: Are you managing translation projects? Is that what you mean? John Bond: Yes. We worked on a book for an agency in the UK called The Happy Dog Cookbook, which was actually recipes for dogs. I know you're laughing. Joanna Penn: No, I bet that sold loads of copies because people love their dogs! John Bond: Absolutely. It sold a lot of copies here. And now the same for a company called Tails.com and they have operations all across Europe. So they want to do foreign language versions of that as well. Joanna Penn: I think that's another trend is really a lot of indies moving into translation. Again, all of these things take investment and you have to have a business reason to do them, but as you said, it can be really good. One question which I think is really important is there' are a lot of companies out there who are frankly vanity press and charge authors a lot of money and difficult contracts, where they're essentially the vanity press companies. And it's very, very hard for authors to know the difference between quality publishing partners, where yes, it's an investment. There is money involved. You're a business and you do high-quality work, but obviously, there are other companies who might charge similar amounts of money but don't offer the same value. How are you differentiating yourself from a vanity press and how do you encourage people to figure out what are the good companies? John Bond: It's such a good question. And I think, again, we talked at the beginning about what's happened during lockdowns or during the pandemic around the world. And definitely, we had a lot of people who were, for want of a better word, shopping around looking for the best deals that they could get, which is completely fine, obviously, absolutely, all to the good. We've had a few people come back to us after some fairly sharp practice, experiences of things not being done very well and people being told they can get a discount if they paid a whole fee upfront, and then not hearing from those people again for weeks. We had somebody come to us last week, who said they'd been told by one service provider that they didn't think their book needed editing. And the author said, ‘Well, I think it does.' There's Orna Ross's Alliance of Independent Authors who do an incredible job as a watchdog over the industry. They've been fantastically supportive of us and others. Do your homework, and our experience is always to look at the work. What is the work that people have done? We strive to do good work and be as good, if not better, in attention to detail and editorial quality and design and every single aspect as a traditional publisher. And that's what we've always done. And we've always tried to be incredibly transparent and be available to questions about anything and not try and put up any kind of screens. But it is hard. What do people say? Who is recommending it? What work has been done? How can I benchmark what I'm doing against what these people seem to be saying they are good at? Take your time, and really the contract thing is a shocker, the obfuscation and opaqueness that we have seen of others. Again, we try to keep it incredibly simple and straightforward. And that seems to work for us. Joanna Penn: Yes. I should say that a White Fox is a partner member of the Alliance of Independent Authors rated Excellent by the watchdog service. And this is what I say to authors is the first question is, is a company a partner member of ALLi? And how are they rated? If people are interested, if you go to thecreativepenn.com/watchdog, that is a hyperlink to the watchdog service. And also, it's about personal relationships, as you said and as we briefly mentioned, I've known you almost a decade. I've been aware of White Fox for that long. I've seen you at book fairs, I've seen the quality of the work, and I am considering working with you myself. So that's why I wanted to talk to you because it is so hard, and yet there were more and more authors, independent authors who want help. So, obviously, by having you on the show, I'm putting my reputation behind you guys. So, it better be good! John Bond: Thank you. Joanna Penn: Let's talk about the future then. Given the acceleration of change in the publishing industry, what are you excited about as you move into your next decade of White Fox? John Bond: We've seen so much change and we love this idea that there used to be a particular way a writer would produce a manuscript. There was then a relay race where the authors waved goodbye to that manuscript as it went to their agent or to the publisher, and then through the different departments and out came a book at the other end at some point. We just love this idea of things now starting to change. They might start as a podcast. There might be an opportunity for e-commerce, which I think has boomed in the last year, the ability to sell things directly yourself. And look at all the growth in the email subscription businesses, the Substack model, there are so many ways in which really good quality content is finding a readership, audios. We just love this idea that there are growing numbers of services that we want to make available to the people that want to work with us. And who knows where that will be and what else will add to that? And to do that on a more global scale, which we've started to do. We're really excited about the prospects of not just being so UK and London-orientated, but seeing what we're doing working in other territories, which is really exciting. Joanna Penn: I'm the same. I'm particularly excited about NFTs at the moment, and I don't know if you saw, but Shopify has just announced that they are going to allow NFTs as part of their platform. And I was like, ‘Whoa, this is totally going mainstream. We're going to have digital special editions as well as physical special editions.' There are just ever more opportunities to turn things into multiple streams of income. I'm so glad you're excited about these different ways. John Bond: It never stands still. I think you talked about we started in 2012, which was an extraordinary year for many things. There were all sorts of things going on. And I thought what we'd be doing, it sounds ridiculous, but I thought we're going to be making apps. We're going to be doing enhanced digital additions of things. Actually, what we found is a lot of what we do is bringing old-world publishing skills, if you want to call them that, to new-world creators in whatever manifestation they want it to be. A lot of it is about having beautiful physical products, which people do want and see as having perceived value. But it's also making that show, or working out how I can create a subscription business based on small chunks of content rather than one large piece of content. So, it's exciting. I'm excited, Joanna. Joanna Penn: I'm glad you're excited. I'm always excited too. I mean, there's a reason we're still doing this. There's a reason I've been podcasting since 2009 is, as you say, things keep changing. Last year, I was like, ‘Oh, I think I'm quite bored as things kind of settled down a bit.' And then, of course, all this acceleration has happened and it's like, ‘Okay, there's definitely enough going on for another decade.' John Bond: Absolutely. Joanna Penn: That's for sure. Let's talk a bit about the process. Where can people find White Fox and what can they expect if they go check out the website? John Bond: You'll see lots of case studies. You'll see lots of examples of our work. You will see us and the team wherever we are in the world. You can contact us at info@wearewhitefox.com, and we will reply in an incredibly timely fashion to your query. We pride ourselves on responding to everybody that contacts us. I say as quickly as possible. If I say that, it sounds desperate, but it's as quickly as possible. I can't bear some of the slackness of communication that happens inside some publishing houses. So we're good at doing that. And then let's talk and see if we are the right fit for you and you'd very quickly, if you come to us, end up having a conversation with one of the team. We're at www.wearewhitefox.com. Joanna Penn: Brilliant. And if people would like to support the show through my link as I am an affiliate, it's thecreativepenn.com/whitefox — or just tell the team I sent you. And, of course, you can use any link you'd like. So thank you so much for your time, John. That was great. John Bond: Thank you, Joanna. Thank you so much for having me.The post Bringing Old World Publishing Skills To New World Creators With John Bond From White Fox first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can you rediscover your creative free spirit if you're feeling burned out? How can you combine creativity, spirituality and money to experience more in your author life? Peleg Top talks about these things and more in today's interview. In the intro, adding A+ content to your Amazon book pages; Audible launches Premium Plus in the UK [The Bookseller]; and Audiblegate goes on. Shopify introduces NFTs [TechCrunch], Jeanette Winterson's 12 Bytes; and A Mid-Life Journey through US National Parks. Today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, where you can get free ebook formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Get your free Author Marketing Guide at www.draft2digital.com/penn Peleg Top is an artist and a coach, living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He serves the accomplished creative community with workshops and retreats, as well as his transformational course, 100 Days of Creative High Growth. 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 Pivoting to a new type of creative work after burnoutSearching for our creative free spiritThe importance of expanding, moving forward, and taking risksFacing fear when making a big changeAdvice for those creatives who feel stagnantThe importance of creating just for the joy of itBringing creativity to the flow of money You can find Peleg Top at PelegTop.com and on Twitter @pelegtop Transcript of interview with Peleg Top Joanna: Peleg Top is an artist and a coach, living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He serves the accomplished creative community with workshops and retreats, as well as his transformational course, ‘100 Days of Creative High Growth.' Welcome to the show, Peleg. Peleg: Thank you. Good to be here. Joanna: I'm so excited to talk to you, and several of my close creative friends are your clients, and so I'm very excited about today. Peleg: Me too. Thanks for having me. Joanna: We're going back in time a bit. You had this incredibly successful career building one of LA's leading creative agencies, and you served clients in the music and entertainment industry; pretty sexy stuff, to be honest. What made you pivot from what many would consider the height of creative business success? Peleg: It's an interesting story because it wasn't anything that actually made me pivot, but it was really an organic process that came about. I was a creative professional from, gosh, right out of high school, and I became an in-house designer, and then a freelancer, and then opened my own agency, and did that for 20 years. In the beginning, it was just amazing, because design was such a passion of mine, and I loved doing the work. I was one of those odd creatives that had a passion for the business side and the marketing side as well. To me, that was a big part of the creative process as well, so it helped grow the business, to the point of becoming really successful. But somewhere along the line, after about 15 or so years of working as a creative, I started getting burnt out. I started feeling like it's the same thing over and over again. And I didn't really feel as challenged anymore. Over time, I started caring less about the work. And I found myself in this place that, now, looking back, it was a bit of a spiritual crisis, because my whole identity was so wrapped up around being a designer and running an agency that, when that all of a sudden didn't satisfy me, satisfy my soul, my reason for waking up in the morning, I felt lost. The pivot really began when I started noticing that this isn't working for me anymore. I'm not really excited about this work anymore. And it became a process of shifting into something new. But it wasn't something that was so clear in the beginning as far as what I wanted to do. So, to answer your question, the pivot was a process that started with a lot of fear and anxiety, and lack of clarity, but became more of a new path to walk on after I took the time to actually do the inner work that I needed to do to get back in touch with something inside of me that I'm excited about. Joanna: That resonates with me a lot. And I think a lot of writers are burned out from doing the same thing over and over again. We see this in the writing community, with this need to create ever more product, books, and what might start out as the book of your heart or the thing you really want to write, and then once you've written that, or once, as you did, you've created that design, and then it becomes more like work. And work is great. We love work. You mentioned the process of discovery and not really knowing where to go. How did you find where to go? I feel like a lot of people would love to pivot, but the process of doing that, does it take years? I know you enrolled in chef school. You did some practical things. Does it take all this deeper, meaningful work in order to pivot? Peleg: That was part of the journey. And in the beginning, I really honestly didn't know what I wanted to do next. What I didn't realize was that I was looking for answers outside of myself. And the answers were really inside of myself, but I didn't really have access to that part of myself at the time. A lot of that was a result of years and decades of doing creative work for other people. So, being a designer, being an agency. We create beautiful work. We create beautiful art, but the purpose of it is, it's commercial, ultimately. It's to satisfy a client. It's to solve somebody else's problem. In the beginning of that journey, it was very exciting, because I get to make art and I get to design and I get to solve problems. But after a while, I realized that I really wasn't expressing myself as an artist. I was only expressing part of me through the artistry that I've learned to master, but my inner artist, my soul artist, was not really active in my life. Before I could really go into any other type of path in my life, I needed to really get in touch with my creative core, with my creativity. I always believe that when the student is ready, the teacher appears. I was definitely ready. The right teachers always showed up. I've learned to notice, to pay attention, when a teacher shows up on my path that is speaking directly to the thing that resonates inside of me, deep inside of me. At the time, there was a teacher that showed up, that basically asked me a very simple question. And he said, Where in your life do you experience your creative free spirit? And I couldn't answer that question at the time. And he sent me home, he said, ‘Okay, go do some homework. Come back next time to our next session, and bring me a list of where in your life do you experience creative free spirit.' I went home and I did my homework. And the first thing on that list was, well, I experience my creative free spirit in the kitchen. I love to cook. I love to play in the kitchen. That's always been fun for me. So, he actually challenged me, and he said, ‘I want you to find a way for you to experience cooking in a kitchen on a more regular basis, that will start waking up that creative free spirit in you.' Now, being the overachiever that I am, that I used to be… I'm trying to work on that more and more. Rather than taking a weekend class, I decided to enroll in culinary school and go full-time for a whole year into this intense program, that was really transformational. After a while, I realized cooking school was really not about cooking. It was more of a personal growth experience, because my intentions weren't really to become a chef. I've mastered more skills in the kitchen now, but it gave me the chance to play. When I finished school and I came back, my agency was running at the time. I had an amazing staff that ran the show without me. All I did was come in and do client pitches or sign payroll checks. But after I finished school and I came back to work again, I just knew that I need to stop. I need to end this. I need to really cut the cord. Which is not an easy thing to do, because I was an agency owner, I had a lot of responsibilities, and people were counting on their livelihood, was counting on the business. So it was a huge risk, and there was a huge unknown in front of me. But the dark space that I experienced in not being creatively satisfied was too big at that point. And I realized that if I stay in that space, it's just going to kill me. It's just going to completely diminish my soul. It was one of those moments, one of those lifetime moments where I had to sit my staff down one day and just say, ‘Guys, I think I'm done.' And they looked at me and they said, ‘Done? Done with what?' And I said, ‘Well, done with all of this, with this agency, with running this. I'm just done.' And to my surprise, actually, my longest-term employee at the time, who was one of my senior designers, she looked at me and she said, ‘Good for you.' I didn't really expect that to come back from the staff, but they were so supportive and loving. And over course of the next four months, we've basically closed shop, and I ended up actually selling the shop to my employees, and moved on. It wasn't an easy decision, but it was easier to get to that decision because I've experienced what it was like to be in that space of creative free spirit. I've began to experience that excitement of creativity in me, in my body, and I realized where I used to be, there's no room for that anymore. I need to expand, I need to move forward, and I just need to take a risk and trust. I think that's one of the things that we have the most trouble with, is trusting that everything is going to work out, that we'll be okay. That's the biggest thing that we deal with. And to me, that's a spiritual issue. What do I trust in, in order for me to make a decision that can really change the course of my life? What do I have to hold on to? And before I started doing all that inner work, I didn't really have anything to hold onto at the time. I didn't really believe in myself as much. I believed in myself as a designer, because I have the track record, and I had the success, and the notoriety, and the money that I made from that. But anything else, I had no idea. I had no experience. Of course, all the fears come up, the fear of failure, and the fear of being judged, or the fear of being rejected. They all play a role in all of that. So, I needed to overcome all of that and really hang on to something bigger, that can pull me forward. And that was really my creativity. My creative free spirit is what helped me move forward. When I tap in into that space, I know that I'm okay, that things will work out, because I have this creativity inside of me that can really figure anything out. And I think that this is what I find a lot with my students and clients that I coach is that oftentimes, all the answers, all the things that you want, are already inside of you. If your creative free spirit, if your true creativity is really not activated, if your soul artist is not a part of your life in a way that is active, well, that opens up a space for the inner critic to come out and all the fears to come out and the self-judgment. And that keeps us stuck. Joanna: I think the interesting thing about facing the fear… I used to be an IT consultant back in the day. And when I left that job, I went from a six-figure income to the bottom of another ladder. I was at the top of one ladder and I was down the bottom of a new one. And yes, we downsized, and I saved some money, so I had some protection of the risk of financial issues. But I remember that first year, and it's on my blog still as lessons learned from year 1, the self-esteem drop was huge, from going from the top of one ladder to the bottom of another, and going, ‘I want to become an author, but I have to learn all this stuff. I don't know what the hell I'm doing, and I've got no money, really, and no one even knows who I am anymore. People used to know who I am and now they don't.' I feel like that loss of self-esteem, like you mentioned, fear of judgment, I actually think that it's maybe part of that, because it's, like, ‘What will people think of me? They must think I'm a flake, or whatever.' I guess these fears will happen. They will happen, and the loss of self-esteem will happen. If people aren't confident in where they're going, how do they face the fear and make these changes? Peleg: That's a great question. Fears will come up. They're are part of our makeup. The question is not so much ‘How do we face the fear?' The question is, ‘What tools do we have in our toolbox to be able to tame the fear?' To dance with the fear, and not let the fear be the consultant that we're listening to. And because we live in a fear-based culture. You turn on the news, and there's fear coming at us every day. Especially these days, living in a pandemic world. Fear is a serious thing. But there's another side to fear, and that side is love. And if we don't cultivate that side inside of us, and connect to that love inside of us, through different tools and different processes and techniques, when fear comes up, it could seem like this huge dragon that we have no idea how to face. If we have the right tools and the right practices, when fear shows up, it's something that becomes part of the process. It doesn't stop us. It's there. We know how to manage it. We know how to tame that dragon, but we keep moving forward. Joanna: It's interesting because you mentioned love. I feel like you almost talked about that before with the creative free spirit. This is a creative show, a lot of creatives listening. But many people feel that they love their creativity, but they don't know how to take that to the next level. And you coach a lot of who you call ‘accomplished creatives,' I guess ‘mature creatives,' people who've been doing this for a while. And so, I guess that I feel like maybe I'm one of those people. I have been doing this for a while! Peleg: You probably are. Yeah. Joanna: When we've been doing an established creative role for a while, how do we take that to the next level? How do we tap into that creative free spirit, even when we're doing the thing that we love, but we want to make it even better? Peleg: That's a great question. The way that I've found to tap into that is through art, traditional art. When clients knock on my door, accomplished creatives who have had amazing careers and achieved a lot, and they're also feeling a little stagnant and a little bored, and they're in that crossroad, looking for what's next, or even looking to take their current work to a new place, the thing that I always like to look at is, how are you expressing yourself creatively, from your soul? Not from your head, but from your heart. Where do you get an opportunity in your life? How much do you give that voice, that authentic voice of yours, room to play? And oftentimes, the answer is ‘nowhere.' That part of us as creatives oftentimes gets forgotten. It's that part of us that we met when we were kids, when we were given a box of crayons and said, ‘Hey, go draw something'. We left that part of ourselves behind, and became professional creatives, and learned how to merge our creativity and our artistry with the commercial part of art. Whether we're writing or whether we're designing, or whatever it is that we're doing, when we get financial risk attached to that, it becomes a different way of expressing our artistry in the world. My advice to anybody who's listening to this right now is that if you do feel a little stagnant, or if you do feel that you're a little stuck, or you do feel like you're in this space of in-between something, go back to art, go back to creativity at a very basic, raw level. Create for the sake of creation, not for the sake of meeting a deadline or for publishing a book or earning money. Maybe don't even write for that creativity part. Do something else. Go take a cooking class. Go take an art course. Do something else that wakes up that creative juju in you, that can begin to feed other areas in your life. Joanna: I feel like we all have a default creative mode. And obviously, you're a visual artist, primarily, although you write as well. I'm on your email list and you write some great emails. Peleg: Thank you. Joanna: And obviously, you have books as well from that design life. I really feel like I'm primarily a writer. But I guess, from my soul, when you were talking there, from my soul and what is not monetized, is my Books and Travel podcast. I was just telling you about it before we pressed record. That podcast has been so hard with the pandemic, not being able to go anywhere, and I feel my creative well is empty for writing fiction, because I write from my travels. I love doing that podcast. I love talking to people about different places in the world. And it's really just not monetized. And it's so funny because I'll talk to business friends and they'll be like, ‘Oh, you should really give that up. It's not doing anything for you. It's not part of the business, really.' And I'm like, ‘No, I really love it.' So I guess it is that part of it. Peleg: It brings you joy. Joanna: It does. It really brings me joy. Peleg: Right. And at the same time, there's still commitments around it that you have. It is a business, in a way. You're channeling your creativity in this way, and it's beautiful, and it's blessed, and you're contributing to the world in a beautiful way. I would challenge you to find a different avenue of creative expression that doesn't have anything attached to it, that you're really expressing between you and you. It's not something that is created for the sake of an audience, or that has some kind of a particular outcome that you have in mind, but just to experience the joy of creating for you. I think it's a wonderful thing to try different artistic modalities, even though you think to yourself, ‘Well, I'm not a painter,' or ‘I'm not an artist, or ‘I'm not a photographer.' Well, says who? Joanna: I do take photos. Does that count? Peleg: It counts if you're taking a photo coming from a place of self-expression, rather than just capturing moments because they're pretty. It's the approach. It's how you show up inside of that work. It could be a different modality of writing for you. Perhaps you're a novelist and you've never tried poetry before. Well, try that. Try different ways that can activate and wake up that part of you that can inform other areas in your life. Joanna: I like the idea of creative free spirit. I guess we have to just acknowledge how we're feeling. There's definitely a feeling, an emotional feeling. And you mentioned excitement and play. I definitely struggle with play. I'm a very serious person! Peleg: Oh, yeah. Joanna: Even going for a walk, you know, I have to walk an ultramarathon. But hey, you mentioned being a overachiever. So yeah, I'm a bit like this. ‘I'm going for a walk. It has to be 56 kilometers.' I like that feeling of excitement, creative free spirit. And so often, we do get obsessed with the business side, but we have to come back to that. We challenge the people listening, how much of that is in our writing life? Peleg: Yes. And really, we want to tap into that part of ourselves, because deep down inside, before we became writers, before we became designers, novelists, whatever hat we're wearing that is our identity in the world, our profession, right, underneath all of that, we are artists. And we oftentimes forget that. Artistry is not confined to one practice. We want to be able to tap into that part of ourselves through different avenues and different channels. And if we get stuck on just one avenue, whether it's writing, designing, photography, whatever it is, that we're familiar with, and comfortable with, and by now, having experience in, we limit ourselves. We limit what's possible for us as artists. I'm hoping that whoever's listening to this right now, to remind you that you are an artist first. Before you became a writer, you're an artist first. And I would encourage you to meet that artist again. Joanna: I think that's so right. It's interesting because you have this spiritual artistic way about you, which is so important, but equally, you coach creatives around business. And as you mentioned, you consider business and marketing and money part of the creative process. That's what attracts me to your work, really, is that you also help people with money. A lot of authors have negative thoughts and blocks around money. What are some of the common issues that come up around money, and how can we address those, while at the same time acknowledging our artist? Peleg: Money is an issue for almost every person I've ever worked with. Most creatives that I've known have a basic belief system around money, that there's not going to be enough, the money's going to run out. If we go a little bit deeper than that, there's belief systems around money that directly relate to our own self-worth and value. And they go hand in hand. Oftentimes, when I coach people, business owners, the business and the money issues that they're having with their business are oftentime spiritual issues in disguise, things that they're not looking at inside of themselves, as far as what their relationship to money is, and what their relationship to their own self-worth. Because again, they go hand in hand. It is a process of healing something inside of us that helps us feel more worthy, that helps us see and sense our own value in the world, that money doesn't become oxygen. We learn how to make money become a tool for our growth. There's a lot of fears around money that we walk around with. And a lot of the times, those fears are fears that we inherit from our family of origin, we inherit from our culture. And, in a way, to really overcome a lot of those fears, we have to learn how to detach from those old stories and old beliefs that are not generally ours, but we made those beliefs ours over the years because that's all we were exposed to. A lot of the work that I do with people around money is starting to help them really shift their relationship with it, and detach themselves from the stories that they've inherited. One of the first steps that I always ask people to do when we begin this conversation around money is I ask them to go away and write their money biography. ‘Go write your money story.' From the first moment that you remember money coming into your life, write that down. And begin to write that story of money as a character in your life. That by itself is such a healing process, because by the end of that assignment, things become very clear that, oh, my gosh, the way that I am with money, this is so not who I am. This is such a relationship that I've developed, that has been completely influenced by external factors. That is really a great place to start shifting and building a new set of beliefs and values around money that are healthy, that are actually attached to who I am and who I really believe, and not what I think I should believe in around money. Joanna: Talking about the creative free spirit, obviously, you can make money from your art, but do you think the process of making primary income from art is a problem over time? Is it inevitable that if your art becomes your income stream, that you will then want to change that and find different kinds of art? Peleg: That's such a great question. There's always the danger of that. And if I could turn back time and go back to the time when I was thriving as a designer and doing all this great work for clients, if I could give that version of myself advice, I would say to him, ‘Keep your creative free spirit alive. Don't just put all your creative eggs in one basket.' Keep that creative free spirit alive with other artistic experiences in your life, that have nothing to do with the art that you're doing for commerce. Because otherwise, you're going to lose that part of yourself, and that the art you do for commerce is going to start becoming a little stagnant, a little boring, a little of the same. And that is just the path to becoming burnt out, eventually. In my opinion, it is crucial to keep that creative free spirit alive. And it's different for everybody, depending on who they are. I teach people how to connect to that creative free spirit, and how to wake it up and get it going. But from that place, well, there's so much that they can experience and so many modalities that they can bring into their lives to keep that creative free spirit alive. I see it as a practice. I see it as an important spiritual practice for us as artists that are selling their art, that art becomes our source of income that we still have that connection to our soul artist in a way that keeps us alive, that keeps us excited, that keeps us in this space of wonder, so that the work that we're doing commercially, the art that we're creating commercially, is fed by a different type of energy in us. Joanna: Definitely. And then I wanted to come back on the money stories, because one of my money stories, I was brought up by a single mom and very independent woman, and so I was brought up to be an independent financial woman, and I have always done that. But the story that definitely affects me very much is you have to work very hard for every single pound that you earn, and your money is related to the hours you work and the time that you work. You have recently taken a sabbatical, and what was funny is we were going to have this conversation months ago, and then I emailed you and you were like, ‘Yeah, I need more time on my sabbatical. I'm staying away for longer.' And I'm like, ‘Woah. How does he do that?' I'm really interested about how you knew that you needed this extended time away, and what the sabbatical really meant for you. Peleg: There's a lot of questions in that question. Joanna: Yeah, sorry. Peleg: Let me address the money part of it, because that's a question that I hear often, ‘How can you afford to take six months off?' A few years ago, I took two years off from work and traveled the world, on a travel sabbatical. At the time, when I did that, those two years cost me about $150,000 in travel costs. And I did not have $150,000 in travel costs to expend when I started my journey. I had about 50, and I thought, ‘Okay, let's see how long it lasts. I'll finish this experience when the money runs out.' Well, the money ran out after about eight months, and I wasn't done. I wasn't done traveling. I just felt like there's still more that I need to experience out there in the world. And I was going through a whole other personal issues that were being looked at and healed at the same time. I'm telling you this because what I've learned about money is that money and creativity go hand in hand. And it wasn't until I was 43 years old…I became financially free at 43. And it was a goal that I had set to myself since I started working. I want to become financially free by 43. In rhymed. It sounded good. It was sexy. I thought, ‘I'm gonna put that out there as something I want to achieve.' I turned 42, and I did not at all feel like I was financially free. And right about at that same time, another teacher showed up, that clearly had some insights around money that I wasn't really exposed to. What I learned from this teacher, in particular, was that money and creativity go hand in hand together, that money is not oxygen. If I want money, I can go and create money, but I never actually connected the dots, that if I want to create money, really, what I need to tap into is my creativity. And if I take my creativity, and add a way of serving people to that, money happens. That's really how I started experiencing my life from that point is this flow, this ease, this sense of abundance, that there's always money there. All I just need to do is just turn on my creativity, and channel it in a way that creates money. So, when it was time to continue my sabbatical and continue traveling, and I realized, okay, I'm going to live on my credit card for about a year now, and I'm going to rack up a debt, and that's okay, because I know that I have a well of creativity, so that when I'm back on the other side of my time off, all I have to do is just tap into that creativity, and create money again. That's exactly kind of what happened. Money has stopped becoming oxygen for me, and I stopped attaching money to my own worth and time. In other words, I don't work for money. In other words, I don't sell my time for money, or I don't feel like I'm ‘earning money.' ‘I'm earning money' is a concept that I've really deleted out of my vocabulary, because as soon as I say ‘earn,' my own self-worth gets attached to that as well. My own value gets attached to that. So if I'm not ‘earning money,' well, that opens up a space for self-judgment, for fear, for all of that. I would encourage you to stop thinking about earning money, and begin to think about creating money. And as artists, as creators, if we really get in touch with that part of ourselves, and if that muscle is really strong and active, not only in what we do for a living, not only, let's say, in the writing that I do for my work, or the designing that I do for my work. If I'm truly creative in my life, I bring that creativity to every aspect of my life, including money. I bring that creativity to my relationships. I bring that creativity to the way I communicate. It's endless applications of my creativity. We have to tap into it first. We have to keep it alive. To me, that's the most important spiritual practice that I engage in, is keeping my creativity alive. Joanna: That sabbatical was a decision to take a step back from the serving other people part, and go back to serving just your creativity for a period? Peleg: That was part of it. This recent one that I just took, it was an intention that was to take three months off, and then go back into work, and we going back to that overachiever part of who we are, right? I finished my client commitments for the year, and all of a sudden, I had this three months. So, guess what I did in those three months? I filled them up with projects. I'm going to remodel this part of the house, and I'm going to take this marketing course that I've been meaning to take. I really didn't put too much time into my own creativity, because I wanted to accomplish these things while I'm having this time off. Two months into the sabbatical, I hit a wall and realized, wait a minute, this is not rest. I'm not really feeling like I'm getting back into my artistry again, so I need to extend this time. I basically just said, ‘Okay, I'm giving myself permission to extend my sabbatical from three months to six months, and go into a more quiet space, a space where there's really no commitments on the calendar.‘ Nothing. I wanted to see what would it be like to actually live without a calendar, without appointments. I remember just thinking it in the beginning, give me anxiety, because I'm so dependent on my calendar and my schedule, and for so many different parts of my life. But you walk into that space of plan nothing, and just live my days, and listen to my creative free spirit as far as what it is that I want to create every day. I really missed that spot, that space. In a way, I got so involved in the work that I did the year before that I've neglected that part of myself and it got a little stagnant. So, I really took the time to dive back in into that space and wake that part up. And in that process of waking that part up, new ideas come, new excitements come that I couldn't wait to bring back into my life on the other side of the break. Joanna: You've really encouraged me, and I'm planning on two months, but I wonder if I'll have the strength like you did to extend it. Peleg: Let me tell you, it wasn't easy. I don't want you to think that this was easy. It was a really challenging time at the beginning, because I didn't realize how addicted I was to doing, and to planning my days, and having this structure that I was so used to. It was a bit of a detox period in the beginning. And I needed support, I'm going to be honest with you. I had to call my coach and a couple of good friends to help me process the what was going on, because I wasn't doing so much. Joanna: It's so interesting, isn't it, as you say, looking at your worth as a human being, when you take away all the stuff you do, that is a challenge. I want us to talk about your transformational coaching program for creatives, called ‘100 Days of Creative High Growth,' which is not a sabbatical. It's a hundred days. Tell us a bit about what 100 Days of Creative High Growth is, and who it's for. Peleg: I wanted to create an experience where I could really teach everything that I've learned over the past 15 or 20 years of coaching people, and all the tools that I've gained along the way of healing myself and supporting myself, inside of a process that a person can go through and really shift and transform their life, transform the inner map of who they are as an artist, and heal some of the things that are standing in their way. I've done the work with people. And sometimes it can take years, especially if I'm meeting a client every two weeks, or even on a weekly basis. It's a slow process. That idea came to me really coming out of my two-year sabbatical, of what if there was a process that was really, really intense, we really shake the person up in a way that completely rewires who they are and how they see themselves, and teach them how to become this extraordinary artist, extraordinary creative, who creates their life. So, I created this course. It was a completely crazy idea. But the course is a hundred days long. And what it actually entails is 100 sessions with me in 100 days. It's run as a cohort. We go on a journey together for 100 days. It takes a big part of my life during that time, the commitment to be with people at that time. And during that course, you spend time in self-inquiry, deep self-inquiry, that I guide you through, in addition to activating your creative free spirit through art. We make art every day. We go back to taking you back to when you were a kid making art, and we help you get in touch with that innocent part of making art. What happens along the way is that your inner critic is going to come up, and it's going to really try to run the show. And the process becomes a process of learning to tame that inner critic while you're inside of this work. It's been a really amazing process to watch people transform through the simple act of self-inquiry and radical, creative self-expression. And when we do something to that intensity, a hundred days in a row, you can't help but shift, but change. Something opens up in us that, I'm just amazed, watching and witnessing creatives completely emerging something new out of them that they've never seen before. It's intense. And it's become my life's work now, leading this process for people. Joanna: It sounds fascinating. And obviously, it's not for everyone, but tell people where they can find the course, and where they can find you, in case they are interested in finding out more. Peleg: The easiest way to find me is on my website, pelegtop.com. There's information about my courses and this course, and the retreats that I lead. I'm also on Instagram, @pelegtop. Not that much active on it, but I do have a small community that I love to connect with over there. Signing up to my newsletter will be the best way to begin to get a sense of what it is I'm trying to teach people around creativity and around living from a place of creative free spirit. Joanna: And then, because you do a cohort, is there a particular timeframe for this particular run of the course that people need to sign up by? Peleg: The program runs twice a year. I run it in the fall and in the spring. The next one, the fall ones, will start September 3rd, 2021. The enrollment for the course will open in August. There is an application process. Like I said, it's not for everyone. It's probably one of the biggest commitments that you will make for yourself. One student at the end of the last cohort said to me, ‘I dreamt about walking the Camino,' which I know you did. Joanna: I'm doing next year. Peleg: Oh, you're doing? Okay. I wasn't sure if you did it or not. They said, ‘My whole life, I wanted to walk the Camino, and I know that's probably not going to happen. But I feel like this is the equivalent of that, as far as the inner work that I'm gonna be doing.' And it's kind of like that. It takes a lot to prepare. But it is a journey. It's a pilgrimage. And it's an extraordinary experience, if you're willing to really surrender to what will come up for you. Joanna: Fantastic. Well, I really enjoyed talking to you, Peleg, so, thanks so much for your time. Peleg: Thank you. Been great being here.The post Rediscover Your Creative Free Spirit With Peleg Top first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Bestselling author and writing coach Roz Morris dives into the nuanced world of literary fiction. She explains how to recognize when an idea is ripe for a novel and explores the emotional depth that sets literary fiction apart from other genres. Roz shares her writing journey with her novel 'Ever Rest,' discussing the importance of rewriting and the role of personal connections in storytelling. She also touches on marketing challenges for introverts and underscores the significance of artistic integrity while creating authentic art.

Can book marketing really be gentle, sustainable — and even enjoyable? Sarah Santacroce talks about how to reframe marketing and gives ideas for marketing your books. In the intro, Kindle Vella launches in the US [The Next Web]; A UK report calls for a reset in music streaming revenues to ensure fairer pay for artists [BBC] and how it relates to authors and publishing [The Bookseller]; are you in a mid-year pandemic slump? and a wet adventure walk [Books and Travel] This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors.  Sarah Santacroce is the author of The Gentle Marketing Revolution: A Radical Business Approach to Getting New Clients with Integrity and Kindness. She's also a business coach, podcaster, LinkedIn specialist, and the founder of The Gentle Business Revolution. 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 a breakdown led to a breakthrough What does ‘gentle’ mean when it comes to marketing? Why client avatars are overrated Building a brand around yourself so that when you pivot you can take your audience with you Making a book launch about the message, not about you, the author Lessons learned from a Kickstarter book launch Pitching podcasters You can find Sarah Santacroce at SarahSantacroce.com and on Twitter @sarahsantacroce Transcript of interview with Sarah Santacroce Joanna: Sarah Santacroce is the author of The Gentle Marketing Revolution: A Radical Business Approach to Getting New Clients with Integrity and Kindness. She's also a business coach, podcaster, LinkedIn specialist, and the founder of The Gentle Business Revolution. Welcome, Sarah. Sarah: Hi, Joanna. Thanks so much for having me. This is fun. Joanna: Tell us a bit more about you and your background in business and writing, and also where you are in the world as I think people would find that interesting. Sarah: Off recording, we said we're both Europeans, but I guess that's not so completely true for both of us because I'm in Switzerland and we're not part of the European Union and England is a whole other story! I born and raised in Switzerland. That's where I am based now. Still, we did a little exchange in California between 2006 and 2010, and that's where I started my business. I first got into social media in general, and then we came back to Switzerland in 2010, that was still the ice age regarding social media in Switzerland. People were maybe on Facebook, but just about started. So when I came and thought, oh, I'm going to help businesses with their social media strategy, I quickly realized never mind strategy, they don't even understand what social media is. And so I had to pivot into training and then focus mainly on LinkedIn, and that's what I've done the last 10 or so years. I created an online LinkedIn consulting business. A bit more than two years ago, I had this breakdown that led to a breakthrough, how they often go, and really started realizing I can't do this anymore, this whole online marketing thing. Something is just wrong and nobody's addressing it. Am I the only one feeling that way? That's where The Gentle Business Revolution was born and then led me to write this book about gentle marketing. Joanna: Can we explore that a bit more? You mentioned the word breakdown, you said everything felt wrong. I know many authors don't like marketing, but there's also a lot of hype-y marketing in the author space. Tell us a bit more about that process of feeling because I know authors feel it too. How did you know things were wrong or you were feeling it was wrong? Sarah: Through my work, mainly with clients in the LinkedIn space, but they were all online entrepreneurs. I heard it over and over again, this phrase, ‘I hate marketing. I love what I do.' A lot of my clients are in the service-oriented business, so they love coaching. They love creating transformations but marketing their business, they hated that. I think for a lot of authors, that's kind of similar. It's like, yeah, we loved writing our book, but now we have to market it and market it the way the gurus tell us, oh my God, that's just another story! I really felt an ever-growing anxiety when it came to marketing and I started realizing that the anxiety is two-fold. On one hand, there is anxiety from us, the entrepreneurs who are told to market in a certain way, because when you go online there's millions and millions of things that tell you how you should be marketing. So that creates anxieties for entrepreneurs, but there's also anxiety on the receiving end. When I used to open my email inbox and there was all these headlines, like, you know, ‘Have you created your seven-figure business yet? If not, what are you doing wrong?' And all of these pushy, scarcity-oriented headlines in emails, that creates anxiety also on the receiving end. I really paid attention to this ever-growing anxiety. Actually, the first term that I came up with was ‘anxiety-free marketing' because I felt like can we just talk about our businesses but without creating more anxiety? Joanna: I feel very conflicted about this because, on the one hand, I totally agree with you. And on the other hand, we still have to sell our books and make some money. Tell us a bit more about the gentle side and we'll get into the detail. How did you come up with this word gentle and how does it balance ambition and the desire to make money? Sarah: In fact, it has nothing to do with each other. You're right though. It's like, we have this idea that gentle means too nice or a pushover, but that's not at all what the meaning of the word is. The word means empathic maybe, it means compassionate, but that doesn't mean that we're not making money. In fact, in the book, I write about the triple win, which is based on the triple bottom line. I came up with this idea the triple win, and that is a win for ourselves. So clearly, yes, we still want to make money. Win for our clients and then also I included the win for the planet. So it really just means marketing our business with integrity and kindness. I think that's where a lot of the hype and bro-marketing or whatever you want to call it, that's where things got out of hand. There was no more integrity. It was always about just making that sale no matter what. And that's what I think is wrong with the current marketing paradigm. Joanna: You're right because again, people think marketing is negative, but marketing is not negative in itself. Marketing is sharing what we've created with people who are interested in hearing about it. That doesn't mean we need to push, push, push, and hype, hype, hype. Sarah: That's what I'm saying, that's exactly what I'm saying. And the difference is very subtle, actually. It's about words. On my walk today, I just listened to this podcast by Brene Brown where she talks about the concept of dehumanizing. She talks mainly about politics, but that is exactly what's been happening also in marketing. We had started to dehumanize the way we market our businesses. So it was all about numbers and getting more and more and more numbers rather than actually selling our services or ideas or products to humans. And so it's all about the words we choose to use in our marketing, whether it is these shaming techniques or only highlighting how much money you could be making if you're using this product and selling this illusion of how rich you're going to get when you buy my product. That is all about words, the words you choose, whether you're inviting and focusing on the positive or whether you're focusing on the negative and making me feel bad that I'm not a seven-figure business owner yet. And maybe I will never get there because I'm such a loser because you're making me feel bad. So it's all about the subtle differences in words and language really. Joanna: The intention. And it's interesting, you talked there about that almost instead of dehumanizing that if we remember there are humans on the end. Sarah: Exactly. Joanna: It always makes me laugh with email lists, people are like, ‘Oh, well, you have to have this massive list of hundreds of thousands of people or whatever.' And people who have a list of maybe 50 people get really upset because they think that's too small. But then if you think about how things used to be in book marketing where if you got 50 people in a room to actually listen to you, if you'd imagine 50 people listening, humans, then it changes completely. 50 people in a room (or on an email list) listening to you is actually quite a lot. Sarah: It is. Can you imagine out of 50 people, you get 10 people to a workshop around the topic of your book? You're done and you made your day. So it really is this push to always more. Of course, I'm totally not against technology. I think technology helps. I mean we couldn't be doing this podcast if it wasn't for technology, but there's, to a certain extent these guru marketers, they created these huge, huge, kingdoms and that you really became only a number to them. That's the risk also of technology is that you're on a webinar with thousands of other people and clearly, you don't feel heard and seen because you're just one of those buyers. So there's a good side to technology, but there's also the dehumanizing side to technology. Joanna: No, it's a good point. I've been talking a lot about doubling down on being human in an age of AI. There's more and more AI creation and ways to scale, and scale is brilliant. Again, this is going out to a lot of people on the podcast feed, but I also find that podcasting is quite a personal way, and people, even when I meet someone who's been…you've got a podcast too. Obviously, when you meet people who've listened to your podcast, they actually feel quite connected. Even though you've created it in a bigger way, it can still be personal, which is interesting. Sarah: Again, yeah, and it's because we make it personal. And we really talk, it's the choice of words. We want your listeners to feel like we really care about them and we don't just care about their money. I think that's also the dehumanizing aspect of marketing. If it feels like you only want to make the sale, or if you truly care that I'm going to get results from what you're selling to me. In book marketing, you see a lot of these books that are lead magnets. I don't want to get too much into that, but I really wanted to write a book where the reader walks away with real information and, yes, it's part of my business. We'll talk about that maybe a bit later, but I didn't want to just create an empty book that then has you come over to my website and buy my $600 program. That's also the place where you show that you truly care, there's empathy and there's integrity behind it. Joanna: I want to be clear with what I'm hearing from you. There's nothing wrong with lead magnets. There's nothing wrong with marketing. It's our intention and the care we put into things and that we really do want to give value to people who get something from us, even if it's for free. And that's important. It's about the value to the person, whether or not they buy something. Sarah: Exactly. Clearly there are just things that work in marketing and a lead magnet maybe I don't like the word anymore because if you think about, it's not a nice word, but giving away something for free that gets people to come to your email list and then get to know you and they get a taste of you basically, that's a good concept in marketing. And so there's nothing wrong with that. But then the value has to be there when you're actually asking for money. Joanna: Yes. And I really think this is great because it hopefully will help some people who struggle with the mindset of marketing to change the way they feel about it. Because as you say, if you come to it with the good intentions, then the same tactic as such can work for you, but you're doing it differently to someone else who's using it in a different way. So I really like that. I want to get into some of the details of the book. You say in the book, ‘Forget your client avatar start, with yourself.' What do you mean by this and why is that important? Sarah: In every marketing program that I've ever taken, it's always the first thing you look at is the client avatar. And again, there's nothing wrong with looking at the client avatar, but I actually say customer-centric marketing is a bit overrated, especially when it comes to us entrepreneurs and maybe your authors who are listening. If you only pay attention to your avatar, so you create this giant business model around your ideal client avatar, and you then wake up one day and realize, oh my gosh, these people are not at all aligned with who I am, what my values are, what I stand for in this world, then that's exactly when you maybe also have this breakdown that I had a few years ago. I created a business that was purely oriented towards this client avatar. The marketing felt like a hustle all the time because I geared everything towards them. So what I suggest is that we actually start with ourselves and in the book, I built a book around three stages, rumble, rise, and resonate. The first one is rumble and that means rumbling what your story and who you are because when we go deep within ourselves and do this work and figure out what our values are, our world view, what our story is so that we can really show up fully, then we can bring more of ourselves into our marketing. That's when marketing is really fun. That's when we feel like we are doing something that is aligned with our values and it attracts people that are also aligned with those values. I think the reason that so many people hate marketing is because they're just following blindly things that some guru told them to do. And deep down, if they really listened to themselves, they don't feel aligned with what they're doing. Again, that's what I did and it didn't feel good. I felt like, really do I want to send out another cart closing email today because that's what I've been taught? You send out four cart closing emails the same day. Go within first, figure out who you are, and then bring more of you to your marketing. That sounds like marketing that is joyful and not arduous. Joanna: It's so important to tap into that feeling. I know exactly what you mean. I used to a lot more joint ventures and webinars and things and I would never do that. They'd be like, ‘Oh, well, we'll do a webinar, but you have to send out these closing emails or whatever.' And I'm like, ‘No, I don't do that.' I'll send one email that says, ‘Hey, fancy coming along?' And then one email with, ‘Here's the recording,' and that's about it. I never felt like I wanted to do more than that. And that feeling is so important. I agree with you. I feel like people aren't necessarily in touch with that feeling. And in order to find the best marketing for you and your audience, it's really tapping into what feels good. For me, podcasting, I do so much of it because I enjoy this. It's also marketing. Sarah: Right. Exactly. It's marketing and it's bringing all of you to your marketing because you get to also bring in your stories and you get to connect with people on the podcast that you feel aligned with. You would never bring in someone who you're like, oh, this is, like, a complete jerk. Why would you want to have him on the podcast? Joanna: You talked about what you stand for in this world and your values. And I think if you do build more of an audience around yourself and to be fair, you have to grow into that. But if you can do that, then people will follow you when you pivot. Because of course, both of us have been online business people for over a decade and many people fall away because they build a brand around one particular thing, and then they just have to blow it all up because they want to change. Whereas if you build it around yourself, you can pivot and people will come with you, at least some of them. Sarah: That's an interesting point. I never actually paid attention to that, but you're right. Look at what I did before, I had nothing to do with gentle marketing. Even though people always told me, ‘You're the real thing,' and, ‘We never thought you were pushy or anything like that.' They followed me even though I was doing something very specific. Now I feel like I've really come full circle and I share, for example, I remember the day when I pushed publish on my new about page where I share about my hippie upbringing and how the growing up in a commune has really had a big impact on how I look at business and how I want to run my business. That felt so scary, especially having built a business on the most sterile professional platform that you can think of. Joanna: And in fact, the more you are honest with boundaries, of course, we all have to have boundaries around what we share, but if you share as a real person, I think a lot of people still listen to this podcast after so many years because I share my mistakes and the problems and the issues as well as the other things along the way. That helps people know that you're a real person instead of someone trying to be something else. Sarah: I talk about that as well because a lot of people ask me, ‘Could you have called it authenticity marketing or something like that?' Unfortunately, the word authenticity almost became a buzzword. It became this thing that you do. It's another thing you do and check off, ‘Oh, I'm being authentic.' And let's face it, there's just no course on how to be authentic. The course would probably be exactly what I talk about in rumble, find out who you are, but it's not a checklist, show up in pajamas on your Zoom call and that's being authentic. In a way, there's this thing also that sometimes we feel like we have to be authentic or we have to be vulnerable. No, that's if you start using those things in order to sell more, or in order to market, people can see through it, people want the truth now more than ever, especially after what we've just gone through, and people can see through it. I think it's almost like consciousness in the world has risen and marketing is still this outdated thing that we used to do 10 years ago when people didn't have all this information that we have access to today. It feels like a lot of the marketing, the hype-y, pushy bro marketing, it feels like they're treating me as I'm stupid. Like, really, don't you understand that I can see through this completely? It always makes me cringe. Joanna: Also in the book, you say “stop chasing, attract instead.” What are some of the things that authors can do to attract readers? Sarah: We already mentioned podcasts, so that is my favorite. And I think it's your favorite too. Find opportunities where people can really hear you talk about the story, the backstory also of your book, and hear the real you and not just the marketing pitch of the book because that's where you bring more of you. Another thing I seen some authors do recently is a webinar or a collaboration actually where they got on a webinar with three authors. And then the idea was to each talk, not just about the book, but about ideas from the book, so they had a common seem to the webinar. And then at the end, they just invited people who hadn't bought the books yet. If they're interested, go and buy the books of all three authors. I found that a beautiful collaboration because oftentimes as authors, just like as entrepreneurs, we do everything alone and that's hard. To sell a book all by yourself, you have to create the audience around it. So think maybe also about collaborating more with others where you have a common audience. It doesn't have to be exactly the same topic, but they often overlap. Joanna: You and I obviously have our own podcasts, but we both go on other people's. I've been on yours. And we go on other people's shows. Most authors are not going to start their own podcast. Do you have any tips for getting on other people's shows? What has worked for you in terms of pitching? Sarah: Probably like you know as well, we get those pitches like every week and there's very few that turn into something, but the ones that do work are the ones who did their homework. They've listened to my podcast, they know what the show is about. In my case, I organize my conversations around the 7Ps of the gentle marketing mandala. And so they put that into their pitch. Often they're agencies. And so they're like, ‘I'd like to pitch this person for this and this topic.' And so they actually give you the topics. So that's the first recommendation I would have. I'd say you need to actually do the homework and make sure that A, you have researched the podcast, B, you suggest what kind of topics you would like to cover, and C, what has worked really well for me is a quick video that I record. In my case, I actually recorded a generic video that I use in all of my pitches. It helps the host to actually see the person and hear them talk and have them go through the topics that they suggest. So that has worked well for me. Joanna: I've never done a video, but it is interesting. I find particularly if you are a non-English or non-native English speaker…because with my Books and Travel podcast, I interview a lot of international authors and I do go looking for videos just to make sure that our level of English is going to work. So I think that is important, but you're absolutely right. For people listening, I think you get much better results if you pitch 3 or 5 podcasts specifically than scattergun, 100 with the same letter. You do much better if you do your homework, as you said. Again, it comes back to your intention, which is to serve the audience of the podcast host. Sarah: Exactly. Yes. Joanna: I also wanted to ask about you recommend ditching the shoulds, and you call it comparitis, and I call it comparisonitis, but comparing yourself with others. Obviously, this is easier said, or not easily said, easier said than done. We know there are new ways to market all the time, particularly with books, paid advertising like Amazon ads and Facebook ads, but no one is finding it easy or experimenting with ease. There's a lot of anxiety, as you mentioned, around this type of thing. How do we, as you call it, ‘experiment with ease' around marketing? Sarah: I have to admit that with this book marketing thing, it was new territory for me as well. I noticed myself thinking, how does it work, and what are the standard rules in this industry? When I talk to my coach about it, she's like, ‘Wait a minute, Sarah, just walk your talk and do your own thing.' I'm like, ‘Oh right. Yeah, I forgot.' What I noticed is that, of course, for example, when it comes to the book launch, there is this standard, oh, you do the three videos or whatever, how many videos, and then you have your launch. Before COVID, we had our book tour. So there was this standard thing that, to me, just didn't feel good to make this book launch about me. I really wanted it to be about the message. And so I thought, well, what can I do differently that would feel good to me? What I came up with, we'll talk about the Kickstarter in a minute. But the other thing I did is I wanted it to coincide with a worldwide event that's called the Random Acts of Kindness Week. I thought that would be a good way for me, as an introvert, to shine the light on something else and just have my book as a, ‘By the way, this is sponsored by my new book, but we're having a weeklong event that's based on this random acts of kindness topic and we're hosting conversations that have to do with kindness in business.' That got me really excited. I'm like, oh, I can find all these guests that have something to say about kindness. And so you really have to step out of your box that the industry built and says, ‘This is how it's done,' and then give yourself permission to do it differently. So that's the first thing maybe that I would say. The other thing is I did then feel like when it came to launching the book on Amazon because I self-published, I'm totally overwhelmed with all the left-brain thinking around algorithms and keywords and all of that. And again, this is not about just throwing everything away. Like we discussed earlier, there's just certain concepts and things in marketing that have worked and that's just how it is. Rather than getting all anxious around those kinds of things, I was like, well, I'm going to have to hire a book launch coach who is going to deal with those number-related things and keywords because that's her thing. I didn't want to let my energy get dragged down by things that would just overwhelm me. Joanna: That's great. And yes, sometimes just paying someone else to do things. I pay someone to do my Amazon ads for me because I have exactly the same thing. If your energy really is, ‘I hate this,' then you either just don't do it at all and you ignore it or you pay someone else to do it. And of course, you need to have a budget to do that. Only the individual author can assess what is important to them. But as you said, with actually self-publishing, there are things you have to do, you have fields to fill in to actually put the book up, so you have to do that. Sarah: Yeah, exactly. Joanna: You mentioned the Kickstarter and I was part of your Kickstarter and it was really interesting because I feel like many books do not do very well through Kickstarter. It's starting to get a bit better, but it's designed for a lot of different things really. Tell us a bit more about the Kickstarter and why you wanted to do it, and any tips or lessons that you learned. Sarah: For me, I was really new to Kickstarter and my husband was on it mainly for board games and video games, maybe. So when he first mentioned it, I'm like, ‘Yeah, that's not going to work for me.' I also had the impression that Kickstarter is basically begging people for money, like go around to your friends and ask them for money. And so I was like that doesn't feel good. But the minute I understood that it has to do with community building, I was like, oh, maybe it is interesting. So that's really how I looked at it. I looked at it as an internal launch to my own community. Yes, it helped me raise the money, but it really was this community that kept me going and said, ‘Yeah, Sarah, I think we want you to publish this book.' So that's really how I launched it at. What I learned from it is that, again, when it comes to the numbers there's always the left brain and the right brain. I had huge fun with the right brain and coming up with the page and the video we shot at the lake and all of these right-brain creative things that gave me a lot of motivation and I liked it a lot. Then when it came to launching and measuring the numbers and see the money go up, that didn't excite me so much. It also made me realize that Kickstarter, even though it's targeted to where it's creative entrepreneurs and in general, creative people, there is still a pushy attitude to it and I didn't like that so much. It's built into the system that they want you to basically go crazy and reach the $100,000 target or whatever. I think for authors, it's all about expectations. So I raised a goal of $3,000, which obviously is a very lower-end goal. But it felt important to me that I was able to reach that goal. So it was more about getting the community together and having that positive outcome rather than raising $10,000 or $20,000 or even more to get the money. It was not about the money, it was more about the community. And that then really helped me to get these initial reviews and get people to share it. Overall, I would say was a successful kind of experiment. Joanna: That's so interesting you said that because I haven't done a Kickstarter yet and I keep thinking about it. I try and trust my feelings as well like you do. And I also just don't feel good about it. But as you said, if you put a very low number on it, then there's much less stress, but I also feel it's a bit like what I like doing as a creative is I create something, I put it out there in the world, and people can buy it or not. Whereas with something like Kickstarter, I feel like, well, I haven't decided what it's going to be yet. How can I possibly tell people upfront what I'm going to make when I'm a discovery writer and I make it as I go? So it worries me that people might not get what I can agree on upfront. Sarah: That's interesting because, for me, I used the Kickstarter probably not as you're supposed to be using it, meaning raising the money before you've written the book. I already had a finished manuscript when I launched a Kickstarter. So you're right that if you do the Kickstarter before you know what you're going to write, that can be a bit more challenging. Joanna: This was interesting because you did the launch, you basically launched it as a Kickstarter, so you'd already written it. You did the Kickstarter, you've got the money. And then what I thought was really smart is I think you set the book for free. The link I got was the Amazon link where I could download the book for free, right? Sarah: That's right. Yes. Joanna: Which meant that you also got the download and any reviews were going to be a verified review. So that was super smart I thought. Sarah: Yeah, exactly. I thought it was super smart too, but then my book launch coach, she's like, ‘Well…' Yeah, we had to do a thing where we had to relaunch it because the official launch was not going to be until the Random Acts of Kindness Week, which was only two months later. So we had to relaunch it with that same link and then ask Amazon to transfer the reviews to the new link. But it worked out in the end. Joanna: It did work out. Well, there you go. I thought it was super smart. I think this is really interesting because what we just said there were a couple of things I didn't know. And there are always new things in book marketing. They are always different ways to do stuff. I want people listening to know you can experiment, you can do different things. It doesn't have to be the same every time. As a nonfiction author I always say to people, don't expect to make your entire business income from book sales. What part does book sales play in your business and your multiple streams of income and how does the book lead into these other business opportunities? Sarah: It's definitely a small part of my business. You can call it a lead magnet if you want. For me, it's a standalone product, but definitely there's opportunity for it to lead into other business services that I offer. At the end of the book I talk about my Gentle Business Circle. That's my community membership. And then I also have an online program. So it is part of getting people into my world and then having them maybe also download my freebie, which is the one-page marketing plan in the form of a mandala. If people are interested, that's at sarahsantacroce.com/1page. It's part of a whole if you want. In terms of the actual revenue, it's still early, early days, but it will probably always be a small part of my business income. Joanna: Have you noticed that you have attracted new people through the book or, for example, do you find many people come into you through your podcast or your blog? Sarah: I would say people have come in who have bought the book who've heard me talk on other podcasts. That's usually how it happens. So they go from a podcast that I've talked on, they buy the book, and then they sign up to my one-page marketing plan. Or they sign up to my one-page marketing plan in which in one of the emails I mention the book and then they go buy the book. As you know, it's all connected and it's just part of my hub. So that's how I set it. Joanna: That's important, this ecosystem approach, everything links together and you've got this coherent message that works with yourself and what you're doing. And also, I guess, just to finish this, sort of circle back to the longer-term view because I know you think about this longer-term view as well. If people look at you and I right now and our websites and everything, it looks like we've got it all together, right? I feel like people keep saying to me, ‘Look you must've been that you were going to build all this.' I'm like, ‘Oh, no, it just sort of happened over time.' What have you really learned about this long-term thing and do we really have it all together? Sarah: First of all, no, I really don't have it together. I actually even say in the book I don't have it all figured out, right now, especially. Maybe two years ago, I thought I did, but then everything changed and I'm pivoting again. And who knows? I'm hoping that I'm still going to be interested in talking about gentle marketing five years from now, but who knows? And that's the beauty of entrepreneurship. We can always pivot. Joanna: If you don't know what you want your authentic brand to be just trust how you feel and over time it will reveal itself. Sarah: Yes. It really is also about resilience. I think entrepreneurship is so much about resilience and going into a dead end and then saying, ‘Oh, well, okay, that one didn't work out. Let me start again and go into another direction.' It's just, I think, once you've done it for 10 years, there's just no way back and there's no other place I'd rather be. And so it's always about thinking, well, if that didn't work, what else, where do I go next? For me, the book was always something that I wanted to do. I never thought I'd had it in me. And now already, I'm thinking about writing a second sequel book about selling. Had somebody told me 10, even 2 years ago that I was going to write a book about selling, I would've said, ‘No, I know nothing about selling.' But now it's just a logical next step. And people are asking me about it, ‘Well, what's the difference between marketing and selling?' And so I grow into that. We grow into them as we grow as people. And I think maybe that's one of the biggest lessons in entrepreneurship is that we really have to also grow into things as people because we can't always figure things out and wanting to do more, we have to really also let ourselves be more and that's only if we do the deeper inner work. Joanna: Where can people find you and everything you do online? Sarah: My main site is sarahsantacroce.com. So my first name is with an H at the end, sarahsantacroce.com. And you pronounced it perfectly, thanks, Joanna. And my book is at thegentlemarketingrevolution.com/book. I mentioned the free download one-page marketing plan at sarahsantacroce.com/1page with a 1, number 1. And if you're more of a listener, then you can also check out my podcast that's called ‘The Gentle Business Revolution.' Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Sarah. That was great. Sarah: It's been a delight. Thanks for having me, Joanna.The post Gentle Book Marketing With Sarah Santacroce first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Shane Neeley, a data scientist and author who explores AI's crossroads with art, dives into the transformative power of AI tools for writing and visual arts. He shares his journey from lab scientist to AI writer, revealing how the pandemic spurred his creativity. Neeley discusses the joy and humor AI can bring to writing, the balance between human and machine creativity, and navigating the legalities of AI-generated content. He emphasizes the importance of collaboration and adapting to technological changes in the creative landscape.

What are the key elements of a good crime novel? How can you reboot your author career through publishing and marketing changes? Ed James shares insights on his writing craft and author business. In the intro, Jeff Bezos steps down as CEO of Amazon [The Verge]; Why this is the best time to be in publishing [The Hotsheet]; Why enterprise publishing is on the rise [Mike Shatzkin]; plus I'm on the Intermittent Fasting Stories Podcast. Today's show is sponsored by IngramSpark, who I use to print and distribute my print-on-demand books to 39,000 retailers including independent bookstores, schools and universities, libraries and more. It's your content – do more with it through IngramSpark.com. Ed James is a Scottish crime author with over 20 crime and thriller novels spanning five different series set across Edinburgh, Dundee, London and the Pacific Northwest of the U.S.A. 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 differences between crime audiences in the US vs UKThe essential elements of a crime novelHow Ed’s engineering background influences his writing and plottingWhere ideas come from and how to keep things original while adhering to genre tropesCuriosity as a muscleDifferent publishing choices for different books at different timesThe importance of book covers for book marketing You can find Ed James at EdJames.co.uk and on Twitter @EdJamesAuthor Transcript of interview with Ed James Joanna Penn: Ed James is a Scottish crime author with over 20 crime and thriller novels spanning five different series set across Edinburgh, Dundee, London and the Pacific Northwest of the U.S.A. Welcome, Ed. Ed James: Hi, Joanna. It's good to catch up again after so long. Joanna Penn: Indeed, and we see each other in person occasionally at events. Tell us a bit more about you, and how you got into writing. Ed James: My path to writing was because I was looking for a creative outlet as I was growing up, and it used to be music, and I was in bands and so on and so forth, and then that all died a bit in about 2005, 2006 time. I was very angry about music, and how much time I'd spent on it and a lot of other things, so I just started channeling my energies into writing. And over that next four years, it was a case of writing what people call practice novels, I suppose, over various genres, sending them off to agents, getting absolutely nothing other than maybe a few little leaflets back, saying yeah, no, thanks for sending, it's not for us kind of thing. And then I think about 2010 I finished the first Scott Cullen book, and actually had some interest from agents there. And that was quite exciting, because everyone I knew who'd been involved in writing had never even got that far, so it was like three months you wait when you send off the full manuscript, and then another not quite a form rejection, but just saying, yeah, it's not for us. That was a bit dispiriting, and I gave up writing about that point, for about a year and a half. My day job got a bit hectic as well, and then I remember reading lots of stuff late 2011, about how the Kindle was taking off, and I thought, right, I've got that book, I think it's probably got a lot of potential, so I'll finish it, publish it and see how it goes. And that took me a bit longer than expected because it needed a lot of work, so maybe the agents weren't so daft. Then my dad did the copyediting and proofing for it, and I got it up in the middle of April 2012. And it took me quite a while to get any sales to come in, and that was, like, I think you talk about the flip of being an author to being the publisher, and it's understanding that side of it. I knew absolutely nothing, no understanding of what publishers even did around editing or marketing, all that kind of stuff. And actually, just having to get a handle on marketing, and then start to sell books, that was in those days you got a lot of stuff free from Amazon, I think it's fair to say. They used to present your books to people, and that was always quite nice. And once you got enough traffic on, you'd get quite a lot of traction off that. Joanna Penn: So that takes you up to sort of 2012, 2013. What happened with your day job? Ed James: Around that time, I think I published five books in about a year, maybe… a year and a half, and it started creeping up to being quite a good monthly income. And at that point I was working in London, and I was actually traveling from my home near Edinburgh every week on a 6:30 flight down to London in the morning, and then back up on Thursday night and working from home on Friday. I was basically either working or writing when I was down there, occasionally seeing friends. I started to get quite a bit of money coming in from having a decent start to a series, so four books in that, and a vampire thriller that didn't exactly set the world aflame. I had back pain at the time, it was really a lower back problem, and I was struggling to actually work. So I had another contract in Edinburgh this time and I lasted about three days because my back was so bad, and it must have been some form of sick building syndrome. I just sat from then, recovered a bit and wrote, and the money kept coming in, rolling in and increasing, so I haven't looked back since. That's now my eighth year, I think, full time, so it's been a pretty good ride, but stressful I think it's fair to say. Joanna Penn: It's a stressful one. We'll come back to the publishing side, but I want to start with the genre side because a lot of listeners, obviously we've got a lot of UK listeners, but we've also got a lot of Americans listening, people in other countries. I feel like crime fiction has a really specific place in the UK market. It feels like it's a huge genre, and we have an appreciation, perhaps even the literary critics seem to have some appreciation of crime novels. Why is crime so big in the UK? And what are the essential genre elements for a crime novel? Ed James: There is definitely something in the discrepancy between Britain and America in terms of popularity of maybe more of the police procedural side of things, which I write. In America, it's very hard to think of any police procedural. It's probably only Michael Connelly's Bosch series, that's a police procedural, and even then it's like a PI working in the police force, whereas a lot of the big books over there tend to be that PI thing, which isn't really a genre over here. Whereas we have a rich legacy of police procedural going back to Inspector Morse. A lot of is I think the television side of it picks up. If you think when we were growing up, there was lots of TV shows that we had, basically police procedural case of the week, those long-running, quite cheesy ones like ‘The Bill' that's run every week, and every jobbing actor would appear in. That is probably ingrained in our consciousness. And then the police force here is different to America, with all the difficulties they've had over there, the roots of it are quite different. So police officers here tend to be seen directly more as absolute heroes, whereas America it's maybe a more of a murky gray area. I think it's been really traditionally difficult for British police procedural authors to translate their success across the Atlantic. I remember Ian Rankin saying that it took him about 20 Rebus books before he had a best seller over there. And I think his eighth one over here basically established that whole genre, with the stuff him and Val McDermid were doing at that time in the late '90s. It's rare for British authors to have that sort of success over there. Someone like Ruth Ware, for instance, sells an absolute kiloton over there, and that's her biggest market. And she writes very British crime novels. She's maybe a bit more traditional, but with a modern twist on it, and they do colossally well in that neck of the woods. [Click here for my interview with Ruth Ware] So, it's an interesting one, and it's something I've definitely seen. I do sell an interesting number in America, surprisingly so, but it's not that much bigger than what you'd sell in Canada or Australia, so maybe it's like an expat community or anglophiles or whatever. It was an interesting one that led me on to writing an FBI thriller set over in Seattle and the Pacific Northwest, just to see if I could sell books over there. But one of the things I've found with…I don't know, but maybe it's particular to genre fiction, that the readers tend to be very intolerant of authors experimenting, I think. I think they like the characters as much as they like the author, if that makes sense. Someone will be looking for a Reacher book or a Rebus book rather than a Lee Child or an Ian Rankin book, and if you write something that's by the same name but it's a thriller set in America, with American English, and it's not got a couple of alcoholic cops wandering around Edinburgh, it's got a lot of chase scenes and so on, they don't seem to appreciate the difference. That's one of the things I've found with the vampire book that should have maybe been more of a warning sign back in the day, that writing under the same author name, they just want police procedurals, that's what the reader, a lot of the reader feedback I got was. And it's quite hard when you've got that established brand, to then break into other things. Joanna Penn: I totally agree. And I tried, because being here in England, and I've met you and a lot of crime authors at conferences. And I decided to write myself a proper crime novel, with a detective and everything, and I attempted a police procedural, and ended up with a supernatural psychological crime thriller hybrid — my Brooke and Daniel series. I just can't write anything that doesn't have supernatural in, and I discovered that these crime readers just would not read it. They wouldn't pick it up. It just wasn't their thing. And that cross-genre, as you're saying there, it just doesn't seem to work, particularly, with a British crime audience. I think you're right about America, there's a lot more FBI thrillers than there are police procedurals as such. If we accept that we're going to write a very pure crime, novel, a police procedural, what are the main genre elements, the essential things, that you need? Ed James: The main thing that you want to focus on with a police procedural isn't so much necessarily the crime, but it's starting to look at character. That's probably true of any type of fiction, really, but I think with police procedures, it's very important. Like I was saying earlier, I think the readers are attached to the characters. So if you think about a long-running series, it's about people wanting to spend time with those characters, they become their friend. I think it's the same, that's why podcasts are so important now, and popular, because a lot of the long-running podcasts, it's like spending time with your friends. So thinking about lots of TV shows like ‘Friends' and ‘Cheers' and all that kind of stuff, it's about that bond of friendship that the audience has with the creator. A lot of the characters that do really well are interesting. You don't have to be a kind of Superman type, or too dark like a Bruce Wayne type, but like, sort of an interesting character is kind of fresh and has an interesting spin on it. I'd say the characters I've created, the Scott Cullen one is the one who tends to attach most to people, and he was started as the opposite of the tropes, where there's a middle-aged alcoholic who drives a classic car, and has a difficult relationship with his estranged daughter or whatever. All those things, it was inverting that, and making him a really young cop who was kind of idealistic, and all those sort of things. So it made it a bit interesting for me to write, and I could see that it was kind of fresh, and it seems to have picked up on a lot. But the problem is that a lot of the readers tend to be quite conservative in their views, not…with a small c, maybe, rather than a capital C. If you look at the bigger sellers, they do like a patrician-type, steady hand on the till, so someone who's an authority figure rather than a wee daft idiot from Edinburgh running around. And so that's the main kind of thing I think, is if you're looking at writing a police procedural series, is focusing on an interesting, unique character. And someone that you want to write and you want to spend time with, and that you think other people will. Also, the other side of it is that I think the important thing is each novel in a series should be not necessarily standalone, but that case should just cover that, so any new readers who are picking up book eight or whatever can just get a contained story, and there's not too much heavy backstory they need to have read the first seven to get up to speed on. Focus on the victims, and the families and friends of the victims, making them interesting characters, showing their lives. Because with a police procedural it's a reflective thing, so you're not necessarily seeing the victim alive and going through their day, you're investigating their life through a lens, and you're picking up lies and clues from the friends and family, and there's discrepancies, and that's where the detectives work at it. They can throw in things like action scenes to spice it up a bit, but that's broadly what you're writing is investigating someone's life, and I'm picking where it all went wrong, to the point where someone killed them. And obviously, you can extend that into the psychology of a serial killer, where you've got a very active threat against the police who are trying to solve the crime, but a lot of police procedural books tend to be a single murder, which is much more believable to write, whereas a serial killer there's hundreds of them in fiction, and not so many in actual real life anymore. Joanna Penn: It's interesting you say that, because I was thinking I really write thrillers where things are much bigger, like the threat is much, much bigger. But as you say, I think a lot of the police procedural books, as you say, there might be one murder, and even though the stakes are high, they're not the destruction of humanity, or millions of people dying. I don't want to use “small” in a derogatory way, and it doesn't even have to be domestic. It's a much tighter viewpoint than having this grand, epic thriller. Ed James: One of my favorite books which you never see mentioned is a craft book, ‘Secrets of Action Screenwriting,' by I think it's William Martell. It's got one of the worst covers I've ever seen for a book, but the interior is incredible, and there's lots of dissection. And it's very applicable for any type of crime stuff, or thrillers, or anything like that. It's really good stuff, it's all about the psychology of the villains. But like you were saying, I think the thing he hones in on is the stakes. So they should either be personal or global, like you say, but take it to the extreme. Police procedurals, it's not about trying to save the President's life to avert a nuclear war or anything, it's about someone's life is collapsed and the most extreme personal loss is someone's death…and then you can extend that with police procedurals, and serial killers, and get more of sort of a threat to society in wider active parts of it. I think you're definitely right, the police procedurals tend to have much more of that personal side of it than your big conspiracies. That's not to say there's not a genre for conspiracy police procedurals… Joanna Penn: That's a good point. I want to come back to your background, because you worked in process engineering. Crime novels, mysteries, solving a crime, what you can't do is really make it easy for people to figure out. How does your process engineering background influence your writing process and your plotting? Ed James: The thing I look at is trying to make everything as efficient as possible. So, that was what I was always doing in insurance companies and banks, is like there's a process of someone, I don't know, changing an address or applying payments or refunding payments, and you're looking at it, documenting what they're doing, and you're understanding where they really had the problem point is things that slow it all down. It's kind of same with writing, where can I make this more efficient? Every time I write a book, I try to do something different to see if I can make it more efficient. And it's always like just having that sort of flow chart…and it's actually not even some kind of document, but it's always in my head. Everything I do is all about process and flows of left to right. I think a novel, when you're reading it, it's obviously left to right, but a lot of the stuff we write, thrillers or police procedurals, you can think about it, whether you're plotting or pantsing, you can think about it right to left, where the right is you've got the answer, so why has someone done this? That's the biggest question any book, when you're writing it, you should always ask yourself. It's not necessarily about the character, but why has someone killed someone, why is someone trying to start a nuclear war between America and China, or that kind of stuff. What's the motivation behind the villain, and what's their plan? And then it's how do you reveal that, how do you get the front-facing narrative drive to meet up with discovering the motive? Once you've got those bits at least sort of concrete, a lot of the stuff falls out of that because there's a conflict between what your protagonist hero wants and what your villain is trying to do, and all that sort of comes out kind of naturally now, I find, whereas before when I was writing, it was very messy. I've written 30-odd books now, and you learn a lot when you're going through editing with people. There's no one standard editorial process. Everyone has their own little biases they bring to it, and their own little tips and tricks. One of the things I'd like to do is use various editors at various points, and pick up little techniques, little tricks so that it speeds me up so that any less editing is a go, so it's maybe not the first draft, but it's about the first final product I've done that's as close to finished as possible. So it's been edited by myself to the same standard as another editor would have done because I've learned a lot of the things they would be looking for. It's kind of like designing, I suppose. One of the main things you'll see in screenwriting books, for example, is that a scene should either show character, or move the plot forward. And if it doesn't cut it out, an editor will say this scene doesn't move anything forward, can you just get rid of it? Making sure that when you're going through an outline, or even if you're pantsing it, when you're actually writing it, making sure there's tension to it, does this move the plot forward, is there an obstacle to the character getting what they want, is it clearly defined what the character wants in this scene, or does it just show them, show something about them, or ideally both? All that kind of stuff is trying to sort of get myself maybe not so much a pro forma, but a template that asks me all these standard questions, then it becomes intuition and instinct as you're going through the outline. So a lot of it's practice, but a lot of it's reading up on craft books as well to understand the best, the best practices across other people's experiences. Anything that tingles your spidey sense, putting that into your own process, and making sure that every time you go through stuff, you're starting at the right point, or making sure that any scenes that you've got in there should be in there, have to be in there, and they're essential to the story. Joanna Penn: Everybody now wants your flowchart, and your writing process engineering book. I think you should definitely try and put that together at some point, and come back and tell us about it. I used to do a similar job in consulting, and swim lane diagrams is probably what you're talking about, the different roles, and who would do what, and then you try and re-engineer that. But it's funny, because I can't think of my writing in that way. What I do is, as you say, with every scene is I will sort of see what the movement is, and I use that Robert McKee value shift, the plus or minus, or minus minus, or all of those types of things. So as you say, we all pick up our tips along the way, and we apply them, and it doesn't matter whether you're a plotter or a pantser or whatever you do, you will find a way. It sounds like you've got a really honed process, because you've written, as you said, over 30 books now, and you're still going. One of the things with crime novels, of course, is that generally, the crime is often the same, someone's been murdered, and there really only are a certain number of ways to murder people and how people actually die. So the originality is never in the death really, rarely in the death, the originality is more about, as you say, the motivations of the characters, and the development of the characters. How do you do your research? How do you pick things up? Do you read a lot of true crime, or how do you get your ideas? Ed James: Yeah. Well, there's that shop in Camden, you know, that sells author ideas now. Joanna Penn: Yeah. I think they've run out. Ed James: I don't really read a lot of true crime, or listen to a lot. But you're absolutely right, that the thing is, there's not necessarily a lot of originality. And I've tried to do it a few times in books where…I think the first one I published with Amazon's Thomas & Mercer, but it was called ‘Snared,' and it's now being re-edited and republished as ‘Tooth and Claw.' That was not a murder, that was sort of domestic terrorism, so animal rights. But it was a missing person andI treated it as very much a police procedural, and I think there wasn't even a murder until about 200 pages in. So that was me trying to do, right, how can I do a book that doesn't have a murder on page one, and just trying to do something interesting like that. I think a lot of it is I'll have an idea for either like a character who seems interesting, and then you can get some motivations, and it's like, what would push them to kill, or you get ideas about a theme, so that one about animal rights terrorism, what would be the motivations for that, what kind of crimes would they commit to get into the papers or onto the telly to further their cause? A lot of it just comes down to thinking about the victim and the villain and what would make someone push themselves to that extreme end? And then it's just all a lot of osmosis, I think. I listen to a lot of podcasts, and current affairs, news, politics, video games and technology and stuff, and it's amazing the interesting stuff you pick up that just sort of sparks off some little sort little idea that starts flowing out from there, that makes you think, oh, well, if I took that and they did that… And a lot of it's what ifs; what if someone like so-and-so was was more like this, and they did that? Which isn't really very helpful, but that's usually the starting point. One of the things I've been doing this year is a lot of idea development. Because usually, I think when you're talking about plotting and pantsing, whenever I've tried either, I always have a bit of a mess in the third act, just as it's closing in, and it's always like, well, I haven't thought through this, I haven't thought through that. So what I've spent a lot of time this year on is refining my process so that I understand that motivation, and then being able to bake it into the whole story as I go through it. I think that would be the biggest piece of advice I would say, and it's simple stuff like the who, what, where, why, when, how? Answer those questions, and you've got a pretty solid sort of motivation for a book. And then you can twist it a few times, and you get something that's actually quite interesting because sometimes the first idea you come up with is fairly vanilla, fairly plain, but then if you twist it and then twist it again, you get something that's kind of unique and cool, that probably, hopefully, nobody's ever done before, and you can run wild with that. Joanna Penn: You mentioned that what sparks your interest, and I think developing that curiosity is so important. I feel like that's where, when I worked in the IT and business process industry, I didn't understand that spark of curiosity, I couldn't tap into it. It takes practice to become aware of your personal radar as to what you are interested in, and then honestly do that. One of mine is religious relics. I can't walk past a religious relic, I just love them. I'm so interested in them, and I'm always reading about them, and they turn up in a lot of my books. But it's like, I didn't really know that about myself. Do you find that curiosity is almost a muscle that you have to lean into and trust in some way? Ed James: Yes. And I think that's an interesting one. I think when you're growing up, you assume everyone's the same, and as you grow up, you discover people are very different, and you're very different, and you have your own little peculiarities. You can't walk past a religious icon. I can't walk past a map. I'm absolutely fascinated by maps. Joanna Penn: I can't walk past a map, either. Ed James: I absolutely love maps. Maybe I should write high fantasy so I can get maps to put at the back or the start of my books, and then throughout. One other thing is that I never thought I was a people person, but as I sort of worked, I really actually was, and I got fascinated by the people I would meet and engage with. And when you work in financial services, you actually meet a lot of interesting characters, and that's for sure. Certainly banking I probably have met quite a lot of psychopaths. I don't mean that flippantly, I mean genuinely, the sort of behavior that you get from these people, it's quite staggering, when you actually analyze it. I've had incredibly difficult meetings. We go into an office in central London, and you just sit down, and then you've got to get something out of these guys there to help with your part of a project. And they just sit there and go why the eff should I help you? That actually, genuinely happened to me, and I still can't believe it. There's a lot of crazy people out there, and when you start meeting them you'll notice yourself that when you're working in that sort of industry, and you're flipping around between different companies or different parts of a company, you meet lots and lots and lots of people. If you meet hundreds and thousands of people, it's like you start to see fine gradations of people and lots of different personality types, and then you get them very instinctively. And a lot of the time when I'm writing particularly, the characters jump out of my head because it's all based on aspects of people I've met. Not friends or family, just like little bits of people, and you sort of extrapolate that. Which is sort of really an unusual piece of psychoanalysis I've just done on myself. Joanna Penn: I've never been a people person, so I do things in quite a different way, but that's interesting about you. I do want to ask you about marketing. You recently…I think it was recently, or last year, you rebranded your series covers. Ed James: Yeah. Joanna Penn: And obviously a series is so critical, but why did you do that? What was the need, and how important is that, branding and cover design, in crime selling? Ed James: I think a good cover is a pretty good starting point. Because predominantly when you're looking at the stuff I do, it's all on Amazon whereas people who are wide, they're still on a digital platform, so you're looking at it on a screen, or whether it's a phone or a computer or a tablet or whatever, so that's the thing that people are seeing. Especially now, as more and more of the Amazon stuff is becoming very…not quite pay to play, I don't want to mean that disparagingly, but there's a huge focus on the advertising, and the thing you're advertising isn't necessarily anything other than the book cover. When you look at the sponsored page, a section of a page on Amazon, it's the book cover, so it's got to be particularly eye-catching. I've always done my own covers for the self-published books, and they used to be pretty rubbish and amateur and stuff. I've just had a lot of practice now that I feel I can start to produce more professional-looking ones, and so I've been able to sort of do print ones which look quite cool. The reason I rebranded; it can be quite a good habit to get into, I think, to just have a look. If you even look at the trad-pub publishing world, people like Ian Rankin I've noticed a lot, since I bought his books starting in late 1998 going onwards, there's been about four or five different iterations of his covers. So they always move around different themes, but they're always reasonably similar, but they do like to refresh the backlist. I think that sort of function of that, particularly in the digital age is that you can look at a book cover, and you'll just go, eh, doesn't look like it's for me, when the interior could be entirely up your street, but you are judging a book by the cover, which is a very true thing. But if you adjust the cover so that it's got a different image, or it's got different typography, or it's sort of brasher colors or it's more monochrome and it makes that person look again. And they see it, they're seeing it and they're getting presented to on Amazon, then it might be you get more sales just because of that, that someone who's potentially passed by your book because they didn't like the look of the cover, they might have a little, well, that looks quite interesting, and not realizing they've already looked at it before. It's trivially easy to upload a new file nowadays. The downside of is you don't want to change the title because you might confuse people, which I have done. Joanna Penn: I have also done. But you just have to say previously published as or whatever, and hope that it was long ago that people won't buy it. And of course, you can't buy the same Kindle file twice, and it will tell you you already bought this, so I don't worry too much about that. What are any other ways that you have found successful in terms of marketing crime fiction? Ed James: I think the main thing now is all ads really. I had a point at the start of last year where my sales were in the toilet. I hadn't had a book out for a wee while I think, and so I had that dark night of the soul moment whereas I needed to look at how to get this working. I dabbled a bit in the Facebook ads side of things and a bit of Amazon ads, and I was just really going hardcore on that, and spent, I think, a solid month, maybe even six weeks figuring out what to do, reformatting all my books, recovering them, and then doubling the sales over that time, as well as kind of publishing some new stuff. [If you resonate with this, check out the interview with Michaelbrent Collings on rebooting your backlist, which goes into this in more detail.] But that, it seems to be a lot focus on the marketing side now is definitely about being able to advertise on the various platforms. I've only really done Facebook and Amazon, and they've both got their own different functions I seem to find as I go through it. I'm not particularly great at it, I would say. There are a lot of people out there who are much, much better than me, and you see their pages and their books being advertised against your own. But you do see the return on it. Obviously back in the day, it used to be you uploaded a book, got a few people to buy it, and then Amazon's algorithm would kick in and fire it around. I don't know if that's still necessarily the case, or if my vampire book spoiled my name with a lot of people on Amazon. Joanna Penn: I want to read this vampire book now. Is it under Ed James? Ed James: It was. I haven't published it last year actually, because I didn't sell any. It was just, like, it was just sitting there. Joanna Penn: You should just put it up under another name now. Ed James: I may do that, yeah. I might do that. Joanna Penn: Put an initial in it, and stick it up. Why not? Earlier you mentioned practice novels, and I don't even know if we're in that world anymore. I think there are so many varied types of books that people put up on to Amazon, Kindle. As you say, if you do your own covers, and you can format things and you can just put something up under a different name, I think it's interesting. Personally, I'm up for your vampire novel, so I want to hear that. But we're coming towards the end of our time. I do want to ask you about your publishing experience, because you've mentioned Thomas & Mercer, and then of course, you've mentioned your self-publishing. And you mentioned all the rejections at the beginning. What have been your choices with publishing, and what's changed? Ed James: I had a good run with Thomas & Mercer working as a hybrid thing. They batched up the first three Fenchurch books for instance, and that was a lot of getting three books together to then rapidly release. That was a huge success that then led on to a lot of people discovering my other books, I think. And then, I think there's a lot with publishing houses, faces change and stuff, and people move on. So I moved away from that, and I wanted to have a bit more control of myself, and try other things. I've had books published by Headline and by Bookouture, and they've both been interesting experiences as well, and it is interesting to see the different models that each of the publishers play. I think when you're considering whether to sell a book to a publisher or to self-publish it yourself, is that you basically, when you sell a book, you're ceding all control, pretty much, of that book and you have to trust that somebody, that that person you're selling it to is going to do their utmost to sell the book as well as you can, or better. And obviously there's a lot of people out there who've made huge sums of money from selling books to traditional publishers or digital publishers these days, but there are a lot of people who've had their fingers burnt and stuff. And I think the thing with the self-publishing side is that I've spent a lot of time on maintaining my backlist, which I don't think many publishers necessarily do. It's a good passive income. Obviously, you need to do a wee bit of work on the advertising side to get things in. But the stuff that Mark Dawson teaches on his Ads for Authors course, that does work. If you've got a book series, the funneling books through book one through six, seven, eight in the series, it does work, and it's lucrative if you can get it working. That's the thing I would point to is that if you're in control of your entire destiny with the publishing side of it, then you're going to give your all to make sure those books sell as well as they can, whereas a publisher they tend to stick to windows of about three months, and if they're not selling in that, then that's it, it's gone, you're not hot anymore. Whereas you're always going be hot to yourself, I think. Joanna Penn: Not sure about that! Ed James: But you know what I mean, you give all your focus to all your babies that you've got, and you want to give them as much attention as possible, and sell them as much as you can, whereas a lot of publishers, they'll move on to the next big author, and it's the nature of the beast. Sometimes you're the big author, and you're going to sell a gazillion pounds of books, but I think it's harder and harder to see if that's going to be you or not, or if you're just going to be something that's thrown at the wall, and you just sort of dribble down the side. Joanna Penn: Exactly. As they say, they might take a hundred books in a year or something, and then one of them might stick or break out. What's so difficult about the publishing industry, I think, is the reporting. It's the same in the indie space, which is you hear about the big successes in traditional publishing, but you don't often hear about all the authors, of which there are many, who break up with their agent, or get orphaned at a publisher, or just get picked up and then nothing happens. We hear about the big success stories. But I think, also, a lot of people don't want to criticize their publisher, even if they're not being treated very well. Ed James: That's very true. There's a certain amount of professionalism that people will not do that. You don't pick up a copy of The Bookseller and see, yeah, here's a list of all the authors who have been dropped this week. Joanna Penn: Exactly. Ed James: It's all about so-and-so has had a gazillion-pound book deal. And here's their agent, and they've done really well. But a lot of times, when people can get these big deals, there's no guarantee of success as well, and it's quite a mystery, quite tough to be a debut author getting a big deal. Joanna Penn: Oh, I don't know, one of those seven-figure deals would be fine. Just before we finish, I did want to ask you, because you talked there, it was 2012, I think you said, 2011, 2012 when you self-published the first book. I moved back to England in 2011, and in 2012 I think I went to London Book Fair for the first time, and I really started to socialize more in the British scene as such, the British writer scene. I think even came to Harrogate at a similar time, Harrogate Crime Festival, for people who are listening, and I very much felt there was a stigma in the UK around self-publishing, that it really still had this kind of negative view, and people treated me a bit like a curiosity, and I found that really hard. Did you feel the same way back in 2012? And then have you seen things change? Ed James: I think you're totally right, and I don't think it has changed that much. I think if you look at the big festivals like Harrogate, Bloody Scotland, Capital Crime, etc., they don't tend to have a lot of indie authors, or even digitally published authors, through Thomas & Mercer, or Bookouture or whatever. I think there's definitely a stigma attached to not being with a big, traditional publisher, and having the weight of their publicity machine at it. There's definitely a snobbish element out there. But I think actually, when you meet other authors, all the ones who are traditionally published, they're always very interested…I don't know if you get that, they're very interested in, well, how do you find self-publishing, and all that kind of stuff? Joanna Penn: Quietly interested. Ed James: Yes, quietly interested, they don't want their agent to see you talking to them. I think they maybe see it as a little, wee hobby they could have on the side, rather than actually the indie mindset, which I suppose is different from self-publishing, whereas you are your own publisher, and you're actually going to push yourself really far, whereas the self-publishing just feels a bit more…I mean, you used the terminology, it feels a bit more hobbyist. So, I think that's the impression I get. And I think a lot of them, I think the difficulty they see is actually, oh, how do I get a cover done, how do I get someone to edit it, how do I upload it on Amazon, which is all the easy stuff. Joanna Penn: Exactly. Ed James: It's the marketing that's the really tough stuff, and that's the bit I don't think anyone really appreciates, and there's a lot of hard hours put into just sort of mastering any of that kind of stuff. Joanna Penn: I should have met you back then. I think maybe I did, but because I'm such an introvert, I probably just didn't speak to anyone. I just stood in the corner. Where can people find you and your books online? Ed James: My books are all on Amazon. I think the first Scott Cullen book is 0.79p, you can have a look at that. There's a Vicky Dodds book called ‘Blood and Guts,' which is free, and there's another three in that series. And my website is edjames.co.uk. Joanna Penn: Fantastic. Thanks so much for your time, Ed. That was great. Ed James: Cool. Thank you very much, Joanna. Grateful to you to have me. Thank you.The post Writing And Marketing Crime Fiction With Ed James first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Your personal story can change other people's lives, but only if you get your words into the world. In this episode, Gin Stephens shares how she self-published her first book on intermittent fasting and went on to get a traditional deal for more books, and lead a community of people into a healthier way of life. [For more on my IF journey, listen to Intermittent Fasting Stories episode 155.] In the intro, Jane Friedman on SPS; my 2021 book sales revenue breakdown; my Author Timeline; Clifton Strengths Assessment. Plus, I recommend Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention. Today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, where you can get free ebook formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Get your free Author Marketing Guide at www.draft2digital.com/penn Gin Stephens is the New York Times bestselling author of Fast. Feast. Repeat., Delay, Don't Deny, and Feast Without Fear. She's also a podcaster with three shows, including Intermittent Fasting Stories, which is one of my favorites. 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 Getting over fear of judgment when writing a personal storyWriting with the aim to teach and help othersThe pros and cons of self-publishing vs. traditional publishingHow podcasting sells booksDon't depend on one platform! The importance of owning the tools you use to reach your community and followers. Why Gin gave up Facebook. You can find Gin Stephens at GinStephens.com and at The DDD Social Network and on Twitter @gin_stephens Transcript of Interview with Gin Stephens Joanna: Gin Stephens is the New York Times bestselling author of Fast. Feast. Repeat., Delay, Don't Deny, and Feast Without Fear. She's also a podcaster with three shows, including Intermittent Fasting Stories, which is one of my favorites. Welcome to the show, Gin. Gin: Thank you for having me. And I'm so glad that's one of your favorites. Joanna: Oh, it is. Gin: I love doing it. Joanna: I love to hear all the stories about everyone's different pathway, but today we're talking about you. Gin: Yay. It's odd to be on this side of the microphone, right? Joanna: Oh, absolutely. I want to start with why did you decide to write a book in the first place and how did you actually get through to the end? Because so many people say, ‘Oh, I'm going to write a book,' and never actually finish it. How did you do that and why did you decide to do it? Gin: That's a very interesting question. I actually have had ideas for books as far back as I can remember. I wrote as a child. I think every writer probably has stories like that. But getting published is so tricky, especially now it's even harder than ever, because just because you have something good to say doesn't mean that a publishing house is going to take a chance on you. Because unless you have a big audience, a big following, they're like, ‘Sorry, I'm not interested.' So, really, all that has changed with the advent of self-publishing and the ability for anyone just to get their message out there. But I didn't really know what would happen with self-publishing. I had a couple of Facebook groups that were really small, although they didn't feel small to me back at the time, it was 2016, and I was supporting people who were doing intermittent fasting. Actually, at that time, before I wrote the book, I only had one Facebook group and we were probably right around 3000 members when I started writing Delay, Don't Deny, my first book and the one that I self-published first. It all started because people would join the group and they would be like, ‘How do I get started?' Or my friends, people that I knew. I lost 80 pounds with intermittent fasting and have kept it off since 2015, and so people wanted to know what to do, what did I do. And there weren't any books that I could send them to. Dr. Jason Fung had just released The Obesity Code in 2016, but he didn't really say, ‘Here's what you do.' It wasn't a plan for how to get started. At the end, he had a little bit of alternate daily fasting with a 36-hour fast, but I was like, not everybody wants to do 36-hour fast. I prefer a daily eating window approach where I eat every day. I like to eat every day. And there were several books that were good, but they missed some of the important information like fast and clean, which is something I realized over time was so very important. So I would tell people, ‘Well, you can read this book over here, but ignore what he says about drinking diet soda. Don't do that. And let me tell you why.' I really need a book that I can send people to, so I'm going to write it myself. And maybe nobody will buy it, but I'm just going to put it up on Amazon. That was back in the days of CreateSpace when, if you wanted to publish on Amazon, you did CreateSpace for the paperback, and then you did KDP, Kindle Direct Publishing, for the electronic version, and now they have since merged, so it's all through KDP now. But I didn't know what I was doing. I did a lot of reading on the internet about how to format a book for publishing, things like gutters, I didn't know what that was, but it said that when they bind your book, it doesn't look weird on the page. But I basically taught myself how to do it. I'm a teacher. I taught elementary school for 28 years and I have a doctorate in gifted education. I could figure things out. So that's just what I did. Writing it was the easy part for me. It really just flowed out of me. I write very much like I'm talking to you. And even though I included some research in Delay, Don't Deny, it's a pretty short book. There are links to a few studies and ideas here and there, but it's mostly like I'm giving my friend advice about how to start intermittent fasting. And that was really my goal, was, here's how you do it, here's what you do. Just giving you the information that you need to get started and be successful. So it came out December 31st of 2016, really, was the first day. But like January of 2017 is when it really hit the market. And I was so excited that first day, I think I sold like 100 books. That's a lot for day one. I just had my little group of 3000 people. I had started a second group because I knew I was writing the book and I intended it to be the Delay, Don't Deny support group. So we had maybe 1500 members by that point in that group. I remember mid-March of 2017, like I was selling an average of 18 copies a day and I felt like I'd conquered the world. Joanna: It's just a fantastic start. I want to come back on the writing process, because you said there that writing the easy part, and I can hear my audience like some of them are going… Gin: I'm sorry audience! Joanna: …'Oh my goodness.' Now, I think that's because, so, a couple of things. So, one, you said you're writing as you're speaking, and I've read all your books so I know that's true and that's fantastic. But I think one of the mistakes of many self-help books and health books is that there's not enough personal story. I was attracted to your book because let's face it, we're middle-aged women. And I'm like, well, here's Dr. Jason Fung, some doctor guy, or Tim Ferris talking about hardcore fasting, and here's Gin, who's this intelligent, educated, middle-aged woman. And I'm like, ‘Oh, yeah, hers is the story I feel like I get.' But that's so difficult. How were you able to share things? Let's face it, weight and your body image, these are very personal things. How did you get over any fear of judgment in order to write your personal story? Gin: Well, thanks to Facebook, people had seen me. People that I went to high school with and college, they had seen my pictures getting bigger and bigger over the years. I weighed 210 pounds at my highest recorded that I saw on the scale, could have been higher, but I wasn't weighing much at that point. They knew I was obese, they could see it. I'm what Malcolm Gladwell refers to in one of his books as a Maven: I tell people things that I like. I always have. I try to convince people, ‘Look what I'm doing. I love it. This is fabulous.' Even before I had books. That's why I started my first group. I'm like, I want a place where I can help my friends be successful with intermittent fasting. So I already had put it out there. There was nobody that didn't know that I had gained a lot of weight and then lost the weight. I have these groups, I'm just being real and authentic and telling the story of my struggles. So if I can tell the people that really know me, I can certainly tell strangers. Joanna: It's interesting because I think a lot of people don't do that. They write a self-help book or they write a health book and they don't put personal information in because they want to be like an ‘expert.' So I also wanted to ask you about this, because as you said, you were a teacher for 28 years, you have a Ph.D., but you're not a medical doctor, and yet you've written books with medical research in them. Talk about your research process and how you learn about all these different things. Gin: Well, I'm a teacher and that's what teachers do. I can teach math without being a mathematician, I can teach history without being a historian. So I'm not afraid to find content and redeliver it to people. That's literally what I was trained to do. In fact, one of my friends, when I wrote Fast. Feast. Repeat. it had a lot more science in it because I wanted it to be everything that Delay, Don't Deny. wasn't. And I still love Delay, Don't Deny but it didn't have a deep dive. I wanted Fast. Feast. Repeat. to have more scientific support. So, as I was writing it, I know how to read the literature. When you get a doctorate, you have to be able to read what's in the journals. My doctorate's gifted education, but still, people write in wordy ways and you have to figure it all out in these journals, all these professional journals. And so I have to read, make sense of it, and redeliver it. One of my friends was reading, as I would finish a chapter I'd be like, ‘Tell me what you think about this,' because I didn't want it to be over people's heads. I wanted to strike that balance between a chat with Gin and giving you the science background that you want. She said, ‘I think every book should be written by a teacher.' And I'm like, that's really interesting to hear. I never really thought about that. But I really think that writing as a teacher is just a different perspective. Because again, it's just like teaching a lesson or delivering the content. If I want to teach a class of third graders about rocks and minerals, I have to learn about rocks and minerals and then redeliver it in a way that they understand it. So, that's really what I'm doing just in the health and wellness world. I'm writing a new book right now. My deadline is May 7th, so it's coming up fast, but you do have to be a lot more careful with your sources. It takes a lot longer. When I said Delay, Don't Deny was easy because I was lighter on the science. Now, I'm not saying I didn't have any, but as I'm writing now, with a traditional publisher, I really want to make sure that I am supporting everything that I'm saying. And, of course, writing a dissertation trained me to do that. You don't make a statement like the sky is blue without finding the support for that somewhere and having a footnote or an endnote or something. Joanna: I think that's really true. But it's interesting, as you said, with a traditional publisher, you do have to be a lot more careful with your sources because it's I guess more ‘official' in some way. They, hopefully, will have a fact-checker as well who will help with that. Gin: Oh, they do, which is so much fun because when I was writing Fast. Feast. Repeat. I made a comment about the town where I went to college and they were like, ‘Actually that's backwards,' so I'm like, ‘Oh, I always thought it was the other way,' but it's nice just to have that. Joanna: And just so people know, you can actually hire people to do that for you if you want to self-publish books. Obviously you can hire professional freelancers to check that. Coming back on the science and talking about fasting in particular, because, of course, I found your book and I've been intermittent fasting since July last year, 2020, and so I've really learned a lot from you, but I feel like a lot of people get it wrong. Before we carry on with your publishing process, maybe you could give us the highlights of what your intermittent fasting lifestyle is and how it's about health as well as your weight management. Gin: I think the big differentiator for me versus really every book I've ever read on intermittent fasting is the idea of the clean fast. The more I read, the more I learned. After I read The Obesity Code, for example, in 2016, I realized the mistakes I had been making with fasting. Back when I first started, I started dabbling in it in 2009 and it never really stuck until 2014 and that's when I went on to lose the first 75 and then 80 pounds over time. I was a dabbler. I didn't understand the science behind it all back then. And we also really thought it was just a way of cutting calories, you're eating less food. But after I read The Obesity Code by Dr. Jason Fung, I realized, oh, our bodies are a lot more complicated than calories in, calories out. Of course, that doesn't mean you can overeat and still lose weight, you can't. You can't eat more than your body needs, but it's not as simple as just count the calories, you will lose the weight. We've all had that fail for us over and over and over again. And so I realized that when you're fasting, you want to really be fasting. Dr. Jason Fung taught me about insulin and how important it is to keep your insulin low if you want to tap into your fat stores because insulin is antilipolytic, meaning that it prevents fat burning. So, for all of us who have tried those low-calorie diets where you eat frequently throughout the day, little tiny, small meals, all those food signals coming into your body keeps your body releasing insulin all day long and your insulin stays up, up, up, and you never really tap into your fat stores for fuel and that's why you're hungry and you feel awful. But fasting is completely the opposite. Once you train your body to fast clean, you're keeping your insulin low during the fast, and then you're able to tap into your fat stores for fuel, you don't have those slumps. You're running on your stored fat for fuel, you have great energy, you have great mental clarity. It's a completely different experience. So keeping the fast clean is really the number one thing. And I think it's a non-negotiable. I have all this in Fast. Feast. Repeat. but there are three goals to the clean fast, one is, keep your insulin low, like I just said, so you can tap into your fat stores. And we do that by making sure we don't send any food signals to the brain. We have something called the cephalic insulin response, where our brain, from our taste buds, we get the message, ‘Oh, something with calories is coming in.' And then our body releases insulin in response to that. It can be something like a diet soda, which has no calories, but your brain doesn't understand, because in all of the history of food and human life, if you had something sweet, it was because it was sugar, or honey, or fruit, and your body knew a glucose load was coming in. So it doesn't understand diet sodas. Also that would happen if you're drinking like a fruity herbal tea, like apple cinnamon delight or something. Your brain's like, ‘Aha, we're having an Apple dessert.' It doesn't understand. So, in order to keep our insulin low, we stick to plain water. We don't add fruit slices or make it delicious. We stick to black coffee with nothing added, plain tea. Coffee and tea both have a bitter flavor profile and that does not tell your brain we're going to need some insulin. That's why coffee and tea black are okay. Stay away from the flavors. You don't want like hazelnut flavor, or vanilla delight. Stay away from all of those. Just keep it plain and black so your brain doesn't think food's coming in. The second fasting goal is, of course, that we want to burn our stored fat for fuel, so, that is why we don't follow the fun trend of Bulletproof coffee with butter and MCT oil and all that stuff in your coffee cup. Because when I'm doing intermittent fasting, I'd rather burn the fat from my body than fat from my coffee cup. People say, ‘I love this Bulletproof coffee, it gives me great energy.' Well, of course, it gives you great energy. It's a lot of energy in your coffee cup. We don't want to take in sources of fuel, we want to use our own stored body fat for fuel. So, don't put any fat, don't put cream, even a drop, don't put almond milk, all of that, keep it out of your coffee. You just want it to be black and plain. And then the third fasting goal is we want to experience increased autophagy. Autophagy is our body's cellular recycling system, where it goes in and cleans up all the old junky parts. And to do that, we want to keep from taking in protein during the fast. So you don't want to have bone broth or something. There's a popular bone broth fast, but bone broth is food for the body. It has plenty of protein, so it's not technically fasting. So, avoid that. Just stick to plain water, plain sparkling water, unflavored coffee, black, the same with tea, don't add anything to it, and that's what you do during the fast. And really almost every other book you go read, in fact, I don't know of any that really insists that you stick to the clean fast other than me. But with all of my years of experience with real people, at one time we had a combined membership of almost 500,000 members in my Facebook groups. The number of people who have said, ‘Gosh, I used to do such and such because I heard it was okay. I saw a YouTube about it, it said it was fine if I put Stevia in, but then I read your book and I didn't want to believe you, but I tried it anyway. And oh my gosh, you were right.' So the number of people that have said, ‘Well, I thought putting butter in my coffee was okay and then I stopped doing it, and, oh my gosh, you were right.' So that's why I came up with the clean fast challenge in Fast. Feast. Repeat. for anybody who doesn't think that I'm right. And it's okay to not think I'm right because you can find scientific articles that say there is no insulin response from diet soda, but you can also find scientific articles that say that there is. So if we're trying to keep our insulin low, you want to err on the side of caution. I challenge everyone to try it my way, give it a month, six weeks, and you will not go back. Joanna: Absolutely. For me, it was the final piece of the puzzle of why have I tried everything and nothing works? And I think, for people listening, and I'm going to do a bit more of an introduction before this goes out, but the realization that you have the freedom not to eat during the day and then obviously both you and I do a eating window and your whole point with Delay, Don't Deny is you delay your food, don't deny yourself your meal in the evening, your delicious food. You love food, right? I think that's important. Gin: I love food. And, some people are like, I couldn't do intermittent fasting, I love to eat so much. I'm like, ‘That's why I do it.' Joanna: Exactly. It's so I can have my delicious food in my window. Gin: I don't have to deny myself from butter, or a cookie, or delicious food. Joanna: Coming back to your writing and publishing, the reason you wrote Delay, Don't Deny was to help other people, but also to share your own experience and to talk about that. Your life was changed and you wanted to change other people's lives. I think that's a really good reason to write. Let's come back to the self-publishing. Obviously you mentioned that that's the way you went the first time. You mentioned some of the technical stuff you had to learn, but what happened after it went out there, and then What happened with your publishing journey and how did you get that next deal? What were the benefits of doing that and what were some of the issues? Gin: The beauty of self-publishing is that I could write something now and have it for sale on Amazon this afternoon. Of course that's also the downfall. Because someone could write something now and have it on Amazon in the afternoon and it could be garbage. All the books that people write where they try to steal the title of another book. Like right now, there's one, I have to get taken down because they used my title in theirs and I have a trademark. But all the things I've learned along the way. But it frees you up to get it out quickly. The traditional publishing process is very long. And it has to go through so many hands. And honestly, things going through a lot of hands, it can actually create problems. With Fast. Feast. Repeat which I published through St. Martins Press, they're delightful, I love my editor, I love everybody there. But somehow along the way, from when I turned in my first draft till I was reading it for Audible, a whole paragraph got changed and it made no sense. I'm like, ‘Where'd this come from?' I didn't notice it was there until I was reading it for Audible and I was making notes of things that needed to be fixed before it went to print. And then I sent it to my editor, she's like, ‘Too late. It's already in line for printing.' And I'm like, ‘Wait a minute. We still have, you know, like…' What was this, like April? We still had over two months before it was going to be officially for sale. She's like, ‘Yes, but we're in line at the printer and you can't make a change while you're in line at the printer.' So the first 10,000 copies had a few mistakes in there that I knew were there and we knew were there. They were minimal, they weren't huge. And everybody listening, don't worry, if you buy a copy now, those first 10,000… Joanna: It's a first edition. It's precious. Gin: Yeah. Those first ones are long gone. And it wasn't anything that was going to make your fasting ruined, it was just like a sentence got changed and it didn't make sense. It wasn't the way I had originally written it. And they left out flavored coffee in the chart, but they have added it in since. So you'll get a copy that has the right information. But the amount of time. I could pull Delay, Don't Deny right now, make a change to anything and it would be seamless and be correctly out there this afternoon. It's just so quick. I do remember the very first day, January 1, 2017, within a couple of hours after people buying it, somebody said, ‘I found a typo in the introduction.' I was able to correct it, and boom, it was fixed. That's one of the perks of self-publishing. You also make a lot more per copy with self-publishing than you do from a traditional publisher, like a lot. But the flip side is, with a traditional publisher, you get it out into more hands, and it's widely available. You can be on the New York Times bestseller list because they have sales data. There's so many pros and cons. But I think you asked about how did I make the transition to traditional publishing, and I don't know if I told you that. I don't think you know this story at all, but I had some trouble in 2018 with book pirating. Delay, Don't Deny was selling very, very well, and turns out that makes you a really big mark for pirates who copy the whole book and then they sell it through third-party sellers, but they're counterfeit. And so, all of a sudden, my paperback sales went down dramatically and I didn't know why. I reached out to Amazon. I'm like, ‘I know people are still buying it, but it says in my report that zero people bought the paperback between this day and this day, and yet I see people in the groups every day. They're like, ‘Here's my book. I just got it. What's happening?' To make a long story short, we found there was a counterfeit version. It had typos on the back cover. It had a different font. The book was in a different font. It had italics in places I didn't have them. The spacing was different. And Amazon worked with me, but I still I lost thousands of dollars over the course of those months before I figured out what was happening. And so, it made me think, you know what, I have all my eggs in this one basket of Amazon because I'm self-published through Amazon and I had to really push for them taking my case seriously and prove it and buy multiple copies of my books. Sometimes the counterfeiters still roll them out through third-party sellers, but the third-party sellers themselves don't always realize they've bought a bunch of counterfeits. So they've been great to work with me. I keep my eye on the listing. It was because Amazon changed the rules in 2018 where third-party sellers could get the buy box. And so, whoever has it for cheapest gets the buy box. That's how the pirates were able to pop in there and sell it to so many people before I realized what was happening. I really needed support. I don't want to do this all by myself. This is my whole livelihood. If something happens with my book, I'm done. So I found a great literary agent. I went to the publishers marketplace and asked, ‘Who are the top non-fiction agents in the diet category?' Because I had sold so many copies of Delay, Don't Deny that was self-published, the top three all wanted to work with me, which was so exciting. But again, it goes back to what I said at the beginning, in order to find an agent and a publisher, you have to have a track record. So you have to make your own track record these days. You can't just start off. No one would have looked at Delay, Don't Deny if I'd been like, ‘I have a great idea for a book and I have a group of 3000 people in it,' they'd have been like, ‘Thank you. But no.' Joanna: They wouldn't have replied. Gin: That's true. No agent would have taken me on. No publishing house would have been willing to take a chance on this book. But when suddenly I had all these sales and they're like, ‘Oh, you're interesting to us now.' You have to build your own platform and then people want to take a chance on you. I found a literary agent, and then the first idea was to shop Delay, Don't Deny around and try to get it taken over by a traditional publishing house. But because of how much I was selling, nobody had an offer that was high enough for me to say yes to. So I was like, yeah, I'm just going to keep it. I think really the best thing to do is to write a new book. And that's where Fast. Feast. Repeat. was born. I'm glad that I did it that way because Delay, Don't Deny continues to sell even after Fast. Feast. Repeat. came out. Yesterday Fast. Feast. Repeat. was number two in the weight loss category on Amazon, which is still very exciting because it came out last June. It's still doing very, very well. Delay, Don't Deny was number 25 in the weight loss category on Amazon. So it's still selling well. So I have my income stream from Delay, Don't Deny that never went away and then I have Fast. Feast. Repeat. as well. I was able to find a great publishing house, St Martin's. And when we were negotiating for the advance, I was like, ‘I don't even care if you give me an advance, I'm going to sell so many of these books that you're going to be sending me royalty checks.' And they're like, ‘Well, okay.' And that actually is what happened. Joanna: I think that is more common with non-fiction anyway, is that you don't necessarily get a big advance, but you get really better royalties. Just to come back on the piracy, we should say that, obviously, traditionally, published books get pirated all the time. Gin: Oh, absolutely. But you've got a legal department protecting you not just you going, ‘This book is counterfeit.' Amazon doesn't want to talk to me. They're like, ‘No, it's not.' For months they told me nothing was wrong. They're like, ‘Sorry, nothing's wrong. It's not a problem. No one's buying paperbacks anymore.' I swear to God, someone said that to me. ‘People just aren't buying as many paperbacks.' And the part that made me so angry is Amazon knew exactly how many they were selling. If the departments had talked to each other, they knew how many they sold and they know how many they paid me royalties for. And those numbers did not match. And they could have very easily crosschecked, especially with their own in-house people. Joanna: Definitely. I know a lot of authors, and there are always pros and cons of every approach. We have to deal with the cards we choose, but you've definitely got the best of both worlds. Because, as you say, you still have control of one, you can do sales easily and all of that and giveaways, and also you get more sales with cross-promotion. Gin: I don't do any sales or giveaways. Joanna: Fair enough. There's no need because they sell each other. I wondered about book marketing, because this is something that many authors struggle with. There's writing a book and there's publishing it, but then there's marketing. What does the publishing house do for you and what are you doing yourself in terms of marketing? What drives the sales of the books do you think? Gin: I'm going to be honest with you, they may talk a good game about what they're going to do for you, and again, I love my publisher, I love my editor, she's fabulous, they have, you know, a publicity department that's gotten me into a few publications. But honestly, the publisher expects you to market your book these days. They don't send you on tour, maybe they might for some people, but I asked about it. I had someone who wanted to put on an event for me in a town I was going to have to travel I'm like, ‘If this event is organized, will you pay?' They were like, ‘No, that's all on you.' So you've got to do it yourself. And, of course, in this day and age, with social media and podcasts, the barrier to entry is zero. Just learning how to do it. You have to build your audience. So there is no substitute for building your audience. That is where the magic lies. You can write the best book in the world, but if nobody finds it and nobody reads it, it's not going to be a success. And I think that's what happens. If it is good and it gets out there like Delay, Don't Deny I wrote a book that people enjoy reading and it helped a lot of people. So, word of mouth, it just got bigger and bigger and bigger. I think that I read, I don't know if this is true, but I read a blog post or saw it in a podcast somewhere, maybe I read the transcript, 10,000 is the magic number. If you can sell 10,000 copies of your book, it's out there enough that it's going to keep selling steadily over time. So, you want to get that first 10,000 out there and get people to buy it. But you really have to build your audience. I did that through Facebook groups and providing the support there on Facebook and then my first podcast in 2017, and then a second podcast in 2018, that was when ‘Intermittent Fasting Stories' came out. And you have to tell the story that make people want to listen to you. With ‘Intermittent Fasting Stories,' you enjoy hearing it. It's me and a guest and we talk and people like to hear it. And so it keeps them coming back to listen again. But people like to hear real stories. You could read all the science in the world, but if there's no real story connected to it, it's not going to feel like something you really care about. Joanna: I listened to the ‘Intermittent Fasting Stories' podcast before I bought any of your books. And I know sometimes you sound surprised on the show when people say that they found you through the podcast and then they read the book. Gin: Well, I'm no longer surprised by it, but it actually for a while. I'm used to it now, but it's taken me a while to get there. Joanna: I think there's a trust. I'm introducing you to my audience and I'm coming on your show, so it's the same thing. People get to trust the host. And if I say that I want to talk to you because I trust you, then that just gives a lot more, I guess, clout to the audience and they go, ‘Okay, well, I trust this person because I've been listening to them for years, and therefore I'm open to the guest.' And, in the same way, I feel like when I was listening to you on your show, then I was like, ‘Oh, okay. I really like her. I'm going to check out her book.' I think this is how podcasting can sell books, but it's not necessarily a one-click thing. Gin: Correct. I agree with you completely. People have to first connect with you and then they want to read what you've got. And there's some people, I'll read everything they write, no matter what they write, I'm going to read it. I think that's true for, but that's your small fan base. You've got your small fan base of people that will read anything you write, but then it's got to be good to keep selling. You've got to write a good book that people will recommend to other people because if only my fan base for ‘Intermittent Fasting Stories' had read my book, then it would have been… You know, you see it happen a lot. I watched the Amazon bestseller list and the weight loss category, and a new book pops up every time it comes out, it pops up, it will be number one, number two, the number one will be like the paperback, number two will be the Kindle version, number three might be the Audible version. So it holds that position for a while and then you see it goes away. It falls away. Becoming a New York Times bestseller or having a best seller is one thing, but continuing to sell your books to people over time is more of a challenge. And that's where the book, like I said, it has to be good. The book has to be one that can stand the test of time and have people recommend it to other people. Joanna: Well then, let me ask you about the challenge of a niche. So you have a niche which is Intermittent Fasting and you've got the three books and the workbooks, I think, at the moment. And, as you said, you're working on another one. It must be very challenging to come up with more books on the same topics. Gin: Well, I'm not doing that. Joanna: Oh, okay. Tell us about it. Gin: I'm not writing another book on the same topic. And see, that's the thing where I'm a little bit contrarian and breaking the mold because my editor, of course, and the whole publishing house is very interested in, okay, so you've written this great book. New York Times bestseller, what's your next fasting book going to be? And I'm like, ‘No, there isn't going to be a next fasting book,' because I wrote the book about intermittent fasting that said everything I need to say. I don't need to write a book about one meal a day intermittent fasting. I don't need to write a book. It's all in Fast. Feast. Repeat. I put it all there and that's it. I don't want to be one of those authors that writes the same book over and over and over and then just you're on that cycle of book, book, book, and then I don't need people to read another intermittent fasting book that I wrote. Now, Delay, Don't Deny stands the test of time because it is always going to appeal. Some people will prefer Delay, Don't Deny and some people will prefer Fast. Feast. Repeat. It just all depends on how deep you want to go. Some people will want to read both because there is, you know, a difference to the two. You'll get different things out of ‘Delay, Don't Deny than you got out of Fast. Feast. Repeat. So I didn't rewrite Delay, Don't Deny and release it as Fast. Feast. Repeat‘ it's a completely updated book with a lot more detail and a section on food and the feast section. It's a great book. Feast Without Fear, my second book, was also self-published, but it is not an intermittent fasting book. It's a book about choosing foods that work well for your body, the idea of personalized nutrition, your gut microbiome, all of that, eating according to your DNA. So, it's a completely different book. The book I'm working on now is not an intermittent fasting book. And it's about what you eat, and how you live. I don't want to get into too many details about it. Joanna: It's more like a lifestyle book? Gin: Not necessarily. It's about cleaning up where it counts, let me put it that way. Cleaning up your life with food and with how you live. Joanna: But it's still a self-help/health book? Gin: Oh yes, it absolutely is a self-help/health book. That's a tongue twister, self-help/health. Yes, it very much is. [We recorded this before the pre-order came out, but Gin's next book is Clean(ish): Eat (Mostly) Clean, Live (Mainly) Clean, and Unlock Your Body's Natural Ability to Self Clean.] And then I actually have a two-book deal, so I'm going to write another one the next year and we haven't decided on what that one will be yet, but I have a very strong idea about what I want it to be and I've just gotta talk them into it. That's the other difference about being with a traditional publisher. You're like, ‘I know that people will love this, and I know they will want it.' And they're like, ‘No, I don't like that one.' I'm like, ‘I promise you, this one's going to be the best seller. I promise you. Let me write it. Let me write it, let me write it.' And they're like, ‘Uh-uh, no.' Joanna: We know you always have another choice. Gin: I really want to keep working with them and with my editor. But they do have first right of refusal. But if they refuse, then I'm not locked to them. I can still do what I want to do. But anyway, I do have an idea for my next one that's coming in a year. Joanna: Oh, well, that's great. I like that. It's kind of tangential. I think that's exactly the right way to do it. And, of course, I write books for authors as Joanna Penn. And they all cover smaller areas of the author life, so, that completely makes sense to me. I do also want to come back on Facebook because, of course, at the beginning, you talked about, in 2016, you started out with Facebook groups and you built up your audience to over 500,000 people. In March 2021, you wrote a blog post about why you quit Facebook. Tell us about that decision. Gin: It is huge. Here's what's funny, back in the fall of 2020, my agent said, again, like all my eggs in the Amazon basket, she said, ‘You've got all your eggs in the Facebook basket. If something were to ever happen on Facebook, you would lose your whole audience. You need to start collecting their email addresses.' I'm like, ‘Oh no, nothing's ever going to happen. This is how it works for me. This is my group. This is what I do. I don't need to worry.' Well then in the fall I read an article about how Facebook was ‘cracking down' on health groups and no longer recommending them. And because a lot of people would find my groups because it would show up in the groups you might like category. That struck fear in my heart. I'm like, wait, Facebook could literally decide, ‘We don't support intermittent fasting, we think it's wacky. No more intermittent fasting.' And then we'd all go dark. I started really thinking about that. They actually did that in the essential oil community. A lot of people in the essential oil community found their groups just were closed. Of course, once you make this decision, stories come out of the woodwork. A friend of mine shared a story of another friend who had a cooking group. It was just a cooking group with 10,000 members. And she went to bed one night with a cooking group and woke up the next morning and not only was the cooking group removed, but she was blocked from Facebook because something that happened overnight while she was sleeping went against something or other, and Facebook shut it down. She wasn't even awake, didn't even know what happened. But it just lets you know that you're very much guests on Facebook's platform. I started thinking about that and I'm like, I need to have a platform that's just for me and my audience that I control and I'm not really at the whim of artificial intelligence flagging what you're writing. For example, one of our moderators wrote a very great skilled reply to somebody about becoming fat-adapted, which is part of the lingo. You become fat-adapted, that means your body can tap into your fat stores. And she said something like once you're fat-adapted, the fast becomes much easier. The artificial intelligence on Facebook flagged that as hate speech and bullying because of the words, you're fat. But in context, when you're fat-adapted, it makes perfect sense. It's totally not hate speech or bullying. But she got flagged and we got dinged because she's a moderator and Facebook said, ‘If you're a moderators or admin are going against community standards, we can shut your group down.' We're getting these notices behind the scenes and that's scary. So we're trying to figure out, once you're lipid adapted. You're having to be really careful because you'd get in Facebook jail. She wasn't able to post on Facebook for seven days. Joanna: Yes. Facebook jail is a term now. Gin: It's a thing. She was in Facebook jail. And so, all that fear, like I said, led me to start my own platform, the DDD Social Network at dddsocialnetwork.com. It's a membership site and people can pay to join. Once I started setting that up, it made me take a hard look at what I was doing and how I was spending my day.I had been thinking about this for years because when I wrote Fast. Feast. Repeat. it came out in 2020, but I was writing it in 2019 and I purposefully did not say the word Facebook on Fast. Feast. Repeat. one time. In fact, my editor was like, ‘Do you want to add your Facebook groups to your bio?' I'm like, ‘No.' Because I knew that it was unsustainable. I could not personally manage 500,000 people in Facebook groups. I woke up in the morning and it was the first thing I did. It was affecting the quality of my life to the point that it was all I had time to do. I just spent the weekend away with my sister and it's the first time we'd been anywhere since I left Facebook. And she's like, ‘This is night and day, you're present. You're here. You're able to sit at the dinner table,' and I just cannot express how intrusive Facebook had become in my life. And so, making the shift, I would say 99% of the response has been positive. Although this morning I woke up to a message. The moderators are still running the main Delay, Don't Deny Intermittent Fasting Support Group. We ask a moderator post every day, members can't post, but they can ask questions and the moderators will still support them, even though I'm not there. So we have a chat that we talk about group business and I'm still there providing administrative advice. But she said, ‘If someone is in a spinoff group and they're slamming Gin and talking really bad about Gin, can we remove them from this group?' So people are still out there they're mad. They're mad that I closed down two of my groups, the advanced group that had just over 30,000 members, and the one-meal-a-day group that had just about 100,000 members. The regular group, we didn't change how that functions at all, except that I'm not there, like I said. But the advanced group is closed and the one-meal-a-day group. But those were the ones where I was spending so much time because the members were posting. And so you had to be there moderating. People really enjoyed being in the groups. But the reason they enjoyed them is because of how heavily moderated they were and how much time we spent behind the scenes, making sure everyone was kind and not bullying, and giving good advice and not saying, ‘Oh, I drink Bulletproof coffee and it's fine.' We didn't want to have conflicting advice. And it took so much time to manage it. When I wrote that blog post, my husband said, ‘You're going to regret it.' I'm like, ‘Well, if I regret it, I regret it, but I will not regret living my life on my terms.' When it dropped, I woke up that morning and archived the two groups and waited to see what would happen. [Click here to read Gin's blog post on quitting Facebook.] When I write a blog post, I don't get very many comments. The first two days, 80 people submitted comments for my blog post, and they were overwhelmingly positive. And it just made me feel so relieved that people understood. They were like, ‘I can't believe you did it as long as you did. I often saw, I was like, she's up at 5:15 in the morning responding and here she is at 10:00 at night responding. When does Gin sleep?' People get it. They understood that I couldn't continue to provide free intermittent fasting support for the world forever. But on the flip side of that, the people who were angry somehow felt that buying my book for $14.95 entitled them to me forever for free. $14.95 for a book entitles you to a book, not support from the author. Joanna: Yes. Absolutely. Gin: I was happy to do it. I was really happy to do it. I loved building that community, but it just became unsustainable for me. Joanna: I love that. And I think it comes out, and also, this pandemic time has really helped us all consider, what do I really want in my life? Gin: That's true. Joanna: Do I want to spend my time doing that? And you said no, and that's not what you want to do. And I completely agree with you. Like, you wrote the book with all the answers, separate books with lots of answers. Gin: Lots of answers. Joanna: So people can go there. And I think it's very empowering that you've done that. One of the things you've talked about in this is how empowering the choice is, the choice to self-publish, the choice to traditionally publish, the choice to build the groups and to shut them down. That's the important thing, which is brilliant. Where can people find you and your books and your podcasts online? Gin: If you go to ginstephens.com, Gin is G-I-N, Stephens with a P-H, I have links to everything there. You can still join the Delay Don't Deny Intermittent Fasting Support Facebook Group, and the moderators will answer your questions in the ask-a-moderator thread. But then we want you to join the Delay, Don't Deny Social Network if you want to make posts and have a higher level of support. I'm having so much fun there because it's so different. I don't have to approve posts. And because people are paying. I mean, it's not expensive. It's $59 a year to join, which is like $4.99 a month. It's not expensive. It's like one latte a month to join. But that tiny barrier of entry of $4.99 a month is enough of a barrier to entry that the people who are there really want to be there. So I am enjoying. It's refreshing. We haven't had a single reported post or problem yet. It's amazing. Gin: Well, I'd say yet because eventually, there'll be someday, people are people. But it's an amazing supportive community. And we have all these groups within it that people can join. I have a 28-day fast start group for new intermittent fasters. I am personally responding to every post there. Someone posts about they're on day nine and I'm able to go in. And it's not from 5:15 in the morning until 10:15 at night, because it's smaller. I can go in one time in the morning, then I can go about my day, then I can go back in the evening and still provide support, but not have to micromanage behind the scenes every little thing that's happening. So, I'm loving it. And also, my podcasts, Intermittent Fasting Stories, you can find that anywhere you can find podcasts. If you join the Delay, Don't Deny Social Network however, you can stream all episodes of ‘Intermittent Fasting Stories,' ad-free. Joanna: Fantastic. Gin: No ads at all, you just stream. They come out on Thursday, but I'm putting them up on Monday so people can get them a few days early, and no ads. So we're completely ad-free on the DDD Social Network. Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Gin. That was great. Gin: Well, thank you.The post From Self-Published Book To A Life-Changing Health Movement With Gin Stephens first appeared on The Creative Penn.